God without Religion: Can It Really Be This Simple? by Andrew Farley
“When we’ve lost a sense of belonging in God’s kingdom or the feeling of closeness to the King, we may look to religion for answers.” Andrew Farley, in his new book God Without Religion: Can It Really Be This Simple?, tries to establish how easy it is to live under the New Covenant. The easy answer to the hard arguments plaguing the religious beliefs of many churches, (tithing, predestination, role of biblical law, etc), can be found in the love and grace of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and everything that comes with it.
What I did enjoy about this book is that it did make you think about the role religion takes in your relationship with God and more importantly why and when do we turn to religion for answers. Farley’s argument is that we turn to religion only when we loose site of Jesus. “When we’ve lost a sense of belonging in God’s kingdom or the feeling of closeness to the King, we may look to religion for answers.” I think a more important question to ask would be, “What is causing us to feel distant from God, and who or what are we blaming that distance on?”
Under the New Covenant, for Farley, our sins are completely paid for and faith is established through relying and resting on the will of God. The picture that is presented in this book is a Jesus, who is a loving and forgiving “daddy,” that can be fully engaged once we leave the bondage of religion and law behind us. The statements about many people being distant from God are not new and neither are Farley’s words.
I would not say this book is a must read, especially for youth leaders as the arguments are established in books by Kimball (They Like Jesus But Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations), and Cenda Creasy Dean (Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church) over the past couple of years and establish a better understanding of the growing trends in youth ministry.
I was left with a couple of questions after finishing this book, “Is love the only character trait that Jesus has? How does judgment fit into this model of who Jesus is? Lastly, in a book about following Jesus, where are the statements about life that Jesus made because many of the statements that are quoted are not from Jesus, but from Paul.
The main point to this book is love wins, but I guess that title was already taken.
HT to our reviewer Adam B.R. Clarke from the Emerging Network
