To start off this review, let’s take a look at an excerpt from No More Christian Nice Guy: When being nice–instead of Good–hurts men, women, and children:
It’s hell being a Christian Nice Guy until you embrace Christ’s tough, courageous protective, assertive personality, which invigorates real male sensibilities. These qualities are found on the more rugged end of the male spectrum, currently not well represented in the church, which overemphasizes Christ’s gentler side at the expense of honest and healthy balance.
Here’s a story that I hope will help to clarify. I call it the Parable of Jim.
Jim is a thirty-something teacher to whom people are drawn. But Jim breaks all kinds of rules. He’s confrontational, opinionated, filled with will-power.
He threatens to fight scoundrels who are making money off of religion, even grabbing their TV camera, a tool for this sordid gain, and smashing it to the ground, creating one long commercial break.
He has called his students dumb and dull, asking how much longer he’ll have to endure their company.
In order to stem his influence, his enemies play word games and devise interview scenarios in which to embarass him; he’s so cunning and shrewd that he constantly shows them up instead. No one has the guts to talk the way he does. Others talk like they understand God; Jim talks like he knoew God. Jim forcefully disrupts the order of things and disregards convention. Jim’s inappropriate.
He calls people bad names that “respectable men” never say. He verbally confronts one of his most powerful government officials. When Jim has faced an authority figure who, because of manufactured charges, could actually invoke the death penalty, Jim’s slow-to-come responses have been obscure, searing, and disrespectful.
Jim doesn’t mind his manners around important persons. Jim causes problems for society’s respectable people. No wonder they want to pull him down.
In one public speech, to illustrate a profound spiritual truth, Jim has spoken of excrement going into a drain. He’s colorful, but some think his language is too coarse for a spiritual leader, and the press has a field day: PREACHER OR POTTYMOUTH? YOU DECIDE.
He has told reporters that his mission isn’t to discover or promote a lifetime of warm and cozy. Au contraire: “I bring division and conflict! Live as I say you should,” he tells morning news shows over coffee and crumpets, and it may “tear your families apart!” Then he states the obvious: “Those who don’t find me offensive will be blesed.” Who booked this guy? Regis wonders, glancing at security,, hoping they’re keeping a sharp eye. Who in the world does he think he is? muse countless others.
Jim is sarcastic, sometimes bitingly so; he doesn’t apologize. Jim goes to parties and hangs out with others who do. At least once he has suplied the wine, for free, during a wedding where children were likely present. Drinks are on him, even though he knows he’ll be accused of corrupting others and touting singulness. The bureauccrats and government workers with whom he spends time are the ones everybody hates. Jim doesn’t even shun mentally imbalanced devotees or politically leprous radicals.
Many murmur and complain that they don’t understand him. His own students sometimes won’t ask him questions because they fear his response.
Most religious leaders enjoy the attention of large crowds, but Jim’s wary: He doesn’t trust them, and he doesn’t hide his distrust. He actually confronts empty compliments during public gatherings–not a seeker-friendly ministry approach. Even though he still takes students, Jim’s been unemployed for at least three years and doesn’t even look for a job. He lives off handouts, owns no property, doesn’t even have his own cardboard box to return to at night.
One choice that led to further attacks was Jim’s allowing a prostitute–in public–to annoint him with rare and expensive oil that could have been used to feed the poor, support missionaries, or pay for part of a child’s lifesaving surgery. While his students and his opponents boiled with anger over this wasteful extravagance, Jim would not hear it denounced and had the audacity to say that whenever God’s liberating message is preached, this one event will be mentioned favorably. The woman wiped Jim’s feet with her own hair, a lure she has used to draw men to her bed, but he has no care for his reputation. The scandal of it all! Hear the good folk gossip! Film at eleven!
He warns his students that people will despise them. Some will even be brought to court by blackmailers with unfair charges. Jim tells them to pay off the blackmailer before it foes that far. He instructs one student to sell some clothing in order to buy a weapon.
Jim, who’s loving kind, and compassionate, is not owned or influenced by fear and shame, Still, he does all the above and more, which begs the question: Do you think Jim’s a “good Christian man”? Is he a Nice Guy?
This is part of the life of Christ as recorded in the Gospels, but are you surprised by how foreign some of it looks? If we compare these actions ofJesus to the behavior expected of the average guy in most churches today–and, if we were honest–we’d say, absurdly, that Christ is not a “Christian.” We wouldn’t pray to him; we’d issue prayer requests for him.
Something doesn’t add up.
That pretty much sums up the book. We are presented a sanitized version of Jesus that is nice, kind, respectful, gentle and non-violent, while really Jesus was sarcastic, loving, funny, kind, violent, and disrespectful to authorities.
I agree with much of what the book says, but the CNG (as he likes to call us: Christian Nice Guys) inside of me says: “No!”
I think if we give credence to this model, it becomes ever so much more so incumbent upon us to make sure that our motives are always pure and that we are acting in a Biblical way. It was easy for Jesus to be all these unpleasant things while remaining unsinful because he was perfect, his motives were always right, and the doctrines driving his motives were always correct. We don’t have that characteristic. We’re prone to be sarcastic in a way that is sinful. We are prone to shout, not because we are excited about God, but because we are personally offended. We don’t get violent to protect God’s honor, but to protect our own. We call people names not to illustrate a Biblical point and to call people to repentance, but rather to make them look bad and to elevate ourselves. We don’t diss people so they will be shocked to a closer walk with Jesus, but to burnish our own ego.
While much of what he said may be true, we need to be very, very careful as we put any of this into action because of our latent sinful tendencies.
I’d give this book four stars out of five.
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This book was given to me for free by the author/publisher to review through my arrangement with Mind & Media. I receive no other compensation from them. As you may have seen from some of my negative reviews, I have no compunctions about saying it like it is simply because they gave it to me free. If you buy the book through the link above, I will get a commission from Amazon.
