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Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality | 
 enlarge | Author: Donald Miller
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Category: Book
List Price: $14.99
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Rating:  448 reviews
Sales Rank: 761
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0785263705
Dewey Decimal Number: 277.3082092
UPC: 020049024874
EAN: 9780785263708
ASIN: 0785263705
Publication Date: July 17, 2003
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Product Description
"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. . . . I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened." In Donald Miller's early years, he was vaguely familiar with a distant God. But when he came to know Jesus Christ, he pursued the Christian life with great zeal. Within a few years he had a successful ministry that ultimately left him feeling empty, burned out, and, once again, far away from God. In this intimate, soul-searching account, Miller describes his remarkable journey back to a culturally relevant, infinitely loving God.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 443 more reviews...
 Blue Like Jazz August 15, 2008
This is a book well worth reading. It is appropriate for late teens and early twenties since it covers life in a university. It has a great spiritual depth and we have used is as the basis of study in a small group of men. I recommend it highly.
 Shallow or Even Faulty Theology, Powerful Analysis on Humanity August 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
When I read Don Miller's thoughts on human personality and relationship, it is not exaggerating to rate them as powerful as those of C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoffer and Francis Schaeffer. But to run an apple-to-apple comparison, I would pick Lewis in this case for a comparison study, because Miller is not a minister. While Lewis is excellent in using illustrations and allegories to get his points across which might be ambiguous and challenging to understand, particularly when one is not familiar with the literatures he used as references, Miller, while equally personal, sharp and hilarious, is surprisingly and impressively much more articulate in conveying and in the presentation of his observation and analysis from his own experience and interaction with his acquaintances. He nails it when he speaks about human depravity, loneliness, and money (somewhat naive, but still worth pondering),
"I remember a particular midnight, three weeks into our stay, walking into a meadow surrounded by thick aspens and above me all that glorious heaven glowing, and I felt like I was part of it, what with the trees clapping hands and me feeling like I was floating there beneath the endlessness, I looked up so long I felt like I was in space. Light. No money and no anxiety" (p.199).
"When I was in love, I hardly thought of myself. When I was in love, there was somebody in the world who was more important than me. I think being in love is an opposite of loneliness, but not the opposite. There are other things I now crave when I am lonely, like community, like friendship, like family. [The words alone, lonely and loneliness] say that we are human; they are like the words `hunger' and `thirst.' But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.
When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface...the soul needs to interact with other people to be healthy.
And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions (I might add Internet, blogs, computers, and video games), not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all" (p.151-152, 154, 172).
With this said, however, Miller's theology, which I consider as a close representation of the theology of the emergent church, is shallow, if not faulty. It is a humanistic, anthropocentric theology, where the gospel has been turned into a social gospel, and Christianity as a means to turn the world into an utopia at the expense of neglecting the fundamental issues of sin, the attributes of God; particularly the justice and holiness and glory of God, the authority of Scriptures and the cross of Jesus Christ, the latter being the linchpin of the gospel. He did so by eliminating these and substituting them with a false notion of the love of God, which is common in the emergent camp (the name Brian McLaren usually pops up when the word "emergent" is mentioned).
One might challenge my statement about Miller's theology and accuse it as if I were beating a dead horse considering the sub-title of the book is "Non-religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality." However, this sub-title both sounds like an oxymoron and is inconsistent with what Miller actually does. How can one write about Christian Spirituality without being religious? These two are inseparable. Moreover, despite "non-religious" claim, he does talk about the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, prayer and love. How can one write about these altogether and not be religious? Impossible. Perhaps Miller is trying not to scare anyone away by not giving a religious impression on his book, but it doesn't work. If it is Christian, then it must be religious. He tries not to sound religious but he can't help sounding religious as he discusses Christianity, yet ironically, by violating this non-religious claim by writing religiously anyway about Christianity, he doesn't present Christianity rightly as the Bible teaches, but a heavily diluted version of it, so thoroughly diluted that it barely resembles orthodox Christianity that the Bible teaches. From this perspective, this book is a mess. Though Miller does an excellent job in describing the problems with humanity as well as with the so-called fundamentalist Christianity, but sadly he does not go to the bottom of them, that the true gospel points out and the remedy thereof. Consider for examples,
"Loneliness is something that happens to us, but I think it is something we can move ourselves out of. I think a person who is lonely should dig into a community, give himself to a community, humble himself before his friends, initiate community, teach people to care for each other. Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the Fall. If loving other people is a bit of heaven then certainly isolation is a bit of hell, and to that degree, here on earth, we decide in which state we would like to live.
... I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human. We are born into families,... and we are needy at first as children because God wants us together, living among one another, not hiding ourselves under logs like fungus. You are not a fungus... you are human, and you need other people in your life in order to be healthy" (p. 173).
Just like Lewis, Miller is a great writer-psychiatrist-philosopher, but a horrible theologian. My suggestion is to read Miller with caution, disregard his views on theology, learn from his analysis on humanity and combine it with John Piper's Desiring God.
Great Book August 7, 2008
This is one of the most profound books on spirituality I have ever come across. For those who are questioning your faith and feel there is nothing in Christiandom that can help you find the answers to why you feel so miserable, why things don't seem to be going your way, this is the book for you. It has no answers, per say, but it does tell of one man's quest to find the living God and some of the revelations he came to while on that quest. A must have for any Christian library.
 God help us.......... July 23, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
I must say that I am most troubled in my spirit that so many people gave this book a five star rating. I wonder if this guy has ever even picked up a Bible. The only reason I gave it one star is because I could not give it zero.
All I can really say about the book is that the god portrayed in it is not the God of the Bible. When I first began to read, I was impressed with the fact that Donald Miller has actually felt conviction for his sin and I was truly encouraged. Though after continuing on, I realized that it was not a conviction that produced a true repentance which leads to life, but just an emotional and romantic "poor me" story which unfortunately leads to death.
What shocks and concerns me is that someone who hates God as much as Donald Miller does can actually call himself a Christian. This is our fault brothers. This is our fault for being so complacent. If we don't take a stand against this type of humanistic nonsense, this is the "Christianity" that we can expect to keep seeing.
Filled with non-historical half-truths, this is just another postmodern, psychological self-help book which prostitutes Christian terminology to its own demise.
It's time to wake up.
Compelling July 8, 2008
I found myself laughing aloud one minute and welling with tears the next. This readable collection of thoughts on being Christian is compelling and inviting. It stretches the imagination of what could be and helps to expose some deeply guarded pharisaical practices in church culture. It will be offensive to some who are used to reading "Christian" books.
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