DONALD MILLER

I wrapped this book up in a bar on Hawthorne and that night I felt like I was losing it a bit. Essentially, I had begun to wonder if had misunderstood the gospel of Jesus, thinking of it in propositional terms rather than relational dynamics. The latter seemed too poetic to be true, but the former had been killing my soul for years and was simply illogical. If we hold that Jesus wanted us to "believe" certain ideas or "do" certain things in order to be a Christian, we are holding to heresy. In that bar on Hawthorne, I finished the last paragraph and felt a kind of sickness at the thought of whether or not I was telling the truth. But after further consideration, and after rewriting the book, I realized the formulaic version of Christianity was irrational, and for that matter, unbiblical. True Christian spirituality mirrors relational dynammics more than the workings of a free-market economy. This seemed to open up an entire new world to me, a world where every thought and feeling operates as a kind of living metaphor for the workings of the Godhead.

As a year has passed since the release of the book, I've seen more and more how, in my own life and in the lives of the Christians around me, we subscribe to false gospels that are troubling our souls. Because we live in a constant sales environment where we are told a certain car will make us sexy or a certain dishwashing detergent will be a miracle for our dishes, we assume the gospel of Jesus works the same way, that is, if we invest something, we get something more back. But this is not the case. To understand what the Bible explains Jesus' gospel to be, we must look to each other, to the way a father interacts with a child, a bride to a bridegroom, a doctor to a patient. When we let go of the idea of Jesus as a product and embrace Him as a being, our path to spiritual maturity begins.