The Gospel of Donald Miller

I'll admit I haven't read a lot of Donald Miller's writing. But I've read enough to keep me from wanting to read more.

I try not to be overly critical in my posts on this site. I much prefer the constructive proposal to the negative critique. But something about Miller's writing really gets to me. I think it may stem from when I read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and realized that I was holding in my hands the best example I had ever encountered of the unfortunate things our culture is doing to the Christian faith.

If you haven't read the book (and I do not recommend it), it is the autobiographical story of Donald Miller trying to figure out how to turn another autobiographical story about Donald Miller into a movie about Donald Miller's life story. I frankly found myself simultaneously exhausted reading it and impressed that Miller had figured out a way to earn a living writing book after book about himself. Don't get me wrong - he can be really funny. But when the humor is sprinkled in a narrative so characterized by genuine self-absorption, it tends to lose its edge.

Someone once told me that Miller is considered a cutting edge evangelical who has the ability to "speak to the culture." If that's the case, then the word evangelical has completely lost whatever meaning it once had. The only gospel that Donald Miller is interested in preaching, so far as I've been able to tell, is the Gospel of Donald Miller.

I bring this up today because of a recent post on Miller's website. The title is "Should the Church be Led by Teachers and Scholars?" After some predictable (and tired) references to the fact that Jesus called fishermen and not professional educators, followed by some wildly inaccurate statements about the impact of the Protestant Reformation, Miller ends with this little musing:

     "Let me ask you this: Aren’t you a little tired of scholars and psudo-scholars [sic] fighting about doctrine? Is it worth it that you are divided against other denominations because scholars picked up their ball and stomped off the playground? If you are tired, then be the church. I’m not kidding, you don’t know everything but you know enough. Be the church and be united. Let the academics go to an island and fight about the things that matter to them, and we will be united based on the things that matter to us."

Since Miller poses a question, I have some questions I would pose back to him:

1) Is any person's fatigue over doctrinal disagreements an adequate basis for dismissing those disagreements as irrelevant to the church's understanding of the gospel?

2) What are the practical steps involved in moving the idea "Be the church and be united" from a bumper sticker into the polity of an actual church that exists as an expression of the body of Christ in time?

3) What exactly are "the things that matter to us" other than fatigue over doctrinal disputes and a desire for unity? And if they involve such things as the way a church is organized, the way its leadership is chosen and understood, the core meaning of the Christian gospel, and the framework for ministry, then how are such things expressed other than through the church's doctrine?

4) Assuming our church is serious enough as a Christian community that the issues in the preceding point are spelled out, how do we relate to other Christian communities - either at the level of individual congregations or whole denominations? And what should we do if our desire for unity with such churches conflicts with our most fundamental understanding of central aspects of the Christian faith, as in for instance when those other churches profess beliefs that run significantly counter to our own? Would we not need some kind of doctrinal formulation to guide how we would proceed in such a scenario?

5) Once we come to common agreement on the "things that matter to us," how do we adjudicate between "things" that are faithful interpretations of Scripture and "things" that we mistake for Christian but which, on further examination, turn out to be purely cultural? And for such adjudication to be done well, would it not be advisable to draw on the assistance of those who have been theologically educated and so might fall under the label of "teacher" or "scholar"?

My reasons for writing this post are more than a desire to take potshots at Donald Miller. In a way, it is good he's out there writing what he's writing. And that's because we need to have good, crystallized examples of how the antinomian impulses that our culture generates can lead to such catastrophically bad undercurrents in the church.

Don't think I'm exaggerating, either. Miller is a popular writer, and every word he puts into print is influencing someone.