A Book Review from Books At a Glance
by Cory Carwile
Kevin DeYoung’s premise in Impossible Christianity is an engaging one: that a fulfilling, God-pleasing Christian life is not only possible for believers, but expected by God, and Christians ought not resign themselves to moral defeatism. In the early portions of his book – which he circles back to in his concluding chapters – DeYoung does an admirable job elaborating on these points, though in the middle portion of the book he begins to wander from this central idea into the specifics of Christian living.
In Reformed circles, there is a famous emphasis on the depravity and deep-seated sinfulness of man, such that the casual observer could easily get the impression that the “Christian lifestyle” is largely one of self-flagellation and despair at one’s deeply rooted wickedness. Those who have plumbed more deeply into the teachings of the Reformed tradition know that this attitude does not accurately reflect a well-developed attitude toward sin – that a deeper awareness of our sinfulness drives us to deeper love for, appreciation of, and reliance on the mercy and grace of Christ to redeem and sustain us. But even for those who have recognized this tension, there remains the question: How can we expect to please God when we find ourselves sinning every day, when we see our affections often tempted toward worldly desires, when we know that even our best actions are “as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6)? DeYoung posits his book as a brief answer to that question.
I emphasize “brief” because the book clocks in at a tight 128 pages and is written at an eminently popular level – there is no need to pull up a Greek concordance for this book. There is much to be said for this style of writing: most people are not scholars, nor is the average Christian that interested in digesting a dense theology text, and so DeYoung’s straightforward language, use of personal anecdotes, and frequent employment of humor make Impossible Christianity approachable to the broadest possible audience of potentially struggling believers. That said, I often found myself wishing he’d stick to a topic for longer, feeling like he only took just enough time to scratch the surface of each of his points before moving to the next one.
For example, the first two chapters of the book – which I believe are DeYoung’s strongest – zero in on the need to keep God’s will and the need to believe we can keep His will, containing several helpful insights about the Christian life. In his first chapter, DeYoung makes a good point about the Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:14-30), saying that the third servant, who buried his talents and thus produced nothing for his master, did so because he was afraid of his master’s anger if he lost the money (p. 14). In short, the slothful servant is condemned because he didn’t believe it was possible actually to please his master – he opted to do nothing at all instead of risking squandering what had been entrusted to him. The other two servants, though, pleased their master by multiplying the money trusted to them, and both receive the same commendation when their master returns. As DeYoung points out, “The master didn’t demand any more, or expect any less, than faithfulness with the opportunities they had” (p. 14). This is a good point, and clearly made!
In the same chapter, DeYoung also tries to cut off his critics by listing what he is not trying to say in his book: things like “Christians can be perfect” or “Sin is not a big deal” (pp. 17-18). The clarification is useful, but these points are brushed through in the space of no more than ten pages, and then he is off to his next topic. In his brief treatment, I felt that these ideas were left ripe for further exploration, but never developed. DeYoung asserts (correctly) that Christians are frequently told by the world that their concerns are unfounded, and that sin is either not a serious problem, or not sin at all (pp. 19-20), but he never expands on this. He notes (practically in the same breath) that some Christians have the opposite problem – a conscience that’s too sensitive – but he spends no time elaborating. How might one distinguish between one and the other? What is a holy level of conviction? He somewhat returns to topic, in a roundabout way, in chapter five, but in both places, it felt to me like he moved on to the next topic just as his thoughts were becoming clear. I assume that if DeYoung were to respond, he would point out that the book is only meant as a beginning, surface-level treatment of these issues, aimed at a popular audience, and elaborating beyond these basic ideas is outside the scope of the book. I understand that, but it meant the book often left me wishing he would say more, only to find him jumping to new topics and new chapters.
My other major issue with the book’s structure is about the difference between the arguments he makes at the beginning and end of the book, and the ones he makes in the middle. While I thought DeYoung was zeroing-in on an important idea in the beginning of the book, once you move beyond the first two chapters the thrust of the book changes. Chapters 3-6 of Impossible Christianity move from a discussion of how we can reliably please God by the power of His Holy Spirit to what things God specifically requires of us. While certainly related, this middle section of the book feels like it came from a second book, dealing not with our ability to do good works, but on what requirements God has actually put in place for us to do. Specifically, DeYoung deals with requirements for quiet time, Scripture reading, and evangelism (chapter 3), how to use our wealth and how much money we are supposed to give away to charity (chapter 4), how guilty we should feel about our performance (chapter 5), and how to interpret and apply the moral edicts of the Sermon on the Mount (chapter 6).
In each chapter, DeYoung’s conclusions circle the same idea: that many of us are mistakenly thinking of these requirements as being more stringent than they actually are. Regarding prayer time and Scripture reading (pp. 45-50), DeYoung points out that the Bible never specifies a set amount of time to be spent reading or praying: “Too many of us have learned to measure our discipleship according to this one criterion, and because we can always spend more time in prayer, we never seem to be measuring up” (pp. 47-48). Regarding evangelism (pp. 51-56), he says that while we are all certainly witnesses to God’s grace and should be ever-ready to give an account for the hope that we have (1 Peter 3:15), the mission of evangelizing the world is not so much for each individual Christian to perform, but rather the mission of the Church as a whole. Some are dedicated evangelists who preach on the street or go as missionaries to foreign lands, while many (indeed, most) Christians support those evangelists materially and evangelize through more mundane, everyday ways by being good examples of godliness in their workplaces, or upstanding members of their communities. As DeYoung puts it at one point, “The New Testament encourages us to be ready to explain our Christian faith when asked … to make the gospel look attractive by our honest and obedient lives … to be concerned for the salvation of the lost … to be conduits for the word of God. The New Testament does not expect us all to be extroverts, gifted conversationalists, and cold-call evangelists” (pp. 53-54).
This pattern is repeated throughout the subsequent several chapters: DeYoung describes how modern Evangelicalism tends to think about a common Christian practice or idea, and then talks about how the Scripture is not actually that strict about said issue. I spent a long time ruminating on this shift in focus. Something about it rubbed me wrong, but the issue wasn’t that I thought DeYoung was incorrect. Indeed, I think DeYoung is mostly correct in these middle chapters. He is careful to point out in chapter three that while the Scriptures never prescribe a daily prayer and Bible-reading routine in so many words, “they presume something like it” (p. 47), and he proceeds to lay out a number of the passages that speak of believers living prayerful lives that are well-studied in the Word. In chapter four, about the relationship between wealth and godliness, he discusses at length how the Gospel of Luke uses examples of both the arrogant and righteous rich, those who use their wealth to serve themselves (or obtain their wealth through dishonest means), and those who “get it” and use their wealth to serve others and advance the Kingdom of God (pp. 58-72). When he speaks of collective and generational guilt in chapter five, he takes time to distinguish between instances when collective guilt is appropriate and instances where it is not (pp. 83-85). These (and others not discussed here) are all valid points, even if I do think he rushes through some of them, but they fit awkwardly with the other chapters of his book, and with the thesis he proposed at the start.
These middle chapters amount to DeYoung saying, “God doesn’t actually expect as much from you as you might think he does.” This isn’t a contradiction of the point in the first couple chapters, but it is a different, debatable, and (to me) less interesting point. Those initial chapters (and the final two chapters, which circle back around to the topic) focus on our ability to please God (by His grace) and our attitude and orientation toward Him. “We have a tendency to so focus on God as Judge that we forget to relate to him as Father” (p. 104). God is conforming us to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29), which means we can expect God to both provide good works for us to accomplish (Ephesians 2:10) and the ability for us to accomplish them. The master of the house in Jesus’s parable does not tell his two good servants merely “Passable,” or “Good enough,” but “Well done.” DeYoung does a good job of making this point in these chapters. I can’t help but feel, though, that something is diminished when he suddenly turns and says that God’s expectations are not as exacting as we worry they might be – i.e., that what we need to understand is not how, by grace, we have been made capable of following and enjoying the good works God has given us, but rather that the bar has been set relievingly lower. I do think there’s something to the idea of Christians getting tied in knots trying to accomplish things God never expected of them. That topic, though, might better belong in a separate book, or perhaps DeYoung could spend only a single chapter talking about the topic, rather than having it be the focus of the entire middle portion of his book.
All said, Impossible Christianity gets at an important aspect of daily Christian living and could be a welcome help for Christians who feel a sense of perpetual defeat in their daily walk, whatever my misgivings with his brief treatment of many of his points, or his aggressively informal writing style, or the incongruity of topics in the book. The book is clearly aimed at a general audience of laypeople, who may not have the time or the interest to press through a 500-page tome of complicated theology and are just looking for something that can help them understand their duties better and provide some encouragement. Those who are hoping for a more complex treatment of the book’s topics, though, will need to seek out deeper works.
Cory Carwile