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 PrintableVersion The road tripThe bloke's BibleNot for blokes & it’s not the Bible! THE ROAD TRIP The forward to this book says, ‘if you like adventure, a good story and seek a “real” godly manliness, this book will help’. Sadly, this is not true. None of it! Never have I found a book so disappointing. Each chapter in this imaginary road trip begins with a retelling of a passage of the Bible. On almost every occasion the author’s imagination completely obscures the real point of the text. Sometimes it is just fanciful. Sometimes it is crude. Sometimes it is blasphemous! At times he tries so hard to be clever and funny that he seems to forget what the Bible is really about, indeed one wonders if he really knows. Is the narrative about Isaac and Rebekah in Genesis 24 really about falling in love? Did Jesus really call the disciples by asking ‘are you interested’? I could ask a similar question about most of the 29 chapters! Most worrying of all, his retelling of Matthew 27.38-50 concludes: ‘the young man shook his head and quietly walked away from the jubilant crowd, taking one last glance at the silent, redundant cross. He had been rescued by a visible, mighty God. But a billion others had not; humanity was still forever lost’. No, there is no gospel in this book and there seems very little encouragement and help for men to live godly. In the final chapter the road trip ends with no clear lessons learnt and instead the realisation ‘All too often these days I realise that I haven’t lived what I believed … I hope I’m in the procession. I so hope so’. He wonders if perhaps there might, after all, be a back door entrance into heaven. His answer is to go down the pub and have a pint of Guinness and read the Bible. That sounds pretty good (assuming that you like Guinness!) except his summary of the Bible is horror, drama, action, adventure, romance, sex, comedy, mystery … there’s even science fiction at the end. The Bible is all about Christ, all about his finished race that alone means that we can run the race set before us. Men do need honest, biblical encouragement to live godly lives. This reviewer certainly does. Sadly, this book doesn’t teach the Bible and it is therefore no help to blokes (or women for that matter!). In fact, my biggest concern in writing this review is that it might make some read it just to see if I am exaggerating! Please don’t! Buy A Few Good Men by Richard Coekin instead! David Sprouse, © Evangelicals Now - July 2008 |
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