Christ In You: Why God Trusts You More Than You Trust Yourself, by Eric B. Johnson

[Note: This book was provided free of charge by Chosen Books in exchange for an honest review.]

This is a kind of book that is hard to review fairly. Does one give credit for good intentions, for being written with warm and optimistic feelings, or does one judge a book harshly because its author appears to lack any kind of biblical depth about the legal and moral underpinnings of the Kingdom of God, or that the covenant relationship he trumpets involves the laws of God being written on our hearts and minds? Do we split the difference, and try to recognize the good and the bad, hoping it doesn’t come off as mere faint praise? At least, that is what I will attempt to do here. This is the sort of book that is based on leaps of human reasoning followed by a search for proof texts and amillennial interpretations of millennial biblical texts to justify the author’s viewpoint. Even when the author is right in seeking to encourage readers to recognize that our longings are put for godly purposes even if they can easily become corrupted, the lack of balance and the ‘name it and claim it’ attitude of the author is something that could only spring from a privileged background where immense blessings are expected, and where lives full of hardship are judged to be less godly.

In terms of structure, this book is less than 200 pages, and it focuses on making false dilemmas about kingdom now and kingdom later, or making feel-good emotional reasoning that occasionally hits the mark and occasionally veers well into heresy. It is hard to imagine a book like this being written anywhere except among optimistic Americans with a slim grasp of scripture, a knee-jerk hostility to God’s law, and a belief that the contemporary dissatisfaction with political and cultural elites shows a genuine hunger for living according to God’s ways as defined in scripture. Yet this book, as it wrestles with areas far beyond its author’s comprehension, is worthwhile in pointing to how other authors can do better, and write with biblical accuracy, in pointing out how God wishes for us to live today and what sort of world we can look to beyond today.

So, let us construct what a truly great book on this subject would do. For one, it would avoid both extremes of minimizing God’s judgment or seeking to motivate people to obey God out of fear. It would point out that Jesus’ sacrifice forgives us of sin, but also enables us through His spirit to live according to His ways. It would point out the grace and positivity of God’s laws as applied to civil and criminal law, to economics and culture and everything that involves human conduct. Indeed, the best response to a book like this, which apparently took ten years for the author to write, is to present a biblical account of the implications of God’s kingdom for life on earth. To be sure, every author would have his (or her) perspective on the issue of God’s kingdom and the tension between desiring God’s active involvement in life now and our expectation of future glory, but it would be easier to address the longings of people for a better way than human failures by pointing to God’s ways, rather than mere human reasoning.