A Gentler God: Breaking free of the Almighty in the company of the human Jesus

by Doug Frank

Editorial Reviews Review "This is a beautiful piece of work. In the first half of the book, I 'This is the best and deepest diagnosis of what's wrong with American evangelicalism I've ever read.' In the second half, I thought, 'This is one of the most moving accounts of Jesus' humanity and death I've ever read.' This book will stay with me for a long time." (Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christianity and Naked Spirituality) "Doug Frank is kind and gracious and dangerous and fearless and honest - all at the same time. This book will help lots of people find liberation from the malevolent Being they never believed in in the first place." (Rob Bell, author of Love Wins) "The gentleness with which Doug Frank deconstructs the Almighty of popular preaching and the schizoid salvation story of America's patriarchs could not be more respectful of the God of infinite love, the forgiveness of Jesus and the evangelical tradition itself." (David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K) "A Gentler God is a fascinating insight into the psychology of evangelicalism and the men who gave shape to it. Doug Frank carefully, lovingly uncovers the emotional damage that can result from clinging to a magical almighty deity, when our souls might be saved by the messy and merciful Jesus." (Debbie Blue, pastor at House of Mercy, St. Paul, MN, author of Sensual Orthodoxy) "A Gentler God is a rich ragout of theology, American church history, pop culture, scripture, and psychology... Frank's book is compelling because of Frank's own gentleness - gentleness that has conviction and energy.... One senses that this book is a life-work, an outcome of a long, patient journey where enough time has passed and enough wisdom been gained for sour grapes to have become sweet and nourishing." (Perspectives) "Narrating extensive stories of his own spiritual pilgrimage away from ... the wrathful God of his youth and recounting experiences of others who have been wounded by their experiences in evangelical families, churches and colleges, Frank develops a full-scale psychological interpretation of evangelical pathologies and a full-scale theology to remedy those pathologies." (Christian Century) Product Description What is God like? Is God the lofty Almighty of conservative religion, with power to stop human holocausts and deadly natural disasters, but who inexplicably declines to do so? Is God the callous Judge, offering his favorites a place in heaven while summarily casting the damned into everlasting hell? Is God the vain King on his throne, requiring us to stroke his ego by praising him unceasingly for his awesome power? If this is the God we've been taught, no wonder so many have come to realize that they don't like - let alone trust - God. The simple certainties of their childhood no longer make sense. But the equally assured assertions of today's atheists leave them cold. They want a personal connection with God - an honest faith that grows out of their own felt truth and touches them at the deepest levels of their being.

Genres: Nonfiction, Christianity

390 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Jonathan Hiskes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third time through and I still don't know what to do with this book. Plan to write on it for the next month or two.

... Two Oregon Extension friends and I wrote pages and pages of letters to each other processing this book and its significance. Can't do it justice in a capsule review.

[Luke Hillier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book a lot, largely for what it contributes to an overarching conversation and the ways it impacted me. Technically speaking, it had some weaknesses that bogged down my experience of reading it, but the former elements are so compelling.

I've been looking forward to this book ever since I found it existed about two years ago (and I can't believe it's been out since 2010!) and there's always a bit of trepidation going into those reads for fear it won't meet my built-up hype. This book wasn't exactly what I anticipated, but it was also much more than that; I genuinely did not expect the breadth of topics Frank was going to tackle. Based off the cover, subtitle, and some reviews, I thought that this would be exclusively addressing the notion of "omnipotence" as a theological attribute of the common conceptualization of "Almighty" God. I was pumped for that, given that I've found process theology to be really life-giving in the past 5 years or so, particularly as I've processed through some firsthand and second-hand experiences that make omnipotence really hard to hold in tangent with a God I can trust. What intrigued me about this contribution to that field was that it wasn't coming from an academic "process theologian" place at all, but in fact someone pretty firmly rooted in evangelicalism. In fact, I discovered during my reading, that Frank hadn't even really connected with any other process theologians' work until midway through writing this book. Given how antithetical much of process thought is to my understanding of "evangelicalism," the book had a real draw for me from the start.

I hadn't anticipated that Frank would essentially be traversing across a wide expanse of the theological minefield, working through not just omnipotence/sovereignty (and the wrathful and/or coldly distant conceptualizations attached to those concepts) but also the penal substitution theory of atonement and both the eternal torment and annihilation ideas of hell. While at points I felt like Frank bit off a bit much than could be chewed, I can see how it all fit into place, and interestingly addressing the whole protected the writing from feeling like an ideological diatribe and instead allowed it to represent his core argument that God is in fact "gentle" (as a loaded term) and that has implications in all of these realms. Similarly, I was surprised by how central psychology was to much of his explorations, but I loved how he consistently helped the reader to recognize that ALL theology is created by complicated humans, none of it comes from a vacuum where our unique identities and backgrounds somehow doesn't influence what we believe and produce about God. Beyond that, I really appreciated the attention he paid to Jesus's psychological makeup, especially the notion of a "climate of hospitality" that defined his inner life and allowed him to meet everyone with compassion because he first received and showed it to himself (a reflection of God's heart/spirit).

There were certainly aspects I didn't agree with, and from both sides of the fence. I think his whole endeavor would have been deeply, deeply enriched by a prolonged engagement with process and liberation theologians, particularly women of color who have written about the cross and "redemptive suffering." I also think he loses some power in the specificity of seeing Jesus on the cross in his unique perspective. Plus, there are just waaaaaay too many freakin' footnotes!! Man oh man those made the reading experience such a choppy, rabbit-hole-filled process that just felt really frustrating and tedious at times (especially given how peripheral many of them felt...I understand having trouble parting with meaningful secondary content, but it totally distracted from the beauty of the book many times). BUT, the 5-star stands because this genuinely made me love Jesus more, and also to adopt a posture in light of that that allows me to love myself more too. It feels like a really powerful and special book for that alone.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Gentler God by Doug Frank is broken into two parts. Part One deconstructs many parts of the evangelical Christian faith which have developed over the last 50-75 years, focusing on the change from a personal God to a more powerful, almighty God. Part Two reconstructs Christian faith in terms the author has found meaningful through his life - giving a newer explanation of what sin is and what it means to be saved and reconciled to God.

In Part One, the author gets most of his inertia from doing away with the concept of hell as popularized in the Middle Ages and rebirthed with the development of evangelical theology. By freeing himself from hell (as eternal conscious torment), he frees himself from the type of God who would create such a place and send his creation into it. The author does a very insightful investigation into why Christians in the 20th century were motivated to elevate the powerful attributes of God and hide away the weak and vulnerable God that is sometimes present in the Bible. He even explores the relationships prominent theologians had with their fathers and hypothesizes that this effected that God many of us grew up with. He then moves on to examine what effect belief in this almighty, judging, condemning God has on the psychology of humans trying to find their way in the world.

In Part Two, the author relates how his theology has developed after a significant event he experienced in which he had a vision of Jesus dying powerless on the cross. (The author never claims that his view is the only view, or the right view; he instead says that he is relaying things how he can best explain them. The non-claim to exclusive truth is very attractive, especially when there are so many competing views all claiming they are the truth.) To the author, sin is the disharmony created within us by competing aspects of our personalities. Inside each of us is a believer, a doubter, a do-gooder, a selfish prick, a know-it-all, a know-nothing, etc. We are not comfortable with the different parts of ourselves, so we usually pick one out and pretend that it sums up our entire existence. But in doing so, we deny who we are and who we were made to be. The author proposes that we love all the parts of ourselves, even the embarrassing and unflattering parts. In loving these parts, we allow them to inform our personality and become a balanced human being, the way God created us to be. Jesus was a good example for how to live, in that he learned how to hold all the parts of himself in harmony. We saw his desire to avoid the cross and also his willingness to go to the cross. And in suffering, Jesus shows us a God who suffers at the evil of the world, and in doing so can overpower evil in weakness.

A Gentler God was recommended to me by my friend Alex, who described it as the second book in a one-two punch which completely changed the way he views God. (The first book in the knockout was A New Kind of Christianity by Brian D. McLaren.) I am glad for having gone through it. It gave me a lot to think about. I believe that I resonated more strongly with the first part dealing with deconstruction of recent theological developments than I did with his strongly psychological second part. It is not that I have strong feelings about psychology; it was just a lot for me to process and take in. I definitely find hope in the concept that God may not be all-powerful as many believe. The concept of a weak, suffering God rings more true to my experience of life than a distant, holy, omnipotent judge at watch over the earth.

(Review originally posted at http://mrsundquist.blogspot.com/2011/...)

[Jed Sanford · Rating 1 out of 5]

In Part 1 of A Gentler God, Doug Frank critiques American evangelicalism as incoherent and psychologically harmful. He argues that repeatedly trying to scare people into getting right with God by threatening them with eternal Hell is psychologically damaging. He is probably right that these kinds of crude and clumsy tactics are problematic, but sound evangelical theology teaches that we can grow more and more in the assurance of our salvation as we mature in our faith and grow closer to God. Frank tries to trace the evangelical concept of God–the Almighty, Sovereign, Holy Lord of the universe–to 20th century evangelical theologian Carl Henry’s daddy issues. Even leaving aside the absurdity of trying to psychoanalyze someone you have never met, this is nonsensical, since it ignores the fact that this is the God that the entire Church has believed in since the first century. Frank argues that the penal substitution theory of the atonement depicts a cruel, distant, and bloodthirsty God. This is baffling, since the entire point of the substitution theory of the atonement is that God has taken the (natural and inevitable) consequences of our sin upon Himself. Frank loathes the idea that God wants every part of us to be sanctified and conformed to the image of Christ, comparing this idea to prisoners constantly being watched by prison guards. But why not instead compare it to a fitness coach who pushes us to train in a hard and disciplined manner because he genuinely cares for us and wants us to be perfectly fit and healthy? Frank argues that a truly loving God would leave us alone to affirm and accept ourselves and to live our own lives; he criticizes the demanding God of historic Christian orthodoxy as “distant.” This is baffling, since the God of historic Christian orthodoxy is a lover who passionately wants to be completely intimate with us and to possess us completely, with whom we can have mystical union through Christ.
In Part 2 of A Gentler God, Doug Frank makes his case for rejecting the God of the Bible and of historic Christian orthodoxy–the Almighty, Holy, Lord of all–and replacing Him with a completely different God. Frank claims that this completely different God is revealed in Jesus. Since it is clear that Jesus believed the Old Testament to be the infallible and Authoritative word of God, and since the apostles who wrote the New Testament were Jesus’s closest friends and knew Him and His teachings better than anyone, this claim is patently absurd. Frank’s Jesus is not the Jesus of history, a first century Jewish apocalyptic prophet, but an imaginary Jesus of Frank’s own making, some kind of modern therapeutic psychologist (a historical anachronism if there ever was one). In order to believe in this Jesus, Frank has to ignore many, many teachings of Jesus that directly contradict his theology, such as Jesus urging people to extreme moral rigor and self-denial, and demanding that we obey His commandments. Then, he has to “reinterpret” Jesus’s other sayings in ways that are utterly historically preposterous; for example, by “repent, for the Kingdom of God is near,” Jesus did not mean “turn away from your sinful behavior, because YHWH is about to fulfill His covenant promises to Israel,”but, “stop believing in YHWH and start believing in a completely different God so you can have a religious experience of being loved unconditionally.” The only “evidence” Frank provides for why anyone should believe in his imaginary Jesus is a questionable interpretation of an extremely vague vision that he had, supposedly from God.
Frank claims that Jesus being God Incarnate proves that God is not Almighty. But if God has been weak and impotent all along, then this completely robs the Incarnation of its power as a demonstration of God’s love for us: the infinite God emptying Himself and humbling Himself in order to be with us as one of us. Frank argues that the problem of evil proves that God is not Almighty. But orthodox Christianity does have an answer to the problem of evil: sin has radically separated humanity from a Holy God. Frank articulates an alternative theory of the Atonement, in which Jesus’s death on the cross reveals that God has always loved, forgiven, and accepted us unconditionally, so we should love and accept ourselves just as we are. It remains completely unexplained how Jesus’s death was actually necessary for our salvation, then. In spite of the fact that Jesus clearly taught there would be a Final Judgment, followed by Hell for the wicked, Frank absurdly tries to claim that Jesus was just using Hell as a metaphor for the psychological suffering we endure when we don’t love and accept ourselves. Frank claims that evangelicals don’t know how to mourn, and that they constantly put up false fronts of perfection. I don’t know if these problems are as widespread as Frank thinks they are, but, in any case, there are certainly spiritual practices within historic Christian orthodoxy (lament, confession) that can resolve these problems. Finally, Frank claims that Jesus wants us to just be free to be ourselves and to be a mess. This is a rather sad and pathetic soteriology compared to the orthodox biblical Christian vision of all of creation being renewed, transformed, and brought to perfection, a new heavens and a new earth.
In the end, Frank’s theology has all the telltale weaknesses of evangelical theology (a focus on an individualistic “personal relationship” with God, an abstract soteriology divorced from the story of Israel and the hope for the renewal of all creation) and none of its strengths. The result is a pseudoChristian religion with no actual connection to the historical Jesus or the God that He revealed. While Frank does make a few valid critiques of 20th century American evangelical subculture in this book, that is the only positive thing that can be said about it.

[Pastor2112 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story of a former conservative evangelical who has come to believe in a God that goes beyond the conventional God of evangelical theology. By playing on "our yearning for love and our susceptibility to fear" evangelicals are able to speak of a God who loves individuals enough to offer then eternal life, but is so angry with the same individuals that, should they refuse this offer, punishes them eternally. This is a God whose wrath is absolutely certain, but whose love is definitely not. With care and compassion, Frank deconstructs his former evangelical faith and reconstructs a faith that more aligns with the God revealed in Christ Jesus.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is one of the more moving books I've ever read. I gobbled up the first half of this book because Mr. Frank's insight into the culture I was raised in was like a healing balm. I could not stop reading this book. I was losing sleep over it, because I was reading it deep into the night.

I do not have time to do this book justice, but let me say for now 1) This book is not for everyone - it will likely deeply turn off most evangelicals and most conservatives. This book is meant for those who are in those groups and who see problems that need addressed and more specifically it's meant for those whose fundamental paradigm has already begun to shift. (I don't have time to break this down.) 2) Even if someone is in that group, this book will likely still be disorienting. The word "troubling" in a quote on the front of this book is accurate. I was troubled by this book, but in a good way, in a way that makes me grow. So, be forewarned this book is disorienting and troubling. And it is worth it! 3) I feel blessed to have felt Mr. Frank's heart and to have experienced his transparency and how much he shared of himself. This is a work of love! It is beautiful. And it comes out of significant pain. I consider this book to represent damage that comes from religion. (And I am sure many would say that some of the ideas Mr. Frank is suggesting are themselves damaging.) 4) "emotionally incoherent" is the primary term I remember from this large work. I now recognize/feel the emotional incoherence of telling people that God loves you, and if you don't love him back you're going to be tortured for all eternity. Not only is that emotionally incoherent but it is coercive, something I now recognize that some of us have added to the good news but it wasn't there originally. Mr. Frank makes the brilliant point that fear does not generate authentic love. And he goes on to demonstrate the evangelicalism is centered around hell and fear. This emotional incoherence meant the world to me to hear from someone who has walked these streets and bled. 5) Several of Mr. Frank's conclusions are ones I don't currently share with him but I love to have my ideas challenged and I appreciated hearing alternative perspectives. 6) Mr. Frank's realization and description of evangelicalism inability to mourn and suffer is accurate, horrible, and damaging. It is what I've experienced. I am so grateful to hear someone call this out and detail it.

There are so many more worthwhile things to say about this book. It is large! He treads a broad swath of ground and it is deep, so deep. Unlike one of the other reviewers, I loved his many, deep footnotes. They are as good as the main work!

This is a work of love, first and foremost, last and finally. Multiple times I thought: is Mr. Frank still alive? Because I want to meet him! Maybe this is how we should respond to Jesus and to God? But as Mr. Frank so devastatingly reveals, the evangelical God is not inviting. And Mr. Frank has done his best to bring us back to the God seen in Jesus.

I will be reading this book for years to come...

[David Andrianoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frank clearly expresses what I have often tried to articulate regarding my perspective on Jesus. I have found myself dissatisfied with contemporary views describing Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit—the Trinity. Frank provides a refreshing alternative. I totally agree that “American evangelicalism [is] firmly in the grip of an adolescent spirituality” (p. 147). Frank suggests that we “avoid thinking of God in any other way than through the prism provided by the human Jesus” (p. 196). A Gentler God is just what I need.

[S · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Jordan Swisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great view of God that was healing for me.

[Brady Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most thought provoking, challenging and beautiful books I've read. If you haven't read it, read it.

[Samantha Hafelin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a long hard read, but very thought provoking.

[Christopher J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scholarly and compassionate dismembering of. conservative Christianity, from the inside.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank's critique of evangelical Christianity is pointed and well thought-out. While some of the book feels reactionary, a response to what he was taught in childhood, it offers compelling arguments to think of God in a different way. A good book to read in a group of people who are interested in thinking about faith in a different way and interested in relating to God.
If you've ever felt shamed by the church, Frank knows what that's like. And he offers a perspective of God that shows that God does not shame you. I took some thing from this book and left others but am glad to have read and been challenged by it.

[Carolyn Vance · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part One was absolutely cathartic. The author voiced just about every question I'd ever had about the form of Christian faith I'd been a part of since the age of 16, questions voiced and unvoiced. It was powerful to read. It was like being given permission to let out my breath, held for way too long. Part Two is the author's movement forward from the the place of confronting all the questions. He finds a way to live with faith honestly. The solution that worked from him does not work for me. I'm glad it worked for him, but I'll have to keep looking. Nevertheless, that doesn't cancel the the importance of the first half of the book.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting reading, if incomplete, of evangelical history through the lens of Jungian and Internal Family Therapy approaches to the psyche. Frank’s work excels in recognizing the role shane plays in shaping Evangelical theology.

The primary weakness of the book is that it does not really address racism as a founding concern of fundamentalism and the evangelical movement (cf. Randall Ballmer’s work)

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

He raises questions that many people struggle with and are good to think about, but his answers were very troubling to me. I loved how much he emphasized that seeing Jesus is seeing the Father, but aside from that I cannot recommend this book. I can tell that he wrote this book with a lot of love and concern for people, but I think the direction he leads people in could be problematic.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book after reading an interview with Doug Frank: http://theotherjournal.com/2016/10/17...

It's a very interesting analysis of American Evangelicalism and ways forward.

[Nathan Bonney]

I haven't finished, but this is one of the best books I've read in a while!

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great example of theological argument both critical and constructive. This book makes me want to believe in God.

[Jenna Walthour · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read!