Skye Jethani – WITH [ Review ]

How Can We Say that We Love and Commune with God?

A Review of

With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

Skye Jethani.

Paperback: Thomas Nelson, 2011.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]  [ Kindle ]

Reviewed by C. Christopher Smith

I picked up Skye Jethani’s new book With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God because it had blurbs recommending it by several authors whose work has been highly reviewed here in the ERB, most notably Scot McKnight and Alan Hirsch.  With is a mostly helpful book in providing language for the ways in which we all too often skew our relationship with God, and in depicting in clear, simple terms what right relationship with God should look like. The major flaw of the book, one that almost always pops up in books written for evangelical Christians – and one that long-time readers of the ERB have heard me point out many, many times, ad nauseam – is that the church has no role in the Jethani’s depiction of our relationship with God; for him, the primary relationship is solely between the individual and God.   As helpful as the language is that Jethani provides here, the book is deeply flawed by its propagation of the prevailing individualism of Western culture.  Jethani does help guide us out of some destructive ways in which we tend to define our relationship with God, but ultimately With does not go far enough in bearing witness to God’s mission of reconciling all things, a redemptive work that is centered primarily in the church.

With that caveat in mind, here’s a summary of what I did find helpful in Jethani’s book.  The first half of the book overviews four ways in which we misunderstand our relationship with God.  Jethani begins the book with an insightful discussion of expectations, and indeed this is primarily a book about expectations, about how the shape we expect our relationship with God to take.   In the book’s introduction, Jethani says:

My concern is that we are inoculating an entire generation to the Christian faith. Many come with a holy desire to know God, to experience his presence in their lives … But this is not what they see or experience.   … Instead, they are offered a substitute form of Christianity, one cannot break through the shadows and that never really satisfies the deepest longings of their souls (3).

The four misrepresentations of our relationship with God that Jethani keenly names are:

Life From God – “People in this category want God’s blessings, but they are not particularly interested in God himself”

Life Over God – “The mystery and wonder of the world is lost as God is abandoned in favor of proven formulas and controllable outcomes.”

Life For God – “The most significant life … is the one expended accomplishing great things in God’s service”

Life Under God – “Sees God in simple cause-and-effect terms – we obey his commands and he blesses our lives, our families, our nation”

 

Jethani spends a chapter on each of these postures, explaining why each falls short of what God intends for humanity.  In the second half of the book, he fleshes out a vision of right relationship with God, what he has called “Life With God.”  After introducing the basic framework of this posture, Jethani fleshes it out using the Pauline triad of Faith, Hope and Love.   What he offers is a challenging and deeply biblical vision, but ultimately it is not radical enough. Our local church communities are where we learn to be with God in faith, hope and love.  The deepest longings of our souls, to use Jethani’s language from the earliest part of the book is to commune not only with God, but also with our brothers and sisters – and furthermore in our communing with our brothers and sisters, we learn to commune with God.   There are times at which Jethani hints at this deeper picture of communing with humanity and with God, but mostly the human communion has been lopped off and Jethani focuses on our communion with God as individuals.  To be fair, Jethani in the book’s appendix “Communing with God,” Jethani advocates the practice of “praying with the Church,” and there in he notes: “I cannot isolate my union with God from my union with his people.”  However, the vision of the church that he offers here is of the Church universal and abstract, and not the church local and particular.  Again, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of praying (i.e., Jethani’s shorthand for communing) with the historic tradition of the people of God, it simply does not go far enough, and help us in the much more difficult task of communing with the real and particular people (in all our brokenness) in our local church communities.

 

The Mission of God in the world is the reconciliation of all humanity (and indeed, all creation).  Paraphrasing the Apostle John, if we cannot love and commune with the particular brothers and sisters that God has given us in our local churches, how can we say that we love and commune with God?  Ultimately, for all its insightful advice, the vision offered by Skye Jethani in With is ultimately a shortcut that tries to imagine loving God without the slowness and messiness of loving our brothers and sisters, the community that God has gathered in our place in the Holy Spirit.

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C. Christopher Smith is the editor of The Englewood Review of Books and author of the recent ebook The Virtue of Dialogue: Conversation as a Hopeful Practice of Church Communities. He is currently working on co-writing a book on the theme of Slow Church (IVP Books 2013), and blogs about this new project on Patheos.com.