BOOKS: I Answered You with Thunder

“A Gentle Thunder: Hearing God through the Storm,” by Max Lucado (Word, 227 pp.; $19.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Wayne Brouwer, senior pastor of Harderwyk Christian Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan.

I have a confession to make. I read every book Max Lucado writes, but I don’t keep any of them on the shelves of my personal library. It’s not that I always pass them along to others, delightedly sharing this latest colorful creation. Mostly it is just that I like to be baptized, for a few devotional hours, in the rhythmic waves of his soul-refining stories, but then I move on, and they don’t move with me. My one-time use of Lucado’s offerings may be unique. I know that some of my best friends bathe regularly in Lucado’s pools, returning again and again to “When God Whispers Your Name” or “He Still Moves Stones.”

And I can understand why. Max is creative. He is interesting. His images fit the flow of our world–short sentences, vivid cameos, wisdom distilled into sound-bites. Reading “A Gentle Thunder” makes me thoughtful and reflective and feeling good 30 times over.

Max seems to know God just a little better than most of us–not that he puts on airs about it. But as Abraham Joshua Heschel said of the Hebrew prophets, some individuals have their ears tuned to an octave higher than normal speech. They hear things most of us never catch. And when these folks listen in on heaven, they can feel pain beyond terrestrial measure and ride wings of joy just beyond the range of human bliss. That is what Max does in “A Gentle Thunder.” God dreams. He loves boldly. He gives his beauty away. Maybe we knew that. But likely we never quite perceived it in the terms God’s friend Max paints.

And painting is a good term for what Max does. Psychological painting. Entering Nathaniel’s range of vision when Philip invites him to “come and see” Jesus, Max suddenly expands our sight through Nathaniel’s eyes until we encounter whole vistas of Jesus’ power challenging and changing the mundane and decadent trivialities of our world.

Or take the “parable” of “The Cave People.” It seems to start with Plato’s timeless tale of cave dwellers but quickly becomes a true caricature of our times–with hope found in the promise of John’s gospel through the witness of the church. Lots of theology packed into four rapid vignettes that simmer with simplicity. Dark world. A torch-carrier. Pain and hesitation. Joy, warmth, and sharing. It is worth the price of the book all by itself.

So I like the book. But here is the continuing saga of why I don’t keep Lucado’s books on my shelf, and why this one will pass on as well. Invariably I get weary with the incessant individualism, which doesn’t seem to grab hold of the next steps of Christian faith. It is always the point of crisis, always the point of turning, and it is always individualized.

I’d love to see Max turn to Acts 15 (“So, now we’ve got a church, and we don’t all fit together–what do we do?!”) or Psalm 88 (“God betrayed me!”); or Isaiah 60 (“That’s a different slant on world news!”). I’m a little disturbed when the powerful theology of John 2 is reduced to a psychological reading of Mary’s processing of a no-wine problem, or the drama of Lazarus’s resurrection is reproduced as a teaching about four personality types. I have similar misgivings about Max’s “two-garden” view of the Bible: “The Bible is the story of two gardens. Eden and Gethsemane. In the first, Adam took a fall. In the second, Jesus took a stand. In the first, God sought Adam. In the second, Jesus sought God. In Eden, Adam hid from God. In Gethsemane, Jesus emerged from the tomb. In Eden, Satan led Adam to a tree that led to his death. From Gethsemene, Jesus went to a tree that led to our life.” That’s tremendous parallelism. But it stops short of understanding either Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained in dimensions broader than individual attachment.

I am sure Max knows more about creation and eschatological re-creation. After all, he is a great student of the Bible. I just wish that sometimes those motifs would meander through the delightful forest of his resigned individualism.