Think Like Jesus rpbr

Think Like Barna

George Barna is one of the most widely featured observers of Christian culture in the country today and spends an enormous amount of time and effort cataloging and interpreting what he sees. So when I saw that he had written a book titled Think Like Jesus, I thought I was going to find a series of observations about how Jesus thought on the variety of issues that Barna addresses in his surveys. Yet, in all contradiction to the title, he managed to write an entire book on thinking like Jesus that is almost wholly void of any direct quotes or even allusions to the thoughts of Our Lord, except for a cursory overview in one chapter. Instead of showing us how Jesus thinks, the author provides far more illumination on how George Barna thinks.

The book is divided into three sections. Part 1 deals with “Perspectives on the State of Worldviews” where Barna defines “worldview” just a little bit differently than one finds in general usage. A worldview is generally thought of as the overarching narrative used to explain a person’s view of life and the universe. Barna applies a unique definition to the term. In saying that a Christian worldview is to think like Jesus, he says that we are to make our faith practical to every situation we face each day. “A biblical worldview is a way of dealing with the world such that we act like Jesus twenty-four hours a day because we think like Jesus.” (p. 4 italics his) He then defines a biblical worldview as “a means of experiencing, interpreting, and responding to reality in light of biblical perspective.” (p. 6) This sounds pretty good so far. So where does he suggest that we acquire this biblical worldview? I am not making this up - “it is asking the question, ‘What would Jesus do if He were in my shoes right now?’ “ (p. 6) His cure for the lack of serious engagement in forming a comprehensive biblical worldview is “WWJD?”

Eschewing diligent exposition of scripture, his cure what ails our churches is a hackneyed cliché. If his best efforts to inform the Church on how to “think like Jesus” are nothing more than the vacuous parroting of an Evangelical bumper sticker, it is probably best if he left the writing of this book to someone else. Think Like Jesus is exactly the kind of book one would expect a non-theologian to write. It is the perfect book for those who want to examine the problem but don’t want to seriously grapple with the theological complexities of forming a “biblical worldview.” It is a comforting book for Evangelicals who are rightly alarmed about the very real problem of shallow Christianity but who don’t want to change what they are already doing. Barna’s “cure” for the church is to do more of what we’ve always done but with a little better planning. Ignoring the advice of, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got,” and the definition of insanity as doing the same thing and expecting a different result, Barna forges ahead in plowing old ground.

Aside from appealing to the trite cliché that has made a mockery of Charles Sheldon’s original masterpiece, In His Steps, the question of what Jesus would do is one worth examining. Had Barna done that, his book would have been an exposition of how Jesus thought instead of a collection of well-heeled pabulums that have been trotted out for years. How can one title a book Think Like Jesus and not include the words and thoughts of the Master Himself? Easy. Barna does what he does best - focuses on poll results. In a masterful stroke of reductionism, Barna defines thinking like Jesus and having a biblical worldview in terms of the following six beliefs:

· The existence of an omniscient, omnipotent God who actively rules the universe

· The sinlessness of Jesus

· A literal Satan

· Eternal salvation is a free gift of God and not based on a person’s good works

· Believers have a personal responsibility to evangelize unbelievers

· The total accuracy of the Bible

Despite the fact that Jesus did not formulate a systematic theology, Barna manages to define those who hold to a “biblical worldview” by using a litmus test of Fundamentalist/Evangelical doctrinal statements. Through his surveys, Barna finds that 91% of all born again adults and 98% of all born again teens do not have a biblical worldview because they do not positively endorse these six defining beliefs. One wonders if the twelve apostles would have measured up using Barna’s survey. None of these six beliefs comprise the basis for the Sermon on the Mount, the Kingdom Parables in Matthew 13 or Jesus’ denunciations of religious hypocrisy. Most glaring in its absence from the list is Jesus’ teaching in John 13:35, “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another,” or the compassion evidenced in the parables of The Good Samaritan and The Prodigal Son. And more puzzling still is why it is that Barna equates these six beliefs with “thinking like Jesus.”

The answer can be found in his chapter on “The American State of Mind” where he compares people with a biblical worldview (i.e. they assent to the six beliefs listed above), people who are born again but do not have a biblical worldview, and those who are not born again. He says those with a biblical worldview live differently (they volunteered more, smoked and drank less, and were more likely to avoid adult rated films), practice their religion differently, and hold to religious beliefs differently than born again Christians without a biblical worldview. The latter tend to bear a stronger resemblance to those who were not born again. As far as Barna is concerned, a Fundamentalist outlook and practice constitutes thinking like Jesus and those who lack this perspective are indistinguishable from the immoral pagans who make up the bulk of unsaved America.

In order to cure this problem, Barna suggests finding the right answers to these seven questions:

1. Does God exist?

2. What is the character and nature of God?

3. How and why was the world created?

4. What is the nature and purpose of humanity?

5. What happens after we die on the earth?

6. What spiritual authorities exist?

7. What is truth?

The bulk of the book is contained in “Part 2: Developing a Biblical Worldview,” where he conducts a chapter-by-chapter examination of each of these questions. Despite the fact that Jesus spent only a tiny amount of his ministry addressing these questions, Barna forges ahead with the answers. Apparently, the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule (to name just a few) have no place in “thinking like Jesus.” Barna handles each of these questions with the typical Fundamentalist/Evangelical answers. Anyone looking for theological depth or an even-handed, finely nuanced treatment of these issues from a variety of perspectives on the topic of what Jesus thought need not bother. Barna simply repackages and condenses most of the Fundamentalist writings from the last 50 years and updates them for modern audiences. In order to make it “fresh” he adds current poll results since this is his field of expertise and Fundamentalist/Evangelicals use his polls to determine their focus. Other than that, there is nothing in this book that has not already been published in one form or another by The Sword of the Lord.

In the third and most incongruous section of the book, “Practicing a Biblical Worldview,” Barna attempts to provide some practical strategies for living out one’s biblical worldview. After a chapter that narrated a fictional story of two contrasting individuals, one with a biblical worldview and one without, he then suggests some ways your church can help you. His advice? Find a church that is intentional in implementing the following strategies:

· They begin with Big Picture objectives and build their ministries around them rather than implementing programs because they sound like good ideas.

· They are uncompromisingly biblical. This is interesting advice from an author who rarely quotes from the Bible in his book on developing a biblical worldview, preferring to have a list of endnote scripture references. I suppose being “uncompromisingly biblical” does not necessitate actually reading from or quoting or even directly referencing the Bible.

· They have “connected foundations.” While Barna defines what he means by this term, there are no examples of what these connected foundations actually look like. Churches with a biblical worldview also have a “consistent framework” and “full integration” that brings “total family involvement” to the church. This sounds like something from Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church, not an analysis of how Jesus might practice his “biblical worldview.”

Lacking practical, how-to instructions, these and his other ideas become nothing more than a chorus of “We need to do more and better of what it is we say we should be doing.” Getting advice like, “The most effective ministries have learned that genuine worldview development is like a three-legged stool: Remove any one of the legs and the stool cannot stand. What are those legs? Information, skills, and application”(p. 182, italics his) hardly constitutes practical strategies for implementing a biblical worldview. At the very least it has no resemblance to the One who said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 16:24-25)

Closing the book with such statements of the obvious makes me wonder what the publisher was thinking when agreeing to put this book into print. When the writer of Ecclesiastes said that there is no end to writing of many books which contribute to the vanity of life, he could have easily had Think Like Jesus: Making the Right Decision Every Time in mind. Containing hardly any words of Jesus and very little thinking, the right decision is to skip this book altogether.

by Rick Presley