A Gentler God

Coming in January (more info soon)

REVIEWS

This is a beautiful piece of work, extraordinary for its spiritual and theological—as well as its psychological and sociological—insight. In the first half of the book, I thought, “This is the best and deepest diagnosis of what’s wrong with American evangelicalism I’ve ever read.” In the second half of the book, I thought, “This is one of the best and most moving accounts of Jesus’ humanity and death that I’ve ever read.”

This book will stay with me for a long time, and I will recommend it to many friends. In fact, I’ve already started making a list.

BRIAN MCLAREN
Speaker (www.brianmclaren.net)
Author of The Secret Message of Jesus and
Finding Our Way Again—and other titles

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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 an “immaculate-magical-almighty” deity, when our souls might be saved by the messy and merciful Jesus.

The author beautifully articulates a Savior who might break our hearts open—truly “save us” in a profound way not just from some deadly fate after we die, but from the “deathliness” and “hell” of living now, locked up in false pretenses, loveless fear and damning shame.

I wish everyone (I’m not exaggerating) would read this book.

DEBBIE BLUE
Pastor, House of Mercy, St. Paul, MN
Author of Sensual Orthodoxy and
From Stone to Living Word

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I have encountered many within the Christian community whose souls have been crippled by a distant, majestic, untouchable God. In A Gentler God, Doug Frank tenderly traces our destructive attraction to this false God while uncovering the earthy, vulnerable, shameless person of Jesus as the true revelator of unconditional Love.

If read as openly as it is written, this book has the capacity to release a kind of human freedom and vitality that each of us aches to embody. Doug Frank is a healer and this book a much-needed balm.

MARK YACONELLI
Author of Wonder, Fear, and Longing and
Contemplative Youth Ministry

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Reading A Gentler God is like listening to someone telling truths in a house filled with family secrets. Frank leaves no corner of evangelical theology and practice un-probed and un-narrated. His dogged pursuit of a genuine salvation event sends him back to the Bible to discover the good news of an authentically human Jesus and a God who treasures, rather than condemns, the “beautiful mystery of the self.”

Frank touches a nerve so deep that evangelicals—both professed and disaffected—will feel something while reading this book. And this is precisely what Frank aims to do: to attend to the yearnings, betrayals and lost-loves of evangelicals. No other book has so aptly named, and met, the deep longings and deeper disappointments of wayward evangelicals.

SHELLY RAMBO
Assistant Professor of Theology
Boston University

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Doug Frank is kind and gracious and dangerous and fearless and honest—all at the same time. This is a book I’m convinced is going to help lots of people find liberation from the malevolent Being they never believed in in the first place.

These pages contain a lifetime of experience, wisdom, pain, healing—and, of course, resurrection. Deeply moving, extraordinarily insightful—this is a rare book.

ROB BELL
Founding Pastor, Mars Hill Bible Church
Grand Rapids, MI
Author of Velvet Elvis and Sex God

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A Gentler God is a labor of love, aimed at healing the common wound of Protestant and Catholic evangelicals. It’s hard to explain “love” to veiled “hate” without sounding mean, but this book pulls it off. 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 evangelical tradition itself.

Nowhere does Frank take the tone of “educated and freed authority” who “knows better.” With the improvisational humility of a teacher/healer who’s worked with hundreds of wounded faithful— and suffered faith-wounds himself—Frank applies salves and bandages as soothing as the touch of a truly loving parent, the mercy of the Gospels, the wind on the plain of Mamre.

Welcome to the masterwork of a huge-hearted, evangelical son.

DAVID JAMES DUNCAN
Author of The Brother K and God Laughs and Plays

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From the Introduction

I’ve organized this book in two parts—one for the bad news, the other for the good.

Part One takes a long, hard look at the God who hides within and maintains the institutional structure of evangelical Christianity. Evangelicals do not have a “lock” on this God—“he” has appeared, in one guise or another, in many times and places throughout the history of Christianity, and he shows up in non-Christian religions as well. But evangelicals have put a particular spin on him, and that spin has shaped my life and my religious experience for over sixty years.

In order to know myself, I have had to become more familiar with this God, and try to understand him from the inside. I will show that this God does not give evidence of a truly loving heart, and this makes it hard for his children to love him, as Jesus urged, “with all our heart” (Mark 12:30). Once we can admit we don’t love this unlovable God “with all our heart”—a very painful admission, to be sure—I believe we will have passed an important milestone on the journey to find and love a truer, better God.

Part Two is about this truer, better God. I hear this God’s liberating word in the living spirit and the dying gasps of the shabby human being who was nailed, two thousand years ago, to a splintered pole in Palestine. Unlike the “bad-news God” of evangelicalism, this human God feels genuine warmth for me—in the words of the familiar hymn, “just as I am”—and my heart instinctively reciprocates. In the embrace of this human God, my fear of God and my religiously-inspired enmity toward myself begin to find relief.

DOUG FRANK