Book Review: When God Doesn't Make Sense

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: When God Doesn't Make Sense


Author: James Dobson

Author's web page: http://www.focusonthefamily.com/

Date: 1993

Publisher: Tyndale House

ISBN: 0-84323-8227-5

Length: 250 pages

Quote: "'Why would God permit this to happen to me?' is a question all believers--and many pagans--have struggled to answer."

When God Doesn't Make Sense is probably the least popular book the founder of "Focus on the Family" ever wrote. To some extent it deserves to be. For instance, the opposite of "believers" is "unbelievers," not "Pagans," who are, technically, subscribers to a different system of belief.

In the 1980s, Dave Hunt claimed that Christians had been "seduced" by the "positive thinking" movement. Not only did positive thinkers claim that people could simply tell ourselves how to feel (and cure diseases, including AIDS and cancer) by "choosing to be happy"; they also claimed that people needed to tell God how to smooth and straighten out our lives. Even if the focus of a positive thinker's prayer was trivial, positive thinkers preached that it would inevitably be granted if the positive thinker wished hard enough, or "visualized" in enough detail.

James Dobson wrote this book as a corrective. In his long active ministry, he says, he's seen many situations in which prayers seemed to be miraculously answered. He even prints a color photo in which a partial rainbow appears oddly inverted in the sky, like a smile or like a cradle supporting the small airplane for which he hoped prayers were being answered with protection. On the other side of the page is a photo of Dobson in a group of four friends, taken shortly after all four friends died in a plane crash despite Dobson's prayers for their safety.

Dobson's reasoning about how God can allow good people to die young, while people who would never be missed live on and on, is biblical. People whose questions have to do with deaths and natural disasters may find some comfort in this book.

My objection to When God Doesn't Make Sense is that it barely touches on what I believe to be its more valuable theme. Most human suffering begins when humans violate a law of nature. The Bible teaches that we have been given the gift, and the burden, of consequentiality; things we do have consequences. We don't always know the consequences of an act. Marrying someone you love, in spite of the person's genetic physical quirks, and trying to raise a family ought to have better consequences than "hooking up" with strangers, but either choice can cause children to be born with horrible diseases.

I wish Dobson had had more to say about this idea, and less in support of the positive thinkers' "crutch" argument that, if something wasn't going well, at least some good could be brought out of bad things if people would try hard enough.

I remember sitting in a Sunday School class where ignorant people were trying to convince themselves that everything was working for the good of two absent members of the class, sisters I'll call Rachel and Leah. Rachel was a beauty queen who had done well in college, found a good job, married well, and had two adorable babies. Leah had suffered damage to the skull and the brain during the birth process, had never gone to school, had never done a job, had never walked all the way across a room, could hardly speak, and had spasms of the facial muscles that continually distorted her face. Leah's parents had built her a wheelchair-accessible house of her own, with a large and luxurious room for entertaining friends, which she often used for church gatherings. "Maybe God needed for Leah to have cerebral palsy," a young man gushed, "so there'd be room in her house and life for our church!"

I've never gone back to that church; so far as I know Leah never did either. There may be times when it's easy to believe that God is a sadist who "needs" for people to suffer, but I've not observed any good results coming from anyone's attempt to love a Cosmic Sadist...or even to bond with "friends" who assume that able-bodied people never open their homes to the church.

I could wish, further, that Dobson had been more biblical about what we can sometimes do about suffering. We are never told to sit around, like Job's comforters, trying to defend God's honor by blaming the sufferers, or like the people James chastised, passively murmuring "Depart in peace, may you be warmed and fed [somewhere else]" to the homeless and hungry. We are specifically told that the first of these bad choices is a sin and the second is an exercise in futility.

When the Bible writers address people whose friends are suffering, they are less likely to offer any abstract "spiritual" thoughts than they are to use active verbs in the imperative mode. "Bear one another's burdens." "Divide your substance with" those in need. "Be a father to the fatherless, and in place of a husband to the widows." Or, in a delightful modern paraphrase, "Give until it hurts."

In order for human suffering to become a means of grace, Christians need to rediscover what the Bible plainly tells us to do about human suffering. Not say--do. Those tempted to utter "positive thoughts" when they ought to be offering time, money, or labor to relieve suffering should go to someone who understands the Bible better than they do (click here to contact me) and request Duct Tape Therapy.

When God Doesn't Make Sense is recommended to those who may still be tempted by positive thinking. I think it's better read and absorbed before grief has caused a person to doubt his or her faith. The truth it contains may be too harsh for the sick, the recently bereaved, or the unjustly punished to read...if this book is handed to them by anyone who has not met their physical, material needs in humble silence first. Those who have seen Jesus living in their fellow believers will at least have something on which to base their faith when inappropriate verbiage threatens to blow away the remaining shreds of it.