The review about this product
Francis Chan's bestseller, Crazy Love, was a bit of a disappointment for me. Like many other books that I've heard hyped up in mainstream evangelicalism, I found the basic ideas of the book to be somewhat rudimentary and a little cliche.
Still, there were a few bright points to the book, and it wasn't a complete wash.
The basic premise of the book is summed up in the Hebrew metaphor of the heart. Ancient Hebrews considered the heart not to be necessarily the seat of human emotion (as post-Victorian Europeans and Americans might), but rather the seat of human decisions.
Francis is telling us that to love God means to make decisions in our life based on God's will.
It's a challenging point, and he excels in making it challenging. Francis encourages you to dream big, not small. He attacks the "lukewarm" who rely on some misguided nominal and false sense of Christianity. He provides a "cloud of witnesses" of modern day Christians who live out the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. He encourages you to live day by day, giving all you can, being obsessed with living life as a Spirit-guided Christian.
Yet, noticeably lacking from this treatment of Christianity is Jesus - at least Jesus presented as a redeemer and Savior. Little time is spent on the "crazy love" that God has shown us in the cross, and that....well....it's just crazy.
My favorite explanation of the Lutheran concept of "Law and Gospel" is "Disturbing the Comfortable and Comforting the Disturbed." (Lex and Terry Radio Show by-line). Francis succeeds in disturbing the comfortable, but not in comforting the disturbed and giving the empowerment to do that which God has set before us. To me, that means that the job is only half-done.
