Like Keillor's Lake Woebegone, Miller's world portrayed in Blue Like Jazz is filled with quirky characters all drawn with deft minimalist strokes: Tony the Beat Poet and Tony the Trendy Writer, Mark the Cussing Pastor, Andrew the Protestor, Penny, Laura, all wind in and out of Miller's thoughts about God, about Christian faith, about life.

Charming. That’s the effect Blue Like Jazz had on me. Given that Miller has sold well over three-quarters of a million of this title alone, I'm not the only one charmed.

What makes Miller so appealing? As he relates, Miller was always an evangelical, and too comfortably so. He became disenchanted with the faith, only to become re-enchanted. Blue Like Jazz is the story of his re-enchantment.

Apparently many evangelicals have experienced the same disenchantment but not the re-enchantment…until they read Miller. In Blue Like Jazz, he describes the self-pitying angst of every writer. "Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible….I hate not having money." That complaint's gone. All of his books sell very, very, very well. Not that I am envious, mind you. At least, not overly much, given that, as a writer, I make about a dollar. Miller makes about a million.

Laying envy aside for the moment, I do have a complaint, something that's arisen after some of the charm has worn off. Miller's stories are personal, and that is all to the good, but his faith is all too personal. Stepping back from Blue Like Jazz, one is not really sure where Miller is headed after the last page.

"For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system to be experienced but not explained. Christianity, unlike Christian spirituality, was not a term that excited me."

I will not repeat the old canard, that mysticism begins in mist and ends in schism. Well, perhaps I will, but not without first taking what Miller says very seriously.

Miller believes that formulaic faith is dead. "Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder….I don't think there is any better worship than wonder."

Our problem, Miller contends, is that we want God "to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant." Instead of holding on to a formula, we need to experience the wonder of a God who reaches down from above what we can understand, and loves us as his own.

That is the real drama of faith, and for Miller, apologetics means drama, replaying for others what God has done for us in our lives.

But I have two serious misgivings. First, as the inimitable Dorothy Sayers said, "the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comfortable sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death."

It is of course wrong to start worshipping the Creed rather than the living Christ, but that having been said, the Creed is the drama of Christ in condensed form, the fundamental story that must be told. In fact, the Creed was forged over the first Christian centuries precisely because all too many people calling themselves Christians were telling all too many different stories about redemption. The Creed is a formula, to be sure, but it is a formula for Holy Fire, the drama of redemption that continually sears away the world's dross. If it has become formulaic, it is because we no longer see Christ through its lens but only the lens itself.

Secondly, apologetics always means both a confession of faith, and a defense of the faith. Accepting the merits of Miller's story-telling approach, we can also wonder what defense they could possibly offer against the heavy-hitters of atheism, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christoper Hitchens, who are selling far more books than even Miller. 

Miller doesn't seem to care. "My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore.  Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter, and honestly I don't care."

Well, I do. I really doubt that I'd ever convert Christopher Hitchens, but I do believe that I can do some good for others who have fallen under his spell, Christian and non-Christian alike. If his arguments are faulty or disingenuous, and I can point that out, then at least some might not reject Christianity because they've been hoodwinked by atheist apologetics. Miller must understand that if the theist walks away from such arguments, then the atheist will make his case loud and clear all by himself.

Donald Miller helps culturally conflicted evangelicals make peace with their faith.

Blue Like Jazz takes its title from the notion that jazz music does not resolve, which Miller sees as a metaphor for the ambiguities of the life of faith in God. But if anything, Blue resolves its beefs with evangelicalism succinctly and consistently, with chapters that are more like the 3-minute condensations of pop rock than the lingering improvisations of jazz. The book is a tour through sites of frustration for evangelicals, especially young evangelicals. Chapter titles include "Belief," "Church," "Romance," "Community," "Money," "Worship," and "Love." On each subject, Miller begins by describing a well-known problem with slight insolence, but ends by offering, well, a resolution. In "Church," he writes, "I don't like institutionalized anything," listing beefs with churches he's attended. But within a few pages, he tells the story of his current church in Portland, Oregon, and writes, "So one of the things I had to do after God provided a church for me was to let go of any bad attitude I had against other churches I'd gone to. In the end, I was just different, you know. It wasn't that they were bad; they just didn't do it for me."

Dallas Willard
Revolution of Characte

Rebecca Merrill Groothuis reflections on Blue Like Jazz create buzz in the blogosphere

Donald Miller’s comments cleverly turn a deep theological error into a point of “righteousness.” What he says strikes a chord. It sounds wise, profound, countercultural even. But that is exactly what it is not. The insidious element in this culturally constructivist view is that it appeals to some things that are true: Modernist notions of objective truth are in some ways arrogant, false, and unworkable. Much debate over the existence of God is carried on by arrogant, know-it-all guys who do nothing to further people's faith in or knowledge of the true God. Faith in Christ is more than intellectual assent. But to skip from these observations to the assertion that no one knows anything anyway, and all belief is based on purely personal notions and needs, is a classic example of a non sequitur: the conclusion does not follow from the premise. But, of course, this would not bother the truth-constructivist, because logic—along with biblical authority—has necessarily disappeared with the demise of objective truth.

I really cannot understand the appeal of the postmodernist worldview. When I hear that Donald Miller believes in Christ for mere "social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons" (since these are the reasons he does anything), I have zero interest in hearing anything else he has to say. What have his social, identity, and emotional issues to do with what I should believe? If no one "knows anything anyway," then Mr. Miller simply has no way of knowing what he's even talking about! He has no way of even knowing what he should believe, much less what anyone else should believe. And if his deep emotional issues should somehow steer him away from Christian "belief," then there is where he will be going. Away. What incentive would anyone have to ground his or her faith in such an utterly groundless faith?

"Blue Like Jazz"--Reflections by blogger Rebecca Merrill Groothuis

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