Book review: God Is Not Nice by Ulrich L. Lehner

The first book I read in 2018 was God Is Not Nice: Rejecting Pop Culture Theology and Discovering the God Worth Living For by Ulrich L. Lehner.  I found this book disappointing.  For one thing, it is written from a very Roman Catholic perspective (which I should have guessed, if I'd noticed it was published by Ave Maria Press).  Lehner quotes Aquinas and Aristotle in the same breath and with the same authority as the Old or New Testament; unbiblical traditions such as Mary being a teenager at the time of the Annunciation and Joseph being a widowed father of multiple sons are asserted without a whisper of qualification; and word studies are performed from Latin, a concept which makes as much sense in dealing with translations from Hebrew and Greek as word studies from English.

In general, I enjoy reading works from scholars of different denominations.  It challenges the unexamined yet unbiblical beliefs I've picked up from my own tradition and compels me to look at the Bible from different perspectives.  There just wasn't enough here to interest me: nothing new and thought-provoking.  Lehner is preaching against what has come to be known as Moral Therapeutic Deism, a concept which hasn't been novel since 2005, and he has nothing new to say about it.  In addition to his general lack of revelations, Lehner occasionally utilizes awkward constructions which underline the fact that he is writing in a second language, the most glaring of which is his statement that a "nice" god would be "like milk toast," when he obviously means "a milquetoast."

Scott Hahn opens his foreword by bemoaning the MTD rampant "in the Sunday worship of suburban mega-churches and, I'm sorry to say, not a few Catholic parishes."  I have repeatedly heard about these Evangelical churches which fail to preach the gospel, and I am sure they exist, albeit not in near the numbers people ascribe to them in sweeping stereotypes.  Lehner triumphantly builds up to what he imagines is a startling detail, one which "almost every commentary on the Bible overlooks": that in clothing Adam and Eve after the Fall God killed at least one animal for the skins, thus demonstrating that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.  Well, all his commentaries on the Bible may overlook that, but this suburban Baptist girl has heard the detail repeatedly, in Sunday School lessons, sermons, and devotions since childhood.  Score one for the Reformation!

Lehner's epilogue, however, closes with a moving tribute to Joseph, which I appreciate, and contains one admirable aphorism I shall endeavor to remember:

"So how do we find the right way to integrate faith into our lives?  I think that is asking the wrong question.  Instead, we should seek to integrate our lives into the faith."