Book Review: “Radical” by David Platt

Platt, David. Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. Sisters, OR: Multnomah Books, 2010.

Earlier this year (May) I heard of a new book that had been published and was going to be the new “must read” of 2010. Typically when I hear epitaphs attached to a book like that I turn the other direction and ignore it. So I ignored David Platt’s book, Radical until this last weekend when the president of the university I work for asked if I had read it and suggested that if I hadn’t that I should. So I downloaded it onto my iPad through the Kindle application this last weekend and read through it.

My first impressions of this book is that it has the feel of Francis Chan’s Crazy Love meets John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life. Now if you have not read either of those books, then I suggest you start with Don’t Waste Your Life stat! Don’t Waste Your Life has been one of the most influential books in my life and also my Dad’s life, before he passed away from complications with cancer.

Back to Platt…David Platt is very readable. I read this book casually on a weekend and it was very easy reading. The theme of this book is something along the lines of “You need to live a radical life in pursuit of Jesus and away from the American Dream.” In essence, he is asking “What is Jesus worth to you?”

Much of what Platt writes about is based on personal experiences from pastoring a large church and traveling through Asia, Indonesia, India, and Africa. He has been challenged to evaluate his life and to live a “radical” life, so to speak, in light of these experiences as he works to interpret them through the lens of the Word. I commend him for this as many would be tempted to interpret the Word through the lens of their experience.

There are a myriad of quotes and short statements that I highlighted and made notes on. Some of the statements that impacted me the most, even void of their context are;

We are molding Jesus into our image. He is beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is whom we are most comfortable with.

We are afraid that if we stop and really look at God in his Word, we might discover that he evokes greater awe and demands deeper worship than we are ready to give him.

We have taken the infinitely glorious Son of God, who endured the infinitely terrible wrath of God and who now reigns as the infinitely worthy Lord of all, and we have reduced him to a poor, puny Savior who is just begging for us to accept him.

Is materialism a blind spot in American Christianity today? More specifically, is materialism a blind spot in your Christianity today?

And then this statement I found to be one of the most convicting of the entire book;

Most Christians rarely share the gospel, and most Christians’ schedules are not heavily weighted to feeding the hungry, helping the sick, and strengthening the church in the neediest places in our country.

So all in all I think this is a worthy read, however, it does not come without some issues. It seems at times Platt misses the meaning of some passages of Scripture, like when he is talking about John 15 and says that the meaning of this text is to teach that we cannot “accomplish anything of value apart from him.” While this text does teach that apart from Christ we can do nothing, it is not the primary purpose of the the entire passage as Platt tends to imply. Unfortunately I feel he ripped this text from it’s context (Location 667 on Kindle).

At another point in the book Platt is talking about the Spirit as our comforter and seems to imply that the Spirit does not permanently indwell a believer (Location 831 on Kindle). Unfortunately he does not elaborate much on this so perhaps it simply was not developed well enough to get his full meaning.

All in all I feel that reading through it was redeeming and challenging.I would encourage others in the church to read it as well and see how the Spirit will use it their lives.