I’m finishing my third book review from the same publisher in as many weeks. As I read these three books, written by three different authors, written to three different audiences by the same publisher, (My alma mater’s publishing house, Moody Publishers) I got frustrated to have the same type of content in three different books.
Several months ago I read an article and a "rant" by a well-known youth ministry blogger. The article (not by him) and his rant were blasting the idea that so much stuff uses "battle" or "fighting" metaphors. When I saw that I was a bit put off because I actually think we ought to teach people that we are in a spiritual battle with our adversary, Satan, and that we’re good teachers to tell people the truth. And if the visuals of fighting and warfare are politically correct or are overly dark… stay out of the book of Revelation!
Now having read these three books, I have to agree to some extent with the concept I before thought was just another soft, PC statement of the wimpification of Christ’s church.
In each book there is imagery of spiritual battle. I’m 100% cool with that as the Bible uses this metaphor plenty. There was a call to action. I’m cool with that too, the Bible is God’s instruction manual to us for what we should do. But they all also connected spiritual battle imagery to September 11th, 2001 and the war in Iraq. When I read the first book… it didn’t bother me. When I read the second one I thought, "Hmm, interesting coincidence." When I read the third book I thought… "What the heck, did Moody tell these guys they had to use these metaphors or what?"
Reading the same ideas in three books by the same publisher has just gotten annoying. Was 2007 Moody’s year of spiritual warfare books? For some reason, it’s just annoying to me. It actually has made book three almost impossible to finish because I feel like I’ve already read this book twice.
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