This post is a bit of an expansion of a book review I did for Leadership Network Books. I hope it is helpful.
I remember analog devises. And the static that accompanied them. If you are my age or perhaps a few years my senior, you may also remember the good old days of holding your head just right and very still in order to hear the voices on the other end of your analog wireless phone. Thank goodness for digital.
But static may not be a thing of the past after all. In his book Static: Tune Out the “Christian Noise” and Experience the Real Message of Jesus, Ron Martoia argues that much of the language we use within the church is not effectively communicating the gospel. Instead of coming to the text of the Bible and asking what it says to us and the people with whom we are in conversation, we are bogged down by the “Christian Noise” of what we have come to assume that we know about the text and what it means.
Ron uses the device of an ongoing conversation with a young couple in his church who are struggling with the question of how to share the gospel with friends at work. Through this ongoing conversation we are introduced to various words which may have lost much of their original meaning throughout the ages of church history. He goes to great pains to elaborate how faith, repentance, Kingdom and other words which we use so frequently may have been understood by the people with whom Christ spoke in a very different way. We are also asked to re-evaluate whether Jesus really was as concerned about the same things which occupy so much of our thinking. In particular, the notion is challenged that Jesus’ primary concern was that people go to heaven when they die. Instead, Martoia claims that Jesus focused on God’s Kingdom and salvation as first and foremost having to do with the reestablishment of God’s rule within our lives. Martoia is quite willing to ask the question, “Did Jesus really say or do that?” He is unafraid to push the point that we often read into the scriptures things which simply aren’t there.
When you reading Static, it is possible to be confused, convicted, upset, enlightened and even feel somewhat helpless, all in a single page. After all, we want to ask, if all of this is true, why did so few of us encounter this kind of teaching in seminary? Books like Static challenge those of us who are vocational ministers in the place which hurts us most; our ability to clearly communicate the gospel. The idea that we might not even be fully aware of the meaning of the Gospel is almost untenable. Yet it is even more untenable to imagine that we may be communicating through static which makes the hearing, understanding and living out of the Gospel impossible. The real tragedy is not in not knowing, it is in pride which prevents us from learning.
