Review of "Blue Like Jazz"

I was slow getting around to reading Donald Miller’s wildly popular book, Blue Like Jazz, which was published in 2003. But I’m glad I finally got to it. There’s a lot to like in this meandering memoir from an earnest, honest, humble young Christ-follower.

Miller is a great story teller, and since the book is more or less a string of stories about formative events in his adventure from childhood to young adulthood, it’s a great read—the kind of book you get lost in, that you can’t put down. And as we follow Donald Miller through various life-stages, he introduces us to wonderfully colorful characters.

And the characters in his narrative are not idealized—no air-brush touch-up for them, no dodging their eccentricities or weaknesses. The same is true, and abundantly so, with Miller’s portrayal of himself: he’s not afraid to bring out the odd or undesirable or broken or warped aspects of who he is; openness and humility run rampant in these pages.

This humility is disarming. Honest readers can relate to many of the insecure thoughts and fear-driven actions transparently set forth in Blue Like Jazz. If you imagine reading an authoritative treatise by a highly respected expert in some field of study who sets out his or her own insights and achievements as definitive knowledge, then you can imagine a work that is utterly different from this one. Miller presents himself as a stumbling, mixed up, ordinary guy who slowly and at times even reluctantly falls into wisdom and grace. That humble style helps the reader—particularly the anti-traditional and anti-authoritarian reader caught up in the value system of postmodernism—to enter Miller’s world and learn from him.

And to be sure, there’s much he wants to teach (don’t mistake his bumbling manner for the lack of an agenda). One attitude he vigorously opposes is the notion that Christians ought to have all their stuff together and thus shouldn’t to be struggling with various unhealthy or sinful attitudes, practices, habits, etc. By witnessing Miller’s various foibles and fumbles, one is freed up to confess his or her own sins—I saw myself in the mirror of his stories many times: insecure me, judgmental me, self-absorbed me… That’s the core problem the book confronts: ME; self-absorbed living.

As I reflect further on the “message” Miller conveys, however, I have some concerns. For one, there’s an unnecessary and false dichotomy between heart and mind. Traditional Christianity is presented as being about facts and data and head-knowledge, whereas the breakthrough into a vibrant faith for Donald Miller is focused on the heart. This is portrayed in ways that slide into an unhealthy either/or: the traditional church is about the mind, but the liberating Jesus meets you through the heart.

So you end up with head versus heart, light versus heat. Of course, it’s never stated so bluntly (that would violate Miller’s humble-yet-penetrating style), but in the end, heart wins and head loses; passion wins and reason loses; love wins and truth loses. One could wish that Miller would take to heart the vital insights of Christian spiritual writers who have seen the beautiful union of head and heart—for example, Jonathan Edwards, who expressed so well the interplay of “heat” and “light” within Christian spirituality.

In keeping with his leaning away from fact-centered religion, Miller suggests that belief in Jesus is not rational; the desire to make sense of God is mistaken. “He will make no more sense to me than I will make to an ant” (p. 54). Of course, there is a measure of wisdom here. And yet, Miller doesn’t grapple with the fact that God can make good sense to us even though we cannot comprehend God exhaustively.

Miller’s inclination to be provocative becomes a weakness—this approach gets predictable and even wearying. How cool is it that he has a beer or smokes or uses “cuss words”? Now I don’t care to make a big deal of these practices, and I sure don’t want to fall into the externalism and legalism that drive so much “Christian” opposition to these practices. And I can appreciate his resistance to forms of church life in which people are loved only if they measure up, only if they meet certain conditions: point well taken. But the endless jabbing at tradition gets tiring, and it’s just not helpful.

Along somewhat similar lines, Miller begins the book by telling how, when he was young, his father left home—abandoned the family. For this reason, he had a hard time with the concept of God as “Father.” I can understand and appreciate the point so far. But then he goes on to say, “Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as ‘Father’ at all” (p. 4). Today? It’s one thing to say your experience made it hard to resonate with the fatherhood of God. It’s another to suggest that God and the Bible more or less blew it by bringing in the father metaphor, and to neglect to probe this language for its positive, God-intended value. This is a case in point of being provocative (is it just for effect?) and pushing an idea too hard—pushing it into exaggeration and thus creating rather than solving problems.

So, as it turns out, I don’t offer a very enthusiastic recommendation for Blue Like Jazz. The book is interesting and even fascinating; at times it’s also aggravating and begs to be thrown across the room. In that Miller makes you think and prompts readers to search their hearts, the book has real value. In addition, Christian leaders may well want to read Blue Like Jazz because it illustrates how the traditional church is seen from one believer’s postmodern angle. But, in the end, the book’s imbalances, exaggerations, and provocative barbs overshadow its positive features.