Kim Gentes

"Embracing Obscurity" is a book of challenge meant to confront the church of western society which lives squarely in a culture of self-seeking, goal-oriented, achievement-centered structures and people. For the most part, the book starts with the premise that the church hasn't escaped these cultural trappings. The approach taken with "Embracing Obscurity" is to try to deconstruct the evils of the culture, explain how unbiblical they are and pursue a higher devotion to God’s purposes than the "me"-centric ideals of our western world.

At first blush, honestly, I found the book to seem weak in its theological composition of any ideas that weren't just a "U" in the Calvinistic acronym of TULIP. Yes, we are all bad, all worms, and God is great, up on His high throne. This is how the book starts, and it doesn’t help itself in starting this way. I understand the compulsion to begin with the affront on the standard culture infiltrating church and Christian values. Shock the reader into realizing they are attaching their actions to values that aren't Christ-centered. But ultimately this approach may scare away people who might want a more substantive foundation of understanding of where to center their lives and value. The patient reader will find that the book does indeed make its final claim of human worth in the valuation as being through being God’s family and finding our eternal rewards in Him (as opposed to the temporal rewards of self-centeredness).

I say this upfront to make the point that the book starts weak but ends strong. In fact, by the fourth chapter, the author (who has notably remained completely anonymous to make a further point about their thesis) turns the ship towards reconstructing a new understanding of self, of value, and of living life within the obscurity of the world so that one might be known by the One to the glory of God.

By the end of the book, I was wanting more. It felt like the author had turned the ship towards God's goodness enfolding man's destiny, leaving us squarely with a hopeful understanding of where to pursue life. The author sparks the conversation about eternal significance and eternal rewards- and the validation that pursuing God’s offered rewards are proper and just for the Christian. This is joyous and good. The reason I say that I felt like the author ended the book too soon was that while they centered the conversation properly, they didn't really explore the obvious next step of significance based on the imago dei, a concept of human value centered in God from creational theology. I kept waiting for this to be a main point and the author seems to leave without making the point, which is where the book seemed to be leading.

Like almost all modern Christian books, it has some weaknesses in presentation that are partly due to needing to fill the needed number of pages for publication. I felt like a reading of CS Lewis' "The Weight of Glory" would have accomplished much the same adjustment of heart and mind (with a similar goal and topic) in less than 20 pages. I also am not convinced that the author remaining anonymous really accomplishes the goal the author intends, since even within the book the reader is encouraged to embrace the spotlight that God brings, but with a new perspective of giving glory to God. I originally had a printed pre-release version of the book to use for my reading, but (after forgetting the printed copy in seat back pocket of an airplane seat) I ended up purchasing a Kindle version of the book. Because of the extensive notes and support references used in this book, I found the Kindle version to be better simply because I like working through all the support material while reading through the main text. Something to consider for those of you who might be reading for school studies or such.

Those things said, this is a topic that needs to be addressed, and addressed with new words and new perspectives to our generation. For that I am grateful and this work accomplishes that goal. Given my critiques above, the book ends up being strong and worth reading.

Amazon Book Link:  http://amzn.to/WS7VwO

Review by Kim Gentes