Book Review: Ain't Too Proud to Beg

I had promised the folks at Eerdmans that I would review some books for them. I reviewed The Luminous Dusk a few months ago and had planned on offering a similar review shortly thereafter on Telford Work’s Ain’t Too Proud to Beg: Living through the Lord’s prayer. But it didn’t happen. True, a lot came up, including my father’s passing and the birth of my daughter, but what kept me from reviewing this book for so long was that I just didn’t like it. It feels lame to say such a thing, but the truth is that it just isn’t a very interesting book. This seems like a disservice to say, since Work is a wise scholar and there are many great moments in this book. The problem for me was Work’s insistence on bad examples and going on for too long about subjects that I honestly was not expecting or interested in. But to try to do some honor to this work, I have decided not to do an actual review, but to share on some points that were illuminating for myself as I read. Also, you can go to Scot McKnight’s blog, where he has been writing about this exact work.

My favorite part of this book was located in a section titled The Woe of Sloth. It’s at this point, in my opinion, that Work writes the best, saying:

Sloth is certainly a sin I have struggled with lately. As I write, I am unproductive, burnt out, worried, numb. Despite outward health, I have not shaken a nagging feeling of massive failure. I spend way too much time in ways I regret even while I do them. I put off necessary duties with aimless diversions that quietly accrue into weeks of life simply surrendered to the void.

“That sounds like depression,” the clinically savvy will say; “you should seek professional counseling.” Even if the diagnosis fits (and it probably does, though only in a very mild form), this response just means that psychology would prefer to use a different word with merely medical rather than fully moral connotations, as if I need only to be treated rather than saved…

Sloth is a far more demanding and satisfying diagnosis. It tells me that I am distancing myself from my sources of life. I am salt that is losing its saltiness and light that is hiding out of sight…

Modern depression and mid-life crises are, at least in some cases, the cognitive dissonance between our crumbling sense of obligation to fix everything and our building sense of ineptitude and impotence. Apathy, burnout, inactivity, and hopelessness shrivel childhoods of pride into adulthoods of sloth. Once our resignation finally breaks through our messianism, there is finally nothing to do but retire as comfortably as possible and wait for the end to come. (pp 185, 6)

This passage resonated with me in an amazing way. I have felt burnt-out for years and I know, especially after reading this passage, that I went from a self-messianic wanting to fix everything and everybody to a nihilistic despair as I realized my own impotence to produce the kinds of changes I long to see in my world. Why is it so hard to find that middle ground where we rely on God. Why can’t I live out Augustine’s words and act as if everything depended on me but trust as if everything depended on God?


My other favorite passage is found on page 101. It is about how some churches work in the U.S., and I will not comment on it, but let you read and think your own thoughts about it (he writes about four different kinds of American Christians, but this is what I have experienced the most, so I found it noteworthy):

It is when she breaks [this particular type of Christian’s] code rather than, say, the Bible’s moral standards that the community of faith demands contrition and repentance and offers forgiveness and restoration. Sexual offenders need to repent, as well as disloyal children, blasphemers, abusive parents, liars, thieves, swindlers, backstabbers, and substance abusers. However, Christian businessmen do not need to repent of lives driven by greed. Overachievers do not need to repent of consuming competitiveness. Conspicuous consumers do not need to repent of how they handle their prosperity as long as it has not endangered their children. Soldiers do not need to repent of fighting unjust wars, let alone just ones. Politicians do not need to repent of working the system (so long as they have done it legally). Wage earners do not need to repent of exploiting the tax code or America’s retirement system (though welfare patients might). Heretics do not need to repent of their theological mistakes. Parents and children do not need to repent of putting their families before their church communities. Teens do not need to repent of their popularity or longings for it. When some of them do, fellow congregants react with amusement, puzzlement, discomfort, or resentment: we have a zealot in our ranks!...

This perpetuates a folk Christianity that rewards social conformity, punishes radical obedience, distorts the faith through peer pressure, and is suspicious and dismissive of outsiders.

Peace,
Matt