A Loving Life: In a World of Broken Relationships

Short Review: I really would like to recommend this book. I have read Miller's previous book A Praying Life twice and strongly recommend it as a practical guide to prayer. But this book seems to hit all of my problems with Christian Living books. It tries to use linguistics and ancient cultural understanding to bring insight to the modern reader about the book of Ruth. But more often it shows weak scholarship and reads modern sensibilities onto ancient culture. Miller over simplifies problems, which leads to inadequate answers. It is also full of hyperbole which leads me as a reader to question the hyperbole instead of listening to the actual statement.

The biggest problem however, is that the focus of the book is suffering in grace in order to bring people to repentance. Essentially this is taking the idea of Gary Thomas' Sacred Marriage and applying it to all relationships. But Miller does so in a way that elevates suffering and minimizes appropriate grace filled confrontation of sin. I certainly agree there are times when it is appropriate to suffer in silence, but suffering is not a grace in and of itself. Suffering may be good in one situation, but the exact wrong thing in another. In the case of sinful abusive church leadership, it is the wrong thing to suffer in silence. But there is no discussion of this, in fact there are examples of suffering in silence under abusive church leadership. We have far too many examples of where abusive systems were allowed (and encouraged) to continue to abuse ‘for the greater good'. This is not a Christian understanding of either grace or suffering.

There really are good parts of the book, but I cannot in good conscious recommend it because of the parts that are sort of on the right track, but can so easily be misconstrued.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/loving-life/