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A Glorious Dark: Finding Hope in the Tension between Belief and Experience, by A. J. Swoboda
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When what you believe isn't what you see
On Thursday as they ate the Passover meal with Jesus, the disciples believed that the kingdom was coming and they were on the front end of a revolution. Then came the tragedy of Friday and, somehow even worse, the silence of Saturday. They ran. They doubted. They despaired. Yet, within the grave, God's power was still flowing like a mighty river beneath the ice of winter. And then there was Sunday morning.
Real, raw, and achingly honest, A Glorious Dark meets readers in the ambiguity, doubt, and uncertainty we feel when our beliefs about the world don't match up to reality. Tackling tough questions like Why is faith so hard? Why do I doubt? Why does God allow me to suffer? and Is God really with me in the midst of my pain? A. J. Swoboda puts into sharp focus a faith that is greater than our personal comfort or fulfilment. He invites readers to develop a faith that embraces the tension between what we believe and what we experience, showing that the very tension we seek to eliminate is where God meets us.
- Sales Rank: #221798 in Books
- Brand: Baker Pub Group/Baker Books
- Published on: 2015-02-03
- Released on: 2015-02-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .60" w x 5.50" l, .64 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
From the Back Cover
"Too often Western Christian churches focus only on the sunny side of life. Why? Because it takes far more courage to walk into the darkness. Lucky for us, A. J. Swoboda has the guts to pierce the darkness and search for God there."--Jonathan Merritt, author of Jesus Is Better Than You Imagined; senior columnist for Religion News Service-"Once upon a time, there was a man who saw the the breadth of God's strange redemption in just three days of Holy Week. That man is A.J. Swoboda and this is his book. It is funny, honesty, literary, outward looking, inward looking, and upward looking. 'Stars are only seen when its dark,' Swoboda writes. Indeed, and it is rare to find both stars and their darkness so beautifully charted in ink. A glorious read."--Paul Pastor, associate editor for Christianity Today's Leadership Journal and PARSE-"A.J. writes with the passion of a genuine seeker and with the reflective insight of a true mystic. Here he turns his attention to the meaning of Jesus's death and resurrection. We find ourselves drawn into the momentous events of the cross and resurrection yet again."--Alan Hirsch, author, activist, dreamer; alanhirsch.org-"Just as the real story of Golgotha is of three crosses, not one, so theologian A.J. Swoboda shows in fiery wisdom and icy wit how the real story of Holy Week is of three days, not one. This is a book I will get out and reread every Holy Week for the rest of my life-to keep the gospel 'good news' that stays good and stays news."--Leonard Sweet, bestselling author; professor at Drew University and George Fox Evangelical Seminary; chief contributor to Sermons.com-"A Glorious Dark is a brilliant display of the cross of Christ. My heart and mind were awakened by A.J. Swoboda creatively redeeming everything from personal experience to insightful apologetics, from Star Wars to Jean-Paul Sartre. He challenged me to confront long-held myths that dead-ended my faith. For any serious student of life, A Glorious Dark is a must read!"--Wayne Cordeiro, author and pastor at New Hope Christian Fellowship, Honolulu, Hawaii-"Attention is owed to any writer who can excavate the deep theological meaning of Scooby-Doo and apply it articulately to Christian faith-and that writer is A.J. Swoboda! With spark, passion, and an engaging accessibility, Swoboda successfully makes the case for a holistic Christian life that holds in tension the poles of light and dark, triumph and loss. Highly recommended!"--Tom Krattenmaker, USA Today contributing columnist; author of The Evangelicals You Don't Know-"Is our Christian faith painful, awkward, or hopeful? That's like asking if water is a solid, liquid, or gas. The answer is emphatically Yes! Swoboda reminds us that although we want to pick and choose, God knows we need the full spectrum of death, descent, and resurrection to abide in Christ. Gloriously enlightening!"--Nancy Sleeth, author of Almost Amish; cofounder of Blessed Earth-"Swoboda has written a beautiful book. It felt like reading the Psalms. He touches on the full bandwidth of the human experience with compassion, honesty, insight, and humor. And this book ruminates with love for God. Not a sentimental love of evangelical culture, but a deep clinging to Jesus through all the complexities of faith and discipleship. This book will resonate deeply and inspire faith to walk boldly into the glorious dark."--Jon Tyson, pastor at Trinity Grace Church, New York; author of Sacred Roots: Why the Church Still Matters-"A.J. is like Seinfeld and Kierkegaard rolled into one. If you want dry diatribes of funny fluff, look elsewhere...This book is hilarious and holy in all the right ways!"--Joshua Ryan Butler, author of The Skeleton's in God's Closet; pastor at Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon-"Among this next generation of faith-leaders, A.J. Swoboda stands apart, bringing in equal measure the mind of the scholar, the heart of the shepherd, and the honesty of the bard. No one else could have written A Glorious Dark."--Tony Kriz, author of Aloof; neighborhood pastor in Portland, Oregon-"In A Glorious Dark, AJ Swoboda paints a full-color portrait of the love of God that is both exquisitely simple and profoundly complex. His words dive deep into the beauty of Holy Week while never attempting to explain away the mystery. I found myself more intrigued, more captivated and more in love with the One whose story stretches out over the wide expanse of human history and welcomes us all in."--Bo Stern, speaker and author of Beautiful Battlefields -"This good book on the pattern of death and resurrection in the Christian life, A Glorious Dark, offers a fresh accounting of faith in the contemporary world. In this book, author, pastor, theologian, Swoboda guides us through the story of Jesus's death, burial, and resurrection. Throughout Swoboda teaches us to embrace the Christian life with all of its mysterious discomforts."--Keith Jagger, spiritual director with Equipping Lydia
About the Author
A. J. Swoboda (PhD, University of Birmingham) teaches biblical studies, theology, and church history at George Fox Evangelical Seminary and Fuller Seminary, among others. He pastors Theophilus church in Portland, Oregon, and is the author of A Glorious Da
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A Perfect Road Map Through the Process of Spiritual Questioning
By Dr. Michelle Watson
Vulnerable. Real. Challenging. Authentic. Heartfelt. Thought-provoking. Moving. I could go on but these meager words are my best attempt at summarizing the impact that AJ's book, A Glorious Dark, had on me.
They say you can't judge a book by it's cover, but in this case the cover truly does accurately represent that which unfolds in the treasured pages that follow. His subtitle claims that this is a book to help us "find hope in the tension between belief and experience." From the very start AJ calls us to embrace the tension involved in working out our faith experience. No pat answers. Instead, he invitingly normalizes the process of spiritual wrestling.
Having already been a fan of AJ's writing from his first book, I enthusiastically dove into this one and once again found that I was drawn in from the very first page. He has a powerful style of sharing his heart while leading us to follow. His profound and unique ways of seeing the world are a gift in that they put words to thoughts that have often not had such succinct expression. I can honestly say that this book exceeded my expectations.
By using the three days between Jesus death and resurrection as a metaphor of our lives ("I want to persuade my readers that Christian faith is the whole weekend and they must enter all three days---we must embrace the pain of Friday's sunset, the awkwardness of Saturday's silence, and the hopeful sunrise of Sunday morning."), AJ chose to vulnerably expose his "Friday" struggles, risking possible criticism as a result. For me, however, it is exactly this kind of raw and honest self-disclosure that deeply spoke to me and makes this book, in my opinion, a must-read for anyone who longs for a richer, fuller, more authentic, transformative interaction with our Creator God, the One who longs for relationship with His kids. Thank you AJ for the gift you've given us all in writing and sharing this book.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
"Hey, A.J, I read your book..."
By Bryan C. McWhite
You should really read "A Glorious Dark" just to get that joke. And then marvel at my wit, please.
I've been reading the other reviews of this book, and rereading the cover blurbs and I'm honestly convinced that many (most?) of the endorsers didn't actually read the book, or at least aren't quite sure what to make of it. There are a lot of gushing adjectives in the endorsements--and deservedly so--but not much sense at all of what the book is actually about, or what it might be useful for. And it's hard to blame them. It is a little difficult to discern what A.J. is trying to do here. And it might actually help to have a little ADHD in order to follow it's flow, which is far more serpentine than the stream in its cover art. But it's an excellent book, so I'd like my (brief) review to try to fill that gap a bit in hopes that you'll read it.
"A Glorious Dark" is part Swoboda autobiography, part biography of Theophilus, part gentle critique of the shallow, consumeristic, materialistic tendencies of the western church, and part a few other things... But really what it is (or, at least what I perceived it to be) is a holistic articulation of the beauty and wonder of the story of God in Christ. In other words, in some ways it's an apologetic for Christian faith. But not at all in the vein of Geisler or Zacharias or William Lane Craig, who spoke into a modern, Christendom mindset, convinced that a compelling articulation of evidence is sufficient to "win" people to Christ. Swoboda is much closer in pedigree to N.D. Wilson (see his "Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl") or C.S. Lewis who, as he says, began later in his career to realize that people tend to be changed not through their intellectual faculties, but through their imaginations.
Swoboda uses the rubric of the three final days of Holy Week as a lens that brings the Christian life into focus. As he says, "I want to persuade my readers that Christian faith is the whole weekend and they must enter all three days---we must embrace the pain of Friday's sunset, the awkwardness of Saturday's silence, and the hopeful sunrise of Sunday morning." But what's that mean? Well, what he really seems to be doing is reimagining a fresh articulation of the Christian faith--and not a shallow, Christian bookstore best-seller shelf version of the Christian faith. But a Christian faith that reckons with the doubt, darkness and despair inherent in the Christian life, as well as its joy, wonder and beauty. This despite the fact that his "positions" (I don't think he'd like that term) on a variety of issues such as sin, heaven and hell, judgment. the resurrection, the Bible, human sexuality, etc., are actually quite traditionally orthodox. But his articulation of the Christian faith is anything but traditional. It's fresh and imaginative and vivid and tangible and humorous and insightful--exactly the sort of articulation many Millenials, in particular, will find compelling. Swoboda is a masterfully insightful observer of the world, and his observations make his work very engaging and enjoyable.
So, how I intend to use this book is to read it several times and to absorb its language and expressions--not so that I can mimic A.J., but because I think his articulation of the Christian faith is a very helpful one in the cultural milieu in which I find myself. I'm a Gen X-er pastoring Millenials, and I have an inherited modernistic, Christendom, evangelical vocabulary that I'm constantly trying to break out of because it doesn't work anymore. It had its place and time, but it's now tired, doesn't spark imagination, and doesn't address the questions Millenials tend to ask. My theological and ecclesiological "positions" (there it is again) seem very close to Swoboda's, but I want to learn to articulate them as imaginatively and provocatively as he does--even if that means stealing his lines here and there.
You'll enjoy this book. You'd really have to have lost the humor and whimsical faculties of your brain not to. It's worth reading just to spark your own imagination and learn new ways of thinking about Jesus and his present and coming Kingdom. But if you find yourself in similar shoes as mine, this could also be a very useful tool. Thanks, A.J.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
One Weekend in History
By Michele Morin
For years I celebrated Easter as if it were a stand-alone holiday, singing “Up from the Grave He Arose” without giving much thought to the horror of the Dying or the silence of the Dead. Providentially, my early efforts to incarnate and to enliven an invisible God in the hearts of four sweet boys found a way into the obtuse heart of their mother as well. Therefore, this Lenten season, I will be re-reading A Glorious Dark, a book about believing which confronts the loss and defeat of Friday and the awkward silence of Saturday with Sunday morning resurrection truth. Where memoir meets theological pondering, author A.J. Swoboda’s story winds through his faith journey, with the bonus of startling spotlight quotes which he aims at himself and at all of us who say that we believe. Here’s one of the dozen or more: “Many envision faith as a kind of hall pass for laziness, excusing them from a life of action, doing, and working hard.” Ouch and amen.
What we believe about one weekend in history, the three days’ journey from Golgotha to the garden tomb, impacts our whole experience of the Christian life. A Glorious Dark challenges the reader to enter into Friday, to “own up to our part of the evil in the world.” This involves trusting for the lavish grace to have our emptiness filled, our requests denied, and our fatherlessness remedied by the Father. On Friday, we turn our faces away from our “sponge” of choice and embrace our identity as pilgrims, lifelong seekers of the will and the voice of God.
With candor, Swoboda describes the bleak-hearted rising of post-crucifixion Saturday, and because much of the Christian life is lived under Saturday-like conditions, it is helpful to hear that we must “sit in Saturday;” we must “squat in the tomb” in order to enter into the grief and disappointment of the original disciples. Saturday is our opportunity to remember our own mortality, to remember that we live with Jesus in his death. On Saturday, we evict ourselves from the center of the universe by “embracing the gift of waiting,” and by mourning our failure to see others and their grief.
Resurrection Sunday not only verifies all that Jesus claimed, but it points to his future coming, the ultimate surprise which will serve to further verify all that we hold true. As the church meets to celebrate the resurrection every Sunday, we also reenact the resurrection, celebrating the mystery with “people we normally wouldn’t love, [who] breathe down our necks, [but who] hold our feet to the fire of our beliefs.” Sunday faith perseveres when my theology cannot account for the chaos I see around me.
A Glorious Dark reveals a God who “stand[s] tall” above human history and invites (rather than scorns) the questioning heart. After all, of the thirty-one questions Jesus posed in the Gospels, He answered only three. When God does not break into history to rectify the list of problems set forth in my latest memorandum/prayer, it will be helpful to remember the messy way in which that one weekend in history played out for those who were on the scene. Once again, the life of Jesus will be made manifest, a glorious life emerging from a glorious dark.
This book was provided by Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, in exchange for my unbiased review.
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