Book Review

A Review of:  Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God: How to give love, create beauty and find peace by Frank Schaeffer 

I suppose I ordered this book for my Kindle, because the title caught my eye.  It seemed a contradiction.  Either you are a believer or you are not.  I thought, there can be no in-between . . . can there?

As I read the book I found that he was raised by fundamentalist parents, just as I was, and he started his life trying to be as good a Christian as his family wanted him to be.  That sounded like me.

And later, over time, Frank Schaeffer rebelled against that fundamental past.  I did that too.  Frank turned his back on fundamentalism, and that lead to a less certain life.

Frank calls himself an atheist, but he is an atheist that prays, goes to church, reads the Bible to his grandchildren, and he has been attending the Greek Orthodox Church for over 25 years.

Frank is a very interesting atheist.

I actually do not think he is an atheist.  This is just me contradicting what the author said about himself, but I think Frank Schaeffer is a believer who believes so differently about God now, that he knows his fundamentalist parents and their followers would call him an atheist now.  Frank believes in evolution.  Frank believes the Bible is a book written by inspired men who were not perfect and the document itself is not perfect.  Frank picks and chooses which parts of the Bible he will accept.  I believe Frank would even admit that sometimes he accepts parts of the Bible that he earlier did not accept.

There is a part where Frank talks about reading a children’s book of Greek myths.  His granddaughter would hear the wild stories and at the end of one myth his granddaughter would say, “That one really happened.”  At the end of another she would say, “That didn't happen.”  When Frank moved on to reading Bible stories to the child she did the same thing.  Some stores just sounded true, while others didn’t.  Frank talked about when he worked in the movie industry that he could tell when a script had too many writers.  One part would have a sound and direction to it and then the script would lose something.  Frank compared this to sound.  We all can tell the difference between a vibration of a violin string, and a shoe scraping in gravel.  Both or sounds but if you can hear, you can hear the difference between music and a noise. 

It was clear in this book that Frank was still smarting from the hurt of his fundamentalist past.  There is a passage where he asks what he would do if he were god and his grandchildren were various characters in the Bible.  Would any loving grandfather yell at a grandchild because they brought fruits and vegetables as an offering instead of meat?  Even if a grandchild was angry and said, ‘I hate you, I wish you were dead’ would any grandfather reject the grandchild and send them to be tortured for all eternity?  And if Frank the grandfather would not do such a thing to a child and Frank has imperfect love while God is pure distilled love, why would any of us think God would just his children so harshly?

Over all, this book was not really organized to provide a cohesive understanding of faith that contains doubt.  I don’t think this would not be a good book for a study group.  The writing goes off on tangents.  Parts of this read like a guy who just needs to vent.  Nevertheless, it makes an excellent point about faith.  We all live with a mix of faith and doubt.  When a tragic thing happens our faith can be shaken and tested.  Just a bad day, and problems finding a parking space can test our faith.  Fusses with our spouse can cause us to question our love and make us grumpy with God.  But we are not called to be certain.  We are not called to be sure.  We don’t have to make 100% on some test to be worthy of God.  We are called to be faithful and that faithfulness can, and does include our doubts.