Hardly any Christian would disagree with Graham Maxwell's introductory statement: "God's clearly stated preference [is] for something more than sub missive service." God wants open, intimate friendship. In developing the model of Christ as friend of God, Maxwell presents engaging, winsome insights on divine/human relationships. His mission is to help honest, questioning people dis cover there really is Someone they can trust: a God whose actions make good sense.
Despite this noble purpose, I find several problems with the book. Maxwell writes: "There is one passage that stands out ever more clearly as revealing the most important truth about God a key to understanding the rest of Scripture and God's plan to restore peace in His uni verse. His offer of friendship is recorded in John 15:15."
Human friendship is a rich metaphor for understanding the divine/human relationship but insufficient for describing the complexity of God or humanity in their interrelationships.
Maxwell diminishes his friendship model by focusing on friendship as egalitarian camaraderie between peers. Friend ship can describe a warm, personal relationship between nonpeers. Friendship does not erase the wonder and mystery of our differences, but rather it exults in them. Friendship with one who is extraordinary in spiritual excellence, musical genius, or social responsibility high lights the truth that we can never fully comprehend another. In reading Servants or Friends?, I sometimes felt that God had been robbed of His mystery. He had been reduced to the comprehensible.
Occasionally Maxwell slights the biblical data in order to maintain his model. For example, he asks: "What would have happened when you were a child in school if you had walked up to a fellow student and said, 'You can be my friend as long as you do what I say'?" Because he cannot imagine ordinary peer relationships structured this way, he dismisses Jesus' declaration, "You are my friends if you do what I command you" (John 15:14, RSV). Rather than denigrating Jesus' statement because it does not fit his friendship model, Maxwell should adapt his model or ac knowledge its limited applicability.
Another conceptual flaw in the book is Maxwell's model of sin. He writes: "To the servant, what makes sin most dangerous is that it angers God. To the friend, what makes sin most dangerous is what it does to the sinner. To persist in sin is to destroy oneself."
Offending God and destroying our selves are to be avoided, but what about sin as harm to others? Sin destroys not only sinner, but others as well.
Maxwell sounds eloquent in his declarations of God as a nice guy. But my suffering friends are not asking, "Is God harmless?" They are asking, "Is God able to defend me? Is God tough enough and good enough to balance the cosmic scales of justice?" I found nothing in this book to give courage to the oppressed and broken.
While pastoring an inner-city church, I saw numerous demonstrations of self-destructive sin such as alcoholism, promiscuity, and criminality. But more disturbing were sins that devastated others. I heard wrenching tales of child abuse. I remember 80-year-old Emily, who was knocked down the stairs of her apartment house by two teenage girls who wanted her purse. Emily went to the hospital with a broken hip, never again to come home to her beloved cat. She died of a broken spirit in a nursing home.
The sinful behavior of those teenagers expressed a self-poisoning attitude. But a theology that focuses only on the impact of sin on the teenagers and ignores the cruelty they inflicted on another remains irrelevant.
Another problem for me is Maxwell' s attempt to make God attractive to the fearful and guilt-ridden. He does it in such a way as to devalue the appropriate fear that flawed human beings inevitably experience as they contemplate an omnipotent, holy God. Even worse, he trivializes nearly two millennia of theological enterprise by dismissing historic and biblical models of the significance of the Crucifixion, presenting his own idea as the one true way of understanding this complex reality. Finally Maxwell per forms a curious semantic inversion. The word "servant" is used in the New Testament as a badge of honor for both Christians and their Lord (Phil. 1:1; 1 Peter 2:16; Acts 4:27). The author makes it a label of immaturity at best and perverse spirituality at worst.
Maxwell wants us to know that God can be trusted, that God is reasonable and loving. All followers of Jesus can only wish him well in this endeavor. But it seems to me that in attempting this, he describes only one aspect of the reality of God, implying that there is no other.
God wants us to experience all we can of Him. He invites us to explore the truths of a relationship with Him hidden in these words: child, bride, ambassadors, disciples, heirs, body, holy nation, flock, soldiers, household of God, servants, and friends. No one model is sufficient.
God is eager to have us as friends who really know Him. For that to happen, we need to let go of our preconceptions and allow Him to continually surprise us with new, unanticipated revelations of His justice, His love, and Himself.
