Booking Through Thursday – April Fools (April 4)

This week Booking Through Thursday asks the following:

What’s the silliest (most foolish?) book you’ve ever read? Did you enjoy it?

I had to think about this question for a while, but I finally came up with one that stands way above some of the books I’ve read over the years as one of the silliest ever. That book is The Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson.

At first glance this book seems to be one designed to be helpful for Christian believers, but the person it ended up being most helpful for must have been the author himself, because it spawned a whole ‘Jabez’ industry of other books, prayer mats, prayer shawls, candles, and so on. The whole premise of the book was based on two short obscure verses from the Old Testament, but the author just took them and ran with them. There is so much that is wrong with the theology in this book that it is hard to know where to start.

I read the book and didn’t enjoy it. In fact it makes me mad that I even wasted the time on it, but at least having read it I can criticize it based on this, rather than what others wrote about it. Unfortunately, too much criticism happens today by people who haven’t even taken the time to read whatever it is they are criticizing.

By all means read this book, but I know I won’t be reading it again any time soon. Funnily enough, someone I know told me they read it at the time it came out and told me it was one of the most powerful books they had ever read. I stopped myself from asking if it was the only book they had ever read! Each to their own, I suppose.