Lion of Babylon
by Davis Bunn
Bethany House
I got this book as a free audiobook (though not free
anymore) from Christian Audio. Every
month they have a free audiobook of varying quality (from utter Christian
brilliant to outright heresy). I’ve
gotten several good titles this way, and this is honestly one of them. Not necessarily for theological reasons, but
simply because it is a good book.
Spy Thrillers
I actually took a class on spy fiction in school (don’t
judge!), and it was a class I very much enjoyed. It got me more into Tom Clancy than I had
been before, and introduced me to John Le Carré, whom I have very much enjoyed,
as well as several other titles.
This book could stand beside a lot of those great
works. The pacing, the characters, and
the setting are just top-notch, and I found myself really drawn into
post-Saddam Iraq and the people there.
The story is good – an American agent goes missing, as well as two other
Americans, and so the main character, Marc Royce, is sent to Iraq to find his
old friend. But he finds that he’s being
pulled into a larger web as the individuals around him and their own goals and
motivations guide him into the culture and situation around him. I blew through the book in two long car
trips, when I was actually planning on only listening to a few chapters at a
time and then turning to other podcasts.
All that to say, the book is great.
I see that there are two more Marc Royce books out, and I
will happily pay for both and read them as soon as I get the chance.
The Theology behind
it
I’m not really sure that the book bills itself as
“Christian.” I looked on Amazon, and
while it is a Christian publisher (Bethany House), I don’t see any indication
that it is trying to be any besides a thriller.
This is good. There
is little or no theology in the book, so I would not want it to be categorized
as a Christian book. It should be seen
for what it is – a spy thriller. I think
fans of the spy thriller would be happy with the title, no matter their own
religious convictions.
That is not to say that there are not Christian
elements. The main characters are mostly
Christian. They pray and consider what
God would want them to do. They wrestle
with how they are to act and believe.
The friend they are seeking is a Christian, and one of the other
Americans is a missionary.
I’ll not say more about that for fear of giving too much
away, but I will speak a little of the approach taken by the missionaries
(there are more than one) in this book.
I honestly don’t know what David Bunn is trying to say in this
part. The missionaries appear to be
taking a very non-confrontational approach to the Muslims there, mostly trying
to be friendly and discuss Jesus.
That’s fine, I don’t really have a problem with that, as
long as the conversation is actually happening.
But then some very odd elements happen.
And this is not stated explicitly, so it is really difficult to say what
is going on, but it appears that there is an ecumenical result of this effort,
with Muslims and Christians worshipping and praying together without actual
conversion of either. It is written of
this worship, “There was no religion, no creeds, just the fact that Jesus lives”
(I may have the punctuation wrong here – I was listening to it, not reading
it).
I’m very curious as to what Bunn is trying to say in
this. One of the strongest Christian
character is convicted at seeing this worship, and he decides that he’s been
going about things the wrong way before that.
He draws a distinction between being a Christian and being “a servant of
Jesus.”
Muslims affirm that Jesus lives. In fact, they deny that He died on the
cross. Certain statements made me uneasy
because of this. Is Bunn advocating the
idea that Muslims know Jesus well enough and are servants of Him? Because that is not so. We have different Gods, Muslims and
Christians. Christians worship a triune
God, the second person of which took on human flesh, lived a perfect life, and
died a sinner’s death for the people given to Him by the Father, then rose
again on the third day as evidence that His sacrifice was accepted by the
Father and as a promise that we too will rise.
Muslims worship a god who cannot take flesh, who speaks of mercy, but it
is a mercy that arbitrarily invalidates the Law, not fulfills it. To them, Jesus was a prophet only, not to be
worshiped.
Conclusion
