The Slumber of Christianity

July 4, 2005
In his debut nonfiction work following a plethora of successful novels (White; Three), Dekker exhorts Christians to wake up and find genuine happiness in cultivating a deep desire for heaven. Although he argues that Christians should enjoy the pleasures of earth as a "foretaste" of heaven, he cautions that these pleasures should not be mistaken for the real thing. Relying heavily on C.S. Lewis and the Apostle Paul, he makes a case for hope as the "engine of life." Satan, he says, has redirected our obsession away from God and heaven by filling our minds with earthly things. With the relentless zeal of an evangelist, Dekker illustrates many of his points with excerpts from his novels and from scripture, but his thought flow is sometimes problematic. He offers three practical ideas for setting one's mind on heaven-meditations, readings and corporate exercises-but fails to satisfactorily flesh them out. Although Dekker clearly has a sincere passion for his topic, Mark Buchanan's "Things Unseen" and Arthur Roberts's "Exploring Heaven" are better choices to excite desire for the afterlife.