While in Bolivia I finished the book Your God Is Too Small by J.B. Phillips. I started reading it on the plane on the way down and it is clearly thought provoking. This is one of those books that expanded on things I have been asking and contemplating over for the last several years.

Phillips deconstructs our often marred, confused and distorted picture of God (resident policeman, parental hangover, God-in-a-box, second-hand God, projected image, etc.) and proposes, or rather constructs, an alternative view. I think the view he begins to construct moves closer to the life, message and ministry of Jesus – and if nothing else, it is the beginning of such a journey. Like many authors today, Phillips proposes that we have misunderstood and, even possibly, distorted the message of Jesus. For example, here is a quote I found rather interesting on evangelism: “Christ very rarely called men “sinners” and as far as we know never attempted deliberately to make them feel sinners, except in the case of the entrenched self-righteous, where He used the assault and battery of scathing denunciation. (This, we may surmise, is an instance of what He saw to be desperate ill requiring a desperate remedy.) Some evangelists, whose chief weapon is the production of a sense of sin, would find themselves extraordinarily short of ammunition if they were obliged to use nothing but the recorded words of Christ.” (Pages 103-104) For me, this exemplifies some of our twisted understandings of Jesus and His message. This practical outworking can be traced back to our often confused and wrongly perceived cultural understanding or misunderstanding of God and who He is as well as whom He is not. It is precisely this dichotomy that Phillips addresses.

This book touches on a number of different concepts and constructs and although I don’t agree with every conclusion and construct that Phillips presents, the conversation is intriguing. This book is not new to bookstores and Phillips has passed on over twenty years ago now, but the questions and discussions raised are equally valuable today. In fact it demonstrates that the questions others and I are asking and conversing about are not new but have been asked for decades now… In fact, I think that what started out as a few whispers from the back row is now moving into a louder voice in Christianity today that cannot be ignored.

I read The War Between Peru and Chile by Clements R. Markham (written in 1883) on my journey down to Bolivia. I was given this book by friends who thought it might interest me as I prepared for my experience. Because the book is well over 100 years old I had to first get accustomed to the old English it was written in (it is never easy to get use to phrases like “social intercourse”) but after about the first fifty pages I got into the “groove.”

What intrigued me most about the book was the complicated and vast history of Bolivia and South America in general. Being educated in North America it is hard to comprehend the effects of colonialism and the wars that erupted as a result.

I found it interesting that although Bolivia has been in several wars, they have never won. For a Canadian this is a hard concept to grasp but one that would undoubtedly have a profound effect on a country’s psyche. You can see these effects on both the culture and the unstable political system in Bolivia.

This book was fascinating to read as it gave me a glimpse into the history of a country I visited, a history I previously knew very little to nothing about.