Thorny matters, an author interview
A.J. Swoboda talks about his new book, *The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War of Our Wants* + the Church Blogmatics March Madness Champion
Gentle reader,
Today, I get to bring you an interview with author
who talked with us about his new book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War of Our Wants (239 pages, Zondervan).Before that, let me announce the champion of the Church Blogmatics women in contemporary theology March Madness book bracket.
The winner is…
Sarah Coakley’s, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On The Trinity'
The interview with A.J. Swoboda:
BFJ: Your title intrigues me: Can you tell us about it?
AJS: One of the themes of the Bible that has always intrigued me is the theme of ‘thorns.’ In fact, it is one of the first images that pops up in the creation account just after the humans disobey God and enter into their rebellion story. God tells the man that as a result of this rebellion, he will work the ground, and it will “produce thorns and thistles for you.” (Genessis 3:18) Long ago, I was reading a commentary and the scholar suggested that this is less a curse and more a provision. That is, thorns are ‘for’ humans. Of course—without giving the rest of the book away—it is striking to me how many times this image pops up and eventually finds its way into the final moments of Jesus’ earthly life. The premise of the book is simple: God has refused to give us everything we desire. And, in the end, this is one of his greatest gifts to us.
BFJ: That’s beautiful. Why did you write The Gift of Thorns?
AJS: That’s right—nobody ever writes a book accidentally. This book is birthed, in part, out of my desire to see us better understand the role of desires, wants, and longings in our lives. As a friend said to me, this book is about the stuff that is underneath everything our culture is talking about, from politics to sexuality to personal happiness. But, there is also a personal angle to this book. My desires are often the last place I want to see the hand of God, and it is also one of the places I least understood. So I felt like a book on the formation of our desires into the image of Christ was a very important topic. To say nothing of the fact that it is a one-stop-shop for just about everything I’ve been telling my students in office hours over the last five years.
BFJ: I love a book that comes out of student interactions. Give us the short version: what’s the book about?
AJS: Big idea: the book is about how we are people of desires and how those desires will have disproportionate impact on the trajectory of our lives. I tell the story about two students who found their way into my office hours—back-to-back. One felt a desire to serve as a missionary in an urban center. Another wrestled with sexual desires he knew did not align with the way of Jesus. I had an epiphany after those two appointments. Had I told both of them to follow the desires they had, I’d have violated the spiritual authority I had in their life. In fact, such pithy and trite cultural comments as “you do you” can be wildly harmful and oppressive to the human spirit. I wrote this book because of the importance of coming to a sense of maturity in how we learn to desire Christianly.
BFJ: Share a detail you’re fond of from the book?
AJS: I neurotically sought to write this book in clear, concise, and compelling language. In fact, this book thrust me into actually starting a Substack —
— that I have grown to love writing. And while I believe I am becoming a better writer with every book I’ve written (this is my eleventh), I am most fond of the fact that when I put my head on my pillow at night, I know without a shadow of a doubt that I put words in this book that God had invited me to write.
“Beauty lies in thorns too,” via Wikimedia commons
BFJ: What does our contemporary world tend to get wrong when we think about wanting?
AJS: Our secular understanding of desires tends to say that we must pursue all our desires—and if we don’t, a post-Freudian world would say, we are repressed and oppressed. But equally problematic is an understanding of desire that tends to say all desires are bad, a worldview that tends to lead to a form of Christian thought on desires that cannot tell the difference between our good desires and the flesh. So we end up spending our time trying to kill the very thing God is wanting to heal. In short, we need a balanced and Christocentric understanding of the nature of our longings that invites us to follow those desires we have been given by God while crucifying the one’s he didn’t.
BFJ: What do people mistakenly assume when they hear about your book?
AJS: To be honest, there haven’t been too many mistaken assumptions on the front end—which is good. This is one of the few benefits of having a few people other than your mom be the first readers of the book. But I can anticipate two assumptions that may come down the pike. First, that I don’t come down hard enough on unchosen desires as some kind of ‘culpable sin.’ And, second, that I offer too graceful a pastoral posture toward people who wrestle with temptations that they wish they didn’t have. These are critiques I’m willing to sleep confortably over receiving.
BFJ: How does the book relate to your experience of discipleship?
AJS: Most Christians who talk to me about their desires—and are honest about them—wonder why they still struggle with the same desires and temptations they did when they first began following Jesus. I harbor these same questions. I think, in part, this book relates to my discipleship journey in the sense that it is my way of reckoning with desires that I’ve had to walk with since I was a young man. My baptism did not cause my flesh to go away. And I’ve had to walk with it since my conversion as a teenager. Call it self-spiritual direction or whatever, but this book was my way of wrestling out how I can understand the place my desires have played in my deep need for Jesus.
BFJ: Are there difficulties in the spiritual life that your book can help to address?
AJS: Yes. How do we walk with sexual desires we wish we did not have? How do we see our deeply hurting desires die and be resurrected? How does one know the difference between good and fleshly desires? How do we see the desire of God in a new and vivid way? How do we learn to desire God again, when our desire has died? These are just a few of the core questions I seek to address in the text.
BFJ: Those are some major and important questions. If you could gift everyone with one insight from the book, what would it be?
AJS: God is a God of desire and gave us good desires. The Holy Spirit wants to show us how to discover them.
BFJ: Amen. How has your spiritual life and prayer life changed as you’ve matured?
AJS: Writing this book—and undertaking the research that I did for it—has awakened me to a far more truthful and evocative prayer life. I feel like I pray more honestly and invite God into my actual desires. In the past, I think I tended to talk to God as though God did not know what was going on inside of me. That I was informing God rather than inviting God. Of course, there has never been a point in human history where a human has prayed, and God walked away more informed about a thing. Prayer for me, now, is less letting God into the secrets of my heart. Rather, it is allowing him to have a conversation with me about them even as he already knows them.
A. J. Swoboda (PhD, University of Birmingham) is assistant professor of Bible, theology, and world Christianity at Bushnell University. He also leads a Doctor of Ministry program around the Holy Spirit and leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of a number of books, including the award-winning Subversive Sabbath. He is married to Quinn and is the proud father of Elliot. They live and work in Eugene, Oregon.
BFJ: What would your 10-year-old self say if he learned you’d grow up to write about this stuff?
AJS: He would say that it was cool and then ask to play more video games.
BFJ: Besides The Gift of Thorns, what are your top reading recommendations for folks who want to think more deeply about these matters? Why do you recommend them?
AJS: Three books or authors that I think every Christian must read that deal with the topic of desire and longing are:
(1) St. Augustine (yes, everything he wrote; he has been called the ‘apostle of desire’);
(2) Jay Stringer’s Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing;
(3) and the award winning Teach us to Want: Longing, Ambition, and the Life of Faith by
.
All three of these writers and texts have been deeply formative. Of course, I could include so much more. But that is what my nearly 500 footnotes are for, right?
Don’t miss A.J.’s substack,
, and many thanks to A.J. for sharing with us! You can buy the book here.Grace & peace,
BFJ
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Good for Sarah Coakley! She 's a winner! But her books are soon expensive!
Still $24.