Road Away from God: How Love Finds Us Even as We Walk Away

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Jonathan Martin preach on the Emmaus Road, how God is the one who walks with you even on the road away from God. It was completely and utterly transforming. They weren’t just beautiful words of comfort I desperately needed when my previously held beliefs were unraveling, they seemed to unlock this place deep inside me where I heard Spirit reassuring me that YES, God HAS been here all along, and I never had to choose between a rigid system of beliefs and lack of belief altogether. God wasn’t touchy, demanding or defensive, and not only okay with the journey I was taking, maybe it was precisely the path my soul needed to take. When I sat down and read it cover to cover, tears falling on every page, I knew I was holding beauty that could change the world. It’s not a book of answers, not a Christian how-to, not four steps to get here or there. It’s a roadmap for the soul. There’s not much I read about God that I find truly beautiful anymore. Most of what I resonate with nowadays speaks more to how God has been misinterpreted and misused. It’s honest, but not all that compelling. Aren’t we all in agreement that modern-day, western, evangelical, white Christianity has gone off the rails? Okay, now what? I don’t really care to read or hear any more critiques about something so obvious. I want to know what we do now. If God isn’t all THESE things, then who/what are they? And why is this story worth fighting for after all? THAT is THIS book. It’s a vision of Jesus and the story of God and the story of our lives taken back to Eden with the wonder, the beauty, the playfulness and the innocence. There’s permission to be wherever you are, to take the journey, even to “walk away.” I don’t think anything I’ve read anything that paints a more compelling or beautiful picture of what this whole thing is about.

Jonathan Martin’s words have a way of stirring you up in all the right ways. He speaks directly to your heart with wisdom, gentleness and most of all love. This book is so incredibly needed right now as many of us are unlearning what we have been taught and learning to listen to the Spirit speak to us in our lives of a new way to follow Jesus. It’s a lonely road…. Until we realize it isn’t.

This is a beautiful and meaningful book. I am so thankful something like this exists, because it offers such a fresh and valuable perspective on a faith life. Jonathan Martin is a prophet, and may we all take heed of the message.

‘The Road Away From God’ is a lovely and truthful meditation and embellishment on a well-worn story. Martin invites us to see the two bedraggled friends walking away from Jerusalem toward Emmaus mourning the death of who they thought was their savior as on an archetypal road away from God that we must all take if we are to be freed from the powers, principalities, institutions, and relationships that so often enslave us even as they construct us.One of the things I love about this book is that it is deeply guided by the wisdom of at least two figures that have been traditionally misunderstood and misconstrued not only generally, but especially by Christians. Martin manages to deliver gently and palatably the hard-won and often difficult to understand wisdom of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.Kierkegaard’s insight that truth is subjectivity and that the push to discern some objective or absolute way things must be for everyone is often a push to dehumanization and oppression runs all through ‘The Road Away From God’. Martin is careful to steep all of his observations and remarks in the loving attitude of privileging subjective and situated experience as the deepest way of knowing; an important and ever-fresh thing to hear from a Christian author.Similarly, Martin takes seriously, in a way many religious folks simply fail to, the personal and institutional implications of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’. When it is true for us that God is dead, what is left to do? When that which formerly situated us and our values is laid to waste, how can we go on? When hope is lost, what is left to be found and what is required? What could resurrection possibly be? These are all questions Jonathan meditates on and digests with the reader.Generally, I find works from a broadly construed ‘ex-vangelical’ or ‘deconstructed’ faith perspective to be merely caught up in replacing one fundamentalism with another, but there is no trace of that here. Rather, Martin is providing a glimpse into his own journey through the lens of the Emmaus Road. This glimpse functions as an invitation into a bodily understanding of what it truly means to be crucified with Christ, to act in such a way that one is deemed unworthy of life or position by one’s own people, to move radically beyond the social and relational configurations of an unjust world and into the ever-walking arms of a beloved community and an ever-present God who is Mirth and Love and who is always bringing the wine and the bread and the table to you.I highly recommend you pick up a copy!

This was a different way to look at God. The author examines how we find God and what does them journey means. He uses the story of. The road to Ephesus as an example for his book and the basis for his story. I found the book a good read and inspirational. I recommend this book for religious readers.