Collateral Bloggage What passes for thought around here…

Theology Thursday Book Review: Feeding Your Appetites

I started reading Feeding Your Appetites, by Stephen Arterburn last year and finished it this year.  And I haven’t reviewed it up till now for two reasons:

• I didn’t know how to review it without being really, really transparent
• I didn’t really feel like reviewing it

So laziness and self-consciousness.  That’s about the sum of it.  But then this week, Tyler shared an item on Google Reader titled “If a Fat Man Can Lead a Church…”.  (You can go read it if you want to.  It’s a short post with long discussion in the comments.  Then you can come back and see how I think this ties in to my current book review.)

First, how about I discuss what Feeding Your Appetites is about?  As the title suggests, it’s about the many kinds of appetites we have and how to feed them properly.  The appetites discussed are:

1. Appetite for Fellowship with God
2. Appetite for Pleasure
3. Appetite for Food
4. Appetite for Sex
5. Appetite for Authority and Power
6. Appetite for Work
7. Appetite for Companionship
8. Appetite for Wisdom

The underlying philosophy can be summed up by a quote from the forward:

So I set out on a journey to understand what I had to do to get my appetites under control.  Along the way I learned something amazing:  every human being has an inborn desire to know God, but our personal and selfish wants get in the way.  Our desire for knowledge of our Creator is taken hostage, and we find ourselves captured instead by appetites for foods, feelings, or experiences.

Of course, the appetites described in this book are not bad in themselves.  In fact, Arterburn goes to great lengths to make it clear that they’re all good things, but things which can be abused as substitutes for other unfulfilled appetites, the primary one being the appetite for fellowship with God.

(To be honest, I question the very premise of the book.  The idea that all humans have an innate desire for God sounds like Christianese to me.  I’m not saying it’s a wrong idea, but I’m just not convinced.)

The book is directed at anyone who has one or more appetites out of control, but I didn’t really go into it looking for a self-help book.  I must admit I got it to read it with a friend, and it was cheap!  Cheap books good!  Reading book with friend good!

And I don’t find myself to have any completely out-of-control appetites.  I don’t drink.  I don’t gamble.  I don’t try to control people.  I don’t have any particular temptation to look at pornography.  Of course, I’m carrying around a few extra pounds here and there that I’d rather not carry.  So my appetite for food must be at least slightly off. 

One of the things that becomes clear in the book is that we tend to abuse one appetite in substitution for another, with the abused appetite bringing pleasure to cover the pain of the unfulfilled appetite.  We’ve all heard of “comfort food” and “emotional eating,” I imagine.

(By the way, it was interesting reading this article about the whole Tiger Woods thing after reading this book.)

I actually didn’t intend to do a full book review here, so I’m not even going to discuss the rest of the book, except to mention that I liked the way it ended.  Arterburn didn’t expect that reading a book would solve everything, counter to what a librophile like myself would probably hope.  But he hoped to provide some guidance for getting started on straightening out our out-of-whack appetites.

One interesting thing I noticed in myself while reading this book was the way our struggles seem natural to us, while others’ struggles look bad and sinful.  I could sit there reading, repulsed at the idea of gambling addiction or porn addiction (and even scoff at the idea of labeling it addiction), while figuring that whatever was wrong with my appetites was both pretty much normal and perfectly understandable.

And that’s where the tie-in to the “Fat Man Leading a Church” post comes in.  If you look through the comments (and I admire anyone who could read all of them), you’ll find some very reasonable ones (like mine – see, me opinion good, you opinion bad), but then a whole bunch of vitriol from either the “but gays are gross” or “fat people lack self-control” sides.  And quite a few puerile “sin is sin” comments (yes, I used the word “puerile” for that overused and under-thought-out statement).

Anyhow, the more polarized comments on both sides seem to stem from someone standing in judgment of somebody else’s struggles.  Though I must admit that I’m standing in judgment of all those commenters, calling what they’re doing wrong.  It’s wonderful being human, isn’t it?

Well, this wasn’t much of a book review.  Maybe I could get a comment or two from someone else who’s read the book, filling in something else about it.  Say, perhaps, someone I see several times a week?  Who spotted the cheap book and ordered a couple of copies, then slipped one to me for a reasonable fee?  Anybody like that out there?