The Ruthless Elimination of Paragraphs

Everyone is reading John Mark Comer. That’s only mild hyperbole. As my friend Brad East has written: “My students appear not only to be reading him but to be reading no one else. Once it was Lewis and Chesterton, then Schaeffer and Stott and Packer, and then Piper and Keller. Now it’s Comer’s world, and we’re all just living in it.”

Comer’s books appear throughout Christian bestseller lists. On Amazon, the vast majority of Christian books struggle and claw to get a couple hundred user reviews. Comer’s books stroll into thousands and tens of thousands. Forget what you’ve heard about a “post-literary” age or the end of the book. Comer is a fine communicator in podcast or preaching, but it’s his books that are shaping so many people.

So, I decided to dive in. Over the past couple months I’ve spent some quality time with Comer’s most successful book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

Let me start by telling you what this piece isn’t. It’s not about whether Comer is orthodox (I think he is). It’s not about whether Comer is a great theologian (I’m not sure). And it’s not about whether you or your teens or the people in your church should be reading him (I have zero opinion on that). The fact is I think The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is overall a good, thoughtful, and biblically sound book.

It’s also a particular kind of book, written in a particular kind of way. It’s not the first, second, or one hundredth book like this. It’s part of an ongoing style of writing that has many examples. Conventional wisdom says it’s useless to talk about style. If the book is orthodox, if it’s thoughtful, who cares how it’s written? Well, because I think the how is actually connected to the what. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry embodies a particular writing technique that, in my view, shapes its meaning…and does so in a somewhat ironic way.

And Now…This

The style I’m talking about is essentially the one or two-line paragraph style. Here’s an example from the first pages of the book:

Corrie Ten Boom once said if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.

The famous psychologist Carl Jung had this little saying:

Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.

Jung, by the way, was the psychologist who developed the framework of the introvert and extrovert personality types and whose work later became the basis for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. (INTJ, anybody??) Suffice to say: He knew what he was talking about.

Throughout the book, Comer uses one or two-sentence paragraphs that often transition into a completely new train of thought. This gives the book a very conversational or even podcast-like feel; if you read it out loud, it sounds less like a paper and more like a TED Talk. That’s the point. It’s accessible at a granular level, and gives the pages themselves a roomy, progressing vibe.

In the above excerpt, the first paragraph is 3 sentences, one of which is a throwaway (“There’s truth in that” is filler). The second paragraph is one sentence plus a cited sentence, and the third paragraph is two sentences. Now, before you stop reading this article and chalk it up to an overly pedantic writer who has nothing better to do than count lines on a page, consider the following questions:

1. Do sin and busyness really have “exact same effect”?

2. Did Corrie Ten Boom mean this, or did she possibly mean something else?

3. Is hurry really the devil?

4. What does the introvert/extrovert framework have to do with whether sin and hurry do the same thing to our souls?

5. Did Carl Jung really know what he was talking about?

All of these are questions that traditional paragraph style—3 or more sentences that aim to support a thesis statement—could address. Paragraphs develop and extend ideas outward. They engage objections and questions that readers might aim at the thesis statement. They clarify and focus what the writer is saying. But in the minimal paragraph style, there’s no time or willingness to do this. The train of thought must continue, must progress and pivot to the next point.

Here’s another example from the book, where the context is Comer talking about why “more time” won’t solve the spiritual problem of hurry, given that Americans spend over 2,000 hours each year watching TV:

What else could we give thousands of hours of our year to?

In twenty minutes of Candy Crush on our morning bus ride, we could pray for every single one of our friends and family members.

In an hour of TV before bed, we could read through the entire Bible. In six months.

In a day running errands and shopping for crap we really don’t need, we could practice Sabbath—an entire seventh of our lives devoted to rest, worship, and the celebration of our journey through God’s good world.

You see what I’m getting at?

Long before Thoreau went off into the woods, Paul said:

“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. “

The next to last phrase can be translated from the Greek in a few ways:

Redeeming the time.

Making the most of every opportunity.

Make the most of every chance you get.

Now, unlike the first example, this particular section is pretty clear. The single lines are fairly effective; say them out loud, and it sounds to your ears like a well-delivered sermon. Comer is making a poignant observation about how our lives are lost not year by year, but segment by segment, episode by episode. Yes and amen. But consider just how…hurried this writing feels. Calling on your readers to radically alter how they spend the minutia of their day is a big ask, after all. You are wading into the realm of comforts and “self-care” and three centuries of good old fashioned American libertarianism. Can’t we stop to really ponder, with the help our friend the paragraph, the meaning of this invitation?

Ironically, this particular style resembles television. Imagery has to change from one line to the next. The train of thought goes in a different direction on the very next line. It keeps the reader engaged in the sense that it lets them feel like every sentence is a new thought, a new thing to look at. This is the kind of “And now…this” world that Neil Postman lamented. Speed and novelty crowd out reflection. Attention capture proceeds at the cost of thought development. As Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the “Now ... this” world of news—a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished.

Again, it’s not that Comer’s book is wrong. It’s not using bad ideas or untrue assertions. But can we ask whether this hectic intellectual ethic is effective at helping us consider truth or goodness? We have to keep moving with the author. We cannot stop and consider, lest we miss something.

Alarm Bells

One guy who wrote Christian books like this to great effect in the 2000s was Rob Bell. Bell, for those who don’t know, was a very popular pastor in the Emergent Church stream, a Y2K-era movement of disaffected evangelicals who flirted with mysticism and “authenticity” as an antidote both to megachurch plasticity and theological rules. If you want to know more about Bell, there’s lots of other things to read. I mention him only because he really was the first writer whose non-paragraph style I ever took seriously.

Comparing Comer to Bell is not exactly fair. For one thing, at least in what I’ve read of Comer, he does not actually encourage his followers, as Bell did, to think of doctrine as “springs” that can help you bounce higher on the trampoline of Christianity (that’s a real metaphor from Velvet Elvis). My point is not to draw a comparison between the men, but to notice how this style of writing has served a slippery and often unhelpful ideological framework.

In Velvet Elvis, the truncated style seems to sidestep questions and clear argument. Bell strings together sentences that are not false, but need something underneath them in order to really be true. Many times he doesn’t supply it, and this seems to harmonize with the theological trajectory Bell eventually went on. Here’s an example:

In the middle of this page you do have a meaty paragraph. The big idea Bell presents is right there: “Jesus was not making claims about one religion being better than all other religions.” But instead of really developing this idea with sustained thought, Bell directs the reader’s attention away from the provocative suggestion—what if Jesus isn’t really all that interested in what we believe?—by simply reasserting the premise: That the core of Jesus’ mission is to help people live in light of reality.

“So the way of Jesus is not about religion; its about reality.” But isn’t religion reality? When Jesus teaches us how to pray, is that not both religion and reality?

No time to address that! Gotta move on.

I wonder often if Bell’s theological journey was greatly shaped by this kind of thing. I wonder if his style was sometimes not just a style, but a kind of intuition-privileging. I wonder if his books couldn’t be bothered to stay and sit for a minute and make a case for themselves because that wasn’t the point. The point was to feel the words, not necessarily hear them. Perhaps this mentality would lead just about anybody away from, say, the doctrine of hell, or scriptural teaching on sexuality.

In Praise of the Paragraph

This might seem incredibly pedantic. Who in the world cares how many sentences are in a paragraph? Who in the world cares whether a book’s lines are short or thick?

My only answer is this: The paragraph is more than a literary convention. It’s a way of thinking. If Nicholas Carr is correct when he says of the Gutenberg revolution, “As language expanded, consciousness deepened,” that means part of the way we reason has been shaped by the form of the book. Paragraphs that contain a thesis sentence and then sentences that support, illustrate, or explain the thesis sentence are uniquely germane to the way we humans think.

In conversation we are not necessarily waiting for a person to show why what they’re saying is true/interesting/relevant. Interpersonal communicational is interpersonal; the relational element is natural and makes us feign interest, not probe, and smile a lot. I don’t think books are an extension of that relational dynamic. Trying to capture a TED Talk style on the page sells the power of the page short. Paragraphs and pages can and should make demands on both author and reader that conversation cannot.

In theological writing especially, there is always a temptation to bypass the expositional. I could try to unpack or defend what I’m saying, but I fear you may lose interest, so instead I’ll pile on ancedotes, short quips, or gimmicks (like “breaking the fourth wall” and talking to the reader about the book). But we lose something when this happens. Jared Diamond, Walter Isaacson, and Malcolm Gladwell cannot be the only writers we expect to actually convince us. What is the task of a Christian writer except to demonstrate how compelling the truth of God really is? And how can a Christian writer accomplish this if the natural thought processes of his reader are undermined by the work itself?

Let me say at the end, once again, that this is not in any way a lament about people reading John Mark Comer. It’s simply a humble defense of the paragraph, and the role that paragraphs might serve in making the way we talk about God, the world, and ourselves truer, more coherent, and more likely to withstand the test of time.