I did not enjoy John Mark Comer’s book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
Comer’s book is written to people trying to find meaning in a world that feels rushed, distracted, and isolated. At the time of writing, Comer was a Protestant pastor in Portland, Oregon, but he’s since stepped back to focus on creating resources for spiritual formation (like this book).
The book takes its title from a quote by Christian philosopher Dallas Willard:
Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.
In the book, Comer argues that hurry is incompatible with love (p. 23), patience (p. 23), joy (p. 25), peace (p. 25), wisdom (p. 52), and gratitude (p. 52). Hurry is a sign that we aren’t accepting our God-given limitations (p. 65), and hurrying causes irritability, restlessness, distraction, and isolation (pp. 27, 58, 89).
The base state of man before the modern era, Comer argues, was unhurried (pp. 42–45). God rests in Genesis 1, and Jesus himself never hurried. The cure to our modern malaise, thus, is to embrace a life marked by slowness, solitude, simplicity, prayer, and rest. Comer advocates taking a literal 24-hour sabbath, rejecting consumerism, and trying to find a “perpetual Zen-like state of Jesus-derived joy and peace” (p. 251).
Much of what Comer says is good. But the central argument of his piece, that hurrying should be eliminated, doesn’t seem defensible to me. Comer makes very few direct arguments that hurrying itself is bad, instead using hurrying as a metonym for a vaguely defined bucket of negative modern traits: isolation, anxiety, fear, and so on.
This is a classic example of a motte-and-bailey argument, popularized by Scott Alexander on Slate Star Codex. In his post “All In All, Another Brick In The Motte,” he defines a motte-and-bailey argument thusly:
So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.
Comer does exactly this. “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurrying” is a bold, controversial statement—but the statement he actually defends is more like “anxiety and isolation are bad,” which doesn’t have quite the same transformative implications for modern Christian living.
I’ll go a step further and try to defend the assertion that hurrying can be good, actually. Here’s Genesis 18:1–8 (ESV), when Abraham receives God at Mamre (emphasis added):
And the Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth and said, “O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” And Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah and said, “Quick! Three seahs of fine flour! Knead it, and make cakes.” And Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to a young man, who prepared it quickly. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them. And he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
In the above passage, Abraham hurries and tells others to hurry. I think it’s pretty clear from context that Abraham’s behavior here is correct hospitality, not sinful, since God immediately blesses Abraham (v. 10) and says he’s been chosen ”to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice” (v. 19).
Here’s a few other passages defending the practice of hurrying, which I will summarize for brevity’s sake:
These points may seem obvious—clearly, if Amalekite raiders carried off your family, you would hurry after them! But even a trivial example like this demonstrates that hurrying is not intrinsically opposed to the will of God.
Comer also argues that Jesus himself never hurried (p. 92). This is debatable—Mark uses the word “immediately” to describe many of Jesus’s actions, but that may reflect a Markean narrative style more than the actual pace of actions. Jesus himself commands Zaccheus to hurry (Luke 19:5), and his anger cleansing the temple and agony at Gethsemane should be sufficient to dispel the idea that Jesus perpetually existed in a “Zen-like” (p. 251) stoic state. Stress is not incompatible with sanctification.
Comer further argues that we’re called to walk with God, not run with him (p. 23). This is quite literally false! In 1 Corinthians 9:25–27, Paul uses the metaphor of running to convey the discipline, self-control, and perseverance required for mature Christian living:
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.
Equating maturity with a restful, non-stressed life sets Christians up for disappointment. Hebrews 11 specifically highlights the heroes “of whom the world was not worthy” who “went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated” (vv. 37–38). A stressful life doesn’t mean, as Comer argues, that “something is out of whack” (p. 85). God’s rest will come, but it might not come today.
The conclusion here is not that we should hurry more. Most people hurry for bad reasons, stuck chasing selfish desires or climbing social ladders in pursuit of an elusive fulfillment. But the call of Christianity is not to abnegate these bad desires but to align them with God’s will. As Rene Girard says in I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning (p. 13, emphasis original):
What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs towards the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible.
What we are willing to hurry for reflects what we care about. We see this reflected in the passages above: Abraham hurries to show hospitality and welcome God into his life, David hurries to save the captives, and Mary & Philip hurry to share the good news of the gospel. We should care enough about these things that we’re willing to hurry for them.
Comer’s call to a life of virtue, peace, and rest is excellent—and at the margin, he’s probably right that most people should hurry less in their lives. But the central claim of the book is just not correct. The vision of Christian maturity contained in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry seems a little too close to California-style Zen Buddhism and other modern mystical practices to fully align with Scripture, and I think this is bad.
Thanks to Taylor Wagen, Tony Robinson, Elias Mann, Jonathon Vandezande, and Chloe Wagen for helpful discussions, and for Ari Wagen for originally pointing me to read Girard.