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The Gospel According to Starbucks: Living with a Grande Passion | 
 enlarge | Author: Leonard Sweet
Publisher: WaterBrook Press
Category: Book
List Price: $13.99
Buy Used: $2.79
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New (38) Used (22) from $2.79
Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 40724
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 1578566495
Dewey Decimal Number: 248.4
EAN: 9781578566495
ASIN: 1578566495
Publication Date: January 16, 2007
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Product Description
Introducing the life you’d gladly stand in line for
You don’t stand in line at Starbucks just to buy a cup of coffee. You stop for the experience surrounding the cup of coffee.
Too many of us line up for God out of duty or guilt. We completely miss the warmth and richness of the experience of living with God. If we’d learn to see what God is doing on earth, we could participate fully in the irresistible life that he offers.
You can learn to pay attention like never before, to identify where God is already in business right in your neighborhood. The doors are open and the coffee is brewing. God is serving the refreshing antidote to the unsatisfying, arms-length spiritual life–and he won’t even make you stand in line.
Let Leonard Sweet show you how the passion that Starbucks has for creating an irresistible experience can connect you with God’s stirring introduction to the experience of faith.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 No customer service October 2, 2008
I have still not received this book and I have emailed the seller three times to tell me the status of the order. I have gotten no response. I am going to initiate the process of getting a refund.
Flawed Analysis June 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As with many who are in the emergent movement they know there are issues within the church and often are correct in their identification of them. (Though you wonder how so many of them could have the same, incredibly bad experiences - I have seen and participated in some real authentic, Christ following fellowships and would think there has to be a few more out there). Anyway, my issue is with their solutions. Instead of returning to the Bible for how to do church (Acts, Pastoral Epistles), they turn to modern thinking and strategies for solutions that will only lead the church into more error and problems. In fact, I find it interesting that though the book was written not that long ago that today Starbucks is in trouble as a company and looking to find their magic again. Not sure how to fix Starbucks, but scripture gives us clear understanding of how a church will prosper.
 When Sweet Writes and Speaks, I Drink Deeply And Richly June 17, 2008
When I read this book, I smelled the coffee and tasted the cup of early and dark "double black eye" (true Starbucks fans and "Gospel" readers understand). Sweet takes the EPIC filter and brews a masterpiece. I read this on a journey to New York (where a Starbucks is on every corner) while traveling to celebrate my son's high school graduation. It was true "gospel." If you've never had a Sweet cup, this is a Grande place to start!
 Sweeet at his finest February 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Just how is a personal walk with Jesus like a fresh cup of startbucks? You will learn much about Starbucks, more about your spiritual life. It will make you long for both.
 a modern day application of the Medieval quadriga hermeneutic December 1, 2007
7 out of 13 found this review helpful
The Gospel According to Starbucks is rather deceiving at first glance. It appears to be one more book in the plethora of shallow Christian books that attempts to mimic pop-culture. The title and the picture of the coffee cup on the cover portray a distinctly non-academic aura. And even the content may appear to lack significant theological depth. This would all be a safe assumption except for a crucial statement in the often skipped "acknowledgements" chapter.
The crucial statement Sweet makes is that this book is an attempt to update the "medieval method of reading for the four senses of Scripture (literal, allegorical, tropological, and analogical) and applying these four senses to the reading of culture" (xi). This is significant because it alerts the careful reader to the fact that the engagement with Starbucks is in some sense secondary to Sweet's project. He is first of all using a specific hermeneutical lens (also called the "quadriga") that has a long history of debate and analysis.
This project resonates strongly with Sweet's background as a professor (and dean) of a mainline seminary. The turn toward medieval and patristic hermeneutics reflects frustration with the historical-critical method and the rejection of the grammatical-historical method by post-Liberals. Although the renewal of interest in this methodology was revived by Roman Catholic theologians such as Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, it resonates strongly with the postmodern and emerging church sensitivities that Sweet represents.
Specifically, the "four senses" method is a hermeneutical lens that supports the notion that there is polyvalence or "surplus" of meaning in texts. While originally applied to written texts, Sweet recognizes that culture itself is a text or a discourse that can be examined in light of specific hermeneutical paradigms. The intentionality of this is apparent in his quote by Derrida, "All the world's a text" (7). Throughout the book Sweet is quite successful at portraying Starbucks both as a cultural text and as a place where texts can be read.
The reader who spends the time to read the acknowledgments and becomes aware of his hermeneutical project with its four-fold lens will notice that the book is outlined according to an acrostic with four main points. The acrostic "epic" is used in a two-fold sense. It represents his narratival and experiential approach to faith as well as the four-sense hermeneutic.
The four-fold hermeneutical lens is translated into the four points of experience, participation, images, and connection (20). Significantly, Sweet argues that this hermeneutical lens is also a "new epistemology" (21) and a framework that defines "the life that every person is seeking" (22). Thus, he advances the medieval paradigm and argues that he can use it not only to understand the world (what is) but to understand what we are seeking. This itself represents a significant weakness of the book. It is not clear how this hermeneutic (in this case applied to Starbucks) is authoritative enough or "polyvalent" enough to both explain and structure reality.
Furthermore, it is not clear how these four points of EPIC correspond to the four-fold points of the quadriga, much less how he bypasses the traditional Protestant history of rejecting it that stretches from the Reformation (Luther) to the Puritan era (Perkins). The medieval hermeneutic that he refers to (xi), traditionally consisted of: historia - what actually happened, allegoria - where one thing is understood through another, tropologia -which deals with right moral conduct, and anagoge - relates to the final state of glory. Medieval exegetes often created a hierarchy within the quadriga by elevating the "historia" or literal sense above the others. Yet it is hard to discern how this model comports with Sweet's model and his elevation of experience.
Sweet's postmodern tendencies are apparent as he (intentionally?) vacillates between radical dichotomies and conciliatory positions. For example, he creates a radical dichotomy between experience and belief and calls the choice between the two the "basic question of life" (45). At other times he appears to reconcile the two, stating that one can have "intellectual belief" but not experience "EPIC faith" (46). This apparently suggests that he seeks a union between intellectual belief and EPIC faith (52). However, experience seems to win the day. He states, "The stuff of divine revelation is experience - experiences that form themselves into story and story into theology" (46). Thus, Scripture is apparently relegated to a "witness" role that helps stimulate an experience through which we gain divine revelation.
He further explains that "Rather than merely seeking experiences of God, we are invited to become living expressions of God" (51). This is admittedly part of an anti-foundationalist and post-propositional faith that prizes experiences over belief as an intellectual phenomenon (51). While the problems with this view are legion, one need only ask a very basic question for the "foundations" to crack - how do you know? How is it that Sweet can assert that Christians should know Jesus as "Truth" and experience him without propositional faith? How might we know that one experience is true and one is not true? This is particularly important in light of Scripture passages that warn against false experiences that reflect demonic powers rather than Jesus (cf. 2 Cor 11:14). Sweet does not adequately explain how his readers can both remove propositionalism from their faith and at the same time retain the ability to compare their faith to the standards (foundations?) of experience that he finds in Starbucks?
There is no doubt that The Gospel According to Starbucks is fun to read, even if only for the random factoids about coffee interspersed throughout. This is significant for Sweet who argues that boredom is the "ultimate spiritual taboo" (8). The attempt to revive the church with Sweet's updated quadriga provides us with a powerful reminder that post-Liberals and post-moderns are wary of anything that smells like dead orthodoxy. They seek a gospel message that includes the "spirit" and not just the letter. However, although Sweet tries to assure the reader that he has not forsaken the "letter" in his quest for the experience of the "spirit," (112) he points only to Jesus Christ. This would normally be a sufficient answer except that this "Jesus" is not the Jesus of Scripture's words, but only the "image" or "story" of Jesus we derive from Scripture (112). And what "turning fork" do we have to determine whether this Jesus is an idol or not? In a rather circular move he answers that Jesus is our only tuning fork (124). Epistemology is Sweet's undoing and he cannot sustain his implicit denial of the authority of Scripture and his claim that Starbucks can help us experience Jesus.
Because Sweet's quadriga model lacks a sufficient grounding in Scripture it makes the task of sifting the wheat from the chaff tenuous. The doctrine of common grace and the fact that all men are made in the image of God may be avenues that can substantiate his claim that Christians can and should learn about the "deeper meaning of a spiritual life" from the Starbucks corporation (8). The church can indeed learn from the world, but not uncritically. His model lacks the theological and Scriptural tools that are needed to be in Starbucks but not of Starbucks. The medieval quadriga was forsaken by Protestants during the Reformation - and for good reason. Sweet's model needs to under a reformation as well.
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