Your God is Too Somber

Your God is too somber if your posture before him lacks a spirit of joy and a commitment to rejoice as much as possible. While life has its sadness and tragedy, the good news of Jesus Christ is that God's kingdom has won; and the suffering we face for a time is shorter compared with the endless delight that God promises. So, ""Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice!"" (Phil 4:4).

Your God is too somber if you embrace a theology of tears, rather than a theology of laughter. Of course, salvation and Christ's sacrifice are serious business, and we should engage in moments of penitential reflection, confession, and atonement. But all of this so we can shake off the shackles of our shortcomings and celebrate God fully and joyfully.

Your God is too somber if you fail to see the humor in the Bible: the calls to joy, paradox, irony, burlesque, play, and wordplay. God laughs, sometimes with us, sometimes at us, and Jesus's humor is evident in parables and sayings, with the goal of teaching us the truth.

Is your God too somber? This book aims to help you answer that question.


""Chris Dreisbach keeps our focus on the joy that is at the heart of the Christian message. In Your God is Too Somber, he draws on plentiful examples of wordplay, humor, and wit that are often overlooked in the Judeo-Christian tradition. What a delight it is to read a book that celebrates the joyful nature of our God and our faith""
--Mark Stanley, Rector of Old St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Baltimore, MD


Christopher Dreisbach is the director of the Division of Public Safety Leadership in Johns Hopkins University's School of Education; professor of moral and systematic theology (part-time) at St. Mary's Ecumenical Institute; and an Episcopal priest. His four most recent books are Ethics in Criminal Justice (2009), Collingwood on the Moral Principles of Art (2009), Social and Criminal Justice in Moral Perspective (2013), and Constitutional Literacy: A 21st Century Imperative (2017).