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Oct 30, 2008 ∞

Book Review: <em>How Would Jesus Vote?</em> by D. James Kennedy

Have you heard that there’s an election coming up soon? So has WaterBrook Publishing, apparently, because they timed this blog review giveaway to fall just before the 2008 presidential election. Which brings me today to review How Would Jesus Vote? A Christian Perspective on the Issues, written by the late Dr. D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe. Kennedy was the senior minister at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and Newcombe is a television producer for Coral Ridge and a frequent co-author. I will admit to being skeptical about the book when I was invited to do the review; in general I feel that the “Religious Right” has done far more harm to the name of Christ than it has accomplished with its political machinations over the past 20 years. But I figured it was worth a read.

Chapter One of HWJV? asks, appropriately enough, would Jesus even have His followers vote at all? Unsurprisingly, it concludes that yes, He would, based primarily on the “render unto Caesar” command in Luke 20. Taking it even a step further, the authors claim that it is primarily the Christians' fault that America’s morality has taken a downturn in the past century; if only Christians had been more involved politically, they say, and been more effective at “legislating our morality”, things would be much different today.

Part Two of HWJV? addresses “The Issues”, devoting a chapters to:

• Matters of life and death (Abortion, stem cells, suicide, euthanasia)
• The Death Penalty
• War - can it ever be justified?
• Education and the schools
• Economic Concerns
• Health-care issues
• The environment and climate change
• Immigration and racial predjudice
• Protection of marriage
• Judicial Activism

This is a pretty fair swath of topics that surround most elections, and I was looking forward to having them dealt with in a thoughtful manner. I was quite disappointed, then, to read the chapters and find that they are little more than a regurgitation of the “Religious Right” talking points that you would hear from Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, or any similar religious conservative political group. Some examples:

• After telling us in Chapter 3 that he will never tell folks who he’s voting for, Dr. Kennedy says in Chapter 4 that he “cannot support [a] person” who is “for the pro-choice position”, saying that “this one issue of life trumps all others”. Doesn’t leave much question who he’s supporting now, does it?
• After saying, though, that the “issue of life trumps all others”, he goes on to conclude that the death penalty is an appropriate deterrent for crime and that “only by misunderstanding the Bible… could one conclude that Jesus would oppose the death penalty.”
• In the chapter on education, the authors detail the decline of the public education system in America and stunningly conclude that “as long as God continues to be barred from our public schools, the public-education system will continue to falter.”
• On health-care, the authors conclude that Jesus would “be concerned” about the plight of the uninsured, but that He would not favor government involvement in health care, not only because of government inefficiency, but also because it would “impose an anti-Christian ethic, such as forcing abortions on handicapped unborn children or forcing euthanasia on the weak”.
• On the environment, I’ll give them credit for a slightly more nuanced position than I would’ve expected; the authors say that it’s important we care for our environment, but suggest that there are more practical ways to do that than the massive programs proposed to stop “global warming”.
• On immigration, the authors pull a fair number of examples from the Old Testament claiming that God had Israel deal with two groups of immigrants differently, treating those who came to adapt and become Israelites as Israelites, while opposing those who came in as “aliens”.
• On judicial activism, the authors speak harshly against the Senate that railroaded Robert Bork and tried to destroy Clarence Thomas, but in the end conclude that they can’t say “whether Jesus would prefer judges who hold strictly to the constitution”.

One of the most disturbing things to be in HWJV? was the way the authors mangled Scripture interpretations in support of their views. No place was this more evident than in the chapter on the economy and taxes. After arguing the standard Republican platform (that big businesses are good because they create jobs, and that it’s damaging to tax them more heavily) for the better part of the chapter, they then stunningly support this by quoting Matthew 23:11: “The greatest among you will be your servant.” So, they say, look at Henry Ford as an example. He was a great, rich man, but in doing so he enriched the lives, and thus served, many others.

I want to explore that a little bit more. Matthew 23 is a chapter in which Jesus chastises the Pharisees and religious leaders for their pride, ambition, and hypocrisy. In context:

8"But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have only one Master and you are all brothers. 9And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. 10Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Christ.[b] 11The greatest among you will be your servant. 12For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

- Matt 23:8-12, NIV

That’s right, the authors picked a single verse from a chapter in which Jesus is telling us that the values of the kingdom are inverted, that status and position don’t matter, but that humility and servanthood do… and they use that single verse to try to prove that God would have us reduce taxes on “big business”, because those rich are doing us all a service. Did they completely miss the irony here?

I had hopes for How Would Jesus Vote?, hopes that it would be a thoughtful consideration of the issues, a step beyond the talking points that are rehashed on the radio and the blogosphere every day, hopes that the authors would acknowledge and consider that there are Christians, deeply devout, serious, thoughtful Christians, who disagree with nearly every “Religious Right” tenet. Instead the book turned out to be just more of the same stuff we hear every election cycle from those would would have us believe the lie, as Derek Webb wrote, that “Jesus was a white, middle-class Republican”.

The link to Amazon is included here because it’s part of the reviewing agreement; however, I’d suggest you spend your money and time on some other, more thoughtful book.

[How Would Jesus Vote? on amazon.com]

Oct 15, 2008 ∞

Matthew Paul Turner's <em>Churched</em>: A Review

Next up for review, courtesy of WaterBrook Press, is Churched: One Kid’s Journey Toward God Despite a Holy Mess by Matthew Paul Turner. Turner is a speaker, author, and former editor of CCM Magazine. Churched is written as a memoir of Turner’s growing up in a independent fundamental Baptist church.

In what will feel familiar to anyone who has been around that sort of church, Turner tells stories about dressing the part (complete with clip-on tie) and getting his first “Baptist haircut” (only a flat-top will do!), paints pictures of weird Sunday School teachers and loud, aggressive preachers, and who can forget the weekly altar calls? The stories hit a humorous note and manage to recount the frustrating times without coming across as cynical or cutting. In chapter 8 he recounts a third-grade Sunday School teacher named Moose teaching about hell:

[One morning] he looked at us and screamed, “BOYS AND GIRLS, DO YOU KNOW HOW HOT HELL IS?” He was serious, as if speaking to a room full of Christian meteorologists. “DOES ANYBODY HERE KNOW?”

As soon as Moose asked the question, I looked at my friend Angie. If anybody in our Sunday school class had visited hell and remembered to take a thermometer, it would be her. Not only was Angie always well prepared and organized, but she also claimed to make frequent visits to farr off places when she slept. One time, during a nap, we heard her mumbling in tongues. When she woke up, she told us she had taken a vacation to Montreal and been able to speak in French. When she saw me looking at her, she raised her hand.

“Mr. Moose, the temperature of hell is 666 degrees,” said Angie with the enthusiastic confidence of a demon. “Everybody knows that! Or should.”

I thought her answer was brilliant - possibly even correct - despite the fact i never believed she’d gone to Montreal.

Moose grew quiet. He didn’t tell Angie she was wrong, but he didn’t tell her she was right either. He just walked over to the door and shut off the lights. Moose’s Sunday school helper, Penny, placed large sheets of fabric underneath both of the doors to block the light coming in. The room became almost black. Moose stood behind his pulpit and found his Dollar General bag.

“This morning, I want to talk to you about hell.” His voice was quiet and low. He wanted it to sound spooky, and it did. “What’s hell like? It’s black down there. Much blacker than what you’re experiencing right now. Imagine a black so thick you can almost feel it. That’s what hell is like.”

I heard Moose rummaging through his paper sack and then the distinct sound of a Play button being pushed on a tape recorder. The crackling noise of the tape began. And then voices.

“It’s hot down here!” said the tape recorder. “We are thirsty! Very thirsty. We need Jesus.”

“Do you hear that, boys and girls?” asked Moose. “That’s what you would hear in hell. There would be a lot more of them, though. And some of the voices you wouldn’t be able to understand because they’re from other countries.”

While I assumed Moose was right, that his tape of sound effects could have been a live audio recording of hell, I was also convinced that if I closed my eyes during the church fellowship time, when a long line of Christians waited for Ho Hos and fruit punch, it might have sounded similar.

Turner’s stories are amusing and will provide laughs, grimaces, and knowing nods along the way. I felt like the story ended too soon, though. I would’ve liked to hear more about how Turner found his way out of the fundamentalist culture and where he is now. Still, it was an entertaining little book.

You can purchase Churched from Amazon.com.

Oct 2, 2008 ∞

"I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety."

I sent an email this morning which sent me thinking about a familiar quote, which in turn sent me thinking about one of my favorite sets of stories: the various adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a multitude of mysteries featuring the odd detective between 1887 and 1927, and Holmes has been studied, quoted, parodied, and dramatized ever since.

I was first introduced to the Homes stories by Lydia back in, oh, 1989 or so. (I was probably 12 years old.) After borrowing her volume (I’m thinking it was A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles) and devouring it no time, I proceeded to borrow whatever I could from the library, and eventually bought “The Annotated Sherlock Holmes”, a ridiculously large book containing not only all the stories, but also illustrations, explanations of some of the period references, and, most amusingly, studies as to the “actual” dates of the mysteries, piecing these together from descriptions of cultural events, weather, and moon phases in the stories. This book was equal in size to my father’s Strong’s concordance, but I lugged it around anyway, reading in the car, reading while my brother Ryan took his piano lesson, reading pretty much anywhere I could get away with it. I was that sort of kid.

I recall distinctly driving my mom a bit batty with that annotated Holmes. One of the readings in my literature book somewhere in early high school (recall I was home-schooled) was a Holmes story, so, rather than read it from my lit book, I read it from the Annotated Holmes. Afterwards, Mom got out the discussion questions, and question number one was “when did this adventure occur?”. It’s supposed to be a straightforward question; after all, the story told the supposed month and year right in the first paragraph. But no, I wasn’t going to pay attention to that. I quickly gave her the supposed “actual” date that the editor of the Annotated had surmised. She gave me a quite baffled look, and then, well, I had some explaining to do.

Holmes is one of those characters who, once you know, you start seeing references and allusions to all over the place. One such reference several years ago gave me the opportunity to email long-time New York Times columnist (and favorite of mine) William Safire to correct him. (In retrospect, I must have been one of dozens, if not hundreds, to do so.) He had quoted Holmes' line about “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”, correctly attributed it to the story “Silver Blaze”, but then slipped up by saying that “Silver Blaze” was the name of the dog in the story. Oops. (Silver Blaze was a racehorse.) I got an automated reply email from the NYT, but was more excited to receive a two-line email response later that day which, by all appearances, was from the columnist himself.

I go back to Holmes every once and again to enjoy an old friend. The Annotated still occupies a rather large chunk of bookshelf in my basement, not too much the worse for wear after having been dragged around for nigh on twenty years of my life. Many years and many readings have not “withered” or “staled” the stories quite yet. I look forward to the day when I can pass on the adventures (and the giant volume) to one of my little readers at home.

[The title of this post is a quote from The Adventure of the Empty House, wherein Holmes slightly modifies the line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.]

Sep 30, 2008 ∞

Trying to describe Watership Down

I finished reading Richard Adams' Watership Down last night and, when adding it to my reading list, found it rather difficult to describe. Figuring that few of you ever look at my reading list, (which is fine,) and knowing that my attempt amused me, I thought I’d post the description here, too.

This is a hard novel to describe, not because it’s nondescript, but because short descriptions would leave out so much. It’s a story about rabbits. Let’s try this on for size: if Tolkien were to have written a story the length of one of the LotR books, and set it in modern day, and narrowed the scope from “save the world” to “find a new place to live” and written it about rabbits instead of hobbits, you might get something like Watership Down. I enjoyed it.

Sep 22, 2008 ∞

Scot McKnight's "The Blue Parakeet" - a review

When Zondervan offered up free early copies of Dr. Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet for bloggers to review, I knew I wanted to get in on the action. I’ve enjoyed reading Scot’s (he won’t mind if I use his first name here, I think) blog for some time now, and while I knew he typically inhabits a spectrum of belief a little more emergent than I find myself, I looked forward to reading his thoughts on the Bible, or, as the subtitle of the book says, “Rethinking How You Read the Bible”. (Dr. McKnight is a professor of religious studies at North Park College in Chicago. He also wrote a volume on Galatians in the NIV Application Commentary series.)

Scot lays out his question in the first chapter: “how, then, are we to live the Bible today?” Sure, there are those folks who say that we follow all of it, but really, he says, we “pick and choose” what we live out. He knows that phrase will make us uncomfortable, but he does that to a purpose. We are so used to our denomination’s (or our own) interpretations of Scripture, which help us know which parts we follow and which parts we don’t, that we’ve often stopped thinking about how we go about that interpretation in the first place.

McKnight asks us to look at the Bible and first understand the whole sweep of history - from creation to the fall to redemption to the end. Within that sweep, then, we can start to see how the individual pieces fit. Just as we shouldn’t take a single verse out of context in a chapter, we shouldn’t take a single chapter (or a single book!) out of context of the greater whole. He also encourages us to distinguish between God and the Bible. The Bible is one way God has chosen to reveal Himself to us, but the Bible isn’t God. We don’t worship the Bible. We worship God. (This whole distinction is a useful reminder for those of us who have been in churches where precise, “literal” adherence to the Scripture (at least, the passages deemed “important”) has been given overly-high priority.)

I really enjoyed, appreciated, and agreed with the first two-thirds of The Blue Parakeet. Then Dr. McKnight, in a move he fully admits will not sit well with some, uses his principles of Biblical interpretation to argue for the acceptance of women in pastoral (teaching/leadership) roles in the church. And here is where I lose him. I know that this is one of his pet causes, but it just doesn’t work for me, I’m not convinced.

A few weeks ago on his blog, Dr. McKnight talked about his interpretation of 1 Timothy 3 (a passage that doesn’t get touched on in The Blue Parakeet), and argues it this way:

However, it is an inference to claim that only males can be elders or that all elders must be males. Why do I say this? Here’s why: Paul does not say “Elders must be males.” He assumes the elders to whom he writes are males, but he does not explicitly require that elders be males. Again: he assumes they are males, he says things that apply to males, but Paul does not explicitly say that elders must be males. [Emphasis in the original.]

And that just isn’t a convincing argument to me. You have to assume and read just as much into the passage to come up with his interpretation as you do to come up with the traditional interpretation, and, with McKnight’s position, you further have to ignore 2000 years of the church’s historical understanding of the passage. Furthermore, he argues that the list of qualifications in 1 Tim 3 shouldn’t be considered “rules for” or “qualifications of” elders - rather, that it should be considered “symptoms of virtues expected of leaders for Christians in the 1st Century”. And why? Because, first of all, the lists of 1 Tim 3 and Titus are different, and second, because “we know that many pastors/elders/deacons have children who don’t believe and who are rebellious, some are quarrelsome, some are not hospitable, and not all have a good reputation with outsiders”. In other words, because some who have held the role of elder in the church have failed to meet these standards, therefore they must not be “standards”. Begging your pardon, Dr. McKnight, but isn’t that like saying that since people break the speed limit that the speed limit must just be a “symptom of a virtue expected for drivers in the 21st century”? But I digress.

All in all, I’d recommend Dr. McKnight’s book for a good fresh look at how we interpret Scripture. The degree of “groundbreakingness” (surely that’s not a word, is it?) you feel when reading it will, in large measure, depend on what Biblical tradition you have grown up in and/or studied. Be cautious, though, when you reach the portion that’s interpretation; the quest for “rethinking” needs to continue to be guided by wisdom and historical perspective.

The Blue Parakeet will be released on November 1, 2008, and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.

Aug 28, 2008 ∞

Book Review: Wild Goose Chase

Wild Goose Chase, the latest book by pastor Mark Batterson of National Community Church in Washington, DC, sets out its' premise in the introduction:

The Celtic Christians had a name for the Holy Spirit that has always intrigued me. They called Him An Geadh-Glas, or “the Wild Goose”. I love the imagery and implications. The name hints at the mysterious nature of the Holy Spirit. Much like a gild goose, the Spirit of God cannot be tracked or tamed. An element of danger and an air of unpredictability surround Him. And while the name may sound a little sacrilegious at first earshot, I cannot think of a better description of what it’s like to pursue the Spirit’s leading through life than Wild Goose chase. I think the Celtic Christians were on to something that institutionalized Christianity has missed out on…

With each chapter in the book, Batterson then calls the reader to “come out of the cage” of one encumbrance or another, sharing anecdotes from his own life and those he’s come into contact with in his ministry, and then finishing up each chapter with an example of the principle that he sees in the life of a biblical character.

I was unimpressed when the introduction, and indeed, the whole premise of the book, seemed to be based less on some Scriptural principle than on a single phrase from Christian antiquity. And my concerns were deepened when I looked at the chapter titles and subheadings:

• Goose Bumps: Coming Out of the Cage of Responsibility
• Dictatorship Of The Ordinary: Coming Out of the Cage of Routine
• Eight-Foot Ceilings: Coming Out of the Cage of Assumptions
• A Rooster’s Crow: Coming Out of the Cage of Guilt
• Sometimes it Takes A Shipwreck: Coming Out of the Cage of Failure
• Good Old-Fashioned Guts: Coming Out of the Cage of Fear

While there are some good points to be made in the book from time to time, it really feels to me that Batterson wrote the self-help, motivational principles of Wild Goose Chase and then looked to find bits and pieces of Scripture to support his points… which is a dangerous way to teach the Bible. In addition, Batterson’s style of writing is unimaginative, cliché-ridden, trying too hard to be cool and trendy. Color me unimpressed.

After finishing up Wild Goose Chase, I felt like I had just sat through one of those exercise infomercials where ridiculously-toned models and cheesy announcers hype their transform-your-life product ad nauseam for 30 minutes late at night. What I came away longing for was something more solid, stable, and reliable - something more analogous to a Ken Burns documentary on PBS. So I’m sorry, Multnomah, I just can’t recommend this book. My friends, if you’re going to buy a book on living the Christian life, get something by Eugene Peterson instead. You’ll be glad you did.

As requested, I’ll link to Amazon: you can buy Wild Goose Chase there. But I’d suggest you pick up something else instead.

Aug 4, 2008 ∞

100 Books

Being the voracious reader that I am, I was happy to steal this from Kari and Roger. The story is that apparently the National Endowment for the Arts estimates that the average adult has only read six of these books. Here are the markup guidelines:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you intend to read. 3) Mark in red the books you LOVE. - I’m skipping this step. 4) Reprint this list in your blog

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - This sure seems like a duplicate to me!
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - I’ve started this one three times and can never seem to finish it.
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - Started it, but just can’t get in to Rushdie’s writing style.
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, looks like I’ve read 28 off the list, which barely puts me ahead of Roger, but finds me far, far, behind librarian Kari’s 50. I do enjoy this, though, because it gives me a list to work from. Now if our library could ever get their online catalog back online after the flood, I could start reserving some of these. :-)

Aug 3, 2008 ∞

Book Review: The Healing Choice

This week’s book review, thanks to a free copy from WaterBrook Press, is The Healing Choice and its associated Guidebook, written by Brenda Stoeker and Susan Allen. The authors are aiming here to help women heal from the betrayal of a husband’s unfaithfulness. Given the subject matter and the target audience, Becky volunteered to read the books and give us a review.

Becky says:

In what might well be a surprise to the reader, the first half of The Healing Choice centers not around an unfaithful husband, but around the death of author Brenda’s mother. She then goes on to draw parallels between her feelings of being betrayed by God and the feelings of being betrayed by her unfaithful husband. The second half of the book then tells the story of Susan’s healing after her husband’s unfaithfulness. Her experiences led her to start Avenue, a ministry facilitating support groups for men and women dealing with these situations. Both the stories are good and seem like they’d be helpful to someone in those situations, but it was something of a surprise to open up a book with a cover selling it as being about marital unfaithfulness and find the first half dealing, rather, with the death of a parent.

I opened up the guidebook expecting more of a study guide, something that might be used in a group study or personal study. However, the guidebook was less of the workbook-style book I was expecting and more of what I would’ve expected to be in the actual book. There is a lot of good content in the guidebook - it would work well as a stand-alone book, too. Expectations aside, these would seem to be good books for someone in the process of putting a marriage back together.

--

Thanks, Becky!

Jul 21, 2008 ∞

A call for plot creativity, or, Why is it always the Christians?

This weekend I finished up reading Rules of Deception, the latest novel by Christopher Reich. I have read all of Reich’s novels and quite enjoy them; he does the spy/crime/legal thriller genre as well as most anybody out there right now. I had one real disappointment with the book, though (and OK, this is a bit of a spoiler, so be forewarned): the true evil villain, the mastermind who is willing to kill hundreds of people to accomplish his nefarious goals, is a “born-again”, “evangelical Christian”.

Now, I realize Dan Brown made it cool to rip on Christians and the church with The DaVinci Code, indeed, it seems nearly de rigueur these days to have Christians as the bad guys. And certainly as an author Mr. Reich is allowed to make whatever plot choices he wants to. He’s very even-handed with his other groups of people - there are good and bad CIA agents, good and bad Iranians, good and bad Americans, and etc, in his plot. But Christians? They’re all bad. And shadowy. And in lock-step. And willing to do anything, kill anyone, incite nuclear war, all for the purpose of “hastening the Rapture”. Ugh.

As I’ve been thinking about it, this is one of the reasons that Tom Clancy, one of the better authors in this genre a decade ago, had such good stories: he was willing to use the real-life bad-guys of the day and didn’t feel any politically-correct need to pick somebody else. Hence, during the Cold War, the Soviets were the bad guys, even though there were some good Soviets among them (The Hunt for Red October, The Cardinal of the Kremlin). Once the Wall fell and the new fear was Islamic Fundamentalism, Clancy went with it. In The Sum of All Fears there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, good Jews and bad Jews, heck, good Americans and bad Americans. But Clancy never felt the need to invent some other bad guys just to be politically correct.

So I enjoyed Rules of Deception, and I’m sure I’ll read Mr. Reich’s next book when it comes out. But I can’t help but wish that he’d take a more realistic look at the world when he does. Maybe a little more plot creativity next time?

Apr 5, 2008 ∞

The Strange Story of Easter: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 4

Having noted in chapter three that something happened to cause the early Christians' belief in resurrection to be vastly different from their former religious or cultural beliefs, in chapter 4 N. T. Wright sets out to make the case for a real, historical Easter. He starts out be listing four “strange features” shared by the accounts in the canonical gospels which, he says, should compel us to take them seriously as early accounts. Those features:

1. The “strange silence” of the Bible in the stories. Up to this point, the gospel writers consistently used allusions to and quotations from the Old Testament to show that Jesus' death was “according to the scriptures”. The resurrection narratives, though, have almost no such references. If the resurrection accounts were invented much later, you would expect the writers to stay consistent.
2. The presence of women as principal witnesses. As has often been remarked upon, women were not regarded as credible witnesses in the ancient world. Yet there they are in all the resurrection accounts.
3. The portrait of Jesus himself. If the resurrection stories were written later, you’d expect a shining, transfigured Jesus. Instead, you get Jesus mistaken for a gardener and as a human being with a body that was in many ways quite normal.
4. The resurrection accounts never mention the future Christian hope. In every account since then and in every Easter sermon preached, the conclusion is drawn: Jesus is raised, therefore there is life after death. But in these accounts, no such conclusions are drawn.

Wright goes on to address with great clarity some of the other common objections to the resurrection, including hallucination, cognitive dissonance, the swoon theory, mistaken identity, and the like. Each of them is reasonably discarded.

Finally, Wright concludes,

In any other historical inquiry, the answer would be so obvious that it would hardly need saying. Here of course, this obvious answer (“well, it actually happened”) is so shocking, so earth shattering, that we rightly pause before leaping into the unknown. And here indeed, as some skeptical friends have cheerfully pointed out to me, it is always possible for anyone to follow the argument so far and to say simply, “I don’t have a good explanation for what happened to cause the empty tomb and the appearances, but I choose to maintain my belief that dead people don’t rise and therefore conclude that something else must have happened, even though we can’t tell what it was.” That is fine; I respect that position; but I simply note that it is indeed then a matter of choice, not a matter of saying that something called scientific historiography forces us to take that route.

Wright’s other main argument in chapter four is for those who discount a “real” resurrection based on “science”. He notes that

…there are different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable… historians don’t of course see this as a problem and are usually not shy about declaring that these events certainly took place, even though we can’t repeat them in the laboratory.

But when people say “But that can’t have happened because we know that that sort of thing doesn’t actually happen,” then they are appealing to a would-be scientific principle of history, namely, the principle of analogy. The problem with analogy is that it never quote gets you far enough. History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial.

There’s a lot more to this chapter but it would be uncharitable to just quote the whole thing. Suffice it to say that Wright very convincingly argues that there is really no good explanation for all that has happened since other than that Jesus was truly resurrected from the dead. “Sometimes,” he notes, “human beings - individuals or communities - are confronted with something that they must reject outright or that, if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview.” Having thus set out the framework in part one of Surprised by Hope, Wright will continue to discuss what that worldview looks like when it comes to future things.

Apr 4, 2008 ∞
Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 3
Let’s start at the very beginning, says a familiar song from a classic musical, it’s a very good place to start.. And start at the beginning N. T. Wright does in Chapter 3 of Surprised by Hope. In fact, Wright is in a supremely-qualified position to start at “the beginning” given his preeminence as a New Testament scholar. Wright’s question for chapter three is this: how did the early church talk about the resurrection? What was their view? The answers provide some keen insights into truths about the resurrection of Jesus.
In the ancient Jewish tradition, Wright says, they did have a concept of resurrection. But their view of resurrection wasn’t some vague concept of “life after death”. Instead, what they looked forward to was a bodily resurrection of the righteous at the end of time. When Jesus tells Martha that she will see her brother Lazarus again, and she replies “I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”, that’s what they’re talking about. So when the early Jewish writers then spoke of Jesus resurrection and being bodily alive right now, they understood that they were describing something that had never happened before. The resurrection was the thing that set Jesus apart.
Wright then discusses seven ways in which the Christian view of resurrection soon mutated from the traditional Jewish view of resurrection:
1. The Christians, though coming from a broad spectrum of philosophical and religious backgrounds, quickly agreed on a single, “two-step” view of life after death: a temporary, spiritual time with God until the final, bodily resurrection.
2. The resurrection became more important - it moved “from the circumference to the center”.
3. The understanding of the resurrected body moved from some vague Jewish beliefs to a solid belief in a material, transformed human body.
4. The early Christians came to understand the resurrection as “split into two” - the prototype of Jesus resurrection, which points forward then to the resurrection at the end of days.
5. Because God had inaugurated the resurrection in Jesus, the Christians now “believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.”
6. The metaphorical use of resurrection changed from being about the restoration of ethnic Israel to being about the restoration of humans in general.
7. Resurrection became associated with the Jewish views of messiahship. To this point, no one had expected the Messiah to die and be resurrected; from this point on, they understood it to be the case.
It is important here, Wright says, to see this key development of a very early belief that “Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar is not.” This, says Wright,
…is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. … Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that. It was the Gnostics, who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology, thereby more or less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escaped persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas? Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did.
So, Wright says, there was a definite shift in the religious views as Jews became Christians following Easter. So what happened, really, on that historical Easter? That’s the question Wright will address in Chapter 4.
Also in this series:
• Overview
• Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go?
• Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise?
• Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting (this post)
• Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
• Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
• Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
• Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
• Chapter 8: When He Appears
• Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
• Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
• Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
• Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
• Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
• Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
• Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future
Apr 1, 2008 ∞
Puzzled About Paradise? Surprised by Hope, Chapter 2
In Chapter 2 of Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright examines the wide sweep of confusing views that the Church has commonly held about death over the past few centuries. I found them quite familiar. From the stern “death is our enemy” position all the way over to the “death is our friend to take us out of this place” end of things, Wright quotes familiar hymns (most of which you’ve probably sung in church before) to point out the varied viewpoints. Really, how do you even begin to start to rectify John Donne’s “Death be not proud… Death, thou shalt die”, with Abide With Me’s “heav’n’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee”? There’s a disconnect there somewhere. Wright reminds us that “God’s intention is not to let death have its way with us.” Death is an enemy, one that has been and will be defeated.
So, then, what about heaven? The common Christian conception of heaven, Wright says, and I find this true in my experience, is that it is “…the appropriate term for the ultimate destination, the final home, and that the language of resurrection, and of the new earth as well as the new heavens, must somehow be fitted into that.” Not so, says Wright - “there is actually very little in the Bible about ‘going to heaven when you die’ and not a lot about a postmortem hell either”. Rather, Wright says, “Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hudden, dimension of our ordinary life - God’s dimension, if you like.”
Wright goes on to ask a series of questions that he will answer later in the book: What about the human soul? What is it? What do we mean by “Jesus coming to judge the living and the dead”? What do we mean by “the communion of the saints”? In this final introductory chapter, Wright definitely impresses us enough that there is widespread confusion, not just from outside the church about the church’s beliefs, but from inside as well. It is that confusion that he hopes to iron out in future chapters.
Also in this series:
• Overview
• Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go?
• Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise? (this post)
• Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting
• Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
• Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
• Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
• Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
• Chapter 8: When He Appears
• Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
• Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
• Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
• Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
• Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
• Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
• Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future
Mar 30, 2008 ∞
Wrestling with Tom: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 1
So it’s been far too long since I posted my original review of Surprised by Hope, the latest book from N. T. Wright. As you may recall from that review, I found myself stunned by the clarity and richness of Wright’s exposition of the doctrines of heaven and the resurrection. (As Wright so cleverly puts it, “heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world!") Finally I’m finding some time to come back to it and interact more fully here. Surprised by Hope is split into three broad sections: ‘Setting the Scene’, ‘God’s Future Plan’, and ‘Hope in Practice: Resurrection and the Mission of the Church’. In this post I want to just address the first chapter, titled ‘All Dressed Up and No Place to Go’.
Wright opens Surprised by Hope by positing two questions which he says are often dealt with quite separately but that should really be tied together.
First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven,” of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one. This in turn makes some others get angry when people talk of resurrection, as if this might draw attention away from the really important and pressing matters of contemporary social concern. But if the Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for “new heavens and new earth”, and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together.
Wright then goes on to highlight just a few of the various beliefs commonly held today regarding death and the afterlife. From the ancestor worship of Africans and Buddhists to the Islamic hope of paradise to the Jewish hope of resurrection, and finally to the Christian view… but what, exactly, is the Christian view? Wright asserts that while there are many popular views of the afterlife in today’s culture, “so far as I can tell, most people don’t know what orthodox Christian belief is.” Yes, there is some belief in “life after death”, but what form does it take, and in what places? What about this word “resurrection”? Wright wants to clear up confusion on these issues.
It’s hard to do much commentary on this first introductory chapter, but it certainly sets the scene for the book. More to come.
Also in this series:
• Overview
• Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go? (this post)
• Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise?
• Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting
• Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
• Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
• Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
• Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
• Chapter 8: When He Appears
• Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
• Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
• Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
• Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
• Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
• Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
• Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future
Mar 18, 2008 ∞

On The Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness

Read to the end of the blog post - I’m giving away a copy of the book!

Just when you think you’re familiar with a guy’s talents… then this happens.

I’ve been an Andrew Peterson fan for a few years now. He is an amazingly-talented songwriter; albums to his credit include my all-time favorite Christmas album, Behold the Lamb of God. He’s shown himself to be a bit of a thinker and writer, too; he launched The Rabbit Room a few months ago and it is now a must-read site with book and music reviews and essays on the arts and faith.

Then I hear the latest news: AP’s writing a book. I actually think I got wind of it about 18 months ago from a friend who knows Andy, but had kinda forgotten about it. Now it’s for real: On The Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness.

OTEOTSDOD focuses on the quiet land of Skree, the Igiby children Janner, his younger brother Tink, and their crippled sister Leeli. Oh, and their ex-pirate (are you ever really an “ex”- pirate?) grandfather. There’s something about lost jewels, and a dude whose name is Gnag the Nameless. (How is he nameless, again?) Oh, and there’s this thing about toothy cows. Amazing.

OTEOTSDOD is a work of fantasy and adventure. It feels a little bit like Narnia, but with much more humor and much less allegory. It feels a bit like Monty Python, but without all the naughty bits that you wouldn’t want your kids to see. It feels a bit like The Princess Bride, but without Andre the Giant. And there are footnotes. Can’t forget the footnotes.

Being over 30 I might not be in the target demographic for this book, but I loved it none the less. The cover of the book promises that this is just book one of the saga, and talking to Andrew before a concert the other night he confirmed he’s working on the next volume. This is a set to add to your bookshelves. Fun to read, probably even more fun to read aloud - I just hope AP doesn’t get so popular as an author that he stops making music.

Full disclosure: the publisher gave me a copy of this book to review. Can’t say it influenced my review, though - the book really is good.

And now for the giveaway: they gave me an extra copy to giveaway. It’s gonna be real simple: leave a comment in reply to this post anytime through March 19. I’ll randomly select a winner and send you the copy.

Oh, if you don’t win the giveaway, you can buy the book from Amazon.

Mar 6, 2008 ∞

Another post from Augusta

Yesterday was Day 2 of the RTCA committee meeting here in Augusta. (Why am I posting a day behind, you ask? Because there’s free wi-fi in the convention center, but they want $10/day to get it in my room. I don’t need it that bad… so I’m only online during the day.) The meetings were rather uneventful.

Traveled around Augusta last night, and was surprised a bit when I drove past the famed Augusta National golf club. For some reason when I picture golf courses I think of them as big, open, in beautiful surroundings. Augusta National (where they play the Masters every year) is plopped down right in the middle of an older, poor part of town. I suppose maybe years ago when they built it it was on the outskirts, but now it’s just a walled-off enclave in the middle of the ‘hood. Strange.

Last night I found a shopping mall (boring; all shopping malls are about the same. why do I continue to seek them out?), a bookstore (also the same, but good for buying gifts for the girls), and a steakhouse restaurant (mediocre at best - disappointing). But I spent most of my time at the restaurant and then in the hotel after dinner working through N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. There will be several blog posts on it here in the near future, but let me say right now that this is one of those books that has been an “aha” book for me. It simply makes sense and puts the pieces together in a way that no book has done for me since reading Lewis’ Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man back in college. Oh, and Dad, if you read this: I ordered you a copy this morning, so don’t buy one.

Time for the meeting to start again. Gonna make sure those Synthetic Vision Systems are safe.

Feb 25, 2008 ∞

Tim Keller's The Reason For God - a review

Tim Keller has been a favorite speaker of mine for some time now. As pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, he reaches thousands each week. He has also become a fixture at pastor’s conferences including John Piper’s conference in Minneapolis (where I saw Keller in person a couple years ago) and Mark Driscoll’s Acts 29 conferences. His dry wit and humor coupled with great insight on ministering to the city make him a must-listen for me.

(As a brief aside, I made this analogy at Piper’s conference a couple years ago: if Piper’s conference were Star Wars, Mark Driscoll would be Han Solo, Piper would be Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Tim Keller is quite easily Yoda. Quite easily.)

When I heard that he had written a new book, I eagerly ordered it (thank you, wtsbooks.com) and put it at the top of my reading stack.

God and Reason have been hot topics lately in the book world; it seems to be the topic du jure for atheists who want to trash Christianity. Keller’s book seems to be something of a response to those books, proposing, as the title suggests, The Reason for God. There has been significant buzz in the Christian blogosphere surrounding the book, and a not-insignificant marketing blitz as well - it’s not often that a new Christian apologetic comes complete with its own website.

Quite frankly, I found The Reason for God to be underwhelming. Keller spends the first half of the book responding to common objections to Christianity (“why is Christianity so exclusive?” “How can God send people to hell?”, etc) and then takes the second half on the positive side of the bargain, explaining why he thinks Christianity is true, and then laying out a bit about Christian beliefs. While the reasoning was solid, it wasn’t anything groundbreaking - it’s the same stuff you’ll find by reading C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity and N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian. In fact, Keller quotes extensively from Lewis and philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Too often it seemed to me Keller should just be suggesting that we buy and read Lewis and Plantinga rather than reading his repackaged version.

The first half of the book kept my interest pretty well, but I will admit to a waning interest and a lot of skimming toward the end. This isn’t to say that The Reason for God is a bad book, or not worth reading. Put into the right hands, it could be a good introduction to the rational, logical reasons for Christianity. I don’t think it’d answer all of the serious intellectual doubter’s questions, but it’d be a start; good for your college seeker, too. But for someone who’s already familiar with the arguments, has already read Lewis and the like? Don’t bother. Or buy it for the quick read and then give it away. Here’s hoping for something more fresh and insightful next time from the capable Dr. Keller.

Jan 2, 2008 ∞

2007 in Books: Chris's Reading in Review

One year ago I decided that my blog was the must useful place to keep my reading list, and that proved to be a good choice. I’ve tried keeping reading lists in the past, but was never consistent in recording. This year, though, I managed to record each book and a couple sentences of synopsis and review. I don’t do much in the way of Top 10 lists, but this seems like one place where I have enough data at hand to make a year-end summary. So here goes.

Total books read: 85. Total fiction: 68. Total non-fiction: 17. Total re-reads: 1.

The one notable series for this year was Harry Potter. I managed to resist the series until this year, but finally decided it was time to give them a try. I was glad I did; they were some very entertaining reads. I started Book 1 on July 11 and finished Book 7 on August 23, and managed to sneak six other books in during that six weeks as well!

A look at my non-fiction stuff betrays my interest in history and science, with a dabbling in music. No real surprises, I guess.

My Top 5 non-fiction reads of the year, in no particular order:

• The Everlasting Man - G. K. Chesterton. This is a classic, took me a while to read, but Chesterton is worth it.
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin. Goodwin makes history interesting. Very readable, interesting insights into an amazing man.
• Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior - Dick Couch. I’m a sucker for special forces/military stuff anyway, and this is an excellent look at what the Army Special Forces folks do.
• No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II - Doris Kearns Goodwin. Got started on DKG, read a second book. Good stuff once again.
• A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country - Larry J. Sabato. Some very interesting ideas here, including changing the number of senators/representatives and the lengths of their term, a proposal for a single six-year (extendable to eight-year via national referendum) term for president, and others.

My top 8 fiction reads, again in no particular order (I was going to list 10, but couldn’t find two more that lived up to the standards of these 8):

• Variable Star - Robert Heinlein & Spider Robinson. The title character goes on a “galactic bender”… yeah, and it’s a great story.
• Sun of Suns (Virga, Book 1) - Karl Schroeder. Schroeder manages to create a very believable, imaginative world for his story. I’ve got book 2 sitting in my to-read pile right now. Can’t wait.
• In War Times - Kathleen Ann Goonan. Goonan combines time travel, jazz, and World War II in a way that blows my mind. Easily my favorite non-series book of the year.
• The Children of Húrin - J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien does the classic epic better than anyone else.
• Magic Street - Orson Scott Card. Card has a gift for storytelling and imagination. This novel weaves some of the plot and ideas of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a delightful modern fantasy.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) - J. K. Rowling. I promised myself I’d only include one HP book in this list, and it had to be this one. It caps off the series brilliantly.
• Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present - Cory Doctorow. Most of the sci-fi short stories I’ve read up to this point have been older; it’s fun to read something written recently - the current-ness of the technology and ideas makes them even more believable and frightening.
• The Road - Cormac McCarthy. No, I didn’t read this one because Oprah recommended it. Andrew Peterson recommended it, too! :-) Chilling, spare, and yet ultimately hopeful.

Apparently I am a sci-fi nerd. It’s not that all I read is sci-fi… I guess those just stick out the most to me.

I’ll start a new list for 2008 once I finish my first book. Gotta see how my reading preferences change from year to year.

Feb 4, 2007 ∞

Pick Chris's Reading List: Hell's Best Kept Secret

My dad loaned me Hell’s Best Kept Secret by Ray Comfort back at Thanksgiving, and sadly it had set by my night table since then, still waiting to be read. Dad reminded me about it the other day, so I picked it up last night and read through it. It’s a short little book, maybe 150 pages in paperback, but contains a lot of good stuff.

I was not really familiar with Ray Comfort before reading his book. A quick online search shows that he is the main man at Living Waters ministry, and that he’s done a series of TV programs called “The Way of the Master” with Kirk Cameron. His website says that Living Waters “…has been equipping Christians across the world for more than 30 years. We train Christians who want to learn evangelism – by teaching them how to witness the way Jesus did.”

I will admit that a brief browsing of the Living Waters website makes me a bit queasy; products they have for sale include the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution Board Game and novelty Million-Dollar bills that contain a Gospel presentation. I’m not sure I’m to keen on either of those ideas, but then this is supposed to be about the book, right, not about Ray Comfort’s ministry in general.

Mr. Comfort gets right to it in the first chapter. We find out that Hell’s best-kept secret is the message that our sins condemn us to hell unless we trust Christ for salvation. He says that the reason 80 - 90% of “conversions” from altar calls and crusades fail is that people are coming because they are promised something good, that Christianity will make their life better. Then when tribulation comes, people fall away because all of a sudden Christianity isn’t helping them out any more. He gives the illustration of two men on an airplane. If you offer the first one a parachute, telling him it will make his flight more pleasant, the guy will immediately take it off, because it’s heavy and bulky and uncomfortable. If you offer the second one a parachute, telling him to wear it because at any minute he’s gonna have to jump out of the airplane from 20,000 feet, he will thank you profusely and will keep the parachute on regardless of the discomfort, because he has a view of the danger that will come should he not have the parachute.

Comfort quotes profusely (and at times repetitively) from D. L. Moody and Charles Spurgeon, among others, to say that an understanding of our condemnation under the law is a key starting point to understanding the Gospel. In that message I can’t disagree with Comfort - he’s right on. The Good News of salvation through Christ isn’t really good news unless there’s something we need saved from. Where I wrestled with this book wasn’t in the particulars of the message, but was more with my reaction of the entire method he was proposing. The book itself is about 20 years old. I see him writing it to react against what he’d seen at big evangelistic crusades (Billy Graham, maybe?). Then several times in the book he talks about doing streetcorner preaching, or about stopping at a train station and just having the Lord direct him to people who he could sit and talk to. In all those cases, I see them being more prevalent and on-topic 20 years ago than they are today. Let me try to explain.

I think Dr. Tim Keller hit it right on back at the Desiring God 2006 conference when he noted that our world to day is post-Christian. He talked about a historical 20th century progression of evangelism techniques that started with the crusades of Billy Sunday, then later Billy Graham; later it transitioned to the personal evangelism methods found in Evangelism Explosion; then towards the very end of the 20th century and into the 21st we have “seeker services”. Keller postulates that we have three problems in reaching postmoderns: 1) a truth problem - they don’t like our exclusive claim of truth. 2) Guilt problem - it assumes they have a consciousness of guilt. 3) A meaning problem - they don’t believe texts can really get a meaning across.

Number 2 is the one that I think hits it - for many people these days, there is a lot to establish philosophically before we can get to the idea of an absolute standard and guilt before God. Now, I think most of them have an inner understanding of guilt but won’t admit it; they have been convinced that there is no absolute truth, no God to whom they are accountable, and thus their feelings of guilt are a product of some bad thinking on their part. So when we start the discussion, we may not be able to start with “do you understand that you’re guilty before God?”, we may have to start with “what is truth?” and go from there.

I wrote over a year ago that the place that makes sense for me to start the story is with this phrase: “Things aren’t right.” There is a statement we can all pretty much agree on. Yes, some hardcore types may want to argue that there is no “right”, so how can things not be right… but as C. S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity, you only have to do something bad to that person to get them to start appealing to a universal moral standard. :-) Then we can talk about why things are wrong, and how God has a plan to set them right again.

I have over the past few years started tending towards the Calvinist side of Gospel presentation. Not that I’m going over into full five-point Calvinism; that’s a topic for another post. But it seems to me that we are called to proclaim the Gospel to everyone. Even as believers, we need to be reminded of the Gospel, of the good news that God has provided a way for us to be redeemed and to become a part of His kingdom. Non-believers need to hear it, too; how far back in the story we have to start will largely depend on where they are philosophically. For those who still have a Judeo-Christian mindset, we can probably start with Mr. Comfort’s approach and talk about our guilt before God. For those firmly entrenched in postmodernism, we’ll probably have to back up a few steps. Either way, we have good news to share, and we need to share it.

Jan 29, 2007 ∞

Pick Chris's Reading List: Velvet Elvis

Finally I complete another entry on my reader-suggested reading list: Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. Thanks Heather for the recommendation!

I’m having a harder time writing a review for this book than I have for any of the previous ones I’ve read. I’m not too sure what my conclusion is yet. Some general observations are in order, though.

First, I’m not too keen on the general writing style. The book is full of single sentences masquerading as paragraphs. Now, these aren’t long, Pauline run-on sentences; these are short, one line sentences with lots of white space between them. As a consequence, to me the book sounds less like a well-reasoned argument for something and more like a collection of little thoughts that don’t necessarily connect so well. Maybe I’m just too old to get it.

Second, I haven’t seen Rob Bell’s NOOMA videos. I’ve heard they’re pretty good, and they might clue me in on a little more of what he’s thinking. I haven’t heard any other of Bell’s stuff, either, so all I have to base my understanding of him on is this book.

There were a couple things that I disagreed with in there. First of all, towards the beginning of the book he goes through this extended illustration about how doctrines are like the springs on a trampoline - how they serve to propel us and our faith and our actions. Fine, I guess, OK. But then he goes on to argue that, hey, even if you’re missing a spring, that doesn’t mean that the trampoline won’t work. I’m starting to get a little queasy with the illustration at that point. Then he says, hey, so if the virgin birth doesn’t happen to be true, that spring pops off the trampoline, that doesn’t mean it won’t work. And at that point he has gone too far. To my reading, Bell is not denying the virgin birth of Christ; however, he’s clearly leaving the door open. This is a problem, a big problem. I think the virgin birth is one of the essentials of the faith that we simply must hold to. (Side note: Mark Driscoll addressed this pretty directly back in September at the Desiring God 2006 conference.) So Bell loses bigtime points with me on that issue.

Secondly, I have some queasiness with Bell’s discussion about interpreting the Scripture. His basic argument is that Scripture has to be interpreted; that much I agree with. He ridicules people who will say “let me tell you what the Bible says”, saying that they’re just trying to sell you their interpretation. I guess I’m OK with all that. Where I start to get uneasy is when he encourages his readers to continue reinterpreting everything. He seemed to come dangerously close to saying that there isn’t necessarily a “right” interpretation of any Scripture, that we should just use the interpretation that makes sense to us. I don’t think he actually said that, but he seems to be oriented that direction. That bothers me a bit. As Christians we can’t be so postmodern that we refuse to say there’s a “correct” way to view the truth… that just won’t work.

Other than that, I didn’t have any huge problems with Velvet Elvis, but at the same time I didn’t find it that compelling. Sorry, Heather, wish I could give it a better rating, but I just didn’t come away from it very excited. Maybe I’ll have to try it again another time.

Jan 26, 2007 ∞

You'd think I'd learn...

I stopped at the library yesterday afternoon to pick up a book I had reserved. (Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, yes, Heather, I’m finally getting around to reading it.) And of course, even with my book backlog, I couldn’t stop with just that one book - I had to pick up two more while I was at it. My book pile next to my bed has gotten large. Very large. From memory, here’s what’s sitting there waiting to be read:

• This is Your Brain on Music - Daniel Levitin - a fascinating book about how our brains deal with and remember music. I’m about 2/3 done with this one.
• Submarines: A History - I forget the author. I started this one before I bought the previous title. It’s in progress as well.
• Traitor - Stephen Coonts - I enjoy Coonts, this appears to be his latest.
• Velvet Elvis - Rob Bell - Just picked it up. This will be the next one I start.
• The Ragtime Club? - some random novel I picked up yesterday, deals with Scott Joplin and the ragtime music scene. Looks mildly interesting.
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin - my mom recommended this one. Should be interesting.
• The Republic - Plato - picked this one up with a Christmas gift card.
• The Everlasting Man - G. K. Chesterton - This one is in progress as well - good stuff, but slow going.
• Beyond All Earthly Powers - David Wells - a freebie for attending the Desiring God 2006 conference.
• Lectures to my Students - Spurgeon - Bought at the DG2006 conference, read the first few chapters, it’s still sitting there.
• Looking Unto Jesus - Isaac Ambrose - my dad gave me this one a couple of years ago - I have started on it several times and never finished. Slow going, but good stuff.

There may be a few others, that’s just all I can think of for now.

[Checked tonight when I got home - found I’d missed a couple: What I Saw At The Revolution by Peggy Noonan and Case Closed by Gerald Posner. I guess I’ve got even *more* reading to do. :sigh: