Elliot Ritzema

Category: Biography

  • Book Review of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy


    Eric Metaxas, who is already familiar to aficionados of Christian biography through Amazing Grace, his biography of William Wilberforce, has written a fast-paced and informative portrait of Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who resisted the Nazis even unto his death in a concentration camp in April 1945. This book, while not nearly as long as Eberhard Bethge’s 1000-plus page authoritative biography, is still a substantial 542 pages, not including endnotes.

    While Metaxas relies heavily on Bonhoeffer’s own words to tell his story, one way in which he keeps the pace fast is that he does not enter into a detailed discussion of Bonhoeffer’s written work, which one can get elsewhere. It seems that Metaxas is far more interested in showing the real-life consequences of Bonhoeffer’s theology, instead of giving a lengthy exposition of it.

    This is a wonderful book, and a real page-turner, but there were a few problems that might have gone away with more vigilant editing. For example, it mentions that Bonhoeffer’s brother Karl-Friedrich studied with Alfred Einstein and Max Planck in the 1920s. Karl-Friedrich was a physical chemist. Alfred Einstein was a musicologist. I can only assume that Metaxas meant Albert, the more famous Einstein? Also, there is a quote from Matthew 10 that says it is from the Sermon on the Mount – but Matthew 10, while part of Jesus’ teaching, is not part of the Sermon on the Mount. These are minor errors, and didn’t seriously impede my enjoyment of the book.

    This book will not replace Bethge’s biography; after all, it is hard to get closer to Bonhoeffer than his best friend. But what Metaxas does is introduce Bonhoeffer to a new generation that will greatly benefit from knowing that such a man existed – a man who was obedient to God (not merely to a set of principles), even when that obedience brought him into deadly conflict with his church and his country.

  • March 2010: Books Read

    1. Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain. I’m a big fan of Mark Twain. As a fan of Twain’s, I have already read his most well-known works, like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I have also read Roughing It, Life on the MIssissippi and an awful lot of his essays. It was about time, then, that I got around to reading Puddn’head Wilson.

    It was not bad, but clearly there is a reason why this is not among his most-read stuff. It is about two children who were switched as infants, with one being raised as the scion of a wealthy family and the other being raised as a slave. The plot was interesting enough, but for a “mystery,” the ending was not at all surprising. The characters were not as compelling as in some of his better work. And this book was written in the 1890s, when Twain was becoming more and more of a cynic – as can easily be seen in the epigraphs at the beginning of every chapter. Though he was still talented, his later work is, with some exceptions, just not as entertaining to read.

    2. Jane Austen (Christian Encounters Series) by Peter Leithart. Reviewed earlier here.

    3. Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire by William T. Cavanaugh. This is an excellent, short work on the interaction between Christianity and economics. It is made up of four essays, and is only 103 pages long. Cavanaugh is Catholic, and draws mainly on Catholic theologians, but his theology is not so distinctly Catholic that other Christians can’t benefit from his insights.

    Cavanaugh critiques the definition of economic freedom as only “freedom from” and proposes instead that economic freedom ought to be “freedom for” participation in community and realizing our humanity more fully. He also critiques consumerism, globalization and the economics of scarcity. It is simultaneously a quick read and a dense read, and unfortunately I read it over a month ago and can’t describe its arguments with the nuance they deserve. It is a book well worth picking up, though.

    4. The Glory of Preaching: Participating in God’s Transformation of the World by Darrell W. Johnson. I studied preaching under Johnson at Regent College, so it was no surprise that I found much to agree with in this book. He honed the material for this book in his preaching classes, so a lot of it was not new.

    What is unusual about this book, as over against most other books about preaching, is Johnson’s confidence in the biblical text. That is not to say that other books on preaching are not confident in the Bible to change people’s lives. It is unusual, though, for a writer to say, as Johnson does, that when the living God speaks, something ALWAYS happens. Another unique thing about this book is that Johnson thinks preachers are not responsible for applying the text to people’s lives. I remember, when I was in preaching class, that some students pushed back on this. Johnson was adamant, though. Preachers can imply what the text means – they can state the truth that the text leads us to. But applying – that is, telling people what particular things they ought to do – is the job of the Holy Spirit.

    This is a wonderful book, and one that I will return to over the years.

    5. The Cross of Christ by John R. W. Stott. I decided that during Lent this year, in addition to fasting from something, I would read something that led me to focus on Jesus. I’ve had this book on my shelf since my time at Regent, and it is as good a book as any to accomplish that goal.

    There isn’t a lot that I could say about this book, aside from saying that it is a classic work on what Jesus’ death meant and means. If you are interested in learning more about what Jesus’ death accomplished, this is the first place to turn.

  • Book Review: Jane Austen by Peter Leithart

    I have never read a Jane Austen book. I love to read, and I’m sure I would enjoy her novels, but I have just never gotten around to it – though she is one of my wife’s favorite authors.

    So when I had the chance to read a short biography of her, I jumped at the chance. I saw it as a way to “prime the pump,” as it were. This book by Peter Leithart, in the Christian Encounters series from Thomas Nelson, did not disappoint. Though Austen did not live an outwardly eventful life, Leithart does a good job of mining her correspondence and the reminiscences of friends and family members to paint a picture of a woman who had a gift for observation and storytelling, a strong sense of humor with a satirical bent, and a sincere (though reserved) Anglican faith. I especially appreciated Leithart’s pointing out that Austen intended for her works to be instructive without being overtly moralistic. Throughout the book, and especially in the first chapter, the reader can get bogged down trying to keep straight the names of many of Austen’s relations and friends. However, the publisher has taken pity on the hapless reader by including an appendix of names in the back.

    In all, this book made me more interested in reading Austen, so that I can more fully understand the fascination that she has exerted over readers for two centuries.

    (Thanks to Thomas Nelson for a review copy.)

  • March 2009: Books Read

    Once again, it’s the list that proves to you that I’m really doing something when I’m sitting around.

    1. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey. I’ve heard about this book over the past few years, and since my church is going through the Truth Project (a DVD curriculum that trains Christians to have a biblical worldview) together, I thought I’d read a book about worldviews.

    This book has a lot in it. Pearcey studied under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri, and you can see his influence in the way that she paints with a broad brush, surveying all of western culture. She writes that secularism has pushed religion (specifically Christianity) to the margins of society, and Christians ought to reassert Christianity as public, all-encompassing truth. She spends a particularly large chunk of the book dealing with Darwinism, saying that it has begun with science but seeped through the rest of society as its own all-encompassing worldview. Then she tells the story of how evangelicals became so anti-intellectual, and expresses her desire that the trend be reversed.

    This book also has a lot going for it. Many of her insights I thought were right on. I liked the fact that she went out of her way to be irenic when it comes to dealing with culture:

    Our first response to the great works of human culture – whether in art or technology or economic productivity – should be to celebrate them as reflections of God’s own creativity. And even when we analyze where they go wrong, it should be in a spirit of love.

    I also liked it that she does not seem to have been taken in by the false notion – so widespread among evangelicals – that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

    In fact, if there is one factor especially distinctive of the second [Great] Awakening, it is a surprising lack of critical distance from the political ideology of the American Revolution. – 274

    Instead of offering a distinctively biblical perspective on the current political culture, many evangelicals [during the Second Great Awakening] virtually equated spiritual liberty with political liberty.

    And this lack of critical distance, which has a 200-year history, continues.

    One area that I think Pearcey went astray was when dealing with Christians who believe in evolution. At the end of her chapter which makes the case for Intelligent Design, she claims that those who are theistic evolutionists are pawns of scientific naturalists (not her words, but I think her sentiments), allowing their beliefs about God to be shunted off to the private realm and only accepting as real the scientifically verifiable.

    I’m not sure that this is entirely fair to theistic evolutionists, one of whom (Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project) she quoted favorably just 13 pages before. It is far from evident that theistic evolutionists all experience God as an optional add-on, living their lives settled in the “naturalist’s chair” (as opposed to the “supernaturalist’s chair” that Christians ought to be in). Unfortunately, Pearcey doesn’t really deal with them directly. Pearcey says

    Christians are called to live out their entire lives, including their scientific work, from the perspective of the supernaturalist’s chair, recognizing the full range of reality. This is what it means to ‘walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7), with a day-to-day awareness of the unseen dimension of reality.

    I would like Pearcey to explain exactly how scientists ought to conduct scientific research through appeal to unobservable things. Pearcey does not seem to acknowledge that it is not just naturalists who have truncated the “range of reality” available to scientific investigation. Rather, science just deals with the observable. It isn’t atheists who came up with these rules. The bad guy here, it seems to me, is not the one who conducts science based on observable facts. The bad guy is the one who then claims that facts observable by science are all there is. Theistic evolutionists don’t claim this, and so I think Pearcey ought to be kinder to them. As it is, her brief (pages 203-205) dismissal of them is likely, unfortunately, to lead to misunderstanding and alienation within the body of Christ.

    Another area where I think Pearcey went astray is in her repeated insistence that Christianity is “objective truth.”

    To bring about a restoration of the Christian mind, we would do well to follow the Intelligent Design movement in challenging the Baconian model of autonomous or neutral knowledge in every field. We must reject the presumption that holding Christian beliefs disqualifies us as ‘biased,’ while the philosophical naturalists get a free pass by presenting their position as ‘unbiased’ and ‘rational.’ Most of all, we need to liberate Christianity from the two-story division that has reduced it to an upper-story private experience, and learn how to restore it to the status of objective truth.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but Pearcey seems to contradict herself in this paragraph. First she says that the idea of “autonomous” and “neutral” knowledge should be challenged, and then she goes on to say that Christians should claim Christianity as “objective truth.” Part of the very definition of “objective” is that it is unbiased and neutral. Instead of trying to shout louder than naturalists that we are unbiased and rational, why not argue that naturalists are just as biased as we are, and that bias is inescapable in finite human beings? I think that this has a lot more potential to be fruitful, since it would be awfully difficult to argue that Christians are any less biased than naturalists. Bias is OK; it just needs to be taken into account.

    But I’ve rambled on enough. All in all, I thought this was a worthwhile book with a couple of weak spots. If a Christian wants to know what it means to have a biblical worldview, I’d recommend this book. I would also recommend that person to not stop there.

    2. John Stott: The Making of a Leader by Timothy Dudley-Smith. This is the first in a two-volume biography of the well-known evangelical leader John Stott. I’ve benefited a great deal from his writings, and when I saw this book in a used bookstore in Grand Rapids last December I snapped it up.

    It follows Stott from birth to approximately age 40, following him from his London childhood to his school days at Rugby, then on to Cambridge during WWII, theological studies at Ridley Hall, curacy at All Souls Anglican Church in London and finally his promotion and subsequent career as Rector of that church.

    A couple of highlights for me were reading about his “instinctive pacifism” as he was preparing to and beginning to study theology during WWII, and his deep concern for evangelism. Within his own parish he began training laypeople in evangelism and led regular Guest Services for outreach. Outside, he met and befriended Billy Graham during the 1950s, and even led a few university missions of his own, both in the UK and overseas. The book also spends some time on his lifelong interest in birdwatching.

    I enjoyed this book a great deal, and the pages flew by. The only thing I wanted more of was discussion of Stott’s theological shaping. There was some talk of why he was drawn to pacifism during his student days, but once he entered parish life there is much discussion of his actions and little direct discussion of his theological growth and deepening.

  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89

    Yesterday morning, I read in the newspaper that Alexander Solzhenitsyn died on Sunday in Moscow. He was most famous as an author and dissident in the Soviet Union, and in my estimation was one of the greatest men of the twentieth century.

    I first heard about Solzhenitsyn in college, when I read his most famous book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for a Twentieth Century Russian Lit class. I was fascinated by the man and his story, and decided to read a lot more of his work. I have bought several of his books at used book stores, but up to now the only other full-length book of his that I have read is A Warning to the West, which contains five speeches that he delivered in the United States and Britain after he was exiled from the Soviet Union in the ’70s.

    I like Solzhenitsyn so much because of his accurate diagnosis of the problems of our age, and his fearlessness in denouncing those problems. He was so fearless in the face of opposition because, as he stated in his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he believed that “One word of truth outweighs the world.” Chuck Colson has written an article in the August edition of Christianity Today that draws parallels between Solzhenitsyn and the prophet Jeremiah. Unfortunately, like Jeremiah, after a while many people stopped listening to Solzhenitsyn because he always seemed to have bad news.

    After he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, he moved to the United States and spent the next 18 years in Vermont. Although he was celebrated for his defiance of the Soviet Union, his honeymoon with the West didn’t last long. The substance of his famous 1978 Harvard commencement speech was, “Communism may be bad, but the West isn’t doing so well itself.” He denounced the West for falling into a “despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.” While there is no official state censorship as in the Soviet Union, Westerners are slaves to fashionable ideas. I think that much of that 1978 address still holds up, and can still serve as a warning to us to abandon unrestrained materialism and freedom without accountability. Here is Solzhenitsyn’s conclusion to that speech, which could also serve as a fitting coda for his own life:

    If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

    It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times. Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

    If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

    This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.