Elliot Ritzema

Category: Books

  • Book Review: The Empty Promises of Idolatry

    It’s easy to assume that idolatry is not an issue in the lives of most modern Western Christians. Polytheism isn’t a struggle you hear anyone talk about, and we tend to not physically bow down in front of idols.

    But idolatry is alive and well. Nashville pastor Pete Wilson explores modern idols in his second book, Empty Promises: The Truth About You, Your Desires, and the Lies You’re Believing. It isn’t the first book in recent years to explore modern idolatry. Tim Keller’s Counterfeit Gods (which is cited several times in this book) is perhaps the most recent example, and another one I’ve read is Vinoth Ramachandra’s Gods That Fail (which deals specifically with idolatry as it relates to Christian mission).

    Empty Promises takes a look at the idols of Success, Approval, Power, Money, Religion, Beauty, and Dreams (hopes for the future, not what happens when you’re asleep). Each chapter follows a similar formula: first Wilson explains how something can function as an idol, then he brings a biblical perspective on it, and finally talks about how the idol can be defeated. At the end of the book there are chapters on how to defeat idols more generally: one chapter explores the idea that we become what we worship, another explores the spiritual disciplines of solitude, fasting, Scripture study and prayer as ways out of idolatry, and the last one talks about finding genuine satisfaction in God rather than idols.

    This is a very good introduction to the subject of idolatry for someone who might not have thought about their life struggles in terms of idolatry before. My only two critiques of the book are not in what was included, but in what was left out. First, Wilson was very good at naming the idols that individuals get wrapped up in worshiping, but various ideologies can and have, at various times, become idols for the Church on a large scale. It would have been good to spend some time exploring how these idols affect not just individuals and their circles of influence, but the Church as a whole. Second, a big part of the biblical emphasis on idolatry is God’s anger at it, which really doesn’t come through in this book as much as it could have. It is good that Wilson emphasizes that idolatry prevents us from being who God wants us to be (which is true), but a big part of the prophetic condemnation of idolatry in the Bible is that God hates it. He hates it because he loves us and wants something better for us. Idolatry is serious business.

    Despite those two suggestions, I would recommend this book for those looking to gain a greater understanding of idolatry and how it still affects our lives.

    Note: Thanks to Thomas Nelson for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • Book Review: My Imaginary Jesus (and yours, too)

    Everyone has an imaginary Jesus. Whether it is Liberal Social Services Jesus, Conservative Truth-Telling Jesus, Political Jesus, Gay Jesus, Legalist Jesus, or some other Jesus, we all (both Christians and non-Christians) tend to make Jesus in our own image. We project our own cultural and personal biases onto him so that he doesn’t challenge us, the way the real Jesus does.

    Matt Mikalatos has written a fun, fictionalized treatment of this concept in which he travels around Portland, Oregon, looking for the real Jesus and running into dozens of imaginary ones along the way. When I picked up the book, I was concerned that it would be very didactic and read like a Sunday-School lesson. Instead, it was a creative, imaginative, compulsively readable exploration of what it means to follow the real Jesus, over against all the imitations we create for ourselves. And just because this is fictionalized, that doesn’t mean that Mikalatos is a theological lightweight. I never ran across anything in the book that I regarded as unsound. I’d recommend this to anyone looking for an easy-to-read investigation of the imaginary Jesuses we all create, and how they fall short of the real thing.

    There was an earlier edition of this book, called Imaginary Jesus, and it seems the only difference between that edition and this one are that this one has a new cover, a new foreword by David Kinnaman, and a discussion guide in the back.

    Note: Thanks to Tyndale for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • Book Review: Death in Holy Orders

    I love the writers from the “Golden Age” of detective fiction, like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. P.D. James is a more modern (but still British) writer who has been compared to them, so I decided to give one of her books a try. This one features her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, investigating the mysterious death of a student at an Anglo-Catholic theological college on the remote East Anglian coast. Before he is there very long, an even more mysterious death takes place, and his investigation takes on more urgency. In the end, a conspiracy comes to light, and Dalgliesh is able to apprehend the murderer.

    Considering my interest in both murder mysteries and theology, I thought that I would really enjoy this book. And it is true that it got off to a very promising start. Also, James was very good at describing the scene in a way that put her readers there, and her presentation of the psychology of her characters was quite good. But for me, the plot moved too slowly, and the conclusion was ultimately unsatisfying. There was no chase, no sense of a race against time—even the capture of the murderer was a bit anticlimactic. I didn’t find myself heavily invested in the outcome, and didn’t find myself caring about the characters. It may be that this book is more “realistic” than the older mystery novels that I like so well, but I don’t read mystery novels for realism. I read them because they are a puzzle to be solved, and because they pit good against evil in clearly recognizable ways. I didn’t get that out of this book. I will probably give James another chance, though.

  • The Next Christians: Take Two

    The Next Christians by Gabe Lyons is built on one crucial insight, with two corollaries. The insight is that the culture wars are over. The corollaries are that 1) Christians lost, and 2) that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

    Sure, you sometimes hear people trying to whip up support for another offensive in the culture wars. There is no shortage of “Christian Nation” and “Take Back America” rhetoric, but generally speaking these salvos come from people who are over 50 or so years old. They grew up in a time and place where Christianity had more cultural power than it does now, and they think that because they experienced it in the past, it just takes a little wielding of political muscle to experience it again. However, those who are younger—those whom Lyons calls “the next Christians”—have a different perspective. They grew up in a time when Christianity had already started its slip away from the center of society, and they believe that fighting a culture war is a destructive response—and not just to the “other side.”

    This is my second go-round with The Next Christians. I read the hardcover version last year (here is my review), and picked up the paperback version when it came out earlier this month. I’m glad that I did; Lyons has made the book stronger with the addition of a new chapter.

    The paperback is mostly the same as the hardcover, but includes a new subtitle (“The Good News About the End of Christian America” is replaced by “Seven Ways You Can Live the Gospel and Restore the World”) and a new chapter on a seventh characteristic of the Next Christians: “Civil, Not Divisive.” That means the characteristics of the “next Christians” are that they are:

    Provoked, not Offended
    Creators, not Critics
    Called, not Employed
    Grounded, not Distracted
    In Community, not Alone
    Civil, not Divisive
    Countercultural, not “Relevant”

    The “Civil, not Divisive” chapter is a welcome addition. Too often, Christians in the public square subscribe to the “but they started it” school of political engagement, using fear-mongering and tit-for-tat tactics to gain support. Jesus calls us to a better, more gracious, way. The chapter also contains the important idea, which I originally heard from Tim Keller, that politics is downstream of culture (78). That is, it is changes in culture that make political change possible. Putting all of one’s eggs in the basket of political change is a short-sighted philosophy.

    Along with a different political outlook, the “next Christians” have a fuller understanding of the gospel. Lyons writes,

    The next Christians believe that Christ’s death and Resurrection were not only meant to save people from something. He wanted to save Christians to something. God longs to restore his image in them, and let them loose, freeing them to pursue his original dreams for the entire world. Here, now, today, tomorrow. They no longer feel bound to wait for heaven or spend all of their time telling people what they should believe. Instead, they are participating with God in his restoration project for the whole world (53).

    “Restoring the world” can sound a bit grandiose, but I think Lyons is merely trying to direct attention to the grand calling given to humans by Christ. He isn’t saying that restoration can happen apart from Christ, and he isn’t saying that evangelism isn’t important.

    My main critique is that Lyons’s cultural analysis can be a bit oversimplified at times, but I don’t think that is out-of-bounds for a popular level book. He has put his finger on a cultural shift among Christians in the West, and wants to help define and encourage it. I think he’s on the right track.

    Note: Thanks to Waterbrook/Multnomah for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • Book Review: Invitation to Biblical Interpretation

    First there was the hermeneutical circle. Then there was the hermeneutical spiral. Now, in Invitation to Biblical Interpretation: Exploring the Hermeneutical Triad of History, Literature and Theology, Andreas J. Kostenberger and Richard D. Patterson give us the hermeneutical triad.

    The hermeneutical triad, as the subtitle indicates, consists of history, literature and theology. History and literature are at the two lower points of the triangle, and they build up to theology. This book looks at each of them in turn, but spends the most time exploring three subsets of literature: canon, genre and language. It closes with a chapter on application and proclamation, since that is the ultimate goal of interpretation.

    The greatest strengths of this book are its readability and comprehensiveness. Though it is a mammoth textbook, I found that it was not a chore to read. It is well-organized and well-written. And it truly is a one-stop shop for anyone interested in biblical interpretation. The reader learns about historical backgrounds, different schools of interpretation, literary genres, exegetical fallacies, and more. It pulls together things that I was exposed to in different classes at different times of my seminary education.

    Negatively, some of the chapters (Like 12, on discourse analysis, and 15, on biblical theology) focused inordinately on the New Testament. Since this is an invitation to biblical interpretation, not just the New Testament, there should have been more balance here. I also wish the authors had spent a little more time interacting with other hermeneutical approaches—even approaches the authors disagree with. I understand that things must be left out even in such a large book, but it was a bit frustrating that in their brief overview of the history of hermeneutics, some approaches were dismissed without much discussion.

    In spite of that, this book is well worth the time spent reading it. It gives a solid method for interpretation of the biblical text, and it is so wide-ranging that it is almost a seminary education in itself. It is very well suited as a textbook for a college or seminary level biblical hermeneutics course. It includes key words, study questions, assignments and bibliographies at the end of every chapter.

    Note: Thanks to Kregel for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • Book Review: Our Favorite Sins

    There is a paradox at work in modern Christianity. On the one hand, it is popular to think that the gospel has primarily to do with how to handle sin (what Dallas Willard calls “the gospel of sin management”). On the other, we’re terrible at actually dealing with sin. All too often, the response to persistent sin is “try harder,” but this technique often leads to short-term results and long-term failure.

    Todd D. Hunter (author of The Accidental Anglican) has written a book about how to deal with temptations to sin that doesn’t begin and end with “try harder.” He begins by saying that at the root of persistent sins is disordered desire—the “tyranny of what we want.” Desires are good to have, but we are tempted to pursue them destructively. Overcoming temptation starts with recognizing those desires and learning how they can be directed in more positive ways.

    Hunter uses research from the Barna Group that indicates the top five temptations Americans deal with are anxiety, procrastination, overeating, overuse of media, and laziness. He spends a chapter each looking closely at these temptations, but these chapters are helpful even for people who do not struggle with those particular temptations. He spends each one talking about how to defeat temptation by reordering desires and becoming people who, “having feasted on God, his desires and purposes for us, would not entertain temptation” (63–4).

    In the latter part of the book, Hunter focuses on “ancient and fruitful” ways that the Church has historically dealt wit temptation by reordering desires. These include silence, solitude, liturgical prayers, sacraments, and the lectionary.

    This is a book on sin and temptation that I would recommend, for two reasons: First, since its goal is getting at the root of temptation rather than the symptoms. Second, it relies on the collected wisdom of the historic Christian Church to give guidance on reordering those desires that enslave us.

    Note: Thanks to Thomas Nelson for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

    Second note: Two of my fellow Regent alumni are thanked in the acknowledgements, so that is another point in the book’s favor!

  • On Reading Pride and Prejudice for the First Time

    Before this month, I had never read anything by Jane Austen. There was no reason for that, other than I had never been required to in school. Sometimes the contrarian in me takes a perverse pleasure in having not read a book or seen a movie that is very popular (for example, I have never seen The Lion King, and probably couldn’t be convinced to at this point), but when it came to Pride and Prejudice, my inner contrarian was strangely silent.

    I finished it last week, and I liked it. I can definitely see why so many Jane Austen fans are female: even though there is no first-person narrator, the story is definitely told from a woman’s perspective. In case you have been hiding under a rock, I will tell you that the plot centers on the Bennet family, which consists of a silly mother, a sensible (and quietly hilarious, I thought) father, and five daughters. The father’s modest estate is entailed, which means that none of his daughters may inherit it. This in turn means that they need to marry well if they want to ensure their future financial well-being (as a side note: entails sure do have dramatic possibilities, as the popularity of Downton Abbey can attest). The “pride” and “prejudice” of the title come mostly from the attitudes that Elizabeth Bennet, the second-oldest daughter, and Mr. Darcy, a very wealthy young man who comes into the Bennets’ circle of acquaintance early in the book, have toward one another.

    I enjoyed this book a great deal. It has what all great novels have: a ring of truth. Even though the characters and events are fictional, the characters’ thoughts, emotions and actions are what real people would think, feel, and do in the same circumstances. That recipe for a great novel sounds simple, but anyone who has ever tried to write fiction knows how hard it can be. To be a good novelist, you have to know people extremely well. This trait isn’t all that common. But one way to fine-tune this trait is by reading great novels. Theologian Victor Shepherd says (in a lecture to a class full of seminary students):

    The instrument that the best social scientist wields is a very blunt instrument compared to the instrument that a good novelist wields. A good novelist is a far finer diagnostician of the human situation than the best sociologist or psychologist. Therefore never, ever, ever neglect the reading of fiction.

    Jane Austen was indeed a fine diagnostician of the human situation, which is I suppose why her novels have such enduring popularity. The cultures of early 19th-century England and the early 21st-century United States are very different, but the human situation doesn’t change. Even two centuries and an ocean apart, I can read Austen’s fiction and it feels familiar.

  • Moneyball: The Book and Movie

    Michael Lewis certainly has a sense for a good story. Lewis is the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, among other books, and the thread that seems to run through his work is an interest in value and a talent for telling a story about how it is created.

    In The Blind Side, the value that he was interested in was that of a football lineman who plays on the left side of the offensive line, thus protecting the “blind side” of a right-handed quarterback. To explore that value, he told the story of Michael Oher. In Moneyball, the value that he was interested in was that of baseball players. The story he told was that of the cash-strapped Oakland Athletics and their general manager, Billy Beane.

    I read the book last month, and saw the movie last week, so the “moneyball” concept is fresh in my mind. The idea behind “moneyball” is twofold:

    1. When evaluating baseball players, measurables should be valued above intangibles. This means, for one thing, that you tend to draft college players more than high school players, because college players have a larger body of work.
    2. When you are a baseball team without a lot of money, you need to look for players with measurables that are undervalued. Players who have measurables that are highly valued tend to be paid more, and so they tend to play for teams that can pay them more, like the Yankees. So you look for players like Chad Bradford, who was a good relief pitcher, but who was undervalued because he had an unusual throwing motion—he threw underhand.

    Lewis followed Beane around during the 2002 baseball season and interviewed him several times. The fun thing about reading Moneyball all these years later, as someone who follows baseball, is that I know how things turned out for many of the players mentioned. Nick Swisher, for example, was the player that the A’s wanted most in the 2002 draft. They got him, and he played for them for several years, but now he plays for the Yankees. Another player the A’s drafted that year is Joe Blanton, who now plays for the Phillies. Most of the other players selected by the A’s that year did not make it to the major leagues for long, as pointed out by this article on espn.com. As Paul DePodesta—who was Beane’s assistant GM in 2002—points out, that is more of a reflection on the nature of baseball’s draft than the A’s philosophy. Lots of draftees, even in the first round, just don’t pan out.

    The movie was generally faithful to the book. The one major change was that, since DePodesta did not want to be portrayed on screen, Beane’s assistant GM in the film is a composite character named Peter Brand. Also, Beane’s daughter does not feature in the book, but she does in the movie.

    One problem with “moneyball” is a problem that it shares with all other forms of empiricism: It tries to turn everything into a measurable quantity. This probably works better in baseball than it does in most sports, because of the sheer number of statistical categories, but eventually it reaches its limits. It tries to be objective, when it is impossible for humans to be completely objective. Lewis points this out in the book, as he describes Beane’s quirks and the ways in which he behaves that are not entirely rational.

    Another problem with “moneyball” is that eventually you run out of statistics that are undervalued by other teams. This has apparently been the case with the A’s over the last several years, as other teams have seen their success and adopted their methods. Former Red Sox G.M. Theo Epstein, for example, wholeheartedly adopted Beane’s style of player evaluation, but with an important difference: the Red Sox have way more money than the Athletics. Since Moneyball was published, the Red Sox have won two World Series, and the Athletics have won none.

    That’s not to say I don’t like the book or the movie. I enjoyed both; it’s a fun underdog story about challenging the status quo. I’d recommend both, and I look forward to reading more Lewis.

  • Book Review: The Hunger Games and the Myth of Redemptive Violence

    In a post-apocalyptic future, 24 teenagers must participate in a reality show in which they must kill or be killed. That is the premise of The Hunger Games, a young adult (!) novel by Suzanne Collins.

    The book is set in the country of Panem, which occupies what was once North America. In Panem, 12 districts surround the Capitol, the seat of government and power. The protagonist of the book is 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in District 12 (formerly Appalachia), one of the poorest districts. Her father has died five years before, and her family now consists of her younger sister Prim—whom she loves—and her mother,whom she has contempt for. In fact, with a few exceptions, Katniss has contempt for most people she meets.

    For the benefit of those who would like to read the book, I won’t get into many plot details. I will say that Collins is a skillful storyteller, and it was easy to keep reading. I will also say that, for reasons other than Collins’s storytelling skills, the book was a disappointment for me. I felt that Katniss was not a likable protagonist from the beginning, and she did not change significantly over the course of the book. The book comes across as deterministic in the way that it presents the world. There are no surprising twists (Actually, let me clarify that. I shouldn’t say that there are no surprising twists; I should say that I was not surprised by the twists that were there. I don’t want to ruin it for people who haven’t read the book, so I won’t go into details. But there were a few points in the book where it seemed like Collins wanted the reader to be surprised, and I wasn’t.) The Capitol is in charge and no one can do anything about it. The only thing anyone can do is look out for the welfare of themselves and the people they care about. In this way, it reminded me of Thomas Hobbes’s description of the state of nature, where it is a war of all against all, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes says this condition obtains where there is no single power to keep everyone in awe. I heard Collins saying, through her story, that this condition also obtains where there is a single power, but it is in that power’s interest to deprive others of any kind of security.

    One positive aspect of this book is that, although there is lots of violence, it isn’t glorified. Violence–even violence that is “necessary”—is terrible, and that comes through loud and clear in The Hunger Games. There seems to be no myth of redemptive violence at work here. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here is Walter Wink:

    The belief that violence “saves” is so successful because it doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god. What people overlook, then, is the religious character of violence. It demands from its devotees an absolute obedience- unto-death.

    This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today….

    No other religious system has even remotely rivalled the myth of redemptive violence in its ability to catechise its young so totally. From the earliest age, children are awash in depictions of violence as the ultimate solution to human conflicts. Nor does saturation in the myth end with the close of adolescence. There is no rite of passage from adolescent to adult status in the national cult of violence, but rather a years-long assimilation to adult television and movie fare….

    Redemptive violence gives way to violence as an end in itself. It is no longer a religion that uses violence in the pursuit of order and salvation, but one in which violence has become an aphrodisiac, sheer titillation, an addictive high, a substitute for relationships. Violence is no longer the means to a higher good, namely order; violence becomes the end.

    While the myth of redemptive violence pervades our world, it is not present in the world of The Hunger Games. There is no sense that violence from the “good guys” is an adequate response to violence from the “bad guys.” All violence in The Hunger Games is disturbing, and that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, though it does not glorify violence, the world in The Hunger Games is presented as a hopeless place. The cycle of violence cannot be broken, even though violence isn’t presented in a positive way. If I were the parent of young adults who read this book, I would probably want to help them appreciate the negative presentation of violence, but also talk to them about the deterministic (or possibly fatalistic?) worldview of the books, and whether it accurately depicted the world as it is. I don’t believe that it does, but I do believe that there are many determinists among us. Collins, apparently, is one.

  • Book Review: The Me I Want to Be

    Popular-level books on Christian living are not my favorite genre. Partially this is because I just prefer to read books on theology and biblical studies, and partially because a lot of what some of them have to say has been said better elsewhere by someone like C.S. Lewis. But I like John Ortberg a lot—maybe because we have a similar personality type (INFP, according to the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter). He is able to write straightforwardly about complex realities without over-simplifying, and he has a good sense of humor.

    The idea behind this book is that each person is made by God in a certain way, and that it is our task to find out how to flourish given the way we are made. Different things make us grow, and different things give us life. We don’t find out what makes us grow and gives us life by imitating other people. For example, although prayer is something that all people need to flourish, different people flourish most by praying at different times, in different ways, and in different places.

    The negative side of this is that each of has “signature sins,” ways of sinning that are connected to the ways we are gifted. Just as different things make each of us grow, different things keep each of us from growing and becoming the “me” we were meant to be. A temptation that one person finds very difficult to resist will be easy to resist for someone else. For example, people with great leadership abilities are tempted to use others.

    This book contains a lot of good advice, and each copy contains an access code to a spiritual assessment tool at Monvee.com. I’d recommend it especially for young people who are just beginning to figure out how they have been wired, but older adults can benefit from it as well.