Elliot Ritzema

Category: Books

  • February 2009: Books Read

    1. A Primer on Postmodernism by Stanley Grenz. This book was published 13 years ago, but it is still exactly what is needed to get people (especially Christians) up to speed on the philosophical developments that have been taking place in our culture over the last half century or so.

    For some in the church, postmodernism has become the boogeyman. It is a notoriously slippery concept to attach a definition to, and so often Christians will make it represent everything that is bad about our culture. This is uninformed, and does not in any way help us to relate to people who have been influenced by postmodernism. Grenz realized in 1996 that in order to preach the gospel in a culture, you had to do the work of understanding that culture, and so he sets out to show what postmodernism is all about. He begins by taking note of the many disciplines that have been affected by postmodernism, and attempts to show that postmodernism is, at root, “a revolution both in our understanding of knowledge and our view of science” (39). He then spends three chapters giving a history lesson: first he deals with the rise of the modern world, then the cracks in modern epistemology (theory of knowledge) that began to show in the 19th century, and finally the philosophers of postmodernism in the late 20th century: Foucault, Derrida and Rorty.

    He ends the book with a chapter called “The Gospel and the Postmodern Context,” which I found extremely helpful. Instead of saying, “Postmodernism is relativistic! Christians must have nothing to do with it!”, he says that in order to preach the gospel to a postmodern context, we must, yes, reject those things that are in opposition to the gospel, but we must also search for common ground. So, while Christians, according to Grenz, could not affirm the postmodern rejection of metanarratives, we must affirm the postmodern rejection of Enlightenment epistemology. Grenz writes that “in contrast to the modern ideal of the dispassionate observer, we affirm the postmodern discovery that no observer can stand outside the historical process” (166). We do ourselves and others a great disservice when we try and get back to the modern ideal of objectivity. When we do this, I think, not only are we deluding ourselves that we can be objective knowers, but we often make concepts more important than people. This is no way to present the gospel winsomely.

    The gospel preached to the postmodern world, Grenz writes, should acknowledge the shortcomings of modernity. It should be post-individualistic, post-rationalistic, post-dualistic, and post-noeticentric (that is, it acknowledges that our existence is about more than just accumulating knowledge). The gospel has gone out in every generation for the last 2000 years, and just like in every generation up to now, it needs to be articulated in a way that people (including postmoderns) can understand.

    2. Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! by Bob Harris. I took the Jeopardy! Online Test for the first time in January, and since then I’ve been thinking about Jeopardy! way more than usual. I have no idea whether they will contact me to do an in-person audition, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to read a book about someone’s experience on the show.

    Prisoner of Trebekistan is part that, but it is also part autobiography. It’s the story of Bob Harris, who became a 5-time winner on the show in the late ’90s, studied like crazy for the Tournament of Champions that year, lost big, then was invited back twice more: for the Masters Tournament in 2002 and the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005. In the book, he reveals a lot about how the show works, and about his own study methods, but he also tells the story of his life during the 8 or so years that Jeopardy! and other game shows were a big part of it.

    I liked this book, and it was a quick read. The only thing that irritated me from time to time was that Harris seemed to be trying hard to be funny. He never met a metaphor he didn’t like, and there are many pages with three or four. Some of them I thought were good, like when he called Ken Jennings a nice feller with “the instincts of a pissed wolverine.” Others I thought should have been edited out to keep the narrative flowing.

    1. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton. The associate pastor of my church gave this book to me, describing it as “a spiritual gifts inventory without the Spirit.” The main thrust of the book is that, instead of focusing on overcoming weaknesses, all people should discover their innate strengths and cultivate them. Everyone has strengths, and if people focus on using their strengths instead of becoming well-rounded, they can have “consistent near-perfect performance.” People who read the book can take an online test called the StrengthsFinder to find their 5 top strengths (out of 34). If they are managers, they can also learn from the book how to best manage a person with a particular strength.

    I think there is something to this idea. Everyone has God-given talents and abilities, and I think God intended people to use them and derive joy from them. But there is also one possible outcome of this idea that should be avoided, and here is where the “without the Spirit” part comes in. Just because we all have particular strengths does not mean we can avoid doing things that, if we are Christians, God calls everyone to do. For example, one of the strengths listed in the book is Empathy. Empathy was not one of my top five, so should I give up on trying to be empathetic? No, I don’t think so. I think that when God puts his Spirit in our hearts, we are enabled to change. We are not all given the same strengths and abilities, but when we are in step with the Spirit, we exhibit the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). These things are available to everyone with the Spirit, no matter what his or her strengths are.

  • January 2009: Books Read

    1. Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century by John Stott. This book has been re-issued recently with the more up-to-date subtitle “The Challenge of Preaching Today,” but the version I read was the older one. I’ve long admired John Stott, and when I read this book, I found that he had some sensible things to say about preaching. He begins the book by giving a brief sketch of the history of preaching, and then addressing some contemporary objections to preaching. He continues to flesh out his reasons for thinking preaching is so important by giving some theological foundations for preaching. The next three chapters I found the most practical, the first of which was called “Preaching as Bridge-Building.” In it he talks about how a preacher might make the Bible more relevant to a contemporary audience. The next two chapters, “The Call to Study” and “Preparing Sermons,” deal with the nuts and bolts of putting together a sermon. He then closes the book with two chapters dealing with four characteristics that a good preacher should have: sincerity, earnestness, courage and humility.

    These last two chapters, in my mind, set this book apart from other books on preaching that I have read. Stott, a long-time preacher himself, knows where good preachers get their power from, and it isn’t (just) eloquence. It is the character of the preacher and the working of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the listeners that give a message its force.

    2. The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries by Rodney Stark. I bought this book in the late ’90s for a religion class in college, but only had to read about three chapters. I heard so many good things about it in seminary that I decided to get it off my shelf and read the rest of it that I didn’t originally have to read for class.

    Stark is a sociologist of religion who, before this book, had not spent much time looking into the history of religion. He insists in the preface that he is not a historian, nor is he a New Testament scholar; he’s just a sociologist who uses this book to look at the early history of Christianity with a sociologist’s eye (since this book was published in 1997, though, he has made several more forays into the history of religion).

    It would take too much space to review the book in detail, but suffice it to say that it was eye-opening. A few things that Stark argues are: that Christianity was not initially a proletarian movement, but it appealed to the privileged classes, that one of the reasons why people in the ancient world were so drawn to Christianity was the way Christians cared for the sick during epidemics, that Christian women enjoyed higher status in the community than their pagan counterparts, that one reason why Christianity thrived in cities was because it had a better capacity to solve chronic urban problems than anything else, and that “Christianity brought a new conception of humanity to a world saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love of death” (214). Definitely a great read, even for someone who doesn’t have a background in sociology.

    3. Not Even A Hint: Guarding Your Heart Against Lust, by Joshua Harris. Like many Christian young men, I’ve had my struggles with lust (that’s not to say that these struggles are all a thing of the past, but I hope that the worst struggles are over). So when I was in the library a few weeks ago, this book by Joshua Harris (of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame) caught my eye. I read I Kissed Dating Goodbye about 10 years ago, when it was making big waves in my circle of friends. I thought it was a pretty good book, but I had never done the casual, aimless, “looking for a good time” dating that Harris had kissed goodbye to, so it didn’t change my life.

    This is a small book, and a quick read. It comes in three parts: “The Truth About Lust,” “In the Thick of the Battle” and “Strategies for Long-Term Change.” The best part of the book, I thought, was chapter three of part one, called “You Can’t Save Yourself.” In it, he makes the case that a person can’t overcome struggles with lust (or any persistent sin) merely by deciding to. Legalism leads either to disillusionment and self-loathing (if you fail) or self-righteousness (if you succeed – and you will never succeed for long if you have fallen into self-righteousness). Instead, the Christian should realize that he or she is justified and forgiven by Christ’s work on the Cross, and that he or she is being sanctified, made holy, by his Spirit:

    And only the Spirit can transform us. Our job is to invite His work, participate with it, and submit more and more of our thoughts, actions and desires to Him. (p. 57)

    Harris goes on in the rest of the book to give practical tips on what that can look like: creating a custom-tailored plan, understanding how men and women are different in this area, dealing with masturbation, dealing with temptations in media, becoming accountable to others, using Scripture to fight lies and sowing so that we reap holiness. I particularly found his list of Scriptures helpful, so here they are: Job 31:11-12, Romans 8:6, Galatians 6:7-8, Romans 13:14, Matthew 5:29-30, 2 Timothy 2:22, Colossians 3:5-6, Ephesians 5:3, 1 Corinthians 6:18-20, 1 Thessalonians 4:3-6, Proverbs 6:25-27, Psalm 101:3, Romans 14:12, Hebrews 12:6, James 1:15, Proverbs 5:3-5, Proverbs 5:8-11, Psalm 84:10-12, Lamentations 3:24-26, Proverbs 19:23, Matthew 5:8, Psalm 11:7, Isaiah 33:17, Psalm 119:9-11.

    All in all, I think this is a great little book to give young men and women encouragement and help in defeating lust.

    4. A Holy Meal: The Lord’s Supper in the Life of the Church, by Gordon T. Smith. I preached a sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 recently at my church, and read this short (124 pages) book as part of my research. Smith is a professor at Regent, and one of my regrets about my time there is that I never got to take one of his classes, especially the popular “Spiritual Discernment” and “The Meaning of the Sacraments.”

    However, reading this book seems like the next best thing to taking the latter class, since he spends the time expanding on what the Lord’s Supper is all about. Chapter 2 (“The Sacramental Principle”) alone is worth the price of the book. I found his discussion of signs, photographs and symbols immensely helpful in understanding what is going on at the Lord’s Supper. The bulk of the book is taken up with looking at seven different aspects of the Lord’s Supper, based on seven different Bible texts: The Lord’s Supper as memorial, as fellowship with Christ and with one another, as a table of mercy, as a renewal of baptismal vows, as bread from heaven, as a declaration of hope, and as a joyous thanksgiving celebration. Although short, there was enough to chew on in this book that I could have preached a whole series on the Lord’s Supper.

  • December 2008: Books Read

    1. Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile, by Rob Bell and Don Golden. Reviewed earlier here.

    2. The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based On a National Database of over 200,000 Churches by David T. Olson. My pastor lent me this book, and I found it to be very interesting. Olson, who is director of church planting for my denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church, divides this book into four parts: Observation, Evaluation, Introspection and Action. The first three parts (as the title of the book indicates) are pretty depressing for Christians. He starts out by observing that things are worse than they seem. Even though 40-44% of Americans say that they go to church regularly, the actual number is around 17.5%. The reason for this discrepancy is the “halo effect”: people want other people to think that they engage in socially acceptable behavior. Olson also points out that the number of orthodox Christian churches might be growing, but this growth is not at all keeping up with population growth. Out of the three categories of evangelical, Catholic and mainline, the only category that has kept up with population growth in the last 15 years has been evangelical, with just over 9% of the population.

    In the second section, evaluation, he looks at why churches thrive or decline, concluding that a huge factor that makes churches and denominations thrive is dedication to planting new churches.

    In the third section, introspection, Olson asks, “What do we do now?” He looks at the changing cultural landscape of the United States, concluding that the church will soon die if it doesn’t change. His prescription for change is my favorite part of the book. The solution isn’t trying to be more relevant or more strategic (although he does think that those things have their proper place); it is to “restore Jesus’ words and actions to their place of centrality” (185).

    In the final section, action, he sets forth what restoring Jesus’ words and actions to their proper place looks like. He says that the gospel consists of five messages of Jesus, combined with five missions of Jesus. Those messages are:

    1. To forgive our sins and reconcile us with God.
    2. To destroy the power of Satan and deliver people from bondage.
    3. To change hearts of stone to hearts of flesh.
    4. To treat people with compassion and justice as God’s loved creation.
    5. To invite and summon followers to become the new people of God.

    Here are the missions:

    1. To be the sacrifice for the sins of the whole world on the cross.
    2. To fight the decisive battle with Satan, triumphing through the grave.
    3. To be authenticated as the Son of God through the Resurrection.
    4. To challenge earthly principalities and powers through his ascension.
    5. To establish his church as the new people of God through Pentecost.

    The church has its own message and mission which correlate to the above message and mission of Jesus:

    1. Evangelism
    2. Ministry
    3. Spiritual Formation
    4. Love
    5. True Community

    I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is unflinching in its honesty about how bad things are for the church in America, but it is also ultimately hopeful because Olson knows that the gospel has power to change lives. As a final perk, it has lots of great graphs.

    3. August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I started to read this book back in August, shortly after Solzhenitsyn died. I’d had it on my shelf for a couple of years, and thought that reading it would be a good way to reflect on his life and work. I put it aside several times in order to focus on other books, but now it is finally finished.

    This is a very ambitious novel, with a length (714 pages in the original edition, published in the 1970s, which I read) to match its ambition. It is about the first month of World War I, and specifically the catastrophic Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia. Solzhenitsyn uses the events of this month to criticize both the incompetence and unreadiness of the senior officers in the Russian army, as well as the leftist ideology rampant in Russia at the time that would eventually lead to the Russian Revolution a few years later. He tells the story primarily through the eyes of a fictional colonel in the Russian army, who is simultaneously awed by the spirit of the Russian people and disgusted by the behavior of their highest officers.

    There were some great passages in the book, but all in all I found it very difficult to slog through. Mostly this was because of the sheer scope of the novel, with so many characters, places and military maneuvers to keep track of. The list of characters at the beginning was helpful, but there were so many characters that it was hard to create an emotional attachment to all but a few. Also, Solzhenitsyn made it so clear throughout the narrative what his opinions were of the characters that his descriptions often came off as heavy-handed. I felt that the reader was not given the opportunity to come to his or her own conclusions. This would have been a better novel if Solzhenitsyn had just told the story and had been less manipulative of his readers.

    4. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The movie that was made of this book a few years ago is one of Mary’s favorite movies, and I have had a battered old copy of the Bantam Classics edition kicking around for years, so I decided to read it. I’m glad I did. This is an abridged edition of the book, but I liked it so much that I think it would be good to read the unabridged version someday.

    The story is about an innocent sailor, Edmond Dantes, who lives in Marseilles and is just starting out in life. He is scheduled for a promotion and has a girl that he wants to marry, so he couldn’t be happier. He is accidentally mixed up in the politics of Napoleon’s return from Elba, however, and his enemies (a sailor who is jealous of his promotion, a fisherman who is jealous of his romance with the girl Mercedes, a public prosecutor who wants to put Dantes in prison to secure political advancement, and a neighbor who is just greedy) conspire to have him thrown into prison at the Chateau d’If. Dantes is in solitary confinement for several years, but eventually meets another prisoner (the Abbe Faria) who educates him, tells him of an immense fortune buried on the Isle of Monte Cristo in the Mediterranean, and gives him hope of escape. Dantes, who had become bitter in his first years as a prisoner, eventually comes to faith in God. When he escapes (I won’t say how), he asks God to allow him to be God’s instrument of justice against those who had betrayed him. The rest of the novel features Dantes, who has adopted the alias the Count of Monte Cristo, exacting justice against his four enemies.

    No wonder this is such a popular book. It is a great adventure novel, and has beautiful themes woven throughout. Even though Dantes is attempting to ruin his enemies, I continued to root for him because he didn’t appear to be particularly dastardly about it. A lot of what he did to exact revenge was simply bring the devious actions of his enemies to light. He also gives his former neighbor two chances to change his wicked ways. When the neighbor continues in his life of crime and selfishness, Dantes takes his protecting hand away and allows him to be killed. Dantes also allows several of the public prosecutor’s family members to die, and has doubts about whether in doing this he has gone too far.

    I could say other things that I liked about the book, but that would be giving away too much of the plot. This was a fun read, and as I mentioned above, I hope to make it to the unabridged version someday. The movie makes some significant changes from the book (especially leaving out details and some characters), but I like the movie as well.

  • Book Review: Jesus Wants to Save Christians

    Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell and Don Golden. This is the third book published by Rob Bell, the first one with a co-author (Golden was lead pastor of Bell’s church, Mars Hill, 2005-2008), and the second one I have read. In it, Bell and Golden encourage their readers to see the Bible and the church through a particular lens. That lens is “exile” (hence the subtitle).

    The first four chapters (“The Cry of the Oppressed,” “Get Down Your Harps,” “David’s Other Son” and “Genital-Free Africans”) give a quick overview of the Bible through this lens. In the first chapter we follow the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt, to encountering God at Sinai, to living in Jerusalem, to exile in Babylon. The second chapter deals with the hopes of the Israelites while in exile. The “David’s Other Son” of chapter three is Jesus, and Bell and Golden focus on Jesus walking with two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke’s gospel. Jesus is the suffering servant referred to by Isaiah, and is also the new leader of a new exodus. The “Genital-Free African” of chapter four is the Ethiopian eunuch from Acts 8. His baptism by Philip is a sign that the “new exodus” has been extended beyond the Jewish people to everyone, since “Baptism is a picture of exodus” (p. 100).

    Chapter five is where the application (for lack of a better word) section of the book kicks in. For the first part of the book, Bell and Golden have been speeding through the Bible, and now they begin to talk about “Swollen-Bellied Black Babies, Soccer Moms on Prozac, and the Mark of the Beast.” (catchy chapter title, no?) In it, Bell and Golden connect the stuff they covered in the first four chapters to our own situation. And one of their most eye-catching assertions is this one:

    America is an empire.

    And the Bible has a lot to say about empires.

    Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It’s a book written from the underside of power. It’s an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.

    This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures. (p. 121)

    In the next chapter, “Blood on the Doorposts of the Universe,” Bell and Golden give us a resource for resisting empire, and that resource is the Eucharist. God brought his people out of Egypt during the Exodus, Jesus became the new passover lamb, and the church celebrates this today:

    The Eucharist is about the church setting the table for the whole world.

    The Eucharist is about the new humanity.

    The Eucharist is about God’s dream for the world. (p. 167)

    The Epilogue wraps it all up:

    Jesus wants to save us from making the good news about another world and not this one.

    Jesus wants to save us from preaching a gospel that is only about individuals and not about the systems that enslave them.

    Jesus wants to save us from shrinking the gospel down to a transaction about the removal of sin and not about every single particle of creation being reconciled to its maker.

    Jesus wants to save us from religiously sanctioned despair, the kind that doesn’t believe that the world can be made better, the kind that either blatantly or subtly teaches people to just be quiet and behave and wait for something big to happen “someday.” (p. 179)

    I must say that I liked this book. I have heard critiques of Rob Bell, and I think some of them are valid, but in general I have to honor the guy for trying to make the gospel relevant to our culture. I think that Bell is mainly trying to reach two people groups: those who were raised in the church and are disillusioned by it, and those who don’t have any experience with church at all. It seems to me that some of the people making the loudest criticisms are people who are part of the church and are comfortable with the church the way it is. That doesn’t mean their criticisms are automatically not valid, but it does mean that they are not the audience Bell is shooting for.

    The “new exodus” theme was not new to me, especially after having taken a class on the gospel of Mark with Rikk Watts (whose thesis was published under the title Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark). I do wish, though, that Bell and Golden had given their readers a few more resources for following up this line of thinking. The idea that the arc of redemptive history can be seen as a “new exodus” is probably foreign to most of the people who read this book, and nods to a few more scholars besides Tom Holland would be helpful.

    I also wish that Bell and Golden had fleshed out their reasons for opposition to violence more. Several times in the book, the way of Jesus is contrasted with the way of violence (p. 87-8 and 133, among others), but no mention is made of the ambiguous passages in the Bible with relation to violence (like the conquest of Canaan) or of the fact that many Christians through the centuries have not been categorically opposed to violence. Entire books could be and have been written on this subject, but perhaps just a nod in the direction of some good ones for the benefit of readers would be good.

    Third, I don’t think that America is an empire in exactly the same way as ancient empires were empires. That is not to say that America isn’t empire-ish in some things that it does. But obsession with security and self-preservation can be critiqued biblically without busting out the “E-word.” My concern here is that the word will start to lose its meaning if it is thrown around so much. If what is meant by “empire” is “a state bent on violent means of self-preservation,” or “a state which uses a disproportionately large amount of resources,” then use a different term (maybe “hegemonic state”), because that’s not what “empire” means. I wish the authors had been as specific in this book as Don Golden was when he later wrote an article at God’s Politics that took a different angle on this issue. He wrote,

    America is not an empire like Rome; it’s a nation contingent upon a Beast of its own creation.

    What is that Beast?

    Instead of arguing about empire, we should be talking about Beasts because history has a new one, and it’s not America.

    The force that accepts no boundaries to its acquisition of wealth, whose disregard for the poor is matched only by its betrayal of the wealthy, is not a political state at all. The power that rules planet earth in our age is the unrestrained force of raw capitalism.

    I really do appreciate the clarification, but it would have been nice for Golden to acknowledge that the reason people are arguing about empire is that he’s the one who brought it up in the first place. If he doesn’t want people to get exercised about whether America is an empire, or if he thinks it distracts from the main issue of unfettered capitalism, then he should be more careful about the words he uses.

    Finally, I wish that they would move away from this spaced-out typesetting style. It makes me feel good that I can get through a 218-page book quickly, but it does get a little annoying after a while. I sure hope Zondervan isn’t paying these guys by the page.

    Despite my quibbles about the book, I think that this is a book that is needed in 21st-century America. It calls attention to aspects of the gospel that have been ignored for too long. The trick now is to live out a complete gospel, instead of just focusing on different (but still incomplete) aspects.

    P.S. – Scot McKnight has written a good review here.

  • November 2008: Books Read

    There were not a lot of books that I finished in November, but this was not for lack of reading. A lot of the reading that I did this past month was in preparation for the sermon that I gave yesterday, and so much of the reading I did was in commentaries and such. I also read sizable chunks of two books on preaching, but since I didn’t read the entire books, I can’t list them among the ones I finished.

    1. No Perfect People Allowed: Creating a Come As You Are Culture in the Church by John Burke. I saw this book in the library and picked it up for two reasons: first, because of the catchy (if long) title. Second, because I had been impressed favorably by John Burke the two previous times I had heard his name: first in a book that I borrowed from a friend last year called Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches, and then this past August, when he was a speaker at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit.

    After reading this book, I must say that I like him even more. The book is basically about how to reach the postmodern, post-Christian culture in America. Burke is pastor of Gateway Community Church in Austin, TX, and he peppers the book liberally with stories from people who have come to faith as a part of that church. They make the book 328 pages long (pretty hefty for a popular-level book, most of which I’d say top out at around 200), but they make it very readable.

    He structures the book like this: in part one, he looks at our current cultural situation: people have become cynical and jaded, particularly where “organized” religion is concerned. Burke compares our situation to the biblical Corinthian church. In part two, he examines the struggle that many people have with trust, and how to address that in the church: create a culture of dialogue and authenticity. In part three, he looks at the struggle with tolerance. He stresses that at Gateway, they often repeat the phrase, “Come as you are… but don’t stay that way.” They want to create a culture of both acceptance and growth. Then he devotes a chapter each to two huge issues that many people have with Christians when it comes to tolerance: the question of other religions, and the question of homosexuality.

    Part four he devotes to the struggle with truth. This (well, and part three too) was probably my favorite part of the book. Instead of going along with the postmodern notion that all truth is contextual and that truth claims are primarily assertions of power, he writes with a practical eye, saying that different people relate to different approaches to truth. He argues that truth must be humble, pragmatic, rational and incarnational. I liked his approach because, on the one hand, he didn’t insist that truth cannot be known. But on the other hand, he does not attempt to return to the modern mistake of overestimating our ability to know truth and coming across as arrogant. While there may be objective truth, no mere human being can know it in an objective way. That’s where humility comes in. Here is a quote from an e-mail that Burke sent to a spiritual seeker:

    Many postmodern philosophers say… the word “truth” has no real meaning other than “strong opinion.” But what if God, the Universal Creative Mind, who alone understands all things and can know what is true (really as it actually is), decided to communicate his mind to flailing humans? If we could determine with some assurance God really has communicated, that would be our very best shot at knowing what is true–a lot less risky than trusting spiritual advisors (like me) or scholarly opinions…. I believe that ultimately, Truth is a person. And if you can approach finding truth about God more like you’d approach getting to know a person, it might help. Because the fulfilling part of knowing Truth personally comes with experiencing his love–that really is the whole point! It seems like you’ve been doing religious learning, but have never fully given yourself to God–in an act of surrender. (p. 172-3)

    In part five, Burke moves on to talk about the struggle with brokenness. He devotes chapters to creating a culture of hope, sexual wholeness and healing, which I fully agree with. I think that many churches need to dive more into the messiness of people’s lives more than they have, or else they risk being irrelevant. Not that being relevant is the most important thing, but devoting attention to people’s real issues instead of sweeping them under the rug is something that the church simply needs to do. Part six Burke devotes to a similar theme: the struggle with aloneness; creating a culture of connection and of family.

    Part seven is Burke’s conclusion; he stresses the creation of a culture that encourages leaders to emerge. Again, I agree. Overall, I enjoyed and enthusiastically agreed with this book. I think that Burke is on to something when it comes to being the church in our current culture.

    2. The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis. I love the little Macmillan paperback editions of C.S. Lewis’ books. They’re so little and portable. I saw this one in a used book store about a month ago, and thought that reading it might help me prepare for my sermon. Although I’ve read lots of Lewis over the years, I hadn’t made it around to this one.

    And it was good, as expected. The guy sure knew how to turn a phrase. This book contains such immortal gems as this one:

    God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (p. 93)

    and this one:

    I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. (p. 127)

    I was most impressed, though, with his resoluteness to follow a train of thought all the way out to see where it led. This is a trait that, honestly, is not found enough in the evangelical Christians (like me) who so admire Lewis. In this book we find Lewis saying that he doesn’t necessarily have an objection to people being descended from animals (p. 72), speculating on whether animals can be immortal (139-140), and wondering whether Satan might have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared (135). The fact that I admire him on this point doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree with all of his conclusions, but I like it that he’s not afraid to use his intellect and see where it goes. This doesn’t always lead in good directions, of course, but neither does sticking with tradition merely because it is tradition. I could learn a lot from him.

  • October 2008: Books Read

    1. Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture? I had heard good things about this book (after all, one of the blurbs on the back is from a professor at Regent, Hans Boersma), and I saw it on sale in a seminary bookstore, so I picked it up. Allert, who teaches at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, argues in this book that evangelicals who have a “high view of scripture” rarely investigate the historical process of how the Bible came to be. Instead, they first argue from a certain view of inspiration (that is, verbal plenary) that they call the “high view of scripture.” This intimidates others into taking the same view, for fear of having a dreaded “low view of scripture.” The end result is that everybody agrees, but nobody is actually helped to make sense of the Bible. Allert insists that a high view of scripture should be “just as concerned with how the New Testament came to exist in the form we have it as with what it says.” (173)

    So how did it come to exist? The important thing for Allert is that there was nothing that was universally recognized as a New Testament “canon” for the first four hundred years of the church’s existence. This means that the early church’s sole rule for faith and life was not the Bible (which didn’t exist yet), but the teaching of the apostles as passed down by the churches. Further, people who would be called heretics (like Marcion) appealed to books that would later become part of the New Testament, so it would be difficult for us to maintain now that the Bible was the early church’s only rule for faith and life. Also, Allert makes note of a stunning amount of citations from early church fathers in which they call non-canonical writings “scripture” or “inspired.”

    Allert’s book resonated with me, because even before I read it, I was not entirely comfortable with the notion of “inerrancy.” It’s not that I think the Bible is riddled with errors. Rather, I think that the word itself has been used in different ways by so many people that it has ceased to have a definite meaning other than this one: People who use the word “inerrancy” are evangelicals and have a high view of scripture, and people who don’t are not and do not. It has become a shibboleth: a word whose primary meaning is to indicate group membership (see Judges 12:6). Rather than continuing to argue about this word, it would be better to come up with a doctrine of inspiration that deals more directly with both the history of the Bible and its text, so that people can better understand what the Bible is.

    2. A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. I got this book from the library, so I don’t have it in front of me to refer to, but I’ll soldier on and tell you what I remember. Jacobs is a thoroughly secular New Yorker who writes for Esquire magazine, and who is steadily making a career for himself out of writing autobiographical books. He decided to follow the commands in the Bible as literally as he could for a year. In part I suppose he did it because he knew it would just be a great book idea, and in part he did it to show how ridiculous religious fundamentalism was.

    The results are nothing if not entertaining. As a Christian, I expected a book written by a confirmed secular person about following the Bible literally to be smug and condescending. To my surprise, I found Jacobs to be a winsome and funny writer. He also has a lot more respect for religious people than I thought he would. For example, at one point he goes down to Kentucky to visit a Creation Museum. He doesn’t come away convinced that creationists are right, but he readily admits that they are not stupid. That’s all one can hope for, really.

    In the end, Jacobs is changed by his experience, and not changed at the same time. He is still an agnostic at the end of the book, but he writes that he has opened himself more to the notion of the sacred. Whether sacredness is a result of God’s presence and action in the world or just human decision, he can’t say.

    3. Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage. The tag line at the bottom of the book’s cover says it all: “What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?” Thomas sets out in this book to argue, negatively, that the romantic idea of marriage that has become so prevalent in our society – the idea that the primary purpose of marriage is to provide passion, fulfillment and excitement for the individuals involved – is destructive. He also argues that the long Christian tradition of exalting celibacy as the only way to be holy is not the way to go, either. Positively, he argues that marriage is meant to teach us to be holy: to love, to respect others, to pray, to deal with our sin, to persevere, to build character, to forgive, to serve, to be aware of God’s presence, to develop our calling… He even argues that marital sexuality can provide spiritual insights and character development.

    I haven’t read a lot of books on marriage, so it is hard to compare this one to others, but I recommend this one highly. Instead of emphasizing romance in a marriage (which is not a bad thing, but can become a bad thing when romance is elevated to ultimate importance), Thomas sees marriage as a way to make us more loving, more unselfish, holier people.

  • September 2008: Books Read

    I’m a little behind again this month, but here they are: the books I read in September.

    1. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. This book, published in 1979, has been discussed rather a lot for its argument about early Christianity, and so when I saw it being given away by a retiring pastor, I grabbed it. Pagels takes as her starting point the collection of texts found near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the 1940s, and uses them to argue that early Christianity was much more diverse than it is today. The eventual “winners,” the orthodox, suppressed the scrappy Gnostics and destroyed their sacred writings – or so it was thought, until those writings were discovered at Nag Hammadi. She argues, in short, that the rise of what would eventually be Christian orthodoxy was a power play on the part of bishops, who claimed to be the only legitimate heirs of the apostles. Christ’s bodily resurrection, monotheism, the orthodox view of martyrdom, and male-only priesthood were doctrines that emerged over time as the proto-orthodox squashed dissent. Not surprisingly, her argument didn’t convince me. I thought that she misrepresented orthodox beliefs in several areas, and that her conclusions were far from inevitable based on the data she did present. She didn’t really seem to consider the possibility that the early church actually did preserve the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. Since that is so central to its claims to legitimacy, it’s surprising that she didn’t address this argument and instead characterized its doctrines as nothing more than a grab for power.

    Nevertheless, I’m glad that I read it. It is a book that could only have been written in our postmodern times, when distrust of institutions and authority is at an all-time high. It is good to think about such arguments, to weigh whether they have validity, and to decide how to respond when they don’t.

    2. Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus. This book could have been a great popular introduction to the textual criticism of the New Testament, but it isn’t. The problem is that Ehrman, who was once a Christian fundamentalist and is now an agnostic New Testament scholar and text critic, has an ax to grind. As he writes in the Introduction of this book, he once believed that each and every word of the New Testament had to be the very words of God, and as such could contain no mistakes, no matter how minor. When he discovered an apparent mistake in the text while writing a paper in graduate school, his tenuous faith was shattered. I first heard of Ehrman when I was in college, when one of his books served as a textbook for a religion class called “Intro to the Early Christian Era.” Back then, even as a college freshman, I was frustrated by how Ehrman would leap to his preferred conclusions from insufficient data. Everyone has biases, but you can’t make a good argument if you leave out inconvenient data and don’t address counter-arguments on their own terms. When I saw this book in an airport bookstore a couple of years ago, I decided that it would be good to read it and get re-acquainted with Ehrman, since if a book is in an airport bookstore (and on display at the front, no less), it is bound to be popular and affect the way people think about the Bible.

    Ehrman is a good writer, and an entertaining writer, who makes his subject interesting by telling stories. He also brings up some difficult textual issues that have all too often been glossed over by people in the church. In the end, though, I was once again frustrated in places by his leaping to unwarranted conclusions. For example, he points out that I Timothy 3:16 should read “He [Jesus] was revealed in flesh,” rather than “God was revealed in flesh,” as some scribes transmitted it. He then proceeds to imply that the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ divinity is based on doubtful passages like this one – which is simply not true, as a scholar like him ought to know. Even though this book had great potential, in the end it was marred by Ehrman’s deep desire to cast doubt on Christian origins. My guess is that the primary people who will be impacted by this book are those who already dislike the church and are predisposed to accept its conclusions without thinking critically, and those Christians who have not been taught well by their churches. I hope that this book serves as a challenge to churches to explore the issues of textual criticism and what it means for the Bible to be inspired, instead of letting those who are critical of the church set the agenda.

    In the end, I think that Ehrman is to be pitied. He went from being a Christian fundamentalist with an inadequate doctrine of scripture to being an agnostic fundamentalist who has spent nearly his entire career reacting against an inadequate doctrine of scripture. This review has been necessarily short, but if you are interested in reviews that are more in-depth, one can be found here.

    3. Jeffery L. Scheler, Is the Bible True? I picked up a pre-publication copy of this book seven years ago, and only now got around to reading it. I’m glad I did. It was written by a religion writer for U.S. News & World Report, who brings his mainstream journalist’s eye to examining whether the historical claims of the Bible are true. He looks at the Bible and history, the Bible and archaeology, the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bible and the Historical Jesus, and the Bible Code. (remember that?) He concludes by saying that many of the Bible’s central claims – that there is a God and he is personal, that this God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, that he died and was raised from the dead – are theological in nature and can’t be incontrovertibly historically verified. However, the Bible is not completely immune from historical scrutiny, and when it is scrutinized with regard to the historical claims that it makes, it holds up remarkably well. I’d recommend this book as a popular-level introduction to the background behind a lot of the public controversies going on about the Bible. I wonder, though, if there has been a new edition in the past seven years…

    4. Gerald May, Addiction and Grace. While I was in class at Regent last fall, the professor made a statement that stuck with me: he said that if he could include any book at the end of the Bible, as an appendix, it would be this book. Now, he wasn’t making an argument that it should seriously be considered to be added to the canon, but nevertheless his high regard for it made me sit up and take notice. Not long after that, I found it on sale at Amazon, and got myself a copy.

    I found that it was, in fact, very good. May casts the net wide when he defines addiction; he’s not just talking about alcohol, drugs and sex. Addiction, for him, is anything that has these five characteristics: tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, self-deception, loss of willpower, and distortion of attention (that is, we can become preoccupied with it). He says that virtually anything can become an addiction, but just because we have strong feelings doesn’t mean we’re addicted. The difference is that with addiction, we lose freedom. Our addictions become gods. Grace comes in because, May says, addiction can’t be defeated by the human will acting on its own. There is a lot more to be said, but it is hard to summarize his argument beyond that.

  • August 2008: Books Read

    It’s that time again to make a public mental note about what I read in the past month. With the road trip and all, though, there wasn’t much going on in August, reading-wise.

    1. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. Reviewed earlier here.

    2. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. In recent years, Steve Martin has been less visible as a movie star and more visible as a writer. It used to be that the only writing peep you would ever hear from him was the occasional humor piece in the New Yorker, but now he writes novels, plays, essays, and now: autobiography. This is an entertaining read, and a quick one; I finished it in just two days. In it, he tells the story of how he was drawn to stand-up comedy as a young man, and how he moved away from it after several years of success. Along the way, he writes about his relationship with his parents, his life among young entertainers in Southern California in the ’60s and ’70s and – this is interesting to me, as a Christian – his romantic dalliance with the future Stormie Omartian. I have never read Omartian’s books, but I have seen them on display in Christian bookstores. They generally begin with the phrase, “The Power of a Praying…” and then the phrase is completed with any one of a number of possibilities: Wife, Husband, Parent, Babysitter, Second Cousin, etc. Martin writes about their relationship taking place well before she was married or became a Christian, but nevertheless – it’s interesting.

    3. How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Mark Strauss. This book is the third in the “How to Read the Bible…” series, and I read it in preparation for a class I will be teaching at my church this fall about where the Bible came from. I decided to add a section at the end on translations, since there are many people with many opinions on this. There are those who think that the King James Version descended on a cloud from on high, there are those who think that gender inclusive language amounts to liberalism sneaking in the back door, there are those who just want a translation that makes sense, etc. No matter what your opinion might be, I recommend this book highly if you want to get a grasp on what the issues are in Bible translation, and why there are different translations in the first place. Their chapter on “Gender and Translation” alone is worth the price of the book. In the interest of full disclosure, I will make clear (as Fee and Strauss make clear in the book) that both the authors are on the translation committee of the TNIV (as well as others). This is one of the versions that has caused a kerfuffle over its gender inclusive (not “neutral,” as the authors point out) language.

  • Book Review: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

    Last week I finished reading a novel by Michael Chabon called The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I’d never read anything by him before, but I remember my old roommate Neal recommending his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay when I lived in Hungary. I first was drawn to this book last year when I saw its brightly colored jacket and read about its intriguing premise in an airport bookstore. Since the author was recommended by a friend with good taste, and it is set in southeast Alaska, where I have spent some time, I decided to give it a try.

    The southeast Alaska of this book is nothing like the southeast Alaska I know, however. Chabon’s is a completely fictional world in which the state of Israel never got off the ground in 1948, and Jews were settled in the District of Sitka with a 60-year lease from the United States. The novel is set just a few months before Reversion, when the lease will be up and the Jews of Sitka will be wanderers once more. It is also a detective novel strongly influenced by noir – an appropriate choice since it is so dark during the Alaskan winter. This book is Raymond Chandler meets Chaim Potok meets James Michener’s Alaska. Some of the best books I have read mash up aspects of the world in creative and unexpected ways, and so I was looking forward to this one.

    What I liked about the book is that Chabon certainly does have a way with words, but in a way that doesn’t necessarily scream, “I’m a literary novelist!” It’s a tough thing to write creative prose and not call attention to the fact that you are writing creative prose. Chabon showed more restraint than many other writers of so-called literary fiction I have read, and I appreciated that. I also appreciated that the book had more of a plot than much literary fiction, which often seems to coast along for pages on turns of phrase alone. Chabon was not above writing a detective novel with an interesting plot. And while the plot was not as fast-paced as your typical popular paperback mystery, it was much better written, which ought to count for something.

    In the end, though, the plot was where I found fault with the novel (and if you’re planning on reading it, don’t read any further, because I’m going to disclose some things). It starts out with a body found in a hotel, with detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, trying to find out whodunit against the wishes of their superiors. The story leads into the depths of Hasidic organized crime, and the identity of the corpse is revealed as a chess-playing, heroin-addicted man who was once hailed as a potential Messiah, but who faded into the shadows because he couldn’t handle the pressure. He was later found by a group who wanted to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and who needed him to lead them. This group was in cahoots with the U.S. government, which is run by Christian dispensational premillennialists who think it is necessary for the Temple to be rebuilt so Jesus will return.

    I won’t get into how the man died, because that is less important to me than who the “bad guys” are revealed to be. First, I found this coalition of Orthodox Jews and Left Behind -reading Christians a little too far-fetched to be true. It’s not that there aren’t such Christians out there; there are lots of Christians, particularly in North America, who have that kind of eschatology. You could even say (and you would probably be right) that dispensationalists have had an influence on U.S. foreign policy. However, those who would seriously espouse violence to bring about a supposed Second Coming have never been more than a lunatic fringe. The idea that, even in an alternative universe, they would control the government and destroy the Dome of the Rock lacks plausibility. It also comes across to me as a thinly veiled satirical snipe at said Christians.

    But more than that, this plot twist reveals that we Christians in the United States have a PR problem. If we are known more for theories about the End Times than for, say, love for one another, then it seems we’re not getting the right message across. Michael Chabon may be just one person, but he had to get his ideas from somewhere, and he certainly has a lot of influence through his books. I’m not mad that he turns wacky Christians into a contrived plot device; I’m just sad that enough Christians have that wacky theology to give Chabon a target. I would recommend this book for its fine writing and better-than-average plot. However, even in a richly textured and plausible alternative world, the deus ex machina of Christians who run the government and use explosives to hasten Jesus’ return was a little too unbelievable.

  • June/July 2008: Books Read

    Last month I didn’t post my monthly brief reviews of books I read. The reason for this is that I didn’t read any books during the month of June. I took Herodotus’ The Histories with me on the cruise that I was on from June 3 to June 19, and read a bit of it after I got back, but didn’t finish it by the end of the month. Here it is, along with the other things I had my nose buried in during July:

    1. Herodotus, The Histories. (The 1954 Aubrey de Selincourt translation) Herodotus is known as the “Father of History” largely because of this book, which is regarded as the first work of what we would today call “history.” It is ostensibly a history of the Greco-Persian wars that took place in the early fifth century B.C. However, it is sometimes difficult to follow the narrative because Herodotus interrupts himself so often. He doesn’t begin talking about the wars until well over halfway through the book. Instead, he sets the stage by giving histories of the Persians, the Greeks, the Scythians, and the Egyptians, among others, and passing along every story he has ever heard, whether true or not, about everyone and everything in the ancient world. As a source for information about the ancient world, it is invaluable. This is how we know almost all of what we know about, for example, the famous battles of Marathon and Thermopylae. As a narrative, though, it drags.

    2. F.F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture. I’ve been talking with the pastors of my church about teaching an adult Sunday School class in September on how we got the Bible. As part of my background research on this topic, I read this book. Even though it came out almost 20 years ago, I think that it holds up well. First he writes about the Old Testament, and gives details about why some books were included by everyone, other books (the Apocrypha) were included by some, and still others were left out by everyone. He then does the same for the New Testament. I’d recommend this book to anyone who is curious about how the canon of Christian scripture was formed. Don’t read this book if you’re looking to have your ears tickled with titillating conspiracy theories about how the church “silenced” its enemies.

    3. David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. I first heard of David Sedaris from his 2001 book Me Talk Pretty One Day. His comic, autobiographical essays are hilarious, though I’d only recommend them for adults (some of the essays have foul language or mature subject matter). One thing I particularly appreciate about Sedaris is the essays about his childhood, growing up in Raleigh, NC. Even though he is older than I am, I resonate with many of his observations about southern culture from my own North Carolina childhood. One of my favorite essays in this collection is “Rooster at the Hitchin’ Post,” about his brother Paul’s wedding. Here is a sampling:

    My brother had chosen the [hotel] not for its sentimental value but because it allowed the various family dogs. Paul’s friends, a group the rest of us referred to as simply “the Dudes,” had also brought their pets, which howled and whined and clawed at the sliding glass doors. This was what happened to people who didn’t have children, who didn’t even know people who had children. The flower girl was in heat. The rehearsal dinner included both canned and dry food, and when my brother proposed a toast to his “beautiful bitch,” everyone assumed he was talking about the pug.

    4. Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. This book is a short one (104 pages), but an excellent one. It is one of the best books on religious epistemology I’ve ever read, and I think that it is sorely needed as many churches are struggling with how to be missionaries in our “postmodern” world. Newbigin relies a great deal on Michael Polanyi’s idea of “personal knowledge,” and applies it to Christian discipleship and missions.

    5. Paul Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible. I’ve had this book for over a year now, and finally got around to it because of the aforementioned Sunday School class I plan on teaching soon. This book has a different subject matter from the Bruce book above. Instead of asking how we got the canon, this book introduces the science and art of textual criticism, which is dedicated to determining as closely as possible what the original biblical texts said. The book can be a little technical (it is a “student’s guide,” after all), but I think that it will be a great resource. It has many charts and illustrations to help the reader get a sense of what the author is talking about, and the end of each chapter has a reading list for further study. It is also organized thoroughly, so you can find what you’re looking for easily. This is a worthwhile addition to my library of biblical reference books.