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MODERN REFORMATION VOL.27 | NO.4 | JULY-AUGUST 2018 | $6.95

“ Narrow reading makes the world itself narrow.

Broad reading reminds us that the world is enormous.”

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V O L .2 7 | N O.4 | J U LY-AU G U S T 2 0 18

FEATURES 16

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Behind the Book

Mother Knows Best

B R O O K E V E N T U R A I N T E RV I E W S C R O S S WAY A N D Z O N D E RVA N

BY BROOKE VENTURA

BOOK REVIEWS 30

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Recapturing the Wonder

John Owen and English Puritanism

BY MIKE COSPER R E V I E W E D B Y J O H N J. B O M B A R O

B Y C R AW F O R D G R I B B E N REVIEWED BY HARRISON PERKINS

34 The Ninety-Five Theses and Other Writings

44 Benjamin Franklin

BY MARTIN LUTHER

B Y T H O M A S S. K I D D

REVIEWED BY CASEY CARMICHAEL

R E V I E W E D B Y J. G . A M AT O

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Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

B Y M AT T H E W R I C H A R D

B Y R I C H A R D B AU C K H A M

REVIEWED BY RICK RITCHIE

REVIEWED BY SHANE ROSENTHAL

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Reformation Anglicanism

Silence

ED ITED BY ASH LEY NU LL AND J O HN W. YATE S III

BY SHŪSAKU ENDŌ

R E V I E W E D B Y DA N I E L S A X T O N

R E V I E W E D B Y L E A H B AU G H

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MUTI

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DEPARTMENTS 4

53

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

BY BROOKE VENTURA

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GEEK SQUAD

INTERVIEW

The Well-read Christian

Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored

BY RICK RITCHIE

Q&A WITH MICHAEL G. BROWN AND ZACH KEELE

56 B A C K PA G E

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Best-sellers

C H R I S T A N D C U LT U R E

BY ERIC LANDRY

Pen, Print, or Pixels: A Short History of Christian Publishing B Y JA C K S M I T H

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Associate Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

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Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Review Editor Ryan Glomsrud Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith

Modern Reformation © 2018. All rights reserved.

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LETTER from the EDITOR

pleasure that comes from getting lost in a good book or from a better understanding of the world around you, not for the sake of being able to cross War and Peace off your checklist.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that summer was invented by publishing companies to capitalize on this pleasure, and who are we to stand in the way of capitalism? Seriously, though, longer days and lazy vacations mean more time to finish that novel or start that book you got for Christmas. In honor of this great tradition, we’ve devoted this issue to helping you choose new books and learn more about the industry that produces them. Our esteemed n his book The Pleasures of Reading in book review editor has been hard at work coman Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs writes piling reviews of some of the best books we’ve that Americans tend to think of reading seen during the past few years. They cover a as something that is “good for you”— wide range of genres—from Christian living and the intellectual equivalent of eating kale and church history to a novel about the persecution jogging. While acknowledging the value of of Japanese Catholics, and a new edition of one how-to-read books—such as the venerable How of the best works in biblical criticism—so there’s to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles something for everyone!

Van Doren—Jacobs says that the grave, almost Not only are we reviewing books, but we are severe manner in which these also discussing how they’re proauthors stress the educational and duced. For this issue, we had the spiritual value of reading has had pleasure of speaking with reprethe unintentional effect of elevatsentatives from Crossway Books “ READ FOR THE ing it to an almost sacramental act and Zondervan Publishers on the PLEASURE in our social consciousness, somestate of the Christian publishing THAT COMES thing to be performed only with industry, and how they negotiate FROM GETTING due reverence and awe. Since there the relationship between religious can be no ritual ceremony without priority and market demand. No LOST IN A a priest, this mind-set has given discussion about the marketplace GOOD BOOK.” birth to a particular class of readof ideas can afford to exclude that ers (Harold Bloom, Thomas C. most democratic of publishing Foster, et al.), who have convinced platforms, the blogosphere, so the laity that they “are the proper guardians of I took it upon myself to examine the cultural reading and the proper judges of what kind of developments we see reflected in the emerging reading counts.” Jacobs tries to undo this by trends of contemporary blogs. arguing that the best reason to read is because Whatever you read this summer, we hope you want to. “Don’t turn reading into the intelit’s as restful and enjoyable as it is instructive. lectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or Happy reading! some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some fix their attention on the ‘calories burned’ readout.” Read for the BRO OKE VENTURA assoc iate editor

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INTERVIEW

Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored Q&A with Michael G. Brown and Zach Keele

odern Reformation recently sat down with pastors Michael Brown and Zach Keele to talk about their book, Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored, 2nd ed., with a foreword by Michael Horton (Wyoming, MI: Reformed Fellowship Inc., 2017).

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MR: How does the whole story of the Bible fit

together?

ZK: How much time do you have! There are so

many things that could be pointed out that hold together the drama of the Bible, yet Scripture itself lays a framework for its story, a drama centered on a relationship—“I will be their God and they will be my people”—which is

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called the covenant formula. This formula is present implicitly in the opening chapters of Genesis, it is explicitly announced as perfected in Revelation 21, and it salts and peppers the pages of Scripture everywhere else in between.

The covenant formula is the glue of the Bible, and we learn the layers of the covenant formula by the different covenants God makes with his people.

MR: Is there a key to unlocking the Bible?

ZK: Simply put, no. Furthermore, I don’t think

it is wise to simplify Scripture as having one key or secret formula that makes everything clear.

The truth about the Bible is that it is complex and beautiful and there are many tensions and

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INTERVIEW

paradoxes in God’s word. We do a disservice to God’s word if we try to simplify it with a single key, theme, or topic. That said, there are tools that aid in our understanding the Bible from beginning to end. The first is Jesus Christ. As Jesus himself said in Luke 24, it is all about him. We read the Bible as Jesus read the Bible.

A second is covenant theology, because this is the Scripture’s own structure for its self-understanding. The covenants of the Bible are the bones that the muscles of the stories grow on.

is the Bible’s own method of interpreting itself.

This is why covenant theology has enjoyed such a prominent place in the Reformed tradition.

The Protestant Reformation saw covenant theology as God’s prescribed method for interpreting Scripture. It is impossible, therefore, to interpret Scripture faithfully without understanding the meaning of these covenants. As J. I. Packer puts it, “The Word of God is not properly understood till it is viewed within a covenantal frame.”*

MR: Could you summarize “covenant theology”?

MR: Why did you write this book?

MB: Covenant theology is a way of reading and interpreting the Bible through the lens of God’s covenants. As anyone who has read the Bible knows, the word covenant seems to be one of God’s favorites. It appears more than three hundred times. That’s because it is one of the most important themes of sacred Scripture. Covenant is the way in which God has chosen to relate to human beings. The book of Genesis is primarily about God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. The book of Exodus is in large measure about God’s covenant at Mount Sinai with Moses and the nation of Israel. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament—in its historical, poetical, and prophetical books—we find continual references to the Abrahamic and the Mosaic covenants. Then there are important covenants with Noah and David. When we come to the New Testament, we read of Jesus instituting a new covenant, the same covenant of which the prophet Jeremiah foretold (Jer. 31:31–34).

The apostle Paul and the writer to the Hebrews elaborate on the vital differences between the old (Mosaic) and new covenants (Gal. 3–4; 2 Cor. 3; Heb. 7–10).

What do all of these covenants mean? Does it really make any difference how well we understand them? Answering those questions is the task of covenant theology. Covenant theology is not an interpretive grid we impose on Scripture, nor is it a system invented by Calvinists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather, it

MB: We wrote the book because we both recognized the need to provide our congregants with a clear and simple resource on covenant theology. In the early to mid-2000s, I taught several courses on covenant theology to my congregation, because I wanted to provide them with the right categories, vocabulary, and distinctions for reading the Scriptures well. During those classes, people often asked me to recommend a book on basic covenant theology. At the time, there were some great books in print, such as Michael Horton’s excellent work God of Promise, but nothing written at an introductory level for the average layperson. I began working on the project and then reached out to Zach to see if he wanted to write it with me. We have been friends since seminary and have always shared a passion for covenant theology. Like me, Zach saw the same need for helping people understand the person and work of Christ and the message of the gospel as it unfolds in redemptive history.

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MR: How will this book impact the way lay Christians

read the Bible devotionally?

MB: Our prayer is that reading Sacred Bond will help you know how to read and interpret the Bible more faithfully. Studying God’s covenants has one primary goal: to know God and our relationship with him more fully. Studying the covenants should never be a dry academic exercise. It has immense pastoral and practical value

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“[Covenant theology] sweetens our fellowship with the Father as we come to know his oath and promises to us, promises that are ‘yes’ and ‘amen’ through the Mediator of the new covenant.”

for the Christian. It revolutionizes our approach to Scripture, providing us with helpful categories to understand the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. It shows us that the Bible is actually one book with one story, told on the stage of real human history. It highlights the plotline and central point of Scripture, setting every story in the context of the larger story about Christ. More importantly, it comforts us as we learn that God accepts us not on the basis of our covenant faithfulness but on the basis of Christ’s. It sweetens our fellowship with the Father as we come to know his oath and promises to us, promises that are “yes” and “amen” through the Mediator of the new covenant.

It changes our view of the local church as we discover that we are part of God’s covenant community and worship him in a covenant-renewal ceremony every Lord’s Day. It transforms the way we see our children—namely, as the baptized members of God’s covenant of grace.

It helps us understand that covenant is not a means to an end, but it is the end itself—the communion between God and his people.

Since we first wrote Sacred Bond in 2012, we have been humbled and amazed by how God answered our prayers and used this little book to help people grasp more clearly what the Bible is all about. In fact, he did far more abundantly than we ever asked or thought. This book has reached people far and wide and has been published in six languages. We have received a steady stream of encouraging e-mails and messages from believers all over the world who tell us how Sacred Bond has helped them to see Christ more clearly on the pages of Scripture

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and understand their relationship with him in the new covenant.

MR: What have you learned in writing this book, something new that you didn’t know before?

ZK: This is a popular book in which we were trying to make clear many complex topics and passages; it is a distillation of a host of intricate issues. It is hard to say how much new information we learned. Yet, I think the better word is appreciation. Deeper understanding sprouts from the soil of teaching it to others. So the process of condensing, summarizing, and applying the rich beauties of covenant theology definitely impressed on us a more profound appreciation for God’s word. To put it another way, the writing of this book made us love Jesus Christ and the drama of redemption all the more.

MICHAEL G. BROWN is pastor of Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California. He is the author of Christ and the Condition: The Covenant Theology of Samuel Petto, and editor and contributing author of Called to Serve: Essays for Elders and Deacons.

ZACH KEELE is pastor of Escondido Orthodox Presby-

terian Church in Escondido, California, and lecturer in Greek, Hebrew, and English Bible Survey at Westminster Seminary California. He is the author of a commentary on Judges for the Rafiki Foundation (2009) and several articles and books reviews in New Horizons, the denominational magazine of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

I. Packer, “Introduction: On Covenant Theology,” in Herman * J.Witsius, T he Economy of the Covenants between God and Man (Kingsburg, CA: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1990), 5–8.

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C H R I S T & C U LT U R E

Pen, Print, or Pixels: A Short History of Christian Publishing

by Jack Smith

used to think that the mild euphoria I experienced while visiting antiquarian bookstores was induced by my fascination with the artistry and craftsmanship that came from an era when book publishing was an art form. I still marvel at the wellpreserved leather covers, illuminated pages, well-rounded Smyth-sewn spine, and marbled fore-edge of these old volumes. After reading Ellen Warren’s Chicago Tribune article “Could It Be That Old Books Are Really, Uh, Mindaltering?” (September 21, 1996), I realized there might be another source for that “buzz.” In her article, Ms. Warren notes:

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Experts on the various fungi that feed on the pages and on the covers of books are increasingly convinced that you can get high—or at least a little wacky—by sniffing old books. Fungus on books, they say, is a likely source of hallucinogenic spores.

Dr. R. J. Hay, one of England’s leading mycologists (fungus experts) and dean of dermatology at Guy’s Hospital in London, confirmed that “fungal hallucinogens” in old books could lead to “enhancement of enlightenment.” Dr. Hay quips, “The source of inspiration for many great literary figures may have been nothing more than a quick sniff of the bouquet of moldy books.”

VOL.27 NO.4 JUL/AUG 2018

As pleasant as the “bouquet of moldy books” may be, it was the potential for ministering to others through books that led me to a thirty-sixyear career in the Christian book and publishing industry. It’s no small thing that one of the primary ways God chose to disclose himself is through the written word. The Gospel of John says, “These things were written that you might believe” (John 20:31), meaning that the word has to be read or heard in order to be believed and preserved. The idea of selling print material that contained life-altering truths about the nature of God was irresistible. Five or even seventy-fifty dollars seemed like a small price to pay for a book that would transform your understanding of God. In 1978, as a new Christian, I was drawn to authors and titles that were unfamiliar to me but that filled the shelves of my local Christian bookstore. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Bavinck, Kuyper, van Til, and Machen all presented the God of the Bible in a way I suspected he might be but couldn’t articulate for myself. Where did these guys come from? How did these theological savants know so much about God?

ARTISANAL BOOKS Like most new converts, I thought the church began when I became a Christian. As a novice, I had no sense of how God worked through the apostles, church fathers, apologists, Reformers, and Westminster divines to point to Christ, preserve the gospel, and advance his kingdom. Not only that, but God had ordered all of history, industry, and commerce to preserve his word and the work of these men to nurture the faith of his people. These men had hammered out and refined the theological essentials of the Christian faith that would sustain the church as it grew in the face of great opposition. Throughout the history of the church, anonymous and unknown “others” did the hard and sometimes dangerous work of reforming the church as they recovered and protected these truths. We are heirs of their

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“It’s no small thing that one of the primary ways God chose to disclose himself is through the written word. The Gospel of John says, ‘These things were written that you might believe’ (John 20:31), meaning that the word has to be read or heard in order to be believed and preserved.”

efforts and have been made guardians of the doctrines they so carefully and cautiously preserved.

As custodians of those truths, the question is, will we follow in their steps and walk in those old paths? The answer to the question is “apparently so,” even if we stumble along the way. From the apostolic period to the spread of liberalism and decline of the church in the late nineteenth century, there have been heretics, schisms, apostasy, and opposition to the gospel.

From the beginning, the gospel was often met with hostility, the letters of the apostles moved slowly through the churches, and the development of orthodoxy took time. It took decades—sometimes centuries—for the welldeveloped doctrines we take for granted to be refined, codified, and formed in the life of the church. In the monastic period, scribes or copyists played an important role in the church.

Responsible for the handwritten transmission of religious documents, from the sixth to the mid-fifteenth century, monastic scribes would wake before sunrise to take their place in the scriptorium where they would hand copy various texts of the Christian faith. Working during daylight hours, every day but the Sabbath, it would

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take fifteen months or more to make a single copy of the Bible. Working with limited lighting in crude conditions (no MacBook Pro or PC), the scribe’s rigorous commitment to accuracy made the process intensive, time-consuming, and costly—which meant that books were hard to come by.

PROJECT GUTENBERG In the fifteenth century, Gutenberg’s introduction of a movable type press to the European market made books of various kinds available to the masses, and it was as revolutionary then as the Internet is today. From the apostolic period to the Reformation and eventual decline of the church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, God’s word would be preserved in writing so that others might believe.

In 1929, J. Gresham Machen—along with John Murray, Cornelius van Til, and others— founded Westminster Theological Seminary as a bulwark of Reformed theology against the rising liberalism in the academy. The following year, Samuel Craig and Machen established Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, and

“In the fifteenth century, Gutenberg’s introduc­tion of a movable type press to the European market made books of various kinds available to the masses, and it was as revolutionary then as the Internet is today.”

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in 1955, Jay Green founded Sovereign Grace Publishers. Through a series of events— catalyzed by a common interest in Reformed literature—Jack Cullum and Iain Murray (at the urging of Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones) founded The Banner of Truth Trust in 1957. For the next thirty years, the Western church experienced an almost unimpeded spread of faithful Reformed literature and Puritan reprints.

THE BOOKSTORE REVOLUTION In the 1970s, the Christian bookstore business took off as brick and mortar stores spread across the country. Even then it was clear that serious Christian books wouldn’t be able to generate the sales and margins needed to give bookstores long-term viability. In order to cover the costs of operation, the revenues generated by the publication of serious Christian literature would have to be supplemented by best-sellers such as Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and Roland Buck’s Angels on Assignment, anything by Benny Hinn, Christian rock music, and eventually Christian trinkets. But by the mid to late 1980s, there was evidence of a declining interest in the serious things of God. The church seemed to be wearied by the essentials of the faith; surely, there was more to the gospel than the gospel. Christian theology was being replaced by Christian stuff.

As consumer interests changed and sales dropped off, rather than coming up with fresh new ways to present the ancient truths of the faith, the publishing industry began to follow instead of lead. Biblical illiteracy increased, spiritual discernment declined, and with the growing appetite for novelty, most publishers buckled under the pressure of popular demand. Rather than asking “Are the books we’re publishing faithful to the Scriptures?” publishers began asking “Is what we’re publishing relevant to our readers?” The doctrines that safeguard the church were giving way to the felt needs of the readers, and publishers

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“It’s always the case that if the gospel isn’t the ‘main thing,’ then the center will not hold. The new evangelicals were becoming the old liberals.”

turned their resources and efforts to meeting needs readers never knew they had.

As a result, the market was flooded with books on Christian dieting, Christian sex, Christian aerobics, and self-esteem. At the same time, the Christian Booksellers Association annual trade show expanded the exhibit floor to accommodate an ever-growing variety of vendors and manufacturers who were in a frenzy to get the next new Christian knickknack to market. Scripture Tea, Testa-Mints, bobble-head Jesus, and “This Blood’s for You” T-shirts were all big sellers. The lack of commitment on the part of much of the publishing industry and the absence of discernment among many evangelical consumers came together to create the perfect storm; it’s always the case that if the gospel isn’t the “main thing,” then the center will not hold. The new evangelicals were becoming the old liberals.

The writings of Augustine, Calvin, and Murray were replaced with the music of Evie, Amy, and Stryper. In spite of sweeping changes in the industry, publishers such as The Banner of Truth Trust, Presbyterian and Reformed, and a handful of others remained faithful to their commitment to produce works that would fulfill readers’ most profound needs. Good News Publishers expanded its ministry to create Crossway Books, and new publishers such as Charles Nolan, Canon Press, and Christian Heritage Books in the US and Christian Focus Publications in the UK would eventually emerge.

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LIBRI EX MACHINA With the rapid development of technology and the promise to improve every area of life, the Internet took on a recognizable form and outpaced the Christian publishing industry’s ability to adapt. With the development of digital media and online purchasing, the industry as we knew it was in danger of becoming obsolete. All of its expertise, facilities, equipment, and human resources were devoted to the enterprise of paper, ink, and press. A large staff of employees skilled in print publication, warehouses filled with paper stock, newly purchased presses, and large in-house or independent publisher rep-teams were becoming unsustainable.

Those who were technology-resistant saw the digital invasion as the coming of the antichrist; others saw it as a way to move the kingdom of God forward.

The boom of brick and mortar retail bookstores that took place in the 1970s was in decline by the ’90s. The independent mom-and-pop operations that had been displaced by the large chain stores in the ’80s would witness those same stores in free fall by 2000. There were casualties, but there were also many forwardthinking booksellers and publishers who made a successful transition. A few denominational, seminary, and independent outlets have adapted and survived, but the recent closure of Family Christian Stores marks one of the last in a long

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list of bookstore chains to perish under the pressure of online purchasing, deep discounting, and free shipping. From the acquisition of a manuscript to the finished book, the editorial/ production process has pretty much evolved from using physical ink and paper to using computers and software programs.

New self-publishing platforms have allowed a host of informed and thoughtful Christians, who had no hope of being published by a major publishing house, access to a resource where their views could be made public and considered by anyone who has a computer. Ancient texts, commentaries, e-books, podcasts, and video lectures have become available to anyone who has the technology. Whole communities now find forums for their interests, thoughts, and views to be shared as the abundance of websites and ever-expanding blogosphere encroach on the printing press. Every life issue and theological topic can now be researched, debated, or discussed in real time on the web.

There is as much difference now between print publishing and digital media as there was between the monastic scribes and Gutenberg.

New technologies allow anyone and everyone to instantly and anonymously weigh in on the issues of the day.

The downside to the rise of digital media is that our attention spans began to shorten in proportion to our lack of patience with older forms of communication. With so many platforms and applications available, a serious interest in the slow methodical discipline of reading anything in any format took a nosedive. The digital world’s promise to improve everything came at a cost and with unintended consequences—just as the medium and methods had changed, so had the reading habits of an entire generation.

The good news is that the technology that has brought about a rapid decline has been the same means of providing helpful cautions and correctives. As useful and portable as digital publications may be, research shows there are deficiencies: Fast Company, First Things, The Scientific American, and others have published

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studies on screen fatigue and a renewed interest in reading the printed page instead of the e-book. These studies show that people read slower, less accurately, and with less comprehension on screens than on paper. In his article “The Persistence of Print” (October 24, 2017), First Things senior editor Mark Bauerlein writes: When linguist Naomi Baron asked college students which format helped them concentrate and study the most, 92 percent chose the hard copy, not the screen. A story in Fast Company cites more research showing that absorbing information from analog mediums now appears to be better for memory retention. The same material read in a book tends to stay with you longer than when read in digital formats.

But speed, comprehension, and retention are not the only factors diminished by reading in digital format—reading is a human and sensual experience. In his article “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens” (April 11, 2013), Ferris Jabar, associate editor and contributing writer for The Scientific American, says, “Laboratory experiments, polls, and consumer reports indicate that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss.” Readers miss the tangible interaction of texture of the printed page, the pleasant bouquet of moldy old books, and the fact that they never have to recharge a book. Mark Bauerlein also disputes the assumption that once the Millennials head into middle age, they’ll take with them the screen-reading dispositions they acquired in childhood.

Studies indicate that the fascination students and children have for real objects— actual books—is not a generational trend; there may something more natural, congenial, and in some way more human in reading the printed page.

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READING THE SIGNS Prior to the Reformation, the Christian community was, for the most part, illiterate. Readers today are becoming increasingly aliterate. Our mental faculties and imaginations have been weakened, because most of the media we consume today provide all the sights, sounds, and pop that our minds are normally required to create as we read the words printed on a page.

Whether it’s the literary classics or systematic theology, reading the printed page actually stimulates our readerly sensibilities, curiosity, and imagination in ways that screen reading does not, and there appears to be a return to the reading of actual books.

Each generation enters the world with a high view of their self-worth and contribution to the world around them. It’s the solemn duty of the preceding generation to patiently allow them to think too highly of themselves as they come to maturity and, in turn, become displaced by the succeeding generation. The digital age is no different. For all their valuable contributions, in a few short years, another generation will emerge with new and unanticipated methods of communication that will replace what we are so fascinated by today. The time will come when the tablet and stylus will be as antiquated as the spiral notebook and number two pencil.

The very concept of publishing may take on a completely different meaning.

Older is (usually) better, but not always. There are things that improve with age—fine wines, cheese, books, and friendships all mature and increase in value over time. (There are exceptions, of course—a well-kept ’57 Chevy or ’65 Mustang is an artifact; a ’77 Yugo is a novelty.)

One thing that should improve with age, however, is the ability to recognize things that improve with age. The “new” can bring amazing improvements to the quality of life, but their value is in the contribution they bring, not in their newness.

The scribes never imagined movable type, and Gutenberg never dreamed of electricity, much

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“Whether it’s the literary classics or systematic theology, reading the printed page actually stim­ulates our readerly sensibilities, curiosity, and imagination in ways that screen reading does not, and there appears to be a return to the read­ing of actual books.”

less the iPad. It’s beyond our capacity to envision today the forms of communication that will be developed in the future. Whether we use paper and print or pixels and screens, it is the supremacy of the message, not the medium, that matters most. God will continue to use ordinary people to accomplish his extraordinary purposes as he orders all of history, industry, and commerce to preserve his word and the work of the church to nurture the faith of his people. By God’s design, and for most of the history of the church, the Christian faith has been dependent on the preservation of the text of God’s truth and the existence of habitual readers. Whether it is pen and ink or ones and zeros, God’s truth will always have to be heard and read to be believed and preserved.

JACK SMITH is associate pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, and has been on staff since 2006.

He has also served as manager of the Banner of Truth Trust US and as national sales manager of NavPress/Piñon Press.

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FEATURES 16

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BEHIND THE BOOK

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Brooke Ventura Interviews Crossway and Zondervan

by Brooke Ventura

BOOK REVIEWS 30

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RECAPTURING THE WONDER

THE NINETYFIVE THESES AND OTHER WRITINGS

WILL THE REAL JESUS PLEASE STAND UP?

REFORMATION ANGLICANISM

by Mike Cosper

by Matthew Richard

edited by Ashley Null and John W. Yates III

by Martin Luther REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

John J. Bombaro

Casey Carmichael

Rick Ritchie

Daniel Saxton

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JOHN OWEN AND ENGLISH PURITANISM

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

JESUS AND THE EYEWITNESSES

by Shūsaku Endō

by Thomas S. Kidd

by Richard Bauckham

by Crawford Gribben

SILENCE

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

Harrison Perkins

J. G. Amato

Shane Rosenthal

Leah Baugh

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MUTI

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BEHIND THE BOOK BROOKE VENTURA INTERVIEWS C R O S S WAY A N D Z O N D E R VA N

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HICH CAME FIRST, the publisher or the book?

Well, the book, obviously— right? There were books long before there were publishing houses, but publishing houses have been around a lot longer than we realize. The Epic of Gilgamesh wouldn’t exist (as a book, that is) without the asipu (the scholar-doctor-astrologists) who recorded it; we wouldn’t have the Book of Kells without the Columban monks; and if Bloomsbury Publishers hadn’t accepted J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter manuscript (after twelve other companies had rejected it)—let’s be honest—would this world really be worth living in?

True, the publishing house of the twenty-first century is a far cry from the learned scholars of the ancient Near East or the scribes of the medieval monastery. Their aim was the preservation of human knowledge and wisdom; the goal of today’s publishing industry is necessarily much more complex. The socioeconomic and geographic aspects of the modern age have fundamentally shifted and reshaped the work of preserving and propagating ideas—the select group of scholars and students who would choose a particular oral tradition or codex for historical preservation and future study have been replaced by diversified organizations that are not only looking to maintain intellectual and narrative history, but

to connect that history with current events and promote healthy discussion on the various topics that confront global society today (while necessarily maintaining a profit). This is not to hold up ancient publishing methods as better or more ideologically pure, but to emphasize the historical, social, and technological developments that make present-day publishing a much more intricate and multifaceted operation.

The Christian church has divided along Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Coptic lines, which means that the scope of Christian thought has broadened tremendously. Thanks to (nearly) universal elementary education, people of varying educational levels are not only able to read but also to utilize the opportunities provided by the Internet and digital platforms to bypass the industry entirely by writing, printing, and promoting their books themselves.

How does the twenty-first-century publisher promote communication and dialogue among people of different religious convictions, educational levels, cultures, and languages? Associate editor Brooke Ventura spoke with two representatives from two different Christian publishing companies—Samuel James, associate acquisitions editor for Crossway, and Ryan Pazdur, associate publisher and executive editor at Zondervan—to discuss how they and their colleagues work to provide good books to readers across the theological spectrum.

QUESTION How does Crossway/Zondervan view its relationship with the author, reader, and broader Christian public? As an organization devoted to encouraging and edifying the people of God by endeavoring to speak to people’s felt needs while providing thoughtful, engaging content, navigating the waters between the various denominations can, I’m sure, be a challenge. How does Crossway attempt to negotiate that balance, while being mindful of the social and political situations Christians find themselves in today?

SJ: Crossway’s mission statement identifies

four primary goals for all our products: that they would lead readers to faith in Christ; help the church grow in knowledge and understanding of the gospel; bear witness to God’s truth,

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beauty, and holiness; and glorify Christ in every way. This means that we view our identity and practices first of all from a vertical perspective— what does God say about this?—and then from a horizontal perspective—is this what the church

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needs right now? Both our relationships to authors and readers are gospel-centered, meaning that we believe that our authors and readers have the same fundamental need: to hear and believe and love the gospel. That commitment shapes every publishing decision we make.

That framework also allows us to concentrate on ultimate things. We have hundreds of authors representing many different denominational and liturgical traditions. Our confessional identity is bound up with Scripture and with the heritage of the Reformation. Within that identity are many different tribes and traditions, some of which disagree with one another, but ultimately all point continually toward the centrality of Jesus and the infallibility of Scripture.

Our desire is that readers would see “Crossway” on a book and instinctively know that that book, whatever the topic or style, is going to exemplify a commitment to the gospel and to the faithfulness of Jesus’ church.

RP: Zondervan publishes evangelical and nonde-

nominational trade, academic, and professional books primarily for Christian readers. As a division of HarperCollins Christian Publishing (HCCP), Zondervan is able to maintain its editorial independence and its evangelical integrity while having an avenue into the general and Christian markets. At Zondervan, we publish books with the intent of meeting the spiritual needs of people at all ages and all intellectual and economic levels. We seek to express our commitment to God’s truth with a philosophy of acquisitions, writing, editing, producing, selling, and marketing that is consistent with biblical faith, practice, and ethics. We determine a book’s worth by its contribution and content, the goal being not only to confirm readers’ faith and understanding but also to challenge and stretch their thinking. So, while Zondervan publishes books within the historic evangelical mainstream of Christian faith and practice, we do not hesitate to publish books that represent the various currents within that mainstream.

While we do not have a creedal or confessional basis for our mission, we are a values-driven

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company focused on fulfilling our mission to inspire the world by meeting the needs of people with content that promotes biblical principles and honors Jesus Christ. We operate under five core values: integrity, accountability, initiative, respect, and service. We seek to publish authors who profess Christian faith and whose character and lifestyle, so far as they are reasonably known to us, are consistent with basic biblical standards. Our intention is to publish Christian content that honors God and that sees humanity in its proper perspective in relation to God as revealed in the Bible.

Historically, Christians have accepted the Bible as their authority on those matters that it addresses. This means that we want our books to be consistent with the Bible and within the historic mainstream of Christian doctrine and ethics. These include such basic beliefs as the Creator God revealed in the Bible, eternally existent in three persons, the creation of all humankind made in the image of God, the Fall, the deity of Christ and his sacrificial death on our behalf and his bodily resurrection, salvation by grace alone through faith alone, the literal return of Christ to the earth, the final judgment of all people, and biblical ethical and moral standards.

As Christians from different traditions, we recognize that this stream of Christian traditions contains a left bank, a right bank, and various crosscurrents. Overall, we want to be in the broad center of this stream; but as we seek to engage the culture and address the crucial and complex questions of our day, from time to time we may publish a bit to the left or right of this center or publish the various crosscurrents. We want to be a broker of ideas within the context of our commitment to biblical authority and the historic doctrines of orthodox Christianity.

As part of our broader publishing program at HarperCollins Christian, we encourage authors to write about a variety of topics—from politics to cookbooks, fiction to financial advice, children’s stories to memoirs—because we believe that Christians should write and explore many different facets of life, because God touches them all. We believe God can be experienced through

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“From editorial to marketing to sales, we try—prayerfully and with the Lord’s help—to always see our content and strategies through the lens of our mission.

That kind of conscientiousness is, I hope, apparent to our readers in the doctrinal and doxological consistency in our products.”

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all things, and we encourage authors to explore, debate, and then write about their journeys. Since all truth is God’s truth, this means that not all of our publications must be explicitly “Christian.”

In some cases, books that promote wholesome values (Phil. 4:8) are consistent with the broader mission of HarperCollins Christian, even if they are not the primary focus of our mission.

Our objective in partnering with authors is twofold: to spread their message and support God’s kingdom work. We accomplish this through our editorial excellence, our expansive market reach, our longstanding bookseller relationships, and our industr y-leading insights into recent trends and developments in publishing.

QUESTION Samuel, you mention that Crossway’s confessional identity is bound up with Scripture and with the heritage of the Reformation, which comprises many different traditions. How does Crossway negotiate the different needs of various churches within that spectrum?

SJ: The local church is near the heart of our mission. To that end, we try to emphasize (as much as possible) gospel-driven content that has tangible applicability within local congregations. Whatever is true for individual Christians is true for Christian community. Rather than

thinking of our audience in terms of denominational identities (which are a good thing!), we strive to think in terms of local congregations, across denominational and liturgical traditions, which nonetheless have a gospel continuity about them.

QUESTION The erosion of trust in institutions—political and social—is something that the publishing industry has had to reckon with of late. How does Crossway/Zondervan view its role as a trustworthy resource in a time when misinformation is a continual concern?

S J : We talk often about cultivating a trust

among readers. We will often hear from consumers that, even if they are not familiar with a particular author or concept that we publish, when they see the name “Crossway,” they know the book will be a faithful representation of the gospel and joyful submission to the Lordship of Christ. That’s a trust that is meticulously maintained with diligence throughout our publishing program, from the leadership of Lane Dennis and our board of directors down to the departments themselves. From editorial to marketing to sales, we try—prayerfully and with the Lord’s help—to always see our content and strategies

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through the lens of our mission. That kind of conscientiousness is, I hope, apparent to our readers in the doctrinal and doxological consistency in our products.

RP: Since the middle of the twentieth century, there has been a cultural pattern in American culture, a loss of trust, and a corresponding rejection of institutional authority. Americans lost faith in political institutions following World War II and throughout the latter half of the century. In the 1980s, a series of scandals rocked evangelical church leaders, followed two decades later by revelations of sexual abuse in

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“As Christians from different traditions, we recognize that this stream of Christian traditions contains a left bank, a right bank, and various crosscurrents. Overall, we want to be in the broad center of this stream.”

the Roman Catholic Church, and Americans lost faith in religious institutions as well. Over the last twenty years, alternative K-12 educational movements have grown, and American colleges have become seedbeds of identity politics, leading many Americans to lose faith in our educational institutions. In recent years, the news media has experienced a full-blown rejection of its authority as an institution worthy of trust. Proverbs 26:28 says, “A lying tongue hates those it hurts, and a flattering mouth works ruin.” Trust isn’t developed by telling people what they want to hear, and you cannot have a hidden agenda or ulterior motive—that’s manipulation. Trust is built by being clear about who you are and why you do what you do, and then staying true to your identity and mission.

As a publisher, Zondervan remains within the mainstream of evangelical beliefs and doctrines, but we make it clear that we do not identify with any particular stream within the evangelical movement. Our role is not that of a denominational press or a publisher that adheres to a confessional statement; because rather than promoting a particular theology, we view ourselves as a facilitator of broader discussions within the evangelical community. As I said earlier, our goal is not only to confirm readers’ faith and understanding but also to challenge and stretch their thinking.

There are books and resources we publish that some readers do not agree with. There are others they love. We try to be clear about our identity. We’re not publishing books to tell people what they want to hear, and we’re not publishing to manipulate them toward a particular agenda. We want to represent the variety of views in the evangelical stream, and we hope by being candid about our mission and our identity we can retain the trust of our readers and authors.

SAMUEL JAMES is an associate acquisitions editor for Crossway Books in Wheaton, Illinois. He blogs at blogs. mereorthodoxy.com/samuel.

RYAN PAZDUR is an associate publisher and executive editor at Zondervan Publishers in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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MOTHER KNOWS BEST

BY BROOKE VENTURA

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f someone had asked me what my highest ambition was as a twentyyear-old, I would have said, “To be a wife and mother.” I had it all planned out—I was going to be a flawless, wellheeled, stay-at-home mom of six who ran errands in my immaculate SUV, prepared glorious dinners, and enjoyed fancy date nights with my husband once a week.

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Needless to say, it didn’t turn out that way. I wasn’t married until I was twenty-nine, and I have two children, not six. I run errands in a tidy sedan, my dinners are occasionally glorious, and my husband and I enjoy fancy date nights about every six months. I don’t mean that my domestic dreams were shattered, just that the reality of my married life turned out to be quite different from what I envisioned as a single woman.

I didn’t realize just how difficult it would be to care for an energetic two-year-old after having woken up twice in the night to feed a newborn.

I didn’t understand how much work it would be to prepare fresh vegetables for dinner, and I definitely underestimated the toll that doing all of that—all day, every day—would take on my physical and mental health.

It turns out that I’m not alone. There are a lot of women who have experienced the rude, comical, and heartwarming awakening that comes with motherhood, and they have done what our generation usually does in times of emotional upheaval: Post it on the Internet. In fact, young mothers have taken to the blogosphere in such numbers that, according to sociologist Emily Matchar, in 2013 they accounted for one-third of active bloggers.1 A 2017 report released by ConvertKit shows that those numbers have risen slightly, with 62 percent of bloggers as female and 52 percent of those bloggers as having children, with the primary motivation for starting the blog being a means of creative expression, and the primary blog category being “personal development.”2 In studying these trends, Matchar learned that the majority of these bloggers are college-educated, career-oriented women who gave up their careers in order to be stay-at-home mothers.

This was perplexing. Why would someone with an MBA from Wharton give up a lucrative job as a stockbroker to cook every single thing (from tortillas to yogurt to beef) from scratch?

Who sets aside a PhD from Cornell to become a farmer in upstate New York? In her book Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity, Emily Matchar identifies six reasons: (1) a rising sense of distrust toward government, corporations, and the food system; (2) concern for the environment; (3) the

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gloomy economy; (4) discontent with contemporary work culture; (5) the draw of hands-on work in a technology-driven world; and (6) an increasingly intensive standard of parenting.

Since the purpose of this article is to discuss mommy-blogger culture and its reflection of a broader cultural nostalgia, my explanation of these reasons will be brief.

THE NEW DOMESTICITY During the early 2000s, an aura of distrust began to settle over the United States. Books such as Fast Food Nation examined the food industry and its deleterious effects on the diet, economy, and well-being of America. The World Is Flat explained how globalization would change the economic and social systems of developed nations. This generated considerable anxiety among thoughtful citizens, so when the financial crisis of 2008 erupted (resulting in mass unemployment and a severe economic downturn), it was the last straw for Millennials—the food industry was killing them, the economy they were training to work for was changing right before their eyes, and the government bailed out the very banks that all but created the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It seemed clear that the system was broken, so they took the only option available—go home and start from scratch.

Thus began what Matchar refers to as “the New Domesticity”—that is, the return of (primarily) women to home and hearth to reclaim the fine art of homemaking and create a lifestyle that’s more ecologically and personally sustainable— one where they wouldn’t be forced to choose between a fulfilling career and a stable, loving family. In many respects, it resembles the life of the June Cleaver/Betty Draper 1950s housewife, and these self-proclaimed “radical housewives” are fine with that. They’re proud of their ability to grow their own tomatoes, care for their own chickens, clean their homes with baking soda and vinegar, all the while wearing their six-month-old in a sling purchased from a fair-trade organization that supports mothers in developing nations.

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But there’s one crucial difference Matchar says distinguishes them from their grandmothers—the Internet. Unlike Betty Draper, these women don’t just sew their own baby clothes; they create a modestly lucrative media platform around those clothes (and other aspects of homemaking) that allows them to cultivate a community of like-minded and devoted followers. Unlike Depression-era homemakers, who sewed their own clothes because they didn’t have the money to buy them, these lifestyle bloggers sew their own clothes as part of a brand centered around their thrifty, creative, locally sourced organic lives. While 1930s housewives were socially praised for their industry and economy, successful Millennial bloggers receive direct, personal affirmation in the form of likes, comments, messages, and endorsement deals from companies looking to promote their products.

It doesn’t end there. Matchar writes that this devotion to a sustainable, natural lifestyle extends into how they raise their children, with many mothers forgoing traditional medicine and vaccination schedules for a natural homeopathic approach. A paper written by British doctor Andrew Wakefield in 1998 describing the connections between vaccinations and autism was incredibly influential among young, educated mothers. Despite the fact that Dr. Wakefield’s findings were not reproduced by subsequent research—and that his license was revoked by Britain’s General Medical Council— the damage was done, and the medical industry (lumped in with government, economy, and educational institutions) is still regarded with deep suspicion among young upper-middleclass mothers.3 As a result, some mommy bloggers’ “health insurance” takes the form of preventative care: buying organic clothes, BPAfree bottles, extensive breastfeeding, making their own baby food, and delaying or omitting vaccinations altogether. The popularity of The Attachment Parenting Book: A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby, a book by (Roman Catholic turned evangelical Christian turned Roman Catholic) William Sears, M.D., with his wife Martha

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“People are attracted to the New Domesticity because (surprise!) it’s attractive—a powerful and beautiful expression of the value of a life that balances thoughtful, meaningful engagement with your environment and a stable and healthy family.”

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Sears, R.N.—which promotes (among other things) extensive breastfeeding, bed sharing, and baby wearing—has established itself as a touchstone of twenty-first-century parenting philosophy, so much so that Matchar says it’s impossible to be a new parent without being influenced by it.

When these three elements—the allure of healthy, carefully prepared organic meals and hand-knitted sweaters; the rising levels of anxiety about the failures of previously trustworthy institutions; and the higher standard of parenting that has morphed from concern over our children’s welfare into a status symbol—are filtered through beautifully shot high-resolution photographs and the feeling of collegial intimacy, which characterizes many of the bloggers who dominate the industry, the result is a strong sense of confidence and trust in a romanticized image that has little basis in actual reality.

MOTHER KNOWS BEST Matchar’s overall assessment of the mommyblogger culture is critical but sympathetic. She understands the disillusionment and frustration her peers feel with the institutions that raised them. She herself is frustrated with corporate America’s refusal to implement a comprehensive leave plan that allows families with dependents to have social and job security.

She readily acknowledges that many of these women wouldn’t be at home blogging if the workplace they trained to enter hadn’t effectively compelled them to choose between working seventy-hour weeks and having a family.

She willingly owns up to the many hours she’s spent clicking down the rabbit hole of beautiful lifestyle blogs, admiring the hand-built wainscoating, pots of homemade jam, and pictures of the dimple-cheeked baby gnawing on a BPA-free food-grade silicone teether. People are attracted to the New Domesticity because (surprise!) it’s attractive—a powerful and beautiful expression of the value of a life that balances thoughtful, meaningful engagement with your environment and a stable and healthy family.

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New Domesticity is, at heart, a cry against a society that’s not working. A society that doesn’t offer safe-enough food, accessible health care, a reasonable level of environmental protections, any sort of rights for working parents.4 For Christian conservatives who have long been engaged in the culture wars, this seems like the win we’ve been waiting for—a popular censure of the feminist agenda to get women out of the home and into the workplace, combined with a resounding affirmation of the noble art of caring for a family. However, there are aspects of Matchar’s criticisms that Christians would do well to consider.

THE REALITY BEHIND THE FANTASY Matchar is quick to emphasize the benefits of the mommy-blogging community: the ability to speak frankly with like-minded women who share similar experiences in navigating the waters of new motherhood, the appreciation and affirmation they receive from fellow homemakers on their newly reupholstered furniture or first attempt at canned salsa, or the instantaneous advice and suggestions they can receive on everything from teething pain to ADHD medication.

Young people are ready to push aside the 1980s- and 90s-style notion that domestic life is inherently uncool, the purview of the unintellectual, unambitious woman.

We want to see images of women knitting or baking or raising kids not to please a husband or live up to some societal notion of proper femininity, but because they find it personally fulfilling.5 Many of the bloggers Matchar interviewed were honest about wanting to promote a certain lifestyle and showing the sunny side of stay-athome life. The difficulty, she says, is that there’s much more behind the folksy wife-and-mom personalities than some highly paid bloggers let on. Ree Drummond (the woman behind the

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“For all [Ree Drummond’s] quirky blogposts and self-deprecating humor, the selfdescribed ‘desperate housewife’ is actu­ally an incredibly astute businesswoman whose highly produced and heavily edited world bears almost no resemblance to the ordinary life she projects.”

wildly popular The Pioneer Woman blog and Food Network show), wife of an Oklahoma cattle rancher and mother of four, is her prime example. Women the world over (myself included) have smiled at Drummond’s comic descriptions of cattle-branding, delighted their friends with dinners composed entirely of her recipes, and laughed at pictures of her husband’s chaps-clad bottom (she devoted an entire blogpost to it).

The picture is one of a decidedly sweet, down-toearth woman enjoying rustic life on her family’s ranch as she homeschools her children and makes meatloaf and steak sandwiches.

But Drummond’s upbringing bears little resemblance to the salt-of-the-earth Midwestern lifestyle she represents. She was raised in the affluent town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, the daughter of a surgeon and a social worker, and graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in gerontology. Her husband’s family members are third-generation cattle ranchers who own 433,000 acres of land across Oklahoma and Kansas, and who receive $2 million a year for allowing the US Government to use some parcels as a sanctuary for wild horses and burros.6 Combine this with income from Drummond’s store (The Mercantile), her Food Network show, ad revenue, best-selling memoir, cookbooks, and Walmart kitchen line, and the picture that emerges isn’t one of a down-home country woman but of a wealthy and privileged celebrity. For all her quirky blogposts and selfdeprecating humor, the self-described “desperate housewife” is actually an incredibly astute businesswoman whose highly produced and heavily edited world bears almost no resemblance to the ordinary life she projects—a fact that Matchar says goes either unnoticed or disregarded by fans.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION I’m not saying that Drummond is a duplicitous con artist. She’s wealthy, to be sure, but she’s used a significant portion of that money to revitalize her small hometown of Pawhuska and pays each of her employees a living wage.7 The universal opinion (from The New Yorker profiler

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POETRY AS WITNESS TO BEAUTY

BY MARK GREEN

Crossing the Drake Passage from Argentina to Antarctica challenged our sense of balance. In a small icebreaker made for calmer seas, our family hunkered down, sliding from one side of the boat to the other. Eventually, after an experienced sailor took pity on us and taught us how to stand, we ventured out into the cold, clear sunshine on deck. Soon, we joined the chorus of our colleagues, all exclaiming in wonder over this frozen, dazzlingly beautiful world all around us.

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ven though we are united to Christ, we can feel that same disorienting lack of balance in our current historical moment. We hunger for equilibrium. We hesitate to venture out into a world where power attempts to overcome the good, lies labor to suppress truth, and ugliness tries to engulf the beautiful. We often feel unsteady and discouraged.

We forget those things the Father uses to remind us that what he created is both good and beautiful.

Poetry done well declares witness to such beauty.

Poets spend hours looking for a combination of words that is true to how they see this created world.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson instructs us.1

When the poet takes our hand and leads us to these slanted places, we often are overcome with emo-

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tion. We weep because we know, deep in our hearts, that there is so much more to life than what we can measure, manipulate, or control. When we let a proper poet lead us, we climb new heights to view new vistas. Panoramas and perspectives unwind themselves and the multidimensional written word startles us. In our world, often hypnotized by deceit and cunning, we need these tangible touches to shake us from our slumber.

Rousted awake by the thrum of life-filled lyrics, we feel curiously refreshed.

Restored, we run toward the poet’s painted sunsets that dance and frolic and bid us join in the joy.

King David was a poet, and Solomon as well. Closer to our day, we find poets such as George Herbert and Francis Thompson,2 who understood both the poetic line and the wonder of the gospel revealed in

Jesus Christ. They welded together art and truth with word-sculpture proclamations that make us shiver with delight. This feast of crafted words provides a foretaste of the new creation to come.

Poetry helps restore our balance. It gives us hope when focusing on God’s beauty that still thrives amid these fallen ruins.

Because God’s image resides in us, albeit disfigured by sin, God’s creation still speaks to us.

Words wrought well remind us that we have a loving Father who still is the Gardener over all we survey.

At the same time, poetry can contribute to our destruction. Like sharp knives wielded by one who seeks only to destroy, words can cut deep when they advance the materialism and despair that characterize much of our postmodern assump-

tions. The enlightened poet, by contrast, strives to locate and unfold and reveal beauty while acknowledging the reality of our fractured world.

As Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”3 While the enemy would crush us with despair, the Holy Spirit continues to reveal and testify to us that God’s creation is always good. The light of the good creation seeps, even leaps, out of poems properly forged in our land of exile.

When I was studying for my Master of Fine Arts in poetry, I attended a workshop where New York Times best-selling novelist Janet Fitch encouraged us to start each day by reading poetry out loud for ten minutes. Poets, she said, hold the standard of the language while pushing hard to find meaning in their lives. Novelists

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POETRY AS WITNESS TO BEAUTY

take life slowly. Poets, by contrast, are on the edge of experience at all times.

Poets are first lifers—this is their first time here, and they are enraptured with

everything. They run at life with arms open. Let us therefore read the poets!

Our loving Father adores us, and he longs to give good gifts to his children.

Poetry is one of those gifts, waiting to be discovered by sons and daughters of the living God.

MARK GREEN is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and president of White Horse Inn.

1 Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).

2 See The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson (1893).

3 Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” The Future, Columbia Records, 1992.

RECOMMENDED READING

The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry (2005) An excellent introduction to poetry in the classic mode. Witty and down to earth. Examples and not an anthology.

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99 Poems: New and Selected

by Dana Gioia (2017) Written in plain English with both sad and funny moments, with his serious Catholicism occasionally peeking through.

An Introduction to Poetry (13th ed.)

by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia (2009) Dana Gioia recommended this book to me when I asked him where to start. It’s expensive but luxurious.

Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke (2003) This anthology places the poems in their context with helpful background on the poets. Unfortunately, Wendell Berry’s work is missing but this collection is still delicious.

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who interviewed her and the employees at her store) is that the kindly, unassuming personality on the pages of her blog closely reflects the character of the woman behind it.8 She’s selling a fantasy, but it’s the inspirational fantasy of Disneyland—a beautifully curated world that envelops the reader with the comforts and nostalgia of vintage Americana.

What I am saying is that while it is the purpose of the blog to entertain, and that the narrative of the blogger’s life is, of necessity, partially fantastic, ethical lines are uncomfortably blurred when the fantasy is literally sold as reality. When a blogger deliberately downplays her actual wealth and influence in order to maintain (and thereby capitalize on) her saltof-the-earth persona, one questions the ethical probity of marketing oneself as “an ordinary housewife plowing through life in the country.”

Matchar writes: For bloggers, blogs are not necessarily just an outlet to vent or a source of community.

Frequently, bloggers are deliberately painting a highly controlled picture of their lives in order to make money, sell products, or promote certain lifestyles or political agendas. Readers, who look to these blogs for community, are often getting an unintended dose of marketing and commercialism as well. But more worrisome than the semi-hidden advertising is the fact that, by painting idealized pictures of their “real lives” in order to make a living, bloggers are selling fantasy but calling it reality.9 There’s nothing exactly wrong with a blogger combining real life with a carefully curated image—provided that they’re not deliberately deceptive—but we must remember that this is relatively uncharted territory on the frontier of Internet culture, and so discernment and caution should be exercised.

Granted, in this Snapchat-filtered, Facebook world, it’s slightly petty to accuse someone of marketing the glossy version of themselves as their “authentic” self. Since when has anyone— actor, homemaker, public servant, student, or

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professional—not cared about presenting their best face to the world? It’s not artifice or duplicity to keep the nitty-gritty details about your personal life private; it’s tact. There are appropriate and inappropriate times and places to share our less-than-savory aspects with people.

But when the glossy photographs are interpreted as the day-to-day reality, when the spheres of happy memory and actual history become indistinguishable, then we’ve succumbed to a false ideal that’s unhelpful and counterproductive.

The polished image of the lovely young mother with three beautiful children and organized closets may entertain, inspire, and encourage— and that’s a good thing—but when we’re tempted to compare her image with our reality, then it’s important to bear in mind that the story we see isn’t the whole story.

It’s natural to yearn for “a better, simpler time,” to mourn for a way of life that seems to be disappearing, to want to preserve the best of our past as we continue into the future. But when we ignore or minimize the complexity of the truth for the nostalgia and romance of the fantasy, we are perpetuating a myth about the world we want, instead of engaging with the world we live in.

BROOKE VENTURA is associate editor of Modern Reforma-

tion. She lives with her family in Ontario, Canada.

1 Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 51.

2 See https://convertkit.com/reports/blogging/topic, accessed February 22, 2017.

3 Other researchers were unable to reproduce Dr. Wakefield’s findings or confirm his hypothesis of a link between the administration of certain vaccines and autism. His medical license was revoked after an inquiry by Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that he had violated ethical procedure by subjecting children to unnecessary medical tests without the referral of their general practitioner. See https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/jan/28/andrew-wakefield-mmr-vaccine, accessed March 20, 2018.

4 Matchar, 248.

5 Matchar, 66–67.

6 See http://www.landreport.com/2017/06/2016-land-report100-drummond-family, accessed March 20, 2018.

7 Khushbu Shah, “Pawhuska or Bust: A Journey to the Heart of Pioneer Woman Country,” https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/ree-drummond-interview-pioneer-woman-saved-oklahoma-small-town, accessed March 20, 2018.

8 Amanda Fortini, “O Pioneer Woman!” https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2011/05/09/o-pioneer-woman?irgwc=1&source=affiliate_ impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_Skimbit%20Ltd.&mbid =affiliate_impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_Skimbit%20Ltd., accessed March 20 2018.

9 Matchar, 69.

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by Mike Cosper IVP Books, 2017 224 pages (paperback), $17.00

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RECAP TURING THE WONDER: TRANSCENDENT FAITH IN A DISENCHANTED WORLD

opular podcaster, author, and Gospel Coalition speaker Mike Cosper presents an enigmatic reflection in Recapturing the Wonder that ultimately distills into a technique-oriented approach to recapturing “the magic” of disenchanted evangelicalism.

Earnestly lamenting that his “ordinary life felt strangely irreligious” (4), Cosper says that by reading authors such as Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt, and mystics such as Thomas Merton, he awoke to the fact that there should be more to the Christian experience of divine transcendence and presence than the “biblical deism” that contemporary evangelicalism offers. The “practical magic” of sensing and

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encountering the divine, as Cosper describes it, isn’t to be found in the spectacularly miraculous, but in “the more quiet and invisible magic of how anxious souls find wholeness and how broken people find healing” (4–5).

Such a thesis would seem to resonate strongly with Martin Luther’s pursuit of divine grace, and might therefore have driven the author’s discussion of the presence of a transcendent and holy God to the immanent voice of Christ in the gospel and within the sacraments. However, instead of finding the real voice and real presence of God in Christ within the “pure preaching of the gospel and the sacraments administered according to the gospel” (Augsburg Confession VII.2), Cosper steers his readers to the religious

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practices he elsewhere upbraids as “the business of appeasing gods” (35) in his recommendations for recapturing the wonder.

Cosper begins by acknowledging that he once harbored skepticism about the spiritual realm and divine transcendence. The evangelical world he inhabited was disenchanted—devoid of “supernatural presences, of spirits and God and transcendence” (10). He traces today’s evangelical conformity to “the discipline of disenchantment” back to Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who confirmed Copernicus’s heliocentricity and paved the way for Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe in which God was banished to the outer limits of the cosmos, negating divine immanence and providential care.

According to the author, evangelicals still long for a heavenly transcendence to permeate spatiotemporality, along with God’s enriching immanence, but have adopted worldviews and religious practices antithetical to these ends. This book intends to lift the lid and draw back the curtain for evangelicals. The challenge for Cosper is doing so within the commitments of what Luther might have called evangelical “sacramentarianism,” in which the transcendent One’s presence is not objectified by way of real presence and real voice in spatiotemporality, but rather subjectively experienced through, in this case, “ancient paths” of spiritual disciplines adjudicated by Cosper himself.

Thus a host of “pathway” chapters are proffered to stimulate for the evangelical a sense of the wonder of God, ranging from “Re-enchanting Our World” to “Breath Prayers” and “Practicing Abundance.” A pathway demarcated “Marking Time” is typical. Cosper suggests acquainting oneself with the liturgical calendar and, cafeteria style, selecting days to observe in order to re-sacralize time: “Whatever your church tradition is, there’s value in marking out these days

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as sacred (or if you don’t like that term, then call them ‘unique’)” (29). But isn’t this precisely the problem with disenchanted evangelicalism: Leaving the subject as the arbiter of both what may be denominated sacred time and whether to even use the nomenclature of the enchanted ecclesial world?

In the same section, Cosper encourages weekly observance of sacred/unique time at church where “the signs of the kingdom are present in bread and wine and in the waters of baptism” (29). Signs, however, point away from themselves to something not immediately present. The lid therefore remains secure, and the curtain drawn closed; only the signs are truly present; not the immanent God, not the embodied Christ, not the manifest kingdom—just signs with an ill-determined terminal point. Stated differently, the reader must import meaning rather than conform to an objectified meaning within an intentional context. So, while it may be commendable to introduce the church calendar and liturgical elements to evangelicals, they lose their intentional content and context when placed adrift alongside “breath prayers” and “lighting candles” or, put differently, alongside a more ephemeral religion based on volition and personal taste.

In sections leading to “Pathway Seven: The Rule of Life,” Cosper describes traditional “religion,” which he says “was birthed as a substitute for that life [of longing for God], an independent pathway to transcendence,” which he juxtaposes with his own set of (supposedly) nonreligious pathways (44). To be quite critical, Cosper’s own pathways seem to be a lot like traditional religion itself without commitments to any particular religious tradition, such as Lutheranism or Anglicanism.

This otherwise noble proposal begins and ends with a resigned appeal to discipline,

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duty, and techniques, and thereby comes off as an evangelical version of The Benedict Option.

But there is an alternative narrative to Cosper’s for readers to consider—namely, the possibility that the desacralization of Christianity (as well as the disenchantment of the world) began not with Galileo but with the sacramentarianism of the Radical Reformation and the subsequent triumph of Pelagianism within Arminian evangelicalism. Descartes merely added his piece to render it thoroughly modern.

Recapturing the Wonder is an effort by a sincere evangelical to recapture the ever-abiding “magic” found within the sacramentalism of the first traditions of the Reformation for his own sacramentarian tradition. But there’s a sense in which the title of the book does in fact describe the outcome—namely, a selfchosen faith of reconfigured monastic habits.

In the end, God remains objectively distant, so all that’s left for those desirous of greater intimacy with the Creator is a cornucopia of subjective spiritual disciplines. At best, Recapturing the Wonder may engender a shortlived sympathetic following (like the Emergent Church fad); at worst, it may frustrate to the point of leading some to abandon the Christian faith altogether if the techniques don’t “bring the practical magic.” In sum, Cosper asks of evangelicalism what its sacramentarianism cannot give: a God of divine miracle and presence in sacraments.

Confessional clerics would do well to read this book in part to become better informed about what many disenchanted evangelicals long for and attempt to self-fulfill through ad hoc religion. A disposition of mercy and a willingness to invest in conversations with such evangelicals may yield the joy of seeing thoughtful Christians like Cosper step more deeply into an evangelical-catholic faith and so experience the grace and presence of God afresh, abidingly, even religiously.

JOHN J. BOMBARO is senior pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, and is coeditor with Adam Francisco of The Resurrection Fact: Responding to Modern Critics (New Reformation Publications, 2016).

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MR STAFF RECOMMENDED TITLES Befriend: Create Belonging in an Age of Judgment, Isolation, and Fear

by Scott Sauls (Tyndale, 2016) This book is a cross between a devotional and a counseling book. Aimed at helping people develop deeper and stronger friendships, the book is meant to be read with a group and to help readers understand the important role that friendship plays in building one another up in love in the Christian community. Most important of all, Scott Sauls roots friendship in the gracious love of Jesus, reminding readers of their deep need for Jesus’ friendship.

Recommended by Leah Baugh The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faerie

by Jonathan S. McIntosh (Angelico Press, 2017) Anyone interested in the mechanics of myth, meaning, and the masterful work of J. R. R. Tolkien will want to pick up this book. This work is a seminal text that brings the reader into a fresh discussion with one of the church’s leading theologians and philosophers.

Recommended by Tim Massaro Wittenberg Meets the World: Reimagining the Reformation at the Margins

by Alberto L. Garcia and John A. Nunes (Eerdmans, 2017) In this book, two conservative Lutheran thinkers reveal a different side of Lutheranism. They show not only that the majority of Lutherans are in the Global South, but also how these Christians have much to teach us about God, grace, missions, witness, service, and fellowship. This book will inspire readers about the always life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ, how it is embraced and understood by our southern neighbors, and how their vision of the gospel might inspire us in the United States and Europe to renewed zeal and love.

Recommended by Silverio Gonzalez

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by Martin Luther translated and edited by William R. Russell Penguin Classics, 2017 272 pages (paperback), $16.00

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MARTIN LU THER THE NINETY-FIVE THESES AND OTHER WRITINGS

n late 2017, the Penguin Classics series published an edition of selected writings of Mar tin Luther, featuring the Ninety-Five Theses. Lutheran pastor and scholar William Russell freshly translates and edits several of Luther’s writings on a wide range of subjects and genres, showing the depth and breadth of Luther—the man, the theologian, and the reformer. I recommend this book to the modern Christian reader as a front door into the mansion of Luther’s writings.

My chief complaint, however, is that the editor’s introduction incorrectly defines Luther’s “Law and Gospel” distinction (xxvi–xxvii). Citing Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, he defines “law” in existentialist, therapeutic categories—that is, how we are wronged. For that reason, he paints the gospel in terms of how we’re rescued from the harms done to us. I will first show that Luther’s law-gospel distinction is misrepresented in the introduction by showing from the same book— from Luther’s own words—how he understood the law-gospel distinction. Next, I conclude from this that the book should be on the bookshelf of every Christian. As a professional translator, I commend this genuine, plain-English translation of Luther.

From an editor’s perspective, the volume contains a number of formal errors. First of all, on several occasions the translator places a colon after something other than an independent clause (i.e., after a phrase or dependent clause; e.g., xxiv, 11, and 115; cf. The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., 6.65). Another weakness is the

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format of the translations, which is usually not explained and thus hard to follow. For instance, the translation of the “Heidelberg Disputation” omits the numbers from the theses that Luther prepared for the disputation (15–29), and the same is true of the translation of the Small Catechism (88–105). Finally, the translator includes Latin words and quotations in the course of the English text, which seem out of place and are occasionally spelled incorrectly (e.g., 34, 51, 108, 136, 180, and 221 ). Yet the volume’s most material error lies in its definition of law and gospel: He begins with “the law,” a faithful and authentic description of the realities facing every human being. Death, meaninglessness, and guilt threaten all people, regardless of their location. (xxvi) At the heart of his understanding of the Scriptures is this gospel: God in Jesus Christ has acted to rescue humankind and the whole world from the painful realities exposed by the Law. (xxvii) Conspicuously absent from these descriptions of law and gospel is the doctrine of sin—that the law condemns our transgressions and lack of conformity to the law, and that the gospel saves us from their penalty. But the reader who pushes on beyond the introduction will find the comforts of Luther’s own distinction between law and gospel.

One of the selections Russell includes is Luther’s preface to his commentary on Galatians (149–59).

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“For Luther, the believer’s heavenly comfort derives from a conscience at rest in the righteousness of Christ.”

Here Luther clearly distinguishes between law and gospel: The law exposes our sinfulness so that we must look only to the gospel of Christ for salvation.

It is a marvelous thing and unknown to the world to teach Christians to ignore the Law and to live before God as though there were no Law whatever. For if you do not ignore the Law and thus direct your thoughts to grace as though there were no Law but as though there were nothing but grace, you cannot be saved. “For through the Law comes knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20). On the other hand, works and the performance of the Law must be demanded in the world as though there were no promise or grace. This is because of the stubborn, proud, and hardhearted, before whose eyes nothing must be set except the Law, in order that they may be terrified and humbled. For the Law was given to terrify and kill the stubborn and to exercise the old being within us. Therefore, the Apostle says law and grace need to be properly distinguished (2 Timothy 2:25ff.). (153) For Luther, the believer’s heavenly comfort derives from a conscience at rest in the righteousness of Christ. When the believer is tempted by the condemnation of the law, Luther says, Give no more to the Law than it has coming and say to it: “Law, you want to ascend into the realm of conscience and rule there. You want to denounce its sin and take away the

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joy of my heart, which I have through faith in Christ. You want to plunge me into despair, in order that I may perish. You are exceeding your jurisdiction. Stay within your limits, and exercise your dominion over the flesh.

You shall not touch my conscience. For I am baptized; and through the Gospel I have been called to a fellowship of righteousness and eternal life, to the kingdom of Christ, in which my conscience is at peace, where there is no Law but only the forgiveness of sins, peace, quiet, happiness, salvation, and eternal life. Do not disturb me in these matters.

In my conscience not the Law will reign, that hard tyrant and disciplinarian, but Christ, the Son of God, the King of peace and righteousness, the sweet Savior and Mediator.

He will preserve my conscience happy and peaceful in the sound and pure doctrine of the Gospel and in the knowledge of this passive righteousness.” (158) These are but a few gems from this new translation of Luther. Although I caution the reader to take the translator’s introductory remarks with a grain of salt, I guarantee that the Christian will find other treasures in this Penguin Classics edition of Luther, which has appeared at last. I heartily recommend the volume as an introductory Luther reader.

CASEY CARMICHAEL holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Geneva. He works as a freelance translator in Saint Louis, Missouri.

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WILL THE REAL JESUS PLEASE STAND UP? 12 FALSE CHRISTS n Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? 12 False Christs, Matthew Richard explains how easy it is to fall into the trap of redefining Jesus to suit ourselves. The theme is one I have seen dealt with in the past by Francis Schaeffer (who also stressed the importance of worldview), and the layout of the book reminds me a bit of J.B. Phillips’s Your God Is Too Small. But I do find this book to be fresh and timely. Richard recounts real conversations he has had—in homes, on airplanes, and elsewhere—where false Christs have been brought forth. Each case strikes me as (I guess the term has to be) a “genuine imitation”; that is, these were not invented by Richard as straw men but are plausible cases of how real people have redefined Jesus, letting go of the real one.

I especially liked his introduction where he defines terms such as “free will,” “idolatry,” “cognitive dissonance,” and “postmodern relativism,” and shows from Scripture how Saint Peter fell into the very same trap the book sets out to expose—namely, redefining Jesus to better suit one’s purposes or situation. In one sense, Peter knew the true Jesus, even confessed his name, and in another, he created a substitute in order to avoid persecution. How easy this is to do.

Some of the twelve false Christs include “The Mascot,” “The Option among Many,” “The Social Justice Warrior,” and “The Mystical Friend.” I was especially happy to see Richard go after “The Mystical Friend,” as I know how real that one was in my life for a time, and how easy it is to be considered a heretic by those who think that if you don’t seek Jesus within, you’ll never find him.

If I have a quibble, it is that while I think he is correct in his identification of every one of these false Christs, I think most of them would be

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by Matthew Richard Concordia, 2017 261 pages (paperback), $14.99

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WHI RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON APOLOGETICS Jesus: A Very Short Introduction

by Richard Bauckham (Oxford University Press, 2011) Can We Still Believe the Bible?

by Craig Blomberg (Brazos Press, 2014) The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach

by Michael Licona (IVP, 2010) How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature—A Response to Bart D. Ehrman

by Craig Evans et al. (Zondervan, 2014) How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus

by Larry Hurtado (Eerdmans, 2005) The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between

by Gregory Koukl (Zondervan, 2017) Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts

by Lydia McGrew (DeWard Publishing, 2017) Why Good Arguments Often Fail: Making a More Persuasive Case for Christ

by James Sire (IVP Books, 2006) Religion on Trial

by Craig A. Parton (Wipf & Stock, 2008) The Reliability of the New Testament: Barth D. Ehrman and Daniel B. Wallace in Dialogue edited by Robert B. Stewart (Fortress Press, 2011)

found primarily among liberal Christians. The strongest exception was “The National Patriot.”

This problem is somewhat mitigated by the fact that most readers will realize they have fallen for most of these false Christs to some degree at some time in their own lives; so they shouldn’t go away thinking, “Those other people are falling for a false Christ. Lucky for me, I never do.”

Also, Richard ends the book with an account of how he fell for a false Christ during part of his ministry, despite earlier contact with the real Jesus at several points in his life, beginning with his baptism. This was a crucial point to make, in line with his account of Saint Peter’s fall into idolatry. It is important that we try to guard against these falls, but falling is inevitable. We seem destined to fall so that we can be restored. If we never fell, then we would hardly feel a need for a savior. Our own tendency to fall should keep us from jumping on our neighbors when they seem to be following one of the false Christs. When a neighbor does this, there is a serious danger, but we don’t need to conclude that they never knew Jesus or that he has abandoned them.

I rather wish the book had more by way of conclusion, as there are many more than twelve false Christs out there, and I would like to have a better idea how to identify them. But I think for the intended audience, this more concise treatment might be just the kind of book the reader would be willing to read.

Finally, there are discussion questions at the end of each chapter, making this book good for conversation in an adult education setting.

The conversations the book will spark will be important ones to have. While there are some cases where I would prefer more nuance, I was mostly happy to see an avoidance of knee-jerk responses. The primary issue the book addresses is how our overall approaches to Jesus can lead us away from the true one. The specific issues that come up are secondary and illustrative.

Readers can take the cure for each deviation even where they don’t finally, or yet, agree on all the details.

RICK RITCHIE is a long-time contributor to Modern Refor-

mation magazine.

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REFORMATION ANGLICANISM: A VISION FOR TODAY’S GLOBAL COMMUNION

edited by Ashley Null and John W. Yates III Crossway, 2017 224 pages (hardcover), $35.00

nglicanism has fallen on hard times, to the extent that many look on it with suspicion and pity as liberal teaching and eroding morality gut many of its churches from within. Even worse, many confessional, Reformed Christians also see Anglicanism as inherently prone to theological instability, supposedly founded on a “middle way” between Rome and Geneva. However, the Anglican tradition was in fact a vital contributor to the

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Protestant Reformation and is still intimately involved in the Reformation’s ongoing legacy.

That truth is what editors Ashley Null and John Yates seek to emphasize in this introductory volume of The Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library series.

Through contributors representing the worldwide sweep of the Anglican Communion, Null and Yates seek to wed Anglicanism with the key distinctives of the Reformation, showing that in its original form as instituted

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MR STAFF RECOMMENDED TITLES

The Giveness of Things: Essays by Marilynne Robinson (Picador, 2016)

Marilynne Robinson is perhaps best known for her novel Gilead, but she has also written several books of essays. The Givenness of Things is one such collection of thought-provoking and insightful essays on a variety of topics.

Recommended by Leah Baugh Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification

by Sinclair B. Ferguson (Banner of Truth, 2016) In Devoted to God, Ferguson carefully expounds ten foundational New Testament passages on sanctification. Defining holiness as “whole-hearted devotion to God,” he keeps the gospel and our identity in Christ at the very center of spiritual growth.

This book will prove a welcome guide to those on the lifelong path toward maturity in Christ.

Recommended by Andrew Hess New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001

by Czesław Miłosz (Ecco, 2017) Czesław Miłosz’s work is always worth reconsidering, since his writings come from the Second World War and the Cold War era of Poland. The decadence of communism, which heightened his sense of the modern world’s nihilistic telos, is worth pondering in our day and age, if only for the refreshing clarity of someone who saw where a world without God leads humanity.

Recommended by Tim Massaro

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under Thomas Cranmer (the archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and Edward VI), Anglicanism was a powerful force in spreading confessional, Reformed doctrine. Null and Yates contend that a recovery of Anglicanism’s roots will prove essential in preserving and spreading biblical Christianity in today’s turbulent and forlorn world.

Undoubtedly, the most valuable aspect of this book is its heavy emphasis on how the founding fathers of the sixteenth-century Church of England deliberately shaped their tradition in line with the key teachings of the Protestant Reformation, such as sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, and soli Deo gloria.

Excerpts from Anglican formularies (such as the Book of Common Prayer, the Homilies, and the Thirty-Nine Articles) clearly show that the Church of England was committed to preserving the pure gospel. Heartfelt and firmly grounded quotations from key figures (such as Thomas Cranmer, Katherine Parr, and Augustus Toplady) provide vivid examples of Reformed faith and piety. For this reason, this volume will prove especially helpful to confessional Presbyterians and Continental Reformed Christians who desire to understand and encourage their Anglican brethren.

One excellent example of this volume’s emphasis on the reformational heritage of Anglicanism is found in chapter 4, “Sola Gratia,” in which Null takes us through a detailed exposition of Thomas Cranmer’s four “Comfortable Words” in the Book of Common Prayer (111–20). Cranmer’s liturgy allures us into the beautiful assurance of the gospel as we prepare for Communion: Hear what comfortable words our Savior Christ says to all that truly turn to him.

“Come to me all that travail, and are heavy laden, and I shall refresh you.” God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son to the end that all that believe in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Hear also what Saint Paul says. “This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save

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sinners.” Hear also what Saint John says. “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins.”

By hearing such words each time we come to partake of the body and blood of Christ, we are enabled to “lift up our hearts” and be filled with thankfulness and comfort.

Even though Reformation Anglicanism is on the whole an excellent and informative book, I do feel it could benefit from a better organized placement of the content in the first two chapters. Chapter 1, a survey of the Anglican missionary tradition, begins well as it describes how Christianity came to the British Isles. However, the chapter bogs down when it moves on to discuss contemporary issues in the Anglican Communion—issues difficult to fully grasp for readers unfamiliar with them. For this reason, I think chapter 2, Ashley Null’s survey of the Reformation in England, is a more effective opener, because it eases the reader into the turbulent and exciting events surrounding the reigns of the Tudor monarchs and the break of the Church of England from Rome. This could then be an appropriate backdrop for discussing the extensive efforts of Anglican missions, which do not receive much prominence in other Reformed circles. A volume that seeks to recover the Reformed origins of Anglicanism benefits from being “user-friendly,” so to speak, because many who read it may be either Anglicans who need to be better exposed to their heritage or outsiders who are curious in learning more about the true essence of Anglicanism. The rest

“[Reformed Anglicanism] is an honor­able Christian tradition that has great power and potential to revitalize the gospel in many lands.”

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of the book flows smoothly, however, so I would advise the reader to go through the first sections of chapter 1 (15–24), then move ahead to chapter 2, and return to the rest of the first chapter at a later point in the book.

Reformed Anglican pastors and laypeople, along with their fellow Protestant Reformed brothers and sisters, face many challenges in cultivating the rocky spiritual soil across the world. However, they have much to be thankful for as they contemplate their heritage.

As Ashley Null and John Yates emphasize at the end of Reformation Anglicanism, the Anglican faith is apostolic, catholic, reformational, mission-focused, episcopal, liturgical, transformative, and relevant. It is an honorable Christian tradition that has great power and potential to revitalize the gospel in many lands. I am thus delighted that this book has been written, and I hope that the future volumes in Crossway’s Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library series will continue to build on this good beginning and further establish the body of Christ in the beauty and comfort of the gospel.

DANIEL SAXTON, a graduate of Westminster Seminary

California, attends Reformation Anglican Church in Gray, Maine, which seeks to break new ground for confessional, Reformed Christianity in a largely unchurched region.

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JOHN OWEN AND ENGLISH PURITANISM: EXPERIENCES OF DEFEAT

ohn Owen is becoming a wellknown name in Reformed and evangelical circles for his penetrating theological and exegetical writings, and Crawford Gribben has done the world a favor in providing the first in-depth and detailed account of his life. For readers and fans of Owen, this will be a resource of inestimable value to help understand the culture, context, and personal experiences that motivated Owen in his ministry and especially in his writings. This is a clear, insightful, and well-ordered telling of Owen’s life and the events that shaped the world in which he labored.

Most readers of this magazine know Owen as a powerfully gifted theologian and commentator on Scripture. His writing corpus is massive, and his commentary on Hebrews alone spans eight volumes. In his own time, however, Owen had much more difficulty in achieving the theological renown he currently enjoys. Gribben’s work is enlightening in the way it highlights the frustrations, setbacks, and failures that marked much of Owen’s career. His world was one of continual change, and political upheaval was a constant factor. He labored during Archbishop William Laud’s suppression of Reformed theology under the reign of Charles I, during the English Civil War of the 1640s, during the Interregnum or Cromwellian period, and during the Restoration when the monarchy was reinstated and Charles II had many reasons to go after theologians who had supported Parliament’s opposition to his father, men such as Owen. There likely was no

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by Crawford Gribben Oxford University Press, 2016 (reprint edition) 424 pages (paperback), $35.00

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truly peaceful interval during his life or work, and yet he managed to produce some of the most enduring writings of the period.

The focus on “experiences of defeat” was an interesting approach for Gribben to take in explaining Owen’s life, because there did seem to be some high points in his career. He was a favored preacher in Parliament during the English Civil War, and he served prestigiously in Oliver Cromwell’s regime. He was also appointed as vice-chancellor to the University of Oxford. Yet, it is true that most of these high points either came with accompanying difficulties or ended

SELECT WORKS BY JOHN OWENS

The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (The Banner of Truth)

The Glory of Christ (The Banner of Truth)

Communion with God (The Banner of Truth)

in disappointment. For example, his tenure as vice-chancellor of Oxford ended with no acknowledgement of the reforms he had achieved, which was indicative of his waning influence and the decline of the ecclesiological Independents in the Church of England. The ups and downs of Owen’s life remind us that he did not work in a vacuum, and there was a swirling storm of turmoil that almost always threatened to overturn his projects.

This book is difficult to criticize. The most valuable aspect of Gribben’s biography is that he arranges the narrative around Owen’s publications. This gives serious readers of Owen’s works access to the context in which each work was produced. This background information will help Owen’s readers understand external factors and likely internal motivations that influenced the writing of each work. This will only make Owen clearer to us as we seek to understand his theology through his books.

The next strength of this book is its realism. Gribben makes excellent use of private papers and unpublished manuscripts to stitch together details of Owen’s life previously lost to us. Although he has respect for Owen, he does not slip into hagiography and points out the moments in which Owen had clear agendas and worked hard to promote his own cause. This is an important reminder that even the best theologians should not become our untouchable heroes. He gives great attention to the proximate British context and the important events of Owen’s own setting that would have shaped his life and decisions. Gribben follows the historical evidence where it points him and presents a believable Owen: a real person with real-world concerns and frustrations, but one who cared deeply about his work and who left a massive literary output best understood as it relates to the life of the man who wrote it.

Gribben’s work is a significant contribution to the continuing discussion about Owen, and we can be glad he has brought new clarity to this important theologian.

HARRISON PERKINS is a postgraduate research student in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast.

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by Thomas S. Kidd Yale University Press, 2018 288 pages (paperback), $20.00

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B E N JA M I N FRANKLIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF A FOUNDING FATHER

as Benjamin Franklin an authentic Christian who subscribed to any orthodox confession of faith?

Responding to an inquiry about his faith from his friend Ezra Stiles, Congregational minister and president of Yale College, Franklin writes,

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I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his Providence.

That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we can render to him, is doing good to his other children.

That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. (234) In truth, Franklin was neither confessional nor an orthodox Christian. Instead, Thomas S. Kidd, a prolific historian of the United States at Baylor University, would have us claim Franklin as the pioneer of a distinctly American religion he describes as “doctrineless, moralized Christianity” (6). In his biography of Franklin, Kidd seeks to show “how much Franklin’s personal experiences shaped his religious beliefs” (5).

In nine lively and entertaining chapters, Kidd charts Franklin’s trajectory from his

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Boston Puritan childhood and indentured servitude in his brother’s print shop to his rise as a self-made man and essayist in Philadelphia’s printing and newspaper industry, and finally to his career as a statesman for Pennsylvania and the newly formed United States. Slavery, philosophy, romantic relationships with younger women, and vegetarianism are just a few of the topics broached in this biography. Along the way, Kidd ably demonstrates Franklin’s continual interaction with religion and avoids forcing him into the neat categories of believer, atheist, or the more protean “deist.” Instead, Kidd suggests Franklin slid along a spectrum of belief and skepticism, and the devout faith of his sister Jane Mecom and his unlikely friend, George Whitefield, served to “tether him”—one of Kidd’s preferred phrases—to the faith of his parents.

Chapters 1 through 3 treat Franklin’s childhood, bookish youth, and establishment as a printer in Philadelphia in his early twenties. Chapters 4 through 6 treat Franklin’s successful career as a printer, his fame for his experiments with electricity, and his friendship and business relationship with Whitefield, for and about whom he printed vast amounts of literature. Chapters 7 through 9 and the conclusion bring Franklin through his

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diplomatic stays in England and France. Kidd indeed shows how Franklin’s different contexts shaped his religious ideas. Where his stays in Europe broadened his view of religion (195), his experience of the American Revolution brought him closer to his parents’ Reformed view of fallen humanity (224). Despite these developments, moralism remained the core of his belief.

Despite my following critiques, I commend the biography to readers interested in church history, colonial America, and the founding fathers. The lack of a bibliography is unfortunate but expected, as is the use of endnotes.

Several quotations and references to concepts were unfortunately not cited, but the text is largely free of typographical errors and repetition from chapter to chapter.

Kidd mainly endorses Max Weber’s theory about a Protestant work ethic stemming from anxiety over one’s election or reprobation (3, 16, 100, 162). I would have appreciated actual critical engagement with Weber’s theory rather than passing approval. Kidd also seems to generalize various forms of Protestantism, flattening out differences between theological views. For example, he portrays both Franklin’s father and Whitefield as devout Calvinists, yet Whitefield’s evangelistic practices subverted Reformed ecclesiology. Thus Whitefield may have encouraged Franklin on his course of doctrinal innovation, even while he “tethered” him to conservative Protestantism. In addition, such a use of the term “Calvinism” refers primarily to soteriology, effectively attempting to extract it from the other loci of Reformed theology. In my view, Calvinism is shorthand for the complete body of doctrine contained within the Reformed confessions, and careless use of the term hints at evangelical doctrinal minimalism. Kidd’s largest underlying claim is that: Franklin was the pioneer of . . . doctrineless, moralized Christianity. Franklin was an experimenter at heart, and he tinkered with a novel form of Christianity, one where virtually all beliefs became nonessential.

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. . . For Franklin, Christianity remained a preeminent resource for virtue. But he had no exclusive attachment to Christianity as a religious system or as a source of salvation. (6–7) As far as Franklin’s religious descendants today, Kidd identifies “doctrineless, moralized Christianity” as “America’s most common code of spirituality” (7–8). Pointing to such figures as Oprah Winfrey and Joel Osteen as its proponents, Kidd adapts sociologist Christian Smith’s term “moralistic, therapeutic deism” to describe this phenomenon. In doing so, he makes no reference to the influence of pagan, gnostic, and pantheistic ideas on late-modern American religion. And yet, Dr. Franklin’s gouty shoulders cannot bear this load alone.

It would have been simpler to draw a connection between Franklin’s religion and Modernism, whether of Schleiermacher or the Protestant mainline churches. Franklin’s creed echoes Modernism’s universal fatherhood of God and universal brotherhood of man, its skeptical denial of supernatural intervention in history (Franklin spoke of a generic “God” and impersonal Providence), its kernel-andhusk approach to Scripture, and especially its exaltation of ethics over doctrine. Moreover, both Franklin and Modernism instrumentalized religion for social and political ends.

Kidd’s admirable historical scholarship aside, his overarching claim linking Franklin to progressive spirituality and his analysis of contemporary American religion fall short because he politely declines to acknowledge that doctrineless Christianity, to borrow a line from J. Gresham Machen, “not only is a different religion from Christianity but it belongs in a totally different class of religions.”

Doctrineless Christianity is not Christianity, and that is where the “electrifying” enigma of Franklin’s religion and its alleged progeny loses its charge.

J. G. AMATO is a member of the United Reformed Churches

in North America and a graduate student of history at Stanford University.

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JESUS AND THE EYEWITNESSES: THE GOSPELS AS EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

by Richard Bauckham Eerdmans, 2017 (2nd ed.)

704 pages (hardback), $50.00

t has been over a decade since Richard Bauckham’s critically acclaimed book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses was first published.

Last spring, Eerdmans released a new edition with three completely new chapters, a new preface and an updated bibliography. In his foreword to this second edition, Cambridge scholar Simon Gathercole acknowledges the importance of Bauckham’s original work in the world of New Testament scholarship: “Whenever I have been asked over the past ten years what the most significant recent books in my discipline are, I have invariably made mention of this book” (xi).

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Not long after Jesus and the Eyewitnesses was first released, we had the opportunity to interview Bauckham on White Horse Inn; and in that conversation, he laid out his overall approach: The gospels are actually full of all kinds of little detail about people and places, and all kinds of stuff about the historical context in which the stories take place. So that’s one way of verifying that the Gospels are credible from that geographical-historical context that they claim to be about.

And that I think is one of the most important historical methods of confirming

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Recommended by Leah Baugh and Tim Massaro

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testimony. You see, the term “testimony” of course implies that we can’t actually verify independently everything that the witness says. The whole point of a witness is that they tell you something you don’t know yourself. But what you can do is assess witnesses as either trustworthy or untrustworthy. And if you decide that a witness is trustworthy, then you trust them. . . . This truth to the context—correspondence to the historical context at the time in which the stories are set—is a key method that Gospel scholars have neglected.

One fascinating aspect of Bauckham’s work relates to his use of Tal Ilan’s database of Palestinian Jewish names. Essentially, he argues that when you combine all the names from the four Gospels and the book of Acts, the ten most commonly used names are strikingly similar to the top ten names of this larger database of some three thousand names from this same time and place. By contrast, when you examine the names of characters from the Gnostic Gospels, other than those found in the canonical Gospels, they are invariably names that were uncommon in first-century Palestine. Jens Schröter, a New Testament Scholar at the Humboldt University of Berlin, was critical of this part of Bauckham’s research, saying that this “simply shows that the Gospel authors gave their narratives a realistic effect.”

Bauckham took the opportunity to respond to Schröter and others in this new updated edition as follows: Even supposing that a Gospel writer would try to make the range of his names realistic . . . he was only responsible for one Gospel.

Nobody planned the . . . data we get from putting all four Gospels together. . . . While contemporaries would realize that some names were common and others rare, they are unlikely to have known . . . the relative proportions of name usage. . . . The evidence is therefore much more precise . . . and strongly suggests that . . . the names are those of historic individuals. (543–44)

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The first of Bauckham’s three new chapters is an evaluation—or revisitation, as he calls it— of the eyewitnesses in Mark’s Gospel. Most of the claims of this gospel, the author argues, are rooted in the eyewitness testimony of Peter and sometimes other members of the Twelve. But this makes the reports of the crucifixion scene all the more interesting, given the fact that none of the Twelve were actually reported as being present during this crucial period. Bauckham observes that the way women are described in this portion of Mark’s Gospel “seems to me to leave hardly any possible doubt that Mark is naming them as the eyewitnesses of the most critical events of his whole Gospel narrative, and indicating that they were the source . . . of his own accounts of these events” (521). According to Bauckham, this becomes “obvious” when one attends to “the repeated use of verbs for seeing in connexion with these women” (521; cf. Mark 15:40–16:7).

In the second new chapter, Bauckham further develops the argument he made in the first edition: that the Beloved Disciple should be seen as a unique Jerusalem disciple, who is not to be equated with the apostle John. One of the reasons he gives for this relates to the absence of the Twelve in Mark’s Gospel. If one of the Twelve had actually been present during Jesus’ crucifixion, then why would Mark (or the other Synoptics, for that matter) resort to the eyewitness testimony of a few women in a culture that did not value their testimony (cf. Luke 24:11)?

But according to the Fourth Gospel, the Beloved Disciple was present at Golgotha, which is a fact difficult to account for if this figure is to be equated with the apostle John. Bauckham also spends a good amount of time in this chapter defending his view of the authorship question by interacting with the claims of various conservative critics.

The final new chapter is titled “The End of Form Criticism (Confirmed)” and is perhaps the boldest of the three additions, given that the author himself refers to his own argument as an “extreme conclusion” (590). In fact, he goes on to say that once we look hard at the evidence, we’ll see that form criticism “is no more than a

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ghost, haunting the corridors of Gospels studies” (603). Bauckham sums up the situation for us nicely: Scepticism has become endemic in Gospel studies as a result of form criticism. Many New Testament scholars seem to suppose that the more sceptical of the sources they are, the more rigorously historical is their method. But this is not how historians usually work. In good historical work it is no more an epistemic virtue to be sceptical than it is to be credulous. In everyday life, we do not systematically mistrust everything anyone tells us. When someone who is in a position to know what they tell us does so, we normally believe them. But we keep our critical faculties alert and raise questions if there is specific reason to doubt. (613) This new updated edition of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is must reading for New Testament students and scholars alike. In N. T. Wright’s words, it is “a remarkable piece of detective work.” If you already own the first edition, list it for sale on eBay and get yourself a copy of this newer second edition.

SHANE ROSENTHAL is the executive director of White Horse Inn radio broadcast, and a ruling elder at Christ Presbyterian Church in St. Charles, Missouri.

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SILENCE A NOVEL

ince director Martin Scorsese turned it into a film last year, many have written about Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence. The novel is a compelling story that addresses two important questions by depicting the thoughts, emotions, and struggles of real historical characters and events. The novel combines personal letters and narrative prose, all from the perspective of Jesuit priest Sebastião Rodrigues.

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by Shūsaku Endō Picador Classics, 2016 256 pages (hardback), $16.00

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In this novel, Japan is in the midst of trying to stop the spread of Roman Catholicism by forcing any priests who refuse to leave to apostatize.

Rodrigues and fellow priest Francisco Garrpe travel to Japan in search of their mentor, Cristóvão Ferreira, who has reportedly apostatized after being tortured. When they arrive in Japan, they minister to the Japanese Catholics in secret while asking about Ferreira. Before they have a chance to find him, however, they are captured. The narrative describes Rodrigues’s inner turmoil to keep his faith during his imprisonment and interrogation by Japanese officials. The Japanese argue with him that Roman Catholicism is not compatible with Japan and must be allowed to die out. While never tortured himself, he witnesses the torture, apostasy, and martyrdom of several Japanese Catholics, which causes him to wonder why God stays silent in the midst of his people’s suffering.

Rodrigues cries out in anguish, “Why are you silent? Here this one-eyed man has died—and for you.”

When the Japanese officials present the people with the opportunity to apostatize, they tell them to walk on a rock that bears an image of Christ—called a fumie—as the sign of their renunciation. After they capture Rodrigues, the Japanese officials bring Father Ferreira to him.

Ferreira then tells him he apostatized not to end his own torture but to end the suffering of the Japanese. He argues that their Christian beliefs cannot survive in Japan and that Christ himself would have apostatized to save the people from their torture. The book comes to its climax when Rodrigues finds himself in Ferreira’s position and is forced to decide what to do.

The novel is a compelling and thought-provoking read. Endō not only gives us a piercing glimpse into history, but he also provides us with raw insight into the thoughts and emotions of a man facing a question still relevant today: Is God silent?

Reading this novel brings us into this struggle, helps us feel the tension, and forces us to wrestle alongside Rodrigues.

Silence, however, has a second thread running through it. It surfaces in the conversations Rodrigues has with the Japanese officials who argue with him that a religion steeped in Western

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influence, tradition, and history cannot simply be transplanted into another country with a different history and culture. The question Rodrigues faces at the end of the book is whether it is possible to be Japanese and love Christ. In an interview, Endō admits that this is a recurring theme in his writing: From the time I first began to write novels even to the present day, this confrontation of my Catholic self with the self that lies underneath has, like an idiot’s constant refrain, echoed and reechoed in my work. I felt that I had to find some way to reconcile the two.* I recommend reading the novel for the questions it wrestles with and forces us to wrestle with along with the author and characters. I also recommend the book for its provocative and intensely personal depiction of the history of political and cultural clashes of the time. The Jesuit missionaries represented Western influence to the Japanese rulers, and rooting out Roman Catholicism was as much a political move as it was religious.

That being said, it is important to note that the novel is just that, a novel. It offers no particularly insightful theological conclusions, and what theology is portrayed by Father Rodrigues is Roman Catholic and not Protestant. While the novel doesn’t provide satisfactory answers to the questions it raises, the very fact that it raises these questions makes the book worth reading.

LEAH BAUGH is a staff writer at Modern Reformation.

* “Shūsaku Endō: Japanese Catholic Novelist,” Thought (Winter 1967), quoted in the Translator’s Preface, Silence by Shusaku Endo, trans.

William Johnston (New York: Picador Modern Classics), xviii.

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GEEK SQUAD

The Well-read Christian

by Rick Ritchie

he well-read life was the aspiration of bygone saints. For them, heaven on earth was a scriptorium, where illuminated manuscripts and scrolls containing the collected knowledge, wisdom, and misinformation of the ages were available to the literate for their use, enjoyment, and befuddlement.

There are three stages in the history of God’s people that can be used to show three ways Christians can benefit from reading. Tradition itself is no infallible standard that can be imposed on the consciences of Christians; but if past practice can be shown to be reasonable, we may miss something worthwhile if we ignore it.

The first stage in the histor y of God’s people with books came with the writing of

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the Scriptures. Unlike an oral tradition, written Scriptures required literacy in order to be understood, so the people became literate. Some argue that what we know as historic Christianity is a late development. Primitive Christianity, they say, was an undogmatic, private experience—until basilica-building bishops, seeing that laypeople with direct access to God couldn’t be controlled, foisted upon the church a collection of politically useful documents. The church has been chained to the Scriptures ever since.

Contrary to these revisionists, Christianity has always derived its very life from the written text. In the Bible itself, the words of Scripture are so identified with the words of God that the words God and Scripture

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GEEK SQUAD

are used interchangeably. The apostle Paul even uses the expression “Scripture says to Pharaoh” (Rom. 9:17) about an occasion when Moses speaks God’s words to Pharaoh (Exod.

9:13–19). A high view of Scripture is no late invention of second-century clergy; it is the view of St. Paul himself.

Biblical religion’s focus on the written word of God has always naturally led to literacy among God’s people. It is common when arguing the authority of the Bible with an unbeliever to be asked the question, “But wasn’t this believed by primitive people who didn’t even know how to read or write?” The answer is that a written revelation led to a literate society. The synagogue was an educational institution that required literacy, as it was in the synagogue that the Scriptures were read.

According to Scripture, Jesus read (Luke 4:16) and wrote (John 8:6). His accusing questions to the Pharisees begin with the words, “Have you not read…?” (Matt. 12:3, 5; 19:4; 21:16, 42; 22:31; Mark 2:25; 12:10, 26), suggesting that his hearers were readers who should have read with more diligence. People of the book were always a literate people.

CRITICS OF CULTURE BECOME CULTURED The second stage came with the confrontation of Christian teaching with pagan learning. When learned pagans argued that Christianity was unreasonable, Christian teachers had to know how to refute, reinterpret, or assimilate the teachings of their opponents. Critics of paganism became literary critics.

A commitment to reading and knowing Scripture was not enough to prepare the early church to evangelize the world for Christ. Early on, Christianity was besieged by well-educated unbelievers and heretics. In many cases, topnotch argumentation was not needed to keep Titus and Claudia from abandoning the faith.

For a while, any argument might do. Besides, pastors had enough to do persuading their

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hearers to avoid the arena. Over time, however, arguments had to be met, and this meant that someone had to do the hard work of coming to grips with pagan thought.

One example of this, documented in George Grant’s Heresy and Criticism, is the way the early church responded to the ancient practice of literary criticism. Pagan literary critics threatened to undermine the validity of the Christian writings by attacking their internal consistency on the one hand (displaying alleged contradictions), and their origin on the other (claiming they were written by someone different from traditional claims, or claiming they had been altered). Christian apologists responded by learning literary criticism and either critiquing their opponents’ methods or using the critics’ techniques to prove Scripture’s logical consistency and apostolic authorship.

Christians were drawn into the pursuit of pagan learning to combat paganism and became more cultured in the process.

It happened again during the Middle Ages when the universities encountered Aristotle through his Islamic commentators. The result was a breathtaking synthesis of Christian and secular learning that commanded the respect of the learned and still finds adherents in our time.

This can happen today as well. In many cases, it is the Christian apologists who are our best guides for broadening our mental horizons.

Many will pick up a book by C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, or John Warwick Montgomery to learn how to defend their faith against unbelief, only to have those authors interest them in any number of other subjects. These were men of broad learning. C. S. Lewis was a poet, a medievalist, and a philosopher. G. K. Chesterton was a journalist. J. W. Montgomery is a lawyer and a theologian. These men are capable of illustrating the correspondence of Christianity to the known world using knowledge from many fields because they studied all subjects asking the question, “How does this relate to what Christianity teaches?”

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PAST LIVES BECOME PRESENT OPTIONS

A PRESCRIPTION

Although the beginning of the third stage cannot be located with any precision, this stage begins for any Christian reader when the ability of a book to set forth possibilities is exploited to a Christian end, allowing the Christian reader to explore the feasibility of other forms of Christian life. For this purpose, I suggest old Christian books. Even when we have weeded out those deviants who espoused damnable heresies or held to grossly deficient views of grace, the remainder is a surprising lot. Aside from a rereading of the New Testament, a reading of old Christian authors is probably the best way of challenging our own complacency with our understanding of the good Christian life. In fact, sometimes it is better.

Jesus was able to point out the specific holes in his contemporaries’ ethics. The inspired writings of the prophets were certainly sufficient to prove the points Jesus made if anyone would make the application. The problem is that we seldom do. And like those who failed to see how the prophets’ words applied to new first-century conditions, we seldom make the application of Jesus’ words to our own situation with any ease. Many applications are strained, the most tenuous becoming the favorites of retreat speakers and youth leaders. We believe we are teaching Scripture when we present stale recipes for victorious Christian living, but this has not led to a better understanding of the Christian life. The problem is not with the clarity of Scripture, but with our own perspective on our lives. We take the environment in which we have grown up for granted. It is difficult to criticize precisely because we cannot see it for what it is. Does the fish criticize the ocean for being salty? Another of the benefits of reading is its ability to combat what C. S. Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield referred to as “chronological snobbery,” which is the assumption that the present age is to be held superior to the past merely because it came later—that history is a record of uninterrupted progress.

There is so much to be gained from reading, but my call is not merely for Christians to read, but to read more, to read more broadly, to read more broadly together. Reading more makes reading easier. The more material you have been exposed to, the more you will be capable of reading. We need a grid on which to hang facts and perceptions. Reading gives us categories, and the more categories we have and (what is more important) the more solidly these categories are fixed in our minds, the more we will be able to glean from what we read and experience.

Reading more broadly keeps us from getting into ruts. Narrow reading makes the world itself seem narrow. Broad reading reminds us that the world is enormous. It also allows us to see the same thing from different points of view.

Reading broadly together will keep us from always being on a new crusade to the bewilderment of our Christian friends.

The Christian purpose of all of this reading is to glorify God. Reading alone may do this, but when we become passionate about an issue, it is nice to have company. When we see things rightly, others can support us; when we miss the mark, they can correct us. It is gratifying, however, when the new viewpoint that seems so exciting to us is adopted by the others. When we make a new discovery, it will often seem implausible for the simple fact that no one around us sees what we now see. If friends travel the same road, all is different.

I wish you a well-read life, and I hope that as time goes on we will have more fellow-travelers to bump into. It makes the journey more enjoyable.

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RICK RITCHIE is a long-time contributor to Modern Refor-

mation. He blogs at www.1517legacy.com.

This article originally appeared in the July/August 1994 issue of Modern Reformation. It has been adapted from the original for brevity and clarity.

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04

B AC K PAG E

Best-sellers

by Eric Landry

n 1994, evangelical historian Mark Noll wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and as many authors have noted ever since, the real scandal is that there didn’t seem to be much of an evangelical mind to even study! I thought it would be helpful to conclude this issue, which we have devoted to important books and how truth is communicated in our time, by revisiting the largely pessimistic view that many of us have had of Christian publishing.

What can the most popular books on sale today tell us about the current state of the evangelical mind? Each month, the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association sends out a list of best-sellers. Here are the current “Top 10” as I write this:

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1. The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman (Moody) 2. Jesus Calling by Sarah Young (Nelson) 3. Live Fearless by Sadie Robertson (Nelson) 4. Anxious for Nothing by Max Lucado (Nelson) 5. The Masterpiece by Francine Rivers (Tyndale) 6. Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis (Nelson) 7. Uninvited by Lysa Terkeurst (Nelson) 8. The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey (Nelson) 9. Capital Gaines by Chip Gaines (Nelson) 10. Jesus Always by Sarah Young (Nelson)

The first thing that strikes me about this list is the monopoly that a few publishers have on the general market: eight of the top ten best-selling books are published by the same company. The monthly list shows the top fifty

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books, and of those, almost half are published by Thomas Nelson. Nelson, of course, is now part of HarperCollins—one of the largest publishing companies in the world. While a large and successful company can marshal the resources necessary to promote an author’s book, it seems that they are in a rut with the same types of books and authors. Somehow these make their way to the “best-seller” list, and because they’re on the “best-seller” list, the average evangelical reader keeps buying them.

You can see that lack of originality in the kind of book that dominates the top ten list— Christian self-help. Whether it is in the form of mystical conversations with Jesus, inspirational sto­ries of success, practical guides to living, or the basic self-help books themselves, evangelicals can’t seem to get away from schemes of self-salvation. We should be quick to realize that this is not entirely the fault of the bookbuying public. It’s generally what they find on the Christian bookstore shelf (again, because they’re “best-sellers”) or find on these lists.

Only one book doesn’t fit the self-help genre, The Masterpiece by Francine Rivers. Honestly, after reading all of those self-help books, who can blame the poor reader who just wants to escape into a bit of Christian romance! Still, as we have seen in this issue, there is a wealth of excellent books available for Christian readers.

Let’s encourage them to look higher and deeper into those bookshelves.

ERIC LANDRY is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

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