Summary: Jesus is Lord does not necessarily mean that early Christians were also saying Caesar is not.

Jesus is Lord, Caesar is Not sounded like a great book that I desperately wanted to read.  In the end I found it was a good book that I probably could have read a review of instead.  That is not to say it isn’t worth reading.  Just to say it was not worth reading for me.

You see I have previously thought that thinking about Christianity in terms of Empire or Anti-Empire could be useful, but either way often put more emphasis on the writer’s political views than on the actual biblical evidence.

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Takeaway: Worship, Spiritual Development, Discipleship, all are based on what we do, not just what we think.  Plans for growth and worship based primarily on knowledge break down and leave Christians ill prepared for actual life as a Christian.

It has been six weeks since I have finished Imagining the Kingdom and I am still not sure how to write the review.  But I finally decided that the review is not going to get better the longer I think about it, it is going to get worse.  So I need to just write and apologize for not having fully processed this book.

Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works has a deceptively simple premise.  Growth is based on practice.

Early in the book is a memorable illustration.  Smith, having being influenced by his his wife to read more about eating healthy looks around for a pen to highlight a passage from one of Michael Polen’s books.  As he is looking around he realizes that he is sitting (and eating) in a Costco food court.

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Takeaway: The variety of ways that the Christian church understands wealth and economics has a long history.

One of the reasons that we should read Christian history is because it can give us context for our own modern issues.

Because there are limited sources for late Roman history, Brown uses a variety of historical methods. Most interesting for me was the personal narrative of Christians, Augustine, Ambrose, and a number of people that I had no knowledge of prior to this book.

Culture has always influenced Christianity. So late Roman culture expected those of great wealth to give gifts to the city either through the games and circuses or through community building projects.

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Summary: Highly recommended book about biblical translations.

I do not have a lot of patience for bible version arguments.  But we continue to see large and divisive fights over English translations of scripture.

I think one of the biggest reasons for those arguments is the wealth of options that we have.  No other language has literally scores of options. There have been 19 new translations or major revisions of English language bibles just since 2000 (and 80 complete translations in the last century).  As far as I know, no other language has even 19 different translations.

The biggest fight in the English Bible translation world is between ‘word for word’ or literal bibles (like ESV or NASB) and ‘dynamic equivalence translations (like NIV or NLT) and paraphrase versions (like The Message).

Brunn’s primary purpose is to show that the way that the argument is usually framed is not honest to the reality of biblical translation.  One of the strengths of the book is that Brunn has been a bible translator for Wycliffe and tries to focus primarily on real examples and not just theory of translation.

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Summary: Short, highly readable book that would make a great discussion in a teen or 20/30 something mens group.

The subject of what it means to be a man in the modern world fraught with difficulty.  We mix up ideas of gender, personality, aggression, control, authority, biblical understanding and more.

Rhett Smith, author of the highly recommended book, The Anxious Christian, and a family counselor tackles the concept of manhood in a very readable (and short) book that is perfect for discussion.

I (sort of) participated in an online discussion group about this book that Rhett hosted. (I am horrible with book clubs that reads a book slowly, I want to read it straight through and discuss it).

Rhett said that he intentionally kept the book short so that there would be little reason not to read it.  The shortness makes it great for discussion groups, but has less detail than I would like.

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Reposting because the Kindle edition is on sale for $3.99.

Summary: The Church at its core is about reaching people outside its walls for Christ.

Right off the top, I love my church.  Andy Stanley is my pastor.

If I had to recommend this book for only one reason it would be because this book, more than any other I can think of, casts the vision for why the church has to be focused on those outside the church. If there is one thing that Andy Stanley is passionate about (and writes well about) it is the fact that most churches need to do everything they can to reach people that are not in church.

I should not need to repeat statistics about the fact that most churches baptize very few adults because of conversion.  Or the recent statistic that says that most Christian adults believe that they are instructed to share their faith, but admit that they have not in the last year shared their faith with anyone.

I do not believe that the attractional church model is the only model for church.  In fact, I think that organic church and missional church are two other models that are very important to drawing in people that have almost no background in the church to Christ.

However, Deep And Wide is unapologetic about the fact that one of the most important ways that people become Christians is that they are invited to church by a friend or family member, and then they are confronted with God (usually over time, often over years) and are changed because of that confrontation.  Deep and Wide is both Andy’s story and the story of North Point.

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Summary: An important look at the historical development of the Doctrine of the Trinity and how modern language drift has changed the historical definitions.

I have been looking forward to reading the Quest for the Trinity ever since I first heard about it in the middle of last year.  Consistently it has been well reviewed and it certainly deserves the accolades.  Holmes know his historical theology, he is very well read and no other book on the trinity I have read so far has been as well documented.

But I intentionally was holding off on reading this because just by reading the description and I knew he was reacting against the modern theological work around the trinity.  And it was the more recent (primarily social focused) theology of the Trinity that drew me toward investigating the trinity more.

The basic thesis is that the modern focus is fundamentally different from the Patristic understanding of the Trinity.  This is not actually all that hard to capture.  One of the things I most liked about Dunzl’s Doctrine of the Trinity is that he clearly showed that doctrinal development is at least partially dependent on language and culture of the time.  You cannot move beyond the current ability to describe the theology you are trying to document into a doctrine.

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Summary: A well written succinct account of the Catholic church.  Primarily concerned with the workings and practice of the church. Written in a question and answer format, which is wearing after awhile.

Over the past year or so I have been reading to understand more about the Catholic church.  I have read several accounts of conversion from Protestant to Catholic. I have read Robert Barron’s Introduction to Catholicism and Scott Hahn’s 40 Catholic Customs and their Biblical Roots and Richard Rohr’s Why Be Catholic.  I have read Mark Noll’s evaluation of the state of the Catholic church and Evangelical/Catholic Relations.  I even have read (but not yet reviewed) the first of the Pope’s books on Jesus.

But all of these books have been either primarily theological or primarily personal accounts of the Catholic church.  John Allen is the senior Vatican correspondant for the National Catholic Reporter and Vatican analyst for CNN.  This new introduction to the Catholic church (very conveniently released just as the conclave gets under way to elect a new Pope), is clearly the work of a journalist.

The writing is clear and punchy.  It gets straight to the point and it covers a wide swath of material.

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Summary: A modern take on CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.

I remember reading CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters when I was pretty young.  I am not sure, but I think I was probably 12 or 13.

It was just enough humor and story for me to be able to read, while at the same time absorbing some good theology.  I think that is what Matt Mikalatos is doing with Imaginary Jesus and Night of the Living Dead Christian (Bookwi.se Reviews), but there are not many other books that are trying to mix a light story wrapper on good theology.

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