Book Reviews

Summary: It is not a violation of faith in Christ’s work, to pay attention to our own soul.

Lately I have been increasingly frustrated with Christian Living books. Particularly their introductions. I think I first noticed this strongly with James Bryan Smith’s The Good and Beautiful Life, but I have noticed the problem with a number of other books as well.

Maybe it is my problem and not one else need pay attention. But if I have to diagnose a more general problem, it is that for some reason Evangelicals seem to need to over compensate in their introductions for the general feedback that they think they are going to hear. And worse that overcompensation seems to be particularly focused on clichés. The books that are am frustrated with often have some really good content, once I get past the general introductions. But several times I have been so frustrated with the cliche-ridden introductions that I have had to force myself past them.

Soul Keeping has this problem. I really love that John Ortberg is writing a book that is as much about a tribute to the work of Dallas Willard in his life as it is about soul keeping as a subject. But honestly, I don’t need to be convinced that it is important to think about and work on my own spiritual health. I have been seeing a spiritual direction for over a year now. I read Christian books incessantly. I go to church regularly and while far from perfect, I really do think I am paying attention to my spiritual life for a lot of good reason. And the primary reason I don’t need to hear about the importance of spiritual care is that I grew up as an Evangelical (as would most of the readers).

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Takeaway: Very few take Jesus seriously when he about having a different type of kingdom.

As American Christians have started looking again at their eschatology (view of the end times) and moving away from dispensationalism, more Christians are starting to see that the implications of their eschatology affect many areas of their Christian life.

For instance, a number of Christians have adopted a more nuanced position on ecological issues after rejecting the traditional Dispensational idea that the physical earth was simply waiting to be destroyed as punishment for the sins of the world.  So if the earth was not condemned, then God’s command to be stewards of the earth in Genesis might still be a present command.

Brian Zahnd began re-evaluating his support of war (after originally supporting the first Gulf war and then the wars after 9/11) in response to a new look at Jesus’ words in the Gospels.  Repeatedly throughout the book, in one way or another, Zahnd asks, “What if Jesus really meant what he said.”

For Christians that really try to take scripture seriously, this is a deeply disturbing question.  It is hard not to think that Zahnd has a real point if you have heard just a few sermons from the Sermon on the Mount.  We tend to spiritualize the Sermon on the Mount, not put it into practice.

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Summary: Three essays about the church.

I have been working on a two month free trial of Scribd, a Kindle Unlimited and Oyster competitor that offers unlimited access to their library (a Netflix for Books) but also has 30,000 audiobooks. It is the audiobooks I am interested in. Scribe has a far better selection of audiobooks than Kindle Unlimited. And the ebooks selection at Oyster is roughly the same as Scribd’s.

I will post a review of the service in the next week or so. By that time I will have used the service for a month.

Included in the audiobooks is several short collections of CS Lewis’ essays. These are all included in the larger CS Lewis: Essay Collection and Short Pieces, which has 135 essays. That is a little too overwhelming to tackle. But these smaller collections are organized thematically and much shorter. This one on the Church is only 3 essays and 36 minutes long.

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Reposting this review from earlier this year because the kindle edition is on sale for $1.99.
Takeaway: A Classic 20th Century Missionary Biography

Christians have been writing missionary biographies for a long time.  The purpose of these biographies is to raise interest in the work, to raise money for the work, to encourage Christian to evangelism and missions in their back yard and to build greater trust and devotion to God in the reader’s lives.

The first time I ran across Brother Andrew was a comic book version of God’s Smuggler originally published in the early 1970s.  I think I later read the full version of the book as a teen (but I may not have).

A couple months ago Christianaudio.com was giving away an MP3 of the audiobook of God’s Smuggler and I picked it up.

It is interesting that in light of my recent reading of God of the Mundane, I spent most of the book thinking about the relationship between special callings (like Brother Andrew) and the mundane calling of the majority of us Christians.

God’s Smuggler is the story of Brother Andrew, a Dutch Christian who became famous for smuggling bibles to Christians behind the Iron Curtain and into China and more recently for his work in the Muslim world.  God’s Smuggler spends a lot of time making Brother Andrew seem like an average guy (barely any education, married with several children, poor background) except for the fact that he trusts God to blind the eyes of border guards so that he can sneak bibles into the eastern block.

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Summary: How out we to live? What really exists? How to we Know?

Very Short Introduction series has been pretty hit or miss, as are most short introductions. It is hard to introduce a subject that has thousands of books and thousands of professionals working in the areas.

Philosophy is one of the better ones. My background in philosophy was pretty weak. I have tended toward theology instead of philosophy and while there can be some overlap, as I am getting older I feel my lack of background more and more often as I am reading.

Craig made some good decisions in structuring the books. He focused on the three questions in the summary as three of the questions that have been a part of philosophy since the beginning and continue to be important. Then he looks at Plato, Hume and an unknown Buddhist philosopher to illustrate how those questions were handled.

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Takeaway: Someone that has found meaning in a new stream of Christianity may not be the best person to talk about the stream of Christianity that they walked away from.

Over the past couple years I have been intentionally trying to read books about Catholicism and part of that has been reading several stories of Evangelicals that have become Catholic, like Scott Hahn, Francis Beckwith, and Christian Smith. I have been less interested in stories of Catholics that have become Evangelicals but I did think I needed to read “˜the other side.’

Chris Castaldo, has a chapter in Journey of Faith, a book telling the story of people converting from one Stream of Christianity to another, so I was somewhat familiar with his story. Holy Ground, however, is not so much about Castaldo’s own story as it is a book about Catholicism for Evangelicals. And I think that is where my problem really started.

The overall approach was to explain Catholicism to Evangelicals primarily using the reasons that former Catholics became Evangelical. This is has the inherent problem of not looking at those that are happy with their Catholic faith, but looking at those that are unhappy (or in most cases just unaware of their Catholic faith because of a lack of participating in it.) Castaldo is a good example of that.  While he was baptized as an infant and seems to have participated fairly frequently as a young child, once he was confirmed neither he nor the rest of his family actively participated in the church. And from my experience, this seems to be common with Catholic converts. I honestly don’t know a single person that has become Evangelical as a former Catholic if they were active. (While most Evangelical converts to Catholicism that I know of are very active in their church, theologically trained and often clergy.)

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