Blogger Review Books

Takeaway: The Mystery of God is a real part of historical Christian Theology.  But it is not useful as a way to explain away all the difficult parts of the bible or theology.

As I have been reading about the Trinity over the past year or so, I have run across the idea of the mystery of God as an explanation of difficult parts of theology.  It often feels more like, “I don’t want to fully deal with this, so I will call it a mystery of God.”  At the same time I have been reading introductions to Catholic theology and a few books on the importance of beauty; in both areas there is a full embracing of the need for mystery, not just to explain difficult areas of theology, but to allow for the bigness, uniqueness and unpredictable ways of God.

So I accepted a review copy of the Mystery of God hoping it would touch on more of the later and less of the former.

Boyer and Hall exceeded my expectations.  The first part of the book is historical theology.  Hall and Boyer walk the reader through a variety of Christian theologians, Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Luther and others to illustrate that throughout Christian history the concept of God as unknowable has always been present.

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Summary: A Book summary of the 2011 Wheaton Theology Conference on Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I am always so excited to read the book produced from the papers of the Wheaton Theology Conference, but then I tend to have to force myself to finish the book.

It is not that the papers are bad, there are always some very good essays and a few that are less interesting to me (I am sure mostly because of different interests between myself and the authors more than the quality of the papers.)

Because these books are only loosely connected around the subject I tend to read a chapter or two and then put the book down and then pick it up again quite a while later.  I have been reading Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture for a couple months now on and off.

Timothy Larsen’s chapter on how Evangelicals have received Bonhoeffer over time was very interesting.  It was a good supplement to the biographies that I have read on Bonhoeffer because it was more about why we read Bonhoeffer than Bonhoeffer himself.  (Makes me want to read Martin Marty’s book on the history of Letters and Papers from Prison).

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Takeaway: Ways of reading scripture that we take for granted as today were revolutionary in the past.

Short histories, like the Armchair Theologian series or the Very Short Introduction series are hit or miss. Because the author usually has wide latitude to emphasize what they want and organize the books on their own, reading one book is not a good introduction to series.

Aquinas for Armchair Theologians gave a decent biography of Aquinas but focused on how Aquinas changed the nature of philosophy for the modern world.  It as very focused on explaining how to read Aquinas as a modern reader.

John Calvin for Armchair Theologians was very sparse on biography and mostly focused on walking through the structure of Calvin’s Institutes as an organizational structure for Calvin’s theology and thought process. In the process, it seems to not do a very good job introducing Calvin or his theology.

John Knox for Armchair Theologians is mostly a history of the Scottish Reformation and John Knox’s role in that.  While there are several interludes discussing Knox’s writing, there are only a handful of short quotations.  So if you are looking for an introduction to Knox’s theology, this is not it.

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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: 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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