Charles

Allen Mitsuo Wakabayashi is an area director in northern Illinois for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He has written an exciting and encouraging book on a topic that has not received the emphasis it deserves. After all, as he points out, the kingdom of God is the very focus that Jesus talked about during his earthly ministry. He came preaching the kingdom.

One thing I find is that most Christians do not have a good solid view of the kingdom of God. If they think about it at all, they usually equate it with the church. While the church is the nucleus of the kingdom, the kingdom itself is much broader. While the church focuses on carrying out the great commission of Jesus in making disciples and thus preparing people to live in the kingdom, the kingdom’s focus touches all areas of life. As Christians are discipled with a kingdom view, they will see the challenge and opportunity to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. They will take part in fostering a transformation of life-the culture and society around them.

Wakabayashi gives personal testimony regarding the centrality of the Kingdom of God theme and its influence upon the Christian life. Jesus said, “Seek you first the kingdom of God…” If those are Jesus’ words regarding a Christian’s first priority, then it behooves us to pay attention. The author said, “…the kingdom of God has become the foundation for my whole philosophy of ministry and understanding of the Christian life.”

Wakabayashi raises this situation, if seeking first the kingdom of God is the priority of the Christian life, then how can that be done without understanding what the kingdom is all about? He wrote this book to help bridge the gap between what Jesus said and where Christians are in their understanding.

We have also observed, as this book underscores, the church is either silent in speaking God’s word to the whole of life, or the church moves beyond its role and begins to do kingdom tasks not appropriate to the church. The church’s role in disciple making is to help its people develop a biblical world and life view. A kingdom perspective will enable them not only to learn “all things whatsoever Jesus has commanded,” but also to apply those truths to all of life with the help of the Holy Spirit.

The author underscores some ideas that correlate with our research, observations, and conclusion. He writes, “I believe that our Western individualism has caused us to misperceive and misunderstand the gospel in a way that blunts the gospel’s world-transforming force. Furthermore, the tradition of the Western church, steeped in this individualism, has stamped its approval on narrow conceptions of the gospel that leave us living in ways that do little to change the society around us” (page 17). He further states, “Where the gospel is supposed to explode into our world with transforming power, it has been co-opted by aspects of our culture so that it blinds us into a quiet cultural conformity” (ibid).

If we understand what it means to be a citizen of God’s kingdom and to seek first his kingdom, then we will be empowered to serve as God’s agents of change in the world. God does not call us to be cultural transformers but as we live as kingdom people, we will definitely impact our culture and society. Not only that, while we pray “your kingdom come, your will be done,” we will have a greater understanding and appreciation for the petition we so often say. As the church trains its people to live with a focus on God’s kingdom, non-believers will see the difference between God’s way and the world’s way.

The book has six parts containing fifteen chapters. Each chapter offers good instruction and ideas for application of the Christian life within the kingdom context. Our desire is to encourage Christians to seek and develop a kingdom perspective regarding the Christian life that will keep them from withdrawing their influence. It will equip them, as they are going into the world, to apply God’s truth to every aspect of their lives. As we state over and over, the kingdom mindset reminds us “it is not about us, it is about God.”

Read this book now, and when our book, Making Kingdom Disciples is available you will have a better foundation to understand why that theme is the focus of CEP in its five-year strategic faith plan.

The name Alister McGrath may or may not be familiar to you. I try to read everything that he writes. For the last twenty years, McGrath has been known as a person with great acumen in evangelical circles. He writes as a scientist, a theologian, a philosopher, and a knowledgeable evangelical Christian scholar. We have reviewed a number of his writings over the years and highly recommended each one, including A Passion for Truth and a biography of J. I. Packer.

McGrath personifies our challenge to know the word, the world, our surroundings, and how to communicate to this generation. He shows that Christianity is indeed a religion of the mind and heart founded on the word of God. In this book, he attempts to help the reader understand the tremendous change that has taken place in twentieth century relating to Christianity, but also in religion in general.

We are hearing the echoes of many disturbing yet challenging questions from numerous sources: Will Christianity survive and if so, what will it look like? What about religion in general and the church in particular? What does the future look like? Of course to answer those kinds of questions we need to understand not only where we have come from but also how we have arrived where we are. From that vantage, we can look at the trends and project where we might be headed.

For example, there is definitely a renewed or new interest in spiritual things. However, the interest is far different today from what we have seen in the past. It is multifaceted. Part of the resurgence stems from the rejection of the Enlightenment’s logical, rationalistic, and scientific approach to life. Another part of it stems from modernity’s attempt to privatize religion and remove it from the public square. Finally, some interest springs from a type of cynicism present in western civilization about all kinds of things: reason, logic, organized religion, televangelists, and distrust in church leaders.

McGrath poses a haunting question at the outset of his assessment. “Might the erosion of confidence in the institution of the church lead to a corresponding erosion of confidence in the Christian faith? Or might it open the door to new forms of Christianity emerging in the west, which deliberately play down the institutional aspects?” When coupled with the realization that the west is no longer the numerical center of the Christian faith because it has shifted to the developing world, we have to ask what is the future of Christianity, as we know it?

As McGrath so clearly points out, we must realize that “all is not well in the household of faith of the west, supremely the mainline Protestant denominations.” Though modernism subtly led us to either reject religion or to assign it to a private area of life, we cannot ignore religion today. One of the problems we face in dealing with people of Middle Eastern countries is they do not separate their religion from the rest of life. All is not simply political for them, as we attempt to make it in the west. As a result, many people who have responsibilities to fight evil and terror do not understand that strategy has to include religion as well as politics and economics.

What are some of the things we should anticipate and then how can we prepare to respond to them? For example, based on a present trend a global religion is rising which is an “amalgam, constructed to taste” of bits and pieces from different religions. There is a continued diminishing of Christian influence on culture, as demonstrated in European countries. Also, there’s a resurgence of Christianity in Africa countries. The global interface of Christianity-Islam is also an important dynamic.

From there McGrath talks about the death of American denominationalism. He quotes George Hunter who points out, “the real issue is how well churches are able to adapt to their host populations and communicate their faith in ways that connect with where people are.” This calls up the question, of “whether or not the denomination has any real future.” Since “evangelicalism” is transdenominational, should not the Christians of the future attempt to be transdenominational? Is there a valid place for denominations, as we have known them? He points out that we are seeing less and less demonstrated loyalty to denominations. Becoming like the culture in which we live has brought much of this about. The question is how far can we go with that? How can we keep it from leading us from the path of truth and the gospel? What should the standard of churches be today? The business model? The marketing strategies of the world around us? “The McDonaldization of Christianity” as McGrath calls it or the dumbing down of the Christian faith?

In chapter four, McGrath lists a number of challenges that are confronting Christianity. First there is the threat of fundamentalism, driven by the fear that secularism is out to eliminate religion. Also, there is the new fault line between Christianity and Islam. With Islam growing so rapidly globally, what will be its impact on Christianity? There is new ecumenical spirit that emphasizes putting aside differences, not only theological ones, but religious ones in general. Therefore, we face the challenge centered on “what forms of Christianity are likely to emerge from the complex forces that will shape the twenty-first century.”

With the widening gap between academic theology and the everyday life of the church, the danger is going to be, who is equipped to deal with all of these issues? How do we not throw out the baby with the bath water? How do we avoid a wholesale sellout of our Christian religion? How can biblical theology relate to the postmodern theology of today?

This is a must-read book for leaders and teachers. Part of our role is to help people understand the word in the context of today’s world. McGrath has plowed the ground for us. This book is more descriptive than prescriptive but that’s how the process works.

I define a kingdom disciple as a Christian who thinks God’s thoughts after him and seeks to apply those thoughts to every area of life. If that is true, that means we have a gauge for all of life. There are situations where it is so easy to put our brains in neutral and fail to apply hearts unto wisdom. Some say that many do that when they come to church, but we can definitely say that is true when the media comes into play. We are often tempted to put our thinking on hold while watching television or a movie. That’s one of the main reasons that the media has such a negative impact on our lives. That does not happen by design, but often because we do not have a good handle on how to think critically and with discernment.

In our local church, some of the men meet once a month for fellowship, pizza, movie viewing, and discussion of the film. Our emphasis is fourfold: to fellowship, to sensitize ourselves to the culture and society in which we live, to see what contributions films make to our thinking Christianly or non-Christianly, and to help one another think critically about what we see.

Brain Godawa helps us practice discernment and gain wisdom about our world and life. He is well equipped to write this book. He is a Christian and a screenwriter who has been influenced by at least a couple of PCA pastors. He understands that each movie contains a story and that story was good enough to result in a movie. Often, the story falls into one of two categories, the way life should be lived or the way life should not be lived. Stories contain ideas and ideas do have consequences.

Godawa says that Christians need balance in their lives. For example, they either become “cultural gluttons” who watch too many movies, or they become “cultural anorexics” who avoid them altogether. Whichever we chose, says Godawa, we generally rationalize our choice. He also reminds us that one person’s tolerance may be another person’s indulgence.

In the style of the late Francis Schaeffer, Godawa reminds us that the arts, including film, are “our God-given means of expressing our humanity.” “To reject the arts in toto is to reject the imago Dei, the image of God in humanity.” However, he also reminds us that we are a fallen people and our sinful nature has not yet been fully destroyed. He writes, “I will show in the following chapters that most movies follow a main character who seeks a specific goal and in so doing learns something about himself or herself and the world in a way that inevitably results in this person’s redemption-or lack thereof.”

I could write much about this book. I have found it to be both challenging and helpful in knowing how to view a film critically. I have also found it to be a reminder that we cannot afford to anesthetize our thinking capabilities, even when our goal is entertainment. Entertainment, according to the writer, “reinforces certain values over others, namely those that reflect the current fashion of the creative community.”

Godawa takes us through movie after movie to demonstrate the truth of his premise. He helps us identity the character and the story and then suggests ways to think about and evaluate the message. Each chapter contains a “watch and learn” section at the end that stimulates discussion questions.

One example you will want to think much about centers on the often-heard criticism that movies are full of sex, violence, and profanity. That they are! But Godawa challenges us to see how much of that is in the Bible. He helps us understand the importance of identifying the context where they are used. As we do that, we find that some are destructive while others are of a redemptive nature. I hope that will challenge you to read this book.

Pastors, teachers, parents need to understand how to be discerning in what we see in the media. We need to teach our covenant children and adults how to be discerning. We must help those to whom we have some responsibility know how to have a godly view of human life. This includes seeing through redemptive eyes how God’s plan and will contrast so drastically with the world’s. One way this seems to play out in recent films is the attempt to blur reality with virtual reality. Godawa points out that “the illusion/reality dilemma is a great story telling tool to challenge our assumptions about reality and truth, but taken to its extreme (that of denying all reality), it suffers under the weight of its own contradiction.”

In conclusion I would remind you of our beginning comments, the challenge for balance, discerning (thinking biblically), and understanding our world. This book will be of value in doing just that.

Here is a book that any Christian should have as a reference. There are other similar books which attempt to answer key questions regarding God, the Bible, theology, etc. Often Christians find themselves in difficult and embarrassing situations because they are asked hard questions and do not know how to respond. You know some of the questions: Where did the Bible come from? Who wrote the Bible? Where did the universe come from? What is God’s ultimate purpose in allowing evil? Why is Islam growing among black Americans?

We could go on with the topics covered in this helpful book. Because of the diversity of authors, some responses are better than others. Yet each one will give you some points to consider when faced with difficult questions. I agree with Ravi Zacharias that we are living in a time in which the church needs to be able to respond with intelligent answers to the questions being raised. This would be a helpful book for college students to have available.

I’ll site two or three excerpts from the responses to various questions to give you an idea of how the answers go. Question: Why does God not immediately do away with evil? Answer, in part: “Even though God’s ultimate solution to the problem of evil awaits the future, as I have argued, God has even now taken steps to ensure that evil doesn’t run utterly amok. God has given us human government to withstand lawlessness. God founded the church to be a light in the midst of darkness…”

“Are the copies of the Bible reliable? The biblical scribes were meticulous in how they copied Scripture. The overall reliability has been measured in several ways. First, with regard to any major doctrine in the Bible, there has been no loss whatsoever…. The Bible claims to be the Word of God. Both the internal and external evidence overwhelmingly reveal the accuracy…”

A third question: How might the church reach out to black Muslims? “Before the church can reach black Muslims, the church must first seek to mend the rift that exists between black and white Christians in America…. Once the black and white churches have buried the hatchet of divisiveness, they must collectively engage in local Islamic organizations in dialogue about the problems of race and make a good-faith effort to assist in rebuilding the black community.”

Those are some samples of the expanded answers in the book to those and many other questions. Contributors to this volume are William Lane Craig, Ronald Rhodes, L. T. Jeyachandran, Lee Strobel, and Robert White, along with Zacharias and Geisler.

The Christian faith did not start with our contemporary generations. God did not take a vacation when John laid down his pen at the end of Revelation. True, God’s biblical revelation ceased and therefore the Bible is not to be added to nor subtracted from. But God continues to work down through the history of the church. He enables leaders to continue to define, refine, and clarify direct and indirect teachings from the written word of the Old and New Testaments.

I try to read church history on a regular basis because I have found that if we take the time to learn about our roots, we spend less time fighting the crisis fires that spring up today. These “fires” include questions such as: Is Jesus God? What’s wrong with open theism, or liberation theology, or the development of the cults? We could even include issues like worship, the sacraments and the global missions movement as further examples. There is too much at stake for us to neglect reading what those who have gone before us have to say. That would be as wrong as to say that God is not working among us today to give us further understanding of his truth. In this book, Homes states he is attempting to show “that theology, at least, by being attentive to its own tradition, can teach by example…”

While the Bible is the inspired Word of God, theology is our attempt to understand that written word’s theology. Theology, therefore, is our attempt to express our understanding of biblical truth plus general revelation. Though there have been common threads that weave the different times in history together like a tapestry, we need to understand why and what went into the expression of that theology by the different church leaders. Holmes makes a clear case that if we are to study theology we have to have some understanding of theology’s tradition.

It sounds very good and pious to say, “I just read the Bible and don’t bother with tradition.” However, you will not understand the Bible apart from its history and tradition. Also, trying to read and study the Bible in a historical vacuum will undoubtedly lead you to some strange conclusions, e.g. the cults.

A statement in the book illustrates the author’s point in a clear way, “Calvin, although committed to the principle of sola scripture, none the less thought it important to stand within tradition of the Church. It is not just that Calvin owes much (indeed, more than is often recognised) to the immediately preceding theological tradition, although he does; the relevant point is that both the Institutes and in other places, he devotes considerable energy demonstrating the positions the Reformers are urging against the Roman Catholic Church are in fact more faithful to the Christian tradition than the Roman alternatives…”

If we could understand the issues over which Calvin and the Anabaptist differed, then we could understand more of 21^st Christendom. Holmes points out the big difference between the Anabaptist’s focus on “refounding” the church while Calvin’s emphasis was on “reforming” the church. They also held different views of the Eucharist. While tradition must never be elevated to the place of Scripture as the final rule of faith and practice, the church always “‘Reformed and being reformed’ [is] a slogan that indicates the constant desire of the Reformed Churches to seek further reformation from God.”

I could site many examples from the book of how knowing, studying, and appreciating tradition, in its proper place, is a key to the church’s understanding of itself and its role today. There is a chapter entitled “Calvin Against the Calvinists” that is worth the price of the book. Holmes develops the idea and gives examples of how the followers of Calvin “hardened and systematized his theology.” That is one of the reasons I believe it is important for us to read and study John Calvin today. He predated what we call modernism, with its enlightenment and Scottish Realism schools of thought, which attempted to make Calvinism appear to be something different than Calvin. Hence, Calvin often said and practiced that where Scripture stops, we stop. Therefore, everything may not be carried to its logical conclusion, as many of his successors attempted to do with their theology.

You will also enjoy the chapter, “Strange Voices: Edwards on the Will.” Holmes points out that we can do theology today with the attitude, “I will read those like Calvin and Edward and appreciate them in their context and time, but they do not speak to me today.” Or, we can read and learn how they developed their theology and be helped with our tasks today, not by simply restating what they said, but by using their teachings to clarify our theology.

I would say that Holmes’ basic thesis is that we need to listen to the past. When we study theology we always ask, what is the basis of authority? Holmes reminds us that four things are usually used to answer that question, and in this order: The Scriptures as our authority, tradition, reason and experience. But Holmes says that we are better off to maintain in doing theology, we need to hear the teaching of Scripture as our basis authority but “we could not hear the teaching of Scripture aright without listening to the tradition, but this does not of itself ascribe any authority to the voices of tradition, it just insists that they are necessary guides to enable us to hear the words that are authoritative in the Scriptures.” In all of this, we must be sensitive to and submissive to the Holy Spirit guiding and opening our understanding to God’s Word today.

As people of the Word, Christians have a great legacy and we must have much respect for the past. This book reminds us of that importance. Knowing, reading, and carefully studying the masters who have gone before us are necessary if we are to understand our situation today. There is no doubt that theology “is an irreducibly communal task.” Both pastors and teachers would benefit from this book.