Book Reviews

From time to time we try to keep you aware of some helpful commentaries. There are two that we would like to put before you that we find particularly useful. The first commentary mentioned, Genesis: A Commentary, is by a first-rate Old Testament scholar, Bruce K. Waltke.

As I was reading a book that I will review in a later edition, How To Read Genesis, by Tremper Longman, I was reminded of the importance of the book of Genesis. Longman writes, “In Genesis we learn of God’s creation, human rebellion and God’s pursuit to redeem us. In Genesis we meet Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Joseph and many other compelling persons. In Genesis we also get the first intimations of our Redeemer.” Those and other similar comments brought Waltke’s commentary on Genesis back to mind.

In Genesis we meet the creator God who is one and the same as the covenant making and keeping God. Two statements by Waltke reflect the importance of Genesis: A Commentary. First, “As God unfolds the drama of creation in successive days, building to a climax, so God develops the drama of history through successive epochs, which reach a dramatic climax when all volitional creatures bow to Christ.” Second, “The order of creation will undergird God’s later revelations regarding humanity’s social order. His law (the teachings of Scripture) is in harmony with the created order. Thus, to flout his revealed moral order is to contradict creation, his created reality.”

While I appreciate his exegesis of each passage of Genesis, I particularly find Waltke’s treatment of chapters 1 through 3 extremely useful and helpful. You will quickly see what I mean as you read his observations on the Genesis account of man’s creation in God’s image and likeness. He writes, “Understanding that we are made in the image of God is essential for understanding our destiny and relationship to God. Without revelation humans become confused and depreciate themselves.” He further writes, “The narrator (of Genesis) does not systematically present abstract truths about the divine; rather he tells us a story about the Creator and his creation.”

Being somewhat aware of Waltke’s pilgrimage in the Reformed faith, the passages dealing with Abraham and the development of the covenants is of particular interest and value. This commentary is a must for the pastor, teacher, scholar and student of the Bible. As the book of beginnings, we need to be thoroughly acquainted with it. It is the foundation of our entire world and life view and understanding of God’s creating and redeeming love. As you read the biblical book of Genesis and use a tool such as Waltke’s commentary, you will have a much greater appreciation for God’s covenant faithfulness, a better feel for God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility, and God’s universal and mediatorial Kingdoms in which he blesses the nations. Waltke highlights the importance not only of having right relations with God, but also with one another. One of my favorite sections in Genesis covers the family of Joseph and how God worked to protect, provide for, and bring about reconciliation. Waltke refers to this section as the reconciliation of a dysfunctional family, and that it was, yet God’s purposes were uniquely served through this family.

This commentary should be in your library and at the top of the list for Genesis.

These two books contain daily devotions for one year. In the first book, Day By Day With Jonathan Edwards, Randall J. Pederson compiles 365 pithy, spiritually challenging topics from Jonathan Edwards, known as the energy and force behind the first New England Great Awakening, which began in 1740. Edwards was a great expositor of the Word, a philosopher, a pastor with great sensitivity to people, and as some biographers maintain, the last representative of Puritan theology and thought in the New World. His sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741, is still found in many literature books. People who heard the sermon responded with great moaning and crying out, “what shall I do to be saved? Oh I am going to hell! Oh, what shall I do for Christ?” Today there stands a monument at the site of the Enfield meeting church. This volume contains daily devotional thoughts appropriate for a multitude of settings. It will give you the sense of Edwards’ spiritual sensitivity, theological brilliance and great intellect. It is a good way to introduce someone to Jonathan Edwards.

The second companion, Day By Day With The English Puritans is likewise a daily devotional containing thoughts from about 80 different Puritans. They range from people such as John Bunyan, Richard Baxter, Thomas Manton, to Thomas Watson, Richard Sibbes, William Gurnall and John Flavel.

J. I. Packer, noted for his love and appreciation for the Puritans, wrote, “These are wonderful in the way that all good devotionals are-that is, they enlarge your sense of God’s greatness, goodness, and closeness to you, and so make you praise and pray. I am sure the readers will be greatly energized by them in faith and hope and love.” Packer goes on to say that these men’s grasp of godliness remains unrivaled, and we today who lack it need to learn it from them.

As I have read through many of the daily offerings, I believe this would be a good way to acquaint someone, especially our covenant children, with some of these great men of the faith. Family devotions, Bible lessons, Sunday school classes, and individuals will appreciate having both these volumes to draw from in their thinking.

This book is part of The Westminster Handbooks to Christian Theology series. Roger Olson is a well-known professor at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University. This book is written for scholars and students who study topics of theological significance. Olson writes about people, organizations and controversial subjects related to evangelical theology.

First, about the book’s design. The first section is a 63-page summary of “The Story of Evangelical Theology,” beginning with an attempt to define evangelical theology. “Evangelical,” etymologically, means “of the good news” or “related to the gospel.” Evangelicalism, writes Olson, is simply synonymous with authentic Christianity as it is founded on and remains faithful to the “evangel-the good news of Jesus Christ.” He goes on to list the seven different definitions that are given to the term today.

In this introductory section, which is worth the price of the book because of its summary of twentieth century evangelicalism, he covers the diversity of roots in evangelicalism such as: pietism, revivalists, Puritans, Wesleyans, Old Princeton, Holiness-Pentecostals, fundamentalists and postfundamentalists. He also covers the tensions in evangelicalism among the Calvinists, Arminians and Pentecostals.

While Olson mentioned Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield in connection with old Princeton, I was disappointed that men like Machen, Van Til and Allis were not included. He did talk about Gordon Clark’s influence on Carl Henry who led the postconservative arm of the movement. He concludes with explaining how Billy Graham became the figure head of the movement of postfundamentalists in evangelical theology.

You will find the first 66 pages very interesting as Olson threads all the parts together into a tapestry that gives a wholistic view of evangelicalism in North America. The remainder of the book deals with movements and organizations related to evangelical theology. Some examples: The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, The Charismatic movement, Dispensationalism, Fundamentalism, Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship, Princeton Theology, Lausanne Conference, Puritanism, World Evangelical Alliance, and others. These are dealt with in alphabetical order and not usually more than one to two pages.

I particularly appreciated his defining Scottish Common Sense Realism and its later connection with Princeton Seminary. This influence philosophy simply states that human beings share certain basic experiences and cognitions that require no proof but are “common sensical.” The Princeton theologians then applied it to the knowledge of God and other theological subjects.

The book contains other good summary explanations of topics such as ethics, authority, doctrines, the Lord’s Supper, miracles, and prayer, as they relate to the broader evangelical movement.

The third section deals with current issues in evangelicalism such as: the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts, creation/evolution, Calvinism/Arminianism, epistemology/faith and reason, homosexuality, inerrancy of Scripture, and open theism.

My disappointment in the book is in the omission of some of the men from the Westminster Seminary faculty such as Machen (only mentioned briefly) and Cornelius Van Til who is generally looked to as the most influential presuppositionalists of the twentieth century; however, he does attempt to present presuppositionalism as distinct from fideism and evidentialism.

While I would like for him to have said more in certain places that would have given a stronger emphasis on reformed theology, this book will be of much value to its reader. It is concisely and clearly written. It will be an easy handbook to use.

We reviewed D. A. Carson’s excellent book, Becoming Conversant With the Emerging Church in our July/Augusts issue. At the time of reviewing Becoming Conversant I was also reading the manuscript for Truth and the New Kind of Christian. While both books deal with the emerging church movement and both are in a helpful manner critical of the postmodern church paradigm, the two complement one another. While Carson examines, critiques and comments about the movement in a broader or more general way, Smith focuses more on the philosophical aspect of the movement. Smith, a professor of ethics and Christian apologetics at Biola University in California, writes as an analytic philosopher in this book.

He begins with a chapter on postmodernism, a focus of Smith’s for some time. J.P. Moreland stated that while most Christians lack the intellectual training to examine many issues, Scott Smith is uniquely equipped to do that and help us to see the roots of the issues. This book is a must read, especially by church leaders today as they shepherd God’s people through the turbulent waters of the postmodern paradigm.

We need to know how to respond to the attempt of postmodernism to eliminate objective truth, absolute or universal truth, and true authority. We need to know that truth is more than a linguistic or social construct that varies from person to person. Scott takes us there. He tells of a four-year period when he challenged students to critique the notion that ethics are only relative. He only found three students who could do that.

In chapter 1 he deals with objective truth and whether we can we know it. He begins to show how postmodernism has come into certain sections of the church through men like Brian McLaren, perhaps the most influential of the group, and Tony Jones, another youth leader. In this chapter he sets the stage to critique their embracing of the postmodern paradigm. But more than these types of popular leaders, Smith goes to the roots of postmodernism in Christian circles with people such as Brad Kallenberg, Nancy Murphy, the late Stanley Grenz, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Franke. You will be intrigued by his treatment. He delineates between the popular street version of postmodernism and the academic postmodernism–a fair distinction. Most of those in the popular vein of the emerging church would probably fit into the former of the two.

Chapter 2 deals with how these people believe we should see Christianity in a postmodern way, which then paves the way for chapter 3’s treatment of how the popular leaders such as McLaren and Jones advocate the postmodern paradigm for pastoral ministry.

Chapters 5 and 6 are particularly helpful because Smith analyzes the roots of postmodernism and critiques the emerging church. In chapter 6 he raises the question, “Would the acceptance of their proposal [to follow a postmodern paradigm for the church] lead to an emerging church, a new kind of way of being a Christian that allows us to venture ahead in faith, to proclaim faithful devotion and allegiance to Christ in a new emerging culture of postmodernism? Or would it lead to a submerging of the church in culture, such that the church ends up being ‘snookered’ and co-opted by it?”

Smith effectively critiques the idea that we construct our own reality by how we use words how it effects Christian belief and ministry. This means when we read and use Scripture we make it into what it is by how we use it within our local communities. This basically means that we make God what he is by the way we talk. When we claim that Jesus rose from the dead, the postmodern paradigm, at least within the emerging church trend would say, the statement about the resurrection is equivalent to the statement “Christians say that Jesus rose from the dead.” (Do you see the distinction?) It is an undercutting of objective truth and embracing in its place relativism and pragmaticism? Religious truth therefore becomes our opinion and values not fact or objective truth.

In conclusion, the emerging church people, operating on the postmodern paradigm will not build the church on the truth but other foundations that will not stand the test of time. It is a repeat of the problems of buying into the world’s ideologies, which has created disaster to the church of Jesus Christ that Smith’s book is a must read for all Christians young and old. It should be taught, studied, and discussed along with Carson’s Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church and David Wells’ Above Earthly Pow’rs.

Though Lost In the Middle, Midlife and the Grace of God deals with that nebulous idea of midlife crisis, whenever that might occur, it has a powerfully challenging message. Though I have moved beyond that general time frame of when we often think midlife occurs and though I understand that according to U. S. demographics old age begins at 81, I found the book helpful and challenging to me personally. The topics dealt with are applicable to Christians of any age. Though Moses prayed, “teach us to number our days…” none of us know when that once appointed time to die will be – we need to have certain things in place in order to live God-honoring healthy lives today.

Tripp demonstrates solid biblical and theological perspectives plus definite understanding of human behavior. One of the main points of interest was his emphasis on latent idolatry and how it surfaces in what is often referred to as midlife. Often times the regret, disappointment, unfulfilled dreams and discouragements of past and missed opportunities pull us down. In reality, upon close examination, some of those things have become those latent idols that should not have been there in the first place.

I participated in a class of forty adults using the book as its study and found the input, response, and interaction to be most enlightening. And of course Tripp wants individuals to deal with the hurts, disappointments, and pains in a manner that enables them to discover God’s wonderful grace in the process. Tripp also reminds us that it is often difficult when we are going through certain situations to be able to make sense out of it. However, those can be hopeful times when we discover more fully God’s plan and will for our lives.

Tripp writes, “The Bible never discusses midlife, just like it never discusses teenagers. Yet, the Bible is able to unpack any of life’s experiences because it is written by the One who made them all.” One characteristic God has put in his children’s lives is hope, and hope often comes in a moment of crisis when we discover his grace.

Tripp’s overall thesis is while the Bible never tells us about midlife crisis, the Bible tells us everything we need to know about midlife crisis. Isn’t that just like our God? He knows our needs and is never caught unaware or unprepared to minister to us. In a highly readable style, Tripp closes with these words, “The notes of disappointment, regret, weakness, decay, defeat, restoration, reconciliation, and sight are not parts of another song. They are each a part of God’s symphony of grace and redemption.” God does love us and has a plan for our lives and in that we have encouragement, hope, and confidence that his grace is sufficient for our every need.

I have recommended this to people struggling with some of these things. I have also encouraged a couple of men’s groups to study this book and the mixed adult class mentioned about is another possibility for some fruitful study and exchange using Lost in the Middle as the point of reference.

We usually do not call attention to commentaries in this review section. There are so many, some very good and others less helpful. In order to encourage expository preaching from a historically redemptive perspective, we believe these two commentaries, one from the New Testament and one from the Old Testament, should be noted. Karen Jobes, author of the 1 Peter Commentary from the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament series, is an outstanding New Testament scholar.

Jobes has an obvious understanding of the original languages, solid theological perspective, and the ability to communicate the fruit of her labors. I have enjoyed working through several passages that are special to me from her commentary. Her comments reflect both a grasp of the historical, but also has fresh ideas for us today. Just as there is great danger in using only commentaries from the past or only using the latest and most modern, continuity of the past and present works coming together is important. You will find this in1 Peter.

You will also appreciate Jobes’ attention to details, demonstrating her masterful handling of the Greek text, but not in a way that will loose the reader in the process.