Any book by Murray J. Harris, the world-class New Testament scholar, is worth buying and reading and shelving for future reference. Here he says in 90Any book by Murray J. Harris, the world-class New Testament scholar, is worth buying and reading and shelving for future reference. Here he says in 90 pages what most writers say in 250, and as it happens, these 90 pages showcase some of the most profound historical, exegetical, and theological insights into the crucifixion of our Savior.
Merged review:
Any book by Murray J. Harris, the world-class New Testament scholar, is worth buying and reading and shelving for future reference. Here he says in 90 pages what most writers say in 250, and as it happens, these 90 pages showcase some of the most profound historical, exegetical, and theological insights into the crucifixion of our Savior....more
C.S. Lewis said it well. Theologically, we often resemble little kids, happy to live in the ignorance of mud pies because we’ve never stood on the sanC.S. Lewis said it well. Theologically, we often resemble little kids, happy to live in the ignorance of mud pies because we’ve never stood on the sandy boundary that slopes into oceanic depths. This is a critique with teeth, and it bites. But sometimes we need to be told to theologically grow up (Heb. 5:11–14).
But Lewis’s aim is to awaken us to greater and more glorious things than we have ever seen before, to see new oceanic depths in Scripture, for those willing to push out into deeper water by asking questions over things like God’s glory as the purpose of creation, and what it means that Christ as the first-born from the dead, and the re-creator of all things. And what does it look like for me to participate in God’s kingdom today?
What the Bible tells us is that “God is about to do a big world event and not just a big *individual* event — a cosmic thing and not just a heart thing. What happens when God comes is not going to be grapeshot; it is going to be nuclear, a kind of explosion, a reshaping of the earth” (Bruner). The resurrection of Christ ignited “a cosmic shockwave” of something more to come (NTW).
But this cosmic theology is also a hard sell for readers today. Self-help, felt needs, lifehackery, solutions to all the immediate demands of life dominate our attention, even digital distractions meant to tickle our amusements — all of these aims seem to drive the popular book publishing and viral memes of our day. But as Christians we know there are higher and greater priorities at work in the competing powers in unseen realms.
All of this is why I am THRILLED to commend this book.
Gloria Furman celebrates the ocean-deep theology of Ephesians, Paul’s most important letter in describing the far-reaching, cosmic consequences and Christ-victory sermon of our rather routine activities that comprise most of our daily lives. Or as Furman puts it: “We live our lives on a cosmic stage” (57). YES! Once you see this, and embrace it with a whole heart, everything else changes, too. Then you see the Christ-centered plan of God to reclaim lost sinners and fallen creation.
She writes: “Because of Jesus there is a ‘new creation order’ in effect from the highest echelon of the angelic order in heaven to the lowliest invertebrate growing in the deepest part of the deepest ocean” (19). But Furman — taking her queues from the Apostle Paul’s development in Ephesians — takes this cosmic victory, and the coming re-creation, and then works the victory back into daily life, shining a spotlight on the newfound glory of our everyday obedience.
“Jesus is about his business of redeeming all things and making all things new,” Gloria writes — “from the way a wife trusts her husband’s leadership, to the way a husband lays down his comfort for the sake of his wife; from the way a believing child relinquishes her opinion to follow mom and dad, to the way parents choose to be gentle and patient toward their kids instead of rude and exasperating; from the way a worker honors his boss at work, to the way supervisors generously give their employees everything they need plus more. These acts of submission are not for the sake of mere efficiency in light of the motherland, but they are the tiny mustard seeds of Christ’s kingdom, which is growing as its branches spread throughout the whole earth” (148–149).
The nuclear re-creation of the cosmos to come is now breaking out in atomic pinlights of daily actions of God’s new creations (those of us united to Christ).
It’s hard for me to express in a short space how well Gloria has captured the heart of Paul in Ephesians. J.I. Packer voices his excitement in the foreword (with gushing prose). I’d simply like to add my small voice to his. *Alive in Him* is a magnificently executed study of Ephesians for all of life — and easily one of the top five Christian books of 2017....more
[On August 18, 2016, the publisher, IVP, withdrew this volume for “review” based on recent allegations that the author plagiarized content from others[On August 18, 2016, the publisher, IVP, withdrew this volume for “review” based on recent allegations that the author plagiarized content from others. Very sad. And a very stark reminder for writers that we must be extra careful about borrowing from others without the proper attribution.]...more
Of the most intriguing 40 Christian non-fiction titles published in the first half of 2016, historian George Marsden’s new book — C.S. Lewis’s Mere ChOf the most intriguing 40 Christian non-fiction titles published in the first half of 2016, historian George Marsden’s new book — C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography — stands out immediately. Published in Princeton’s pioneering series, “Lives of Great Religious Books,” Marsden has written a biography about a book, and if that sounds boring, it’s not. Lewis’s classic has a backstory worth telling and Marsden has penned one of the best books of the year.
When it comes to Amazon’s bestselling books in Christian apologetics, Mere Christianity has been in first place ever since I can remember. The book was originally the product of a series of short eight-to-fifteen-minute talks delivered on BBC radio by Lewis during World War II, and delivered to a British culture quickly becoming increasingly post-Christian, and an audience that lived under perpetual fear of night bombing raids.
He gathered a listening audience of between 1–1.6m (the evening news update programs would draw ten-times that number). He pulled the addresses off with great skill and imagination, but it was all met with mixed reviews in the British press, and also generated an unbearable amount of fan mail for Lewis.
Marsden retells the amazing story of how God used one intellectual, but also a novice apologist and lay theologian (CSL), to invest himself in the immediate medium at his disposal (BBC), in a dire time in world history (WWII), to produce talks that would become three separate books, then one book, that would spread globally in the 1950s and then largely be forgotten in during the sexual revolution in the 1960s (except at Wheaton College under the key influence of Clyde Kilby), and then would surge in the late 1960s and take on new life in the 1970s — largely by the long-tail of word-of-mouth spread — leading to a swell of posthumous sales and popularity and eventually to Amazon’s top spot.
In the end, what makes Mere Christianity so powerful? All Christian non-fiction apologists will pay close attention as Marsden summarizes the key features of Lewis’s work (pages 153–188):
1. Lewis looks for timeless truth as opposed to the culturally bound. 2. He uses common human nature as the point of contact with his audience. 3. Lewis sees reason in the context of experience, affections, and imagination. 4. He is a poet at heart, using metaphor and the art of meaning in a universe that is alive. 5. Lewis’s book is about “mere Christianity.” 6. Mere Christianity does not offer cheap grace. 7. The lasting appeal of Mere Christianity is based on the luminosity of the gospel message itself.
A respected historian has retold a worthy story any Christian reader or writer will benefit from hearing. Like his biography of Jonathan Edwards, though shorter by 460 pages, Marsden has once again pulled off a masterpiece of history, in retelling the fascinating life of one of the most influential Christian books in the past century....more
In the three-year process of researching and writing my book on digital media (12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You [April 2017]) I read over 1,100 artiIn the three-year process of researching and writing my book on digital media (12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You [April 2017]) I read over 1,100 articles and somewhere around 50 books on smartphones, digital technology, and social media. The Happiness Effect (Feb. 2017 release date) was the last book I read, and it easily finishes in the top three of what I think are most helpful books in the field. It is a rare must-read in a crowding shelf of digital tech diagnostic studies.
Donna Freitas surveyed about 800 students, and met and interviewed about 200 students in person, a group spread out across the country, and she compiled it all into this well-researched and brilliantly organized collection of insightful interviews on the social media habits of college students. She reinforces some of the major concerns, brushes aside a number of false presumptions and over simplifications, raises new issues I found nowhere else (like the link between digital addictions and personal insecurity), and she illustrates all of the points from her lively anecdotal interviews.
As a Christian reader, this book is not necessarily Christian, though there are several key interviews with professing Christian college students. The overall strength of the work serves as the most thorough, balanced, illustrative, and shrewd diagnostic tool into the social media habits of college students. And who better to pull off such a thing than Freitas?
In the end, this is a brilliant work of data collection and synthesis for any student, leader, or parent wanting to awaken to the new trends and pressures and expectations in smartphone habits, but with critical thinking and with an awareness of the complex social dimensions navigated by this smartphone generation. It is highly recommended as a diagnostic study that exposes the strengths and weakness of the digital age, and begs for solid gospel solutions going forward.
Here’s one little taste from the book, on the constant love/hate schizophrenic relationship we have with our phones. Freitas writes this on page 230:
“The burden we are carrying around because of our phones would be lifted if they would only disappear off the face of this earth. These tiny, light, pretty, shiny devices have come to represent an outsized weight upon our shoulders — we look at them and see our to-do lists, our responsibilities, other people’s needs, our perpetual inability to keep up, the ways in which others constantly judge us, everyone’s successes amid all our failures, among so many other stresses — stresses that feel more like thousands of pounds than a few ounces. At the same time, we see them as our escape from boredom and loneliness, our connection to loved ones and friends, our guide when we are lost, the archive of our best hair days and most memorable moments, the diaries where we place all our most intimate feelings, hopes, and dreams.”
To make it all seem simpler would be a disservice to this generation....more
By the time I came to know and appreciate David Foster Wallace he was already dead by suicide, which really stinks because I now have so many questionBy the time I came to know and appreciate David Foster Wallace he was already dead by suicide, which really stinks because I now have so many questions for him about his life, his writings, his ideas, and I can only interact with his books (as I did in my book *The Joy Project*).
Thankfully, others did have time to talk at length with him including Bryan A. Garner, the lexicographer (think: *Garner’s Modern English Usage*). Their paths crossed after Wallace’s monster book review of Garner’s lexicon (an article titled “Tense Present,” April 2001).
This book is a 67-minute conversation between Garner and Wallace on writing and grammar, and it’s an especially fascinating look into how Wallace wrote his nonfiction pieces. It resonates with me and how much his process resembles mine: the slow, torturous, work of wrangling thoughts down on paper and then rewriting and rewriting until the organization becomes clear, and then finally adding clear transitions (a process Wallace uses but does not commend!). All of this work is aimed at the goal of creating “incredibly clear, beautiful, alive, urgent, crackling-with-voltage prose” (60).
There are bunch of helpful thoughts in the book, many of them simple but good, like “the reader cannot read your mind,” and the process of Wallace using a pen to write his first and second drafts to slow down the writing process for his mind and hand to work at a synchronized pace (a process not unlike that of C.S. Lewis’s, see my article: “Jack’s Typewriter”).
Wallace labors hard for clarity, a deceptively easy looking trait in good writing. “My main deficit, at least in terms of nonfiction prose,” Wallace admits, “is I have difficulty of being as clear as I want to be. I have various tricks for working around that and making it kind of charming to watch somebody trying to be clear, but the fact of the matter is, I can’t be clear and compressed in the way that, say, parts of the preface of your dictionary that I like very much are clear and compressed” (57).
When making arguments Wallace labors to get as many of the facts down on paper as he can, in the right in the order, but then the real labor of rewriting and organizing kicks in, and then, finally, he sharpens transitions to make it clear how points and sentences and paragraphs relate to one another. Hard-to-read content is typically the product of unclear transitions, he says.
All in all this is a delightful book. It’s short and you can read it in about an hour and I’ll give it four stars since this is a raw transcription of the unedited conversation with a lot of broken off sentences, so it’s not the smoothest thing to read, but all of us are making due with the early loss of Wallace, and this book will never be edited by him. Still, the book is full of little nuggets on writing and commendable to non-fiction writers especially....more
We’re blessed with several weighty books about the crucifixion of Christ in all its theological and spiritual significance (books like John Stott’s *TWe’re blessed with several weighty books about the crucifixion of Christ in all its theological and spiritual significance (books like John Stott’s *The Cross of Christ*). But when it comes to explaining the historical use of crucifixion as a culturally repulsive penalty in the Greco-Roman world, this little 90-page book by Hengel is not only worth owning and reading, it’s worth re-reading two or three times over a lifetime. This is one of the most stunning works at making the offense of the cross concrete through careful historical study....more
Between 1995 and 2006 David Powlison published five weighty journal articles that profoundly deepened (and challenged) my thinking on aMy endorsement:
Between 1995 and 2006 David Powlison published five weighty journal articles that profoundly deepened (and challenged) my thinking on anger, and those articles, gathered up and Xerox copied many times over, have served for years as my top recommendation to friends and inquirers struggling with anger, and struggling to discover its many diverse and sometimes subtle roots. Those articles, once scattered in journals, have finally been collected, reworked, and expanded into a fresh new book. It is rather rare to have a 20-year history behind a commendation of a new book, but *Good and Angry* by Powlison now takes its rightful place as my number one recommendation on anger, not to mention it now stands as the fullest and wisest Christian response to the subtheme of self-hatred and self-anger I have ever read. ...more
As they said of C.S. Lewis, everything he believed about everything was present in everything he wrote about anything, and this same worldview consistAs they said of C.S. Lewis, everything he believed about everything was present in everything he wrote about anything, and this same worldview consistency is true of Piper. This little 150-page gem applies Christian Hedonism to three of the most potent areas of life — money, sex, and power — each a loaded gun, each freighted with as much potential value as they are loaded with dangers of self-destructive harm. Originally prepared as a three-part series of messages delivered in London, the content was refined and edited tightly and published for international print distribution through The Good Book Co in England. Perhaps what most stands out to me is that the book represents the longest and most sustained meditation to date from Piper on what it means to be a God image-er. He’s on to something really profound, and profoundly simple, but he rarely addresses imago Dei directly (two paragraphs in the foreword to Sam Crabtree's book being the longest). ...more
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