Category: Books

I had pre-ordered the book. I was waiting for the UPS man when he delivered it to my door. I read it as fast as I could.

I wrote my review and then happened to scan the Twitter log and found that Southern Seminary President Al Mohler had written my review before me.

If I were in the company of Rob Bell, whose book Love Wins I was on the verge of reviewing, I would say that Dr. Mohler had thrown off the shackles of the hell of his own creation and was experiencing heaven here, heaven now, and that I would not be true to the heaven God created for me if I were to resent Dr. Mohler’s swifter pen.

But I am not.

So, all I can say is that Dr. Mohler gets advance copies, reads quicker, writes better, and, oh yeah, is a whole lot smarter than I.

So quit wasting time and read his review.

Many have already spoken about Love Wins (Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, Robert H. Bell Jr., HarperOne, 2011), and many will continue to talk in coming weeks and months.

I haven’t yet decided whether to post a running review by chapter (a device originated by other bloggers), but will address here my initial thoughts, then review the rest of the book at a later time.

Many might be familiar with Rob Bell because of his other books (Sex God, Velvet Elvis, Jesus Wants to Save Christians), or through his video shorts (NOOMA). Love Wins has gotten much advance publicity because of speculation (based upon Bell’s own releases) that in this book he champions a universalist theory of salvation.

We will see. If the views espoused in his previous books are any indication, his proposing such an idea would not be a huge surprise.

I can tell, at any rate, that reading Love Wins will not inspire in me an emotion consistent with the title: in fact, reading Bell will make me angry.

Not because Bell challenges us to examine an orthodox belief and make sure that the Scriptures actually teach it, but because he challenges us to examine an orthodox belief and determine whether we like it.

From the Preface alone, Bell foreshadows the themes he will apparently expound upon. Bell simplisticly reduces the gospel message to “For God so loved the world…” as the reason that Jesus came. This “message”, according to Bell, has been “hijacked” by other stories, presumably included among them those that recognize the biblical storyline that sin has left men under God’s righteous judgment — hence the need for Jesus — and that many will not come to Jesus.

Many people reject the God of the Old Testament who instructs the slaughter of nations because “my God wouldn’t do that!” Bell caters to that sentiment, and even establishes it as the test of truth, by appealing to those who think “I would never be a part of that.”

The idea that some will believe and gain heaven, while others will not believe and will gain hell, is obviously a strange one to Bell — actually, “misguided and toxic” — and to him actually impedes the “real” message of “love, peace, forgiveness and joy.” At the same time, Bell asserts that the faith he describes doesn’t avoid questions about salvation, judgment, heaven and hell. But as Martin Bashir pointed out in his interview, if Bell’s idea is true that God will ultimately prevail over men’s hearts, even post-mortem — if, in fact, Love Wins — then it does not matter one whit what man does during this life.

One of the most troubling aspects of Bell’s approach is that Scripture is not complete as it is. For, you see, all that “white space” between the letters waits to be filled with with our response. That is, the biblical revelation is not complete until we respond to it, and our response might be negative (“I would never be a part of that”). So the final word about the Word is whether man agrees.

Bell is correct that he hasn’t come up with a “radical new teaching”; self-made religion, after all, appeared in the garden.

Many things have changed since Walter Kaiser published Toward an Exegetical Theology. Mainly, thirty years have ticked off the calendar, and his is a “syntactical-theological” method of exegesis and sermon preparation, while the current view is a grammatical-historical method of interpretation (or redemptive-historical, or other variations).

Even so, there is in Toward an Exegetical Theology a wealth of insight to a method of approaching Bible study and sermon preparation based upon a Christ-exalting, gospel-centered, God-honoring and Spirit-welcoming hermeneutic.

Kaiser observed that “One of the most depressing spectacles in the Church today is her lack of power” (p235), and the culprit is an “impotent pulpit” that has stopped walking in the Spirit.

As I was reading the book where he describes this phenomenon I was also doing a survey of the book of Acts and the Epistles for evidence of what the early disciples believed the Gospel was, what they said to unbelievers about it, and any methods they employed to deliver it. What is dramatic in Acts especially is the power with which the Word went forth. After all, Christ had said that they would receive just that.

In Acts, the “method” of the early witnesses can be summarized as: tell people they crucified Jesus, but God raised him from the dead for forgiveness of sins, live communally, do mighty works, be persecuted and even killed. As a result “the word continued to increase mightily.”

The weakness of the messengers was contrasted with the power of God working through his Word. A typical theme is found in Acts 9:27-31, where Paul spoke bold apologetics against the Hellenists, who tried to kill him. The effect? “The church…was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied” (Acts 9:31, ESV).

Where has, in the words of Kaiser, the power in preaching gone?

“If God is absolutely sovereign, in what sense can we meaningfully speak of human choice, of human will?”

D.A. Carson addressed this and other, broader questions in his 1975 doctoral dissertation. I know, I’m late to the party, but questions regarding God’s sovereignty and “free will” still plague sincere believers today, and Carson’s treatment is a good antidote to some of the muddled thinking going on out there.

In Divine Sovereignty & Human Responsibility Carson explores the Old Testament’s apparent nonchalance about speaking both of God’s absolute sovereignty and, at the same time, man’s responsibility in choosing.

Carson also examines the tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility in the Greek Septuagint, the apocrypha and psuedepigrapha, the targums and rabinnic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other intertestamental literature. To be honest, I skipped this. Call it lazy, but I went straight to the discussion of the tension as it appears in the gospel of John.

From John’s gospel Carson explores all the different ways in which the apostle expresses the theme of divine sovereignty, particularly with regard to how men come to have faith in Jesus.

Much of Carson’s discussion is technical, but much is also useful for pastoral concerns and the interests of laymen who wish to clarify their understanding of how God can be sovereign while man is held responsible, especially in the area of salvation.

I had read R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God while in college in the late 1980s, and recently finished a re-read.

Even when Sproul first wrote the book, he recognized that many people left the church because they found it boring. Yet the church that contemplates the holiness of God will be anything but boring.

I still have the same copy that I read 20 years ago, and it was interesting to see what I had marked the first time. This time around, one thing that stuck with me was Sproul’s observation that while we talk a lot of God’s grace, his love, his mercy, the Bible nowhere says “God is grace, grace, grace, or love, love, love, or mercy, mercy, mercy. It does say, however, that God is holy, holy, holy.”

If you’ve previously read The Holiness of God, get it out and re-read it. If you never have, get one.

Sinclair Ferguson maintains that while Christians sing “Amazing Grace,” we have largely ceased being amazed by it. In By Grace Alone: How the Grace of God Amazes Me, he offers an antidote to our general unamazement.

To illustrate the truth that none of us truly understands — is amazed by — grace until we understand our need for it, Ferguson offers a helpful explanation and application of the parable of the Prodigal Son.

A significant contribution is Ferguson’s assessment of the security that grace affords the believer. In discussing Romans 8:31-35 (‘who can bring a charge against God’s elect’, etc), Ferguson challenges the Christian not to look at the circumstances of life, or how much we might ‘deserve’ grace, and draw conclusions about our security and God’s care from them. Instead, it is in grace — Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross — that provides security regarding our standing before God.

Ferguson also suggests that one of Satan’s ‘fiery darts’ with which he attacks Christian was employed in his attack on Job: attempting to have Job question the good character of God and attribute to Him the devil’s machinations. In other words, trying to get Job to ‘exchange the truth of God for a lie.’ This is, after all, how Satan tempted Eve in the Garden.

As Christ-followers, we need to constantly preach the Gospel to ourselves.

“Sometimes we imagine that our greatest need is to move on to the ‘higher’ or ‘deeper teaching of the gospel. But in fact, our real need is to get a deeper and firmer grasp of the main truths of the gospel.” (Ferguson, By Grace Alone, 102).

I realize that this book has been out for some time, and I am notoriously behind the wave regarding when I read new — or not so new — books.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is one of those efforts that cause thoughtful readers to kill sacred cows and burst favorite bubbles of conventional wisdom.

The most useful contribution of Gladwell’s work here is that he dispels notions that people are fixed in the life results that are heaped upon them by their economic condition, social status, or — most significantly — their cultural background.

Yes, Asians are better at math, but not for the reasons we typically suppose. And yes, New Yorkers make better air traffic controllers, but not because of common stereotypes. And yes, non-Asians can learn math just as well once we recognize and deal with the non-genetic reasons why work in rice paddies facilitates better math skills.

Gladwell’s work has implications for education, cross-cultural communication, international business, and a host of others, and has powerful illustrations that are applicable to other contexts, as well.