Another Gospel? - A Review

Deconstruction. All the cool kids are doing it these days. Former evangelicals, embarrassed by Trumpism, tired of harassment over adherence to Christian sexual ethics, and often ill-informed about the basis of historic Christianity are becoming “Exvangelicals” and turning on their earlier beliefs. In essence, Christianity is experiencing a new divide between orthodoxy and progressivism.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the fight was between fundamentalists and liberals. Fundamentalists gathered around the five fundamentals of the faith: Biblical inspiration and truthfulness of Scripture; the virginal conception of Jesus; the substitutionary atonement of Christ; Christ’s bodily resurrection; and the historicity of Christ’s miracles. Liberals either rejected these or were not concerned with their truthfulness, because they were deemed accessories to true Christianity, which could be jettisoned as irrelevant in the face of modern naturalism.

Fundamentalists later divided between evangelicals and fundamentalists, whose theology is generally compatible, but who have different understandings of the degree of theological agreement necessary to cooperate. The current focus on revisionists is less on a rejection of miracles, since supernaturalism is no longer a cultural pinch point, and more on sexual ethics and other issues that have cultural controversies associated with them. Add onto that the brutal nastiness of political wrangling by those who have concluded that doctrinal orthodoxy requires vocal support for Trump and his policies which have been accompanied by ongoing revelations of sexual abuse among evangelical institutions.

There is certainly a great deal of room for criticism of evangelicals and their institutions. But it need not follow that criticism of abuses of power should result in abandonment of the historic Christian faith. That is what is happening with the growing “Exvangelical” movement, which is simply a form of progressive Christianity.

Alisa Childers aims to confront the growing progressive Christian movement in her book, Another Gospel? A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity.

Progressive Christianity is difficult to define, as Childers discovers when she opens here book. She writes, “Progressive Christians tend to avoid absolutes and are typically not united around creeds or belief statements. . . Because of this, it might be more helpful to look for certain signs, moods, and attitudes toward God and the Bible when trying to spot it. For example, progressive Christians view the Bible as primarily a human book and emphasize personal conscience and practices rather than certainty and beliefs. They are also very open to redefining, reinterpreting, or even rejecting essential doctrines of the faith like the Virgin Birth, the deity of Jesus, and his bodily resurrection.” As Childers initially describes the movement, it sounds a great deal like the modern liberalism of the last century, but throughout the book it becomes clear that she understands the movement to be in some ways different. Progressive Christianity tends to be less overtly distinct from historic Christianity at the creedal level; the differences tend to be in ethics and the theology that underlies it.

In response to the redefinitions and abandonment of the ancient Christian faith by progressive Christians, Childers responds by pointing people toward “historic Christianity.” She doesn’t perfectly define this term either, but she describes it as a faith “deeply rooted in history. In fact, it is the only religious system I can think of that depends on a historical event (the resurrection of Jesus) being real—not fake—news.” She goes on to summarize her faith as understanding that, “The Bible is [God’s] Word, or it’s not. Jesus was raised from the dead, or he wasn’t. Christianity is true, or it isn’t. There is no ‘my truth’ when it comes to God.” What she defends through the book is the faith “once and for all delivered to the saints,” with the truthfulness of Scripture at the core and the necessary conclusions drawn from that about the nature of God, the importance of the cross, and the goodness of pursuing holiness as it is described in Scripture.

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Another Gospel? is framed around Childers’ experience with a pastor who was losing his faith and brought together a group to try to deconstruct the Christian faith together. She describes how her Christian faith collided with that group, her faith was nearly shipwrecked, but by asking honest questions and seeking honest answers she was able to reconstruct her faith in a more robust and biblical way.

This book is interspersed with personal narrative, but it also covers some of the basic apologetic topics: the authority of Scripture, basic epistemology, the possibility of reliable texts of Scripture, the reality (and reasonableness) of hell, the atonement as child abuse, and some other challenges. This is a popular level book, so there are few new arguments here, and those seeking exhaustive discussions of any topic are going to be disappointed. However, what Childers covers is well-done. She honestly represents challenging questions to Christianity and answers them faithfully.

One challenge that this book will face is that Childers uses the category “Progressive Christian.” In the online world, especially among progressive Christians, one of the greatest sins is using categories (for them) because it “dehumanizes.” Also, since progressive Christianity is an attitude rather than a position, there will be some who are closer or farther from her definition (sometimes based on the day of the week, it seems). At the end of the day, though, Childers is not seeking to attack the beliefs of progressive Christians as much as she is trying to argue for the superiority of historic Christianity. This book does that well.

I commend this book highly for those who are questioning their faith and wondering if there are really answers to cultural challenges. Childers answers as someone who has carefully considered the arguments and come out more convinced of the gospel she learned as a young girl. This would be a good book to read with a youth group, for pastors to have on hand to distribute to those honestly seeking answers, and to put in the church library.

Dispatches from the Front - A Review

If you watch the news, listen to the radio, and read the usual blogs it is easy to forget a simple fact: God is on the move and the gospel will be triumphant.

Tim Keesee’s 2014 book, Dispatches from the Front, is a reminder that the light of life has the power to penetrate the darkness in a million places in the world. The power of salvation, which is made plain in the story of Christ’s life, death, burial and resurrection, is not dependent upon the perfect political conditions, but upon the message going forth and the sovereign choice of an omnipotent God.

Dispatches from the Front bears the subtitle, “stories of gospel advance in the world’s difficult places.” Though some readers might think that the subtitle refers to progress in suburban homes in the US, it actually refers to the advance of the gospel in the places where Christianity makes believers social and political outsiders. The good news about the good news is that God is on the move.

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Keesee gives the reader snippets from his travels with Frontline Missions International, which was formed to get the gospel to hard-to-reach places in the world. We don’t see the months and years of plowing and tilling that went into some of the conversions, but we get to read about the baptisms, the equipping of pastors, and the growth of the gospel. There may be, for some, a danger of romanticism about getting on a plane, handing out a few tracts, and seeing communities flock to Christ. That can happen, but that is not the story behind most of these stories.

The stories Keesee presents are vitally important as an encouragement because it is a reminder that the Church will not stand or fall based on the party in power or the irrational laws that are enacted.

The book is arranged geographically. It begins in the former Soviet Bloc, then moves to the Balkans. In the next chapter Keesee travels through China with the following one detailing God’s work in Southeast Asia. Chapter Five presents the gospel advance in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, with the sixth chapter detailing some events from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. The final two chapters offer the hopeful signs of renewal in the horn of Africa and Egypt, closing with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Each of these dispatches—quick vignettes of the gospel bearing fruit and increasing—reminds readers that we have a supernatural God who works in mighty ways to accomplish his vital work in the world. For the pastor weighed down by the constant bickering about pandemic protocols, selfishness of congregations, and mundane arrangements of life in the US, this book offers a vitamin shot of encouragement about the way God can work in hard places. For the average Christian whose vision of the faith is limited to a service that can be squeezed in between travel league games and vacations, this will reveal Christian faith that energizes all of life.

Reading the Times - A Review

Most local newspapers are dying. The little paper in my city has been reduced to high school sports, complaints about the nearby nuclear plant, classified ads, and the occasional social gossip. More and more newspapers are shifting to a model of reprinting what comes through on some subscription service. This has had the effect of trivializing the news, so that local stories about small-scale, but important deeds like a teen giving her father CPR or a child finding the foundation of an old historical building while exploring the back woods disappear. In their place we get news about a smaller and smaller set of less and less real people who happen to have a large following on social media, their own TV show, and might have moderate talent in some other area of life. We end up knowing more about a rich, beautiful, spoiled person whom we will never meet than we do about our neighbor down the block.

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The media by which we take in the news of the day affects the trivialization of the world, though it does not mandate it. Many people get their news from social media, which means that it tends to be ideologically slanted toward opinions shared with one’s friends. Since one of the basic presuppositions of our society is that if you associate with someone you agree with them, a bubble of reality begins to form. And, since the art of disagreeing temperately on social media is difficult to learn, opposing ideas are often avoiding or ignored rather than engaged and questioned. Comments are either strongly affirming or attacking the opinion under consideration, because to say “yes, but” or “maybe this, yet not that” is a needle that few can thread from a keyboard.

But it is our behaviors that trivialize the news. We share articles with misleading headlines, sometimes without having read the body. We look for opinions that excoriate our outgroup. The algorithm feeds our human behavior and continues to provide the material for which we have developed a taste. And we must be clear that our taste has been developed through our own actions, or, at least, through our own failures to resist the tendency of the news medium to trivialize our view of the world.

What can we do about it?

Jeffrey Bilbro’s book, Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, provides both an apt diagnosis of the problem and some particularly helpful steps toward alleviating it. The result is a succinct, clearly-written book that is accessible to the layperson.

Bilbro’s diagnosis is not particularly innovative. He is channeling the energy of Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, and Thoreau in arguing that the way news is presented is not good for the human condition. In application, Bilbro’s solutions are much more reliant on Berry and Thoreau (whom Bilbro has written about previously) than the other two thinkers. In any case, innovation is not what is needed, but intelligibility and digestibility.

The core of the problem, as Bilbro presents it, is not necessarily the technology or the content of the news, but rather that too much of what we get that passes as news has very little to do with our lives, even though it is designed to rattle our cage. What we get angry or excited about often has little to do with what God is concerned about:

“Perhaps we need to conduct an emotional audit and consider which issues or news items cause us to become angry, outraged, or excited: Are we grieving over what grieves God and rejoicing over what brings him joy? Or have we become emotionally invested in trivia while growing apathetic about matters of real import?”

Bilbro recognizes that a big part of the problem is the way we read the news. As a result, the fix is to change ourselves and what we value. This is a book that is timely and well suited for those looking for an off-ramp from the highway of partisan politics, misanthropy, and emotional turmoil that often goes with the news.

After a brief introduction, in which Bilbro explains that his purpose is to help us understand how to use the news to love our neighbor better, the book is divided into three parts with three chapters each. Part One deals with attention, Part Two with time, and Part Three with community. The pattern of each part is to present the modern problem in the first chapter, put out a somewhat abstract better condition in the second chapter, and then provide some realistic practices that can help transition between the two. This pattern of problem, better vision, and help to get there makes this book a novel contribution.

Bilbro does not abstain from social media, nor does he recommend that for his readers, but he provides a means to put social media use in its place. He doesn’t recommend disconnecting from news media, but being more thoughtful of who we read, when, and how. The book presents a realistic vision of living in a world that demands our participation, but threatens us through our participation at the same time.

Much of Bilbro’s writing has had a localist bent. Like his hero, Wendell Berry, he has invested a great deal of thought in how to live in this place, right now. Modernity tends to flatten the world (a la Friedman) and create a tyranny of the eternal immediate present. Bilbro points to living better with an eternal viewpoint and a local scope, which is just the opposite of the way the news pushes us to have a global scope with an immediate viewpoint. This book won’t solve all of everyone’s problems, but it is another piece in a puzzle of dealing with the malaise of modernity.

In addition to being helpful and well-written, for those engaged in the study of modernity, this book ties a lot of pieces together. The footnotes are a roadmap to a wide range of resources for deeper study and consideration. They are also a trap for an individual’s book budget. I had to read the book again (a pleasure) before writing this review because I got sidetracked for several weeks following the leads that Bilbro laid out in his notes. Several mysterious packages showed up on the porch in the interim, which I had to explain to my wife, which was local news enough around here.

Buy the book because it is good and useful. Beware that it is going to make you stop, think, and probably even change the way you look at a few things.

NOTE: I received an advanced reader copy from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Together on God's Mission - A Review

The Cooperative Program is one of the most effective funding mechanisms for worldwide gospel ministry in the history of Christianity. Annually, autonomous local congregations give millions of dollars to support the advancement of the Great Commission at state, national, and global levels. Hundreds of pastors, missionaries, and lay people graduate from the six Southern Baptist Seminaries each year, better equipped for ministry and less financially burdened that would be possible if millions of people did not give to the Cooperative Program through their local churches. Missionaries go to language school, are transported to the field, and sustained in thousands of international locations because the gifts of small congregations are pooled with those of large ones to enable men and women from any sized church to dedicate their lives to getting the gospel to the ends of the earth.

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Some might say the Cooperative Program is a wonder of modern missions. It serves as a catalyst for the spread of the gospel and offers a bright future for engaging the lost with the good news of Jesus Christ. Tragically, sometimes the purpose and fruit of Cooperative Program giving are invisible to people in the local churches. If Southern Baptists are going to continue to function in a collaborative manner to fund gospel ministry in the years to come, we must work diligently to celebrate the positive impact our cooperation can have and explore the shared theology that enables congregations who differ in their understanding of some doctrines to work together to advance the Great Commission.

The SBC has needed an updated simple, brief, and theologically informed case made for continued cooperation for several years. Together on God’s Mission: How Southern Baptists Cooperate to Fulfill the Commission, which released in early 2018, is a resource that fills that need.

Scott Hildreth’s recent book on cooperation in Southern Baptist life offers a concise history of the convention, with an emphasis on the Cooperative Program, and outlines a theological foundation for the ongoing collaboration of SBC churches in advancing God’s mission on earth. In less than one hundred pages, Hildreth significantly updates previous histories of the CP and makes explicit the ecclesiology that has for generations been assumed by cooperating Southern Baptists.

Part One of this volume consists of three chapters. The first chapter of Together on God’s Mission gives an overview of the early history of the Southern Baptist Convention as they shifted from mission society to a convention cooperating in ministry on multiple levels. Chapter Two traces the evolution of the early convention to a robust network of churches joined together to efficiently fund Great Commission activities. The third chapter helpfully informs readers how the Cooperative Program works.

In Part Two Hildreth shifts from history to theology. Chapter Four succinctly outlines a theology of mission. The fifth chapter offers a basic Baptist ecclesiology for cooperation which unites the many autonomous local congregations of the Southern Baptist Convention and enables them to work together with the other churches in the convention. In Chapter Six Hildreth outlines some of the ways the local congregations of the early church—that is, those documented in Scripture—cooperated, pooled funds for ministry, and sent personnel to accomplish the common mission of advancement of the gospel.

Part Three of the volume contains a single chapter. In the seventh chapter, Hildreth summarizes his arguments and offers some proposals for continued cooperation among Southern Baptists in the future. He commends churches to consider the theological implications of the Cooperative Program, evaluate cooperation in broader, non-financial terms, and celebrate the ability to participate in CP giving rather than viewing it as membership dues.

Together on God’s Mission was published by B&H Academic because it contributes to the academic conversation within the SBC about ecclesiology and history. However, the volume is written in plain English, with short chapters, and clear argumentation. These make the volume suitable for a popular audience. This book would be helpful to pastors who are not sure exactly what the Cooperative program does. It will also make a useful resource for prospective members of SBC churches who wonder what makes Southern Baptists distinct and unites them. As tensions continue to simmer over differences in ministry methodology, political persuasions, and doctrinal debates, this book can help recall to mind the good things that keep Southern Baptists working together. Together, the local churches of the Southern Baptist Convention can do a great deal more than we can do working alone.

This is a book that fills a void for the SBC at a time when a call to unity and recognition of the powerful way God has used the Cooperative Program to get the gospel to the ends of the earth. Together on God’s Mission deserves to be read broadly and discussed carefully as the convention marches toward two centuries of cooperative missions.

NOTE: This review was originally published at the B&H Academic blog, which has since been deactivated due to changes in strategy at LifeWay. I was provided a gratis copy of the volume with the expectation of an honest review.

On a Recent Edition of Frankenstein

There are so many books coming out that it is sometimes hard to keep up. And yet, there are many very good books that have been deemed classics that I have yet to read. In general, like many people, I probably invest too much time in the latest books, usually non-fiction, to the detriment of my exposure to well-weathered literature.

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Karen Swallow Prior has been working with B&H to republish a set of literary classics in lovely bindings with helpful introductions and annotations to help contemporary readers access some good books from our literary past. So far the set includes Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, and Frankenstein. The general approach of the set has fit well with Prior’s earlier volume, On Reading Well, which encourages reading good literature for its ability to make us think morally, not simply to check a box on the Facebook “100 books every person must read” clickbait quiz.

Recently I picked up the new edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is a book I had never previously read. First, it is worth noting that the physical book is a nice edition. It is a cloth hardback volume with quality paper, an easy-to-read font, with space between the lines and on the margins for notes and for the delight of the eyes. Unlike many reproduced classics, this is no cut-rate production that saps the energy through the process of trying to decipher tiny text on gray paper. Second, the introductory material is actually helpful. Too many reproduced classics have academic essays that diverge from framing the context for contemporary readers into second and third order scholarly debates that do little to help the average reader gain access to the information. Prior demonstrated restraint and focused on the most helpful bits of debate that actually pertain to the text (not its later interpretations), which makes the introduction worth reading before and after tackling Shelley’s work. Third, Prior frames the book for a Christian audience, which can be helpful. Instead of pushing the reader toward feminist interpretations or whatever neologism a particular scholar may be interested in, Prior offers some helpful points for consideration without providing the answers. Along with this, there are some reflection questions at the end of each of the three volumes of the book to encourage dialogue or reading with others.

The themes of Frankenstein are helpful for contemporary readers. Though the technology Victor Frankenstein uses to reanimate his monster is obviously fictional, it points beyond to moral questions of our own day like cloning, artificial wombs, and in vitro fertilization. Frankenstein conquers nature by “creating” life and that creature subsequently conquers him, taking away much of his joy, harming those he loves, and eventually resulting in his own death. In many ways, Shelley shows that by moving beyond the limits of nature, Frankenstein has really conquered himself. One great difference between Victor Frankenstein is that the misery caused by his invention has consequences that he himself feels, while many modern innovations externalize costs to another locality or a later generation. But a thoughtful reader may look around and wonder in what ways he or she is working to create a monster.

Readers should be grateful to Karen Swallow Prior for her work on this project and to B&H for refreshing these works of literature for contemporary readers to enjoy, discuss, and grow through. These volumes promise to be resources that can be appreciated for decades to come.

Some thoughts on The Postmodern Condition

Postmodernism was the bogeyman of the late ‘90s and early 2000s among evangelicals and other conservatives. In much the same way that one’s response to Critical Race Theory (which has some connections with postmodernity) serves as a shibboleth for acceptability in trendy circles, postmodernism functioned as a way to be part of the cool kids (on either side).

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There are now those that think that postmodernism is really just another form of modernity (perhaps further advanced along its trajectory), and thus never really existed as a distinct movement, but there was something that adherents and opponents felt was different from the general stream of modernity, which still deserves some attention. With that in mind, I picked up, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, to try to get a better understanding from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

Lyotard offers a definition in his introduction: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

In other words, Lyotard was arguing that modernity attempted to impose homogeneity on the world through metanarratives—high level explanations that were an attempt to make sense of everything. Postmodernity claims to recognize metanarratives as impositions from authorities that likely have little claim to correspondence to the truth.

At its best, postmodernity shakes the claims of modernistic empiricism, which leads to the apparent supremacy of “Science.” Postmodernity did not succeed in uprooting the religion of Scientism, as evidenced by the year of shaming that we “follow the Science” or “believe in the Science” or “listen to the Science.” In general, when someone puts a definite article in front of “Science” they are no longer talking about actual science, but about how they intend to try to browbeat you into doing what they want to. We are still very much living in an era where people believe that “Science” has or can produce a unified theory of everything. This despite Thomas Kuhn’s work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which shows a truer picture of the way the scientific community develops metanarratives that evolve over time.

By Lyotard offers some helpful analysis beyond his definition of postmodernism. Though The Postmodern Condition was written in 1979, he predicted the information age with a surprising degree of prescience.

For example, he wrote,

“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”

There are obvious connections to information warfare, the psyops that are ongoing with bots on social media, election interference, etc. The fact that there are operatives from other nations whose primary goal is to stir up dissent and doubt among citizens of the United States is an illustration of Lyotard’s prediction.

Also, significantly for the concept of education and the role of the state, Lyotard anticipated the shifting role of the state with regard to education:

“The mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according to which society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are rich and easy to decode. The ideology of communicational “transparence,” which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.” It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency.”

It isn’t entirely a bad thing when the State is no longer perceived as “the brain or mind of society,” since the State has been significantly wrong about a number of life changing issues in the not-so-distant past. However, within Lyotard’s prediction is the anticipation of QAnon and similar conspiracy theories, which see a “Deep State” that is controlling the narrative. This has effectively made Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other outlets the de facto gatekeepers of truth, as congressional hearings and obnoxious overlays on social media posts frequently remind us.

It is interesting to read The Postmodern Condition at this point, to see how many of Lyotard’s anticipated realities have come true. As a description of reality, he is on the right track. He does little to help find a way to navigate through toward some better condition, but there is some value in the diagnosis.

Can Science Explain Everything? - A Review

Can science explain everything?

Most people would answer that question reflexively, but there is likely to be a divided response.

John Lennox, longtime apologist for Christianity and emeritus professor of Mathematics, argues that science cannot explain everything. His little book from The Good Book company, Can Science Explain Everything?, is a concise explanation of his response.

To some, the question itself might seem absurd, but one of the prevailing worldviews of the 21st century is scientism. We see this when people tell us to “follow the Science” or that “Science tells us” or some other trick of speech that assumes that there is a univocal authority in Science (it must be capitalized) that can shortcut any moral or practical concerns. Scientism is the belief that empirical scientific inquiry can answer any question and provide a consistent correct answer.

The question is significant because much of our cultural conversation seems to assume that science either knows everything or that it can know everything if we only ask the right questions and properly fund the research. There are huge ethical problems created by scientism, but there are more practical ones as well.

Scientism presumes that religion is either irrelevant to meaningful knowledge and thus useless for life or directly opposed to reason. This is the view of atheists like Richard Dawkins, but it is also a garden variety myth often used to marginalize Christians. Lennox topples scientism as a presupposition of reality and shows that while science is important, it is lacks sufficient structure to answer some of life’s most important questions.

Lennox opens his book arguing that being a scientist does not preclude belief in God. As a retired professor of mathematics, he has good reason to know this. But he also shares with us the account of his academic superiors attempting to shame him into rejecting Christianity. Lennox then moves on to a discussion of the shift in culture from faithful scientists seeking rational explanation for natural phenomenon because of their faith in God to some more contemporary scientists who seek to use their scientific findings to argue against the existence of God.

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The substance of the argument of the book is that both religion and science are dependent upon reason, but they are often geared to ask different questions. Science tends to ask “What?” and “How?” while some sort of philosophical thought, including religion, is necessary to come to an answer about “Why?” The “Why?” in this case refers not to the process, but to purpose. Science can not answer questions of purpose.

Lennox also argues that there is no reason not to take the Bible seriously, despite the apparent power of science to explain all natural phenomena and exclude any supernatural events. He even argues that there is no reason to reject miracles. The miracles recorded in Scripture, like the resurrection of Jesus, are matters of history rather than of philosophy or science.

The whole book has an apologetic edge. Lennox is making a case that Christianity is credible. The book begins focused on the question of science, but turns during the discussion of miracles toward other objections to Christianity, for example, Lennox briefly discusses the problem of evil. After that point, he examines the trustworthiness of the text of Scripture we have as a way of explaining why the resurrection miracle has a historical basis. He then provides a chapter explaining that for the skeptic to falsify Christianity—that is, to prove that Christianity is not true, he needs to disprove the resurrection. Lennox shows that Christianity is falsifiable, but also makes the case that the account in the Bible of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection plausible and, indeed, even probable as the most credible explanation. Lennox closes the book by explaining how one can be a Christian and why it is important that skeptics and Christians test the faith honestly, seeking answers to doubts without perpetuating them indefinitely.

This is both a good book and a limited book. It is a worthy tool for the right applications, but is not the right instrument for every job.

Can Science Explain Everything? is an introductory level text. It is written at a level that an advanced junior high student could follow the argument. It is most suitable for those with more advanced reasoning skills—curious high schoolers, college students, or congregants who have come up against exclusive claims of scientism and are asking good questions about the faith. The book would also be helpful as an evangelistic tract for an open-minded skeptic who is honest about seeking answer to her questions. It will also be helpful for Christian students asking whether a skeptical teacher really has all the answers.

On the other hand, this is a book that is likely to meet resistance and ridicule by more hardened atheists because Lennox made the necessary tradeoffs between concision and completeness. In a book of 125 pages it is impossible to explore every contour of these important questions. This will lead more antagonist people to find the intentionally basic explanations Lennox offers unconvincing. This is not due to an inherent deficiency in the book, but a recognition of its purpose. Lennox has provided more substantial refutations of scientism in his book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

This is a good, useful book. Don’t ask more of it than it is prepared to give, but it would be a handy resource for a youth pastor or church bookshelf to answer some of this culture’s most pressing challenges.

How do We Know? - A Review

One of the biggest needs in the church, especially among theologically conservative Christians, is a recovery of epistemology.

The problem is that that first statement alone will significantly limit the audience for a post like this or the sort of study that is needed to really help change the unhealthy approach to media and Bible study by many Christians.

Epistemology is the study of how we know things. It’s one of those words that until you read it a bunch of times in different settings and hear a number of people defining and explaining it, you will often have a hard time grasping what it really means.

How do we know things? Well, we just do, right? Not exactly.

In certain crowds, if I ask “How do we know?” I am likely to be told that we read the Bible. “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” I’ve seen more than a few bumper stickers to that effect.

That may be a comforting way to end a discussion for some, but how do we know that the Bible’s statements are true? What do we do with phenomena about which the Bible does not speak? In other words, even if I accept the Bible as absolutely trustworthy in everything it addresses, how do I live in a world that is culturally unlike the Bible.

Additionally, how do I know that my reading of the Bible’s statements is correct? Exposure to individuals from other cultures will quickly reveal that different people perceive different symbols different ways. How can I know that I know what is true in the Bible is really true?

That last question reveals how strange the question can get really quickly. It’s easier to jump back to “common sense” where we simply accept the received wisdom from epistemic authorities—the people or institutions we trust—than ask this slippery question.

But what happens when manipulative predators realize that folks are going to take their word for it? And what happens when there are so many entities posing as epistemic authorities because of the information age that anyone can jump on YouTube and present themselves as an authority that anyone can find and some folks will believe?

You get the right epistemic mess that we are in, with conspiracy theories flying around a mile a minute, distrust in any group that does not agree with you or your in-group, and a failure to recognize that even with an authoritative text like the Bible, a reader can bring so many presuppositions to the table that he or she can entirely misread the message. It’s a pretty bleak situation.

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However, there is hope. First, because we have a living and loving God who inspired the Bible and illuminates it, so that the person of the Holy Spirit will continue to work on the minds and hearts of those who are honest in their pursuit of holiness. Second, there is hope because of books like How Do We Know? An Introduction to Epistemology, which was just released as a second edition, by Jamie Dew and Mark Foreman.

How Do We Know? is an attempt to provide a resource on a tricky subject that does not require a background in philosophy to understand. The authors come at the problem head on in the first pages of the series introduction: “Many people today have embraced, often without realizing it, an approach to knowing reality that undermines their ever coming to truly understand it.”

The book asks a series of questions in each of its chapters:

What is epistemology? What is knowledge? Where does knowledge come from? What is truth, and how do we find it? What are inferences, and how do they work? What do we perceive? Do we need justification? [of belief, not soteriology] Can we be objective in our view of the world? What is virtue epistemology? Do we have revelation? How certain can we be?

That is a lot of questions for a very short book. In about 150 pages, the authors try to provide reasonable answers to each one of those difficult, but very important questions. They do quite well.

How Do We Know? is a good place to start in getting a foothold in what I believe to be one of the most important topics for our day. There are obviously some side, tribal battles that pop up and might be cause for disagreement among more experienced theologians and philosophers. For example, some Reformed individuals who have been exposed to presuppositionalism may find points of disagreement. However, on balance, the authors are fair in their dealing with the tribal disagreements within Christian philosophy. As a result, the 150-pages of this book may be more helpful to a beginner than the 400-page tome that is John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, for example. Dew and Foreman wrote an introduction with all of its blessings and limitations. But it is a good introduction.

Even though this is the sort of book that is written specifically for those that have little background in philosophy, it requires either some scaffolding through a class or a decent education. This would make for an excellent undergraduate text, a useful volume for a small-group study with reasonably educated lay people—especially those who read. This is a book that would be well-placed withing a high school homeschool curriculum, particularly if a parent was available to help work through some of the hairy edges of the concepts. In other words, this is an accessible book, but the topic is very abstract and sometimes help is needed. Dew and Foreman have done about as well as can be done with an exceptionally important, but extremely difficult field of study.

One can hope that How Do We Know? gets a wide readership beyond academic settings. The church in general, and evangelical churches specifically, have a significant crisis of knowing, trust, and critical thinking on their hands. The answer is not more five-minute YouTube clips, but basic discipleship and training in how to process information, which is exactly what How Do We Know? provides.

NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Your Money or Your Life - A Review

In 1992 a little book was released that is still creating ripples today, nearly three decades and three editions later. Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez published Your Money or Your Life not long after a major stock market crash on Black Monday 1987, as the United States was suffering under a slow-recovery recession after a decade of decadence. Your Money or Your Life is largely credited as the inspiration of the FIRE movement, which calls people to work hard, live frugally, save vigorously to achieve financial independence with the goal of being able to step away from the daily grind years before normal cultural expectations.

In true American fashion, the book is fashioned as a simple nine-step process that raises the reader’s awareness of where your money has gone, where it is going, and where you would really like it to go. The central concept of the book is that in the modern economy, humans trade time for money. And, since time is the one thing every human has a limited amount of in this life, they describe the employment relationship as one of trading life energy for money, hence the title: Your Money or Your Life.

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As with many truly helpful things, the book’s premise is incredibly simple: For a great many people, raising awareness of expenses and asking a few value questions can reorient attitudes in ways that help shake of consumeristic habits and lead to a great deal more financial freedom. The concept works much better for those that are middle-income or higher, since the poor tend to already have a tight focus on their finances. But as Robins points out, many middle-income people have no idea where their money goes and are wasting a great deal of their time earning money to spend on things or experiences that give little satisfaction.

The practical advice in Your Money or Your Life is sound, which helps explain why a third revision was just released. The core is sound, though the specifics of recommendations have had to change. For example, in a low interest environment, the early advice to use bonds to fund retirement would be a relatively quick path to ruin.

Philosophically the book is all over the place. It mixes a few proof-texts from the Bible with Eastern thought, as well as some assumptions that are more American than anything else. However, by common grace there is a helpful integrity to the outlook, however quilted the underlying ideas may be.

One of the more helpful ideas that the book promotes is that all of life should be viewed as a whole. We can’t see our budget as one piece of our lives, our work as another, and our home life as something entirely different. All of them are of a piece and impact one another, as anyone who has worked alongside someone going through a divorce can attest. This isn’t to suggest that getting one thing right fixes everything, but what Robin and Dominquez point out is that viewing them all together helps us make better choices in the places we have agency. Spending money is, for many of us, one of the places we have the most agency. Therefore, the encouraging people to ask questions about how their spending reflects their values can lead to changes that open up opportunities in other areas.

Another significant element of the book is that it forces readers to rethink the nature of work. They argue,

The real problem with work, then, is not that our expectations are too high. It’s that we have confused work with paid employment. Redefining “work” as simply any productive or purposeful activity, with paid employment being just one activity among many, frees us from the false assumption that what we do to put food on the table and a roof over our heads should also provide us with our sense of meaning, purpose and fulfillment. Breaking the link between work and money allows us to reclaim balance and sanity.

There are too many eggs in the “work” basket for many of us. We define ourselves by our job and invest our best energy into tasks that may be demeaning or seem to be designed to be frustrating.

To some degree, that is the nature of an industrialized economy, which sometimes reduces tasks to repetitive minutia in the name of efficiency. Connected to this reduction is that due to the liquidity of modernity, there are few stable aspects of a contemporary human’s life. We are likely to change jobs, move thousands of miles, and undergo shifts in vocation that would have been unthinkable for the majority of human history. Work was meant to be satisfying as we create and organize, being made in the image of God. What work has become is not what it was meant to be. This is helpful truth that the authors recognize.

The book carries some significant baggage philosophically. The authors seem to assume that one of the primary purposes of humanity is to achieve a degree of autonomy. The number of cases of divorce they seem to celebrate is significant. There is an assumption that happiness can be achieved in some measure through material goods. All this and more lie beneath the surface, which should cause the Christian to read this book with care. At the same time, the advice is presented by non-Christians who argue for a distinct worldview, which makes it easier to chew the meat and spit the bones than when someone reads Dave Ramsey or another of the Christian financial gurus, where a heavy dose of proof-texts and testimonies saturated with church language can cause us to lower our guard, allowing greed to slip in when we least expect it. Your Money or Your Life is helpful, in part, because it is written from a different perspective that can be illuminating even as we filter it carefully.

For many American Christians, the lure of consumerism has led to an increase in consumer debt, a lifestyle of excess that would have shamed earlier generations of believers, and an increasing difficulty to enjoy the benefits of real wealth in one of the most affluent societies on earth. Books like Your Money or Your Life can present an alternative picture that is, in fact, closer to a biblical attitude toward money and the unity of life than many similar products from faith oriented Christian publishers offer. It’s high time American Christians began to rethink their money habits, and Your Money or Your Life is a decent place to start.