13 Wednesday Nov 2019
Posted in Books
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Church History, Volume 1: From Christ to Pre-Reformation, by Everett Fergusson (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).
Excellent. A very clear and engaging tour of the story of the church before the Reformation. Fergusson does good history: fair, insightful in analysis, neither burdened by (post)modern disdain nor blinded by the rosy lenses of nostalgia. Highly recommended.
10 Monday Sep 2018
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Sinclair B. Ferguson’s The Holy Spirit (IVP, 1996) is an excellent introduction to pneumatology. Ferguson is always insightful; in this case he provides a profoundly exegetical theology, well-reasoned even where one may disagree with him. He makes a strong case for cessationism (regarding the gifts of prophecy and tongues), addressing the key passages in the debate and drawing on broader contours of history and theology. Very good.
25 Wednesday Jul 2018
Posted in Books
The Doctrine of God, by Ronald Gregor Smith
This book is the edited notes for the 1969 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, which Dr. Gregor Smith passed away before being able to deliver. It is probably the strangest book to bear the title The Doctrine of God, for there is little enough doctrine in it, and even less true knowledge of God.
It is not easy reading. The book contains a great deal of existentialist sophistry that can be of little value for the Christian. Gregor Smith suffers from an illusory crisis, and proceeds to set fire to the foundations. The sixties must have been interesting times in the world of academic theology.
24 Thursday Mar 2016
Posted in Books, Contra Mundum, Theology
Fortress Press, the publishing house of the ELCA, has a forthcoming book that appears to be a piece of straight-up paganism. Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology–a window, I expect, into the sort of idolatry that passes in some circles for theology.
Now, this is not a book review. I haven’t read the book, and I don’t intend to unless for some unexpected reason it should be relevant to my parishioners; life, they tell me, is short. To all appearances this is the sort of book I should urge people not to buy–we don’t want to reward the publishers for this sort of thing. But do not think I am telling people not to read it; perhaps the book is good for a lark, in an ‘I laugh only to keep from weeping and anathematizing’ sense.
No, what I have to say right now is simply based on impressions, the description of the book to which I have linked. To all appearances, at least, the book is an exercise in idolatry. We have here two ‘theologians’ engaged in a conversation with the goal of dethroning the God revealed in the Bible–the one true God who is indeed transcendent and omnipotent and–to avoid for the moment parsing the relationship of God and gender–consistently refers to Himself with masculine pronouns.
What is God to be replaced with, in the spirituality advocated by the authors? One appears to advocate a feminist panentheism, the other a sort of pantheism. Both are unambiguously pagan ideas.
Of the host of questions and issues that present themselves when we see an ostensibly Christian publishing house producing such a book, I would like to reflect on two:
1. Why on earth should one want to reject God as revealed in Scripture?
It seems that it all has to do with comfort. They reject the God of the Scriptures because He doesn’t meet their perceived notions of who God should be or what will work in the world. The chapter title “Finding a God I Can Believe In” is tremendously forthright about the idolatry being embraced here. ‘I can’t believe in the God who has revealed Himself, so I will construct a God I can believe in.’
2. What, then, is the source of theology?
The blurb gives no indication that they try to build their case on the Scriptures in any meaningful way. Instead, the description indicates that their experiences are the source of their theology: what has my life led me to think and feel is true? Absent from such a hermeneutic is an understanding of the Fall, and the concomitant healthy skepticism about the capacity of the human mind and heart to faithfully understand God apart from His special revelation.
God created us in His image, and we’ve been trying ever since to turn the tables. But all our efforts are vain and less than worthless. We must know God as He truly is, as He has revealed Himself to be, or we will not know Him at all. It is no wonder that the theological method modeled here has led these authors to pagan idolatry.
