Review of Owen’s ‘Communion with the Triune God’

 

John Owen, Communion with the Triune God, edited by Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor, Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2007.
The great English Puritan author John Owen would not make it onto many people’s lists of devotional writers. Alongside the common fare today Owen stands like an imposing yet stately variegated oak rudely protruding a functional white plastic fence. He is not easy reading. He is not easy reading even in his most readable moments, as in his books on The Person of Christ or his Exposition of Psalm 130. And his Communion with God, here presented in a carefully edited format by Kelly Kapic and Justin Taylor, is not as comfortable to navigate as those works.

 

Why, then, this new edition? There are many sound reasons that could be given. One might say that Owen’s profundity and theological balance make this work required reading for anyone who is serious about researching the glories of trinitarianism in our day. Certainly, Owen made important contributions to our understanding of the Trinity which ought to be heard again. Or it could be explained that he was a theologian of the heart, a master at bringing God into the quandaries of facing life in a fallen world, and so making it less formal and impersonal. For John Owen, as for the Puritans generally, theology was the most human expression of Truth. Not primarily for the academy but for the Church – for the congregation. Communion with the Triune God is an exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity for the children of the Triune God.

 

This edition is enhanced by an admirable essay by Kapic on Owen’s conception of the saint’s worship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Kapic really sets the stage for the feast to come. A very thorough analytical outline, (an improved version of the one found in Owen’s Works, vol. II), with page numbers relating to the treatise, encourages the wary to sample parts of the book before taking the plunge.

Review of “The Apologetics Study Bible”

The Apologetics Study Bible, Ted Cabal, General Editor, Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishing, Hbk, 2007.

At the risk of showing my age, I can remember a time when considering which Study Bible to purchase was an easy affair. One had only a few to choose from: Scofield, Thompson, Nave, and a few more. Well, those days are well and truly gone. What is one to make of the current situation? Options fill out the pages of Bible catalogs. Within the long lists of contemporary Study Bibles there are good and not so good choices. I’ve even come across ones with metal covers (who dreams up these things?) But in our consumer-culture there’s always room for one more, right? How, then does the new Apologetics Study Bible rate?

It would be helpful in a review of a work like this to first provide a general overview of what one will encounter in The Apologetics Study Bible (hereafter TASB).

First, the translation is the Holman Christian Standard Bible, a fairly formal correspondence version done by the Southern Baptists, usually accurate and quite vivid (especially in the Prophets). The study notes and book introductions are provided by recognized Bible scholars, many of whom were contributors to the New American Commentary series. This feature of TASB does not appear to be geared towards the subject of apologetics, but the material is good, reflecting a wise decision to expound the text itself instead of affixing clipped apologetic digressions to a biblical passage.

Review of New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics

New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, edited by W. C. Campbell-Jack & Gavin McGrath, consulting editor, C. Stephen Evans, Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 2006, cloth, $45.00.

When in 1999 Norman Geisler published his Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics he provided the Christian community with a useful, if slanted reference book on the defense of the Faith. Like the Catholic Handbook by Kreeft and Tacelli, it reflected a heavily Thomistic approach. Now we have this offering from the UK, produced by IVP and including articles by many contributors.

The choice of articles is on the whole excellent. It appears that a lot of thought has gone into the selection. We find fine articles on such pertinent topics as “Advertising,” “Authority,” “Critical Realism,” “Foundationalism,” “Globalization,” and “Islam.” Included also are many cameos of important thinkers (e.g. Augustine, Barth, Dooyeweerd, Henry, Lewis, Wittgenstein) that support the formal entries.

The dictionary is divided into two parts; the first fifty pages being given over to six essays on the history, role and relevance of the discipline. I confess to being quite disappointed with this part of the work, since on the whole the essays suffer from a lack of depth and balance, with Evans’s article, “Approaches to Christian Apologetics” being a prime example of the latter. But perhaps this would have been remedied if more space had been set aside for them.

Letter from a Christian Citizen - A Review

As many of you are well aware, the past year or so has been a period of rejuvenation for atheism. Four big selling books, by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris have made a splash, and, I think, caught some evangelicals napping. Not so Douglas Wilson, who among other things is Head of a Christian college that focuses on “the lost tools of learning,” and the editor of the respected Credenda/Agenda magazine. His new book, Letter from a Christian Citizen responds to the similarly titled atheist tirade of Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation.

Wilson’s book, like all his work, is interesting, fun to read, and incisive. He is one of the very best writers out there today, and Letter from a Christian Citizen is one of the year’s most worthwhile books. It begins with a valuable “Foreword” from Gary DeMar about the pretensions of “new” atheism and the latest assault it has launched upon truly free-thinking people (meaning anyone who may want to disagree with it).

When Wilson enters the fray he does so cordially, thanking Harris for “setting your thoughts down so plainly.” (3). He explains that the acerbic attacks Harris has received from some Christians is not a sign of a general ill-will among believers (4-5), but then skillfully uses Harris’s characterizations of these church-goers to cut through the atheist’s unreasoned assumptions. “I am genuinely curious as what you can possibly offer as a basis for these judgments” he quips (6). After all, if the atheist version of the world corresponds with reality, what is Harris doing making moral judgments of other biochemically-driven systems? The ethics of the thing isn’t even on the table! As Wilson points out, “In order to demolish something intellectually, you have to have a standard for thought and reason” (8), and this standard extends (if one is to have any hope of a coherent worldview) into the realm of morality also (9, 40, 99). Hectoring believers with epithets and speaking patronizingly at them when one is standing on the equivalent of epistemological Balsawood is stock-in-trade for atheism. But when anyone dares ask for the fulcrum upon which the high-sounding appeals to “science” and “reason” turn all one hears is the crickets chirping outside.

Promise Not Quite Fulfilled: A Brief Review Article

Recently I was in the bookstore of a small but outstanding Christian college in Florida when I came across the book Promise Unfulfilled: The Failed Strategy of Modern Evangelicalism by Dr Rolland McCune, longtime Professor of Systematic Theology at Detroit Baptist Seminary. The title caught my eye right away, so I bought it and read it as soon as I could. It does not take an advanced student in American evangelical history to know that modern evangelicalism is awry in most respects, so I was keenly interested to see what McCune makes of it all.

Let me start off this review by registering how much I appreciate the author’s attempt to both inform believers of the state of evangelicalism and to remind them about how the movement got in the tar it is in. Any author who helps us not to repeat our mistakes by telling us the sober truth about ourselves is to be warmly thanked and appreciated.

Dawkins Deludes Himself

Not enough people are heeding Richard Dawkins! Despite trying his utmost to spread the gospel of evolutionism-dressed-as-science, there are not enough takers. For the life of him Dawkins can’t understand why Christianity in particular continues to attract intelligent persons to it. For years he has been crusading for his “truth.” Now he has written (another) book, The God Delusion, which as he says will persuade reasonable readers to become atheists like himself.

Humility has never been one of Dawkins notable traits, and throughout the book Christians are patronized as if their chance-given minds are not being used in the way nature “intended.” His hope is that the Christian who picks up the book will become an atheist when he or she puts it down. Well, sorry and all that, but i’ve been an atheist and I think their arguments are wholly unconvincing. Cornelius Van Til put it so well; an atheist is like a man of water trying to climb out of the water with a ladder of water. Try as they may, they cannot come to terms with the fact that if you reject God you have to redefine everything you assert in terms of the accidental, the relative and the changing.

Review of “A Concise History of Christian Thought” (Tony Lane)

A Concise History of Christian Thought, rev. & exp. by Tony Lane, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006, pbk, 336 pp., $19.99.

This is one of the most accessible histories of Christian doctrine I have seen. The author teaches Historical Theology at London School of Theology and is well regarded in the evangelical community. The method employed in the book is to survey the lives of the eminent theologians from East and West and connect them with the controversies or disputes which oftentimes brought forth their notable works. The book is divided into five parts, covering the early Fathers to AD 500; then the Eastern and Western traditions from AD 500 to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The last part deals with the Modern world from AD 1800. The influence of Williston Walker’s famous A History of the Christian Church can be traced, especially in Part Four.

The treatment of each thinker is necessarily abbreviated, yet Lane knows what he is doing and therefore makes good use of his space. By viewing Christian thought through the lives of individuals the whole subject becomes less imposing and less abstract; qualities which should recommend this book as a textbook for senior undergraduate and first year graduate students.

Sadly Lane falls into the trap of departing from orthodoxy in giving space to the likes of Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Urs von Balthasar and others. I suppose this is inevitable in a work such as this, but this should have been redressed more than it is with better coverage of evangelicals such as Gill, Fuller, Darby, Machen, Van Til, Henry, and Lloyd-Jones. There is also a notable dearth of Dutch theologians in the book, both from the Further Reformation (Voetius, Cocceus, Witsius) and the neo-Calvinist movement associated with men like Kuyper, Bavinck and Dooyeweerd. These are important omissions.

But with that said this book does accomplish much and, therefore, deserves our recommendation.

Review of “Meet The Puritans” (Beeke and Pederson)

Meet the Puritans by Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pederson, Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2005, xxx plus 895 pp., cloth, $24.95

It is high time the Christian reading public had such a book as this. There have been excellent introductions to the Puritans like Peter Lewis’s The Genius of Puritanism, Leland Ryken’s Worldly Saints, and J.I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness, but until now there has been no work that provided an introduction to the lives and works of these great men in such a helpful, straightforward way. Meet the Puritans functions almost as an encyclopedia of the Puritans.

Beeke and Pederson run through their subjects in alphabetical order; first in England and Colonial America, then in Scotland (Appendix 2), and lastly the Nadere Reformatie (Appendix 3) in Holland. Three other appendices, plus a full bibliography, a glossary and index round- off the volume.

Each author is presented through a brief biographical sketch (Brook’s Lives of the Puritans has been mined to good effect). In some cases (e.g. John Bunyan, Thomas Gouge, Nicholas Byfield) these are sobering reminders of the triumph of faith over life’s trials.

Review of “A Biblical History of Israel” (Provan, et al)

A Biblical History of Israel by Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, 426 pp., paperback, $24.95

I approached this book expecting a halfway capitulation to the modern liberal push for a discarding of biblical Israel from the textbooks. But I was very pleasantly surprised. In fact, I would have to say that Provan, Long and Longman have written a History of Israel which must be considered essential reading for the student of the Old Testament. The opening section (about the first hundred pages, authored mainly by Provan) is a tour de force. In it Provan examines the various theories of history-writing that have led up to the Biblical Studies departments of two influential European faculties removing “biblical Israel” from the context of historical fact. The reader is led on a fascinating tour of historiographic methodology, all the while being strengthened by a telling critique of liberal approaches (including the subjective nature of much archaeology), and a powerful reinforcing of the facts of the Old Testament. Buy the book for this first part alone.

Book Reviews: Table of Contents

“A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith” by Robert L. Reymond (2002)

“A Biblical History of Israel” by Iain Provan , et al.  

“Biblical Interpretation Then and Now” by David S. Dockery

“Chariots of God” by Alan Cairns

“Christian Apologetics” by Cornelius Van Til

“Dispensationalism” by Charles C. Ryrie

“On the Reliability of the Old Testament” by K. A. Kitchen

“The Pentateuch” by Kenton L. Sparks

“The Prayer of Jabez” by Bruce Wilkinson

“Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments” edited by Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Michael Welker

“To Know and Love God: Method for Theology” by David K. Clark

“Triumph of the Lamb” by Dennis E. Johnson