At certain places, this book was far too thorough -- like killing ants with a canoe paddle -- which gives off an obsessive feel. But at other places, At certain places, this book was far too thorough -- like killing ants with a canoe paddle -- which gives off an obsessive feel. But at other places, there are points where the book is devastating. At a minimum, when all the players are dead and politics is out of the picture, this question needs to be examined independently. The question I am referring to, the question before the house, is whether Walter Hooper has been a faithful and reliable executor of the Lewis literary estate....more
Hope to write more about this soon, but for now, let us just say it is superb.
Here is what I wrote on my blog:
Testimonies are powerful. The apostle PaHope to write more about this soon, but for now, let us just say it is superb.
Here is what I wrote on my blog:
Testimonies are powerful. The apostle Paul gives his testimony in the book of Acts more than once, and he did so to great effect. The center of New Testament-style evangelism is found in the two-fold ministry of preaching and testimony. How will they hear without a preacher (Rom. 10:14)? And the one who believes has the witness (marturia) in himself (1 John 5:10).
Witnesses in the first century gave testimony to what the incarnate Christ said and did (1 John 1:2). But that does not render witness superfluous in the ages after—because the Holy Spirit was given to take the place of Christ, and He has been active down to the present day. This is why testimonies have the capacity to be singularly powerful. They can be done poorly, and can be over-run by hackneyed clichés. But sermons can be done poorly also, and yet no one doubts that preaching is an instrument appointed by God.
This testimony is delivered with exceptional grace and force. The Great Good Thing is the testimony of how Andrew Klavan, a secular and very messed up Jew, was found by Christ.
Klavan is an award-winning writer, and it shows. He brings exceptional talents to the description of an exceptional story, one I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The genre of his other books is “crime novel,” a part of Lit Town where I do not usually go, and so until this book I was unfamiliar with his writing. But in the world of mystery and crime writing, he is a well-known name. His novel True Crime was made into a movie, as was Don’t Say a Word. He has won the Edgar Award twice, and can safely be called a competent wordsmith.
I was familiar with him because of his online video commentary on politics and culture, which are very funny and almost always leave bruises. I found out about this book because of his political presence online, ordered it willingly, and read it even more willingly. This is a testimony that has the power to put both hands on your shoulders, and make you sit down with the book.
Here is his description of how he began praying, before He even knew who he was praying to.
“After a while, though, it began to seem to me that I was thinking too much about perfect truth-telling. It was a waste of prayer time. The human heart is so steeped in self-deception that it can easily outrun its own lies. It can use even meticulous honesty as a form of dishonesty, a way of saying to God, ‘Look how honest I am.’ So I let it go. I let it all go. I just flung wide the gates to the sorry junkyard of my soul and let God have a good look at the whole rubble-strewn wreck of it. Then I went ahead and told him my thoughts as plainly as I knew how” (p. 239).
His was a conversion that had cultural, historical, intellectual, and emotion reasons. He deals with them all, honestly, seriously, and without any sanctimony. You will never read a less sanctimonious testimony.
We live in a time when stories like this need to be told, over and again. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. ...more
An enjoyable read. When it comes to the history of the Protestant tradition in Ireland, this book filled in some lacunae in my brain. If my knowledge An enjoyable read. When it comes to the history of the Protestant tradition in Ireland, this book filled in some lacunae in my brain. If my knowledge of the Reformation were a decrepit road, Gribben filled in numerous potholes....more
If you were to try to sum up the significant contributions of Anglican theologian Richard Hooker in the words of a Broadway musical, you could do no bIf you were to try to sum up the significant contributions of Anglican theologian Richard Hooker in the words of a Broadway musical, you could do no better than to point to the lyrics of Gershwin’s It Ain’t Necessarily So — referring of course to the chorus and not the verses. Now I am not sure why you would want to do it that way, but if you were, that would be the way to do it. Hooker’s central contribution, in my view, was to answer “the precisionists” of his day with a learned retort that it is not really that simple.
This companion to Hooker’s life and work by Brad Littlejohn is fascinating, learned, straightforward, well-written, engaging, and balanced. The title is Richard Hooker: a Companion to His Life and Work. I really enjoyed it, and the point of this review is that you or someone you love should enjoy it as well. I understand Christmas is coming up.
Because of the historical importance that England came to occupy in the centuries after the Reformation, it became important for some later anachronistic Anglicans to project a “neither fish nor fowl” Anglicanism back on the period of the Reformation. But Littlejohn does a marvelous job showing how Hooker and company considered themselves, quite accurately, to be simply Reformed theologians within a broad Protestant consensus. The Reformation was not a denominational affair — it was an essential and huge part of the history of the culture of the West. The point of this book could be summarized as arguing that just as Luther belongs to more than the Lutherans, so Hooker belongs to more than the Anglicans. The Reformation was a huge river, not a consortium of mountain brooks.
The chapter on Hooker as polemicist was particularly good. Hooker had his own unique style of theological reasoning that governed the structure of his Laws as a whole, and even worked down into the syntax of his sentences. What you might have initially thought was a tedious run-on sentence turned out by the end to be the wind-up to a haymaker.
The first part of this book deals with Hooker as myth, Hooker as man, and Hooker as his book (Laws). The second analyzes Hooker as Protestant, as polemicist, as a philosopher, and as a pastor. The last third of this companion surveys certain key doctrines — Scripture, law, the Church, and liturgy and sacraments.
As a Puritan myself, I appreciated the distinctions that Littlejohn made among Hooker’s opponents, even though there are a number of points where I would agree with (some of) them over against Hooker. Not all the Presbyterians were “precisionists,” against whom Hooker easily carried the day. C.S. Lewis points out in his book English Literature in the 16th Century that it is in Thomas Cartwright that we first encounter the Puritan of common caricature, and Cartwright was one of Hooker’s main opponents. While reading this book, I also noticed that many of the qualifications that the early Presbyterians needed to make were in fact made by the time of the Westminster Confession. In other words, if you were feeling impish, Hooker could be considered an honorary ex officio member of an early Westminster editorial committee, for which we should all thank him.
Littlejohn is fair-minded in his handling of all such disputes, and where the Puritans had a point he is not afraid to acknowledge it. Where they demanded too much, insisting on jure divino authorization for every detail of their whole project, down into the nooks and crannies, Littlejohn points out what Hooker pointed out, which is that such exegesis cutteth no ice.
The problem was that a number of the early English Presbyterians adopted a form of reasoning that shows up later in Baptist hermeneutics, or among the strict regulativists. That is, that unless something is expressly authorized by Scripture, then it is forbidden by Scripture. The problem is found in that pesky word expressly. We have no express warrant for infant baptism, for worship on Sunday, for women taking communion, for pianos in worship, for stated clerks, etc. If you insist on express warrant for everything, you either wind up doing hardly anything at all, or stretching multiple texts quite thin in order to get your “express” warrant. It was the latter approach that the precisionists adopted, and was a classic case of overreach.
But all Protestants must be regulativists of some stripe, and I much prefer the formulation of it provided by Hughes Oliphant Old, when he says that “worship must be according to Scripture.” That’s the way you do it.
This short book by Littlejohn is really valuable in all the issues related to this that it makes you think through. As a convinced (jure divino) Presbyterian and as someone who is also convinced by Hooker’s cautious and conservative approach to all reform, I commend the careful approach to ecclesiastical reform, with Hooker as one of our models. Reformation is not revolution. A friend recently pointed out that some radical elements of the Reformation had all the pastoral instincts of the Khmer Rouge, and standing against them was a necessity. You don’t want to turn anything over to those who are in the grip of an idea. But neither do you want to leave the ship of the church with the status quo johnnies, who never met a barnacle they didn’t love. So we should not just look at Hooker’s positions, but also at his process. In other words, for the Reformation in England to have allowed the precisionists to bulldoze everything in order to build a glorious New City would have been beyond destructive. The only thing we can be certain of is that there would have been no glorious new anything.
I let slip that I was a jure divino presbyterian, so I should say something briefly about that. In a debate with express warrant presbyterians, who were rummaging in the New Testament for their express justifications, someone of Hooker’s abilities could just roll their socks down and pull their kirtles over their heads. But if we are allowed to bring in the Old Testament (as we all must do with baptism), appealing to the government of the synagogues, the nature of the Sanhedrin, and so on, the picture changes dramatically. At the same time, my sympathies would still have been with Hooker over against the men with the bulldozers. But that’s all right — postmillennialists can afford to be patient. A time is coming when the whole church will gather in the general assembly (Heb. 12:23 [Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)] ). A little joke there. Well, mostly a joke.
It is also worth pointing out that a downstream Hookerian approach in our day will be profoundly conservative about different institutions, particularly for Americans. If we learn our lessons rightly, we can invoke Hooker while defending something he would never have defended. But to pursue that right now would take me too far afield.
Back to Littlejohn’s work. Well-written, well-done. The main value of the book is, I believe, in getting narrow and truncated Reformed Christians to see just how big their tradition actually is....more
This is an important book for a number of reasons. The first is the timing — and it is almost as though a higher power were at work. In this book, ChaThis is an important book for a number of reasons. The first is the timing — and it is almost as though a higher power were at work. In this book, Charles Jackson gives a fresh historical overview of the work of Alexander Henderson, one of the stalwarts among the Scottish Covenanters. There was a time when Christians with a backbone used to give the ruling elite the fits, and it is long past time for us to be reading up on them.Riots Revolutions
Civil resistance from Christians is not a phenomenon that arises from nowhere — it requires a theology. Not only so, but it requires a theology that is faithful to Scripture. Left to themselves, without godly leadership, too many Christians simply assume that “Romans 13″ — the catchphrase, not the actual text — requires craven acquiescence. With theological rigor and subtlety, Henderson (and others with him) showed quite the contrary. And those who wanted to maintain unquestioned and unquestioning rule were frequently not happy about it.
“One can only imagine the king’s fury in being told that what he considered treasonous rebellion, Henderson was defining as godly beneficence toward him. This is most certainly why Henderson was said to have made his majesty run ‘starke mad'” (p. 86).
Speaking of theological rigor and subtlety, Jackson does good work in vindicating the intellectual reputation of those faithful theologians and preachers of Scotland who resisted the tyrannies of their day. The received standard view is that the Calvinist leaders of seventeenth century Scotland were a gaggle of unimaginative dullards which, to the unimaginative dullards of our own day, is quite a satisfying slander. Jackson dispatches this view with a number of helpful observations. “The leaders of the Second Reformation in Scotland were very much humanists and were trained in a context rich with a wide variety of sources including ancient, medieval and Renaissance” (p. 24).
After Knox, and perhaps Melville, Scotland owed her liberty to Henderson. Downstream from that troubled time, because of all the Scots and Scots/Irish who emigrated here, we owe much of our liberty to him as well. Out liberties have eroded as much as they have because we have forgotten that fact. For those interested in the work of recovery, this book is a great place to start.
“Alexander Henderson created the National Covenant of 1638 to serve as theological and constitutional pillars on which the Covenanters based their resistance to Charles I” (p. 49).
Henderson understood that resistance to tyranny is a work of architecture; if you want the roof to stay up, you have to have pillars. Get this book. Read it, and stand ready to be inspired....more
This is simply a superb book. It is beautifully written, theologically rigorous, elegantly typeset, and carefully designed. Every page was easy to looThis is simply a superb book. It is beautifully written, theologically rigorous, elegantly typeset, and carefully designed. Every page was easy to look at and equally easy to turn.
This is book for anyone dealing with (apparently) inexplicable suffering. That may be you, or it may be someone close to you. In this book, Ben Palpant raises all the hard questions without flinching, and offers clear and careful answers that go all the way down to the right part of the soul. He does this without patronizing anybody, or patting the back of the reader's hand once.
I don't want to say too much about it because, even though it is non-fiction, I don't want to create the spoiler effect of telling you in summary what he says so well over the course of the book. But I will tell you one thing. Palpant is a teacher in one of our classical Christian schools here in the Pacific Northwest, and one day, some years ago, the lights in the city of his mind began to go out, one by one. Everything shut down. He didn't know what was happening, or why it was happening. "What I wanted most of all, and what they couldn't deliver, was a name for my illness" (p. 26). The harrowing story of the many months that followed is remarkable for how complicated it all is, and how simple it remains.
I know that many would be encouraged by this book, and want to urge them to it. The Puritans were great on the subject of affliction, and here in this book we have that same set of sensibilities in modern guise. One Puritan once said that affliction was a dirty lane to a royal palace, and that is the testimony of this book. ...more
A short review here will have to suffice. I read this book in order to submit an extended review of it to Books & Culture, which I will do shortly. ThA short review here will have to suffice. I read this book in order to submit an extended review of it to Books & Culture, which I will do shortly. The short review is that this book was a detailed history of the rise of reconstructionism, by someone not himself a reconstructionist, and was surprisingly free of screeching....more
I recently included a "bucket book" in my line-up of books I am reading. These are books I really ought to have read by this time in my life, but whicI recently included a "bucket book" in my line-up of books I am reading. These are books I really ought to have read by this time in my life, but which, alas, I have not. This book, The Life of Samuel Johnson, was the first in this roster that I have completed. Having done so, it continues to strike me as a really good idea.
Boswell mentions near the end of the book that those who took the time to read "may be considered as well acquainted with him." I think this is quite true, and gaining the acquaintance was genuinely rewarding. It was also a pleasure to run across so many of Johnson's bon mots in their original setting. Despite being such a massive book, or perhaps because of it, this was a truly rewarding read. ...more
This was a quick and enjoyable read. Mozart was a phenomenal genius, and this short book -- short just like Mozart's life -- gives a marvelous sense oThis was a quick and enjoyable read. Mozart was a phenomenal genius, and this short book -- short just like Mozart's life -- gives a marvelous sense of that genius. For those who don't know much about Mozart's life, and don't know whether or not he was a founding member of the Dave Clark Five, this is the book for you. If you know enough about Mozart to think that joke wasn't funny, this is also a book for you....more
I liked this one, filing it under biography. But it is actually a biography of a book, of Mere Christianity. McCusker tells the backdrop story of the I liked this one, filing it under biography. But it is actually a biography of a book, of Mere Christianity. McCusker tells the backdrop story of the Second World War, and the BBC broadcasts that eventually became Mere Christianity. Not scintillating, but good info here....more
I really enjoyed this one. I had never taken a close look at the contribution Sam Adams made to our liberties, and this fine biography shows that the I really enjoyed this one. I had never taken a close look at the contribution Sam Adams made to our liberties, and this fine biography shows that the contribution was extensive.
Here are a couple of favorite moments. One adversary said, after Adams' death, that his politics were derived from "two maxims, rulers should have little, the people much" (p. 259).
In another apt application, Stoll refers to Adams' religious tranquility, and notes the odd juxtaposition -- a tranquil revolution. He then applies Perry Miller's wonderful assessment of the Puritan character -- of which Adams was a prime specimen -- a characteristic "most difficult to evoke," that being the "peculiar balance of zeal and enthusiasm with control and wariness" (p. 265).
If you are like many, and need some gaps filled in with regard to your knowledge of Samuel Adams, this would be the place to start. Did you know that the redcoats likely went to Lexington and Concord because they were looking for Sam Adams and John Hancock, who were on the lam?...more
Louie Zamperini and my father, Jim Wilson, were friends, and so I have known the outlines of Zamperini's story my whole life. Somewhere in the photo aLouie Zamperini and my father, Jim Wilson, were friends, and so I have known the outlines of Zamperini's story my whole life. Somewhere in the photo archives around Moscow, we have a baby photo of me, taken by Zamperini. I am drooling in that picture, something I have contrived not to do with more recent photographs.
Though I have been familiar with this story for a long time, Hillenbrand's telling of it is magnificent. This is a book to reinforce everything you knew doctrinally about man's capacity for both depravity and heroism. This was a deeply edifying read. Highly recommended....more
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