Archive for category Book Reviews
Real Marriage: Part 1, Chapter 2 – Friends with Benefits
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews, Marriage and Family on February 1, 2012
I am on to chapter 2 of Mark Driscoll’s Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship & Life Together. Sorry it took me so long to get the second chapter out, but I have had a few other things going on that have kept me busy.
This second chapter develops the idea of marriage beginning as a friendship. This is an interesting theme that, despite the Driscolls’ insistence that it appeared in none of the books they read on marriage, I have seen in just about anything I have read on the topic. (No doubt, this is a curious inconsistency which I can only attribute to reading different books on the subject.)
Mark develops the story of Martin Luther and Katherine von Bora’s marriage as a prime example of marriage trumping attraction, and given what I know about Katherine, I would have to say you could not have picked a better illustration. Katherine was, to put it charitably, not a looker.
Katherine von Bora
Over time, Martin and Katherine seem to have developed a bond grounded more in their shared interests and their own peculiarities than on physical attraction. Given that they had six children (two lived to adulthood), one can assume that the couple got past their physical differences and found happiness.
Personally, I feel that Driscoll is right on about the necessity of having friendship with your spouse, and he develops a theme that people forget too easily in this world of easy-out relationships. He writes:
…true friendship involves conflict and hard discussions as God reveals sin and repentance, and reconciliation takes place.
This declaration is beneficial not just in marriage but in all relationships. I have any number of friends who, over the years, have found some kind of small fault or slight on my part and abandoned the relationship. The most recent trend seems to be to declare their intention by “unfriending” me on Facebook. This is rather childish, if you ask me, but it is grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of friendship.
Driscoll hits the nail on the head. Friendship must involve those hard discussions. My friendship with my wife has had to incorporate some very difficult conversations, about our pasts, our present and our future. At times, we have screamed until we wept; and more times than we care to remember, we have sat across from one another with no words left. Because we bare our souls to one another, our souls are able to entwine more closely. We find the Spirit of God healing the wounds by knitting us together.
You cannot assume you are friends with your spouse. You must take the time necessary to build that friendship, to know when and where certain things are appropriate, to know each other’s boundaries.
Of course, then Driscoll descends to one of my least favorite mnemonic devices, acrostic, to drive home the point. I shall reproduce the acronym without comment because I loathe devices like this like a snail loathes salt and a Yankees fan loathes the Red Sox:
F – Fruitful
R – Reciprocal
I – Intimate
E – Enjoyable
N – Needed
D – Devoted
S – Sanctifying
I have no problem with Driscoll’s point. I just don’t like acronyms and acrostics.
Let’s close with the closing line, written by both Mark and Grace:
also found that by always working on our friendship, the rest of marriage seems to sort itself out in time. So we would commend to you the goal of devoting the rest of your life to being a better friend to your spouse.
(As an aside: I would heartily agree, although I would also recommend that you develop one other, confidential and trusting relationship with a godly friend of your own gender – someone who can encourage you in your relationship to your spouse as well as be an outlet for you. This can be your pastor, a friend, a mentor or a peer. What is important is that they are going to encourage you by letting you vent and then giving godly advice that will strengthen your friendship with your wife.)
Real Marriage: Part 1, Chapter 1 – New Marriage, Same Spouse
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews, Marriage and Family, Reading on January 19, 2012
Mark Driscoll can be an arrogant chauvinist. He has admitted that freely, so I don’t think I am revealing anything he has not addressed himself.
When I finally went ahead and downloaded the controversial book Real Marriage, which he wrote with his wife Grace, it was not with the best of intentions. In fact, it was because he had given an interview with Justin Brierley in which Driscoll behaved himself like the animal Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
It takes a lot for me to pick up a book by Driscoll these days. I would like to say his behavior in the Brierley interview was unusual, but it isn’t. He can be a real jerk sometimes, and I was afraid that this book on marriage would be more of the same.
That being said, the book is #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list, and everyone in the blogosphere is buzzing about it – both good and bad. So, I laid down my $8 and bought the Kindle version of the book. (Bless you, Amazon, for saving me $14!)
Reading the first chapter, I encountered something I did not expect. First of all, Driscoll openly confesses to his chauvinism and anger issues. He calls his behavior sin, which further surprised me since in other books I have read from him, he justified his behavior.
What really caught me was that he was treading over years he covered in Confessions of a Reformissional Rev and exposing the pain that was going on in his heart during those years. A lot of his bombast and arrogance was tied to a deep, secret problem in his relationship with his wife Grace.
It is never easy to be in the public eye and have deep, emotional, sexual sin causing your spirit to twitch. Driscoll was very much in the public eye – by choice – while his private world was a disaster, despite appearances. And even his explanations that he provided in Confessions were false because he was hiding the real problems – perhaps even from himself.
I expected bombast and arrogance. What I encountered was the honest dialogue from Mark and Grace about their failings and sexual frustrations. It surprised me. It caught me off guard, and I had to put down a lot of the preconceived fears I had about the book.
I’ll let you know tomorrow if I feel the same way after reading chapter 2.
BOOK REVIEW: The Art of Action
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews, Church, History on October 12, 2011
Steven Bungay has written a masterpiece – a phenomenal blend of business acumen, historical research and didactic illustration.
I know – I’m gushing.
But I loved this book.
I had not previously been exposed to Bungay’s work largely because I try to avoid reading business books, but some things have been going on at our church that have really made me question the accepted model of church vision-casting. It seems like we in church leadership seem to devour books on abstracts like vision and mission, but we fall down when it comes to translating that vision and mission into practical terms. People are left asking, “That’s great, but what do we do?“
That is where Bungay’s book comes in. Maybe it is because I am a history nut, but this book connected with me like few business books do. He spends the first third of every chapter delving into the thinking of Helmuth von Moltke – a German military genius who practically invented the method of leadership used in most Western militaries to this day. This fascinates me.
Then, Bungay shows how these principles are largely ignored by business (and I would say church) models that struggle, while they are almost unconsciously adopted by businesses that flourish. Much of what he says is non-instinctive because it goes against the way many of us were trained, and yet it makes good sense.
Seriously, if you are in church leadership, pick this book up. No, it won’t contain Bible references or references to religion in any way. You will need to read it with your Bible open to Ephesians, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus; and you will need to do a lot of comparison reading in the Scriptures. You will be surprised how much of von Moltke’s thinking syncs with the way that Jesus and the Apostle Paul led.
I received a free PDF version of The Art of Action from the publisher via Netgalley.com with no expectation of the content of this review.
BOOK REVIEW: To Be Perfectly Honest
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews on October 5, 2011
Really, Multnomah?
Really?
A couple of years ago, A. J. Jacobs wrote a book called A Year of Living Biblically. In it, Jacobs – a secular Jew – endeavored to – well, live biblically for a year. He followed the prescriptive formulations of the Torah and did his best to honor the principles of the teachings of Jesus. It is an interesting book, and one worth reading. Jacobs previously had spent a year reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica and will probably do something crazy again sometime soon.
So, in typical Christians copying something successful in the world fashion, Multnomah appears to have asked Phil Callaway to spend a year living truthfully.
Get it? Living Biblically = Living Truthfully.
What can I say? Not much.
The book made me yawn. Quite frankly, it was not funny. Sure there were humorous sections, and I am sure that Callaway is a funny person, but the book was forced and difficult to read. Not only that, it demonstrates quite plainly that a secular Jew like Jacobs does a better job of living biblically than Callaway, a professing Christian, does of living truthfully. Callaway can’t seem to get through a couple of days without telling a whopper, and then repenting on the page and starting again.
Like I said. Yawn.
If you want to read this book, don’t buy it. I’ll give it to you. In fact, I’d probably be willing to cover the shipping to send it to you. It is going to go in a box with the rest of the mediocre books I seem to attract like black nylon attracts white pet fur.
DISCLAIMER:
I received a copy of the book To Be Perfectly Honest: One Man’s Year of Almost Living Truthfully Could Change Your Life. No Lie. from Waterbrook-Multnomah with no stipulations as to the content of this review or guarantee of a positive review.
REVIEW – Reverberation
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews, Ecclesiology (Church), General on June 23, 2011
I have been reviewing books for most of the major Christian publishers for two years now. There have been a few decent books, but most of them have been substandard in my opinion. They are churned out because they have a guaranteed audience, with no consideration for content and a poor focus on editing.
About two months ago, I started reviewing for Moody Publishers, and I have been pleasantly surpassed by the content and quality of the books I have been invited to read. The first, Chris Brauns’ When the Word Leads Your Pastoral Search, was a practical and useful book from cover to cover.
(Recently, I read a book by an instructor from Moody Bible Institute, which was published by Waterbrook Multnomah. Let me simply say the Biblical content was not nearly as prevalent or emphatic as the books published by Moody themselves.)
This month, I had the opportunity to read Reverberation by Jonathan Leeman.
Leeman’s book is a manifesto for a Bible-driven church. Throughout, he illustrates the necessity of not just “biblical doctrine” but biblical action. It is not enough to teach the Bible as part of our ministry. Teaching the Bible is supposed to BE our ministry. The Scriptures are supposed to be the first and foremost resource for the church.
In a culture where rampant consumerism has defined our way of thinking when it comes to church ministry, Leeman calls his readers to exalt the Word of God – not just in doctrinal statements but in actual practice. It is a far more radical call than some might think.
Much of the thinking that pervades the church today is driven not by the word of life but by the latest business and marketing trends. For decades, the church has been trying to give people what they want. The Bible has been repurposed as a resource we can draw from for inspiration and even challenge, but it has lost its place of preeminence in the church.
As a result, we breed generations of greedy, self-centered Christians. We seek other ways for the Holy Spirit to be “experienced.” We turn to every resource under the sun rather than to the one provided by the Creator.
I can highly recommend Leeman’s book Reverberation. It is a challenging, powerful read.
Legal Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, with no expectation of a positive review.
REVIEW – The Book That Made Your World
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews, General on June 21, 2011
Perhaps nothing says more about our Western culture than the fact that when I read a name like Vishal Mangalwadi, I assumed he was not a Christian. As it turns out, I was wrong. Mangalwadi is a Christ Follower – a radical one at that. He turned to Christ during his college education and has walked a long road of comparing his faith in the Scriptures to the other world faiths he has encountered.
Ultimately, his conclusion is that all we consider foundational to our Western society is defined by the Bible. Morality, human dignity, democracy and many of our foundational ideas come directly from the Bible. He argues quite convincingly that the things we consider ‘universal’ are only universal within cultures that began with the Bible.
The Book That Made Your World is fascinating because it comes at the major issues of western secularism from an obtuse angle. Rather than trying to compare Christian and secular values, Mangalwadi shows us the absence of the shared Western values and then points to the Scriptures. He demonstrates the source of these ideas, and makes it plain that without the source, the ideas are meaningless.
It is easy to try to reject the Bible as revelation without considering its significant, even overshadowing, contribution to our society. To reject the Bible is to reject our very identity. An honest atheist must then be honest enough to reject the western code of morality, government, human dignity and even basic logic. All these things derive from the Scriptures and their direct influence on our culture as a whole.
One of the most interesting things about The Book That Made Your World is that Mangalwadi does not go back to the ancient or medieval periods to see the origins of these ideas. He goes to the Reformation – the ‘rebirth’ of the study of the Scriptures. He shows that it has only been since the Reformation that our culture has been so significantly altered, although the truths were evident all along the way.
I found Mangalwadi’s book to be intriguing. It could have done with a bit more editing because it becomes redundant at times, but all the same the themes are valid arguments for the exaltation of the Scriptures in our culture. He does a good job of demonstrating that Western culture is not innately superior to other cultures. It is buoyed up by the reliance on the Scriptures, and when we abandon the Scriptures as the authority of our culture – that is when we get in trouble.
Disclaimer: I received a free e-book copy of The Book that Made Your World from the publisher without expectation of a positive review.
REVIEW – Out of a Far Country
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews, Marriage and Family on June 16, 2011
I am a harsh critic of Christian books. I don’t like books designed to give warm fuzzies and a false sense of security to a bloated and yet anemic market of Christians clammering for mediocre works that don’t focus on Jesus Christ and his revolutionary Way.
I don’t like most Christian books, Sam-I-Am!
That being said, when I saw Christopher Yuan’s Out of a Far Country at Waterbrook-Multnomah’s Blogging for Books site, I knew I needed to read it. Yuan’s book, which is co-written with his mother Angela, is the story of his redemption from a particularly dark journey. It is the story of his family learning how to forgive, how to walk in truth, and ultimately how to be transformed.
I have gay and bisexual acquaintances and friends. They have been classmates, students and coworkers; but most importantly, they have been human beings and that means God loves them.
The typical evangelical responses to homosexuality are usually either a kind of awkward patronization or a reactive hatred. We are not really equipped to handle the idea of someone having an alternate sexuality. (It is perhaps bigger than evangelical circles, but I will restrict this statement to that niche for the time being.)
Yuan’s entire point in telling his story is not to condemn homosexuals. In fact, he still considers himself a homosexual. He tells his story to demystify this idea of “sexual identity” – a pop psychology concept that does far more damage than good. He explains quite plainly that we do not get our identity from our sexual preferences. We get our identity from God, and a heterosexual who is not committed to God is just as lost as a homosexual.
Christopher Yuan is still gay. He teaches at Moody Bible Institute.
Wait – think about that one for a moment.
Christopher Yuan has chosen God’s definition of holiness over his own sexual identity. God did not zap him straight, anymore than God zaps an adulterer married. Christopher has submitted his will to that of the Father, and he has chosen to be celibate.
As he puts it, “The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality. The opposite of homosexuality is holiness.”
I won’t say that this book is perfect.
It gets a little bogged down in the middle where you get the impression that every homosexual is sexually reckless, drops Ecstasy every day and travels the country going from rave to rave. (They don’t. Most homosexuals live and work just like their heterosexual counterparts.) I felt that a little bit of a disclaimer in this section would have been in order, because it really does convey an inaccurate image of gay life. You can imagine the uproar if a homosexual author used Wilt Chamberlain as an example of the average heterosexual!
That aside, this book is an excellent starting point for evangelical Christians trying to wrap their minds around homosexuality. I would also highly recommend Who Is My Enemy? by Rich Nathan. The chapter on homosexuals is worth its weight in gold.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of this review. There was no requirement placed upon me for the content of this review.
Tags: homosexuals, gays, christopher yuan
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Bill Shatner’s “Up Till Now”
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews on June 15, 2011
I love Bill Shatner. Yes, I know he can be annoying. Yes, I know he is a bit of a quack. But I still love him. He makes me laugh.
Although I vaguely remember Shatner as Captain Kirk in Star Trek and the eponymous T.J. Hooker, for my money, Shatner’s best work is as Denny Crane in Boston Legal.
If you don’t know, Boston Legal is one of my all-time favorite shows. It had an incredible mix of drama, comedy, shock value and real life lessons. It was a solar system of bombastic, outsized characters, and every one of them was orbiting in the gravitational well that was Denny Crane. He was absurd. He was outlandish. He was scandalous. He was Denny Crane. Because of Denny Crane, I actually went back and watched the old Star Trek movies and even some of the show.
For the remainder of this post, I want you to imagine me overacting everything – I – SAY!
I picked up the unabridged audio recording of Shatner’s autobiography Up Till Now at a discount store in Tilton. To be honest, I might not have even paid $5 for it except that it was read by the author. Who could turn down Bill Shatner reading his own life story?
What can I say?
It was everything you would expect it to be. It was Bill Shatner talking about Bill Shatner. He read his own book as if it were a dramatic interpretation. He whispered; he shouted. He rushed; he paused. He read his poetry and talk-singing just as he reads them when he is performing.
It was perfect Shatner, and I loved it.Tags: denny crane, william shatner, bill shatner, shatner, up till now, autobiography
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Then Everything Changed
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews, History on June 10, 2011
Alternate history is one of those things I have loved for a long time. It started with Guns of the South, a work by Harry Turtledove that asked what would happen if the Confederacy acquired automatic weapons. (You’ll have to read it to find out how.)
Rarely do I pass up an alternate history book, but they are seldom as good as they could be. When I saw Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield. After a lifetime of covering the American political arena, Greenfield sat down to question how America might be different today if three significant events had been altered. He asks what might have happened if 1) John F. Kennedy were killed in 1961, 2) Robert Kennedy were not killed during his 1968 campaign, and 3) Gerald Ford had won the 1976 election.
I won’t get into all of the details, but I felt that Greenfield’s perspective was not quite as comprehensive as it should have been. He certainly knows more about the era than I do, but I felt that he underplayed some things like the Youth Movements of 1968 and Gerald Ford’s capacity for mediocrity.
What I did gain from this book was the cast of secondary people that he brought to light. While I know the names of people like Robert Macnamara, I did not know that he was a Republican. It was also interesting to see how Ronald Reagan played into all three scenarios.
All in all, I wouldn’t have paid for the book, but as a "bathroom read" it was adequate.
Review – When the Word Leads Your Pastoral Search
Posted by Erik in Book Reviews, Ecclesiology (Church), Reading on June 1, 2011
I don’t know the statistics, but there are a lot of churches looking for pastors. Since the average tenure of a pastor is around two to three years, then the average church will go through a search three or four times every decade. Since there are tens of thousands of churches in North America, of which a healthy proportion have some kind of congregational voice in the calling of a pastor, there is a lot of searching going on.
I am the son of a pastor who served fourteen years at his first congregation and is in his nineteenth year at his second. As a pastor myself, I have served in the same congregation for six years. I say that to point out that my personal experience with pastoral search committees is very limited. That being said, I have heard some horror stories from congregations and pastors.
When Moody Publishers put Chris Brauns book When the Word Leads Your Pastoral Search on their review list, I knew I had to read it. To me, the idea of the Word (the Bible) dictating how you choose a pastor seems to be quite obvious, but I know that many churches choose a pastor for all the wrong reasons. They base their decision on a man’s age or education or they listen to a sermon or two and find him acceptable.
Brauns’ book is exactly what it purports to be – a manual for biblically, carefully discerning who God has called and gifted to be the pastor of a congregation. It is written primarily for churches who have a CEO-type pastor – a single elder who is supported by the congregation. In this type of polity, it is absolutely vital that a congregation make the biblical choose of pastor since they grant him a great deal of responsibility and authority in the congregation.
(As I have written before, we do not have this style of leadership among our congregation. I serve as a vocational elder and share the leadership of the congregation with several other Godly men.)
If your congregation is seeking a new pastor, Brauns’ book is a resource worth picking up. He walks you through the biblical precedence for a pastor. He then shows a biblical process for selecting which pastor is the man God has called and equipped for your congregation. Of particular usefulness is his list of “Frequently Asked Questions” at the back of the book. A search committee would benefit greatly from the book.
Personally, I think the book is also a great resource for congregations with elder leadership, especially when calling additional vocational pastors. Churches of all types drop the ball when calling assistant pastors because they take unqualified men and give them inflated titles with very little responsibility as elders.
All around, this book is worth putting on your book shelf.
A copy of this book was provided to me at no cost by Moody Publishers.
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