Last night my wife and I sat and did a rough tally of the number of couples we have known as they have gone through dating and engagement. It's a pretty good number of friends, family, and fellow church members. Then we thought about how many of them maintained healthy and God-glorifying physical boundaries and how many had confessed that they had not. The numbers were suddenly not looking nearly so good. This is one of those areas where contemporary Christians so often do very poorly and this is exactly why there have been so many recent books on dating, courtship, purity and all the rest. Christians are failing and desperately looking for a better way.

It has been some time since I have read a book on dating and relationships, probably because it has been some time since the subject has seemed urgent to me. But recently a local pastor told me that as he pastors young adults toward marriage, he has been helped by Sex, Dating, and Relationships by Gerald Hiestand and Jay Thomas. I decided to check it out and I am glad I did so.

Hiestand and Thomas call their approach to relationships "a fresh approach" and this is an accurate way of describing it. They don't kiss dating goodbye and they don't advocate a return to the courtship of years gone by. Instead they encourage Christians to form "dating friendships." In this little phrase "dating" is the activity and "friendship" is the relational category. You are not boyfriend and girlfriend, but friends, and you spend time together (i.e. date) as friends for the purpose of seeing if there is mutual interest and compatibility. Romance and sexual activity and commitment can wait; for now, it is simply "two friends getting to know each other with a view toward marriage."

Think of a dating friendship as a precursor to a marriage proposal but without all the romantic, sexual overtones that so often accompany a dating relationship. A couple in a dating friendship, regardless of their attraction to each other, doesn't pretend there is more to the relationship than is warranted. They consciously refrain from sexual and overtly romantic activity and don't become naively optimistic about the commitment level of their friendship. Thus, the main goal of a dating friendship is to explore the viability of marriage while preserving the guidelines of sexual and romantic purity required by the neighbor relationship.

Integral to the argument is an understanding of how the Bible guides and restricts sexual activity. God gives us clear sexual boundaries to guide marriage relationships (sex is required), neighbor relationships (sex is forbidden) and family relationships (sex is forbidden). The authors want dating couples to understand that until they are married, their relationship to the person they are pursuing is a neighbor relationship in which any sexual activity or even the awakening of sexual desire is inappropriate. What is conspicuously absent from the Bible is a category that falls between neighbor and spouse. Yet this is where so much of our relationship confusion comes from--an invented category that is more than one but less than the other and lacking any clear biblical guidelines.

No one could possibly claim that the Beatitudes (see Matthew 5:1-12) are overlooked or underappreciated. They have been the subject of countless books and sermon series. But this is not to say that the Beatitudes have been widely understood and properly taught. As often as not they have suffered from moralization, reduced to the level of the fortune cookie and with all the spiritual power of a fortune cookie.

In Crucifying Morality, R.W. Glenn takes a new look at the Beatitudes saying, Maybe you “were taught that the Beatitudes were the highest form of morality that anyone could live by, and you know now how impossible they are. Or maybe you experienced the flannelgraph version of the Beatitudes.” If that is the case, “maybe it is time to get unfamiliar. Maybe you need to read these verses with fresh eyes for the first time. Whatever your exposure to the Beatitudes has been, you probably think of them as less powerful and captivating and helpful than they are. Take a step back to see how breathtakingly radical their real message is.”

The fact is that

the flannelgraph and the saccharine tone of those reductionist Sunday school lessons can’t get the job done. Jesus’ teaching is too radical to be stuck on felt. He uses counterintuitive gospel logic to show us that life in the kingdom of God is completely contrary to what we expect. In fact, we could not have predicted it. Kingdom blessing looks like the opposite of everything we value. So don’t moralize the Beatitudes, sterilizing the gospel as though it is primarily or even only a rule book for nicer living. You cannot put the mind-altering, world-shattering nature of the Beatitudes into neat categories. Jesus won’t let you.

Glenn wants the reader to contemplate this: “It is no accident that the Beatitudes contain no imperatives whatsoever. Because we are wired for performance and have an insatiable hunger to turn Christianity into a system of dos and don’ts to earn a spot at the table of grace, we feel almost irresistibly inclined to turn them into commandments. Instead, they are the qualities that begin to characterize sinners who encounter God’s grace in the gospel.” We need to be careful not to read the Beatitudes as a series of commandments because when we do that we empty them of their true power.

In 2010 Josh Harris released Dug Down Deep, a book concerned with sound doctrine. He encouraged the reader to unashamedly embrace that much-maligned word theology and to “dig deep into a faith so solid you can build your life on it.” In the final chaper he called Christians to a “humble orthodoxy” and many considered this the book’s greatest strength.

Today’s marks the release of Harris’ new book Humble Orthodoxy. This is a short volume that takes the content of that final chapter and expands on it. Though there is a good bit of overlap between the two, Humble Orthodoxy stands on its own merit.

Harris’ desire in this book is to encourage Christians to hold the truth high without putting people down. He calls for Christians to be guided by both truth and love, to be guided in equal measure by orthodoxy and humility, qualities that are complementary, not in opposition to one another. As J.D. Greear says in his foreword, “Getting doctrine right is a matter of life and dead, but holding that doctrine in the right spirit is essential too. A great deal of damage is done by those who hold the truth of Christ with the spirit of Satan.”

The book begins by setting the context and explaining the dilemma. “One of the problems with the word orthodoxy is that it is usually brought up when someone is being reprimanded. So it has gotten a bad reputation, like an older sibling who is always peeking around the corner, trying to catch you doing something wrong. … I don’t know any other way to say this: it seems like a lot of the people who care about orthdoxy are jerks.” And here he begins to suggest the solution: a humble orthodoxy, caring deeply about truth, but defending and sharing this truth with compassion and humility. “Whether our theological knowledge is great or small, we all need to ask a vital question: What will we do with the knowledge of God that we have?” The Bible does not allow us to choose between orthodoxy and humility, but insists that we need both in equal measure, and assures us that through the Holy Spirit we can be humbly orthodox. I have always loved this quote from John Stott which speaks to this very thing:

Thank God there are those in the contemporary church who are determined at all costs to defend and uphold God's revealed truth. But sometimes they are conspicuously lacking in love. When they think they smell heresy, their nose begins to twitch, their muscles ripple, and the light of battle enters their eye. They seem to enjoy nothing more than a fight. Others make the opposite mistake. They are determined at all costs to maintain and exhibit brotherly love, but in order to do so are prepared even to sacrifice the central truths of revelation. Both these tendencies are unbalanced and unbiblical. Truth becomes hard if it is not softened by love; love becomes soft if it is not strengthened by truth. The apostle calls us to hold the two together, which should not be difficult for Spirit-filled believers, since the Holy Spirit is himself ‘the spirit of truth,’ and his first fruit is ‘love.” There is no other route than this to a fully mature Christian unity.

Harris lays out two alternatives to humble orthodoxy. The first is arrogant orthodoxy, where our doctrine is correct but we are unkind and unloving, where we are self-righteous and spiteful in our words, attitudes and behaviors. “If anyone thinks arrogant orthodoxy doesn’t exist, he’s never read the comments section of a Christian blog.” Touche. The other alternative is humble heterodoxy where a person abandons orthodox Christianity but does it very nicely. The temptation for Harris, for myself, and for most of those who will read this review is toward the first of these alternatives, to pursue orthodoxy at the expense of love. “You and I need to contend for the truth. But there’s a fine line between contending for truth and being contentious.”

The driving passion behind our pursuit of biblical orthdoxy is “not to prove ourselves more right or better than someone else but to better worship the holy God, the one who forgives and accepts us for Christ’s sake alone.” He looks to Tim Keller and says “if we make a good thing like correct theology the ultimate end--if being right becomes more important to us than worshiping God--then our theology is not really about God anymore. It’s about us. It becomes the source of our sense of worth and identity. And if theology becomes about us, then we’ll despise and demonize those who oppose us.”

Thus the solution to arrogant orthodoxy is not less orthodoxy, but more. The more we know of God, the more we love and trust him, the more humble we will be before him.

This is a book that I would love to put in the hands of a lot of people I have encountered over the years. First and foremost, though, it is a book I needed to read. It is a book I need to read again. It is a book I plan to read regularly. It rebuked, encouraged and challenged me in very helpful ways. If you have a blog or you regularly peruse blogs (especially if you comment on them), if you just plain love theology and desire to believe what is right and true, then do yourself a favor and read it as well.

Humble Orthodoxy is available at Amazon.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Nashville at the National Religious Broadcasters’ annual convention. I was there to lead a breakout session that would explain a biblically-based understanding of technology, but had almost a whole day to just wander the event. The exhibit hall was massive, though I heard it was actually smaller than in years past. It was a sight to behold, a mishmash of some of the best and some of the worst of Christian broadcasting.

George Washington was there with Martha (though I suspect it may actually have been people in costume) protesting gay marriage. Jesus and what appeared to be one of the high priests were walking the exhibit floor, looking like they were getting along surprisingly well, all things considered. I was not able to figure out why they were there, but my guess is they were connected to the TBN booth in some way and, if not that, one of the many (many!) Israeli travel companies advertising themselves there. Among the myriad displays and posters was one for Byron Yawn and his book Suburbianity. I enjoyed the irony because Suburbianity was written to take a wrecking ball to so much of what is celebrated at the NRB convention.

Byron Yawn is the pastor of Community Bible Church in Nashville, a church I have been to a couple of times and one I have very much enjoyed. He loves Christianity, the Christian faith, but despises Suburbianity, a contemporary perversion of that faith. Every person, every Christian, is to some degree a product of his environment. Yawn’s concern is that Christians have been unwittingly and unduly influenced by the values and ideals of suburbia. 

Suburbianity is the general conviction among professing evangelicals that the primary aim of Christ’s death was to provide us with a fulfilled life. We came to this perspective by persistently reading the mindset and aspirations of the suburbs into the biblical story. It relentlessly seeps into our Christianity. It comes through in nearly all forms of Christian media, including songs, books, movies, and sermons. God has big plans for you. You are important. You should not be discontented, There’s more out there for you. This is the suburban gospel. By it we’ve saved countless sinners from a poor self-image but not much else.

Of course the Christianity of the Bible is not about this at all. It is antithetical to this. “You can’t find it anywhere in the Bible. You may cite Moses, but he never meant that. Even if you make Jesus say it, He didn’t really. Jesus never commissioned anything close to this. We’ve made all this stuff up.” Powerful gospel-centered Christianity has been replaced by an impotent gospel-free suburbianity.

Most people who read this review will be like me in that they live in a culture of radical individualism. Where our identities were once inexorably wrapped up in a local community, today we are what one sociologist has referred to as networked individuals, people who are loosely bound together by interests, but each convinced that we are answerable ultimately, or perhaps only, to ourselves. Individualism reigns, solidarity is passe.

Contra this individualism comes Chris Brauns’ Bound Together: How We Are Tied to Others in Good and Bad Choices. Brauns wants Christians to understand that in God’s economy we are tied together through what he calls the “principle of the rope.” He holds that corporate solidarity is a key aspect of life as taught in the Bible. We are not meant to exist apart from fellowship and community.

Brauns looks to man’s fall into sin as the ultimate negative example of this principle and then looks to Christ’s work on the cross as the ultimate positive example. In the first case one man sinned and saw the effects of his action extend to all who would come after him. In the second case one Man died and now offers the benefits of his death and resurrection to all who will take hold of the grace he offers and, in so doing, be united to him. In this way Brauns provides a uniquely interesting take on two foundational but often misunderstood Christian doctrines: original sin and union with Christ. And as he does this he shows the beautiful gospel truth that this second rope is infinitely stronger than the first. 

The principle of the rope finds application in all areas of life, but Brauns focuses on just a few:

I am often asked to comment on Calvinistic theology and its impact on my life. I was raised in the Reformed tradition and continue to hold fast to the tenets of Calvinism, but always try to distinguish between Calvinism as a kind of theological shorthand, a means of summarizing a lot of theology under a single word, and Calvinism as a banner to rally around. I advocate the former and shy away from the latter.

Greg Dutcher is a Calvinist pastor who is concerned about some of what he sees in today’s New Calvinism. Calvinism is “in” today; this is a cause for joy for those who, like me, believe that Reformed theology is a pure and accurate expression of New Testament theology, but with Calvinism’s trendiness come certain dangers and challenges. Some time back Dutcher approached me to ask if Cruciform Press would be interested in publishing a book that would look at a series of ways that we, today’s Calvinists, might destroy what the Lord appears to be doing. His proposal was intriguing and I passed it to the decision-makers. Cruciform went on to publish Killing Calvinism: How to Destroy a Perfectly Good Theology from the Inside. Though I looked at the initial proposal I deliberately chose not to read it until several months after publication. In fact, I only read it in full yesterday. (A long-delayed flight gave me a lot of time.)

I am glad I waited and even more glad that I finally read it. Killing Calvinism is part confession, part teaching, part exhortation. Dutcher looks first to himself and his own propensity to be a Calvinist first and a Christian second, to be more concerned with a theological system than with the gospel itself. He offers eight different ways that we may just destroy what the Lord is doing.

• By loving Calvinism as an end in itself
• By becoming a theologian instead of a disciple
• By loving God’s sovereignty more than God himself
• By losing an urgency in evangelism
• By learning only from other Calvinists
• By tidying up the Bible’s “loose ends”
• By being an arrogant know-it-all
• By scoffing at the hang-ups others have with Calvinism

David Platt’s Radical was one of those rare books that catapults a first-time author straight to top of the charts. For two years it was a fixture on the lists of bestsellers and even today it remains a top seller in the Christian ranks. Radical was a call for Christians to escape the doldrums of the American dream and to live for something better, something that counts for far more. Books with this message are hardly a rarity today, but what set this one apart was its grounding in the good news of the gospel.

Almost three years later Platt brings us his follow-up, Follow Me. Where in Radical he exposed cultural values and ideas that are opposed to the gospel, his purpose in Follow Me is “to move from what we let go of to whom he hold on to. I want to explore not only the gravity of what we must forsake in this world, but also the greatness of the one we follow in this world. I want to expose what it means to die to ourselves and to live in Christ.” He says

I am convinced that when we take a serious look at what Jesus really meant when he said, “Follow me,” we will discover that there is far more pleasure to be experienced in him, indescribably greater power to be realized with him, and a much higher purpose to be accomplished for him than anything else this world has to offer. And as a result, we will all—every single Christian—eagerly, willingly, and gladly lose our lives to know and proclaim Christ, for this is simply what it means to follow him.

The fact is that there are multitudes of people who profess faith in Jesus Christ but who are not truly his followers. Platt wants his readers to be radical in their Christian commitment, but he wants them to ensure they have left behind the trappings of superficial religion for the joy of supernatural regeneration. He wants his readers to know that as we follow Christ, “he transforms our minds, our desires, our wills, our relationships, and our ultimate reason for living.” Once Christians have been transformed, they will inevitably begin to multiply, to make more disciples, both in their local context and across the planet. As with Radical, Platt’s particular concern is that North American Christians shake off their apathy and desire for comfort and take the gospel to the far corners of the earth. The call to follow Christ is a call to go wherever the gospel has not yet been preached.

Follow Me is essentially a brief theology of Christian living and mission, extending from the response to the gospel’s call to being the one to then extend that call to others. So many books of this kind come from outside of our theological stream, and it is almost as if we need to translate or contextualize them. Platt’s, though, is consistently biblical and gospel-centered in the best sense of that term. He does not introduce anything new or, dare I say it, radical to the equation (which I say as praise, not critique). He does not try to be clever or witty or original. He just teaches what the Bible teaches.

If there were a Guinness Book of World Records record for “amount of times having asked Jesus into your heart,” J.D. Greear is pretty sure he would hold it. Like so many church kids he asked Jesus into his heart when he was very young, and then again when he was slightly older, and then again every time he wondered if he really loved Jesus, and then again whenever he felt the guilt of sin. For years he wrestled with assurance and fought for an answer to this question: How can anyone know, beyond all doubt, that they are saved?

It is a question most Christians ask at one time or another; it is a question every pastor faces on a regular basis. Greear’s new book Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart tackles this question head-on and does so very effectively. Greear sets out to accomplish two things: to help the Christian find assurance that he has been saved, and to help the unbeliever resting on a false assurance see his danger and to turn to Christ. “My prayer is that by the time we’re done, you’ll know exactly where you stand with God. I hope to show you how to base your assurance on a promise God gave once for all in Christ and not on the fleeting memory of a prayer you once prayed.” What Greear teaches is consistent with what the best theologians have been drawing from Scripture for so long, that “what saves the sinner is a posture of repentance and faith toward Christ, that and that alone. Any ‘sinner’s prayer’ is only good insofar as it expresses that posture.”

Salvation does indeed happen in a moment, and once you are saved you are always saved. The mark, however, of someone who is saved is that they maintain their confession of faith until the end of their lives. Salvation is not a prayer you pray in a one-time ceremony and then move on from; salvation is a posture of repentance and faith that you begin in a moment and maintain for the rest of your life.

Greear begins with his own story of praying the sinner’s prayer a thousand times and being baptized four times, using it to illustrate the importance of finding assurance. He then proceeds to show that God wants us to have assurance, saying that God “changes, encourages, and motivates us not by the uncertainty of fear, but by the security of love. That is one of the things that makes the gospel absolutely distinct from all other religious messages in the world.” With that in place he reminds the reader of the gospel and explains both belief and repentance. One chapter answers this question: If “once saved always saved,” why does the Bible seem to warn us so often about losing our salvation? Along the way he offers three bases for assurance: a present posture of faith and repentance; perseverance in the faith; and evidences of eternal life in our heart—a love for God and a love for others, particularly other believers.

Yet even then some will wrestle with assurance and to those Christians he offers wise and simple counsel.

Am I really saved? How could I be, and still have feelings like this?

What do you do in that moment? Pray ‘the sinner’s prayer’ again? …

The answer is relatively simple in that moment: keep believing the gospel. Keep your hand on the head of the Lord Jesus Christ. No matter how you feel at any given moment, how encouraged or discouraged you feel about your spiritual progress, how hot or cold your love for Jesus, what you should be doing is always the same—resting in the gospel. Rest in His finished work. That’s all you can do. It’s all you need to do. It’s all God has commanded you to do.

I have just been in the South, so I can give a loud “Amen!” to that!

The best life is a risky life. Really, I am convinced there is not much worth doing that doesn’t involve at least some measure of risk. A lifetime of always making the safest choice is an unrealistically boring and plodding life. We risk when we love, we risk when we live. To love any person is to risk—it is to risk your heart, to make yourself vulnerable to another. To love God is to risk—it is to risk your very life, to make yourself willing to do whatever it is that the Lord commands. Simply to live is to risk; we do not know what the next day, or even the next moment will bring. Yet we value our safety and so often run from risk, living our lives within the most comfortable boundaries.

John Piper wants us to know that Risk is Right—the title of his newest book, a short one that weighs in at all of 64 pages. If the ultimate aim of life is to honor and magnify Jesus Christ, then the meaningful life, the unwasted life, is a life in which it is right and good to risk everything for this ultimate goal. “I define risk very simply as an action that exposes you to the possibility of loss or injury. If you take a risk you can lose money, you can lose face, you can lose your health or even your life. And what’s worse, if you take a risk, you may endanger other people and not just yourself. Their lives may be at stake also.” Is it right, then, to take risks?

That all depends. It depends on whether losing life is the same as wasting it. Piper’s burden is to prove that all of life is a risk and that as Christians we are called to take big risks, good risks, that will result in the Savior being honored and glorified. “It is the will of God that we be uncertain about how life on this earth will turn out for us. And therefore it is the will of the Lord that we take risks for the cause of God.” We risk well when our motive is not heroism or lust for adventure or a desire to earn God’s favor, “but rather faith in the all-providing, all-ruling, all-satisfying Son of God, Jesus Christ.”

As Piper builds his case he looks at examples of biblical risk, searching out both the Old Testament and the New. He looks at Paul as the great risk taker of the early church, a man who risked his life time and again in order to advance the cause of Christ. He presents a strong case and a reasonable one. He proves biblically, as he means to, that it is better to lose your life through godly risk than to waste it.

This review of Kyle Idleman’s Not a Fan comes a little bit late. The book released almost two years ago and has sold over a half million copies. I have been meaning to read it for some time, but something else always seemed more urgent. However, with Idleman’s follow-up releasing in the next month—a book that is likely to hit the list of bestsellers before Not a Fan has fallen off—it seemed logical to read the first before the second.

Not a Fan is a call to become a completely committed follower of Jesus. It is hardly alone in this category, this subgenre of Christian living or spiritual growth. Idleman’s unique angle is in focusing on the distinction between fans and followers. He looks at the Evangelical landscape and sees that there are many people who are mere hangers-on, mere enthusiasts for Jesus. “It may seem that there are many followers of Jesus, but if they were honestly to define the relationship they have with him I am not sure it would be accurate to describe them as followers. It seems to me that there is a more suitable word to describe them. They are not followers of Jesus. They are fans of Jesus.” In these circles Jesus is almost indistinguishable from a celebrity with committed fans “who know all about him, but they don't know him.”

Idleman wants more than this. He wants more than this for himself, for you, for me.

He shares many good insights into contemporary Evangelicalism. “My concern is that many of our churches in America have gone from being sanctuaries to becoming stadiums. And every week all the fans come to the stadium where they cheer for Jesus but have no interest in truly following him. The biggest threat to the church today is fans who call themselves Christians but aren't actually interested in following Christ. They want to be close enough to Jesus to get all the benefits, but not so close that it requires anything from them.” There is no doubt that this is true. He pushes back against easy-believism, against the kind of seeker friendliness that is all promise with no commitment. “Following by definition requires more than mental assent, it calls for movement. One of the reasons our churches can become fan factories is that we have separated the message of ‘believe’ from the message ‘follow’.” Again, this is very true, and refreshing to hear from a pastor who leads one of the most mega of America’s megachurches; his Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, is the 5th largest church in America with over 20,000 in attendance each weekend.