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.

Poor Eutychus. He had an opportunity and privilege we’ve all wished for at one time or another: an evening with the world’s foremost theologian. But it didn’t go exactly the way he had imagined (or, to be fair, how the theologian had imagined). Eutychus perched himself in the coolest part of the room—right up there in the window—and listened as this man preached about Jesus Christ. And preached. And preached some more. The evening turned to night. His eyes got heavy. He drifted to sleep. He slipped right out of that window. The next thing he knew he was all dead and it was only some well-timed apostolic first aid that let him see the sunrise.

Of course we’ve all wished death upon ourselves somewhere in the second hour of a particularly disjointed and interminable sermon. The occasional bad sermon is an inevitability to all of us who attend church week after week. The occasional dud is equally inevitable to those of us called to preach. Gary Millar and Phil Campbell are concerned with boring preaching, or just plain bad preaching, and to war against it they teamed up to write Saving Eutychus. An Aussie and an Irishman, each lifelong preachers, they have written book on preaching that is uniquely practical and uniquely quirky. It’s a great combination.

While they position the book as an antidote to boring and ineffective sermons, it is actually far more positive than defensive in its tone. Their great desire is to equip men for the kind of preaching that changes the heart. They say,

We all know good preaching when we hear it. We may not be able to explain why it is so good. We may not know why the sermon enthralled and challenged us this Sunday, or why this time last week we were counting the bricks in the wall behind the pulpit. But we know there is a difference, and all of us can feel that difference.

I hope you’ve heard the Bible taught in such a way that you simply could not miss the fact that God was in the room addressing his people through his word. I hope you’ve felt that strange combination of fear and comfort as you suspect that the preacher wrote the sermon just for you (and as you wonder whether the speaker has been secretly interviewing your parents, spouse, children, workmates and neighbors again). That’s the kind of preaching that changes the heart…

Indeed. We may not be able to easily define that kind of preaching, but we can all remember occasions when we have experienced it, whether we were in the pews or the pulpit at the time. And whether we deliver a sermon or hear a sermon, this is our desire, to experience preaching that changes us from the inside out. But how do we do that? What are the characteristics of this preaching?

Many years ago my grandmother succumbed to cancer and went to be with Jesus. Among the things she left behind, buried among other personal effects, was a long, handwritten letter from Joni Eareckson Tada. My grandmother had experienced excruciating pain in her life, losing both a daughter and her husband to suicide. As a new Christian she had written to Joni to share her grief, believing that perhaps in Joni there would be someone who might understand and who might give her hope. And she did. In this letter she mourned with one who was mourning and shared hope grounded in the gospel.

Joni is one of those entirely unique Christian personalities and one who is universally loved and admired. Her ministry has continued for decades, and through conferences and radio and music and books and every other media she has been sharing encouragement and hope. I have seen Joni speak a few times and off to the side I’ve always spotted her husband, Ken. So much has been said about her, but so little about him. He is content to love and serve his wife and to allow her to be center-stage. But I’ve wondered who he is and what his role has been in Joni’s life and ministry. Their story is finally being told in Joni & Ken: An Untold Love Story. 

This is an honest book that tells the story of what has not always been an easy marriage. Though Ken married Joni after her accident and after she had become a renowned Christian personality, neither of them was prepared for all the challenges that marriage would bring. What started as a great love story soon began to lose some of its lustre. While the love remained, the romance and respect faded. But the Lord was not done with them and sparked a great renewal of love and romance. Their story is not one of unfading, unattainable marital bliss, but one that is so very real, and one that went through difficult valleys. Though it is unique in many of its particulars, in other ways it looks like so many other marriages. 

As I read about Joni and Ken I found myself growing in my love for Aileen. Isn’t it funny that reading about another couple’s marriage can do this? Yet their love for one another is contagious, the way they pray and laugh and sing together is admirable, and the way Ken has sacrificed so much for Joni is Ephesians 5:25 in action. I learned about love and sacrifice and deep intimacy from this portrait of their marriage.

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:

Without a doubt, C.S. Lewis is one of the most interesting, perplexing and polarizing figures in recent Christian history. For some he is a giant of the faith who asked questions few were willing to ask and who answered those questions in compelling ways. For others he is no Christian at all, a fake, a fraud, who revoked his faith at the end of his life. Few men are seen in such contradictory ways. What is undeniable is that Lewis remains a hero to many Christians and that his influence continues to grow even fifty years after his death.

Lewis has been the subject of several full-length biographies but I would suggest none is as fine as Alister McGrath’s new C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. Where most of Lewis’ previous biographers were former friends and acquaintances, McGrath never knew C.S. Lewis. He may not write as beautifully as George Sayer (Jack) and he may not be able to offer the warm, personal insights that come from enjoying a personal relationship with his subject, but he has the advantage of a critical distance that was lacking in some of those previous accounts.

The book’s subtitle aptly captures his portrait of C.S. Lewis: an eccentric genius who was also reluctantly prophetic to his generation and to our own. Lewis’ eccentricities were many. McGrath looks deeply into the strange relationship with the mysterious Mrs. Moore, finally saying what biographers have been reluctant to admit: that for many years Lewis was living in a common-law relationship with the mother of one of his dear friends. He looks as well at Lewis’ unexpected marriage to Joy Davidman and tries to discern whether this was a marriage of convenience, whether it was a gold-digging woman taking advantage of a naive man, or whether there really was a spark between the two. He examines Lewis as a friend, a brother, a professor and an unexpected celebrity.

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

Galatians is all about the gospel. It’s obvious, I guess, and yet many people seem to miss the sheer gospel-centeredness of the book with all the joy and freedom it holds out. Perhaps more than any other book of the Bible it shows with utter clarity that the gospel is not only the message that saves us, but the message that underlies and empowers all of the Christian life.

Galatians For You is a new book from Tim Keller that simply opens up the epistle to the Galatians, teaching it verse-by-verse. It is the first in a new series of expository guides from The Good Book Company—a series I’m excited about. These are books that can be used to read, to feed and to lead—to read on your own, to feed you devotionally and to help you lead others through Galatians. It can be read from cover-to-cover as any other book; it can be read as a personal Bible study; it can be a curriculum for a group study. It will prove excellent in any of those contexts.

Keller wants the reader “to see Paul showing the young Christians in Galatia that their spiritual problem is not only caused by failing to live in obedience to God, but also by relying on obedience to Him. We're going to see him telling them that all they need--all they could ever need--is the gospel of God's unmerited favor to them through Christ's life, death and resurrection. We're going to hear him solving their issues not through telling them to ‘be better Christians’, but by calling them to live out the implications of the gospel.”

With all the talk of being gospel-centered today, this book takes us to Galatians and clearly, helpfully illustrates exactly how Paul called on the people he loved to center their lives and their church upon the gospel.

As with all of Keller’s books, this one is full of the gospel and full of powerful quotes. Here are just a few favorites:

Motherhood was something I planned for, something I wanted, so why was living it out so drastically different from my expectations?” This is a question many an honest and searching mother has asked herself. If motherhood is so good, so desirable, so obviously the will of God, then why does it have to be so difficult? Why does it feel so unfulfilling? This was Sarah Mae’s question as she faced another day of caring for her children after yet another sleepless night—one of those days where she was just too tired and too worn out to be a mom. “Down to the bone, to the deepest part of my soul, is the love I have for my children. Every day of my life is imperfectly offered to them. But the little years, they're hard and oftentimes lonely. It's like a secret we fear sharing, just how life-altering motherhood is, especially when you don't have training or support.”

Mae found both training and support through Sally Clarkson, an author who would also become a dear friend and much-needed mentor. Together they have written Desperate: Hope for the Mom Who Needs to Breathe, a book that, judging by its early reviews, has resonated with mothers.

Sally and I want to encourage you to keep going even when it feels like you can't, and we want to help you. We won't offer you formulas, but we will offer ideas, perspectives, transparency, and wisdom. We have some ideas for you in getting help, and we are making a plea for older women to remember the tired years and come alongside young mothers, so that our children and our children's children will know how to serve and to receive help.

Mae and Clarkson collaborate in a very natural way. Mae, whose oldest child is just six years old, describes motherhood as she goes through it. She identifies concerns, confesses exasperation, asks question. Clarkson responds as the mentor, the one whose children are older and grown, the one who comes alongside those who are in the trenches.

I have no first-hand experience of motherhood, but what I can testify is that the questions Mae poses are the very ones that Aileen and I have discussed so many times. Almost every area of frustration is here: the never-ending piles of laundry, the house that begins to fall apart before the cleaning is even complete, the children who won’t sleep, the children who don’t want to obey. But it goes deeper than that. Here too is the self-reliance and unrealistic expectation. “A good mom, in my mind, was up bright and early before her children woke up; she got dressed, did her hair, put on her makeup, had her quiet time, and had breakfast simmering in the pan as she went to wake up her babes. Of course in my fantasy she was always cheery, always smelled good, and never raised her voice. She was what God never asked us to be apart from Him: perfect.”

The authors’ solutions to such questions and frustrations uniformly lead back to Scripture.

Each of us has a story, but God, who originated the design of motherhood, is the expert advisor to whom we should turn. God has equipped us for every good work, and I am quite confident that He who designed this role to be so eternally significant is the one who is ready to help, support, instruct, and guide. He will provide all we need for the task He has given us to fulfill. But to hear from God we must become women of the Word and women who pray, so that His voice may lead us as we grow into this role with grace. I look back now through all of the huge obstacles, unexpected twists, and challenges on this course of motherhood through my life and see that at each point, He was there, helping, carrying, guarding, and blessing as a true and present advocate. He is the reason for any success or blessing I have felt as a mother.

As the authors share wisdom, they also share hope.