Book Reviews: theology

Practicing the Power

Matt Chandler says he has been waiting for this book for fifteen years. Mike Bickle assures the potential reader it “combines sound theology with inspiring personal examples.” Jack Deere describes it as “an immensely practical” work while Gregg Allison believes it is just what his church needs to experience a deeper outpouring of God’s grace. The book is Sam Storms’s Practicing the Power: Welcoming the Gifts of the Holy Spirit In Your Life. Over the past couple of decades, the …

Faith Alone

Here we are, five hundred years past Luther. You have to wonder to what degree that first protester would recognize today’s Protestantism. But you don’t have to wonder what he would think about contemporary attempts to bridge the gap he helped create. He, of all people, knew the necessity of defending the true gospel by separating from false gospels. That doesn’t mean others haven’t tried. In 1994, Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus co-founded Evangelicals and Catholics Together in an …

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John Piper’s Five Points

We will leave it to future church historians to determine the reach and impact of the recent renewal of Reformed theology. While we do not know if, when or how it will fade out, we do know that John Piper has been one of the men at the forefront of the movement. His books, his sermons and his conferences have been instrumental in raising awareness of Reformed theology and in making it downright exciting. In his new book Five Points, …

The Glory of Heaven

A few weeks ago a reporter from Macleans magazine got in touch to ask if I would be willing to talk about a whole new genre of books—books that claim the author has journeyed to heaven. He had been assigned the story and was baffled by their popularity. I am baffled too. He saw as well that even as authors are insisting that heaven is real and that they have seen it, hell is on the downgrade. He understood readers …

Blood Work

Christianity is a bloody faith. It is a bloody faith because it is the faith of sinful people and the Bible tells us that sin requires blood. For sin to be forgiven, for sinful people to be made right with God, there must be a payment of blood. That payment was made by Jesus Christ on a blood-soaked cross and through the centuries Christians have been praising God for providing the one thing they need most that they cannot do …

Christians and the Environment

I am rather a skeptic when it comes to many of the claims of global warming and environmentalism. However, this skepticism about the prognostications of doom and gloom does not indicate that I am unconcerned about the planet we live on. It is quite the opposite, really. I want my skepticism to allow me to find better solutions than those posited by the green movement. I want my diagnosis of the problem and my understanding of solutions to be grounded …

Killing Calvinism

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 …

Delighting in the Trinity

It’s a feeling every reader knows and loves, and perhaps especially the reader of theology. It is the feeling that comes as you read a book and find yourself thinking “This could change everything.” There are some books that go straight to what you think you know, what you are so sure of, what you’ve so carefully constructed, and begin to pull it all apart and to replace it with something that is so much better, so much loftier, so …

The Work of Christ

As Christians we make a big deal of the death of Jesus and rightly so because it is only through his death that we can be saved from our sin. But if all Jesus needed to accomplish before God was his death on the cross, he could have come to earth as an adult on the evening of Good Friday, he could have died, and still be the one to save us from our sin. But had he done all …

Through the Jesus Lens

  It is one of Jesus’ more audacious claims–that all of the Scriptures testify to him. As Jesus appealed to the religious authorities of his day and as he exposed their ignorance, he declared that he himself is the subject of the Bible; he himself is the one all of the Old Testament Scriptures were pointing to. Finding Christ in the pages of the Bible can be a challenge at times, and especially so when reading portions of the Old …