Review: Finding Freedom in Constraint

December 4, 2023December 3, 2023 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Finding Freedom in Constraint, Jared Patrick Boyd. Downers Grove: IVP Formatio, 2023.

Summary: Proposes that constraints in terms of spiritual practices in the context of community, expose our inner desires, allowing them to be healed and formed by Christ.

You might do a double-take on the title of this book. Shouldn’t it read “Finding Freedom From Constraint”? There is no mistake here. It gets at the core idea (as many good titles do) that the author is proposing. As the founder of a missional monastic order, the Order of the Common Life, Boyd proposes that constraints, in the form of a rule of life of spiritual practices, is crucial in Christ’s transforming work in our lives. What he observes is that a crucial element to that transformation is communal practice. Our call to love God and one another cannot be practiced alone. We cannot love, and dies to our self-centeredness, without others. Nor can we die to pride and take on humility alone.

A crucial aspect of how constraint works to free is that spiritual constraints, like fasting, the constraint of food, lays bare our compulsions around food and what lies beneath (pain, trauma, grief) that we try to address with food. As we practice the constraint in community, we can offer these, with the support of others, to Christ for healing and transformation as we discover how deeply we our loved amid our disordered desires. The healing, ordering and purifying of desire allows us to burn more brightly, to “become all flame” for Christ.

The remainder of the book discusses six constraints that form a kind of rule of life–three that we choose and three to which we consent. The three we choose are silence and solitude, simplicity, and marriage or celibacy. In silence and solitude, we submit to the present, to simply attend to what comes, sifting and sorting our distractions, offering them to God, waiting for God, and coming to the place where we know and participate and rest in God. Simplicity is the constraint of our attention, through fasting as we pay attention to the meaning of food and eating, through clothing as we pay attention to what we wear and any attachments we have to clothing, and to our possessions and wealth. Marriage and celibacy have in common the giving away of one’s life for the sake of others. Boyd has some of the most original material on the constraint and practice of love in each state that I have seen and writes with special sensitivity to both gay and straight individuals who choose celibacy, guarding this as a choice rather than something imposed.

The three constraints to which we consent are formational healing, faults and affirmations, and discernment in community. Formational healing means allowing God access to all areas of our lives, open to God’s invitations, accepting the constraints of our stories and experiencing healing of disordered attachments that push God out of the center of our lives. “Faults and affirmations” is a communal practice in families and small groups in which we each confess our own faults and affirm others in their gifts and gracious acts. We practice discernment in community when we bring both personal decisions and those of a community to the community for their prayerful input, listening together for God’s invitation.

This is a book written for small groups and leadership communities to work through together. Each chapter concludes with practical ideas for pastors and church leaders, for small groups, and for parents. The author shares a number of ways he has practiced this in his own family with his wife and four children and vulnerably shares his own transformational journey. For those dissatisfied with the use of spiritual practices on an individual basis, Boyd offers a model of communal practice. And for those who wrestle with the tyranny of a life without constraints, Boyd offers a vision in which constraints free rather than bind.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Behold and Become

August 2, 2023August 1, 2023 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Behold and Become, Jeremy M. Kimble. Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2023.

Summary: A classic yet contemporary evangelical account of the doctrine of scripture and how God works transformation through scripture in salvation and Christian growth and what this means for one’s engagement with scripture and its use in the life and leadership of the church.

This book is a winsome, straightforward discussion of the classic evangelical doctrine of scripture. It is neither tendentious toward others with a different understanding nor does it temporize about the difficulties critical scholarship has raised to this classic doctrine. It is a book rooted in the Bible’s testimony about itself and assumes the veracity of its testimony. Some may find that off-putting, but I found it fit the book’s purpose–to argue that God works his transforming work in the believer through the scriptures and to encourage its humble yet confident use by both the individual believer and those who pastor and lead congregations in a scripture-centered ministry.

Jeremy Kimble begins with the self-revealing character of God who speaks in creation and acts to show his redemptive purposes. It is entirely consistent that such a God would reveal his glory and purposes in scripture as he has in the world and that we do well to saturate our lives with this self-revelation of glory. He then turns to a theology of scripture affirming its inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility, clarity, necessity, sufficiency, and authority. He both cites scripture’s own testimony and that of those in the Reformed tradition. Accepting these things as true, the believer devotes his or her energy to diligent attention to scripture, not as a textbook, but as the speech of God meant to reveal God, God’s saving ways, and how we might live in the enjoyment of that salvation.

Kimble then turns, in chapter 3 to look at scripture’s testimony to itself, the intertextual character of scripture in later references to earlier texts in the OId Testament, to the New Testament’s use of the Old, and the symbols and patterns that recur that reflect the writers of scripture’s knowledge of and development of what has come before. All of this in the first three chapters builds to the conclusion of chapter 4, the efficacious character of scripture in the transformation of the believer, both from death to life and in progressing in holiness. He offers a study of a number of texts in both testaments that affirm both that scripture is efficacious in our lives and how this works out in the life of the believer. For me, this was one of the highlights of the book. And the focus is not, first of all, on scripture as an instruction manual, but rather as the disclosure of the Triune God and God’s workings in creation and redemption.

At the end of this as well as in the following chapter, Kimble argues that this calls the believer into a scripture-saturated life, giving ourselves to the reading, study, hearing, memory, and meditation of scripture. He also believes this calls us into the correlation of scripture, moving from careful reading to determining the biblical theology evident across a book or multiple books, learning historical theology, as we see how others have correlated the teaching of scripture into doctrine, moving to systematic theology, where we synthesize our learning across the whole of scripture. This forms our worldview and shapes our lives. He discusses how scripture transforms as we behold and become, experiencing renewal of mind that eventuates in lived trust and obedience. He speaks trenchantly about how scripture roots out sin, brings repentance, and the putting on of righteousness. He also encourages the use of scripture in the family, sharing some of his own practice.

The last two chapters focus on the ministry of the scriptures in the church as a body formed by God through the gospel. He values the place of creeds and confessions as doctrinal guardrails. All this sets the context for applying ourselves diligently to listening to the scriptures read and preached, the scriptures taught in educative settings and studied in small groups and applied in discipleship, counseling, and evangelism. He then comes to the preacher, advocating text-driven teaching and preaching and then advises on the practices of study that allow one’s preaching to be driven by the text. Echoing John Piper, he describes preaching as exulting over the truth of the passage and exhortation to grace-empowered action. More briefly, he outlines his convictions about scripture-centeredness in the stewardship practiced by leaders. He concludes the work by summarizing his overall argument and then an appendix re-articulates this in a thesis and one sentence summary of each chapter.

Kimble does not deal with challenges to the doctrine of scripture, or problems that arise in its misuse or abuse in the context of the church. As I noted earlier, while these questions are not unimportant, they would have distracted from the purpose of this book. The idolization of politics and nationalism and the resort to ploys of power have persuaded me that broad swaths of the church have lost their confidence in the power of God, by his Spirit and centered in Christ to work through the ministry of the scriptures both for the transformation from death to life, and in the “breaking of the power of cancelled sin and the setting of sinners free.” We resort instead to gospels of sin management (e.g. purity culture) and self-help. I appreciated the winsomely portrayed vision of a scripture saturated life, devoted to reading and study instead of the 24/7 news cycle and scripture memory instead of social media memes. I long for the joyful confidence that comes, not from ourselves, but from soaking in and exulting in the story of scripture that Kemble portrays. What comes through is the rich joy of such a life, as we become enthralled and enchanted again with the character and work of God and swept into that work. That seems to me what it is to “behold and become.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Lay It Down

February 22, 2016February 21, 2016 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Lay It Down, Bill Tell. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2015.

Summary: Through a personal crisis, the author discovers the freedom of the gospel in terms of three miracles.

You are a successful ministry leader and suddenly experience a series of incapacitating panic attacks when facing ministry opportunities. After a season of rest you take the step of trying to find out what is going on and whether life can be different.

That is the situation Bill Tell faced as a senior leader in a prominent discipleship ministry. He discovered that deep down he struggled with issues of self-worth that went back to his childhood and that to cope, he had devoted himself to a life of achievement in ministry that had become an exhausting treadmill. He longed for freedom from such existence, and paradoxically discovered it in the message that he had proclaimed but had not really lived into for many years.

In a season of counselling and personal study, he discovered three miracles of surrounding the work of Christ that spelled freedom. The first of these was that God viewed him differently. The good news of the cross was of God’s unconditional acceptance apart from any good behavior and in spite of any bad behavior. This meant he no longer needed to “perform” to merit God’s love. He was freed from condemnation, punishment, and fear, and freed for living in peace and grace.

The second miracle was realizing that in Christ, God makes us different. The gospel transforms us from the inside out. We are freed from working on not sinning and to mature into who we are in Christ. This doesn’t preclude effort, but he observes that “the gospel of grace is never opposed to effort–it is opposed to earning” (p. 140). We are freed to obey, to love, and to bear fruit, all of which emerge out of a relationship of being loved by Christ. He contends that:

“When we have a new heart, freedom does not make us want to run wild and sin more. It makes us want to walk with Jesus” (p. 107).

The final miracle is that God relates to us differently. We are adopted children, family, with Jesus as our brother. This frees us from an identity rooted in shame to one in which we are the beloved of God.

Martin Luther reportedly urged those around him to “preach the gospel to yourself every day” (source unknown). It seems to me that this is what Bill Tell has done compellingly in this book, beginning with his story of transformation from panic attacks and burnout as a senior ministry leader to one who discovered a new freedom in the gospel. What Tell writes in his chapters around the “three miracles” is simply a very clear and personal restatement of the basic Christian message–that we are saved by grace alone through the work of Christ alone, that we are transformed by Christ’s indwelling presence that enables our loving obedience and growth in Christian character, and that we are adopted as God’s beloved children. Meditating on this book chapter by chapter can be a good way to preach the gospel to oneself.

The only thing that would have made this book better for me would be if Tell would have woven more of his narrative subsequent to his crisis through the chapters on the three miracles, particularly in how this has shaped his ministry leadership, how life is different because of this transformed perspective, and how he applies this in mentoring emerging leaders. Perhaps that is too specific or too much for this book, but I hope he will address this in the future. What Tell has given us is a vulnerable account of his own personal crisis and how even Christian leaders can have distorted understandings of gospel, often because of deep wounds in one’s own life. He points us to a kind of “second conversion” where the “truths” of the gospel become lived, and life-giving realities that are in fact the birthright of every believer.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”