Christian growth

Reviewing Christian Books

/ rtrube54 / 4 Comments
A random selection of books awaiting review. ©Robert C. Trube, 2024.

I imagine one of the questions some have asked on encountering this blog is “why does Bob review so many Christian books?” That’s actually pretty atypical of most book blogs. I suspect some of you just pass these up and read other reviews on books, or my Youngstown posts. That’s just fine, although I hope you will dip in if you see an intriguing title. Don’t worry, this blog is not about proselytizing. Like all reviews, I want to help people get a sense of what the book is about and what I thought about it so they can decide if they want to buy or borrow it.

OK, so why do I review so many Christian books? Besides the fact that I am a follower of Christ, it stems, I think, from a conviction formed early in my Christian journey. A Christian leader I deeply respected once said, “While not all Christians who read are growing Christians, all growing Christians are reading Christians.” That resonated. Deciding to follow Christ was quite simply the best thing to happen in my life and I wanted to grow into all that this meant for my relationship with God and neighbor, my calling in life, my character, and how my faith informed how I saw and lived into every aspect of life. More than fifty years later that is still true.

I believe we grow through our interactions both with God and other Christ-followers. Some are those in my own Christian community with whom I share life. The first book, of course, that we should read and re-read is the Bible. But the wonderful thing about other Christian books is the chance to learn from other Christians I may never meet, especially if they are from before my time. How thankful I am for what I’ve learned from Augustine, Calvin, C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, John R. W. Stott, Theresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many others. Likewise, I’ve been enriched by so many contemporary writers from N.T. Wright to Tish Harrison Warren.

I began writing reviews to remember what I read, to record what I wanted to remember. I started posting them on an old Facebook app and then on Goodreads (where they still appear). A few years later, I started Bob on Books with the idea of making my reviews, and other thoughts about reading and life available to those who didn’t want to be tied to Goodreads.

I work with a collegiate ministry serving graduate students and faculty. I also hold a Masters degree from a seminary. That leads to reading works written with a kind of academic rigor and careful thought that characterizes what the students and faculty I work with read. While those kinds of books are not generally so popular today, they offer the heft to meet the spiritual and intellectual challenges the scholars we work with face. And this is not so unusual in a Christian history in which the great universities of both Europe and the United States grew out of the church. Any study of intellectual history will number devout Christians like Aquinas and Pascal among the greatest thinkers.

One of my reasons for my reading and reviewing is to share these resources with colleagues, faculty and students who will find these helpful. In earlier years I carried a trunkful of books to share with students I met on campuses. Books would continue conversations we began, with conversation partners who offered far more than I could. I discovered that in writing about books, I could do something similar with a wider group of people. I get to connect people with everything from devotional resources to the latest in Pauline scholarship to books discussing the relationship of faith and science as well as books discussing pressing societal issues from a Christian perspective.

While some of the books I review are academic in character, I try not to write “academic” reviews such as one would find in an academic journal. Most of my reviews are under a thousand words–a challenge when trying to distill several hundred pages! I work to identify the writer’s main idea and how they unpack it, highlighting what seem original, or sometimes, controversial insights. I try to write for ministry colleagues and for non-specialists in theology or biblical studies, though they are often highly specialized in their own field of study.

I’m a non-specialist myself. While I read widely and have some academic training, I am not a specialist in many of the fields in which authors work I review. I don’t attend the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL) conferences they attend or follow the journals where they hash out ideas with other scholars. That’s a handicap, and I will be the first to admit I miss things, even though I try to fairly and accurately present a writer’s ideas. Mostly, authors are glad for the publicity for their books and often pass along resources to fill in the lacunae in my own knowledge.

But this is the same handicap most of my readers have. They are bright folk but not trained in the fields of the writers I review. Sometimes, I’m saddened because writers actually have important ideas for “people in the pews” but they write only for the AAR/SBL crowd. But many of the writers I review write plainly enough that any fluent reader of English will profit from reading them if they are willing to give them undivided and unhurried attention, something increasingly rare in our age of distraction. I consider it a privilege to help them reach a wider audience than they might otherwise–and I learn along the way.

A book that greatly influenced both my sense of call and my passion for reading and reviewing thoughtful Christian writing was Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Noll’s point about the evangelical mind at the time he wrote was that there wasn’t one. He noted the penchant of evangelicals for action rather than thought and the critical need for both. In seminary, I researched the work of William Wilberforce, who with a circle of reformers called the “Clapham Sect” achieved a number of social reforms including the abolition of the slave trade and then slavery itself in the British colonies forty years before our Civil War. Again, the one critique that might be offered was a tendency to action over thought. In consequence, many of the reformers children carried on the reforms but departed from the faith.

I’m concerned that I sometimes hear a longing for spiritual renewal set against the renewal of our minds (Romans 12:1-2). I want it all and think being asked to dispense with one is like being asked which wing of an airplane I would dispense with. I long for living a life of loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength and my neighbor as myself. I do think what we read, what we nourish ourselves on, matters. We rail against junk food but settle for mind candy when there is so much rich fare out there. I hope my reviews point the way to a better diet that enables us to link thought to passionate devotion and action. Instead of banning ideas in the world of higher education, I long for Christian scholars who meet deficient ideas with better ones. This is the renewal I long for. I hope the reviews you find here will help in some small way toward that.

Review: Becoming Sage

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becoming sage

Becoming Sage, Michelle Van Loon. Chicago: Moody Press, 2020.

Summary: An exploration of what Christian growth looks like in the second half of life.

One of the dirty little secrets of Christian discipleship is that most of the resources that have been developed focus around the early years of the Christian life, and most around the issues of the first half of life. What is a Christian to do who lives beyond his or her forties?

Michelle Van Loon proposes in this book that we move from what a Christian believes and does to growing in the wisdom won of hard life experiences, in other words becoming sage. Drawing on the work of Hagberg and Guelich, she argues that most church discipleship programs address the first three of six stages of Christian growth: 1. “God I believe in you”; 2. “God I belong to you.”; and 3. “God, I’m working for you.” At mid-life, we often hit the wall and all the earlier answers seem to stop working. She calls this “God where are you? I’m alone in the dark.” We face loss and we move from certainty to humility. If we persevere, we move into Stage 5 where we pass along what we’ve given, and Stage 6 as we prepare for and move toward the conclusion of our lives (“Lord, I’m coming home”).

Van Loon explores the process of growing sage through our changing relationship with the church and how we deal with wounds and disappointments. She describes our changing relationships with family and friendships that fade or endure and new ones that develop.

She explores that changes that inevitably happen to us bodily. She observes:

Becoming sage means growing into the tension of wasting away and being renewed. It is not an either/or proposition, but both/and. As unlovely as the notion of suffering and decay are, Paul tells us here that eternal glory is being created through them.

Change happens with our money and our intangible treasures as well. We come to terms that we can’t take anything with us, and need to think how we leave these things behind well.

One of the most perceptive chapters is on the “U” curve of happiness. She discusses acedia (often known as the “noonday demon”), a kind of weary sadness that comes over many in midlife. Van Loon doesn’t have simple answers for this but rather the persevering faith that allows Christ to deconstruct and transform our relationship with Him.

She describes the movement from doing to being, from being “world changers” with the hubris this carries to those who by quiet faithfulness heal the world. We learn to impart what we learn and begin to prepare for facing our own home-going, our own death.

People hitting midlife are leaving the church. Some decide that when the answers they learned in their early years as Christians don’t work or satisfy, that there is nothing there, particularly when the church offers nothing, no vision of the second half of life. The issues Van Loon discusses often aren’t discussed. How do we deal with the disappointments of the church itself. How do we come to terms with the bodily changes that remind us of our mortality? How do we fruitfully invest what we’ve earned and learned? How do we prepare to die well when no one talks about this? Van Loon breaks the conspiracy of silence and casts a rich vision of the second half of life, a vision of becoming sage, going deeper into Christ and Christ-likeness in a lifelong journey of discipleship.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Power of Together

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power-of-together

The Power of Together, Jim Putnam. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2016.

Summary: A pastor of a thriving church explores what he believes to be the key to both spiritual maturity and the ministry effectiveness of his church–the fostering of relationships of depth between believers throughout the church.

Jim Putnam begins this book by observing a gap that exists in many American churches. People have come to faith, been taught both Christian doctrine and Christian practice and yet seem to lack the vibrant maturity and depth one one would expect in disciples of Jesus. His thesis is that what is lacking is a depth of relationships between believers, where people are deeply engaging with each other week in, week out, practicing the Christian faith with each other in working through conflict, confessing and turning from sin, learning to serve together, learning to go the extra mile for each other, and caring for those who are seeking.

Relationship is central to the gospel, not only a restored relationship with God but also with each other. First Corinthians 13, he observes, is instructions on how people in the church are to love each other and be family to each other. Marriage is only a small subset of that. Pride is often the major barrier to really opening our lives to each other. We fear being known, and we resist the idea of submission when it means we need to be open to others speaking into our lives, calling us to change. This may especially be an affliction of church leaders to whom Putnam writes pointedly:

“Leaders must be submissive too. This might sound counterintuitive at first, but it’s not in practice. If leaders are submissive, to whom do they submit? The answer is that leaders must be submissive to God, to other leaders, and even other Christians. Yes, it takes strong leadership to get a church off the ground, and yes, it takes strong leadership to keep a church running smoothly. But Ephesians 5:21, which says, ‘Submit to one another out of reverence to Christ,’ applies to everyone, not just people who aren’t in leadership positions” (p. 121).

He writes of how deeply his church invests in training its leaders to work as a team and how hard they work at it. He recognizes the danger of leaders becoming siloed in their work and how much better leadership is when teams keep thinking about the whole and keep developing their capacity to care for the whole. Putnam argues this is crucial to meet the spiritual battle churches face and to stand out as “a city on a hill.”

The style of this book is a consistent movement between biblical principles and stories from various settings of life from Putnam’s personal life to sports. One of his most memorable images is that often our investment in relational discipleship is similar to buying an $8 tube to float down a river. Fine for calm waters, but entirely inadequate for white water rafting.

There are points where I felt the writing was a bit of “variations on a theme” where the author was reiterating his point about how important being together in relationships of depth is to our growth as disciples. I thought there were places where he could have fleshed out how this works more in his congregation. For example, thousands of congregations have some form of home groups or small groups. What distinguishes those at his church?

I think this could be a helpful book for a church leadership wrestling with a sense that the congregation seems “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Often that lack of depth is in the dimension of relationships. Putnam charts a biblical vision, some practical dimensions of the form this takes, what it looks like for leadership, and both the barriers and crucial spiritual importance of relational discipleship to spiritual maturity and church vitality.

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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.