June 2014: The Month in Reviews

July 1, 2014January 11, 2015 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

This past month I read the classic account of the sinking of the Titanic and a book on Christianity’s engagement with classical culture. I explored the idea of the Holy, and the idea of the humanities. I read about immigrant zoologist Louis Agassiz and a contemporary book on the opportunities to serve immigrants. And I explored the diffusion of Christianity around the world in the 20th century, and the fiscal and moral deficits in our federal budgets. Here’s the list of books I reviewed in June with links to the full review:

1. The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. Otto coined the term “numinous” and explores the “non-rational” aspects of our encounters with God.

2. The Humanities in Public Life edited by Peter Brooks. This book is the text of symposium presentations and discussions exploring the qualitative worth of the humanities in our public life when they are under fire on the grounds of their utility.

3. Fixing the Moral Deficit by Ronald J. Sider. Sider believes our federal budget deficits reveal a deep moral deficit and he makes faith-informed proposals for how these deficits may be addressed so we don’t bequeath a mess to our children and grand-children.

4. The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism by Brian Stanley. Stanley explores the diffusion of evangelicalism in two senses–both its global spread as well as its increasingly incoherent identity at the end of this time.

5. Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science by Edward Lurie. This biography of Agassiz spans his life and his passion for zoology, his emigration to the U.S. and his pivotal role in the American scientific establishment as well as the challenge presented to his leadership by evolutionary biology.

6. A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. This is the classic account of the sinking of the Titanic, drawn from first hand accounts of survivors. Not recommended reading if you are going on a cruise!

7. Christianity and Classical Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan. This is the text of Pelikan’s magisterial Gifford Lectures on the interaction of the Cappadocian fathers (and Macrina) with Hellenistic influences in defining Christian orthodoxy.

8. Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration, and Mission by J.D. Payne. Payne chronicles the migrations occurring throughout the world and the implications for the mission of the church of hosting so many immigrants in our communities.

I read a few less books than usual this month–a combination of some long books like the Agassiz biography and the Pelikan book–and a major conference I was directing. But I hope in these reviews you will find something to your liking and look for more next month!

Review: The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott

June 11, 2014June 12, 2014 / rtrube54 / 3 Comments

The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott by Brian Stanley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title of this book proposes an ambitious project and I am impressed with how well Brian Stanley pulls this off in under 250 pages of text. While focusing on the evangelical landscape in the U.S. and U.K.(hence Graham and Stott), he gives us a helpful overview of the global spread of the evangelical movement from 1945 to the year 2000.

He opens with exploring the dynamics of this period–communications, the spread of evangelicalism in the English-speaking world, and the growing evangelical influence of the majority world. He then goes back to the beginning of this period and explores the differentiation of evangelical from fundamentalist in its US, British, Canadian and Australian forms, marked most notably in the US with the establishment of Christianity Today as the print organ of the forming evangelical consensus.

The next chapter on missions, evangelism, and revival focuses on the development of Billy Graham’s global ministry, the World Evangelical Fellowship, the Evangelical Fellowship of India, and the East Africa Revival, and finally the work of Scripture Union in Africa. “Scholarship, the Bible, and Preaching” focuses on the beginnings of an evangelical effort to engage the biblical scholarship of the day and produce scholarly work consonant with an evangelical view of scripture, including the New Bible Commentary. Stanley explores the British controversy over inspiration and the later American one centered around Fuller Seminary over the issue of inerrancy. The chapter concludes with profiling the development of expository preaching as an expression of evangelical biblical conviction in the ministries of Martyn Lloyd Jones, John R. W. Stott, and James Boice.

Chapter 5 profiles the major evangelical apologists of the period beginning with Cornelius Van Til, Carl F.H. Henry, Edward J Carnell, Francis Schaeffer, and Leslie Newbigin. He also cites the philosophical work of Alvin Plantinga, and the appropriation by evangelicals of High Church Anglican, C.S. Lewis, whose approach to the Bible was anything but evangelical. Chapter 6 explores the history of world missions consultations and the increasing social justice emphasis beginning from a bare mention at Berlin 1966, to a greater majority world presence and emphasis at Lausanne 1974 and the increasing integration of evangelism and social justice efforts since.

Chapter 7 covers the global spread of pentecostalism and that rapid growth of pentecostal movements in the majority world. This often gets short shrift in Western contexts but is critical to understanding global evangelicalism. Then the book concludes with raising the disturbing question of whether evangelicalism is simply diffusing, or in fact disintegrating as a cohesive movement with a coherent theological stance. The book ends with the provocative idea that this may not be something decided in the West but in the Majority world.

I found this book a fascinating overview of this decisive period–how decisive, the next 50 years may tell. It makes one give thanks again for the vision and character of so many profiled in this book, notably John Stott and Billy Graham, but also many other scholars, pastors, evangelists and missionaries of this period. At the same time, I think the book shows evidence of, but fails to diagnose the critical issue of the lack of consensus with regard to what is meant by the inspiration, authority, and inerrancy (or infallibility, or trustworthiness) of the Bible that was oft fought over and also the source of an interpretive pluralism that could lead to disintegration of this movement. Does final authority lie with the individual interpreter, within “interpretive communities”, or in the tradition of biblical interpretation? This is an issue discussed at length in Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason (reviewed here). Perhaps an exploration of this issue in detail would move beyond the descriptive character of this work and yet this issue is important in what seems a growing movement of frustrated evangelicals to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. That being said, Stanley has given us a masterful overview of the development of evangelicalism up to the turn of the century.

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Review: Vanishing Evangelical, The: Saving the Church from Its Own Success by Restoring What Really Matters

January 4, 2014August 27, 2025 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Vanishing Evangelical, The: Saving the Church from Its Own Success by Restoring What Really Matters by Calvin Miller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Calvin Miller first came to my attention as a student when The Singer Trilogy was published and captured our imaginations as a wonderful retelling of the story of the New Testament. Miller was not only a prolific author (over 40 books) but a pastor who took a church plant in Omaha from 10 to 2500 in 25 years. In Andy Unedited-Remembering Calvin Miller InterVarsity Press editor Andy LePeau described Miller in this way:

What I loved about Calvin and about these times together was his joyful love of words. Of course, he was a voluble character with a ready smile. He always had something to say about what he was up to, his family, what he’d been reading or writing, or where he’d traveled.

This book was Miller’s last, completed shortly before his death in 2012. In some ways, I wonder if there was time to edit this before his death. The love of words, the volubility, and the sharing of his thoughts, reading and writing run through this book. It is both a somewhat rambling and yet trenchant final testament to the “evangelical church”. One senses Miller writing quickly, passionately, perhaps sensing that his own time is short. That’s only speculation on my part but the book has that feel.

Miller’s basic theme is that evangelicalism is in what he sees as an irreversible decline in North America. Throughout the book, he states that there will be no pendulum swing back. Why such a pessimistic assessment?

He contends that we have exchanged truth for relevance in our proclamation of the gospel and made significant compromises with the culture. He sees us infatuated with growth and technology when real transformation occurs person by person in intimate encounters. He believes preaching has divorced mind and heart. Denominations have lost any confessional distinctiveness and are simply communities of common interest and demographics that are rapidly hemorrhaging members.

He has little hope for evangelical institutions. His advice and concluding encouragements are to personal spiritual renewal and a recovery of personal one to one gospel ministry. He does see vitality in the church in other parts of the world but says little about the significance of this for the North American church.

I was torn in many ways in reading this book. Having been impressed elsewhere with Miller’s use of language, I was surprised by the infelicities of language and grammar. While sharing many of the concerns Miller articulates, I felt he made sweeping generalizations that often lacked good supporting argument or acknowledged counter-trends. Reading this through the eyes of the younger believers I work with who challenge me with the vibrancy of their faith, I fear they would see this as the venting of an old curmudgeon, out of touch with the ways God is at work in their generation.

What I think this book actually chronicles are the ways that the boomer generation lost its way from the days of the Jesus movement and the “year of the evangelical” (1976) to the present. The value for younger readers is to avoid repeating or amplifying these errors. For all who read this book, I think it should be read as a passionate plea and a compelling “last testament” to return to Christ as our first love and a life of devotion, holiness and gospel faithfulness.

This review is based on an e-galley provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

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Review: Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism

September 17, 2013September 17, 2013 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism by Molly Worthen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading Apostles of Reason was kind of like reading a family history written by someone outside the family (although I am unaware of Molly Worthen’s faith commitments). I consider “evangelicalism” to be the family with which I most closely identify, much as I would take issue with some of the expressions of some of my family members.

On the whole, I thought Worthen gave a balanced and illuminating account of American evangelicalism, spanning the period from after World War II to the present. She charted the tension between the efforts of those like Carl F H Henry to articulate an intellectually rigorous Christianity and evangelicalism’s continued commitment to biblical inerrancy. She also elaborates the varieties of expression that develop through the charismatic movement, growing tensions to confront questions of the role of women, questions of justice, and the beginnings of the political engagement of evangelicals in the 80s and 90s. She also does a good job of representing the intellectual renaissance of evangelical scholarship within public universities, one of the most promising trends of evangelical engagement. She concludes by suggesting that the tensions and diverse expressions within the evangelical movement (whatever that means in our present time) may actually be an asset enabling the movement to reach into various segments of society and balance disparate parts of this movement.

Through all this, she helps us both understand what figures and movements are trying to accomplish in their own terms while also showing the tensions, both internal and with the culture these create. The one thing I found myself wrestling with at times was a feeling that the evangelical community was being scrutinized critically while the larger cultural context it was seeking to engage was more or less “given a pass” and at times the larger culture was implied to be intellectually the superior. That may be true in some of the ivy-ed halls of academia at times but what about the banal, consumeristic, violent, and hyper-sexualized mass culture of early 21st century America? Still, to do what I propose may have meant a much longer work and I must say that I found Worthen’s portrayal of “my family” fair and well-supported.

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My Books Are Talking to Each Other!

August 28, 2013August 28, 2013 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

My books are talking to each other. Some of you suspected I was a little crazy–now you know! Seriously, have you ever had the experience of reading a couple works that either directly, or via your own thoughts, were in a conversation with each other?

I am currently reading Rodney Stark’s Victory of Reason and Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason (reviews in the next couple weeks). Stark argues that medieval Christianity in fact was responsible for the rise of universities, the scientific enterprise, European capitalism, and human rights–all before either the Reformation or the Renaissance. Stark contends that Christianity, among all the religions, has an openness to reason that is reflected in the development of doctrine over time–that belief is not etched in stone but evolves over time responding to different social situations. This openness to reason and progress in Stark’s mind accounts for this remarkable development of civilization during the supposed “Dark” Ages.

Worthen is addressing a very different period–the post World War II period up to the present and the neo-evangelical movement led by Carl F H Henry, Billy Graham and others that sought to maintain doctrinal ties with late 19th-early 20th century fundamentalism while promoting an intellectual and social engagement with the broader American culture. I am only part way into the book but it appears that Worthen is exploring the fault lines that develop in this movement as the tension between its view of biblical inerrancy and authority and its attempt to articulate a reasonable faith become apparent.

The interesting conversation for me is around the differing perceptions of Christianity’s engagement with reason at different points–at some times, a friend, at others, an enemy or at least a bugbear. I’m considering several questions as I read: is Stark’s account of faith and reason in early Christian history accurate? is Worthen’s of American neo-evangelicalism? is there a difference in the ways Christians engage society dependent on whether authority resides in the “magisterium” or in an inerrant or trustworthy scripture personally interpreted by a priesthood of all believers? When does orthodoxy foster creative engagement with the world and when does it stifle it?

While the authors (at least as far as I’ve read) don’t engage each other, their shared discussion of authority, faith, and reason and their differing perspectives provoke hard and good thinking. That, it seems to me, is one of the important reasons for reading good and significant books.

Years ago, Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago and Great Books fame wrote an article (available as a free .pdf here) on The Great Conversation. His contention is that the Great Books explore perennially great ideas and that over time, the different writers are engaged in a conversation with each other regarding these ideas. By reading, we get to join in.

When have you found your books talking to each other? And how have you been changed by that conversation?