Writing a book review is a little bit like brushing my teeth at this point; I do it without thinking. Ever since I discovered the wonder that is goodreads.com and got a bit more serious about tracking my reading and setting reading goals, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing at least something about every book I read. And so whenever I read something particularly interesting or engaging, I tend to write a lengthier and more detailed review.
My approach to writing reviews is definitely more whimsical than a typical academic book review. I like to focus in on a few salient points that struck me particularly and then to engage the book via reflection, sometimes bringing in another conversation partner as well. The classic “summary plus evaluation” equation for book reviews has always been rather unsatisfying to me because I enjoy a writer who involves himself or herself more directly in the review. Context matters here. For some publications, such as academic journals or professional association publications, it makes sense for the reviewer to fade into the background. But frankly, the kind of depersonalized prose this approach produces is so stripped of human vitality that no one would ever be able to tell if it was written by ChatGPT or not.
In contrast to this, I prefer to read (and write) reviews that emphasize the reviewer’s encounter with the book. One label for this is the review essay: a piece of writing where the reviewer uses his or her encounter with the book as a launching point. This means the resulting piece has a lot more personality in it; more of the writer and slightly less of the book. Sometimes such an essay can actually take two books and put them in conversation with each other. When done well, this approach makes for a compelling piece of writing.
Lately I’ve had a couple of book reviews published. First, at Faith Today, I have a review of Harold Ristau’s book, Spiritual Warfare and Deliverance: How to Minister to the Demonically Oppressed and Possessed. Faith Today has a very limited word count for their reviews, so I wouldn’t say this piece manages to feel like the kind of review essay I prefer. Nevertheless, I’m always grateful for the chance to be published in a print magazine, and the book was very interesting. Second, at TGC Canada, I have a review of Brad Littlejohn’s book Called to Liberty: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. My editor at TGC, Wyatt Graham, prefers the review essay, so I appreciate the freedom to do those.
In an earlier piece, I reflected on the contents of the opening chapter of Samuel G. Parkison’s book To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice. I have since finished that book, and I gave it 4.667 stars over at goodreads. Here is the brief review I left there:
This book is a great achievement. It succeeds in its mission, which is to retrieve the doctrine of the beatific vision for evangelicals, and in so doing, reintroducing new generations of Protestants to the riches of their own tradition. The introduction and opening chapters do a great job situating the modern reader in terms of where we are in late modernity and how that relates to the metaphysical foundations that undergirded earlier eras of Christian thought. The book self-consciously situates itself within the ‘Great Tradition’ and calls evangelicals back to classical Trinitarian theism from the barren wilds of modernist biblicism.
Having been thus oriented, Parkison takes the reader through a number of major figures from the early church, the middle ages, and the Reformation, and explores how the church’s view of the beatific vision has evolved over the centuries. The author then attempts to synthesize the best of these views into a coherent whole that is digestible for modern readers. His distinctive contribution seems to be a more thoroughly trinitarian formulation of the beatific vision, drawing on and continuing the work of Protestant giants such as John Owen and Jonathan Edwards.
One of the book’s strengths is the affective tone, the marriage of academic and spiritual concerns. In other words, the book is edifying and, when rightly read, is sure to bring the reader to worship. That being said, it is still quite dense, and some of the middle chapters felt like a bit of a slog at times. Perseverance, however, is richly rewarded. I recommend it most heartily.
Dave Barry, true to form, made fun of himself and almost everything else in his memoir. I’ve enjoyed Barry’s writing on and off over the years as I’ve come across it. This book, like many of his columns, had me bursting out with laughter. For that reason alone it was worth reading.
The more serious sections were handled with adequate solemnity, but Barry’s brand of irreverence, as funny as it is, seems inadequate to face up to the realities of the world. The ability to make everything into a joke cuts both ways, of course. It helps one get through tough times with humour and wit, but it also encourages a habit of mind and heart that ultimately undermines one’s ability to take seriously what in fact is serious.
C.S. Lewis is helpful here, lest I be accused of simply being a fun-hating curmudgeon. In the Screwtape Letters, he helpfully distinguishes between four types of laughter: joy, fun, the joke proper, and flippancy. The first two are good and harmless. Barry’s humour contains a fair amount of rejoicing in sheer fun, and this is all to the good. The joke proper relies “on [a] sudden perception of incongruity,” and this is Barry’s bread and butter. Much of the time, it is simply clever and a good deal of fun, but Lewis warns that this type of humour is especially apt to be used to destroy the healthy human instinct towards shame (Brené Brown will just have to deal with it; I’m going with Lewis on this one). Barry certainly deploys jokes in this way, though not nearly as much as so many of the most popular comedians.
The last type of laughter, flippancy, is described memorably in the following lines: “Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it…. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.”
As much as I enjoyed the book, I did feel this kind of flippancy to be at work in Barry’s writing, and it is the part of it I enjoyed least. Perhaps it is an occupational hazard when one is in the business of comedy. The other thought that came to me was that Barry’s type of humour is particularly situated in the baby boomer generation’s experience of the world. This is not a criticism, only an observation. And it seems to me that it’s unlikely to appear again in any subsequent generation.
I grabbed the (audio)book because I wanted something light and enjoyable to listen to on my commutes that wasn’t a current events podcast riling me up about the latest unbelievable political outrage. It certainly met and exceeded my hopes for such a light and enjoyable read. If that’s what you’re looking for, Dave Barry’s memoir may be just the ticket.
For some reason I was expecting this to be a popular-level book on the topic. Instead, like Unseen Realm, it was a substantive work of scholarship that delved deeply into the academic literature. That’s fine with me, but it is good to know when considering recommending it to others. That being said, the audiobook version I listened to was very well done, with substantive footnotes being included while footnote citations were excluded. This approach came as close as it is possible to get to the experience of reading a physical copy.
I enjoyed the book, much as I enjoyed Unseen Realm. Indeed, there is a lot of overlap between the two books. He chronicles in detail his contention that there were three (instead of one) supernatural rebellions (Gen 3, Gen 6, and Gen 11), each of them by different sorts of beings and for different reasons, with different consequences that play out across the rest of Scripture’s narrative.
Heiser’s strength is also a cause for caution; he pays little heed to interpretive tradition after the NT era. Rather, he privileges Ancient Near Eastern and Second Temple Jewish understandings of these topics since he argues these were the formative influences guiding the thinking of the OT and NT writers. And he undoubtedly has a strong case. It’s undeniable that the NT writers were familiar with this material, like 1 Enoch (referenced in Jude and 2 Peter).
In Heiser’s telling, this 2nd Temple material synthesized the scattered and partial OT teaching on the powers of darkness into a more cohesive narrative. There is explanatory power in this since it’s obvious that when we turn from the OT to the first pages of the NT, a significant shift has occurred in the way these spiritual forces are described. And his framework makes sense of the fragmentary evidence in a way that the typical default framework of Christians does not.
But the concern this work raises is also worth considering. Heiser is perhaps too comfortable departing from the near-consensus of Christian thought throughout the centuries. His reliance on textual variants and extra-biblical sources to frame his narrative mean that we ought to be cautious about thinking we’re on very solid ground. The fact is, despite my desire to understand all this, the topic is shrouded in much mystery. The evidence is scattered and ambiguous–seemingly deliberately.
One strength of the book is what so many have found so helpful about Heiser’s work–he is not beholden to modernist anti-supernaturalism. Instead, he is refreshingly open to a thoroughly supernatural worldview all while being a careful scholar.
He has done much to chart a path forward for Christians to be unembarrassed in our affirmation of the supernatural while being intellectually rigorous. In other words, staying out of the ditch of kooky theories built on the flimsiest conjectures, a ditch with too many denizens already. For that, and for much else, I am thankful for Dr. Heiser’s work.
The opening chapter of Samuel Parkison’s ‘To Gaze Upon God’ — a work of theological retrieval for evangelicals on the beatific vision — makes a striking argument.
Parkison states that all Christians throughout history have agreed that the beatific vision — seeing God face to face — is what makes heaven heaven, it is our blessed hope. But evangelicals in the last couple centuries have largely abandoned the term, though thankfully, many have not abandoned the idea. For example, John Piper’s ministry has hammered home the idea that seeing and savouring Christ is the chief delight of the soul; C.S. Lewis’ vision of “further up and further in” forever in Aslan’s country is similar, and so on.
But then Parkison takes aim at what he calls the “fundamentalist-biblicist” approach to the Bible as fatally compromised by the spirit of the Enlightenment. “Tradition, according to the Enlightenment, is a straight jacket, confining the would-be liberated intellect to immaturity.” Sola Scriptura, he argues, was never meant to be a rejection of the “confessional, catechetical, and liturgical life” that is shaped by the wisdom of past generations.
“The contemporary antipathy for tradition that often accompanies fundamentalism and a biblicist approach to theology did not come from sola Scriptura; modernity and the Enlightenment are to blame for this aberration form historic Christianity.”
This is a bold statement. And we are only at page 6. He goes on to argue that we have been largely cut off from our historical inheritance as Christians by this Enlightenment turn, this promise of intellectual maturity that turned out to be more like the journey of the prodigal son. Seeking self-fulfillment and freedom, we’ve ended up as a culture and in much of the evangelical church at a dead end, wondering what went wrong.
In this context of modern confusion, the idea of the beatific vision “touches a nerve within the soul; a nerve for which the post-Enlightenment imagination does not even have a category.”
And here is the conclusion he drives home to conclude the section:
“The way we escape the malaise of modernity is not by embracing individualistic biblicism, for individualistic biblicism is stuck in that very same malaise. The way forward is first the way backward. We must correct our course, and theological retrieval is the way to do this.”
I find myself resonating with this line of argument, though Parkison puts a very sharp point on the matter. One of the challenges here is that not every Christian or lay leader or pastor can be (or *should* be) doing this work of retrieval. There are SO many other good things to give ourselves to.
But I am convinced we do need a broad movement within evangelical Protestantism that consciously works to retrieve the best of the small-c catholic tradition, the ‘Great Tradition’ that forms the central core of Christian belief (including philosophical substructures) in such a way that is accessible and digestible for 21st-century believers of all kinds. Thankfully, there is such a movement already underway.
I’m looking forward to what I’ll find in pages 8-214 of this book, and maybe I’ll have more to share. I expect this book will be intellectually stimulating and, more importantly, spiritually edifying.
A Response to Christianity Today’s recent article, which featured a subversive argument, a spirit of revisionist speculation, and evinced poor editorial stewardship.
Correction: In a previous version of this post I stated that Gordon College is associated with Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, but I was mistaken. Gordon-Conwell was formed in 1969 as a merger between Gordon College’s Divinity School and the Conwell School of Theology, so the two institutions (Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) have been separate entities since 1969. I apologize for this error and any confusion it engendered.
Introduction
I do not make a habit of speaking to the latest furor or controversy. It’s not healthy to be fixated on such things, at least for me. Polemics is not my wheelhouse. But I read an article on Good Friday that I found frankly shocking, called ‘Was Jesus Crucified with Nails?’ with the subtitle being ‘Why one evangelical scholar thinks the answer might be no’. It was featured at Christianity Today, under their Church Life section, as a kind of report on the thought of this scholar, Jeffrey P. Arroyo García, from Gordon College.
So I’m breaking from my usual habit and I want to share a few thoughts about this article and the three problems I see in it. The first problem is the argument, which I think is very weak and contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture. The second problem is the spirit of revisionist speculation that motivates the argument in the first place; and the third problem is the editorial decision by CT to publish this and push it during Easter week.
I have already seen a number of responses to this ill-begotten article. And so probably my voice is not needed to push back on it, but this is one of those pieces that I felt compelled to write, if for no other reason than to get it out of my system.
It’s never a good sign when a post has 25 times more comments than likes.
The Argument: Nails or Ropes?
Dr. García’s argument boils down to this: Since the crucifixion narratives themselves don’t explicitly mention nails, and since it is well established that crucifixion during Roman times was often done using ropes instead of nails, then it is quite possible that Jesus was not actually nailed to the cross but only hung with ropes. I think I have represented the argument fairly, but you can read the article for yourself and make of it what you will.
In one sense I am grateful for this article because it sent me, like the Bereans, examining the Scriptures “to see if these things were so.” And lo, I beheld they were not so. The article itself admits this problem about three quarters of the way through, where García deals with John 20:25, which he says is the “one place in the New Testament that mentions nails.” That’s not quite true, as we’ll see, but even if all we had was John 20, it’s a slam dunk that puts this argument to bed.
In John 20:25, Thomas says “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” Then, in verse 27, Jesus makes clear that Thomas was not mistaken in assuming nail holes in his hands, when he responds: “Put your finger here, and see my hands.” It’s hard to imagine how the text could be clearer about the fact that Jesus was crucified with nails. The only way around the clear meaning of John 20 is to undermine the truthfulness of John’s gospel itself. Sadly, that’s exactly what García does:
But he isn’t completely convinced. Jesus doesn’t explicitly say “nails,” and the Bible does not say Thomas touches Christ’s hands or his feet. Many scholars think John was written later—perhaps after crucifixion with nails had become more common, García said.
Come again? I had to read that paragraph over a few times to believe what I was seeing. What does the dating of John’s gospel have to do with the argument? How is this not just refusing to believe what the text clearly says? What does it matter whether Jesus says the word “nails” when he does say “put your finger here.” García seems to be more riddled with doubt than poor Thomas was.
There are a lot of other passages in the Bible that point firmly towards the crucifixion being done with nails, including Colossians 2, Psalm 22, and Luke 24. For an excellent overview of these passages and more, see Benjamin Gladd’s article over at The Gospel Coalition.
To summarize, the Bible clearly teaches that Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross. This was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and served as a powerful symbolic image for Paul to use in Col. 2:14, where he explained that God took “the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands” and set it aside, “nailing it to the cross.”
It grieves me that this clear teaching was undermined in this subversive and speculative article that only serves to get Christians to question whether the text itself is trustworthy. But it raises the question of what exactly is driving this project? For lack of a better term, I’m calling it a spirit of revisionist speculation.
A Spirit of Revisionist Speculation
One of the few things I didn’t enjoy about my time living on a Bible College campus was the way in which some of the young men seemed to enjoy speculating about all kinds of biblical and theological matters. I hadn’t experienced that before and I wasn’t expecting it. My own formation had been towards seeing these things as weighty, consequential, eternal matters, so I was thrown off by the apparent enjoyment some guys took in questioning and speculating.
I was reminded of this experience as I read the article and came across the words “perhaps,” “unclear,” “maybe,” “not convinced,” and then language like this:
‘“We don’t really know,” García said. “We don’t really have a lot of evidence, and the evidence we do have, it involves interpretation.”’
This is the lexicon of speculation. I don’t mean to imply it’s wrong to ask questions and think through various sides of an issue. There is most certainly a place for that. But what I’m trying to put my finger on is this spirit of taking delight in calling into question things that normal Christians consider to be solid received truth. This is destabilizing for simple Christians, and it strikes me as a problem related to scholars who are divorced from the nitty-gritty sin and glory realities of church life among normal people.
Kevin Vanhoozer addresses this problem in his recent book, ‘Mere Christian Hermeneutics’, where he claims that this division between the academy and the church has led to a theological anemia in the church and an ecclesial anemia in the academy. That seems to apply here, for I cannot imagine how this line of speculation and subversive revisionism about the crucifixion could possibly be edifying for God’s people. As an intellectual exercise between historians and scholars, maybe, but not as a featured article for Easter week for a publication that claims to be the flagship magazine for evangelicals. And that brings me to the third problem.
Publishing as Editorial Stewardship
Christianity Today’s unfortunate trajectory of decline has been well documented. I subscribed to it a few years ago, while it was under the editorial leadership of Mark Galli. It was a mixed bag to be sure, but I found value in keeping abreast of the conversation in broad evangelicalism. But what became clear over time is that it was more reflective of an elite cadre of left-leaning evangelicals than actual normal evangelicals. Galli left his post and then converted to Catholicism, which is perhaps not the ideal trajectory we are looking for in the people who fill these very consequential editorial positions. He was replaced by Russell Moore, who has had his own troubling theological trajectory.
The magazine and website still publishes good straight news reporting on issues facing evangelicals around the world, and it also still publishes good, thoughtful writing, but it certainly does seem to suffer from what some have dubbed living under the progressive gaze. This latest article is sadly on brand for what CT has come to represent, though it is the most egregious I have seen because of its direct attack on the truthfulness of the Gospel of John.
Whether John’s gospel was written early or late makes no difference when we are talking about the canon of Holy Scripture. Consider the staggering hubris of the argument once again. Consider what John himself writes in verse 24 of chapter 21, “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.” But here comes a scholar who, having studied extra-biblical sources, decides that they are a better guide to what really happened than the divinely inspired biblical author.
Should we also question wedding at Cana? The conversation with Nicodemus? The encounter with the woman at the well? The raising of Lazarus? After all, these stories only appear in the gospel of John, which “many scholars think was written later.” And if we shouldn’t question the truth of those stories, why not? On what basis are we deciding which parts of the gospel of John are trustworthy?
Whatever this is, it isn’t an evangelical view of the Bible.
Vanhoozer warns about the danger of allowing the world behind the text (historical context and research) to eclipse the text itself. I think that is what has happened here because it’s stated plainly in the article, here in the penultimate paragraph:
“The most important thing for me is that we read the text,” García said. “And then there is a world lying behind the text—but it takes some work for us as moderns to get to the point where we know something about that world, and for me, that deepens, that broadens and focuses how you read the text, how you understand it.” (emphasis mine).
Historical context is helpful, but it should not be used to contradict the plain meaning of the biblical text.
Any publishing outlet that puts content out has to decide what it will feature. These editorial decisions are what give each publication its own flavour and voice, and are therefore a stewardship of the trust and attention that readers grant. I think every publication has at times put out content that wasn’t so good in retrospect, but over time a publication does reveal what its agenda and priorities are—and readers will take note.
It strikes me as a staggeringly poor editorial choice to feature this article prominently on the week of Easter, and a poor stewardship of the trust and attention that regular churchgoers place in the masthead of Christianity Today.
I hope and pray that CT learns from this decision and recommits itself to building up the faith of its readers with robust, wholesome, edifying content. Especially during Easter, when the focus should be on the wonder and cosmic significance of the resurrection of the Son of God, as testified to by the trustworthy Scriptures.
Happy Easter, dear reader.
Update: The article’s author, Daniel Silliman, has since written an apology at the Christianity Today website, which is commendable and for which I am grateful. My critiques of the original article and of CT more generally remain the same, but good on them for course-correcting.
I’ve had this book on my radar for some years, but until now haven’t found the opportunity to read it. I was happy to find a copy in a library and pick it up. As a novice in the field of political theory, I feared the book would be confusing, boring, or some mix of the two, but it really wasn’t. In fact, it was very well written, with long flowing sentences that were easy to follow, sprinkled with some advanced vocabulary fitting for a distinguished professor at an elite University.
So what is this book? It is a diagnosis and critique. But not just any critique; Deneen offers a radical-to the roots-critique of liberalism as an ideology. For that is exactly what he claims it is. Born out of the myth of the autonomous individual freely choosing to form a state by way of the social contract, it was in fact a revolution in anthropology, he claims. The free market was devised to serve the telos of this new project: the emancipation of the human person, not from vice and passions, but from any unchosen external restraint or limit.
Deneen argues that what we today call conservatives and progressives are actually both united in their adherence to the liberal project. The difference between them is that conservatives restrain the liberalizing scope to freeing humanity from the constraints and limits of nature, while progressives expand the scope to include the limits of human nature and biology.
The author contrasts this modern revolutionary view of liberty with the classical vision of liberty. The earlier notion of liberty was of mastery over one’s passions, the freedom to choose the good. If enough people could be formed to exercise such self-control in a given social context like a town, then a self-governing group could emerge. This group could only govern well insofar as a critical mass of them were habituated in virtue and able to constrain their own passions for selfish gain. What stands out as the key element in this classical view is the role of the virtues. The new view of liberty, however, is fundamentally different: freedom from constraints, oppression, and limitations. And in practicality, this means freedom to indulge in the passions, as long as no one “picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” to quote Jefferson.
Deneen argues then that liberalism, in one sense, has not failed at all. It delivered exactly what it was destined to deliver given its philosophical and anthropological foundations. But in another sense, it has failed to deliver the promises of ever-greater freedom and ever-growing economic prosperity that are central to it. This cycle of failed promises and the idea that more freedom will finally bring about the desired prosperity and liberty is where the book’s title comes from.
Any regular readers of my little blog will know I have had a keen interest in the topic of Biblical anthropology for some years. I was surprised and delighted to find that Deneen points to the turn away from a classical view of the human person to the one devised by the early liberal thinkers as a key to understanding the essential nature of liberalism — and why it will fail. Simply put, it gets humanity wrong. As Deneen describes it, liberalism is built on the notion that the individual is the starting point for everything else. It dreams up an Edenic scenario of unattached, autonomous individuals who come together freely to make a social contract about how they shall govern themselves. But in reality, humans always exist in families and tribes. There is no lone ranger, at least not for long.
This unsound foundation creates a tension, or even a contradiction, between liberalism’s ideals and the inescapable realities of human nature and society.
Deneen goes on to identify another contradiction. He argues that an ever-growing government is inherent in liberalism since it is needed to secure the expanding individual rights of the autonomous self. But here is a central contradiction: the expanding state apparatus itself must control more and more of its citizens lives in order to accomplish this. Such a diagnosis certainly has the ring of truth.
The book also touches upon the topic of culture in a way that I found helpful. Deneen argues that true culture is always local, organic, connected to history, and rooted in place. These are the hallmarks of local cultures all over the world and throughout history. Liberalism, by contrast, flattens, homogenizes, abstracts, and can only mimic such real cultures. It does not and cannot create real culture. This was an interesting point that I think has a lot of merit. Culture arises organically out of the shared life and practices of a group of people, and that culture cannot help but be made unique by the unique circumstances, geography, history, particularities of that group of people. And so almost by definition you cannot have a global culture.
What people call a global culture will necessarily leave almost everyone still connected to a local culture alienated from it.
The lens of Deneen’s analysis provides some interesting insights into more recent events. He claims that the death of self-governance (a classical virtue overthrown by liberalism) is the common thread between the widespread campus chaos of the 2010s and the 2008 mortgage crisis. The campus chaos arises from the fact that young adults are given the wafer-thin moral guidance of consent to guide them through the impossible moral maze of campus Life. And since these young people have not been taught to master their appetites, they wreak havoc in their relationships because their inner lives are a mess of conflicting desires.
Similarly, the investment bankers getting rich off dubious loans were shaped in a context where financial self-restraint was unheard of, where the profit motive was not moderated by other moral considerations. The inner desires for riches trumped everything else, and the result was a catastrophic global economic crisis that ruined the financial lives of millions. There are certainly other decisive factors at play in both these phenomena, but the connective tissue Deneen identifies is not imaginary. The loss of virtue that comes bundled with the ideology of liberalism certainly played a part.
Deneen offers an interesting perspective on the interplay between classical liberalism and progressivism. While classical liberalism created inequalities (intentionally), progressivism came in and argued for a new form of liberalism to deal with those inequalities. But it was not a deep rejection of liberalism’s core values.
“But this embrace of economic equality [by progressivism] was not intended to secure an opposite outcome to classical liberalism: rather, it sought to extend the weakening of social forms and cultural traditions already advanced by classical liberalism, with an end to increasing political consolidation. Under classical liberalism, this end could best be achieved by limiting government’s authority over individuals. For progressive liberalism, it was best achieved by empowering the State to equalize the fruits of an increasingly prosperous society while intervening more actively in the realms of church, family, and even human sexuality” (p. 142).
Melt down local connections, reforge strong partisan political ones. This is certainly what we have seen as progressives has advanced across Western democracies in the early 21st century. Deneen’s depth-charge criticism gets underneath the froth of contemporary partisan politics.
While I was ready for the critique of liberalism and progressivism, I had not come across a non-progressive critique of free market capitalism before this book. This is probably the aspect of the book that gave me the most food for thought. As someone with firmly conservative leanings, I’ve tended to buy into the idea that the free market is a de facto good which has lifted billions out of poverty. I still believe the free market is preferable to central control, or monopolies, or the corruptions of crony capitalism, but this book helped me see the very real local costs which were part of the package of global free markets, as well as the dehumanizing effects of reducing local economic production to dollar amounts and fungible units to be traded across the global market.
All in all, I really enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it. While published in 2018, so much has happened since then culturally that it was very interesting to read it in early 2025 as Trump started his second term. J.D. Vance is perhaps the clearest contemporary example of a post-liberal ‘conservative’ (we are all struggling with finding the right terms here), who is friendly with Deneen, and willing to entertain ideas and approaches to governing which go against some of the sacred cows of classical liberalism. As N.S. Lyons has argued recently, the second Trump term seems like the clearest end-point for the “long twentieth century.” And with it, perhaps, the end of liberalism as we have known it.
I haven’t read very much by Francis Schaeffer, so I was glad to come across this handsome reprint by Crossway, a publisher who continues to impress with the aesthetic and editorial quality of their books. And I came across it while browsing in a local library in Southwest Florida – something that I feel quite sure would never happen in Canada.
The book is short, moving along at a fine clip. And yet it is anything but simplistic. What it is is a readable popular-level work of Christian philosophy responding to the particular shape and blind spots of contemporary culture circa 1970. But despite the fifty-five years that have elapsed since its publishing, the insights are certainly still relevant.
I was impressed with Schaeffer’s use of simple language to cut through academic jargon and get at the nub of the issue. You can tell he cares little about academic respectability and a lot about the lives of regular people. He rightly identifies two areas of catastrophic error in the modern mind: metaphysics and epistemology. This comes back to the title of the book: He Is There (Metaphysics) and He Is Not Silent (Epistemology).
An alternative title might have been: “A Christian Response to Contemporary Metaphysical and Epistemological Thought.” And then we would never have heard of it because it would have been read by exactly seven people. So Schaeffer had a gift for boiling things down to their essentials. This comes across strongly in this brisk and fast-paced book, which leaves the reader with the impression that it might have been written in a week-end. The style of writing is conversational, and not especially eloquent. It’s a workmanlike prose that gets the job done.
The drawback of Schaeffer’s style is that he deals very briefly with those he disagrees with. He boils down their view to some essential points and then explains why he disagrees. This is actually quite helpful for the layman who is not and cannot be familiar with the finer points of, let’s say, logical positivism, but I am sure it would be objected to by a logical positivist, who might rightly point out that Schaeffer glossed over many important nuances. Be that as it may, for a work this brief, it manages to cover a lot of terrain in contemporary philosophy.
Schaeffer’s driving concern seems to be twofold: To speak to the seeker who is dismayed and confused by the spiritually devastating consequences of modern philosophical materialism; and to build up the believer in holding fast to a Biblical view of metaphysics and epistemology which is so out of step with the late 20th-century mind. When this is kept in mind, the pace and style of the book makes a lot of sense.
It is a work of evangelistic and pastoral philosophy. It’s central message is something like: “The world now says that ‘the material world is all there is and that the best we can say about God is that God-language is comforting to the mind’, but in reality, despite this modern hubris, there really is a God Who Is There. He is not just a projection of religious hopes, not just the composite picture of responses to religious experiences, but an eternal, self-existent, Triune Being who can and does reach down into the universe he made at His pleasure. And despite the claim that we can never truly know anything with certainty, the truth is that God Is Not Silent — He has chosen to reveal himself using human language. That revelation, it is true, cannot lead to exhaustive knowledge, but it is true revelation that does lead to true knowledge of God. Modern man is wrong. There *is* a God. He is There and He is Not Silent.”
While some of the references in Schaeffer’s book may be a bit dated, the central argument is fresh and relevant. It is a message that not only remains relevant, but may in fact receive a warmer response now than at any point since its original publication in 1972. I say this because of the massive shifts roiling the Western world in recent years. In God’s providence, people are open to reconsidering these most fundamental questions in a way they were not before. Call it the vibe-shift or the ‘Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God’ as Justin Brierley does, it is a real phenomenon.
I for one hope that this short and readable treatment finds its way into many more hands.
This book is a brief survey of the history of Heritage College & Seminary, with a chapter devoted to Central Baptist Seminary, another to London Baptist Bible College & Seminary, and then finally a chapter on the merged entity of Heritage College & Seminary (from 1993 to 2023 when the school celebrated its 30th anniversary and the book was published).
There is lots of very interesting and salient information to be gleaned in this book about the history of these three schools, even though it left me wishing it was longer. Despite being already somewhat familiar with the material, I learned lots from these essays. For example, I had not appreciated before just how central the topic of eschatology had been to the identity of the two schools (perhaps especially London) — which magnifies the accomplishment of finding a way to merge the schools together in 1993 to form Heritage. We too often hear about Christians splintering apart; it is good and right to celebrate when Christians find ways to come together without compromising on truth.
On a personal note, I was also surprised to hear about how truly dire the financial situation was even while I was living on campus and serving in student leadership from 2006-2009. Yet despite those challenges, the school was a buzzing hive of genuine spiritual transformation, regular deep immersion in the Scriptures, and warm Christian fellowship that has left a mark on me for life. As a student I had picked up on the fact that there were financial concerns, but it’s a credit to the leaders at the time that this did not put a damper on the spiritual and academic experience of students. I don’t deny that the school needed course correction and a way to achieve financial stability, but those were also great years of blessing under the leadership of Marvin Brubacher. If I have one minor criticism to make, it’s that this reality (admittedly based on my personal experience and bias) did not seem to come across in the way the story was told.
As a graduate of the college, a former staff member, and a continuing friend to the school and those who work there, I read the book with great personal interest. (And full disclosure: I also know and like the authors!) Despite whatever challenges it has faced and continues to face, Heritage remains a shining light of doctrinal fidelity and spiritual vitality among Bible Colleges and Seminaries in Canada. I pray that it grows and flourishes in the years to come.
I’m so very grateful for the work that went into researching and preparing this written history. I hope it spurs further writing on the history and leadership of what I consider to be the premier Bible College & Seminary option for broadly-reformed complementarian evangelicals in Canada.
Somehow I have never read ‘Miracles’ until now. I listened to it, narrated by a very good narrator, and really enjoyed it. Lewis’ prose is so striking and memorable – but why? It is a strange mixture of dense rational arguments, conversational tone, and colourful illustrations. There is a strong undercurrent of wit and humour spread throughout the whole thing. This kind of writing is a pleasure to take in, even when you don’t agree with it. Chesterton is the same way, though perhaps more effortlessly funny.
Lewis here is writing in the mid-20th century in an intellectual climate that is modernist and naturalistic. He is concerned about making a robust defense of miracles, but really miracles is just an entryway into a far more expansive discussion that centrally takes aim at the hubris of modernist metaphysics (naturalism) and, having disarmed it, makes a strong case for the reasonableness of the Christian faith which includes the central Christian miracles of the incarnation and resurrection.
It’s worth noting that he presents the incarnation as the central Christian miracle in a way that evangelical apologists have typically presented the resurrection. Lewis is in line with the early church here more than contemporary evangelical apologists, I believe, and my hunch is that this difference is not disconnected from the relative weakness of evangelical anthropology – our understanding of the human person and human nature. Which is not to take anything away from the importance of the bodily resurrection, of course.
This book is also a prime example of what makes Lewis so rewarding to read: his writing has aged so well. In fact, his analysis and prognosis of Western culture was so perceptive and ahead of its time that some of the books that were largely ignored in his lifetime have surged in popularity only in the last couple of decades, such as The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. To a lesser degree, this is true of Miracles as well.
One of the most perceptive writers of recent years has been Dr. Iain McGilchrist, a psychologist and cultural critic who specializes in the way the brain hemispheres affect our modes of thinking. His work is fairly popular now, as one can see by the flowering of discussion about the left vs right brain kinds of thinking. He argues that the left hemisphere, which specializes in a narrow focus of attention for manipulating and controlling elements of our environment, has become dominant in the modern era. But the left hemisphere was always meant to be subservient to the broader-scoped, more intuitive and open right hemisphere. He argues that many of our modern psychological and social ills are related to this left-brain dominated mode of thinking.
Here again Lewis seems to have anticipated this state of affairs, this modern crisis. He was himself a man of unusual gifts in this exact regard, as John Piper helpfully explored in his conference and subsequent collaborative book called ‘The Romantic Rationalist’. In short, Lewis’s mind was a remarkable marriage between the left-brained hardnosed rationalism that he imbibed from his beloved tutor William Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’, and the right-brained imaginative intuition and romanticism. How many other authors have managed to write works of fiction (imaginative) and non-fiction (rational) that have endured so well?
These two passages here illustrate how prescient Lewis was in his diagnosis of the modern mental malady. The first passage traces the process of increasingly “truncated thought.”
“There is thus a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget the most obvious fact of all. And since the Sixteenth Century, when Science was born, the minds of men have been increasingly turned outward, to know Nature and to master her. They have been increasingly engaged on those specialised inquiries for which truncated thought is the correct method. It is therefore not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the evidence for the Supernatural. The deeply ingrained habit of truncated thought—what we call the ‘scientific’ habit of mind—was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency were continually corrected from some other source. But no other source was at hand, for during the same period men of science were coming to be metaphysically and theologically uneducated.” (Chapter 6).
In this second passage, Lewis argues that Christianity is uniquely equipped to bridge the “unbridgeable chasm” that has grown between the two different ways of thinking.
“There is thus in the history of human thought, as elsewhere, a pattern of death and re-birth. The old, richly imaginative thought which still survives in Plato has to submit to the deathlike, but indispensable, process of logical analysis: nature and spirit, matter and mind, fact and myth, the literal and the metaphorical, have to be more and more sharply separated, till at last a purely mathematical universe and a purely subjective mind confront one another across an unbridgeable chasm. But from this descent also, if thought itself is to survive, there must be re-ascent and the Christian conception provides for it. Those who attain the glorious resurrection will see the dry bones clothed again with flesh, the fact and the myth remarried, the literal and the metaphorical rushing together.” (Chapter 16).
As you can see, the book is brilliant and worthy of close scrutiny.
Another element that stood out to me was the way Lewis based his central argument against naturalism in the mystery of human consciousness and the mystery of human thought. I don’t know if consciousness studies were in vogue in the mid-20th century, but I know they have exploded in popularity in recent years. And somehow everything Lewis said about cognition and consciousness aligned with what I understand (as a layman) to be the best ‘theory of mind’ out there.
For a book that is nearly 80 years old, that is remarkable.
Back in 2022, I read an interesting little book called The Everlasting People. I wrote up a brief review on Goodreads and then went on with my life. And then I got a reply from the author, gently pushing back on some of my comments. It was a strange experience, which I wrote about here.
I thought about what the author – Dr. Matthew Milliner – wrote back to me and I decided I needed to re-read the book. Fast forward to 2024, and it became time for me to keep my promise. So a few weeks ago I cracked it open again and gave it a second reading.
I tried to have a more open and positive posture towards the book this time around. It really is a remarkable project, trying to adopt the general approach and insights of the inimitable G.K. Chesterton, and applying them to the Native peoples of the Americas (or Turtle Island), especially their art and mythology. Having just re-read Chesterton’s great book, The Everlasting Man, I was all set.
The book, derived from a set of lectures that were delivered, is made up of three chapters, followed by three ‘responses’. The first thing to say is that I learned so much from the book (in both readings). I learned a ton about First Nations history, a lot about Chesterton himself, and much about the surprising degree to which those early indigenous people accepted Christianity. The fact that I – along with most North Americans – do not know this history well is a sad testament to our particular blindness when it comes to these matters.
So the first reaction is a genuine lament for the way in which human persons, indeed entire communities and peoples, were mistreated, cheated, and wiped out by bloodthirsty men who too often claimed the name of Christ. Milliner is to be commended for the evenhanded way he did not ignore the sins and atrocities of First Nations people (a common enough manipulation of the story in our day of cultural self-hatred). The third respondent came closest to this particular malady of the mind, but we can just leave that to the side since it was written in 2020; one can still catch the aroma of the peak wokeness and racial angst convulsing our educated classes at the time.
One concern I had in my initial review, the usage of terms like whiteness, is still worthy of comment. Having read the book more carefully, I don’t really see any compromise here. And yet the cultural turmoil of recent years is necessarily the context into which this book must be understood, and everyone knows that a term like ‘whiteness’ is strongly coded as leftwing-progressive. Here at the end of 2024, it feels like the winds have shifted and the reactionary populism of the normies has rejected the progressive left’s project of anti-Western critical theories. So while I am happy to gloss over the term in my reading of the book, it’s inescapable that it will signal certain political and cultural alignments whether the author intends it to or not.
The meat of the book, however, is far more interesting that culture wars. The Mishipeshu (underwater panther) and Thunderbird (Animiki), two mythical creatures found within indigenous mythology, are explored for their evocative imagery and the way in which these figures were adapted by Native Christians. It is powerful to consider the Native Christian, sorrowful after so much suffering, persevering in Christ and expressing that faith in ways that are genuine to the best aspects of their culture. That is good missiology, and a good example of the kind of thing Chesterton loved.
The last chapter, which reflects on Chesterton’s poem about the Virgin Mary (The Queen of Seven Swords) as well as the medieval Virgin of the Passion (a suffering Virgin Mary, later renamed Our Lady of Perpetual Help), and how devotion to her permeated through the region where the Lenape people had once lived, was the hardest for me to wrap my head around.
But that’s okay. Gotta leave something for the third reading, I guess.
Phil's Scribblings 