Amazon Book Reviews 6

vision of worship with an eschatological focus, September 6, 2010



Ben Witherington with his characteristic way with words brings his expert NT knowledge on the subject of worship. This is a comparatively short book compared to the many academic tomes this prolific writer has churned out. It is probably targeted at the thoughtful Christian readers who sit in the pew wondering what the bible has to say about worship, given that worship cannot simply be a habit shaped by one's church tradition and the secular culture rather than what God has said about it. Witherington has some sharp things to say about Christians caught up in the 'what's in it for me?' culture of our time because he contends that worship is about God's glory rather than ours and more of what we do in response to his worth than what we hope to get out of the transaction. On another prong, he challenges the slavish carryover of Judaic practices such as Sabbath, priesthood, sacrifices and temple into Christian worship. While he notes the continuity with the old covenant, he puts the emphasis on the discontinuity as a result of what Christ has fulfilled through his life, death and resurrection. He therefore restores the Christ event to the center of Christian worship.

The Christ event does not simply call for a backward look into the past but calls us forward to the heavenly worship pictured in Rev 4-5. Our worship ought to recognise the inbreaking of God's kingdom with the first Easter as well as the advanced taste of worship in the new cosmos following the final Easter. This helps situates Christian worship in the proper place within the larger salvation historical narrative.

Witherington fleshes out this eschatological focus of worship by taking us through various NT texts that deal with the various components of Christian worship - preparing to be caught up in the Spirit on the Lord's Day, preaching, singing, the Lord's Supper, the Lord's Prayer and the labors of love. In reading this book, one gets the message that much of what gets passed for worship today suffers from some serious deficits - the narcissism, the shallow theological content, the disconnect between worship and life- to name just a few. This is therefore an important contribution to educating pastors, worship planners/leaders and all the people of God participating in worship. The discussion questions appended to each chapter will be useful for small group study.

If worship is the chief end of human existence, then Witherington's call to re-examine and reform our service to God in the light of scripture is an important one. But he does more than call. He has given us this basic primer with which to start exploring what it means to truly worship in the Spirit and in truth.

My only criticism is that it could be better organised around some logical structure or familiar liturgical movements. I find myself bogged down quite easily by the disparate concerns of the selected passages (as it is the nature of the NT materials to be occasion-based). This leads to the unfortunate glossing over of the Lord's Supper, which was strangely subsumed as a small subsection under the chapter devoted to talking about the sermon. In fact, if there is one place where eschatology should come to a sharp focus, it would be the Eucharist! Notwithstanding this flaw, Witherington's textual expositions are as in many of his commentary writings solid and inspiring. But readers need to keep in mind the overarching theme of eschatological worship to avoid getting lost in the interesting bits.




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Pilgrim Heart: The Way of Jesus in Everyday Life
by Darryl Tippens
Edition: Paperback
Price: $10.19

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a helpful retreat companion, September 5, 2010


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This review is from: Pilgrim Heart: The Way of Jesus in Everyday Life (Paperback)
I find this book to be a good guide to soul care.. to be put alongside books like 'Keeping the Sabbath Holy' (Dawn) and 'Testament of Devotion'(Kelly). The gentle, conversational tone immediately puts you in the state to receive soul food, soul care and rest. Indeed, in my own frantic world of speed, tight schedule and demands, this is a welcome reminder to slow down and take ourselves a little less seriously and let God be God. For example, I took his suggestion to sometimes take the slowest lane to deliberately drive at a lower gear! Tippens suggests helpful way to prevent the rigor of discipleship and vocation from becoming anemic for the lack of space and time to receive the fresh dews of God's nourishment through the practices of spiritual reading, hospitality, forgiveness, music, art, story-telling and rest. It is still a difficult discipline for me despite the number of very good materials I've read on the subject. The balance between work and rest remains a delicate one to maintain. But Tippens has a knack of slowing you down with every page and opening up a space amidst the clutter so we can breathe deep from the eternal source of life. It is however a different kind of book than what i thought the title suggests. Not exactly 'the way of Jesus in everyday life' as in the way of cross bearing and discipleship rigor but surely a helpful retreat companion for every serious Christ-follower who will benefit from a timely reminder to take breaks, care for one's own heart, travel light and enjoy the journey. For the weary, struggling, hurting and beleaguered pilgrims, Tippens has written a balm full of gentle wisdom.

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Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve (Plus)
by Lewis B. Smedes
Edition: Paperback
Price: $10.07




best book on forgiveness!, September 2, 2010


This review is from: Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve (Plus) (Paperback)
This is the best book I've ever read on the subject of 'forgiveness'. It is written with wit, biblical wisdom, practicality and compassion. It first disabuses you of all the caricatures of what forgiveness is - excusing, tolerating, condoning, etc. Then, as usual, Smedes comes at the subject with his typical hard-nosed treatment. In forgiving someone, the sin has to be grappled with for what it is - wrong, unfair, evil and hurtful. One should not simply gloss over and get over it but take it into account, experience deeply the horrendous evil that it is and call it to curse. It is in confronting sin as it is and coming to grips with the the deep hurts that it brings, that one could ever go on to slowly let go of the associated onslaught of anger and resentment. It is a long journey for most and one might have to forgive the same sin by the same person over and over again. One comes to know that forgiveness is beginning to bear fruit when one begins to see the adversary with new ('magic') eyes and the event of the hurt with a new perspective that sets one's heart free to love. While the goal of forgiveness includes the healing of the aggrieved, it also opens up the real possibility of reconciliation. But Smedes wisely cautions that reconciliation takes two parties and on this side of eternity, forgiveness needs not hang on reconciliation for its completion. This is as realistic as one can get.

In recent years, Smedes has been criticised for operating too much under the therapeutic mode and falls short of the reconciliation aimed at by the biblical ideals by such books as 'Embodying Forgiveness' by Gregory Jones. While the latter is a fine book to be read profitably in its own right, its critique of Smedes is in my reading wide off the mark. Smedes was charged as advocating a kind of forgiveness that is aimed primarily at healing the individual's hurts and ignoring the larger issues of sins, culpability, repentance and reconciliation. I think given Smedes' more modest aim in focusing on the discipline and experience of forgiveness in this book, he has simply been criticised for not writing beyond the scope of what he intends to focus on.I think this book should simply be taken on its own merits. One has to read it to see that Smedes writes not only with academic precision but also hard-won compassion culled from the tough work of forgiving your debtors in this broken world. It is an immensely liberating and life-transforming work!


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Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy
by Ronald W. Pierce
Edition: Paperback
Price: $19.80

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Currently the best one-volume compilation of essays on gender-egalitarianism, September 2, 2010


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This review is from: Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy (Paperback)
This, I submit, is probably the best one-volume compilation of essays contending for gender equality and complementarity (what has come under the label of 'egalitarianism') currently available. It is a concerted scholarly response to the 'complementarian' counterpart 'Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood' that apparently does not, IMHO, quite enjoy the level of erudition that this book presents from a plethora of leading evangelical scholars such as Gordon Fee, Craig Keener, Howard Marshall and Stanley Grenz. I especially enjoy, though not necessarily endorsing its conclusion, the article by Rebecca Groothuis "Equal in Being; Unequal in Role", which of course challenges the notion that the genders can be essentially equal and yet functionally unequal. To me, this grasps exactly the nettle whereby egalitarianism and complementarianism part ways. She argues that the supposed paradox is a red herring since the so-called 'functional hierarchy' is maintained (permanently) on the basis of gender, that is the nature/essence of being a man or woman and hence cannot be compatible with equality in being.

I am also convinced that the popular label 'complementarianism' by which the opposing camp would like to be identified with is a facade for what is really gender hierarchichalism albeit in function, because at the heart of its position is a belief in male authority (over the woman), however one softens it with concepts like 'servant leadership', 'honor of headship', 'accountability', or 'shepherding', etc. On the other hand, the egalitarian contenders are really arguing for gender *complementarity*, the kind that does away with any notion of hierarchy or authority on the basis of one's gender; it is not simply advocating equality per se, which is often confused with identity/undifferentiation. Perhaps, the revision of the respective labels is an essential first step in clearing the confusion and maintaining the integrity of what each position is really pitching for. Both views in fact advocate complementarity; the difference is that one has the principle of male functional authority worked into it and the other does not.

This book is a pleasure to read for the gracious and intelligent way in which the egalitarian (ie. complementarity without hierarchy) view is laid out from a wide variety of angles. However, for all its erudition and scholarly work in exegesis, it still remains to be seen if it has produced a persuasive case against what seems to be derived from the 'plain sense of the texts', esp in Paul (1 Cor 11, 14, Eph 5, 1 Tim 2) which appear at face value to support male headship rooted in the intent of the Creator and perhaps even the nature of the economic Trinity(?), however 'incoherent' it may seem to our modern minds. Hence, the issue remains open for me and perhaps will remain so for a long time to come. In the mean time, the old adage is ever so relevant: 'unity in essentials, liberty in adiaphora and charity in all things!'


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Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World
by Lee C. Camp
Edition: Paperback
Price: $14.95

Availability: In Stock
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an anabaptist vision already championed by not a few writers, September 2, 2010


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This review is from: Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World (Paperback)
I appreciate Lee Camp's contribution to the wider discourse of what Christian faith can and ought to be in contrast to the 'Constantinian' version in American Christianity. I was able to read through it fairly quickly, recognising most of it as a re-presenting of ideas readers of Yoder, Hauerwas, Clapp and Boyd would have been familiar with. In fact, a lot of the syntaxes and terms (even the provocative jargon!) are borrowed from these other writers as much as the concepts themselves. So while there is much in this proposal there is attractive in light of the hijack of the Christian gospel in the interest of a certain brand of American religio- politics, I am left somewhat disappointed when i lay the book down and wondering if an heir-theologian of the Stone-Campbell tradition has something more original to bring to the table even if it were a nuanced distillation of what one has learned from his mentor. It sounds too much like an echo of a lot of what these other thinkers have already said. I would recommend instead the works of Leonard Allen and John Mark Hicks for a more creative voice to come out of 'America's best kept secret', as Scot Mcknight called it - the Churches of Christ. Having said that, I can see how such a book could be helpful to Christians across the board who long for a more radical expression of the Christian faith though I suspect that a pacifist, anti-Constantinian, contra-Niebuhrian paradigm needs not be the only way of going about it. In this respect, John Stackhouse's Christian Realism articulated in his book 'Making the Best of It' could be a refreshing take in its own right.