Book Review: The Christian Atheist by Craig Groeschel
Publisher:

Author Craig Groeschel coins the term “Christian Atheist” to denote a believer who isn’t living his or her life in a way that exhibits that belief. Far from judgmental, this book is an exhortation for the reader to experience a fullness in their relationship with God. Groeschel uses several anecdotes from his own life to explore such weighty topics as shame, love, prayer, worry, and evangelism. Groeschel’s work reads almost like a biography documenting his own journey from Christian atheist to maturity in faith.

The goal for this book is to encourage the reader to strive for and embrace what Groescel refers to as “Third Line Faith.” Groeshell paints the picture of a Christian who crosses three separate lines on their road to spiritual maturity. The first line denotes a Christian who believes in the gospel of Christ just enough to benefit from it. The second line represents the Christian who has matured enough to have the desire to contribute to the Kingdom of God as long as it is comfortable to do so. The third and final line represents the Christian who believes so devoutly in the gospel of Christ that they are willing to give their entire life in service to it.

I don’t want to reveal too much because my hope is that you will read this book. I highly recommend it to all Christians who seek to grow and mature in their faith. Personally, I had a couple of “light-bulb” moments as I read this book; specifically when reading Groeschel’s chapters on forgiveness and worry. This book encompasses enough subjects that any believer who reads it should be able to identify their own obstacles on the road to spiritual maturity.

I’ll be adding this book to my list of highly recommended titles.

Clark

Book Review: A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren
Publisher: HarperOne, 2010

In past reviews of Brian McLaren’s books I have always attempted to hold my criticism back a little. This is due in large part to not wanting to harshly judge a fellow Christian in a public forum. After reading A New Kind Christianity I am no longer concerned with holding back. I suppose this is because McLaren is also no longer concerned with holding back. In the past, McLaren has always been hard to pin down.  His opinions are vague because he will never make a claim of truth in what he writes. He has said that what he writes is merely a contribution to the ongoing “conversation” we humans are invited to engage in about God and seems to think that the moment someone claims an actual truth regarding God the conversation is muffled. The problem is that McLaren seems to apply his relativist outlook to the rock solid truths of the Bible leaving us all swimming around in a sea of uncertainty.

In A New Kind of Christianity McLaren comes as close as he ever has to showing his cards. In this book he denies hell, the fall of man, human depravity, and seems to think the greatest Christian minds throughout history have all been reading the Bible in the wrong way. McLaren submits that for millennia Christians have been reading the Bible through a faulty Greco-Roman world view. He claims that this worldview has led us all to come to fundamentally wrong conclusions concerning Jesus’ role in our lives. Thank goodness McLaren has come along to save us from the false teachings of the greatest minds the world has ever known. While McLaren doesn’t explicitly state it, if he is correct concerning the things he writes, than the likes of the apostle Paul, Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and C.S. Lewis have all been wrong. McLaren’s claims reek of arrogance.

Rather than reading the Bible through our faulty Greco-Roman reading glasses (according to the author, these glasses lead us to read the Bible as a constitution that reveals too much truth), McLaren suggest we should read it as an ongoing conversation. The most attracting aspect of this “conversation” is no doubt that it will never lead us to a certain or definite conclusion. What McClaren has done is invent a new way to read Scripture due to his inability to juxtapose the God of the Old Testament with the Savior of the New Testament. McLaren submits that the Bible is evidence of the evolution of mankind’s thought processes. In the Old Testament, when man’s thoughts were the most primitive, God was painted as a violent and cruel God that no savvy Christian such as McLaren could ever worship. After a few thousand years, Jesus was portrayed in a much different light because thought had evolved to the point that mankind could imagine a God that was closer to the truth. McLaren takes this theory far enough to imagine a future where Christians will imagine a God that is even more perfect than Christ. In his future, Christians (and God) are vegetarian, earth worshiping pacifists who throw up in their mouth a little when they remember those barbaric Christians who laid the foundation of the church. It seemed to me that McLaren’s God of the future is very much like McLaren himself. McLaren’s book is one of the grossest forms of idolatry I have ever witnessed another Christian commit. Because he is unable (or unwilling) to accept God as He is revealed to us in Scripture, McLaren resorts to recreating Him in his own image. It is the ultimate form of humanism and arrogance.

Personally, I’ll join the early church fathers and fundamental Christians over the last two millennia who wished to understand the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as revealed by God Himself in the Holy Scriptures. McLaren’s teaching in this book are so far removed from traditional fundamental Christianity that it is virtually indistinguishable from atheism.

Christ taught that the world would hate us because of Him. This was evidenced in the church fathers who gave their lives to promote the Gospel. It is witnessed to today in various parts of the world where Christians are persecuted and killed for their beliefs.

In this book, McLaren spits on the memories and sacrifices of those Christians and sides with the world. He disregards the revelation of God Almighty and creates a disgusting idol.

Cowan’s purpose in presenting his Five Views on Apologetics is to provide the reader with a “side by side” view of the varying apologetic methodologies so that one may make up their own mind as to which method is correct (Cowan, page 8). Cowan classifies the apologetic methodologies into five separate categories; classical, evidential, cumulative, presuppositional and reformed epistemology. The editor then attempts to accomplish his self-assumed task by allowing a contributor who represents each of the five categories to make a case for their unique methodology. After each apologist completes his presentation, the other contributors are provided the opportunity for rebuttal. While the content of this book is valuable, I do have a couple of quibbles.

The first problem with this text is the layout. While I appreciate that the contributors were afforded the opportunity to respond to one another, I feel that each of the five methodologies should have been fully presented prior to the rebuttals. For instance, on page 56 Gary Habermas begins his rebuttal to William Lane Craig’s take on classical apologetics by pointing out that it has much in common with his own evidential approach. This comment is made before the reader has read Herbermas’ essay and can fully grasp what evidential apologetics is. This problem could be addressed by simply reading the chapters out of order and in retrospect I wish I would have done so.

My second complaint with this book concerns taxonomy. The editor himself seems to suggest this is a problem when he says, “these five apologetic methodologies do not constitute an exhaustive list of apologetic approaches” (page 20). With that in mind, one wonders if Cowan’s choice of five methodologies was somewhat arbitrary. Couldn’t he have divided apologetics into six or seven categories with justification? My concern; however, isn’t that Cowan didn’t differentiate enough between methodologies, but rather that he could have focused more on their similarities. The classical and cumulative approaches seem to be very similar in approach to evidential apologetics; as Cowan observes on page 18, “The careful reader will no doubt note that this [cumulative] method belongs in the same broad family of methods as does the evidential (and perhaps classical) method.” Likewise, the reformed epistemology belief that it is reasonable for a person to believe something without evidence seems to place it in the same family as the presuppositional method. Cowan could have easily presented the material in this book under two wide classifications; an evidential approach verses a presuppositional one. My concern is that the reader will become more concerned with adhering to one of Cowan’s five camps than with presenting the best apologetical argument in a given situation. In all fairness, this issue is addressed somewhat in Cowan’s conclusion beginning on page 375 when he summarizes the agreements and disagreements between the five methods.

Despite the above criticisms, this book is highly valuable and should be recommended for newcomers to the subject of apologetics. Before reading this text, I had no idea of the complexities concerning apologetic methodologies and was unaware of the current debates between apologists. Despite the fact I have a natural affinity for the evidential methods of apologetics, I was extremely impressed with John Frame’s essay on the presuppositional method and his examination of how unbelief effects a person’s perception of the truth (beginning on page 210). Frame and the other contributors do a good job of stretching the reader’s perceptions of apologetics. In sum, will help prepare its reader to give an answer to all who ask and for that it is valuable.

I have to admit that I opened this book with some trepidation. I can never know what to expect from Anne Rice. When the “Queen” of vampire stories is on her game, she produces a fabulous book such as Interview With A Vampire or Tale of the Body Thief. When she’s off, she’s very capable of writing a convoluted time-waster like Memnoch the Devil. I was also afraid that Rice might use a book about Jesus as an opportunity to make some “way out there” artistic point. My fears were apparently somewhat justified. Consider what Rice herself writes in the Author’s Notes at the end of her book …

“Having started with the skeptical critics, those who take their cue from the earliest skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment, I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud … And what would I write about Jesus? I had no idea. But the prospects were interesting. Surely he was a liberal, married, had children, was a homosexual, and who knew what?” (page 312)

These were the types of things I expected to see in a Rice book about Jesus. But Rice goes on to explain how she discovered that the skeptical scholars were wrong. After extensive (and impressive) research, Rice found that the “anti-Jesus” arguments made in the “liberal circles [she] frequented as an atheist for nearly thirty years” (page 315) were unsupported and “some of the worst and most biased scholarship [she] had ever read” (page 315).

As it turns out, the story of how Rice’s faith and confidence in the Scriptures were strengthened by all her research is, in some ways, far more interesting than her work of fiction. I could easily recommend this book on the “Author’s Notes” alone. I love stories about people who are sure they know all they need to know about God and Jesus. Scholars like C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel, and now Anne Rice who investigate the matter and then get “knocked on their butts” just like Paul on the road to Damascus. These types of stories really get me jazzed up.

As it turns out, Rice’s fictional account of the childhood of Jesus is a pretty good read as well. While it is obvious that she has drawn on some non-authoritative works such as the Gospel of Thomas, her use of these narratives are very unobtrusive and rare. This book shines though by giving the reader a glimpse into the word that surrounded Jesus. Rice draws from sources like Josephus and Philo to paint a picture of the politics, geography, and people that surrounded Jesus during his childhood. While it is obvious that this is a work of fiction and that specific conversations and the like are purely conjecture, they are all set over a backdrop of real historical events that give the book a sense of realism. I have to admit that it is an excellent read.

Readers will detect a hint of the Catholic in Rice’s theology, but there is nothing that a Protestant should take much issue with. I think Rice has produced a book that readers of any denomination (even non-Christians) will enjoy.

My biggest fear now is that this book will become the next “controversial Jesus film.”

Doug Fields is concerned with those people who feel “stuck” in harmful patterns of sin, pain, anger and other harmful states. Early in the book Fields defines sanctification as “the act or state of being purified and freed from sin” and stresses throughout that the power in this process comes from God while the Christian’s responsibility is cooperation. Fields then applies this concept to a variety of scenarios.  

While I thought the subject matter of this book was right on target, I had some problems with the author’s writing style. Fields’ sense of humor doesn’t seem to translate well into writing. Every other sentence seems to contain a forced joke that I caused me to wonder just how serious he was taking the book. This book needed less joking and a more serious tone. I also feel that Fields’ only managed to skim the surface of his subject matter. For instance, in his chapter on forgiveness Fields recommends the reader write down everyone that has hurt him along with what they’ve done and then write down that they are “paid in full.” The author then offers suggestions on how to recognize when they have truly forgiven their offenders. It seemed so lightly approached that I began to wonder if Fields really recognized how hard it was for someone stuck in the grip of resentment and bitterness.

Fresh Start does include a nice small group’s guide and I would recommend it to a small group that wants a primer on sanctification. Despite my criticism of this book I look forward to reading more from Fields in the future.

A complimentary copy of this book was provided to me as part of Thomas Nelson’s BookSneeze Program.