Book Review: Journeys of Faith

Journeys of Faith

ISBN: 9780310331209

By Robert Plummer

Zondervan, 2012

Review by Jennifer Callaway

“A man with an experience never lies at the mercy of a man with an argument.” The old saying gets a workout in this new book from editor Robert Plummer. Journeys of Faith gives four men an opportunity to share their experience.

But one thing makes it unique. These four men held leadership roles in their churches before changing their Christian faith tradition through a period of soul-searching, seeking and following where they believed the Lord led them.

One went from Catholicism to evangelicalism. The other three, however, left evangelical denominations to move to liturgical ones. One moved to Catholicism. Each tells where the questions began, what steps he took, and why he made the decisions that he did. Students will find a great supplement to their studies of church history as they read how these men applied the historical church arguments and understandings to their contemporary situations. But those who love to read stories of the impact God has in and through one life will enjoy each man’s heartfelt recounting of the painful and life-altering decisions they made.

Plummer, the editor, states his goals clearly in the introduction. He desires to help evangelicals understand why people leave their churches for more liturgical traditions, how to answer questions of those interested in liturgical worship, and the fundamental differences.

His method consists of allowing each man to share his story, followed by a rebuttal from an evangelical theologian. The subject responds to the arguments, getting the last word. However, grace and charity prevail and extend from both sides, even as the writers lay out opposing viewpoints without apology.  In fact, some topics remain unaddressed in the interest of unity. Take for example, the doctrine of Mary in the Catholic church. Its proponent, Francis Beckwith, seemed to avoid the issue. Though Allison brought it up in his rebuttal, Beckwith remained silent on the subject even when he got the final word. Such a crucial point of divergence between Protestants and Catholics left unaddressed seems incomplete. So his refusal to discuss it left me wondering why.

Overall, the book balances “head and heart” well. Some write very academically and analytically, while others tend to speak more of experience and spiritual and emotional issues. Plummer chose both subjects and critics carefully. They all communicate well as intelligent, educated men, experienced in church leadership and now leaders in their new traditions. I gained greater understanding of all the traditions discussed, and that alone earns the price of the book. Because I desire to see the church keep the “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” the effort put forth toward unity refreshed me and gave me hope. May the whole church learn to embrace this attitude.

I believe Plummer achieved his goals. He set out to provide a glimpse into the heart and mind of sincere believers doubting their heritage. His desire that we use this as a tool in understanding the reasons for losses to the evangelical church remains up to the reader. Take care not to get caught up in the stories and forget to pay attention to such detail in a way that you can apply it elsewhere.

I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to relate to a loved one who has changed faiths within our Christian tradition. And if you have changed and want to start some dialogue with those who wonder why,  you may find the help you seek here.

For the student, if you struggle to understand or even to care about all the details of church and doctrinal history, you will find this a great tool for seeing the importance of those records we have when applied to modern believers in a practical way.

And for anyone who just enjoys reading the story of a life changed by God, you will find this a real page-turner. And all of us can use it to understand what we believe, why we believe it, and perhaps through it even filter some doubts.

Book Review: Fearless

Fearless

ISBN: 9780307730695

By: Eric Blehm

WaterBrook Press, 2012

Review by: Annette Ensz

Five years ago, Navy SEAL Adam Brown deployed to Kunar Province in Afghanistan. While the Special Forces soldiers around him packed extra ammunition when they left the base, he took a notepad. Brown slung his weapon on his back and knelt in the dirt by the feet of village children. He wrote down their shoe sizes. With the help of his wife, Kelley, and church members back home, he handed out over five hundred pairs of shoes during that tour.

The shoe story takes up about half a page in Fearless. It serves as an aside in a more harrowing context of Afghani battlegrounds and SEAL Team Six missions. But it sets the tone, helping the reader understand the type of heart Adam Brown possessed.

Brown’s story carries us from his grade school years to the day he dies in combat. This man’s passion for freedom inspires readers to brave their own inabilities and insecurities. While some profanity and coarse accounts infiltrate the tale, they make it easier for the reader to identify with Brown. A few bad decisions after he becomes a Christian eventually help to solidify his faith and marriage. As Brown learns to wrap his identity in Christ, he finds the courage to pursue a calling beyond what he allowed himself to imagine.

            In this narrative, New York Times best-selling author Eric Blehm (The Only Thing Worth Dying For) sets out to tell a hero’s story. He stumbles on something better—a riveting tale of redemption. Through a series of interviews, Blehm pieces together snapshots of the SEAL’s life into a collage of salvation in action. The author’s simple style reveals a warrior who cares about family time more than bullets and his team more than his own life.

Blehm has written other biographical accounts of remarkable military men. So have many other authors: Marcus Luttrell, Mark Owen, Rorke Denver. But Adam Brown’s faith sets Fearless apart. His hope in Jesus Christ proves inseparable from the other aspects of his life. Brown’s final wishes included someone telling his entire testimony, from dark days of drug addiction and prison to his perseverance through to SEAL Team Six. His family sought out Blehm in hopes that “others might be inspired to seek faith and overcome their own struggles” (251).

The result: a straightforward testament of friends and family to the disciplined, funny, kind, courageous heart of Adam Brown and the God who created him fearless.

Guest reviews

Since starting this blog, I’ve had a number of people ask me if they can write reviews for us. Because of the nature of the site, I’ve chosen to keep the reviews limited to bookcenter staff (although I may reference a faculty member now or then). Still, I do appreciate the interest that people have in contributing material to our site, and I want to have a venue where they can do so.

Unfortunately, due to the limitations of wordpress.com, I cannot create more than one page at a time that allows posts. So, until I figure out a better way to both display and distinguish posts by our staff and our customers, I am going to have to make due with this separate Guest Review page.

If you have a review that you’d like to present to us, feel free to post it on this new page, in the comments box.  I may edit or delete a comment for content but I don’t intend to do so much.  I’m particularly interested in books on theology, church ministry, or Bible study/commentary. Please only review books that you’d recommend, and try not to get too wordy with your reviews–no more than 500 words, please.

We look forward to seeing what you think is worth reading!

The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity

The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity
William P. Young

Review by Dr. Glenn Kreider, professor of Theological Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary

Used with permission

Ranking consistently in the top ten at Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and other booksellers over the past couple of months, The Shack has clearly connected with a wide audience . . . and stirred up its fair share of controversy.

At the center of the book is the most difficult of all theological dilemmas: the goodness of God and the problem of evil. Where is God in the midst of pain and suffering? How can a good God allow the kinds of horrific evil that humans and other creatures experience? Why doesn’t He do something to stop it? Why does God seem so unconcerned about suffering and injustice? Intense and complex, these questions have almost universal appeal.

The Shack was written by a Christian father for his children, to help them understand his relationship with God. William P. Young explains that he never intended to write a book, but that this story became the means of communicating the real conversations he had with God and with friends and family over several years. Though the story is fictional, it seems pretty clear that Young’s claim that the conversations were “all real, all true”1 is a claim that the words of God found in this book are true. Now, any work which claims to record divine speech needs to be read carefully and critically. Claims to speak for God must be treated with utmost seriousness. Hence, the controversy.

The Plot
In this novel, the protagonist, Mackenzie Allen Phillips, receives an invitation from God to meet Him at a shack in the woods. It takes Mack a little while to decide to keep the appointment, but his curiosity and his pain eventually convince him to make the trip. When he arrives at the shack, it and its environment are transformed into an idyllic setting by the presence of God. Mack, too, undergoes a remarkable transformation, although that change takes longer to accomplish.

Four years earlier, Mack’s youngest daughter, Missy, had been kidnapped during a family outing. Her body had never been found, but the evidence pointed toward her murder at this abandoned shack in the Oregon wilderness at the hands of a serial pedophile. Mack had identified Missy’s bloody dress, found on the floor in front of the fireplace in the shack. As would be expected, these years had been difficult for Mack and the rest of the family, a period he describes as “The Great Sadness.” But, after spending a couple of days at the shack with God, Mack returns home a changed man. Through a series of conversations with God, he begins to understand how God’s love provides the basis of forgiveness and the power to change human lives. The transformative power of redemption through forgiveness is the theme of the book.

The Strengths of the Book
I so wanted to like this book. It is an engaging story, even though it is very predictable. The horrific nightmare this family experienced is every parent’s worst fear and thus the story connects with the reader at a deep level. The author effectively uses word pictures, characterization, and plot development to probe deeply into the emotional recesses of the reader’s soul. The conversational tone draws the reader into the story, encouraging him or her to experience vicariously Mack’s spiritual transformation. The story stresses God’s love for His children, emphasizes human freedom as the cause of sin and evil, focuses on forgiveness and reconciliation as the solution to sin and evil, stresses the hope of eternal life in God’s presence in a new creation, and encourages the reader to interact with the human characters and God in a deeply meaningful way.

The Weaknesses of the Book
But I cannot recommend this book. The reason is simple: the author’s portrayal of God is confusing at best and untrue at worst. An engaging story is not enough. Emotional appeal is not enough. Many such books have been written, some even by Christians. Young is claiming that real conversations between himself and God are put into the mouths of Mack and God. Regardless of whether or not God continues to speak today—and Christians differ about that—what He says today can never contradict what He has said in the past. A book which purports to describe God must be accurate. A book which tells the story of God’s involvement in the world must be consistent with God’s revelation of Himself in His Word. This book does not measure up to God’s self-disclosure. A couple of examples will have to suffice.

Confusion about the Trinity
The first couple of chapters of the novel advance the plot to the pivotal point at which Mack arrives at the shack and meets with God. Throughout the book, the triune God appears in three human forms. His first encounter, at the front door of the shack, is with Papa, a “large beaming African American woman.”2 He then meets a “small, distinctively Asian woman,” named Sarayu, and a Middle Eastern laborer, who is obviously Jesus (83). Mack concludes that “this was a Trinity sort of thing” (87). Portraying the Trinity as three people, separate from one another, is hardly appropriate. God is not three separate people; that would be three gods—tritheism. Rather, He is one in essence yet three in person. The persons must be distinguished but never separated. Of course, the Trinity is a great mystery and beyond human comprehension. It is not, however, appropriate to portray God in a way which treats the doctrine of the Trinity as tritheism.

Confusion about Christ
Not only is this novel’s portrayal of the Trinity inadequate, so is its portrayal of Christ. Christians confess that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, two natures in one person (called the “hypostatic union”), because this is the teaching of the Scriptures. In this union the integrity of each nature is preserved. The author’s view of Christ confuses the natures and undermines the uniqueness of the hypostatic union. In one conversation between Mack and Papa, Mack explains his belief that the miracles of Jesus are evidence of His deity. Papa corrects him, “No, it proves that Jesus is truly human” and continues,

Jesus is fully human. Although he is also fully God, he has never drawn upon his nature as God to do anything. He has only lived out of his relationship with me, living in the very same manner that I desire to be in relationship with every human being. He is just the first to do it to the uttermost—the first to absolutely trust my life within him, the first to believe in my love and my goodness without regard for appearance or consequence. (99 – 100)

Mack is shocked to learn this, so he asks about Jesus’s healing of the blind. Papa explains:

He did so as a dependent, limited human being trusting in my life and power to be at work within him and through him. Jesus, as a human being, had no power within himself to heal anyone. . . .

Only as he rested in his relationship with me, and in our communion—our co-union—could he express my heart and will into any given circumstance. So, when you look at Jesus and it appears that he’s flying, he really is . . . flying. But what you are actually seeing is me; my life in him. That’s how he lives and acts as a true human, how every human is designed to live—out of my life. (100)

Several significant problems exist with this understanding of the incarnation. First, it is not true that Jesus “had no power within himself to heal anyone.” Jesus, as the God-man, did, and does, possess full and complete deity (Colossians 2:9). Young’s view sounds like kenotic Christology, that Christ gave up His deity when He became human. If He did not retain full deity on earth, He is not fully divine. Second, no other human is like Jesus in being fully divine. No other human has the power of deity as Jesus did. The incarnation of Jesus is one of a kind. And it certainly is not the case that all humans possess the life of God in them, as Papa’s statement implies.

Conclusion
I first read this book because it was recommended to me by several people I know and trust. Most significantly, I read Eugene Peterson’s recommendation: “This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!” (front cover). That is pretty high praise. I began reading with a great deal of optimism and enthusiasm. The story hooked me from the first couple of pages. Although my experience of suffering and pain is not to the same degree as Mack’s, I have many of the same questions he has. As I read this book, I waited with anticipation for the conversations with God to begin. As they did, I felt an increasing feeling of sadness in the depths of my being. This is not only not literarily comparable to the work of John Bunyan, it is even less worthy of theological comparison. This is a dangerous book. Its view of the Trinity is inadequate and its view of Christ is unorthodox. That is not good.

Notes
1. William P. Young, “Is the story of THE SHACK true . . . is Mack a ‘real’ person?” http://www.windrumors.com/30/is-the-story-of-the-shack-trueis-mack-a-real-person/ , accessed May 14, 2008.
2. William P. Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity (Los Angeles: Windblown Media, 2007), 82. Hereafter cited in text.