A Bibliographic Essay, Part II

I was talking with the general editor of an evangelical publishing house recently after sending him a book proposal in which I identified pastors and church leaders as the intended audience. His response was somewhat discouraging. “The problem is the book you’re proposing would be a seminary level text but our sense of things is that pastors stop reading seminary level books when they leave seminary.”

That was disheartening news—not about my proposal but about this man’s assessment of pastors. Jesus says we are to love God with our whole mind (Matthew 22:37). Paul says that life transformation is rooted in mind transformation (Romans 12:1,2), and so we are to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). Christian discipleship is, necessarily, harnessing our brainpower for Jesus’ glory. Evangelicalism has produced numbers of men and women who have, in varied and remarkable ways, honored God with their minds. But exceptions only tend to prove the rule. The Evangelical church is largely a movement with populist roots that has tended to teeter between indifference and contempt with regard to the life of the mind. How sad to have an editor acknowledge that pastors often lead the way.

WITH ALL YOUR MIND . . .
My hope in writing these bibliographic essays isn’t only that you might find these particular books challenging and valuable for your own life and ministry. It is that these essays will also lead you to reflect on your own obedience to Christ’s command to love him with all your mind and consider what that means for the life of your congregation. Water doesn’t rise higher than its source. If we as pastors are not worldview disciples who do worldview thinking rooted in worldview reading, then our congregations will decide that what is not important to us need not be important to them. Quite frankly, brothers and sisters, in an image-oriented culture, reading is becoming a counter-cultural activity. Little in our world asks of us anything more than to respond unthinkingly to a rapid succession of ever-changing images. The kind of corporate Christian discipleship that can effect deep changes in a culture cannot be sustained apart from critical thinking. Indeed, the broader culture we have come to call Western Civilization cannot be sustained apart from the life of the mind.

If you don’t believe that’s true, consider the following. You have been charged with a serious crime but you are innocent. You now come to trial to be judged by a jury of your peers. Your peers have had little more going into their brains than Oprah, MTV, Jerry Springer, Fear Factor, any sitcom you can name, and People magazine. If you are not worried about whether justice will be served, this essay will not help you anyway and you may stop reading now.

WHAT’S NEW(BEGIN)?
For my money, one of the primary places where significant worldview thinking begins is Lesslie Newbigin’s, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. I am sometimes tempted to say that no single book has influenced me as this book has. Newbigin’s impact on me can perhaps be measured by a section in my library that contains all the books Newbigin ever wrote, books written about Newbigin, as well as books that significantly shaped Newbigin’s own thought. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society is the best expression of his thinking on the missional challenge of the church in the West following his return to England after 40 years of missionary service in India.

It is a wide ranging look at the Enlightenment culture of the West and the challenges it presents to the communication of the gospel. This is no simple book of “techniques” for “effective ministry.” Be prepared to wrestle with questions of pluralism, epistemology, history, revelation, and contextualization as they intersect such traditional theological topics as Christology and ecclesiology. And yet, for all that, he manages to show you how it all makes a difference at street-level for the life of the church in modern culture. This is theologizing at its best.

Four years ago our church was looking for another pastor. After the search committee was formed, its members asked each of the three pastors to meet with them so that we could have some input on the search process. Among my recommendations was this, “You shouldn’t hire anyone who hasn’t seriously engaged the work of Lesslie Newbigin. Thinking about the church and its ministry in Western culture is now dated pre- and post-Newbigin. To hire anyone who hasn’t engaged him would be like hiring a physicist who hasn’t read Einstein.” I still think that four years later, perhaps moreso now than ever. This book is like swallowing a 20-year theological time-release capsule.

THE WRIGHT STUFF
Next up is N.T. Wright. Recommending N.T. Wright is a bit more difficult in that I’m not sure there is one single volume that best serves as an introduction to the work of this remarkable New Testament scholar. But for brevity’s sake, let me recommend two. First, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is. This book is a presentation, in popular form, of Wright’s much larger (and more scholarly), Jesus and the Victory of God. While I hope that the first book will cause you to read the second, the first has the added benefit of two chapters that apply Wright’s application of the life and ministry of Jesus in first century culture to the life and ministry of Jesus’ followers in 21st-century culture. Second, Paul in Fresh Perspective is a relatively brief (174 pages) look at the theology of Paul the Apostle. Wright’s skills as a historian serve him well here as he seeks to consider Paul in the context of his Jewish roots, the Roman Empire and Hellenistic thought.

So why recommend Wright? Two reasons, at least. One, few theologians or Biblical scholars will stretch your notion of “gospel” as does the Bishop of Durham. If you have come to be suspicious and dissatisfied with a gospel that has been reduced to the limits of your “spiritual life” so-called, then you’re ready for Wright. Here you’ll encounter a gospel as vast as the cosmos God redeems. Whether in his scholarly work or in his popular writing, Wright presents a gospel that isn’t simply a four-point outline about personal salvation. Rather, it is gospel as worldview; gospel as a way of seeing the world and everything in it in the light of God’s redeeming purpose. Two, Wright scrubs off the many grimy layers of churchly piety that have rendered the Jesus of the gospels as a rather dainty ecclesiastical moralist. This is scholarship that provokes wonder and worship as we see Jesus again with new eyes. If you have wrongly concluded that rigorous thinking gets in the way of genuine piety, then the necessary prescription is regular doses of Bishop Wright.

AND NOW FOR SOME LEITHART-ED READING . . .
If you want a real theological roller coaster ride, let me recommend Against Christianity by Peter Leithart. While written in a Nietzschean aphoristic style, Leithart is not (as you might wonder from the title) a cultured despiser of the faith. A conservative Presbyterian minister, Leithart has written a compelling book with such chapter titles as “Against Theology,” “Against Sacraments,” “Against Ethics,” and (rather unfashionably) “For Constantine.” This is a worldview book that interacts with a host of New Testament scholars, ethicists, systematicians, sociologists of religion and religious historians, and wrestles with questions of culture, church, and state on the way to defining the church as an “alternate polis.” And all in 143 pages! This book demonstrates that theology can be fun, unsettling, and challenging as it wrestles not just with “spiritual things” (that would be Gnosticism, after all) but the real world that God has made. Not for the faint of heart, this is a thought-provoking book that can stir the pot as you seek to make worldview disciples at church.

LOVELACE AND THE LIFE OF LOVE
Two other books need to be added to our list, Dynamics of Spiritual Life and Renewal as a Way of Life, both by Richard Lovelace. I’ve recommended these books constantly over the years as part of my personal campaign to keep them in print. When I taught at a seminary in the ‘90s, I made Dynamics required reading as often as humanly possible. In these volumes, Lovelace has articulated a biblically shaped, historically informed theology of spiritual life that simply cannot be beaten. My recommendation to students was that Lovelace’s taxonomy of spiritual life and renewal was so important that it should be the grid through which they looked at the life and ministry of the local church.

What sets these volumes apart is their depth and breadth. Many of the pastoral observations have so much wisdom that I find I turn to them again and again. And in an age of so many “Jesus-for-me-Jesus” books on spirituality, it is remarkable to turn to a book that sees such matters as social justice, issues of contextualization, and theological engagement as essentials for ongoing spiritual renewal. Equally refreshing is that Lovelace clearly understands that ongoing corporate renewal cannot be separated from personal renewal nor personal renewal from corporate. While Renewal is largely a condensation of the much larger Dynamics (each articulates the same basic taxonomy of renewal), it is—by Lovelace’s admission—something of an improvement in that it sets the theology of spiritual renewal of Dynamics into the even larger theological setting of what Lovelace calls the God-centered life and the Kingdom-centered life.

FOUR FOR THE KINGDOM (STUFF)
Lastly we come to the kingdom. Without your doctrine of the kingdom straight, you will misread the Bible. Period. To understand the kingdom is to read the Bible redemptively (not as a collection of moralizing stories), historically/eschatologically (not as a repository of timeless truths), and missionally (not as an “in-house” document). How important is the kingdom of God? Jesus announced the kingdom as the Good News of God (Mark 1:15): He commissioned the twelve to preach it (Matthew 10:7) and the seventy-two to proclaim it (Luke 10:9); He taught it to the apostles for forty days after his resurrection (Acts 1:3); the early church preached it; and it was the backbone of Paul’s teaching (Acts 8:12; 20:25; 28:23,31). Yet one of my seminary students said to me, “My pastor asked me the other day, ‘What’s with Bob Lynn and all this kingdom stuff?’” We are in deep trouble with respect to our reading of Scripture if its grand narrative simply becomes “this kingdom stuff.” The consequences for worldview thinking are enormous because worldview thinking rests on the foundation of the kingdom of Jesus who now rules until he has put everything—not just our spiritual live—under his feet (Ephesians 1:9,10,19-23).

In one sense we’ve traveled over this ground. A serious engagement with Newbigin and Wright, for example, will transform your thinking about the kingdom of God. Yet you may want to do some reading specifically about the kingdom. Over the past twenty years dozens of books have enriched my understanding of the kingdom of God in many different ways. But for now perhaps you should consider some volumes that help introduce you to kingdom theology. A slim but still challenging volume is Mortimer Arias’ Announcing the Reign of God: Evangelization and the Subversive Memory of Jesus. I must confess that one of the reasons I like it is because it has the word “subversive” in the title (it seems to make people nervous) but beyond that it is a fine introduction to the kingdom theology of the four Gospels.

So are George Eldon Ladd’s The Presence of the Future and Herman Ridderbos’ The Coming of the Kingdom. Finally, a brand new book certainly destined to end up in the next edition of My Rather Idiosyncratic Worldview Reading List, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative  by Old Testament scholar Christopher J.H. Wright. I’ve been waiting for a book like this for years. This substantial book (over 550 pages) develops a missional hermeneutic for reading the Bible. God has been on a mission from the beginning to redeem his fallen creation, and his kingdom of grace is the means by which he is bringing his sovereign, saving purpose to pass for us and for a broken world. To read the entire Bible—not just certain texts—as a mission text is to read it as a kingdom text. Wright’s book is exactly what you need to revolutionize the way you read the Bible.

The ancient Preacher said, “Of making many books, there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” (Ecclesiastes 12:12b). Agreed. And in a culture where book publishers issue, not annual, but quarterly catalogues of their latest wares, it’s easy to find yourself reading and much, much wearied, yet none the wiser. The answer, of course, isn’t quantity but quality—reading wisely and reading well. It is my hope that God might use these essays and some of these books to move you along the road to better knowing him which, after all, is what wisdom is really about.

Rev. Robert Lynn is associate pastor at Knox Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, Mich.