Every summer on vacation, I try to read a variety of things.  Here is a thumbnail on each of the books from this past week in South Carolina:

 

Arnold Toynbee's 1957 Christianity Among the Religions of the World. Basically, he calls for Christianity to stop being uniquely and specifically Christian in its beliefs in order to get along with the other "higher" religions. Bad idea.

 

Read chapters from DeYoung & Gilbert's forthcoming book (??!!)--superb!

 

Stephen Gonzales on The Regulative Principle & Drama in Worship.  He says "no".

 

Read another book that was not so good. It is never appropriate to joke about Hell.

 

Sheldon Lingenfelter on Ministering Cross-Culturally. Good stuff to think about.

 

Conrad Mbewe's Foundations for the Flock (2010)--a combination of nine or ten things he's written over the last twenty years. Pastorally very useful, especially the thoughtful, long section on congregations cooperating together in gospel work.

 

Peter O'Brien's Consumed by Passion (1993) where he carefully and convincingly argues from 1 Cor 10:33-11:1 and elsewhere against David Bosch and others who maintain that Paul did NOT expect other Christians to evangelize. Paul did, O'Brien argues. Good book on the gospel and evangelism. Careful treatment of key passages.  Anything by O’Brien is worth reading.

 

Camille Lewis' Romancing the Difference (Baylor 2007). Anyone interested in the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke and how a Bob Jones Professor would present fundamentalism in an attractive way using the rhetoric of romance should read this book.

 

The late Ronald Nash's early 1980's book, Social Justice and the Christian Church, a good introductory survey of economics and political theory, specifically investigating what is biblical justice, and showing that capitalism is a biblically just system. Good to read as background for considering how we can best help those who are materially poor.

 

Carl Kell, ed., Exiled (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), the autobiographical stories of about thirty folks who left the SBC in the 1980's & 1990's. Made me recall my time at Southern Seminary in the 1980's. Sorry to think of those who created a world in which gospel issues were not clearly presented, and in which, as one person said, joining a church was something one did, even if religion wasn't very important in their lives.

 

Reading Kell's book also made me thankful, in God's strange providence, for my time as an agnostic, which ruined the allure that made a lack of clarity masquerade as charity and tolerance. Thank God for the clarity of the gospel, and for how unity in essentials really can help us to allow diversity in nonessentials, and charity in all things.

 

And, finally, Martyn Percy's Words, Wonders and Power (SPCK, 1996), a consideration of the theology and practice of power in John Wimber and the Vineyard churches. Interesting observations. Basically, Percy faults Wimber for holding a traditional Christian understanding of God's omnipotence. For Percy risk is essential for God to love.

 

After doing all this reading, I am left thanking God for the sufficiency of God’s Word and the clarity of the Gospel.