Book Review: The Indomitable Brainerds by Mack Tomlinson

The bulk of the book is a summary biography of David Brainerd, and then the pulling together of what is known about his younger brother John's life and ministry. Then, the appendices give some comment/thematic observations. 

It's a little volume, and doesn't take long to read. The lasting takeaway is that God does in fact give men delight in himself, devoted holiness, longing for the eternal world, and tireless zeal and effort for God's glory and perishing souls in this world. How He might use that, with what fruit, and for how long is His inscrutable business. 

I doubt that you will be blown away by the fruit in terms of numbers or lasting effect. But I was blown away by how few ministers I have known of the stripe of these two brothers, and of my own defects by comparison.

So long as your takeaway is that we belong to, and believe in, the same God of grace, I think this will be a profitable read for you. Would that He would give us to cling to Him for that grace, and not let go until He blesses us.

Book Review: The Redeemed Man (edited by Beeke/Phillips/Smalley)

 

This was the second book that we received this week, not so much because it fit the theme as because it contains chapters and by three of our speakers and two of the other attendees.

The book on the whole is excellent, and the first thing I would put into the hands of someone who wishes to learn about true manliness. 

Like all anthology style books, there's a great diversity in the quality of the contributions. So I have organized my review not according to the sequential order of the book but by grouping the contributions according to their level of helpfulness. 

This first grouping are what I would call superlative contributions. Any one of them would have made the book worthwhile. The fact that there are eight of them ought to strongly commend the book to you. For the sake of brevity, the less helpful a contribution, the more I will say about why. So do not let that mislead you into thinking that my view of the book is negative at all. So I will say nothing more about these contributions than for you to take up and read: 

• The Redeemed Man Knowing His God (Conrad Mbewe)
• The Redeemed Man Growing in Grace (Sinclair Ferguson) 
• The Redeemed Man Honoring His Parents (Terry Johnson)
• The Redeemed Man Loving His Wife (Joel Beeke) 
• The Redeemed Man Witnessing to Unbelievers (David Strain)
• The Redeemed Man Viewing Work Rightly (Richard Phillips) 
• The Redeemed Man Persevering in His Faith (Geoff Thomas)
• The Redeemed Man Preparing for His Death (Ian Hamilton)

This next grouping are good contributions. They handle their subject well and are useful for understanding and application. To speak analogously to the descriptions of  David's mighty men, "they are of the thirty but did not attain to the three":

• The Redeemed Man Repenting and Believing (Beeke and Smalley)
• The Redeemed Man Committed to God's Word (Paul Smalley)
• The Redeemed Man Leading His Family (Jason Helopoulos)
• The Redeemed Man Growing in Family Worship (Joel Beeke)
• The Redeemed Man Serving in His Church (Kevin De Young). This would have been in the superlative category, but in my opinion, it is missing some important detail in application. Also, the section on magnanimity doesn't naturally belong to this subject, even though I think it is an important contribution on the idea of ambition (which was not well defined in other chapters, so that approving of it without defining it was potentially harmful without this contribution).
• The Redeemed Man Sustaining His Health (Joseph Pipa). My only note would be that, in the section on medical care, to heed his caution that non-traditional types of care would be supplemental only, and guided by the counsel and evaluation of your M.D. Good internal medicine doctors are hard to find. But they are increasingly holistic, and availing yourself of their understanding that covers from biochemistry, to microbiology, to all of the interconnecting systems of the body, may well spare you for much that passes itself off as wisdom but lacks genuine biological knowledge and is often based in dangerously pseudobiblical philosophy and spirituality. 

The next grouping our contributions that I consider to be weak. Not necessarily bad, but either lacking something significant, or not worthwhile on the whole. 

• The Redeemed Man Discipling His Children (Rick Phillips). Just not specific or detailed enough. 
• The Redeemed Man Cultivating Friendships (Michael Haykin). Misses a wealth of biblical material that could have more strongly grounded the chapter and more richly supplied application. 
• The Redeemed Man Laboring at His Work (Daniel Doriani). Covers the same ground as the chapter that immediately precedes it, but not as well. Also commends ambition without carefully defining it, which would have been more dangerous without the chapter that immediately follows this one. 
• The Redeemed Man Enjoying His Recreations (Gerard Hemmings). Doesn't at all cover a biblical theology of mornings and evenings, which is one of the most essential components of understanding and employing recreation in our lives, particularly in our finding God Himself to be recreational in the truest sense of that word. A man who lays hold of this will find himself much recreated in the ordinary course of life. 

This final grouping is what I would call "mixed." These chapters would have been good, or even superlative, except for one or more significant defects. 

• The Redeemed Man Living in Singleness (Curt Daniel). Very helpful for sympathizing with the lonely, and includes good counsel for what to do with that loneliness. Comes close to a good doctrine of singleness, and employing that condition unto God's glory, but uses the unfortunate language of the gift of singleness. To his credit, he even defines it as something that may be temporary, which comes close to the truth: if you are single, then you presently have the gift of singleness, meaning that you are to employ it for the glory of God in the service of His church. However, women under 60, and all men, should be seeking to marry, as implied by Genesis 2 and 1Timothy 5 and really the whole of the biblical witness about marriage. Misuses the eunuch text in Matthew 19, whose context is choosing celibacy rather than adulterous remarriage. Does not do enough to emphasize that the epidemic of singleness is due to the rise of many different forms of sinfulness, together with poor theology of marriage in the churches. For dealing with this subject well, it would be helpful to say something about how contemporarily romanticized notions of attraction and compatibility artificially and harmfully narrow the proportion of potential matches among the godly.
• The Redeemed Man Governing as a Citizen (David Innes). Much to be commended, but missing an important emphasis upon Christ's reign already upon the earth, even from His seat on the throne of heaven. The chapter ends up too dependent upon the hypothetical reign of the first Adam, if he had kept the Covenant of Works. The chapter does a good job of arguing that only a Christian properly governs himself, and that for the governing of others, a Christian is best suited, which ought to motivate him to do so out of love for his neighbor. But after reasoning that a redeemed man should, the chapter is too light on details of how a redeemed man could. 
• The Redeemed Man Entering Retirement (Derek Thomas). Asserts that retirement is inevitable, then acknowledges that it is unbiblical. Much more helpful when giving counsel to retirees, which counsel consists largely of advising them not to be retired. On the whole, a helpful exhortation to serve God as well as possible for as long as possible. Might have been helpful to present Ecclesiastes 12 not as the arrival of retirement, but the beginning of the intrusion of death into the life of the redeemed man. After reading this chapter, my thought was that if I was counseling, someone who is coming into a season of no longer being able to do what had been his primary vocation for decades, I would probably recommend following chapter 13 all over again (The Redeemed Man Viewing Work Rightly).

Again, please remember that I was trying to keep this brief, so I did not review each chapter. If the first two categories I had received full reviews, the vast majority of that much larger article would have been effusively positive. 

This is an excellent book on manhood, and I recommend it for every man and for every church officer, to whom the Lord has entrusted the leadership of other men.

Book Review: "You Will Be My Witnesses" by Brian DeVriea

 

We were given a copy of this book at an annual ministerial fellowship that the Lord has blessed me to attend for the last 27 years. This year's theme is the local church's participation in global mission. 

The book does some things well.  

It is well-organized, especially in the format of each of the chapters, identifying and enumerating the main ideas in such a way as to make the book easy to read and assimilate.

It focuses upon theology proper, christology, and pneumatology from the whole of Scripture—particularly as these shape the visible church's role in God's ongoing work in the world. And it does a good job with both of these things.

The book traces its biblical theology from the whole of scripture and properly identifies and employs many of the most relevant specific texts to show this theology.

It does justice to the fact that the mission belongs to God and is accomplished by His activity and power. Too many other works on the subject fail to properly acknowledge, and yield to, the necessarily supernatural essence of what we pray and hope will occur as we bear witness.

Among its many emphases, the book has a much-needed emphasis upon how the church's witness (its part in God's mission) consists most of all on just being the church, as He has designed and called it to be. The greatest need, therefore, is reformation. Sanctification. Revival. 

I don't envy the task of trying to tackle such a large subject. But there are some things that the book does not do well. These are largely in the areas of what it does not address.

Considering the need for revival, in order to Bear biblical witness, the book does some good work in describing what the fruit of revival looks like. But it is a little lacking in describing what that revival is, and more lacking in describing how it happens. We cannot have congregational reformation without household reformation, and we cannot have household reformation without personal reformation. The biggest defect in the church's witness is men whose selves and lives are not beacons of union and communion with Jesus Christ, by His Spirit, unto communion with God. 

Another lack is in failing to distinguish the role of the Christian from the role of the congregation. This is especially glaring in a few of the items that he repeatedly identified as the "church's witness," particularly: "gospel global partnerships, [...] compassion ministries, biblical counseling, cultural engagement." Several items that Scripture handles entirely with reference to individuals with their neighbors, are listed in a way that fails to correct the confused state of the church in which the congregation attempts to function as a citizen or neighbor, which it is not.

One more weakness that bears mentioning is that the book at times has an ax to grind with what it considers a failure to contextualize, sometimes described as a confusion of the Gospel with the exporting of Western European culture. This familiar trope is unhelpful, because it fails to recognize that much of what is now known as Western European culture is not the original culture of Western Europe but the consequence of gospel transformation. Exhortations to contextualization need to be strongly tempered by the fact that culture is an aggregate of individuals and personalities, and the biblical response to it is always some form of correction, most of all. Adaptation is not an exercise in figuring out how the culture should shape gospel expression, but rather identifying unnecessary corrections that the gospel must bring to that culture.

In my view, the most glaring weakness is the absence of a thorough doctrine of ordination and a thorough ecclesiology. Faith comes by hearing, and particularly by hearing those who are sent. Since the mission is God's (while the witness is ours), and God Himself ordains and sends particular preachers particularly, a biblical implementation of witness demands a functional submission to a thorough doctrine of biblical ordination. And Scripture describes a mission of God in which He is not just saving but planting churches, not just planting churches but planting presbyteries. This may be intentional, since thinking and writing in this way significantly narrows the proportion of the visible Church that would welcome the book as things currently stand. But how can these deficiencies in the church be corrected, if in order to get a wider reading audience, they become deficiencies in the book?

Finally: do not let these weaknesses dissuade you from reading the book. First of all, it is an easy read. Secondly, it is a worthwhile read—it does as good a job of a biblical theology of the witness that the church bears to Christ as any book that I am aware of.