Season’s Readings: Bringing In The Sheaves
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(REVIEW) As Christmas approaches, some U.S. Christians despair that millions who used to go to church no longer do so. “The Great Dechurching” by Jim Davis and Michael Graham (Zondervan, 2023) shows the decline, which —given cultural pressures plus scandals within churches — is not surprising.
Stephen Bullivant’s “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America” (Oxford, 2022) argues that a decade ago, ex-vangelical support for LGBTQ doctrines “was already widespread among many of those raised evangelical,” but the number of young dropouts increased with the “enthusiastic rallying around Donald Trump” by older evangelicals.
Four books I’ve read recently suggest ways to fight dechurching. Paul Miller’s “A Praying Church” (Crossway, 2023) shows how church members can and should pray more as a body and with each other. Those who see prayer as hypocritical or rote tend to pray less, but the same goes for some with a strong sense of God’s sovereignty: We think God’s in charge and has already decreed what happens, so will prayer change things? Somehow, it can — at the least, it will change us. Miller, author of the terrific book “J-Curve” (Crossway, 2019), shows again that belief in Jesus has the look of a J: A short descent into suffering and a long rising.
A second book, Craig Blomberg’s “Jesus the Purifier” (Baker, 2023), shows how Christian one-time baptism supplanted the tendency of faithful Jews “to immerse themselves in cleansing pools whenever they became ritually unclean and whenever they wanted to enter the temple precincts.” Blomberg shows how “the whole account of the feeding of the five thousand in a desolate place raises the question of ritual handwashing.” They ate without ritually washing hands, and all of us need to learn that Jesus’ blessing is sufficient.
It's right to minimize ritual that unnecessarily excludes others — and that could also bring some nonverts back to church. The evangelical movement has traditionally emphasized the call in Matthew 28:19 to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” yet some American evangelicals are so intent on drawing tight boundaries to preserve purity that they are always on defense.
Early Christians went on offense, putting aside dietary laws and other constraints of Judaism: They risked their own “purity” so those they evangelized could look to Christ’s true purity.
A third way to bring back some: Freshen Bible reading without sapping doctrine. I like “The New Testament for Everyone,” a fresh translation by N.T. Wright (Zondervan, third edition, 2023). Here’s the core of Wright’s explanation as to why he produced it: “Most of the New Testament isn’t ‘great literature’ in terms of the high standards of the day. … Paul’s letters, though capable of poetic brilliance, often seem to reflect the kind of animated discussion you might have after a lecture in a crowded room. (It seemed) more important to convey that sense of excitement than to imitate the more formal, somewhat stately prose we know from the traditions of the King James or Revised Standard Versions, good in their way though they have been.”
A fourth thought along these lines: We’re not always better off by being happy happy happy happy happy all the time, as one evangelical song for children suggests. A book good for intellectual nonverts, Gary Saul Morson’s “Wonder Confronts Certainty” (Harvard, 2023), looks at how Russian writers during the last two centuries asked timeless questions amid suffering that either deformed or exalted them. Morson shows that “Russian literature might almost be described as the literature of conversion. Time and again, suffering leads to awareness of Truth or apprehension of God.”
Here are two other challenging books: Randall Smith’s “From Here to Eternity” (Emmaus Road, 2022) notes that “death is pictured in the Scriptures as the enemy. Christ does not go to his death with calm equanimity. He sweats drops of blood.” We should have a merry Christmas because “Christ is the center. Our victory over sin and death is won by Christ and Christ alone.”
Trevor Laurence’s “Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer” (Baylor University Press, 2022) notes that many churches tend to skip by Psalms 74, 79, 139, and others that emphasize God’s anger toward His enemies — and yet, many active enemies of God (as I and millions once were) do not cross over to God until we feel His anger.
Is an imprecatory psalm consistent with Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek? I remember Tim Keller’s teaching that a slap on the cheek is a personal insult that we should not respond to in kind, but a punch or a knife thrust is different. Jesus did not choose metaphors carelessly.
In brief: “Glorifying and Enjoying God,” by William Boekestein, Jonathan Cruse and Andrew Miller (Reformation Heritage, 2023), is a good 52-week devotional based on the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Michael Mather’s “Having Nothing, Possessing Everything” (Eerdman’s, 2018) is a useful corrective for deacons who have fallen into either ignoring needs or merely writing checks.
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Marvin Olasky, editor in chief of World from 1992 to 2021, reviews books on religion here and books on other subjects at Discovery Institute’s Olasky Books Newsletter.