READER, COME HOME: THE READING BRAIN IN A DIGITAL WORLD. By Maryanne Wolf. Harper, 2018. 205 pages plus end matter.

I came across a review of this book on The Gospel Coalition website. In the book she points out that we tend not to finish articles that we read online. I laughed at myself: I hadn’t read the whole online review, of course. I ordered the book from the library — I think they bought it upon my ILL request, they are really good that way. I didn’t finish it within my 3-week loan period, and it was quite good, and others had holds on it, and she makes me feel really bad for starting things and not finishing them, so I went out and bought it for myself. Hardcover – I could have saved a bunch of money by downloading it as an e-book, but she points out the research that says how much less attention we pay when reading e-books.

The major issue: By reviewing recent brain-science research, Wolf demonstrates that as our reading habits are changing from print to digital, so are our thinking patterns changing. Our thinking is becoming less reflective, less contemplative, less critical, less emphathetic, etc. She demonstrates that all of those good qualities get built up by habits of careful, attentive reading.

The major goal: Instead of coming out with a goal for us to get rid of electronic media, Wolf suggests a fascinating goal: We know that children can be raised in bilingual homes where, if their parents do things right, the children’s brains naturally switch back and forth between different modes of thinking – in that case, different languages. Wolf says that is evidence that we could train our brains, and our children’s, to respond to cues in such a way that we can be in  digital-engagement mode (with lots of skimming, response to artificial stimuli, dependence on search engines, etc.) and effectively switch into reflective-reading-of-print mode, and back again. She makes a compelling case that both modes are necessary for life in our contemporary world, and she is very hopeful that if we are purposeful about it, we can do well at both.

The experience of reading this book: The first half or two-thirds of the book is made up of her compiling and summarizing (popularizing) vast amounts of other people’s research. She drops so many names that it makes for choppy, annoying reading. But the content comes across, and it makes a person like me feel guilty for even thinking about not finishing the book. But then in the last third of the book, Wolf comes into her own research and creativity, and the style of her writing improves drastically.

Lessons for my life:

• For most books, aim to read them slowly, cover to cover. Don’t skim. (University can be terrible for promoting skimming.) He uses an image of a hurried, deliberate kind of slowness.
• I need to value the freedom of my mind to wander as I read. She demonstrates the brain science of how the very neural processes of reading depend on a freedom to wander, free from the kinds of planned distractions that happen with digital media, free for our very flesh to feel our bodies’ responses to what we read, etc.
• I need to value the skill of careful, concentrated reading. It may require time and energy, but it is a dying art that is essential to our civilization. If I don’t value it and maintain it as a skill, I will lose it. In recent years, having children and responsibilities, I’ve placed my hopes for learning into listening to podcasts etc. I might be getting some interesting content, but my capacity to think is probably diminishing.
• I need to maintain “empty spaces” in my schedule in which contemplative, critical, heartfelt reflection can be done. She gives the image of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett being interviewed, and the one saying that the other had taught him the value of blank spaces in his calendar. I usually feel guilty for blank spaces in my calendar.
• I need to read worthwhile books a second or third time.
• I need to be on-purpose to aim for my children to be good readers: deep, critical thinkers, empathetic, etc. To do that, I need to drastically limit their screen time. Wolf encourages us to be very aware of how much screen time the children get at school.

THE REASON FOR GOD: BELIEF IN AN AGE OF SKEPTICISM. By Timothy Keller. Dutton: 2008. 242 pages plus notes.

I had been feeling like I need some good, thoughtful, kind, solid resources that I can hand out to help engage skeptical people around me, young and old. I think this book will be helpful. It was certainly stimulating for me to read.

I was already familiar with many of the arguments and counter-arguments that Keller engages. He just does it so well. However, one particular emphasis won me over, so that it is no longer just something that I generally agree with, but something that will shape my approach to life in this world. He quotes Stephen Carter on how very religious secularism is, while claiming to be neutral with regard to religion. The longer I read this book, the more I began to see religion deep down in everything, especially deep down in the commitments of anti-religious people.

Probably the best thing about this book is that it is the fruit not of solitary study, but of deep, thoughtful discussions with skeptical people. And Keller has seen so many people become convinced of the truth of the gospel, that he does not sound pushy or defensive or up in arms at all.

The one area where the book seems weak is in Keller’s embrace of macro-evolution. He leans on Francis Collins for that, whom I should read.

People say that Keller is the 21^st century’s C.S. Lewis. Indeed, Lewis is one of Keller’s two favourite authors, and by his admission, Lewis’s thought is behind most every page. However, one major difference is their style. I remember being struck by the authority of Lewis, how he does not often quote directly from other sources, nor drop names, etc. Lewis is well read, but he has internalized so much of what he has read that he brings it out masterfully and simply in his own words. Keller handles other people’s writing much more explicitly – though he has certainly internalized much. May I become adept at handling resources like Keller does, yet I still long to be able to think, speak, and write as straightforwardly as Lewis.

“Resources” is a word that Keller enjoys. Particularly, he talks about how the gospel gives Christians the “resources” to deal with even our deepest hypocrisies. And so, historically, the church has been able to self-correct when it could have kept going in its evil. That is a good image. May my churches and I learn to make full use of the resources of the gospel.

I also bought the DVD discussion videos that accompany this book. They are quite good: Keller sitting with six non-believers, discussing these topics openly and with love. I hope we are able to use those videos well, but even if we don’t, watching them has been a good lesson in seeing Keller’s manner with people. No wonder God has blessed his church so much.

ELDER TO NOVICE: THE ART OF LECTIO DIVINA, PRAYERFUL READING OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. By the Hermitage of the Anunciation, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2017. 88 pages.

I have been getting to know the monks at the Russian Orthodox monastery down the road from me. This little book was produced by their lead monk, Papa Luc. Extremely refreshing to me.

My favourite story is from pages 8-9, as follows…

“One of the many new ways to learn is how to read. I recall my own introduction to this, as a novice. Accustomed to the ways of the world, I was used to reading as fast as I could, and I assumed that reading a lot was beneficial. As a result of this outlook, I was reproached many times by my Elder. For example, in my very first days as a novice monk, I was handed the book of the letters of Abba Barsanuphius, a great ascetic writer from Gaza (6^th century), and told to read it. A week later, the Elder asked me how my reading was going. I apologized that I was only on page fifteen – I had other obediences that were consuming my time. “What!?” he exclaimed. “Page fifteen!? You can’t be!” In my worldly way of thinking, I expected to be admonished for reading so little in a week. Instead he told me, “Start over! You should still be on the first paragraph!” Learning how to read again, in this new way, was a big challenge for me.”

There is also a beautiful story on pages 50-51 about a leaky bucket, and how fresh and clean it became as a monk made the futile effort to fetch water with it daily.

Here are some more of my underlinings:

Page 38, on “rumination.” “It needs to be emphasized that rumination, or “chewing on the words,” is not a practice that helps us possess the Holy Scriptures or appropriate them for ourselves … God is ruminating us.”

Page 38. “All reading of the Holy Scriptures is an exercise in extreme humility – both ours and God’s.”

Page 39. “Extreme humility is the way to illumination.”

Page 42. “Remember that we do not read to be recognized as a knowledgeable person. We read to obtain humility, compunction, and meekness.”

Page 44, under “Live Simply.” “WE need to structure our life in such a way that we can hear the word resonating within us like an echo throughout our day…. Small, quiet times during the day will not just happen. We need to make them.”

Page 45. “It seems – and this is a frequent temptation in our world – that the human has become the focus of our reading of the Scriptures.”

This little book also emphasizes the hermeneutical approach of seeking the “spiritual meaning” of a text, using types, allegories, etc. I was strongly warned against this in our Baptist seminary. However, while I do not go as far as this book encourages, I am finding that there are indeed some very helpful insights from the tradition of reading for the spiritual meaning. For example, I preached from the gospel of John and admitted that I really didn’t know what Jesus saw Nathaniel do under the olive tree. When I told Papa Luc about that, he commented that the spiritual meaning of being under an olive tree in the Bible is always the study of Torah: that is a strong hint about what Nathaniel was doing. That is at the very least helpful as a hint.

There is a bibliography at the end that I hope to use to study this more.

C.S. LEWIS: MASTER STORYTELLER. By Janet and Geoff Benge. YWAM Publishing: 2007. 189 pages.

My wife has been reading this to our six-year-old son. I happened to pick it up while we were on vacation, started about halfway through, and kept reading, then worked my way back to the beginning. The book is written more for teenagers than for adults. I benefitted a lot from C.S. Lewis when I was a teen (Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man). Reading this simple biography, 20 years later, was very powerful for me. Here’s why.

C.S. Lewis (Jack) bore great fruit as a writer and as a thinker. I aspire to that, in some senses. But it is easy for me to get frustrated about the everyday distractions of a family man and a pastor: people need help or attention etc. I can easily find myself coveting the leisure a professor and bachelor like Lewis would have. But this book was fascinating in what it said about a woman named Janie Moore. In the later part of the book Jack’s brother Warren becomes more and more angry at Janie for never letting Jack have more than a half hour of time to think or write. She is always yelling for him to fetch her something, or peel potatoes for her, or something.

So who was Janie Moore? She was the mother of a fellow soldier Jack trained with at the start of WW1. He and that other soldier made an agreement that if one died, the other would be a son to the other’s parent. Jack honoured that commitment: right from his early years as a student at Oxford he actively cared for Janie and her daughter Maureen. The lesson: the distractions that come from faithful commitments are far outweighed by the effect of those commitments on one’s character. I remember a C.S. Lewis quote I used as a screensaver 20 years ago: “Virtue – even attempted virtue – brings light; indulgence brings fog.” Indeed, Jack’s virtuous care for a widowed mother brought to him – and through him, to me – much light.

Another insight about Jack’s fruitfulness: he gave time and energy to friendships, especially friendships with men. I need to do the same.

And many of those friendships were augmented by vacations of long days of walking. I need to walk more.

I am also in the midst of reading Maryanne Wolf’s book, in which she emphasizes the need for children to be appropriately bored and thus to learn creativity. Such was Jack’s childhood with Warren, cooped up in their big house with Warren. Wolf also emphasizes the importance of parents giving time to reading and language and instruction – I think Charles Taylor’s term is “shared attentiveness.” Jack had this in his early years with his mother, who taught him French, Latin, etc.

There were also beautiful scenes of Jack talking with various friends, especially Tolkien, about faith in God, and of long walks and long talks leading to conversion.  I need to believe that reason and discussion can get somewhere.

THE OLD MAN TOLD US: EXCERPTS FROM MI’KMAW HISTORY, 1500-1950. By Ruth Holmes Whitehead. Nimbus: 1991. 385 pages.

I picked this up on our local bookmobile. Good bedtime reading. Sometimes witty, sometimes heartbreaking, always enlightening.

Father Maillard’s background interview material is just fascinating, on what life was like for the natives before contact with white people. The image of killer whales attacking canoes in the open ocean is nightmare material. In later years there is also a big shark that attacks a canoe off of Digby.

Reading about Vincent de Paul selling indulgences to starving families made the Reformation and its issues feel closer to home.

There was surprisingly little of Silas Rand’s material, though he is often in the background. One example is the discussion of the meaning of the name of Kejimkujik Lake. Rand said that it was so named, meaning “swollen,” as referring to the breadth of the waters there. But the discussion in the book suggests that Rand either didn’t know the truth, because he was a minister and people didn’t want to be crude in their speech around him, or else Rand toned it down himself. They say there was another name for the lake that would be used around women and children, but men would talk about this lake of “swollenness” with reference to parts of their anatomy so effected by the hard paddle across its rough waves.

In terms of heroics, there were two men who, having heard it was done in older times, set out to paddle from Dartmouth to Saint John in one day. And they accomplished it, catching the tide in the Shubenacadie River just right.

I’ve been learning there is great value in reading a book through to its end. An author can discuss things there that people are less worthy to read otherwise. So there is some discussion of Mohawk pranksters coming to Nova Scotia. The story involves an admission that Christianity has drastically tempered the wrath of native peoples, in spite of all the horrors that “civilization” has brought with it. That fits with what I read last year in the book about Champlain.

IN THE HEART OF THE SEA: THE TRAGEDY OF THE WHALESHIP ESSEX. By Nathaniel Philbrick. Penguin Books, 2015. 238 pages plus end matter.

I picked this up for a dollar at the hospital. A gripping and worthwhile read.

In 1820, this ship out of Nantucket was hunting sperm whales in the centre of the Pacific Ocean when an enraged whale rammed and wrecked the ship. Setting out for South America in their three small whaleboats, only 8 of the crew ended up surviving, most resorting to cannibalism.

I think the background Philbrick paints of the life and economy of the New England island of Nantucket is even more striking than the adventure itself. Here are some highlights.

First, here is a small, remote, culturally unique corner of the world that ends up driving sectors of the global economy by its hold on a key commodity – in this case whale oil. That is not an unfamiliar story. Consider, for example, parts of Texas or the Middle East that have a hold on another kind of oil today.

Second, it is a striking picture of a society where most of the working men marry and are away from home for three years or more, then home for three months, then away again. Philbrick draws a fascinating comparison with the mating habits of the sperm whales: the bulls spend most of their lives wandering the world’s oceans alone, only returning to the mating grounds momentarily. The hunters learned to imitate their prey.

Third, the very names in the story connect to my home here in Nova Scotia. Within a short walk I can visit Nickersons or Chases. My sister travels to work down Nantucket Avenue in Dartmouth. The story of Nantucket whalers in 1820 is not far removed from the story of my home province.

Fourth, throughout the adventure, Philbrick gives fascinating background about the various expected leadership roles of the young officers of this whaling ship. The captain was expected to be decisive and firm, the mates were expected to be helpful and malleable to him. The adventure shows how that did not happen the way it was supposed to.

On an incidental note, this book was the second in a row for me to read about a killer whale attacking a small craft. Makes me cringe when my son tells me about reading Free Willy.

At the end of the book, Philbrick comments that second mate Chappell returned to England and composed an account of the disaster for a religious tract, in which he milks the story for all of its possible spiritual lessons. I have ordered a copy of that tract, and I look forward to reading it.

A PROPHET WITH HONOR: THE BILLY GRAHAM STORY. by William Martin. William Morrow and Company, 1991. 736 pages.

When Billy Graham died this past winter, there was a flurry of magazine articles etc. One article I read cited this book as the most rigorous one about his life. So I pulled it off the church shelf, and started reading. At first I planned only to read about his early life, but once I got into the start of the crusades, I had to keep reading to the end.

It is interesting that this book was written in 1991 on the assumption that Graham was about at the end of his years.

The simplicity of Graham’s learning inspired me, his mother teaching him Bible verses in the bathtub etc. When he felt called to preach, he went ahead and preached on the streets.

One of the major arguments of the book is that God blessed Billy Graham’s preaching, plain and simple. He could have been a much better preacher, but God blessed the results. May God teach the rest of us to trust him for results.

The scale of some of Graham’s biggest successes was another big surprise for me: filling Madison Square Garden daily from May through labour day; over a million people listening to him at one time in South Korea; successfully gathering, encouraging, and equipping evangelists from around the globe at the Amsterdam conference; gathering missionaries to the Lausanne conference, etc. He had access to the money that comes with a wide reach, and he knew how to wield it.

Graham’s intimacy with American presidents was also a fascinating topic. Even someone as wise and effective as Billy Graham could be drawn in and deceived by Richard Nixon. How great was Graham’s disappointment seeing the truth about Nixon! What a lesson, that there are more important things to do than to sidle up to important people. Some of his involvements in world politics seemed grand to himself and to others at the time, but they make him look small in retrospect. The gospel is a much higher calling than to be involved in superpower politics.

Pages 96 to 99 speak about Graham’s first time in England and Wales. Many clergy were quite closed to this American fundamentalist, but he was so winsome, he gained many open doors. And he had a learner’s heart too. Probably the part of the book that moved me the most was Graham learning from Stephen Olford there about how to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the immediate, visible change that brought to his preaching. Whatever conclusions I reach about Keswick teaching, I have to acknowledge that it had a deep impact for good on Billy Graham.

Other things that surprised or blessed me:

• Simple as he was, Billy Graham was also a committed reader. For example, in responding to criticism from Reinhold Niebuhr, he could comment that he had read most of Niebuhr’s stuff.
• He continually opened up the possibility for his own embarrassment.
• He earnestly sought God’s presence in prayer. I heard a quote recently that said that if we want to learn to be like Jesus, we have to learn to be with Jesus. Billy Graham was with Jesus much.
• Billy Graham’s basis of prayer support was tremendous. He once came upon a little church in Africa that had been praying faithfully and fervently for his New York crusade.
• He was willing to preach wherever he was invited, as long as no restrictions were placed on the content of his message.
• He aimed to hold onto the Bible as firmly as his fundamentalist brothers, but to display its kindness rather than their meanness. He would acknowledge their criticism and express his love to them, but he would not grapple with them.
• Billy Graham improved his preaching by reading many sermons, especially early on. I should read sermons more.

Probably one of the richest gems in this book is to read about the labour and influence of a Hungarian doctor named Alexander Haraszti. Ordinary doctor by day, opener of closed doors for the gospel by night. At one point Billy Graham comments that Haraszti’s understanding of world politics is matched only by the likes of Kissinger himself (p. 492). Out of his own drive, initiative, wisdom, grace, etc., Harazsti changed world history in the 20^th century by getting Billy Graham speaking opportunities in Hungary, then Russia, and throughout the Soviet bloc. I really look forward to meeting him in heaven.

THESE ARE THE GENERATIONS. The Story of How One North Korean Family Lived Out the Great Commission for More Than Fifty years in the Most Christian-Hostile Nation in Human History. By Mr. and Mrs. Bae, as told to the Rev. Eric Foley. .W Publishing, 2012. 121 pages.

My wife and I heard about this book through some Eric Foley interviews we listened to online at https://secure.persecution.com/radio/. So I bought the book for my Kindle, and read it in a hurry.

The book traces the story of the Bae family in North Korea for three generations. Their faith in Christ endured under the Japanese, and then under the Communists. But it was not easy. Here are some remarkable aspects.

In the grandfather’s day, there were times when God would give him clear instructions to flee from the town or city where he happened to be living. That would seem cowardly at first blush. But it made it more real to me that Jesus told his followers to flee from Judea once they see the abomination that causes desolation (Matt. 24:16). Several times, his fleeing in a particular moment would save not only himself, but others as well.

Under Communism, the family realized that they would have to get rid of their Bibles, public worship, etc. So they considered what they would keep. The 10 commandments were key, as the older generation would very secretively advise the younger generation on how to live by these rules. This helped me to picture just how precious God’s commands are.

I’ve seen images and stories of the poverty that people live through in North Korea. It was interesting, then, to read about one of the generations struggling with the temptations involved in advancing successfully in a career in the military. There is indeed an amount of worldly happiness for a sector of the population in North Korea.

In the final section about fleeing from North Korea, to arrive ultimately in South Korea, the difficulties they faced were heartbreaking. But then the strangeness of their arrival in South Korea was even more startling: that the South Korean government has to be very careful to screen refugees to discover spies among them. Then the Baes admit that life in South Korea is not perfect either. But they keep on trusting God.

The organization that Eric Foley leads has as its goal not simply to help Christians in North Korea: “The vision of Seoul USA is that the North Korean church become the catalyst for spiritual examination, repentance, and renewal in Asian and Western Christianity, with North Korean defectors serving among the leadership pillars of the church around the world.” May God bless their work.

 

PARTNERS IN CHRIST: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism. By John G. Stackhouse, Jr. IVP Academic, 2015. A revision of FINALLY FEMINIST, 2005.

The New Testament has some seemingly clear instructions for women not to be the leading authorities in church and family life (1 Cor. 11:1-16; 14:33-35; Eph. 5:22-33; 1 Tim. 2:11-15). In many circles, evangelical Christians have turned away from those instructions and patterns, adopting modern egalitarian/feminist approaches. The best I’ve been able to see, that is a very problematic thing to do, especially if you try to keep on believing that the Bible is infallible. Last summer I asked a woman in ministry for a basis for her setting those problematic passages aside. She referenced this book. So I decided I should read it.

(I read it on Kindle, and I’m not sure if I got the page numbers exactly right in what follows.)

It was a much more enjoyable read than I expected. Among academics, Stackhouse is probably one of the most honest that I’ve ever read when he comes to discussing his personal feelings and judgments about difficult subjects. There are a lot of aspects of modern feminist struggles that I never took the time to appreciate. Also, his desire to honour the truthfulness of all of scripture is evident, along with his desire to see more and more people in the world won for Christ.

However, as much as I learned from Stackhouse, and as much as I enjoyed his gentle and respectful spirit, I was left with some serious questions:

His driving force toward accepting egalitarianism (feminism) and rejecting paternalism (complimentarianism) is basically that he just plain sees women as equal, both in identity and in their rights to aspire to the same roles as men. He writes the book assuming that I will see this too, and that he just needs to get those pesky aspects of scripture out of the way for me. But while equality of identity and worth are clear in scripture and in my mind, equality of roles does not seem so clear-cut and obvious to me at the start, like it does to him. So I’m either right, or I need someone to explain more of the basics to me.

In chapter 11, Stackhouse outlines his central interpretive argument: that there tends to be “doubleness,” patriarchy and egalitarianism side by side in many passages of OT and NT alike. He takes the patriarchy to be accommodating, and the egalitarianism as ideal. Stackhouse posits that such duality is based on God’s willingness to accommodate the sinful institutions and views of a society, in order not to distract from the central message of his salvation. That was fine then, he says, and it is a fine thing to do today, e.g., when a female missionary goes into a strictly Muslim country. However, he claims that our North American culture has reached a stage where a conservative approach to gender roles actually hinders the furtherance of the gospel instead of speeding it. Our culture has come of age, and it is time for the church to embrace this beautiful thing called feminism. (Page 71)

(Stackhouse views himself as doing something different from Webb’s approach in Slaves, Women and Homosexuals. Webb’s approach looks for a trajectory, while Stackhouse looks for a duality. At a more basic level, it is a similar kind of effort to see something deeper in the scripture than what is found at the level of a basic reading.)

As I struggled to understand why Stackhouse says what he says and assumes what he assumes, I realized that a big part of my struggle is based in the difference between his background and mine. He grew up in a strict Brethren setting where rigid male headship was enforced. And he grew up in a time when feminism was still struggling for a footing. I grew up in quite the opposite setting, where male headship was the subject of jokes, and feminism was celebrated. And I watched my church decline and close, along with many others. When I look around at the few churches in my region that are thriving at reaching people with the gospel, they tend to be churches that hold to complimentarianism (paternalism). I see most families around me dealing with various kinds of disintegration and dysfunction, and I don’t see the wide embrace of feminism as having helped that in many ways at all.

Furthermore, Stackhouse came to his conclusions in a time before the feminist movement got lumped together with the gender-fluidity movement. Stackhouse sees eschatology (end times) as ultimately producing a world of equality between sexes. That seems obvious to him, and he assumes it will seem obvious to his readers, too. But it also seems obvious to him that the sexes would remain distinct, as two sexes. More and more of Western culture sees even that as too conservative, now, as elementary school students are encouraged to consider whether they are really a different gender from their biological sex. If Stackhouse is going to base his argument on what seems obvious to our culture, then he will have to make a more watertight argument that the sexes are still distinct.

Endnote 1 to chapter 10 is fascinating. Stackhouse critiques his allies Fee, Bruce, and many others for trying to resolve the issues according to technicalities, like the meaning of kephale “head” in Ephesians 5. He says that such an approach “seems to me to miss the patriarchal forest of the entire Bible for the particular textual trees.” Egalitarians should make careful note of that: one of their champions is stating that the plain reading of scripture is a patriarchal reading.

Another way that this book is a help to a complimentarian is in how Stackhouse seems to have read much complimentarian material, and not only agrees with some aspect of it, but also points out the challenges inherent in other aspect of it. For example, he points out on page 76 that complimentarians are weak at explaining exactly what male leadership in the home looks like. Exactly how should male leadership/headship be exercised, e.g., in decision making? That is a challenge for us (soft) complimentarian husbands to get our heads around, and I appreciate Stackhouse for making the challenge more explicit.

In chapter 11, note 3, Stackhouse references the argument from naming in genesis 2. I’ve come up with this argument myself, and have looked for a long time for anyone in the literature to address it, and I’m grateful Stackhouse “names” it. The argument is basically that in Genesis 2, since Adam names Eve “woman,” then that is evidence of his position of authority over her before the fall. (Many egalitarians try to argue that the first mention of male authority over woman only comes as a consequence of the fall in Genesis 3. Stackhouse then makes some bad rebuttals against it, saying that Adam didn’t even really give Eve a name at first, just called her woman. But God didn’t give day a name at first either, really, he just called it day. And clearly God has authority over all that he made. Anyway, this is an interesting avenue for further research.

On page 96 Stackhouse discusses the Trinity. He says complimentarians get the better side of argument from trinitarianism. Nevertheless, he says that in Gen. 1, with the introduction of male and female created in God’s image, he says that there is no explicit reference to the Trinity at all. He neglects to see the brilliance of man created male and female in the image of the one who says “let us make man in our image.” He then takes issue with the inner-trinitarian analogy in 1 Cor. 11:3, just because it’s jarring, basically.

On pages 99-102, Stackhouse makes some suggestions that alarm me. He seems to be suggesting that the very identity of God as “lord” was an ancient accommodation. The transcendence of God was what God was trying to get across, but “lord” was good enough for that culture. But where does that leave us today. To say, like Rauschenbusch, that we need a “democratic” view of God? (Rauschenbusch, Walter. A Rauschenbusch Reader: The Kingdom of God and the Social Gospel. Benson Y. Landis Ed.  New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1957. Page 122) To abandon the most basic Christian creed, that “Jesus Christ is Lord”? If this essential rejection of absolute authority is what is at the heart of much of egalitarianism, then egalitarianism is much more theologically dangerous than what I ever imagined. But maybe I’m misreading Stackhouse. (John Frame makes some interesting arguments that might get right to the heart of what has led Stackhouse astray on this point. He says that while modern theology has carved out the categories of God’s “transcendence and immanence,” the Bible never seems to express God’s greatness or closeness in exactly those same ways. Rather, whenever God’s “transcendence” is expressed in the Bible, it tends to emphasize his majesty and lordship. Such authoritative dimensions get left out of the concept of transcendence today. (John Frame. The Doctrine of God: A Theology of Lordship. P&R Publishing, 2002.)

On another topic, Stackhouse nods to the insight of the complimentarian position again. On page 113, in rejecting homosexuality, Stackhouse says that “there is something crucially complementary about marriage of a man and a woman (versus same-sex unions) just as God created humanity in his image as “male and female” in Genesis 1.” Then he admits that he doesn’t know what the difference is between male and female. His subsequent rejection of homosexual practice bespeaks his age. He has appealed to the spirit of the age so much up to this point, that he sounds out-of-tune to be saying things that are so culturally odd today.

Overall, I would recommend this book to careful readers of both the complimentarian and egalitarian side of Bible-believing church life. May Stackhouse’s irenic spirit and rigorous scholarship set an example for us all.

However, I have to confess that Stackhouse leaves my soft complimentarian (paternalist) position unshaken. Indeed my position is better informed on many points now than it was before I read this book, and I hear various particular challenges clearly, for living and teaching consistently. Yet my complimentarianism remains intact, and I feel more motivated than before to challenge egalitarianism’s claims.

 

THE KOREAN PENTECOST & The Sufferings Which Followed. By William Blair and Bruce Hunt. Banner of Truth Trust, 1977. 162 pages.

As tensions and intrigues increase between the USA and North Korea, we read an article in World Magazine that emphasized some of the events from this little book. So we ordered the book, and were thoroughly blessed by it.

The first half of the book tells the remarkable story of how God prepared the Korean people to hear the gospel. Written by missionaries of those early days (William Blair went to Korea in 1901; Bruce Hunt was a generation younger and suffered under Japanese and Communist persecution), the book shares the incredible vigor of those missionaries. It seems like nothing could deter the Presbyterian missionaries of those years.

A century later, what is striking is that South Korea is so alive with the gospel, having caught that same missionary fervour. Meanwhile Japan, having such a similar culture and located so close-by, has yet to embrace the gospel in any significant numbers. The book gives some indications of what God did in the hearts of the Korean people to prepare them to embrace the gospel. But the book also does well to show that it was very much God’s doing, not man’s.

The Korean Pentecost happened in 1907 in Pyengyang (Pyongyang in today’s media). It was a prayer meeting, a large gathering of Bible study leaders, basically. As these people began to confess their sins to God, and as the leader encouraged them to all pray together at the same time, God’s Spirit came upon that meeting in a tangible, powerful way. The church throughout the country was purified and blessed by that experience. It was not something those Presbyterian leaders were particularly pushing for – Presbyterians are usually more about good thoughts and good order than about frenzied charismatic experiences.

The test soon came, of whether that experience was from God or not. The occupying Japanese soon demanded that all Koreans (Christians included) pay regular homage to the Shinto shrines. Many Christians refused, and many Christians suffered intensely for it. It is an interesting test to think through: there are a variety of ways that a Christian could justify bowing to those shrines (and many Christians did it and justified it). But in hindsight, the martyrs’ resistance to that forced worship was so very right.

The resilience the church learned under the Japanese only prepared them for the worse trial under the Communists after Japanese surrender and the partition of Korea. The most memorable story for me was of a martyr’s wife warning him before his execution: if you recant, you are not my husband anymore.

Overall, it was a very good book to remind me of how real God is, how real our testing in this world will be, and how I need to be ready to relinquish everything in order to cling to Jesus.