Hebrews: The Radiance of His Glory (John Piper) 5/5

OK, this isn’t a book, but there is more than enough material in these 52 sermons on the book of Hebrews to put together a commentary. Whilst not going through the book as slowly as he is currently going through Romans (170 sermons and counting!), he does not rush through, usually tackling 3-4 verses in each 30-45 minute sermon. And as anyone who has heard Piper before will tell you, this is not dry and academic expository material – Piper is passionate about getting his message across.

The book of Hebrews may seem a surprising book to choose for someone as vocally Calvinist as Piper because of its passages that seem to teach that you can lose your salvation. He deals with this, in my view, brilliantly, demonstrating that the author of Hebrews himself teaches the “perseverance of the saints” elsewhere in the very same book. So believing that the author was not confused, and did not contradict himself, he shows that endurance is the only true sign of a genuine faith (bringing him, not surprisingly, into line with the standard teaching of the Puritans).

The call to persevere in faith flows through the book, with John Piper repeatedly warning about the dangers of drifting in the Christian life. In fact, it would seem that much of the material for his recent (and excellent) book “Don’t waste your life” came from this sermon series.

Also prominent throughout the series is John Piper’s characteristicly honest treatment of the subject of suffering. Everyone experiences suffering in their life, and everyone will one day die. Add to that the fact that many great saints of Bible times and throughout church history have had do endure tremendous suffering and it is a wonder that preachers do not address this subject more often. John Piper doesn’t believe in the “I’ll worry about that when it happens” approach. His heart is for people who are ready and willing to suffer and die for the cause of the gospel, and who know how to make sense of it when it comes in whatever form (whether for the gospel or not).

You will need quite a lot of spare time to work your way through this series, but it will be time well spent. It would be ideal material for listening to on a daily commute. Prepare to be challenged to a seriously radical discipleship.

Power Through Prayer (E M Bounds) 4/5

This is just one of seven books E M Bounds has written on prayer. It is broken up into 20 chapters, each of which are fairly short making it easy to work your way through slowly. The book is directed at preachers and uncompromisingly calls them to put prayer as their top priority. Bounds argues that without prayer, a preaching ministry is useless, even if on the surface of things it seems to have some good qualities or results. The early chapters urge the preacher to spend more time in prayer, drawing repeatedly on the examples of great preachers from church history, demonstrating their own reliance on prayer. He is critical of those who are willing to put much time into studying theology or developing their rhetorical technique while neglecting prayer.

He sees prayer as the key to a successful and Holy Spirit anointed preaching ministry, almost to the point of saying that prayer is the only thing you need to get right – the rest will just follow. You could perhaps criticise him for coming across as legalistic in some places, and anti-intellectual in others but that would be to miss his main point. A preaching ministry is dead without prayer as surely as a human being is dead without oxygen. Don’t think you need to be a preacher to appreciate this book though, its call to prayer is a vital message for all Christians.

Paul For Everyone – Galatians & Thessalonians (N T Wright) 3/5

I had been looking forward to reading this book for quite some time, as the books of Galatians and Thessalonians contain subjects on which Wright has some unique things to say. Galatians of course brings up the issue of the “New Perspective on Paul”. As expected Wright does not see the book as an attack on teaching that the way for an individual to be saved is by works. Instead, he explains that faith, rather than circumcision is the “badge of membership” of God’s people, and that the issue at stake was God wanting to create a people from all nations rather than by Gentiles having to conform to Jewish law. While rejecting the Lutheran view of the law, Wright describes the law as a “babysitter”, performing a useful function, but no longer required when maturity is reached.

Thessalonians brings up the controversial issues of the rapture and the antichrist. Wright has argued strongly in other publications that the “coming” passages in the gospels are not to be read as prophecies of Christ’s “second coming”. Rather, they are seen as mirroring the Daniel 7 “coming” of the Son of Man to heaven (as opposed to from), or the long awaited return of YHWH and the end of the exile. The passage on the rapture is seen as symbolic language rather than literal. Wright provides good insight into the situation at the church in Thessalonica, linking up with the Acts accounts and demonstrating the relevance of Paul’s comments to them. In 2 Thessalonians, he avoids getting into debate on the identity of a future antichrist, favouring a partial preterist approach (he sees it as being fulfilled in AD70).

The Message of Daniel (Ronald Wallace) 4/5

Any commentary on the book of Daniel is in danger of getting bogged down in argument about dating and authorship and an overwhelming amount of background historical information. Wallace does well to provide a basic overview of the main arguments and necessary history as well as making his own case for Daniel as author without letting the introduction become unmanageably long.

The commentary itself is never far from practical application, particularly due to the parallels with Daniel’s situation for modern Western Christians. Like him, we are trying to live for God in a pagan culture, wondering what aspects of our culture we may accept, and what we ought to stand against. Wallace also draws out lessons from the contrasting attitudes of kings Nebuchadnezzar and Belteshazzar, both received judgement and mercy from God but responded very differently.

Whilst the first part of the book of Daniel is well known and loved, the second part is taken up with some vivid apocalyptic imagery which Christians either tend to skip over quickly or else come up with very fanciful interpretations of which 21st century characters and organisations it is refering to. Wallace takes a balanced approach, briefly explaining the options and drawing out relevant encouragements for us without feeling the need to explicitly determine who the 6th horn on the 4th beast is. He helpfully distinguishes between those prophecies clearly already fulfilled, and those that speak of the “end times”.

The Message of Hosea (Derek Kidner) 4/5

Of all the symbolic actions the Old Testament prophets were required by God to perform, Hosea’s is surely the most emotionally taxing. He married a prostitute, who bore three children, only one of whom was his, and then left him. Hosea then graphically modelled God’s grace and love by buying her back at great cost to be his wife again. Kidner has been careful to help the reader get a good overview of the flow of the book and its historical setting by providing some useful appendices (in fact, it would be nice if some of the other BST volumes could follow suit in this regard).

He breaks the book into two sections – the first being Hosea’s acted out parable of God’s love and then the prophetic message. In both parts, a vision of both the love and holiness of God shine through as the people are confronted for their sin and unfaithfulness yet the deserved judgement to come is not without hope because of God’s amazing grace. In the second part Kidner shows how Hosea consistently reveals their self-sufficiency, half-hearted religion and shallow repentance. The book ends with the amazing grace of God as he offers healing, refreshing and fruitfulness to those who will genuinely repent.

Paul for Everyone – The Pastorals (N T Wright) 3/5

Another highly readable volume in this series from Tom Wright. The books of 1 Timothy and Titus have a lot of practical teaching in them which he highlights nicely. In a volume this size, he doesn’t have space to argue the case for his interpretation of some of the gender-specific commands, but gives a brief defense of his egalitarian reading of them. For 2 Timothy, I prefer Stott’s BST volume, which better emphasises Paul’s passion for the safe handing over of the gospel. As one would expect though, Wright does an admirable job of highlighting some of the subversive use of vocabulary (e.g. good news, saviour) that challenges the claims of the Roman empire.

The Message of Psalms 1-72 – The Bible Speaks Today (Michael Wilcock) 3/5

There is a lot of material for a book of this size to cover, so don’t expect a verse by verse exposition. Given this limitation, Michael Wilcock devotes a surprising amount of space to discussing the historical situation behind the writing of each psalm. In most cases, of course, this is guesswork, but he makes some good cases for the links he proposes. The remainder of the space allotted to each psalm is spent considering the structure of the psalm, with general comments on each section. Another useful feature of the book is that during the early Psalms he highlights key words and phrases that will reoccur throughout the Psalter and provides definitions for them.

The Message of Thessalonians – The Bible Speaks Today (John Stott) 3/5

As with many of the BST volumes on shorter books, this one is more like a standard commentary with comments on almost every verse. Stott sees the overriding theme of 1 Thessalonians as Paul’s preoccupation with the gospel – its proclamation to the world and implications for the church. There is a useful and balanced discussion of the Parousia and rapture. Stott characterstically takes pains to differentiate between Paul’s apostolic gifting, which in his view is no longer available, and our current situation with the canon of Scripture complete.

The analysis of 2 Thessalonians continues along similar lines, with more teaching on the second coming and the problem of the antichrist to deal with as well. Again, Stott links Paul’s apostolic authority with his mandate to write Scripture which gives him an yet another opportunity to vigorously champion an evangelical commitment to the Bible.

Jesus and the Victory of God (N T Wright) 5/5

This substantial work, volume 2 of Wright’s “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series is widely recognised as a hugely important contribution to the “third quest” for the historical Jesus. Wright begins by surveying the recent trends in historical investigation into the life of Jesus. He takes the opportunity to provide a robust critique of the Jesus seminar’s findings (something that he has also done admirably elsewhere in various papers). He then proposes a method for examining the various accounts of the life of Jesus (the four canonical gospels, and the gospel of Thomas) with their stories and sayings and coming to an informed conclusion as to “what really happened”. Rather than, as many scholars favour, taking individual sayings and asking “did Jesus say that?” – which rarely leads to any kind of certain conclusion, he approaches it from a different angle. He looks at some of the key themes running through Jesus’ life. Celebratory meals, riddles, symbolic actions, remarkable healings, kingdom sayings and so on are to be found in “triple tradition” which gives us confidence that Jesus did actually do these type of things.

Wright shows how Jesus through symbolic praxis and subversive riddles predicted the downfall of the temple cult, effectively replacing the temple and Torah with himself. To answer the charge that many sayings or miracles of Jesus were simply invented by the early church to prove various points, Wright introduces the criteria of double similarity and dissimilarity which
he uses to gain strong historical footings in each of the categories he examines.

Having examined the teaching and praxis of Jesus, Wright slowly builds up his picture of what Jesus’ own sense of vocation was – arguing that we can determine this without needing to psychoanalyse him. He does this by working through the material that gives us insight into Jesus’ own worldview. The book closes with an examination of the reasons for Jesus death – moving backwards from the Romans’ intention to the Jews and then to Jesus himself. Finally Wright considers the question of the return of Yahweh to his people. Forgiveness of sins for first century Jews meant a real end to the exile – something that they believed had not happened yet. The pagan forces would be thrown out and the temple would be the focal point of God’s presence. But Wright argues that Jesus saw himself not just as a prophet announcing that return, but that in himself and through his suffering he was actually bringing that forgiveness – the end of the exile and a new kingdom where the temple was superceded.

This is a tremendously valuable book for gaining a stronger understanding of Jesus’ own sense of identity and calling, as well as appreciating the first century culture in which he lived. Many of the parables, “apocalyptic sayings” and symbolic actions (such as the cleansing of the temple and the last supper) will take on a new light as a result of his careful analysis. He ably demonstrates that we can approach the gospel records without prejudging them to be either infallible or full of myths and discover that they contain a great deal of reliable material purely on the basis of level-headed historical investigation. The extreme skepticism of many liberals is shown to be unwarranted.

The subject of the resurrection is reserved for the third volume in the series, which I hope to tackle soon (it has taken me over a year to read this one). There is a lively discussion group on Yahoo that talk about Wright’s writings, so ifyou read this book and have any questions you can ask them there. The fourth volume (probably on Paul) is eagerly anticipated, but due to his new role as Bishop of Durham it might be a while in coming.