Book Review – Clouds of Witnesses

• Hardcover: 286 pages
• Publisher: IVP Books (March 2011)
• Amazon
• Christian Book Distributors
• Excerpt on Scribd

Perhaps forty or seventy or a hundred years from now, someone will pen a valuable book about Christians who are living in places such as Iran or Syria or Tunisia today.

Like the seventeen men and women profiled in Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Clouds of Witnesses, many of the subjects of this future work will be individuals who will have held fast to the faith despite being at odds with their national culture; a culture that seems inhospitable to Christianity and where one might assume the church will never thrive.

Shi Meiyu was raised by parents who were early Chinese Christian converts. She studied medicine at the University of Michigan, one of the first women to enter a coeducational medical program. She returned to China and was instrumental in developing a hospital and training nurses—nurses who had far more responsibility than their counterparts in the United States.

Shi Meiyu required that her nursing students be trained as Christian evangelists as well as medical professionals.

This is a not uncommon theme in the book—many of the individuals profiled expected that Bible teaching and training of Christian workers would be paired with their efforts in social areas—and vice versa.

The account of Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) is virtually un-put-downable. The journey of this woman of India to faith in Christ did not happen easily, nor all at once. But her conversion and commitment were solid.

Ramabai had a life of incredible experiences and achievements, among which was the publication of The High-Caste Hindu Woman. This work helped educate Americans about the plight of Hindu women, many of whom faced a bleak life. Using proceeds from her book, she aimed to reenter their world in order to bring them hope. She began a school in Bombay, using some ingenious and bold methods to act within a Hindu social system to read aloud and introduce Christian Scriptures to students.

These few words can’t do her story justice, nor can they tell of the culture of the Hindu world she had been born into and knew so well. When you pick up Clouds of Witnesses, turn to her story first!

In addition, you won’t want to miss:

• Byang Kato, who noted that Christianity is deeply rooted in African history, and who outlined four workable, long-term goals for the church on this continent

• Sun Chu Kil, whose conversion and life during times of great national change in Korea greatly influenced the church there today

• Yao-Tsung Wu, who was so impressed with the Sermon on the Mount that it became the basis of the view of social justice he developed for China so all could have enough.

Readers may find some of these richly detailed narratives, with their abundance of unfamiliar proper names, places, and events a bit difficult to follow. But nevertheless, they’re interesting and worth pursuing.

Countless Christians are laboring within their own cultures today—some in hostile climates where we wonder how the church can ever grow—bringing hope, reform, the Word. Their stories, too, should be told one day this side of heaven.

—Reviewed by Pam Pugh, General Project Editor, Moody Publishers

* Thanks to InterVarsity Press for providing a review copy.

Philosophy Word of the Day – Absurd

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“That which is untenable or beyond the limits of rationality. When associated with existentialism, the absurd refers to there being a lack of any meaning inherent within the real world or in our actions. It gained currency in popular culture via Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd and works by Sartre and Camus. A phrase famously (and erroneously) attributed to Tertullian claimed that faith in an incarnate God was absurd: credo quia absurdum est—’I believe because it is absurd.’

“The actual quotation from Tertullian is: credibile est, quia ineptuin est—’It is credible because it is silly.’ (De carne Christi 5.4). Tertullian is sometimes taken to thereby valorize irrationality, but his thesis was instead that the truth of Christianity was absurd only in relation to Stoic, non-Christian philosophy. If Tertullian is correct, the tenability of Christianity is not contingent upon external, philosophical inspection.”

— A Dictionary of Philosophy of Religion, Charles Taliaferro and Elsa J. Marty, eds., 4.

Book Review: Getting the Reformation Wrong

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: IVP Academic (July, 2010)
• Amazon
• Christian Book Distributors
• James Payton’s Faculty Page

 

Getting the Reformation Wrong is a lucid and well-written work, one that everyone with an interest in early Protestant history ought to read. It’s literally flawless.

Okay, that was an overstatement. But Jim’s book is very good and, in my view, achieves well what he set out to accomplish. As the title suggests, Getting the Reformation Wrong is a corrective, and as such it does not survey the broad sweep of Reformation history so much as retell select portions of it. The book is not intended to replace overviews like Owen Chadwick’s The Reformation, in other words. Instead, it drills down into areas of common misunderstanding and, undergirded by recent scholarship, unearths a picture that’s messier and less simplistic than popular historiography about Protestant triumph over Catholic corruption would suggest.

That’s not to say that Jim is polemic throughout the book. His tone is calm and—in the vein of his subtitle, “Correcting Some Misunderstandings”—somewhat understated. He’s in command of his material, but he doesn’t bash the reader with it. If he has an axe to grind, it isn’t with younger Reformed enthusiasts (as I feared when I first saw the book’s title) but with poor history.

Some examples of misconceptions his book corrects:

· The Catholic church was hopelessly derailed before the Reformation

· Protestant theology arrived fully formed and the Reformers agreed on all important points of doctrine

· The doctrines of sola fide and sola scriptura were understood as making good works and tradition irrelevant

· Today’s Baptists are direct descendants of Reformation-era Anabaptists, who were themselves a readily definable group

· The counter-Reformation was a Catholic backlash against Protestantism without any reforming aims of its own

In place of these misconceptions, Jim sketches a Catholic church longing for change and revitalization before, during, and after the Reformation, a vast and diverse church incorporating both virtue and venality. The Reformers as a group were prone to disagreement and had no idea where they would end up, theologically or ecclesially, when they began their remonstrations. Sola fide and sola scriptura eroded over time, to the point where Martin Luther wouldn’t recognize much of what is proclaimed under their banners today. Some Baptists have little in common with Anabaptists apart from adult baptism, the counter-Reformation was a vital revivification movement in its own right, and so on. Myth-holders have little ground left to stand on by the time Jim is finished.

The strength of Getting the Reformation Wrong is Jim’s accessibility; he makes his points with the ease and graceful prose of someone who knows his material inside and out. However, my one complaint with the book is that most of the misconceptions he overturns simply aren’t taught in college or seminary classes, nor are they common in good histories. They may be popular-level misunderstandings, but as noted earlier, this book isn’t meant to be a primary text on the Reformation. No one who has read a good introductory text holds to these misconceptions any longer, so who exactly is Jim’s book for? I wonder if the type of volume he’s written accidentally misses those readers he most wanted to persuade.

Nonetheless, Getting the Reformation Wrong is both expert and readable, and Jim is a deft guide through some of the complex currents and theologizing of the Reformation. I highly recommend this book.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I have worked with Jim on past projects.)

— Reviewed by Madison Trammel.  Madison is a digital acquisitions editor at Zondervan.

* Thanks to InterVarsity Press for providing a review copy.