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Is The Bride of Christ Beautiful Too?

Beauty is all the rage. In the Movie of the Moment (Barbie, obviously), there is a scene in which Barbie sits on a bench next to an elderly lady, looks at her intensely, and breathlessly exclaims, “You are beautiful.”

Studio executives suggested cutting the scene because it served no real point in advancing the plot. But the director stood firm, “If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”

[Further reflections on what the movie is “about” are in Tremendous Trifles here. (And if you have not signed up for the newsletter yet, this is a great time to do so!)]

Philip Ryken’s new book was timed perfectly to coincide with the Barbie Phenomenon. Beauty is Your Destiny sure sounds like it could be the subtitle of the movie. But Ryken isn’t writing about the extended advertisement for Mattel toys. He is writing about God.

First, the definition. What exactly is “Beauty”? If you have never tried to define it, then give it a try right now.

How good is your definition? Not great, right? It is a notoriously difficult word to define in a satisfactory way. Ryken too leads off with “the conundrum of definition.” “Today we do not seem to be much closer to an answer than we were two thousand years ago.” This is an odd state of affairs for a concept that we do not doubt exists.

What is the way out? Ryken first turns to the most beautiful thing that exists: God. If anything can be described as “beautiful,” then God is surely beautiful. He quotes Jonathan Edwards, noting that God is “infinitely the most beautiful and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but a reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who has an infinite fullness of brightness and glory; God is…the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty.” Ryken repeats the idea: “beyond simply being a divine attribute in its own right, beauty is an aspect of all God’s attributes.”

Starting with the idea that God is by definition beautiful, chapter by chapter, Ryken shows how God’s beauty radiates outwards to other things. Because God is beautiful, God’s creation is beautiful. The beauty of the created material world includes the culmination of that work; humans are beautiful too. (And, in a chapter which is rather specific amongst the rest of the chapters about broad themes, Ryken explains that the way humans create new humans is also beautiful—at least when the creative act happens within the bonds of matrimony.)

God, creation, and humans are all beautiful, so it naturally follows that the moment when God and Humanity combine in the incarnation of Christ is also beautiful. Following that beautiful moment when Jesus humbled himself and became human, we find another supreme act of beauty in the midst of the supreme act of ugliness: the crucifixion.

Throughout this exploration of the ways God’s beauty overflows to all these other things, Ryken draws heavily on thinkers of the past to show that this beauty has been widely recognized for thousands of years. In the chapter on the beauty of creation, for example, he quotes Chesterton:

I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud.

He follows this description of the beauty of creation with admonitions on how we should think about what God has created. We should pay attention to all this beauty; we should adore the beauty of the world; and we should protect that beautiful creation. Beauty, in other words, is not something to acknowledge in passing. We should continually and consciously immerse ourselves in what is beautiful, enjoying it and doing what we can to help others enjoy it too.

Similarly, in the chapter on the incarnation, Ryken asks what it is about that act that makes it so beautiful. The humility of what Jesus has done. The holiness of the incarnation. And the sacrifice inherent in the incarnation leading to crucifixion. These are all aspects of the beauty of Christ.

Chapters 1 through 7 of this book are a long reflection on all these beautiful things. A few discordant notes pop up now and then (sometimes beautiful things are destroyed by the activity of humans), but the tone of these chapters is continuously uplifting, pointing our attention towards the Good and the True and the Beautiful.

Chapter 8 thus comes as a complete shock. A chapter entitled “Beautiful Community: The Beauty of Christ’s Bride” sounds like it will be more of the same. The first two paragraphs describe the image of a transcendent bride representing the community of God’s people on earth. Then the third paragraph:

We need this vision because in the present time, we are living a different reality. The church we see is not as beautiful as this painting—not as fully global, as genuinely diverse, as truly unified, as clearly illuminated by the gospel, or as radiant in its witness. These shortcomings cause us to long for the day when the people of God will finally look as beautiful as our savior does.

That tone continues. The church should be beautiful.

Why then, are we so ugly? Everywhere we look, we catch glimpses of the beauty that our Creator has put into the world—his divine beauty displayed in creation and reflected in the people he saved. But we also see the deformity of sin wherever we look, and sometimes the church looks like the ugliest community in the world.

The ugliest community in the world? Really? Obviously there are some things about the modern church that are not so great, but can Ryken truly not imagine even uglier communities outside the church? Is God so absent from the modern church that there is nothing uglier in the world?

Ryken proceeds to explain what we all should be doing to make the church more beautiful: Practice Hospitality, Give Generously, Do Justice, Pursue Reconciliation, Live in Christian Unity. These are all very sound admonitions to Christians everywhere. But there is no escaping the fact that when Ryken looks at the church, he does not see beauty; he just sees ugliness:

Today we face a strong temptation to give up on the church—to watch from home, sit in the back, sleep in, or stop going altogether. Sometimes, in its ugliness, the church has become for us the scene of the crime. Nevertheless, God has promised to beautify his blood-bought bride.

At some point, God has promised to make the church beautiful, but right now Ryken just doesn’t see it.

In a different book, Ryken’s complaints about the modern church would fit right in. But, what are they doing here? Ryken looks at God and creation and humanity and sex and the incarnation and the crucifixion and steadfastly points out how beautiful these things are even if they sometimes appear ugly to us now. But when he turns to the church, the entire discussion changes into a focus on descriptions of ugliness.

Looking out at the world of Christians in the church today, does Ryken really see no beauty? Does he not see the people showing love to their neighbors, the people being light in dark places, the people meeting material needs with generosity and love? Does he not see the hospitals? Does he not see the schools? Does he not believe that Wheaton College, where he is the President, is not a magnificent and beautiful work of the Universal Church?

The change in tone when Ryken comes to this chapter is truly stunning. A chapter focusing on how the church is (not “could be” but “is”) beautiful, with a section noting that the church is not nearly as beautiful as it could be, would keep up the theme of a book which has a whole chapter on how the crucifixion (which surely is uglier than the modern church, right?) is really beautiful because of all the good that came out of such an ugly act. The chapter on the beauty of the creature made in the image of God is not centered on the Fall; it is not a chapter devoted to the ugliness of people corrupted by sin. So, why doesn’t the chapter on the church have the same emphasis? Is the church uglier than the imago dei which makes up the church?

The problem here is not that Ryken is noting the ugliness of the church. Original Sin is real. People are truly and totally depraved. I get that. If Ryken wanted to write a book about the ugliness of the world, he would have no lack of examples. But, that is not the message of the bulk of this book. In a book showing that the beauty of God radiates throughout all of creation, then surely the beautiful works the bride of Christ has done by the grace of God deserve an exploration too.

Let us not lose sight, though, of Ryken’s main point. Once you realize the beauty of God, the beauty of what Christ has done, then it immediately follows that beauty is indeed your destiny. There is beauty all around you; you should notice that beauty and enjoy that beauty and do everything you can to protect and enhance that beauty. Lift your eyes up off the ugliness and notice the beauty of God shining forth everywhere. Or as Chesterton put it in a poem Ryken discusses:

The world is hot and cruel,
We are weary of heart and hand,
But the world is more full of glory
Than you can understand.

Related Posts:
Fitzgerald, F Scott The Beautiful and Damned, “A Cautionary Tale”
Kingsolver, Barbara Prodigal Summer “The Beauty of Appalachia”

(Alas, a not so beautiful note to end a reflection on beauty. The publisher insists that I remind you that federal regulations require that I tell you that I received a copy of this book from Crossway so that I could write a review of this book on the topic of beauty. Having done so, I now encourage you to think on more beautiful things than federal regulations.)

Is Phantastes Worth Reading?

“Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, Farewell.”

That is the end of George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance.

Phantastes has a fame that far outstrips the number of people who have read it. Why? Because one cold evening at the bookstall in a railway station, C.S. Lewis picked up a copy in a “dirty jacket.” (The “dirty jacket” is a really odd detail to mention.) Lewis marks that moment as one of the biggest events of his life. As he later reminisces in Surprised By Joy, “I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.” “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer.”

With that note in his autobiography, Lewis inaugurated an eternal interest in MacDonald’s book. The book that sent the great Christian apologist on the path of conversion to Christianity! What could be more exciting than that? To those for whom Lewis is their Patron Saint, Phantastes is like a Holy Relic. But wait, there is more! In The Great Divorce, Lewis has MacDonald play the role of Beatrice, his guide to Heaven!

But, truth be told, the three pages in Surprised By Joy which describe Phantastes do not exactly make the book come alive. In describing the book, Lewis gets completely wrapped up in his mystical language of Joy. Piecing it together, it is obvious that this book is in the genre of fiction Lewis had grown to love—tales of faeries and Norse Gods and medieval legends—and that somehow this book made all that realm he loved seem more real than reality. But, Lewis never really explains the book. His description was just enough to make me think, “I should probably read Phantastes someday,” but not even remotely enough to make me want to rush out and track down a copy.

Interestingly, I do not seem to be alone in that reaction. I never saw a copy in a bookstore or ran across any mention of the book outside of discussions about Lewis. Sure enough, when Lewis would get discussed, sooner or later a mention of Phantastes would be made. But, again, I never met anyone who said that they had actually read the book, let alone that it was life changing or even recommending that I should read it.

I finally read it. Having done so, I finally understand its strange reputation.

The quick evaluation: it’s good, but not great. [Insert gasps of horror from those addicted to Lewis.]

It is really obvious why Lewis loved it, why it had such a huge impact on his life. It is a very self-conscious book, a painstakingly deliberate attempt to take the genre of the fairy story and use it to convey the essence of Christianity. It contains a nonstop series of episodes, every one of which tries to capture the inexpressible parts of the nature of God and what Christ has done. It’s not exactly a Christian allegory. It is more a mystical book which conveys the same impression as the mystical parts of Christian theology. You read it and you recognize the religious feeling.

I am well aware that the last paragraph makes zero sense to anyone who has not read MacDonald. Indeed, it probably makes less sense than Lewis’ attempt to explain the impact of the book. Phantastes seems to defy explanation, which is exactly the point of the book.

Here is another way of describing it. Take any Neil Gaiman book and make it far less concrete. There is a real world and there is this other world lingering right outside the real world; this is, by the way, a summary of every story Gaiman ever wrote. But Gaiman explains the connections between the worlds. Phantastes conveys a sense one gets when contemplating things that are there but just beyond our comprehension; the connections of the fairy world and the real world are just hovering there, incapable of being explained.

You, Dear Reader, are now exclaiming, “Enough with the mystical feelings stuff. What is the book about?”

Plot summary: Anodos, our hero, wakes up one morning in Fairy Land. He wanders around the land for many days. Then one day he wakes up back in the real world.

Ah, but what does he do in Fairy Land? Therein lies the problem with describing the book. Anodos really does simply wander around. It is just a steady stream of episodes, with no apparent forward motion. A few characters show up more than once. But, there is no quest, no grand thing that Anodos must accomplish. There are villains, but they also just wander in and out. There are also allies who join Anodos every now and then. Some inexplicable episodes are later explained when a character pops back in for a chat.

I enjoyed reading the wanderings of Anodos. But, if I had read this when I was younger, back when I was obsessed with fantasy literature but before I knew how to read well, I would not have enjoyed the book at all. As a straight fantasy story, it is a miserable failure. This is undoubtedly why the book is not nearly as popular as Lewis would have liked it to be. Nobody coming from The Lord of the Rings and picking up Phantastes looking for more of the same is going to be impressed at all.

Since the book doesn’t make it as a ripping good yarn, how does it rate as a disguised work of philosophy? Again, it is good, not great. It echoes a lot of the themes that Lewis promulgated—the influence of MacDonald on Lewis’ thinking is obvious.

Consider:

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality?—not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still. Yea, the reflecting ocean itself, reflected in the mirror, has a wondrousness about its waters that somewhat vanishes when I turn towards itself. All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass….In whatever way it may be accounted for, of one thing we may be sure, that this feeling is no cheat; for there is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning. Even the memories of past pain are beautiful; and past delights, though beheld only through clefts in the grey clouds of sorrow, are lovely as Fairy Land. But how have I wandered into the deeper fairyland of the soul, while as yet I only float towards the fairy palace of Fairy Land! The moon, which is the lovelier memory or reflex of the down-gone sun, the joyous day seen in the faint mirror of the brooding night, had rapt me away.

That is a nice description of the idea that this world is not all there is. That world of reflections is showing us a glimpse of heaven, a world more beautiful than anything contained in this world. That feeling that the reflection world is more beautiful than the real world is not a cheat; “there must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.” Though now we see through a glass darkly…

Or this:

They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men, are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts.

Again, MacDonald draws out that sense that the physical world, the laws of nature, are only a part of the great cosmic dance in which we participate.

There are also the moral lessons:

Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, “I am what I am, nothing more.”…I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal. Now, however, I took, at first, what perhaps was a mistaken pleasure, in despising and degrading myself. Another self seemed to arise, like a white spirit from a dead man, from the dumb and trampled self of the past. Doubtless, this self must again die and be buried, and again, from its tomb, spring a winged child; but of this my history as yet bears not the record. Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul: will it be as a solemn gloom, burning with eyes? or a clear morning after the rain? or a smiling child, that finds itself nowhere, and everywhere?

That passage the sort of thing that gives the sole reason for reading Phantastes. If you like the sudden appearance of moral lessons drawn from the Bible and then dropped into a tale, lessons that make you long for greater understanding, lessons that make you think you are surely missing something important, then Phantastes is a book you should read.

Just don’t mistake the book for something by Tolkien or Gaiman. Don’t expect that the lessons will be succinctly explained. Don’t expect that the allegories will be clean and obvious. If you are willing to go along for the ride with an interesting raconteur telling tales that are somehow larger than life, then you will enjoy Phantastes. And maybe, if you are a lot like Lewis, it will change your life.

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Lewis, C. S. The Silver Chair “Can’t You Read the Sign?”

How to Plant a Church

“The problem comes when we aren’t conscious or honest about the real reasons we plant churches. I professed to plant churches for the glory of Christ, but my practice had a lurking desire that compromised our work. I wanted glory.”

That is Nathan Knight, a pastor of a church in Washington, DC, and the author of Planting by Pastoring: A Vision for Starting a Healthy Church.

It is not hard to see why someone like Knight would be captivated by the idea of glory. The church planting movement in modern America all too often makes it seem like personal glory is the whole point of planting a church.

Consider the familiar template. Christians are told that God wants his church to grow, which is obviously true. Then some statistics are trotted out to show that there are a whole lot of unchurched areas, places where there are lots of people who do not regularly go to church. A crying need! Isaiah is quoted: “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send?’” (ESV) Will you be Isaiah and say “Here I am! Send me” or will you continue to live your safe life? Answer the call!

Then when you do, you find an entire set of resources at your disposal. Endless books and videos and conferences to give you the secrets to successfully planting a church in the 21^st century. You need these resources because you don’t want your new church to fail, do you?

The industry that has sprung up around the best practices for planting a church has a strange feature. It looks a whole lot like the industry that has sprung up around the best practices for starting a business. To be a church planter, you are encouraged to get the church equivalent of an MBA.

Indeed, as I thought about this, I realized that it is rather surprising that some entrepreneurial college has not launched a Masters in Church Administration (MCA) program, where aspiring church planters can go learn the latest techniques. Then I googled it, and, of course, there are such masters programs. Masters in Church Management seems to be the preferred moniker, though, presumably to mask the fact that it is just a spiritual MBA program.

Knight takes this entire way of thinking about church planting to task.

I wanted to write this book because I can’t help but notice the absence of the church in most church-planting resources. I’ve read more than a dozen books on church planting. I’ve watched talks online. I’ve read blog posts, I’ve listened to podcasts, and I’ve attended conferences and assessments. I’ve talked with “strategists,” and I’ve met with future planters. And you know what? Ecclesiology is hardly mentioned!

Ah, yes, ecclesiology, that branch of theology related to the church. Let’s face it, the theology of the church is really boring compared to that breezy feel-good tome offering the latest techniques on mounting a successful ad campaign for your church. Why bother studying Acts or the letters of Paul?

Knight begins the book by noting the errors of church planters who think about the four S’s: “size, speed, sufficiency and spread.” That is the list of traits of a successful commercial establishment. Instead, Knight encourages church planters to think about the four C’s: “character, capability, conviction, and compassion.” The C’s are the marks of a faithful Christians, not the marks of an entrepreneur.

The corruptions arising from thinking about starting a church in the same way we think about starting a business are legion. Knight catalogs all sorts of errors. Consider the “Target Group.” If you want to build a successful business, you obviously need to identify your customer base and then target your advertising to that set of people. So, if you are starting a church, who is your target audience? Millennials? Young families? Singles? Military families? Liberals or Conservatives (obviously not both)? Pick your target and build your church!

Except…as Paul would be quick to tell you, there is One Church. Does the gospel message only apply to a subset of humanity? Is the church family just people who share your characteristics? As Knight puts it, “Each person with his or her myriad of backgrounds and experiences collected together as one united family in Christ is unlike anything else in all the world.” Does the world need another cultural gathering of like-minded people? Isn’t the point of church that there are all these people who are different from you and that you are all working together for the common aim of bringing glory to God?

At times Knight seems to relish in not even trying to follow the advice of church planting gurus. He tells the story of a man who once told him in a room full of people, “I thought your sermon was boring.” Knight (rather churlishly) replied, “Do you believe it is my job as a pastor to entertain you?” He then goes on: “The conversation that followed centered on the preacher’s need to not be boring, yet still faithful. As Martin Lloyd-Jones said, “The preacher must never be dull, and he must never be boring.… How can a man be dull when he is handling such themes?’”

As Knight goes on to argue, he really can’t help it that he is boring. He has no idea how to put a sermon together. He is not a performer. And yet:

These folks endured my boring preaching. Some of them still endure it! Why? Because as I opened and explained and applied God’s word, they smelled the aroma of life—not only from the pulpit but over meals in restaurants and during walks around the block.…Faithfulness may not be flashy, and it might look quite boring. But it leads to fruitfulness—every time.

Be Boring Boldly! Knight is onto something here. The apostles were not celebrities when they were called to spread the gospel. Yet, the gospel spread. Churches popped up all over the place, despite the fact that nobody in that era had ever read a book on church planting. How is that possible? It’s almost like the power of the gospel message doesn’t need the help of the very model of the modern major-general.

The message of Knight’s book is thus quite solid, and I suspect that there are quite a few prospective and active church planters who will benefit immensely from learning that if they want to be successful, they should toss the help manual and instead read the Bible itself and model themselves after Christ. Mixing metaphors, Knight points out that Christ is the Great Shepherd and God wants shepherds to plant churches. If you are starting a church and are more focused on numbers than on the needs of the person right in front of you, then you are missing the whole point of being a church planter.

In one way, though, Knight’s book is quite depressing. There really is not anything particularly deep or profound in this book. That is not an insult. Knight agrees:

I assume no faithful follower of Jesus will disagree with anything I’ve said. So why say it? My burden comes down to a matter of emphasis. What I’m trying to do in this book is to emphasize various essentials that are often assumed or taken for granted.

If a church planter or a pastor in quest of more resources to help them figure out what to do picks up Planting by Pastoring instead of the latest crypto-MBA manual, then some good will have been done. It would be nice to live in a world where church planters did not need to be reminded that those neighbors they should be loving are the people they meet on the side of the road and not the target group of an ad campaign. We don’t live in that world.

The local congregation of which I am a part was started almost thirty years ago. It is still going strong. One of the most important things I ever learned about church was from a conversation with one of the gentleman, Marv Kuipers, who helped start the church. The church planters spent countless hours thinking about how to start the church, working out the details of what was truly important and how the church would be managed. I was talking with Marv a few months after the first service, raising the question of how long this new church plant would be around. He said, “It will be here as long as God wants it to be here.” As long as this local congregation is faithfully doing the work of God, then none of us really needed to worry about the rest. God can take care of whether the church grows or dies out. Our job was much simpler: be faithful Christians and glorify God.

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Beaty, Katelyn Celebrities for Jesus “The Celebrity-Industrial Complex”

(The legalese: Crossway sent me a copy of the book to review. It would be nice to live in a world where this notice was not legally required. Alas, there are people who write nice things about products just to get more free products. So, this legal bit is required. Don’t you feel better now that I have fulfilled my legal obligation?)

The Sovereignty of God

“At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever,
for his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
and his kingdom endures from generation to generation;
all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,
and he does according to his will among the host of heaven
and among the inhabitants of the earth;
and none can stay his hand
or say to him, ‘What have you done?’”
Daniel 4: 34-35, ESV

The story of King Nebuchadnezzar in the fourth chapter of Daniel is one that fascinated me since I read it in a picture book as a kid. He grew very proud of the empire he had built, exclaiming, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” And the next thing you know, as Daniel had prophesized, he becomes like a beast of the field until he knew “that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.” The quotation at the outset is Nebuchadnezzar coming to his senses, realizing that God is sovereign.

Conrad Mbewe relates this story early in his slim volume Is God Really Sovereign? Part of Crossway’s “Church Questions” series,” this is a 37 page extended essay on the topic. Mbewe is the chancellor of the African Christian University and a Baptist pastor in Zambia.

The first part of the book is a rather winsome exposition of the completeness of God’s sovereignty. It is a commonplace among Christians that “God is Sovereign,” but as Mbewe documents, the extent of the sovereignty is much larger than many Christians imagine. God’s plan was created before time began, He created the world in which that plan would unfold, He has total control over history, He included a plan of salvation, He works out that plan of salvation in history, and He will one day execute his plan for final judgement.

How detailed is this control? Mbewe explains:

But God not only sustains the universe, he is also intricately involved in ordering all the events of every one of his creatures right down to the smallest detail. The next time you’re playing a board game, consider that according to scripture every roll of the dice was planned and purposed by God: “The lot is cast into the lap, but it’s every decision is from the Lord” (Prov. 16:33).

Many people do not like the idea of God’s sovereignty being so all-encompassing. But, for Mbewe, this doctrine is not only important because it is True, but because it causes great joy in those who understand it.

I want you to know the God of the Bible. I want you to find God’s sovereignty to be as life-giving as I do. I want it to be a cordial tonic for your soul, just as I have found God’s character and power a comforting balm and great hope in my Christian life.

So far, so good. Reading this description of the extent of God’s sovereignty makes it very clear that that Mbewe is a rather engaging, inspiring, and charismatic speaker. Everything is so cheerful and happy. Until…well, you know…

Every discussion of the idea of the total sovereignty of God sooner or later comes crashing into the problem of Evil. If God is sovereign, why is there sin and evil? This question is so common, trying to answer it has a name: theodicy. Mbewe faces the question squarely. Yes, it seems like there is a problem here. God is sovereign, holy and good. Horrible things happen in the world. Surely something must give. It is impossible to deny that horrible things happen. If Mbewe is right, then we cannot avoid concluding that God is also sovereign and good and holy. What then?

God brings disaster on a city, and yet Scripture maintains that he remains holy and good. His sovereignty doesn’t compromise his holiness, and his holiness doesn’t compromise his sovereignty. In fact, the biblical authors never even acknowledge any supposed tension between these two ideas. They simply reveal that God is sovereign, holy, and good.

That answer will satisfy nobody. Mbewe knows this, so he goes on to attempt a fuller explanation. He arrives at this maxim: “God has a hand in the action of the sin but not in the sin of the action.” Clearly that distinction makes some sense to Mbewe. His example is the story of Joseph, in which Joseph says to his brothers “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” To be sure, that is a good example of how God and man can be looking at the same event in very different ways. But the good of Joseph being able to provide food for his family is pretty obvious. Translate the idea to things of greater horror: God had a hand in the fact that genocide happened, but had no hand in the sin of the genocide. Yes, as a sentence that works, but would it reconcile anyone to the problem of believing simultaneously in the goodness and the sovereignty of God? Don’t very many examples of suffering and evil create exactly the same problem?

To his credit, and unlike most writers on this subject, Mbewe is willing to acknowledge that his answer to this question is not full satisfactory. “We simply have to confess that we are shortsighted. We may have to leave some questions unanswered.”

That is the secret of this short book. It does not try to do too much. If you or someone you know is looking for a quick primer on the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, one which will make you appreciate this aspect of God, then this book is a charming starting place.

[An aside about the marvels of the internet age. That book I loved when I was a kid about Nebuchadnezzar turning into a beast has long been lost. But, with a Google search for children’s picture books about this story, I found the book! Copies are even on sale at Amazon! And, as an added bonus, over on YouTube, someone reads the book! My biggest shock—I had no memory that the book was written in rhyme.]

(The Obligatory note: yes, Crossway sent me a copy of the book (Mbewe’s, not the The Braggy King of Babylon) so that I could review it here. Yes, for legal reasons they request that I note this fact. Yes, if you find this fact important, then you probably shouldn’t be bothering to read the things I write about books. Then again, it isn’t really clear to me why anyone would suspect I am being dishonest in my reviews.)

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The God of Analogies

“All human knowledge is analogical…These analogies have their origin in the perfect knowledge of God….Human knowledge of God is the indispensable background for our knowledge of anything at all…”

That is from the conclusion of Vern S. Poythress’ Redeeming Reason: A God-Centered Approach.

Poythress has created a cottage industry in Redeeming Books. Ere now, he has Redeemed Mathematics, History, Philosophy, Science, and Sociology. Redeeming Reason is thus a sort of Ur-Redeeming—before thinking about any subject we must first redeem our reason.

What does it mean to redeem reason? In what way was reason heretofore unredeemed? Wittgenstein encapsulates the error. Poythress notes that Tractatus Logico-Philosphicaus “is remarkable, but very far from a Christian approach,” which is a shocking offhand claim to toss into a footnote. Wittgenstein’s problem—he didn’t ground his method in God.

Apparently all the reasoning that has gone on before Poythress came along has suffered from being improperly grounded in something other than God. It is neither a coincidence no incidental that three-quarters of the footnotes with citations in this book are to other things written by Poythress. This is not a summary of what others in the long history of philosophy have said about reason; indeed, it isn’t even clear that Poythress sees himself as building on that historical foundation.

What is this new way of conceiving of reason? Analogies. All proper reasoning is simply an analogy. We think about God, but God is too complicated for us to understand, so what we do is create analogies of God and the creation of those analogies is reason.

Here is an example, the first one Poythress provides in this book. Logical thought, a subset of reasoning, is an analogy of God. How? Consider the principle of noncontradiction, that two contradictory things cannot be simultaneously true. A and Not-A cannot both be true. It’s simple logic. Now if we think about this idea of a logical principle, what can we say about it? The Law of Non-Contradiction in specific, and logical principle in general, is: omnipresent, eternal, immutable, immaterial, invisible, truthful, reliable, omnipotent, transcendent, and immanent. You know what else is escribed by that exact same list of adjectives? God! Logic is an analogy of God! QED! “The law of noncontradiction testifies to God.”

If you are unpersuaded that the fact that Poythress has found a list of adjectives describing both logic and God is proof that logic only exists because of God, then you are simply still stuck in ways of reasoning which are not analogically based on God.

In one of the more surprising twists in Poythress’ argument, God Himself is an analogy of God:

Analogy, we have said, involves both similarity and difference. The similarity that belongs to an analogy is a reflection of the unity that is in God. This unity is represented by God the Father. The difference that belongs to an analogy is a reflection of the diversity that is in God. His diversity is represented preeminently by God he Son, Finally, the analogy itself, as a multifaceted relation, is a reflection of the Holy Spirit, who preeminently reflects relations.

It is analogies all the way down! All reason is composed of analogies. A is an analogy of B and B is an analogy of C and C is an analogy of God and God is an analogy of Himself, and so on to infinite regress.

How does this work? Consider arithmetic. As stated above, logic is an analogy of God. Mathematics is a subset of logic in which special symbols are used. 1+2=2 is just a set of symbols. Then when I say, “One apple plus one apple equals two apples,” I am creating an analogy of the set of symbols which is a subset of logic which is an analogy of God who is an analogy of Himself.

This may sound like a simplification of the argument of this book, but it isn’t. Poythress himself collapses the argument of this book to a single page in the conclusion, so the bulk of the book is just a seemingly endless set of examples of analogies based on other analogies. If you want to make sense of Isaiah’s idea that “the daughter of Zion is like a lodge in a cucumber field,” you just need to think through the myriad of ways that phrase can be reasoned out in an analogical sense.

But through the whole book, I could not shake the feeling that I have read all this before. This is where Poythress’ penchant for self-citation becomes problematic. There is another philosopher of some note who has a theory that all our knowledge is merely a reflection of some perfect knowledge that exists outside of our universe. That triangle you see isn’t actually a triangle (lines have no breadth or depth, so we literally cannot see the lines that make up an actual triangle). Rather, the triangle you see is a form of the Ideal Triangle. There is also an Ideal Dog and an Ideal Beauty, and everything we see is just some sort of form of these Ideal Forms. In other words, all human knowledge and all things on Earth are simply analogies of these Ideal Forms, or as they are commonly called, the Platonic Forms.

What is troubling for Poythress’ book is that he is simultaneously arguing that reason must begin with God and presenting a form of reason that sure seems a lot like what Plato was arguing. Now maybe Poythress sees no similarity between his account of reason and Plato’s account, but when the most famous philosopher has an argument that sure looks a lot like your argument, then maybe, just maybe, you ought to at least mention that fact. Surely it would be worth a chapter in a book about how reason is simply an analogy to something outside direct human experience to discuss how your theory is different than Plato’s theory that reason is simply an analogy to something outside direct human experience.

I read this book because of my long fascination with how reason and faith interact. It isn’t Poythress’ fault that this book isn’t about what I assumed it was about. But, I am very stuck on trying to figure out the answer to this question: Who is the audience for this book?

The argument itself is self-contained. If you accept it, well and good. But, is the argument persuasive if you don’t initially accept it? Of course not. If you don’t accept that all reasoning is analogical, then an analogical argument that reason is analogical is by definition not persuasive. To accept the argument requires some form of revelation from God.

Poythress acknowledges this need for revelation, which then complicates the argument of the book. If God has not revealed Himself to the Reader, then there is no way the Reader will be persuaded by this book. That problem is not of much concern to Poythress. But, what if God has revealed Himself to the Reader and the Reader is perfectly willing to accept that God is the Author of All Things? Is it necessarily true that such a reader will also accept the argument that reason is definitionally analogical? If a Reader does not accept the analogical argument because the argument in favor of the argument assumes the argument is correct, what then? Does accepting this account of Reason also require a second revelation from God about the nature of reason? If accepting the conclusion of the book requires God to reveal to you that the argument of the book is true, then why do we need the book?

Who then is the audience for this book? I am truly unsure.

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(Crossway wants to make sure that you The Reader know that the US Federal Government requires me to disclose this shocking bit of news: Crossway sent me a copy of this book so that I could review it here. The Federal Government wants to make sure that you are not deluded if I am only saying nice things about a book because I got a free copy. The oddity of this regulatory burden is particularly apparent when the review being written about the book is nowhere near as laudatory as the advertising wing of a publisher would like. Fortunately for you, Dear Reader, Crossway only asks me for honest reviews and I only write things I actually believe. Shocking, to be sure.)

How To Read The Good Book

“If this robust three-fold mode of reading happened naturally and was common today, we would not need the book you’re holding in your hands. But in reality we often don’t read this way.”

The book (which, truth be told, you are unlikely to be holding in your hands while you read this here review) is Come and See: The Journey of Knowing God through Scripture.

While the author Jonathan Pennington doesn’t frame his book this way, Come and See reads like an appendix to an excellent book I have been recommending to people for decades: How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren.

The chief problem with Adler and van Doren’s book is finding a way to convince people to read it. From the title, most people assume it is about acquiring literacy. It is not. The book assumes the reader is literate, which is good because writing a book for people who are not literate would be a bit odd. How to Read a Book explains to literate people how to actually read a book, not in the sense of reading the words, but in the sense of getting the most you can out of a book. It is a rigorous practical manual, explaining the four levels of reading, and what you need to know to read different literary genres. If, for example, you try to read novels and poems and scientific works and history books in the same way, you are a very poor reader. You will get vastly more enjoyment and knowledge and wisdom from books if you learn how to be a more active reader. How to Read a Book is not only excellent, but as the authors explain, it is a practical book and they happily explain how you should read their own book.

For all of its amazing breadth, How to Read a Book does not directly discuss how to read the Bible. If you read with attention, you can piece together advice on good Bible reading. The history books need to be read differently than Paul’s letters. It explores many of the questions a reader should be asking while reading the Bible? It explains why it is really important to read books in the Bible as a whole unit in one sitting so that you can see how the book coheres. And so on.

Pennington, though, has made the challenge of learning to read the Bible a lot easier. As Adler and van Doren would surely agree, the Bible is not just a collection of history and practical books. Learning to read the Bible deserves its own explanation, and Pennington’s book could easily be tacked on as an appendix to Adler and van Doren’s book. Fortunately, you don’t have to read How to Read a Book first. Come and See reads perfectly well as a stand-alone book.

As the quotation at the outset of this review explains, Pennington is very concerned that most people are very poor readers of the Bible. I fully share his concern. (Indeed, in an indirect way that concern was the origin of this here blog and the accompanying newsletter.) Most Bible reading these days is ripping short passages of scripture out of context and then reading or listening to a short exposition of that passage full of folksy anecdotes and an immediate practical application. There are no other books which are read the way that most people read the Bible. Take the most recent book you read an imagine someone reading it by flipping to a random paragraph or chapter and treating it as a standalone passage. Why don’t we read other books that way? It is a horrible way to read books.

This raises an immediate challenge for a book like Come and See. Who is the audience for this book? People who don’t know how to read the Bible well. But, as Pennington’s concern indicates, most people don’t know that they don’t know how to read the Bible well, so how will they know they should read a book about how to read The Good Book? It is an odd circular problem.

Setting that problem aside for a moment, what does Pennington have to say in Come and See? The book divides the reading experience into three parts, bringing them all back together in the end to note that if you aren’t simultaneously reading all three ways together, you are not reading the Bible well.

First there is informational reading. There are two parts to this, and the simpler one is understanding that there are very different literary genres in the Bible and the different genres need to be read in different ways. If you do not understand that the gospel of Luke is meant to be read in a very different way than the book of Psalms, you are reading poorly. Pennington shows how to notice what is important in the assorted genres in the Bible

But informational reading also includes a lot of the basics of how to read any book. The books in the Bible were written in particular times and particular places, so learning more about the world in which the books were written illuminates all sorts of details about the book. If you don’t understand, for example, how first century Greece was different than 21^st century America, then there is no way to understand many parts of the New Testament. In addition to knowing the background, it is important to see how a given book works as whole. The gospels, for example, are carefully constructed narratives, where how a given episode is described and which episodes come immediately before and after it are a large part of the overall message of the book. Treating each incident as an isolated event misses a lot of what the book is doing. And finally, to read a book well it is good to know how other people read the same book; if you only ever see what you personally notice in a book or what one other person notices in a book, then you will miss the riches of the book.

Informational reading is exactly the sort of thing you can also learn in the Adler and van Doren book. It is the sort of reading we should have all learned in school, but most of us never did. If someone never learned how to read poetry, is it any wonder that the person is a very bad reader of the Psalms?

But informational reading is only one part of reading the Bible well. It is good to understand that the Bible is a book that can be read according to its assorted genre types. But, it is more than that. It is also a theological book and to be fully understood, it needs to be read with an understanding of the theology underlying it.

“Theology” is one of those words that conjures up images of large dense and very dull tomes read by people who never see the sunlight. Reading theologically does not mean you need to blow the dust off of molding books. Reading theologically means understanding that for a few thousand years, people have been studying Scripture and have discovered quite a few things about God which can be pieced together by reading deeply. When we come to the Bible, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. For example, the Old and New Testaments combined teach about the Trinitarian nature of God—that there is one God, that God has three parts, and each part is fully God. To read Scripture well means reading it with an understanding of such theological basics. We don’t even have to spend time figuring out what constitutes the theological basics. That is the point of the Creeds; we just need to read things like the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed and understand that these are the basic truths with which a theological reading of Scripture begins.

To read without an understanding of theology, to imagine that when you, the Reader, open the Bible you are exploring strange new worlds is to guarantee that you will be a bad reader of the Bible. Reading theologically is the way to unlock the depths of the teachings about God, to see that the book is deeper than any human mind, not just your mind, can fathom. Reading theologically helps us to understand God as He has revealed Himself and avoid the trap of simply seeing God as a mirror reflecting our own shallow reading.

If we only read informationally and theologically, however, the Bible is simply a large, potentially interesting doorstop. We must also learn the third avenue to reading: transformational reading. The Bible doesn’t just tell us about God and His works, it teaches us what God wants of us. It teaches us what the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, who sent his Son to die on a cross for us, wants us to do today and tomorrow and for the rest of our lives. We seriously misread the Bible if we miss the idea that when God says He wants us to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves, it was not just an empty platitude but something we really should be doing day after day.

As Pennington argues, the goal of thinking through these three ways of reading is not to learn one of them and do it, or to read every part of the Bible three times in those different ways. The goal is to learn how to read the Bible well, which means having all of these three things going on in the back of your mind simultaneously. If you don’t read like that, you are reading the Bible very poorly.

Come and See is in the Adler and van Doren category of a practical book. As they note, “To fail to read a practical book as practical is to read it poorly. You really do not understand it, and you certainly cannot criticize it in any other way.” Moreover, “If you are convinced or persuaded by the author that the ends he proposes are worthy, and if you are further convinced or persuaded that the means he recommends are likely to achieve those ends, then it is hard to see how you can refuse to act in the way the author wishes you to.”

In other words, the first question to ask yourself is whether it is a worthy end to read the Bible well. If so, then the next question is whether you are reading it well if you are failing to think through the informational, theological, and transformational questions the Bible raises. If you know you are not reading the Bible well, or if you don’t know if you are reading the Bible well, then you are the audience for Come and See.

(Once again, the obligatory note: the federal government requires me to say that the publisher Crossway sent me a copy of this book so that I could review it. Presumably the government requires this in case you don’t trust me to be an honest reviewer. Which raises the question: if you don’t trust that I am being honest, why are you reading this review in the first place?)

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