Introducing the Inklings Bookshop Christian Life Collection

• Why Believe? Reason and Mystery as Pointers to God by C. Stephen Evans
• Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ by John Piper
• Learning to Pray Through the Psalms by James W. Sire
• Understanding Paul: The Early Christian Worldview of the Letter to the Romans by Stephen Westerholm
• The Mark of Jesus: Loving in a Way the World Can See by Timothy George, John Woodbridge

While Inklings Bookshop has long provided a wide variety of informative and edifying books pertaining to the Christian faith, it has recently established a new collection that focuses specifically on key aspects of the Christian life. The Christian Life Collection comprises five shelves:

• Asking, Seeking, Knocking
• Knowing Jesus
• Praying and Meditating
• Reading Scripture
• Following Jesus

We introduce this collection with brief reviews of a book from each shelf.

Asking, Seeking, Knocking...

This shelf contains books of popular Christian apologetics. We hope that readers who have questions about the Faith and those who want to share the Faith with others will find helpful volumes here.

This mere reader considers Why Believe? Reason and Mystery as Pointers to God by C. Stephen Evans to be one of the best popular Christian apologetics published in the last decade. Evans, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College and a Kierkegaard scholar, presents a gently argued cumulative case for Christian belief. He starts from reflections on the mysteries of the physical universe, the moral order, and human persons as pointers to the reality of God:

...God has hardly left us bereft of clues to his reality and character. If for some reason we are blind to the mysteries of the universe, we should still see the mystery of our own being. And when we are not reflective enough to see God in the mystery of our own being, he is still evident in one thing we can hardly miss: the deepest desires of our own hearts. The hard part is not finding the clues, but deciding to trust what we find.

Evans goes on to consider the life and claims of Jesus and then some of the common obstacles to faith: miracles, the problem of evil, the problematic aspects of religion. In his final chapter he argues for belief in and commitment to Jesus as a reasonable choice based on a wide range of evidence.

Knowing Jesus...

This shelf in The Christian Life Collection contains a number of scholarly or popular books that deal with the current historical issues about the life and teaching and significance of Jesus. John Piper’s Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ is not one of them. Listing a sample of such works in an end note to his preface, Piper sets off on a different path:

...it would seem strange if God revealed himself in his Son Jesus Christ and inspired the record of that revelation in the Bible, but did not provide a way for ordinary people to know it. Stated most simply, the common path to sure knowledge of the real Jesus is this: Jesus, as he is revealed in the Bible, has a glory—an excellence, a spiritual beauty—that can be seen as self-evidently true. It is like seeing the sun and knowing that it is light and not dark, or like tasting honey and knowing that it is sweet and not sour. There is no long chain of reasoning from premises to conclusions. There is a direct apprehension that this person is true and his glory is the glory of God.

This is a beautiful, passionately written, little gem of a book that will edify believers and encourage unbelievers.

Praying and Meditating...

The content of this shelf is obvious – books to aid the Christian in praying and meditating.

James W. Sire’s Learning to Pray Through the Psalms helps the Christian learn both to read the Psalms meditatively and then to use them in prayer as “our own answering speech” to the God who has spoken to us first in creation, in Holy Scripture, and through His Son.

In ten chapters, Sire teaches his readers how to read, understand, and pray ten psalms in a five-stage process: 1) reading the psalm repeatedly – “reading, rereading, and then reading again–and again” (get the message?), 2) clarifying puzzling words and phrases, 3) analyzing the rational, emotional, and rhetorical structures of the psalm (not as difficult nor erudite as it sounds), 4) gaining a sense of the psalmist’s changing relationship to God, and finally 5) adapting the words of the psalm to one’s own prayer.

Sire primarily wants his readers to “learn and practice” this process and then learn from their own practice of it:

The present book is more like instructions for riding a bike than a presentation of a theory of prayer. It is my sincere desire that you will learn not so much from reading this book as from practicing its suggesstions.

Yet the reader definitely will learn much from this book both about the Psalms and about prayer. Sire provides valuable insights into the ten psalms he has selected and into the varied emotions and attitudes and language in the prayers they contain. His chapter on the notorious Psalm 137 provides a wise and helpful discussion of intepreting and using the imprecatory psalms.

In stage 5 of each chapter Sire leads the reader in adapting and praying a verse or two of the psalm a time. These ten sections, I think, are his most valuable gifts to the reader. Each psalm chapter is also followed by a group study guide.

Reading Scripture...

Frank Thielman of Beeson Divinity School writes of Stephen Westerholm’s Understanding Paul: The Early Christian Worldview of the Letter to the Romans, “If C. S. Lewis had been a biblical scholar, he would have written a book like this one.” As Dr. Cole points out above, such a compliment “invites comparison with the incomparable.” But the prose styles are indeed similar–very lively and lucid, occasionally touched with humor: “The opening of Romans offers nothing to cheer those who would fain believe that even Paul must, on occasion, have engaged in small talk.”

Westerholm, a conservative Swedish New Testament scholar, is associate professor of religious studies at McMaster University. He is a trenchant (and this reviewer believes very persuasive) critic of the various “new perspectives” on Paul and justification espoused by E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn, N. T. Wright, and others. (For a summary of his criticisms, see Justification by Faith is the Answer: What is the Question?, a paper he delivered this year at Concordia Theological Seminary).

Not a commentary on the details of Romans, Understanding Paul seeks to “make comprehensible the major components of Paul’s vision of life as they are touched upon in his most important letter.” To do so Westerholm allows “the argument of Paul’s Letter to the Romans to determine both the issues raised and the sequence in which they are handled. Such a procedure should offset the temptation to impose our own systems on Paul’s thought or to deal only with aspects of Paul deemed relevant for modern readership.”

Though Westerholm follows the sequence of Romans, he does spend more time on the crucial first eight chapters of Romans (125 pages) than he does on the last eight (25 pages). And in his first three chapters dealing with Romans 1, he confront us moderns with the ultimate “framework” of the epistle’s entire argument: the reality of good and evil, the Divine tzedakah revealed in creation and Scripture, and humanity’s “war against goodness”. (For a translation of tzedakah, read the book!)

Westerholm takes his readers on a thrilling aerial ride over the terrain of Romans. Riders will want a copy of Romans in their lap. To quote Thielman again, Understanding Paul is “a book that is difficult for anyone–whether scholar, student, or curious inquirer–to put down.”

Following Jesus...

In The Mark of Jesus: Loving in a Way the World Can See, evangelical theologians Timothy George and John Woodbridge describe the increasing resistance to Christianity in the liberal West, “despite our best efforts in communicating the gospel of Jesus Christ” innovatively and more effectively. They believe that one explanation “goes a long way to account for the lack of receptivity…Many non-Christians are convinced that Christians are inveterate hypocrites.”

Dislodging this “hypocrisy stumbling block” will require that Christians place more emphasis on what Francis Schaeffer called a “final apologetic” – “to love all men as neighbors, love them as ourselves…to love all the Christian brothers in a way that the world may observe.” This love is the “mark of Jesus” and the focus of this book.