Theology, Christianity, Christian Living
The Doctrine of Repentance, Thomas Watson
The Puritans truly were doctors of the soul. Exhaustive and unrelentingly practical, this little book considers repentance from every angle and leaves me little room to hide from this biblical obligation, or to want to. I don’t agree with everything here (i.e., Is our deathbed really to be our hour of greatest sorrow?), but this is a great read for some “experimental” Christianity. I’d bet too that Repentance is actually an easier (and shorter) read than most would assume a Puritan volume to be. (I’m interested to be reminded as well that Watson often went to secular sources for illustration.)
The Prodigal God, Tim Keller
What more can I say than what’s already said about this book? The Prodigal God is as good as advertised: It’s at once a basic explanation of the gospel and a searching call to reexamine what you thought you knew about it. As with Keller’s preaching and teaching in general, you can give Prodigal God to both Christians and non-Christians.
Christ and Culture Revisited, D. A. Carson
An academic examination of a perennial issue in the church. Carson gives the best sustained discussion of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture that I’ve seen, and by way of both critique and appreciation of Neibuhr he constructs a paradigm of cultural interaction into the 21st century. I agree with the basic amillenial stance of the book towards culture and cultural renewal (although I don’t know if in fact Carson is amillenial), but I would have been interested if towards the end of the book Carson would have more directly taken on various popular theories of Christ and culture current in the Western church. It should have been Grey Pupon time, but Carson was a little fuzzier in telling us what he really thought about different movements than he probably could have been.
The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament, Edmund Clowney
A book that was talked about at our monthly men’s ministry meeting. There are quite a few volumes out there that detail the rationale for a Christ-centered interpretation of Scripture (including and especially the Old Testament), but I haven’t seen a work that better illustrates that way of reading than this one. Clowney’s bringing out Christocentric detail after detail in different OT stories is astounding. Christians can profit from learning those interpretations themselves and by developing their own skills in being able to see Christ in all of the Scriptures.
Is Jesus the Only Savior?, Ronald H. Nash
The title is pretty descriptive of the content for Is Jesus the Only Savior?, and Nash (a deceased professor from RTS in Orlando) has given us a good resource that argues for a “yes” answer here. This book is good one-stop-shopping concerning a question that I suspect troubles more evangelicals than would admit it. Nash supplies solid critiques of both religious pluralism, i.e., that salvation is possible in any religion, and also “Christian inclusivism,” which holds that Jesus saves those that have faith in him and those that fear God and do good works but don’t explicitly believe in Jesus. The biblical and the philosophical arguments against those positions are spot on.
However, I’d give this book negative marks on two fronts. First, Is Jesus the Only Savior?, which was written in 1994, doesn’t address issues connected to universal salvation that have become more prominent in the past fifteen years through postmodernism. At the same time, I think that the basic lines of argument in this book can pretty easily be applied to postmodern responses without too much loss of force. Second, and more seriously, Nash obviously has no respect for his opponents and is often sarcastic in interacting with them here. For that reason, I’d think twice before passing along this book to someone that has questions related to salvation and Jesus; that person may be persuaded by Nash’s argument, or turned off by his tone.
Ministries of Mercy, Tim Keller
I reread this book about mercy and diaconal ministry as part of our deacon training at church. In Part I, Keller uses Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan to outline a theology of mercy ministry; he then in Part 2 gets more practical in supplying a plan for deacons to mobilize deed ministry in churches. This book is every bit as important as Keller’s more celebrated The Reason for God, The Prodigal God, and Counterfeit Gods, although perhaps more specialized.
Getting the Blues, Stephen J. Nichols
Graduate school and seminary professor Nichols examines 20th century blues music and its intersections with various biblical themes, particularly lament. He builds a convincing case. For a book like this, I was expecting Nichols (whose work I hadn’t previously read) either to fail to do justice to the blues or to biblical theology, but he’s strong on both counts. I loved Getting the Blues, and it’s recommended to those wanting to examine the “minor key” elements of Scripture, but it has enough about the blues in it that if you’re not interested in that particular music, it may be slower going.
Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, T. David Gordon
A fascinating study that asks the (perhaps inflammatory) question, Why is most of the preaching in America today so bad? Gordon’s answer is that for the first time in the Western Church since the Reformation, people preaching sermons are aliterate—meaning that while they can read, they don’t and haven’t. It’s a simple and, in retrospect, obvious thesis: Preachers are expected every Sunday to craft half hour (give or take) messages that exhibit clarity, unity, movement, and beauty, but they (we?) have never read a novel or enjoyed a poem. This unfortunate reality has caused a deep erosion of quality in the pulpit. Preachers, get thee to a library!
Three Views of the Millenium and Beyond, ed. Darrell Bock and Stanley Gundry
I read this book in preparation for a topical sermon about the place of contemporary (and future) Israel in God’s plan. For those wanting a more than superficial treatment of eschatology, this is the book I’d go for. I appreciate the book’s structure that allows a chapter each for premillenialism, amillenialism, and postmillenialism, followed by critiques from authors of the other two positions. (This “multiple views” series from Zondervan, by the way, is a model for peaceful and substantive inter-Christian dialogue; a book is worth a thousand blogs.) I was gratified (!) to see that arguments against a future restoration of Israel, at least in my opinion, are stronger than the contrary. And incidentally, I was struck by how much stronger I found the arguments for amillenialism than for postmillenialism. It seems that a postmillenialist will criticize a premillenialist for a wooden and over-literal interpretation of Scripture but then uses a similarly literalistic hermeneutic (with different results) in constructing a postmillenial eschatology.
Reformed Dogmatics, Vol 2: God and Creation, Herman Bavinck
Thanks to the unredoubtable Chris Hilton for going through this tome with me. This volume is not for the faint of heart, but it’s the best treatment of the doctrine of God I’ve ever read. Ironically, Bavinck begins with the incomprehensibility of God before hitting all of the traditional issues related to the subject. In addition to the thoroughness of Bavinck’s approach, he’s also a model of combining systematic theology with historical, biblical, and exegetical theology. Dr. Gaffin’s (Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia) claim that the Reformed Dogmatics is “the most important systematic theology ever produced in the Reformed tradition” doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to me. The only downside for Bavinck is that his cross-disciplinary approach makes it more difficult to use The Reformed Dogmatics as a quick reference for a specific theological topic, unlike systematics from Berkhof, Hodge, even Calvin, etc.
When People are Big and God is Small, Ed Welch
I read Ed Welch’s book on the “fear of man” sometime in 2008 (or 2007?) in preparation for a sermon and liked it enough to use for a Sunday School class in the spring of this year. The real strength of the book is that it targets what truly is a perennial struggle for Christians and non-Christians: we worry way too much about what other people think of us. Welch gives the best “answers” and strategies for dealing with this problem that I’ve seen. If there’s a weakness to be found with When People Are Big, though, it’s that not all of the chapters are equally essential to the main thesis. With that small caveat in mind, this is a book to read and reread.
The Bible, the triune God
An oldie but goodie! For the second or third straight year, I’ve used the ESV Literary Study Bible as my daily reading Bible, utilizing the yearlong plan provided in the back. As for the study apparatus, I can’t say enough about how much I love this version. For years I’ve struggled through Bible-in-a-year plans with long stretches of dry sections of books where I didn’t really have a sense of what’s going on. Instead, the Literary Study Bible by use of headnotes gives me just enough orienting info that I can grasp the artistry and significance of a Bible passage, especially the difficult ones, so much easier than just plowing in cold. (It’s also less detail-heavy than a regular study Bible.) This particular plan, in addition to covering the Bible in twelve months, takes readers through the Psalter, Isaiah, Luke, and Romans twice each, which seems about right in terms of emphasis.
Specific bible books that stood out to me this year include the gospel of Luke. Having finished preaching through Luke at church, I feel like I have a grasp on the book as a whole that I didn’t have before. What a gospel, and what a savior. On the difficult side, reading Proverbs straight through is always a challenge for me, and 2009 wasn’t an improvement. My Groundhog Day Proverbs experience contrasted pleasantly with my soldering through Job. The Literary Study Bible applies conventions of ancient drama to this book, which has always seemed very foreign, old, and repetitive to me before. I’m looking forward to tackling Job again next year.
Fiction
It’s Beginning to Hurt, James Lasdun
Short story collections are always a challenge to me. What’s gained in clarity and conciseness is offset by the effort of emotional reinvestment required with each new piece. It’s Beginning to Hurt is every bit worth the strain. Lasdun has written books of poetry, and his gifts of lyricism and observation carry into his prose. (I quoted at length from the first story, “An Anxious Man,”in a sermon from November, since it so accurately and devastatingly describes the psychological topography of worry.) In most of the selections included here, the characters aren’t subjected to huge tragedies as much as the “small” torments of memory, choice, and lost opportunity. These types of disappointments exist most of the time on the edges of our consciousness but define us more than we’d like to admit. “Lime Pickle,” for example, is a heartbreaking cameo in which the protagonist recounts a true love that came too soon while he pretends not to regret its demise; he ate “lime pickle” at an Indian restaurant the night of this relationship’s doom, and it burned. Overall, Lasdun presents to us a world that is random and cruel, but he can’t help but draw his characters with a sad compassion that rages against the machine. Add to that a pure, almost crystalline writing style that gets the little details right, and It’s Beginning to Hurt feels a lot like life.
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
The Orient Express, Graham Greene
I went on a serious Graham Greene kick this year. I hadn’t read anything by him before, and it wasn’t more than a whim that caused me to pick up my first Greene, The Heart of the Matter. Four books later, it’s hard for me to read anything not by him.
The lightest (and, if I’m not mistaken, earliest written) of these five novels is The Orient Express, which carries a motley crew from Europe into Asia Minor on the famous railroad. “Strangers together on a train” may be a stock plot device, but Greene’s quiet and compassionate control of character elevates Orient Express above genre fiction. An introduction by Christopher Hitchens in the current edition uncovers class tensions at play in the novel that subtly add depth and drama to the story, but none of the characters are without the vanities, desperations, and aspirations that make each one uncomfortably recognizable.
The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana are similar in that both feature naive and/or self-deceived men whose unrealistic ideas reap unexpected and severe consequences. The difference is that The Quiet American plays as tragedy and Our Man in Havana as farce. Havana, however, is actually the more cynical work because the “hero” for no good reason is rescued from his just desserts, and for that reason it’s more disquieting. Still, the questions remain the same between both: Can we really understand, let alone help, other people? Is there any motivation for human beings beyond self-interest?
The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory have Christian (specifically Roman Catholic) protagonists on their way to destruction, one a low level bureaucrat in a fictional African colony, the other an outlaw priest in communist Mexico. Both men demonstrate that it’s easier merely to fear God than to love him, but infinitely more miserable.
Athena, John Banville
Shroud, John Banville
Eclipse, John Banville
As much as I’ve loved reading Graham Greene in 2009, I’d have to say that my favorite writer is the Irishman John Banville. Most of his novels, including the three listed here, involve very little plot development and are consumed by the psychologies of their main characters, who are invariably old and bitter men.
I think I’ve read six or seven Banville novels total, but it’s hard for me to articulate why I find them so compelling. One reason must be Banville’s prose. His writing style is very leisurely and meandering yet incredibly precise and incisive. The musings of his characters are so atmospherically rendered that you struggle to believe that anything exists beyond the mind. A hypnotic quality pervades Banville’s work, the effect of which mirrors an addiction for me: by the end of every novel, I’m over-satiated, but afterwards reading anything by someone else (except maybe Graham Greene) feels hollow and empty.
In addition, Banville’s men are all in various states of psychological dissolution but present a unified facade because it’s more amusing than the contrary. John Calvin said that we can only know ourselves truly if we also know God, and Banville is negative proof for me. Grace has a profoundly centering effect on the human psyche, apart from which it’s difficult for us to know ourselves at all. Banville reminds me that self-definition and identity are impossible on their own terms, since we are deceivers to the core.
Anyone wanting to tackle Banville might start with either Shroud or Eclipse, since Athena is the third installment of a loosely connected trilogy. Be warned, however, that Banville is difficult reading both in his technique and also for his unflinching gaze into the dark night of the soul.
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
This is a story of an older New England lady as told through a prism of different chapters, each told from the perspective of various people that knew her. The portrait that emerges of Olive is deeply contradictory—she’s tough and tender, proud and humble, traditional and progressive—and by the same token very human. Strout’s prose style reminds me of Shaker furniture: functional, rough-hewn, and starkly beautiful. (In addition, the different-chapters-from-different-viewpoints is an intriguing storytelling device that asks questions about truth and perspective.)
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
I’ve been told for years that I should read Nabokov, and Lolita appears to be viewed as his masterpiece. I got about fifty pages through it before I had to put it down. Lolita is about a middle aged man’s sexual obsession with pre-adolescent girls. Call me a prude, but I couldn’t stomach what I read as graphic perversion in order to arrive at the higher points of social criticism supposedly at play. Is it really the case that the ends justify the means as far as artistic comment and license is concerned? I’m also intrigued at how Lolita is universally adored by literary critics that presumably would themselves decry injustice against women. Then again, I’m only a simple preacher.
V For Vendetta, Alan Moore
A graphic novel, considered to be one of the best of the genre, or at least on the long list. In V, the bad guys are fascists, the good guys are fascists, everywhere a fascist, fascist. Is this really a critique of end-justifying-the-means totalitarianism, or a case of the pot calling the kettle black? (Quack, quack.) Not recommended.
Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
The crown jewel of novels about my hometown, New Orleans, and a comic masterpiece by any estimation. The protagonist of Confederacy is a lovable sociopath Ignatius J. Reilly, a grown man living with his mom, bathing little, sleeping too late, eating too much, and pontificating continually. But is Ignatius messed up, or is it the rest of the city and world? (It sounds trite to put it that way, but that’s it in a nutshell.) I tried reading this in high school but didn’t quite get it; this time around, I was laughing out loud every few pages and burned through the book very quickly. I must have matured, and I shower more than Ignatius.
Music
The ‘59 Sound, The Gaslight Anthem
Rock and roll is about two things, destruction and love. Good rock and rolls gets the balance between the two right—i.e., love wins, but destruction is properly accounted for and never more than a breath away—and bad rock and roll doesn’t. The ‘59 Sound is great rock and roll. Cliches straight out of American Graffiti (which was nostalgia-driven to begin with) provide the canvas for reflections upon lives on the margins that are struggling for more. Gaslight Anthem hits as hard and loud as anyone would want, but even the most joyous choruses are tinged with an autumnal sadness that appreciates that life’s most beautiful moments occur the split second before you recognize them as such. “Miles Davis,” for example, pictures a character underneath his lover’s window, pleading with her to climb out of her parents’ house and take a ride with him. The scene is pure “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” or “Only the Good Die Young” romanticism, and maybe “Miles Davis” is romantic too, but since our hero here is asking our heroine to come home, we know that this relationship (possibly marriage?) has failed once already. The chorus of “Miles Davis” goes, “Don’t wait too long to come home/My how the years and our youth pass on.” It takes courage to write a fist-pumping refrain like that one and sing it through the sorrow. (Back to our rock and roll, love vs. destruction dynamic: notice how the lyrics there tilt toward destruction but the music itself fights against it with something greater.)
Concerning the title track, which is the single best song I’ve heard in years, score one for common grace. The singer on “The ‘59 Sound,” Brian Fallon, recalls a friend of his that was killed in a car accident; as he was dying, did the deceased hear the “‘59 sound” (Buddy Holly reference) that he and his friend would listen to on their grandfather’s radio, did he hear angels, did he hear chains? There’s your destruction, but at the end of the song, Fallon sings a coda, “Young boys, young girls ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night.” Amen—there’s your love. One of the reasons I’m a pastor is because I hate death.
Take Me To the River: A Southern Soul Story, 1961-1977, Various Artists
1960’s Southern soul is the music that’s most like God. I say that not because soul is essentially secularized gospel, even though it is, but because a good soul song reflects the divine simplicity. The simplicity of God means that he is not composed of any parts and instead that each of his attributes is coextensive with his entire being. God’s love and wrath, for example, don’t describe different “parts” of who God is; they are each (true) perspectives on his simple person. The best of Southern soul finds singers so consumed with passion that seemingly disparate emotions (love, anguish, joy, regret, and so on) are fused into a white-hot unity. This merging of various and even contradictory feelings is recognizably human because we’re made in the image of a simple God.
Take Me To the River is a three CD compilation of Southern soul from its golden period and is as essential as anything in my music collection. This box set gives me 75 wonderful songs, some well known, others not, that have been chosen based not on their popularity but their excellence. The acknowledged classics remain preternatuarally moving (James Carr’s “The Dark End of the Street,” Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine,” Aretha Franklin’s “Do right Woman, Do Right Man”), but the real success of this set is in showing that the lesser known singles are just as good. Southern soul is a towering genre. Take Me To the River comes with a gorgeous 72 page book that really does tell a story, and every page speaks to the love that the compilers have for these artists and songs.
The Soul of Rock and Roll, Roy Orbison
$20 on Amazon marketplace bought me this four CD box set. From his 1950’s Sun recordings through his posthumous releases in the 1990’s, Roy’s music runs through many different pop and rock genres, but the singularity of his voice and vision that marks all of the tracks on this collection are remarkable. I’d say that Elvis is the only other singer I know beside Orbison that was able to make any song his own, except that the Big O really only sang his own songs (sorry, E). Maybe it’s that Roy’s spectral vocals never were really a part of any song he ever sung but only hovered above them; it could be that the very otherness (or better, “more-ness” in his voice) exerted something inexorable and mysterious upon its listeners, like how a pair of dark glasses hints at what’s beneath. Among other things with Orbison, I’m fascinated by the fact that unlike almost every other rock and roller that burst onto the scene in the 1950’s, his best music was still ahead of him. Why did Roy Orbison succeed at sustained creative (and commercial) longevity when Elvis (arguably), Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard—not to mention flare-outs like Carl Perkins and Eddie Cochran—spent the rest of their recording careers being unfavorably compared to their first sides? I should spend more time in Wink. (P.S. Asking that question causes me to lament the plane crash in 1959 all the more; Buddy Holly very clearly, at least in my mind, had a vastly broader musical vision than what he was able to wax before his death. He could have been such a dynamic rock and roll force in the early 1960’s that the British Invasion never would have received the invitation.)
Stay Positive, The Hold Steady
2006’s Boys and Girls in America by the Hold Steady gets my nod for pop album of the decade, so maybe my expectations were too high for this 2008 follow-up. The conventions of the “fourth wall” are undoubtedly more fluid for music than for film and literature, but you still at least have to use it (and/or break it) consistently or the product is going to come off as sloppy. Which is what happens here. The worst offender in this regard is the title track; Craig Finn’s singing, “I get a lot of double takes when I’m going around the corners . . ./Because most kids give me credit for being down with it,” seems oddly self-congratulatory (not to mention self-referential), especially for a song writer so hungrily committed to more literary rock. Telling the audience later in the song, “And we couldn’t have even done this/If it wasn’t for you,” while it may garner a cheer in concert, comes across as pandering to an embarrassing extreme.
The opening song on Stay Positive is fascinating to me. It’s called “Constructive Summer,” in which the protagonist gets his friends together to “build something this summer”; they’re going to rebuild and climb up an old water tower together, using “love and trust and friends and hammers.” So far, so good, and I agree that “we could all be something bigger”—there’s a better life, a more connected life meant for us than this. The problem comes, however, when we find out what the pilgrims do once they reach the top: drink. Is the “something bigger” for which we yearn really fulfilled by putting down “double whiskey, Coke, no ice”? Are we satisfied if we resolve to “drink along in double time/Might drink too much but we feel fine”? Then again, this may be as good as it gets as long as we believe, and as Finn sings at the song’s end, “We are our only saviors.”
(By way of blogfession, a few months ago I talked to a clerk at Ralph’s Records to see if we could bring the Hold Steady to town. He spoke with a local promoter about it, but no dice. There’s always shuffleboard.)
Johnny B. Goode: His Complete 50’s Chess Recordings, Chuck Berry
The Complete Chess Masters (1950-1967), Little Walter
Two birthday presents here, thanks to my parents. For the Berry set, his recordings remain as striking and fresh as ever. The hits (including alternate takes, etc.) haven’t lost any luster or punch, but the revelation here was Disc 1, which captures Berry before fame caused him to narrow his songwriting focus into his classic formula. Cuts like “Downbound Train” and “Drifting Heart” reveal Berry to be more subversive than the label “rock and roll pioneer” might allow him. If the greater variety of rhythms, song structure, and melody of Disc 1 indicates that the rock and roll of his later, more well known songs were crafted with an eye toward maximum airplay and sales, we have some food for thought here regarding the issue of authenticity and artifice in music and art. Also interesting to think about is that the Berry who so perfectly captured teenage life in the 1950’s was in his thirties when he wrote the songs. I only wish the liner notes did better justice to the man and the songs.
For the vault-clearing second collection, if Walter Jacobs’ groundbreaking blues harmonica style is the lingua franca of post-war blues harp, this collection is the Rosetta Stone and showcases Little Walter as the rare artist best appreciated via his many B-sides, non-singles, and outtakes than chart successes. Harmonica players are still trying to replicate his amplified harmonica sound in addition to his impeccable sense of swing. Many harpists after Walter are faster, but very, very few are better. Unlike with the Berry set, Walter’s Complete Chess Masters are accompanied by substantive liners that deeply enhance the listening experience.
Working on a Dream, Bruce Springsteen
An album strangely full of pop-by-numbers songwriting makes this Bruce’s weakest studio album since 1992’s Human Touch. Whether Working on a Dream feels hackneyed because he was in a rush to release product to coincide with his Super Bowl halftime show (Bruce, less grease on the knees during the slide next time, please) or because he’s straining to create new contexts in which to hear his music with a fresh ear is anyone’s guess. You’ll still find some gems here, however. “The Wrestler” displays Springsteen’s strength at portraying beautiful losers as the protagonist sings, “These things that have comforted me I drive away/This place that is my home I cannot stay/The only faith is in the broken bones and bruises I display.” The best song, though, is “Life Itself.” A subtle and percolating groove creates an interesting, atmospheric slow burn in which Bruce wonders, “Why do the things that we treasure most slip away in time/Till to the music we grow deaf, to God’s beauty blind/Why do the things that connect us slowly pull us apart?/Till we fall away in our own darkness, a stranger to our own hearts.” Good questions.