Book Reviews

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Written by: Rhys Bezzant

Created: 01 June 2022

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
Carl Trueman
Wheaton: Crossway, 2020
Reviewed By Rhys Bezzant

I don’t often say it, but this book was so good I read it once then listened to it as an audiobook! Carl Trueman, an Englishman teaching in the US, has written an extraordinary overview of the last three hundred years of Western culture, to help explain how the sexual revolution came to pass, and how transgenderism can be understood philosophically within that story. I am a sucker for grand vistas when they help me to investigate the minutiae of an event, and that he admirably achieves. The heart of the book is an evaluation of Rousseau as the fountainhead of modern views of the self, but he goes on to explain how the great Romantic poets Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake reinforce the subjective turn, with Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche rendering the subjective a political force. All that is then needed is the contribution of Freud to sexualise the political. This layering of cultural sediments is a fine example of intellectual history, explaining where great thinkers got their ideas from, how they reshaped those ideas given their own historical moment, and how they passed them on. Ideas matter, for it is not just our material environment that impacts who we are.

Trueman takes up the language of “expressive individualism” to capture the goal of the modern search for identity, with questions of sexuality a case study. So many in the West work with a default position, like Rousseau the French educationalist, that culture is corrupting, so we long for the “state of nature,” in which we were free to express ourselves without the shackles of social expectations. The great Romantic poets worked initially within this mimetic frame of mind, which assumed that meaning was given to us (rather than created by us) and discovered through art. This was in time overturned, as philosophers and poets came to understand that what we had previously accepted as universal and static was actually the dynamic and local product of oppressive historical forces, from which we needed liberation. Christianity was regarded not as offering freedom, but something from which we needed to be freed! As Shelley wrote, “Religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude” (p155).

Expressive individualism, in Trueman’s estimation, therefore doesn’t assume a worldview but instead a social imaginary, as Charles Taylor the Canadian philosopher has argued. We create our world and create ourselves within it. We become plastic people, who find meaning in self-expression: “Freedom for Nietzsche is freedom from essentialism and for selfcreation” (p174). If Marx believed we need a new social self-awareness, if Freud believed we should be open to deep sexual motivations that lurk just beyond our recognition, and if Darwin undermined an exalted and purposeful role for human beings in history, then together they set up profoundly modern ways of grasping what a human being is. Better to begin within ourselves, and from there to invent our own identity according to our own lights. Though with any model for understanding what it means to be human there are philosophical challenges, in this model there is a new danger: “Where once oppression was seen in terms of economic realities (eg poverty, lack of property) or legal categories (eg slavery, lack of freedom), now the matter is more subtle because it relates to issues of psychology and self-consciousness. The political sphere is internalized and subjectivized” (p250). Learning to express ourselves as individuals has a deep prehistory.

Set within the development of expressive individualism, and against the backdrop of longer and larger philosophical shifts in the West, Trueman ultimately wants to explain how a concept like transgenderism makes eminent sense to our contemporaries though it made no sense to his own grandfather. This change within a generation is not to be explained by referring to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s alone! He sets all these particular concerns (and others!) within the sociological analysis of Philip Rieff, who has generated categories like “the triumph of the therapeutic” or “the anticulture,” and the ethical reflections of Alasdair MacIntyre, who has argued that in the modern world truth claims are more like “expressions of emotional preference” (p26). Trueman’s breadth of reading gives great depth to his analysis, even if along the way we might want him to explain or qualify a point further.

This book has won notable awards, for its prose is lucid and its argument coherent, as it tries to guide Christians through a short course in intellectual history and an outline of a way of understanding the process of secularisation. His concluding reflections may at points highlight the weakness of a historian trying to be a prophet, but he is surely right when he concludes: “If sacred or metaphysical order is necessary for cultures to remain stable and coherent, then we currently face an indefinite future of flux, instability, and incoherence.” (p394). I recommend the book to readers who want to find ways to understand the pressure points in contemporary culture.

Rev Dr Rhys Bezzant is Senior Lecturer and Dean of The Anglican Institute Ridley College and Visiting Fellow Yale Divinity School. First published in TMA.

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Written by: Mark Simon

Created: 01 March 2022

Changing Lanes, Crossing Cultures: Equipping Christians and churches for ministry in a culturally diverse society
By Andrew Schachtel, Choon-Hwa Lim and Michael K Wilson
Sydney: Great Western Press, 2016

Reviewed By Mark Simon, Lecturer In New Testament And Research Associate, Ridley College, Melbourne

Changing Lanes, Crossing Cultures is a timely and practical book for individuals and churches wishing to begin or enhance an existing cross-cultural gospel ministry within Australia. Using the analogy of good driving habits, the book seeks to outline the why, what, how, and when of reaching ethnic minorities with the gospel. The book is structured in 6 modules which are designed for study by a church leadership group such as a parish council, or a local missions task-group. The modules are (in turn):

• The biblical motivation for ministry across cultures; ‘the why’
• Ministry in an ethnically diverse society; ‘the why’
• Dealing with hindrances to ministry across cultures; ‘the what’
• Increasing your cultural intelligence and skills; ‘the how’
• The importance of leadership and management for ministry across cultures; ‘the how’ and
• Where to from here? ‘the how and when.’

Module 1 covers some of the same territory broached in Ben Clements’ article in this volume of Essentials; that is, biblical and pragmatic motivations for cross-cultural ministry.

Module 2 details the increasingly multi-ethnic nature of Australian society: over a quarter of Australia’s population come from approximately 200 different overseas countries. It elaborates how different immigrants might express their ethnicity from isolation to assimilation.

For me, modules 3 and 4 were the most practical, since they equipped me as a church leader to tackle the default ethnocentrism of my own church. Simply naming the illegitimate hindrances to ministry to ethnically-diverse communities is liberating. The book identifies the following ones: no burden for the lost; over-dependence on social factors and feeling comfortable within one’s own people group; ethnic difference; ethnocentrism and racism; painful history; lack of gospel-driven leadership; preserving church culture; confusion of gospel and culture; cultural barriers; cultural distance; lack of community; spiritual opposition. Having identified these illegitimate barriers, the book encourages us with a reflection on Peter’s cross-cultural awakening in Acts 10, and then tabulating possible solutions for each one (pages 82-86). The book is worth its price for these pages alone!

Module 4 continues by dealing with the nuts and bolts of improving cultural intelligence. It introduces six lenses through which cultural difference can be understood. This chapter also encourages all Christians to take the time to observe, listen, and learn from the ethnic groups around us. Lastly, it points out that practising hospitality is a sure-fire way to develop relationships with minority ethnic contacts, and to grow in cultural intelligence.

Modules 5 and 6 round out the book with material on the cultural dimensions of leadership, and some ways of planning to launch or enhance ministries to ethnic minorities in our own communities. Most Australian churches now periodically engage in some form of mission action planning or strategic planning for ministry. Incorporating study of this book in the next round of your church’s planning cycle would help to ensure you are not neglecting this burgeoning harvest field so close at hand to many of our churches today.

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Written by: Stephen Hale

Created: 01 March 2022

God of All things: Rediscovering the sacred in an everyday worldBy Andrew Wilson - Teaching Pastor at Kings Church London and Author
Zondervan 2021

Reviewed By Stephen Hale, Chair EFAC Global and Australia

God of All things is a wonderful book and I commend it to you. Wilson seeks to explore the reality that our world is full of things. Each of those things point to the creator who put it all together. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it’ Psalm 24.1

The book comprises a short introduction and conclusion and in between 30 short chapters split between the Old and New Testaments. Each chapter looks at one thing – dust, earthquakes, pigs, livestock, tools, horns, sex, salt, rain, trumpets, viruses etc etc.

It is a fascinating book. Each of the short chapters talks about the object/thing and captures how they are referenced in Scripture and also how they are described in contemporary science. Along the way there are lots of wonderful insights. As Wilson says, they may well lift one’s sight to reflect on the place of each of these objects in our world and what they point us to. He makes links like these:

• Dust: the image of God
• Horns: the salvation of God
• Donkeys: the peace of God
• Water: the life of God
• Viruses: the problem of God
• Cities: the kingdom of God

We live at a time when many people have given up on God and believe that science has all the answers. The fascinating and awe-inspiring wonders of the created world are inspiring in themselves, not because of what they point to. My wife teaches both Christian studies and science in an Anglican school and says that most of her students are essentially materialists, even if they have never heard of the term.

I chose to read the book as a chapter each day, given that most of the 30 chapters are around 5 or 6 pages. I found the book to be genuinely inspiring as well as fresh and interesting. Each chapter contained surprising revelations from either creation or Scripture. In Romans 1 Paul says that creation reveals God’s invisible power and divine nature. C S Lewis talks about following sunbeams back to the sun so that we enjoy not just the object of goodness but the source of the good. As Wilson says, ‘Creation preaches to us. The things of God reveal the God of things.’ (page 3).

I really enjoyed God of All things and found it refreshing and original. I’ve given it to a few people who also loved it.

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Written by: Karen Winsemius

Created: 01 December 2021

A Church Called Tov
by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer
Tyndale Momentum

REVIEWED BY REV. KAREN WINSEMIUS

My name is Karen. Chances are that you know someone called Karen.

But over the last few years, Karens have had a bit of a raw deal. Because Karen is no longer just a name. Karen is

particular person. There is ‘Karen who wants to speak to the manager’. Bunnings Karen. Karen from Brighton (It should be noted that that particular Karen moved to Queensland). Karen is a bossy, entitled woman. She wants everything to go her own way, even if it puts others out. How did one name come to represent so much? And what do all the rest of us Karens do?

The cultural phenomenon that is ‘Karen’ is fascinating, and I’m sure someone will write a PhD in years to come on why our generation feel the need to associate certain characteristics with particular names. In the meantime, as I have been reading ‘A Church Called Tov’ by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer, I couldn’t help but ponder certain similarities about the challenges the church faces, albeit on a much larger scale. As I and other Karen’s seek to reclaim their name as standing for good, so must the church.

McKnight and Barringer seek to pull apart and investigate this Goodness Challenge in their book. They explore the Hebrew word Tov, meaning ‘good’ or ‘goodness’, found in the scriptures, pointing back to the goodness of God as the primary example, highlighting the many examples of Tov promises, and offering hope as we look forward to redemption. Tov is not a one-time act, but an ongoing, sustaining, beautiful characteristic of God, and one that we as Christians should emulate, both individually and as the church.

However, the church hasn’t and doesn’t always get Tov right. McKnight and Barringer take time to acknowledge the pain that so many of us have experienced in the church. They are honest in their naming of the hardship, dysfunction, abuse and toxic relationships that have been allowed to fester and wound so many. This dysfunction has torn apart relationships, and broken apart churches. It has even led to people walking away from Jesus, assuming that the abuse they have experienced is what Jesus must be like as well. McKnight and Barringer offer words of insight into how these unhealthy church cultures form, and helpfully give many practical tips and advice on what signs to look for that a church culture might be unhealthy. But they don’t stay in a place of dysfunction, or despair. They move to a place of Tov, of nurturing habits of goodness, and encouraging churches to put these into practice. McKnight and Barringer identify seven key elements of a Tov culture:

- Nurture Empathy (and resist a narcissist’s culture)
- Nurture Grace (and resist a fear culture)
- Put People First (and resist institutional creep)
- Tell the Truth (and resist false narratives)
- Nurture Justice (and resist the loyalty culture)
- Nurture Service (and resist the celebrity culture)
- Nurture Christlikeness (and resist the leader culture)

We can’t do all of this in our own strength, and yet we’re reminded in 1 Peter 2:9 that, ‘you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.’ We are called to be God’s people, to serve as ambassadors for Jesus in the world and as members of one body, the church. On our own, this is overwhelming, but with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we can work out this calling, living out a Tov life in our own lives and in the churches we worship in.

What I enjoyed most about ‘A Church Called Tov’ is how encouraging it is. It points us forward, gives us hope; that the church can develop a healthy Tov culture. Both in its theology and its practice, ‘A Church Called Tov’, gives us the big picture and the next step to get there.

Let us be a Tov people, practicing goodness each day. And when you next see your friend Karen, give her a high five of encouragement – she is also working on redeeming her own name for good too!

Rev Karen Winsemius is Assistant Minister at Oaktree Anglican, Caulfield, Melbourne

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Written by: Steve Boxwell

Created: 01 December 2021

Together for the City
by Neil Powell and John James
IVP 2019

Wouldn’t it be great if the body of Christ in a particular area was a bit more coordinated! If our deaneries were more purposeful, if our minister’s fraternals were more strategic? Wouldn’t it be great if we could hear of the success of a church down the road or a church plant in the suburb along without an ugly defensiveness rising within us?

If you’ve got a fire in your belly to see more churches grow and be planted in your region; if you’ve got the uncomfortable sense that your church floats a foot above your locality and your people aren’t burdened to see your specific town/suburb/city reached for Jesus; and if you’ve got an inkling that this is a project that is going to need a vision bigger than any one parish, or even (perish the thought) any one denomination, then this is the book for you.

Together for the City is a book best read with a group of like-hearted pastors. It claims to be provocative. I found it provocative in the way that the smell of fresh-baked croissants in my kitchen provokes me out of my bedroom in the morning.

Neil Powell and John James both share that rarest of characteristics – people who can both do something well and explain how they did it. The book, in part, gives the narrative of how 2020Birmingham came to be with their vision to see 20 new churches planted by 2020, now extended to 30 planted by 2030 and 100 in their lifetime.  But in laying out this story, they’re also offering a  guidebook for how we might establish similar networks in our context to attempt the gospel goals that we couldn’t achieve working on our own.

The book breaks up into three sections, the first paints a vivid picture of the scale of the task before us, suggesting it’s akin to the Dunkirk evacuation of WW2. But rather than leaving us feeling exhausted before we’ve begun, it also suggests that the gospel not only requires, but enables collaboration across difference.

The practical meat of the book comes in the middle as they lay out a framework for the ‘how’ of collaboration using the equation: core + cause + code = collaboration. That is, although we may share a theological affinity with another church (core) that, in and of itself, is not collaboration. Collaboration comes when churches in a locality who share a gospel core also share a theological vision for what could be achieved in that area (cause) and flesh out a shared DNA (code) that energises a movement and carries it to action.

Having laid this all out, the third section offers several case-studies in the UK and abroad. It’s hard not to be excited reading this section, imagining similar partnerships and collaborations emerging in one’s own context.

It’s fair to say I came to this book suspiciously. “Are you asking me, a convinced Anglican, to give up my distinctives and plant churches with the [insert denomination I find disagreeable here] church down the road?” I protested. “I’m really busy – like Covid busy – and I’m not sure this is a good use of my time!” I complained. But at each turn I found both the argument and the narrative utterly disarming. They showed that they weren’t arguing that we plant churches together, but ‘to be together as we plant churches’ which is a masterful difference. It means that we can genuinely celebrate God doing new things in our area without experiencing threat or competitiveness. They also make the strong theological case for prioritising this work and can bear witness to how it has been life giving for pastors in collaborative partnerships around the world.

I hope there are many editions of Together for the City, and that with each the case studies section swells with stories of pastors who bravely worked together and, therefore, achieved what they couldn’t have alone for the cause of Christ in their region.

Steve Boxwell leads a church plant in Tuggeranong, Canberra

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Written by: Rhys Bezzant

Created: 01 December 2021

Evangelicals and the End of Christendom: Religion, Australia, and the Crises of the 1960s
Hugh Chilton.
Routledge

With the soundtrack of the 1960s and 1970s as some of my earliest musical memories, I heard them again (metaphorically not literally) when reading Hugh Chilton’s magnificent book Evangelicals and the End of Christendom: Helen Reddy’s “I am woman,” Whitlam’s “It’s time” jingle, and “Leaving on a jet plane” by the trio of Peter, Paul and Mary. Indeed, the period which Chilton investigates will not only bring back ear-worms like these, but for some readers difficult debates, lost opportunities, perhaps even a sense of gratitude. These were decades in Australia that witnessed the rapid dismantling of the British Empire, Cold War conflicts in south-east Asia, a new sense of national purpose in Australia impacted by multicultural migration, and technologies which changed our quotidian lives. How evangelical Christians responded to or contributed to these tumultuous changes is Chilton’s goal in this book, which in other words is to summarise the place of evangelicals in the story of Australia at the end of Christendom. These are highly contested categories, but when they are placed here within the concrete framework of Billy Graham’s visits to Australia in 1959 and 1968-69, and 1979, they gain in clarity. If Graham is seen as a leading representative of post-war evangelicalism, reactions to him are a kind of bellwether, signalling a change of wind direction.

Indeed, concrete exploration of six leading figures in this period constitutes the substance of the book. Chilton has not begun with an ideological frame of reference into which these historical figures are shoe-horned, but rather he allows for complexity and nuance in the story he tells. The six chapters treat Fred Nile and the (youth movement) World’s Christian Endeavour, Han Mol the Presbyterian sociologist of secularisation, Billy Graham and Australian engagement with the American pseudoempire, Archbishop Marcus Loane in the context of the 1970 Cook Bicentenary, the Christian counter-culture and the Jesus People of the 1970s, and the substantial contribution of Bishop Jack Dain and Athol Gill to the Lausanne Congress, its backstory and impact (the selfconsciousness of indigenous Australians is an especially important dimension here). The introduction to these chapters expound the secularisation thesis in the light of the rupture of the 1960s, and the conclusion provides a bird’s eye view of the whole, important when there are so many layers to the story. Firstly, how evangelicals have positioned themselves in the nation, secondly how they have pursued an international network, and thirdly how they have managed tensions on the home front are the three dimensions to the presentation (p205).

This book, though not uncritical of the sins of the movement which reflect the sins of the nation, is however a respectful account of the part evangelicals have played in our national narrative focussed on the 1960s as a window into that story. To tell the story, Chilton takes up Bebbington’s language of conversionism, activism, crucicentrism and biblicism which have proved so enduring as markers of evangelical identity, but he is not beholden to them. Many commentators disconnect them from any longer narrative and therefore disconnect them from eschatology. Not so Chilton. In fact, he implicitly critiques their reductionism when he describes evangelicalism not merely as a set of abstract theological commitments, but sets these commitments within the bigger story of populist protest against nominal Christianity since the 1730s.

Evangelicalism promotes vital piety as a protest against the notion of establishment Christianity and navigates themes within the mental map of national understanding, therefore reflecting providential themes as well. Indeed, evangelicals have been nation builders and agents of cultural renewal. We have found ourselves engaged with the life of the nation when we have accepted the conditions of British imperial advance, or defined ourselves over and against Roman Catholic immigration, or taken sides during the Vietnam War. Our place in constructing modern Australia is not easy to narrate, nor is the contribution of evangelicals without tensions, but resoundingly our involvement has not been marginal, even when it has suited our temperament or theological convictions to speak prophetically from the edge.

Evangelical Christians have been carriers of modernity as well as leading opponents, which reminds us that our movement, one of the most vital in the Christian world today, is not merely defined by Trump activists or hyperspiritual separatists. It maintains a tradition of significant spiritual stature and philosophical pedigree.

Some surprising facts. After the Lausanne Congress of 1974, The Australian ran a four-page spread on the event, paid for by the Evangelical Alliance. Chilton notes – perhaps needlessly – that this is well-nigh inconceivable today (p186)! Church attendance per month in Australia is double the number of people who attend all kinds of football (p213). Billy Graham heard of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr in 1968 while playing golf in Brisbane, so his tour was shrouded by a sense of crisis in the US (p83). In an address in the presence of the Queen during her visit in 1973, Sir Marcus Loane amended Psalm 137:5 by replacing the word “Zion”: “If I forget thee, O England, may my right hand forget all her skill” (p133). Australia has perhaps the longest running survey of Christian beliefs in the world (p56). A global youth ministry network, the Christian Endeavor organisation was perhaps “one of the largest voluntary associations in the world” (p27) in the first half of the twentieth century and profoundly shaped the leadership of Fred Nile. The march on Canberra in 1973 by the Jesus People gathered under the banner of “Kairos,” meaning the appointed time, to rival Whitlam’s election slogan (p143). This book does double service by addressing questions concerning the metanarrative of Western history and by sifting through the granular details of personalities and events, a witness to much time and effort spent in archives. No wonder with so much fresh material, and with Chilton’s sure prose, this book is stimulating to read.

Now with this panoptic account in our hands, many other articles or books can now be written, taking up Chilton’s framework and exploring other people or moments. I would have liked to see some exploration of the work of David Penman in this period during his time labouring for the CMS and the IFES in the Middle East, given that his work in Pakistan especially was to influence his later ministry as Archbishop of Melbourne. The work of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students in the 1960s and 1970s is worthy of much further historical attention, as would be the impact of new assumptions concerning authority on theological education. How church-planting fared at the perimeters of our cities after the boom of the 1950s is surely a doctoral dissertation in the waiting as well! This wish list aside, there can be no denying the value of the breadth of the material included in this volume, along with the groovy photos to anchor the text. I dare you to read and not find something to sing along to.

Rev Dr Rhys Bezzant is  Dean, Anglican Institute, and Senior Lecturer Ridley College, Mebourne