This book, a critical look at apologetics and how the practice of Christian persuasion should be recovered from William Edgar, was rather interesting. I read it very thoroughly and write a summary document as I went along (to help Tim Chester, one of my church leaders and author of one or two good books, with something, I don't know what, he just wanted it summarised), so have already written far more words than I'd've usually liked about this book, so I'll keep this post very brief indeed. If you actually do want a 4368-word breakdown of the whole thing, here's my full summary as a freely-viewable Google Doc.
The book's about recovering christian approaches to persuasion, so the area of mission and evangelism largely taken up by apologetics. Edgar lays out the biblical mandate for our engaging in this activity, considers some broad realities about how we should do so, and then outlines helpful stances we can take to some of the most common difficulties in it. His overall point is twofold: firstly that we need to tackle not just intellectual issues but the 'reasons of the heart', i.e. we must try to understand someone's worldview, character and relationship to God, and understand these multidimensional aspects properly, to accurately be able to speak the gospel to their position; and secondly that our own 'reasons of the heart' need to be rightly attuned, i.e. we need to be fully mindful and worshipful of God's goodness and glory, so that we proclaim him with the right motivations. The combination of these two aspects makes for an approach to apologetics that is humble, loving, realistic in its treatment of persons and God. Though parts of the book were fairly dry or seemed unnecessary and other parts which I thought deserved a great deal more discussion were neglected, this main focus on refreshing the way we not only do but think about apologetics struck me as important and largely correct.
Would I recommend this book? I have no idea who to. I'm not even sure I enjoyed it or was just concentrating on it harder than most things I read outside my degree. If you want helpful books about apologetics, there are probably far better out there, and if you want helpful books about approaches to mission, there are also probably far better out there. It was pretty interesting though, so if you're the kind who enjoys shortish densely-written reconsiderations of aspects of christian life mingled with very vague methodological pointers, check it out.
It prompted much responsive thought in me about the nature of reason, persuasion and truth, but I've spent two workdays writing about this book so now I'm going to cut the post off shortish and watch the last episode of Better Call Saul.
The book's about recovering christian approaches to persuasion, so the area of mission and evangelism largely taken up by apologetics. Edgar lays out the biblical mandate for our engaging in this activity, considers some broad realities about how we should do so, and then outlines helpful stances we can take to some of the most common difficulties in it. His overall point is twofold: firstly that we need to tackle not just intellectual issues but the 'reasons of the heart', i.e. we must try to understand someone's worldview, character and relationship to God, and understand these multidimensional aspects properly, to accurately be able to speak the gospel to their position; and secondly that our own 'reasons of the heart' need to be rightly attuned, i.e. we need to be fully mindful and worshipful of God's goodness and glory, so that we proclaim him with the right motivations. The combination of these two aspects makes for an approach to apologetics that is humble, loving, realistic in its treatment of persons and God. Though parts of the book were fairly dry or seemed unnecessary and other parts which I thought deserved a great deal more discussion were neglected, this main focus on refreshing the way we not only do but think about apologetics struck me as important and largely correct.
Would I recommend this book? I have no idea who to. I'm not even sure I enjoyed it or was just concentrating on it harder than most things I read outside my degree. If you want helpful books about apologetics, there are probably far better out there, and if you want helpful books about approaches to mission, there are also probably far better out there. It was pretty interesting though, so if you're the kind who enjoys shortish densely-written reconsiderations of aspects of christian life mingled with very vague methodological pointers, check it out.
It prompted much responsive thought in me about the nature of reason, persuasion and truth, but I've spent two workdays writing about this book so now I'm going to cut the post off shortish and watch the last episode of Better Call Saul.
No comments:
Post a Comment