“The Story for Little Ones” Misses the Mark

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Here is the latest review from my blog on children’s books, The Children’s Hour:

The Story for Little Ones: Discover the Bible in Pictures

(Zonderkidz, 2011), hb.
Ages 3-5
Recently I received a review copy of this book along with some other materials related to Zondervan’s The Story project, an effort to help people see the overarching story of Scripture. I was pleased to see another effort aimed at helping people move beyond disconnected Bible stories to seeing how the Bible fits together as one major story of God’s work of creating a people for himself. And this initiative has books for little children, children, teens and adults. This is a good idea.
However, The Story for Little Ones is a disappointment, and I cannot recommend it. I decided to just jump in and begin reading it to my four and five year old children one evening. What immediately jumped out to me was that the story of the Fall was completely skipped. Of course in a summary of the Bible you have to pick which stories to include and which to leave out, but how can you leave out the Fall! This is one of the major movements of the entire story- Creation, Fall, Redemption, New Creation. After a happy creation, the story moves simply to God calling Abraham, “a good man who trusted God.” The burden of that story is Abraham trusting God to being him to a new place. There is no hint of sin, covenant, etc. In fact most of the Old Testament ends up as moralisms about being good without the dimension of our need of rescue from sin. Here is a sample of the bolded conclusions of each story which state the main lessons:
“Abraham trusted God. You can trust God too.”
“God gave these rules to help his people live good lives and be closer to him. God’s rules will help you too.”
“God had Rahab help his people. You can be a helper too.”
“Samson asked God to help him. You can ask God for help too.”
“Ruth was kind to Naomi, and Boaz was kind to Ruth. God smiles when you are kind.”
“Nehemiah knew God was on his side. God is on your side too.”
In the New Testament there is improvement with it being clearly stated that Jesus came to save people “from their sins.” However, the lesson from Jesus’ baptism is “God’s power shows through Jesus. God’s power works in your life too.”
If you are looking, as I am, for resources to help your children grasp the overall story of God’s work of salvation, to grasp the heart of the Bible’s message, to point them to their need for Christ, this is not a great resource.
The next step up book, The Story for Children, a Storybook Bible looks to be much better- I noticed the fall is clearly dealt with. I have not had the opportunity to read more of it yet, though. I will plan to post more on it in the future.

Westerholm- The Pastorals Negate the New Perspective

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The latest from PastoralEpistles.com:

I have previously mentioned here the new section at the Evangelical Theological Society meeting devoted to the Pastoral Epistles. This section came into being due to the conviction (shared by myself and others) that the exclusion of the Pastorals from our thinking about Paul has skewed our understanding of Pauline theology. Specifically, I have become convinced that if the Pastoral Epistles were taken seriously as Pauline, the “New Perspective on Paul” would never have taken off. Stephen Westerhom in 2004 made this very point, stating:

No study that took Ephesians and the Pastorals into account could conclude, what proponents of the new perspective have sometimes claimed, that the Pelagian crisis or sixteenth-century controversies are the source of the “misreading” of Paul that sees him excluding human works from salvation rather than particular works from the terms for Gentile admission to the people of God. (Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics, 406)

Some of our papers next month will speak to this issue. I hope to see you there.

Bede, the Pastor

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The Ancient Christian Texts series from IVP is a real treasure, as it provides access to writings of the Patristic era. I have been recently thumbing through the new volume, Commentaries on Genesis 1-3, which contains writings from several men including Bede the Venerable.

In the introduction to Bede’s commentary, the following quote struck me as an appropriate description of a pastor:

Bede was “a scholar on the brink between two worlds, an ancient one he knew only from books but which he still loved dearly, and a modern one, which he frequently criticized, but whose inhabitants, the English, the newest of God’s elect peoples, he also loved dearly.” (xvi) [quoting Joseph F. Kelly, “1996 NAPS Presidential Address on the Brink: Bede,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5 (1997): 85]

This should be true of all pastors. If we live in only the ancient world we will be merely nostalgic, not very helpful to our people and perhaps irritable with them for not being like the world we really love.  If we live only in the current world we will not have a standard by which to point out the errors of our world and by which to guide our people carefully. May we stand faithfully “on the brink” proclaiming God’s word our people, whom we love dearly.

P. D. James and the “restless desire for change”

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Brad Green recently posted this significant quote from P. D. James, the famous British novelist. James takes aim at our society’s “restless desire for change.” It reminded me of Paul’s warning against “youthful desires” (2 Timothy 2:22), which several scholars suggest may refer to a penchant for the novel.

This quote is worth contemplating:

“We live in an age notable for a kind of fashionable silliness and imbued with a restless desire for change. It sometimes seems that nothing old, nothing well-established, nothing which has evolved through centuries of experience and loving use escapes our urge to diminish, revise or abolish it. Above all every organisation has to be relevant – a very fashionable word – to the needs of modern life, as if human beings in the twenty-first century are somehow fundamentally different in their needs and aspirations from all previous generations. A country which ceases to value and learn from its history, neglects its language and literature, despises its traditions and is unified only by a common frenetic drive for getting and spending and for material wealth, will lose more than its nationhood; it will lose its soul. Let us cherish and use what we still precariously hold. Let us strive to ensure that what has been handed down to us is not lost to generations to come.” [The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Prudence Dailey (Continuum, 2011)]

Athanasius Book Giveaway

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At my blog on children’s literature I recently posted a review commending Simonetta Carr’s book, Athanasius. This is the latest book in Mrs. Carr’s wonderful series on key leaders in church history.

You can grasp the heart of the book by watching this trailer:

Today I have announced the opportunity to enter a drawing for a free copy of the Athanasius book. Instructions for entering can be found here. The drawing for the winner will take place Wednesday, October 5.

Father Mercer: The Story of a Baptist Statesman

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Just today I received my copy of Tony Chute’s new book, Father Mercer: The Story of a Baptist Statesman (Mercer University Press).  Tony’s doctoral work and first book (A Piety Above the Common Standard) were on Mercer, and I have previously discussed here (and here) my appreciation of the previous book. Tony is a good scholar and writer so am I keen to read the book.

So far I have only had a chance to look through the book, but I like what I see. The first part of the book is an overview of Mercer’s life. The second part is a selection of Mercer’s writings including letters, newspaper essays, and addresses.

I particularly liked the way the story of Mercer’s life is framed by the description on the cover:

Yet, rather than telling the story of a larger-than-life pastor with whom few “ordinary” pastors can identity, Father Mercer reveals how one who is faithful in small things can, over time, bear much fruit for the Lord. Pastors who have been wounded by church members by their neglect of Christian duties will strike a friendship with Jesse Mercer who handled more than his share of opposition. College students who have left home for the first time will discover how God used the twists and turns in Mercer’s life to prepare him for opportunities he never foresaw.

We need examples of faithful people, “subject to like passions as we are”, who have persevered and been used of God. This looks like a great book.

Serious, Lively Teaching

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I was struck by the following quote which I came across in Bartholomew and Dowd’s Old Testament Wisdom Literature: Theological Introduction.  The original quote seems to have in view primarily classroom teaching. Bartholomew and Dowd use it in well drawing out the implications of biblical wisdom. The truths here apply well to those of us who preach and teach the Bible. Let us not be “amiable gravediggers” diminishing our hearers to our “own level of indifferent fatigue.” There is life in God’s Word and if it animates us, life in the teaching will be unavoidable.

To teach seriously is to lay hands on what is most vital in a human being….Poor teaching, pedagogic routine, a style of instruction which is, consciously or not, cynical in its mere utilitarian aims, are ruinous.  They tear up hope by its roots.  Bad teaching is, almost literally, murderous and metaphorically, a sin.  It diminishes the student, it reduces to gray inanity the subject being presented.  It drips into the child’s or adult’s sensibility that most corrosive of acids, boredom, the marsh gas of ennui.  Millions have had mathematics, poetry, logical thinking, killed for them by dead teaching, by the perhaps subconsciously vengeful mediocrity of frustrated pedagogues….The majority of those to whom we entrust our children in secondary education…are amiable gravediggers.  They labour to diminish their students to their own level of indifferent fatigue. (300) [quoting George Steiner Lessons of the Masters.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.  p 18.]

The Reformers & Paul the Pastor

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Yesterday I received my copy of Gerald Bray’s inaugural volume on Galatians and Ephesians in the Reformation Commentary on Scripture Series. It looks great!

In his introduction Bray makes the point of the pastoral emphasis of the Reformers and how Paul was a key example to them.

“They [the Reformers] were also determined to imitate the apostle in showing concern for the spiritual welfare of the churches under their care.  To them Paul was a pastor as much as an evangelist, and his epistles reveal his pastoral role more than anything else.  They knew from their own experience how easily a church could fall away from the preaching of the gospel if it lacked good teaching and sustained discipline, and much of their interest in Paul focused on this.  They also knew from experience that a faithful minister of the gospel will suffer persecution for his efforts, and here again Paul provided an obvious model, not the least because he did not let his chains stop him from proclaiming the message and caring for the churches he had founded and nurtured.” (xli-xlii).

We still need to see these lessons in Paul today.

T. S. Eliot on Wisdom and Our Lack

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“…the values which we most ignore, the recognition of which we most seldom find in writings on education, are those of Wisdom and Holiness, the values of the sage and the saint….Our tendency has been to identify wisdom with knowledge, saintliness with natural goodness, to minimize not only the operation of grace but self-training, to divorce holiness from education.  Education has come to mean education of the mind only; and an education which is only of the mind…can lead to scholarship, to efficiency, to worldly achievement and to power, but not to wisdom.

–  T.S. Eliot. The Idea of a Christian Society and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faver, 1982),  p 142, cited by Craig Bartholomew & Ryan Dowd, Old Testament Wisdom Literature: A Theological Introduction, 293

Melvyn Bragg, The Book of Books: Biography of the King James Bible

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KJV400: Legacy & Impact, the King James festival hosted by the Center for Biblical Studies at Union University will get underway tomorrow with viewing of the Bible exhibit in the afternoon and the actual program beginning in the evening with bagpipes, dinner and an address from Timothy George.

Here is what I thought was a well put tribute to the impact of the KJV from Melvyn Bragg’s TThe Book of Books: A Biography of the King James Bible, 1611-2011:

The King James Bible has been called the Book of Books. It has a good claim to this title. It consists of sixty-six different “books”. It has sold more than any other single book since its publication in 1611. It has carried the Protestant faith around the globe. And, by the law of unexpected consequences, its impact, alongside and often outside its vital role in spreading the Word, has been radical and amazingly wide-ranging. This Bible is one of the fundamental makers of the modern world. It has set free not only its readers and its preachers but those who have used it as a springboard to achieve gains and enrichment in our world never before enjoyed by so many. This book walks with us in our life today…

It stands still as a book of great language and beauty. There has never been a book to match it. It has a fair claim to be the most pivotal book ever written, a claim made by poets and statesmen and supported by tens of millions of readers and congregations.

When we “put words into someone’s mouth” and “see the writing on the wall” or “cast the first stone”, when we say “you are the salt of the earth”, or “a thorn in the flesh”, when we “fight the good fight” or “go from strength to strength” or “when the blind lead the blind”, or are “sick unto death” or “broken-hearted”, or “clear-eyed”, or talk of “the powers that be”…  in these and literally thousands more ways we talk the language of the 400-year-old King James Bible. And “beautiful”, that too makes its first appearance in the translation which became the keystone of the Bible. “It is,” wrote American journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken “the most beautiful piece of writing in any language.”