To begin, let me say that this book has maybe the greatest subtitle ever:

Just Do Something: How to Make a Decision Without Dreams, Visions, Fleeces, Open Doors, Random Bible Verses, Casting Lots, Liver Shivers, Writing in the Sky, Etc.

You’ve got to admit that that’s a pretty great subtitle!

But – if you can believe it – the book is even better!  There are two unique things about my reading this book:  (1) it was recommended by the great Kevin Griggs and (2) it holds the distinction of being the first book I read on my Amazon Kindle!  (Thank you, Mrs. Richardson, for such a great birthday present!)

Anyway, I digress.

Kevin DeYoung wants to demystify and de-hocus-pocus all of the “will of God” talk that is part and parcel of the evangelical landscape.  “How can I know God’s will?  Is it God’s will for me to take this job…marry that person…buy this dog as opposed to that dog…see Robin Hood this weekend?”

He is not, of course, arguing that God does not have a will.  Rather, He is arguing that God is not a sadistic trickster who craftily hides His will in such a way that His people literally have to go crazy trying to put the puzzle pieces in the right place.

DeYoung does a few brilliant things in this book.  First of all, he wonders aloud why it is that there is such a fevered pitch to know God’s will about matters like vocation and marriage, but so little passion to obey God’s clear will about loving Jesus and being conformed to His character?  Furthermore, DeYoung suggests that it is by walking in the clearly revealed will of God on these matters that we are equipped to make wise decisions on the less-clear matters.  Finally, DeYoung argues that God-given wisdom and common sense are good tools from our Heavenly Father to equip us to make decisions.

DeYoung argues that our uncertainty about the non-moral and less-clear aspects of God’s will can tie us in knots, whereas Christ came to set us free.

“If there really is a perfect will of God we are meant to discover, in which we will find tremendous freedom and fulfillment, why does it seem that everyone looking for God’s will is in such bondage and confusion? Christ died to give us freedom from the law (Galatians 5:1), so why turn the will of God into another law leading to slavery? And, to make matters worse, this law is personalized, invisible, and indecipherable; whereas the Mosaic law (which was hard enough already), was at least objective, public, and understandable. What a burden. Expecting God, through our subjective sense of things, to point the way for every decision we face, no matteer how trivial, is not only impractical and unrealistic, it is a recipe for disappointment and false guilt. And that’s hardly what intimacy with Jesus should be all about.”

Freedom in the area of knowing God’s will means thinking clearly as a Christian and making a decision based on the knowledge you have.  This is in contrast to wringing your hands and torturing your Christian friends with year-after-year-after-year wrangling about, “Yeah, but how do I know this is God’s will!”

“At the rate some of us are going, we will be exploring our future career at thirty, entering adulthood at forty, trying to find ourselves at fifty, questioning everything again at sixty, pondering a career move at seventy, wondering what we were made for at eighty, and still waiting to discover God’s will at ninety. And then we’ll die, never having done much of anything. If we had done something—almost anything, really—faithfully and humbly and for God’s glory for all that time, we could have made quite an impact. But if we do nothing, because we are always trying to figure out the perfect something, when it comes time to show what we did for the Lord, we will not have anything.”

Again, DeYoung is not arguing against praying for and seeking God’s will.  He just wants Christians to stop acting like God’s will is an elusive needle in a haystack that you have to find after years of sleepless nights and ulcers.  So “man up!”, as they say, and love Jesus and act rightly and take joy in the Lord…and do something.

This is an excellent book and one that anybody (but maybe especially young adults) would benefit from.

My friend Truitt Martin (FBC Dawson Sunday School teacher and deacon extraordinaire), handed me John Meacham’s American Gospel earlier this year and told me it would be worth my time to check it out.  Though I had to read it in moments grabbed here and there, I found it enthralling from the get-go and determined early on that this was a book that really needed to be read slowly and carefully.  As I finished it last night, it occured to me that I had just finished a book that deserves one of the better compliments a book can receive:  important.

Meacham’s central thesis (it seems to me) is that “American public religion” as it has been articulated in our founding documents and in the pronouncements of American public officials, honors the existence of God but does not go very far beyond this pronouncement into detailed theology or evangelistic efforts.  Theology and evangelism, as Meacham portrays this public religion, is the job of the church, not of the state.  As such, the freedom of religion clause as well as the idea of a separation of church and state guard against the establishment of a state church (“state religion” being distinct from “public religion”), but the presence of an early and consistent “public religion” (which Meacham documents with aplomb) keeps this separation from growing coldly secular or crudely atheistic.

As such, Meacham says that both the secular left and the religious right are mistaken.  To the secular left Meacham points out, again, the presence of public religion from our nation’s founding.  He would agree with the idea that “freedom of religion” does not mean “freedom from religion.”  To the religious right Meacham points out that the public religion, while nominally Christian from its inception due to the large numbers of Christians living in the nation at the time of its founding, has nonetheless never asserted itself in the guise of Christian orthodoxy in any consistent way.  In fact, he helpfully documents that the earliest attempts at inserting blatantly Christian language from the beginning have been resisted by both the government and the people of the nation at large.

Meacham readily acknowledges that Christians (and Meacham is one) will find the public religion inherently insufficient due to the fact that it says much less than Christian orthodoxy.  On the other hand, the Christopher Hitchens’ of the world will find the public religion frustrating because it certainly assertsmuch more than atheism is willing to assert.  As such, we find ourselves in a kind of dialectic dance between secularism and theism, and the death or dominance of either partner in the dance, Meacham argues, would ultimately be injurious to the nation as our founders envisioned it (i.e., it would either become starkly secular or theocratic).

It’s a very interesting thesis, and one that I find largely convincing.  As a Baptist who holds to the early Baptist emphasis on religious freedom, I have never envisioned the government as the nation’s “church,” though many Christians almost seem to be saying that they want this to be so.  On the other hand, it is refreshing to see an editor of Newsweek slapping the hands of the rabid secularists who are contributing to what Neuhaus famously called “the naked public square,” or the removal of God from the public square.

The book is very well written, extensively documented, and, in my opinion, quite fair.  As a Christian, I am indeed aware of the severe limitations of “public religion.”  I place no trust in it and it is certainly not the essence of my faith.  What is more, I have no interest in the Church of the Risen Lord refusing to engage and speak truth to the political establishment, including the public religion, with prophetic timeliness under the guise of keeping everything comfortable (nor, I gather, would Meacham).  But as an assesment of the kind of theism that has pervaded the political life of our nation from the beginning, and as an argument for the idea that this was the kind of public religion the founders envisioned for the public square, even as many of their own personal convictions went far beyond this public religion (an important point to make!), and as a warning against secular iconoclasm on the one hand and the naive desire for the establishment of an outright theocracy on the other, the book is a convincing, persuasive, and helpful study that I think anybody would read with great profit.

When J.D. Salinger died on January 27th, I decided to read The Catcher in the Rye.  I had tried some years ago, but it just didn’t connect.  I’m not prudish in my reading, but I do believe there is a line that we should not cross in terms of language and content.  To put it mildly, Holden Caulfield’s language in the book is deplorable, which is one of the reasons it is the subject of such controversy and has been since it first appeared in 1951.  It is also the main reason I quit reading the work the last time I started.

Yet I decided to read it again for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because it is a landmark in American pop-culture and it still sells 250,000 copies a year (it has sold something like 65 million copiesall told).

The appeal of the book is not hard to see.  It is a fascinating account of teenage angst and existential vacuity, and its mammoth reception reveals that, at least to some extent, people resonate with these aspects of Caulfield’s plight (if such it can be called).

Caulfield is part wander-lust, part nihilist, part hormones, part slacker, and part tender-hearted.  He has failed out of yet another school and decides to take a few days in New York City before having to face the inevitable meeting with his parents.  Along the way he encounters such diverse figures as a sentimental and discouraged teacher, a slew of largely unlikeable classmates, a pimp and prostitute, a couple of irritated cab drivers, two nuns, the mother of one of his classmates, a girlfriend (kind of), a possibly homosexual former teacher, and , most significantly, Caulfield’s sister, Phoebe.  It is a story of a young man’s observations, distractions, and obsessions.  Most of all, it is the story of a young man’s decline and prospects for maturation (or not).

The meaning of Salinger’s book has been famously debated for almost sixty years now, and I, for one, do not claim to have great insights into the work.  I will say, however, the Caulfield strikes me as infuriating but oddly understandable.  The ADD (as we would call it today) is charming in its own weird way and the pessimism is, to me anyway, understandable.  Who hasn’t felt that the world is full of “phonies” and hypocrisy?  Who hasn’t evaluated people and movies and life events with the same kind of insular and idiosyncratic critique that Caulfield shows?

I do find it significant and hopeful that Caulfield seems impressed by the genuineness of the two nuns.  I also find it significant that Caulfield is enraged at the the thought of his roomate compromising a girl he knows.  I was moved by Caulfield’s shock at the crude words written on the walls of his sister’s school and his small but significant efffort at wiping the words away.  Most of all, I appreciate his honesty with his sister, Phoebe, and his return home to face the consequences of his actions.

In many ways, it is a sad book.  In many ways, it is very insightful.  Also, in ways that probably many people will not want to admit, it is a very accurate book showing us what is in the hearts and minds of many of our neighbors…and, at times, of our own selves.

Caulfield says at one point in the book that he likes Jesus ok, but that the disciples frustrate him.  It was just one of many disjointed thoughts that we are privileged to observe, but it, of course, gets closest to the answer that Caulfield, and all of us, need.

A strange, interesting, sad, and thought-provoking book.  There is a kind of significance about this book, and a haunting insightfulness that I do not regret encountering…but I will not let my daughter read it, nor will I read it again.

I suppose I’ve listened to Michael Card and John Michael Talbot more than any other Christian musicians.  That may make me decidely uncool, and it certainly makes me unmitigatingly retro, but so be it.  Michael Card has been a stalwart voice in Christian music and print for many, many years, and his latest book, A Better Freedom, is a wonderful example of why this is so.  Card loves the Word of God, as anyone familiar with his music will attest, and this book is yet further evidence of this devotion.

The occasion for this book was Card’s joining an African American church and his hearing the members of that church pray to Jesus as “Master.”  The use of that word by African Americans struck Card as fascinating and provocative and led him to study the biblical image of “slave.”  Specifically, it led Card to study and think through what it means for believers to be “slaves to Christ.”

Card finds here a paradox:  that it is only in slavery to Christ that we are truly free.  I suppose the truthfulness of this fact is known cognitively by many of us, but what Card does by fleshing out the ancient meaning of “slave” and showing the New Testament’s approbriation of the term is add a depth of understanding that is not readily evident from just a surface reading of the text.  Card employs sound exegetical and hermeneutical insights, along with fascinating historical evidence, to make the case that “slavery” was a powerful metaphor for Christian life in the early church.  This would have struck the inhabitants of the first century Roman Empire (an Empire teeming with slaves) as scandalous and well-nigh unbelievable.  But, of course, Christ redeems the image of slave by becoming one Himself.  As such, a term of derision is baptized and emerges as a paradoxical badge of honor.

There are life-changing insights in this book.  The overall impact is one of awe at the radical transformation that Christ brings to life.  I daresay that after reading this book one will never speak of the “freedom of the Christian” without feeling the awesome wonder of that idea:  that we who were slaves have been set free by becoming slaves to Christ.  This slavery is “a better freedom.”

Get this book.  It’s a wonderful devotional text that will encourage you, enlighten you, and help you in your journey with Jesus.  Thank you Michael Card!

Don’t buy this book.

McCormac is enough of a genuis to make any tale fascinating, no matter how sordid, and that’s just what he’s done here.  He’s told the tale well, but the story is just too sordid.  I am not trying to suggest there is no redeeming value in it.  It is a powerful and haunting tale of depravity…but I do fear that that’s all it is.  So, as far as that goes, it’s interesting, but, when I can see the same thing by watching the news each night, I do wonder what the point is.

The story follows a Tennessee hillbilly named Ballard.  Ballard is mentally, socially, spiritually, and psychologically stunted.  Come to think of it, that may be too much of a compliment.  He’s a degenerate in pretty much every possible way.  His discovery of a dead body by the side of the road seems to send him spiraling into a murderous rampage of lust and debauchery that is nothing less than shocking.  Ballard’s tale is one of isolation, misery, and jarring amorality.  His demise is pitiful and well deserved.

The story left me feeling like I had just witnessed a parade of nihilism.  Unfortunately, I felt dirtied by the experience.

McCarthy is a great writer, but this tale is just too grotesque to be of any real and lasting redeeming value.

Unlike The Road (the movie version of which, inexplicably, showed up in one theater in Atlanta but nowhere closer to me ((WHY?))), I actually saw the movie version of No Country for Old Men first.  The movie was next to brilliant (but, of course, it’s a Coen brothers film, so you know…), but having just finished the book I can now apply that wonderfully worn but almost always true cliche’ to this story:  the book is better than the movie.

Bottom line:  McCarthy can write like a tornado.  His prose is stark and brutal.  It’s very deceptive.  There are almost no rhetorical frills to it and almost no overly complex sentences but, when you finish reading McCarthy’s work you wake up a couple of days later feeling bruised, like you’ve been sucker punched by your Grandpa.  If you just got lost in all that, let me just assure you that, yes, that was a compliment.

Mrs. Richardson wanted to sit this one out, having just read The Road.  She loved The Road, as did/do I, but it was a dark read and she wanted a respite.  So, of course, a few nights back I say, “Listen to this scene,” and, of course, she says the next morning, “He’s a really good writer!”  And there you go.  We read most of it together.

Depending on how much Cormac McCarthy’s views are similar to those of Sheriff Bell (and I suspect they’re very similar), he may just be my new best friend.  Bell’s sporadic reflections, italicized throughout, were worth the read.  He drops wisdom about family, God, truth, faith, war, patriotism, and, of all things, abortion.  This last point very much caught me off guard, pleasantly.  Bell recounts sitting next to a liberal woman at a conference who wants to make sure that her daughter grows up in a country where she can get an abortion.  Bell wryly assures her that there does not seem to be much threat of that changing.  Then he goes on to say (and I paraphrase):  “I suspect she’ll always be able to get an abortion.  She’ll also be able to have you put to sleep too.”  Bell then notes that that ended the conversation.

Brilliant, I say, and true!

Chigurh is more brutal in the book than in the movie, if that’s possible.  Little scenes the movie left out gave me chills.  After shooting up the Mexican dope dealers after his gunfight with Llewelyn, Chigurh stands over one of them ready to execute them.  The dope dealer looks away.  Chigurh says, “No.  I want you to look at me.”  Then he shoots him.  It’s at moments like these that you enter and understand the Sheriff’s suffocating anxiety about what’s happening to the world.  Chigurh is amoral, cold, soulless almost.

Llewelyn is a tragic figure.  You pull for him, of course.  He’s a good guy, especially in how faithful he is to his wife (and isn’t that a rarity in big-time stories like this?), but he’s proud.  His pride is his undoing.  There are hints throughout that his time in Vietnam is playing into this.  But, in the end, Llewelyn just isn’t a Chigurh.  When he has Chigurh at gunpoint in his hotel room (another scene not in the movie), he won’t shoot him.  Part of you thinks, “If you shot that guy, your troubles would be mostly over.”  But that’s just it.  Llewelyn isn’t a Chigurh.  He’s not a killer.

I’ll just finally note that I am still chewing here on McCarthy’s point.  I think I get it then it seems to elude me.  But I’ll say this:  it resonates with me.  I feel that I understand it even if I can’t articulate it.  The closing dream is key:  Bell’s father going ahead with fire in a horn.  It’s an image that McCarthy really likes and he uses it throughout The Road.  Oddly enough, it reminds me of the end of Brideshead Revisited, where Charles Ryder stands before the small flame in the Brideshead family chapel, then walks out smiling.  (Heck, it reminds me of of Gandalf’s secret-flame-guardianship-announcement on the bridge of Khazad-dum!)

I somehow think that the key to understanding McCarthy is in that reappearing flame.  It’s awful small in his stories, but it is not extinguished.  I suspect it makes McCarthy smile in his less morose moments.  I’m starting to think I might know what it is.

Roni and I have recently finished Cormac McCarthy’s stunning novel, The Road, and I am struggling with how to describe this book.  It is Faulknerian in many ways (the tone, the dialogue, the stream-of-consciousness, the bleak, brutal surroundings) and I was not surprised to find that McCarthy’s first literary agent was Faulkner’s as well.  Yet it is also a very distinct work that has come from a very distinct pen.  McCarthy won the Pulitzer prize for The Road, and it is easy to see why.

The story, at first glance, is simple enough:  a man and his son trying to survive (mainly along the road) in a mysteriously apocalyptic landscape.  I say “mysteriously” because we are never told what happened, though the prevailing view among readers seems to be that a massive ecological crisis has occured.  I do agree with that view, though some kind of nuclear holocaust can’t be ruled out either.  Regardless, most people are dead, and most animals as well.  The food supply is gone, and those humans who remain have either embraced a despairing life of animalistic cruelty (i.e., cannabalism) or have taken a higher road and are simply seeking to survive.  The man mentions “communes” once or twice, so you gather that there are small pockets of people somewhere out there trying to rebuild some rudimentary form of society.

But the book is much more than it appears at first glance.  It is a deeply and profoundly spiritual book.  I was not surprised to read a recent interview with the director of the movie version in Christianity Todaysaying that McCarthy insisted to him that the references to God and the spiritual impulse of the book not be diminished in the film.  I daresay that any fair-minded reader will agree that such an omission would do serious harm to the fabric of the story.

God is “in the air” of The Road:  from the boy’s simple but resolute faith, to the man’s occasional Job-like cries of despair, to the continuous references to carrying “the fire” (a theme McCarthy ends No Country For Old Men with as well), to the mysterious old man’s observation about the boy’s belief in God.  There is more, but I do not want to say more about the actual story.

I’ll only add this:  McCarthy is a profound and powerful writer and the book is stunning on many levels.  Mrs. Richardson raised a question out of the clear blue last night about the book that had been on her mind since we finished the last page two nights ago.  And that is the mark of a truly great work, isn’t it?  It stays with you, haunting you almost, and continues to work in your mind and in your heart.

Read The Road.

Eugene Peterson is known most for his paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, but to many pastors it is his work on pastoral ministry that forms his true legacy.  He is no stranger to controversy, and I occasionally note things in Peterson with which I disagree, but let me say with no hesitation that Eugene Peterson’s voice is important and well worth heeding.  I daresay that if pastors were to heed the wisdom of a book like Under the Unpredictable Plant (the last in a trilogy on pastoral ministry, the first two beingWorking the Angles and Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work), that much heartache and confusion could be avoided.

Using the story of Jonah as a metaphor for modern minsitry, Peterson argues that too many pastors are enticed by the lure of Tarshish.  By Tarshish, he means that fictional pastorate where the people are perfect and the problems nonexistent, where the pastor gets to bask in the spotlight and where all is a bed of roses.  He believes that the lure of Tarshish has led to an influx of careerism into modern ministry and results in scandalously short tenures among clergy who keep jumping from church to church in search of that perfect place.

Peterson admits that he himself knows the lure of Tarshish.  But, he warns us, Tarshish isn’t real.  The vast majority of pastoral work, he argues, isn’t glitzy and glamorous.  On the contrary, it’s a day-by-day walk with normal people in normal circumstances (or “a long obedience in the same direction” to borrow a title from another of Peterson’s books).  But, Peterson says, it’s in the normal life experiences of people where God is at work, if only we’ll open our eyes to see it.

For example, Peterson reveals how he used to see visitation with people as dull work, until he came to see that each person contains a fascinating story, a whole universe of experiences, and that, most importantly, God is at work in each person.  This transformed Peterson’s approach to visitation.  He came to see each meeting as a great opportunity to find out where and how God was working in the lives of each of his members.

This book hits me at the right time.  I found it powerfully convicting and prophetic and I found myself reading selections to my wife over and over again.  I daresay that every pastor should read this book!

My friend Kevin Griggs told me that I just had to read Jim Belcher’s book, Deep Church, primarily because of Belcher’s appeal to elements of Tom Oden’s paleo-orthodoxy programme as a potential “third way” between the quagmire that emergent and traditional churches have found themselves in.  It’s a quagmire in communication and in understanding, and Belcher believes it is fixable (possibly).

The book has gotten a good bit of press in American evangelicalism.  I gather most of the press has been positive, though there has been some negative push-back as well, maybe most notably from Greg Gilbert at 9Marks.  The 9Marks review is notable because Belcher is himself a reformed pastor of a PCA church who openly espouses a deep conviction on penal substitutionary atonement.  Gilbert feels, however, that Belcher has sold too much of the store in seeking a third way.  Others are applauding the work as a wonderful example of seasoned, careful irenicism whose proposals need to be carefully considered.

Well, I have to admit that I approached the book reluctantly and almost purely because of a trusted friend’s recommendation, but what I found there was very interesting, thought-provoking, and (largely) compelling.

On the positive side, Belcher helpfully defines terminology which is thrown about way too loosely in the squabbles between the emergents and their detractors.  For instance, he helpfully draws a distinction between “emerging” and “emergent,” and he does so in an effort to show that the camp is not monolithic.  This was particularly helpful to me.  I think Belcher reasonably demonstrates that the movement is not populated by an army of Brian McLaren clones (thankfully), and that not recognizing this fact greatly hinders progress in dialogue.

Furthermore, Belcher fairly critiques the emergent views on various issues as well as the traditional objections to the emergent positions.  In this, he has achieved a level of neutrality that is commendable and rare.  His handling of these respective positions really does calm the waters a good bit, particularly his discussion of foundationalism, relativism, and espistemological humility.  At the least he demonstrates that not all emergents are hardcore relativists who do not believe that truth is knowable.

Finally, his proposed “third way” is, I think, fairly reasonable, though moreso in some areas than in others.  Regardless, none of Belcher’s proposals will fail to challenge and stimulate the reader to think carefully about the crucial issues at hand.

On the negative side, however, I do think Greg Gilbert raises some fundamental questions in his review of the book that need answering, particularly in his query concerning how exactly a “third way” can be reached with some in the emergent camp that, by Belcher’s own admission, are soft on the atonement.  (This is not to say, by the way, that I find Gilbert’s review convincing overall.  For instance, I did not see the arrogance in Belcher’s book that Gilbert saw there.  Quite the contrary.  Furthermore, Gilbert did not seem to respect the nuanced position concerning the ecumenical creeds that Belcher, following Oden, is employing.)

In all, a very interesting book that is well worth reading and pondering.  Check out Deep Church.

As a seminary student at Southwestern Seminary, I picked up and read a little 1956 work on eschatology called The Blessed Hope written by a theologian named George Eldon Ladd.  To borrow that great phrase initially used to describe the effect that Barth’s commentary on Romans had on the liberal theology of his day, Ladd’s work fell like an atomic bomb on the playground of the dispensationalism in which I had been raised.  On hindsight, it did much more than that.  His argument against the pretribulation rapture from the position of a lack of historical attestation for that view coincided with a campus visit and lecture from Tom Oden on paleo-orthodoxy.  The two combined caused me to have a kind of epiphanious crisis in which I began to understand more about the importance of historical theology and, more importantly, about what the church is and who God is.  (If that doesn’t make sense to you, then you may not get the struggle that a lot of people feel when they have grown up in the radicallly ahistorical confines of free church Southern fundamentalism only to discover the shocking truth that what God did between the close of the canon and your birth actually kind of matters a bit.  But more on that later, perhaps.)

Anyway, The Blessed Hope was, for me, the death knell of dispensationalism and particularly of the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture.  As I’ve come to know more about the thought of George Eldon Ladd, I’ve come to appreciate him even more.

Now comes John A. D’Elia’s fascinating, enthralling, and heartbreaking biography of Ladd:  A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America.  It is a simultaneously devastating and sympathetic look at one of the 20th century’s greatest Evangelical minds…but not one of its greatest lives.

D’Elia reveals a tortured soul:  too tall and too skinny as a child, Ladd carried with him the label of “freak” throughout his life.  He seems to have been wounded deeply by the early cruelty of the children around him and by the absence of any real fatherly affection.  He married a woman who carried similar wounds.  Their marriage proved to be deeply troubled.  In the midst of this, their son had serious physical and psychological issues, and their daughter harbored deep resentments, apparently, towards her father and his neglect of his son, her brother.

Ladd was a deeply flawed individual…which is to say, Ladd was human.  It is safe to say that he seriously neglected his family in his relentless pursuit to achieve academic standing and credibility.  His life’s ambition was to gain respectability for evangelical theology, a noble goal to be sure, but it’s hard to distinguish how much of Ladd’s goal was the rehabilitation of evangelical theology and how much was the rehabilitation of George Eldon Ladd’s self-image.  Forever seeking to overcompensate for a fragile image of himself, Ladd hurt those closest to him in ways that are tragic and lamentable.  When Ladd’s greatest work (in his eyes) was published, a negative review from a liberal scholar (Norman Perrin) sends him into a kind of spiritual, moral, and psychological tailspin that becomes nothing short of bizarre.  (D’Elia correctly notes that the review itself could not have done this.  Rather, it simply opened a wound out of which poured many of Ladd’s long-festering demons.)  Eventually, Ladd turned to alcohol and died a broken man.

And yet, Ladd produced some of the most influential evangelical works of theology and scholarship in the last one hundred years.  Furthermore, D’Elia paradoxically reveals a man who seems to have deeply loved the Lord and treasured the gospel and thrown himself passionately into  more than a few noble, commendable, and God-honoring tasks.  Ladd even seems to have been aware of his own brokenness and the pain he had caused others, pitifully revealing this fact to audiences of students.

What to make of this book?  Well, it’s a page turner and was very hard for me to put down.  It was not a hit piece in the least (Frank Schaeffer anyone?).  It was sympathetic and balanced yet honest and revealing.  It is a sad but well-told story.  More than that, it is an important story and a powerful cautionary tale.

And what to make of Ladd?  Ladd was a tragedy in so many ways.  He never knew the effect his work had on scores of young ministers and laymen because he was too focused on trying to win the respect of the wider academic world.  He never considered that the work he had done would be opening the eyes of young seminarians in 1996 in Ft. Worth, Texas.

Was Ladd a believer?  Yes, I think he was.  Was he deeply flawed?  Yes, he clearly was.  Does Ladd’s work still have value?  By all means it does!  Should he still be read today?  Yes, yes, yes!  And can his life serve as a cautionary tale against seeking validation in all the wrong places and losing perspective on what is most important?  Indeed it can.

I daresay that nobody who reads this work will do so dispassionately.  You will be changed by this book.  You will see yourself on these pages and you will be warned.  You may just have your heart broken…not by Ladd’s tragic tale, but by how much you may just see yourself in his story.  I daresay that many ministers will resonate with this story of seeking approval, of achieving success, of gaining the respectability of your peers.  But hopefully they will be cautioned by this story about the dangers of fixating on these things at the cost of integrity, family, peace, and joy.

Above all, this book will help you remember that God works with jars of clay, some of them deeply broken…which is to say, that God loves His people, even, and especially, in their brokenness.