Cupboards, Vaults and Underground Tunnels: Digging into N. D. Wilson's Fiction

It's been a while since I've gotten caught up in a book in a way reminiscent of my experience with C. S. Lewis' and J. R. R. Tolkien's works. Okay, it will probably still be a while before I find something comparable to Tolkien - I'm holding out for the next world. But N. D. Wilson's got me. After reading his dancing and dizzying Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl, it was really only a matter of (very short) time before I started in on his fiction. And a whirlwind of a month or so later, I'm stuck having nothing left of his to read, and anticipating September when his next book comes out.

His fiction is written for children, with an imagination and craftsmanship that takes its readers seriously and thus can reach a wide audience, including those no longer supposed to be playing dress-up. Personally, I can't wait to read these books to my kids, should God so bless us, and in the meantime my husband and I have enjoyed reading and discussing them. Wilson is a skilled writer, very aware of what he's doing with sentences and imagery, and I found the storytelling of sophisticated enough craft to not only hold my attention, but spark it. And when it comes down to it, he spins a good yarn: exciting plot, seductive landscapes and quirky and compelling characters. Actually, his character portrayals and development are particularly successful. I appreciate his attention to creating secondary characters in such a way that one recognizes them to be significant; had a different storyteller chosen, the story could have been told from their perspectives with equal interest. Also, the adult characters aren't demoted to the characterization that seems to haunt them in much children's literature: irrelevant, boring, ineffective, unable to understand, or just plain oppressive. Thus, even if as a thirty year old you have a hard time following around a thirteen year old protagonist, you may find yourself invested in the story for the sake of the forty year old father trying to make a go of it by selling tumbleweed on the internet.

I started with 100 Cupboards, and knew after the first few pages that I was in the hands of a storyteller whose work I could respect. The initial description of the town of Henry, Kansas, was emotive and impressive. Granted, as an English major I'm particularly guilty of looking for ways in which landscapes interact with the characters, reflecting, subverting, creating them. But I think Wilson is fully aware of this too, and uses it in a very productive way. The main character of this particular series (which includes #2 Dandelion Fire and #3 The Chestnut King) is Henry, accompanied in many of his adventures by his cousin Henrietta. Yes, Henry and Henrietta. And it works. The basic premise: a kid with a pretty sheltered upbringing spends the summer at his cousins' farm and discovers a wall of cupboards behind the plaster walls of his room. And of course, they aren't for holding socks. As with the Lewis' wardrobe made from a Narnian-grown tree, so are Wilson's cupboards made from wood with a tendency to transport...

The only complaint I had against this series was the matter of pacing in a few sections. I felt the end of book one a little rushed - with the villain appearing and disappearing a little too quickly and dramatically. Book two produced the opposite reading experience for me as I felt it started a little slowly, with a bit too much "recap" of book one, but then accelerated in a fantastic accrual of events and characters. What I perceive as weaknesses of pacing are minor, and don't detract from the overall thrill and thrust of the books. And indeed, book two boasts one of the best battle presentations (in terms of pacing and attention to what is described and what is not) my husband claims he's ever read; I have to agree.

Wilson's Ashtown Buriel series seems to be progressing in an equally positive direction, but the book I am currently excited about is his first and shortest, Leepike Ridge. I think I had the lowest expectations for this one (not sure why), and so it turned out to be a surprisingly pleasurable experience. I read it in a day, following its eleven year old protagonist down a river and under a mountain. More than any of the books, Wilson nails the narrative pacing here - it's dynamic and contemplative all at once. Its world feels simpler than the other books, and yet, like the others, and like the events of the plot itself, it digs deeper. It draws on old stories like the Odyssey. It weaves in a counter-cultural view of history. And it does so in a way that will keep an eleven year old engaged and thinking and enjoying.

With the books back on the bookshelf (until I return them to the public library), what I think I value about them the most is that like with the Narnia Chronicles, Till We Have Faces and The Lord of the Rings, they continue on in the real world. Wilson has said in regards to his own writing that he seeks to open peoples' eyes to the wonder around them, to the magic that is woven into the world we live in. And it's true. He doesn't squirm around suffering and death. He doesn't avoid the beauty and danger intrinsic to life.

And I will never look at dandelions the same way again.

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The Magical Movement of Mr. Walker

I saw magic a couple of weeks ago. It was beautiful. It made me actually shake my head in awe. It made look around to call my husband over to see, even though he wasn't home yet.

I sat down with my laptop, logged in to Facebook and got ready to do my daily perusal of friends' status updates, cleverly captioned photos and mildly inspiring videos. I was expecting to be distracted from whatever I was supposed to be doing, and I was hoping to be amused. But I wasn't expecting to be confronted with magic. It went something like this:

I see a video. A close friend has posted it, and it is called 'Mr. Walker!' Sounds promising (an exclamation marks always helps). And I love her posts about her son, Baby D, the firstborn within our intimate friend group from high school.

I scroll over that familiar right-facing arrow and click; the slightly pixilated home-video flicks to life. A  round little face comes into focus a few feet from the camera, blond hair whisping, smiling eyes looking beyond me, looking at the Great Wielder of the iphone. The little boy sways back and forth for an instant, rocking against his dad who's kneeling behind him. His hands are scrunched in little excited fists, and he is held up by his dad's hands wrapped around his yellow-shirted tummy.

The camera goggles, the thirteen month old flexes his knees up and down, and his dad whispers "Go see mommy!"

All this I take in within a mere two seconds. There is no further warning. I am not prepared for what will happen:

Baby D leans towards us, even before his dad has let his hands gently fall from the chubby belly. Baby D bobs. His arms are stretched up, fingers grabbing air. He steps. He is released. And he walks.

I am completely and utterly taken aback. My own delighted laughter dances with the sounds of the moment. The thwump sound as he lands on his bum after three steps. (And he doesn't even seem to notice his dad lifting him up again, just begins again with that focused, excited trot towards the camera as soon as he finds himself back on his feet). The sound of his mom bursting out "Come see mamma!" in musical, rising tones and "Woohoo you made it!". The sounds of flump, flump, flump, of baggy little pant legs shuffling back and forth against each other.

How can I describe this? Here is the little boy I first saw only just over a year ago, a tiny, red, delicate little ball of preciousness, newborn. So fragile. So helpless. And here is the little boy who I've held, who I've listened to gurgling or crying, who I've had pee on my jeans, who I've helped bundle up into the carrier on his mom's back. He's grown and changed so much. Of course, babies grow. But this? I wasn't expecting it to be like this. Here he is - bumbling and bouncing and bounding on his own two feet. Walking. Reaching the camera.

And then his mom turns him around, saying "Go see daddy!", and he walks back to his daddy with that zestful bend of newly found knees. And then he thwumps down on the ground and the adult arms reach in and pull him up again. And so, back to mommy as he takes another step all by himself. 
 

And it is magic, just magic, and I'm in total wonder at it.

I don't think I'm alone in this experience, in this realization of the wonder that is present within the very normal and the very human. I'm embarrassed at my failure to expect it (although in this case, it's a pleasant failure). For there are moments when I am too numb to recognize the magic. Too familiarized to notice the Divine's artistry. Too busy to see and rejoice. Or just too tired (albeit sometimes legitimately so) to wonder.

Please - splash the cold water of your comments over me, share your experiences of magic in the everyday, so that we can wake up to the magic that God has woven into the universe.

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Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: an Author Acknowledgement

Is there a particular phenomenon which in all this wide world causes you to take notice and feel a certain way – almost entirely regardless of when you encounter it or how you are feeling at the time or who you are with? And when I say “take notice” I don’t just mean that you notice it, in which case any gaudy or unavoidably attention-grabbing thing would suffice. No, it might be very subtle, or common, or silent, or  yes, gaudy, but when faced with it, you cannot help take notice, pay attention, open up your ears to what it is saying. It ends up not being the focus of your attention; what it is saying does. For me, the it is standing in the snow, and feeling – realizing really – that it’s cold. I will often take my gloves off and grab a fistful, because the feeling of burning, icy, melting snow turning my fingers red and cold and eventually numb reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me that I am not numb, not really. It reminds me that I am not wholly calloused to the Voice that speaks through all of His creation, that I am not wholly dead to those non-lingual words that N.D. Wilson identifies in his book as “God’s Spoken World.”

Notes from a Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World. This book – a poem in prose, really – made my reading experience very much like picking up a handful of snow. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that one recurring image throughout the book is the vivid recollection of snow-experiences. But mostly it has to do with Wilson’s beautiful preoccupation with uncovering the Voice of the Poet, with de-numbing our senses to God’s words, specifically His spoken world, all around us. Like the medievals (but unlike the medievals), Wilson believes strongly that this world is a book, a book revealing the Author - if we are willing to become literate (which is much more an issue of the heart than of dissecting analogies). I can’t help but quote him directly here: “In the beginning… There was a Word, a Voice. There was Artist, but there was not yet art. And that Voice said Light, and extended Himself a finite canvas to paint the only thing that could be worth painting, to paint the I AM” (186 – 187).

In reading Wilson’s book, I didn’t feel like I was being taught something shockingly new, but rather being exposed to wider and stronger and more beautiful depths of the familiar. These are the whispers and shadows of light that some of us were introduced to through the writings of Tolkien (with his mythology of “splintered light”) and Lewis (who resists the possibility that a star is simply a ball of gas, that its existence consists only in its materials of composition). These are the whispers and shadows of light that we are hopefully aware of to some degree through our own experiences. And if not there, then certainly through the words of Scripture: “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (Psalm 19:1-2).

And Notes is steeped in Scripture. Not in the ways we may be used to (whether bad or good). There is no copy and paste of de-contextualized verses. There is no in-depth exegesis of a passage, a phrase, a word. But the Written Word of God pervades: it forms the base of Wilson’s theology, it permeates his assumptions, it sweeps through his anecdotes, it colours his perspective with an irrevocable dye. The fear, for some of us, is that a book which insists on God’s effectiveness to speak through every created thing will crumble into diverse mantras of  “god is whatever you understand him to be through whatever you discovered him in.” Fear not. This book is anything but flaky. And it is anything but tame – there are no half-hearted convictions here. This book insists on God’s sovereignty, on His power, on His goodness, on His holiness, on His Incarnation, on His humility in coming “to live in a trough and die on a pole,” on the reality of Hell, on the gloriousness of God, on the joy that is ours to come.

"But what kind of book is it?" you may ask
It is a book of very big ideas and very small details. There are many lists in the book. In sentences, mostly. Juxtapositions. And all are carefully crafted. The chapters start off with a scene, a recollection of the author’s, with a deeply visceral connection to the landscape or some creature therein. And there the chapter returns in closing. In between, however, the images shift. We are in places confronted with the voice of a philosopher (Plato? Nietzsche? Annie Dillard?). We are introduced to a butterfly. We are told that there are shellfish fossils in the Rockies. We are privy to lists like: “A single world combining galaxies, black holes, Jerry Seinfeld, over 300,000 varieties of beetle, Shakespeare, adrenal glands, professional bowling, and the bizarre reproductive patterns of wasps (along with teams of BBC cameramen to document them), precludes easily palatable explanations” (4-5). These lists are marvelous. They de-familiarize the familiar; that is, they prompt us to think of common things in new ways; that is, we must put some work into it. But it is invigorating work. And Notes is ultimately cohesive – it is a fitting embodiment of the paradox we see around us of the diversity and unpredictability of life, and of its unity under the creating, sustaining, reigning Lord Jesus Christ. Notes is a story, with a kind of plot, with an accrual of force and emotion, with a point. Like life.

Life. Wilson weaves within the book’s pages a provocative and humbling account of life, of this created life, and he does not hold back from dealing with the hard stuff: death, the (so-called, but much felt) problem of evil, pain, decay, Hell, Heaven, bodies, souls, laughter, language, wonder, worship. Of what is. Of what will be. Oh yes, of what will be! There is a quote on the last page (before the acknowledgments section) that I wish I could read to you, but it is on the last page and so I don’t want to read it to you. You must read it yourself. I think you’ll know which one it is.

There are so many other passages I want to share too. In fact, when I first drafted this post I had worked up my own juxtaposition of something from Barthes’ purposely provocative short essay, “Death of the Author” with one of Wilson’s statements regarding the Voice of the Author. I've obviously since discarded that idea, but I’ll end here with the quote from the latter: may its reminder of your created-ness and God’s creative authority provoke you to go find the book and read it.

“You are spoken. I am spoken. We stand on a spoken stage. The spinning kind. The round kind. The moist kind. […] The magic is real, and I stand blinking on the stage because of it. I’m real. I’m heavy. I’m matter. Cut me and I’ll bleed. But I’m not made out of anything, and if the Magician, the Poet, the Word, if the Singer were to stop His voice, I would simply cease to be” (24).

If you've read Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl, what are your thoughts on it? How did it impact you? And have you read any of his children's fiction yet?

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Fast to Feast: thoughts on observing Lent

What Lent means, literally.

It seems like many people are doing Lent this year – or at least more are posting about it on Facebook. This will be the first year I’ve participated in the fast (no TV for me!) and as such I’ve decided to do a bit of research and thinking about it, especially regarding the benefits of observing Lent and the best way to go about it.

But before we get to this, I must share the first question that naturally came to mind when I started my musings: “What does Lent mean?” I asked. I don’t mean “What is it all about?” or even “What does it mean to me, personally?” But literally, what does the word lent mean? I’m curious, you know? (And I’m married to a linguist, so this kind of question is to be expected).

I let my brain do some of its own internal research as I lay in bed “falling asleep” the eve before Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent). It ran something like this: “Lent? Perhaps its related to the word relent, as in “a period of relenting from sin”? Or maybe the past tense verb lent, like “I am giving back that which I’ve been lent from God”? No wait – it’s clearly Latin because the origins of Lent lie in Medieval Catholicism. Despite my almost non-existent Latin, verses from Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” spring to mind: “O lente, lente currite noctis equi!” or “O, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night!” Slowly? Really?

Actually, a quick trip to the Oxford English Dictionary makes me somewhat embarrassed to call myself a medievalist. Lent is not a Latin word in this case – but Middle English. Lent, from lenten, refers to the season of Spring and may derive from the Old English lencten, meaning to lengthen (i.e. Spring is the season in which the days lengthen). I guess I should have checked Chaucer before Marlowe.

All right then, lent means spring. Moving on…

What Lent means, practically.

Lent is the forty day period prior to Easter (excluding Sundays) during which Catholic and a number of Protestant denominations engage in fasting. In the Middle Ages, Lent functioned as a counterpoint to something we might call the carnival impulse – that practice of delighting in the flesh (carne), which of course we all do in some form or another. For the medievals, Lent usually involved fasting from meat and other rich foods, those luxuries which the body enjoys. However, what Lent was really meant to signify through such a fast was a rejection of the bodily corruption indulged in during the feasts and other carnival-esque activities and excess. For them, Lent’s significance was intended to be spiritual, and the Lenten fast was meant to counter the damning effects of the carnival impulse and help make one right with God again.

Now, not all Christians observe Lent (growing up, it was never something I was aware of in any of the churches I attended). And many have stayed away from the Lenten fast citing the danger of falling into a works mentality or mere ritual. Certainly for the medievals, not all was right; while many likely participated in Lent because of an awareness of sin, there existed the danger of viewing it as a convenient way to compensate for the carnival impulses, without intending to renounce and turn from the sin. Back then, as today, I am sure that some participated in genuine contrition and repentance, while others, as is so easy to do, would have found it a useful means to ease a guilty conscience and procure insurance for the sin which they knew would damn them, but had no intention of turning from because it was so enjoyable. In the latter case, the spiritual significance of Lent gets turned on its head, for its main goal is to be free the rest of the year to cater to the desires of the carne and indulge oneself in sin.

Today, I think Lent is often de-spiritualized in a different way. It can be less about compensating for sin, and instead becomes an opportunity to exercise our human will, a moment of self-discipline meant to aid us in experiencing the kind of purification found in self-denial. It’s a chance to prove to ourselves that we can abstain from Facebook for a month and a half. Or it’s a chance to experience the health benefits of avoiding sugar. These are not bad motives, but I can’t help but feel they miss out on the best!

What Lent can mean.

What is the best? The Bible says that it is to “glorify God” in whatever I eat, drink or do, including the act of abstaining from these things (1^st Cor.10:31). The Psalmist puts forward this sole vision for his life: “one thing I have asked from the Lord, that I will seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to see the beauty of the Lord” (Ps. 27:4). John Piper sums it up with a reference back to the Westminster Catechism: “the chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.” So how might I use Lent to glorify God by enjoying Him? How might I return to the spiritual meaning of Lent, without falling into the traps of works-based righteousness or attempted bargaining with God or mere ritual? Here are two things that I’ve come up with:

First, consider carefully what to fast from:

Think about fasting from something that distracts you from God. Do you spend 30 minutes a day checking Facebook photos? Or 45 minutes watching an episode of The Mentalist? Or 2 hours listening to music during your commute? Or 16 hours a day accessing the convenience of your iphone? None of these are sin – many are good! – but they can take time away from communing with and hearing from God. Consider such a fast.

Or something that you enjoy…maybe even a teensy bit more than you enjoy God? The point is not to say that chocolate, meat or shopping are evil. But might a time away from these things make us more aware of these things as blessings from God’s hand? Might a time away from these things demonstrate that we are serious about first cultivating our enjoyment of God? Consider such a fast.

Or something that offers an area of temptation for you. I don’t mean sin – we should be striving to permanently fast from sin and shouldn’t give ourselves the option of sinning the rest of the year if we can but manage to abstain for forty days. But think about places or activities or even people which seem to make it a greater challenge for you to keep from sinning. They prove a special weakness for you at this point in your life in terms of falling into sin. Are there things that God has been whispering that you should give up in wisdom, and you’ve been ignoring Him because you think you can do the dance and avoid falling down? Might a time away be spiritually wise? Consider such a fast.

Second, consider carefully why you are fasting:

Fasting in the Bible is often used to express our sorrow over something (2^nd Samuel 1:11-12, Neh.1:3-7). For the medievals, Lent was meant to be a time of mourning over sin, a time of repentance, a time of penitence. Christians are called to regularly confess our sin to God so as to keep fellowship with Him and actively engage in His work of freeing us from the power of sin in our lives(1^st John 1:5-9). Lent can be a yearly opportunity, a season built into our calendar, to humble ourselves, confess our sin, meditate on God’s holiness and our sinfulness, be convicted of these, and genuinely repent (that is, seek to turn from sin, not just store up “good points” in an attempt to outweigh our sin). Use the Lenten fast to declare to God that you are serious about His desire that you walk in holiness. Use the Lenten fast to physically support your mental decision to turn from sin, and to physically fuel your heart’s resolve to do so.

Fasting enables us to become more aware of our weakness, need, and selfishness, and to realize our dependency on God (Ps. 109:21-24). Have you ever fasted from food before? (Please don’t try this for forty days!) I tell you, the moment you lapse in judgment and walk into your college’s dining hall and smell those delectable fibs (“fake ribs”), you experience a monumental flood of desire: you are overwhelmed with how hungry and weak you are feeling, how much you want food, and just to what extent you might go to provide for yourself. You realize how much time and effort you usually spend during the day satisfying yourself and caring for yourself so that you don’t need to feel this way. And, if you allow your thoughts to go there, you realize that this is just a small picture, a tangible experience, of your deep spiritual need. Use Lent to re-sharpen your sensitivity to your great need for God. Use Lent to re-awaken you to an awareness of what stuff you are made of and what is in you.

Fasting is used to cultivate Godly self-discipline. Here we can engage in the Spirit’s work of producing self-control within us (Gal.5:22-25). Here we have a tangible opportunity to submit to God’s sanctifying work in us by learning to die to self. I believe that if we are in the habit of restraining our desire for good things, we will have a better time restraining our desires for evil things. Use Lent to strengthen your self-control and to weaken the habit of surrendering to self’s priorities instead of God’s.

Lent: fast to feast.

Until now, any of the last three points could be modified to leave God out of the picture – you could fast as a way of mourning, or fast to remind yourself of your weakness, or fast to exercise your self-discipline. This last point then is crucial. In the Bible, fasting is used to open up a space, a silence, an opportunity to meet with God. It is a way to return to Him (Joel 2:12-13).

Human beings are never vacuums or voids. We are always filled with something. If I remove dessert from my diet, I will replace it with something – salad hopefully, whining possibly, but certainly another activity during the time in which I would have eaten dessert. If I fast from Facebook, I may use that time to invest in youtube. If I stop listening to music while I clean the dishes, I will still listen to something – perhaps silence, or my own thoughts, or the sound of construction next door. What if during the 10 minutes I’d normally spend having dessert and coffee, I found a quiet place and thanked God for his grace to me? What if I took my 30 minutes of Facebook time and used them to read God’s word and pray, communing with Him and interceding for others? What if I filled the music-less silence with meditating on Scripture that I had memorized and asking God to speak with me? Consider how I would be trading the good for the best! Imagine how I would be enjoying God, experiencing His presence, growing in His holiness, rejoicing in His grace! Think about how this would honour Him, how it would declare “Your love is better than life!” (Ps.63:3), how it would bring Him glory!

You see, we have returned to the best. We have abstained from good things in order that we might gain something greater. We have fasted that we might feast. Use Lent to spend more time communing with God in the Word and in prayer (Dan.9:2-4). Use Lent to not only fast from something, but also to take that newly opened space and use it to return to God. Fast from the good in order to feast on the best.

What Lent means, to the glory of God.

Lent leads up to Easter, to the celebration of that most central event in all of history – that moment when God broke the power of sin and death over us, that place where His love and justice met in the humiliated and broken body of the Holy Man, that victory in which God purchased a people for Himself that they might enjoy Him forever and in doing so, glorify Him. This is the moment we celebrate at Easter – and this is the climax to which Lent leads. We break our fast with a celebration of the Gospel. And what a wonderful way to prepare ourselves to celebrate what our God has accomplished! What an opportunity to humble ourselves in surrender to God, to view ourselves and our sin as they truly are, to declare that we are serious about Him, to actively participate in His progressive transformation of our lives to holiness, and to experience that for which He saved us, namely to spend time with Him, to know Him, to love Him, to enjoy Him, to glorify Him.

This Lent, I’ve given up watching TV; it’s an area of temptation for me which rivals my time and affections for God. But I’ve also replaced it with something. Each week I meditate on a single Psalm and I have committed time every day to read the Psalm, memorize part of it, meditate on it and talk with God over it. I have missed a few days, but when I do I resolve to stick with it, moving past the failure by trusting God to help me choose His best one day at a time, knowing that He saved me for such a purpose.

Are you participating in Lent this year? What are you fasting from? What are you feasting on? O that we will fast in order to really and truly feast!

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The Disappearance of God: a resolutely hopeful book of warnings

What’s your view on the existence of hell? Does the term “church discipline” have any meaning to you? How do we maneuver a God-glorifying balance of maintaining cultural sensitivity and relevance with Biblical truth and imperative? Has anyone ever offered you counsel, wisdom or even – gasp - warning about these things? How much warning literature do you read (aside from the Bible)? Do you read so much that you find it difficult to trust a Christian from a different church because you are afraid of uncovering heresy at every turn? Or do you read only those books which confirm a happy and calm state of mind, which don’t participate in something so archaic as fear-mongering?

Some things, I am convinced, merit warning, serious warning. It is true, some of us are so steeped in it that we honestly need to step back and spend some time actively trusting God to sustain His Kingdom-work in this world, learning to love selflessly and be less self-defensive. However, my guess is that for the majority of us, reading a book full of warnings is not something that occupies a lot of our time (unless it’s a joke column listing ridiculous warnings that are found on some products, such as “Do not eat” on an electric can opener). I’ve read a few (books full of warnings, I mean, not the jokes), and this is one which I found very appropriate and timely, and especially suitable for people for which this is the first foray into warning literature. This little book offers a useful survey of a few very significant ways in which God is “disappearing” from Western church doctrine and culture. An intentionally provocative term, “disappearance” as Mohler uses it refers to the apparent trend of rejecting the truth about God’s character and will as revealed in the Bible, and replacing it with one of our own choosing.

One of the greatest strengths of this book is Mohler’s ability to pack the basics of the issues into a concise and yet provocative study. I’ve been told that the book originated on his blog, and if so, I can certainly see this reflected in its composition and content: the chapters are short (short enough, I believe, for someone not-so-academically-inclined to read and enjoy and learn from without getting worn out or bored) and the discussions are well balanced in unpacking some pretty thought-provoking ideas while generally operating at a layman’s level of expertise. (I think some terms like “penal substitution” and “liberalism” do go undefined, but can largely be understood from the context. And if you occasionally need to reach for the dictionary or google a word, remember that so many of us easily spend forty-five minutes jumping from video to video through youtube links, that we can probably handle looking up a few definitions!) This book does assume that the reader is a Christian with some knowledge of the topics, which is a reasonable expectation; hell and sin are two such topics general to the Christian faith, and even the more specific movement of the emerging church is likely a label which most Western Christians have come across at some point. Each chapter offers you enough to be informed and properly oriented to the discussion at hand, while pointing the reader to further resources and areas for consideration. In many ways the chapters are jumping-off points. If you never have another chance to properly research the debate around the existence of Hell (aside from your personal study of the Bible and exposure to Sunday preaching), the respective chapter offers sufficient warning. However, the chapters also work to pique reader interest, and I think many readers will come away from the book wanting to further invest in equipping themselves to respond to these issues in a God-honouring way.

As is clear from above, there are a range of topics covered in the book. These include the disappearance of the Biblical concepts of hell and sin and the need for missions and preaching from Christian belief and practice. The Emerging Church movement is also discussed for three chapters and I appreciated Mohler’s conclusion: “The Emerging Church and its leaders are right to insist that substance must be preferred to superficiality. We can only pray and hope that they will remember and acknowledge that substance requires a substantial and honest embrace of truth” (95). Now, obviously I am coming from a position which is largely in line with Mohler’s own and I don’t expect that those of you with Emerging Church leanings will simply bow to each claim Mohler makes – but I think, I hope, you will find that he treats the movement and its leaders with fairness, as he attempts to respectfully but adamantly draw our attention to areas for concern. Mohler draws heavily on Carson’s book, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, and so if you have already read that, you probably won’t discover anything radically different – although, as I maintain, this book’s treatment has the benefit of brevity which makes it easier to remember.

The chapters which I really responded to the most include Mohler’s discussion of “A Christian version of Beauty,” in which he suggests that beauty is a concept in crisis, and that as Christians we must not divorce beauty from its proper relation to what is good, true and real – that is, from the glory of God. These were refreshing chapters despite the warnings, and I was particularly affected by the move he makes to suggest that “the confusion over beauty is not merely an item of cultural consternation, nor is it merely a matter of theological debate. It is a matter of redemption.” (56) Beauty and missions are related – and it’s a beautiful thing.

I also greatly appreciated his discussion of church discipline and the reality that the Western church now exists in an increasingly post-Christian culture and what our response to this should be. For those more pessimistic individuals among us (perhaps of an older generation disappointed with the direction of our culture, or of a younger generation jaded because we’ve read too much Nietzsche, or of any generation and owning a melancholy personality), the warnings of this book may not be new or shocking. However, the book is not a mere lament over change, nor does it fall into the tired rut of mourning the truism that the older must inevitably give way to the newer. If you are a younger reader, you are not excused in ignoring the book because you feel that in it you will find only the protests of the previous generation at the deviations of the following one. No, this book crosses generations, for it unites around the common grace that is given in the conviction of the absolute truthfulness of Scripture. Change itself is not the issue. Change in our attitude towards the truth of God’s revealed Word is. Our response, however, in light of the solemn warnings is not to be pessimism, and this was a point I found particularly striking. How easy to pile warning upon warning about how our culture and, more seriously, the church is turning away from the Living God and to then shake our heads and give up! It’s hopeless! It’s inevitable! We just have to resign ourselves and survive it! But Mohler makes it clear that there is no place for pessimism, and this is so refreshing in a book so (necessarily) burdened with warning.

I leave you with his words and encourage you to go out and find a copy of this hopeful book of warnings.

He writes, “In reality, we have no right to be either optimistic or pessimistic. To be either optimistic or pessimistic is to be deluded, and in some sense to deny the sovereignty of God. We cannot be pessimistic because Scripture tells us we are to be a people of hope. Of course, that does not mean that we are a naïve and ignorant people of hope who close our eyes to the reality around us. No, we find hope in something that is far more secure than anything this culture can secure.”(173)

What are we to be?

“We are to be the community of the open-eyed, the intellectually alert, the brokenhearted, and the resolutely hopeful.” (174)

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