Mike Wittmer

Category: book review

  • God Is Love

    Yesterday I read through the first half of Gerald Bray’s systematic theology, God Is Love. It’s a rollicking stem winder (if that phrase means what I think it means) that is a lot of fun and includes many asides that you wouldn’t normally find in a systematic theology. I felt as if I was listening…

  • good grief

    I preached on death this past Sunday, and afterword a retired man gave me a book written by his son after the sudden passing of his teenage daughter. I’m usually reluctant to receive these gifts, as I have a stack of reading that I still must plow through, but it’s a topic that I’m interested…

  • disrespecting Scripture

    One of the most perplexing traits of Love Wins is its cavalier attitude toward texts. Whether it was contradicting Jesus’ parable of the ten virgins, mistranslating the Greek term for eternal, omitting Revelation 20:11-15 from its chapter on hell, or wrenching one line from Martin Luther until it meant the opposite of what Luther clearly…

  • year of living

    We are in the middle of another media blitz for “A Year of Living” book. Since Alan Jacobs wrote A Year of Living Biblically, evangelical Christians have been inspired to write The Year of Living Like Jesus and now A Year of Biblical Womanhood. This phenomenon puzzles me, because I would think that any Christian…

  • pornography

    Yesterday a seeker oriented church in my town gave its Sunday morning platform to unrepentant porn star Ron Jeremy. The ploy seemed to work, as the story landed the church on the front page of the Grand Rapids Press and as a lead story on the evening news. Jeremy told the 2,000 member audience that…

  • God told me

    My friend Jim Samra has written a provocative new book, God Told Me:  who to marry, where to work, which car to buy…and I’m pretty sure I’m not crazy. The book is endorsed by Kevin VanHoozer and Darrell Bock, so it’s a safe bet it’s not crazy. I don’t happen to agree with the premise…

  • tempted and tried

    This took me way too long to get to, as I’ve had it on my must read pile for more than a year, but last night I finally had a compelling reason to read through Russell Moore’s Tempted and Tried, and I rekindled my dormant man crush for him. We think a lot alike and…

  • waters of promise

    As I have taught on baptism and wrestled with how it is often practiced in our Baptist churches, I have concluded that we too often limit God’s role to mere spectator. He isn’t doing anything in baptism except watching us testify to our faith. It would be textbook Pelagianism if we thought that baptism was…

  • center church

    I recently received Tim Keller’s new book, Center Church, and I think I’m really going to like it. This is an exhaustive textbook that explains Redeemer’s philosophy of ministry—and I suspect it will be our generation’s go to book on this topic. Every church ministry course should require this text, and every pastor should read…

  • Hannah Coulter

    Summer ends tomorrow, and just in time I finished my last summer novel, Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. I was turned on to reading Berry by my Cornerstone colleagues, and I’m glad I did. Like Garrison Keillor and his fictional town of Lake Woebegone, Berry has constructed an entire world centered around the farms of…