Mike Wittmer

Category: book review

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 4

    Who is Jesus and Why is he important? Brian begins this section with a good reminder that we must beware of the temptation to remake Jesus into our own image.  I wish he had followed his own advice, for his Jesus ends up looking a lot like a beefed up Brian McLaren.  This section reminded…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 3

    Is God violent? Brian begins this section by admitting that he has a big problem.  It helped his new kind of Christianity to assert that the Bible is our cultural library rather than authoritative constitution, but he still has to wrestle with the fact that this library contains many bloody books.  In Brian’s words, he…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Interlude

    The Defining Issue Before I examine Brian’s next question, I think it is important to interact with the foundational thesis which grounds everything else he says in this book.  Brian’s underlying point is that what Christians call the Creation-Fall-Redemption narrative actually starts with Plato and was adopted later by imperial Rome.  It is this “Greco-Roman…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 2

    How should the Bible be understood? Martin Luther warned us not to destroy something good simply because it is abused.  He said that some people worship the sun and moon, but we don’t “pull the sun and stars from the skies;” some people visit prostitutes, but we don’t “kill all the women;” and some people…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 1

    What is the overarching story line of the Bible? Kuyperians such as Al Wolters (Creation Regained) Neal Plantinga, (Engaging God’s World), and myself (Heaven is a Place on Earth) have argued rather persuasively that the evangelical church can free itself from Platonism by recovering the biblical story of creation, fall, and redemption.  So I was…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Introduction

    I read the introductory three chapters of A New Kind of Christianity, and so far it’s an updated version of the Brian we’ve seen before.  He claims to be “a mild-mannered guy” who is only looking for a new way to be a Christian that will boost the declining numbers in our churches, and he…

  • Bach and Freddy

    If you enjoy history you will love James Gaines’ Evening in the Palace of Reason.  I picked this up on the advice of Gene Veith, who said that you should put down whatever it is you are doing and read this book.  I happened to be grading papers at the time, so I did. This…

  • how it ends

    Here is a book review of A Case for Historic Premillennialism which I just finished for Calvin Seminary’s journal.  My review won’t be published until November or next April, so it looks like new media triumphs once again.  I teach at a premillennial, pretribulational seminary (we’re mostly progressive dispensationalists) and I wrote this review on non-dispensational…

  • adoption option

    Last weekend I watched Slumdog Millionaire on Saturday, learned about my church’s new ministry to orphans on Sunday, and began reading Russell Moore’s new book, Adopted for Life, on Monday.  So I’ve been thinking a lot about adoption this week.  Should Christian families seek to adopt a child?  Are we being selfish if we don’t?…

  • unfashionable is in

    Given the cover story of last week’s Newsweek, “The Decline and Fall of Christian America,” we Americans who believe in Jesus can expect to fall increasingly out of step with our culture.  Life was somewhat different in the 1950’s, when “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance and “in God we trust” was…