I picked up the manuscript of my friend's first book unsure of what would I find inside the pages. I was hoping that after bugging him to let me read it I would find something worthwhile to say about it in a review. I did.
In Arete Again - missional adventures in theology and life Tobin Wilson cahllenges the reader through personal story, a social theology of the trinity and Aristotle's concept of virtue, to a deeper level of living as followers of Jesus Christ and embracing the grace that is our through him.
The concept of Arete comes to us from Aristotle, it is the idea of excellence or virtue in ife. As Tobin explains in the book, our virtue, our character matters to God, becasue we as God's image bearers in the world and therefore we are to be a reflection of God's virtue, character. Contrasting virtue and vice Tobin helps us see more clearly what it means to live a virtue filled life of grace, recognizing that the virtues are not works righteousness but rather they are formed in our lives becasue of the gift of grace that God has granted us.
At times the brutal honesty and carefully written personal narrative in the book left me wiping away tears from my face as I felt the raw emotion of the story flowing from the page. It is this narrtive thread that holds the whole book together. Once started reading the book I couldn't put it down because I wanted to hear the next how God was at work in the next story.
The theological elementof the book picks up on Moltmann's social trinitarianism and the idea of 'perichoresis.' If this last sentence scares you, don't worry, Tobin does an excellent job of explaining these terms for the non-theologian and I believe makes the theological complexity accessible to all readers.
There is something in this book for everyone. I plan on buying a case when they are available and giving them away. I haven't done that with a book since I read Eugene Peterson's Eat This Book. I'm not ready to put Tobin up there with Peterson but I do feel strongly about getting this book into people's hands.
By way of full disclosure: Tobin and I have been friends since we first met in 1991, we have travelled to Africa together, he and his wife, Dawn, introduced my wife and I to one another and he officiated at our wedding. In one of the stories in the book he speaks of driving home from a party, that party was at my home. I wrestled with how much of my response to the book was personal as oppoed to critical and concluded that there is no reason the stories told should have moved me as they did unless they had been exceedingly well articulated.
Image: Passion to Pentecost by Linda McCray
I really enjoyed reading
I just finished a fascinating book, "
I was intrigued by the title of this book but thoroughly disappointed with the content.
What can I say about a book that bashes screens and technology in worship and praises the hymnal. The very idea that a hymnal is something that “has historically been considered vital to church life” (p.110) is just absurd. For most of church history there has been no hymnal, a hymnody, but not a hymnal. Indeed the hymnal that caused people to look down at words on a page rather than lift high their heads in praise is a product of technology, the print medium. A technology that receives no critique the way other more modern communication mediums do.
Smith argues that God’s preferred medium is words (p.179) but he makes no distinction between the spoken word and the written word, it is almost as if the two are synonymous but they aren’t. Again a glaring gap in the book.
Attacks on Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, Billy Graham and others proliferate the book and just provided further frustration for me as I was hoping to find something redemptive in this book, some solution to the problems mentioned, yet nothing substantive was offered, only the feeling of condemnation. I think the only substantive solutions offered where hymnals and having every church preach Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in an non-emotional manner. There was a rallying cry to return to a certain theological framework, which appeared to be a Calvinism as defined by the Synod of Dort.
This is one book I was glad to be done reading and not one I would recommend to others.