Book Review: Twelve Extraordinary Women

How God Shaped Women of the Bible and What He Wants to Do with You by John MacArthur

First he wrote Twelve Ordinary Men, a book that contained character studies of the twelve disciples. Based on the success of that book, John MacArthur has given us another book written in the same format, only this time, the twelve people whose lives we read about are all women—women chosen for the important place each has in the story of redemption. The twelve women included are

• Eve
• Sarah
• Rahab
• Ruth
• Hannah
• Mary  (the mother of Jesus)
• Anna
• The Samaritan Woman
• Martha and Mary
• Mary Magdalene
• Lydia

Twelve Extraordinary Women is a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading and I learned much more than I expected about the lives and characters of these women. They are all women “who were unremarkable in and of themselves.” Rahab was a harlot, Ruth was a very poor widow, Anna was a very old widow, and a list of the descriptions of all of them would go on in a similar vein. What made these women extraordinary, as the subtitle suggests, was God’s work in their lives, shaping them into faithful women—women who loved God.

Click to read more ...

Book Review: By Faith Alone

Answering the Challenges to the Doctrine of Justification, edited by Gary L. W. Johnson and Guy P. Waters.

This is a book of essays—nine in all (ten, if you count the introduction by Guy Waters)—answering recent challenges to the historic Reformed understanding of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, concentrating on the New Perspective on Paul and the Federal Vision, but also engaging the classic Arminian position and Mormonism. Individual essay authors include

• Cornelis P. Venema
• T. David Gordon
• Richard D. Phillips
• C. FitzSimons Allison
• David VanDrunen
• R. Fowler White and E. Calvin Beisner
• John Bolt
• Gary L. W. Johnsons

As might be expected from a book that consists of essays by various authors, the book is a little uneven. Some essays seem to be written with the interested lay person in mind, and others assumed much more prior knowledge on the part of the reader. In addition, since the essays were originally intended to stand alone, there is a fair bit of repetition of ideas and arguments.

 

Click to read more ...

Book Review: Evangelical Feminism

A New Path to Liberalism? by Wayne Grudem

The focus of this book by Wayne Grudem is his concern that evangelical feminism will prove, over time, to draw people into theological liberalism. By liberalism, Grudem is referring to a system of belief that does not accept the Bible as the supreme authority in the lives of believers, or accept the absolute truthfulness of what is written in it.

Grudem bases this concern of his in many of the arguments made in support of egalitarianism. They are, he says, often exactly the same arguments used first in liberal Protestant denomination—arguments that deny (although sometimes in subtle ways) that the text of scripture is completely error free, and that what we find written there is the final arbitrator of things in a believer’s life and in the life of the church.

Grudem’s first argument is from history. He makes the case that, generally speaking, denominations that ordain women are also denominations that at least tolerate liberalism. The lists are interesting, and it does seem that the ordination of women and a denial of the inerrancy of scripture (or at least a tolerance of those who deny the inerrancy of scripture) tend to go hand in hand within denominations. I’m not sure exactly what this proves, but the correlation is worth noting.

The second section of the book is a collection of short chapters (fifteen in all), with each one examining a single argument put forward by evangelical feminists. Each arguments examined is one that Grudem believes undermines the authority of scripture. I won’t run through the various arguments, but I will give you one example, and a summary of Grudem’s reasoning for his charge that this particular argument undermines scripture.

Click to read more ...