Books read in February 2006 - II

Preaching Christ in All of Scripture by Edmund Clowney (Crossway) 177pp.
I was looking forward to this book when I got it a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I found it more difficult and less satisfying than I first expected. I have a great respect for Clowney as a preacher. I have a few tapes of him from when he came to preach at the Tron many years ago. However, I have not found his written work so easy to penetrate. The first 50 pages or so are instruction on seening Christ in the OT and then preaching. The remainder consists of sermons Clowney preached on various passages. Though these are engaging, I found it difficult to see how the teaching of the first 50 pages was worked out in the examples. It would have been helpful to see his thought processes as he constructed the sermons, somewhat akin to the BT Briefings one finds at beginningwithmoses.org.

The Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll (Zondervan) 200pp.
As I have mentioned before, Driscoll is very engaging in a number of ways. Now this book. It is radical, earthy, even irreverent, but boy does it make you think. The structure is determined by the greatest command: love God, love your neighbour. Driscoll has a clear view on what needs to be held on to and what comes down to mere preference. For example, he is rock solid on the need for repentance - where do you hear that nowadays? - calling sin sin, but nevertheless loving people, even your enemies. He is uncompromising on churches that become holy ghettos, and uncompromising on the post modern movement. Then, disarmingly, in the last chapter he says,

The problem with my pastoral job is that I don't really know what I am doing. So I read every book I can find and I cling to the Bible like a kid who can't swim but somehow found a life preserver in the middle of the ocean.

Don't know about you, but that seems like a pretty good way to go about things.