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Dear Reader,
It’s 1:15 a.m. The dorm-room debate has shifted from predestination to physics. Outside the philosophy classroom, that’s where we’re most likely to wrestle with the nature of time. Yet the way we see time shapes the way we approach history.
Time was created by God and has meaning. As John Wilsey observes in God and Country, “God’s purpose for time was for it to be measured and that the standards for measuring time would be predictable, knowable, and permanent.” Time anchors every human in a particular context. As we learn about our ancient neighbors, we need to reckon with both their context and ours.
Time flows like a river. We can never experience the same moment twice. A right understanding of time helps Christians appreciate the reality of Peter’s inconsistencies in the Gospels. It also helps us understand how the relentless flow of history shapes our view of progress.
Glen Scrivener talks about the idea of progress in his contribution to Making Sense of Us, a new curriculum from The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He argues that cultures, technology, and ideas aren’t better because they’re new. Instead of assuming that progress comes through the passing of time, we recognize that real progress comes from conformity to God’s Word.
Happy reading!
Andrew Spencer
Associate Editor
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New from TGC
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Book Review
Andrew Spencer
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“Good history requires a biblical perspective on humanity. We all have mixed motives, a tendency to be selfish, and the potential to do great evil. One day, our lives will be summarized by the dash between the dates on our headstones. Neighbor love requires us to treat the dead—some of whom we’ll meet in eternity—as complex people living in confusing times rather than as two-dimensional caricatures.” Read the review.
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Book Review
Andrew Spencer
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“Helping children understand this part of our nation’s history equips them to be thoughtful observers and wise interpreters of their world. I often think of it like medicine: A doctor would never make a diagnosis without first understanding a patient’s history, and the same is true for a nation. Our past helps explain, in part, many of the race-based realities we see today, including how race-based chattel slavery played a foundational role in access to opportunity and generational wealth; it even shaped the physical layout of cities.” Read the review.
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Book Review
Austin Gravley
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Links for the Reading Life
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| 1. |
Glen Scrivener, “What Is the Biblical Way of Progress?” (The Gospel Coalition)
“When the Swords into Ploughshares statue was unveiled in 1959, Soviet propaganda seemed so cutting-edge, but now it’s the hammer and sickle that are on the wrong side of history. Progress is real, but it’s biblical. There is an arc, and it does bend, but it bends down and then up. It bends toward death then life. It’s cross and then resurrection, and in the end, all nations will see that it’s the Word of God that brings real progress. It’s the Word of God that will prevail.”
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Ivan Mesa and Winfree Brisley, “On My Shelf: Life and Books with Winfree Brisley” (The Gospel Coalition)
“For years now, as I’ve talked with women about their spiritual lives, I’ve heard a consistent frustration. They want to grow in knowing the Lord. They want to have a rich devotional life. But everything else in life seems to get in the way. So I’ve been wrestling with this question of how we can equip women to grow in devotion to the Lord even as they live in an age of endless distraction.”
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Trevin Wax, “The Christian Life Is More than ‘Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again’” (The Gospel Coalition)
“I’m grateful for books that put words to this experience. Kyle Strobel and John Coe’s When God Seems Distant may prove life-changing for believers who wonder what God is doing as spiritual seasons shift and our feelings fluctuate.”
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Sam Chan, “What Could Be Better than Pursuing Happiness?” (The Gospel Coalition)
“If we only live for ourselves, we’ll end up bent, curved in on ourselves, twisted, broken, and distorted. This is what the Bible calls ‘sin’—to fall short of the glory God designed us for (Rom. 3:23), to turn our backs on God’s bigger story for us. That’s why Jesus says, ‘Follow me.’ He wants to be the big story we live for—not just as the model for how to live but as the One who opens the door to God’s great story for us by paying the penalty for our sin and giving us his new life.”
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Ivan Mesa and Brad Edwards, “On My Shelf: Life and Books with Brad Edwards” (The Gospel Coalition)
“In ways that continue to surprise me, writing The Reason for Church opened my eyes to how thoroughly individualism has subtly indoctrinated us to achieve our identity (through self-discovery and self-construction) rather than receive who we are in Christ (by grace, through faith). And the more I understood individualism’s soul-crushing tradeoffs, the more I started seeing where I’ve been compromised by the same indoctrination and have yet to fully source my significance, meaning, and purpose in Jesus.”
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Joel Miller, “Is the Nonfiction Book Crisis for Real?” (Miller’s Book Review)
“The ‘nonfiction is in crisis’ narrative is, in other words, attractive not because it’s supported by real data, but because it tells a flattering story about ourselves—embattled serious readers in a frivolous society going to hell one podcast download at a time. But that story, melancholic and meaningful as it might be, belongs on the fiction shelves.”
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Alexandra Alter, “From ‘The Correspondent’ to ‘Theo of Golden’: The Year’s Surprise Hit Novels” (The Virginian Pilot)
“When Allen Levi, a musician who had written scores of songs over his career, began writing his first novel, his plan was to finish it and stick it in a drawer. ‘I just wanted to see if I had the muscle to write a piece of long fiction,’ he said. . . . After a group of Levi’s friends read the novel and encouraged him not to let the manuscript molder, he self-published it through Amazon in the fall of 2023.”
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The Gospel Coalition
8520 Allison Pointe Boulevard, Suite 220, Indianapolis, IN, 46250
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