Book Review: On Giants' Shoulders

 

This is less a book review and more a recommendation. Michael Reeves' book introduces us to some of the most influential theologians of the last 500 years with the plea that we don't ignore them. Reeve's desire is that we study the theologians of the past. In their own words. We should understand their works and influence, the questions they were asking and where they went wrong. And so this short book is designed to whet our appetites for their works. In short: it works for some of them.

Each chapter of the book is devoted to a theologian: Luther, Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Schleiermacher and Barth. The chapter begins with a summary of their life and the context of their writings. This is helpful for understanding what and why they wrote, and gives us an impression of their character. Reeves then summarizes their main works. He finishes with suggestions on which of their writings to make a start. Importantly Reeves comments, not just on each work's importance, but also on their readability. For example, I've always been put of reading Barth by the obscure quotes I come across, but Reeves claims this is the result of his writing style involving long sweeping arguments that don't lend themselves to being quoted. The result of all this is that I'm quite keen to get hold of works by Luther, Barth and Calvin's Institutes. I'm less eager to read Edwards and Owen. And I'm not tempted by Schleiemacher; though I'm probably more sympathetic towards him than I was before reading this book.  There's only so much time avaliable in life for reading. 

So my advice for you: give this book a read – it doesn't take long – and see if you can resist wanting to read some of the works mentioned within.

 

Beware what you believe.

That's right. Beware what you believe, lest it blind you to the truth.

None of us are a blank slate, we all believe lots of different things, and this affects how we interpret the Bible, historical evidence, everything. For example, I was once listening to a sermon, and a possible interpretation of the passage (I can't remember the one) was that Paul could have lost his salvation, but this was ruled out on the basis that the rest of Bible teaches you can't loose your salvation. This rather irked my Arminian sensibilities as I could think of various passages, such as Hebrews 6, that many Christians would interpret to say that you could loose your salvation. So what's going on?

We're confusing our belief system, which (hopefully) we've based on scripture with what the Bible actually teaches. Whenever we interpret a passage we only consider possibilities that fit within our system. Is this wrong? Not necessarily. It's good practise to interpret confusing passages in the light of the more obvious ones, which hopefully form the basis of our belief system. However we should be aware that we're doing this. We should acknowledge that other Christians have come to different conclusions, also based on scripture, and we should (I say this to myself) try to understand why they believe what they do and their methodolgy for doing so. This may change what we believe. It may not. But at the very least it should widen the possible ways a given text could be understood. And this may allow us to arrive at a more accurate interpretation, even if this challenges our nice, neat, pre-existing, beliefs.