“Hearing the Stories of the Women of the Bible
in Their Own Contexts“

A Review of
Women in the World of the Earliest Christians:
Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life
by Lynn Cohick.

Reviewed by Chase Roden.

Women in the World of the Earliest Christians:
Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life.
Lynn Cohick.
Paperback: Baker, 2010.
Buy now:  [ ChristianBook.com ]

Think of the Samaritan woman at the well from John 4 — the one who has had five husbands and who is, at the time of meeting Jesus, living with a man who is not her husband.  What is your mental image of her?  If you’re like many Bible-readers, you may think of her as a “loose woman.”  Some interpreters have even called her an outcast in her community, forced to go to the well by herself because no reputable woman would want to be seen with her.  This characterization is dead wrong, argues Lynn Cohick in Women in the World of the Earliest Christians.

As any responsible Biblical interpreter knows, it is frighteningly easy to read our own culture and values into the Bible, even with extensive practice.  The best way to combat this eisegetical tendency is to learn the true historical background of scripture, and Cohick nobly takes on the task, focusing specifically on painting a picture of the everyday life of women in the time and setting of the early church.  In doing so, she reveals a world vastly different from what most modern readers will expect.

Although the voice of women in antiquity has often been hushed to the faintest whisper, Cohick presents a mix of original research and adept synthesis of current academic work on a wide-ranging variety of topics to dig deep into historical sources to uncover echoes of these women’s stories.  Her sources are wide-ranging and often clever; she works with not only the traditional mainstays of historians such as epigraphs, civic inscriptions, marriage contracts, and contemporary accounts, but also pays close attention to small details in surprising sources, often with great reward.  For instance, when examining Jewish marriage customs, Cohick examines the way that key terms are translated from the Hebrew Bible into Septuagint Greek; specifically, she notes that the Hebrew word mohar, for “bride price” (money or valuables paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s family) is translated into Septuagint Greek as pherne or “dowry.”  This detail could easily be passed over, but Cohick notes that it represents a major change of custom from the time and setting of the composition of the Hebrew sources to that of the Septuagint audience.

(more…)

“Crippled by Bureaucracy?“

A Review of
Doomed Edifice:
The Eclipse of the Prophetic Ministry And
The Spiritual Captivity of the Church
by P.W. Baker.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Doomed Edifice:
The Eclipse of the Prophetic Ministry And
The Spiritual Captivity of the Church
P.W. Baker.
Paperback: Wipf and Stock, 2010.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

The new book, Doomed Edifice: The Eclipse of the Prophetic Ministry and the Spiritual Captivity of the Church by P.W. Baker piqued my interest with its promise of reflection on early Church history from a viewpoint influenced by the late social critic  Ivan Illich (click here for a delightful introduction to Illich’s life and work).  Baker is primarily interested here with the institutionalization of the Church: “the fruit of the human attempt to remedy what is considered imperfect or vulnerable… Christians [thus] chose predictable order, rule and authority instead of the spontaneous, convivial and organic” (123).  The power structures of the Church therefore came to overshadow shadow what Baker refers to as the “prophetic ministry”, a role he traces back to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament era.  Prophecy, Baker notes was the role of providing divine guidance to the people of  God.  He emphasizes that prophecy was balanced by the crucial work of discernment, a responsibility he argues that rested squarely on the local church congregation as a  whole, and not on “any single individual or to any select group of spiritual leaders” (21).

(more…)

The occasion of our above review of P.W. Baker’s book Doomed Edifice, seemed ideal of a release of an e-book edition of Thomas Lindsay’s classic text The Church and the Ministry In the Early Centuries, as Baker references Lindsay frequently.

You can download a copy of this e-book to your computer by clicking the DOWNLOAD button.

In our continuing effort to fund the publication and free distribution of The Englewood Review, we are going to be collaborating more intentionally with Christian Book Distributors. Primarily, we will be offering you the opportunity to buy bargain books from CBD that we think of are interest. Buying books this way is a win / win / win proposition. You get great books for a great price, CBD gets the sale and we get an excellent referral fee from CBD.

This week’s bargain books (Click to learn more/purchase):

	The Story of Christianity, One-Volume Edition By Justo L. Gonzalez $12.99 (Save 76%!!!) The best comprehensive text on Church History!!
	History of the Christian Church, 8 Volumes By Philip Schaff / Hendrickson Publishers $69.99  (Save 77%!!!)
	Creeds of Christendom, 3 Volumes By Philip Schaff $19.99  (Save 87%!!!)

A Hymn of the Early Church
Translated by John Brownlie
(from Hymns of the Early Church )

Thou, Lord, hast power to heal,
And Thou wilt quickly aid;
For Thou dost deeply feel
The stripes upon us laid–
Thou who wast wounded by the rod
Uplifted in the hand of God.

Send speedy help, we pray,
To him who ailing lies,
That from his couch he may
With thankful heart arise;
Through prayers which all availing find
Thine ear, O Lover of mankind.

Oh, blinded are our eyes,
And all are held in night;
But like the blind who cries,
We cry to Thee for light;
In penitence, O Christ, we pray,
Give us the radiant light of day.

An excerpt from the recent masterpiece:

Baptism in the Early Church:
History, Theology, and Liturgy in the first Five Centuries.
Everett Ferguson.
Paperback: Eerdmans,  2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

[ Read our review of this book here ]

A Brief Review of

Embodying Our Faith:
Becoming a Living, Sharing, Practicing Church.
Tim Morey.
Paperback: IVP Books, 2010.
Buy now:  [ ChristianBook.com ]

Reviewed by Laretta Benjamin.

“My prayer is that God will use my words, humbly and fearfully offered, to help us live more authentically as apprentices of Jesus, deeply loved by the Father, and sent by and with him into the world.  To God be the glory”.(17) .

I have a feeling that this prayer, which the author lifts up in the preface, will be answered as this book is read, discussed and digested among the people of God in the days to come.

I, for one, am very thankful for those in our day and time who  have a gift of discernment in looking critically at our culture and the church’s life within that culture.  Tim Morey appears be one of those voices, calling the church to be the church – to engage and challenge our culture with all the wisdom and power God has made available to us.  Even though this book grew out of a dissertation, it is not stuck in the highways and byways of academia.  It is written out of experience and observation, and it is easy to be caught up in the writer’s passion and longing to see the church become all she was called to be.

Critical thinking does not come naturally to many of us.  If you are included in that group, I would say that you will find Mr. Morey’s introduction very helpful in taking a hard look at our culture and assessing where it was and where it is now, and even more importantly, taking a hard and honest look at the life of God’s people, the church, as she thinks and acts within this culture.   After reading the author’s explanations and insights, words like modernism, post-modernism, pluralism, deconstruction and other such descriptions of our time and culture don’t seem so scary and beyond our realm of understanding.  They actually begin to make sense.  He reminds us that just as missionaries sent beyond our borders need to have an understanding of the culture they are entering into in order to be effective, we need to have an understanding of our culture in order to engage and challenge.  In what ways has the church allowed herself to be formed and shaped over the past years by the culture rather than Scripture?  For those of us who have been thinking about these issues over the past few years (and many within the Christian community have) there isn’t too much new here in the author’s opening pages; but for those among us who haven’t really taken the time to consider the importance of thinking about these things, this book is a good place to begin.   Whereas many look at our culture and feel hopeless, despairing, and unhappy at what seems to be the church’s new place in our post-modern times, the author looks around and sees opportunity.  “I believe this is a great moment for the church.  The church, now relegated to a marginalized role in society, has the opportunity to recover its vocation as God’s missionary people.”  ( 38)

(more…)

A Brief Review of

Baptism: Three Views.
David F. Wright, editor.
with contributions by Sinclair Ferguson,
Anthony Lane and Bruce Ware.
Paperback: IVP Academic, 2009.
Buy Now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Reviewed by Nick Gill.

David Fitch Reflects on
Brian Mclaren’s New Book
A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY

http://ow.ly/1bJZB

It feels a bit ominous to read the blog reviews of Brian McLaren’s latest – A New Kind of Christianity. The book is raising quite a stink. No surprise eh? One gets the sense there is something different going on this time versus the last couple book releases of Brian’s: The Secret Message and Everything Must Change. One gets the impression we are at a pivot point, a moment that upsets the whole terrain of theological allegiances having to do with the post evangelical emerging church developments of the last ten-fifteen years. It’s like Brian is shaking up the foundations of post evangelical theology. I read the book on my flight home from the ecclesia network national gathering  last week and here are some initial observations.

…

Read the full review:
http://ow.ly/1bJZB

A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY.
Brian McLaren.
Hardback: HarperOne, 2010.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/books/23watchers.html

At this very moment analysts at the National Security Agency some 30 miles north of the White House are monitoring countless flashpoints of data — cellphone calls to “hot” numbers, an e-mail message on a suspicious server, an oddly worded tweet — as they carom around the globe like pinballs in cyberspace.

The snippets of information could conceivably lead them to Anwar al-Awlaki, a fugitive cleric in Yemen whose fiery sermons have inspired violent jihadists. Or to the next would-be underwear bomber. Or, much more likely in the needle-in-a-haystack world of cyber detection, it might lead to nothing at all — at least nothing of any consequence in determining Al Qaeda’s next target.

This is the world of modern eavesdropping, or signals intelligence, as its adherents call it, and for many years it operated in the shadows. “The Puzzle Palace,” the 1983 best seller by James Bamford that remains the benchmark study of the N.S.A., first pulled back the curtain to provide a glint of unwanted sunlight on the place. And the years after the Sept. 11 attacks — a period in which the surveillance agencies’ muscular new role would lead to secret wiretapping programs inside the United States, expansive data-mining operations and more — gave rise to public scrutiny that made the place a veritable greenhouse of exposure.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/books/23watchers.html

THE WATCHERS:
The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.
Shane Harris.
Hardback: The Penguin Press, 2010
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

“Putting the American Dream to Death”

A Review of

The Hole in Our Gospel.
Richard Stearns.
Hardback: Thomas Nelson, 2009.
Buy Now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

[ Win a FREE copy of this book!!! ]

Richard Stearns’ recent book, The Hole is our Gospel is a testimony in the old-fashioned sense of the word, the story of a life transformed by the good news of Jesus.  Stearns recounts how he rose to prominence in corporate America, and eventually – after much resistance – became the president of World Vision.  In parallel with the story of his career, Stearns also tells the story our how his understanding of the Gospel was transformed.  He explains this shift in the book’s introduction:

[B]eing a Christian, or follower of Jesus Christ, requires much more than just having a personal and transforming relationship with God.  It also entails a public and transforming relationship with the world (italics retained from the original).

Stearns proceeds to describe the Gospel in terms of feeding the hungry, healing the sick, clothing the naked and liberating the slaves, and draws upon the rich biblical tradition of justice in order to do so.  When Stearns went on at length about his own story in the opening chapters of the book, I was worried that the Gospel that he would eventually describe while arguing for social justice would still leave much leeway for individualism and consumerism, which are themselves at the roots of widespread injustice in the world.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case!  Stearns is convinced that churches (and not just individual Christians) are essential to God’s redemptive work of restoring justice to all creation.  He says, for instance: “I love the Church and truly believe that it is at the center of God’s plan for world.”  And indeed, in his final section of the book, which is written for churches, he pulls no punches, even going so far as to proclaim death to the American dream.  Stearns speaks powerfully and prophetically of the sins that impede churches in the United States, and I pray that his message will be heard.  However, I wish he would have fleshed out in more detail a practical vision of what it would look like for churches to repent of these sins and to move forward in obedience to our call to be the tangible body of Christ in the world.  The Hole in Our Gospel is clearly intended for evangelical audiences, and I pray that it will be read and prayerfully reflected upon, especially Stearns’ insistence that Jesus’s Gospel of Justice is not just for individuals, but churches.  Its message of repentance makes it perfect reading for this season of Lent.  May Stearns’ prophetic words lead us to our knees, to tears, but ultimately to transformation!