Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 33:3 (Sep 1990)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Recovering the Christian Mind. By Harry Blamires. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1988, 192 pp., $6.95 paper.

Meeting the challenge of secularism—the subtitle of this book—will require the meat of sustained argument and not merely the milk of exhortation. Consequently this essay (previously published under the title Meat, Not Milk) has the tone and structure of a sustained argument.

The initial premise of the argument (chaps. 1–2) is the thesis that we live in a state of emergency and that the Christian gospel is all about “lifelines and lifebelts and not just about good advice and moral uplift” (p. 17). The doctrines of the fall and original sin are descriptive truths of our current condition. This is not a “denigration of human quality and potential” (p. 27), suggests Blamires, but rather a call “to recapture what we have lost in the way of an eternal and spiritual endowment” (p. 28). It “is a cry for help beyond what is humanly on offer” (p. 35). “The ultimate result of the Fall of man is ignorance of the Fall” (p. 55), however, and therefore though our civilization was built by the “imposition of frameworks and networks to conquer and tame natural impulses and thereby grant us a freedom we should otherwise lack” (p. 49), our ignorance now blinds us to the reality that secularism is a disease unto death. Unable to see the crisis we are likewise unable to see the need for deliverance, the need for redemption.

The second premise (chap. 3) is conditional on the first: If we are blind to our fallen nature, we will not appreciate the redemption offered to us in Christ. Therefore it should not surprise us when we see putative Christians forsake the costly self-surrender that counterpoints the joy of the redeemed Christian and instead “instruct God on what is theologically appropriate for him to do, and define what acts would conflict with the divine character we have graciously assigned to him” (p. 89). Embarrassed to be “chased by a lamb” (p. 106) we become impotent: Unlike Zacchaeus we cannot welcome or accept the consequences of the “divine life in the human neighbourhood” (p. 93).

The reasonable conclusion to be drawn at this point, suggests Blamires (chap. 4), is that what frequently goes by the name “Christianity” is in reality counter-Christianity, that what is labeled the “Biblical ethic” is an alternative ethic. Indeed “the moral keynote of Christianity is obedience” (p. 109), but there is ample evidence all about us that obedience “is now totally discredited in many fields of thought and action” (p. 110). Arguments are therefore presented in a Christian context but on the basis of presuppositions that Christianity itself rejects. Nothing short of rank permiss...

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