Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 04:1 (NA 2017)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

JIRBS 4 (2017) p. 137

Book Reviews

All That Is In God:
Evangelical Theology And The Challenge
Of Classical Christian Theism,
James E. Dolezal
(Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2017, 162pp.),
reviewed by D. Scott Meadows

With this book, James Dolezal has rendered a great service by distilling the most endangered and important points of theology proper desperately needing explanation, defense, and propagation on account of contemporary proposals which undermine classical orthodoxy with its roots in the earliest centuries of Christ’s church and generally and jealously guarded until recent times. If it were in my power, I would press every seminary student and professor, along with all ministers of the gospel and the more theologically-oriented members of their congregations, to read and reread All That Is in God (ATIG) until its subject matter becomes a treasure to each of them. They would be helped greatly to recognize and reject novel aberrations now arising even from some modern teachers identified as Reformed and Calvinistic.

In an earlier book, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (GWP, 239 pp.), Dolezal addressed some of the same critical issues, but his current offering is most welcome for several weighty reasons. First, it is more concise and lucid. It lacks the earlier volume’s several digressions of an exceptionally-technical nature, surely of much interest to a few specialists in the field where philosophy and theology intersect with respect to the doctrine of God (e.g., four models for explaining divine attribute distinctions, GWP, 127 ff.). ATIG will certainly prove accessible to a much wider audience because technical terms are clearly explained and limited to those most necessary, and the author has wisely restricted his treatment to the more essential aspects of the present controversies. Second, ATIG critiques, more often and specifically than GWP, teachers better known to the general Christian public today, both historic (e.g., Charles Hodge) and contemporary (e.g., D. A. Carson, J.

JIRBS 4 (2017) p. 138

I. Packer, Robert Reymond, Bruce Ware, John Frame, and Wayne Grudem—all of considerable reputation and influence). The best theological dialogue among those who differ within the household of faith is conducted with modesty, charity, and deference. Dolezal exemplifies these virtues in his interactions with theses incompatible with his own. Also cited are theologians representing greater consistency with orthodox theology proper on the disputed points including Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin, Charnock, Owen, and Bavinck, to name a few. Even more significantly, Dolezal’s theological stance has the support of the early ecumenical ...