Two books, briefly

Crossway has dipatched more books to review in spite of my lack of earnestness in reviewing all the books they send me. The title to the left is Religion Saves, and 9 other misconceptions, by Mark Driscoll.

You heard the sermon series last year, I am sure. I was reading the other title I received this weekend while my wife was paging through this one. She says to me, "Are you going to review this one?"

Of course, I said. That's the deal.

"You better throw it away when your finished with it. Our kids are readers, you know. If you leave this laying around, they'll read it and it's not appropriate for them."

So I'll have to review that one pretty quick before my wife takes summary action with it.

The other one is the title you see to the right here -- Southern Baptist Identity, edited by David Dockery. On the one hand, thank God someone is talking about this besides me and iMonk. Seriously.

I was having an e-mail conversation with a Southern Baptist Missiologist who didn't ask to be drawn into this conversation but did contribute to this book (this was about 2 years ago) and he was going on about how the SBC was a denomination -- and I told him that this was the problem. He didn;t get my sly remark, so I clarified: the SBC was never intended to be a denomination: it is a convention. The distinction there is that a denomination can and will dictate terms to member churches because that's the point of a denomination: centralized leadership through which to force conformity. A "convention" ought to be a mode of cooperation by local churches who are seeking to do more for the Gospel collectively than they can do individually -- the agenda is driven from the bottom, up.

And in the ways that this book speaks to that truth, it's a useful book for Southern Baptists to read and think about and discuss vigorously.

You can look forward to some discussion about that book here in the near future.

And sometime this week a debate about the Trinity is going to break out at the D-Blog. I am sure it will edify someone.