Weekend Reads: Lost and found

Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West

By Kevin Swanson

Like its author, Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West (Generations with Vision, 2013) can be a bit histrionic. Though one can quibble about the details, Kevin Swanson’s sweeping analysis of the decline of Western culture is worth reading, if only for the overtly theological category in which he places men like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. That category, of course, is summed up in the title. While much of American Christianity holds that only those who once had a credible profession of faith can be genuine apostates, Swanson disagrees. In keeping with his strong Presbyterian faith (he’s a pastor in the conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church), he teaches that God has a rightful claim on the children of believers, and thus even those who never personally professed the faith can turn away from it.

Swanson gives brief profiles of the usual suspects: philosophers like Descartes, Jeremy Bentham, and John Dewey; authors like Mark Twain and John Steinbeck; and scientists like Charles Darwin. Then he ties their work directly to the moral chaos of the contemporary Western world. His research is not broad and deep, and the book is clearly the product of a busy pastor who moonlights as a radio host and conference speaker and doesn’t have the budget for research assistants and ghostwriters. The result is a popular-level work that expresses the truth a more scholarly tome would probably obscure: The last state of an apostate civilization is far worse than mere paganism (Matthew 12:45).

Apostate closes with a note of post-apocalyptic hope. The morally decadent institutions that thrive by denying God will fall, but believers will survive and rebuild. In fact, they’re already doing so. If apostasy is the threat, the solution is simple: Pass down the true faith to your children. Swanson’s doing it, and so should you.

Missing Jesus: Find Your Life in His Great Story

By Charles and Janet Morris

Missing Jesus: Find Your Life in His Great Story (Moody, 2014) is a profound book. It’s not afraid of heavy-duty theology, yet remains accessible, even humble, in its presentation of the truth. Put simply, we are distracted from Jesus. We seek fulfillment in every other way, in every other thing. We look to godly people, or our own devotional exercises, to be what only Christ is: the one who meets every need, who keeps all the promises of God, who sends the Spirit to empower us for fellowship with our Father. The authors, husband and wife Charles and Janet Morris, are not afraid to get personal. They talk about their son’s death from drug addiction. They are not perfect people, but they know someone who is. And they can’t stop talking about Him.

Not only is Missing Jesus thoroughly focused on the glory of Christ, both in His person and His work, it is thoroughly Trinitarian. Chapters devoted to the Father and the Spirit fill out the central portion of the book, and emphasize that redemption was not something extracted from God by the suffering of Christ. Rather, the Father loves us as His children, and that liberates us from pride. We don’t have to be high and mighty, because we have the ultimate joy of communion with the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. That same freedom is found in the forgiveness of sins that comes with trusting in Christ for salvation. We can leave the “Sister[hood] of Perpetual Apology” and enter the glorious joy of acceptance in the Beloved.

The book closes with a chapter on how not to miss Jesus—in prayer, in the Word, in the sacrament, and in Christian fellowship. The bottom line: Make these things means of communion with your Savior, not a substitute for it. Don’t miss Jesus. Find Him, and find life.