Tuesday Tomes - What I'm Reading Now

Today, I give you three quotes from books I am currently reading. Two of the books, True Spiritual Community (Crabb) and The Rise of Christianity (Stark), are the selections for upcoming book clubs at Valley Christian Church. The third, The Myth of Certainty by Daniel Taylor, is likely to be a future book club selection.

From The Myth of Certainty by Daniel Taylor, p. 70-72

It is my experience that, for all its usefulness in many areas, the closer one gets to the nexus where the eternal and temporal intersect, the less reason operates effectively as the primary instrument of judgment. In fact, reason recedes in importance in most of the truly critical areas of the human experience, largely because there are forces at work with which reason is not adequate to deal.
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It is not my intention, nor perhaps within my abilities, to delineate precisely when and how reason can and cannot be used. The view I am putting forth neither denies its importance nor advocates a floating detachment from all truth claims. On the contrary, it makes commitment possible where the false notion of reason might protest. Because I understand the inherent limitations of the reasoning process and allow it only its legitimate role in relation to faith, I can justify taking risks that carry me beyond the narrowness and illusory safety of mere reason.

From Becoming a True Spiritual Community by Larry Crabb (p. 56)

My burden is to see spiritual communities develop, where spiritual friends, and spiritual directors connect with people. I long to see communities where people feel safe enough to be broken. Where a vision of what the Spirit wants to do in people's lives sustains them, even when they are far from it. Where wisdom from God sees what the Spirit is right now doing and what is getting in His way. Where the literal life of Christ pours out of one to energize that life in another, offering His divine touch.

What I have in mind are connevcting relationships as a response to conflict, not congenial, cooperative, consoling, counseling, or conforming relationships. I've tasted this kind of community. The taste is sweet.

But we must heed Bonhoeffer's warning not to love the idea of community, but to love our brothers and sisters. And we will love each other well if we understand both our struggles, what Jesus Christ has done for us and in us, and wants yet to do on our behalf.

From The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark (p. 63)

These are the reasons that ought to have caused the first missionaries to concentrate on the Hellenized Jews. And virtually all New Testament historians agree that they did so, and were successful, but only in the beginning. These facts are agreed upon: (1) many of the converts mentioned in the New Testament can be identified as Hellenized Jews; (2) much of the New Testament asumes an audience familiar with the Septuagint (Frend 1984); (3) Christian missionaries frequently did their public teaching in the synagogues of the diaspora--and may have continued to do so far into the second century (Grant 1972); (4) archaeological evidence shows that the early Christian churches outside Palestine were concentrated in the Jewish sections of cities--as Eric Meyers put it, "on opposite sides of the street, so to speak" (1988:76; see also Pearson 1986; White 1985, 1986).