Review: Tactics - Greg Koukl

I tend to give book recommendations as often as a postman hands out letters, and the book that I find myself recommending most frequently is Greg Koukl’s Tactics. Tactics, subtitled, A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions, is is an eminently practical (and readable) handbook for doing apologetics.

Tactics’ strength is twofold. First, it encourages, nay, obligates Christians to do their apologetics and witnessing with compassion and humility. Second, Tactics provides a clear and concise way to understand and uncover common logical fallacies.

Debating religion often raises one’s blood pressure, but Koukl reminds us that the point of tactful witnessing isn’t to win arguments, but to win people. Koukl calls this the Ambassador Model. He writes, “This approach trades more on friendly curiosity––a kind of relaxed diplomacy––than on confrontation.” Koukl also provides a manageable goal, which takes the pressure off those of us who feel that we must have a convert at the end of every conversation.

“It may surprise you to hear this, but I never set out to convert anyone. My aim is never to win someone to Christ. I have a more modest goal, one you might consider adopting as your own. All I want to do is put a stone in someone’s shoe. I want to give him something worth thinking about, something he can’t ignore because it continues to poke at him in a good way.”

Not only does this help relieve the pressure, it reminds us that it isn’t our duty to convert anyone. That job belongs to the Holy Spirit. Koukl writes,

“Understanding God’s central role in the process removes a tremendous burden. We can focus on our job––being clear, gracious, and persuasive––and then leave the results to God (what I call “100% God and 100% man”).”

The core of Koukl’s method is the well-placed question (which is also every good conversationalist’s secret). The first half of the book explains how to use questions effectively. The second half of the book is dedicated to common logical fallacies (which gives you something to ask about).

Logic is often confusing. A friend once accused me of “twisting words” when all I was trying to do was show her that one of her views was logically inconsistent. Perhaps the fault was mine, but what seems self-evident to logicians is often confusing to everyone else. Koukl, however, succeeds in explaining his list of fallacies simply and clearly. To supplement his explanations, Koukl follows each with practical examples––often real cases from his career as an apologist.

If you’re serious about the Great Commission, you’ll want a copy of this book.

(For a more thorough treatment, see GoingToSeminary.com's review HERE.)

Guest Review: Crazy Love - Francis Chan

By Taylor Ellen

I received a copy of Francis Chan’s book Crazy Love for Christmas. Although I expected it to be another decent book on what it means to be a Christian in today’s culture, what it gave me was a “holy slap in the face.” It convicted me about the way I was living my life. Instead of living a merely “good, Christian life” in today’s culture, Crazy Love challenges readers to go against what society is saying and to go all-out and live a radical life for Christ.

Chan opens the first chapter with this: “What if I told you to stop talking at God for a while, but instead to take a long, hard look at Him before you speak another word?” So often, especially in American society, church is 90% concerned with the type of music we worship with, the person who gives the message, or the building we go to; and only 10% is about God Himself.

American Christians have become so consumed with the world’s idea of religion that they have lost sight of who God truly is. Instead, we have turned God into what we want Him to be for us. God is holy, yet we manage to constantly overlook that holiness. Chan quotes R.C. Sproul saying, “Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.” American Christians compare themselves with how the world thinks a follower of Christ should look, rather than what God says a follower of Christ should be. As we make our relationship with God completely about us, it becomes harder and harder to look past ourselves and earnestly, passionately seek after Him.

Chapter two begins, “You could die before you finish reading this chapter.” Comforting, isn’t it? But it’s true. In the scope of all of eternity, our lives are rather short—a blink of an eye. So why are we so selfish? How come we think that everything is about us? One of the most convicting sections in the book was a metaphor that Chan used which compares our lives to a movie. It went something like this: Suppose you were cast as an extra in a movie, and your scene was ¾ of a second long. Then, you get all of your friends and family together for the premier and tell them to come see this movie about you. After the movie ended, wouldn’t they all think you were crazy for thinking the movie was about you? Life is the same way. Our lives are ¾ of a second in the movie of life. Clearly, the movie isn’t about us; we are crazy to think that it is. The purpose of an extra in a movie is to point back to the star, and since God is the “star” of the movie, “the point of your life is to point to Him.”

Chapter three focuses on the craziness of God’s love for us. He knew everything about us before we were created. He knows what our names will be, what school we will go to, whom we will marry, how we will die. He knew everything about us before our great-grandparents were born. This incredible God who knew us even before our creation, loves us. “The wildest part is that Jesus doesn’t have to love us. His being is utterly complete and perfect, apart from humanity. He doesn’t need me or you. Yet He wants us, chooses us, even considers us His inheritance…” God’s unfathomable love for us is crazy. That’s why it’s so hard for us to understand. But just because we can’t always understand God’s love doesn’t mean that He loves us any less.

Chapters four, five, and eight go together. Chapters four and five focus on what a lot of churchgoers look like today: lukewarm. If you’re a coffee drinker you can know that there is almost nothing worse than taking a huge gulp of lukewarm coffee. It’s disgusting. That’s how lukewarm Christians are to God (Revelation 3:16). The lukewarm Christian is almost indifferent to God, living foremost for himself and serving anything that’s left over to God. But what are leftovers to the God of the universe? Lukewarm lives couldn’t be farther from the holiness that God intended for His children. As Chan writes, “they equate their partially sanitized lives with holiness, but they couldn’t be more wrong.” In contrast to the Lukewarm, chapter eight is all about the Obsessed—people who are truly in love with God, and whose lives reflect it. Chan gives multiple examples of how your love life with Christ shows through your life on earth, but the main pattern I saw was that people whose lives are consumed by love for God aren’t focused on themselves. Rather, they are entirely concerned with Christ and others.

I encourage you to go to a bookstore, purchase a red book entitled Crazy Love, and sit down to read.

Review: Orthodoxy - Chesterton

I decided to write my senior thesis on G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) during my last year of college. I quickly discovered that Chesterton was extremely prolific. In addition to being a full-time journalist, he wrote approximately 80 books, volumes of poetry, hundreds of essays, and several plays. It was overwhelming, but since I had received a copy of Orthodoxy for Christmas, I began my research there. It was the perfect place to begin, because, as I later learned, the book is critical for thoroughly understanding the rest of Chesterton’s work. All of the major themes in his fiction are explained in this short book.

I opened Orthodoxy for the first time and was soon confused. Knowing that Chesterton was Roman Catholic, I expected that a book titled "Orthodoxy" would be an overview of Roman Catholic theology. It isn't. Ironically enough, it is an unorthodox apologetic for Christianity as a whole. Orthodoxy is unorthodox in that, rather than giving arguments to defend Christianity, Chesterton defends common sense, and finds in the end that common sense itself defends Christianity.

I decided that I liked the book upon reading the first two sentences, and by the second chapter, I was chortling in my coffee. Orthodoxy begins with the words,

The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

In addition to being witty, Chesterton is an exceptional writer. Every paragraph is full of personality. Even on the rare occasion when I disagree with him (he wasn't a fan of the Reformation, but I am) I can't help but like him. All he writes is so well put that to paraphrase Chesterton is to commit a crime against his talents. This makes Orthodoxy a difficult book to pull quotes from. It's nearly impossible to pull out a single sentence; whenever I try, I end up quoting an entire paragraph or two. His writing is also notable for the way he turns the world on its head. But through Chesterton one soon finds that the world makes sense only when it is upside down. Two examples will suffice:

The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

Everyone I know who has read Orthodoxy has remarked that they were overcome with an urge to underline every sentence. This is probably because besides being remarkably insightful, Orthodoxy, like every other non-fiction book Chesterton wrote, is really a book about everything. As he once wrote elsewhere,

If Christianity should happen to be true -- that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe -- then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.