Edit: I found out this morning that my review was removed by Amazon for violating their “Community Guidelines” without further explanation nor a process for appeal. Read the “gritty” review below at your own risk:
Dr. Trueman’s Strange New World is well worth the low price of admission for its final chapter alone. Chapter 9, appropriately entitled, “Strangers in This Strange World,” addresses how the Church – the gathering of the faithful – must take the first step in addressing the topsy-turvy world we live in. He encourages the Church to refrain from pessimism or optimism and instead endeavor on a realistic mission within our neighborhoods and communities living as an alternative to contemporary Western culture.
Lest you are tempted to merely skim the final chapter, the entire book is phenomenal in distilling exactly what has happened in the last several hundred years that led to such an accelerated change in Western culture in a few decades. Trueman successfully explains to laity and scholars alike why culture has shifted and changed so dramatically and reminds the Church that is it part of abdicated our role as living witnesses of Christ that is to blame.
Rather than ending his work in an opportunity to lambast the Church, Trueman guides us back to the ancient church of the first two centuries. He provides us with a few examples from the age of the apostolic fathers to remind Protestants and Roman Catholics alike, that we have much to learn from the Church surviving and thriving in a pagan world. Much more, he would say (and I agree), than navel-gazing and wishing it were the age of the Magisterial Reformation or High Middle Ages.
I highly recommend and thoroughly enjoyed Trueman’s work. It will lead me to tackle his more complete (and much larger) work, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
Disclaimer: Crossway provided a complimentary copy for my review. This review was not in exchange for a favorable review.
We see through a mirror darkly 