Brett

Good for understanding the context of Life Together and The Cost of Discipleship. Important observations for seminary training/internships considering the online distribution model.

Perhaps the best summary and emphasis of the book is within the closing paragraphs:

Etienne Gilson has defined the gods of modern philosophy as “mere byproducts born of the philosophical decomposition of the Christian living God.”

According to Gilson, our choice today is not between Immanuel Kant and René Descartes or between G. W. F. Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard. We must choose instead between Kant and Thomas Aquinas. Gilson insists that all other positions are mere halfway houses on the road to either absolute religious agnosticism or the natural theology of Christian metaphysics. As I enter the twilight years of my life, I am convinced that Gilson is fundamentally right. We need to reconstruct the classical synthesis by which natural theology bridges the special revelation of Scripture and the general revelation of nature.

In this book, the author writes that the USA is no longer the world powerhouse of missions (was it ever?). He believes that there is still exponential potential in North America and this book is an attempt to help churches in America to identify, train, and send the next generation of missionaries (vii). The foundational premise of the book is that God has chosen the local church to be the center of ministry. Instead of inventing new models and systems, the church must take ownership of the God-given role that is already there (2).

In this book, the author argues that God's Word gives us everything we need to know to obey him and bring him glory. This includes everything we need in order to obey his Great Commission and make disciples among all nations (20).

In this book, the author argues that baptism and the Lord's Supper are effective signs of church membership and that they create the social, ecclesial reality to which they point. Essentially, the book not only argues for baptism being required for membership, but also an account of how baptism and the Lord's Supper transform a scattered group of Christians into a gathered local church (2).

In this book, the author writes about evangelism, but it is more than that, it is a book about developing a culture of evangelism (18). He writes from the conviction that much of our problem with evangelism is that we don't have a big enough view of the church. God loves the world and his plan to evangelize it is through his church (19).