Customer Reviews

Back to Basics: Rediscovering the Richness of the Reformed Faith

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The book is divided into four sections: Conversion, The Covenant, The Church and The Christian Life. Each chapter in every section has study questions that reinforce and help the reader gain a deeper understanding of each section. The foreword is written by RC Sproul.

Doug Wilson, Doug Jones, Roger Wagner and David Hagopian have put together a well-rounded presentation of the Reformed Faith. As Roger Wagner, one of the authors, states, "the Reformed faith starts and stops with the sovereign and gracious God who has revealed Himself in Scripture." That's the focus and starting point for every discussion in the book.

Many authors simply complain about the condition of the Church. Not these authors. They exercise terrific insights, give helpful direction and pastoral-theological wisdom that really does encourage the student of Scripture. Each message is an example of compassion.

A short summary of the book from the book: "[God} is, and forever will be, preeminent in all things (Col. 1:18)." In all areas of life, God is primary and it is Him that we glorify in all things. Conversion, covenant, church and life, all things are for Him and through Him. The authors' theses are complete and clear. Their goal was accomplished: Why is Reformed theology such a good thing (or is it)?

This title is recommended by: RC Sproul, Jay Adams, E. Calvin Beisner, James Montgomery Boice, D. James Kennedy, John Frame, Jerry Bridges, GI Williamson and Steve Brown.

I am so impressed with this superbly written overview of the Reformed faith that I am going to write to the editor/author, David Hagopian, to tell him how much I have gotten out of it. I am a religious Roman Catholic who is interested in exploring other Christian theologies, which is why I ordered this book. This book has deepened my faith in God and, as strange as this may sound, has made me a more devout Catholic. Although there are (obviously) differences between Reformed and Catholic theologies, one of the things this book has taught me is that God is sovereign in all things on earth and in Heaven. What wonderful news this is! I recommend this book to all Christians, especially to mainline Protestants, because so many of the mainline denominations seem to have watered down their theologies in the past twenty years. Indifferent Presbyterians, in particular, should read this book and find out what they are missing.

This book is one of the finest books explaining the basics of Reformed Theology available. Clear & concise, the authors explain the tenants of reformed theology in a way that leaves little to question regarding man's lot in life and God's plan for salvation.

Most protestant denominations praise the efforts of Luther and the other founding fathers but since have adapted a very different theology. Hagopian, Wilson, Jones, and Wagner do a good job of bringing us back to the "richness of the Reformed faith." First and foremost, it's biblical. In addition, it's logical and the most glorious! Read this and let's bring the glory back to God, not man.

This book is responsible for introducing me to the Reformed faith. For years I had been told of the "evils" of Calvin and his twisting of God's character... afterall, he's a lawyer... and who can trust those guys? But what I found shocked me! The reformed faith actually made sense (go figure...)and had no semblence to the caricature the critics like to draw of it.

I was going through a rough time in my faith and I decided to re-examine things I had been taught in church when I stumbled on this little gem of a book. This book was the stepping stone to my discovering the Reformed faith and gave me a firm foundation that had never been built in my life. I continue to return to my copy from time to time for its concise examples, thoroughness and extremely readable style... my paperback edition is extremely dog-eared.

If you are interested in testing the waters of historical, evangelical Pretestantism, I heartily recommend this book as a launching point.

I've read several of the books that are often suggested as introductions to Reformed thought. This is the first one that doesn't focus on Calvinistic soteriology to the exclusion of other equally (or perhaps more) important aspects of the Reformed view of what Scripture teaches. My only real quibble is that the title ought to be Back to Intermediates, because there are more foundational doctrines than these - but all Protestants agree about those.

The book is divided into four sections, each written by a different author:

Doug Wilson contributes the chapters on salvation. He very able covers justification and predestination. Doug Jones contributes the section on covenantal theology. Covenant theology is the true heart of the Reformed viewpoint. These few chapters ably lay out the scriptural basis for it and explore the implications of it. A third section concerns the church, including its nature, the sacraments, and church discipline. This is the weakest section of the book, but still adequate for the overall purpose. Particularly, one wishes that more time would have been spent on the nature of worship and on the place of the sacraments in the corporate life of the church. Finally, Hagopian himself handles the section on the Christian life, which is mostly a theology of sanctification. This is perhaps the most immediately practical of the sections.

Each chapter ends with a dozen or so review questions. We are considering using this book in a Sunday school class, so that is a very definite plus. Any criticism that could be leveled against the book would be on the basis that it could have treated a subject more thoroughly, but doing so would have necessitated expanding the book beyond its purpose.

This was the first book I came across when I set out to understand Reformed Theology, and in the last ten years I've amassed a small library of theology books, both popular and academic. It still ranks as the best by a long shot, much preferred over similar entry level books by RC Sproul and Michael Horton. It is unfortunate that it's not recommended more often in Presbyterian and Reformed circles. It is an overlooked gem.

The popular attention in the Protestant world towards traditional Reformed theology and thought that has come about in the last 30 years or so, has had multiple attempts of explaining just what the encompassing nature of Reformed theology looks like. Some have been attempts to be extremely contemporary, some have been dry theological tomes, accessible to only those who are already presupposed to that corner of the Protestant world. What the compilation of chapters, by different authors, in Back to Basics, have done is to present a readable explanation of traditional Reformed theology, beginning with the doctrine of a sovereign God that rules personally in his creation.

A risk with any work that has multiple authors, and this one has four sections, with a different author in each, is that the writing will be uneven and that thoughts developed in one part of the book will be dropped totally later on. As such, even in good books, with well written ideas, stand alone chapters are better remembered than others.

In this book, the chapters on sanctification, or how the Christian grows in his faith and what that means for his vocation and all areas of life; and the section on the covenant nature dealings between God and his people are nicely done. The sections dealing with the doctrine of God and the role of the church do read dryly at times.

The general reader, who is interested in a high view of a personal yet universal God of the Bible and who is looking for a clear, succint teaching on justification and how that applies to the whole life of the individual will find this work useful. Unfortunately, there has much contention historically, and even in recent years among different parties in the Protestant world, between the covenant and dispensational or even more recently towards things like open theism. Some of these arguments have been needlessly distracting from the heart of the gospel. What the authors of Back to Basics have done, is to write a genearlly lucid explanation for how Reformed theology flows into every other area of the Christian life, and to do that in a way that is not argumentative or contentious. And for that, the reader should be grateful, and should find the book a fine complement to their personal study.

As a Bible College student at a non-denominational school, I found it important to really know why I believed what I did. This book was very helpfull in relating to me a lot of essential doctrines in a short space. The various writers all gave a decent cursory exploration of their ideas, it was exactly what it claimed to be, and I am very satisfied.