Customer Reviews

No God but God/Breaking With the Idols of Our Age

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No God But God is a comprehensive book that examines from all angles the current trends in Evangelicalism. And the analysis is quite "spot on" to borrow a phrase from a British friend.

This book, which is a collection of essays, is a great companion piece to Addicted to Mediocrity by Franky Schaeffer and Fit Bodies, Fat Minds by Os Guinness. All three books are unaplogetic in their critique of the modern church - and the thinking Christian owes it to himself / herself, the church and God to read these books.

In No God But God, various writers reveal the ways in which corporate business marketing and growth models have infiltrated the church and been adopted wholeheartedly to the church's detriment. As one who used to work in ministry, i found this book uncannily accurate. Unfortunately, in my experience, the momentum behind things like the church-growth movement has become so strong that the necessary reflection that is required to stop and digest the material in this book is such that most in ministry will not read this book.

Examining the failed politization of the church in the 1980s, the history of Christians failing to love God with their minds and the trap that Modernism poses to the church and the Gospel, this book has something for everyone to wrestle with.

This book addresses the idols of our age, and the idols that have become more important than the cause of Christ in the church - politics, professionalism, education, etc. We have a dread of "The Same Old Thing", as C.S. Lewis put it so eloquently. I found this book to be quite insightful and informative.

A brilliant collection of essays by some of the greatest minds in the Evangelical church. Idolatry is and always has been the single greatest enemy of the people of God, and this century is no different. The only problem, it seems, is that Christians have become blind to modern day idols. Modern sources of authority such as politics, psychology, management theory and marketing have crept into the church and captivated her, and this is what Os Guinness and his friends warn us against. This is a highly accurate critique of the God-substitute epidemic that has spread among Christians in the past decade, and it calls us back to a place where we will serve no god but the true God.

Mr. Guiness was a guest lecturer when I was in seminary in the early 90s, and he was challenged on his simplistic generalizations. He fails in the book to prove his case against the church growth movement. On page 164 he says, "In its fascination with statistics and data at the expense of truth, this movement [church growth] is characteristically modern." So I guess statistics and data are always false? Since when is counting always caving in to modernity? I believe that several times God was counting the people in the church. All you have to do is read the book of Acts to find out someone was counting. Acts 2:41"Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls." Acts 4:4 "Howbeit many of them which heard the word believed; and the number of the men was about five thousand."

Don't waste your time with this outdated and inappropriate book.

This is a collection of short essays, in a non-academic, very popular style with some citations of the New Testament. The text contains some framed excerpts in a huge font, resulting in a quite disturbing layout. The main idea about the book seems to be about the weakening of the influence of Evangelicals / Protestant fundamentalists in the USA due to their anti-intellectualism. While I am also negative about the leading role of the USA in the moral decadence (in particular its spread to the rest of the world through the domination of the US empire, especially in Muslim countries), I find the essays very shallow, poorly researched and naive (the role of the lobby around the ideology of the Frankfurter Schule and its forerunners is completely ignored). Also the obsession of the authors to see an "idol"(!!) in every trend they disapprove of makes the reading the more unpleasant.

At least, if the authors wanted to show that protestant fundamentalism is anti-intellectual, they have succeeded with their own book, showing in my opinion a great lack of open-mindedness and culture. I did not find this book worth keeping and will give it away.