Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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54 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A disturbing book., June 2, 2007
This book profoundly disturbed me. It brought to light many things within myself that I had known but managed to never directly addressed.
I am a avid fan of J.P. Moreland, and as such there was not much in this book that I was not already familiar with, including many of the examples. Around pg 130 or so the stuff that distinguishes this book as different from his others crops up. There is one page in that book that I find to be worth the price of the book alone. And that is in distinguishing between what one says they believe and on the surface claims to believe, with what they actually believe. It helped me to realize that for all practical purposes I had been living like a functional deist.
I don't know what to do with some of the latter chapters and it will require a lot of reflection, but I think this is also one of the books greatest strengths, in putting something in front of virtually everyone that will challenge them to analyze themselves, and where they are at with God.
Another major strength of this book is in it's use of practicallity. It's fine to say one should do this or that, but without any clear recommendation of how to go about doing this or that. J.P. gives advice, his own guidelines, and recommended reading to either show one how to do ... or to study furthur to decide wether or not one should do ... .
It's a great book well worth the money, even for a guy who's read most of his books and gotten most of his lectures from the Veritas forum and Stand To Reason. This book can be a wonderful tool for furthur reflection upon what a life lived for Christ should be like, and thus how your life for Christ should be lived.
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Decade's Most Important Book, June 4, 2007
We're seven years into the decade. It's possible to make that sort of claim. While Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth was leading the pack for the distinction of most important book published in the 00s, after reading Dr. Moreland's masterful new work The Kingdom Triangle, I'm calling the race for him.
After all, when JP Moreland-yes, the guy who wrote the book on the life of the Christian mind-says ridiculous things like, The Kingdom Triangle is "the single best and most important book I have ever written" and "This is the book I've been waiting all my life to write," we should take note. He's written a lot of books, and all of them are worth reading.
I should offer a disclosure, though. You'd expect to hear me to say that I got the book for free. I didn't. I had to buy it. While it's not available from bookstores until June 1st (pre-orders help sales, apparently!), Torrey Honors sold some advance copies. But though I didn't get the book for free, I have met Dr. Moreland, and have an immense amount of admiration for the guy. He doesn't know it, but he's indirectly responsible for me marrying my wife (a story for another post), which is the only decent thing I've done in my life to date. But none of that would change my assessment of this book a bit.
The Kingdom Triangle is clear, provocative and informative. Dr. Moreland manages to attain that difficult but essential balance between the practical and the theoretical, a skill that I admire and lack. It is, as a result, a difficult book to read in that his brief recommendations for how to change remove every excuse to remain stagnant that we might otherwise muster.
Yet Dr. Moreland is practical without being preachy. While no one-not the heartless academic, not the mildly content and mostly passive churchgoer, not the thoughtless charismatic (to pick three bad stereotypes!)-is safe from Dr. Moreland's incisive analysis, he is nothing less than encouraging and humble in his approach. He writes with the awareness that he is offering painful truths, and is at points explicit in his trepidation about doing so. Yet his trepidation doesn't descend into timidity. He writes with a wisdom and maturity of someone who is able to appropriately acknowledge his own shortcomings, and then use them to help others. Throughout the work, Dr. Moreland exemplifies the disposition toward knowledge that he defends, namely one that is confident but not arrogant, humble but not self-deprecating.
The book is broken into two parts: the disease and the antidote. In the first part, Dr. Moreland doesn't pull punches, addressing what he sees as the two chief ailments of Western civilization head on. First, he takes down scientific naturalism. After that, it's post-modernism. Dr. Moreland is intent on establishing the possibility of religious knowledge, something naturalism and post-modernism both undercut.
Dr. Moreland then turns to the Kingdom triangle, or the three aspects to discipleship that individuals and communities must embrace if they wish to be effective witnesses for Christ. Not surprisingly, he starts with the recovery of the knowledge as the grounds of Christianity. Dr. Moreland goes to great lengths to demonstrate how much the Bible cares about knowledge, including some five full pages of verses to demonstrate his case.
Yet knowledge, and the knowledge that we have knowledge, are not enough for a robust Christian life. The second leg of the triangle, then, is "the cultivation of an inner life, developing emotional intimacy with God, engaging in classic spiritual formation practices..." Here Dr. Moreland is extremely practical. He pays particular attention to the role of the body and the emotions in sanctification, and offers tips for how to bring those areas of our lives under the Lordship of Jesus.
Finally, and perhaps most controversially, Dr. Moreland contends that Christians should practice "learning to live in and use the Spirit's power and the authority of the Kingdom of God, developing a supernatural lifestyle, receiving answers to prayer, learning to effectively pray for healing and demonic deliverance, growing in hearing God's voice through impressions, prophetic words of knowledge and wisdom, dreams and visions." Dr. Moreland is open, honest, and candid about the need for evangelical Christians (the book's target audience) to recover the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, and the external signs of His power. It is here that Dr. Moreland really shines, offering a sensible and persuasive perspective on the role of signs and wonders in the Church. He is sensitive to their abuses, but compelling in his defense of their importance to the robust Christian life.
Ultimately, the vision for Christianity that Dr. Moreland outlines-a vision, he points out, which is not original to him-demands that each of us grow in our areas of weakness. We are, I think, better at some legs of the triangle than others. But Dr. Moreland challenges us to recognize that having one or two of the legs is not enough if we wish to be robust and effective proponents of the Gospel. We must recover all three if we wish to rescue the Church from cultural impotence, and discover the sort of dramatic lifestyles for which we were created.
If you buy and read one book in this decade, make it this one. If you buy one book for your pastor this decade, make it this one. If you buy one book for your small group leader, make it this one.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moreland's Most Important Book to Date!, June 1, 2007
With the skillful eye of a philosopher, the heart of a pastor, and the biblically saturated worldview of a theologian, J.P. Moreland's Kingdom Triangle offers a unique and provocative diagnosis of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual impoverishment of our time and the courage to envision a more preferable future. According to Moreland's own admission, the Kingdom Triangle is "the single best and most important book I have ever written, including the best seller Love Your God with All Your Mind." A Zondervan editor observed: "As a person who reads dozens upon dozens of books each year, Kingdom Triangle is one of the best three or four books I have ever read."
With a forward by Dallas Willard and endorsements from Lee Strobel, Chuck Colson, Nancy Pearcey, Ravi Zacharias, and other luminaries, Kingdom Triangle is a passionate, weighty, vision-casting book that harnesses the settled reflection of Moreland's thirty-five years of Christian activism. It is a manifesto clarion call to transformative action; a penetrating critique of the powers and persuasions of Western culture that have contributed to our spiritual and existential malaise.
The first half of the book analyzes the crisis of our age, which is reflected in the widely acknowledged rift in Western, and especially American culture; a rift, he believes, greater than any divide since the Civil War. Moreland deftly shows that this rift is not primarily political, socio-economic or racial; instead, it reflects a worldview struggle among the three central worldviews currently vying for allegiance: Naturalism, Postmodernism, and Christianity. Moreland identifies these worldviews, explains their interrelationship and pecking order, and shows how they have shaped the power brokers in the university, media, pop culture and public discourse in general. Not content with mere description, Moreland empowers Christians by providing them with resourceful tools for recognizing and interacting with these worldviews and discerning their real cultural presence and habits. Thankfully, though, Moreland's book is not another typical "cultural crisis" sort of book about naturalism or postmodernism, where worn-out clichés, alarmist thinking, or dull analyses frequent its pages.
The second half of the book turns from crisis to cure as Moreland charts a powerful way forward for believers who desire to re-capture the church's authority and integrity in the contemporary scene. Building on the model and the priorities of the church in its first three centuries, Moreland underscores, defends, teaches, and, most importantly, provides explicit practical advice for the three central components for the church's renewed vision. These components constitute the three necessary "legs" of the "Kingdom Triangle":
1. Recover theology as a branch of knowledge and not mere true belief, along with specific steps for recovering a robust life of the mind and worldview thinking in one's personal life and local church;
2. Renovate the inner, emotional, experiential life of the heart through spiritual disciplines, direction, specific forms of (usually unheard of) meditation, therapy, and spiritual exercises;
3. Restore an openness to experience the power of the Kingdom of God and the Holy Spirit by re-discovering the practice of healing prayer, demonic deliverance and the supernatural habits of the Christian life.
Readers are served a delectable feast of insight, the sort of mental and affective soul food that enables persons and
churches to live their life skillfully and wisely. Longtime Moreland readers will not be disappointed by the careful treatment of ideas, and the ease to which Moreland attentively takes heady distinctions and makes them accessible to the lay reader. First-time readers of Moreland will also find much to be admired. For here, in a single volume, a modeled evangelical mind distills his choicest and wisest ideas. Kingdom Triangle is a robust précis of Moreland's most important rumination about how best to flourish, individually and corporately, within our local churches.
J.P. Moreland's authorial tone beneficially conveys his mature reflection. Readers experience a pastoral heart that feels like the strength of a faithful friend who wants you to mature and succeed in your life. He is an experienced, wise investor in the capital of Christianity. Moreland knows how to skillfully show his readers where to invest their lives in Kingdom values and priorities so that they can reasonably reap lives and churches that blossom with life giving life and vitality.
The Kingdom Triangle is for the thoughtful Christian who cares deeply about forming a receptive heart that expects the power of God and the presence of His Kingdom to in-break into individual lives and culture in a transformational way.Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit's Power
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