Thursday, January 13, 2011

Are Evangelicals missing something, or is it just me?



I just got back from a visit to one of our local Christian book stores. To put the following in context, you need to know that I live in the Grand Rapids, Michigan USA area of the world which is home to several Christian publishing companies and probably has more Christian bookstores per capita then 99.99% of the rest of the world.

While at the bookstore, I found the commentary I was looking for and then started browsing. I thought as long as I was browsing, I'd see what books might be there that dealt with the theology and meaning of of the Lord's Supper. After all, this was the same store where previously I had found Thomas Davis' This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought.

It was pretty sparse. I could only find one other book dealing explicitly with the Lord's Supper; A Holy Meal by Gordon T. Smith.

I browsed through the theological section and the "Christian Living" section, and that one book was it. There were several books on baptism, one book by a Reformed padeobaptist pastor arguing in favor of allowing baptized, but not yet confirmed children access to the Communion Table, but other then the Gordon Smith book, nothing dealing with a Biblical theology of the Lord's Table.

I could not help but wonder as I saw all the other titles on the shelf dealing with all sorts of, and sundry issues in the Christan life, "How much of this stuff would be impacted if we as Evangelicals had a more Biblical theological understanding of the Lord's Supper?"

Where is the book that gives a definitive Evangelical Biblical theology of the Lord's Supper? And it would be well if it was something that has been written recently enough to have taken advantage of the Evangelical theological and Biblical scholarship of the last fifty or so years. (Dead Puritans need not apply, though whoever writes this should not ignore the contributions of the Reformers and the Puritans.) If you know of such a definitive, more recent work as described, please let me know.

If such a work does not exist, it would be well if some Evangelical theologian/Bible scholar with the qualifications and time to do so, would produce such a work. That's my humble opinion. I really think we may be missing something...

Peace,

~ The Billy Goat ~

2 comments:

Steve Scott said...

Bill, I'll start on this next week. ;)

Bill said...

OK Steve... I hope you are up on your Latin, French, and German.. ;>