The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World

The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World
by John Piper and Justin Taylor

This excellent volume, based on six talks given at a conference, faces the challenge of the post-modern world with its rejection of all absolutes and its assumed right to define all reality privately.

The authors recognise the current view that human existence is an accident followed by random evolutionary processes, which leaves our contemporaries without purpose or meaning, simply as consumers trying to make the most out of life while they can.

Against this dark, sad and empty background we are offered DA Carson’s excellent meditation on Jesus’ prayer in John 17. John Piper adds his heart-warming focus on joy and ‘its unique capacity to witness to what we treasure’. Tim Keller’s chapter on the gospel is both powerful and provocative. You will find yourself strengthened and fortified by what he has to say, feeling more prepared to confront the challenge of your contemporaries.

Finally, Mark Driscoll’s typically punchy contribution makes me even more grateful that we have managed to book him for this year’s Leadership Conference in Brighton. After highlighting ten theological issues that we must contend for, he shows the vital place of the church being sent as a missional community into the context of our modern culture. He argues strongly that without incarnation and contextualisation we can be orthodox but totally irrelevant.

His chapter concludes with remarkable statistics associated with John Calvin’s Geneva, namely that great numbers of Christians, having been trained there, returned to their cultures resulting in an explosion of church planting. There were only five underground Protestant churches in France in 1555, but by 1562 2,150 churches were planted, totalling some three million people. Furthermore, some of the churches were mega-churches with anywhere from 4,000–9,000 people in attendance.

You will also enjoy eavesdropping on the conversation between the authors that follows their six chapters. This is an outstanding book which I wholeheartedly recommend.