jason d
Puritan Board Freshman
I never tire of reading Piper books for two reasons:
1. They cause you to engage your mind and think hard about some big truths about God
2. They always leave with delight in God and encourage you to pursue and treasure Him more
Like his past books, this books does both, I would say ESPECIALLY the thinking part (given the title) but it causes you to want to treasure God with all your faculties, INCLUDING your mind.
The thesis of Piper's "Think" is that Christians should "embrace serious thinking as a means of loving God and people."
He starts off the book by giving you his backgroud (which will not be unfamiliar if you have read Desiring God) then giving props to Jonathan Edwards for thinking the way he does (which again, if you know Piper you already know.)
If your familiar with Piper I would skip down to chapter 3, it is a great chapter that deals with reading and how it is something we must give ourselves to, particularly since God gave us His Word in … well, WORDS!
Piper then goes into what our minds have to do with faith, it may sound obvious, but thinking and reading about it will give you more and more reasons to glorify God, in all you do, even things that may seem mundane since we do them all the time.
If one is particularly interested in the challenge from Relativism then chapters 7 and 8 are for you, in fact I hope that these two chapters would come out in a little pamphlet as that would be very handy in our postmodern society to share with people. Not only does Piper do a good job (and is far) at debunking Relativistic thinking, but also provides safeguards for keeping up drifting into that area. This was my favorite section of the book.
Piper then spends a lot of time doing good exegesis on passages regarding thinking and passages that often come up to support “anti-intellectual” Christianity. Of course Piper keeps the balance by not only encouraging us to be intellectual but to know that that is not the end... he encourages the thinkers that their discipline should make them more loving and he encourages the loving crowd to be harder thinkers.
All in all an excellent book, one I need to go through again.
I heard the audiobook version from ChristianAudio.com. It is done very professionally and the narrator did a good job of not putting you to sleep, epsecially when dealing with some heavy, mind-racking subjects.
