Kevin DeYoung et al. on The Old Faith for a New Day (1)

Kevin DeYoung (ed.), Don’t Call It a Comeback: The Old Faith for a New Day (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 252pp., ISBN 9781433521690.

I enjoyed reading this during a family holiday over the Easter period, partly because it was easy to pick up and put down again in between the pleasant distractions of going out for walks, trips to the beach, etc.

Edited by Kevin DeYoung (Senior Pastor at University Reformed Church in East Lancing, Michigan), it’s essentially a collection of short essays in three main parts:

• Part 1 – Evangelical History: Looking Forward and Looking Back

• Part 2 – Evangelical Theology: Thinking, Feeling, and Believing the Truths That Matter Most

• Part 3 – Evangelical Practice: Learning to Live Life God’s Way

It’s badged as belonging to ‘The Gospel Coalition Series’, and D.A. Carson provides the Foreword, in which he draws attention to the relative youthfulness of the contributors, and notes the twin aims of the collection as being ‘to unpack what Christians ought to believe and how they ought to act and... to articulate the essentially theological nature of evangelicalism’ (14).

In his Introduction – ‘All Grown Up and Nothing to Say’ – Kevin DeYoung expands briefly on that twofold aim, expressing the hope that the book ‘might be of some small use in reforming God’s church according to the Word of God and forming Christians in the truth of God’s Word’ (17).

I’ll try to write separate posts on each of the three parts.