Book Review: The Kingdom Triangle

“Be ruthless in assessing the precise nature and strength of what you actually believe and develop a specific plan of attack for improvement.”

I recently finished a class at Liberty University for my doctorate called Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education.  The class was interesting and a profitable use of my time.  The most redeeming part of the class was the required reading of Kingdom Triangle by J.P. Moreland.  Moreland is one of the most well known evangelical apologetic thinkers and leaders of modern Christianity.  I’ve read several of his books and heard him speak a few times.  He is a student of God’s Word and a relentless advocate for knowledge of the Truth.  The three areas of the Kingdom Triangle are: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, and Restore the Spirit’s Power.  I’d recommend this book for anyone that desires to fully engage the heart, mind, and soul in full out pursuit of the holiness of God.

I highlighted several things while reading and have posted those below…

• Political correctness so rules our universities that they are now places of secular indoctrination, and one is hard-pressed to find serious classroom interaction from various perspectives on the crucial issues of our day.
• The current addiction to the cult of celebrity and professional sports, along with our preoccupation with happiness, tells us something about our true nature and the bankruptcy of our culture.
• In a thin world, religion is not the sort of thing that can be true.  Religion is merely a cultural, social phenomenon to be analyzed by sociologists.
• The only way we are going to move from our boring lives to lives filled with the drama of the Greatest Story is for those who embrace mere Christianity to set aside the shallowness of their thought and the weakness of their spiritual practices, and corporately to enter afresh into Kingdom forms of life and thought worthy of the name of Christ.
• There are at least five important questions that should be put to any worldview:
  1. What is real?
  2. What are the nature and limits of knowledge?
  3. What is well-off?  What is the good life?
  4. Who is a really good person?
  5. How does one become a really good person?
• We need a Christian community filled with disciples with eyes to see where the ideas of culture are moving, how they impact the cause of the gospel, and how we can bring a Christian worldview to bear on them.
• The abandonment of Christian monotheism from the cognitive domain meant that there was no longer a basis for a unified curriculum.  Without a single, rational God, why think that there is a unity to truth, that on discipline should have anything at all to do with another discipline?  Thus, universities gave way to plural-versities, and we have lived with fragmentation in our schools ever since the 1930s.
• My only word of caution is to be sure we argue for the importance of a Christian worldview for the university’s mission on the grounds that it is rational, defensible, and arguably true, and not simply because of the good results that follow when religion gets a seat at the table.
• As go the universities, so goes the culture, and the Christian must keep in mind the tensions between Christian claims and competing world views currently dominating the culture, especially views of knowledge and reality that constitute the universities.
• Postmodernism is a form of intellectual pacifism that, at the end of the day, recommends backgammon while the barbarians are at the gate.
• One is free in life if one has the power to live the way one ought to live.
• Classic freedom is liberating, indeed, but a necessary condition of such freedom is the availability of the relevant sort of knowledge.
• The shift in worldview from a Judeo-Christian thick world to a naturalist or postmodern thin world has brought about a culture milieu that lacks the resources needed to resist the drift towards the proliferation of empty selves.  In this context, men are empty selves gorged on and dulled by seeking happiness and, as a result, are individualistic, narcissistic, infantile people who approach others as objects that exist merely to make them happy.
• Given the crisis of knowledge in our time, it is crucial that the church recover her confidence that she is in possession of spiritual and ethical knowledge in Holy Scripture primarily, but also in the history of her thought about God, moral issues, the spiritual life, and other important topics.
• Many people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.  Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you from being My priest.  Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.  Hosea 4:6
• Be ruthless in assessing the precise nature and strength of what you actually believe and develop a specific plan of attack for improvement.
• Take appropriate yearly risks that stretch your faith.
• Read books about and share stories of God’s miraculous actions in other people’s lives as an encouragement to your own faith.
• People perish for lack of the knowledge of God.  The devil is waging war against the possibility of knowledge of God.  This is no time for the church to adopt an anti-intellectual approach to knowledge and faith.
• A central part of the church’s educational program, including its pulpit ministry, is to constantly present a vision of life in the Kingdom of God that is so rich and real that propel want to give themselves away for it and in light of which the empty self is seen and felt to be the trivial fraud that it really is.
• Empty selves exchange a life of drama for Turkish Delight.
• A Christian spiritual discipline is a repeated bodily practice, done over and over again, in dependence on the Holy Spirit and under the direction of Jesus and other wise teachers in his way, to enable one to get good at certain things in life that one cannot learn by direct effort.
• The Kingdom Triangle:  The first leg provides a thoughtful sense of truth, knowledge, and direction to this approach to life; the second leg gives passion to the journey and allows one to lay aside baggage that gets in the way; the third leg provides the faith and confidence to risk more and more for God and expect him to actually be a coworker in the only sensible life plan available.