Tim Chester, Truth We Can Touch: How Baptism and Communion Shape Our Lives. Crossway, 2020. 176 pages.
Intramural Protestant conversations about the ordinances often feel like entrenched squabbles over ecclesial distinctives about everything these symbols are not. Many of these arguments have emphasized what pastors are communicating by administering the ordinances, or what Christians are saying by participating in them, and the ecclesial implications that follow from these practices. We might be dismayed, then, when an evangelical author deliberately disappoints our penchant for partisan answers about subject, manner, and mode—unsettling, I know, but all articulated by other able voices.
What we get in return for our disappointment, however, is affirmative, devotional, confessional meditation on how the ordinances function for our Christian encouragement and growth in grace. Instead of insisting on what we’re saying to others in these symbols, Chester invites us to listen afresh to what Jesus is saying to us in them. As a result, we see not how the ordinances divide churches, but how they unite Christians.
But come on. Can a book really unite if it refuses to reconcile the controversies that divide? I wondered that too; and then I read it.
IF BAPTISM AND COMMUNION DISAPPEARED,
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