Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit's Power

J.P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle: Recovering the Christian Mind. Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit's Power. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007. J.P. Moreland is a highly esteemed, well-published, and extremely active Christian philosopher. For years I have profited greatly from his books and articles, and for fifteen years I have used his books as texts for courses at Denver Seminary. Unlike many Christian academics, Moreland maintains a passionate concern for the church, evangelism, and the state of culture at large. To that end, he divides his writing and speaking between the highly academic and the more popular or semi-academic. In so doing, he is able to build a bridge between scholarly pursuits and the questions and concerns of laypeople. Os Guinness refers to this area of endeavor as "intermediate knowledge." While proponents of intermediate knowledge are few, the need for such is great. Few non-philosophers are likely to read Moreland's book on universals, for example, but many thoughtful Christians will be drawn to his other books, such as Love Your God With All Your Mind (NavPress, 1997), which is a stellar apologetic for a robust and spirit-filled engagement of the intellect for the glory of God, the good of the church, and the winning of the world. Moreland's new work is both profound and controversial. The controversy will largely stem from his endorsement of the charismatic dimension of Christian experience. It is highly unusual to find an analytically trained philosopher with a Th.M. from Dallas seminary who endorses the "third wave" form of the charismatic movement! Kingdom Triangle is a passionate and knowledgeable summons to the church to engage God, the world, and the self in a deeply biblical and profoundly meaningful manner. To this endeavor, Moreland brings the resources of philosophy to bear fruitfully on the exigencies of the Kingdom of God. This is both rare and wonderful. The book is divided into two sections. The first explains "the crisis of the age" in America and the West in general. The second section gives the answer: a kingdom triangle of intellectual engagement, spiritual formation, and supernatural spiritual power. In explaining the contemporary crisis, Moreland writes that we have moved from the "thick" world of the biblical worldview to the "thin" worlds of naturalism and postmodernism. A biblical worldview provides the knowledge of God, existential meaning, and authentic drama to all of life. We are creatures of a good and holy God, placed on earth to manifest the virtues of the Kingdom of God. We are immersed in and engaged with a life and death struggle with the forces of evil, yet God is our strength and hope. We are not groping in the dark, but have been given knowable truth in Scripture and elsewhere. But both scientific naturalism and postmodernism--each in its own way--eviscerate the world of any objective meaning or genuine drama. Naturalism denies the reality of anything outside of what mater

This is a wonderful book on at least two levels. First of all, it is an accurate and thoughtful critique of two of the most prevalent cultural trends in our world today: naturalism and postmodernism. Secondly, it is a practical and straightforward call to action and engagement for Christians caught up in this particular culture. As a result of these two emphases, Moreland provides a clear picture of what needs to be critiqued and engaged, and how to go about it. In the first section, his call is for a return to the basics of what it means to know something. Naturalism has too narrowly defined knowledge (scientific knowledge only), and postmodernism has jettisoned it altogether (we can know nothing or nearly nothing with certainty). Moreland associates biblical fidelity with a commitment to a form of correspondence theory about knowledge, and argues that part of the pastoral job of the church is to engage the Christian culture and the culture at large with this fundamental committment in mind. In the second section, he calls for the recovery of the Christian's mind and soul, and the Spirit's power in the church. Some of the negative criticisms have not dealt with Moreland's arguments for the activity of Spirit in our age, and too quickly dismiss modern-day spiritual formation writers such as Dallas Willard and Richard Foster. The fact that many in the emergent movement like their writings does not make either one of them emergent. No doubt Moreland's call for the present and miraculous activity of the Spirit in today's church will be controversial in some circles, but it is overreaching to dismiss the book's argument based on that alone. I happen to believe it is an accurate argument, one the church needs to hear, and a crucial part of his work. The Kingdom Triangle is a great call to action for the American church.

We're seven years into the decade. It's possible to make that sort of claim. While Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth was leading the pack for the distinction of most important book published in the 00s, after reading Dr. Moreland's masterful new work The Kingdom Triangle, I'm calling the race for him. After all, when JP Moreland-yes, the guy who wrote the book on the life of the Christian mind-says ridiculous things like, The Kingdom Triangle is "the single best and most important book I have ever written" and "This is the book I've been waiting all my life to write," we should take note. He's written a lot of books, and all of them are worth reading. I should offer a disclosure, though. You'd expect to hear me to say that I got the book for free. I didn't. I had to buy it. While it's not available from bookstores until June 1st (pre-orders help sales, apparently!), Torrey Honors sold some advance copies. But though I didn't get the book for free, I have met Dr. Moreland, and have an immense amount of admiration for the guy. He doesn't know it, but he's indirectly responsible for me marrying my wife (a story for another post), which is the only decent thing I've done in my life to date. But none of that would change my assessment of this book a bit. The Kingdom Triangle is clear, provocative and informative. Dr. Moreland manages to attain that difficult but essential balance between the practical and the theoretical, a skill that I admire and lack. It is, as a result, a difficult book to read in that his brief recommendations for how to change remove every excuse to remain stagnant that we might otherwise muster. Yet Dr. Moreland is practical without being preachy. While no one-not the heartless academic, not the mildly content and mostly passive churchgoer, not the thoughtless charismatic (to pick three bad stereotypes!)-is safe from Dr. Moreland's incisive analysis, he is nothing less than encouraging and humble in his approach. He writes with the awareness that he is offering painful truths, and is at points explicit in his trepidation about doing so. Yet his trepidation doesn't descend into timidity. He writes with a wisdom and maturity of someone who is able to appropriately acknowledge his own shortcomings, and then use them to help others. Throughout the work, Dr. Moreland exemplifies the disposition toward knowledge that he defends, namely one that is confident but not arrogant, humble but not self-deprecating. The book is broken into two parts: the disease and the antidote. In the first part, Dr. Moreland doesn't pull punches, addressing what he sees as the two chief ailments of Western civilization head on. First, he takes down scientific naturalism. After that, it's post-modernism. Dr. Moreland is intent on establishing the possibility of religious knowledge, something naturalism and post-modernism both undercut. Dr. Moreland then turns to the Kingdom triangle, or the three aspects to discipleship that individuals and communities must

This book profoundly disturbed me. It brought to light many things within myself that I had known but managed to never directly addressed. I am a avid fan of J.P. Moreland, and as such there was not much in this book that I was not already familiar with, including many of the examples. Around pg 130 or so the stuff that distinguishes this book as different from his others crops up. There is one page in that book that I find to be worth the price of the book alone. And that is in distinguishing between what one says they believe and on the surface claims to believe, with what they actually believe. It helped me to realize that for all practical purposes I had been living like a functional deist. I don't know what to do with some of the latter chapters and it will require a lot of reflection, but I think this is also one of the books greatest strengths, in putting something in front of virtually everyone that will challenge them to analyze themselves, and where they are at with God. Another major strength of this book is in it's use of practicallity. It's fine to say one should do this or that, but without any clear recommendation of how to go about doing this or that. J.P. gives advice, his own guidelines, and recommended reading to either show one how to do ... or to study furthur to decide wether or not one should do ... . It's a great book well worth the money, even for a guy who's read most of his books and gotten most of his lectures from the Veritas forum and Stand To Reason. This book can be a wonderful tool for furthur reflection upon what a life lived for Christ should be like, and thus how your life for Christ should be lived.

With the skillful eye of a philosopher, the heart of a pastor, and the biblically saturated worldview of a theologian, J.P. Moreland's Kingdom Triangle offers a unique and provocative diagnosis of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual impoverishment of our time and the courage to envision a more preferable future. According to Moreland's own admission, the Kingdom Triangle is "the single best and most important book I have ever written, including the best seller Love Your God with All Your Mind." A Zondervan editor observed: "As a person who reads dozens upon dozens of books each year, Kingdom Triangle is one of the best three or four books I have ever read." With a forward by Dallas Willard and endorsements from Lee Strobel, Chuck Colson, Nancy Pearcey, Ravi Zacharias, and other luminaries, Kingdom Triangle is a passionate, weighty, vision-casting book that harnesses the settled reflection of Moreland's thirty-five years of Christian activism. It is a manifesto clarion call to transformative action; a penetrating critique of the powers and persuasions of Western culture that have contributed to our spiritual and existential malaise. The first half of the book analyzes the crisis of our age, which is reflected in the widely acknowledged rift in Western, and especially American culture; a rift, he believes, greater than any divide since the Civil War. Moreland deftly shows that this rift is not primarily political, socio-economic or racial; instead, it reflects a worldview struggle among the three central worldviews currently vying for allegiance: Naturalism, Postmodernism, and Christianity. Moreland identifies these worldviews, explains their interrelationship and pecking order, and shows how they have shaped the power brokers in the university, media, pop culture and public discourse in general. Not content with mere description, Moreland empowers Christians by providing them with resourceful tools for recognizing and interacting with these worldviews and discerning their real cultural presence and habits. Thankfully, though, Moreland's book is not another typical "cultural crisis" sort of book about naturalism or postmodernism, where worn-out clichés, alarmist thinking, or dull analyses frequent its pages. The second half of the book turns from crisis to cure as Moreland charts a powerful way forward for believers who desire to re-capture the church's authority and integrity in the contemporary scene. Building on the model and the priorities of the church in its first three centuries, Moreland underscores, defends, teaches, and, most importantly, provides explicit practical advice for the three central components for the church's renewed vision. These components constitute the three necessary "legs" of the "Kingdom Triangle": 1. Recover theology as a branch of knowledge and not mere true belief, along with specific steps for recovering a robust life of the mind and worldview thinking in one's personal life and local church; 2. Renovate th