Keller – Part 1

Do we have idols in our African Culture today?

Are idols good things or bad things?

In Kellers new book “Counterfeit Gods” he shows us that idols are all around us, and he points out from Exodus 20:4-5 that anything can be an idol, anything! The thing that really challenged me though was to realise that most idols are good things in and of themselves. Our Families, our security, our job, our happiness, hard work, relaxation, etc.

Where does that leave me and you? Well more will follow…

interesting links to Keller

Since I am going to do a book review on Tim Kellers book, coutefeit Gods, I am adding 2 links to stimulate some thought in the same light as the book. More will follow.

1. “message to the People” SACC (1968) – //’s Kellers book                    (http://www.sacc.org.za/about/celebrate16.html)
2. Book review :Sordid elements of the liberation struggle revealed           (http://www.tonight.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5262240)

Heroic struggle for liberation, or just one load of thugs trying to displace another mob of thugs?

I recently stumbled upon this Independent Online (IOL) book review and was amazed at the conclusion. It reminded me of Romans 3:23! I have attached the link as well as including the body of the review here. I love the concluding sentence.

http://www.tonight.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5262240

Sordid elements of the liberation struggle revealed November 26, 2009

Inside Quatro: Uncovering the exile history of the ANC and Swapo

by Paul Trewhela

Jacana R180

Review by James Mitchell

Heroic struggle for liberation, or just one load of thugs trying to displace another mob of thugs? Neither, of course, but wouldn’t it be so much simpler if we had clearly defined goodies and baddies?

Alas, real life’s not like that.

In a review (see below in this article) of the new biography of Chris Hani, Leon Marshall zeroes in on the “What if…?” factor. What if Hani had not been shot? What if Hani was alive today? What if Hani led South Africa? As Marshall writes, “intriguing scenarios” follow therefrom.

This author (who, by the way, writes like a gem): Paul Trewhela is, above all, a true believer.

He’s not like polemicist RW Johnson… a believer who converted to another faith; instead he seeks the ideal. Never mind that this ideal may have been as exploded as the belief in a flat earth; Trewhela’s still there, preaching the cause.

He was a member of the SA Communist Party, imprisoned from 1964 to 67, then exiled. (He also, poor chap, reported for The Star, but was dismissed in 1962.)

Trewhela left the party because it proved not to be what it claimed. In “The problem of communism in Southern Africa” he writes that this “problem… is in turn central to the dictatorship in Zimbabwe, the sordid farce of its electoral system, collusion with this dictatorship by the government of South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki and the humiliating spectacle of the leaders of the Southern African Development Community in a phalanx of agreement with President Robert Mugabe, their old and young grey heads as fixed and corpse-like as the Politburo of Soviet Communist Party lined up on Lenin’s tomb in Moscow in days of yore”.

Mbeki’s glad-handing of Mugabe was as blind and immoral, Trewhela suggests, as the manner in which another South African willingly served as an apologist for Stalin’s murderous collectivisation policy.

Trewhela describes how two young Rhodes scholars (Oxford 1931) travelled on a four-week Intourist journey to the Soviet Union in 1932. One, New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, saw and understood and described the “State-enforced famine in the Soviet Union (which) brought about the death of millions and gave a massive stimulus to the Gulag: the state-enforced system of slave labour and working to death, most horribly in the frozen goldfields at Kolyma in eastern Siberia, where millions of famine victims were deported under armed guard, to work and die”. The other – South African Bram Fisher – saw it as “the only method whereby a world communist existence could be brought into being”.

The end, in other words, justifies the means. As Trewhela sums up: “Advocacy of terroristic state behaviour has a long history in southern Africa.”

All but one of the essays and articles in this book come from Trewhela’s writing over half a century. The exception is the piece A miscarriage of democracy, by Bandile Ketelo, Amos Maxongo, Zamxolo Tshona, Ronnie Masango and Luvo Mbengo, describing the 1984 MK mutiny, its causes and aftermath, including the details of torture and public execution.

That was Hani’s time. In The ANC Prison Camps: An Audit of Three Years, Trewhela notes how Hani later presented a facade of openness, while doing his best to minimise the horrors of Quatro. At no point did he come clean. And yet, “the more the evidence is studied, the more it appears that Hani has adapted himself chameleon-like to every terrain”.

Can there be any doubt that, far from being the ascetic, principled leader of a new South Africa, Hani would have headed for the fleshpots in the same way as, say, the SACP’s Blade Nzimande? (Flashback: “In 1968 a batch of Umkhonto defectors… accused their commanders of extravagant living…”)

Alternatively, that he would have become “an impressive and indefatigable bureaucrat… genial, hardworking, ruthless, shrewd”. Oh, sorry, that’s from a description of Nikolai Yezhov, aka “the bloody dwarf”, who served as head of the NKVD and Stalin’s butcher. It comes from a book about Yezhov by J Arch Getty, a US professor, and NI Naumov, deputy chief of Moscow’s Communist Party archives.

The possibilities are endless. But reading Trewhela, you realise that corruption of soul and spirit is everywhere.

I don’t have this book, but would love to try get hold of it!

Some of my favorite reads

I thought I would start by adding a few of my favorite books in a list and then give my reasons why I most enjoyed them.

I am very aware that sometimes one person can read a book and it changes their life and they can give it to another person and the book seems as dry as sawdust. Some of these books on this list might also be the dry ones if you read them today but in two years time you might think it is like gold! Well then, lets get on with it:

Here are some of my favorite Books:

J.I. Packer – Knowing God (Just read it! It can be quite deep at times. I think it is best read in a small group reading it chapter by chapter with discussion afterward.)

Don Carson – The difficult doctrine of the Love of God (Shows very insightfully why Christians miss each other, have different denominations and even hate each other because of a misunderstanding of the Love of God)

John Piper – Desiring God (What would a list be without a book by John Piper. This book is often difficult to read, but always eye opening. Just as Jesus shows us that everyones real struggle is a heart attitude, so Piper shows us that our actions in life and our enjoyments in Life should always be the same thing and can’t ultimately be unless they are rooted in a love and passion for God and Jesus Christ.)

Lindsay Brown – Shining like stars (This is a book of inspiring biographies of students from around the world in AFES. but what makes it really brilliant are his wonderful insights into how these stories show good and bad theology at work in practice)

Joel Green (ed) – Hearing the New Testament (heavier book on one of my favorite topics, Hermeneutics – which in lay language is another way of saying “methods to read the Bible”)

Lingenfelter/Mayers – Ministering Cross-Culturally (This book takes your typical personality types and shows how cultures have “personality types” and how to deal with the conflicts and misunderstandings that come with that.)

Tim Keller – The Prodigal God (This book is a piece of “prophetic” writing to our modern world. Keller takes Jesus’ famous parable about the Father with 2 sons and shows us how we are all older brothers or younger brothers scorning and rejecting our Father. Although it is the scandalous younger brother who ends up closer to the truth.)

Philip Yancey – What’s so amazing about grace (A list without a book or two on the topic of grace always feels rather empty to me. Yancey shows us just why we cling to revenge and justice when Grace is the thing that frees us. Without Grace (not cheep grace, but an almost scandalous grace) Christianity becomes a meaningless religion)

I must run, but there are a few books to start with. I think I will include some much lighter ones in future, but this is a good start.

Why is it, is it!?

Well first things first. You might be wondering why this blog is called “is it!?” Well apparently I very occasionally respond to people with the little saying of “is it”  when I am talking to them. On our recent 2009 slackers camp in Vermont, just outside Cape Town, this little snippet of my vocabulary was kindly pointed out to me and well the rest is not so much history as a blog!

I have to say that I would not be writing this blog if it were not for John and Shaun. So thanks guys for opening up this world of blogging just enough to make me have an itch that needed scratching.

My primary reason for writing (at least for now) is to review books, MP3′s, DVD’s/etc for a specific audience: Namely South African and African young people. If you consider yourself young then this is for you. Many of the books/MP3′s/DVD’s I will be reviewing will be of a Christian nature but I look forward to reviewing many that are not as well.

As I write this I sit with Tim Keller’s book “Counterfeit Gods” in my hands. This just might be my first book reviewed on my blog.

Is it

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