Contending for Our All
by John Piper
One of the primary reasons to study church history is the lesson that it brings for the church in our own day. In fact, history in general should be studied to not only get an idea of what has happened before, but to get a sense of cause and effect. History is not just a series of events and individuals that we occasionally focus on in the rear-view mirror. The events and individuals are important because they contribute to the ebb and flow, the regress and progress, of mankind. We are products of those who came before us, just as they were products of the ones that preceded them. The pages of history are filled with good guys and bad guys, and one historian's hero is another's villain. Although we must not judge history by our own modern ideals, we must possess some sort of standard which enables us to draw conclusions. Doctrine is that standard.
John Piper's book, Contending for Our All is descriptively subtitled—Defending Truth and Treasuring Christ in the Lives of Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen—and helpfully shows how we can learn from the controversies of the past. As he writes in the introduction, we can learn to "see reality through the eyes of a different time. That is a great advantage. It serves to liberate us from the dangers of chronological snobbery that assumes ours is the wisest of times" (p. 35). These three men—Athanasius, Owen, and Machen—while separated by hundreds of years, each fought a similar enemy. All three had antagonists both without, in the form of critics, and within, in the form of personal demons. Piper makes these men far more than interesting historical personages, he makes them real men, flesh and blood men, that wrestled with sin just as we do. Piper's examination of these men is not ancestor worship masquerading as biography, it is honest and genuine, detailing both the ups and the downs... CONTINUE READING THIS REVIEW
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