Mohler’s much-anticipated first book accessible to all

Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues with Timeless Truth by Dr. R. Albert Mohler, (Multnomah: 2008) 176 pages, $15/$10.

“If you were a fish, would you realize you were wet? Every person is deeply embedded in today’s cultural reality. Many are fundamentally unaware of this fact, but Christian faithfulness requires a thoughtful and conscious application of God’s truth to everyday situations.”

So writes Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in his new book out this month. What is amazing is that this is the first book authored solely by Mohler. He writes a mountain of words on his blog each week to the benefit of the church, and he has contributed individual chapters to numerous books. However, this is his very first book with only his name on the author line.

Of course, introducing Mohler to readers of this paper is like introducing you to your own mother, for both have consistently served up nutritious food over the years – spiritual and material.

It has now been nearly a decade since Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey gave us the influential manifesto How Now Shall We Live?, calling Christians to understand and act upon the knowledge that American culture is “post-Christian.” In so doing, Colson and Pearcey taught terms like “Christian worldview” and “postmodern” to an entire generation of Christians.

With the theological mind of Jonathan Edwards and the pastoral heart of Charles Spurgeon, Mohler takes up Colson’s challenge to apply a consistent biblical worldview to all of life. In a quick-moving book of 178 pages, Mohler tackles grade inflation, Hurricane Katrina, Supreme Court decisions, abortion, tsunami and theodicy, politics, biomedicine, and public school education – just to name a few. As such, Mohler consciously stands in the tradition of his mentor, Carl F. H. Henry, who argued against disengagement from cultural issues in his book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.

With Schwarzenegger-sized intellectual muscles at his disposal, you have to admire that the first book Mohler put forth is easily-accessible to any thinking Christian. Writing for the Christian in the pew rather than the scholar in the ivory tower, Mohler puts forth his positions with coherence and clarity. Upon reading Mohler’s analysis, people in the local church will be better equipped to converse about these thorny cultural and theological issues.

I gladly join in with John Piper, C.J. Mahaney, David Dockery, and others in recommending this book for your beginning-of-the-year reading. (Scott Lamb is a founding pastor of Providence Baptist Church, St. Louis, and is the ongoing book reviewer for The Pathway. To read about other books, visit www.AChristianManifesto.com.)