Contending for Our All

Defending Truth and Treasuring Christ in the Lives of Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen by John Piper.

This is another in John Piper’s The Swans Are Not Silent book series. Like the others, it consists of biographical sketches of three historical christian leaders and discussion of lessons the reader can learn from lives of each one. The men whose life stories are featured in this volume are Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen, who each defended truth in the Christian controversies of their day.

The introduction of Contending for Our All is a defense of those who fight for “the truth and meaning of the gospel” when the truth of the gospel is at stake. The reason this defense must be made is that

[i]n every age there is a kind of person who tries to minimize the importance of truth-defining and truth-defending controversy by saying that prayer, worship, evangelism, missions, and dependence on the Holy Spirit are more important….

These things are important, but they all depend on clear teaching of foundational truths. Piper explains,

I love the passion for faith and prayer and evangelism and worship behind those statements. But when they are used to belittle gospel-defining, gospel-defending controversy they bite the hand that feeds them. Christ-exalting prayer will not survive in an atmosphere where the preservation and explanation and vindication of the teaching of the Bible about the prayer-hearing God are devalued. Evangelism and world missions must feed on the solid food of well-grounded, unambiguous, rich gospel truth in order to sustain courage and confidence in the face of afflictions and false religions. And corporate worship will be diluted with cultural substitutes where the deep, clear, biblical contours of God’s glory are not seen and guarded from ever-encroaching error.

Athanasius, Owen and Machen all understood how high the stakes were in the controversies of their times. They did not love controversy for controversy’s sake, but they all understood how vital certain truths are to the health of the church, so they contended for the truth out of love—”love to Christ, his church, and his world.”

Athansius defended the deity of Christ against the Arians way back in the fourth century. At times, most of Christendom stood against him. For more than forty years—all of his adult life—Athanasius fought for the truth of Christ’s deity, even though for much of that time, those in power were working to get rid of him, exiling him five times. Eventually, however, the orthodoxy Athanasius fought for won out, although he did not live to see the successful outcome of his work.

John Owen, a Puritan pastor of the 1600s, wrote to defend against errors that diminished the gospel. He worked hard to uphold the truth throughout his whole life, despite the heartbreak that came from burying all eleven of his children. His writings include, among other things, defenses of the doctrines of perseverance of the saints and definite atonement.

J. Gresham Machen did his contending in the first half of the last century, standing against the errors of liberal Christianity. His most important work was Christianity and Liberalism. My favorite story about Machen is this one. As he lay dying, he sent a telegram to his friend John Murry that said, “I am so thankful for [the] active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.” You have to love a man who finds his comfort in death in the doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.¹

John Piper draws out many lessons for us from the lives of these three men who contended for the truth against false teaching, but his central lesson is this:

Faithful Christians do not love controversy; they love peace. They love their brothers and sisters who disagree with them. They long for a common mind for the cause of Christ. But they are bound by their conscience and by the Word of God, for this very reason, to try to persuade the church concerning the fullness of the truth and beauty of God’s word.

I love biographies and I love church history, so I loved Contending for Our All. However, if you are looking for detailed life stories like you would find in most biographies, you may be disappointed. But if you want to learn lessons from the lives of these historical figures of the church, lessons that you can apply to your life now in our times, this book will suit you well.

Click on the image of this book above to order it from Monergism Books.

Contending for Our All is also available as a pdf file from Desiring God.

¹ Learn more about the active obedience of Christ imputed to us in our justification.

Comments

[Staci at Writing and Living]

Thanks for this review, Rebecca. My husband has been teaching in our churches adult Sunday School classes about some of the errors being promulgated by the emergent church movement. The quotes you shared do a great job of boiling down why this is so important. I'm going to check this book out.