God The Father, God The Son

God The Father, God The Son
By Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Hodder & Stoughton. 370 pages. £10.99
ISBN 0 340 65165 2

On Friday evenings after the war Dr. Lloyd-Jones held discussion meetings at Westminster Chapel, between 1952 and 1955. These became extremely popular, not least because of the doctor's astute summaries of proceedings at their close. It was partly because people frequently raised questions of biblical doctrine that he felt it right to give a series of doctrinal lectures.
This book is the first of a three-volume series which brings into print the material he used, captured at the time on an early audio-tape machine. The result is more than worthwhile.
At the outset, Dr. Lloyd-Jones explains that his aim is to set out Scripture truth simply from the Bible. 'We confine ourselves to what the Bible says ... The theologian goes to the Bible ... and extracts its doctrines...He brings them into a scheme ... He brings in philosophy ... and the end of the process is called theology.' In that sense the Doctor insists that he is not lecturing on theology. He is simply bringing to us what the Bible says.
Thus we have 33 chapters (each around 11 or 12 pages) of lucid, powerfully-explained biblical doctrine. Every chapter is a treat. The Doctor explores the Scriptures, from the truth of revelation, on through the authority of the Bible, the character of God, and takes us to the doctrines concerning man, sin, Christ and redemption. Although I could not be sure, the sequence seems to move along the lines of the pattern of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Presumably issues concerning the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, and perhaps some of the controversy surrounding that area of the Doctor's teaching, will come in a later volume. These lectures well repay the reader's efforts. They show a vast and incisive knowledge of the Bible, surveying biblical passages, opening individual texts, brought together in orderly and helpful synthesis.
Inevitably, Dr. Lloyd-Jones does not manage to stick entirely to his promise to bring only what the Bible says. Thus we have his thoughts, for example, on the creation-evolution debate as it stood in the 1950s, and ideas about the interplay between psychology and demonology. All this, in the inimitable Lloyd-Jones style, is extremely illuminating and stimulating. Sitting a little strangely perhaps these days, all the biblical quotations are from the Authorised Version. This was the standard text for evangelicals half a century ago, with its use of such crucial words as 'propitiation'.
To my joy, the Doctor, being a preacher, also drifts strictly from giving lectures, giving a degree of personal application of the doctrines to Christian living. He seeks to transform us rather than just inform us. So we have a robust model of how to use our doctrine.
The material emerged, of course, before the current challenges of post-modernism and New Age thinking, but nevertheless provides a strong and uplifting read for any Christian who would base his behaviour firmly on biblical belief.

JEB

Dr John Benton

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