Tony Reinke. Newton on the Christian Life: To Live Is Christ. Theologians on the Christian Life. Wheaton, IL. Crossway, 2015. $19.99.
John Newton is remembered today as the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace” and as a dramatically converted slave-trader who later supported the cause of abolition. But he was known in the 18th century, and after, as one of the leading evangelical pastors of his generation in England, and above all as a pastoral letter-writer. Everyone seemed to write to him for advice. By the end of his life he was always working from a stack of 60 or so unanswered letters.
Tony Reinke has immersed himself in these letters in order to make Newton’s valuable teaching on the Christian life available to another generation.
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Reinke shows that the center for Newton’s vision of the Christian life in all these letters is the believer’s union with Christ (e.g., 47, 55, 68). According to Newton, maturity involves a deeper and deeper appreciation for, and dependence upon the sufficiency of Christ for overcoming the intractable nature of sin and the painful experience of personal trials. This Christ-centeredness meant that though Newton’s spirituality was deeply concerned with experience, it was oriented away from spiritual self-preoccupation toward contemplating Christ—looking unto Jesus.
Newton’s focus upon contemplation was one of the emphases that first attracted me to him. He is thoroughly Reformed, evangelical, and biblical in his theology, and he is no mere rationalist head-on-a-stick. These letters deal with real experience and hold out hope of real progress in the Christian life. Ultimately he teaches that the goal of the Christian life is to behold the face of God in Christ in humility and wonder. Contemplation is not for Newton a boutique spirituality or a “Catholic thing.” It is the basic Christian life and the way of maturity.
Reinke’s excellent chapter about Newton on reading Scripture (ch. 10) is parallel in many ways to Robert Wilken’s account of the reading of Scripture among the church fathers. Augustine regarded the Bible as nothing less than “the face of God for now,” because by gazing into the Scriptures with an attitude of prayer and devotion we encounter the living God as we await the fullness of vision in the life to come. This is the spirit and manner in which Newton sought for Christ in all the Scriptures. There is much here in Newton to reconcile the “text critical” and “theological interpretation” schools of Bible scholarship today.
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