The New Bereans

If you have ever been caught in a back-eddy, after having been tossed from a raft, then you know the terror of struggle, and the panic you feel when all of your effort is required to get back into the current again.  Metaphorically this is the same result as a conversation between believers that I hear not infrequently.  Without fail there will be a brother or a sister who is grieving over the current state of things in the church and they will lament that we need to get back to the way things were during Christianities formative years.  The more “mature,” wineskin will respond to this requiem cynically by asking, “Which early church would you like to get back to…the Corinthian church with all its carnality…or how about the Galatian believers with all of their legalism?  Or what if we were more like the Thessalonian church; they were a bunch of louts and layabouts…”  Bla bla bla, around the death eddy the conversation swirls until hope is suffocated and the old wineskin cavorts away, skipping with glee, while his twin daggers of discernment and rebuke reflect a glimmer of pale light as he twirls and sheathes them.

With all of the precision and diligence of a grammatical Samurai, Arthur Katz dashes headlong into this vicious circle of puerile reasoning, hacking its foolish carnal logic to tatters.  The issue, he tells us, is with the term Apostolic, a term which was little more than an entitlement to me before I read this book.  Men like titles, so by nature when we see one, we automatically think in terms of hierarchy.  It takes a few hundred pages, but once done, Brother Katz has completely waylaid all misconceptions you may have had about this hierarchy whatsoever.

Early on in the book he says, “There is no man more qualified than the one who believes in his deepest heart that he is without qualification.  The whole preliminary work of God is to disqualify us before we can be qualified.₁“ He would then go on to point out that Moses was at a pinnacle in life when at 40 he had everything going for him, God would have nothing to do with it though as brother Katz would go on to say, “and yet God does not think it lavish, wasteful or extravagant to give Moses another forty years of waiting in the wilderness until he is completely emptied out–and then He calls him.₂”

You may be thinking…uhhhhh wait, Moses wasn’t an Apostle, and what does he have to do with the term Apostolic?  Everything!  Art had great concern that people today have no idea what it means to be sent by God, rather than sent by themselves, or their own efforts.  In a world of fast food, fast love, and quick religion, the joy of patience and the glory of Godly contentment has been lost.  Brother Katz takes off his kimono and drops the sword in favor of playing a violin with a rose in his teeth as he romances deeply with the idea of being patient for God’s calling.  Taking every discipline the Father sends for the joy that it itself is worth.  He asks, “Will we be willing to submit to waiting and to conditions of trial and preparation for true service when the whole religious world clamors for action?₃”

While ruminating upon Leviticus 8:15-17 he points out that: “God is not interested in the outer hide and the flesh; He counts that along with the dung.  The inside, in the inner man, worked by Him in the hidden places, born of inward wrestling, are the offerings of a sweet and pleasing savor before God.  We have been guilty as contemporary Christians of offering our personalities, our winsomeness and our fleshly abilities to God, simply because we do not have the inward parts to offer, never having learned to rest or wait before God.  We have despised the suffering, reproach and obscurity in which alone the sweet offerings are formed deep within us.  We have not esteemed such things as God esteems them, and have preferred to do without them.  We need the obedience and vision that will enable us to take our hide and flesh outside the camp and to exclude it from the holy place, as well as from the pulpit.₄”

If you have read many of our posts, you can obviously see that this man is right up our alley.  I have to thank sermonindex for first placing a sermon from Arthur Katz on my iPod.  After nearly having to pick myself up off of the floor because of the forcefulness and earnestness of his message, I soon started reading all that Google could muster about this man.  I bought his autobiography, “Ben-Israel, Odyssey of a Modern Jew.”  Having read it in only a day or so, it left me pacing to know what happened to him after he was born again.  Apostolic Foundations answered that question for me. I would suggest that this was probably his Opus.  Not having read any of his other books, I find it hard to believe this book could be topped.

There is no way this book could have been written, had it not been lived.  I am suspicious that Apostolic Foundations was only a perpetuation of what Arthur lived out.

I definitely recommend “Apostolic Foundations” to anyone at all who has a care to serve God in any capacity.  I would also suggest placing this book into the category of revival.  I do not know if that was exactly his intent, but I see revival written on every single page.  I was sent to my knees in prayer so many times reading this book that it took me a month to read.  I could hardly get through a paragraph without having to repent and ask for God’s grace to help me overcome.  I hope this review will inspire even one person to purchase this book and pray for its application.  Arthur Katz was a burning man with a precise vocabulary.  May his words catch others on fire. You can order the book here.  I only wish I had had the opportunity to hear him preach in person before he went home…

1.)    Arthur Katz, Apostolic Foundations, Burning Bush Publications, Third Printing: January 2002 © 1999 by Arthur Katz page 12

2.)    Ibid page 12

3.)    Ibid page 14

4.)    Ibid page 29

I am vividly aware this book has been reviewed probably thousands upon thousands of times, I am writing about it nonetheless, probably for the same reason so many other people have written about it…it is worth doing.

As an avid reader, I must state that this book is not for everyone.  I have read reviews by Christians who suggest that it is a, “Must read.”  While I generally agree with the sentiment, I also recognize that this is a difficult book.  Many of the things said require a lot of thought.   Not only do they require a lot of thought, but you have to be able to maintain a large mental log of points, because Chesterton takes about seventy pages to develop his thesis.  Not only that, but understanding some of his metaphors require some heavy mental boulder rolling, but it is calorie burning work, so it is certainly worth the effort.

The first seventy pages will cause many to wonder, “Where is he going with all these odd fractured points?”  I did this exact thing numerous times during my read, but he kept me going with many worthwhile quotable quotes, and barn-burning statements.   On occasions he rev’s his thesis’ engine with unique and entertaining humor.  All the while his observations made me feel as if I was seeing the world through the eyes of a six year old philosophical savant who also happened to be writing probably one of the greater apologetics penned.

When at first you try to wrap your mind around his thesis you will probably feel like a car does when it gets its front end wrapped around a tree.  I hope you have a lot of bondo and carnauba wax.  The scope of this book reminded me of project “Deep Impact,” where NASA hit a comet with a satellite, due to the difficulty of Chesterton’s thesis which was almost as complex to resolve as hitting a philosophical comet 83 million miles away.   Somehow he does it though, with striking clarity, if you are able to not jump off his train of thought.

Chesterton literally mows the forest of humanist philosophy with the fortitude and efficiency of Paul Bunyan.  His axe takes two or three trees at a blow, and does not relent from cover to cover.  I was stunned to realize that he had cut down trees which have found root and re-growth in the some of the institutional church today.  And herein lies the reason I want to recommend this book.  There are many things we believe with nonchalance, because we have been told to believe them.  We need to get our truth from truth, and Chesterton expends all his effort like a blacksmith in the foundries of war by reminding us that Christ is the truth.

There has never been a book of theology, or apologetics, that made me cheer or cry…but this one did.  At one point I jumped out of my chair and pumped my fist and wished to high heaven there was someone to share the moment with me.   The last two chapters actually had my eyes leaking a bit, and my heart threatened to beat itself out of my ribcage.   It is far from often, dare I say never, that apologetics does this.  Either I am twisted weird, or this book was actually that good.

The one thing I observed is that Chesterton keeps his quotes from the bible to a bare minimum, but I think he does this for a reason.  I almost can picture that the thesis and conclusion are like the great pyramid of Egypt that he is slaving to build, and once built he places at its top, a great golden pinnacle which is the scripture he references.  I think that it actually makes the passages he quotes beautiful in a unique way.   Almost as if he is endeavoring to give the bible its right place at the top, by building his analysis underneath the power of the word.  Another way of looking at it is like he is a man holding a torch aloft in a dark cave for many to find their way back to the light.

This is definitely a great book to read, Orthodoxy is one of the most adventurous and daring books on Christian Apologetics ever written, hands down.

Since this book is largely Chesterton’s personal testimony, it is worth being reminded that, “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lived unto the death.” -Revelation 12:11

This book is posted online for free at this catholic website, I however never recommend reading books online, it is bad for the future employment of wood chips, and I am an equal opportunity wood chip employment advocate, unless of course you cannot afford it, or plan to buy it later anyhow.  If you are also a revolutionary like I am you can buy the real deal here, from the American Chesterton Society.