The Narrow Way is an honest account of a life, fully lived, under God's all-seeing eye. Although a memoir, it is not a conventional one. No reader will like everything in this book, but every reader struggling with some aspect of life sexual abuse, marriage, militarism, prison, the loneliness of the American experience, the failure of democratic institutions, the quest for self-knowledge, the search for God can find something interesting and useful in it. Opening with an examination of the long-term damage done to sexually abused children, Part One covers the problems of marriage, the significance of dreams, art, and literature, an insight into suffering, an approach to understanding Scripture, and the social impact Jesus had on His society via teachings that we are still refusing to take seriously. In Part Two, the author gives an overview of the impact of the so-called "Enlightenment," a period that promised a better human type living in an improved world, but that brought the human family instead to non-stop, high-tech war-making, rampant resource consumption, and an on-coming social, environmental, and economic catastrophe precisely because Christians, seduced by the products of the machine, have steadily diluted their commitment to Christ, who showed us the "narrow way that leads to life." The Narrow Way the result of fifty years of hard study of the intellectual and social trends of the past 250 years is a challenging book. Starting where theologian Reinhold Niebuhr left off, it critiques the so-called American way of life and calls for change.
After forty years of theological, historical, and scriptural study, Vivienne E. Perkins, PhD, came to a unique conclusion: that mans entry into the modern and postmodern agesfacilitated by the superficial thought of the Enlightenment philosophesundermined the traditional Christian understanding of human sin in relation to the God who created and sustains the universe. This path had been blazed before her by the great Russian philosopher, Lev Shestov, and by the French Reformed Christian author of forty books on technology (as well as the Gospel), Jacques Ellul. Believing that the evil effects of Enlightenment thinking pose an unrecognized obstacle to her contemporaries realizing the absolute necessity of a scriptural understanding of Christs role in saving man from his overwhelming social and personal sinwhich is now destroying the only planet upon which man can build a futureDr. Perkins is determined to live her faith by adopting Daniel as her son and laying out a clear explanation of Western civilizations wrong turns during the last 250 years. Modern man, this author believes, is so absorbed in worshiping his supposed technological progress that he does not yet see what Shestov, Mumford, Lyotard, Ellul, and other serious thinkers have seenthat we misunderstand the real essence of progress and that the unrestrained technological progress we admire so much cannot give us a human future on a healthy planet. Climate catastrophe looms, and we are now facing a situation in which to repent (to change) is our only option.
The Narrow Way is an honest account of a life, fully lived, under Gods all-seeing eye. Although a memoir, it is not a conventional one. No reader will like everything in this book, but every reader struggling with some aspect of lifesexual abuse, marriage, militarism, prison, the loneliness of the American experience, the failure of democratic institutions, the quest for self-knowledge, the search for Godcan find something interesting and useful in it. Opening with an examination of the long-term damage done to sexually abused children, Part One covers the problems of marriage, the significance of dreams, art, and literature, an insight into suffering, an approach to understanding Scripture, and the social impact Jesus had on His society via teachings that we are still refusing to take seriously. In Part Two, the author gives an overview of the impact of the so-called Enlightenment, a period that promised a better human type living in an improved world, but that brought the human family instead to non-stop, high-tech war-making, rampant resource consumption, and an on-coming social, environmental, and economic catastropheprecisely because Christians, seduced by the products of the machine, have steadily diluted their commitment to Christ, who showed us the narrow way that leads to life. The Narrow Waythe result of fifty years of hard study of the intellectual and social trends of the past 250 yearsis a challenging book. Starting where theologian Reinhold Niebuhr left off, it critiques the so-called American way of life and calls for change.
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