THE FRACTURE OF FAITH: Recovering Belief of the Gospel in a Postmodern World, by Douglas Vickers, Christian Focus, 2000.

Reviewed by Verne Rosenberger

Douglas Vickers is an unusual man. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, having taught economics in Western Australia and at the University of Pennsylvania. His Christian approach to economics is patent in his books.

This book grows out of his concern for the church, and why “its testimony has been tarnished by the devaluation of its doctrine and the uncertainty that clouds its statement of the gospel” (p. 9). Dr. Vickers has read widely to discover why the church’s testimony no longer is the powerful salt and light that it has been. His first concern is to present the true gospel, to show its firm relationship to the doctrines of “the being, the holiness, and the love of God” (p. 9).

Dr. Vickers enters deeply into the thinking processes of man. He shows how our knowledge is related to God’s knowledge. “God exists and knows outside of time. He created time. But our knowledge and our knowing are bounded in time. Our knowing is sequential, and our knowledge is successively grasped and realized and organized” (p. 12). After analyzing how postmodern thinking has degraded recent theological thinking, Vickers shows how the basic questions of being, knowledge, and behavior are directly relevant to our understanding of the gospel (p. 20).

An excellent chapter on “God in Eternity and Time” delves into the mystery of God’s being and knowledge as related to “the redemptive offices of the Persons of the Godhead” (p. 65).

Central to this book is the chapter on the holiness of God—how it relates to all His attributes, to all His creatures, to righteousness. A following chapter on sin—which “implies the dereliction of the sinner from the covenantal obligations that his creation in the image of God established” (p. 81)—deals comprehensively with sin’s reality, its curse, its condition, guilt and self-direction, and the transition from wrath to grace in the gospel remedy.

Then a wonderful chapter on the love of God explains the propitiation of Christ and the gospel of peace. It is followed by a longer chapter, “The Satisfaction of Christ,” which ranges from “the covenantal structure of redemption” (p. 119) to “the intercession of Christ” (p. 140).

Chapters 8 and 9, “The Disarray of Faith” and “Knowledge and Truth,” focus on the causes for the church’s high degree of irrelevance to the culture. It has “accommodated its theological doctrine to alien thought systems” that “embrace the pervasive assumption of human autonomy.” This resulted in the church’s “no longer providing a clear and uncluttered guidance to what the confessing Christian is to believe and do,” and in “the fracture of faith” (this book’s title). This “capitulation of Christian confession to secular criteria of belief and practice has led to a generalized cultural accommodation of the members of the church to the life and behavior patterns of the world” (p. 154).

In the last two chapters, “Knowing God” and “The Life and Walk of Faith,” Vickers points to the work of the Holy Spirit that unites us to Christ and makes the Christian “an eschatological person” (p. 191). By regeneration the image of God is restored. This book is filled with scriptural quotations, and here Vickers expounds Jeremiah 24:5-7, and the blessing involved with God’s promise: “I will give them a heart to know me.” Regeneration “involves the endowment of the faculties with new abilities and capacities, and it implants within the soul a new righteous disposition and principle of action … to love and to respond to God” (p. 196).

Considering the problem of “sin in the life of the Christian” (p. 202), Vickers begins to distinguish biblically between justification and sanctification, and speaks of the process through which our great high priest is leading us to perfection. The last chapter expounds these two doctrines and their implications for Christian ethics. In addition to chastising and disciplining the Christian, the Holy Spirit by the Word of Christ impresses the reality of his or her “vital, organic, spiritual, and indissoluble” union with Christ, and union with the triune Persons of the Godhead, “the highest privilege that the gospel offers” (p. 221). The ethical issue is “the question of whether the professing Christian loves the law of God, and whether he lives with a passion and determination that, by the grace of God, he will seek after righteousness” (p. 222). Vickers closes by relating the Christian’s union with Christ with the organic union of the church with Christ, a brief page fecund of further reflection.

Here is a book that brings together the central doctrines of the Christian faith to clarify the gospel of Christ and its power unto salvation. Reading it will give a firmer grasp on eternal realities. It will enable the Christian to give clear refutations of many popular errors that are taught in our culture, and often adopted as part of the church’s teaching. It is an excellent gift to advance and defend the Reformed faith and life. It is foundational in developing a Christian life ethic.