Product Description
The Company We Keep
- By Jonathan S. Raymond
- 171 pages.
- Published 2018 Aldersgate Press in collaboration with Crest Books
I welcome this timely book on social holiness for several reasons. First, and more importantly God the Trinity lives in unending communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and God invites us to "become participants of the divine nature" (1 Peter 1:4 NRSV), which is at once holy and social.
The book is indeed about social holiness. It uses that term the way John Wesley did, as referring to what holiness essentially is, not to the potential impacts of holiness in society. Holiness most throughly and profoundly affects society as it is grounded in Christ-like community.
There is no better way to holiness and happiness, Wesley emphasized, than being in close relationship with God and with others who are on the same journey. This book's subtitleﾡﾪThe Company We Keepﾡﾪunderscores this point. As Dr. Raymond writes, "Other persons are God's means of pouring grace into our lives." And again, "God uses the company we keep and the company we provide as the divine means of grace along the way of holiness."
This approach of Raymond is thoroughly biblical and immensely practical. Such holiness also involves accountability, the author appropriately points out. Christian holiness immerses us in accountable community as God shapes us into people who exhibit the mind of Christ.
Emphasizing that genuine Christian holiness involves all our social networks, this author speaks of "the ecology of holiness"ﾡﾪthe ways God works to bring wholeness and healing in our relationships with one another and with the whole creation.
These chapters are clearly written and expressed. The author helpfully weaves his own spiritual pilgrimage into the narrative, adding interest and a sense of practical realism. Given these strengths, the book will be a help to people who truly seek to love God with heart, soul, strength and mind, and their neighbors as themselves.
Dr. Howard A. Snyder, author of The Problem of Wineskins, Community of the King, and Salvation Means Creation Healed,
former professor of the history and theology of mission at Asbury Theological Seminary.
