Book Reviews
“Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed.” Francis Bacon (d. 1626)
Harbingers of Hope: Claiming God’s Promises in Today’s World
William E. Hull
Birmingham: Samford University Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Fisher Humphreys, Birmingham, AL
Dr. William Hull preached these twenty-seven sermons at Mountain Brook Baptist Church where he has served as theologian-in-residence since 1991. His faith in God and love for God’s people and God’s world are evident throughout the book. So are his massive biblical scholarship, his pastoral wisdom, and his brilliant mind. These are bona fide sermons, preached to a Christian congregation, employing biblical texts, and full of wonderful stories, analogies, poetry, and quotable sayings, but they are as thoughtful as formal essays (there are footnotes), and they confirm what Dr. Hull’s friends have always known, namely, that he is routinely thinking three or four steps ahead of most of us.
The sermons are divided into groups dealing with six topics: preaching, God, salvation, growth, renewal, and service. The first sermon, entitled “This Is My Story,” is autobiographical and is a winsome example of the old-fashioned Christian practice of “giving a testimony.” In it Dr. Hull reviews his life as a professor of New Testament, educational administrator, and pastor. The last sermon, entitled “Will We Be ‘Left Behind?’,” is a careful analysis of whether dispensational pre-millennialism is biblical. It closes with these words: “All of us would, I am sure, welcome a shortcut to glory, but I would rather be left behind to share [Jesus’] saving gospel of suffering love with friend and foe alike until time shall be no more.”
One of the attractive things about these sermons is that in them Dr. Hull brings as much knowledge and care to the task of interpreting the life of the church and the world today as he does to the task of interpreting the Bible. For example, in “Religion in an Age of Terror” he provides an illuminating interpretation of the crisis that radical Islam has created in our world.
Dr. Hull addresses intensely personal issues as well as public, global ones. For example, in “The Sound of Silence” he says that, in the face of suffering and injustice, it is sometimes the case that we “hear” God in silence rather than in words. On Mt. Horeb Elijah “heard” God in “a sound of sheer silence” (1 Kgs 19:12, NRSV); at the climactic moment of his life Jesus “spoke” “like a sheep that before his shearers is silent” (Isa 53:7); the Spirit of God intervenes for us “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).
Regular readers of Christian Ethics Today may remember reading in the December 2008 issue Dr. Hull’s moving sermon “Finding God in the Darkness.” In it he described the terrible illness ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) which he is now experiencing. If you found that sermon helpful in your faith and life as a Christian, then Harbingers of Hope is for you.
