Sean Michael Lucus reviews and recommends Paul Miller’s book A Praying Life, released this year.
Tim Challies also reviews the book, noting a caution about quotations from Thomas Merton. In the comments, Paul Miller responds to that concern and critics the mystics on prayer.
Challies: “…as a Roman Catholic Trappist monk, Merton’s theology will get worse the closer he gets to the cross.”
If that isn’t the mother of all non sequiters, it’s in mom’s coffee klatsch, at least. Proximity to the cross can only help Christian theology. Challies sometimes trips over his own Calvinism.
I’m late to respond, Patrick, but what you’re saying depends, of course, on your definitions. Are we saved by grace through faith alone, or are we given a grace by which we can earn our salvation?
Phil, I’m not sure I see what your question has to so with Tim’s apparent libel of Merton’s theology and his curious treatment of the cross as some kind of spiritual Kryptonite. FWIW, I believe with the church that we are saved by grace alone, but not through faith alone. More specifically, “I am redeemed by the blood of Christ; I trust in him alone for my salvation, and, as the Bible teaches, I am ‘working out my salvation in fear and trembling’ (Phil. 2:12), knowing that it is God’s gift of grace that is working in me.”