Book Review: Be Compassionate by Warren Wiersbe

Posted by on July 17, 2010

Be CompassionatePages: 185
Pub­lisher: David C. Cook
Year: 2010
Author: War­ren W. Wiersbe

I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I received War­ren Wiersbe’s Be Com­pas­sion­ate: Let the World Know that Jesus Cares. Adver­tised as a com­men­tary on Luke 1–13, and know­ing it was only 185 pages (a com­men­tary on the Bible and brevity usu­ally aren’t asso­ci­ated with each other), I was curi­ous to see what Wiersbe had set out to accom­plish. The fact of the mat­ter is that I’m torn between con­sid­er­ing this a com­men­tary, and not. It’s a com­men­tary in the sense that Wiersbe pro­vides brief expla­na­tions of the text, while pro­vid­ing his com­ments, which seem to aim at aid­ing the reader in under­stand­ing the larger bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive. It is a book for absolute­ing begin­ners — for those who know almost noth­ing about Luke. The only thing I’m really not sure about is call­ing this book a com­men­tary and focus­ing on a cer­tain the­matic ele­ment (in this case, Christ’s com­pas­sion) as it restricts the “com­men­tary” to oper­at­ing from within a cer­tain per­spec­tive. This wouldn’t be such an unsure mat­ter to my mind if Wiersbe had focused on only those ele­ments in Luke 1–13, but the fact is that Wiersbe doesn’t and he attempts an expla­na­tion of the entire text. But with that said, there really isn’t any­thing wrong with Be Com­pas­sion­ate if you keep in mind that it’s for begin­ners. There are a few instances where I dis­agreed with Wiersbe’s obser­va­tions, though very infre­quently (for exam­ple, he spec­u­lates on the text where other com­men­ta­tors wouldn’t for lack of tex­tual evi­dence, such as the rea­son for John leap­ing while in Elizabeth’s womb. He also writes a few blan­ket state­ments, such as “worry is sin”) and noth­ing that is seri­ous enough to war­rant any sort of warning.

This edi­tion is an update to the orig­i­nal 1988 (I believe) print­ing, which includes a new intro­duc­tion by Ken Baugh, and study ques­tions at the con­clu­sion of each chap­ter (though as can be expected, the study ques­tions are very “sim­ple”, much like the book). The book as a pack­age is also quite a bit nicer than what I’ve seen of the orig­i­nal; the cover has a nice grip to it, and is pleas­ing to the eye.

If you know absolutely noth­ing about Luke then I would say this is a good start to sim­ply under­stand the gen­eral ideas found in Luke. Not every­thing in the book should be taken at face value, and some of the ideas will need to be chal­lenged as one becomes more knowl­edge­able and grows in their faith. Oth­er­wise, it’s not a book I would recommend.

Many thanks to the peo­ple at David. C. Cook Pub­lish­ers for pro­vid­ing a copy of this book for review pur­poses.

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Category: Book Reviews

Comments
7 Responses to “Book Review: Be Compassionate by Warren Wiersbe”
  1. Edward T. Babinski says:
    July 26, 2010 at 12:36 pm

    Weirsbe’s book, BE FREE, helped me break free from some legal­is­tic thought pat­terns when I was a born again inde­pen­dent fundamentalist.

  2. Jeremy says:
    July 26, 2010 at 12:54 pm

    Inter­est­ing. I’m not very famil­iar with the fun­da­men­tal­ist mind­set “up close” or with “Be Free”, but if he helped you, that would appear to be a good thing done.

  3. Edward T. Babinski says:
    July 26, 2010 at 4:09 pm

    Yes, that book def­i­nitely helped me at that early period dur­ing my jour­ney. In fact it opened the gates to being “free” enough to read books of “all sorts” after wards.

    Speak­ing of emerg­ing from a type of fun­da­men­tal­ism, there’s an inter­est­ing bib­lioblog­ger named Joel/Polycarp (who blogs at the Church of Jesus Christ blog site) who left the “King James Only” move­ment and is now a fairly mod­er­ate Evan­gel­i­cal with a degree in the­ol­ogy. But he still blogs a bit on top­ics rel­a­tive to the King James Only move­ment. That type of think­ing, and attempt­ing to dia­logue with it, will prob­a­bly remain a part of him to some degree.

  4. Jeremy says:
    July 26, 2010 at 4:43 pm

    So exactly how “closed” is Fundamentalism?

  5. Edward T. Babinski says:
    July 26, 2010 at 5:21 pm

    On the word “fun­da­men­tal­ist,” I’d say that all words are slip­pery, not things in them­selves. There’s a spec­trum of what one might call “fun­da­men­tal­ism,” and there’s sev­eral dif­fer­ent aspects involv­ing such things as, degrees of moral inflexibility/judgmentalism, fear of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, and belief in inerrancy as well as the absolute truth of one’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible (after all, what’s the use of hav­ing a so-called “inerrant” Bible if one’s inter­pre­ta­tions of it are not them­selves inerrant?).

    Many Evan­gel­i­cals are close to fun­da­men­tal­ists in not want­ing there to be any errors in the Bible, while other Evan­gel­i­cals rec­og­nize that “God-breathed” (in Tim­o­thy) is not the same as inerrant. For instance, Adam was “God-breathed” but hardly inerrant. That leads to more mod­er­ate Evan­gel­i­cal points of view. But it also leads one to rely upon “inside infor­ma­tion,” the mov­ing and inspi­ra­tion of the Holy Spirit, when it comes to inter­pret­ing the Bible, and all sects and divi­sions claim that. So, nei­ther inerrancy nor inspi­ra­tion seems to answer the ques­tion of just how Chris­tians know what they know con­cern­ing the Bible and its inter­pre­ta­tion, hence so many dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions exist from Gen­e­sis to Revelation.

  6. Jeremy says:
    July 27, 2010 at 9:02 pm

    I mean in your case, were you entirely closed off to other view points, ques­tion­ing, etc.?

  7. Edward T. Babinski says:
    July 28, 2010 at 12:41 pm

    In my case I knew three peo­ple, two of whom had left con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tian­ity, another of which had never been “born again,” and I began cor­re­spond­ing with them (heav­ily, many pages at a time) via snail mail (in the 1970s) as I attempted like Josh McDow­ell or Lee Stro­bel to lead them back to the one true faith. They sug­gested some books for me to read and I made some excuses as to why I need not read them. But two of my cor­re­spon­dents pressed me with the reply that they had read Chris­t­ian apolo­getic books when they were Chris­tians, so why should I not read the books they sug­gested? One cor­re­spon­dent sent me an anno­tated list of schol­arly the­o­log­i­cal works sim­i­lar to this list (by the same per­son with whom I orig­i­nally cor­re­sponded): http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/study_list.htm But I wasn’t about to dive into it. The other cor­re­spon­dent sent me a list of books on Chris­t­ian mys­ti­cism and east­ern mys­ti­cism, and also men­tioned a book that he found help­ful when he began his own jour­ney out of fun­da­men­tal­ism, that first book was Be Free by Weirsbe and that’s the first one I recall read­ing that had an effect on me. (I had read some other books in col­lege but they had no effect on me, includ­ing Thomas Paine’s Age of Rea­son (given to me by a chess buddy), Mar­tin Buber’s I and Thou (exis­ten­tial reli­gion, given to me by my athe­ist phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor), and B. F. Skinner’s Walden II, and, Beyond Free­dom and Dig­nity, and I believe I read On Human Nature by Edward O. Wil­son a lit­tle after that time. Much later I learned that Wil­son was raised fun­da­men­tal­ist. At any rate Weirsbe’s book had the most last­ing effect, and I began read­ing other works listed by my friends and was pleas­antly sur­prised by many of them, like Meis­ter Eckart’s ser­mons and say­ing, William Johnson’s The Inner Eye of Love (Christian/amida Bud­dhist dia­logue), Sufi Tales, and also James D. G. Dunn’s works, Schweitzer’s The Mys­tery of the King­dom of God, and the last chap­ter in The Search of the His­tor­i­cal Jesus, to name a few such works.