Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Book Review – Prayers for New Brides by Jennifer O. White

There is much about this book that I really like. Author Jennifer White rightly recognizes the priority of bible reading and study in preparing to fight the spiritual battles that come with being a Christian and particularly those related to Satan’s design to disrupt marriages. Each chapter rightly has plenty of theology in it and frequent reference to relevant scripture, some printed out and some referenced for reader lookup.  The chapters are logically arranged, starting with God’s design for marriage, and then weapons given us by God to use to rout out our own sin and resist the attacks of the evil one.  Each chapter has a short topic discussion, a prayer prompt section that has a sample prayer relevant to the subject at hand and “A Wife’s Call to Action” with a short passage to read and a sample prayer related to helping the new bride apply the principle of the chapter.

What I did not like about the book is her strange mixture of the doctrines of grace and her imprecise use of theological terms characteristic of contemporary evangelical errors. An example would be her statement considering Eve in the Garden of Eden on page 142 “Let’s acknowledge that her choice to lead was outside the will of God.”  Well that is both true and not true. It is true in the sense that her actions were disobedient to God’s clear command, but it is not true because in God’s sovereignty and omniscience, nothing is really outside the will of God. It would have been more biblical to say that her actions were disobedience. That would avoid the implication that God was powerless to prevent Eve from straying from obedience.


I received this book from New Leaf Press in exchange for an honest review.