John Piper’s story is different from that of Emil Cailliet. Piper was raised in a home that prized the Bible and by parents who sought to live by it. He became a theological educator and eventually an influential author, speaker and pastor. Over the years his belief in the Bible’s truthfulness was challenged. Graduate school did that, for example. However, he found in experience that it was not so much his holding on to the Bible as an authority in his life but being held by it.

What held him? How can you be held by a book? Piper explores a number of metaphors in answering the question:

The Bible was never like a masterpiece hanging in a museum that I viewed this way and that. Rather, it was like a window. Or like binoculars. My view of the Bible was always through the Bible. So when I say that, all along the way, my view was getting clearer and brighter and deeper, I mean the reality seen through it was getting clearer and brighter and deeper. Clearer as the edges of things became less fuzzy, and I could see how things fit together rather than just smudging into each other. Brighter as the beauty and impact of the whole message [of the Bible] was more and more attractive. And deeper in the sense of depth perspective—I suppose photographers would say “depth of Field.” Things stretched off into eternity with breathtaking implications—in both directions past and future. You could sum it up with the phrase the glory of God. That’s what I was seeing.⁷

For Piper, it was the Bible’s vista of reality holding him and not the other way around.

Cailliet and Piper began in very different places. One started as a naturalist and the other was raised in a Christian home environment. Both came to the same place of prizing the book that understood them.

Such Insight in a Book

My argument is that in this book insight can be found which can transform a human life. It did mine. So what are the insights I am talking about? What is the understanding that captured Cailliet’s imagination and what is the vista of which John Piper speaks? Let me put it this way: this book helps me to see afresh, and with insight comes understanding. Moreover, this book addresses a number of our needs posed by the simple fact of a human existence in all its finiteness.

First, we see God afresh

I heard this story about a preacher in Hyde Park, London. There is a famous section of the Park known as Speakers’ Corner. Anyone can get up on a box and speak on any subject as long as no law is broken in doing so. One Sunday, there was a preacher who was confronted by an angry atheist who shouted out that he did not believe in God. The preacher replied, “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in. I might not believe in him either.” In our pluralist setting we can’t assume that when the word “God” is spoken we are all on the same page. To do so is a big mistake these days. So what God am I writing about?