In Challenges to the Remnant the author attempts to trace God’s remnant throughout history until the end of the age, noting three main challenges common to God’s remnant: persecution, deception, and mission. The task is executed in twenty-two chapters and four appendices. Devoting the first three chapters of the book to a discussion of the Vatican’s 2007 reaffirmation of the Roman Catholic Church as the only true church, the author already hints at what he discusses explicitly in chapter four: the issue of the remnant as a topic of ecclesiology. Here the author defines the church as the “universal” or “invisible” church which comprises “all true believers in Jesus, be they Adventists, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, or those who don’t belong to any denomination” (p. 40). Chapters five to twenty-two contain the discussion of the history of the remnant, beginning in heaven and also ending there. In each of these chapters, historic moments of conflict between the faithful and the unfaithful are discussed.

In chapters five and six, the author examines the events surrounding the fall of Lucifer and the first human pair respectively, labeling the former the “first church fight” and the latter Satan’s attack on “God’s first church on earth.” The sweep of biblical history in the Old Testament is surveyed under the heading “God’s Church in a Broken World” in chapter seven, but unfortunately the discussion seems somewhat truncated. Chapters eight to ten deal with the New Testament church although eight and nine are devoted to Daniel’s predictions about Satan’s attacks on the church in the Christian era. After a brief discussion of the Protestant Reformation and the Great Awakenings in Europe and America in chapters eleven, twelve, and thirteen respectively, the remaining half of the book takes up the story of the prophetic rise and development of the Adventist church as well as its fortunes until the millennium.

Not only does the author depict each of the stages discussed in the book as historic moments of the “church,” he sees the faithful in each stage as constituting a “remnant.” For this reason, the society in heaven that is governed by God’s laws “is God’s church in heaven” (p. 48), and after the war in heaven, “the loyal angels who remained in heaven could be called the remnant” (p. 54). Similarly Adam and Eve formed a “miniature version of the church in heaven,” (p. 57) although in this case, the time of the fall is “the only time in the history of God’s church on earth when He has not had a loyal remnant left” (p. 58). Obviously the author uses the terms “church” and “remnant,” not in a strict, theological sense. However, the freedom with which the author uses both terms enables him to weave the basic concept of the remnant into the history of the Great Controversy in a way that is appealing and simple to understand. In this way, the quick survey of events and personalities in the Reformation, but more especially of the Great Awakening and its interpreters of the prophecies of Daniel, leading up to the Advent Movement, will be quite rewarding to the general Adventist reading public. On the other hand, the more theologically inclined reader may feel that the book’s title promised a more focused discussion of the biblical concept of the remnant than the author delivers.