For the Children in Your Life

Last week I reviewed The Biggest Story for the news letter from my church, and this morning I posted it at Out of the Ordinary, too. From the review:

[T]he Bible is more than a collection of individual stories with heroes to imitate or villains to avoid imitating. It is one big story comprised of all the smaller stories. It’s the story of God’s work of creation; humankind’s fall, bringing with it the corruption of everything; and God’s work to make it all right again.

Do your children know this story, the biggest one? Do they understand how the stories of the Old and New Testament fit together into a grand narrative of a “snake-crushing King” and “destined-to-die Deliverer” who will bring us back to the garden?

You can read the rest here.

If you have children in your life, The Biggest Story would make an excellent Christmas gift. (Canadians will prefer to purchase it from Amazon.ca.) 

Book Review: Can We Still Believe the Bible?

An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions by Craig L. Blomberg

My pastor recently asked me to purchase this book for the church library because he thought there were people in my church who would benefit from it. He also suggested that I review it for the church newsletter. This is the review I wrote. If I had been reviewing it just for my blog, it would have been a different review. For one thing, I would have had no word limit! And the readers of this blog are different than the general membership of my church (and yours, too, probably!). If I had been reviewing for the blog only, I would have mentioned a few places where I disagree with certain remarks Blomberg makes. He’s an egalitarian, for instance, and a bit combative in his approach to the egalitarian/complimentarian issue. But it seemed inappropriate for me to get into those issues in the newsletter, and they have very little bearing on the arguments he makes for the reliability of the Bible, anyway. 

I also would have mentioned that this is not an easy read, something I took out of the review because I needed to shorten it. 

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As you might expect from the title and subtitle, this book addresses several specific recent objections to the reliability of the Bible. You may have seen or read some of these arguments against the Bible’s trustworthiness in television documentaries, magazine articles, or books written by skeptics. In each of the six objections Craig Blomberg tackles, he shows that “new findings, or at least more intense study of slightly older discoveries, have actually strengthened the case for the reliability or trustworthiness of the Scriptures, even while the most publicized opinions in each area have claimed that there are now reasons for greater skepticism!”

The first chapter addresses the reliability of the biblical text we have now, nearly 2000 years after the last of the books of the New Testament were written. Is it true that all we have are hopelessly corrupt copies of the original New Testament writings, copies so full of variants—400,000 is the number some give—that it is impossible to know what the authors originally wrote?

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Book Review: What's Your Worldview?

Click image to purchase on Amazon.comAn Interactive Approach to Life’s Big Questions by James N. Anderson

I’ve been quoting What’s Your Worldview? in my recent Theological Term posts, and I figure if I’m going to quote a book that much, I ought to at least do a short review, right? (See below for a list of theological terms containing excerpts from this book.)

As the subtitle says, this is an interactive book. You won’t—and shouldn’t—read it straight through. The introduction tells us it’s a little like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, with questions to answer (or choices to make) that determine where you go next in the book. 

James N. Anderson is associate professor of theology and philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and an ordained minister in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.

In this case, the questions for the reader found in Part 1 are the big questions with the answers that together form a philosophical view of reality—or a worldview. The reader’s answers finally take them to a page that briefly identifies and describes their own worldview, and also points out a few of its shortcomings.

The interactive concept behind this book is clever, making a difficult subject accessible—and James Anderson’s humor makes it entertaining, too. If you’re looking for an in-depth treatment of the subject of worldviews, you’ll be disappointed, but What’s Your Worldview? can’t be beat as a beginner book especially suitable for high school and college students, or anyone else who needs an introduction to worldview thinking.

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Theological Terms with excerpts from What’s Your Worldview?:

• finite godism
• materialism
• panentheism
• pantheism
• Pelagianism
• polytheism
• relativism
• skepticism
• Unitarianism