Book Review: 40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible

Click image to buy at Monergism Books by Robert L. Plummer.

Last week I mentioned that I’d be adding one more book to the list of excellent books that I judge to be both accessible and valuable for every believer, and 40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible is it. I don’t know of any other introductory book on interpreting scripture that would be as useful for any Christian who desires to better understand the Bible.

Robert Plummer wrote this book with a college or seminary Bible course in mind. “Ideally,” he writes, “it would serve as a textbook…” but would also “be beneficial to any curious Christian.” His goal

was to be accessible without being simplistic and scholarly without being pedantic, while always keeping an eye to practical questions and real-life application by the Christian reader.

It sounds almost as if he had my list in mind when he wrote the book, doesn’t it?

40 Questions has 326 pages, which might sound long, but it’s made up of 40 short stand-alone chapters. It’d be perfectly fine for you to look at the list of questions and jump right in to those that interest you most and skip (but hopefully not forever) those you’re less interested in. And there are plenty of charts and lists to keep things uncomplicated and enough humour and stories to keep things unstuffy. (I started reading this book while traveling and the format  makes it perfect for that.)

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A Book on a Short List

This is a reposting and updating of a short book review I did a long time ago on my old blog. I’m reposting it because this is a book that needs a little attention now and then.

I have a very short list of books that I’d put in the must-read category for every believer. Right now, I can think of only two, the first being Knowing God by J. I. Packer, which I’m pretty sure you’re already familiar with. The second? It’s less well-known, but no less important: The Atonement: It’s Meaning and Significance by Leon Morris. I’ve recommended it here previously, and quoted from it, too. Today seemed like a good day to recommend it again.

Of course, there are many excellent books out there, many important books; but what sets The Atonement and Knowing God apart from all those other worthwhile books is that I can recommend them to you and know that no matter who you are, you’ll learn something valuable from them (After all, what’s more important than knowing your God and understanding what Christ did for you?), and at the same time, you won’t find it difficult to make your way through them. They aren’t pablum—you’ll need your big kid underpants on—but you won’t need to know the original languages or keep a theological dictionary (or even a regular dictionary) nearby to use as you read. And they’re short enough for those of you who do a page count first and automatically turn down anything over 250 pages. Yep, they represent the best of all worlds: dense, but not difficult, and they don’t drone on.

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Book Review: Always Ready

Directions for Defending the Faith, by Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen, edited by Robert R. Booth.

In real life and on the blog, I enjoy discussing and defending my faith. I’ve been told, during these discussions, that I argue like a presuppositionalist. If that’s true, it’s been more by accident than plan, because until recently, I had only a vague idea what the presuppositional method of apologetics was.

But over the past few month, I’ve been educating myself about presuppositional apologetics. Lesson number one was that there is a whole lot of confusion, both in print and on the internet, about  it. I blame part—but not all—of that confusion on some of what’s been written by presuppositionalists explaining and defending a presuppostional approach.  Some of it, frankly, seems unnecessarily unclear.

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