There are 11 chapters, headed Beginnings (a brief introduction to the book ), Prayer, God Still Speaks, On Being A Signpost, His Infernal Majesty, Faith, Changed Relationships, Guidance, Holiness, Deliverance from Drudgery and the Fight. This covers a good range of topics which are of relevance to Christians new and established. White’s psychiatric training make him sensitive to how people tick, and he illustrates his material with stories, often about his own Christian experience in its ups and downs. Some of these stories have stuck with me through the years. All in all this is a sane, sensible and readable book to help the new Christian begin their new life in Christ. Buy it here.

   The New Bible Dictionary has short but authoritative articles on everything from Aaron to Zuzim. People, places, books, theological terms, key events and concepts, cultural and historical background to Biblical texts, and issues to do with the composition and transmission of the Bible all have articles dedicated to them. Important items receive extended treatment (eg the article on Israel is 13 pages long, including maps and tables), and even rather obscure items are treated. Bibliographies are there to conclude the articles and there is an index. This dictionary is now in its third edition and is prepared by a large team of scholars from a confessional Christian perspective (rather than a sceptical and dissenting perspective). It is an excellent resource for anyone who has ever read something in the Bible and wondered what people who have studied the Bible intently would say to that. If you have used a Study Bible with extensive footnotes, the New Bible Dictionary takes that experience to a new level.

There are longer reference works, but the New Bible Dictionary (NBD) is a peerless one-stop shop for scholarly help in appreciating more of the Bible. Buy it locally here.

Keller observes that the elder son in the parable often receives less attention than the younger, prodigal son when the parable is explained, and yet, says Keller, understanding the elder son’s situation is critical to grasping Jesus’ climactic point, which is a warning that the religious moralism exemplified by the elder brother is potentially more spiritually dangerous than the reckless and selfish rebellion of the younger son.

Keller is keen to point this out because he feels like Christian churches often attract ‘elder brother’ types – people who are outwardly very upright and moral and seemingly on board with God, but who are in truth alientated from God because their ‘righteousness’ is self-righteousness, an attempt to live the kind of lives that that God must honour. The elder son’s anger at his father for slaughtering the fattened calf for his disgraceful brother is what shows his true spiritual situation – unforgiving, angry, bitter that his own dutifulness has not bought him the right to direct his father’s acts. He appears utterly unlike his gracious father, who pleads with his elder son to be gracious and come in to the feast. His point is cross-cultural and timeless (it is Jesus’ point – and therefore an old one), but Keller discusses it with an edge that comes from the increased and increasing polarisation he sees in his own (US) culture, as the religiously conservative and the secularly progressive react against one another. This cultural setting by no means dominates the book – it is as worth engaging with as Jesus’ parable itself.    

In later chapters, Keller sets the parable in its context in Luke, and in doing this he makes some creative connections to Jesus, who in his life, death and resurrection, comes to seek and save the lost. Keller also sets the parable and its imagery in the context of the whole unfolding narrative of the Bible, and its analysis of the human condition, and makes some large scale observations about the nature of the salvation God holds out to us in Jesus.

Keller again mines literature and cinema for elegant and evocative illustrations of the points he makes and I found it rich and moving to have the heart of the Christian faith presented (without wrangling or footnotes) through this reflection on the simple but profound story Jesus told so long ago.

Tim Keller

The book has two halves. Part 1: The Leap of Doubt has seven chapters, each of which takes up one of seven objections to Christian belief that Keller has distilled from hundreds of conversations and exchanges with the New Yorkers who have come across his path. These seven are the exclusiveness of Christian claims, the fact of suffering, the absoluteness of Christian claims, the injustice perpetrated by the church, the threat of hell, the challenge of science and the failures of the Bible. In crisp chapters, Keller takes the refreshing approach of engaging with the beliefs that generate these objections. As he puts it, ‘All doubts, however skeptical and cynical, are really a set of alternate beliefs’ (p xvii – alternate, that is, to the Christian beliefs they criticise or question). Thus he offers his own objections to the assumptions of the objector, and seeks to show that the objector has no better ground for their beliefs than the Christian. He encourages skeptics ‘to look for a type of  faith hidden within their reasoning’ (p xvii). In this he is correct and his discussion of these questions is clear, concise, stimulating and useful.

After an ’intermission’ where he lays out his approach to Part 2: The Reasons for Faith, Keller argues for Christian belief. Two chapters approach the question of the existence of God. ‘The Clues of God’ is a brief, but informed and accessible discussion of some of the current philosophical discussion of God’s existence, interacting with the New Atheism. The next chapter is a bold argument that connects our moral sense with our awareness of God’s existence. From there the elements of a Christian worldview that the gospel uses – the nature of sin (two chapters – the second looking at the sin of religion), the cross (a very good discussion of the atonement highlighting elements you don’t often see emphasised so well by other authors), the resurrection, and then a chapter - the dance of God – that tries to weave it all together, beginning from the three-personned God and ending in the new creation. The epilogue seeks to map out the next step and encourage people to take it. I though the last paragraph was a great one to end on.

Keller is  good clear, direct writer who has polished what he has to say for may years. It is distilled here with the fruit of his wide and varied reading amongst all sorts of authors. Keller is someone who loves to deploy elegant, germane quotations to enrich his argument and the result of all this is a very fine book, a book worth reading for your own edification and also worth reading to equip yourself for the opportunities you have to challenge others about Christ and answer their skepticism. It is book written to be given to skeptical inquirers for them to read for themselves. Why not give that a go? Buy it here. You might also like to download the talks that the first half of the book mirrors (free mp3 downloads).

My bookshelf can testify to the fact that I’ve read a lot of Christian books. But this one might just be the best one so far. I cannot recommend it more highly. I loved every minute of it. It’s a book of letters that Mark Driscoll writes to individual members of his congregation, showing how the death of Jesus makes a difference to their particular situation. If you have ever tried to read a theological book on the cross and found it a bit dull and dry, then this is the total opposite.

It is raw, honest, real and confronting. He shows how the death of Jesus speaks to a whole range of situations – someone addicted to pornography, someone who’s wife has committed adultery, a childmolester, someone who has been raped, someone whose wife is dying of cancer, a church goer who thinks they’re a good person, just to name a few. By taking different pastoral situations, he shows just how much Jesus has done for us. It’s a bit like looking at the different facets of a diamond: looking at the cross from many different angles, which is truly the solution to every different sin. Instead of leaving theology in the academic realm, this book shows how words like ‘redemption’, ‘justification’ ‘propitiation’ ‘reconciliation’ ‘revelation’ are not mere words but wonderfully good news and life changing for day to day existence.

I would think this book would be a great encouragement to every Christian, no matter what their situation. It’s also a very helpful tool for the preacher or evangelist, modeling how to apply the cross to people’s lives – their deep hurts, pain and rebellion. It is immensely readable, and thoroughly biblical. If you want to ‘grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ’ (Eph 3:18) this book will be invaluable to you. Buy it, and be changed by it.

The book is broadly a narrative of atheism as an intellectual movement over the last two hundred years. McGrath sets his boundaries for atheism’s golden age by the dates of the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.   His concise, readable and learned discussions of important trends, events and individuals are absorbing. Scientific, literary and political factors are all sketched and weighed with sympathy as the story proceeds from Voltaire, through Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Shelly, Eliot, Swinburne, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Camus all the way to Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the colourful founder of American Atheists. Actually, alighting upon the rather disgraceful and tragic figure of O’Hair does signal the rhetorical intent of the book as a whole, which is to suggest that while atheism may have had its day as a noble movement of protest struggling to shape a vision for human life and cultural alternative to Christianity, it has lost its way in the present, proving in some quarters to be as oppressive, hypocritical and unappealing as any corrupted church. This is, perhaps, as much a taunt directed at atheists as a serious thesis, perhaps repaying in kind the sort of pronouncements of decline and exctinction that atheists have dished up about Christians for a good while now. That McGrath can do this is a sign of the very change in cultural mood that he discusses in part two of the book; pronouncements about the death of God and the soon-coming extinction of religious belief have indeed proved premature, if not utterly mistaken.

I gave this book to my dad (a professing atheist) who declared that he was enjoying the first half immensely. I enjoyed it all the way through (I’ll have to take him up on his opinion of the second half).

Buy it here.

The book opens with an introductory chapter which identifies philosophical pluralism as the root of many new challenges to Christianity. Philosophical pluralism refers to a grab bag of epistemologies which view all human claims to knowledge as so radically qualified and circumscribed, that their popular effect is to enthrone the belief that no ideolology or theology claiming to have a truth that is critical for everyone need be taken at face value.  Hence people might be happy enough for you that you believe that Jesus is Lord, but they have little sympathy for your efforts to persuade them that Jesus is Lord over them too, since religious doctrines are private objects, not public ones.

The book then has  four parts, the first on hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, in which field arose developments central to the pluralistic, post-modern scene Carson is investigating. This is also of special relevance to Christianity, since Christians read a  text, the Bible - which is supposd to be holy, God-breathed – as a foundational part of being Christian. True to his Christian stance, in part 2, Carson turns to the Bible. He first looks at issues surrounding the claim that God has given in Scripture an authoritative revelation, then traces through the unfolding story of the whole Bible, culminating in Jesus, and draws inferences relevant to contemporary religious debates driven by religious pluralism. In the third part he lifts his head to look at the challenge for Christians to engage across all the areas of modern society, and in the final part he looks at the influence of pluralism ‘within the camp’ of evangelical* Christians. There is, in this fourth part, an interesting chapter on the nature of hell as a test case illustrating the tendencies in the broader evangelical camp under contemporary pressures.

This is not a short book (569 pages), and nor is it an easy read – Carson covers a lot of ground. But it is not obscurely written or inaccessible to the motivated and moderately informed reader. It is indexed and footnoted with a substantial bibliography. All this makes it a very worthwhile book to read as a way of learning how a Christian might think about and begin to address the challenges Christians face in the west – marginalisation, loss of respect, influence and confidence, perceptions of our beliefs being discredited, outmoded and irrelevant. Carson refuses to acquiesce to these perceptions, but seeks to confront them and respond to them, holding on to the uniqueness of Christ and his salvation and the authority of the book which tells of them.

Buy The Gagging of God from Moore Books here .

*evangelical is a word with different connotations for different people. It is used here not to refer to fundamentalists, right-wingers, happy-clappers or middle class mid-western US churchgoers, but rather to Christians who believe that the Bible is the true source book of Christianity. There we hear from God, there we meet Jesus, there the Spirit impresses God’s gospel upon our hearts and minds, there we find our wisdom and shape our worldview and ethics, and adjudicate our disputes. Evangelicals need not be unsophisticated, anti-intellectual or literalistic in their reading of the Bible. Nor must they repudiate all tradition. Rather they must listen to the Bible – ‘God’s word written’ according to the Anglican 39 Articles - and heed its call to repentance towards God and faith in Jesus. Carson is a leading light in the worldwide conservative evangelical camp.

All this is very stimulating reading, and timely as the New Atheist controversy spills over into sociological and psychological fields. Myers writes in a pleasant, stylish and to the point manner throughout and the book is a pleasure to read and very accessible. He does not always take a biblical position on issues – most notably he sidelines the Bible’s proscription of homosexual behaviour, and argues for Christians to accept homosexual relationships and regularise gay marriages.

This was a rare impulse buy for me at Abbey’s. I read it in a couple of hours and was not disappointed I did. Maybe it might equip you for some conversations with friends or family. Maybe it might stir up some skeptic you know in a good hearted manner.