2022 Books
Yikes - it has been a long time since I updated my books blog. 2022 was a disappointing year for my reading discipline. I got about 1,000 pages done (including the New Testament In It’s World behemoth that I’m still working through little by little), but that is way under where I should be. 2023 will be better. let me run through these real quick
Live Not by Lies, 2020
I thought this Dreher book was pretty disappointing - certainly not as novel as The Benedict Option, and far too full of the European anecdotes that Dreher is in love with (I believe he is residing there permanently now). I was hoping he would present a clearer vision or path forward for American Christians in our deconstructed jungle, but there are only glimpses of that here. Further compounding my disappointment is Dreher’s penchant for the dramatic and hysterical visions of the future. These are dropped in too often throughout the book. One example is his prediction on page 79 that smart TVs will soon measure our involuntary emotional responses to advertisements and sell this information to outside sources so that our commercial impulses may be further manipulated - that is quite the imagination.
Dreher sets the stage by describing our world as one of lies and then the main Thesis of the book comes on page 100:
It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? by accepting a life outside the mainstream, corrageously defencing the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences. These challenges are daunting, but we are blessed with examples from sains who’ve gone before
If I recall correctly, the structure of the rest of the book is examples of those who did what Dreher described - mostly in the face of Soviet totalitarianism - and how we can emulate their behavior.
Christianity at the Crossroads, 2018
I really enjoyed reading this book. Kruger gives the most focused historical and theological survey of the Church in the second century that currently exists. Those who know me best know that this is the sweet spot for my intellectual curiosity. If you are at all interested in understanding the origins of the Christian Faith and Church after the age of the New Testament, you should read this book. I’ll list some ‘factoids’ from my reading below
we need to pay more attention to the continuation of Jewish frameworks that continued in the faith through the New Testament era (13)
Christians had become known, even among their pagan enemies, for their care of the helpless (28)
William Harris argues that the average rate of literacy in the first-century Greco-Roman world would have been 10-15 percent (29)
The early Christian population may have been composed of nearly two-thirds women (36)
I learned of the early apologist “Aristides” (~125AD) for the first time in this book. He is an incredibly early testimony to orthodox Christian faith (64)
Christians (generally) did not have buildings designed as churches until the 4th century (88)
Of course, anyone interested in information on second-century Church history is going to be looking for details and insight on canonization. Kruger devotes the last quarter of the book to that topic and provides a detailed and compelling case for the orthodox position. This portion especially should be required reading for a New Testament survey student.
Bearing God’s Name, 2019
This book was really good. It was just a tad too fluffy for my preference, but that is the popular/academic line which every author trying to sell books must walk. Imes provides a compelling vision for connecting the Pentateuch, and really the whole Old Testament to our Faith. She spends a lot of time breaking down the 10 commandments, and her work on the third commandment (the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation) is especially important and insightful). Here are some quotes from the book
“in the covenant community, every part of life is an expression of worship and loyalty to the God who has committed himself to these people” (42)
“By bearing God’s name, Jesus lives out Israel’s vocation, showing us how it ought to be done.” (139)
“And to be elect - to be his - is to bear his name among the nations, to demonstrate by our lives that he is king and to bediate his blessing to others.” (165)
“Peter’s phrasing in 1st Peter 2:9-10 exactly matches the greek translation of Exodus 19:5-6, except for “treasured possession”… Instead peter emphasizes the process of becoming Yahweh’s possession by using a slightly different phrase that is found only in Malachi 3:17. this slight shift in phrasing opens up a profound theological possibility. Peter’s citation of Malachi is significant because it is the only Old Testament passage where the term segullah refers to a righteous remnant, rather than the entire nation of Israel… By quoting Malachi directly, Peter shows us that he sees this very promise as having been fulfilled in the believing community made up of both Jews and Gentiles.” (170)
If you go to Madison Church you may recognize the content of this book in the 2022 sermon series called “The People of God”
Did Adam and Eve Really Exist, 2011
In this book, John Collins makes an argument for believing in a historical Adam and Eve within old-earth creation models. His first section establishes that this belief is crucial to the coherence of the rest of the Bible and is native to the orthodox faith of the earliest Church. The second section makes anthropological observations (like human uniqueness, instinctive equality, and natural morality) that Collins marshals in defense of an historical Adam and Eve. The third section is where Collins gets down to the gritty work of incorporating a historical adam and eve into various old-earth creation models. He does not force the reader to pick one but guides them generally in the direction of a model in which humanity is the result of a divine act somewhere in the recent history (geologically speaking) of the earth. He theorizes (generally - and I might be butchering this) that God used a hominid frame which he adapted, physically, intellectually, and spiritually to create humankind, and that this pair either serve as the genesis of all other humans or that they the served as the (federal) head of a community of similarly transformed hominids which were the genesis of the human race. I was looking for the scientific ‘hard points’ that Collins was trying to work with as I read the book, here are some that he mentions that he is trying to incorporate into his working model
anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record around 130,000 BC
around 40,000 BC humans appear to develop part and the complexity and variety of artifacts greatly increases
the genetic similarities between humans and chimpanzees seem to require that these species have some kind of “common ancestor”
the features of the human genome - particularly genetic diversity - imply that the human population needs to have been a thousand or more individuals, even at its beginning
Here is the way that Collins understands Genesis:
“It is probably more accurate, then, to describe Genesis 1-11 as providing the front end to an alternative worldview sotry - a story whose purpose is to shape Israel’s stance toward God, The world, and the rest of mankind.” (149)
“(quoting Alexnader Heidel) the first verse of Genesis brievly records the creation of the universe in its essential form, and the second verse singles out a parto of this universe, viz., the earth, and describes its condition in some detail. These two verses then set out the conditions under which the first main event (Genesis 1:3) took place” (156)
The most helpful feature that you pick up from Collins as you read along is his disciplined resistance to embracing any purchase in settling the scientific-historical narrative of human origins into any one timeline or theory so as to declare that “this is what the Bible is really saying.” Locking yourself into one of those tracts puts you (and the truth of the Bible) at the mercy of the validation/invalidation of any number of scientific or historical theories that are almost certain to be wrecked at some point. It is best to follow Collins’s example of insisting that what the Bible truly means to say is absolutely true, and what scientific and historical discovery are tentatively true pending further discovery or additional or corrected data, and the dance of incorporating them is one best done nomadically - Only grazing temporarily at one model or the other, never building your house on a single theory. So doing might jeopardize your worldview or the validity of God’s Word.
Up Next
(continuing to read The New Testament in It’s World little by little)
Disciple Making, Harrington & Sager
Is God Anti-Gay?, Allberry
Flood and Fury, Lynch
Revelation for Everyone, Wright
The Revolutionary Disciple, Putnam & Harrington
A New Heaven and a New Earth, Middleton