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Christian Apologetics: Past and Present is a two-volume compendium of primary sources that document the variety of reasons Christians have given in defense of their faith over the two millennia of its existence. This second volume covers the period from 1500 to the present. The authors divide it into four parts: (1) “The Reformation, Post-Reformation (Protestant), and Catholic Reformation”; (2) “Modernity and the Challenge of Reason,” from roughly the late 17th through the mid-19th centuries; (3) “The Global Era: Christian Faith and a Changing World,” which covers the mid-19th through early 20th centuries; and (4) “Issues Today and Tomorrow,” which covers the mid-20th century to the present. Each section includes selections by authors from across the ecumenical spectrum–Protestant and Catholic–with Reformed evangelical authors receiving special focus in parts 3 and 4. Each part begins with an “Introduction” that frames the historical context the excerpted apologists worked within and concludes with a “Follow-Up” that briefly describes apologetic authors and works not excerpted for the book. I recommend both volumes for Christian apologists, pastors, seminary professors or readers, or laypeople interested in the historical development of Christian apologetics.

If you found this review helpful, please vote “Yes” on my Amazon.com review page.

In this video, I interview Dr. Craig S. Keener regarding his new book, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Baker Academic). The book (and the interview) ranges widely across New Testament studies, philosophy, contemporary field sociology, and systematic theology.

Christianity Today posted an excellent interview with Alvin Plantinga about his new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Here’s a taste:

In the last, much briefer section of the book, you discuss whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between naturalism and the theory of evolution.

I think that’s an extremely interesting and important point, though to argue for it properly is quite complicated; it’s hard to do in a brief compass. The basic idea, which is far from being original, is that if you are a naturalist and think that we have come to be by evolutionary processes, then you will think that the main purpose of our cognitive processes, our mental faculties, is survival and reproductive fitness, not the production of true belief. Evolution doesn’t give a rip about whether your beliefs are true. It only cares whether or not your actions are adaptive, whether they contribute to your fitness. From the point of view of evolution together with naturalism, you wouldn’t expect that our faculties would be really adjusted to truth or aimed at truth. They would just be aimed at fitness.

But if this is true, if our minds are aimed at mere survival, not at truth, then it’s not probable that our minds should be reliable—that is, produce an appropriate preponderance of true over false beliefs; and if that is so, then one who believes both naturalism and evolution should reject the thought that our minds are reliable. But that’s a crippling position to be in. Nietzsche is among the people who have suggested this problem. Some contemporary philosophers—Thomas Nagel, for example—have voiced the same worry, and so did Darwin himself.

In this video, I interview Mark Batterson about his new book, The Circle Maker. (See my review here.) It’s a great interview, although we experienced some technical problems in the last few minutes. Enjoy!

Mark Batterson, The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011). $19.99, 224 pages.

In the First Century B.C., during a period of extreme drought, a Jewish man named Honi stood outside the walls of Jerusalem, drew a circle around himself, and prayed the following prayer: “Lord of the universe, I swear before Your great name that I will not move from this circle until You have shown mercy upon Your children.” Jerusalem’s religious leaders were appalled at this man’s audacity. Then it rained.

Mark Batterson opens The Circle Maker with this story and challenges his readers to pray like Honi. Utilizing biblical narratives, personal testimonies, and a gift for aphorism, Batterson challenges his readers to “dream big,” “pray hard,” and “think long.” In other words, he dares them to ask God for things only he can accomplish, to be persistent in the asking, and to think not of short-term, selfish gain but of long-term, far-reaching benefits for others.

Early on in The Circle Maker, I started to worry that Batterson was veering into “name it and claim it” territory. Like the Honi’s Jerusalem critics, I was forming the impression that Batterson was being presumptuous. But Batterson dispels this impression in a single paragraph: “God cannot be bribed or blackmailed. God doesn’t do miracles to satisfy our selfish whims. God does miracles for one reason and one reason alone: to spell His glory. We just happen to be the beneficiaries.”

But we cannot be God’s beneficiaries if we aren’t encircling our lives with bold, persistent, long-term prayer. That is the enduring lesson of this excellent. Indeed, isn’t that the enduring lesson of the Most Excellent Book: “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (James 5:16)?

P.S. Batterson is releasing a Circle Maker Curriculum Kit, which includes “one hardcover book, one participant’s guide, one DVD-ROM containing four small-group video sessions, a getting started guide, four sermon outlines, and all the church promotional materials needed to successfully launch and sustain a four-week church experience.” Here’s a promotional video for the book and the DVD-based curriculum:

P.P.S. I’m interviewing Mark Batterson about The Circle Maker on Thursday, December 8, at 3:00 p.m. (CST) on MinistryDirect.com/live. You can email questions for Mark to questions@ministrydirect.com, tweet them using #MinistryDirect, or post them on the Facebook message board on the live page. (You must be logged into Facebook to use the message board.)

Tomorrow–Thursday, December 8–I’m interviewing Mark Batterson about his new book, The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears. The interview will be webcast live on MinistryDirect.com at 3:00 p.m. (CST). If you’d like to ask Mark questions about his book, about prayer, or about other ministry topics, email your questions to questions@ministrydirect.com, tweet them using #MinistryDirect, or enter them on the Facebook message board on MinistryDirect’s live page. (You must be logged into Facebook to post questions on the message board.) I’ll do my best to ask Mark every question I receive.

If you’d like to know a little more about this book, watch Mark’s promotional video for it and the for the companion DVD-based small group series.

Sean Michael Lucas, God’s Grand Design: The Theological Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011). $17.99, 224 pages.

My doctrine of salvation is Arminian, so you may wonder why I think highly of Sean Michael Lucas’s study of Jonathan Edwards, whose soteriology was Calvinist. The answer is twofold:

First, Lucas has written an accessible introduction to the biblical theology and pastoral practice of “America’s greatest theologian”—as Robert Jenson described Edwards. Whatever their theological stripes may be, interested students of theology are in Lucas’s debt for this service. Edwards’s literary corpus is large and his thought complex, but Lucas ably guides his readers through Edwards’s theology, showing its narrative unity, comprehensive scope, and direct connection to pastoral practice. He illustrates this theology with well-chosen quotations from Edwards works, situating Edwards’s writings in their historical context. And Lucas appends an “Annotated Bibliography” of the best primary sources by and secondary sources about Edwards, so that readers new to Edwards can know what to read first.

Second—and to my mind, most important—by offering this accessible introduction, Lucas offers contemporary pastors an Edwardsian model for how to integrate biblical theology into their own pastoral practice. This offer comes across explicitly in the appendix, “‘A Man Just Like Us’: Jonathan Edwards and Spiritual Formation for Ministerial Candidates.” But it is implicit throughout the rest of the book. Lucas’s intent for this book, in other words, is not merely historical. Rather, the history serves a larger purpose: namely, helping ministers better understand and practice their divine vocation.

Lucas demonstrates the connection in Edwards’s ministry between what today we might call message and method. The message of the gospel is the desire of the Holy Trinity to take up creation into its own glory, a desire accomplished by the redeeming work of Jesus Christ and reflected by how Christians live. That life is characterized not merely by right beliefs or right actions but most important by right “affections” or “virtue.” The methods by which we promulgate this message must be appropriate to the end God seeks. Ministers, therefore, must call people to faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that produces an all-encompassing love for God and neighbor. The “means of grace” Edwards considered appropriate to this end were preaching, the sacraments (baptism and communion), and prayer.

Obviously, as an Arminian, I have concrete objections to aspects of Edwards’s soteriology, for example, his anti-Arminianism. Lucas (quoting Gerald McDermott) notes that “Edwards’s struggle with Arminianism was but a battle in a life-long war with deism.” Edwards, it seems to me, routinely collapsed Arminianism into deism, even though no less than the evangelical Arminian John Wesley published an edited version of his Religious Affections. So, I must demur from many of Edwards’s conclusions. Nonetheless, and following Wesley’s example, it seems to me that religious affections might be a point of rapprochement between evangelical Calvinists and Arminians. Didn’t Wesley also speak of “heart religion,” after all?

Perhaps it is time that we Arminians stopped thinking of Edwards as a Calvinist only and started thinking of him as a teacher of the entire Church, including us. Obviously, we can’t accept everything Edwards teaches. (Even Calvinists don’t do that!) But we can learn much and benefit greatly from his manifold insights. (Who knows, maybe Calvinists will start treating Wesley in the same way…)

I doubt Lucas intended his book to produce such thoughts in Arminians, but it produced such thoughts in this Arminian. So, I affectionately recommend God’s Grand Design.

P.S. If you found this review helpful, please vote “Yes” on my Amazon.com review page.

Timothy George, Reading Scripture with the Reformers (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011). $16.00, 272 pages.

In the 1990s, InterVarsity Press launched the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (ACCS) series. ACCS aims to publish a commentary on every book of Scripture, based on representative selections from the Church Fathers. The series’ publication is a salutary event for the entire Church, of course, but especially for the evangelical wing of that Church, which often fails to wrestle with, let alone acknowledge, the history of the interpretation of the Bible.

Now, InterVarsity is launching a new series: the Reformation Commentary on Scripture (RCS). The first published commentary is Volume 10: Galatians, Ephesians, which is entirely appropriate, since the theology of Apostle Paul can be said to have sparked the Reformation.

Reformation historian Timothy George is general editor of RCS, and he has published a companion volume to it called Reading Scripture with the Reformers. He aims to present “the story, or at least part of the story, of how the Bible came to have a central role in the sixteenth-century movement for religious reform that we call the Protestant Reformation” (p. 11). He notes three issues that recur throughout his narrative (pp. 13–14): (1) “the question of Scripture and tradition,” (2) “the desire to make the Bible available to everyone in the common languages of the day,” and (3) “how the Bible was used in the life and worship of the Protestant churches.”

George primarily uses biography to advance his narrative. Chapter 1 asks, “Why Read the Reformers?” We’ll return to George’s answer later. Chapter 2, “Ad Fontes!,” examines two 15^th-century developments that made the Reformation possible: “the rediscovery of a vast store of ancient learning that included new methods of studying the Bible as well as other classical texts from the past” and “the invention and rapid development of printing” (p. 46). Chapters 3–8 then turn to the lives and thoughts of men (and a few women) influenced the ideas and practices of Protestantism: Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon and other early Lutherans, Huldrych Zwingli and Radical Reformers, and John Calvin and his theological progeny. Though we speak of the Reformation (singularly), these men and women show that there were actually many Reformations (plural), united in their opposition to Roman Catholicism but divided among themselves along theological and practical lines.

Back to Chapter 1 and its question: Why read the reformers? One reason, of course, is historical: For better or worse, the Reformers have shaped the world in which we live. But for evangelical Christians especially, there is a more compelling, spiritual reason: “we share with them a common patrimony in the sacred Scriptures.” George goes on to write:

We listen to their struggles, musings and debates about the written Word of God as a way of better attending to the thing itself. From the reformers we learn that the true purpose of biblical scholarship is not to show how relevant the Bible is to the modern world, but rather how irrelevant the modern and postmodern world—and we as persons enmeshed in it—have become in our self-centered preoccupations and sinful rebellion against the God who spoke and still speaks by his Spirit through his chosen prophets and apostles (p. 42).

General readers interested only in historical issues will find George’s narrative a good entryway into the historical forces guiding and leading personalities of the Protestant Reformation. Christian readers interested in history and spirituality will find soul mates in the portraits George paints of men and women who, like us, wish “to point men and women both to the written Word in Scripture and to the living Word Jesus Christ” (p. 258).

P.S. If you found this review helpful, please vote “Yes” on my Amazon.com review page.

From Rick Warren, “The Battle for Your Mind” in Thinking. Loving. Doing. A Call to Glorify God with Heart and Mind, ed. John Piper and David Mathis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 34:

If you’re serious about growing in knowledge and growing in your mind, here’s the approach I suggest:

• Read 25 percent of your books from the first fifteen hundred years of church history. So many people act like nothing happened between the times of Paul and Luther. God was at work all that time, and we are dismissing the God of the church to think that he was not having his Word faithfully taught during these times.
• Read 25 percent from the last five hundred years, since the Reformation.
• Read 25 percent from the last one hundred years.
• Read only 25 percent from contemporary authors of the last ten years.

In this video, I interview Prof. John Fea about his excellent book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? Fea is professor of history at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania.

Interview with John Fea, Author of “Was America…, posted with vodpod

You can read my review of Fea’s book here.

If you’d like to skip ahead to a particular question, here’s the time code:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:56 How’s the weather today in Grantham, Pennsylvania?
• 01:44 Why did you find it important to write this particular book on this particular topic at this particular time?
• 05:08 What do historians do? How is their perspective different from other people who ask questions such as the one your book asks?
• 08:49 Name a few advocates and books of Christian nationalists and the secularists who oppose them.
• 14:01 Walk us through the varieties of Christian nationalism that have appeared in American history.
• 21:02 There are multiple ironies in the history of the idea of Christian nationalism. Can you talk a bit about those?
• 28:36 Chapter 7 is titled “The Revolutionary Pulpit.” You argue that patriotic preachers used the Bible to support the revolutionary cause, but their use of it seems tendentious. Can you talk a bit about the revolutionary pulpit?
• 37:42 The relationship between church and state is one of the biggest flashpoints in the contemporary debate between Christian nationalists and secularists. Can you address the issue of the so-called “wall” between church and state?
• 45:40 Tell us about the religious beliefs of these Founders: George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.
• 50:35 How do we justify slave ownership by Founders who considered themselves Christians?
• 52:53 Tell us about the religious beliefs of these Founders: John Witherspoon, John Jay, and Samuel Adams.
• 55:28 What books on the Founding Period, including this topic, would you recommend?
• 57:43 Upcoming events on MinistryDirect.com/live