The French have a phrase I love: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. While time marches on, and while the Christian faith marches on, the objections to it remain very much the same. Likewise, there are only so many arguments for the existence of God and the accuracy of the Bible. But even while the arguments remain much the same, it can be helpful to present them in fresh ways.

In the late 90’s Lee Strobel exploded onto the scene with The Case for Christ. His unique angle was approaching the Christian faith as a journalist. “Retracing his own spiritual journey from atheism to faith, Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, cross-examines a dozen experts with doctorates from schools like Cambridge, Princeton, and Brandeis who are recognized authorities in their own fields. … Strobel’s tough, point-blank questions make this book read like a captivating, fast-paced novel. But it’s not fiction.” It was an effective book that sold millions of copies and one that continues to sell today.

J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity may well be The Case for Christ for a new generation. He has a unique approach of his own. Wallace is a cold-case homicide detective who dedicated much of his career to solving homicides that had been left unsolved many years before. He would re-open old investigations, take a fresh look at the evidence, interview the witnesses and suspects, and see if he could bring closure to old crimes.

Wallace was at one time an atheist who had been challenged with the claims of the gospels. As he began to read the Bible and consider its claims, he realized that Christianity was much like the cases he solved as a detective. He saw that there was evidence and there were eyewitnesses and records that could be weighed and considered. He used the skills and disciplines he had learned as a detective and brought them to bear on the Bible and on the Christian faith. He came to see that the case for Christianity was as strong as any case he would bring before a judge. 

Why should the Devil get all the good scientists? It sometimes seems that way, doesn’t it? We hear of scientists like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins and others who are acclaimed as being at the top of their field and almost inevitably it seems that they are atheists or otherwise committed to explaining the world in terms of Darwinian evolution. Occasionally we find a great dissenting mind, but then we discover that that person is committed to beliefs that seem opposed to the plain account of Scripture. So we have Francis Collins who writes The Language of God but who in the book says that, though God exists, life and creation can be explained in terms of natural laws and processes that do not depend on the Divine hand of God. It is both tiresome and frustrating.

I have a bit of an aversion to books on apologetics. I don’t know exactly why this is, but it may be that many of them seem to teach methods of defending the faith that either manipulate or bludgeon. Somehow grace and apologetics do not seem to go together as they ought. So it was with perhaps just a bit of reluctance that I began reading Gregory Koukl’s Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions. This is a book that promises to teach a new method, a respectful method, of defending the faith and of attempting to convince others of the truth of Christianity. This is not an apologetics 101 text, as in a book that will compare and contrast various apologetic methods; instead, it is a guide, a book that seeks to lead the reader into a new method of sharing his faith with others.

As of January 1, 2008, Al Mohler was the author of one book, and it was an edited volume to which he contributed only a single chapter. By the time January 1, 2009 rolls around, Mohler will be the author of five books. The first, Culture Shift (my review), was published by Multnomah and offered biblical perspectives on cultural issues. The second, published by Crossway, is Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists. In September will come He Is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World (by Moody) and Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of the New Sexual Tolerance (by Multnomah).

I'm on vacation this week and today we're heading across the border into the U.S. of A. to spend some time at the Buffalo Zoo. And, if we have some time left over, we'll swing by Niagara Falls since we haven't taken the kids to see that site in some time. Today I just wanted to post a short review I wrote quite a while ago but haven't yet had opportunity to post. It's a short review because the book was just so utterly stupid, three paragraphs was all I could stand to write.

This may well be the dumbest book you're ever likely to read. And that is saying something if you've read Hedges previous effort American Fascists. In American Fascists Hedges took on the Christian right, a group he (rather conveniently) left undefined, though he seemed to indicate that it was really any Christian who actually took his faith seriously. His purpose in writing the book was to warn Americans that Christians are rising in great numbers and are waiting only for the next national disaster before attempting to seize power and to create some kind of an American theocracy. He offered little proof and gave the reader little reason to trust or believe him.

Mormonism seems to be on the rise. I read recently that some estimates suggest that by the end of this century there may be close to 300 million Mormons in the world. With the Mormon obsession with proselytizing and with their skill at winning converts, it seems a given that we will hear more and more in years to come about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Once considered little more than a fringe cult, it is fast entering the religious mainstream.

Vintage Jesus is the first book published under the banner of Resurgence Literature (Re:Lit) which is a ministry of Resurgence (which is, in turn supported by Mars Hill Church). This is also the first title in a series called "Vintage Jesus" that will build on the themes and doctrines introduced in this book. It is one of six(!) new books we'll see this year from the pen of Mark Driscoll. The book is a collaborative project between friends--Mark Driscoll and Gary Breshears. Describing how this collaboration unfolded, Driscoll writes, "In the chapters of this book you will hear my voice since I crafted the words onto pages, but many of the concepts were shaped and formed by my good friend.

There are many people I "know" primarily through their books. I read constantly and find that books allow me to understand the people who write them, especially when the author has written several books. As I read through the corpus of his writings I learn to understand how he thinks and learn to understand what he believes. Even if I have never met an author face-to-face, I often feel like I have met him in his books. Because Tim Keller has written so little, I do not know him in the way I feel I know many of his peers--pastors and theologians who have written extensively. So it was with great interest that I read The Reason for God, only his second book (besides edited volumes to which he has contributed a chapter) and certainly his most significant. Published by Penguin and with a positive review by Publishers Weekly, it has all the makings of a bestseller.

Though many people use the name of Jesus in our day, it often seems that one Jesus bears very little resemblance to another. While almost everyone claims to love Jesus, few seem to know the real Jesus. It is to this problem that Erwin Lutzer, pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, addresses his new book Slandering Jesus.

The format is a simple. An opening chapter introduces the problem and the author's rationale for addressing it. "Living as we do at the beginning of a new century, many new Jesuses are being fabricated year by year; this is the age of designer Jesuses." "This book is about a few of the attempts that have been made to remake Jesus of Nazareth into a different kind of Jesus--a Jesus more in tune with the times, or a Jesus who will blend more nicely into the tolerance that our culture prizes so highly." Lutzer introduces six assumptions that give scholars permission to reinvent Jesus according to their own liking:

David Robertson, a Free Church of Scotland pastor who lives in Dundee, wanted there to be an intelligent Christian response to Richard Dawkins’ bestselling The God Delusion. To that end he wrote an open letter to Richard Dawkins and subsequently posted it on his church’s web site. The letter somehow found its way to Dawkins who posted it on his own website where it generated a response that was massive in scope and in passion. According to the back of The Dawkins Letters, “The ferocity, and shallowness of thinking, of some of the responses spurred David to write further letters, which form the basis of this book. They explain a credible basis for faith that counteracts the ‘atheist myths’ that so much popular discussion is based upon.”