I’ve praised Crossway Books for generally avoiding both fluff and academic stuffiness, but here are efforts from five other publishers that also appeal to minds as well as hearts:

P&R’s 2017 books include two thorough texts that readably explain the basics but can challenge those more advanced: Jason DeRouchie’s How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament: Twelve Steps from Exegesis to Theology and Andrew Naselli’s book with the same title except for one term: New Testament. (Some first-year seminary students drink so heavily from the plethora of theological fire hoses around them that they need a 12-step path to recovery.)

The Weaver Book Company’s When Suffering Is Redemptive, ed. Larry Waters (2016), is painful to read as it describes the physical pain some live with every day, but it pushes us to compassion, not despair. Victor Kuligin’s Snubbing God (2017) clearly describes and valiantly defends Biblical standards concerning marriage and more. His chapter on Darwinism is valuable at a time when macroevolutionary thinking is making inroads even at Christian colleges.

Broadman & Holman published David Croteau’s Urban Legends of the New Testament (2015), a fascinating and sprightly look at 40 assumptions that he says many make without Biblical warrant. Croteau argues that Jesus was a builder, not a carpenter, and Paul made other leather goods as well as tents. Croteau doubts that “Eye of the Needle” was a gate in Jerusalem, that synagogues seated men and women separately, and that we can do anything through Christ who strengthens us.

David C. Cook, working with Summit Ministries head Jeff Myers, has published last year and this an updated Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, along with two more 500-page textbooks, Understanding the Culture: A Survey of Social Engagement and Understanding the Faith: A Survey of Christian Apologetics. High-school seniors (and their parents) could benefit from working through the books before heading off to college: At Big State U. and even many Christian schools, professorial propaganda and STDs (student-transmitted doubts) are rampant.

Baker Books this year published God Among Sages by Kenneth Samples, who compares Krishna, Confucius, Muhammad, and the Buddha with Christ and shows “why Jesus is not just another religious leader.” I wish this book had been around 10 to 20 years ago when I taught a comparative religion course at the University of Texas: It shows how extraordinary religious leaders were still broken and far from divine, while Christ both claimed to be God and showed that He is through His life and resurrection.

Baker’s The Complete Topical Guide to the Bible (2017) is also a useful reference: Opening one page at random, I could learn where the Bible refers to staffs (as personal property, symbols of authority, or ways in which God made manifest His miraculous power), sticks (used literally or figuratively), straw (as animal bedding and fodder, as something light and fragile, as something of little value), sycamore-fig trees (as plentiful, as worth cultivating), and thorns (as the result of the curse of the fall, as worthless weeds, as unpleasant, as associated with burning, as instruments of punishment, as Jesus’ crown).

Bookmarks

Oliver Crisp’s Saving Calvinism: Expanding the Reformed Tradition (IVP, 2016) raises good questions until it tilts toward universalism. Crisp reports that Jonathan Edwards argued “infamously” that inhabitants of heaven will applaud rather than sorrow at God’s righteous judgment against those in hell, but argues that “Edwards’ vision is not a comforting one.” Tell that to the millions who died in Hitler’s concentration camps or Stalin’s Gulag or Mao’s great leap backward: If God ignores such enormity, wouldn’t they think less of Him?

Michael O’Brien’s The Fool of New York City (Ignatius, 2016) respects those Gotham residents who seek God rather than money or proximity to power. James Watkins does a good job of updating the 500-year-old language of the Thomas à Kempis classic, The Imitation of Christ (Worthy, 2017)—and that’s the antidote to lusting for worldly fame. —M.O.