Tim Keller’s Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical (Viking, 2016) is a contender for WORLD’s Book of the Year in the Accessible Theology category. It’s a good book to give those who have dismissed Christ from Christmas—particularly elderly friends.

That’s because Keller begins by quoting a secularist who writes of waking up at night and wondering: “How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?” Keller quotes a Harvard professor saying, “As one gets older … such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night.”

Keller writes: “We were made for love without parting. … We are trapped in a world of death, a world for which we were not designed. … If we are not a self after death, then we have lost everything, because what we most want in life is love.”

He then deals with some common objections to Bible belief. Are suffering and hell unfair? Hmm … finite minds are sitting in judgment on the motives and plans of an infinite God. Is the Bible full of holes? Many scholars have refuted contentions that particular verses contain error. Isn’t Christianity faith-based rather than reality-based? Everyone is faith-based. (David Foster Wallace: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”)

Keller points out that we cannot have both complete, autonomous freedom and true love: Love involves commitment, service, and sacrifice. Even with our egos, “we need someone we admire to admire us.” The individual autonomy celebrated in Disney films eventually fails us: Ecclesiastes shows that even the best life under the sun is lacking.

We can be content for a while sitting under our vine and fig tree. The worry is that death will keep us from staying there, and the only real antidote is faith that our Redeemer lives and we will live again.

TWO BOOKS—Mindy Belz’s They Say We Are Infidels (Tyndale Momentum) and Les Sillars’ Intended for Evil (Baker)—are ineligible for Book of the Year consideration because WORLD staff members wrote them. During the 1990s and early 2000s I wouldn’t even mention books written by staff members—most of them were mine—because I didn’t want the magazine to be a public relations vehicle for anyone, most particularly myself. But lately I’ve realized that this policy kept from our readers information they should have about books that would interest them—so I want to mention these books without singing their praises, because I’m hardly an objective observer.

I can at least note the dynamic subtitles—On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians in the Middle East (Mindy) and A Survivor’s Story of Love, Faith, and Courage in the Cambodian Killing Fields (Les)—and mention that both authors come through with the promise of action and adventure. (We ran an excerpt from Mindy’s book in our April 30, 2016, issue, and an excerpt from Les’ on wng.org on Dec. 10 as part of our Saturday series, so you can judge their writing for yourselves.)

I’ll also mention that both writers understand what Josef Stalin and others crudely declared: “Single death: tragedy. Million deaths: statistic.” Mindy and Les give us some stats but also introduce us to heroes like Insaf Safou of Iraq and Radha Manickam of Cambodia, both of whom by God’s grace survived hellish regimes.

Bookmarks

Few books are good enough to outlive the death of their author. Scholar Kenneth E. Bailey died in May at age 85, but his excellent and readable books Jacob and the Prodigal (2003), The Cross & the Prodigal (2nd edition, 2005), Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes (2008), Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes (2011), and The Good Shepherd (2014), all published by IVP, will continue to inform readers of the Bible’s cultural context. —M.O.