Bruce Gordon’s John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography (Princeton, 2016) tells of the great work’s influence over almost half a millennium. Gordon also shows the influence of Calvin’s “graceful economy of language” on French prose: “With short, elegant sentences, Calvin turned religious writing away from the prolix mess of early French Protestant authors.” Shawn Wright’s Theodore Beza: The Man and the Myth (Christian Focus, 2015) is a readable biography of Calvin’s successor in Geneva.

Some recent successors are not so faithful. The Sin of Certainty (HarperOne, 2016) is a quasi memoir of the spiritual journey that took Peter Enns from biblical orthodoxy as a Westminster Theological Seminary professor to the focal point of controversy and dismissal by the seminary’s board of trustees. Enns now teaches at Eastern University.

Enns does not recount in this book the Westminster controversy, although his pointed title displays a sarcastic flair. He seems certain that we should be uncertain. He trusts evolutionists: “The study of genetics seems to be a slam-dunk-over-the-defense-break-the-backboard proof for evolution.” He trusts secular archaeologists who say the stories of creation and flood from other cultures are older than the biblical accounts. His trust in German higher criticism also leads me to think he’s looking for evidence in all the wrong places.

Bookmarks

Dallas Denery’s The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 2015) is a detailed, academic history of our everyday sin. Mark Belz’s A Journey to Wholeness: The Gospel According to Naaman’s Slave Girl (P&R, 2015) lucidly shows how God displayed surprising mercy to an enemy general, and also punished a liar, Elisha’s servant Gehazi, but did not give up on him.

Hell and Good Company by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 2015) is a loaded history of the Spanish Civil War that emphasizes the right’s atrocities and minimizes the left’s. Gary Murrell’s “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States” (UMass Press, 2015) sympathizes with its subject, propagandistic historian Herbert Aptheker: For half a century he hatcheted anyone who deviated from the Communist Party line, and finally party leaders purged him too.

This month brings the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. As German troops advanced through eastern Poland, local anti-Semites used the opportunity to kill Jews. Anna Bikont’s The Crime and the Silence (FSG, 2015) records her investigation of the July day when 40 residents of the Polish town of Jedwabne herded hundreds of Jews into a barn and set it on fire. Intense hatred among some and passivity among many led to holocausts in town after town well before Nazis made it “scientific” through construction of gas chambers.

Mark Riebling’s Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler (Basic, 2015) takes the side of Pope Pius XII, who could have saved many lives by commanding Polish Catholics not to help Nazis kill Jews, but remained silent. Instead, Riebling writes, Pius XII plotted unsuccessfully to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

June 23 brings the big British vote on the European Union. Todd Huizinga’s The New Totalitarian Temptation (Encounter, 2016) helps to explain what’s at stake: “The loss of a religious sense of purpose has left a hole in the European soul, which is being filled for many by a belief in the vision of supranational governance.” Huizinga calls the EU “Christendom gone apostate.”

Many of us know from the movie Chariots of Fire how God made Eric Liddell fast but also called him to China. Duncan Hamilton’s For the Glory: Eric Liddell’s Journey from Olympic Champion to Modern Martyr (Penguin, 2016) fluidly tells the story. Jessica Chen Weiss adds realism to China-watching in Powerful Patriots (Oxford, 2014), which shows how China’s leaders are riding a nationalist tiger: They’ve made the tiger roar for their own purposes, but its sharp teeth may yet bite them, and us. —M.O.