Whom to believe about the big event almost 2,000 years ago? J.R. Daniel Kirk acknowledges in A Man Attested by God (Eerdmans, 2016), “New Testament studies is in the midst of a resurgence of early high Christology,” which means more scholars acknowledge early Christians saw Jesus as divine. But Kirk, who unsurprisingly holds a Ph.D. in New Testament from liberal Duke University, then provides 638 pages of bad news: He denies Christ’s divinity and sees Him merely as an idealized human in Israel’s tradition.

Whom then should we trust? I’d suggest Richard Bauckham, author of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. A decade ago I praised that book for taking us to ground level in ancient Palestine and breaking down the supposed division between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.” Now it’s back in an expanded second edition (Eerdmans, 2017) and worth reading by theology students more than ever, unless they have a time machine and can be eyewitnesses themselves.

Whom to believe about Islam? Tariq Ramadan, in his Introduction to Islam (Oxford, 2017) emphasizes spiritual jihad rather than the more-familiar terrorist kind, but the U.S. government from 2004 to 2010 denied him a visa, arguing that he had supported terrorist organizations. Garry Wills argues that What the Qur’an Meant (Viking, 2017) is peace, but Wills is much less trustworthy than someone he’s occasionally confused with, George Will.

Whom then should we trust? Christine Douglass-Williams interviews many Islamic moderates in The Challenge of Modernizing Islam: Reformers Speak Out and the Obstacles They Face (Encounter, 2017). They challenge the Quran’s violent texts, but others say those verses come later chronologically than the peaceful ones and are thus more authoritative. I’ve recommended over the past two decades many analysts of Islam and its effects, including Nabeel Qureshi, Ibn Warraq, Bernard Lewis, Paul Marshall, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bat Ye’or, Daniel Pipes, Mindy Belz, and others.

Whom to believe about the subject of Steven Weitzman’s The Origin of the Jews (Princeton, 2017)? Few nonacademic readers will want to wade through its inconclusive chapters—but its honesty about that lack of conclusions deserves praise. Every researcher feels an obligation to come up with some new new thing, but Weitzman acknowledges that scholarship “has failed to generate an alternative narrative that can do the kind of work the Book of Genesis does in helping people to comprehend themselves and their places in the world.”

Genetics analysis thrusts before us a fundamental question. Anyone who goes ten generations back—to the year 1717, maybe—has as many as 2,000 ancestors in that span. (Go back another 300 years and we have as many as four million, although that almost certainly includes some double-counting.) If we wonder why we are here, two logical explanations stand out: We are the product of chance, since any change in those four million would have made for a different human being, or we are part of God’s foreordained drama and have significance beyond the accidental.

Whom then should we trust? I choose God (although it really wasn’t a choice).

Since the mid-19th century Darwinism has been the most popular way to emphasize the role of chance. That’s had dire effects: Jerry Bergman’s How Darwinism Corrodes Morality (Joshua Press, 2017) documents the doctrine’s influence in academia, aesthetics, eugenics, philosophy, and the promotion of abortion.

BOOKMARKS

Eastern Voices, compiled by Asian Access (2017), includes 14 essays examining the interaction of Christianity and various Asian cultures. George Melloan’s Free People, Free Markets (Encounter, 2017) is a history of the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Thomas Dekker’s Four Birds of Noah’s Ark (Eerdmans, 2017) features good prayer-poems from Shakespeare’s time. Christopher Tolkien put together Beren and Lúthien (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from papers his father rightly left unpublished. Cornelis Venema’s Christ and Covenant Theology (P&R, 2017) is a scholarly look at the theology of election and a solid critique of the “Federal Vision.” —M.O.