Leland Ryken’s J.I. Packer: An Evangelical Life (Crossway, 2015) describes the “hard nosed and unsentimental” theologian as a man who loves detective stories and considers them “among the most moral fiction of our time.” Packer says they “never have existed without the Christian gospel,” since the detectives are “champions of the needy, bringers of merited judgment and merciful salvation. The gospel of Christ is the archetype of all such stories.”

Packer turns 90 on July 22 and should receive as much celebration from evangelicals as Queen Elizabeth did on her 90th birthday in April. His Knowing God (IVP, 1973, republished 1993) is a Christian classic, and his three-word definition of slow Christian progress that lasts a lifetime—“God saves sinners”—helped save evangelicals during the second half of the 20th century from the “cruel and tormenting unrealities of overheated holiness teaching.”

Packer criticized theological liberals in his breakthrough book “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God (Eerdmans, 1958), which defended the authority of the Bible at a time when trendy theologians were battering it like a piñata. Packer also battled the Keswick movement that claimed true believers could totally conquer sin in their own lives if their faith was strong enough. He called “victorious Christian living” theology “false to Scripture and dishonoring to God.”

Ryken vividly portrays a man who at 80 still climbed staircases two steps at a time, enjoyed jazz, and “played hooky for two evenings” at an academic conference because it “was boring [him] stiff.” Sadly, few professors followed Packer’s four rules for writing: “Have something to say … keep it simple … make it flow … be willing to redraft as often as is necessary to meet these requirements.” Ryken explains well Packer’s endorsement of inerrancy and his praise for the writings of Puritans like John Owen (who turned Packer into a five-point Calvinist).

By stark contrast, Robert Wittman and David Kinney’s The Devil’s Diary (Harper, 2016) fluently covers the career and foul thinking of Alfred Rosenberg, Adolf Hitler’s “chief philosopher.” Rosenberg’s diary revealed the difference between Hitler’s bland public statements about Christianity and the Führer’s real fury: “More than once he emphasized, laughing, that he had always been a heathen, and now the time has arrived for the Christian poison to face its end.” Hitler also told Rosenberg he wished he could return to the era before Jesus: He loved “the real head of Zeus” and despised “the agonized Christ.”

Historians have commented on how the Germans wasted opportunities to enlist Stalin-hating Ukrainians in their cause, but that miss was inevitable given the Darwinian theories of racial superiority that Rosenberg propagated. Erich Koch, Ukraine’s Nazi administrator, said “the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.” Germans thought they were advancing evolution: Heinrich Himmler one night in Poland told SS leaders, “Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand. … This is a glorious page in our history.”

Bookmarks

Ismael Hernandez’s Not Tragically Colored: Freedom, Personhood, and the Renewal of Black America (Acton, 2016) brilliantly shows how the American experiment needs a recreation of the melting pot, which Hernandez calls “inclusive monoculturalism.” Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, 2016) is a well-reported, street-level view of people with messy lives who need compassionate help. Sadly, Desmond’s government-heavy policy prescriptions would help some but make things worse for most.

Roseanne Montillo’s The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America’s Youngest Serial Killer (William Morrow, 2015) shows Boston in the 1870s and offers glimpses of Herman Melville as well. Fawaz Gerges’ ISIS: A History (Princeton, 2016) and Patrick Sookhdeo’s Unmasking Islamic State (Isaac Publishing, 2015) both present well the basics about the new serial killer. —M.O.