2012 Books

Happy new year everyone!

Here are some Christian books on my 2012 reading list. Doubtless this list will morph over the year, but so far the list reads:

As an aside: it was disappointing to see the way this book was promoted. Let me quote from the publisher's blurb about the book from their website:

'The Christian Faith represents his magnum opus and will be viewed as one of—if not the—most important systematic theologies in the past fifty years.'

What an arrogant claim to make! At the very least, it is up to the book's readers to decide if this claim is true. It also really walks over many systematic theologies written before it - some of them not even American (joke?). So this blurb initially put me off a lot. Marketing like this has no place in Christian publishing. Shame on you publisher. Right, rant over. But nevertheless I did buy it in the end anyway! 

I may well post on this book over the year with what I find. 


Theology is what pastors preach in their sermons each week as they exegete and apply God's word. We are telling our congregations about God and his character. God is our subject always. Reading theology feeds our preaching too.    

I'm only going on what I've read around the blogosphere, but I've heard this is a very raw and compelling auto/biography of a Christian plagued by his very difficult childhood. Christians are by no means perfect; our lives are as messy, if not more so sometimes, than those who are not followers of Jesus. This is the moving story of a Christian with a very messy life.     

   

Hermeneutics - I've posted on this topic already. Kostenberger is the protege of Grant Osborne who wrote 'The Hermeneutical Spiral', another good introductory book on this topic. I've mentioned that I want to improve my preaching this year. Part of this process involves some more thinking about hermeneutics in the biblical text.

  

I'm afraid to read this but also compelled. It's the story of a missionary pastor whose 13 year old daughter tragically dies through a brain injury. The books tells of the man's recovery through reading Psalm 103 for a year (although I doubt you can ever recover from such an awful tragedy). 

    

I last read Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion online about 6 years ago. Since finishing J I Packer's theology volume (mentioned a few posts ago), I am hungry to read theology again. So this is top of the list. 

  

I'm not usually into the snappy- titled American pragmatic kind of Christian book, but this grabbed my attention. Will post if I actually read it...