Here’s a quick review of what I cast my eyes over during the year. I should say that I also got through a third of the mammoth Systematic Theology (second edition) by Wayne Grudem but I’ll save my review of that for a year’s time when, God willing, I’ll have finished it! I give the books I read a star rating as follows:
- Absolutely outstanding *****
- Very good ****
- A decent read ***
- Hmm, OK **
- Don't bother *
Agent Running in the
Field (John Le Carré) ***
Spy thriller by the evergreen
John Le Carré; plenty of twists and working out to do so it keeps your
mind engaged. There's even a plot about Brexit - just when you thought you'd switched off! Quite sweary which, for me, detracts from a good book.
Another Man’s Shoes (Sven Sømme and Ellie Sømme) ***
I first heard about this
book listening to an interview with Ellie Sømme on BBC Radio 4. Her father Sven was
a member of the Norwegian resistance during the Second World War and this
autobiography recounts his spying activities, arrest, imprisonment by the Nazis and
dramatic escape through the snowy and beautiful Norwegian countryside to
freedom in neutral Sweden. The cover photo shows Sven leaping from fir tree to fir tree so as not the leave footprints in the snow which is indicative of his ingenuity in fleeing the enemy, armed to the teeth and led by hounds. At one point in his long journey, an old friend gives Sven his sturdy
mountain boots in exchange for the fleeing man's flimsy town shoes – and when Ellie retraces his
steps decades later, long after his death, you can imagine her emotion when she
is presented with papa’s shoes which had been kept faithfully by these admiring resistants all those years.
The Bible Speaks Today - The Message of Ephesians (John Stott) ****
The BST series is a brilliant aid to Bible study, exploring verse-by-verse what the text means in a non-technical style and helping with how it applies to everyday life. The series now covers the entire Bible, Old and New Testaments as well as important themes. I think John Stott’s book on Ephesians is one of the best. It perfectly illustrates Stott’s reverence for scripture as God’s word with his characteristic knack of saying everything so simply yet compellingly.
Outstanding. “Altogether
it takes 7 billion billion billion (that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
or 7 octillion) atoms to make you. No one can say why those 7 billion billion
billion have such an urgent desire to be you. They are mindless particles,
after all, without a single thought or notion between them. Yet somehow for the
length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless
systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, to make you you, to give
you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition
known as life.” Bill Bryson is one of my all-time favourite authors and this is
one of his best books. Up there with his superb Short History of Nearly
Everything, this book on the human body (starting with the head, and working
down to the toes) combines technical information put in everyday terms,
surprising facts, fascinating cameo biographies and laugh-out-loud humour. He
really is very funny as well as being one of the most articulate users of the
English language I’ve ever read. Quite weird that this book, written in 2019, says
this about diseases: “The fact is we are really no better prepared for a bad
outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people
a hundred years ago. The reason we haven't had another experience like that
isn't because we have been especially vigilant. It's because we have been lucky.” One year later…
The Case for Christ - A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Lee Strobel) ***
Classic apologetics book
by atheist investigative reporter turned pastor and preacher Lee Strobel. This is his
first book and it retraces his steps interviewing leading experts as an
inquiring sceptic desperately seeking the smoking gun that brought about the death of God. What
he found instead is that the evidence for the truth of Christianity is much
sounder than he expected. Which is why he embraced faith in Christ for himself.
Christmas - Tradition, Truth and Total Baubles (Nick Page) ***
The ever-productive Nick
Page produces yet another gem using the classic Nick Page formula of
painstaking research, unceremonious debunking of popular myths, creative
imagination and irreverent (but clean) wit. It turns out that virtually
everything you thought was true about the origins of our cherished Christmas
customs is actually false. Total baubles, in fact.
The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis)
- 1. The Magician’s Nephew ***
- 2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ****
- 3. The Horse and His Boy ****
- 4. Prince Caspian ***
- 5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ****
- 6. The Silver Chair ****
- 7. The Last Battle ***
To my shame, despite having become a Christian in 1979, I had never read the Chronicles of Narnia before now. I thought I really ought to get round to it and I found it a very enjoyable and worthwhile read. I knew the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of course, because I’d seen the film, but reading all seven books in chronological order in a fortnight (two days for each book) cast it in a different light. I liked The Horse and His Boy, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair best of all as I just found them to be the most exciting stories. The Last Battle fizzles out rather suddenly to a quite underwhelming ending, though the portrayal of eternity at the end is the most exquisite prose in the series for my money.
Coronavirus and Christ (John Piper) ****
This small book was
written and published in haste due to the sudden spread of Covid-19. Piper
never sets out to please people with platitudes and precious thoughts, even if
he gets panned for being blunt and undiplomatic, which he often does. But Piper
speaks unapologetically from a mind that is saturated in scripture - all
of scripture, not just the bits you find on fridge magnets - and this book gives
a serious warning about how the world should respond to a totally sovereign God
who has sent (not just permitted) this pandemic as a wake-up alarm. Tough love…
Dominion - The Making of the Western Mind (Tom Holland) ****
Wow! This is a tour de
force from respected historian and scholar Tom Holland. It’s about just how much
Western thought and attitudes owe to Christianity, even if since the enlightenment
our worldview has relentlessly pushed Christian culture to the margins. The book claims that even the
very modern excesses of woke activism borrow their instinctive championing of
minority rights to Christ’s insistence that the first shall be last and the
last shall be first. Christianity’s unique emphasis on loving one’s enemy,
self-giving as a virtue and supporting the weak have irrevocably shaped the Western mindset, according to Holland, and are essential to its ongoing dominance.
The Genealogical Adam and Eve - The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry (S. Joshua Swamidass) **
I found this a very
technical book and difficult to get into. Swamidass is Associate Professor of
Pathology and Immunology at Washington University in St. Louis – so no slouch
then. He is also a Christian who holds to an evolutionary understanding of
human origins. However, Swamidass goes into great detail with computer models to
contend in this book that it is possible genealogically (though not he insists
biologically) that we all descend from a common ancestor who might have lived
around 6,000 years ago. (It's the same logic that claims everyone in Europe is somehow related to Charlemagne - you may have heard that). Perhaps this bridges a great divide between creationists and theistic evolutionists? I can't tell you I'm afraid, as it’s all a bit too technical for the likes of me. Gorgeous book cover design though... Gold medal for that.
God's Smuggler (Brother Andrew) ****
Classic Christian
testimony page-turner from the Cold-War era from this courageous Dutchman Andrew
van der Bijl who smuggled boxes of Bibles from the Netherlands across the iron curtain in his humble
VW Beetle. Amazing how time and again Communist border guards were miraculously
unable to see to his trunk full of illegal cargo right before their eyes.
Haynes NASA Mission AS-506: Apollo 11 (Christopher Reilly and Phil Dolling) *****
Love this! It’s a Haynes Owner's Workshop Manual, so it’s got plenty of technical information that even engineers and boffins would not completely grasp, but this is mainly a special commemorative coffee-table book marking the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969. It contains great colour photos, interesting facts about the design, manufacture and flawless performance of the Saturn V rocket, the command module, the lunar module, the software, the space suits… everything. This is a really good documentary celebration of humankind’s greatest technological feat of the 20th century (or quite possibly ever). And if you dare give me any of that conspiracy theory rubbish that the landings were faked I might just chin you. So don't!
John for Everyone Part 1 and Part 2 (Tom Wright) ***
I read these to accompany
my daily Bible reading towards the end of the year. I enjoyed them but by the
end of these two books, I was ready for a change. The format is identical each
day: short Bible passage translated by the author, anecdote, link to key point
in the passage, some kind of application. For a world-class, learned New
Testament scholar Tom Wright has a remarkable gift of communicating profound theology in layman’s
terms. I find his failure to capitalise ‘father’, ‘son’ and ‘holy spirit’ puzzling
and distracting but, overall, these little books help you engage with a little
bit of God’s word each day which I found especially valuable for the long and dense monologues you get in John chapters 5-8 and 14-17.
The Living Church - Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor (John Stott) ****
This is a very readable
book on what the local church should be like. Churches are so diverse (and that’s
a good thing) yet Stott manages to distil a number of key components that are
essential for growing and healthy churches, whatever ecclesiastical form they
take. Typically for John Stott (and I think this is a strength of classic Anglicanism), he loves to describe
the strengths and weaknesses of two extremes and then argue persuasively for a sound
and balanced middle option. This he does on many aspects of wholesome church
life; evangelism and outreach, the shape of ministry, the content and quality
of preaching, fellowship and community, giving, and how the church should stand
on divisive political issues. You’re always going to get value with John Stott
and this is an excellent starting point for a church leader wondering if the fundamentals are healthy or needing some attention.
The Mammoth Book of Bob Dylan (Sean Egan ed.) *
This was the most
disappointing read of the year. There is little, if anything, here that’s new and
you just get the feeling that Sean Egan doesn’t like anything much that Dylan
recorded before 1964 or after 1966. As the 2016 Nobel Laureate for Literature said himself, “You just kinda wasted my precious time, but
don’t think twice, it’s all right.”
The Bible Speaks Today - The Message of the Resurrection (Paul Beasley-Murray) ****
This is one of the earlier
BST Bible Themes books. Paul Beasley-Murray examines the witness to the
resurrection from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, Paul and others by walking
through selected passages from the New Testament. The result is a really
coherent study that I found very helpful as a preacher around Easter.
My Life in Red and White (Arsène Wenger) ***
I really hoped this long-awaited autobiography might uncover some of the many mysteries and enigmas of Wenger’s time as Arsenal’s most successful manager. This is not that book. It devotes a lot of space to his boyhood Alsace, in Cannes, Monaco and Japan, about which I found little of interest. Wenger seems quite guarded pretty well all the way through. You read about successes and failures but we know about them already. You rarely get an insight into Wenger’s soul, though you can detect reading between the lines about how frustrating it was to fight with his arms tied behind his back after building the new stadium and about how hurt he still feels over the way his career ended at Arsenal. I was hoping for an explanation of what on earth he saw in the hapless Igors Stepanovs, Manuel Almunia and Chu Young Park. Or why he didn’t strengthen the squad, like everyone could see he must, in the golden year of opportunity when Arsenal finished second behind Leicester City. Or how annoying it must be to have to answer tabloid journalists’ questions on the disrespectful drivel spouted by the likes of Tony Pulis, Alan Pardew and Jose Mourinho. It’s an absorbing read nevertheless but, like the second half of Arsène’s reign at Arsenal, I longed in vain for more.
No Well-Worn Paths - One Man’s Journey (Terry Virgo) ****
Quitting as a vicar in the
Church of England to become a member of a Newfrontiers church this year was a
big change for me. Although I was never your typical Anglican, sitting very far
from the centre at the low-church, charismatic end of the spectrum, joining
Newfrontiers is an appreciable change of culture so, at apostolic leader Jeremy Simpkins’
recommendation, I found a copy of Terry Virgo’s now out-of-print story of
Newfrontiers on eBay. I have long admired Terry’s Bible teaching recordings and
I recognised some of the stories he tells about his journey from some of his talks. But
this is an interesting and faith-inspiring account of how a young leader came upon New Testament ideals and principles of the way church should be and set about
building a growing movement of churches like that. He is not afraid to admit
where mistakes were made on the way but, overall, there are more stories of how
he and Newfrontiers were disliked and not trusted, only for the
mood music to change as, over time, the network he founded thrived and expanded worldwide.
The Pleasures of God - Meditations on God's Delight in Being God (John Piper) ***
A Piper classic that I
read about 15 years ago and decided to re-read during my sabbatical. It’s a heavyweight theologically and takes a lot of effort to absorb, for example: “Our
obedience is God's pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure. This is
good news, because it means very simply that the command to obey is the command
to be happy in God. The commandments of God are only as hard to obey as the
promises of God are hard to believe. The Word of God is only as hard to obey as
the beauty of God is hard to cherish.” Right… “Very simply” eh? You sort of
need to keep putting the book the book down to compute and assimilate what you’ve just read. But
The Pleasures of God is packed with riches if you're willing to work hard to unearth them.
Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood - A Response to Evangelical Feminism (John Piper and Wayne Grudem ed.) ***
This book has a very
long opening chapter by the editors which sets out what has become known as the
complementarian position (i.e. God created men and women in his image as equal in
worth and dignity, but not as identical or interchangeable; therefore men and women will typically flourish in different ways, which is why God has assigned to us complementary roles
and responsibilities). This opposes the egalitarian view which limits what sets us apart as male and female to essential reproductive biological differences (and, actually, even that is now contested by some due to the transgender and non-binary narrative). Frankly, this first section is by far the
best part of the book; it argues, I think respectfully, from the relevant biblical texts
and gives answers to the main objections to complementarianism that have been raised. I found that, on the whole, Piper and Grudem frame their opponents’
arguments accurately and without caricature, before replying firmly but courteously.
Had the book stopped there I would have given it 5 stars. Complementarianism
has a spectrum all of its own. I would call myself a broad complementarian and I do not agree with some of the conclusions reached by many at the stricter,
narrower end of the scale some of whom were contributors to the later chapters of this book. They go further than I do and indeed I believe further than scripture really
warrants in places, though there are some interesting insights from the social
sciences and theology alike to be found there.
Revolutionary Sex - How the Good News of Jesus Changes Everything (William Taylor) **
This is a short book
made up from a preaching series at Saint Helen’s Bishopsgate in London on the
Bible and human sexuality as they set out their stall in the context of the lack
of decisive leadership and increasing vocal campaigning for change in the
Church of England on these matters. It covers God’s good design as male and
female in his image, the nature of Christian marriage, singleness, fornication, and homosexual attraction and relationships from a biblical point of view, but
relatively superficially. There are FAQs at the end, reproduced from a Q and A
at the church, answered by a panel of three - that’s good but all too brief. I
agreed with pretty much all this book teaches but I only give it two stars as it says nothing
really new.
The Romford Pelé - It’s Only Ray Parlour’s Autobiography (Ray Parlour with Amy Lawrence) **
The autobiography of
Arsenal’s record Premier League appearance holder charts his evolution from Essex
lad falling out of the boozer after getting hammered on lager, blagging his way out of awkward moments with strict disciplinarian
manager George Graham to consummate professional under revolutionary coach Arsène
Wenger. Occasionally very funny, sometimes fly-on-the-wall fascinating (for fans anyway), but mostly
it’s just OK.
The Universe Next Door - A Basic Worldview Catalogue (James W. Sire) **
I
was recommended this book at Moorlands in 1990 and finally got round to
reading it thirty years later. Mine is the third edition and now there are six so it's a rapidly evolving sphere. It’s a critique of all the major worldviews; deism, pantheism,
Marxism, existentialism, post-modernism etc. all from a Christian perspective. James
Sire is a learned chap and he knows his stuff but for some reason this book failed to draw me in. I just personally found it a bit
boring and hard to get into. Maybe I was just a bit distracted or tired at the time...
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