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| Current Book Reviews |
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| More Than a Carpenter |
| by Josh McDowell |
| Dear Bookworms, |
| If you were to Google the name Jesus today, you'd instantly get about 181 million hits. Search for Jesus at Amazon.com and you'll find 261,474 books about him. Given the smorgasbord of competing views, can we still have confidence in the historical Jesus? Many people want to regard Jesus not as God but as a good, moral man or as an exceptionally wise prophet who spoke many profound truths. Scholars often pass off that conclusion as the only acceptable one that people can reach by the intellectual process. Many people simply nod their heads in agreement and never trouble themselves to see the fallacy of such reasoning. |
| This book deals with these questions among many others, painting for us a picture of what the Scriptures teach regarding the Divine, Human, Person and Work of Jesus Christ. |
| -Josh McDowell in More than A Carpenter, p. 27. |
| The purpose and thrust of Josh McDowell's More than a Carpenter is represented by the quote you just read. There are various views of Jesus out there in the world, and many of these views will be talked about and debated over the next few weeks as we approach Easter. This book gets at the question Is Jesus really who he says he is? More than a Carpenter has been used for years as an evangelistic book to give to family and friends to begin answer questions regarding Jesus and his authenticating life and work as the God-man savior. We are making copies of this book available for each of you to use as an evangelistic tool helping people to begin to understand who Jesus really was.
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| Your Fellow Bookworm |
| Who Made God? Searching for a Theory of Everything |
| By Edgar Andrews |
| Some Christian critiques of atheistic Darwinism are at times strident and sound ill tempered. Arguments in favor of the Christian position are often tired and unconvincing, amounting to little more than variations on the theme of Paley's well-designed watch. But, to coin a phrase, here is something completely different. For starters, Andrews does not propose to argue from the presence of design in nature up to some kind of a divine Designer. He begins with the hypothesis that the God of the Bible is the true and living God who made all things. From that starting point this warm professor attempts to show that reality is exactly as we should expect if his underlying assumption is true. |
| The book is full of detailed scientific discussion on the origin of the universe and Darwinian evolution. With his multidisciplinary expertise Andrews ranges over many different fields in his quest for a "theory of everything" - an all encompassing account of the material universe. He skillfully guides the reader through the complexities of the Big Bang account of the origin of time and space, Einstein's theory of general relativity, the laws of nature, quantum mechanics, string theory and much more. The writer subjects evolution by natural selection to critical scrutiny, demonstrating that random genetic mutations cannot account for the evolution of all living things from a single cell "jelly pod". Andrews concludes that no mere naturalistic "theory of everything", not even one that reconciled general relativity with quantum mechanics could explain why an ordered universe exists in the first place. If all that sounds a bit highfalutin and technical for those (like me) with a non-scientific background, then fear not. There are countless handy metaphors from a breakfast of cereal, yoghurt and toast, to ferrets and steam engines. |
| Here is an example of Christian apologetics at its best, appealing, well argued and based on the biblical presupposition, "In the beginning God" (Genesis 1:1). While the book was not written simply as a retort to Richard Dawkins and like minded travelers, Andrews ably shows that atheism is ill equipped to explain the origin of the universe and the development of life on earth. The author concludes by telling us the good news that our Maker is also the Redeemer of fallen human beings through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Reading Who Made God? will strengthen you in your faith and better enable you to witness to your non-believing friends. Atheists who happen upon this book should be prepared to have their views challenged and undermined by the compelling force of Professor Andrews' arguments. |
| To check out more book reviews, click here. |
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