Sparks, Kenton L. God’s Words in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academy, 2008.

There are some books that have the ability to drastically shape your worldview. This is one of them, at least for me. I found the book to be quite a challenging read and made me think about things I had never thought of before.

This book sort of reminded me of my experience reading Peter Enns’ book “Inspiration and Incarnation.” Whereas Enns focused primarily on the Old Testament, the scope of this book is a lot broader, and I felt that the author wrote as much as he wanted to get his points across without worrying about making it easier for a general audience. To me, that’s one of the strengths of the book. I liked Enns’ book quite a bit and, after all the controversy surrounding it, I have come to the conclusion that one of Enns’ book’s primary weaknesses is that it should have probably been double its size. Although Enns wrote the book for lay people at a popular level, it is quite apparent that many evangelicals are not ready for this type of book (given all the objections against it). You not only have to be nuanced when writing about the nature of Scripture, you also need to spend the time building your case from the ground up. You need to interact with other people and attempt to answer more questions than you ask even if they are tentative or preliminary. And I think Sparks’ book does a better job in that sense.
Read more »

Allert, Craig D. A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academy, 2007.

This book is about the formation of the New Testament canon. The author does a great job describing the Evangelical movement to set the context of the debates about the authority, inspiration, canonicity and inerrancy of the bible. He basically talks about how the bible came to be formed and looks at the merits of three different theories: 1) the NT was a spontaneous occurrence, 2) the NT was formed in the second century and 3) the NT was formed in the fourth century (p. 41). The differences in these theories can be attributed to the way historical evidence is interpreted (p. 87). The rest of the book analyzes these three theories and concludes that, while we can talk about Scriptures being recognized as authoritative in the first and second centuries, it is anachronistic to talk about a canon in this period. Even in the fourth century, despite the list of Athanasius in the West and Carthage in the East, there was still a lot of fluidity. Read more »