• We hold the future
• The Commentary
  Advice about strikes
• Renaming your church?
  Pastor Chris Thomas shares his experience
• King's speech?
  Pat William shares her remarkable story
• Young, Christian and unashamed
  About Sorted, a prodigious youth event
• Contending for Christ in Dubai
• Caymanian Christians
• Polygamy?
  Towards a biblical response
• Christian anniversaries 2012
• Third culture kid
  Youngsters who grow up outside their parents' home culture
• Crossing the culture
  Leonardo's modern mind
• The Music Exchange
• Unapologetic Christianity
  Morality and deity
• Letter from America
  Tebowing!
• Roland Lamb, 1917-2011
  Obituary
• The Third Degree
  Missions' flying start
• Monthly youth leaders column
  Team player
• Notes to growing Christians
  What will 2012 bring?

other articles

• Written on the heart
• Pigeon English - Secular shelf life
• The New Testament for everyone
• The Bible book by book
• The minister's wife - Privileges, pressures and pitfalls
• Josiah's reformation
• The money mentor - Getting to grips with your finances
• Our home is like a little church
• What is the church?
• Fathering leaders, motivating mission - Restoring the role of the apostle in today's church
• The green mirage - Why a low-carbon economy may be further off than we think
• You're on your own - How policy produced Britain's pension crisis
• Who is Jesus?
• Smooth stones from ancient brooks - Selections from the writings of Thomas Brooks
• Wait till you see the butterfly
• The life and times of Charles Henry Mackintosh
• Jesus the hero
• Remember - The things that matter when hope is hard to find
• John Knox and the Reformation
• Divide & ... multiply - A vision and a way to go for self-multiplying churches
• What to look for in a pastor - A guide for pastoral search committees
• The doctrine & practice of holiness
• Freedom and order - History, politics and the English Bible

Glossy and floppy

THE BIBLE BOOK BY BOOK
A journey through its people, places, and themes
By Cris Rogers
Monarch Books. 204 pages. £14.99
ISBN 978 0 857 210 166

This glossy and attractive large format paperback gives a four-page overview of each of the books in the Bible. There are beautiful pictures and maps.

The author, Cris Rogers, was teaching pastor of Soul Survivor, is a minister of the Church of England and a speaker at Spring Harvest. The material in the book is designed to appeal to teens and youth workers and some of it appeared as articles in Youthwork magazine.

The writer is keen to combat the idea that Scripture is ‘a tedious book with wild incomprehensible imagery’, which is a worthy objective. He attempts to do this by examining each book under the headings Title and Style, GPS (which means something like geographical and historical setting), Background, The Detail, and Other Books to Read.

The Other Books to Read is disappointing. Tom Wright looms large, being recommended 15 times in the New Testament, but not a whisper of (say) Dale Ralph Davis in the Old Testament. Nor of anything that ties all the books together — like God’s Big Picture (IVP).

We are left in no doubt about the fascinating Jewish background, and Rabbinic views of, for example the shekinah cloud ‘as YHVH’s foot’ (p.22). We are also told concerning Balaam and his ass, ‘[t]he story is Hebraic folklore … talking animals were common in folklore’ (do I see a raised eyebrow?), but are given no citations by which to examine this assertion.

The Details section is often just that. A smattering of interesting details are picked out, but the individual details can leave us without any view of the overall theological thrust of the book — for example, the section on Exodus makes no mention of the tabernacle, despite Exodus 29.46. Glossy, but lacking in theological robustness.

Philip Wells,
full-time elder of a small church in Bohemian Brighton