I’ve been MIA for the last month or so. Aside from Christmas, I was set up to preach Mark 14:22–31 on the last Sunday of December at my church. In that text Jesus transforms the Passover into the Last Supper, pointing to his impending death. He also foretells that Peter will deny him and the rest of the disciples will fall away like the stony soil of Mark 4:16–17. I might share my thoughts at some point.
On top of that we were expecting our fifth child to come along at any point (she has arrived!).
Some Good Books…
While I have a long list of books I’m working through now, which you can find in my upcoming section of my review list. A few of these are Jim Hamilton’s Typology, Jason Staples’ slightly older The Idea of Israel, Christopher Ansberry’s new ZECOT commentary on Proverbs, and Michelle Knight’s book The Prophet’s Anthem on how Judges 5 reverberates throughout Judges. The picture at the top of the page isn’t all of the books either. I have a few on Mark’s Gospel coming in from Wipf & Stock.
…and a Bad One
I also wanted to let you know that I’m reviewing a book by Magnar Kartveit called Gud, Pest og Plage published by Verbum Forlag. In English that would be “God, Pestilence and Plague.” It’s a Norwegian book by a Norwegian OT scholar. I will be tackling this one pretty heavily, but since this book is written in Norwegian all of my posts about it will be in Norwegian. I will separate my review into at least six different posts at first tackling one chapter at a time and ending my review with a final post on the last few chapters. After that, I will collate all of those into an English post in case anyone wants to read Kartveit’s opinions on biblical texts and my arguments against him.
I will try to post them without everyone receiving an email, because I assume most of you who subscribe to my blog can’t read Norwegian (I’m willing to be wrong), and I don’t want to bug you with eight emails about a book you can’t read and will never (and should never) buy.
Why?
The reason why I am spending so much time on Kartveit’s book is because there are relatively few good theological books written in Norwegian (compared what we have in the US), and even fewer written for normal people. Kartveit holds explicitly to a number of liberal positions (the flood didn’t happen, Jericho wasn’t conquered, the Bible contradicts itself, God’s blind wrath, and later authors tried to fix earlier mistakes), and implicitly to others (the Documentary Hypothesis, possibly process theology).
Because Norway is such a small country, Kartveit’s book can have a much greater influence. I’m hoping that my review can dissuade some from buying his book and others from believing what he wrote. Hid book, while aimed at helping people understand the Bible difficult texts, will only work to erode their trust in the Bible by telling them not to read or follow certain parts of the Bible. A much better way is to teach people that the Bible is trustworthy, how the Bible is put together, and how to read it.
Anyways, that’s just a heads up. Hopefully you won’t get any emails about all of the Norwegian posts, but if they do I apologize before hand. I hope they are neither a pest nor a plague to you. I will try to spread some other reviews throughout as well to minimize the cavity of English reviews.
spoiledmilks 