Category Archive: Book Summaries

Destiny: The Life and Times of a Self-Made Apostle

||Book Summary|| I am not a fan of Brian Tamaki. As an educated Reformed Evangelical it is unsurprising that I would be at odds with a fundamentalist Pentecostal, as many others are for many different reasons. But I think a man with such a high profile and public loathing deserves the dignity of being understood. Having read Peter Lineham’s “Destiny: The Life and Times of a Self-Made Apostle”, I came away disagreeing no less with Tamaki’s teaching and practice than I did before, but with significantly more respect for the man. For that reason, I commend the book to fans and critics of Brian Tamaki alike. It need not change your own final assessment, but it allows you to think more intelligently about him.

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A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World

||Book Summary|| Children from families who have immigrated are often said to be caught between two cultures. They belong to their parents’ culture but grow up within another. It can be a tricky tension for them to navigate as they often wish to be faithful to their ‘home culture’ as well as fit in with their adopted culture at school and with their friends.

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Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish & Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World.

||Book Summary|| The contest of rights between women and their unborn is one of modern society’s fraught issues for which a Christian ethic that embraces both justice and care is needed. Gorman’s Abortion and the Early Church is an informative and worthwhile read for anyone wishing to survey the sources and contexts for Christianity’s first voices on the subject.

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Reading the Bible with the Dead: what you can learn from the history of exegesis that you can’t learn from exegesis alone

||Book Summary|| Thompson’s book provides nine introductory tours into the history of interpretation of difficult parts of Bible, and gives directions for those who wish to strike out and explore the interpretive landscape of the past for themselves – and for their church.

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Reading the Bible with Giants: How 2000 Years of Biblical Interpretation can Shed New Light on Old Texts.

||Book Summary|| The vast majority of current Bible study books and methods aim to help the reader understand what biblical texts meant for their original audience so that its message can be faithfully applied to modern audiences. This process is essentially a two-way dialogue: there is the text, and there is the reader. David Parris’ Reading the Bible with Giants promotes the value of a third voice. This third dialogue partner is the history of interpretation that stands between us and the original writing of the text.

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