The Books I Read in 2020

Here is the list of the books I read in 2020. My top ten at the bottom, including my favorite of the year.

 

Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency)
 
Ben Agger (Critical Social Theories)
 
Dale Allison (Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet)
 
Gustav Aulen (Christus Victor)
 
C. K. Barrett (From First Adam to Last)
 
Matthew W. Bates (Gospel Allegiance)
 
Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses; God Crucified; The Bible in the Contemporary World)
 
Hendrik Berkhof (Christ and the Powers)
 
Julius A. Bewer (The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Volume One: Amos, Hosea and Micah)
 
Rachel Billups (Be Bold)
 
Joseph Blenkinsopp (Isaiah 40-55 [ABC])
 
Robert Browning (The Ring and the Book)
 
F. F. Bruce (1 and 2 Corinthians)
 
G.B. Caird (Principalities and Powers)
 
Andrew Cartmel, et al (Evening's Empire)
 
Joel Comiskey (How to Be a Great Cell Group Coach; How to Be a Great Small Group Meeting)
 
James H. Cone (The Cross and the Lynching Tree)
 
Eleanor Davis (How to be Happy)
 
Kate DiCamillo (The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane)
 
Terrance Dicks (The Pyramids of Mars; The Planet of Spiders; Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius)
 
Russell H. Dilday (Columns: Glimpses of a Seminary Under Assault)
 
Walt Disney (The Story of Mary Poppins)
 
James Draper (Authority: The Critical Issue for Southern Baptists)
 
Walther Eichrodt (Man in the Old Testament)
 
Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan Vol. 1, Back on the Street)
 
Millard Erickson (Who’s Tampering with the Trinity?)
 
Tony Evans (Oneness Embraced)
 
Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing is Monsters)
 
David Fisher (Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit)
 
Jean De Fraine (Adam and the Family of Man; The Bible and the Origin of Man)
 
Greg Gilbert (What Is the Gospel?)
 
Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie (The Wicked + the Divine: The Faust Act)
 
René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (Asterix the Gaul)
 
Isabel Greenberg (The Encyclopedia of Early Earth)
 
 
F.A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)
 
Michael S. Heiser (Angels)
 
Hergé (Tintin in America; Cigars of the Pharaoh; The Blue Lotus; The Broken Ear; The Black Island; King Ottokar’s Sceptre; The Crab with the Golden Claws; The Shooting Star; The Secret of the Unicorn; Red Rackham’s Treasure; The Seven Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun; Land of Black Gold; Destination Moon; The Calculus Affair; The Red Sea Sharks; Tintin in Tibet; The Castafiore Emerald; Flight 714 to Sydney; Tintin and the Picaros)
 
Daniel Hill (White Awake)
 
Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft)
 
Graham Joseph Hill (Holding Up Half the Sky)
 
Tom Holland (Dominion)
 
Morna D. Hooker (From Adam to Christ)
 
Bengt Holmberg (Paul and Power)
 
Reggie Joiner and Tom Shefchunas (Lead Small)
 
Aubrey R. Johnson (The Vitality of the Individual in the Thought of Ancient Israel; The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God)
 
Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon)
 
William Johnston (Gilligan’s Island)
 
Reggie Joiner (Lead Small)
 
James Joyce (Finnegans Wake)
 
Norman Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth)
 
George W. Knight III (The Role Relation of Man and Woman and the Teaching/Ruling Functions in the Church)
 
Karoline Leach (In the Shadow of the Dreamchild)
 
Jeremy Lloyd (The Are You Being Served Stories)
 
Eric Mason (Woke Church)
 
Thomas H. McAlpine (Facing the Powers)
 
Leon McBeth (Strange New Religions)
 
Gillen McKelvie and Wilson Cowles (The Wicked and the Divine: The Faust Act)
 
Richard McGuire (Here)
 
Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers (Haggai, Zechariah 1-8)
 
Rachel Green Miller (Beyond Authority and Submission)
 
Dale Moody (Spirit of the Living God; The Hope of Glory; The Word of Truth)
 
Alan Moore and Brian Bolland (Batman: The Killing Joke)
 
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen)
 
Alan Moore, et al. (Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One; The League of Extraordinary Gentleman)
 
Leon Morris (1 and 2 Thessalonians)
 
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (All Star Superman)
 
Stephen Charles Mott (Biblical Ethics and Social Change)
 
C.F.D. Moule (The Origins of Christology)
 
John P. Newport (Demons, Demons, Demons)
 
Jonathan Pennington (Reading the Gospels Wisely)
 
John M. Perkins (One Blood)
 
Norman Perrin (Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus)
 
Peyo (The Purple Smurfs)
 
Nigel Planer and Terence Blacker (Neil’s Book of the Dead)
 
Thom S. Rainer (Breakout Churches)
 
H. Wheeler Robinson (Corporate Personality in Ancient Israel)
 
John A.T. Robinson (The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology)
 
J.W. Rogerson (Anthropology and the Old Testament)
 
Rosemary Ruether (Liberation Theology)
 
Gordon Rupp (Principalities and Powers)
 
Fred Sanders and Scott Swain, eds. (Retrieving Eternal Generation)
 
Richard Scarry (All Day Long)
 
Heinrich Schlier (Principalities and Powers in the New Testament)
 
Charles M. Schulz (The Complete Peanuts: 1963 to 1964)
 
Bill Search (The Essential Guide for Small Groups)
 
Mike Slaughter (Renegade Gospel; The Passionate Church)
 
Donald J. Sobol (Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective)
 
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (August 1914)
 
Evelyn and Frank Stagg (Woman in the World of Jesus)
 
Frank Stagg (The Holy Spirit Today)
 
Frank Stagg, et al (Glossolalia)
 
Ed Stetzer and Andrew McDonald (Christians at Our Best)
 
Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; The Real Inspector Hound; After Magritte; Jumpers; Dirty Linen and New Foundland; Hapgood; Arcadia)
 
William Stringfellow (Free in Obedience; An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land)
 
Albert H. van den Heuvel (These Rebellious Powers)
 
Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth)
 
Amos Wilder (Otherworldliness and the New Testament)
 
Walter Wink (Unmasking the Powers)

B. Wiseman (Morris Goes to School)

Ben Witherington III (Women in the Earliest Churches)

Paul Woodruff (Thucydides on Justice, Power, and Human Nature)

N.T. Wright (Lent for Everyone: Mark; History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology; The Day the Revolution Began; The Challenge of Jesus; God and the Pandemic; Colossians and Philemon [TNTC]; Interpreting Jesus)

 

 

 

Top Ten

Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses)
 
Russell H. Dilday (Columns: Glimpses of a Seminary Under Assault)
 
Jean De Fraine (Adam and the Family of Man)
 
Norman Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth)

Karoline Leach (In the Shadow of the Dreamchild)
 
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (All Star Superman)
 
Stephen Charles Mott (Biblical Ethics and Social Change)
 
John A.T. Robinson (The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology)
 
Heinrich Schlier (Principalities and Powers in the New Testament)
 
William Stringfellow (Free in Obedience)

 

 

My favorite book of fiction was The Phantom Tollbooth. My favorite book of nonfiction, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology.

Brief Summaries of N.T. Wright's Views on Justification and the Atonement.

On another platform, I was asked to briefly explain the difference between N.T. Wright's views of justification and the atonement and that of the classical Reformation attendance.

Justification

In the classic Reformation conception, justification by faith was the idea that Jesus on the cross took the punishment from God that was intended for sinful humanity. Jesus was the perfect sacrifice acceptable to God because he followed the Law, never sinning. In this crucifixion event, Jesus took our sin, and we took his righteousness. Therefore, because God punished Jesus instead of us and because we have Jesus’ earned righteousness, God finds us innocent (or righteous) in the divine court. We appropriate that righteousness by faith. Making someone righteous (dikaios) is called justifying (dikaioo). Justification (dikaiosis) is then the term for how God saves someone by grace thru faith in the penal substitutionary atoning death of Jesus. Justification is deemed the gospel.

Wright and others believe the classic Reformation conception of justification by faith is incorrect. For them, justification by faith isn’t about how someone is saved, but more the declaration that someone is saved. More to the point, justification by faith is a present recognition of a future outcome. At some point in the future, God will settle all accounts, bring the world to right, vindicating his people and punishing those who are not. His people would be the family of Abraham, the Israelite people, Israel as his somewhat-metaphorical son. This vindication is called justification and will take the form of bodily resurrection. God’s people will not be made righteous but will be declared righteous. They will be justified, declared the people of God, his “sons”, the people whose sins have been dealt with, the ones who have been resurrected. The question in Jesus’ day was how does one know who is a true child of Abraham, a member of the people of God? Not every Jew measured up to what God expected, either due to idolatry or cultural compromise with those who were not the people of God: the gentiles. Different Jewish groups had different ideas. “Works of the law” were those more ritualistic cultural aspects of the Law that separated Jews from Gentiles (circumcision, cleanliness, kosher foods, etc.) but also identified a real son of Abraham. Jews performed these works not to earn salvation, but to show fidelity to God, marking them out as the people of God. “Works” identified in the present who would be justified (“declared righteous”, vindicated, recognized as a member of God’s people, resurrected) on the last day. Gentiles who wanted to become a member of God’s people and vindicated on the last day had to adopt these cultural “works of the law”, identifying themselves as a true Jew. Jesus was put on trial for falsely claiming to be the messiah, “the son of God”, the representative of Israel, God’s people. He was found guilty and put to death. When God resurrected Jesus from the dead, he was reversing the judgement of the “lower” court, declaring Jesus to truly be the messiah, the “son of God”. Instead of God’s people being vindicated, declared righteous, resurrected, and declared God’s sons at the end of history, all that that had been done to Israel’s representative in the middle of history. Now it’s not fidelity to the Law that identifies a person as “righteous” but fidelity to the messiah, Israel’s representative who has essentially brought much of the future (and the final verdict) into the present. What marks out someone as a “true Jew” is not cultural “works” but faith in Jesus, a faithfulness like Jesus’. Therefore, Gentiles do not have to become “Jews” by adopting “works of the Law”; they only have to have faith in Jesus. Faith in Jesus marks out those who will be justified/vindicated/resurrected on the last day.

So instead of being about an exchange of righteousness, making someone righteous, earning salvation by following the Law, being saved, and all this being the gospel, justification for Wright et al is identifying in the present who will be identified as the people of God in the future.

 

Atonement

Wright’s understanding of the atonement is a bit more confusing in ways. The traditional Reformation view is that God’s since of justice demanded that human be punished for their sins. Instead, out of love and grace, God sent Jesus to take the punishment instead of humans. With Jesus punished, God’s since of justice is satisfied, so humans escape punishment (provided they accept Christ in faith). Again, Wright’s view is complex. It often seems that he is using traditional atonement language but meaning something else by it. Wright doesn’t reject penal substitution but narrows it. The punishment for which Jesus suffered was the wrath due to the sin that accumulated in Israel, resulting in the exile. Even with the physical return from exile, sin had yet to be fully forgiven. In fact, the Law given by God had the mysterious purpose of increasing sin and drawing it towards Israel. That sin then attacked Jesus with full force and at the same time be punished in his flesh. This was something that needed to be done, but God took it upon himself as Jesus out of love for the world. So, Jesus experienced the curse and wrath that accompanies the build up of sin instead of humans. Jesus experienced the ultimate exile, both for Israel, and for the world. How what happened to Christ affected Israel and then affected the world is really complex, being based in Hebrew anthropology. But what happened to Christ had a cosmic effect. In another level, Jesus’ death on the cross was a enacted parable of Rome’s eventual, permanent destruction of Israel as the wrath of God. Instead of the people of God, Jesus experienced Rome’s destruction for his people, while also showing them what Israel could expect if they did not repent. Then there is Wright’s adherence to the Christus Victor view of the atonement, that Christ’s death on the cross defeated the dark powers of the world, which (as mentioned above) was being drawn onto Israel and onto its Messiah. So Wright holds to a few different atonement theories, seeing them all connected. He also reconceptualizes the traditional Reformed view of penal substitution.