How to Eat Your Bible by Nate Pickowicz  This book is an excellent resource for both old and young Christians. It is a book that teaches all Christians to eat their Bible. This book is an excellent introduction to the basic principles of hermeneutics. If I were teaching a class on Hermeneutics for undergraduate students, this would be my go-to resource because of its simplistic theological tactic as well as its ideological premises of hermeneutics.  How do you eat the Bible, you may ask? One bite at a time, just like one devours an elephant. The Bible is manna—bread from heaven prepared for us by God. As Christians, we can never finish eating the Bible. When we eat the Bible, God fills our vessel with more. All we are, as Christians, are vessels for Christ.  Pickowicz believes that understanding the Bible begins with reading it. In his book How to Eat Your Bible: A Simple Approach to Learning and Loving the Word of God, he proposes a seven-year Bible reading plan. This is a plan I hope to embark on in the near future as it expells many different points of view for Christians as they read the Bible. This Bible reading plan is a good alternative to Bible-in-a-year reading plans that can keep us from taking our time to enjoy God’s word. Pickowicz says: “instead of plowing through Bible-in-a-year reading plans, students should embrace a long-term approach and focus on delving deeper into individual book studies.” And yet, he adds that “the purpose of the Seven Year Bible Plan is to motivate whole-Bible study over long periods of time. And while it’s certainly possible to follow the order I used, I suggest you create your own plan.” How To Eat Your Bible is not an extreme or idealistic book. At less than 230 pages, this book does a good job of reaching its goal of explaining to Christians how to eat their Bible. The author does a good job, and I have even loaned this book out to a few of my pastor friends.

review of Vos' Reformed Dogmatics Geerhardus Vos was a Dutch theologian who taught in American seminaries for over four decades spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He’s probably best known for his Biblical Theology, but that’s changing now that his work in systematic theology has been translated into English by Richard B. Gaffin Jr. Lexham Press has just published Reformed Dogmatics: A System of Christian Theology (Single Volume Edition). Dogmatics is synonymous with systematic theology. This is a book of systematic theology. And, if you’ve never heard of Vos before, just think of him as one of the Three Ninjas of Dutch Reformed theology along with Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper. They were all on friendly terms with one another. Kuyper tried to get Vos to come to teach at his institution. Bavinck did the same. So if you like one, you’ll probably like the rest of the bunch. This edition of Reformed Dogmatics was originally released in five single volumes as Gaffin translated them. And Lexham has done us a tremendous service by compiling these into a single convenient and affordable volume. At over 1,200 pages, it’s surprisingly slim. But there’s a tradeoff when it comes to ghosting from the print on the other side of the page. The paper isn’t opaque, but you will be keenly aware that there is text behind the piece of paper you’re reading. I like to write notes while reading. In contrast to most other systematic theologies, Vos writes in the form of questions and answers. This dialectic method serves the content well, giving it a precision and clarity that is sometimes missed. Each theological subject is developed from general to specific as Vos anticipates objections and clarifications. Vos misses the opportunity to offer a concise, quotable definition for each doctrine. However the scope of the discussion makes up for this weakness. Vos has given us a careful and systematic presentation of many important doctrines of the Christian faith. These volumes are a valuable resource for anyone interested in Reformed Christian doctrine. Above all, Vos’s Reformed Dogmatics is profoundly biblical. Vos the systematic theologian offers a healthy combination of sober proof-texting and extended theological commentary. All in all, Vos does a wonderful job in this text.

Discovering the New Testament is a new and comprehensive introduction to the New Testament in three volumes. This magnificent and deeply caricatured introduction to the New Testament is powerful, engaging, and intended to reach a broad audience of people. I cannot wait for the 3rd volume to be released. Below I will offer an honest review of the 2nd volume. This volume continues the excellence found in the first volume on the Gospels and Acts. If anything, this volume is even better because it lies in the author’s area of proficiency. He has written a major exegetical commentary on Philippians that is outstanding. This volume covers only the Pauline Epistles. In each chapter, the readers are presented with occasion and context, structure, rhetorical devices, the form of letters, authorship, a discussion on its placement in the Pauline section of writings, and concluded with some questions to consider and application points to review. When I encountered the first volume, I felt it would be a complement to Dr. D.A Carson’s New Testament Introduction. This is a great introductory work to help anyone come to a better understanding of the New Testament. I am happy with the layout, design, and easy reading. If a person wants a deeper understanding of the New Testament, this book is the one to help you. Being a seminary student with not much time, the author makes Paul simple and yet deep. I read this book along with Dr. Thomas Schreiner’s work on Pauline theology and these books complement themselves. Remarkably, even at 1200+ pages for the two volumes, there are sections with seemingly brief. This is the nature of a survey text. For example, at the end of his chapters, he could include a short bibliography of moderate and advanced commentaries. For his chapter on Paul’s mission life, a list of several key works on the subject would point interested readers to more detailed treatments. All in all, this is a great book and does a good job getting its point across. I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review.

B.B. Warfield was a theologically conservative professor at Princeton in the late 19th century. Riddlebarger discusses the life and thought of this remarkable and daunting theologian. This book is a great read for anyone wanting to dig into the life and times of Warfield. The book explores a lot of topics, but the most prominent topic concerns Warfield’s thoughts about the relationship between apologetics and grace. Warfield was an advocate of classic apologetics, particularly in his defense of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. For certain Calvinist critics, classic apologetics presumes that the truth can be ascertained by people on the basis of reason and evidence, which nullifies the importance of transforming grace in enabling people to accept the Gospel. These people think the Reformed understanding of conversion and classic apologetics run in opposing directions. This book is a great read and explains Warfield as an apologetic theologian and heavyweight of his era. The book is a heavy and deep read. This book is certainly informative, and it makes a contribution to scholarly discussions about Warfield. The book was somewhat dispersed. A glossary would have been helpful. Overall, it is a fantastic read and introduction to Warfield. It covers a lot of deep and treacherous ground including his apologetics, systematic theology, and more. If you like homing in on specific figures in Church History, you will very much enjoy this book. If you are a big Warfield fan you will also enjoy this book. I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.

I am reviewing Luke and Matthew in the BHGNT What distinguishes this series from other available resources is the detailed and comprehensive attention paid to the Greek text of the New Testament. Each handbook provides a convenient reference tool that explains the syntax of the biblical text, offers guidance for deciding between emulating semantic analyses, deals with text-critical questions that have a significant bearing on how the text is understood, and addresses questions relating to the Greek text that is frequently overlooked. Although this handbook is part of the secondary literature, it will push the reader to the text of Matthew’s Gospel. Olmstead has produced a masterful and incisive treatment of the Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew. This Handbook provides essential detail to understand Matthew's Gospel in the Greek Language. Luke: A Handbook on the Greek Text is part of an expanding Greek commentary series by Baylor University Press that walks a reader through each word, phrase, and verse of the Greek New Testament. The body of the handbook offers an English translation of each section of the biblical text. Next, there is the full Greek text of a given verse. Then follows a word-by-word (and/or phrase-by-phrase) analysis of the Greek NT text. One advantage to this structure is that, without having to have recourse to any other books, the user of this handbook has the full Greek and English texts of Luke in front of them. There is also useful material at the back of the handbook: a glossary of nearly 50 grammatical terms and concepts, a bibliography, a grammar index (with grammatical concepts listed in English and words listed in Greek), and an author index. If I wanted to trace Luke’s use of the double accusative, for example, I’d see a list of verse references in the grammar index for further study. This book is not for the basic Greek student. If you buy this expecting it to be a commentary, you will be very disappointed. This book will be of more use to intermediate Greek students who are working through the text and are sometimes uncertain how to parse or translate a particular word or phrase. This is a specialized work and does not aim to situate each passage in its literary or historical context. The handbook will not replace a good lexicon. Some words simply have parsing information given, with little to no elaboration on the word’s meaning. To be truly comprehensive in this regard would double the size of the book, so it’s an understandable decision. Just keep BDAG close by as you read. That said, in this handbook, you will get detail even down to the level of Greek accents. I am excited to see more coming from this series.