Banner of Truth, Edinburgh, 1983, 316 pgs.

Summary: Thomas Watson (c. 1620 – 1686) was a Puritan, non-conformist, and godly preacher who co-pastored with Stephen  Charnock  (1628–1680). He preached a series of sermons on the Westminster Shorter Catechism which were then published after he is death as A Body of Practical Divinity.   

Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) with the principal of his Pastors’ College, George Rogers, republished the work as the basic systematic theology of his college with an appendix on believer’s baptism. Banner of Truth republished the theology in three volumes: A Body of Divinity, The Ten Commandments, and The Lord’s Prayer. 

A Body of Divinity book is divided into sections following the order of the catechism and extends to question 38, “What benefits do believers receive from Christ at the resurrection?”  Each section begins with a statement of the subject being considered—i.e. “Christ the Mediator of the Covenant—a proof text, biblical explanation, theological development, responses to critiques, and then uses.

Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1985 reprint 1849, 306 pgs.

Summary: Samuel Miller (1769-1850), one of the founding professors of Princeton, was a godly and strident Presbyterian. The book lays out the history and theological development of public and cooperate prayer. Miller is adamantly against Roman Catholic forms of prayer and Protestant liturgies. 

Chapter 2 covers the history of public prayer. It includes the explanation as to why many churches are designed so that worshipers face east. The Septuagint translated the Hebrew word for Branch in Zechariah 6:12 with a word “strictly speaking. . .applied to the rising and appearance of the sun, and by metonymy, it is applied to the East, because the sun rises in the East” (87).

The habit of closing eyes in prayer was known in Origen’s day (c. 185-254): “We learn also from Origen, that ministers in his day were accustomed in public prayer, to officiate with closed eyes. . . ‘Closing,’ says he, ‘the eyes of the body, but lifting up those of the mind.’” (63) [Cf. Contra Celsum, Lib. viii.]

Phillipsburg: P and R Publishing, 2012, pgs. 254

Summary: A friendly critique of Messianic Judaism by Baruch Maoz, former pastor of Grace and Truth Congregation near Tel Aviv, Israel. Strongly recommended by John MacArthur. 

Maoz converted from Judaism to Christianity as a young man and became a pastor. His basic critique of Messianic Judaism is that they are attempting to incorporate rabbinical tradition as a normative means of evangelism and sanctification for Christians of Jewish extraction.  To make his case, Maoz suggests a distinction between being Jewish and Judaism. Judaism is following the rabbinical tradition and Jewishness is a national or cultural identification:

[T]he movement has confused cultural mores with religious duties, insisted upon maintaining the Jewishness of its adherents by degrees of obedience to rabbinic religious dictum, and according the rabbis a legitimacy to which they have no right. Attributing to the rabbis the authority to determine what constitutes Jewishness, Messianics have undermined their own position because the rabbis have determined that faith in Jesus exceeds the boundaries of Jewishness (185). 

Crossway, 2014, 493 pgs. 

Summary: A summation and chapter by chapter assessment of the Catechism of the Catholic Church by Dr. Gregg R. Allison, professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and former Cru missionary to Italy and Notre Dame university in Indiana.  

His basic analysis is founded on the fundamental difference between Roman Catholic and Protestants on the issue of nature-grace interdependence and the Christ-church interconnectedness. He draws this distinction from Leonardo De Chirico’s Evangelical Theological Perspectives on Post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism. 

The nature-grace interdependence allows grace within the Roman system to function as a spiritual substance that can be stored, traded, purchased, infused, and earned. Further, nature, including the human will, is considered receptive to grace without regeneration. The Christ-church interconnectedness allows the papal system to grant the attributes of deity to saints, clergy, and the church (Chapter 2). 

Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing, 1987, 152 pgs.

Summary: A non-academic biography of the writer George MacDonald (1824-1905). MacDonald was a Scottish fiction writer whose works of Christian fantasy influenced C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. He appears as the protagonist’s guide to heaven in Lewis’ The Great Divorce.  

The book traces MacDonald’s major geographic movements from birth to death, theological developments, friends and sources of revenue. There is very little critical engagement with his theological progress, but Saintsbury does explore contemporary influences of friends, artists, and pastors. The most unique effort is to coordinate the geography of his fiction canon with many of the places he lived.

MacDonald grew up Presbyterian, attempted becoming a Congregationalist pastor, was rejected because he taught universalism and the immortality of individual animals (57-58), and subsided into a doctrinally irregular membership in the Church of England (101). He expected that non-believers would die and be purged of their sins to join believers in heaven and placed the personal revelation of conscience above Scripture.

Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015, 272 pgs.

Summary: Evangelical apologist Os Guinness (1941-    ) has written a book laying out a framework of Christian apologetics as a form persuasive speech or rhetoric.

Dr. Guinness believes that it is particularly important that we recover the art of rhetoric in a way that both maintains biblical truth and yet establishes bridges and avenues of communication to those who reject Christianity, are ignorant of it, or are considering the claims of Christ.

The author positions himself within the school of faith seeking understanding (49) and seems to be a Anglicized Calvinist—“Deep down, the unbelieving heart is active, willful, deliberate, . . .” (93).

He defines apologetics as:

It is a form of pre-evangelism that precedes evangelism for those who are not open to God and the gospel. We must never distinguish apologetics and evangelism too neatly. But in broad terms, evangelism is the sharing of the good news, and it addresses the needs and desires of those who know they are in a bad situation. And broadly, apologetics is pre-evangelism in that it addresses those who do not realize they are in a bad situation, and therefore do not see the gospel as the good news that it is (110).