Academic Bible

In clear, simple language, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth helps you accurately understand the different parts of the Bible—their meaning for ancient audiences and their implications for you today—so you can uncover the inexhaustible wealth of God's Word.

Reading the Bible doesn't need to be a difficult journey through strange and bewildering territory. How to Read the Bible Book by Book walks you through the Scriptures like an experienced tour guide, helping you understand each of its 66 books. For each book of the Bible, the authors start with a quick snapshot, then expand the view to help you better understand its message and how it fits into the grand narrative of the Bible. Written by two top evangelical scholars, this survey is designed to get you actually reading the Bible knowledgeably and understanding it accurately.

Abridged from Wayne Grudem's award-winning Systematic Theology, Bible Doctrine provides a more accessible starting point for understanding the essentials of the faith, giving you a firm grasp on seven key topics: the word of God, the doctrine of God, humanity, Christ, the application of redemption, the church, and the future.

Homosexuality is one of the most hotly debated topics in the evangelical church today. In Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church four contributors, two defending a traditional view and two defending an affirming view, address not only biblical and theological questions, but also the pressing pastoral questions for the church.

In Biblical Critical Theory, Christopher Watkin draws a winsome vision for biblical cultural engagement in which faithfulness to Scripture and sensitivity to culture walk hand in hand. If Christians want to speak with a fresh, engaging and constructive voice within our culture, we need to press deeper into the core truths of the Bible.

This book makes a strong biblical case for the loving character of a God who treats His creation in a recognizably good way; a God who does not arbitrarily play favorites or show biased partiality; a God who makes Himself known in a clear and believable way; a God who is not most glorified at the expense of His creation, but at the expense of Himself for the sake of His creation; a God who demonstrates His love by providing the means of salvation for every individual. This book will address questions such as: What about those who never hear about Jesus? How can we say God is good when he ...

In Typology—Understanding the Bible's Promise-Shaped Patterns, author James M. Hamilton Jr. shows that the similarities we find in the Bible are based on genuine historical correspondence and demonstrates how we recognize them in the repetition of words and phrases, the parallels between patterns of events, and key thematic equivalences. When understood in light of God's promises, these historical correspondences spotlight further repetitions that snowball on one another to build escalating significance.

This book offers a brief introduction to the Acts of the Apostles. Acts is a substantial book, sitting right in the middle of the New Testament, looking back to the four Gospels and ahead to the mission of the early church. It provides a framework for our understanding of the letters; but it does more than that. It offers a sophisticated and nuanced view of what it means to think of the gospel of Jesus, Israel's Messiah, going out into the world over which Israel's Messiah claims the status of Lord.

Grasping God's Word has proven itself in classrooms across the country as an invaluable help to students who want to learn how to read, interpret, and apply the Bible for themselves. This book will equip you with a five-step Interpretive Journey that will help you make sense of any passage in the Bible. It will also guide you through all the different genres found in the Bible to help you learn the specifics of how to best approach each one.

What do we do with a God who sanctions violence? Old Testament violence proves one of the most troubling topics in the Bible. Too often, the explanations for the brutality in Scripture fail to adequately illustrate why God would sanction such horrors on humanity. These unanswered questions leave readers frustrated and confused, leading some to even walk away from their faith.

Evolution—or the broader topic of origins—has enormous relevance to how we understand the Christian faith and how we interpret Scripture. Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design presents the current "state of the conversation" about origins among evangelicals representing four key positions.

This audio product enable a person who is taking biblical Hebrew to work on, by ear as well as through the eyes, all vocabulary words that occur in the Old Testament 20 times or more and all the names of people in the Old Testament that occur 100 times or more. Read by Jonathan T. Pennington.

N. T. Wright—widely regarded as the most influential commentator and interpreter of Paul—deftly unpacks this dense and sometimes elusive letter, detailing Paul's arguments and showing how it illuminates the Gospel from the promises to Abraham through the visions of Revelation. Wright takes a deep dive into Romans 8, showing how it illuminates so much else that God reveals in Scripture: God the Father, Christology, and the Spirit; Jesus' Messiahship, cross, resurrection, and ascension; salvation, redemption, and adoption; suffering and glory; holiness and hope.

Rather than trying to resolve discrepancies by bending the Gospel narrative, which risks making them say things they aren't saying, Jesus, Contradicted situates the Gospels within their proper context and helps readers account for differences in the Gospels in a cohesive and historically cogent way.

Christians from a variety of denominations and traditions are in middle of an important conversation about the final destiny of the saved. Scholars such as N. T. Wright and J. Richard Middleton have pushed back against the traditional view of heaven, and now some Christians are pushing back against them for fear that talk about the earthiness of our final hope distracts our attention from Jesus. In the familiar Counterpoints format, Four Views on Heaven brings together a well-rounded discussion and highlights similarities and differences of the current views on heaven.

As a boy, Jesus was a refugee, an outsider, an immigrant in Galilee in which he grew up, and affected by horrific atrocities by the occupying Roman overlords. All this and more is explored in this scholarly but highly accessible investigation into the world of Jesus, ranging from his birth to his coming of age and beyond. Joan Taylor, a world authority on the history and literature of the first century CE, draws both on the latest archaeological findings and on the historical clues to be found within ancient texts of the period.

The purpose of studying the Old Testament is to understand God and his redemptive work more fully. However, this goal is complicated by the fact that it was transmitted through a very different language and culture from our own. A Survey of the Old Testament addresses background information, purpose, message, structure, and major themes of the Old Testament to help readers understand its message and relevance.

Though Christians affirm that the Old Testament bears witness to Christ, how the Old Testament writers did this is a matter of extensive debate. Furthermore, Christian biblical scholars also debate the degree to which contemporary interpreters of the Bible can follow the hermeneutics of the New Testament authors in using the Old Testament to point to the person and work of Jesus Christ. Five Views on Christ in the Old Testament is the first book to bring together in conversation the major views on how the Old Testament points to Christ.

In 1952, C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity eloquently defined the essential tenets of the Christian faith. With the rise of fractured individualism that continues to split the church, this approach is more important now than ever before for biblical hermeneutics. Influential theologian Kevin J. Vanhoozer puts forth a "mere" Christian hermeneutic—essential principles for reading the Bible as Scripture everywhere, at all times, and by all Christians.

Like different artists who render the same subject using unique styles and points of view, the Gospels paint four distinctive portraits of the same Jesus of Nazareth. To Christians worldwide, he is the centerpiece of history, the object of faith, hope, and worship. Even those who do not follow him admit the vast influence of his life. With clarity and insight, biblical scholar Mark Strauss illuminates the four biblical Gospels.