If the mark of a good book is that it causes you to worship your Saviour, then The Jesus Gospel is truly an excellent book.

The subtitle ‘Recovering the Lost Message’, demonstrates the book’s purpose – it’s a response to Steve Chalke’s The Lost Message of Jesus, which cause something of a furore in 2003. This was not simply because Chalke was denying the atoning work of Christ on the cross – countless numbers have done that over the generations – but that Chalke was denying penal substitution whilst claiming to remain evangelical.

Thankfully, Liam Goligher does not defend the truth of scripture by poring over Chalke’s work point by point. Instead (to paraphrase Spurgeon), he lets the lion out of the cage. The Jesus Gospel is no mere defence against liberal theology, it’s a glorious affirmation of the truths of the whole Bible in relation to the Cross.
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Reading is good for you… and I don’t just mean reading blogs! But if you’re concerned about the spiritual well-being of other Christians, it’s important for you not just to read books, but to encourage other Christians to do the same. And one of the best ways of doing this is ensuring you have a bookstall at your church.

I believe every church should have a well-stocked bookstall for at least two reasons. The first is that God uses good books to change lives. Thousands of Christians can testify to that. Perhaps you’re one of them. The second reason is that the church is full of busy people. Too busy, sometimes, to drive into town and spend thirty minutes browsing through the hundreds of books in their local Christian bookshop, trying to find a book they hope will be helpful. Too busy for that – but no so busy they can’t spend five minutes after the morning service glancing through the thirty or so carefully selected books on their church bookstall.

Do you want to run a church bookstall? Here’s how you can do it.
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In an earlier post, I looked at the opening chapter of Sam Waldon’s To Be Continued?. Waldron is arguing for the cessation of the miraculous gifts with what he calls the ‘cascade argument’. He first seeks to demonstrate that the gift of apostleship has ceased, and then cascades that argument down to the the gift of prophecy, tongue-speaking, and finally miracle-working.

In my earlier post I argued that this line of reasoning was not valid for two key reasons. First, Waldon does not demonstrate that apostleship is a spiritual gift. Second, even if we accept that apostleship is a spiritual gift that has ceased, that would not of itself preclude other spiritual gifts continuing. After all, Waldron only believes that miraculous gifts have ceased, rather than all spiritual gifts. A continuationist could use just the same logic as Waldron to argue that all the foundational gifts have ceased, rather than all the miraculous ones.

So then, to the next chapters of Waldron’s book:
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I’ve finally taken delivery of Sam Waldon’s To Be Continued?. My first thoughts about the book (in this order) were:

• It’s expensive! £9.95 for 116 pages
• It’s well written: To be fair, Waldron has condensed a lot into the book. It’s very well structured, and exceptionally clear. A few diagrams help, but even without them, the text is very readable and easily understood.

Rather than post one long response, I’ll post some initial thoughts now, and probably have two more posts later. In this post I want to concentrate solely on the Introduction to the book where Waldron states his case in outline, before going on to give us the detail.

Waldron’s basic premise is that 1) The gift of apostleship was foundational and has ceased, 2) NT Prophecy is like OT prophecy, and therefore that has ceased, 3) Tongue-speaking is equivalent to prophecy, so that has ceased, 4) Miracle-working was to validate apostles and prophets, so that has ceased too.
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If you’re anything like me, you’ll have shelves and shelves of books (all of them read, of course ). I must confess, I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to books, so all of mine are fully catalogued, and classified according to the Dewey decimal system.

If you’re not quite so organised, you may be interested in LibraryThing. Just feed it a list of ISBN numbers, and it will generate your own personal catalogue, scouring the web to find book titles, publishers, authors, even book cover images to match up to the ISBN. It’s free to add up to 200 books, so you can easily give it a whirl. There’s nice widgets (I use one to power the ‘currently reading’ bar on the right), but the very best feature has to be the ‘similar libraries’ section.

I know (for example) that a pastor in Illinois called Steve McCoy has 153 books that I also own. I even know what they are! I can see that across the site, there are 54 of us who own Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, way ahead of Chafer with 4, Reymond (17), Dabney (13), but all trailing behind Grudem (83).
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