Book recommendations
Monday, December 27, 2010 at 10:34AM There are two books that I received as Christmas gifts that I want to recommend to you:
The first is The C.S. Lewis Bible. [I never go after Bibles being marketed around a particular personality or demographic, but this one was worth it.] This version, the NRSV, prized for its accuracy, is sprinkled throughout with quotes and snippets from a wide variety of Lewis' writings. The editors must have spent months, if not years, culling through his work and painstakingly pairing various insights from C.S. Lewis' work with their appropriate counterparts throughout Scripture.
For example, pared with a passage from I Timothy, there is a quote from C.S. Lewis' "Letter to Miss Breckenridge, April, 1951" which reads:
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
Or, another nugget, paired with a passage in I Peter:
At present, we are on the outside of the world [the coming fully-restored Kingdom], the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that is will not always be so. -- from The Weight of Glory
The other book I can recommend to you is, Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus - How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith, by Spangler and Tverberg. What if the Jewishness of Jesus could help us who live on the edge of 2011 make sense of some of the things Jesus did and said? For example:
Do you know why Jesus came as a rabbi and not a shepherd or Essene or or Zealot?
Do you know why you smell good, like freshly annointed royalty?
Do you know that Jesus was not the first to use parables as transformational story-telling?
Do you know why Jesus' invitation, "Follow me" wasn't all that surprising for the role he took on in the Jewish culture of the time?
These two books should prove helpful for the hungry apprentice of the master Teacher.