by Bryan Knedgen | Dec 14, 2014 | Book Reviews
The Healing Path by Dan B. Allender, PhD Book Review By Bryan Knedgen Dan B. Allender received his M. Div from Westminster Theological Seminary and a PH.D in counseling from Michigan State University. He is the former president of Seattle School of Theology and Counseling, is currently a professor there, in addition to heading up the Allender Center, which provides counseling courses online. Allender originally worked with sexual abuse victims for years which allowed him to mine the depths of his soul and see both ravages of sin and beauty of redemption. The Healing Path is the fruition of many years of listening, learning, counseling and caring for people. Since walking through the tragedy of losing the hope to have additional children biologically, I thought it was time to reread this book and process it outside of the crazy winds of seminary. The book is broken into four parts; Suffering as a Sacred Journey, Exposing the Intentions of Evil, Allure of Redemption and Embracing Redemptive Relationships. In each part, Allender uses stories from his own life or a patient he has treated to help create a narrative that displays the themes and glues each part together. He weaves insight, exposition and story together throughout the book. His overall frame work is found in the triad of faith, hope, and love. In the first part, Suffering as a Sacred Journey, Allender begins with how we often approach sorrow and pain. He calls us escape artist. We lean into our escape in four different ways: paranoia, fatalism, heroism or optimism. These categories provide us with how we deal with the pain and...
by Bryan Knedgen | Oct 2, 2014 | Book Reviews
Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology) Book Review By Bryan Knedgen One of my professors once said that inerrancy, defined as “Scripture being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit,” is the watershed issue on which evangelicalism stands or falls. In light of that and recent articles popping up in social media, we felt this would be an important book to review. The book opens with the editors, Merrick and Garrett, giving a history of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI), its purpose, its definition of inerrancy and its challenges in modern-day scholarship. Some well-known founding members of the ICBI were R.C. Sproul, Francis Schaeffer, and J.I. Packer. The editors set up each contributor’s discussion on inerrancy into two parts. The first part deals with four categories: God and his relationship to his creatures, the doctrine of inspiration, the nature of Scripture, and the nature of truth. In the second part, each contributor was asked to do a case study on three topics in Scripture. The first is Josh. 6 (the fall of Jericho) and the factuality of Scripture. The second is on canonical (the collection of books in Scripture) coherence in relation to Acts 9:7 and Acts 22:9. The third is on theological coherence with Deut. 20 in relation to Matt. 5. Each author’s section is followed by a critique from the other four contributors. First up to bat is Al Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who penned the essay “When God Speaks: The Classic Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy.” Molher takes a firm, traditional stance on inerrancy. He views the ICBI as a wholly sufficient summary of the correct view of Scripture....
