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Product Review Summary: Petty RANTS! According to Josh McDowell's interesting foreword (pp. 9--11), Norman Geisler got started witnessing "door to door" at age seventeen immediately after he became a Christian. While witnessing in a Detroit rescue mission, he met a drunk who stumped him (pp. 9--10).
McDowell quotes Geisler as follows: "I decided then after being twisted up by Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and now this drunk, I had better get some answers or stop witnessing" (p. 10).
Geisler has subsequently led a rather distinguished group of evangelicals into defending their faith. This volume contains twenty-three essays by those in one way or another influenced by or indebted to Geisler, including the editors, Craig J. Hazen, Ravi Zacharias, and Gary R. Habermas.
Carl Mosser and Paul Owen contributed a chapter on Mormonism (pp. 324--49), which unfortunately indicates that they have learned little from public comments or private conversations on their previous efforts to overcome what they describe as "a challenge" posed by the Church of Jesus Christ "to the health and growth of authentic Christianity" (p. 324).
They assert that "the tradition of Christian orthodoxy has always insisted that devotion to Christ is not sufficient in itself to qualify a religious movement as authentically Christian" (p. 331). What then is both necessary and sufficient? According to Mosser and Owen, what separates Christianity and Mormonism is a "worldview disparity" (p. 326).
They then insist that they will not see the Saints as Christians, since they assume the role of gatekeepers on such issues, unless we come to believe that God--who they insist "transcends the space-time cosmos" (p. 331), following a notion popularized by St. Augustine--created everything out of nothing and so forth.
To get a clear view of what evangelical apologists mean when they talk about a "Christian worldview," or what it means to be an "authentic Christian," To Everyone an Answer should be read in conjunction with the more substantial volume edited by J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig entitled Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), which is not marred by petty rants about the faith of the Saints.
Product Review Summary: Boring, but informative This book has everything a fundamentalist could ever dream of in terms of nailing down what Christianity is all about... but could it be any more boring? I think not. No wonder my friend turned atheist after reading this book. Any religion this bland would be a turn off.
Product Review Summary: A Festschrift for Dr. Geisler - A Great Resource for the Rest of Us This book is a festschrift honoring Dr. Norman Geisler, with twenty chapters representing a variety of subjects written by his colleagues. Chapters include:
1) Knowing Christianity is True by Thomas & Richard Howe
2) Defending the Defense of the Faith by Craig Hazen
3) Tactics by Greg Koukl
4) The Kalam Cosmological Argument by Doug Geivett
5) An Information-Theoretic Design Argument by Bill Dembski
6) A Thomistic Cosmological Argument by David Beck
7) A Moral Argument by Paul Copan
8) The Ontological Argument by William Lane Craig
9) The Christology of Jesus Revisited by Ben Witherington III
10) Miracles by Winfried Corduan
11) The Case for Christ's Resurrection by Gary Habermas
12) The Problem of Evil by Ron Nash
13) Physicalism, Naturalism and the Nature of Human Persons by JP Moreland
14) Facing the Challenge of Postmodernism by Doug Groothuis
15) Legislating Morality by Michael Bauman
16) Darwin, Design & the Public Schools by Frank Beckwith
17) Religious Pluralism and Christian Exclusivism by David Clark
18) Eastern Thought by Ravi Zacharias
19) Mormonism by Carl Mosser & Paul Owen
20) Islam by Abdul Saleeb
Frank Beckwith, Bill Craig and JP Moreland provide introductions for the various sections of the book and Josh McDowell wrote the Forward.
While some of the sections are more difficult than others, I think the average Christian will be able to use this book effectively. It's an awesome resource!
Product Review Summary: Good essays, but nothing too original I was (and remain) somewhat torn about what to rate this book. On the one hand, as far as a quick reference guide to the apologetics landscape, with fairly well-written essays, this is a good book, and deserves perhaps 4 stars. As a festschrift to Norman Geisler on the other hand, it doesn't do its job very well. There are NO tie-ins, notes or reflections by Geisler, and indeed really the only reason one knows its a tribute at all is because it asserts it in a couple places, has a brief introductory note by Josh McDowell, and at the end of the book has a small summary of Geislers publications and educational history. In this instance I would give it two stars. This is hardly "for Norman Geisler" so much as it is a collection of apologetics essays loosley associated with one another only by the fact that they are all apologetics essays, all the authors fall roughly into the conservative-evangelical spectrum of the issues, and that they (obviously) physically occur in a single volume. I am not the biggest Geisler "fan" out there, but the man surely, despite how much you or I agree or disagree with him, surely deserved a more specific (festschrift-ier?) tribute than this.
As far as the actual materials themselves, despite the essays being fairly good introductory essays (and I emphasize introductory, this isn't an in depth text on the various issues) overall there is very little "new" material here. I felt that, along with another reviewer, the essays didn't necessarily reflect their respective author's best works. If you really want to get into a topic, this is not the book to do it with. Go read Dembski's "Intelligent Design" or Craig's "Cosmological Argument," or Habermas' various books on the Resurrection (or N.T. Wrights massive book on the topic, for that matter). And, again as another author pointed out, there were some strange essay choices amongst the participants. William Lane Craig, apparently sick of writing about the Kalaam Argument (my conjecture, of course) for some reason writes on the Ontological argument (for the most part focusing on Alvin PLantinga's modal-logic version) while R. Douglas Geivett writes on Kalaam. Don't get me wrong, both did decent jobs, but its just odd that a man who has spent the majority of his career becoming an expert in the field of cosmological arguments would suddenly alter essay choices.
So, as I said at the beginning, I was somewhat torn with what to rate the book, and decided that a middle of the road grade was about what it deserved. In summary its a good book if you want a quick essay on a particular apologetic topic and are unfamiliar with it, but overall it really offers nothing that hasn't been put forward by the authors in their other publications, and does so in a less detailed manner. Moreover, Geisler fans will undoubtedly be dissapointed that this is his festschrift, when it feels more like they were publishing a collection of apologetic essays anyway, and just tagged "tribute to Norman Geisler" onto it. In the stead of this book, unless you are just getting started in the field of apologetics, I would recommend reading the books by the respective essayists. It might take more time, but you will most likely enjoy it more, and learn WAY more than you would here. If you are simply looking for a quick "reference" guide to apologetics, I would recommend either Geisler's own Encyclopedia of Apologetics, or, more so, the newly published "New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics" (also offered on Amazon), which has multiple well respective contributors, and is far more broad than this book.
Product Review Summary: Decent exposition of many issues relating to Christian apologetics A number of talented evangelical authors have given us a fairly well-done anthology of writings defend the Christian worldview on multiple levels. Many topics are covered including the necessity and purpose of apologetics, arguments for God, arguments for Jesus, arguments against cultural trends that oppose Christianity (like physicalism, scientism, the problem of evil), and other religions.
Though I like the scope of the book, I must deduct a star for a couple reasons. First is that many times I felt like the eassays in here were not representative of the authors best work. Craig has written better arguments for God other places (and why someone else wrote a peice on the Kalam argument when he revived the argument in the late 70s is beyond me), Moreland has given much more thorough and comprehensive essays better. It seems like a few of the essays are only surface deep.
However, that is not to say that there is nothing worthwhile in this book, as there very much is. I recommend this book for someone who knows little to nothing about Christian apologetics, but for those already well versed in it, this will not be much of anything new.
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