Parchment & Pen Blog

Robert Bowman give a list of the books that have most shaped his life and thought.

Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict (1972). I became an evangelical Christian in 1974-75, and McDowell’s Evidence was one of the first apologetics books I read. Yes, it was a popular, unsophisticated book, but it got me interested in biblical apologetics. Thanks, Josh.

E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson, ed., Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, Library of Christian Classics (1969). Toward the end of my first year of college, another Christian college student challenged me to read Martin Luther’s Bondage of the Will (1525). When I discovered that Luther’s book was a response to Desiderius Erasmus’s book On Free Will (1524), which was itself a critique of Luther’s theology, I decided to read Erasmus first and then Luther in order to get both sides of the debate. At the time, my own theological inclinations were very similar to those of Erasmus. However, I was forced to admit that Luther won the debate, hands down. Reading these two books completed my conversion to an evangelical Protestant faith. The Library of Christian Classics volume, which I read, includes both books and helpful introductions and footnotes.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952) and Miracles: A Preliminary Study (2d ed., 1960). Like most evangelicals, I am unabashedly a fan of Lewis (even though he was not consistently evangelical in his theology). I limit myself to the two Lewis books that have meant the most to me. I still think Lewis’s Miracles is one of the very best books ever published on the subject.

F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (5th ed., 1960) and New Testament History (1969). Bruce’s NTD is a short, clear exposition of the evidence for the textual and historical reliability of the New Testament writings. I read this book in 1975 and its basic positions and arguments still hold up today. You can read the fifth edition of NTD online free; the later sixth edition (1981) is now available with a Foreword by N. T. Wright. NTH is a masterful textbook survey of the New Testament placing the events it records in their historical context. I used NTH as a textbook for an upper-division course on New Testament history that I taught in 1978 for my senior project at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

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