Read the Bible for Life: Your Guide to Understanding & Living God’s Word

As a Bible scholar at Union University, one of the oldest American universities in the Southern Baptist tradition, Guthrie has tracked the decline in biblical literacy with consternation. With earlier books (The Structure of Hebrews and Biblical Greek Exegesis) best suited for academia, Guthrie has switched gears to produce a reader-friendly, digestible, biblical literacy study program that includes this book as well as a participant’s workbook, study leader’s CD-ROM, and three DVDs for group use. Anyone “touched by the English language or Western culture,” argues Guthrie, should be conversant in biblical literature. Through informal kitchen-table conversations with evangelical scholars, Guthrie guides the reader through a study of historical context, differences in Bible translations, varieties of literary genres, and finally a heartfelt devotional on how to read the Bible in a postmodern world. Though successful in reaching beyond a Southern Baptist audience, Guthrie remains limited by the Protestant concept of “progressive revelation,” which prefers later parts of the Bible over earlier ones, a concept not accepted by Roman Catholics or Orthodox Christians. (Jan.)