7 Books I Want to Read for 2020… (But Not Sure I’ll Get To… But Maybe You Will?)

Here is my New Years Resolution: To try to read some books that I have had on my list for awhile, but I never seem able to get to. If you get to read any of these before I do, please let me know. Let’s see if I actually get to read these before the end of the year….

• The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, by Michael Heiser. Dr. Heiser is the voice behind the Naked Bible Podcast, and currently my favorite Old Testament scholar. Heiser is all about building a Christian apologetic framework for living in a post-Christian age. According to others, this is Dr. Heiser’s best book, describing the unseen supernatural realm, which Heiser argues is the key to understanding some of the most difficult passages in the Bible.
• Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?, by Michael Licona. Critics of the Bible often claims that there are errors in the Bible. Unfortunately, some of the supposed defenses of the Bible can be pretty weak, and not very convincing. Mike Licona’s book reportedly tries to take a more responsible approach the reliability of the Gospels. Mike is also friends with my pastor’s father (Michael Simone), who is a recently retired pastor himself, in Virginia Beach.
• Tactics, 10th Anniversary Edition: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions, by Greg Koukl. An updated addition to the classic introduction to Christian apologetics, giving practical tips on how to have good conversations with non-believers. Apologist David Wood ranks this book as the number one Christian apologetics book every Christian should read.
• Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, edited by Elijah Hixson and Peter J. Hurry. Yes, it sounds geeky, but highly recommended by top evangelical Bible scholar, Daniel Wallace, for understanding how we got the New Testament that we have in our Bibles, and how sometimes apologists make mistakes.
• All But Invisible, by Nate Collins. The PhD thesis made into a book, written by the founder of Revoice, a ministry dedicated to maintaining orthodox, Scriptural convictions about God’s good purpose for marriage and sexuality, while reaching out more effectively and compassionately to the LGBTQ community.
• Confronting Old Testament Controversies, by Tremper Longman. Professor Longman is one of the great veterans of evangelical Old Testament scholarship, and contributor to several popular Bible translations, addressing thorny apologetic issues, such as the age of the earth, evolution, and genocide in ancient Israel.

And now, for the number one book, I really want to try to read in 2020:

• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland. Though he himself is not a Christian, by his own admission, British historian Tom Holland promises to make the case that it is the Christian faith that remade the world, and that Western society is on the verge of forgetting that truth, which threatens the West’s very existence.