I grew up believing (I thought) in the God this book talks about. At this point in my life, I suppose I ought to be thankful to authors like Erickson, since it was deep immersion in this sort of exclusive writing that finally made me think about what I claimed to believe. There are so many real Christian ways to talk about the idea of God, and though this book is well written and argued (one star), the tunnel-vision in the book really mars it.... Since these reviews aren't places for personal stories, let me just say that, while this book does a wonderful job describing the sort of God fundamentalists want to believe in, once you get past Bible-worship in your life you find it all just too incredible to take seriously. A good book if you already believe all this stuff, but not theological at all and certainly not anything thoughtful. Erickson drags out all the unwieldy "omnis" and "supras" for display, but covers no new ground and ends up wallowing in his own presuppositions.

Amazing, of course, in a way that only Millard can be. In the face of honest questions about the divine complicity in suffering and evil, Millard prooftexts, like a good biblical literalist. This reveals little about God, but tells quite a lot about Erickson's approach to theology. He is a thoroughgoing biblicist, though his reliance on the portrayal of God in the Hebrew Bible (excuse me, Old Testament) seems to be blind to the context of the passages he quotes. For example, Millard likes to use the psalms to establish the biblical basis for his investigation of the divine attributes (a non-biblical construct in itself), though he has to know that the psalms were the metaphors of a henotheistic people determined to show their God was the greatest. On the other hand, the Hebrew people seemed to be completely at ease questioning their God (maybe that's why God let 6 million of them die in the ovens, right Millard? I mean, God knew it was coming, didn't he?) The majority of the psalms are laments, not praises, and they do not end with assurance that God knows what will happen. Quite the contrary, the God portrayed in the psalms (and the rest of the Hebrew Bible, by and large) is a God that interacts with and seems to even fail the people God has chosen to be God's own. We could all learn a lesson in how to act in our dealings with God from the wisdom of these people. In the face of a God that seemed inscrutable to them, they asked honest questions and in the process gave the prophets no end of grief.

The Man Upstairs did not come from the biblical texts. The God Erickson likes to write about didn't either. The God of the Bible asks questions to which their may be no answers. Certainly, few are given in the texts. Job never recieved an answer, despite attempts at making the book of Job into a theodicy. The biblical God is genuinely intersted in what Israel has to say, and is often shocked and saddened by it. Erickson seems to want the people of the Hebrew testament to be modern day evengelicals who offer platitudes such as "God knows best" when confronted with the question: how can the foreknowledge of an omnipotent being not be causative? Omnipotence and omiscience are completely non-biblical constructs, having far more to do with Plotinus and Aristotle than Jeremiah and Moses. You have to nuance something, power or knowledge, unless you are Millard, in which case you can chalk it up to "mystery." Mystery is a good thing. Mystery in this book, though, seems to be cipher for "don't ask me questions I cannot answer."

In this book, Erickson offers a defense of God Up There that is masculine, athoritarian, and increasingly impossible for the world to believe in. I won't increase my Amazon reviewer's ranking by panning one of Millard's books--those who read him, love him, those who don't read him have never heard of him or dismiss him. This sort of theology has driven away more people fom the faith than it has drawn, and this is a bad book. More of the same from a fundamentalist writer. For an antidote to this sort of bad scholarship (I wouldn't have turned in a paper like this for love or money) and poisonous theology (I certainly wouldn't preach this stuff), one might read Cobb's How to Be a Thinking Christian or McGill's Suffering: A Test of Theological Method. Then again, given the sorts of schools where Millard is read seriously, one might not.

A mastercrafted volume reviewing a critical issue of our day - the attributes of GOD. With all the recent attempts to re-evaluate and redefine the Biblical concepts of Who God is, this is a refreshing affirmation that what Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and all serious monothesists have held is that God is Almighty, All-knowing, All-present without exception. Many neo-theists ask, How can God know the unknowable, i.e. all future events, words, thoughts of free moral agents who themselves have not yet acted, thought, spoken? Isn't the future open to some degree, unavailable even to God Himself? Psalm 147:5 answers that question: 'Great is our LORD, and mighty in power; His understanding is infinite." Unless the Hebrew and English word for INFINITE has changed over the years, honest exegetes are confronted with a mind beyond finite human logic or comprehension. See Erickson's excellent volume, The Evangelical Left for the implications of a departure from an INFINITE vs. finite understanding of God's foreknowledge. This can only inevitably lead to: God the Father(Almost) Almighty and a rewording of the Apostle's Creed, updated to embrace neotheism. For to limit God's knowledge/wisdom is to place human boundaries on His ability/power. Thankfully the author holds to the Biblical concept of the God of ultimate, not penultimate foreknowledge(Is.46:10, Jn.21:17, Job 38-39)

This compendium of essays by various conservative scholars is a fairly disappointing offering. Despite the promise offered by the title, there is little new in here at all. Most of the authors merely retread old doctrines without adding anything of interest. For example, J. Rodman Williams' chapter, entitled, 'New Dimensions in Charismatic Theology,' simply gives a [rather pedestrian] rendition of the Pentecostal distinctives and enlightens us with no further food for thought. Carl F. Henry and Thomas Schreiner both provide well-researched summaries of the last few decades of New Testament scholarship, but where are the 'new dimensions' promised us? They have little to say that one can't read in any run-of-the-mill textbook.

Having said that, there are a few highlights. Wolfhart Pannenberg is a welcome contributor, coming from a less conservative standpoint, discussing society and culture. Alister McGrath bravely raises a few issues regarding new interpretations of salvation and redemption for different cultural contexts. Clark Pinnock's essay on theological method is one of the few chapters that has something new and challenging to say, and, indeed, one of the few that takes a genuinely self-critical look at evangelical theology. Such contributions come as a breath of fresh air in an otherwise dull volume.