Other Books & Publications

This more miscellaneous collection of resources should not be seen to diminish the importance of those featured here, especially the exciting Old Testament and God series of books by Craig Bartholomew, the first of which is now available.

Here you can also find links to our Preaching the Bible for all its Worth document, and to our currently dormant newsletter, Sibylline Leaves.

Old Testament Origins and the Question of God

Craig Bartholomew’s The Old Testament and God is the first volume in his ambitious four-volume project, which seeks to explore the question of God and what happens to Old Testament studies if we take God and his action in the world seriously. Toward this end, he proposes a post-critical paradigm shift that recenters study around God. The intent is to do for Old Testament studies what N. T. Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series has done for New Testament studies.

Old Testament Origins and the Question of God Vol. 1: The Old Testament and God

Bartholomew proposes a much-needed holistic, narrative approach, showing how the Old Testament functions as Christian Scripture. In so doing, he integrates historical, literary, and theological methods as well as a critical realist framework. Following a rigorous analysis of how we should read the Old Testament, he goes on to examine and explain the various tools available to the interpreter. He then applies worldview analysis to both Israel and the surrounding nations of the ancient Near East. The volume concludes with a fresh exegetical exploration of YHWH, the living and active God of the Old Testament.

Craig Bartholomew brings his wide knowledge and insight to the question of God in the Old Testament. His training and sensibilities as both an Old Testament scholar and a philosopher are on full display here. This book, the first of four, is a big book in the best sense of the term. He considers the most important questions and utilizes the best approaches to our study of the Old Testament. In my opinion, Bartholomew sets the study of God in the Old Testament on its proper foundation, which makes this essential reading for all scholars and serious students alike.

Within the sometimes bewildering world of Old Testament scholarship, with its modern and postmodern presuppositions, Craig Bartholomew charts a new way forward, one that takes fully seriously the historical, literary and theological dimensions of the Old Testament, and above all takes the God of the Old Testament fully seriously as one who acts and reveals. For anyone who finds the Old Testament irrepressibly fascinating, this will be an exciting, as well as learned and coherently argued book.

Many of us were apprenticed into the guild of Old Testament scholarship under the paradigm of alleged academic “objectivity” in which “God" could not be the subject of a sentence that presumed his living reality and power, other than as a fictive character in the narrative. Craig Bartholomew challenges that paradigm in a way that enables an encounter with the living scriptures to be an authentic encounter with the voice of the living God.

Only Craig Bartholomew could have written this book! The range of interlocutors is vast; Old Testament scholars mingle with philosophers, literary theorists, and historians of the ancient Near East, and Bartholomew’s immensely creative and constructive mind orchestrates a powerful symphony by means of a running commentary upon the scholarship. At the heart of the matter is the possibility—indeed the firm conviction—that the living God has revealed himself to Israel. A joy to read, this book should find a new and multifaceted conversation grounded in the question of God.

This opus breathes intelligence, learning, and creativity as it frames what it means—and could mean—to study the Old Testament. True to form, Bartholomew assesses the academy critically, with breadth of vision and philosophical rigor. He methodically advances a theological vision of the Old Testament that takes as fundamental its kerygmatic force. Faith and theology inform Bartholomew’s work as resources rather than obstacles, while rightly he pleads for genuine pluralism in the academy. Although it will be possible to interrogate Bartholomew’s argument, it will be impossible to ignore it. This volume exhibits the characteristics of a classic.

In this far-reaching and ambitious work, Bartholomew compellingly contends for an audacious notion: the Old Testament needs God and, above all else, enacts deific truth. This claim stands in sharp contrast with modernity reinforced by its tacit atheism and sardonic rejection of the supernatural. Consequently, the most central aspect of the Scriptures is absent in most post-Enlightenment biblical criticism. The Old Testament and God models an alternative, post-critical approach that is both overtly theistic and particularly Christian.

Preaching the Bible for all its Worth

Good preaching engages in what John Stott called “double listening”: one ear to Scripture, one ear to contemporary life and culture, with the sermon building a bridge between the two. This series, which will eventually cover the whole Bible, aims to provide preachers – and thinking non-preachers – with some of the best resources to help them engage the Bible and culture in a meaningful way.

Sibylline Leaves

With its name drawn from the writings of the major but far too little-known Christian philosopher J. G. Hamann, Sibylline Leaves is KLC’s newsletter, currently dormant. Below you can find an archive of past editions of Sibylline Leaves.