April 29 1996

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is proud to announce the results of the 1996 CT Book Awards. More than 200 books published in 1995 were nominated for this year's awards. Ballots were sent to a large and diverse panel of scholars, pastors, writers, and other church leaders, who chose the titles for our "Top 25" list. (Because of ties, the list includes a total of 27 titles.) Thirteen publishers are represented on the list, headed by InterVarsity, with nine titles, and Eerdmans, with six--including CT's Book of the Year, "Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin," by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. The titles listed here are but a few of a much larger number that merit recognition.

Noteworthy trends in this year's list? Three come quickly to mind. First, the very strong showing of "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," edited by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus, constitutes a significant endorsement of the aims of ECT by leading evangelical thinkers. Coverage of the evangelical response to that historic statement, issued in March 1994, has tended to focus on critics of ECT. Perhaps this emphasis has been misleading.

Second, books such as "The Jesus Quest," by Ben Witherington III, "The Jesus I Never Knew," by Philip Yancey, "Jesus Under Fire," edited by Michael Wilkins and J. P. Moreland, "Cynic Sage or Son of God?," by Gregory Boyd, and "The Real Jesus," by Luke Timothy Johnson (who is profiled in this issue), reveal a robust orthodoxy well equipped to meet the challenge of the Jesus Seminar. At the same time, these books are reminders of the perennial challenge that Jesus poses to us--above all, to our self-satisfied complacency.

Third, a number of this year's books concur in identifying the present moment as "postmodern." Some ...