Books for Christmas

The most intellectually exciting book I read this past year was Richard Bauckham’s “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony” (Eerdmans). Unfolding his research like a detective story and deploying the most contemporary scholarship on what actually counted as “history” in the ancient world, Professor Bauckham makes a powerful case that the Gospels may in fact put us in touch with those who knew the Lord, and certainly put us in touch with those who knew those who knew the Lord. Give it to any priest or deacon you know who preaches out of the “that didn’t really happen”/historical-critical playbook; but get yourself a copy, too.

Roman dissertations rarely become important books; even less frequently do they become readable books. A happy exception is Ralph Martin’s “Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization” (Eerdmans). Martin, a longtime proponent of Catholic evangelism, decided to look closely during his doctoral studies at what the council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church really taught about God’s universal salvific will, and how that teaching had been interpreted (or more frequently, misinterpreted) as proposing a soggy and evangelically-sterile universalism. What Martin found is of prime importance for the new evangelization, which, like the council, puts the Gospel and its urgent demands at the center of Catholic faith.