Core Christianity, by Michael Horton, gets solidly three out of five stars from me.  It’s okay — I had no major reason to dislike it — but I wasn’t particularly impressed by it.

Unclear Audience

Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against Horton.  I’ve just finished his Introducing Covenant Theology, and found it very helpful.*  This particular book, though, seems to lack a well-defined audience.  As a result, it isn’t clear about how basic it does or doesn’t need to be and comes across a little “wobbly” in trying to walk this line.

On the one hand, it is written to those who are already established believers.  “…you have a specific worldview, even if you might not be aware of the details or the reasons for your belief, and that worldview arises from a particular story — the story of God as told in the Bible.” (p. 13)  It seems to presume a fairly thorough familiarity with Scripture, as evidenced by this comment: “Remember when Jesus healed the blind man by mixing his spit with the dirt and placing the mud in the man’s eyes?” (p. 72)

Now, Horton does provide the Scripture reference in case you don’t, in fact, remember, but his wording betrays his view of audience as familiar with this account.  I would venture to guess that the majority of churchgoers do not remember this incident, which isn’t a common Sunday School trope.  Those who do are, as a rule, probably pretty familiar with their Bibles in general.  That is exactly what makes this odd.  The focus of the book seems to be on theology basics.

So we have a book written to people who are presumably long-established, well-grounded believers with a strong Scriptural familiarity…about basics.

The entire book demonstrates this same confusion, with some portions more advanced than others, and appeals to examples that don’t appear to represent a consistent segment of the population.  Consequently, although the vast majority of the book is sound, I can’t think of anyone in my life who would find it to be strongly beneficial.

Benefits

Michael Horton knows his theology, and almost all of this book is extremely solid, theologically.  In this day of wishy-washy, touchy-feely man-centered “theology” that is no small statement.  Overall, it reads rather like a very basic systematic theology.  It covers the deity of Christ, the trinity, God’s sovereignty and goodness, the Bible, the Fall, the promise of redemption, the gospel, the Lordship of Christ, end time expectations, and how we’re to live in the meantime.  All my nitpicking aside, there is a lot of sound theology here.

One of the particular strengths of the book is its introduction of theological vocabulary, which many Christians might find unfamiliar even if they know the concepts behind them.  Justification.  Sanctification.  Hypostatic union.  Etc.

Complaints

Apart from the odd focus and organization my complaints are all minor.

There are a couple places where — probably to avoid confusing the reader by presenting multiple perspectives — the author says that “all interpreters believe” (p. 120) or “everyone agrees” (p. 156) on particular interpretations of certain parts of Revelation.  This is simply not true.  Most may; not all do.  It’s important for believers to understand that godly men have not all arrived at the same conclusion regarding these prophetic verses.

I also sensed a bit of haughtiness in the introduction to chapter two, where the author claims that the prayer, “Lord, I thank you for your love and for dying on the cross to save us and for living in our hearts” — or a similar prayer — must necessarily reflect a collapsing of the persons of the trinity.  Perhaps it may, but I don’t believe it is necessarily true that one praying such a prayer is overlooking the distinction between Son and Spirit.

And the appropriateness (or lack thereof) of this illustration, in my opinion, goes back to the target audience.  If the book is intended for relatively experienced students of theology who are at a place of debating nuances of theology, this may be a helpful illustration.  If the book is intended as an introduction to sound theology for those to whom it’s completely new, it isn’t helpful to begin by putting the reader on the defensive.  There are more constructive ways that could have been illustrated.

Finally, I found it odd that the NIV was the translation of choice.  The NIV is known as a “dynamic equivalency” translation.  That means it’s more of a thought-for-thought translation than a word-for-word translation, making it less precise.  That’s a strange choice for a book heavily focused on systematic theology, which would typically rely on a “formal equivalency” translation (essentially word-for-word, ‘though not exactly, because translation doesn’t allow for a literally word-for-word translation to make sense).

Bottom Line

The bottom line here is that there’s a lot of good content in this book, but the writing style and organization make the audience unclear and the book less useful than it could be.  I think this really should have been two books: one very basic book for those new to the faith, and one more intermediate book designed to give grounded believers a strong theological vocabulary.

P.S. This reviewer on Amazon did an excellent job of describing the concerns I had with the book’s organization.

*In case you’re wondering, the first half of Introducing Covenant Theology is heavily academic; the second half is more accessible.