Today we look at the remaining five books that made my list of the best in 2023. Again, they are cited in no particular order.

Charismatic Christianity: Introducing Its Theology through the Gifts of the Spirit, by Helen Collins (Baker Academic).

Collins, an Anglican priest, is vice principal academic and tutor in practical theology at Trinity College, Bristol, U.K. By this time, I have not come to expect that something new could be said about spiritual gifts, but Collins most assuredly has. Her approach is unique in the way she defines the charismata and applies it to daily Christian living and ministry in the local church. Especially helpful is a focus in each chapter not only on the gift itself but the potential dangers that one encounters when there is overemphasis or misapplication.

Collins structures the book around seven words, each of which begins with the letter E. Expectancy is the word she cites to describe the impact of the gift of prophecy. The word Enchantment is used to portray the spiritual gift of miracles. Gifts of healings is described by the word Encounter, while Expression is used for both word of knowledge and word of wisdom.

Her treatment of tongues comes under the heading of Equality and the gift of faith is explained by the word Empowerment. Finally, the gift of encouragement or exhortation is unpacked by appeal to the word Enjoyment.

If this strikes you as odd, trust me when I say that Collins does an excellent job of relating each word to its corresponding spiritual gift. Her insights are instructive and encouraging, and I can honestly say that this is a truly original contribution to charismatic theology. I learned much from her book and I highly recommend it to all.

The Church Who Hears God’s Voice: Equipping everyone to recognise and respond to the Spirit, by Tania Harris (Paternoster).

Tania Harris is described on the back cover of this book as “a pastor, speaker, author, practical theologian and the founder of God Conversations, a global ministry that equips people to recognise and respond to God’s voice.” This book is the result of her Ph.D. studies and is a comprehensive treatment of the practical manner in which we can hear the Spirit speak today. Harris is clearly an egalitarian in terms of her understanding of the role of women in the church, but complementarians should not use this as an excuse not to read her book. Simply put, this is the most comprehensive and helpful treatment of how to discern the voice of the Spirit that I’ve ever read, supplanting Dallas Willard’s book, Hearing God.

Her thesis in the book is quite controversial. She boldly insists that the voice of the Spirit under the New Covenant is intended by God to be as authoritative as it was under the Old Covenant. She takes issue with the view that the gift of prophecy supplies us with a less authoritative and occasionally (often?) errant word from God. She specifically objects to the way Wayne Grudem describes the gift of prophecy as yielding a mixture of divine revelation and human error in its interpretation and application. Harris argues that “the New Testament characters all treated their revelatory experiences as authoritative, irrespective of whether they were apostles or Bible writers (e.g. Philip, Stephen, Barnabas, Agabus, Ananias and James). Once God’s words were received and discerned, they were seen to be reliable enough to act upon in expectation of fulfillment” (48-49). To say it yet again, Harris contends that her “approach sees no phenomenological distinction between biblical and contemporary experiences” (50).

“The beauty of the New Covenant,” says Harris, “is that the Spirit’s voice is not limited to the first-century church. The same Spirit who spoke to the early disciples is now speaking to us” (73). Of course, Harris also insists that any “word” that we believe proceeds from the Spirit must be entirely consistent with the final authority of the written Scriptures.

On the back cover we read of how Harris “set out to unlock the questions Christians have debated for centuries: How does God speak? How do you know it’s God? and What difference does it make to the church?” Not everyone will agree with everything she says (I don’t), but don’t let your differences be an obstacle to taking advantage of an extraordinarily helpful and insightful treatment of this controversial topic.

I do have one abiding concern with Harris’s book. In her efforts to elevate the authority of God’s voice as it is heard in the present day, she at times fails to subordinate it to the voice of the Spirit as found in the inscripturated words of the Bible. For example, she writes: “We have created an artificial distinction between the word of God spoken today and the word of God spoken to the early church by saying that the former is by nature inferior to the latter” (195).

I’m not happy with this. It isn’t that the spoken word of God in the present-day experience of a believer is “inferior” to the written word of God in Scripture. If God is the source of both, neither is better or more important than the other. But God’s “word” as found in Scripture is the final judge by which to adjudicate the origin of a purported spoken word today. To subject the present tense voice of the Spirit to the standard of revealed truth in the Bible is not to say that the former is inferior to the latter. It is simply to say that the final arbiter in determining whether or not the Spirit is now speaking is the revealed word of God as found in the 66 books of the Bible. The latter is not elevated or cited in order to diminish the value of the Spirit speaking today but to enable us to know if we have truly heard the Spirit’s voice and what it means. The simplest way to put it is to say that the present tense voice of the Spirit will never be inconsistent with what the same Spirit has spoken by means of the canonical Scriptures. If what we think we have heard from the Spirit runs counter to what we know the Spirit has already said, it wasn’t the Spirit speaking.

Of course, to her credit Harris agrees with my last statement. There is “no conflict,” she states, “between the word of God in Scripture and the voice of the Spirit in our experience. This is because they both arise from the same origin” (196). Yes, but what I’m insisting on is that the “voice of the Spirit in our experience” should never be the judge of what “the word of God in Scripture” has stated. It is always the latter that stands in judgment over the former.

It must also be said that the Scriptures do not always address the legitimacy of what we think the Spirit has said in our present experience. In such cases, we must rely on other sources of discernment, be it common sense, the wisdom of friends, past experience, the character of God as revealed in Scripture (in other words, is this something that the God of the Bible can be conceived as having said) and other means by which we seek to determine the cogency of what we think God is saying now.

God, Gift, and Guide: Knowing the Holy Spirit, by Gregg R. Allison (B & H Publishing).

Not long ago, Gregg Allison and Andreas Kostenberger collaborated on a scholarly and comprehensive treatment of the person and work of the Holy Spirit. This much shorter treatment of the topic (205 pp.) is a wonderful contribution to the body of Christ. Gregg has taken the learned and extensive material from that earlier work and rewritten it in a form that is readily accessible to any and all Christians.

He addresses issues such as the divinity of the Spirit and how the latter relates to Father and Son in the triune Godhead, the Spirit’s work in salvation, Spirit baptism, what it means to be filled with the Spirit, illumination, and how the Spirit works in our lives to conform us to the image of Christ. Yes, Gregg addresses the issue of spiritual gifts. He is a continuationist and argues for the contemporary validity of all the charismata.

One feature of Gregg’s work that needed to be addressed is whether it is appropriate for Christians to pray to the Holy Spirit. While the biblical pattern is prayer to the Father, in the name of the Son, and through the power of the Spirit, Gregg contends (rightly!) that it is entirely fitting that we pray to the Spirit as well. He is, after all, no less God than the Father and the Son!

Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, by Andrew Wilson (Crossway).

This is a remarkable and challenging book. My good friend, Andrew Wilson, has accomplished something that I would never have thought possible. He has examined a wide array of developments that were largely birthed in 1776 to account for why we now live in a post-Christian world. I can’t begin to imagine the expanse of his reading that was necessary to justify his thesis.

Andrew uses the acronym WEIRDER to explain what happened in 1776 that has so greatly influenced the world we live in today. He writes:

“The big idea of this book is that 1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are. We cannot understand ourselves without it. It was a year that witnessed seven transformations taking place – globalization, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, the American Revolution, the rise of post-Christianity, and the dawn of Romanticism – which have remade the world and profoundly influenced the way we think about God, life, the universe, and everything” (7).

The word WEIRDER is Andrew’s way of describing our world today and how we got here. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. The extent of Andrew’s analysis of each of these developments is mind blowing. But it all has a very practical purpose. His “primary motive in writing this is to help the church thrive in a WEIRDER world” (12).

Fair warning! This is not an easy book to read. One can get quickly lost in the vast array of facts and historical events. That said, Andrew does an admirable job of tying it all together to justify his thesis. I can do no better than to quote the endorsement supplied by my former colleague at Wheaton College, Mark Noll:

“Andrew Wilson’s book is extraordinary in every way: extraordinary in the breadth of research; extraordinary in the multitude of world-significant events that Wilson identifies for 1776; extraordinary in the depth of his insight on what those events meant (and continue to mean); extraordinary in the verve with which he makes his arguments; and, not least, extraordinary in the persuasive Christian framework in which he sets the book. Remaking the World is a triumph of both creative historical analysis and winsome Christian interpretation.”

Set Adrift: Deconstructing What You Believe without Sinking Your Faith, by Sean McDowell and John Marriott (Zondervan).

I suspect that almost everyone knows someone who has entered into a period of spiritual deconstruction. I know several, and it is heartbreaking. All manner of reasons are given for this phenomenon: the church’s biblical stance on homosexuality, so-called same-sex marriage, and transgenderism; the close identification between evangelical churches and the Republican party; the many moral failures of pastors and other leaders; the exclusivism that insists personal faith in Jesus is the only way to be reconciled to the Father (portrayed as elitism and arrogance); and the always present reality of hypocrisy among many who profess to be believers.

For these and other reasons, many young people are simply walking away, or perhaps only drifting, as they evaluate the validity of Christianity. Into this step Sean McDowell and John Marriott with their excellent book, Set Adrift. Early in the book they make an important observation:

“Contrary to the way the word sounds, deconstruction in its contemporary usage is not necessarily destruction. In its common usage the term refers to the process by which something is disassembled, analyzed, and often reassembled in a new way. Its purpose isn’t necessarily to burn everything to the ground. Instead, its goal can be to rebuild a structure that’s sturdier and more sensible than the previous one. Deconstructing Christians aren’t necessarily skeptics; often they’re seekers. They’re not by definition dismissive of what the Bible teaches. On the contrary, for many, their commitment to taking the Bible seriously is what led to their sense of disillusionment with Christianity” (xiii).

What is especially helpful about this book is that they not only evaluate the reasons people give for deconstructing, but they go farther and suggest numerous steps you can take to interact with such folk to help them understand themselves, their motives, and the Bible itself more accurately. In his endorsement of the book, Gavin Ortlund points out that the authors “invite questions and doubts and encourage a relentless search for truth. But they identify the guardrails and guides we need so that deconstruction ultimately results in a more authentic faith, rather than heresy or deconversion.”

If you know someone who is venturing down this dangerous path, this is the book for you. It will help you understand their thought processes and aid you in knowing how to lovingly respond in a way that may well result in their re-construction.