THE BIBLE MADE PLAIN & SIMPLE
By Mark Water
OM Publishing. 127 pages.
ISBN 1 85078 346 2
The Bible Made Plain and Simple is a friendly book with big headings, bullet-point paragraphs, maps, tables and colourful pictures.
It aims at people who want to get to grips with the Bible but might be daunted by thicker volumes. Any book that sets out to open people's minds and hearts to the Bible is one that we would want to cheer, but though this one looks - from a distance - to be nourishing, on a closer inspection, it turns out to be half-baked. It is a book of bite-sized details, all quite interesting in themselves, but for details to have any life, they need to be put to work in a larger scheme of things. The car's parts are laid out for us and labelled, but there is no sense of how they fit back together again to make the car. If you want to breed in me an appetite for driving, you will need to present me with more than a collection of cogs.
