A JOURNEY INTO CALVARY
By Timothy Cross
Evangelical Press. 115 pages. £6.99
ISBN 978 1 783 971 930
EP are not a hip or trendy publisher (no offence, guys). And – as far as my Christian street-cred radar can tell – Timothy Cross is not a hip or trendy author (no offence, Tim).
However, even though this book is not published by Crossway or The Good Book Company and even though it is not written by someone up-to-the-minute like Craig Blomberg or James Hamilton, and even though the cover contains a fairly naff stock image of some modern crucifixion iconog-raphy and has not been designed by a graphic designer who has also done work for Nike and Coca-Cola, the content in the book is straight-down-the-line solid Biblical Theology.
Flavour of the month
Biblical Theology is the most exciting rediscovery of our generation. It’s the flavour of the Christian 21st century. And with good reason…
For those of you not cool enough to know this, Biblical Theology is an approach to Scripture which is different to the ‘surely by now completely lame’ Systematic Theology. Systematic Theologians just look at the Bible and summarise the doctrines found in it like stressed out nerds, whereas Biblical Theologians tell stories! Who doesn’t like stories!? And who doesn’t like the story of the Bible!? Biblical Theology is what Timothy Cross is doing in this book, but a trick is missed because the term ‘Biblical Theology’ is not used in bold Helvetica Neue on the front cover. But nevertheless, it is a good book. The theme is the Cross of Christ, you couldn’t get a more central biblical theme. Timothy is such a fan of the Cross that it’s his actual name.
If you want a simple – very short chapters – book on how the cross of Christ appears throughout the Bible, this is worth picking up. I’m planning to distill it into a 20-minute study for our church Bible study tonight.
