Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 141:561 (Jan 1984)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

BSac 141:561 (Jan 84) p. 84

Book Reviews

Isaiah: The Glory of the Messiah. By Alfred Martin and John A. Martin. Chicago: Moody Press, 1983. 193 pp. Paper, $7.95.

Commentaries must be judged on the basis of what they are attempting to accomplish. This work “is not intended to be a verse-by-verse exegetical commentary, but aims at a practical exposition of Isaiah through a literal, premillennial, and dispensational approach” (p. 5). The father/son duo of Alfred and John Martin have scored a bull’s-eye by providing a concise, nontechnical study of the Book of Isaiah.

While this commentary is written for a popular audience, it does represent the fruits of careful scholarship. Major problems such as the unity of the book and the identification of “Immanuel” in 7:14 are examined and evaluated. One special section that must be noted is Appendix 1, “An Inductive Validation of the Central Theme of Isaiah.” In this appendix the authors show how each section of the Book of Isaiah contributes to the overall message of the book. They show how the parts relate to the whole. One could wish that other commentaries would follow this technique.

This commentary is recommended for anyone who wants an expositional survey of Isaiah. Pastors and laypersons alike can benefit from the depth of knowledge and clarity of thought contained in this work.

C. H. Dyer

The Word of God and the Mind of Man. By Ronald H. Nash. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1982. 137 pp. Paper, $6.95.

This volume is part of Zondervan’s Contemporary Evangelical Perspectives series. The book’s subtitle, “The Crisis of Revealed Truth in

BSac 141:561 (Jan 84) p. 85

Contemporary Theology,” describes the author’s concern over the acceptance even among so-called evangelical scholars of the view “that human words are incapable of carrying a cognitive word of God” (p. 9). The author accepts, defends, explains, and traces the historical roots of the classical position on “divine revelation and religious epistemology” (p. 9), the view that affirms “God’s ability to communicate truth to man and…man’s ability to attain knowledge about God” (p. 11).

Nash traces the modern “claim that the word of God and the human mind are incompatible” (p. 14) back to what he calls “Hume’s Gap,” which is “the rejection of the possibility of a rational knowledge of God and objective religious truth” (p. 22) and to “Kant’s Wall,” which is “a radical disjunction between the world as it appears to us (the world modified by the categories of our understanding) and the world as it really is” (p. ...