Lutheran Professor Ken Howes Reviews “The Word Set in Stone”

[for book and purchase information, see my book page]

The problem with too many books on Biblical apologetics is that they tend to one or the other two extremes.  Either they are intellectually vacuous, with appeals to church authority: “Believe this because the Church says you must believe it!” or to emotions: “You ask me how I know he lives; he lives within my heart!”, or they are so erudite as to be out of the reach of the average reader.

Dave Armstrong, a Catholic apologist, avoids any of these issues.  The book is scholarly but not abstruse.  He documents every contention carefully.  Where his position is one that has been disputed — when was the great Flood? Which Ur was the Ur where Abram was born? when did Jacob and his sons migrate to Egypt? When was the Exodus? — he presents both historical data and support from respected scholars to his argument.  As to issues of that sort, he presents the argument that he supports well, lucidly and solidly.

An issue not often enough discussed is, “Where was Eden?” He shows from data that is fairly well known but seldom if ever correlated, that wadis that are now largely dry but, in an era when there was more rain in the area, were once rivers whose courses fit the description in Genesis 2.

He repeatedly demolishes the contentions of biblical  “minimalists” who attempt to discredit Scripture by claiming that one or another aspect of the Scriptural narrative is not possible.  At the academic level, the answers to such people have been fairly well known for a couple of decades, but at a popular level, stories in mass-circulation magazines continue to report the “minimalist” contentions as if they were the latest scientific research–which they are not.  This book is an excellent refutation of such contentions.

Christian readers who are not Roman Catholics should not simply chalk this up as a “Catholic book” and not read it.  As a Lutheran theologian, I can say that nothing in the book rests on ecclesiastical authority.  It is all firmly based in Scripture and credible archaeological research.  This book should be on the bookshelf of everyone who is interested in biblical apologetics but has shied away from books on the subject. I would suggest that this book is worthy company to the books of Lutheran John Warwick Montgomery and Anglican C.S. Lewis, and it has my endorsement.

Kenneth Howes, STM, JD
Professor of Theology

[April 17, 2023]

*****

Some really good insights in it–occasionally something I didn’t know, often something I knew but had never fitted it into place. . . . [It] contains a great many things people ought to know and upholds the principle of the Bible’s truthfulness. Much of it is absolutely brilliant, and there’s no question that even as to those matters where you and I don’t agree (I hold with a 15th century Exodus, . . .), you make your argument well.