How Should Christians Live? study review

 

How Should a Christian Live? part of the The Word of Promise next generation series is a study and devotional aimed at tweens and younger teens. This study also comes with a CD with Sean Astin introducing the book of the Bible and then some young star reading the Scripture from the Reader Friendly edition (formally the International Children’s Bible).

This study on the whole does seem to be good for tweens in a small group setting. I am not sure this would be fun and exciting for them to do on their own. The CD has only one negative, in the background they play music which is great so there is not dead time but they also have this, I assume, writing noise (sounds more like the Smoke Monster from Lost) and it is way too loud compared to the background noise, it distracts from the reader. As a warning this material is very conservative (I would say fundamentalist). It promotes a direct inspiration of the Bible, as in God whispered the words to write in the author’s ear. This is fine you if you have that leaning or do not mind your child learning that. However this does take this to an extreme by stating, “He [God] has made sure the Bible remains exactly as He spoke it all those centuries ago.” This is a blatantly false, one only has to look at Mark 16, between verses eight and nine in almost every English Bible if not all of them include a note stating we have three different manuscript endings. Any Biblical scholar will tell you we did not have a perfect copy of the Bible, while it seems this study claims that we do and have several of them. They really need to reedit this study to clear this up because, what will someone do when confronted with the truth when they were told differently? A) Lose faith B) be ignorant. Neither of the options are healthy.

I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com http://BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”