Description: Ridderbos does an excelent job at interpreting Jesus' preaching of the kingdom in the synoptic gospels. This book is redemptive-historical at its finest and when understood gives the reader a good grasp of the whole Bible.
Customer Reviews
Review Summary: Great but not for the faint of heart
Date: 2007-01-24
Details: I bought this book hoping to obtain a deeper understanding and appreciation for what the Kingdom of God as understood biblically. Ridderbos' work is of the highest caliber and exhaustive in its scope. The only reason I gave it four stars is beacause it is a very challenging read. It's not a book you can simply pick up and read, you have to really work at understanding it and following it. Mainly I think because of the abruptness due to it being a translation. (Doesn't flow as fluently as a native English book would).
For someone completely unfamiliar with the Kingdom of God idea and/or not needing a seminary-level discussion of the idea, I would strongly recommend looking at George Eldon Ladd's Book on the same topic. Much less dense. Probably not as scholarly in terms of dealing with liberal lines of thinking (Such as Culmann, Barth, Bultmann, Schweitzer, etc.) but my guess a good start for someone not adept at liberal theology and the historical debates raging around the gospels and the nature of the kingdom.
Review Summary: Simply the best
Date: 2000-01-31
Details: Herman Ridderbos does in biblical theology what Cornelius Van Til does in apologetics: he takes the New Testament self-revelation of God as a given and defends it against all (mainly European) comers in a thorough and scholarly (in the best sense of that word) manner. In fact, he says in the Introduction that the fierce controversy over the kingdom of heaven in the past hundred years is actually "a rich source of instruction to the attentive observer. It is above all the confirmation that the power of divine truth which finds its sublime and most variegated expression in the gospel of the kingdom of heaven again and again triumphs over all human limitations and commitments."Ridderbos puts the kingdom of God in its rightful place at the very center of the gospel preached by Jesus: "the whole of the preaching of Jesus Christ and his apostles is concerned with the kingdom of God, and...in Jesus Christ's proclamation of the kingdom we are face to face with the specific form of expression of the whole of his revelation of God."
If reading this book attentively does not bring you into a quietly intense frame of worship and thanksgiving, you're just not paying attention. It's not pop theology. But it does amply reward the effort it requires.
Review Summary: An excellent look at Jesus' preaching of the Kingdom.
Date: 1999-06-18
Details: Ridderbos does an excelent job at interpreting Jesus' preaching of the kingdom in the synoptic gospels. This book is redemptive-historical at its finest and when understood gives the reader a good grasp of the whole Bible.
out of 3 Reviews
