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Product Description

A definitive master work from the world's leading Christian Apologist.

Respected apologist Ravi Zacharias was once sharing his faith with a Hindu when the man asked: "If the Christian faith is truly supernatural, why is it not more evident in the lives of so many Christians I know?" The question hit hard, and this book is an answer. Its purpose is to equip Christians everywhere to simultaneously defend the faith and be transformed by it into people of compassion.

In addition to writing several chapters himself, Ravi Zacharias brings together many of today's leading apologists and Christian teachers, including Alister McGrath and John Lennox, to address topics present in the very future of worldwide Christianity-from the process of spiritual transformation to the challenges posed by militant atheism and a resurgent Islam. Destined to become a classic, Beyond Opinion is a touchstone that will affect Christians around the world.

Customer Reviews:

• An Excellent Apologetic
  I thought this book was an excellent defense of the Christian faith. It is a collection of essays from various apologists at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. Some essays are better than others, and some essays require more thought than others, but overall this book is a must-read for anyone interested in going deeper in their faith.
  
  I particularly like the chapters titled Challenges from Science, and Challenges from Islam.
  
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• 3 1/2 stars - Good, but inconsistent.
  There were parts of this book that were really top rate stuff, and great chapters. But as is prone to be the case with a work like this quilted together from the work of others, there are those chapters also which really are not well done or offer little of value.
  
  The result is a finished product that sines in places but drags terrible and fails wonderfully in others. Overall it is still a good and worthy book, but it could have been so much more. ...more info
• Good Questions. Good Answers. Genuine Issues.
  Beyond Opinion is filled with lots of good, helpful, interesting information, if you are interested in the field of apologetics--and I am. But, I appreciated this book because it does not simply address the same topics that we encounter in all the other books on apologetics. Its fresh approach addresses issues like "Challenges from Youth" and "Challenges from Eastern Religions" and "Conversational Apologetics" and "The Trinity as a Paradigm for Spiritual Transformation" in useful and insightful ways.
  
  Also, the various authors write with an awareness of the fact that although answering questions at an intellectual level is part of the task of apologetics, also, living as an authentic follower of Christ is a key part of the task for one who would be a defender of the faith. Ravi Zacharias addresses that matter in the introduction of the book, writing, "The ultimate calling upon the follower of Christ is to live a life reflecting who he is . . ." Joe Boot reflects that awareness, as well, writing, "few things are more obvious to those engaged in sharing and defending the faith than that the messenger and the method are as important as the message." This important awareness--that living a genuine life of faith is critical to the apologetic task--seems to come through in the writings of all the authors of the book.
  
  The following chapters were particularly helpful . . .
  
  "Challenges From Islam" by Sam Soloman. What Soloman writes about the Doctrine of Takkiya is quite interesting.
  
  "Broader Cultural and Philosophical Challenges" by Joe Boot. Boot writes, "Our priority in apologetics is not to make the nonbeliever listen to us, but to help the person be ready to listen to God and be taught by him." That's a terrific thought.
  
  "The Trinity As A Paradigm For Spiritual Transformation" by L.T. Jeyachandran.
  
  "Book Reviews That Really Excite People" by Dan Marler.
  
  Oh wait, that that last chapter doesn't exist. But what a thrill, if it did, huh?
  
  A book worth reading.
  
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• Sloppy Arguments and Faulty Logic
  Every time I pick up a book like this, I do it wondering if I will be convinced. Clearly the author (or, in this case, authors, though the front cover misleadingly tells you there is only one) is so convinced of the beliefs in the book that he was compelled to write about them and to try to spread the ideas. You have to be pretty sure of where you stand to be willing to air your opinions so publicly, I figure.
  
  But I was disappointed in this book, which claims to be an intellectual response to the attacks on Christianity (all of the authors are heavily trained in theology, and teach at places like Oxford, etc.). But from the opening chapter I began to run into intellectual lapses. Amy Orr Ewing, in her appraisal of postmodernism, does a terrible job of discussing the vastly different portrayals of God in the Old and New Testaments (she simply states that there is a "discontinuity," but makes no attempt to explain it or justify how Christians reconcile this discontinuity). Things only got worse from there. By the time I got to Ravi Zacharias' chapter on evil, wherein he presents an overly simplified (and therefore inaccurate) version of the problem of evil so that he can easily strike it down (this is known as a straw-man technique, because you're defeating something that isn't really there. The problem of evil is more profound than what Zacharias presents, and is indeed a real problem for theologians; Zacharias' proposed solutions for the Christian apologist would not pass as sound arguments in a university classroom, let alone among learned scholars and philosophers), I was pretty much ready to dismiss this book. Add to the above the fact that the chapter on science seems weirdly unaware of what science actually teaches (the author of that chapter is an Oxford mathematician--at one point he claims that belief in intelligent design is ancient and therefore respectable; but the ancients also believed in slavery and that the world was flat--does the ancient origin of those ideas make them respectable?), and you might begin to understand my frustration.
  
  Maybe the problem here is that the book is meant to be a kind of quick but comprehensive guide to all of the different arguments against Christianity, and in its quickness it lost a lot of intellectual thoroughness and heft (the index pointing readers to other books is long). But I'm inclined to think the opposite, which is that these authors knew that they would have a limited amount of space to present their arguments, and so whatever they presented would have to be their best, most persuasive stuff, written in their easiest-to-understand style. It's all the more bizarre and disappointing, then, that they managed to fail. If there is a convincing reason to believe as the authors here believe, I'm still waiting to hear it....more info
• A great read.
  This book is a great book. It answers a lot of questions for christian believers and more so for those who do not believe God and do not believe in the God of the Holy Bible. This book is written by multiple great renown authors and edited by one of the current great international christian apologists.
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