I have the second edition of this book so my comments are directed at that volume.
What’s the Point of the Book?
When proving a point in an argument or laying out a thesis based on exegetical research, fallacies arise.
They do so (sometimes) innocuously and although they may conclude with a proper
understanding they get there the wrong way. Carson’s goal is to
give people a whiff of the different types of exegetical fallacies that
can arise so that people can avoid them, learning to draw conclusions with
proper methods.
The Good?
The book is short, clocking in at 147 pages sans index. The book is
inexpensive: I purchased mine for about eleven bucks. Carson covers
fallacies in the areas of word-study, grammar, logic, presupposition
and history. Carson touches on several Scriptural portions and common
fallacies performed with them. If he uses Greek in the text (thankfully
a legible font) he always translates it. Carson recommends plenty of
titles to further personal study and even leave you hungering for more.
The Bad?
I couldn’t really find any bad in the book. The grammatical section
becomes a bit medium to hard reading if you’re not versed in Greek
grammar but to those that persevere you get some really great stuff
from this section. I personally read through the section a few times to
properly get what he was saying and then subsequently checked to see if
I owned his recommended software: Gramcord (apparently I do). Maybe the
one bad thing is that the book was so short. His final section leaves the
door open to even more fallacies (in structuralism and literary
genre) but he doesn’t dive into it because the book is purposefully not
comprehensive.
The Ugly?
Nothing. I mean you would think it is ugly to look at fallacies
performed by peers and other authors, but the guy has zero pride about
it. He actually goes and tears up one of his own pieces showing the
fallacies he had committed. If anything were ugly I would say that the
jacket has a horrendous design.
Star Rating.
I don’t have graphics yet. And I have to come up with a sexy design
for this section, but that aside I would give this book five out of
five stars with a recommendation of “must-buy”. If Carson ever comes
out with a comprehensive book on exegetical fallacies (impossible I
know…there are a million ways to do something wrong and then a million
more) I would buy it outright.
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-r-
(Since this was the first Rey-Review do you have anything
you would want to see that would help you know if you should buy a book
or not? Tell me in the comments since this is a project in progress.)