What is God Like Series by William Lane Craig

Charity and John are the children of Brown Bear and Red Goose. In each book, the kids ask their parents a question. Their parents always point them to a Scripture to expound upon who God is. The kids ask follow-up questions, and each book ends marveling at God. The series is comprised of ten books.

Reading Level: 6+ years old
Read Aloud: 6+ years old

Apologetics for children is a niche category that is lacking. I enjoyed seeing the simple, detailed illustrations and smaller amount of text on each page. I also loved how the response to each question was, “let’s see what the Bible says.” Rather than staking truth on what mom or dad says, we should be training our children to use the Sword of the Spirit as the source of all truth. Though the font and illustrations lean towards a 4-6 year old audience, some of the book’s content is suited for children 6-8 years old. The easier-to-grasp books are: God is Forever, God is Self-Sufficient, and The Greatness of God. The moderate level are: God is Spirit and God is All-Good.

There were theological issues in the five other books. In books God is All-Knowing and God is All-Powerful, it is clear the author does not define free-will in accordance with Reformed theology and the Canons of Dort. The theme in those books is that God cannot do anything to take away your free-choices, and if God were to make you do something, you would not be doing it freely. In the Reformed framework, freedom is defined by the ability to consistently choose your greatest desire (Augustinian). We do have free will, but it has been utterly corrupted. We will always choose according to our sin nature until we have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. God’s sovereignty and human’s corrupt free-will work in tandem. The ability to “choose the inverse” should not be the definition of free-will, and it clearly is in those books. God is All-Knowing dissociates God’s foreknowledge with foreordination. I would assume that is because Dr. Craig does not define foreknowledge from a Reformed viewpoint. In God is Three Persons, Dr. Craig states God is three persons, minds, and wills. A human being has a mind and will. However, it is the person who utilizes both facilities of the mind and will. The mind is not an independent facility operating outside of the person. To equivocate a person with a mind is incorrect. Dr. Craig is Neo-Apollinarian and a monothelite; both viewpoints have been formally condemned as heresies. These views likely are the source of this wording.

In God is All-Loving, the book states, “God’s unconditional love for you is the basis for loving and accepting yourself.” It goes on to state that we should love others unconditionally, just as God loves us but hates our sin. God’s design of humans as image-bearers is the basis for valuing our bodies and minds. In all things, we are to honor His good design that we may glorify Him. We have to be careful with saying we are to love ourselves and others unconditionally, because God does not love each person salvificially. Only those who repent and believe He loves intimately, so there are conditions for His specific love. Even in Christ, we are to mortify our inherited sin nature and must never embrace it. We also must define love as submitting to God’s truth foremost. God defines love, not loving how we feel or who we believe ourselves to be. In our modern age, self-love has become an idolatrous god, so it is problematic to tell children to unconditionally love themselves and others with no additional information. Lastly, in God is Everywhere the author states, “when we say God is everywhere, we mean that He knows what is happening everywhere in the whole world and that He is making things happen everywhere in the whole world. He really isn’t really in any place at all.” Omnipresense means He is in all places simultaneously, but not in His creation itself (panentheism). In Scripture, there are a plethora of examples where God is actually present in places in a real sense including his throne, with believers through the Spirit, and in Old Testament theophanies.

Questionable Behaviors:
Mixed Species Family: The father is a bear and the mother is a goose. My children immediately asked how they could produce offspring! After looking on his blog, Dr. Craig gave a sweet answer sharing how they represented he and his wife to the jingle, “brown bear, brown bear what do you see.”

*Note: I am indebted to Nick Cambell with Christ as the Cure for his theological input and insight into Apollinarian and Monothelite theological views.

This review is written by Good Book Mom contributor, Emily Russell. To learn more about Emily, click HERE.