I recently compiled a comprehensive bibliography of D. A. Carson’s publications so that it could be hosted on Carson’s page at The Gospel Coalition’s site.
How the Bibliography Is Organized
The publications are listed chronologically under five categories by the date they were first published:
- Books (currently 50 listed)
- Articles (currently 237 listed)
- Reviews (currently 112 listed)
- Lyrics
- Edited Series
Some of the books and articles are linked to Amazon.com, and others are linked to PDFs available for free on TGC site. Further, most of the articles and reviews are also linked to PDFs.
Note: (1) The PDFs may not be uploaded to other sites without written permission from the copyright holders. (2) I plan to continue updating the bibliography, so please let me know if you spot any errors such as typos or omissions.
Benefits of the Carson PDFs hosted by TGC
- Number: The bibliography of Carson’s publications currently links to about 350 PDFs hosted on TGC site. The vast majority of them have not been available online previously.
- Price: All the PDFs are free. (A few dozen of them were previously sold for $0.99 each at ChristWay Media.) This includes over 300 articles and reviews as well as the following nine books:
- Letters Along the Way: A Novel of the Christian Life (Crossway, 1993)
- Holy Sonnets of the Twentieth Century (Baker, 1994)
- The Inclusive-Language Debate: A Plea for Realism (Zondervan, 1998)
- For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word, Vol. 1. (Crossway, 1998)
- For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word, Vol. 2. (Crossway, 1999)
- The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Crossway, 2000)
- Love in Hard Places (Crossway, 2002)
- Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson (Crossway, 2008)
- From the Resurrection to His Return: Living Faithfully in the Last Days (Christian Focus, 2010)
- Format: The PDFs preserve exact pagination, which is valuable for citations. Also, I’ve systematically formatted each PDF by cropping, enabling OCR (i.e., so one can search them, copy and paste, etc.), and making other general improvements (whiting out advertisements in magazine articles, whiting out other books reviews from journals, whiting out printing smudges, etc.).
- Convenience: Never before have so many PDFs of Carson’s publications been available online at a single website, and no user name or password is needed to download them. I would suggest using a tool such as the Firefox extension “DownThemAll!” to download all the PDFs most efficiently (i.e., by selecting to download all items on the webpage with a .pdf extension).
- Labels: The PDFs are uniformly tagged (e.g., title, topic, date), and the format of the names of the PDFs themselves are also consistent (e.g., “2009_scholar_as_pastor.pdf″).
- Content: When it comes to evaluating the content of Carson’s publications, I’m probably not as objective as others would be since I’m his full-time research assistant and he’s my doctoral mentor, but I don’t think it’s hagiographic to say that Carson is one of the finest NT scholars alive. When I arrived at Trinity in summer 2006, Willem VanGemeren, the director of the PhD program for theological studies at TEDS, advised me to get to know the professor whom I would like to be my mentor for the PhD program. One important way to do that, he suggested, is to read that professor’s works and become very familiar with them. So I did. It took a long time, but not a moment of that was wasted. I’d highly recommend that you redeem the time by systematically reading Carson’s books, articles, and reviews. They’re articulate, informed, thoughtful, engaging, and edifying. He exalts Christ by exegeting his words, tracing themes through the Bible’s salvation-historical storyline, addressing hot topics with clarity and nuance, and engaging and confronting bad theology as well as the culture.
Discouraged or Grateful to God?
Some people, especially pastors and professors, may look at the list of Carson’s publications and be tempted to get discouraged. “How can one man do all that? I’m such a failure.” If that’s how you’re tempted to feel, let me encourage you by sharing an insight I learned from Peter T. O’Brien, one of Carson’s best friends. When O’Brien was at TEDS in September 2006 to teach a block course, he shared his narrative with a group of PhD students, and I’ve not forgotten his valuable counsel that led me to this conclusion: by God’s grace I will serve him with the gifts he has given me and not feel inferior for the childish reason that I am not as gifted as someone else; rather, I will thank God for gracing me with gifts to the church like D. A. Carson.
Update: Justin Taylor writes,
Dr. Carson’s sheer productivity is nothing less than astonishing. One could become tired just working through the latest numbers: he has written 50 books; 235 articles; 112 book reviews; and 46 edited books in the various series he edits. Average it out and it comes to about one book written or edited every four months, with one article and two reviews written every six weeks—for three decades.
Related:
This is great, Andy.
Would be great to add these to the “online books” list as well.
Formidably helpful
This is great! I just downloaded all the PDFs of the books, but the PDF for For the Love of God Vol. 1 didn’t come through. I can’t seem to view it online either.
Jonathan, vol. 1 is downloading fine for me. I’m not sure what to suggest.
It appears to download fine, but then I’m not able to open it in Preview. I can open it using Adobe Reader though. Strange.
[…] has spent several months compiling the list for The Gospel Coalition: everything Carson has published. […]
Thank you for what I am sure was a tremendous amount of work on your own part. This is going to be a wonderfully helpful resource.
Blessings,
Danny Slavich
Thanks for your work in making these resources available.
Thank you Andy.
Thanks for your work in making these available, and also for your Peter O’Brien anecdote. It’s a good reminder to press on for the glory of God using fully (and contentedly) whatever gifts and opportunities God grants you. “Parallelomania” unfortunately does not confine itself to the study of ancient texts. Thanks for the reminder!
Thanks!
Andy, thanks so much.
I’ve always been amazed that I didn’t hear more about the book Letters Along the Way. It’s one that I believe all young pastors should read.
I’ll download it and put it on my Kindle.
Excellent work, Andy! Many thanks!
Andy,
What an incredible resource! Thank you for your diligence on this and the word of encouragement at the end. Thank you for your part in making such resources available to the rest of the body of Christ and to me personally. I am trying to read and listen to as much Carson as I can. Thank you! Hope your family is doing well!
Kendall
Thanks for making all this available, Andy. I just downloaded all the PDFs. This is a tremendous resource.
This is wonderful!
Andy, thank you. This is simply superb. My thanks to you & Don for making such a large portion of a life’s work of writting avaliable for free. Simply astounding.
We are geatly blessed.
PS – Did anyone have difficulty downloading 2004 mystery & fulfillment?
Hi Andy
Vol 1 For Love of God – downloads, doesnt open in Preview on Mac, but will open in Adobe Reader. However when I try to open it in Acrobat Professional 6 it gives the warning “There was an error opening this document. Bad encrypt dictionary”
It might need opened and resaved in a higher version of Professional or whatever created it.
Just incase that helps – but a MASSIVE thanks for all the hard work. Also in case you are interested I put an index together for Letters along hte way – you can find it here
http://three17.blogspot.com/2006/03/letters-along-way.html
This is great thanks!
There does seem to be a problem with the link to article 29 – Rejoice that your names are written in heaven. Would be grateful if you could fix that please?
Thanks, all.
Jamie, we’ll be unlinking the “Mystery and Fulfillment” article. We are not hosting a PDF for that at the publisher’s request.
Mark, maybe you should upgrade to Acrobat Professional 9?
Martin, good catch. Article 29 should be fixed soon.
What an amazing collection of resources, Andy. Thanks for this!
(BTW, are you sure Dr. Carson isn’t a robot? I’m assuming you’ve seen him eat and such, right? Mercy.)
What a generous service you, Carson, and the publishers have performed for us! An excellent resource. Grateful thanks.
This is incredible! Thank you!
This is fantastic. Thank you so much for your work on the bibliography and especially for the links to the free pdf books!
Bless you!
Todd Price
Thank you for this resource page! I have always dipped my toes into a few of his writings but never anything substantial. With this resource page of 200+ articles alone it is amazing . . . even the ones from the 70’s are still relevant for today’s studies. I am looking forward to downloading them all. :) Might take a while though . . . LOL
Amazing, incredibly prolific! Thanks for the resources. Writing a book once every four months…. How about a decent blog post… is that enough? : )
Digital Bible Software.
This is really cool. Thanks Andy for the huge work behind these PDF’s. I’m starting right away with the Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.
What a prolific writer… makes us wonder what we do with our spare time – thanks, Andy.
Hey Andy,
Do you have a top 5 for Carson, or one in particular that you feel is a must read?
I recommend some in this interview.
Hi Andy,
Is the list of books, articles, and reviews you have provided up to date? Do you constantly update them?
I submitted updates to the whole page a month or so ago, and they should be implemented soon.
Hi Andy, it seems as though when I click on the publication link that it takes me to a page that says, “The page you were looking for doesn’t exist.”
Andy, Many thanks for these links, especially the free PDFs! I too have found Dr Carson’s ministry very helpful and am looking forward to his visit to Word Alive in UK later this year. I noticed Desiring God is hosting a free PDF of his joint publication with John Piper too? Thanks Allan