Immigration and Unbiblical Reasoning

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Politics brings out the worst in people. It really does.

A picture of the Alabama Baptist newspaper taken from Twitter. The author's name was smudged intentionally.

Sometimes it also brings out the worst people, but that is another topic for another day.

At times, politics can cause people to speak up who shouldn’t because they haven’t given time to fully vet their ideas or allow someone else to help them think through the implications of their reasoning. This if forgivable when someone is at the open mic at a townhall meeting—we’ve all said things poorly when we were on the spot. However, when you write something for publication—perhaps in the state Baptist newspaper—it should really be carefully considered by some friends so you don’t say anything foolish.

Recently a pastor in Alabama wrote an ill-conceived letter to the editor of the Alabama Baptist newspaper where he demonstrated a ridiculous level of biblical ignorance.

The letter is a call to block Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. I happen to disagree with a wholesale restriction of immigration based on religious grounds. However, I accept that other people can get to a different answer than I do within the bounds of orthodox Christianity. That question is not the point of this post.

It is the letter writer's reasoning that is both dangerous and questionable. It displays a blatant ignorance of clear Scriptural teaching.

The Position and Argument

The basic position: “I am against allowing the refugees the rights to America’s soil and my neighborhood.”

He uses several points to support his argument:

1.           The Old Testament called for putting the Canaanites under the ban because of the impact of intermingling with idol worshipers on the people of Israel.

2.           The Syrians are not the author's neighbors because they don’t “value the same standards of life and way of life that I value.”

3.           Allowing Syrians into the country will destroy our children’s future because (at least these) Muslims hate Christianity and America.

4.           The increase of an American Muslim population will not lead to a growth in or of Southern Baptist Churches.

I don’t think I am misrepresenting his arguments as they are written. See the article in the picture in this post.

America and Israel

Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the position to exclude all Syrian refugees is acceptable. Even so, his basis for the argumentation is unbiblical and in danger of subtly conflating America with Israel, if it doesn’t do that overtly. This is bad hermeneutics.

With regard to God’s call for the Israelites to be the instrument of divine judgment on the Canaanites, and not to intermingle or intermarry with them, the letter writer gets the biblical facts right but the application wrong.

America is not Israel. Post-1948 Israel is not identical to the Israel of Scripture. The idea that God’s command to destroy the Canaanites or not to settle near them or make alliances with them applies to contemporary Christians in a religiously plural nation-state is unquestionably false.

I don’t think the author is calling for the extermination of non-Christians living nearby, but even seeking an underlying principle in the passage that there is a Christian mandate to pursue religious homogeneity through political means is unsupportable.

Christians should participate in the political system, but Christianity is not a political entity. Nowhere did Paul (for example) call for such an application of the OT law for contemporary believers because many of those commands were part of the civil law, which was given to the nation-state of Israel for a specific purpose at a specific time.

By introducing this as support for a ban on immigration of individuals from a particular religious tradition, the writer is introducing a strange hermeneutic that would be very difficult to apply consistently.

Are You My Neighbor?

The author didn’t have to make it all the way to the Bible to eradicate the error in his letter regarding who is his neighbor. VeggieTales would have sufficed. However, had Pastor the man chosen to consult his Bible before making a statement on politics in public, he would have discovered that Jesus already gave a pretty clear indication of what constitutes a neighbor.

Luke 10:25-37 is Jesus’ explanation, by way of a parable, of who someone’s neighbor is. Without going into full-blown exegesis, I can say with confidence that Jesus utterly rebuts the notion that, to use the words from the Baptist newspaper, “My neighbors are the people that value the same standards of life and way of life that I value.”

Now, it may be that the people who live in the geographical region surrounding the letter writer indeed fit his description. However, the ethical mandate to care for the neighbor applies to people that don’t look like us. Therefore, the author is dead wrong when when he says that helping refugees “is not a matter of loving your neighbor.”

Again, there are different ways of doing this that don’t involve allowing immigration to the U.S. But at no point can a Christian affirm the truthfulness of the Bible and and properly affirm such a statement as it stands.

The Hatred of Muslims

The third argument is that we shouldn’t let Syrians in because of their “unknown background but known hatred for Christianity and America.” Letting them in will be bad for future generation because they “will destroy any future our children may have.”

First, not all Syrians are Muslims. That may not be true in the long term, based on the reports of slaughter and persecution of Christians by ISIS. However, this assumption is just factually wrong.

Second, all Muslims do not hate Christianity and America. This is like saying that every Christian acts like a member of Westboro Baptist Church. Or like saying that every Christian (or any Christian) thinks that people should be stoned for adultery.

It is aggravating when atheists and others make stupid accusations about Christianity based on the actions of sub-Christian groups like Westboro Baptist Church. I argue that WBC’s actions are not representative of what the Bible teaches. And yet, the people at WBC believe they are doing what God wants them to do because they misread the Bible. Still, I deserve not to be judged for WBC's bad theology.

Similarly, when atheists ignore hermeneutics and argue that contemporary Christianity is bound to the OT civil law, it is frustrating. They often lack the nuance (or concern) to read Scripture through the lens of the Christian tradition. Their argument is annoying because it misrepresents my position due to their ignorance.

If this misrepresentation is unacceptable to us as Christians, we should be careful about similarly misrepresenting others, including Muslims.

I do not deny that acts of terrorism have been perpetrated by Muslims. I do not deny that those violent Muslims believe they are interpreting their holy writ properly. I do not deny that I can read pieces of their scriptures and come to the conclusion that Islam is an inherently violent religion. However, I am also not steeped in their tradition and hermeneutics, so I’m not qualified to adjudicate who are the normal Muslims and who are the crazy fringe. I am capable of discerning by comparing it with the Bible that it is a false religion that does not save, but for me to make absolute statements about the political nature of Islam in its present expressions is inappropriate.

In fact, many Muslims vocally decry the violence of the Muslim extremists.  To be fair to them (just as I’d like the atheist to be fair to me as a Christian) I should accept the fact that Islam has diverse manifestations and I should not, based on my inexpert Koranic hermeneutics, reject all Muslims from entering into the U.S. due to their religion.

A third rebuttal of this point is a simple call to common sense and a hope for religious liberty. We cannot have religious liberty for some and not for all. By arguing for excluding Muslims from American based on their religion, this pastor is feeding the anti-religious bias that is growing in the U.S.

All religions are not equally true, but if religion is to have a place in our society we cannot pick and choose who gets favors and who doesn’t. That is exactly what the non-establishment clause of the Constitution was designed to protect against.

Exclusion for Church Growth

The last argument in the letter is that allowing Syrian refugees to enter the U.S. will increase the number of mosques and not SBC churches.

He is likely correct here. If there are more Muslims in the U.S. (recognizing that many of the Syrian refugees are, in fact, likely to be Muslim) there will be more mosques. And, they are unlikely to build or plant new SBC churches.

So what?

The argument that we should expand immigration because it will bring the nations to hear the gospel in the U.S. is weak. It is likely true if Christians are living faithfully, but it is a shaky foundation for a political decision.

The refugees are likely to bring their religion with them to a new country. But that in and of itself is not a reason to ban them from entering.

This goes back to a fear of legitimate religious freedom, which necessarily results in plurality of (but not necessarily within) religions. It also points toward the misconception of America and a Christian nation analogous to Israel.

America is not a new covenant incarnation of old covenant Israel. Certainly there is a strong heritage of Judeo-Christian thought in the U.S. that we all benefit from. I do not deny that many of the Puritans intended to build a theocratic society and likened their settlement to Israel.

However, the founding documents of the United States were not inspired by God. We do not have a charter to bring Christianity to the world through political means. In fact, to do so is to abuse our government and to seek the sort of Messianic kingdom that Christ expressly refused to establish during his sojourn on earth.

In short, the final argument is his weakest, but the most revealing. He displays a sub-Christian nationalism that conflates Christianity with America and misapplies the gospel to political rather than spiritual redemption.

Conclusion

As I have said, I think there are legitimate ways to arrive at an immigration policy that excludes victims of the ongoing violence in Syria. I recognize there are legitimate concerns for mass immigration based on recent events in Europe. (On the other hand, I think that Alan Noble’s recent article in Christianity Today helps to explain a way forward that accounts for those concerns.)

Arguing for restrictive immigration policies is one thing, but the writer shreds his Bible and puts himself in an untenable position with his reasoning. His conflation of American nationalism and Christianity is a more dangerous concern than potential religious influence of Syrian refugees.

Statistics that Broaden Our Perspective

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Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review

The use of statistics in argumentation is often maligned. Often this is for good reason, since some very subtle sleights of hand can cause factually correct statistics to significantly misrepresent reality.

For example, there is the joke about the PR department’s reporting of the results of the annual softball game against the R&D department. After losing by a dozen runs, the company newsletter reported that the PR department had suffered a single loss that season while the R&D department had finally managed to achieve their first win of the year.

Despite the very plain dangers of the use of numbers, they are often a good way to illustrate things. Sometimes numbers, when properly used, can help put things into a whole new perspective.

Human Deaths due to War

This video about the numbers of deaths during various wars in history shows how statistics can help us understand our world a little better. Particularly with the rise of the modern media, with social media increasing the number of citizen reporters, we get a steady stream of information about who is killing who and how awful it is. This video helps to put things into perspective

Without diminishing the reality of human suffering, this video shows that things may not be as bad as we believe based on our Facebook feeds. It would be good to live in a world where no one is killing anyone. In fact, I long for that day, though I anticipate it won’t come until Christ returns.

Life is hard and injustice is real, but this visual representation of statistics helps put things into perspective. And perspective is helpful in keeping us from being overwhelmed by the horrors of the world. There are many horrors and will continue to be more, but it may be they are not nearly as pervasive as we might think.

Outrage Porn

Social media enables what has come to be known as "outrage porn." If a definition is required, outrage porn is the phenomenon where people are addicted to being upset about what someone (usually distant from them) is doing and how wrong it is.

This is what leads to people actually getting upset over the colors of a dress in a picture on the internet. It is what leads to a constant stream of angry bloggers (from the right and the left) taking the words of actors, politicians, and regular people out of context, writing about them, and starting a movement to call for the people’s demise. (Or worse yet, actually caring what some of these celebrities say and thinking it is important simply because they say it.)

Outrage porn is how we get a national debate over a boy with a science experiment clock or intentional faux bomb thingy. It doesn’t matter that none of us are in a position to know enough about the topic, we are justified in lauding the victim and crucifying the authorities or mocking the supports and justifying suspicion based on religious grounds. (This is a false dichotomy, of course, but it makes the point.)

We’ve lost perspective because of the broadening of our field of view with the narrowing of our focus. We can see the whole world through the internet, but the lens tends to be more and more biased. Often the bias is myopically focused on the present to the exclusion of the past. (After all, we can’t really trust history because it was written by the dominant culture.)

Taking a Step Back

The video and its visual representation of history (inasmuch as the statistics are reliable) help to put things into perspective by breaking through the “newness” of the newsfeed and seeing history synchronically; it sets different eras beside each other.

In this case, it reinforces the horrors of World War II. It helps me to understand the generation that lived through it a little better. It also shows me that today might not be quite as bad as I thought.

There is room for concern, but no need for despair. In that, this is a helpful video, really.

Knowing Christ - A Review

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J. I. Packer’s volume, Knowing God, is a classic for the ages. It is clearly written, theologically deep, and profoundly inspiring. Reading Packer is an experience every Christian should have as soon as they are able.

In the introduction to his recent volume, Knowing Christ, Mark Jones references Packer’s book and pitches his own volume as another attempt in the same vein. He aspires to help his readers to know Christ better, which is a significant goal to say the least.

Jones describes his book in these words:

This book is not polemical (i.e., disputational), but it is still theological. It is also (I pray) devotional. This is a book for God’s people, not the academy. This is a book designed to give God’s people a glimpse of the person of Christ. In short, I write that people may know Christ better than they already do, and so love him more.

Summary

With that target in mind, Jones divides his book into twenty-seven chapters. He covers topics like “Christ’s Dignity,” “Christ’s Faith,” “Christ’s Resurrection,” and “Christ’s Names.” Each of the chapters is eight to ten pages long with multiple headings. It is structured as a book that can be read easily and in segments. The prose is lucid, which makes the book accessible even when the theology is deep. Jones offers many references to Scripture throughout that point the careful reader back to the text, which is the source of much of our knowledge of Christ. He also quotes from the Puritans frequently and quotes some of them at length.

As a theologian, this was a fun book to sit down with at night in my armchair. It did lead me into a deeper appreciation for Christ. It reminded me of much truth about the Savior and helped me think through aspects of Christ’s existence, such as the faith that he demonstrated throughout his life. At the same time, it encouraged me to want to know Christ better and brought to mind the center of the Christian faith, which is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

This is the sort of book that an educated layperson could pick up and enjoy as well. The structure makes it suitable for a book study, with short chapters and study questions for each chapter in the back of the volume. In the end, whether someone agrees with everything Jones has written here, it is impossible to read this book as a Christian and walk away without having a deeper Christology in some way.

Critique

The weaknesses of the book fall along two fronts. First, Jones loves the Puritans and he draws from them very frequently. As someone who enjoys Puritan theology, I recognize that sometimes they said things so well and in prose that is just far enough removed from modern English to accentuate its theological profundity through shifting cadence. At the same time, those that lack the same love for the Puritans may wonder why some of the quotes are necessary and question the level of authority Jones grants them.

The second weakness of the volume is that at times Jones overstates his case on questionable points. For example, in his discussion of Jesus asking the beloved disciple to take care of his mother, Mary, Jones writes:

We might say that his death for sinners would have been completely ineffectual if he had not entrusted his mother to the care of John. That is to say, if Christ had not uttered these words from the cross, we would be in hell; but he kept God’s law in life and ‘in death’.

Clearly Jones is referring to Christ keeping the fifth commandment to honor his father and mother. However, Jones’ claim is overly strong for the evidence that we have in the text.

Since Christ did utter these words, and the result was the fulfillment of the fifth commandment, it is logically necessary for Christ to utter the words to perfectly fulfill the law. Yet, it does not seem to follow that if Christ had not uttered those words or if we had not received the words through divine revelation, that our salvation would be incomplete. In other words, there could have been other ways for Christ to fulfill the law that Jones has not considered; or it could have happened “off stage.”

This is a minor criticism, but there are a few places where overstatements by Jones made me scratch my head a bit. In the end, they led to some good discussions with my wife (who also read the book), and may prove to do the same if this is read in a group setting.

Conclusion

This is a good book and one that many Christians will find enlightening and inspiring. Pastors might consider recommending this for those that need stimulation to grow in their faith. Seminary students may read this to keep the fire of faith burning brightly. All Christians will find that reading this is well worth the time.

Knowing Christ
$14.25
By Mark Jones
Buy on Amazon

Note: Banner of Truth provided a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.

Writing Theology Well - A Review

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I’m deep in the throes of dissertation writing. This means that a volume like Lucretia Yaghjian’s Writing Theology Well: A Rhetoric for Theological and Biblical Writers is of great interest. I want to have a done dissertation most, but I want to have a good dissertation at the same time. Therefore, a book on theological writing that made it to a second edition seemed an excellent one to review.

Summary

The book consists of four parts. Yaghjian begins by discussing theological rhetoric. This includes considering the context of the writing, focusing on inquiry, reflection, and persuasion, and using tools of identification, correlation, suspicion and construction. Part Two deals with the task of research, documenting that research well, and some chapters on exegesis and hermeneutics. The third part emphasizes writing style, with a focus on discovering one’s voice and the use of analogy, metaphor, etc. This section also deals with some basics of sentence and paragraph construction and delves into the vital art of revision. The fourth section focuses on writing in “new contexts,” which goes from the writing of international students, to various forms of online writing.

Writing Theology Well is a volume that contains many of the basic elements of a writing guide. There are helpful guidelines and checklists for the revision process, some ideas about structuring arguments, and a healthy emphasis on writing techniques that aid clear communication. As a guide to writing, this volume has the necessary framework to be helpful.

The promise in a book like this is that it tailored specifically for a particular type of writing, namely, theological writing. As I transitioned from my undergrad in English to writing for a technical audience in nuclear power to taking seminary courses, there were often points of frustration where a tool that I had used in a previous life was no longer acceptable. For this reason Writing Theology Well held out the promise of a helpful tool that I could benefit from and that I’d recommend to others.

Analysis and Conclusion

My praise for Writing Theology Well will be somewhat limited. This volume will be most helpful in particular theological contexts. It would not have been very helpful at the conservative seminary that I attended for several reasons.

First, the book begins with an emphasis on writing a theological reflection paper well. That is certainly a noble pursuit, but in my decade of seminary (to date) I may have written three reflection papers. These were also not simply essays on my perspective on a doctrine or theological topic, but usually reflections on a book. For good or ill, assuming some continuity among conservative seminaries, there is little call for the sort of introspective reflection paper outlined here.

Second, the emphasis on embracing one’s context and not attempting to rise above it would not be helpful in a conservative seminary. The goal in most conservative seminaries is to get the students to experience theology outside of their own context, which is why there is a high value on research papers over reflection essays. This sometimes results in the prohibition of first person pronouns, which is at times a tedious requirement. However, forcing the student to write from outside of themselves is often helpful in breaking them out of the rut of their own experiences. None of my professors actually expected the students to attain objectivity, but we were all supposed to try. The focus on embracing context has positives, and perhaps a place later in theological education, but the emphasis on writing subjectively would not transfer well in conservative academia.

Third, most of the examples of writing for consideration were from feminist or other post-modern sources. This means that the reader has to try to get past the content of the theology (largely segregated from its supporting arguments), and the logical presuppositions of the excerpts, to try to get to the point of evaluating the style. Of course, I’m sure if the shoe were on the other foot, someone with another bias might have as much difficulty evaluating conservative sources. The trouble is that many of the passages that were supposed to show off the beauty of the prose were so skeptical toward traditional forms of Christianity that it would never matter how wonderful the writing was from. In that sense, this book misses the mark by failing to emphasize that the content is more important than the style, though style is certainly significant. At the same time, I thought some of the author’s comments on being faithful to the text in her discussion of hermeneutics was beneficial.

In the end, this is probably a very fine book for a particular context. Yaghjian puts the fundamentals of writing on display in a way that is consistent with the best “how-to” manuals. Her emphasis on planning, revising, and structure are right on the mark. This is a volume that many will probably find helpful for writing, but most likely not in more conservative contexts.

Note: I received a gratis copy of this volume directly from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Preaching about Joy while Suffering

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It's relatively easy to preach about joy in suffering when things are going well. 

A theology of suffering is simple when the suffering is "out there," outside the walls of the church. It is a little harder when it is in the pew in front of you, but still not as hard as when the suffering is in your house or in your own head.

My friend and fellow PhD student at SEBTS, Kenny Hilliard, was recently diagnosed with a tumor on his brain stem that is likely malignant. He is six years my junior with a wife and two children.

He is also the Pastor of New Horizon Baptist Fellowship of Marion, NC.

He's on the brink of the trials ahead. Today the uncertainty is a greater part of the suffering than the physical and emotional tests that lie ahead for the Hilliard family.

In light of the trials ahead, Kenny preached a sermon on 2 Corinthians 6:1-13. The sermon is on the hope of the Gospel. It's about finding joy amidst suffering through hope in the redemption that is to come.

It's too early to make Kenny a hero, but I have hope that the end of the story will be as good as this beginning. In the meanwhile, we can pray that Kenny will suffer well. We can pray that his family will be sustained and encouraged through this time. We can pray that he will make a full recovery soon.

In light of the trial that is to come, this sermon may gain in significance, but it will not diminish.

Regardless of what comes next, listen to the sermon below (it's just audio over a still picture) in light of Kenny's diagnosis. Listen and be blessed by the powerful trust in the goodness of God, even in light of his present sufferings.

Kenny and his family are facing significant medical expenses in the near future. If you'd care to contribute toward those, you may do so through this link to a third party crowdfunding site.

How to Read the Bible - A Review

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I often read books that I disagree with. It is necessary to read the intellectually challenging disagreement with scholars who oppose my view. This drives me to question whether my answer, their answer, or another might be right.

Recognizing that Harvey Cox is, at least from my conservative Evangelical position, a liberal scholar, I picked up his recent volume, How to Read the Bible with some interest and hope for a fruitful conversation.

This is a popular level book, written with few footnotes and more as a summary of Cox’s religious experience than as a means of engaging in serious debate. 

As such, Cox’s audience appears to be Christians who have not engaged with Scripture seriously and wonder what method the wise sage who has spent a long career proclaiming a version of progressive Christian theology from the respected halls of Harvard Divinity School might encourage them to use. It is, in reality, an apologetic for a liberal approach to Scripture from a post-modern liberal Christian. This statement is not meant in the pejorative (as the label liberal often is) but to clarify my understanding of the author’s actual intent, which is distinct from what he may have actually accomplished; according to his own hermeneutic, his accomplishment will be evaluated as something distinctly different based on the one who actually reads the volume.

Summary

How to Read the Bible is a layman’s book on hermeneutics. It has assumptions (often exposed, but seldom stated) and shows how to apply them to the text of the Bible.

After a personal introduction, which places the book in the context of Cox’s faith journey, there are ten chapters in the text. In them Cox walks through his method of reading of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Job, the prophets, two chapters on the Gospels (though one ignores John entirely), the Pauline Epistles, and Revelation. The tenth chapter is a summary of Cox’s hermeneutic, which is focused on a contemporary reading of the text. The book has a conclusion in which Cox answers the logical question that arises from his deconstruction of Scripture, namely, “Why should we read the Bible at all?”

Qualification

For Cox, this book is no doubt a very personal book; in fact, the first person pronoun and his own anecdotes prevent reading it any other way. He is explaining how he reads the Bible and gains some spiritual value from it. As such, it would be easy to turn these critiques into accusations against Cox’s faithfulness. That is not my goal. Cox no doubt holds the faith commitments that he has, which have some ties to historic Christianity, sincerely. This book helps to reveal what shape they have and why, but the book does not lead me to question the fact that he believes something about God that approximates a form of historic Christianity and is very personal to him.

Despite this personal nature of the book, he did publish it publicly, which means that it is fair game for analysis and critique. This is not a private expression of faith that, like a discovered diary, should be left alone until the author is deceased.

Assumptions

The logical question that arises from this text on how to read the Bible is why it should be read at all. This is a serious accusation that Cox seems to recognize at the end of the volume and begin to address, but, to my mind he fails.

Cox begins with the assumption that the Bible is solely a human book. In fact, given the option, it seems fairly clear that Cox recommends discarding the notion that any biblical data is factual. He allows that Jesus and Paul did exist, but nearly every other apparent factual claim in Scripture is best rejected at first blush. If some things in the Bible actually happen to correspond to historical truth, this is coincidental to the spiritual truth of Scripture and largely irrelevant.

Additionally, biblical scholarship that rejects traditional understandings of the text or modifies what the text seems to say about history are to be preferred over other scholarships. Throughout the volume, Cox consistently refers to his preferred group of scholars as “the best scholars” or “most scholars.”

In fact, one of the prevailing assumptions that seems to drive Cox’s hermeneutic and general approach to biblical studies is that anyone who accepts the prima facie reading of the Bible is intellectually deficient or ignorant.

For example, the hypothesis that has recently been published that presents a late domestication of camels is valuable explicitly because it undermines the historicity of Scripture and because “it require[s] one to move beyond a literalistic view of the Bible to a more mature comprehension.” (pg. 44) In other words, if only those that believe the Bible to be factually accurate would read the New York Times, which popularized the recent archaeological theory, they wouldn’t be so immature as to believe that Scripture was true. The problem is that the archaeologists conclusions were drawn from a limited data sample and appears to have been interpreted by the New York Times to maximize circulation with a controversial headline rather than critically interact with the study.

Similarly, just a few pages later, Cox discards the notion of the miracle of manna in Exodus by arguing, “The meaning of the ‘miracles’ of Exodus is that these people [i.e., the Israelites of the 7th century B.C.E who he believes wrote the Pentateuch] believe that it was through God’s grace and justice that they were escaping from slavery, and they told their story in their own idiom. Mature and imaginative students of the Bible try to get inside that worldview. They do not simply reject it as superstitious or recast it in terms of modern, if often improbable, scientific rationalizations.” (pg.47)

In other words, speaking from the enlightened cultural perspective of the 21st century, we can know with certainty that these miracles did not happen. This solves two problems simultaneously: (1) It eliminates the weird pseudo-scientific theories about how pre-scientific people may have misinterpreted natural phenomena; (2) It eliminates the need for believing in a God who can do miracles.

While I am thankful for the first result, the second result seems unnecessary unless one has accepted the reigning paradigm of naturalism, which allows for only regularity in the natural world. In other words, it requires that God, whatever that being is, does not interfere in history.

From the Pen of Skeptic

At times, Cox seems to be reading the text as a scoffer. He describes the account of the spies of Israel and Rahab as a “dinner-theater fluff piece” (pg. 69) Thus we should read the accounts of the conquest of Canaan much like school boys read Virgil’s Aeneid (pg 76); they're interesting and have some literary value, but certainly aren't true because, after all, a recent book argues that the entire Israelite history may be incorrect, since the Israelites were likely just Canaanites who banded together against their neighbors and created an elaborate nation-myth to justify their actions (pg 76). Since the Pentateuch is just political propaganda, Cox writes, “I do not believe it is necessary for current readers of the Bible to slog through all these grisly verses [about the reasons given by God for destroying the Canaanites.]” (pg. 74)

This brings back that pertinent question that came to my mind while I was reading this volume, why would you read it anyway? I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Cox continues his way through various representative genre’s of Scripture. Job is “explicitly ‘fictional’" (pg. 79); the prophets have meaning according to how modern revolutionaries decide to use them (though not in an absolutely unconditional sense) (pg. 105); the canonical gospels are merely a result of the winning political faction; the synoptic Gospels are a composite of factually erroneous interpretations of history written too far after the events they depict to be remotely accurate; Paul likely didn’t write most of the letters attributed to him and things we find ethically objectionable are either his misunderstandings or later textual additions; and Revelation can be nothing more than an inspiring poem by a political revolutionary.

It is fair to note that few of these assertions are supported in the text; but it is also important to realize that this is not a scholarly volume. Cox merely assumes the validity of scholarship built on the so-called Higher Critical methods and ignores conservative scholarship as immature or poor. This is an evidence of his bias, but should not be counted as a criticism against his method in this volume.

Again, I wonder, why bother reading it if nearly everything that it reports is questionable?

Spiritual Benefit

Cox believes that there is spiritual benefit in reading Scripture. He intimates this throughout. It can inspire the contemporary reader to pursue justice. This he makes clear in the Introduction, where he recounts the inspiration that African American civil rights activists found in the Exodus stories. While he sat bored in his cell (having been arrested during the same demonstration), the segregated African American detainees preached to each other from the account of Moses.

This reading and contemporary application, he notes, is in accordance with the “full-orbed holistic way I have termed ‘spiritual.’” (pg. 8) But it isn’t clear that such a reading is possible once the reader has rejected the factual content of Scripture as mere political fiction.

In other words, if the Bible is just a human book, with a great percentage of it written for political purposes, then why should it be trustworthy for spiritual readings? Why would one trust Scripture more than a contemporary novel for spiritual information?

Cox wrestles with this in part toward the end of the volume, “Why should I spend any time writing yet another book about this strange old collection? One answer is that the Bible helps us to know who God is, and for many people, perhaps most, that is enough. But there is another reason. The Bible also helps us heed the counsel of Socrates to ‘know thyself,’ and the wisdom of all the religious traditions teaches that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are inseparable.” (pg. 230)

Of these two reasons that Cox offers, it isn’t clear how the shreds of Scripture are helpful any longer in knowing God. He has taken pains to debunk the supernaturalness of God throughout the volume. Gone is the miracle-working God. Gone is the redemptive God that chose a people. Gone is the God that is holy and worthy of judging sin.

The second reason Cox presents is more true to what the tattered text of the Bible can do once it has been explained away by Cox’s “mature” hermeneutic. Once all of the parts of Scripture that conflict with the contemporary reader’s worldview are eliminate, what is left is a reflection of the individual from the ancient text. It isn’t clear why it would take over two hundred pages to explain this fact.

Conclusion

Cox’s book is an excellent example of the reader-response hermeneutic at work. He combines this post-modern approach that rejects a desire for objectivity with an acceptance of the validity of modernistic biblical scholarship to work his way through many genre’s of Scripture.

This is a helpful book because Cox explains what many Christians do on a regular basis. What is masked in the liberal pulpit is made clear in this volume.

In the end, the deconstruction of Scripture and rejection of the supernatural reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ description of creating “men without chests.” They are bidden to be moral, but the means for their morality has been removed. Though this is not Cox’s purpose in writing the book, his demonstration of the failure of the liberal theological method has explanatory power for the slow death of many liberal churches.

NOTE: A complimentary copy of this volume was provided by the publisher for review with no expectation of a positive outcome.