Book review: The Spiral Staircase

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 in Book Reviews | 0 comments

by Karen Armstrong

★★★★★

This is a new sequel to Karen’s first book, Through the Narrow Gate, after the first sequel, Beginning the World, flopped. Because, she says, she was “not truthful.”

Perhaps Karen overcompensated on the “truthful” part this time around. The result is a brutally honest autobiography of a repeat failure. At one point, Karen despairs, “I was an ex-nun, a failed academic, mentally unstable, and now I could add epileptic to this dismal list. … Even God, for whom I had searched so long, is simply the product of a faulty brain, a neurological aberration.”

Karen spent seven years as a nun in a Catholic convent, then tried to put God behind her and enter the secular world of London. Yet, God would never quite go away. God hung around in a love-hate relationship until Karen finally faced her demons, and found religion again … this time in writing about God. Faith, Karen learned, is not an intellectual assent but an act of will, a deliberate choice to believe. Believers (among whom Karen confesses multiple times she is no longer) cannot prove or disprove their doctrines, but must consciously decide to take them on trust.

One of Karen’s shortcomings as a nun was that she could never connect with God through prayer. There was simply nobody on the other end. Many years later, she realized she was looking for God where he could not be found. Faith, she came to understand, is not about belief, but about practice. Religion, says Karen, is a “moral aesthetic,” an “ethical alchemy.” If you behave a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. You will not discover them to be true until you put them into practice in your own life, where they compel you to act in such a way as to bring out your own heroic potential. Faith, Karen now believes, should make you more human, not less.

On the very last page, Karen looks down to find that, while she has climbed out of darkness, she has come full circle. The Spiral Staircase. “As I go up, step by step, I am turning, again, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upward, I hope, toward the light.”

1 Samuel 31:4, the Death of Saul

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 in Bible Commentary | 0 comments

Saul said to his armor-bearer, “Draw your sword and run me through, or these uncircumcised fellows will come and run me through and abuse me.” But his armor-bearer was terrified and would not do it; so Saul took his own sword and fell on it.

//Here, we have one of the great murder mysteries of the Bible. In this battle, the Philistines routed Israel and wounded Saul. So Saul and his armor bearer, seeing how it would end, committed suicide. In fact, all of Saul’s sons and fighting men died in the battle. None lived to tell the story of Saul’s death.

Ah, but one man did live to tell. An Amalekite, an enemy of Israel, of a nation Saul utterly destroyed in battle. At least, the Bible says every one of the Amalekites were slain by Saul, but one must have survived. One that was, apparently, loyal to David. He straightaway brought word to David of how Saul was really killed:

“I happened to be on Mount Gilboa,” the young man said, “and there was Saul, leaning on his spear, with the chariots and riders almost upon him. When he turned around and saw me, he called out to me, and I said, ‘What can I do?’ “He asked me, ‘Who are you?’ “‘An Amalekite,’ I answered. “Then he said to me, ‘Stand over me and kill me! I am in the throes of death, but I’m still alive.’ “So I stood over him and killed him, because I knew that after he had fallen he could not survive. And I took the crown that was on his head and the band on his arm and have brought them here to my lord.”

How is it that this enemy of Saul, a man who should have an intense hatred for Israel, is loyal to David? How is it that David, who fought at least once on the side of the Philistines against Saul, now finds himself dismayed to hear Saul has died in a battle with the Philistines? And what does David do when the Amalekite begins telling his story? David quickly has him silenced, killing him as well. Is the story that has been placed on the Amalekite’s lips any more plausible than the suicide legend?

Oh, what a tangled web! Saul’s death is a murder mystery that may never be unraveled.

Book review: Refracted

Monday, May 9, 2011 in Book Reviews | 1 comment

by Sheila Deeth

★★★★★

What a fun read! I smiled the whole time … about an hour. Yeah, pretty short, but memories of the story will linger much longer. If you find yourself describing the book to someone, adjectives will spill forth like the colors of the rainbow. My suspicion, however, is that each reader’s experience will be different … your adjectives will not match mine.

Delightful. Colorful. Fanciful. Meaningful. It’s a very “full” 53 pages. Half the book is a dreamlike romp through familiar Biblical territory, and at its midpoint I felt momentary disillusionment to uncover the machinery that made the magic within the book “real,” but I was just as quickly swallowed up again into its emerging sci-fi plot line.

I dare say no more, because the beauty of the book is in its unfolding wonder, and further hints will dampen your reading experience. Yes, it’s religious, on several levels really, but the setting (which eventually tends more toward New Age than Judeo-Christian) adds flavor … and leaves you thinking about the role of religion in our lives.

(available in electronic form only)

2 Peter 3:15-16, Ignorant and Unstable People

Sunday, May 8, 2011 in Bible Commentary | 6 comments

Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

//Unlike 1 Peter, the epistle of 2 Peter was not widely accepted or even known in the early church. The first definitive reference to 2 Peter is in the third century. Church fathers in the third and fourth century gradually came to believe it was written by the apostle Peter, and thus it found its way into the canon of the Bible.

But could it have really been written by Peter? The letter is an explosive denouncement of heresy, and the wicked teachers who introduced that heresy. The end of the world hadn’t arrived as expected, which encouraged scoffers, and worse yet, people who wrongly interpreted scripture to imagine that, when Jesus and Paul promised immediate fulfillment, they meant immediate fulfillment. Such a denouncement of heresy would hardly need proclaiming before, say, the war of 70 A.D.

To bolster his opinion, the writer of the epistle refers to “our dear brother Paul” and the “other Scriptures.” In other words, by the time of 2 Peter’s writing, Paul’s letters had already been collected and distributed as scripture! Much of 2 Peter is borrowed from the book of Jude. It is, basically, a rewrite and expansion of Jude. Jude may have been written near the end of the first century; if so, 2 Peter was likely penned in the early second century.

This letter certainly could not have been written by Peter himself, who died, according to tradition, around the year 67 A.D.

Book review: Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene

Saturday, May 7, 2011 in Book Reviews | 0 comments

by Bart D. Ehrman

★★★★★

This may be my favorite among Ehrman books. It details the legends of three of the most important followers of Jesus in the Bible.

Few of the stories told are considered historical; even stories that derive from the Bible are not considered literally true by Ehrman. For example, many of our stories come from the book of Acts, and about a quarter of Acts is made up of speeches by its characters, mostly Peter and Paul. But the speeches all sound about the same; Peter sounds like Paul and Paul sounds like Peter. This may seem a bit odd, given the fact that Peter was an illiterate peasant who spoke Aramaic, whereas Paul was a well-educated, highly astute author raised in a Greek-speaking environment. Ehrman handles these situations with characteristic bluntness: “When we examine what Peter is alleged to have preached, we are in effect seeing what different authors imagined him to have said—which may come down to the same thing as seeing what authors would have wanted him to say.”

Nevertheless, even knowing that nearly all we have about these characters is legend, the legends are fascinating and the book is fun to read. Ehrman takes a shot at unraveling which epistles are written by these three (a few of the Pauline epistles is all) and he dives into a number of second-century non-canonical Christian writings, presenting his findings in three parts: One part for each character. The section on Peter is absolutely fascinating; the section on Paul is argumentative, and not so original (Ehrman’s usual chip on the shoulder regarding pseudonymous writing makes an appearance); and the section on Mary will leave you bewildered, definitely thinking differently about her and the role of women in early Christianity. Ehrman puts it like this:

“The Christian religion is founded on the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. And it appears virtually certain that it was Mary Magdalene of all people, an otherwise unknown Galilean Jewish woman of means, who first propounded this belief. It is not at all far fetched to claim that Mary was the founder of Christianity.”

1 Kings 7:23, Tyre Pi

Friday, May 6, 2011 in Bible Commentary | 0 comments

He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.

Book review: Noah’s Flood

Thursday, May 5, 2011 in Book Reviews | 1 comment

by William Ryan & Walter Pitman

★★★★

“We need not try to make history out of legend, but we ought to assume that beneath much that is artificial or incredible there lurks something of fact.” –C. Leonard Wooley, 1934

With this quote, the authors set the tone for the story of their exploration of the Black Sea basin. 7,500 years ago, their research determined, rising sea levels on the Mediterranean broke through a barricade and plunged into the Black Sea with a force 400 times greater than that of Niagara Falls, its thundering sound carrying at least 60 miles. Could this event have spawned the flood legends we read of in so many cultures, including the Hebrew story of Noah and the Ark? “The details given in the inscriptions describing the Flood leave no doubt that both the Bible and the Babylonian story describe the same event, and the Flood becomes the starting point for the modern world in both histories.” Could it be that people driven from their villages spread advances in agriculture and irrigation throughout Mesopotamia?

Because of the impact these flood stories have had on various cultures for so long, this is a fascinating topic for me. For the most part, the research of Ryan and Pitman has been well-received, and the general theory (if not all the details) deserves to be treated seriously. More recent research validates that a sudden flood event may indeed have occurred as suggested, though perhaps not at the magnitude described in Ryan and Pitman’s hypothesis.

The writing is interesting, and it reads like a scientific detective story. This isn’t a new book; it’s now thirteen years old, and you can pick it up used at Amazon for pennies.

Genesis 1:27, On What Day Was Adam Created?

Wednesday, May 4, 2011 in Bible Commentary | 77 comments

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

//On what day did God create Adam? Anybody know? Anybody?

And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Problem is, there is no mention whatsoever in this creation story of Adam and Eve. Just the creation of mankind in God’s image, which occurs on the sixth day. The story of the six days of creation ends in Genesis 2:3, and a second creation story begins in verse 2:4. In the second story, God forms Adam “in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” He prepares Adam before any of the plant life, in order to tend the earth he is about to create: “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.”

So, may we assume that Adam was formed on the third day, when God plants grass, and herbs, and fruit trees? But where is Eve?

Back to the second story. Eve comes after the fruit trees, after the animals. Eve makes her appearance from the rib of Adam, but only after Adam rejects all the rest of God’s creation as his “helpmeet.” Eve eats the forbidden fruit, gives it to Adam, their eyes are opened to see their nakedness, and God casts them out of the Garden of Eden. To Eve, God promises, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.”

Which brings us back to the first story, and the creation of mankind. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. We’re still trying to make sense of two legends, still trying to splice them together in a chronological pattern. So who is God speaking to when he says “Let us make man?” It can only be Adam, just after Adam has rejected all the animals as his mate.

“OK, Adam, you win, we’ll make mankind in our own image.”

So, God forms Eve, Eve seduces Adam, they get kicked out of the Garden and have all the world to play in with their new-found nakedness and knowledge. Along come children. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply.

Whaddaya think?

Book review: Megabelt

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 in Book Reviews | 0 comments

by Nick May

★★★★

Is this humor? I stopped laughing twenty pages into this short little story. It hit too close to home.

Megabelt, the book’s title, forms a fusion between the words “mega church” and “Bible belt,” but by the time you reach the end of the book, the title grows pregnant with meaning, like an antichristic leviathan rising out of the sea in the Midwest. I didn’t grow up in the Bible belt, but I may as well have. I attended annual church conventions instead of summer church camps. I attended nondenominational home churches instead of Methodist buildings. But I relate.

The book traces the growing years of its main character, Gil, from a young teen through his early twenties, in an atmosphere where church trumps all and pervades every part of life. As Gil matures, he struggles to make sense of his Christian environment, simultaneously seeking escape while holding on for dear life. The autobiographical intent is rather transparent, rendering its third-person portrayal rather artificial, but by the end of the book, I got the point. Gil (or Nick, if you prefer) is Everyboy growing up in the Bible belt, just as one of the book’s characters is named Everyman.

Troubling as the book becomes, it’s almost impossible to avoid reminiscing as you read. The humor grows from funny to forced to sour until, finally, a bomb shell is dropped at the book’s climax. Is there no escape from the Megabelt?

Genesis 9:29, Noah’s Death

Monday, May 2, 2011 in Bible Commentary | 3 comments

Altogether, Noah lived 950 years, and then he died.

// Have you ever considered how long these people really lived? Like most of the first ten generations, Noah lived just under 1,000 years. With the traditional dating of the Bible, this means that when Noah died in the year 1935 BC: