The Sacredness of Questioning Everything

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but the title of David Dark's latest book, "The Sacredness of Questioning Everything", was just too alluring for me to pass up. Can a title get any better than that? The rest of the book is living up to the catchy title. I highly recommend this book for its unique combination of theological inquiry, political satire, and provocative cultural humor. How many books can you think of that link quotes from Augustine to Jon Stewart, Aquinas to Stephen Colbert, and a Muslim imam to South Park?

I probably wouldn't agree with all of David Dark's answers, but I love his questions. If I have to pick between answers and questions, I'll take good questions every time. If there's a skeptical side to your personality, or if you get frustrated when answers just seem to easy to be true, then you'll like this book too. If you enjoy a good theology discussion and Comedy Central is on your favorite channel list, then this book is likely to become one of your all time favorites. Here are a few of my favorite lines...

“This is how religions work. Devastating criticism of religion is always part of religion. The religiously faithful aren’t just permitted to critique and complain and reform; they’re bound to do as much by religion. Without it, there is no faithfulness.

Of course, when religion won’t tolerate questions, objections, or differences of opinion and all it can do is threaten excommunication, violence, and hellfire, it has an unfortunate habit of producing some of the most hateful people to ever walk the earth.”

"To be conned, after all, is human. To confess to having been conned is an act of awareness. To believe ourselves impervious to cons is to be in denial, to be dangerous, to perhaps have an especially telegenic personality, and in our day, to be uniquely electable to public office."

"If we’re more opposed, for instance, to what we take to be bad language and nude scenes and films about gay people than we are to people being blown up, starved to death, deprived of life-saving medicine, or tortured, our offendedness is out of whack. We have yet to understand the nature of real perversion. We aren’t as deeply acquainted with our religion as we might think."

HT: Zondervan publishing (thanks for sending me a copy of this book to review)

The Orthodox Heretic

Peter Rollins' latest book, "The Orthodox Heretic And Other Impossible Tales", is a treat. Rollins has written 33 short parables along with commentaries on each story. In his usual fashion, his stories leave the listener a bit unsettled. That's what good parables do. These stories not only make you question the easy answers, they make you wonder if you're even asking the right questions.

I've been thinking a lot about parables lately. I had one of the most bizarre conversations of my life, as a friend tried to insist that a parable is a lie if it "didn't really happen". Of course, he missed the whole purpose of telling a parable. Few people would take that absurd approach by interpreting a parable literally, but it does highlight one of the problems with modernity. During the last couple of centuries, mankind has come to understand some amazing things about the universe. Modern knowledge has been a huge benefit to society, but it had a peculiar side effect. The more we "know" about our world, the less we lean on telling stories to translate meaning. We can become slaves to the quest for certainty as we preference facts and devalue stories. Good parables don't simply communicate facts about some historical person or event, they take us on a hypothetical journey and leave us unsatisfied with simplistic answers.

Jesus, Interrupted

Bart Ehrman’s latest book, “Jesus, Interrupted”, may be his best. Ehrman has written several controversial books over the years, but this book does more than sport a controversial title. It dives deeper into the author’s own experience and provides a behind the scenes glimpse into the world of literary criticism. By sharing his own journey, he opened up the world of literary criticism to a wider audience, and he dispelled several of the myths surrounding the discipline. Like his earlier best seller, “Misquoting Jesus”, this latest book includes the healthy doses of biblical criticism that we’ve come to expect from Ehrman. However, this time he went beyond his usual examples of discrepancies between the thousands of early manuscripts. This book continues by investigating the impact of this historical critical method on the big picture. Keeping the talk about discrepancies and errors to one chapter, he had space to dive deeper into topics about early Christianity, the authorship of the New Testament books, the canonization process, and the impact of biblical criticism on theology. One question provides the underlying theme of the book, “why has this information been common knowledge in seminaries around the world for two centuries, yet, so many mainstream Christians today are completely unaware?”

“Scholars of the Bible have made significant progress in understanding the Bible over the past two hundred years, building on archaeological discoveries, advances in our knowledge of the ancient Hebrew and Greek languages in which the books of Scripture were originally written, and deep and penetrating historical, literary, and textual analyses.
…
Yet such views of the Bible are virtually unknown among the population at large. In no small measure this is because those of us who spend our professional lives studying the Bible have not done a good job communicating this knowledge to the general public and because many pastors who learned this material in seminary have, for a variety of reasons, no shared it with their parishioners.”

I enjoyed reading a bit more of Bart Ehrman’s personal story because I think we’ve had similar adventures in faith. I can relate to his early years in a fundamentalist church, his brief period of disenchantment, and his current religious status as something less than “certain”. We don’t exactly agree eye to eye, but mostly, I relate to his infatuation with the Bible. In this book, Ehrman shatters the myth that biblical criticism is an attempt to belittle the bible. His dedication to the Bible comes through. In fact, he concludes with a chapter that makes the case for religious faith entitled “Is Faith Possible?”

My favorite chapter is a discussion of the historical Jesus and a description of the nature of historical studies in general. In this chapter, titled “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord”, Ehrman dismantles the short sighted logic of the famous and often quoted C.S. Lewis argument. Thanks to a more robust understanding of our ancient texts, we now have a fourth option that Lewis was not willing to include. It turns out this forth option, “Legend”, is the most probable answer.

I need to give a big thanks to TheOoze Viral Blogger network for hooking me up with a copy of this book to review.

The Debate Over God's Existence

A great post by Michal Dowd...

"This is not theological rocket science. Theists are right when they insist that God is real and faith (trust) is transformative. Atheists are right when they insist God is imaginary and supernatural claims are fiction. If we do not understand how both of these can be true, we don't understand the evolved nature of the human brain and the metaphorical nature of human language. Arguing whether it was God or evolution that created everything is like debating whether it was Gaia or plate tectonics that created Mount Everest. Such silly and largely unnecessary confusion will remain the norm until we distinguish and value both metaphorical and descriptive language. In the meantime, I'm grateful to Richard Dawkins and the other "new atheists" for bringing this debate front and center. Perhaps in the coming decades we can finally move beyond the mistaken notion that science gives us a meaningless universe and religion is primarily concerned with unnatural (supernatural) entities." - Michael Dowd

...read the entire article at The Evolutionary Times

What is Progressive Faith?

HT: James McGrath