Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

PAGAN CHRISTIANITY: EXPLORING THE ROOTS OF OUR CHURCH PRACTICES  

When God Talks Back:  Understanding the American Evangelical    Relationship with God By      T.M. Luhrmann Reviewed by       Geoffrey W. Sutton We are His portion and He is our prize, Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes. If grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking; So Heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss, And my heart turns violently inside of my chest. I don’t have time to maintain these regrets When I think about the way that He loves us: John Mark McMillan (2005) I quoted a portion of the McMillan song because it is one of those subgenres of Christian music dubbed "Jesus is my boyfriend." If you observe Pentecostal youth singing with eyes closed and arms raised and swaying you get a real sense of a love relationship between a young woman and a personified God. The idea of a relationship with God is not new, but the focus on a present intensely personal speaking relationship with God as a widespread Christian mo

CHRISTOBIOGRAPHY:  MEMORY, HISTORY,  AND  THE RELIABILITY OF  THE GOSPELS  Author: Craig S. Keener Reviewed by  Geoffrey W. Sutton It’s the second word in the title, memory , that first grabbed my attention. Then I noticed the word, reliability . Like many clinicians, I’ve administered many memory tests and discovered an incredible range of memory capacity. I've tested preschool children and senior adults. I used the best available tests covering a wide range of human memory. And, as a Christian thinker about integration, I wondered about the scant attention given to the role of memory and reliability in understanding the interplay between biblical texts and psychological science. So, I come to Keener’s latest cornucopia with considerable curiosity. Craig S. Keener is professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary . Together, his works have sold over a million copies. He describes his scholarly vantage point as to the right of center. A scholar to the l

A Review of Marcus Borg’s  Reading the Bible Again for the First Time :  Taking the Bible Seriously but Not literally . By Geoffrey W. Sutton   My earliest memory of a conflict between the Bible and the observable world happened sometime in late childhood when I learned that the moon was not a light as it plainly said in my King James Version of Genesis 1:16. It was downhill from there. Like many of my friends, we learned a near literal interpretation of the Bible from parents with a limited education and churches where teachers shared a blend of fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Their application of select biblical laws, commandments, and rules to contemporary life seemed strangely arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive. I should like to think Marcus Borg’s, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time , would have saved me considerable puzzlement—and likely some distress. I’ll say more later but first, a summary of Reading the Bible Again for the First Time . ****

THE MORAL TEACHING   OF PAUL SELECTED ISSUES 3RD EDITION      BY VICTOR PAUL FURNISH Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton The Moral Teaching of Paul is one of the books I cited in A House Divided.   This third edition comes some 30 years after the first edition and aims to expand our understanding of the sociocultural context of Paul's Ministry related to contemporary moral issues. Before discussing the moral topics, Furnish reminds readers in Chapter 1 about Paul's authorship, which at this point appears firm for Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Disputed works include Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy. The disputed works have been variously dated in a range from the 70s to the early second century. The importance of identifying Paul's works is a matter of emphasis thus, Furnish focuses attention on the undisputed texts to understand Paul's moral theology. Furnish advises readers

“The tribal differences that erupt into public controversy typically concern sex (e.g., gay marriage, gays in the military, the sex lives of public officials) and death at the margins of life (e.g., abortion, physician-assisted suicide, the use of embryonic stem cells in research). That such issues are moral issues is surely not arbitrary. Sex and death are the gas pedals and brakes of tribal growth. ... What’s less clear is why different tribes hold different views about sex, life, and death, and why some tribes are more willing than others to impose their views on outsiders (11).” —Joshua Greene ***** MORAL TRIBES: EMOTION, REASON, AND THE GAP BETWEEN US AND THEM by Joshua Greene, New York: Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 422. ISBN: 978-1-101-63867-5 Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton, Springfield, MO ***** I read Greene’s Moral Tribes in 2014. That book along with Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and moral controversies in politics in religion over same-sex marriage, prom