The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate
by John H. Walton
InterVarsity Press, 2009
192 pages (paperback)
Amazon.com
Thales of Miletus, a mid-6th century pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, said the world was created from water. Fast-forwarding several centuries, the writer of the New Testament’s Second Epistle of Peter reminded his readers that God formed the Earth “out of water” (2 Pet. 3:5). Undoubtedly, Second Peter is referencing cosmic waters of Genesis 1, rather than Thales, but many scholars have wondered about the ancient cosmology that starts with water. John H. Walton’s thin, but important book, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate helps bring questions like these into focus. (more…)
Philosophy Bites is always one of my favorite podcasts. In this recent podcast, Don Cupitt argues for Jesus as a philosopher. His argument finds its basis in the discussion over the Jesus of history versus the Christ of theology. If first-century Christians painted Jesus with their own brush, is Cupitt doing the same? Does it matter?
Listen to the podcast here.
Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach
by W. Randolph Tate
Hendrickson Publishers, (3rd Edition) 2008
380 pages (hardcover)
Powell’s Books
Amazon.com
Finding a decent hermeneutics text for introductory courses in biblical interpretation is difficult. Some texts can be either too thorough for the first year student, too narrow on methodology to give them a good overview, or too polemical. As for the last one, hermeneutical texts which begin with an inerrantists’ theology tend to resist helpful tools, like source criticism or postmodern considerations, like reader-response criticism. W. Randolph Tate’s Biblical Interpretation argues for a balanced, integrated approach to reading the text. His textbook, divided into units and complete with questions for the reader/student to ask, looks at the world behind the text, the world within the text, and the world in front of the text, and then argues for an integrated approach that is a modified communication theory of interpretation. “If the interpreter takes any of these interpretative thrusts in isolation (i.e. author-centered, text-centered, or reader-centered), consciously or unconsciously excluding the other two,” writes Tate, “hermeneutics becomes an unbalanced discipline.” (267) Tate’s communication model rests on the idea of a dialogue between the text and the reader. I’ve found this text, with its overviews of various methods—such as form criticism, postcolonial criticism, narrative criticism—and their relative offerings to the process of interpretation to be extremely helpful for the first-year student, but not overwhelming. It also allows the professor, who may use a communication approach, but emphasize a certain method more than others, to write it into his or her course with some ease. Having integrated this text into my yearly hermeneutics course, I highly recommend it.
A.C. Grayling on Paul Murdin’s Secrets of the Universe: How We Discovered the Cosmos:
Jeremiah Horrocks and his friend William Crabtree were ecstatic when they observed the transit of Venus on 24 November 1639. Horrocks had predicted the date of the transit by carefully applying Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables of planetary motion, published twelve years before. The two amateur astronomers watched the black dot of Venus inch its way across the burning image of the sun projected onto a card in Crabtree’s attic. Horrocks described his friend as standing ‘rapt in contemplation’ for a long time, unable to move, ’scarcely trusting his senses, through excess of joy.’ The emotion he and Crabtree felt is one well known to science: the exhilaration of securing empirical proof of theory. Continue reading at Barnes and Noble Review
Publishers Weekly is reporting on a hard-working YA novelist, David Michael Slater, who finds himself in a difficult place: on the one hand, people are finally talking about his books, on the other, they find them to be heretical:
In the first installment, The Book of Nonsense (2008), the twins uncover secrets about their own family history while also getting hints of a larger cosmic drama, learning about a secret language that God may have used to create the world. In The Book of Knowledge, they follow clues to the original Garden of Eden and discover that the record of primordial events recorded in Genesis may not tell the whole story. Read the whole story at PW…
There is a loud subset of American Christianity that reads Scripture, particularly Genesis 1, as if it is intended to be a science text. Yes, I know. This is not news. I mention it, however, because I was raised with this literal reading of Genesis 1 and spent many of my younger years looking for the scientific evidence to back it up. While I abandoned that position many years ago, the discussion of Genesis 1 remains an interesting one for me, though for very different reasons. When one presumes a certain definition of historicity in Genesis, one is subjecting Scripture to an expectation that rips it entirely out of its Mesopotamian context. With some irony, those fundamentalists who warn others about making Scripture subordinate to modern science, are themselves subjecting Scripture to a modern definition of historicity. From my perspective, (more…)
Inside Higher Ed wants to start a book club. Read about it here.
