King is sailing, they say

I had intended to do several thorough book reviews on this site, but I read the books faster then I can write the reviews.  The task of writing reviews is just daunting to me, so I am going to quickly review every book I have read in the last year, mostly from researching and trying to make sense of my beliefs and Christianity.  Some of them are just indirectly related, and others are way off the topic.  After looking at this list, it is interesting how my faith has changed and how that developed from the books I read.  Yeah, I tend to go for the geekish stuff, I admit.  I guess I should explain that I am beginning this list before I started overtly questioning Christianity.  Here are the books I read in the last year or so in the rough order that I read them: 

The Source by James Michener.  I am not a huge Michener fan.  Hawaii is story-telling perfection, but most of his other work leaves me a little dry.  Not so with The Source.  This is historical fiction at its finest.  Michener weaves together the history of a tiny fictional village, just east of Akko in modern day Israel.  We see what might have happened in pre-history, the days of Abraham, Joshua, David, Jesus, the Diaspora, The Romans, the Crusades, the Muslim occupation, etc.  The only Biblical character that appears is King David, and it ain’t exactly a complementary portrayal either.  The only flaws are the short interludes which develop a lame love story between two modern archeologists.  Skim or skip that stuff; you won’t miss anything.  Lots of history of the Jewish people, lots of great story telling – very long – but I could not put this thing down. 

Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines by David Bain.  Bain, a writer and historian, travels to the Philippines and retraces (actually backpacks) the routes of Frederick Funston and Emilio Aguinaldo taken during the Philippine-American war.   It provides very interesting insight into the US Pacific expansion during the turn of the century – a historical period sorely neglected.  It also shows how this war and the American conquest of the Philippines changed much of the current Philippine culture.  I learned nothing new about Jesus in this book, but highly recommended. 

John Adams by David McCullough – I picked this up because I was curious about the infancy of our nation.  John Adams was a President, vice-president, ambassador, and framer of the constitution, so studying his life fit the bill.  I also learned that Jesus had very little impact on his beliefs.  Highly recommended. 

Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther by Roland Bainton.  Not much of his life is detailed here, more of his thought.  You *really* have to be interested in theology to get through this.  It is unbelievable how much power the Catholic church wielded at one time, and how much corruption was involved.  I learned that Jesus had a fair amount of influence on Martin’s life. Recommended if the dry academic style of writing is to your taste. 

Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence by Mark Antonacci – another in the “I started as a skeptic, but became a believer after intense research” category.  The book went through great lengths to show how the Shroud of Turin was the burial cloth of Jesus.  In the end, I did not buy the theory, but I still learned about the fascinating world of medieval relics, which is always fun.  The book included an appendix showing the manuscript evidence for the historicity of the New Testament, almost straight out of a Josh McDowell book!  What that had to do with the Shroud of Turin I don’t know.  Maybe he should have just dropped the subtlety and included the Sinner’s Prayer after the “Evidence by Pollen” section.  A little disingenuous, perhaps?  I admit a fascination for it anyway; I think the Shroud is the most ingenious hoax ever. Recommended if you dig medieval conspiracy theories.

 Let the Trumpet Sound by Stephen Oates.  I picked this up to learn more about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.  I ended up being convicted of our modern Church’s own infantile pietism.  I began to wonder if there was anything more to our own Christian faith than was meeting the eye.  Highly recommended. See my full review here and here 

A History of God by Karen Armstrong.  Technically, this is a history of monotheism, but I get her point.  This book shows how the notion of God changes as mankind’s needs change.  Much of the evolution of God can be seen in our own Bible, where the personal God who could sit and dine with Abraham in a tent, slowly morphed into an awesome transcendence with named intermediary angels in Daniel’s day.  It traces how our scientific discoveries, cultural and philosophical changes through history forced us to revision how God must be.  And our notion of God is still evolving through the present day.  I had always thought there was more to religious history then we were led to believe, but I never confessed that – not out loud to my church buddies anyway.  This book got me curious and a little hungry for more.  OK, I confess I skipped the chapters that described the evolution of the Islamic Allah.  I may get back to them later.  Recommended. 

Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman.  We Christians always assume that the Church started with the teachings of Jesus, was initiated as pure during the Upper Room scene in Acts 2, then gradually devolved into factions of heresy.  We Christians assume a long golden thread of true Christians have been around since those first days, but all heresies branched off from there.  Ehrman shows that Orhtodox Christianity had formed from many sources and many traditions, and there were diverse forms of Christianity since the beginning.  I devoured this book in two days.  I had never heard a single fact from this book taught in our churches, yet the evidence for the histories of these lost beliefs were all around – just the mere existence of all the non-canonical writings should tell us that there were all kinds of beliefs back then.  I checked this out of the library with a companion book, ‘Lost Scriptures’ which I read only portions of.  Seriously convicting and a blow to my faith – where did our Christianity really come from?  Highly recommended. 

All the Messianic Prophicies of Scripture by Herbert Lockyer.  I had always relied on Messianic Prophecy to bolster my belief in the Bible.  I thought the fact that Jesus fulfilled all those ancient prophecies added great evidence to God’s planning, directing, or forknowing history.  So I retreated to this book, taken from a conservative Christian perspective, to study Prophecy again.  First, the book was terribly written.  I would get a sentence or two describing how Jesus fleeing into Egypt fulfilled a verse out of Hosea, followed by a paragraph of ‘Glory be to God’.  Please, just the facts, ma’am.  Second, very little scripture is actually quoted in this book, so I took a long look at the prophecies themselves.  I always knew they were out of context, but after studying the Bible and reading Lockyer I realized just how out of context they really were!  It hit me that it made more sense if somebody could have just easily written the story of Jesus from many disjointed Old Testament verses.  Which brings me to my third criticism – Lockyer contrives all sorts of Old Testament passages and makes them prophecy!  For example – Exodus 27:16 describes the court of the Tabernacle which has 4 pillars.  This predicts the 4 separate Gospels of our Lord Jesus Christ.  There are 3 spaces between the 4 pillars, representing not only the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, but also – check this – Jesus’ Threefold Title of Lord Jesus Christ, and that Jesus was the Way, the Truth and the Life.  The book is filled to the brim with sort of nonsense – over 500 pages of invented contrivances.  Then it hit me.  Lockyer was taking passages from the Old Testament and turning it into Messianic Prophecy.  Isn’t it also possible that the Gospel writers did the same thing?  Because I see no stylistic difference between cutting out of context OT passages to paste into a Messiah, ala Lockyer, or cutting out of context OT passages to paste into a Messiah, ala Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  Not recommended unless you want to put your Christian faith into serious jeopardy. 

The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis.  Not a bad book until we get to Lewis’ last three chapters on Hell, Animal Pain and Heaven.  That is when it starts to unravel for me.  Recommended. 

The Case for Christianity by CS Lewis.  Circular reasoning gone haywire.  Not recommended.  See my review here.

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture by Bart Ehrman.  OK, now the doubt is getting heavy.  In this scholarly work, Ehrman shows that the ancient New Testament manuscripts differ significantly from each other, despite what McDowell, et al claim.  This is a slow, thorough and fascinating read (there are portions where Ehrman assumes you read Greek, but it can be read fine if not).  While most of the differences are scribal errors or some such, there are some which can be systematically mapped to different struggles in earliest Christianity.  Ehrman shows how the New Testament may corrupted passages from Adoptionistic, Separationist, Docetic and Patripassianist factions of anti-orthodox Christianity.  I began to really start doubting the validity of my faith.  This Bible was definitely not written the way I had assumed.  Highly recommended.  Best book of the year award. 

Looking for a Miracle by Joe Nickell.  I always enjoy a good debunking of scam artists, especially Televangelists.  This book takes on Fatima, Lourdes, and my favorite Divine miracle – the weeping Madonnas.  I tell you, if the best miracle that God can pull off is making statues cry, then we are truly most hopeless.  Light reading – but mildly recommended. 

Responses to 101 Questions on the Bible by Raymond Brown.  Very good book by a Catholic authority who answers tough Bible questions.  He seemed to want to approach the Bible critically, yet still believe in the virgin birth and immaculate conception as well.  I could not understand how he could have his cake and eat it too.  See my review here. 

The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.  Have you ever heard the Christian cliché, “with every turn of the archeologist’s spade there is more proof that the Bible is true”.  Of course you have.  Apparently that’s not so.  According to Finkelstein and Silbernan’s research, the Exodus never occurred, there was no conquest of Canaan by the Israelites,  and the Kingdom of David and Solomon as presented in the Bible is greatly exaggerated.  A very easy read and heavily illustrated.  Recommended. 

 Right about this time, I started HeIsSailing .  Like every other Christian, I have always had doubts about my Christian faith, but ignored them and relied on pure faith.  These books made me realize that I needed to take those doubts out and address them.  To stay fair, I am trying to pick books that represent a balance, and reasoned facts and arguments from both sides, not just editorializing.  Well, I tried to pick them that way, but sometimes I did not read what I was expecting. 

Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller.  Trash.  I was too kind in my original review, but it was recommended to me by a Christian friend whom I trust.  I was assured that it would put my doubts in Jesus to ease.  It just got me upset.  Is this the best that Modern Christian authors can do?  This is this trite, infantile Christianity that I am trying to escape from!  Worst book of the year award.  Even worse than Lockyer. 

Twilight of the Gods – Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible by David Penchansky.  Fascinating.  I had always read the old testament with a monotheistic mindset.  This book dares to question 2500 years of tradition and shows how the old testament is filled with polytheism.  This was not my favorite book of the year, but I think it was the most paradigm shattering.  The polytheism begins in Genesis, where the Garden of Eden makes actually makes sense as mythology involving a pantheon of gods.  The sections on the Psalms and Proverbs were particularly interesting.  There are Psalms blatently include many gods, and the English translations have hidden this quite well.  Proverbs contains a personified goddess of wisdom, a daughter of YHVH, that may have been the precursor to the Greek notion of Sophia.  Ever wonder why Lucifer, a Greek word, is left in Greek when the rest of the Old Testament is translated back into a Hebrew Text?  Mindblowing – so is this Bible just mythology after all?  Like every other ancient religious belief?  My Christian belief is taking a nosedive.  Things are not as they once seemed. 

The Formation of the Christian Bible by Hans von Campenhausen – more than you ever wanted to know about very early Christian history.  This book is scholarly and somewhat conservative, which I liked for a balance.  It covered the early struggles that Christians had with Marcionites and Gnostics, the Law and its place in Christianity, the authorship of the New Testament books and  the concept of Canon and the struggles to define it.  The history ends about the time of Origen, before the Canon is fully solidified.  This history confirmed for me much of the huge diversity of Christian belief in the earliest days as I read from Bart Ehrman.  Recommended, but be patient and put your thinking cap on. 

It was here that I read two books by authors I was told by my Calvary Chapel pastor to avoid. 

Out of my Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer.  I have been quoting Schweitzer a lot lately, and that is because I have added him to my list of heroes.  Born in modern
Eastern France, then Germany I think, Schweitzer was a young church organist and theologian.  He viewed Jesus as sort of an apocalypic radical who thought the world would end during his own lifetime or shortly after.  All Jesus’ preaching of selling all one’s possessions was due to the fact that Jesus envisioned the Kingdom of God coming very quickly.  Despite these liberal views on Christianity, he was so moved by Jesus’ moral example that he enrolled into medical school to become a missionary and doctor in Lambaréné Africa.  It was there, and as a prisoner during WWI, that he developed what he believed was mankind’s greatest calling, what he called the Philosophy of the Reverence for Human Life.  The book’s story ends around 1935, so the last 30 years of his life are never recorded.  The writing is a little stiff, and not exactly a page turner, but I really enjoyed the thinking of a Liberal Christian.  Recommended. 

Why Christianity must Change or Die by Bishop John Shelby Spong.  Spong’s book was liberating.  Spong argues that Fundamentalist Christianity has put the Bible into a stranglehold, suppressing further insight and interpretation.  He condemns the Christian community’s stance on homosexuality, and repression of women’s rights, and blames that attitude on strict literalist interpretation of the Bible.  I read the book, and marveled at this Episcopalian bishop’s audacity, and inwardly agreed with most every word he said.  I wanted to say these things as a Christian, but did not have the nerve to disagree with my dogma.  Truly liberating, but I can also see why my old pastor warned his congregation about Spong.  My one complaint is that while he thoroughly deconstructed the Bible, he never built up a theology from it that he did believe in.  Describe the Christianity that you envision, Bishop Spong!  What is it based on?  Recommended. 

The entire year has also been filled with re-reading large chunks of the NASB Bible, but without the lens of inerrancy to filter it.  It is a whole new book to me – and you can read about some of that in my articles.  I have also been reading some related articles off the internet, but I have to watch it there and practice my “Gift of Discernment”.  I have found a lot of good stuff, but a lot of trash – from all ends of the theistic spectrum. 

What am I reading right now?  The Orgins of Christianity – a Critical Approach, edited by Joseph Hoffmann (heavy reading);  The Fingerprint of God, by Hugh Ross (light reading) 

In the hopper for future reading:  On the Genre and Message of Revelation by Bruce Malina;  The Reason Driven Life by Robert Price;  Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen