Anglopressy

So, my friends Daniel and Tonya tagged me on a meme. I don’t know for sure what a meme is, but I’m going to go ahead and post five books or scholars that had the most immediate or lasting effect on me and how I read the Bible.

1. N.T. Wright. I don’t know if everything he says is correct, but his Resurrection of the Son of God, let me know that I was not crazy for questioning my dispensational background. And he gave me some very important tools to take with me on the journey through scripture by heightening my appreciation for resurrection and much more thorough eschatology. He was also the first person I’d ever come across who made it seem wrong to equate scripture as the only form of divine authority in my life. I re-learned from him that I serve Jesus, and not scripture. It never looks the same again after you realize that.

2. Who were the early Israelites and where did the come from? William Dever’s largely laborious and fact-heavy book on archaeology also helped me walk away from something. I had always been told that all things were equal when it came to scripture, though not in those exact words. That if the deluge of Genesis was proved to be false, then the whole faith was a wash, and that we were to be pitied most. Dever, a lapsed fundamentalist turned lapsed Jew, showed me that I needed to freshen my perspective on scripture with a little less inerrantist sloganeering and little more imagination.

3. Walter Brueggemann. I think the first shot fired across the bow of my fundamentalist frame of mind came from his An Introduction to the Old Testament. It was in that work that I was exposed to the idea that facts do not always work in the interest of truth. After that I realized that I ought to stop reading the Bible in search of fact after fact with which I could construct a “Biblical world-view”.

4. Hermeneutics by Henry Virkler. Quite simply this book exposed to the very concept of reading and understanding scripture. It may not be the best, but it had more effect on my understanding of scripture than anything up to that point. Possibly even still.

5. Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat. This is a fantastic book with an extremely lame title. I almost didn’t read it because I thought it was going to be some silly and insulting book about the Christian life that insulted its young readers because of its daring to spoon feed them what someone who is not them with poorly written nonsense. Needless to say, I was wrong. This book brings to life the words of scripture veiled by time and distance, in the world of the here and now. And it uses scripture to bring to life the world of here and now. It was in Walsh and Keesmaat’s book that I realized that good, sturdy intellect could be applied to scripture and then brought into the world of pastoral concerns. It inspired to not hide my light under a basket.

I’m not tagging anybody, because no one really reads this. If I get a request I may change my mind. Otherwise, that’s all for now.

Grace and Peace,

Jared