I have just completed another of the exciting books I bought in order to give away, but this one I’ve read first, since I didn’t dare give it to anyone before having read it first.
“The Bible Tells Me So…” by Peter Enns.
The purpose of this book is to suggest how to read the bible without being bound to treating it either as a 21st century history textbook, or as a legal textbook.
The author goes about challenging a specific event in the Old Testament’s accounts of Israel’s history, and in so doing, challenging the 21st Century athiest’s interpretation that the God of Israel is a monster, and thus cannot be true.
Interestingly, while the author references “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins (which I will review in another post), there is a slightly bizarre similarity in the structure of the two books.
Another similarity I noted while reading this, was that at some points in the book, it was almost like reading “The Da Vinci Code”, and that an almighty conspiracy was being revealed. Thankfully, the writing style is a lot better…
Given all that, the book finishes what it set out to do, and the author is (given what he’s trying to do) extremely reverent for what he considers the Bible to be – a Holy Scripture – but not a factual history or a book of clear and consistent rules.
The final result of me reading this, is that the Bible has just moved up to the top my (long) list of books to read!