All right, I goofed. Chapter 7 is not the so-called Boring Chapter. That would be chapter 8 which is a little boring. I am not at all certain this material deserved a whole chapter. It basically re-iterates that the words in the Bible are meaningless unless lived. Got it!
One thing chapter 8 does do is introduce another McKnightian tortured metaphor. This one pictures the Gospel as a water slide with one wall being the Bible, another wall being Tradition (trusted mentors?) and the water being... wait for it... the Holy Spirit. If you knock down one of those walls you fall off the water slide! Now, first off, a water slide doesn't really have "walls". It is typically molded as an open pipe. Next, the only experience most of has with people falling off water slides is reading about tragic accidents in the newspaper. This aspect distracted me from what I assume is McKnight's point: keeping a balance of forces in following the Gospel NOT bringing up images of bloody teenagers being loaded into ambulances. I guess the water/Holy Spirit carries you forward in this analogy. What happens if you pee in the pool at the bottom? :0
Two more observations: 1) Scot McKnight is a Paul guy, not a Jesus guy. I am leery of Paul guys. 2) McKnight seems to accept the tradition authorship of every book in the Bible. Paul wrote Colossians and 1 Timothy. Jesus' brother wrote James. Moses wrote Leviticus. Never so much as an "alleged to have written" or "traditionally attributed to." I treat people like this as having completely shut down there critical faculties until shown otherwise (I'm not a complete curmudgeon - yet)
The next chapter starts to examine in detail how we pick and choose which parts of the Bible we are going to obey. This bit was the reason I picked the book up in the first place. Upward and onward!
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
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I know this is from last May, so late to the game...
"McKnight seems to accept the tradition authorship of every book in the Bible."
I noticed that too. While McKnight uses arguments internal to the bible to argue later in the book for women's rights, he never says, "There is good evidence this is a later insertion to the bible, which might make its authoritativeness questionable."
But not only does he not make that argument, he never even references it in passing. And I am sure he is aware of the arguments, and I would not be at all surprised if he agrees with them.
So my guess is that he felt that arguments questioning traditional authorship would only fall on deaf ears for more traditional readers, so he did not use them. Which in a way I can appreciate. But at the same time, I think the issues of authorship are really much stronger arguments for egalitarianism than the ones McKnight actually chose to use.
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