Rob Bell – What Is the Bible?

I have just finished reading Rob Bell’s latest book, titled What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything. I really loved it and I think every evangelical should read it. The book does not say anything new, nor does the author claim to do so. It merely presents at a popular level what theologians and Bible scholars have said about it in the last hundred years.

You may ask, what is then so important about it? Here is my answer.

Consumed by Consumerism

Consumed by Consumerism.

Christian Smith, and others, on consumerism in the American society. Here are the conclusions:

1. There is a lack of serious thinking about the good life and about consumerism — personal and environmental impacts.
2. The vast majority of emerging adults have imbibed and are carrying on a consumerist life.
3. A substantial minority sees problems but isn’t sure what they can do about it.
4. Few are seriously critical of consumerism.
5. The future for a change about consumerism is not, then, coming from emerging adults. It may, but it is not yet.
6. They are individualists and consumerists.
7. They are mirroring back to their culture and their parents and their educators what they got from them: this study, then, indicts American culture as both consumerist and vacuous at leading others away from a consumerist life.

An Academic Auto-da-Fé – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

An Academic Auto-da-Fé – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Christian Smith on Mark Regnerus being bullied in the academic world (oh, the disgusting manners of political correctness – ‘American communism’, as someone called it) for publishing the results of a research which appears to argue that children of homosexual couples have more psychological problems that children growing on normal (heterosexual) families.

Jesus Creed » Jesus Creed Books of the Year

Jesus Creed » Jesus Creed Books of the Year.

Scot McKnight has declared Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible as his Jesus Creed Book of the Year.

This is the next book on my reading list.

At the link above you will also find an interesting list of 2011 books that, according to Scot. deserve our attention.

Here is his presentation of the Smith book:

Christian Smith on his Book ‘The Bible Made Impossible’

(I thank Scot McKnight for this link.)

Here is the link to Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

You may watch below the other four parts of this video presentation.

Biblicism – friend or foe?

Scot McKnight summarises in a recent post on his blog the main argument in Christian Smith’s book called Bible Made Impossible, The: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, which he describes as ‘the biggest challenge evangelicalism has to face’ because the author ‘argues that what we believe about the Bible (biblicism) is undermined by how we actually read the Bible and how we practice the Bible’.Quite an indictment, isn’t it?

Here is the gest of the argument, accoding to McKnight:

1. He sees biblicism in evangelicalism (not all of it) and in most charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity.
2. Biblicism involves belief in the Bible’s exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability.

Have Evangelicals Made the Bible Impossible? (a sociologist says “yes”)

a time to tear down | A Time to Build Up » Have Evangelicals Made the Bible Impossible? (a sociologist says “yes”).

You absolutely have to read this if you are an Evangelical.