I hadn't really intended to let a few reflections on previously bought books grow into a series - but I now find it personally intriguing trying to trace some of my footprints through books bought years ago because they were significant at the time - and now might not be, or might still be. Apologies for what is therefore becoming self-indulgence!
1994 Joel Green (ed) Jesus of Nazareth Lord and Christ.
This is the sixtieth birthday collection of essays in honour of Howard Marshall. Thirty essays, and only one by a woman - Ruth Edwards, herself a careful, unassuming but deeply learned New Testament scholar, and dedicated Episcopal priest. But there are some important essays here - some of them heavy going. Such essays date quite quickly, and some of them have already been overtaken by scholarship, sometimes by the essay writer's own developing thought. But most of Howard's main areas of biblical interest (which are remarkably wide) are represented. I value the book for reasons of personal friendship, and because I think Howard Marshall's contribution to New Testament scholarship and to Evangelical credibility in the academy, is in the same tradition, and on the same scale, as his mentor F. F. Bruce.
1995 S. M. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel: You are My Witnesses.
My view of the world, of faith, and of how faith and tragedy combine in the deep moments of personal and moral life, is long indebted to these two Jewish thinkers. Heschel (is that not a wonderful face on the book cover?) was a remarkable thinker, whose work on the prophets and the pathos of God represents some of the most profound theology and humane reflection I have ever read. It deeply influenced Moltmann. Elie Wiesel (pictured below) is a holocaust survivor whose writing is dedicated to ensuring that the world never forgets the story of mechanised evil and genocidal hatred that befell central Europe. Wiesel's two volume autobiorgaphy, All Rivers Run to the Sea, and The Sea is Never Full, I read while on holiday in Yorkshire - they are a remarkable account of a human life lived in the shadow of great evil, and refusing to allow his humanity to be eclipsed by the memories of such moral horror.
Friedman's book examines the life values of these two Jewish thinkers, one a devout philosopher, the other an agnostic novelist, both of them men whose writing glows with morally generated power. Reading this I was conscious of two people, whose life experience and intellectual legacies require those of us who are Christians to read them humbly, and thank God for their capacity to construe and construct a worldview lacking in that embittered hostility that inevitably ignites enmity. They represent the ethical genius of Judaism. They are the obvious riposte to those who say religion per se is inevitably the source of violence, hatred and enmity. As a book to commemorate my ordination to Christian ministry, it compelled searching reflection then, as now, on the relationship between God's ancient people, and the Church of Jesus Christ, within the family of faith that traces its genealogy to Abraham. Shalom.
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