Jim Dean
- If you have a grammatical-historical-normal hermeneutic, and especially if you are dispensational, this series will NOT be your cup of tea. It does provide a mildly interesting alternative way of looking at Gen 1-3 ... the initial arguments make some sense, but then the author gets "married" to those ideas and starts reinterpreting many other parts of the Bible as well. THE MISTAKE that the author makes (imo) is that he presents his "function vs form ... home vs house" understanding AS THE ONLY CORRECT one. He argues that the ones that God used to inscripturate His Word *had to* understand all about what they were writing ... as must have the readers at the time of writing. This is patently false ... we know that many things in the OT were a "mystery" ... only partially or incorrectly understood, until the coming of Christ. He points out that only in the last 100 years have we had access to ancient writings and pictures etc from various false religions, and that those showed what the people understood back then. He says we today MUST KNOW all that perspective to properly understand scripture. This falls apart on simple examination. If that's true, then what about the 2000-3000 years before the last century, but well past those ancient times, when such info was NOT available? Certainly God didn't (oopsie) leave all those people in the dark? Also, this puts God in a box ... it implies that He did NOT account for the later perspectives and insights that came thousands of years AFTER those ancient times. Why couldn't God have structured His revelation so that BOTH ancient and modern believers, and all those in-between, could have understood it properly? And ... regarding form vs function re Gen 1 ... why couldn't BOTH be true? That certainly would be more sensible and orderly than forcing people who, since the Greeks, have had more of an analytical and scientific approach and intellectual structure ... forcing all the people NOT in the ancient mindset ... to dispense with their common understandings. No ... God is bigger than that. And He doesn't try to hide His truth from us, or make it confusing or mystical. I could go on much further and could present refutations of many of the "derivative truths" that the author is promoting here. Once and a while, I'd listen and say "hmm, that's interesting" ... but only in places where it didn't flat out contradict classic understandings. IMO, this is dangerous information. It restricts the understanding of MANY basic things in the Bible (even the Sabbath) to be in the field that only a FEW have the background to follow. I gave this two stars out of charity.