streeff

This book was kind of a rollercoaster ride. At first I thought it was going to be great, an interesting topic and thought-provoking examples. I was ready to be convinced by the authors. Then I had to get past the awkward and sometimes poor writing. There is a special challenge to editing a book that is co-authored by two equal contributors, and I have to say, in this case it didn't work out too well. This is unfortunate because it was bad enough to obscure the authors' points at times. It was distracting how much the prose tended to ramble. Several times I found myself doing a kind of "double-take" as I turned a page--I had to go back and check where we came from to get to the point we were on at the top of the new page. The most memorable instance of this involved the authors rambling about someone's cute toddler at the bottom of the page, only to find themselves discussing Adolf Hitler at the top of the next page. Same paragraph. Say what now? I was willing to put up with some of these eccentricities to hear the authors' theological point, which was pretty compelling. They argue that their position of universal salvation is supported by scripture. I found their thoughts somewhat convincing (though I continued to hold some reservations as they didn't answer all my objections that thoroughly) until somewhere around page 120 they jumped off the deep end and lost me completely. This is when they started talking about how they didn't necessarily believe in the Trinity, or in the divine nature of Jesus Christ. Here I'd been into the book hopeful that there was some way to be a Universalist *without* being a Unitarian! An extreme emphasis on God's grace over his judgement should have been an easy sell to me, with my evangelical Quaker and Lutheran theological heritage. But they completely lost me when they threw the baby out with the bathwater and basically summed up our Lord as a nice guy who was groovy with God. Ehhn. No thanks. So this book was indeed thought-provoking (I'd skip to the appendix where they list universalist-ish passages from the Bible and Church Fathers if I were you) but not very well written, and kind of went of a theological deep end. Tread with caution.

2020-08-26 06:26