22AR27-05

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AR 27:5 - Beware "evangelical preoccupations with authenticity"

In this issue:

FICTION - "evangelical Christianity's influence on American popular culture"

HISTORY - Christian textbooks: "proselytizing, intolerant of other religions and non-evangelicals"

NEW TESTAMENT - "a new theory of Christian origins ... and why the first Christians themselves Judaized Jesus"

SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM - its growth in China

Apologia Report 27:5 (1,558)
February 2, 2022

FICTION

Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith, by Daniel Silliman (news editor for Christianity Today, doctorate in American studies from Heidelberg University in Germany) <www.bit.ly/3Ip2IZx> -- Eerdmans reports that Silliman "shows readers how Christian fiction, and the empire of Christian publishing and bookselling it helped build, is key to understanding the formation of evangelical identity. ... Silliman considers what it was in these books that held such appeal and what effect their widespread popularity had [and how] these novels reflected and shaped the world evangelicals saw themselves living in - one in which romantic love intertwines with divine love...."

   The novels were popular "during the era of the Christian bookstore, this - every bit as much as politics or theology - became a locus of evangelical identity."

   Publishers Weekly (Jul 26 '21) adds that "Silliman selects five novels that ushered evangelical Christian fiction into mainstream book markets.... The five well-chosen and bestselling works - Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly, Frank Peretti's <www.bit.ly/3L4LMK8> This Present Darkness, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's <www.bit.ly/3ulHfx0> Left Behind, Beverly Lewis's The Shunning, and William Paul Young's <www.bit.ly/3HpHz1k> The Shack - allow Silliman to examine the growth and development of Christian fiction over nearly four decades. Silliman illuminates evangelical preoccupations with authenticity ("Evangelical belief ... wasn't about packaged conformity but about discovering your true self"); cultural engagement rather than withdrawal ("This Present Darkness made the connection between evangelical belief and political advocacy"); the comfort of belief in the midst of everyday suffering; and learning to live with ambiguity. [His] thorough analysis calls attention to the understudied cultural phenomenon of evangelical Christianity's influence on American popular culture."

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HISTORY

Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters, by Kathleen Wellman (Dedman Family Distinguished Professor of History and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor at Southern Methodist University) <www.bit.ly/3GRMcRs> -- Oxford University Press explains that Wellman "analyzes the high school world history textbooks produced by the three most influential publishers of Christian educational materials." And she concludes that "The Christianity presented in these textbooks is proselytizing, intolerant of other religions and non-evangelical Christians, and unquestionably anchored to the political right. As Hijacking History argues, the ideas these textbooks promote have significant implications for contemporary debates about religion, politics, and education, and pose a direct challenge to the values of a pluralistic democracy."

   Hijacking History has a focus on "students who are educated outside the public schools, either in religious schools or at home" and asks: "How are they learning history, and what effect does that have on our democracy?"

   Wellman finds that "In these books, the historian, informed by his faith, tells the allegedly unbiased story of God's actions as interpreted through the Bible. History becomes a weapon to judge and condemn civilizations that do not accept the true God or adopt "biblical" positions. In their treatment of the modern world, these texts identify ungodly ideas to be vanquished - evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science among them. The judgments found in these textbooks, Kathleen Wellman shows, are rooted in the history of American evangelicals and fundamentalists and the battles they fought against the tide of secularism. In assuming that God sanctions fundamentalist positions on social, political, and economic issues, students are led to believe that that the ultimate mission of America is to succeed as a nation that advances evangelical Christianity and capitalism throughout the world."

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NEW TESTAMENT

Judaizing Jesus: How New Testament Scholars Created the Ecumenical Golem, by Robert M. Price <www.bit.ly/3FXdPYc> (Jesus Seminar member, host of the podcasts The Bible Geek and The Human Bible, founder and editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism) <www.bit.ly/3AnVgez> -- the publisher asks: "Was Jesus a mainstream or sectarian Jew, as the scholarly consensus tells us? This view - that we must automatically adopt Second Temple Judaism as the paradigm in which to interpret or reconstruct the historical Jesus - is often presented as self-evident, unquestionable, and beyond dispute. However, the promotion of the Jewish Jesus raises serious questions - specifically, whether this consensus is the product of theological and ecumenical agendas. In Judaizing Jesus, noted scholar Robert M. Price challenges this trend and offers a menu of alternative ways of seeing Jesus: Sacred King, Cynic Philosopher, Gnostic Redeemer, and the Buddha! He concludes by proposing a new theory of Christian origins to explain how and why the first Christians themselves Judaized Jesus." Any questions?

POSTSCRIPT, May 3 '23:
How far will one go in risking their credibility to win an argument? In his review, Creating Christ: Challenging Christian Origins, Anthony Sacramone rips Price for his part in the production of the film Creating Christ. Sacramone notes: "Acting as hosts for this documentary are the authors of the book upon which the film is based, James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy. Published in 2018....
  "Both Valliant and Fahy are joined in this film by two scholars (of a sort) and the late Acharya S., who, bizarrely, was late by about five or six years by the time the film was made. ...
  "The first scholar is Robert M. Price, former Baptist pastor, former member of the Jesus Seminar, owner of two Ph.D.s, one of the few pop atheists whose politics run right of center, and now prolific author of books that deconstruct the New Testament into incoherent parts. Robert Eisenman is also in the cast, famous for an 1,100-plus-page doorstop of a book arguing that James the brother of Jesus was the Teacher of Righteousness described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that, well, I'll let Wiki do the heavy lifting here: 'Jewish Christianity emerged from the Zadokites, a messianic, priestly, ultra-fundamentalist sect.' Eisenman's 'scholarship' has come under heavy criticism from everyone from the formidable Géza Vermes to the agnostic NT scholar Bart Ehrman, who, it should be remembered, wrote a book debunking the 'Christ myth' thesis.
  "As for Acharya S., aka D.M. Murdock, she is perhaps most famous in atheist circles for promoting the whole 'Christ myth' thesis. ... What's curious is that this documentary was shot sometime between 2020 and 2022. Ms. Murdock died in 2015." Religion & Liberty Online (Acton Institute), Mar 9 '23, <www.bit.ly/3AQyddb>

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SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM

Schism: Seventh-day Adventism in Post-Denominational China, by Christie Chui-Shan Chow (doctorate in religion and society from Princeton Theological Seminary, independent scholar of global Christianity and Chinese religions) <www.bit.ly/3FQkMdh> -- the book's promo indicates that Chow "documents the life of the Chinese Adventist denomination from the mid-1970s to the 2010s [and] explores how Chinese Seventh-day Adventists have used schism as a tool to retain, revive, and recast their unique ecclesial identity in a religious habitat that resists diversity. ... Chow demonstrates how Chinese Adventists adhere to their denominational character both by recasting the theologies and faith practices that they inherited from American missionaries in the early twentieth century and by engaging with local politics and culture. [She also] explores the multiple agents at work in the movement, including intrachurch divisions among Adventist believers, growing encounters between local and overseas Adventists, and the denomination's ongoing interactions with local Chinese authorities and other Protestants."

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