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avimatic 's review for:
Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again
by Rachel Held Evans
This is a difficult book to review because so much depends on your starting point and expectations for going in. I've enjoyed several of RHE's previous books, and I had actually started this when I first bought it but never finished until our church's discussion group started this year.
Overall I think it's a balanced look at the genres that the bible contains and how to approach them when reading. Evans cites many different theologians and other scholars to back up her claims, including people who see the bible differently and/or actively encourage different people taking different points of view. For me I wasn't surprised by a lot of the information, it's inline with teaching that is prevalent within western progressive protestant Christianity, though if that's not your culture I can see some of her claims being very radical.
The biggest takeaways for me were around the desire to see stories in the bible from different points of view, to engage with the text in a way that is not just asking questions but proposing an interpretation and then staying curious about how that holds up with the larger story, and being OK when someone disagrees with your conclusions. Alongside that is an acceptance that different stories can mean different things to different people, that they may need to be interpreted differently at different times in our lives. This overall desire to have the Bible be flexible rather than rigid is either going to excite or infuriate the reader, and I often feel like I have trouble gravitating to either extreme (no surprise to anyone who knows me) but wanting to embrace more of the flexibility and have understanding that there a variety of perspectives is something that is valuable when it comes to reading the Bible and discussing with others. This is especially important in the shift (especially within the previously stated context of western progressive protestant Christianity) to live out one's Christian identity primarily in community instead of as an individual, also something that I would need to work to embrace more fully.
Overall I think it's a balanced look at the genres that the bible contains and how to approach them when reading. Evans cites many different theologians and other scholars to back up her claims, including people who see the bible differently and/or actively encourage different people taking different points of view. For me I wasn't surprised by a lot of the information, it's inline with teaching that is prevalent within western progressive protestant Christianity, though if that's not your culture I can see some of her claims being very radical.
The biggest takeaways for me were around the desire to see stories in the bible from different points of view, to engage with the text in a way that is not just asking questions but proposing an interpretation and then staying curious about how that holds up with the larger story, and being OK when someone disagrees with your conclusions. Alongside that is an acceptance that different stories can mean different things to different people, that they may need to be interpreted differently at different times in our lives. This overall desire to have the Bible be flexible rather than rigid is either going to excite or infuriate the reader, and I often feel like I have trouble gravitating to either extreme (no surprise to anyone who knows me) but wanting to embrace more of the flexibility and have understanding that there a variety of perspectives is something that is valuable when it comes to reading the Bible and discussing with others. This is especially important in the shift (especially within the previously stated context of western progressive protestant Christianity) to live out one's Christian identity primarily in community instead of as an individual, also something that I would need to work to embrace more fully.