Iain W. Provan > Quotes

“Creatures cannot image even the true God in biblical thinking generally speaking. Nevertheless - and here is the extraordinary exception - there ARE "gods" in the world. There ARE images of God placed in a temple. These images are none other than the human beings - ALL human beings - whom God has created and set in his temple-cosmos.”
― Iain Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

“As we reread Genesis 2...we immediately understand WHAT is 'crafty' about the serpent's question in Genesis 3. God did NOT in fact say in Genesis 2, 'You MUST NOT EAT from any tree in the garden' (3:1). What God did say was almost exactly the opposite: 'You ARE FREE TO EAT from any tree in the garden' (except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 2:16). The vocabulary of God in Genesis 2 indicates freedom and blessing. The vocabulary of the serpent in Genesis 3 indicates prohibition and restriction. The serpent's ploy is to suggest to the woman that God is really not so good after all. He shifts attention away from all that God in his generosity has provided for his creatures in creation and onto the one thing that God has for the moment explicitly withheld.”
― Iain Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

“The humble have once again exhibited more insight than the exalted”
― Iain W. Provan, 1 & 2 Kings

“As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests, the story in which I believe myself to be a character is also the story in which I come to understand my nature and my destiny.1 My sense of who I am, where I should be heading, and what I should do next—I “own” all these in the context of what I believe to be true about the world, its history and destiny, the nature of divinity and humanity, and the good society. It is all very much bound up with the story in which I believe I find myself.”
― Iain W. Provan, Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

“Right knowledge, of itself, EVIDENTLY does not bring about moral transformation in human beings - even supposing that right knowledge is something we are predisposed to desire in the first place. It is possible to be highly educated and at the same time morally depraved. There is, in fact, a certain kind of moral depravity that only the highly educated can attain, because it requires sophisticated skills of rationalization and self-deception.”
― Iain Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

“We are committed to the past as we need and want it to be; we are no longer interested in the past as it was.”
― Iain W. Provan, Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

“we do not always (as a matter of “method”)—if we are intelligent, critical people—invest faith in eyewitnesses as opposed to those people who testify to us secondarily, nor vice versa. More generally, if we characteristically believe the testimony of one sort of person rather than another—for example, if we are Caucasians and we consistently accept “insider” accounts of reality that are offered by Caucasians over against “outsider” accounts such as those offered by Asians—then we are considered prejudiced, and not intelligent. Reality, we recognize, is more complex than such method allows. We do not, therefore—if we are intelligent, critical people—allow method overly to influence us in seeking to apprehend everyday reality; or rather, we try to ensure that whatever method we might embrace is sufficiently nuanced and complex that it allows for nuance and complexity in the world outside our heads”
― Iain W. Provan, A Biblical History of Israel