Randal Rauser's Blog, page 33

Does Christianity Need a Historical Adam?

Today, I posted the following poll on Twitter:

Christianity requires a historical Adam and Eve.

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 14, 2021

We can approach the question like this: imagine that it turns out that the following Christian doctrines are true: a triune God exists,  he created all that exists, and the second person of the Trinity became incarnate as Jesus who died and rose again as an atoning sacrifice to reconcile creation. However, it also turns out that  Genesis 1-3 do not refer to actual historical persons/events but rather are mythic texts intended to describe the universal brokenness of creation and the universal need for restoration and healing by way of the aforementioned atoning sacrifice.

In that case, would this religion still be Christianity? It seems to me obvious to me that it would be. And if that is correct, then it would follow that Christianity does not require a historical Adam and Eve.

But then a critic comes along and she says “Let’s grant for the sake of argument, that all those doctrines are true as you said, except for one more: the resurrection of Jesus. What if it turns out that the allegedly historical resurrection of Jesus is, in fact, a symbolic event that God intended to refer to the creation of a people of God, Christ’s body, in the wake of his death. In other words, “The resurrection of the Christ” really means “the formation of a people of God, Christ’s body, at Pentecost.” If that is the case, would it follow that Christianity is still true? If so, then the resurrection of Jesus is not essential to Christianity, despite the testimony of someone like Paul (1 Corinthians 15:14).”

Our critic continues: “To put it another way, here’s the dilemma. If you grant that this ‘resurrection-as-metaphor’ religion would still be Christianity, then you’ve granted that the central historical event at the founding of Christianity, the resurrection, is not necessary for Christianity. That seems wrong, doesn’t it? But if you don’t grant this, if you insist on the contrary that a triune God, creation, and incarnation without resurrection would no longer be Christianity despite the significant doctrinal commonality in these other areas, why think the religion with an ahistorical Adam would still be Christianity, even with the significant doctrinal commonality in other areas?”

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Biblical Violence is Still Violence … and is not Appropriate for All Ages

A parent once asked me whether The Passion of the Christ would be appropriate viewing for his ten-year-old child. I replied by asking if he thought the infamous ten-minute torture-ear amputation scene in Reservoir Dogs would be appropriate. The fact that you interpret some violent event as having religious significance doesn’t magically make it appropriate for all ages.

And it isn’t just about movies, of course. Ultimately, for Christians, this is about the violence specifically contained within the Bible. And here we come to a great irony: the same parents who carefully read book and film reviews at Commonsense Media and Kids in Mind in order to screen the content their children are exposed to will hand them a Bible and encourage them to read without any restriction at all.

Reflecting back on my own childhood, I can recall several passages that I read as a child which jolted and disturbed me. For example, Judges 3 describes the assassination of obese King Eglon. I remember being haunted by the image of the fat of his gut closing in over the dagger like the blob in the campy 1950s horror film I watched as a child. And to add shock value, he defecates as he is dying:

20 Ehud then approached him while he was sitting alone in the upper room of his palace and said, “I have a message from God for you.” As the king rose from his seat, 21 Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king’s belly. 22 Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it.

And just a chapter later, we meet Jael who brutally pounded a tent peg into the temple of her sleeping foe. I can still remember the pressure I felt on my own temple, hyper-suggestible little chap that I was, as I read that:

21 But Jael, Heber’s wife, picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died.

But for me, the most haunting image came with the impalement of the baker in Genesis 40 followed by the image of ravens stripping the flesh of his corpse off the bones. That really disturbed me:

18 “This is what it means,” Joseph said. “The three baskets are three days. 19 Within three days Pharaoh will lift off your head and impale your body on a pole. And the birds will eat away your flesh.”

20 Now the third day was Pharaoh’s birthday, and he gave a feast for all his officials. He lifted up the heads of the chief cupbearer and the chief baker in the presence of his officials: 21 He restored the chief cupbearer to his position, so that he once again put the cup into Pharaoh’s hand— 22 but he impaled the chief baker, just as Joseph had said to them in his interpretation.

And then there was all the crass sexual imagery as in the shocking parabolic description of religious unfaithfulness as a woman’s infidelity in Ezekiel 23:20:

20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

And perhaps most shocking of all is the combination of sex and violence as in Numbers 25 when Phineas impales a man and woman presumably having sex, a scenario that could have inspired more than a few killings in 1980s slasher films:

7 When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand 8 and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped;

I’m quite sure that no child should be exposed to the image of equine ejaculate or of a man and woman being impaled like two hunks of meat on a giant shish kabob. And so, to conclude, just as The Passion of the Christ or Reservoir Dogs is not an all-ages movie, the Bible is not an all-ages text. And believing it is divinely inspired doesn’t change that fact.

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An Open Letter to Lee Strobel and Sean McDowell

To Lee Strobel and Sean McDowell,

I am writing to you concerning your endorsements of Alisa Childers’ book Another Gospel?  Mr. McDowell, you referred to the book as “a timely must-read book.” And Mr. Strobel, you actually wrote the forward to the book and you claim that Childers “fearlessly confronts the distortions and outright falsehoods that fuel so much of progressive theology.”

On the contrary, having read her book carefully it is quite clear that Another Gospel? is, in fact, a text which is itself full of distortions and outright falsehoods. And I would like to ask you about two claims that Childers makes, in particular, claims that are at the very heart of the book.

My First Concern and Question

My first concern is Childers’ claims about what she calls “progressive Christianity”. For the sake of time, I will focus on her specific claim regarding the religious status of progressive Christianity. She writes,

“As I’ve learned, progressive Christianity is not simply a shift in the Christian view of social issues. It’s not simply permission to embrace messiness and authenticity in Christian life. It’s not simply a response to doubt, legalism, abuse, or hypocrisy. It’s an entirely different religion–with another Jesus–and another gospel.” (76)

Childers claims in this passage, not just that so-called “progressive Christians” are Christians who are in error/unorthodox in some particular doctrine. Rather, she states clearly that she believes they represent, as she puts it, an entirely different religion just as Mormonism or Islam would represent entirely different religions. Childers identifies several people as being part of this non-Christian religion she calls “progressive Christianity,” including Peter Enns, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, William Paul Young, Rachel Held Evans, and Brian Zahnd. Interestingly, I just spoke with Brian Zahnd about this and he does not refer to himself as a “progressive Christian” at all. He understands himself to be, rather, a “small ‘o’ orthodox Christian”.

To claim that all these individuals, and thousands more like them, are not Christians at all but rather adherents to a completely different religion is an extremely serious charge. So I ask you, do you agree that people like Peter Enns, Richard Rohr, Rachel Held Evans, and Brian Zahnd are not Christians at all but rather are adherents to a completely different religion? If so, can you please defend that extraordinary claim? If not, why did you endorse the book?

My Second Concern and Question

At the end of the book, Childers claims that a person must accept the following eight doctrines in order to be saved. She writes:

“Today we have God’s final revelation, and Geisler concluded that, according to the New Testament, the essentials one must believe (at least implicitly) in order to be saved are

human depravity (I am a sinner);God’s unity (There is one God);the necessity of grace (I am saved by grace);Christ’s deity (Christ is God);Christ’s humanity (Christ is man);Christ’s atoning death (Christ died for my sins);Christ’s bodily resurrection (Christ rose from the dead); andthe necessity of faith (I must believe).” (232)

Infants do not believe these doctrines, not even “implicitly”. So it follows that according to Childers’ view, infants who die in infancy go to hell. So does a twelve-year-old Jewish girl who dies in Auschwitz. So does every person who rejects proposition 8 in favor of a Christian inclusivism (or even hopeful inclusivism). No doubt, by this metric, Childers also believes that adherents to that non-Christian religion she calls Progressive Christianity, people like Peter Enns, Richard Rohr, and Brian Zahnd, are also going to hell where they will suffer eternal punishment, being tortured day and night forever.

Do you believe that as well? If so, what is your argument for the claim that these eight doctrines must be assented to or a person will be tortured forever in hell? If no, why did you endorse the book?

Thank you for taking the time to read my open letter. I look forward to hearing from you in this matter.

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According to Alisa Childers, People Like Me Are Going to Hell: A Review of Another Gospel?

I just finished reading Alisa Childers’ book Another Gospel?. It is a hugely popular book that came out a year ago and has almost two thousand Amazon.com reviews. As I will note briefly below, it does have some diamonds embedded in the coal. But there is a lot of coal. Indeed, this is one of the most harmful books I have read in a long time. Although it is praised by Christian apologists like Lee Strobel, Sean McDowell, and Frank Turek, yet page after page it exhibits poor argumentation, utterly unchristian caricatures of opposing views, and attacks of a woolly target that Childers has described as “progressive Christianity.”

According to Childers, progressive Christianity is a new movement whose leaders include people like the late Rachel Held Evans, Richard Rohr, Peter Enns, and Brian Zahnd.  But it is not a new movement: in her view, it is another religion altogether. And as Childers says at the end of the book, those who fail to assent to the set of doctrines she deems essential, including (by implication) all these false teachers of another religion, are going to hell.

To be honest, I’m still reeling about all this, the fact that people like Strobel and McDowell praise this noxious, utterly uncharitable screed that sows division and propagates misunderstanding. I interacted with Brian Zahnd on Twitter yesterday and he said he doesn’t understand himself to be a so-called “progressive Christian”. Instead, he is “small ‘o’ orthodox.” He’s right about that: Zahnd has a far better grasp of mere Christianity than Childers who reads her version of conservative Protestant evangelicalism back into history from Aquinas to Augustine to Athanasius while blasting anyone outsider her narrow scope with the fires of impending eternal damnation.

As I read through the book yesterday and this morning, I posted tweets on it and I have included below those tweets as the bulk of my review. I will then offer some concluding thoughts.

I just started reading Alisa Childers’ book Another Gospel? about the evils of so-called “progressive Christianity.” Ironically, on the first page, she begins by quoting C.S. Lewis with approval. Yet, his theology would surely fall under her “progressive” censure.

Over the years, I’ve had some students like Childers who were rattled by and suspicious of challenges to their understanding of Christianity. Some retrench back into simplistic binaries where their side of the binary is “timeless truth”. That reflects Childers’ approach.

Fifty pages into Alisa Childers’ book Another Gospel? This is a sad book. Childers tends to think in simplistic binaries and to view whatever she labels “progressive Christianity” as the enemy rather than recognizing that Christians exist on a continuum attempting to make sense of faith.

Alisa Childers on the genocidal slaughter of the Canaanites: “the Canaanites were so evil–so remarkably vile in their rebellion against God and all that is good–that if they were alive today, most of us would be crying out for justice….” (57) And with that, we have a defense of the slaughter of infants, children, the elderly, mentally handicapped, women, and other non-combatants. This is such deplorable, dehumanizing rhetoric, and to see it proffered in the name of Christ really angers me.

Continuing my journey through Childers’ nasty book Another Gospel? On p. 63 she says she tries to give Christians she disagrees with “as much grace as possible”. Then on p. 76, she declares that “progressive Christianity” is “an entirely different religion…” It makes sense, I guess: because she has deemed “progressive Christians” as not Christians at all, she doesn’t need to extend any grace to them when describing their views. I am truly grieved that this book has been so enthusiastically embraced by evangelicals.

No shortage of irony here. While Childers criticizes progressives for being captive to culture, there is probably no group in Christendom more captive to culture than white evangelical MAGA Christians with their patriarchal gun-toting nationalism (cf. Jesus and John Wayne).

On p. 91, Childers cites a summary of the Rule of Faith. On p. 92 she quotes Brian McLaren saying Jesus came to declare God’s kingdom, good news for all creation. Then she says “These two gospels couldn’t be more different.” Either she’s a liar or an utterly inept interpreter.

Alisa Childers conflates the penal substitutionary theory of atonement with the atonement and then reasons that anyone who critiques/rejects the former rejects the latter. It’s such spurious and uncharitable reasoning.

According to Alisa Childers, Brian Zahnd isn’t a Christian. Rather, he is a false teacher of another religion she calls “progressive Christianity.” That kind of false teaching is so harmful, destructive, and tragically divisive.

Childers lists questioning the prolife abortion stance as one of the signs of “progressive Christianity.” But the prolife position only became a cause celebre for evangelicals in the mid-1970s. Childers seems to have little awareness of how culturally embedded her Christianity is.

Childers goes on to claim that the “progressive Christians” have made the Gospel about “Jesus + social justice.” (105) The fact that she thinks this entails a false gospel tells you a lot about Alisa Childers.

Childers says “Jesus + anything = a false gospel,” (104) and this was “settled” at the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15). But Acts 15 advises Christians to abstain from blood and meat from strangled animals. So is Acts 15 a “false gospel”? Or is the equation too simple?

Childers is offended by Brian McLaren’s reference to “seven Jesuses”, i.e. “seven versions of Jesus” each from a different Christian denomination with the advice that we should celebrate them all. Childers is indignant: “All I cared about was the real Jesus” (23). Is Childers aware that there are four different Gospels? And that we don’t try to eliminate them to get to the “real Gospel” as the Diatessaron errantly attempted to do. Because that’s the gist of McLaren’s point. Did she really not understand that?

There are definitely some good bits in Alisa Childers’ book Another Gospel? For example, her illustration of creeds and textual criticism with the “Nana’s Peach Cobbler” recipe is bang on. Unfortunately, those bits come in the midst of a wholly uncharitable screed against fellow Christians whom she deems as false Christians belonging to another religion. The book is also full of bad reasoning. For example, she performs a bait and switch, claiming she will discuss the textual reliability of the Bible, then switching to the NT. That’s a very common apologetic gambit, but it is fundamentally dishonest because Childers surely knows the issues with the OT are of a different order than the NT. So she is buoying up evangelical confidence in the Bible on *false pretenses.*

Childers admits that there is progressive revelation, “But” she insists against “progressive Christians”, “it doesn’t mean that the revelation progressed from error to truth.” (138) That’s just flat wrong. For example, the early OT is *henotheistic*: monotheism comes later. Any person who holds to henotheism is *in error* if monotheism is true. So it is the so-called “progressive Christians,” people who Childers denounces as false Christians, who understand progressive revelation better than she does.

Childers has a long list of people she believes are adherents of the non-Christian religion she calls “progressive Christianity”: Peter Enns, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, William Paul Young, Rachel Held Evans, Brian Zahnd, and so on. Incredibly, Childers disparages people that she calls “heresy hunters who delight in pointing fingers” (63). And yet, she is herself a prolific, and prolifically uncharitable, heresy hunter.

Childers says God’s “command to ‘utterly destroy’ the Canaanites was a one-time deal.” (174) Not true. God is described as also commanding genocide of the Amalekites and Midianites. Further, if genocide is always wrong like rape, then saying, “Oh, but just once” is no excuse.

So Childers leaves us with the view that God’s wiping away every tear (Rev. 21:4) and Christ reconciling all things (Col. 1:20) is consistent with God torturing an indeterminate number of interminable rebels forever. No room for debate? Really?

In chapter 10, Childers defends the view that the damned suffer eternal conscious torment. Because in her estimation, that is an essential component of the Gospel. While she critiques universalism as a false view, she makes zero attempts to engage any universalist arguments.

Alisa Childers says that penal substitutionary atonement “has united Christians throughout the ages and across cultures and continents.” (205) First, she doesn’t explain whether she means this qua theory or metaphor (they are very different). Second, it isn’t true. The church always embraced a plurality of metaphors and has never endorsed a single over-arching theory.

On page 206, Childers begins firing at Paul Young and The Shack. I’m surprised it took so long. Remember how she disparaged “heresy hunters”?

Childers accuses critics of penal substitution like Brian Zahnd (she mentions him specifically) of strawmanning the doctrine. God’s wrath, she says, is “not a divine temper tantrum…” Rather, it is “controlled and righteous judgment”. (214) The strawman charge is ironic. After all, claiming that God the Father’s wrath against sin is satisfied as he methodically tortures his son to death on a cross with “controlled and righteous judgment” does nothing to address the critic’s concerns with this conceptual framework of atonement. Indeed, that idea may seem more disturbing to the critic. Childers then quotes Miroslav Volf (a passage that has been quoted umpteenth times in the last twenty years) talking about how God must be wrathful because of the horrors of the Bosnia genocide. Two problems here: First, Volf’s comments are powerful precisely because we think of God being emotionally moved rather than in the cool, dispassionate manner that Childers just attributed to him: she’s arguing against herself here. Second, earlier in the book she defended the genocidal slaughter of the Canaanites in terms of God’s wrath against the entire society of men, women, and children. This is a disturbingly capricious picture she paints with God sometimes enraged by genocide & other times enraged to command genocide. No wonder the critics are concerned.

Childers says that “progressive Christians” who reject the penal substitutionary theory and/or metaphor of atonement leave us with “a codependent and impotent god who is powerless to stop evil. That god is not really good.” (224) What an extraordinary claim. So if you reject PSA and embrace a Christus Victor model, for example, one in which Christ defeats the devil in battle, you have “a codependent and impotent god who is powerless to stop evil”, a god who is not really good”?! Folks, this is craziness.

At the end of Another Gospel?, Childers borrows from Norman Geisler a list of 8 doctrines you must believe to be saved: the sinfulness of humanity, the existence of one God, salvation by grace, Christ’s divinity, humanity, death, resurrection, and the necessity of faith/belief for salvation. Let’s take the last one: the necessity of belief. I disagree with Childers: I don’t think a person must believe these things. I believe infants, the severely mentally handicapped, are saved apart from such belief. I also am a hopeful inclusivist in the manner embraced by the Catholic Church at Vatican II. So I (and the Catholic Church) deny her 8th essential belief. From that, it follows that according to Childers *I AM NOT SAVED. I AM GOING TO HELL.* I’m not taking a tendentious interpretation of her. That’s her clearly stated position. And she isn’t done there. She goes on to say that there are many other doctrines (she notes the virgin birth as an example) that you will not deny if you are saved and have “a bit more knowledge.” It is hard to put into words how offensive this is.

According to Childers, “The strength for the Christian worldview is so strong that one would have to willfully shut their eyes to it.” (236) So on Childers’ view, if you consider Christianity and remain unpersuaded that it is true, that is because you are rebelling; you refuse to admit the overwhelming evidence for Christianity. Folks, this is delusional. Another Gospel? has some good insights but it also has a lot of simplistic analysis that has not begun to grapple with the complexity of issues. As a case in point, I noted that her one-page treatment of the Canaanite genocide is really poor and consists of a couple of talking points drawn from Copan that I thoroughly rebut in Jesus Loves Canaanites.

At the end of Another Gospel? Childers concludes that “We don’t get to completely redefine who God is and how he works in the world and call it Christian.” (239) That’s interesting because in the course of this book she redefines what it is to be a mere Christian. Anyone who doesn’t accept her definition of Christianity is sinfully “shutting their eyes” to the Gospel and will go to hell. This is a book that people like Lee Strobel and Sean McDowell have showered with praise.

For me, Another Gospel? isn’t a brave, helpful book; rather, it is a slap in the face. But I won’t return the insult. I consider people like Strobel, McDowell, and Childers to be Christians. But they are Christians who have conflated their version of conservative Protestant evangelicalism with the simple and beautiful Gospel. And then, apparently, they see fit to damn the rest of us. Another Gospel? has brought home to me just how deep the chasm between this brand of evangelicalism and the wider Christian tradition really is.

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Counter Apologist Round 2: The Epistemology Discussion

Last week, I hosted Counter Apologist on my YouTube channel. This week, he returned the favor and we had a wide-ranging discussion about rationality, dialogue, and other matters.

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On the Holy Piety of Getting Angry with God

Some Christians think that the life of Christian discipleship is a life of victorious Christian living in which we are content in all things. But what if Christian discipleship has room for the full range of human emotional responses to God including doubt, sadness, disappointment, and even anger?

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RZIM, as Shameless as Ever, Engages in Public Relations Disaster Management

Just over a month ago, the CEO of RZIM, Sarah Davis, posted a video addressing Ravi Zacharias’ pattern of habitual lying, sexual predation, and shady misappropriation of funds.  The video has 2.1K likes and only 63 dislikes, including mine. Why don’t I like the video? After all, she mentions “abuse” in passing and calls for healing and talks about “the sins of my father.” What’s not to like?

Well, let’s start off with the fact that Davis is indeed Ravi’s daughter. Nepotism is never a good look.

Next, this video is a carefully constructed exercise in public relations disaster management. It begins with the fact that Davis informs the reader that she will be glancing down at her notes, a disclaimer that is meant to convey vulnerability and honesty. But the entire video in fact functions as a carefully constructed exercise in a brand relaunch for the “ministry”.

Yes, Davis vaguely mentions “abuse” and “the sins of my father”. But she never recognizes him as a habitually lying sexual predator which is precisely what he was. He engaged in classic patterned behaviors of grooming, gift-giving, threats, and so on while developing elaborate financial schemes to cover his ongoing predatory behavior. When Davis uses the term “sins of my father” she is invoking a generalized concept of moral failing. And it is meant to develop an affinity with the viewer: let he who is without sin throw the first stone, right?

But we’re not all habitual liars and sexual predators. Sadly, this kind of corruption appropriation of hamartiological language in favor of self-serving ends is rampant among evangelicals.

Early on in the video, Davis talks about how she believes that God called her into RZIM and that she has been enormously “blessed” through this “ministry”. This is language meant to assure the viewer that “God’s in this”, all the better reason to forgive and reengage as a financial supporter of the ministry. And Davis actually has a special word of thanks for those who have continued to stand with and support RZIM.

Let’s be clear: Davis and the board sought to silence Lori Anne Thompson when she first came out with her allegations. They attacked her and her husband and they circled the wagons around Zacharias. They were dragged kicking and screaming to confront the mounting allegations against this huckster.

Remember how Davis said she’s been blessed in the ministry? Yeah, no kiddin’. In 2015, the last time Davis’ salary was publicly available, . Speaking of which, that’s a damn nice watch she’s wearing.

Davis concludes by warning everyone to be wary of “sin” and how it “grows” if we don’t confess it. She also assures us to remember that God “offers sinners grace, mercy, and forgiveness.”

Davis is right about one thing: sin does grow, and it has long since engulfed that entire, corrupt organization.

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Biblical Violence and Epistemology: A Conversation with Counter Apologist

In this video, I have a conversation with atheist blogger Counter Apologist over biblical violence and epistemology in conversation with my book “Jesus Loves Canaanites.”

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On Transgender Athletes

This morning, I posted the following poll on Twitter:

Regarding transgender women competing as women in sport. This is not a flippant question: I'm quite serious. If LeBron James announced that she genuinely self-identified as a woman, should she be allowed to play in the WNBA?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) June 28, 2021

One supporter of transgender athletes messaged me and complained that the scenario presented was “extreme”. I interpreted that to mean that this person was reluctant to say yes in this case but the person did not believe that justified a general ‘no’. To quote an old maxim, hard cases make bad law.

However, the very fact that one might be inclined to interpret this scenario as a hard case at all reveals a weakness in the pro-transgender sports position. Would it be a hard case to decide whether James should be allowed to play in the NBA? The answer, of course, is no: great athletes at the top of their game are welcome! But then, if self-identification with a gender is sufficient for one to be that gender then James self-identifying as a woman and wanting to play in the WNBA just is a case of a great athlete at the top of their game wanting to play in the appropriate league. It isn’t a hard case at all: rather, it’s a no-brainer.

Consequently, if one still does view this as a hard case, an “extreme” scenario, then that is indicative that one views the matter as more complex than simple self-identification.

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Writing Infectious Books

COVID19 introduced me to the “R number”, a way of rating the ability of a disease to spread. The higher the R number, the more infectious the disease. For example, with no safety protocols taken, COVID19 has an R number of approximately 3 in an unvaccinated population meaning that for every infected individual, three additional individuals will capture the disease. Incredibly, measles has an R number of 15 in a non-immune population. (source)

The R number is a helpful way of thinking about bookselling. As an author, you want to write books with a high R number, meaning that it is an “infectious” book that will lead readers naturally to share their experience of reading your book with others. In this scenario, you don’t even need to do much by way of publicity and promotion because readers are doing the work for you, posting reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, suggesting it to others, or even purchasing copies for friends. Books that have that kind of grassroots effect are rare indeed. But it is worthwhile for every author to be thinking what they can do through every stage of the process in order to increase the R number by making their book an infectious read.

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