Status Updates From The Hebrew Bible, the Old T...

On historical critics “these are people who hose early lives were dominated by an intense religious commitment, in many cases fundamentalism, but whose adulthood is marked by quiet acculturation to the secular liberalism of the academic world and often by a slow but steady disaffection from all religious institutions.”

He said this. From Yale. Dude was ahead of his time.

"Only theology enables safe passage, for by converting law into theology, specific practice into general belief, Bright can grant Paul his doctrine of exemption from Torah without granting Marcion his idea that the Jewish God and the Christ are antithetical. The specifics fade, the laws wither, but Old Testament theology endures forever."

Levenson is brilliant. And hilarious-- so tongue-in-cheek. Wow wow wow.

“The suppressed or forgotten past provides precedents helpful in dissolving the current consensus: historical criticism is invaluable to the venerable liberal (and, in my view, illogical) argument that the inevitability of unwilled change legitimates willed change, that the historical reality that the tradition was, de facto, always changing validates, de jure, contemporary efforts to alter it....

Forty pages is, I'm finding this book infuriating. Sure, he beats up on von Rad and Eichrodt, but that's shooting fish in a barrel. I would love to see Levenson review N. T. Wright's _Paul and the Faithfulness of God_, because IMO that book is Exhibit A disproving the thesis of Levenson's book.

Thus far, I've been nothing but delighted at how this world-class Harvard scholar has utterly shredded the historical-critical framework that is otherwise so ubiquitous within the liberal-Protestant tradition. He points out its (often barely hidden) anti-Semitism with ease and without, in turn, resorting to any overtly anti-Christian polemic.

Thus far, I've been nothing but delighted at how this world-class Harvard scholar has utterly shredded the historical-critical framework that is otherwise so ubiquitous within the liberal-Protestant tradition. He points out its (often barely hidden) anti-Semitism with ease and without, in turn, resorting to any overtly anti-Christian polemic.