A dense and important end-times study that offers serious, credible challenges to long-standing scriptural readings.
An exhaustive depiction of the end times.
“Truth never changes,” Marie writes in this work of systematic scriptural analysis, “and it can usually be verified by an objective mind which impartially examines the evidence.” The truth her book seeks to verify is the precise, virtually day-to-day calendar of the events that will transpire in this Christian conception of the end of time and creation. Verification might seem like a tall order, and the task gets trickier in light of the 2,000 years of scholarly disagreement about the meanings of key biblical verses. In particular, Marie focuses on Daniel 9:25, translated in the King James Version as: “Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous time.” Marie takes readers step by step through not only a deconstruction of this verse, but also a searching analysis of how it differs in key ways from other translations. The New Revised Standard, for instance, has the crucial words “there shall be seven weeks; and for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again,” thus separating rather than adding the two durations. Marie’s main concern is correcting what she views as centuries of misinterpretation that takes each week in Daniel to be a metaphor for seven years; she holds that the original text calls for a different reading, one in which those contested weeks are actually composed of normal days. With meticulous care, she supports this reading with a wide-ranging analysis of Scripture that’s confidently done, though it will quickly leave the general reader behind: this is specific eschatology for serious students of the subject. Those interested and up to speed will be both intrigued and impressed.
A dense and important end-times study that offers serious, credible challenges to long-standing scriptural readings.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1490867700
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The name of C.S. Lewis will no doubt attract many readers to this volume, for he has won a splendid reputation by his brilliant writing. These sermons, however, are so abstruse, so involved and so dull that few of those who pick up the volume will finish it. There is none of the satire of the Screw Tape Letters, none of the practicality of some of his later radio addresses, none of the directness of some of his earlier theological books.
Pub Date: June 15, 1949
ISBN: 0060653205
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1949
A fine thematic introduction to gnosticism, concentrating on the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) in 1945. Pagels teaches the history of religion at Barnard, and she has spent practically all of her young academic life working with the Nag Hammadi manuscripts in one way or another. She brings her considerable competence to bear on the subject without overwhelming the reader with scholarly minutiae. Pagels sees in gnosticism a "powerful alternative to. . . orthodox Christian tradition," an alternative she clearly finds attractive. Gnostics treated Christ's resurrection as a symbolic rather than a corporeal event. They rejected the authoritarian, bishop-dominated structure of the orthodox church. They looked beyond the masculine imagery of the patriarchal God to various concepts of a feminine or bisexual divinity. They avoided the excesses of the martyrdom cult and its apotheosis of the suffering Jesus. In surprisingly modern fashion, they cultivated a religion that stressed personal enlightenment over corporate belonging, insisting that "the psyche bears within itself the potential for liberation or destruction." These and other gnostic tenets were repressed by mainstream Christianity because, Pagels claims, they constituted a political threat to the hierarchy. In the calmer, freer atmosphere of contemporary Christianity, they can better be appreciated for their intrinsic richness. Pagels' advocacy of gnosticism is restrained and responsible—she admits, for example, that its elitist, intellectualist qualities made it ill-suited as a faith for the masses—but this partisanship, plus the absence of solid explanation of the movement's historical roots, may create a misleading picture of it as a sort of heroic prototype of liberal Protestantism. Otherwise a clear, reliable, richly documented guide.
Pub Date: Nov. 26, 1979
ISBN: 0394502787
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979
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