Читать книгу The Beginning and the End - Michael W. Pahl - Страница 4

If you have ever wondered if there might be more to Genesis than fuel for anti-evolutionism, then this book might be for you. Or if you have ever thought, “Revelation has to be more than simply a roadmap for the future of the Middle East,” then perhaps you will find this book to be just what you are looking for.

Genesis and Revelation tend to provoke strong reactions. Many who read the first chapter of Genesis insist the most crucial message is that the earth was created in six, twenty-four-hour days only a few thousand years ago. Some respond by maintaining that these stories of Genesis are merely ancient myths with nothing to offer us in the twenty-first century beyond a glimpse of the strange beliefs of a people long past. Likewise, many who read Revelation claim it describes God’s detailed plan for particular nations and peoples of the world—focused on Israel—in a specific period of time that is just around the corner of human history. Some respond by asserting that these strange visions of Revelation are merely the results of an unstable mind or an antiquated worldview, about as useful to us today as those early stories of Genesis.

Meanwhile, as these Scripture wars heat up, many Christians are left on the sidelines, not wanting to engage in a battle they see as unproductive or misguided; still wanting to read these important texts of Scripture, but not sure how one should approach these texts after all. It can all be very confusing, and can even turn people off from reading Genesis and Revelation.

If this in any way describes where you are, then maybe this book is for you.

One purpose for this book, then, is quite simple: I hope to demonstrate that Christians can read Genesis and Revelation in a way that is both intellectually responsible (with due historical and literary sensitivity) and faith-building (with significant theological and practical implications). In reading the stories of Genesis and the visions of Revelation we do not need to choose between “ancient human writings” and “divinely inspired Scripture,” or between “history” and “theology,” or even between “science” and “faith.” Such dichotomies may indeed have an appearance of wisdom, but they lack any value in making real or full sense of either the biblical texts or the world around us. This could be put another way, rather more directly: on the one hand, acknowledging and even fully embracing the very human dimensions of Genesis and Revelation—their ancient historical and literary features—need not compel us to become agnostics or atheists or secular humanists or theological liberals or whatnot; on the other hand, we do not need to be aggressive fundamentalists or fanatical zealots to take Genesis and Revelation seriously as divinely inspired Scripture.

Another purpose is equally straightforward, reflecting the “faith-building” dimension just noted. I hope to provide a reading of some stories of Genesis and some visions of Revelation that is helpful for Christians in thinking about who God is, what God has done and will yet do, what it means to be human in the world, what it means to be the people of God in the world, what exactly has gone wrong with the world and how God intends to fix it, and so on. I truly do believe that beginnings and endings are crucial for us as humans in how we tell our story, how we understand our place in that story, and how we then live in the world in light of that story we tell. I truly do believe that Genesis and Revelation describe “the beginning and the end,” and that in doing so they have much to say to human beings living between that beginning and end, in any era, including our own.

So I invite you to read Genesis and Revelation along with me, to try on my reading of these texts to see how it fits, to reread Genesis’s stories and Revelation’s visions as if for the first time, and to hear anew what these inspired ancient texts have to say about the beginning and the end. While I have no illusions that the reading of Scripture I present in this book is some kind of perfect or complete interpretation, I do hope it will prompt Christians of any theological persuasion to pick up and read these sacred texts in a fresh yet faithful way.