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The Joshua Delusion? (Hardcover)
Douglas S. Earl; Foreword by R. W. L. Moberly; Afterword by Christopher J.H. Wright
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R1,048
R851
Discovery Miles 8 510
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Many Christians wrestle with biblical passages in which God
commands the slaughter of the Canaanites - men, women, and
children. The issue of the morality of the biblical God is one of
the major challenges for faith today. How can such texts be Holy
Scripture? In this bold and innovative book, Douglas Earl grasps
the bull by the horns and guides readers to new and unexpected ways
of looking at the book of Joshua. Drawing on insights from the
early church and from modern scholarship, Earl argues that we have
mistakenly read Joshua as a straightforward historical account and
have ended up with a genocidal God. In contrast, Earl offers a
theological interpretation in which the mass killing of Canaanites
is a deliberate use of myth to make important theological points
that are still valid today. Christopher J. H. Wright then offers a
thoughtful response to Earl's provocative views. The book closes
with Earl's reply to Wright and readers are encouraged to continue
the debate.
Many Christians wrestle with biblical passages in which God
commands the slaughter of the Canaanites-men, women, and children.
The issue of the morality of the biblical God is one of the major
challenges for faith today. How can such texts be Holy Scripture?In
this bold and innovative book Douglas Earl grasps the bull by the
horns and guides readers to new and unexpected ways of looking at
the book of Joshua. Drawing on insights from the early church and
from modern scholarship, Earl argues that we have mistakenly read
Joshua as a straightforward historical account and have ended up
with a genocidal God. In contrast, Earl offers a theological
interpretation in which the mass killing of Canaanites is a
deliberate use of myth to make important theological points that
are still valid today. Christopher J. H. Wright then offers a
thoughtful response to Earl's provocative views. The book closes
with Earl's reply to Wright and readers are encouraged to continue
the debate.
Douglas Earl sets out a fresh perspective on understanding what is
involved in reading Old Testament narrative as Christian Scripture.
Earl considers various narratives as examples that model different
interpretive challenges in the form of exegetical, ethical,
historical, metaphysical, and theological difficulties. Using these
examples, the significance of interpretive approaches focused on
authorial intention, history of composition, canonical context,
reception history, and reading context are considered in
conjunction with spiritual, literary, structuralist, existential,
historical-critical, and ethical-critical approaches. Christian
interpretation of Scripture as Scripture is shown to be an
inherently ad hoc task, understood as a rule-governed practice in
Wittgenstein’s sense: an established goal-directed activity for
which no method, hermeneutical principle, or critical perspective
discovers ”meaning” or generates good interpretation. Good
interpretation involves exploration of various construals of the
“world of the text” using “hermeneutics of tradition” and
“critique of ideology” (Ricoeur). The interpreter’s task is
to discern faithful readings and develop their significance in a
given intellectual or cultural context. The interpretation of
Scripture and its appropriation is seen to involve wisdom in
forming judgments on a case-by-case basis, learned through examples
and experience, on what constitutes good interpretation and use.
Earl shows how traditional hermeneutics and contemporary critical
resources suggest that history, ethics, and theology can rarely be
“read off” Old Testament narrative, but also how Christians
can appropriate ethically and historically problematic books such
as Joshua, faithfully adopt a “minimalist” approach to 1-2
Samuel, and embrace a Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1.
The book of Joshua has been received and used as Christian
Scripture throughout Christian history. The challenge today,
however, is how Christians should appropriately continue to read
Joshua as Scripture, not least in the light of well-known
historical and ethical difficulties with the narrative. In Reading
Joshua as Christian Scripture, Douglas Earl draws on conceptual
resources offered by recent anthropological approaches to myth and
combines this with a close literary reading of the text, in order
to argue that Joshua is misconstrued when it is treated as a
historical account of conquest. Instead, in its ancient Israelite
context Joshua functioned to reshape accepted norms of community
identity, as reflected in the book of Deuteronomy, by forming a new
"cultural memory." Furthermore, Earl reconsiders the traditional
notion of the "spiritual sense" of Scripture in terms of a rich
account of symbol and also makes use of the narrative hermeneutics
of Paul Ricoeur. The result is a fresh and unexpected reading of
Joshua as Christian Scripture that develops the original function
of the narrative in a way that resonates with classic premodern
readings and is also challenging to contemporary Christian
understandings of identity and faithfulness.
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