Awkward Reverence - Reading the New Testament Today

Reflecting the best of contemporary scholarship on the New Testament, Awkward Reverence is a lively, engaging, beautifully written, rueful, and opinionated guide to writings that some feel have been dulled by modern scholarship. Beeching's response is to revivify the New Testament by reflecting both the important insights of modern scholarship and an of intelligent, self-educated, and awkwardly reverent reader.

Beeching (retired associate dean, Central Connecticut State Univ.) waits until the final chapter of this biblical survey to explain his "awkward reverence" toward the New Testament. This summation provides some needed balance to a work that tends to lapse into glib sarcasm. Beeching insists on reading the texts "sensibly" as a fascinating but wildly diverse and theologically inconsistent collection of anonymous Greek literature, of which only a handful (i.e., some of Paul's letters) were written by their reputed author. Since seminarians have studied such views for almost 200 years, Beeching expresses disappointment that congregations seldom hear them from the pulpit. Hardly an illuminating work; for larger undergraduate and public libraries.?Richard S. Watts, San Bernardino Cty. Lib., Cal.
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