Zond Understand Bible Ref Ser/New International Ency Bible Difficulties [Hardcover]

One important consideration in the Gospels is what the New Testament scholar N.T. (Tom) Wright pointed out, that most of the things Jesus said, he most likely said many times, and with many minor variations.

I didn't give this book five stars, because Archer is unnecessarily intimidated by old-Earth propaganda, but does believe in a global Flood that actually wipes out alleged geological evidence for age. But since this occupies only a small fraction of the book which is otherwise excellent, only a one-star deduction is warranted.

In Archer's Encyclopedia, the theologian's uphill battle to dissolve biblical errancy creates just as many *new* contradictions (presumably requiring a third text to deal with *his* book) for Christians to wrestle with. Intelligent atheists know that pointing out bible contradictions is a shoddy way to critique Christianity, that the rhetorical and semantic contortions of the apologist/theologian can manufacture tidy non-solutions for even the most damning of scriptural passages (see Dan Barker's useful essay "Square Circles" in *Losing Faith in Faith*, pp. 160-163). Rather one must confront the *theological* underpinnings of the bible, and this is where Mr. Archer muddies the evangelical waters, by cleverly re-introducing (or re-naming) FAITH as Christian "reason."

Archer's Encyclopedia is a placebo for anxious believers who need their hand held by an academic theologian cloaked in authority, offering pre-fab defense-mechanisms that demand to be swallowed as uncritically as the bible itself. Predictably, when science helps to "prove" scripture true, the Encyclopedia embraces it. But if and when naturalistic explanations threaten the scriptural account (as in the Old Earth theory), the text counters blithely that "scientific evidence" actually *supports* an Earth barely 6000 years old (it does not provide this evidence, merely assuming that Christians are willing to take it for granted), also noting that "scholars" (yes, it seems to mean *biblical* scholars) disagree with modern geology, and, by extension, any "science" that undermines the bible cannot possibly be true.

As Ned Flanders once put it, "Well, son, it's just one of those mysteries only God understands, like how an airplane flies."

As a student of Christian cult psychology, Archer's Encyclopedia have been invaluable to me in mapping the mind of American fundamentalism, beyond that misleading stereotype of a backwater sky-cult led by pro-Life fanatics and Darwin-bashing school boards. (We all know that theologians have been honing their metaphysical arguments long before Western culture saw the likes of Nietzsche or Heidegger.) But Archer's Encyclopedia is hardly a definitive collection of exegetical "solutions." It is rather an anthology of caveats, loopholes, equivocations, simpering apologies, ad hoc provisional theories, and circular affirmations of Divine Mystery. A catalogue of ifs, ands, buts, and maybes. And not surprisingly, it purposefully and meticulously excludes many bible difficulties perennially pointed out by critics.

The Encyclopedia *does* help to illuminate biblical passages which condemn homosexuality as an abomination, subordinate women to a collateral role in worldly affairs, denounce Roe v. Wade as a Satanic triumph, and valorize genocide, war, capital punishment, and infanticide so long as the target-population is sinful and unrepentant before God -- though how one can be sinless and repentant before a God one doesn't even believe in (or those He mysteriously chose not to reveal Himself to -- i.e. all non-Israelites) is anyone's guess. In one "solution," the act of God-sponsored genocide is compared to that of a surgeon taking drastic action against a cancer. In other words, when God waged war in the Old Testament, it was against the forces of "spiritual evil," and God had no choice but to take drastic action to rid the land of the "evil influence" of the inhabitants (once again, this is the relativistic "evil" of people whom Yahweh did not reveal his Law to in the first place, and whose indigenous pagan culture endorsed the worship of other deities, such as Baal or Isis). Does this really solve the problem of transglobal cultural-relativism at the mercy of a tyrant Deity who allied Himself to less than 1% of the world's population (i.e. a small group of Hebraic war-tribes)? Archer's God apparently knows whether every human soul will ultimately repent, and so vests Himself with the authority to annihilate anyone who was born into the "wrong" culture, socially conditioned by the "wrong" morality, contextually committed to the "wrong" gods, even as He established these geo-ethnic preconditions by designing a world far vaster and diverse than the biblical writers could have conceived (i.e. if ancient China stood in the way of the Promised Land, they would have had to be slaughtered as well).

Archer's Encyclopedia is a masterpiece of conservative evangelical thought. It is an abstruse, exasperating, hyper-judgmental labyrinth of circular hermeneutics in thrall to the dark genius of Aquinas and Augustine (though not remotely of their glory). Distressingly for liberal religionists (or humanistic atheists like myself), this fascinating book has no shortage of "reason" to make its case to Western workers, bureaucrats, and technicians (whose career, family, and social lives leave little time for philosophical training and meditation, making them easy prey in the self-refuting clutches of theosophical rhetoric and semantics). Since 9/11 the world has taken a ramped interest in the psychology and ramifications of religious fundamentalism. Opening up your Bible alongside Archer's Encyclopedia is a great way to introduce oneself to what's at stake in the debate.

Education, Dialogue, Freethought...(!)