The Bible and the Believer

How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously

By: Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter Enns, Daniel J. Harrington

Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld

Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

Can the Bible be approached both as sacred scripture and as a historical and literary text? For many people, it must be one or the other. How can we read the Bible both ways? The Bible and the Believer brings together three distinguished biblical scholars--one Jewish, one Catholic, and one Protestant--to illustrate how to read the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament critically and religiously. Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter Enns, and Daniel J. Harrington tackle a dilemma that not only haunts biblical scholarship today, but also disturbs students and others exposed to biblical criticism for the first time, either in university courses or through their own reading. Failure to resolve these conflicting interpretive strategies often results in rejection of either the critical approach or the religious approach--or both. But the authors demonstrate how biblical criticism--the process of establishing the original contextual meaning of biblical texts with the tools of literary and historical analysis--need not undermine religious interpretations of the Bible, but can in fact enhance them. They show how awareness of new archeological evidence, cultural context, literary form, and other tools of historical criticism can provide the necessary preparation for a sound religious reading. And they argue that the challenges such study raises for religious belief should be brought into conversation with religious tradition rather than deemed grounds for dismissing either that tradition or biblical criticism. Guiding readers through the history of biblical exegesis within the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant faith traditions, The Bible and the Believer bridges an age-old gap between critical and religious approaches to the Old Testament.

©2012 Oxford University Press (P)2013 Audible Inc.

Religiously, yes...but not really critically

For those of us who have read the Bible enough to not believe, the lack of secular or agnostic viewpoints in this book about Theology leaves much to be desired. If you want to see how so-called scholars are failing to be critical of scriptures (in order to get a glimpse into a religious person's mind), then this book might be useful. Also for this audiobook, the narrator seems to have never read it previously, and pauses throughout sentences rather than reading it naturally. Overall it was alright, the content was biased toward faith, and the narrator seemed like he was chosen randomly from a group of people who read sentences for a living.

Great book terrible reader

I would highly recommend the book, but the extremely detached and monotonous narrator made this a struggle to get through.

Great Content

Loved learning three perspectives on how to read the Old Testament. Unfortunately the narration is not done well. The narrator sounds as if he's holding his breath with each sentence. He speaks in the higher register of his voice which leaves the listener perpetually waiting for the question to end. I would recommend reading this book rather than listening to it.

Three PhD Theologians Entertaining Themselves

A 250 word abstract would could have covered everything meaningful discussed in the book. I purchased the word because I appreciated some of Pete Enns previous work. It was a hard boring effort to finish but I stuck it out and my feeling of conquest is my positive reward.