Jesus and the Fundamentalism of His Day. . - book review

Jesus and the Fundamentalism of His Day. By William Loader. Grand Rapids, MI: Win. B. Eerdmans, 2001. 156 pages. Paper. $14.00.

Perhaps the title is misleading; the bulk of the book is about early Christian interpreters of the Law, as reflected in the biblical Gospels, their sources, and (briefly) the Gospel of Thomas. In short, the approach of each of the Gospel writers in his (male pronoun knowingly employed) own way is to portray God as more interested in people than in laws. Their approach, concludes Loader, appears to have originated with Jesus. Jesus' guiding principle is love and compassion.

Fundamentalism, because it is more concerned about laws than about people, is narrow-minded, inflexible, rigid, and oppressive. Jesus was loving, compassionate, open, caring, inclusive, and more concerned about people than about rules. How should Christians today follow Jesus' hermeneutic? Affirm those portions of the Scriptures that are loving, compassionate, open, caring, and inclusive of all people and disregard the rest. This applies to matters of slavery, the role of women in family and community, sexual roles and practices, and beyond. Indeed, according to Loader, at stake is the ability to reject thoroughly oppressive social values that the biblical writers themselves were captive to.

Loader pursues a clever thesis and method, i.e., to argue that the Gospel writers adopt diverse and even contradictory approaches to the Law while at the same time having the same motivating purpose, namely, to reject the Law when necessary for the sake of love of God and love of neighbor. In this way, the book explains its point by doing what it is explaining. The strength of the book is its redaction critical observations. Its weakness is that it takes the reader no further forward in moral deliberation than did Joseph Fletcher's Situation Ethics.

Readers who agree with the way Loader frames the issue will welcome this book. As passionately as I reject fundamentalist claims about Scripture, however, I cannot in good conscience recommend a book that, perhaps unwittingly, lends itself to unloving, uncompassionate dismissal of the views of persons who are less confident than Loader is about relying on human feelings to decide which scriptural ethical directives to ignore.

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group