Engaging the Word

Engaging the Word teaches the reader how to use critical and practical tools to explore the Hebrew and Christian scriptures intelligently and perceptively

A group of adults who want to encourage an open exploration of the Bible, contemporary challenges to its authority, and other related issues can find solid content based on a good grasp of the work of recent biblical scholars in Michael Johnston’s easily read text. The book focuses on what it means to read the Bible as part of a community of faith, rather than simply for personal spiritual enlightenment.

Johnston . . . teaches the reader to read the Bible in three senses: the literal, the historical, and the prophetic or spiritual sense. This helps cut through the idea that reading with untutored eyes will automatically help readers find the word of God. The greatest strength in the book is Johnston’s discussion of the God of the Bible and the Jesus of the Bible. He gives the reader permission to see that there are many differing pictures, images, icons of God depicted in the Bible.

The book will be of great use, I believe, for the many of us who have been marginalized in various ways by the experience of the church: women, gay men, lesbians, people of color or of minority ethnicity. It should find eager audiences in urban and university parishes.

This volume is rather more speculative than its predecessors [in the New Church’s Teaching Series], offering a strategy for reading the Bible (using a literal-historical -prophetic matrix), and a methodology for group study. Unafraid of controversy, Johnston bases his reading of Mark on a relentlessly political hermeneutic connected with the Roman Occupation and the fall of Jerusalem. However, he insists that his strategy remains viable whatever hermeneutic is adopted or preferred, and I think the book as a whole supports his contention.