3 out of 4 stars
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We are so entrenched in our current time, place, and culture that it can be difficult to shed our learned biases when interpreting biblical stories, or really any spiritual teaching. William E. Combs’ Who Told You That You Were Naked?: A Refreshing Reexamination of the Garden of Eden offers a banquet of personal narrative, fictional narrative, biblical quotation, and bits of etymology and linguistics to explore discussions of the knowledge of good and evil, sin, death, and faith from a humanized, empathetic perspective. Particularly, Combs seeks to crack through the shell of learned bias and expand the concept of sin past “a mere list of offenses”.
This book lays out unpopular opinions contrasting with mainstream Christian discussion, offered in a modest and gracious manner. Combs provides a fresh point of view on the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Jesus’ Crucifixion, etc. but never explicitly states his own concrete views. Instead, each chapter ends with a list of discussion questions, leaving the final wisdom up to the reader. However, I feel Combs has quite profound ideas embedded here (like suggesting sin as a mindset rather than an act), ideas which are never explicitly stated, and ideas that only even occur to me because of my own theological studies on world religions. For readers who haven’t explored much outside the modern conventional consensus opinions on these topics, there’s no tipping point here to push folks outside a longstanding comfort zone – which is my main negative critique of the book. Personally, I would've liked to see the digging go a little deeper rather than the shovel being passed off so frequently to the reader. But, I do see it as a useful group discussion book.
Each chapter is presented from both objective and subjective positions - direct quotes and etymological breakdowns of specific words being more objective and personal experience and dramatic recreation of biblical stories being more subjective - leaving the reader with a well-rounded platter of information on which to base their final thoughts. Combs’ writing style is approachable for general audiences, reading more like a sermon than an academic text. I enjoyed the equal attention given to both the meaning of particular words and the feeling of particular acts and experiences.
I rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. It’s more than a two, because I agree that it is a “refreshing reexamination”, but I can’t offer a four because of the lack of tipping point that I mentioned above. This book is a comfortable, relaxing read containing deep, thought-provoking material – an uncommon combination.
As for spelling, the word “crouching” is misspelled as “couching” on pages 126 and 137. I saw no other mistakes. As for formatting, I found the frequent use of block quotes a bit condescending. It’s one thing for a blog post or magazine article to display large quotes of the text, because readers are presumed to be skimming (so the large quotes entice the readers’ attention into the body of the text). But with a full book, the reader has already provided their attention by choosing to open the book. In a book, rereading a sentence I just read a couple paragraphs ago is more confusing than helpful, and I have to force my eyes to leap over them. I think the text can carry itself without their aid.
While certainly aimed at a practicing-Christian audience, I think anyone jaded by punitive dogmatism but still curious as to the truth and mystery of the Bible would find this an interesting and mildly enlightening read.
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Who Told You That You Were Naked?
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