The Little Friar

Looking over the posts from 2020, I see I've made only a handful of original content posts.  Every other post, without exception, has been a book review.  Even the book reviews, though, appear to take place in fits and starts (five in one day on average).  All of that to say:  I feel like this blog is most likely coming to its end.   I currently have five books to review (see the trend now?).  After that, I don't suppose I'll have many others (if any).  My energy for writing has been spent on the spate of books I wrote between 2014 and 2018 -- 13 by my count.  I'll try to get to those before Christmas, but beyond Christmas I don't think I'd expect many new book reviews. Why this paucity of posts? A goodly bit of it, I think, stems from the rather large crisis of faith I've been in since early 2019.  I can't say I no longer believe -- that simply isn't true.  What I do believe, though, is that what I believe can't be reduced to words...

Mitchell Chase’s 40 Questions about Typology and Allegory brings together a series of questions that aim to "orient Bible readers to the subjects of typology and allegory, that we might be more faithful readers of Scripture" (page 12).  This book is an invitation to a kind of reading that has been at the heart of Christian biblical exegesis from the earliest days of the Church.  Both typology and allegory have fallen out of use over the recent decades -- particularly under the joint pressures of fundamentalism and historical criticism.  But Chase is right to highlight the importance of both:  "typological exegesis discerns organic connections and development across redemptive history and through progressive revelation ...  Allegorical interpretation views the text under consideration as having a deeper meaning, understanding the text too 'say other' than what the words read" (page 197). This is an excellent collection that turns these issues over for exa...