The Bible for Grown-Ups
by Simon Loveday, Icon, £12.99
Simon Loveday assures readers that this study of the Bible will be even-handed. His book claims to be “theologically neutral. It neither requires, nor rejects, belief.” By the end, however, we are being told that “the Bible has been made into an instrument of divine tyranny”, and that believers are expected to “shut out any questioning of their own rightness”.
Along the way, we’re informed that the Old Testament is an utterly unreliable “guide to action”, while a fairly dismissive adjudication of the New Testament is also provided. We encounter, Loveday explains, “a stern, judgmental, selective Jesus” and a “mild, forgiving, inclusive Jesus”. “Which,” Loveday wonders, “is the real Jesus? Indeed, which is the real God? Who knows – but what we do know is that the New Testament offers us both, and they can’t both be true.” This doesn’t strike me as any more “theologically neutral” than concluding a book with a pronouncement that “we have created the gods to which we bow down”.
