Securing Life

Securing Life represents a novel yet timely approach to reading and understanding the Bible. While reverence for the Bible and respect for its authority remain high in our society, biblical illiteracy, misinterpretation, and selective reading place us at risk. The Bible seems to have a conserving effect on conservative readers, a moderating effect on moderate readers, and a liberating effect on liberal readers. Do biblical texts contain conserving and liberating messages simultaneously? Should biblical texts be limited to specific meaning and perspective, acceptable by all, or do they contain multiple levels of meaning? While this book addresses these questions, it does not approach the Bible as an answer book but rather as a collection of books, multifaceted in nature, its enduring purpose being to provide us with perspective for living faithfully and fully through the stages and seasons of our lives, in harmony with God, nature, others, and self. Rather than starting chronologically with creation, followed by accounts of the patriarchs, the exodus, the conquest, and the monarchy, this book follows a compositional approach used by the Yahwist, an unknown author in Judea who composed Israel's first religious epic. Like the Yahwist, this book moves backward from Covenant through Community to Creation, but because it includes the New Testament, it moves forward to New Covenant, through New Community, to New Creation. A chapter is devoted to each topic. These motifs are prec...