Mark's Notebook

All You Need Is Unconditional Love

Christianity Today Book Review

A judgmental assessment of judgmentalism is, predictably, full of contradictions.

Reviewed by John Wilson

It must have sounded like a suitably edgy title: Repenting of Religion. Why on earth, the slightly shocked reader is supposed to ask, of all the things to be repentant about, should we repent of religion?

Because, Gregory Boyd explains, springing the trap, religion is all about "getting life from the rightness of our behavior," a fatally delusive sense of self-satisfaction sustained by perpetually judging others and finding them wanting.

Such judgment, Boyd argues—based on his Bonhoeffer-influenced reading of Genesis—is in fact the primal sin from which all other sins derive.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/002/33.87.html

Mark says: This reminds me of Rick Ritchie's assessment of Martin Luther:

"Luther found true life when he repented of his youthful repentance. It was in abandoning the manufacture of a new life within himself (Yes, even with the help of the Holy Spirit--medieval Christians were quite familiar with that!) that Luther discovered the Gospel."

http://www.holytrinitynewrochelle.org/yourti17110.html

In the end, Wilson finds much to criticize in Boyd's book, "a book riven by self-contradictions and flawed by a hermeneutic so naïve it beggars belief." Of course, the main contradiction is that it is impossible to point out the flaws of repentance-based religion without passing judgement on it, which is the one thing we must not do.

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008