Happy Anniversary to Me: “Resurrecting Orthodoxy” Turns 5…

This Sunday, July 19^th, will mark the 5-year anniversary of my starting Resurrecting Orthodoxy. Over the past 5 years, I’ve written about 200 posts on the Creation/Evolution debate, over 200 posts specifically about Biblical Studies, about 100 on the New Atheist Movement, and a smattering of other topics. I’ve also written extended book reviews of the following books:

• NT Wright’s Surprised by Scripture
• CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity
• Christopher Hitchens’ god is Not Great
• Sam Harris’ The End of Faith
• Karl Giberson’s Saving the Original Sinner
• Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion
• Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation
• Ken Ham’s Inside the Nye/Ham Debate, Already Compromised, Six Days, How Could a Loving God? and Gospel Reset
• Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option
• Pete Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation
• John Walton’s Lost World of the Israelite Conquest and Lost World of the Torah
• Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God
• Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus
• Dan Barker’s godless and Mere Morality
• Jerry Coyne’s Faith vs. Fact
• Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm
• Iain Provan’s A Biblical History of Israel

All in all, there have been 627 posts. This is #628. I certainly have learned a lot by taking the time to both summarize and analyze so many books. Reading a book is one thing. Turning around, explaining what is in the book and then sharing your thoughts and analysis of that book, though, really forces your mind to digest the book.

The first really big post I wrote was entitled, “Why I am Not Teaching This Year.” I wrote it in late August of 2015, while I was still trying to process and come to terms with my being let go at a school at which I had taught for eight years, because the then headmaster was a YEC zealot who felt I was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” because I dared to criticize Ken Ham—not in any class, but just in my own writing. It was that crisis that led to my writing of my book, The Heresy of Ham, in which I ultimately argued that the “heresy” I found within YECism wasn’t any actual belief that the earth was only 6,000 years old (on that point, I just think that is wrong), but rather the setting up belief in a young earth as a fundamental, core tenet of the Christian faith and then going around condemning, judging, and questioning the faith of other Christians based on that issue alone.

At the time I wrote it, I thought that it was a tough and straightforward post. As I read it now, I can see just how much I was still hurting from what had happened to me. As I worked on The Heresy of Ham, I joined a number of Creation/Evolution Debate groups on Facebook to share my posts and critiques of Young Earth Creationism. In the process of all that, I struck up some very good online friendships with a lot of people. At the same time, I encountered my fair share of pharisaical YECist zealots who have called me everything from liberal, atheist, compromiser, wolf in sheep’s clothing, pagan, secularist, false teacher…the list can go on. Ironically, often times in some of the same Facebook forums, primarily due to my criticism of the New Atheist Movement as well, I have encountered my fair share of militant atheists who have called me everything from right-wing fundamentalist, to a host of other profanity-laced names that I will not mentioned.

All of that caused me to write an entire chapter at the end of my other book, Christianity and the (R)evolutions in Worldviews in Western Culture, entitled, “Fanatics, Fundamentalists, and Foxholes.” In it I warned about what I saw happening in our modern world, particularly throughout the 20^th century but also into the 21^st century. Namely, that as the light of revelation and reason of traditional Christianity waned, the more and more people were gravitating to their various own “fundamentalisms,” seeing any and everyone who didn’t fully endorse their own “purity doctrine” as the enemy, and then retreating to their own foxholes to lob their own grenades over and against anything “other.”

Sadly, that is what we are seeing on full display these days in this political election year. For all practical purposes, partisan politics is the national religion of America, and what we are seeing is an all-out war of fundamentalisms, and for the first time in my life, I’m struggling to find any hope that things will work out. Perhaps that is the question I’ll have to wrestle with on my blog in the foreseeable future. That being said, I don’t know if I have the strength or desire to—perhaps I’m in a bit of mourning over how everything seems to be crumbling.

In any case, at the end of that “Why I am Not Teaching This Year” post, I listed a number of writing projects I was working on: My book of teaching stories entitled Getting Schooled; My book on the creation/evolution debate entitled The Heresy of Ham; My book on worldviews entitled Christianity and the (R)evolution in Worldviews; and My translation of the Bible. As of last year, I had completed all four goals.

Now, at the 5-year anniversary of Resurrecting Orthodoxy, I want to share the next batch of writing goals that, hopefully 5 years from now, I’ll be able to say I accomplished:

1. A Bible Introduction Series in which I provide a “reader’s guide” through the books of the Bible. I envision it being 7 volumes, with 3 volumes for the New Testament and 4 volumes for the Old Testament. At this point, it is going to be entitled, The Blue-Collar Biblical Scholar’s Reader’s Guide to… then with whatever books I’ll be covering for that volume: (i.e. The Synoptic Gospels and Acts; Paul’s Letters; The General Epistles and the Writings of John; The Torah; The Former Prophets; The Major/Minor Prophets, The Writings).
2. A historical fiction novel about the events of the Jewish War of AD 66-70. It doesn’t have a title yet, but I want the novel to focus on the plight of a Jewish family and a Jewish-Christian family in Jerusalem during that watershed moment in both Jewish and Christian history.
3. A memoir-type book in which I share my own spiritual journey and my growing feelings of exile on a number of different fronts: political, cultural, relational, and spiritual.

If you haven’t before, I hope you take the time to poke around on the blog, and maybe read some of those past book review series I have written. Hopefully this Fall I’ll be able to start writing regularly again on the blog.