Book Review: Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One

“Creations’ debate game changer” is my four words review of John H. Walton’s 192-paged InterVarsity Press published book The Lost World of Genesis One (2009). Noting that the Old Testament was not written to us but for us, Walton returns us to the lost and forgotten ancient Jews to whom the Testament was written to. He, thus, invites us to decipher  ancient Near East cosmology as they would have had understood it. The result, if true, is a game changer in American heating up creations-debate.  It renders the whole debate not only unnecessarily but misguided in the first place.

Walton summons us to interpret Genesis 1:1-2:3b cosmology as ancient Jews would have understood it. He wrote: “We gain nothing by bringing God’s revelation into accordance with today’s science. In contrast, it makes perfect sense that God communicated his revelation to his immediate audience in terms they understood.”(Walton 2009: 15) He invites us to read the text on its “face value”. Before asking what it means to us today, we need to know what it meant to them then.

When Bell Robs Bells of Hell

Plurium Interrogationum, Latin, meaning many questions also known in Critical Thinking as Loaded Question.

Times: Rob Bell

A loaded question is a question that carries a false or questionable presupposition, posed to trick a person into implying something which was not intended.

In the book, Love Wins, A Book About Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, one encounters many rhetoric questions loaded with emotional and false presuppositions. I will address only few important questions:

Emotional Loaded:

Does a loving God really send people to hell for all eternity?

Emotional words in this question are: “love” and “really”. Undressing these words from the question helps a reader to ponder the question without the authors presumptions namely God cannot be loving if he sent people to hell for all eternity.

Removing the emotional wording, the unloaded question appear as

follows:

Does God send people to hell for all eternity?