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What do you do with a story-teller, writer, theologian whose love and passion for the Bible would bring tears of joy to almost any Mennonite evangelical reader, but whose views are often so liberal no self-respecting fundamentalist Christian bookstore would ever carry his book?
Ralph Milton retells the stories of biblical characters, Old Testament and New, around a formula of: an introduction, his paraphrased story, and an explanation of why he wrote the story.
Milton's love and passion for the Bible drives his work from the very beginning, with the first chapter heading "First, you fall in love", and it is clear that he believes his own words when he says we read the Bible primarily to discover and re-discover the Bible.
I would suspect that many of our Herald readers would find Milton too liberal, too loose theologically, relatively speaking, but they could still find his work intriguing. I thought that Milton was clever and creative in this work, to be sure, but his cleverness is too self-conscious. I think we desperately need to rediscover the Bible and learn to love to hear and to tell the story, but sometimes we story-tellers need to get ourselves out of the way--the story is too good not to.
Dan Unrau is Pastor of Fraserview MB Church in Richmond, B.C.
Return to the M.B. Herald Vol. 35, No. 14
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