God's Peoples, Akenson

[scholarsOrAcademics]

God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster by Donald Harman Akenson. 1992
As the title implies,there are societies that exist because they believe they are God's Chosen, The Covenant is the Old Testament Covenant. The last Chapter is "Living with God's Peoples'- not offering much hope.He gets into chaos theory, particularly Stephen Jay Gould. There is this, to give the flavor of his writing:
"At the heart of my argument, antecedent even to the concept of the covenant, is a simple assertion: ideas count. And, second, the ideas that count most are religious. Of course economic and technological developments are significant levers in effecting societal change, but to see them as the key to most major events is tantamount to confusing science with engineering". . . . page 353
He has a conceptual scheme that is worth the attempt to remember.

[tabatha]

1. Yes, and because they think they are God's chosen,

then the "others" are not God's chosen, and can be exploited and brutalized.

[Jim__]

2. I found this review, and it made me curious.

From the review:

Akenson declares that as a descendent of "dour and depressed" Swedes who, as serious "Bible readers," were a "thorn in the flesh of the Lutheran establishment," he has "no ethnic or religious investment (either pro or con)" in the biblical cultures he analyzes. Nor would he have dared to approach the "daunting body of writings that we Christians arrogantly call the |old Testament,'" were it not for his Yale undergraduate class with Rabbi Judah Goldin, who taught him that "the only way to encounter the scriptures was to read them directly" - without the often "sanitizing" mediation of modern criticism or the "distorting" lens of a Christian mind-set.

Since Akenson is a descendant of Christians who were serious Bible readers, how does he read shed his Christian mind-set when reading the scriptures? I think one of the most difficult things for anyone to do is to truly step outside his own culture. I can understand how he could make the effort; but how can he possibly know if he succeeded?