Book Reviews

This book is a personal reflection on connecting with Muslim friends in a variety of contexts. Goldsmith looks at this through his own personal journey to meet, teach and share his Christianity with his students, friends and leaders of Muslim communities in Muslim countries.

Goldsmith begins with a retelling of a brief meeting with Haji Ahmed (lecturer on Islamic Study) who came to the All Nation Christian College in Britain, on the invitation of the college, to discuss the concept of God in Islam. This quickly turned to the subject of Oneness of God (Tawhid of Allah) in Islam and the Trinity in Christianity. This is not an easy topic, compounded by the misconception held by some Christians that Muslims accept Muhammad as God. Muslims do not believe that Muhammad was in any way an equal with God and he is not a god (p. 21). Therefore to compare Muhammad with Jesus is a totally wrong approach. In Chapter 7 when the issue of multi faith is discussed, Goldsmith spells out more clearly that Christians may discuss who Jesus is in comparison with the Quran in the Muslim faith. The difference is that in Islam the Word became book: the Quran. In the Christian faith God's Word became a human being in Jesus Christ (p. 98).

Have you ever wondered how Theravada Buddhism differs from Mahayana Buddhism? Or what practices are upheld by the Mandaeans? Answers to these questions, and any others on religions within the Australian context, can be found in ‘The Encyclopedia of Religion in Australia’.

Despite seeming at first to be overwhelming, with its 799 pages full of information on the history and practice of religions in Australia, ‘The Encyclopedia of Religion in Australia’ is in fact very accessible and functional. Running the gamut from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander religions through to Zoroastrianism, the Encyclopedia is extremely thorough in its breadth, precise in its detail, but also selective in its inclusions; it is never overly ‘wordy’ or repetitive. There are several pages of full-colour photographs that compliment the text in their richness and variety.

Have you ever criticized your own country – the government, the way Australians behave sometimes, the attitudes some people have?  Criticized it because you care about it and want it to be better.

In Re-Reading Paul: A fresh look at his attitude to Torah and to Judaism, Brendan Byrne suggests Paul is not so much saying that the Torah was no longer valid but that there was a need for revitalizing its core.  It was also not necessary for Gentiles to accept all elements of the Torah when they became Christian.

The Booklet has been given to all theological students in the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania of the Uniting Church in Australia.  In it many ideas taught about Paul in the past century have been shown to be biased and inaccurate if one reads Paul carefully and in the context of his time.  There is no disputing the fact that Paul’s certainty that Jesus is the Messiah is a major point of division between Christians and Jews.  Paul felt he was living in the end times and his understanding of who Jesus is changed his understanding as a Jew.  This book makes not attempt to suggest Christianity and Judaism are the same.

Have you ever wondered how we deal with the violent aspects of our faith traditions?  How do we hear the ‘good news’ in passages of scripture which are, when we are honest about it, gruesomely violent? It is not easy for many of us to accept that violence lies at the heart of scripture – whether that scripture is Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu or other religious traditions. Often instead of acknowledging and openly dealing with violence we ignore it, pretend it is not there, or explain it away as some sort of unfortunate aberration. In this book of collected papers by a range of Australian scholars some of these questions are addressed – from a variety of faith traditions.

When I was little, I had a new dress each year.  Then last year’s dress became the old dress.  One of my first theological questions (probably about the age of five) was ‘ what happens to the old testament when there is a new New Testament and the New Testament becomes the old Testament.

How do we read ‘The Old Testament’ as Christians without interpreting it through Christian eyes and seeing its only value in pointing to Jesus?  How do we read the New Testament without denigrating  the Jews?

As the Introduction to the booklet “Rightly Explaining the Word of Truth” says:

For many years it has been recognised by scholars - theologians, historians and philosophers - that there are passages in the New Testament which refer to Judaism and the Jews in terms of animosity. For almost two millennia those passages of the New Testament have caused misunderstandings of Judaism and provoked odium of Jews amongst Christian communities. More particularly those passages have been exploited throughout the ages and continue to be exploited by countless persons for political and social ends, and in some quarters for religious purposes. Hate and odium have led to and created antisemitism expressed by suspicion, mistrust, contempt, prejudice, false charges, discrimination of Jews by Christians, and by persecution, brutalities, forced conversions on pain of death, pogroms, murders and massacres of Jews as exemplified by the Crusades, the York Tower massacre, the Spanish inquisition, the Chmielnicki massacres, subsequent and countless pogroms in Eastern Europe. Those events were all overshadowed by the ultimate of all horrors in the history of mankind the Holocaust perpetrated by pagan Nazis with the full and active participation of, among others, German, Austrian, French, Polish and Hungarian Christians.