A Review of Rachel Held Evans’ “Inspired”
Biblical Inspiration
When I started reading theologically-based books, I started with Rachel Held Evans’ Searching for Sunday. It was recommended to me by a former member and pastor of my church, and I found within that book a lot of me. I’ve grappled with my faith, as Held Evans does in that earlier book, and I was so taken by her writing style and her humour that I wound up reading her two previous books. Now on her fourth book, and first to not be construed as a memoir, I have to say that Inspired is, indeed, just that. Rachel Held Evans has matured as a writer (and she’s only in her mid-30s) and, while the humor is more muted in this book as the topic of conversation is a bit more serious, she continues to mesmerize with sharp sentences and a fluid style.
Inspired is about unpacking the Bible and getting at the root of some thorny issues that may prohibit one’s faith. It is unique in the Held Evans cannon in that this is, again, not a memoir but more of a theological conversation. While part of the book is deriving wisdom from what the Bible might actually means — and I should point out here that Held Evans readily admits that she doesn’t quite have all of the answers yet — part of the book is a retelling of some of these stories. Held Evans is not the first to do this, as you’d know if you read some of my other reviews, but she is the best to do so. The reason why her tellings are so good is because she can be irreverent. One of the stories is actually a Choose Your Own Adventure-style story and yet another is written in the form of a screenplay. Held Evans is playing around here quite a bit, and the way she does so is infectious. She makes the Bible relevant again for people of a certain age, and I was quite enamoured with this book as a result.
However, the real meat is in the theological underpinning. For instance, I’ve always had a problem with the story of Jesus feeding the masses from just a few loaves of bread and a fish or two. Held Evans tells us that whether or not we believe this to be true and literal doesn’t matter — it’s whether or not that we act in ways that suppose this miracle is true is what’s important, whether that be from working in a soup kitchen or bringing forth miracles in other people’s lives in other ways. I’ve never thought of this passage in that way before, so Held Evans, at a mere 35 or so years of age (which is young in book publishing circles), has wisdom beyond her years and you can tell that she’s really thought long and hard about some of the things that she’s writing about here.
I also like the way in how she links the creation story to personal stories that families tell about their own existence. In a rare flash of memoir-esque story, she tells of a crazy uncle many generations before her that blew off fingers on his hand by launching fireworks only to get a response from his wife as “goody, goody” — a response to anything overly dramatic in the Held Evans household ever since. Held Evans also confronts the letters of Paul and how misogynist and gay unfriendly they might be. Her answer is to look at those letters in context and as a whole. For instance, something I didn’t know is that you just can’t cherry-pick through Paul’s writing for a text to defend why gays shouldn’t be included in the church because he was speaking to a specific congregation at a very specific time — and the question really is “Do Paul’s letters apply in this day and age and in these specific circumstances?” Again, I never really thought of that worldview.
As Held Evans will readily admit, you will find stuff in the Bible to support heinous acts of violence and prejudice and stuff that denounces these things in equal measure. The author readily admits that she still hasn’t wrapped her head around the idea that God seems to, in the Old Testament at least, allow for cultural genocide. She has no defence for that, really, which, on one hand, seems unfortunate, but, on the other, is a tacit admission that reading the Bible is a matter of starting conversations rather than coming up with definitive answers for certain things. In a sense, it’s good that Held Evans does not hold all of the keys to the kingdom — that might make her to seem a little too “know it all-like” — since one supposes these things may get hashed out in more detail in later books, maybe even taking up an entire volume.
All in all, Held Evans’ writing style remains effortless but, yet, more densely packed than it has ever been. The transition from Searching for Sunday to Inspired is profound. While I doubt that all Christians will agree with her, she doesn’t actively attack the Christian right, per se, as some Christians do (some of the lefty leaning Christian posts I follow on Facebook make me squirm a bit because they employ the same type of rhetoric that their counterparts to the political and religious far right do). Inspired, then, is a wise and mature work, a means for a formerly evangelical Christian to come to grips with certain aspects of her faith while endeavouring others to do the same. I cannot be effusive in my praise for Held Evans. She is not only a model writer or a model Christian, she is a model human being. Inspired is the type of book that all Christians should read. Maybe you might nod your head in agreement with it, or maybe you might get argumentative with it. Either way, that’s the whole point of this book’s existence, and it makes it a standout contender for Christian Book of the Year.
Rachel Held Evans’ Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again was published by Thomas Nelson on June 12, 2018.
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