Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments This book—and another closely related one, Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That Never Was (Baylor University Press, 2013)—has been a long time in the making, and I have many people and institutions to thank for help and support along the way. On the institutional side, first of all, I want to thank my employers at Regent College for their support for the project in terms of two periods of sabbatical leave in the winter semesters of 2009 and 2012. Thanks are also due, with respect to the second of these sabbaticals, to the University of Erfurt in Germany, and in particular to my host there, Christoph Bultmann, and his wife, Ursula, both of whom went out of their way to make my wife and me welcome. I must also thank most warmly the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Germany, which funded my stay in Erfurt, and the Lilly Foundation, whose Theological Research Grants Program covered our travel and other expenses. On the personal side of things I want to thank five research assistants at Regent College who completed an enormous amount of work on this project. Merely to name each one does not seem sufficient, but this is what one does, apparently: Jen Gilbertson, Alex Breitkopf, Rachel Toombs, Benjamin Petroelje, and Stacey Van Dyk. I also want to thank various colleagues, friends, and students who read the book proposal or x Acknowledgments sections of the manuscript and made helpful comments. In alphabetical order except for the first, these are: my wife, Lynette, then Travis Black, Scott and Monica Cousens, Don Curry, Dennis Danielson, Craig Gay, Edwin Hui, Mariam Kamell, Preston Manning, Bethany Sollereder , John Stackhouse, and Paul Teel. Almost finally, I am most grateful to both Walter Brueggemann and Tremper Longman, who took the time to write supportive letters with respect to my application for the Lilly Foundation grant. And finally, thank you to all my students and colleagues at Regent College over the last sixteen years, without whose stimulation, insight, criticism, and sometimes annoying denseness the thinking behind this book could not have developed as it needed to do, and the book would almost certainly not have been written. I feel rather as John Steinbeck is reported to have felt about his book, East of Eden: “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years . . . I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.” At least, that is what Wikipedia says he felt. This book is dedicated to Loren and Mary Ruth Wilkinson: inspirational friends and colleagues who have not only helped me to think well about the relationship between biblical and other thinking but also lived the integration that they preach. Their impact for good on the Regent College community in the course of their membership in it, and on the wider world, will never be adequately measured on this side of eternity. Only a small part of this book was actually written where they live, on Galiano Island in British Columbia, Canada. It was written over a three-day period in May 2011, in a cottage adjacent to their home, at a desk that looks out over one of the most beautiful bays I know. Yet the book owes a lot to them, as I hope they recognize. I even dare to hope that they like it. Iain Provan Vancouver, Canada, 2013 ...