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Revenge of the Ebionites

By Boaz Michael | Comments (0) | Posted on December 7, 2005

That's the headline from a recent book review of FFOZ's Holy Cow! Does God Care about What We Eat? The magazine that ran this book review is Christianity Today's "Books & Culture," which claims "to edify, sharpen, and nurture the evangelical intellectual community by engaging the world in all its complexity from a distinctly Christian perspective." ¹

They tell me that there's no such thing as bad publicity. After all, how could I not want a 2-page article in a mainstream, Christian publication that uses oversized 14x11 pages to carry a review of our book, and that includes a cover headline that reads "Does God Care about What We Eat?" How could I argue about an on-line version of the article that links a large thumbnail of the book directly to Amazon.com?

Easily.

This review butchers Holy Cow! so badly that I am convinced that the article's author, Steven H. Webb, did little more than skim Hope Egan's section of the book, and he ignored Daniel Lancaster's section entirely. Webb, a self-described Christian vegetarian, riddles this review with so many errors that it's difficult to convey how bad it is. I'll just hit some lowlights:

The author's personal vegetarian bias permeates the article from start to finish. It not only prevents him from writing an objective review, he actually makes it seem like the topic at hand is whether or not Christians should eat meat.
He claims that this book "lacks in scholarship." I guess Egan's good overview of the Scriptures, combined with Lancaster's thorough biblical exegesis on some of Scripture's most difficult passages, does not pass for "scholarship" in Webb's eyes.
I would expect an "evangelical" to hold to higher appreciation of the Bible than Webb does. For example, he claims that "most Christians think that the Apostle Paul settled the question of diet once and for all in the early years of the church." Since when is truth determined by what "most Christians think"? Did he read any of the biblical support that Egan and Lancaster raised? He talks snidely about the "growing movement of Christians who draw their moral principles from the Torah, the Hebrew law found in the first five books of the Old Testament." Even many "enlightened evangelicals" today will admit that the "moral" laws found in the Torah are worth living by. Finally, he claims that "the question of a Christian diet cannot be resolved by appealing to the Torah." To what did Paul and Yeshua appeal when they were deciding something? Torah!

As a magazine publisher who continually strives to deliver content that matches our goals, I find Books & Culture's claims to "edify, sharpen, and nurture the evangelical intellectual community" to fall woefully short.

Am I overreacting? Read the review in question and decide for yourself. You can find it at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2005/006/13.14.html. If you think it's worth a letter to their editors, I encourage you to write them at bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com. If there is a big enough response, maybe they will run an article called "Revenge of the FFOZites."

In the meantime, I'll trust that Abba will use this article, just as He uses "all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." (Romans 8:28)

Endnotes

1. As self-reported in Sally Stuart's Christian Writers' Market Guide for 2005 (Shaw Books), p. 312.

About the Author: Boaz Michael is the president and founder of First Fruits of Zion.

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