Reviews for Treatise on the Law of Indirect and Collateral Evidence

The average rating for Treatise on the Law of Indirect and Collateral Evidence based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-27 00:00:00 Amber Johns This book came highly recommended to me, and there is a lot of good effort represented in its pages. Unfortunately, Bayes takes too many wrong exegetical turns and misses too much relevant biblical material for me to give The Weakness of the Law a higher recommendation than three stars. By way of example: 1. Bayes mistakes the Greek term paidagogos for a "pedagogical" role in the modern sense. This skews his understanding of the law's role in Galatians in an educational direction: the law tutored Israel to an anticipation of the Messiah. The term, however, refers to a child custodian who enforced basic behaviour suitable for minors, not to an educator, and in the context of Galatians, matters such as maintaining a distinct role for Israel separating them from Gentiles is to the fore, not stimulating messianic anticipation. 2. Bayes essentially takes the traditional Protestant line on Paul's handling of Leviticus 18:5 (see Galatians 3:12), whereby the crux of the issue becomes a contrast between faith and doing, and the connection of life to doing becomes problematic. This oft-provided interpretation, however, ignores Paul's own repeated and explicit connection between doing and the promise of life—indeed, between doing good and the promise of eternal life, in the case of Galatians 6:9–10. Paul thus has no quarrel with connecting the promise of life to a mandate for good works. The contrast between the law and faith in Galatians 3:11–12 thus must be located elsewhere. 3. Bayes identifies anything that undercuts the role of the law as a power in sanctification as "antinomianism," but this is far from satisfactory. If one held to a position denying any external rules, period, the charge would stick, but saying the external standard must be the law, and moreover must be a sanctifying power, goes a bit too far and assumes a bit too much about "the law." (That is, it assumes the law's eternality and that it is the sole source of divine revelation regarding the regulation of behaviour.) 4. Bayes's ultimate affirmation of the third use of the law does not reflect any wrestling with whether the so-called moral law has been modified in any sense with the advent of the Messiah. Indeed, he appears to assume that the language of fulfillment of the law (e.g. Gal 5:14) simply means straight line confirmation and obedience, whereas the term itself has the idea of completion of that which was incomplete, and has eschatological overtones. Any assumption that the Decalogue makes a straight-line transition from old covenant to new must deal with the fact that the fourth commandment, at least, has undergone (at minimum) serious alteration. 5. Bayes's understanding of "perfection" in Hebrews as "nearness to God" is interesting, but appears inadequate to account for the letter's references to the Son's own "becoming perfect" through suffering. Did Jesus become near to God by suffering on the cross? Bayes does not so much as address the issue; and it would rather appear that the terminology has a sense of completion in maturity rather than a general sense of nearness to God. As a whole, The Weakness of the Law is informative reading for one doing scholarly study on matters relating to the Mosaic law. But its problems are too basic to be of much help to the understanding of the general reader looking for a better grip on the place of the law in the Christian life.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-27 00:00:00 Tim Barett I just randomly picked this book up in the library as I knew next to nothing about the wicca faith/traditions and it was a small enough book. It was interesting to go through the actual rede and there were a few interesting bits of information about the wiccan faith. On the whole, however, and despite his own protestations, the author is very opinionated and some of the "interpretation" of the separate couplets of the rede were unnecessarily drawn out and downright rambling. I skimmed quite a few pages and ended up skipping a few more for good measure. Still, I guess the book has given me a general idea about the wiccan belief system, but if I decide to read more in future, I will definitely look for books by other authors.