Anne Rice and Christian Scripture

[SedesDomi]

Did you read the Twilight novels?

No. I did see the movies, mainly because people were asking me. I thought they were entertaining and they were for young people. The movies were fairly superficial, very touchingly naïve, traditionally romantic, and they had to do with a young woman with mysterious figures in her life—like Jane Eyre. I do love the series True Blood. I don’t always like the way they handle things, but they have a great sense of humor.

Do you have any regrets about anything you’ve written, or things you wish you could do over?

No, I really don’t. I think all of the books I wrote were sincere. I’m not going back to any of them, but there isn’t anything out there I want to disown. Life is a spiritual journey. I don’t really regret things. It’s important to say that you’re sorry every day of your life. But I think regretting books is a fruitless exercise.

Are there any other religious authors you read?

I read theology and biblical scholarship all the time. I love the biblical scholarship of D.A. Carson. I very much love Craig S. Keener. His books on Matthew and John are right here on my desk all the time. I go to Craig Keener for answers because his commentary on Scripture is so thorough. I still read N.T. Wright. I love the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner. I love his writing on Jesus Christ. It’s very beautiful to me, and I study a little bit of it every day. Of course, I love Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

You mentioned D.A. Carson, Craig Keener, and N.T. Wright. They are fairly conservative Protestants.

Sometimes the most conservative people are the most biblically and scholastically sound. They have studied Scripture and have studied skeptical scholarship. They make brilliant arguments for the way something in the Bible reads and how it’s been interpreted. I don’t go to them necessarily to know more about their personal beliefs. It’s the brilliance they bring to bear on the text that appeals to me. Of all the people I’ve read over the years, it’s their work that I keep on my desk. They’re all non-Catholics, but they’re believers, they document their books well, they write well, they’re scrupulously honest as scholars, and they don’t have a bias. Many of the skeptical non-believer biblical scholars have a terrible bias. To them, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, so there’s no point in discussing it. I want someone to approach the text and tell me what it says, how the language worked.

 

[utah_rose]

Protestant theologians have a very different view of the Bible than Catholics do. Yes, they are Christian but now I can see where some of Anne’s views are coming from.

She may not acknowledge some of our Church’s beliefs because these scholars have a different take on what Scripture is saying.

And the Catholic theologian she sites is very liberal.

Apparently, she doesn’t realize that the Church is not just about the Bible, it also has to do with Sacred Tradition.

She should have Thomas Acquinas, St. Augustine and some of the early Church Fathers on her desk to read to get the full view on the Catholic Church.

 

[twinc]

Why all this lot of adding and subtracting to and from scripture which is forbidden anyway and since it says"there are many other things that are written and said but “these are written so that you may believe and believing have eternal life” - twinc

 

[colmcille1]

Why all this lot of adding and subtracting to and from scripture which is forbidden anyway and since it says"there are many other things that are written and said but “these are written so that you may believe and believing have eternal life” - twinc

Well said, twinc!

 

[JRRTFAN]

Protestant theologians have a very different view of the Bible than Catholics do. Yes, they are Christian but now I can see where some of Anne’s views are coming from.

She may not acknowledge some of our Church’s beliefs because these scholars have a different take on what Scripture is saying.

And the Catholic theologian she sites is very liberal.

Apparently, she doesn’t realize that the Church is not just about the Bible, it also has to do with Sacred Tradition.

She should have Thomas Acquinas, St. Augustine and some of the early Church Fathers on her desk to read to get the full view on the Catholic Church.

What does Anne Rice know anout anything? She is a sad case who deserves our prayers but not our discussion.

 

[SedesDomi]

What does Anne Rice know anout anything?

Anne Rice knows quite a bit. From her book “Out of Egypt”:

Having started with the skeptical critics, those who take their cue from the earliest skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment, I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud. I’d have to end up compartmentalizing my mind with faith in one part of it, and truth in another. And what would I write about my Jesus? I had no idea. But the prospects were interesting. Surely he was a liberal, married, had children, was a homosexual, and who knew what? But I must do my research before I wrote one word.

These skeptical scholars seemed so very sure of themselves. They built their books on certain assertions without even examining these assertions. How could they be wrong?”
…
What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments- arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts- lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horriefied by it if he knew about it- that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years- that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.