Book Review: Fresh Eyes on Famous Bible Sayings

Book Review: Fresh Eyes on Famous Bible Sayings by Doug Newton

Disclaimer:  I received a copy of this book through a Goodreads Giveaway to facilitate the writing of this review.  No other compensation was offered or requested.

One of the things about living in a “culturally Christian” nation like the United States is that a majority of people will use sayings derived from Christian sources without thinking very hard about what they originally meant.  This includes actual Christian believers.  Many times, we assign meanings and never consider other interpretations.

Thus this book by Pastor Newton, looking at some of those familiar phrases once again to find new perspectives.  It’s part of his “Fresh Eyes” series that also considers different ways of looking at parables and miracles.

The volume is divided into chapters by saying, with a main section talking about the meaning and what new perspectives can be found on it, “20/20 Focus” with some discussion questions to make the readers think, a short prayer, and “Vision Check”–suggesting in a more metatextual way a passage can be looked at differently and assigning an exercise.  This then leads to the author’s website for more thoughts.

It’s a good format for this sort of book.  The chapter I found most interesting was the one on “faith moving mountains.”  Like many folks, I’ve struggled with the apparent ineffectiveness of prayer in many instances, especially when prayer is the only thing you can do.   The author distinguishes between “trust in God”, which is a human capability (and necessary to get any value out of reading Scripture or prayer) and “faith”, which is a gift from God granted in accordance with His will (and thus if your prayer isn’t spontaneously curing cancer, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re praying wrong.)

Pastor Newton scatters stories of how his prayers were answered throughout the text; some might say he’s selectively remembering having especially strong feelings of God’s presence in cases where prayer was successful.  Concerningly, there’s a #metoo story where the author remained silent about what happened–but not to worry, because years later the perpetrator came to Jesus, in part inspired by the author’s silence on the matter.

Less good from a reader’s perspective is that three pages in the front are taken up with favorable quotes from other reviews.  I’ve already got the book, why do I need more advertisement?  It seems especially out of place in a religious book.  (And one of the featured chapters is about Jesus’ anger at the commercialization of the Temple!)   With that, a long acknowledgements section which is also an autobiography, an overview of the “Fresh Eyes” series and an introduction to the book proper, we’re 10% into the book before we get to the actual meat.

There’s an endnotes section (unlike some other authors, Pastor Newton does proper citations of things other than Scripture) and a bonus chapter from the Parables book.

Worth looking into if you want to consider other perspective on what the Bible has to tell us.  Likely to be of very little use to non-believers.