Author: Brian Cosby
Publisher: David C. Cook
Genre: Christian
ISBN: 978-1-4347-0909-7
Pages: 208
Price: $15.99
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Many Christians choose to cherry-pick from the Bible, picking out verses that support their own view of God as love, and ignoring the rest. This leads to a watered down Christianity that has no power in a believer’s life. Brian Cosby attempts to show the reader where his faith may be lacking and why.
Early on, Uncensored shares an intriguing Bible passage – 2 Kings 2:23-24. Cosby explains this unusual story so well that I marveled at the insights I expected to read. Unfortunately, there were very few unique revelations to come. For the most part, Cosby expressed his thoughts about the Christian faith and backed them up with a couple of Bible verses. He didn’t tackle the truly tough verses that are causing problems today.
Cosby dares us to embrace the “entire” Bible, but he only half-heartedly mentions the Deuterocanonical books of the Bible, often referred to as the “Apocrypha.” He mis-numbers them as being fourteen or fifteen, but in fact, there are only seven. These seven books of the Old Testament were part of the Bible for over 1500 years, until Martin Luther made the decision to take them out, since he believed they weren’t inspired by God. Cosby also didn’t even touch John 6, which Jesus himself explains is a difficult subject for his followers to understand. And he avoids any tensions caused by Deuteronomy 22:5 and Romans 1:24-32.
While I think Cosby’s intent was good, I felt disappointed that he also seemed to cherry-pick the topics he wanted to write about. These are important ones – making God into our image, the creation and how it impacts us today, the role of parents, the consequences of sin, and the role of suffering, as well as others. But I would have preferred to see a deeper and maybe even controversial look at some of the Bible verses that make people squirm.
Reviewer: Alice Berger
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