PERSPECTIVE

Highfield’s The Choice is a careful and erudite analysis of Keen’s work that uncovers a species of argument being offered from many quarters. First, he lays bare Keen’s postmodern substitution of feeling and rhetoric for Scripture and sound reasoning. “From the postmodern perspective,” he notes, “autobiography is argument.” In such a case, Scripture can be displaced by personal desire. Second, he skillfully explains the implications of such an approach to an orthodox view of the Bible. If only those historic demands of Scripture that pass muster with one’s self-defined notions of kindness, justice, love, secular psychology, and minimal human suffering (i.e., inconvenience, restraint of desire) are obligatory to Christians, we are back to the ancient times in Israel when every individual is a law to her/himself.