Peter Bolt (1)

Can you write about the places and powers of darkness with humour and yet serious intent? Peter Bolt's book says, "Yes, you can". Drawing parallels to Tony Soprano and a large number of references to movies which betoken an at times misspent youth/adulthood, Peter has taken material that I first encountered in a masters subject which he ran on "Mortality" (watch the spelling carefully), and turned it from a careful academic approach to the subject into a short book that reads more like a collection of talks. As a result it is very approachable and well applied to the readers' thinking about life and especially death.

Peter wishes to be guided by the apocalypse (unveiling) which the Bible provides and therefore accepts that we are told less about some areas than others, and in particular that our focus must be on Jesus. His chapters move from the periphery of the subject (areas such as New Testament cosmology and the lesser beings that inhabit the underworld) to the centre (areas such as death, and more importantly, the Jesus who defeats it).

I originally picked up the book to see if it would be a good thing to give the young adults who asked about the nature of unclean spirits that the group was reading about in Mark's Gospel. As I went through Peter's book, I first thought it was on the mark for my young friends, then, as the focus swung toward death, I began to think that it was good material but not as relevant to the questions they were asking, but then, on reaching the last chapters, which focus on the the new and coming world of the Spirit that Jesus has opened up for believers and the significance this has the modern approaches to demons and exorcism, I came full circle and saw how valuable it would be for them.

In the minor observations category:
As always, I hate the endless page flipping that endnotes cause - which this book uses for all its Bible references, but at least they are numbered consecutively throughout the entire book making them much easier to find. And, apart from one extremely valuable extended quotation, they are pretty much all references.
That one extremely valuable extended quotation, from Athanasius, supports Peter's presentation of what is a new thought to me, that the ancient Christian writers thought of the cross as a death in the air -- in the realms of the powers opposed to God.… (more)