Sunday Book Review: Show and Tell

Book Review: Show and Tell

Author: Leo Van Dolson

Date: 1998

Publisher: Pacific Press

ISBN: 0-8163-1681-3

Length: 124 pages

Quote: “God...shows (through revelation) and tells (through inspiration) everything that we can grasp about His infinite nature.”

There’s a tip-off: Van Dolson has not learned one message about God that seems to have been important in Bible days. We are not to make images of God. In English words like “he” or “she” suggest limiting images. The Hebrew Bible teaches that God is not limited to a physical body with a gender or even a number; some names used for God in the Bible are definitely feminine, some are plural, and the Sacred Name is ambiguous and seems to have been understood as a verb form rather than a noun.

I don’t usually labor this point when discussing books by older churchmen, so why now? Because one of Van Dolson’s main points is that “it is absurd to degrade God to the image of a created being.” Churchmen who think that introducing “Goddess” language into Christian prayers would be blasphemous get no argument from me. Nevertheless, God is no more a “He” than a “She”: God is God. Van Dolson, who violates what he is in the process of preaching as a rule, is a prime example of how degrading it is to misidentify anyone as a “he.”

Show and Tell is unsatisfactory in many other ways. Where does one begin? A chapter on prophecy begins with a discussion of Amos, whose prophecy mentions an episode in which he said, “I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet.” He meant that, as a laborer, he had not attended a “school of prophets,” who had memorized the books of Moses and used divination to offer guidance on more specific questions than the law covered. Amos had left his regular fruit-picking job, because more comfortable people didn’t dare, to rebuke the shameful behavior of his rich neighbors, who were accumulating luxuries for themselves while poor people went hungry. The Bible is a Semitic artefact; it doesn’t teach that “property is theft”; it teaches that the main benefit of being rich is to win honor through generosity, an idea that’s still expressed at least in word studies of all Semitic languages. Wealth was good, but being greedy or miserly about wealth was shameful.

After a century of Marxist harangues, Euro-American churches have polarized into two groups: left-wing Christians think that helping those in need is something we need big government to set up expensive programs to do; right-wing Christians seem to think that helping those in need is optional. What we’ve lost here is the idea of individual mutual help, the idea that the have-less may have other things to offer the have-more, the idea that the have-more need to invest in their own communities. Some resistance to this toxic thinking can be observed in some “Black churches,” which is one reason why, if you are a non-African American and get an opportunity to visit an African-American church, you need to take it.

Readers might be prepared for Van Dolson to mention Amos as an odd character and then shift into the usual consideration of clichés and platitudes, as many lazy-minded preachers do. They could hardly be prepared for what Van Dolson does...which is to shift into a family story about how his great-grandfather joined the Seventh-Day Adventist church after meeting Ellen White and convincing himself that she was a prophet! (Ellen White, though famous for her dramatic healing visions, rejected the label of “prophet,” preferring to use her celebrity status to add prestige to her preferred title of “pastor’s wife.”) 

Later in the book Van Dolson tells the sad story of a young parishioner whose name, he says, was Colson (he doesn’t mention any relationship to Charles Colson). This Colson wanted to minister to the needy, so she picked up hitchhikers. Having no personal experience to share, the older church members could only say that “we did not feel it safe for a young woman to pick up hitchhikers.” Possibly they were too old to realize that, while picking up hitchhikers is always a calculated risk, trying to bully today’s young women with vaguely ominous remarks about what’s “not safe for a young woman” amounts to participating in terrorism. The bullying had the effect a woman-hating terrorist might have wanted. Colson locked into a belief that she had to prove she wasn’t offering sexual favors by refusing to turn off a “religious tape” even while she was preaching at a passenger. This verbal abuse probably caused most pedestrians who heard about her to decline any offer of a lift with Colson; it made one hitchhiker angry enough to beat her to death. He wasn’t interested in her “as a young woman,” and she had nothing he wanted to steal, but he wanted to shut off the harangue by any means necessary.

Van Dolson obviously expects readers to sigh, “Yes, that’s what can be expected when young women go outside alone.” Meanwhile, if the reader has taken time to analyze some of the things Adventists typically say to young women, and thus train young women to say to other people...I can empathize with the hitchhiker. Many Adventists struggle with a belief that they’re perceived as misfits among other Protestants, and, apparently as a reaction to this defensiveness, they seem to lose the ability to recognize differences among people in ways that don’t indirectly say “Obviously I am better than you are in every way. In fact, if God wants you to learn anything, it’s probable that God would send that message to you by way of me, because I am so much holier, healthier, happier, and more spiritual than you are, and you are such an ignorant un-spiritual clod.” If Colson’s elders had ever tried to learn, and teach their young, a less obnoxious style of communication, Colson would probably be alive today.

Van Dolson is in fact writing for Seventh-Day Adventists, although he doesn’t seem aware of it. “Dictionaries and commentaries, such as The Seventh-Day Adventist Bible Commentary, are helpful,” he advises those who want to study the Bible daily. There are other commentaries; I find no evidence in this book that Van Dolson is aware of them. The advantages of a Christian writer addressing only one denomination have never been obvious to me. Anyone who joins the Seventh-Day Adventist church has been led through a series of Bible studies explaining why Adventists interpret certain texts as they do. Anyone who goes to an Adventist school learns, if nothing else, how to lead others through those studies. Large parts of Show and Tell consist of rehashes of those old standby Bible studies. The benefit of reviewing teachings that are familiar to everyone in the denomination would be to explain those teachings to the rest of the world—but Van Dolson is not noticeably addressing, or aware of, the rest of the world.

What Show and Tell has to offer, therefore, is fairly well limited to the legend about Van Dolson’s great-grandfather, and a few other personal anecdotes. This book is therefore warmly recommended to any Seventh-Day Adventist who is interested in the life and genealogy of Leo Van Dolson. For the rest of the world...well, this book may help fill in the time on a long train ride.