Metabiblical

I have heard that Dale Allison’s The Resurrection of Jesus is a thorough and evenhanded look at the historical evidence surrounding the belief of the early Jesus movement in his resurrection, and I have begun reading it. However, I got sidetracked into Encountering Mystery after listening to some recordings of Prof. Allison getting deep into the weeds over questions of methodological naturalism and religious experience.

Allison is a well-respected scholar, and seems to me to be a very careful and humble thinker. He also happens to be completely unimpressed by naturalism as a worldview, for reasons of both personal experience and the experiences of many others. Encountering Mystery is in many ways a personal book, in which Allison lays out his various and sometimes conflicted thoughts on the whole business of religious experience and its significance.

I would recommend reading it, although I am cautious about endorsing its conclusions, out of the feeling that I have not yet read a strong case for methodological naturalism, and have probably had a reading selection over a lifetime biased hard against it..