Fall 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 2 · pp. 198–199
Book Review
Cuckoos in Our Nest: Truth and Lies about Being Human
Iain Provan. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023. 258 pages.
Iain Provan, who spent much of his career teaching and writing about the Old Testament at Regent College, has written a fine book in response to an urgent question: Why and how does being a human matter? Because of the ambivalence in our world about the nature of humans, we are unclear about what humans are here for, and thus we become confused about ethics. Though this book ranges far beyond biblical interpretation, Provan’s grounding in Scripture is still one of its most satisfying aspects.
One of the delightful aspects of Cuckoos in Our Nest is the way Provan delivers his panoramic argument in short, readable chapters, each of which could be the topic of a small-group study. In part 1, six chapters address the question of how we can know our view of humanity is right. The critical question, according to Provan, is “Whom shall I admit to my circle of trust, and why?” (12). Testimony is fundamental, and developing a trustworthy community of witnesses to truth claims is essential.
Part 2 is fourteen chapters in length, painting the wide sweep of biblical anthropology. Biblical themes such as creation, animated bodies, beauty, priesthood, male and female, and community are examined. In part 3, fifteen chapters dig further into what it means to be a human; worship, rights, death, gender, children, creation care, and politics are examples. In part 4, the final fifteen chapters describe a host of errors that have crept into our minds on the matter of being human. Examples include delusions about science, the trump card of feelings and subjectivity, the idol of choice, the rejection of the physical, deceptions about social justice, and misguided environmentalism. A highlight for this educator was the chapter that called our current fascination with online education a grave mistake. “So if we desire to teach, over against all kinds of Gnosticism, the utter importance of our embodied nature as social beings, but we choose to do this by way of disembodied communication over the internet, we have tripped over the first hurdle in the race, and we shall not finish it well (if at all)” (190).
The memorable title of this book, Cuckoos in our Nest, gives me a small complaint. The European cuckoo will often lay its eggs in another species’ nest so that an unsuspecting mother bird incubates an alien who, when hatched, pushes out the other eggs and takes all of mama’s food for itself. So, the metaphor goes, we need to beware of unbiblical ideas we let into our nests that appear normal at first but end up doing violence to our vision of the human. I feel this controlling metaphor obscures the fact that the secular humanism Provan is warning us about is mostly a Christian heresy. Its lies are not so much totally foreign cuckoos as they are our own Christian offspring grown up to be strange birds. p. 199
This means we cannot just be against them simply and entirely. This nuance throughout would have strengthened Provan’s analysis. For example, in a discussion of the “cuckoo” utilitarianism school of ethics, Provan says, “All in all, utilitarianism is an utterly unacceptable way of thinking about justice, from a Christian point of view, since it erodes the rights of individual image-bearers in favor of the group or ‘the people’ ” (200). There is something dangerous about utilitarianism for the reason Provan states, but it is also true that it is a Christian heresy, not a foreign cuckoo. It was hatched in a culture that had been taught that true religion will be good for people. Christian ethics will improve people’s lives. But, when this view secularizes, it jettisons the understanding that faith is good for people because it is good for God, and simply asks, “How can we give the most people the most pleasure?” Resisting the perversion of a thoroughly Christian idea requires a more delicate scalpel than simply identifying utterly unacceptable gods.
This book is a wise, gutsy, biblical depiction of the glory of being human. Speaking of being embodied: a book is no less than a physical thing, so a note to the printer: the spine of my book gradually gave way and became a bundle of loose pages when I opened the book.
I recommend this book to Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, pastors, and educators.
