Aleksandr Fuflygin

Zamysel Boga. Tolkovanie istiny.

God’s Plan. Interpretation of the Truth. Non-fiction. Moscow Publishers. Moscow 2016. 608 pages

Neither theology nor science can explain the message of the Bible to us completely and without contradiction. There is no single approach to the interpretation of the Bible with a consistent way of decipher the entire body of texts. Often contradictions and inconsistencies are simply accepted, ignored or declared to be unquestionable statements of faith according to the motto, ‘God's ways are unfathomable’. But Fuflygin is not satisfied with this. Assuming that the Bible contains a real message, he asks, ‘If God, whatever He was, created man and provided for everything, why should He not have given him clear instructions on the way: How to live, what to do, what to strive for?’ For the author, the Bible is exactly this instruction.

The task that the author has set himself is a bold one: to provide a reading with which all the mysteries of the Bible can be solved in a comprehensible way. Moreover, his attempt to prove that the Bible formulates a consistent plan of God should not contradict the latest scientific findings. There are no ‘blank spots’ in his interpretation of the Bible. The author demonstrates this exemplarily in two books of the Bible - the book of Genesis from the Old Testament and the Gospel of Matthew from the New Testament - by commenting on verse after verse and trying to explain it without contradiction, literally and without leaving out any detail.

Nevertheless, God's Plan is not limited to the target group of an academic readership, but is written as a kind of popular science commentary, in a sense an accessible and readable translation of the Bible. The seemingly most incomprehensible things, phenomena, events or images in the Bible, such as the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge, the creation of Eve from Adam's rib, the Flood and Noah's Ark, the resurrection of Jesus and much more, suddenly take on a clear meaning in this reading.

For confirmed Orthodox believers the book might be a sacrilege. More open-minded spirits, whether religious or agnostic, will be more and more astonished with every further Bible verse. One often puts the book aside with a pounding heart and asks oneself, ‘This can't be true!’

Fuflygin's book also opens up the possibility that the religious writings of Judaism, Christianity, but also of Islam, i.e. of the often conflicting monotheistic religions, basically describe one single great plan of God, which in the end even seems to coincide with the wisdom of Buddhism. In this respect the findings of this book, without it having been the author's explicit intention, contribute to a reconciliation of the world religions as well as to a reconciliation of faith and science.