Steeled Faith

A Review of Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism by John Lennox

In the early sixth century b.c., four Hebrew boys, probably teenagers at the time, were forcibly deported from the tiny state of Judah in Israel to live out their lives in service to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. It would have been easy for Daniel and his three friends to forget the history of their people and the God who had revealed himself to them through it, and to adopt instead the pagan worldview of this vast, spectacular city, the greatest city in the world at the time.

But they didn't do that. Nor did they constrain their worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to their own private, subjectivized sphere for the sake of public amicableness. Instead, they lived out a tactful...