Abstract
J. Alexander Sider,
To See History Doxologically: History and Holiness in John Howard Yoder’s Ecclesiology
, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2011; 224 pp.: 9780802865731, £18.99 (pbk)
‘Doxology’ may simply mean praise, especially in the form of a hymn. The phrase ‘to see history doxologically’ already indicates that Yoder and Sider mean something considerably more comprehensive. Yoder used the phrase to describe the vision in Revelation of the saints worshipping the slain lamb, proclaiming that the lamb was worthy to open the scroll, revealing the meaning of history. Yoder wrote, ‘To see history doxologically … is to describe the cosmos in terms dictated by the knowledge that a once slaughtered Lamb is now living … doxology, as I here take it to be a mark of faith, is more than liturgy. It is a way of seeing; a grasp of which end is up, which way is forward’ (The Royal Priesthood, pp. 128–9).
Sider takes this concept as his frame, not only for exploring Yoder’s ecclesiology but for making his own argument about the Church: ecclesiology should avoid attempts to resolve the tension between holiness and difficulty; rather embracing the Church ‘as holy in its difficulty’ (p. 12). Sider analyses Yoder’s ecclesiology in contrast to and conversation with several other authors. Chapter 1 explores ecclesiology and political theology through a contrast with Oliver O’Donovan. Chapter 2 considers ecclesiology and historicity with reference to Ernst Troeltsch. Chapter 3 critiques Yoder’s narration of Constantinianism. Chapter 4 explores the relationship between memory and forgiveness in conversation with Miroslav Volf. Chapter 5 employs the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and John Milbank to describe how two practices Yoder considered central to the Church, the ‘rule of Paul’ (decision-making through open conversation) and ‘the fullness of Christ’ (recognition and empowerment of the divine giftedness of each member), show that Yoder’s ecclesiology was not pure voluntarism or contractual communitarianism. While the first three chapters demonstrate the eschatological orientation of the Church as doxological community, the final two chapters argue that ‘practices of patience are necessary characteristics of the church’s activity if it is to foster itself as a way of being in time that can learn to envision history as praise’ (p. 195). In the conclusion, Sider enters into conversation with Gillian Rose in order to address the risk that an emphasis on ‘patience as praise’ may eclipse justice.
The crux of the contrast between Yoder and Sider’s presentations of O’Donovan, Troelstch and Volf in the first three chapters is that ‘themes of control and the management of history’ are shown as ‘the shadow side of the eschatologies deployed’ by the other authors while patient trust in God’s work in human history is at the heart of Yoder’s eschatology. The explorations of forgiveness, negotiation and dialogue in the final chapters are meant to show ‘the institutional parameters of his rejection of the kind of control over history’ exhibited in these other eschatologies (pp. 199–200).
The book began its life as Sider’s doctoral dissertation written under Stanley Hauerwas. For those who read the work of John Howard Yoder with or through Hauerwas, this will be an interesting volume which charts new territory in relation to other books on Yoder. For those who read Yoder within the Mennonite tradition (like Yoder, Sider is a Mennonite), especially in agreement with authors such as J. Denny Weaver, it will be a challenging read. What this book does not do, and is not intended to do by the author, is introduce Yoder’s work. Therefore it is not recommended for those unfamiliar with Yoder’s writings, who would do better to begin with The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans, 1995).
Westcott House, Cambridge
Graham Adams,
Christ and the Other: In Dialogue with Hick and Newbigin
, Ashgate: Farnham, 2010; 224 pp.: 9781409400288, £50 (hbk)
Graham Adams has written a thoughtful and engaging book on approaches to the question of religious and theological pluralism. It centres around an analysis of two well-known twentieth-century commentators, John Hick and Lesslie Newbigin. Both were committed to furthering the debate about religious pluralism, though each pursued quite different goals: Hick defending a position of committed pluralism in relation to other faiths, and Newbigin developing a more broadly ‘exclusivist’ position. Adams expounds their work succinctly, but does so in the service of a broader thesis. For in their attempts to ‘universalise’ the ‘Jesus tradition’ (albeit in quite different and opposing ways), he argues that both succumb to the modernist tendency to objectify ‘others’ in ways which both foster and maintain false sets of boundaries and solidarities. Hick creates a false solidarity of ‘moderns’ and ‘liberals’ by producing a ‘universal religion’ which suppresses the ‘otherness’ of those outside its bounds, while Newbigin’s insistence on revelation as the grounds for the objective ‘otherness’ of the tradition tends to obscure important elements of ‘otherness’ – both outside and within his tradition. Undergirding Adams’s central thesis is his Christological conviction that Jesus is himself the ‘Shaken One’, whose open encounters with others prompted a more genuinely human existence, and who enables his followers to live likewise at a greater depth of interrelatedness with ‘others’ – both inside and outside the ‘traditions’ which they inhabit. Adams therefore aims to shake ‘unquestioned assumptions about reality’, in a way that fosters ‘constant revision and re-engagement with each ‘other”’.
The book’s argument is culturally and theologically complex and impossible to do justice to in a short review, but it is both well sustained and thought-provoking – even (or perhaps especially) where one finds oneself disagreeing with him. My own hesitations were twofold. First, I found myself wondering whether certain aspects of the interpretation of Hick and Newbigin were not themselves examples of the kind of ‘boundary-marking’ which Adams opposes. Newbigin’s vision of contextualization, for example, is in fact much more subtle than Adams allows, and to set up the debate as though ‘ontology’ were the only Christological marker for Newbigin is therefore rather misleading. (Unfortunately, as part of this discussion Michael Polanyi is consistently misspelt as ‘Polyani’.) Again, the tendency to polarize terms like ‘gospel’ and ‘culture’ (which Adams claims as characteristic of Newbigin) was one which Newbigin himself consistently opposed. Second, though Adams is rightly concerned to develop a contextually ‘thick’ description of Jesus, this leads him to interpret Jesus as the one uniquely enabled to sustain what Adams (following Wink) describes as the ‘myth of Human Being’. Yet, in doing so, it must be recognized that this too is an interpretation of the ‘tradition’ (like those of Hick and Newbigin) and is by no means the only one (is Jesus always ‘shaken’?). So to build a vision for the ‘mutual humanization’ of all upon it – as Adams urges – will remain problematic for many precisely because their Christologies will differ in significant ways. This is not to say that I was not helpfully ‘shaken’ by his arguments, nor by the wider discussions that this book helps to promote, but some difficult questions about hermeneutics and boundaries remain.
Ridley Hall, Cambridge
David Brown,
Divine Humanity: Kenosis Explored and Defended
, SCM Press: London, 2011; 288 pp.: 9780334043805, £50 (pbk)
‘Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied [ekenōsen] himself’ (Phil. 2.5–7,
In this thoroughly researched and satisfyingly coherent book, David Brown explores the development of kenotic Christology: an understanding of the incarnation as divine self-emptying. By way of the Gospels, Philippians 2.5–11, the early ecumenical councils, the Reformation and nineteenth-century Germany, Brown reaches Scotland – where ecclesiastical ferment gave birth to kenotic Christologies – and finally, in England, he arrives at the Catholic wing of the Church of England. The resulting kenotic Christology has enabled us to understand the Scriptures as human witnesses to Jesus’ humanity, and has provided us with an explanation for Jesus’ singular and human self-consciousness. Above all, it has revealed Jesus’ suffering to be suffering with us as well as for us.
In his final chapter, Brown locates kenosis, change, and suffering, in the life of the Trinity; and he returns to nineteenth-century Continental theologians, and to an analogy with an actor inhabiting a character, to create a Christology in which God ‘interpenetrates’ Jesus’ human life and thereby entices us into relationship. Kenotic Christology (Christ emptying himself) has become kenotic theology (God’s self-emptying).
Three reasons for current interest in kenotic Christology and theology become clear: the New Testament evidence for Jesus’ learning and developing humanity; a concern that humanity should not be compromised by its relationship with Jesus’ divinity; and the need to make theological sense of suffering. To this parochial reviewer this need seems to be as much pastoral as doctrinal, as Brown occasionally recognizes. God suffers in Christ as one of us, and therefore suffers with us. (Paul Fiddes’s Participating in God is referenced, but not his The Creative Suffering of God, which might have enabled Brown to develop further his understanding of God’s suffering.) Brown recognizes that a ‘hierarchy of being’ (p. 191) isn’t an adequate metaphysical underpinning for such a kenotic theology. Maybe more action-based metaphysical categories could have been useful here; and reference to process theologians might also have been helpful.
The index is inadequate in relation to subject entries (‘suffering’ merely refers the reader to ‘problem of evil’, whereas numerous page references should have been listed; ‘impassibility’ doesn’t appear; etc.). For a paperback, the price is steep.
But these minor complaints aside: this is a marvellous book. We urgently need to become a more doctrinally literate Church. The next big issue for all of us will be relationships with other major world faiths, and in order to formulate those relationships Christians will need a coherent, comprehensible, orthodox and relevant theology. That theology will have to be kenotic, and this book will become required reading.
Parish of East Greenwich
William Dyrness,
Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life
, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2010; 352 pp.: 9780802865786, £17.99 (pbk)
‘This book seeks to connect poetry and theology’. The opening sentence of Poetic Theology could not be clearer and in this wide-ranging book Dyrness certainly provides a map of the many possible connections.
He takes the term ‘poetic’ in its widest sense, poesis as ‘making’, and uses the term to cover every aspect of human creativity. And here the book’s subtitle is important, for it is concerned not just with ‘literary’ poetry but with ‘the poetics of everyday life’. To this end he introduces from the outset a quartet of ‘ordinary people’, seeking to make meaning and beauty in their lives through their hobbies, their leisure pursuits, their engagement with creative arts in their spare time. Reference to these characters becomes a way of grounding a theology that might otherwise have become too abstract. He makes the case for creativity as a universal element of the Imago Dei in us, not simply an elite activity for a select few. This is important later in his argument when he is critiquing the ‘reformed’ idea that to make human creativity the arena of our encounter with God is to risk reducing that encounter to a human ‘work’ and not a divine grace.
The book contains a comprehensive historical survey of thought about the links between theology and poetry. This section incorporates some of the material he had already given us in the Arts section of the Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, and elsewhere, though this material takes on new life and relevance in this context where it can be linked with everyday life.
In the course of the book Dyrness identifies and expounds a Theologia Poetica which he grounds in Aristotle and draws out through Dante and even into the elaborations of Pico de La Mirandola. He makes good use of Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, writes well on Bunyan, and, coming forward into the twentieth century, has fruitful things to say about C. S. Lewis’s contribution in this field and, more unusually, pays attention to Charles Williams, making good use of Williams’s The Figure of Beatrice. He also gives a good account of recent contributions from thinkers like Charles Taylor and Jeremy Begbie.
At the core of his effort is a rethinking of an essentially Augustinian theology of desire, to give us ‘a religious reading of deep seated cultural longings’ (p. 286).
Dyrness recognizes that these ‘cultural longings’ begin with an experience of meaning as immanent, not transcendent, and that is also where an engaged poetic theology will need to begin: ‘since the Romantic movement religious motives and influences have been culturally mediated and subjectively appropriated. Most people today, even religious believers, live their lives within a radically immanent frame … I suggest we begin not with a conversation that they cannot comprehend, but with the conversation that God has already begun with them in the way they seek a beautiful life’ (p. 289).
Poetic Theology makes an excellent contribution to the opening of that conversation but rightly recognizes that there is much more to be done. As Dyrness observes: ‘This is merely a preliminary drawing, notes for a poem’ (p. 283).
Girton College, Cambridge
David H. Nikkel,
Radical Embodiment
, James Clarke: Cambridge, 2010; 192 pp.: 9780227173534, £18.00/ US$38.00 (pbk)
The desire to know the elemental structure of existence drove philosophy’s earliest inquiries. David H. Nikkel, of the University of North Carolina, makes this quest contemporary. Instead of looking for the essential components constituting the world, he presents our biological creatureliness as phenomenologically basic to our religious experience. Nikkel’s concept of ‘radical embodiment’ attempts to develop this claim and to essentialize human materiality within his portrayal of religion, God’s existence, transcendence and the afterlife. He sets the stage for his view by critiquing ‘radical’ postmodernists, such as Derrida, for the nihilistic and relativistic direction of their thought and for providing nothing more than a ‘mirror image’ reaction to modernity (pp. 16–17, 33). At the same time, he accuses ‘conservative’ thinkers, such as George Lindbeck and other postliberal theologians, of ‘tribalistic thinking’ that adopts a defensive posture against modernity’s critical reason by awaiting the ‘eschatological verification’ of Christianity’s absolute truth claims (pp. 20, 38). In contrast, Nikkel advances his proposal as an example of ‘moderate postmodernism’, which avoids both ‘relativism and absolutism’ (p. 23). As the book unfolds, Nikkel moves from religious experience to divine ontology, presenting the world as God’s body in a panentheistic construal that envelops all earthly life while leaving room for a transcendent, although unknowable, reality beyond our present perception (pp. 133–41).
Nikkel’s argument draws upon a startling range of resources to produce a colourful mosaic that, while not always cohesive, invites readers into scientific and psychological discussions not usually heard among theologians. Creativity and originality flourish in Nikkel’s attempt to offer a new postmodern option but ultimately lead the reader down a path of imaginative, yet starkly ungrounded, assertions. Indeed, the most difficult task when reading this work is discerning the author’s criteria for evaluating theological positions which, in turn, shape the unspoken assumptions behind his own constructive proposal. Primary within his evaluative criteria seems to be adherence to ‘the postmodern spirit’, a concept too subjective and vague to be employed as a standard of judgement. Perhaps Nikkel uses this notion in order to contextualize his thought within the contemporary intellectual milieu. The irony of this attempt lies in the level of abstraction required for a book that tries to ground all thinking and experience in the fact that humans have bodies.
Nikkel must be commended for the great skill with which he provides an overview of several currents influencing contemporary theology. As such, the first two chapters constitute an incisive introduction to postmodern thought for the uninitiated. The rest of the volume presents a proposal admirable for its ingenuity and ambition that unfortunately rests upon the shifting sands of speculation. Nikkel locates his thought in postmodernity’s ‘moderate wing’ which ‘takes to heart postmodern freedom from the modern burden of explicating and justifying all basic assumptions and all meanings’ (p. 23). In his dash to flee modernity, perhaps too much was left behind.
South Brunswick, New Jersey
Ben Witherington III,
Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labour
, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2011; 192 pp.: 9780802865410, £11.99/US$18.00 (pbk)
Witherington writes a theologically reflective introduction to work-related issues for the thinking person and covers some engaging issues. He is honest in attributing accurately the sources of some of the best thinking in this area to the likes of Volf, Moltmann, N. T. Wright, and (perhaps surprisingly) Jensen, Veith and Crouch, and also makes his own contribution into a vital arena where today, sadly, it remains true for vast swathes of the Christian world that, in John Milton's words, ‘the hungry sheep look up and are not fed’.
Witherington's subtitle is ‘A Kingdom Perspective on Labour’ and his point is well made here that ‘extant exercises in biblical theology on the subject of work, work forward through the Bible, rather than backward, with the end result that in most cases they never get to an eschatalogical perspective on work – or kingdom perspective’ (p. xvi). His excelllent opening thesis, in alignment with Miroslav Volf, is (hence) that, when it comes to work, we need to emphasize the continuity between this age and the age to come. Witherington urges us to engage not with a remote God but one who works. Accordingly, in what is perhaps his most promising connection, he asks the reader (in dialogue with Crouch) to think more seriously about our relationship with culture, so that we might in culture make a move towards ‘rediscovering our creative calling’ (p. 109) and ‘behaving ourselves into new ways of thinking’ (p. 109). For Witherington, paraphrasing Crouch, Jesus had a profoundly cultural phrase for his mission: the kingdom of God, foretelling a comprehensive restructuring of social life comparable to that experienced by a (first-century) people when one monarch was succeeded by another, a transformation which would reshape pretty much everything in life (p. 138).
However, there are moments when the reader has a sense that there was insufficient room in an introductory publication for sufficient engagement with some of the issues raised.
As a student currently writing up a piece with links to the 1930s, I would like to close by making a connection between Witherington's conclusion and a work on ethics from this period entitled The Divine Imperative, by E. Brunner, published in 1937. Brunner opens his work with the following phrase: ‘The question “What ought we to do”, the great question of humanity, is the entrance to the Christian faith: none can evade it who wish to enter the sanctuary. But it is also the gate through which one passes out of the sanctuary again, back into life’ (E. Brunner, The Divine Imperative (London: Lutterworth Press, 1937), p. 9). In his closing chapter Witherington concludes: ‘One of the keys to having a Christian perspective on work [I would add: a theology of work] is recognising that what we do is part of who we are. If the Spirit is shaping our character, then what we do must reflect the work of the Spirit. Whatever cannot be done in accordance with “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control” probably shouldn't be done at all and if it is done, it needs to be recognised as a crisis response to a fallen situation, not God’s highest and best for us’ (p. 156). The connection which I would like to make is that in the 1930s, in resistance to Nazism, the crisis of the time was acute, and some (few) attempted a response, often at great cost. In 2011, the crisis of modernity is ever as acute, albeit differently manifested. This publication is much to be welcomed.
St Mary’s, Byfleet
Louis Stulman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim,
You Are My People: An Introduction to Prophetic Literature
, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2010; 304 pp.: 9780687465651, £16.99 (pbk)
Teachers, preachers and individual Bible readers all face the challenge of locating the prophets in their historical contexts while hearing their word of the Lord for our own time and circumstances. It is a hard tension to keep. This book tackles the task with energy and passion. The prophetic corpus is seen as a ‘meaning-making map’ of hope (pp. 8, 10, 13, 28, 111), not only for those ‘interpretive communities’ (p. 1 and passim) encountering prophecy as written text in the exilic and post-exilic periods but also for contemporary readers who also live in ‘a ruptured and chaotic world’ (p. 2). The prophetic books are ‘survival literature for exiles of old and exiles today’ (p. 1). First Isaiah (1—39) and Second/Third Isaiah (40—66 treated as a whole), Jeremiah and Ezekiel are covered in depth; inevitably, the Twelve minor prophets get less detailed attention. The authors say their purpose and methodology are ‘intuitive and artistic’ rather than ‘systematic and scientific’ (p. 1). Their focus is the final form of the text. This holistic approach may be stimulating for those whose earlier academic study of the Bible has taught them to look for successive layers of editing and addition; for example, it is illuminating to read the book of the Twelve as a whole, unified by its (diverse) responses to the issue of theodicy. Detailed attention is paid to texts, with extensive quotation, not dreary strings of references. There are lively anecdotes and many allusions to novels, film, poetry, music and the insights of other disciplines, such as trauma and disaster studies, psychotherapy and spiritual counseling. There is a slightly irritating tendency to quote from ‘big names’, even when what they say seems banal or stating the obvious. But overall, this is an intense, lively and well-written book; it repays the reader’s effort.
I have two major reservations. At the outset, the authors acknowledge that the process by which the prophetic literature reached its final form was lengthy, complex and largely untraceable; they also note that our information about the location and circumstances of the Jewish exilic and post-exilic communities is sketchy. Yet for most of the book these uncertainties are ignored; ‘the interpretive community’ and ‘the text’ are referred to as though we know what we are talking about. My second reservation is that the book explicitly addresses an American audience, allegedly wrestling with issues of identity, security, powerlessness and justice in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This gives the book some bite, but limits its perspective and appeal. The exilic and post-exilic ‘interpretive communities’ morph rather too readily into the contemporary American one. The essential strangeness of Scripture has been lost. The final reflection (p. 248) on two ‘pivotal moments’ of loss and hope – the 2001 September 11 disaster and the election of President Obama in 2008 – already feel dated: a reminder that hermeneutics is a dynamic, ever-shifting activity. Despite its subtitle, this is not a book for beginners, but I would recommend it to anyone wishing to engage critically with the task of discerning the meanings of the prophetic texts for today.
Bury St Edmunds
Richard Bauckham,
Jesus: A Very Short Introduction
, Oxford University Press: New York, 2011; 144 pp.: 9780199575275, US$11.95 (pbk)
The Very Short Introduction series put out by Oxford University Press aims to package important subjects in slim, concise books written by experts. Richard Bauckham’s recent introduction to Jesus hits exactly this mark. Bauckham takes one of the most traversed topics in history and religion and offers a thoroughly sane and balanced treatment. He begins by discussing the cultural history of Jesus in the western world and ends by discussing the implications of Jesus’ impact for Christian theology. But the torso of this book is an introduction to Jesus as a historical figure. Bauckham introduces Jesus’ culture including his (ethnic/religious/national) Jewishness, his political context in Roman-occupied Jewish Palestine, and his contemporaries. He discusses the source material (inside and outside the Christian canon) that historians generally use to reconstruct Jesus’ life and teaching.
Where the book soars is in Bauckham’s introduction to Jesus’ central prophetic speech concerning ‘the kingdom (or rule) of God’. In Chapter 4, Bauckham moves past the clichéd portrait of Jesus as passive teacher of ethics. While he affirms that Jesus did teach on ethics, he reminds us that Jewish prophets were known to act out their teachings symbolically. Thus Bauckham’s portrait shows Jesus to be someone other than the one familiar to modern, western eyes. This portrait makes sense of Jesus along the long trajectory of Hebrew Bible prophets, against the backdrop of imperial Rome, and in the light of emerging Christianity.
One point that deserves criticism is the inclusion of an image of the Alexamenos Graffito on p. 96. The image included in the book is pale, blurred, and will be unrecognizable to those unfamiliar with this etching. This etched depiction of Jesus with the head of a donkey is an important point of historical data to illustrate the embarrassment caused by his crucifixion and deserves to be rendered visibly.
Some readers will chafe at Bauckham’s overtly Christian agenda in his treatment of early belief in Jesus’ resurrection. His move from a primarily historical subject to a primarily theological conclusion will distract many readers, especially those who prefer to keep the two topics neatly separated. However, to omit discussion of the perceived supernatural in the life and death of Jesus would have been conspicuous. Readers interested in an introduction to Jesus by a scholar highly respected both in the Church and the Academy will find none better than Bauckham’s. There is a very good possibility that this becomes a standard text in university courses on Jesus and Christianity.
Lincoln Christian University, Lincoln, Illinois
John Dominic Crossan,
The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer
, SPCK: London, 2011; 208 pp.: 9780281064175, £10.99 (pbk)
What are people thinking when they say the Lord’s Prayer? Seasoned Christians may tend to say it by rote; increasingly, those attending occasional offices seem to struggle to say it at all; while it’s not unusual for ministers to find themselves leading congregations in the prayer several times even before midday. Such a text, like a sacrament, needs frequent meditation, if its common use is to be sustained with fresh perspectives.
Fresh perspectives are offered in this exposition of the prayer by John Dominic Crossan, the veteran scholar of the historical Jesus. Indeed, he wrote the book, he says, to test his understanding of the historical Jesus against this foundational text (p. 7). He sees the prayer in two halves – one concerned with divinity, the other with humanity – and each half consisting of three petitions, with which he deals in turn: so he spends chapters on God’s name; God’s kingdom; God’s will; our bread; our debts (NB: not our sins or trespasses); and our temptations.
Crossan’s study is quite an exercise in biblical theology, as he situates the prayer in the context of the Christian Scriptures as a whole. Beginning with parallelism in the psalms, he draws meaning for the clauses of the prayer from the creation and exodus stories, the Sabbath laws and the prophets, as well as the Gospels and Paul’s letters. Crossan concludes that the prayer, made to God the ‘householder’ of the world, harnesses our collaboration in God’s justice, understood as the nonviolent and equitable distribution of anything and everything. Hence the prayer is ‘a radical manifesto and a hymn of hope … addressed to all the earth’ (p. 2).
It is a very accessible read: it begins with some remarks on the theology of prayer; each chapter starts with an anecdote or story, and ends with a link to the next stage; and a final chapter deals with two possible objections to Crossan’s understanding of the prayer. Just occasionally, Crossan ranges perhaps a bit too far, as when, for example (p. 109), he begins to comment on the psychology/sociology behind Anselm’s theory of the atonement. And if Crossan’s reading were a ‘rediscovery’ then he needed to show how it had been missed by other treatments of the prayer, of which there is no mention at all – no hint here, for instance, of The Lord’s Prayer, by Kenneth Stevenson (SCM Press, 2004), or of C. F. Evans’s classic of the same title, republished by SCM Press in 1997. There are also no indices: the usefulness of such a biblical book would have been furthered by at least an index of scriptural references.
Overall, this coherent and ethical reading of the prayer by a foremost biblical interpreter is both a robust addition to Crossan’s scholarly corpus and a fount of spiritual insights. It will be of enormous help and benefit not only to those producing sermons or courses on the Lord’s Prayer but also to those who wish to prevent their use of the prayer from becoming stale, and indeed to anyone wishing to glimpse one very credible account of the essence of Christian faith.
Tavistock
James D. G. Dunn,
Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels
, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2011; 224 pp.: 9780802866455, US$21.00 (pbk)
This volume brings together a number of lectures Professor Dunn presented in various venues during 2009. Although that would seem to be a recipe for a disjointed book, the resulting whole is quite clear, presenting a coherent account of the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus and some of the ways in which Paul’s writings develop in continuity with the mission of Jesus. That is, rather than emphasizing a great gulf between Jesus and Paul, Dunn establishes lines of the continuity.
In addition, the volume is introduced by a brief intellectual and theological autobiography. This nicely shows how and why Professor Dunn has engaged in these issues over the length and breadth of his distinguished career.
The book begins with a chapter on the historical reliability of the Gospels. Dunn’s remarks here are founded on four presuppositions: (1) Jesus was an actual historical figure; (2) Jesus was a Jew from Galilee who functioned there; (3) Jesus was a figure of some influence, if only on his followers; (4) Jesus operated in a primarily oral society. From these Dunn moves to develop a set of characteristics of Jesus that have a high degree of historical reliability. He then moves to survey that time between Jesus’ life and the writing of the Gospels, treating the Gospels as a new genre of writing. This leads to an examination of John’s Gospel as a source for the historical Jesus. A chapter on the transition from Jesus to Paul forms the hinge between this first part of the book and the second part which is devoted to Paul.
As Dunn presents things, ‘Jesus spoke of God’s kingly rule already effective in and through his ministry. Paul saw Jesus’ death and God’s act of raising Jesus from the dead as similarly enacting what had hitherto been thought of as belonging only to the future – the resurrection of the dead leading into the final judgment (as, classically, in Dan. 12.1–3)’ (p. 104).
Part 2 begins with an account of Paul’s self-understanding, which leads to a chapter probing whether Paul is an apostle or an apostate Jew. Of course, answering that question depends on whether one stands within Christianity or within Judaism. Nevertheless, posing the question allows Dunn to emphasize that Paul understood himself as both an apostle and a faithful Jew. Rather than pursue some of the very interesting difficulties in this debate Dunn concludes with chapters on Paul’s gospel and his ecclesiology.
In a volume packed with numerous insights, the great virtue of this volume is that seems as if it would be a wonderful classroom text, covering a host of issues central to New Testament scholarship with clarity, grace and Dunn’s own great learning. The book offers a nice summation of the intellectual autobiography with which it begins.
Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland
Steve Moyise,
Jesus and Scripture
, SPCK: London, 2010; 160 pp.: 9780281062171, £12.99 (pbk)
Steve Moyise takes on an interesting topic: Jesus and Scripture. After a good introduction, there are four chapters neatly following the four Gospels and three chapters which summarize the views on Jesus and Scripture from different aspects. A short conclusion, two appendices, notes, a bibliography and two indexes conclude the book.
I am very interested in seeing how Jesus quoted Scripture. After all, it is the process of interpretation and reinterpretations of texts that forms the backbone of Jewish and Christian thought. However, as the book hints at the quest for the ipsissima verba of Jesus, I have to acknowledge from the beginning that this is in my opinion a somewhat impossible mission. The real words are after all the words of the text and there are no words beyond that. The author stresses often that he aims at depicting the picture ‘according to’ the Gospel writers. Notwithstanding that, he does ruffle up the problems with the fact that Jesus seems to have spoken Aramaic and that the so-called ‘sayings source’ (Q) was in Greek. On top of this Aramaic-Greek discussion, there is also the problem that the Gospel writers might have consulted an Old Greek text which was at times different from the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible.
The analysis of the Markan Gospel results in characterizing Jesus as a law-abiding Jew who follows the intent of the law and who fits well within first-century
At the end of the chapter on Matthew, Moyise remarks that as Matthew is quoting material which is also found in Luke – in technical terms, the ‘minor agreements’ – these sayings belong to the earliest strata of recoverable tradition – so far so good. He then acknowledges that there is still a gap between the date of the sayings source and Jesus’ life, but writes: ‘the burden of proof lies more with those who deny their authenticity than with those who accept it’ (p. 51). I would not have written that sentence and stayed on the literary level, especially as the sayings source remains still a hypothetical, albeit very plausible, source. Moyise does a similar exercise on Luke and John.
Then Moyise discusses the various positions on how much there is depiction of the Gospel writers in their Gospels and how much ‘authentic reality’ behind it. I put these words in quotation marks, as for me the words are as real and as authentic as it can get. These chapters are interesting, as they narrate the struggle of scholars to deal with the reality versus fiction issue. Moyise thus deals with the minimalists (Geza Vermes, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg), the moderates (James Dunn, Tom Wright) and finally the maximalists (Charles Kimball, Richard France). Moyise confesses to be a moderate. His final words are good: ‘The purpose of the book is not to propagate my conclusions; it is to encourage readers to work out their own’ (p. 121).
The book challenges people to participate in a discussion about how Jesus used Scripture.
University of St Andrews
Veronica della Dora,
Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War II
, University of Virginia Press: Charlottesville and London, 2011; 336 pp.: 9780813930855, US$35.00 (hbk)
The author of this book has to imagine Mount Athos, for that is all she is permitted – aside from viewing at a distance, hundreds of metres from the shoreline. And so della Dora has written a wonderful book about Athos as it has been seen, through history, by others. That is the only way she could, without arrest, come to understand a place with which she has a deep affinity.
One feature of writing on Athos is its repetitions: the same stories, again and again. Like monastic life, these are preserved down centuries in one account after another (I speak as a guilty party). Della Dora has managed to be startlingly original, sifting the accounts of the centuries in search of patterns. These patterns – she finds many – have become the subject of a book often beautifully written, always intriguing, which anyone curious about Athos should have on the shelf.
Of many details, some are familiar but some less so. Russian pilgrims (I did not know) travelled two months by boat to reach the Athonite shore. And della Dora not only extracts insights from the history but also sets both choice details and insightful comment in a larger frame. (This frame is related to her own specialized academic discipline and I am not qualified to say how successful she is in analysing Athos as an ‘object of knowledge’ or a ‘storied landscape’ – as a representation recurring in and through culture.)
One quibble: Latin translations, and Latin words, could have been better edited. The Greek is, perhaps unsurprisingly, better. For there is a vast amount of Greek material, ancient and modern, covered here. And the Holy Mountain is of course (but not only, as we learn again and again) a site of Greek culture and religion.
Athos is – apparently, then – about so much more. It is about how it has been seen by pilgrims and by those who can't go there, by scientists, Nazis and their escaped prisoners of war (sometimes living in the same monastery, while monks kept them skilfully apart). And it is about emperors, botanists and gardeners, about byzantinists and popes. The list goes on.
Beacons are like that. And Athos has been a beacon, physical and moral (as della Dora explains) since antiquity. Agamemnon's watchman saw the beacon-light, heralding Troy's fall, flash across the Mediterranean via Athos. Since then beacons of many kinds – bearing different meanings to different communities – have gone on signalling from the peak of Athos, and from its backbone of villages of monks and hermits, for a very long time.
Blackfriars Hall, Oxford
Lewis Ayres,
Augustine and the Trinity
, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010; 176 pp.: 9780521838863, £50.00 (hbk)
In Augustine and the Trinity Lewis Ayres undertakes an investigation of the development and dynamics of Augustine’s reflections on the Trinity. Rather than concentrating solely on De Trinitate, or even more restrictedly on the later books of that work in which Augustine develops his notorious ‘mental analogies’ for the Trinity, Ayres looks at Trinitarian reflections throughout Augustine’s corpus, placing these against the background of Augustine’s various possible literary sources. This allows for better observation of the variety and subtlety of what Augustine is doing in his attempts to explicate the Trinitarian faith, correcting the common misreadings that occur when the ‘mental analogies’ are considered in isolation. One basic misreading is that Augustine over-emphasizes the oneness of the Trinity by conceiving it by analogy with a single human mind. Another is that the analogies are offered disinterestedly as the best illustrations Augustine can find of the Trinity. In this review I will draw out some of the strategies Ayres uses to debunk these misreadings.
First, Ayres pays close attention to the ways in which Augustine draws on earlier Latin pro-Nicene authors, showing how his use and adaptation of non-Christian Platonist sources is always carried out in the light of these Christian voices. Part I, which looks at Augustine’s early Trinitarian language in relation to preceding traditions, highlights the emerging emphasis on the irreducibility of the divine three (stemming from anti-Monarchian arguments), upheld alongside recognition of their inseparability (p. 92). Bearing these dynamics in mind makes it much less easy, when the books 8—15 of De Trinitate are reached (in Part IV), to read the ‘analogies’ found there as reductions of the divine three to a barely Trinitarian one.
Second, in Parts II and III (which treat books 1—7 of De Trinitate alongside other contemporary works of Augustine) Ayres draws out the exegetical rules which inform Augustine’s Trinitarian theology. The first of these is Christological, distinguishing between the humanity and divinity of Christ, and pointing to the path of ascent along which Scripture seeks to draw us, from the Son’s human visibility towards his divine invisibility (pp. 143–7). This provides the context for Augustine’s later analogical investigation. As Ayres points out (in Part IV), ‘Augustine is not exploring [by way of his analogies] how the Trinity may be known independently of [Christ’s] revealing and drawing’ (p. 318). Ayres shows how the analogy of the triad, mind, knowledge and love, only becomes fully operative when the mind is perfected in its love (p. 287). The triad of memory, understanding and will apparently provides a more unqualified analogy, but even then there are suggestions that it is only known as such when the mind has been purified (p. 305). Thus Augustine’s analysis is not an abstract exercise, but seeks to foster its readers in their Christological ascent towards the Father.
Third, Ayres shows (also in Part IV) how the language of Trinitarian faith shapes the way in which Augustine talks about the mind, and thus informs the construction of his analogy from the outset (pp. 286–9). This further complicates the nature of the analogy: it is not a simple correspondence between two independent realities. Indeed, the mind only takes its analogical shape insofar as God is present to it.In sum, Ayres’s account is thorough and illuminating, as well as being refreshing in relation to previous treatments of Augustine’s Trinitarian theology.
King’s College London
St Basil of Caesarea,
Against Eunomius
, trans. Mark DelCogliano and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, The Fathers of the Church 122, Catholic University of America Press: Washington DC, 2011; 208 pp.: 9780813201221, US$34.95 (hbk)
Of the three great eastern theologians known as the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea is usually seen as the most worldly and practical. He was a successful administrator, a gifted pastor and reformer, an able politician and preacher. But he was also an independent-minded theologian, and the publication of this translation of his treatise against Eunomius reveals what a major contribution he made at a critical stage in the evolution of fourth-century Trinitarian doctrine.
The years between Nicea and Constantinople have often been presented in terms of a battle between Nicene orthodoxy and the remnants of the Arian cause; with the Cappadocian Fathers taking up and expanding the work of Athanasius and bringing it to its conclusion at the council of 381. But, as recent scholarship has shown, the picture is much more complicated. (Andrew Radde-Gallwitz’s earlier volume, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity (2009), could well be read in conjunction with this.) The point is that the Nicene homoousion was not only unpalatable to the majority of eastern theologians but also provoked a wide range of alternatives, some of which rejected ousia language altogether. At the height of the controversy Athanasius’ ‘orthodoxy’ was regarded as extreme as the view of his chief opponents that the Son was utterly ‘other’ than the Father. The problem was that those who tried to hold the middle ground constantly found it slipping away from them. The supposed centre became narrower and narrower as the parties trying to find a comprise fragmented into warring factions. Eventually this led to a return to the homousion and a renewed attempt to build consensus on the Nicene formula.
Basil’s best-known work on the Trinity is his late treatise On the Holy Spirit. But what is fascinating about Against Eunomius is that we see Basil’s thought at an earlier stage when it was far from certain that the language of Nicea would finally be vindicated. His instincts were to be suspicious of the homoousion and it is significant that in his argument with Eunomius he barely used the term and never once referred to the Nicene Creed as the standard of orthodoxy. Yet he articulated what would become the ground on which Cappadocian Trinitarianism rests: God is one, but this oneness is not confined to numerical oneness. The divinity of the Son (and by implication, the Spirit) can be asserted without compromising the divine unity as grounded in the being of the Father. To come to this position Basil had to distance himself from the rationalism of Eunomius who believed that God was knowable in essence. By contrast Basil insisted that there are limits to what can be said of divine nature. The incarnation of the Son should evoke humility, not the arrogance that he found in Eunomius’ formulations.
This is a polemical work; deeply uncharitable in accordance with the conventions of the age. But it helps us to recognize the creative contribution of Basil as the architect of the Cappadocian Trinitarianism that prevailed in 381.
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
Malcolm Lambert,
Christians and Pagans: The Conversion of Britain from Alban to Bede
, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2010; 336 pp.: 9780300119084, £30.00 (hbk)
Despite the unimaginative title, Christians and Pagans is an eminently readable synthesis of a disparate variety of scholarship, including philology, archaeology, art history and Latin literature. Malcolm Lambert's religious history of Britain from the arrival of Christianity to the conversion of the Picts represents an unusual departure from a career mainly spent writing about the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in such books as Franciscan Poverty (1961), Medieval Heresy (1977) and The Cathars (1998).
The difficulty in writing a book of this nature is the unevenness of the source material, a difficulty that Lambert is unable to overcome. He marshals an impressive amount of archaeological and linguistic evidence in illuminating the Christian history of Britain before the coming of St Augustine of Canterbury, even managing to make this material engrossing, but for the later period Lambert increasingly relies upon the more abundant and familiar literary evidence. From first to last, Christians and Pagans is an extended commentary on Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Lambert corrects the monk-scholar of Jarrow, setting the record straight where Bede is wrong, filling gaps in Bede's narrative, adjusting Bede's Northumbrian biases and, where appropriate, approving Bede’s judgements.
Although there are enough materials with which to write a theological history of Britain in this period, Lambert is more interested in surveying the spread of Christianity through the preaching of individual monks and bishops, the building of monasteries and churches and the development of a Christian culture. Of Roman Britain, Lambert concludes that Christianity remained a minority religion, despite the impetus provided by Constantine and his Christian successors. Yet, by the time Gildas wrote his De excidio Britanniae in the 540s, Christianity seems to have completely replaced paganism. As to how this happened, Lambert is able to say little, since little evidence survives. Another puzzle that he is able to shed some light on, however, is the apparent lack of interest on the part of the British in evangelizing the pagan barbarians who invaded their lands. On the one hand, Lambert describes the cultural factors that militated against interaction, while, on the other, he argues that more contact occurred than has been hitherto thought.
For those familiar with Bede's history, what will perhaps be of most interest in Christians and Pagans is that which is either wholly absent from Bede or vaguely described by him, such as the British kingdoms of northern England, including Gododdin to the east and Rheged to the west. When Lambert gets closer to the time of Bede and his literary sources become more abundant, his narrative begins to wander. Instead of discussing Cuthbert in the context of Irish influence in Northumbria, for example, Lambert brings him up much later while describing Wilfrid’s brief tenure of Lindisfarne.
Malcolm Lambert’s Christians and Pagans may suffer from the lack of a bibliography, but it does include numerous black-and-white plates, as well as useful diagrams and maps. From the Roman mosaic of Hinton St Mary on the book’s front cover to an illustration of St Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels on the back cover, Christians and Pagans illuminates a surprising amount of interesting and diverse material in a lively and engaging manner. A well-researched and valuable corrective to Bede, Lambert’s book is a welcome contribution to Church history, of interest to the general reader and specialist alike.
Los Angeles, California
Nancy Bradley Warren,
The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700
, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, Indiana, 2010; 352 pp.: 9780268044201, £32.50/US$36.00 (pbk)
At the heart of this book is the multivalent significance of a God who joins in himself both divinity and humanity, Logos and corporeality, and the individual and the corporate, as this comes to resound in the lives and texts of women spanning great confessional and temporal divides but for all of whom the incarnation is constitutive. The shared incarnationality of these female spiritualities manifests itself, Warren argues, in strikingly corporeal ways of devotion, of knowing, of writing and of political action. These modes of incarnationality give coherence to a book which resists organization according to chronology, creed or country, as it is precisely these too strict demarcations between medieval/early modern, protestant/catholic or English/continental that are contested by the complex texture of these women’s lives. It can be easy for the non-historian to get lost amid so much boundary pushing and across such an array of figures, locales and events, yet, for the theologian, the foray is worthwhile since there is a number of salient ways in which the ‘present revisionary power’ (p. 12) of these women’s lives and texts makes itself felt in our own discipline.
Particularly relevant is the incarnational textuality practised in the female spiritualities Warren presents. Here bodies and words, readers and writers fundamentally shape one another. Their texts take on a ‘quasi-sacramental aspect’ (p. 75) as they turn lives into texts which are consumed by readers who in turn reproduce them in their own written and lived forms. They demonstrate the porosity of boundaries between self and other, present and past, and affective and intellectual, as well as display the possible range of styles and flexibility of genres for theological expression. Such dynamic embodiments of the Word and words not only make these texts rich resources for theology but also challenge us toward more generous conceptions of the ‘theological’ both in the texts we read and those we write.
If these textual modes of incarnationality inspire, Warren’s exploration of their political aspects may incite her readers to exercise greater awareness at the contentious borderlands between the religious and the political. Through figures as diverse as Julian of Norwich and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Warren foregrounds the political potency of gendered, holy bodies to form and re-form the body politic. The performative possibilities discovered here teach the radical potential of an incarnational politics expressed in Galatians 3.8 – that all are one in Christ Jesus – but they likewise call for ongoing vigilance in discernment between life-giving embodiments and those which collude with violence.
In sum, the lives and texts encountered in The Embodied Word serve as beautiful, sometimes startling reminders of the significance of the Word made flesh and challenge us to consider ways in which we may carry forward the often unsettling legacies of these female figures who refuse to stay inside the lines.
Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge
Andrew Bradstock,
Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth
, I. B. Tauris: London, 2010; 224 pp.: 9781845117641, £52.50 (hbk); 9781845117658, £15.99 (pbk)
If you are hazy on the difference between Baptists, Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists and Muggletonians, this is a useful book. Each of these groups gets its own chapter, and there is a smooth narrative progression from one to the next.
The Baptists is the only group that existed before the Civil War. They originate (whether directly or indirectly) in the continental Anabaptist movement. Their rejection of an established Church is the common theme among the other sects that follow in their wake: this is core meaning of ‘radical religion’. After many decades on the fringe of English religious life, the Baptists rose to prominence during the 1640s. To conventional opinion, their style was alarmingly free; the practice of full-immersion baptism brought charges of aquatic naked romping. Bradstock is good at this sort of juicy detail.
In the latter years of the Civil War, John Lilburne led a new campaigning movement. It became known as the Levellers, but this is a bit misleading: the emphasis was not on redistribution of wealth but on the liberties of ‘the people’ – religious liberty, equality under the law (including the universal right not to be conscripted into an army), and democratic reform (including the widening of the franchise and salaries for MPs). Of course the rhetoric was religious rather than secular, but this movement was less religious than the others (beside the Ranters). Some of its leaders seem to have had Deist leanings. Its demands were discussed at the famous Putney debates, but did not find wide assent among the army leaders.
The Diggers was a short-lived movement based around the establishment of a commune in Surrey. The leader, Gerald Winstanley, advocated common land ownership, the abolition of private property. But this was less a political programme than a millenarian performance, Bradstock suggests. The digging was a symbolic way of announcing that a new era was underway, in which the Christ in us would supplant the Adam.
These movements were accused of making a mockery of religion. In the case of the Ranters, the mockery was seemingly intentional. This shadowy movement mixed religious dissent with hedonism. What all radicals were accused of doing, this movement actually did (though it was more of a style than a movement, like Punk). The Quakers were very much in earnest. They developed Baptist separatism in a new direction that was both theologically liberal and emotionally compelling. The Fifth Monarchists were a more religious version of the Levellers who briefly attained great influence over Cromwell’s regime. The Muggletonians were a small, strange, mystical sect, less worthy of consideration than the others.
My only objection to the book is that it pays almost no attention to the political context. Was not Cromwell’s regime itself ‘radical’? Was his motivation not the expansion of religious liberty? By opposing both the old Church and a new Calvinist order, was he not charting a radically liberal path? John Milton, who was as radical as anyone on the separation of church and state, saw Cromwell as the only realistic means to this end. Bradstock somewhat falls into the trap of locating all ‘radicalism’ in these edgy outsider groups. In fact, Cromwell was trying to stabilize a relatively liberal new order, which might have evolved into a more fully liberal and democratic one. Those who denounced him as a traitor to the cause helped to ensure the republic’s failure. Sometimes the best is the enemy of the good.
New York
John Cornwell,
Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint
, Continuum: London, 2010; 288 pp.: 9781441150844, £18.99 (hbk)
John Cornwell has given us a thoroughly readable, lucid book on Newman, a mixture of biography and critique which offers a variety of contexts in which to consider this most remarkable Victorian Englishman. The first of these, perhaps Cornwell’s greatest achievement in this well-written book, is to place Newman firmly within the literary culture of Victorian England. Cornwell’s Newman is a literary figure, at once brilliant, insecure, devout, emotionally immature, self-centred and mannered: his famous autocentrisme is illuminated by reference to Wordsworth (p. 22) and his intimate friendships are contextualized by comparison with Coleridge and Southey (p. 66). Hagiography this is not, but readers hoping for a bundle of skeletons to come tumbling out of a recently opened closet will be as dissatisfied as those who wish to claim the new Beatus for any one particular theological system. Perhaps the biggest surprise for those expecting controversy of the Hitler’s Pope (1999) variety is the lack of any kind of sensationalist appraisal of Newman’s relationship with Ambrose St John. In fact it is St John who appears to be in some ways unreasonably obsessed with Newman, rather than the other way round (p. 206). Newman’s obsessive friendships are portrayed as fruits of deep-seated emotional immaturity and are contextualized by other examples of literary friendships, rather than by a culture of homosexuality. Throughout the book, we observe Newman as having emotional difficulties with relationships in general, familial, fraternal, collegial and otherwise.
Newman’s complexity and contradictions are largely well preserved without the need for any false kind of overarching harmonization, even if at times the narrative appears a little too tidy. Cornwell’s assertion that Newman’s unrelenting literary obsession ‘was the story of his own life’ (p. 12) is perhaps somewhat over imaginative, and just occasionally the reader can feel as if he is about to be swept up in a great tide of systematization. But this is perhaps a feature of Cornwell’s quite compelling style rather than any critical sleight-of-hand. Cornwell has a fine working knowledge of Newman as an individual, of ‘Newman Studies’ and of the broader history of the period, enabling him to handle the field most impressively. His chronology of Newman’s life is well contextualized by the importance of contemporary events, and his analysis greatly enriched by reference to Newman’s concrete experience of travels and the resulting correspondence. Although sometimes the chapter titles are not the best signposts, Cornwell chronicles the different Newmans well: just one example is his move from high regard for Pio Nono in the 1840s and 50s to his later view that the dogma of infallibility had been imposed ‘most cruelly’ (p. 108). Theologically, Newman is shown as a thinker at the very frontiers, even though he might be stylistically recherché in his prose. Cornwell portrays a pious English intellectual, somehow always his own man, who challenges the lazy theological status quo on all sides.
The wonderful array of quotations with which the book is peppered reveals why the beatification of Newman is, perhaps ironically when dealing with someone of such great intellectual learning, at least as much a matter for the heart as for the head. Cornwell aims to unveil the whole Newman, and shows that the whole Newman is worth persevering with. An unattractive neo-conservative agenda could doubtless ensure Newman is preserved in the worst kind of grandmaternal aspic, but a more exciting manifesto would be for the Church to be ‘energised and liberated by his wide-ranging literary and religious imagination’ (p. 19) that is always grounded in prayer and the search for God, and a theological imagination needed to renew much of our ecclesial discourse.
Westminster Abbey
Timothy Larsen,
A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians
, Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2011; 336 pp.: 9780199570096, £30 (hbk)
Timothy Larsen’s latest book completes a neat pair with his earlier volume, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2008). There he reversed a conventional trope of Victorian historical writing by showing how the lives of a number of significant Victorian thinkers showed a journey, not from faith to doubt but from doubt to faith. Contrary to the common notion that the Victorian age saw a leaching away of orthodox Christian faith from the educated classes, he implied that it was marked as much by adhesion to the faith as by its abandonment. Here, his argument is perhaps less striking at first sight. Using a similar technique to that of the earlier book, namely, concentrating on individual thinkers chapter by chapter, here his aim is to demonstrate how Victorian culture was saturated with knowledge of, and reference to, the Bible. The surprise resides in some of the case studies he has chosen. No one is likely to think it much of a discovery that Methodist and ‘Holiness’ leaders such as Catherine Booth and the great Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon were preoccupied with the Bible. But they may well be taken aback to find the great agnostic Thomas Huxley all his life defending teaching of the Bible in schools, the atheist Charles Bradlaugh unable to extricate himself from an almost obsessive concern to write about (and disprove) the Scriptures, and Cardinal Wiseman vaunting his knowledge of biblical study.
Even so, specialists will perhaps find the general point that the Bible was central to Victorian culture a familiar enough claim. The significance of Larsen’s work is that time and again he helps us to see a unifying strand running through the enormous diversity of Victorian responses to Christianity. His subtle, engaging and never dismissive studies cumulatively reinstate the Bible as one of the key reference points – if not the principle one – for controversy over religion. If the age was not one in which all the progressive thinkers gradually abandoned Christianity, as his earlier book showed, neither was it one that pushed the Bible quietly to one side.
Since the figures chosen reflect most of the main strands of Victorian opinion on religion, this book could serve as a useful introduction for many readers. It is certainly very readable. Occasionally the necessary brevity of the individual studies is a little frustrating. It would be wonderful to see this immensely productive historian turn his attention to a full-scale critical study of one or other figure.
King’s College, Cambridge
Martin E. Marty,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
Letters and Papers from Prison: A Biography
, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2011; 288 pp.: 9780691139210, £16.95 (hbk)
In the English-speaking world it has become common to write biographies on the life of books. And, indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison correspondence has – after publication as a book – a rich ‘bios’ to tell, as a best-selling title first published in English in 1954, then as an enlarged edition in 1978 and finally as a translation of the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke Band 8, Widerstand und Ergebung in 2010 (including, for example, previously unknown letters by Eberhard Bethge).
In his biography of Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, the well-known Chicago Theologian and Church Historian Martin E. Marty brilliantly leads the reader through the moving history of one of the most discussed religious books of the twentieth century, providing some explanation of the nature of the success of the book: ‘We are picturing the physical object, Letters and Papers from Prison, as the book picked up almost randomly by someone who has an interest in prison literature and the Hitler years in Germany, but not necessarily in the philosophy of existence or theology. A dust jacket would certainly have identified the main author as a theologian, but this turns out to have been a theologian of a different sort, one who did not match the stereotypes’ (pp. 18ff.). The fact that theological publications would be well-researched, learned, formidable and full of allusions to authors and subjects helps to explain Bethge’s hesitations to publish letters and papers, which had never been planned for publication. In parts, Professor Marty’s biography is an excellent commentary on notoriously misunderstood phrases such as ‘religionless Christianity’ (pp. 52–73). In parts it provides important information, nicely depicted with personal anecdotes, on the contexts in which the book was read and interpreted (East and West Germany, England, the United States, South Africa, Asia and Latin America). The author is also well acquainted with distinctive theological discussions along confessional lines (such as Lutherans, Reformed traditions in Germany and Europe etc.). Particularly illuminating is his fine acquaintance with theological receptions in Germany, such as those between Hanfried Müller’s Marxist interpretation in the East and Ernst Feil’s Liberal Bonhoeffer interpretation in West Germany. Dr Marty finally provides categories for interpretation (such as continuity or discontinuity) but leaves room for future endeavours into the correspondence. He tells the story of a book that invites readers to think, ‘one that can offer a changed view of existence’ (p. 29). The biography is a must for all who have their own history with Letters and Papers from Prison and who wish to revisit that story in the light of the wide range of new insights into a correspondence between two friends that wrote Church history.
Universität Flensburg, Germany
Andrew Davison (ed.),
Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition
, SCM Press: London, 2011; 176 pp.: 9780334043522, £19.99 (pbk)
Apologetics is embodied, writes John Milbank, ‘as narrative, argument, confession and imaginative witness by the human person in the name of the divine personality’ (p. xvi). To enable this task, the authors present Christian reason as attractive and offer a robust critique of secularism. The account of apologetics offered is imaginative because the authors encourage engagement with the arts/literature which either reflect cultural longings or illustrate/argue for the Christian faith. They insist that all human reason is imaginative while celebrating the distinctiveness of Christian reason.
John Hughes’s critique of rationalism and postmodernism concludes with the assertion that the Christian faith is ‘attractive and persuasive’ in itself when it engages with, criticizes and responds to other world views (p. 11). Therefore, apologetic arguments must be enacted in our lives and words. Davison’s essay also stresses embodiment. He articulates the distinctiveness of Christian reason as part of the Gospel, favouring accounts of reason which use story and imagination over unhistorical or abstract arguments. He concludes that ‘Christian rationality is inseparable from Christian disciplines, thus any exploration of ideas must also be an invitation into the life of the Church’ (p. 28).
Alison Milbank draws on J. R. R. Tolkien in particular to explore how the Church can ‘awaken people to their own creative capacity’ in order to awaken their religious sense (p. 35). The praxis of imagination, like sacramental life and acts of service, is transformative. Donna Lazenby reveals the cultural desires and misrepresentations of faith in the Twilight series and new atheist novels. This analysis challenges the Church to rethink how the gospel is presented. Michael Ward’s essay on C. S. Lewis reveals that the root of his success was the presentation of the Christian faith with ‘imaginative skill and imaginative intent’ as well as being ‘reasonable’ (p. 60).
In responding to new atheism, Stephen Bullivant writes that apologetics and ecclesiology cannot be separated: the gospel must be preached in an intellectually robust way; the Church must enable its reception. Craig Hovey considers Christian ethics as ‘good news’. He invites us to consider the Christian faith in terms of goodness as related to the common life of the Church, and displayed in joy.
Effective apologetics demands in-depth reading of culture and enables evangelism, argues Graham Ward. Freed from false desires/needs, people recognize the true orientation of the human heart in the worship of God. Richard Conrad
Overall, there is much to be welcomed: the call for attentiveness to tradition and culture; the affirmation of imagination, ecclesial embodiment and ethical practice. The apologist is called to invite others to see the world differently; doing this requires generosity as well as imagination lest we make too sharp a distinction between Church and world – which is the realm of God’s redemptive love.
All Saints, Hampton
Anders Bäckström, Grace Davie, NinnaEdgardh and Per Petterson (eds),
Welfare and Religion in 21st Century Europe
, Vol. 1,
Configuring the Connections
, Ashgate: Farnham, UK, and Burlington, Vermont, 2010; 256 pp.: 9780754660309, £16.99 (pbk); Vol. 2,
Gendered, Religious and Social Change
, Ashgate: Farnham, UK, and Burlington, Vermont, 2011; 208 pp.: 9780754661085, £16.99 (pbk)
These two volumes originate from a major research project, Welfare and Religion in a European Perspective (WREP), based at the Religion and Society Research Centre at Uppsala University, which had as its aim a comparative study of the role of churches as agents of welfare within a social economy. In much of Europe the welfare state has substantially replaced the churches as the effective means of care (though more recent financial constraints have placed some question marks against this as a one-directional movement): what role then, on the ground do the churches play in the contemporary situation? Furthermore, what are we to make of a situation both in welfare and religion in which women are disproportionately represented at the point of delivery but are under-represented in management? Questions are also posed by changing assumptions about the nature and character of the welfare state, and about changing patterns of religion in Europe, for which a simple secularization model no longer suffices. The first volume has as its core eight case studies of connections between religion, welfare and gender in ‘representative’ towns in eight European societies – Evreux (France), Thiva and Livadia (Greece), Vicenza (Italy), Darlington (UK), Lahti (Finland), Reutlingen (Germany), Gavle (Sweden) and Drammen (Norway). The second volume considers what has emerged from these studies in a more thematic way – sociological, gender, and finally a theological assessment, asking what lies behind the involvement of the churches in the field of welfare, and how ‘the ‘official’ statements of the churches are worked out in practice.
Only a few salient aspects of this detailed and wide-ranging research project can be summarised here. First, the case studies indicated that the role of the churches in the delivery of welfare is expanding rather than contracting – yet in a situation in which the churches themselves struggle to meet an increase in demand both in terms of money and of manpower. Challenges to the privatization of religion arise from this, because, if religion grows in visibility in the social economy, it cannot be relegated to being simply a private matter. European welfare systems are rooted in a sense of commonality and solidarity, which is not the case in America, as the controversy over President Obama’s health-care reforms demonstrates. Yet that commonality and solidarity plays out in different ways in different parts of Europe. In Germany the churches have a major part in a ministry of diakonia; in Sweden the Church of Sweden strongly supported the welfare state; in Italy and Greece the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church guard the role of the family as the primary welfare agent, while providing emergency help for the needy. Per Petterson’s sociological analysis of the findings concludes that just as the churches were pushed into a narrowly defined religious sphere so now, in a piecemeal way, the churches are seen once again as resources available to society as a whole – but a particular kind of resource, one embodying certain values and bringing certain qualities to the provision of welfare, including a critical voice. Ninna Edgardh’s assessment of the case studies from a gendered perspective notes the tensions between the ‘church with a male face’ in terms of hierarchy and theology, and the ‘church with a female face’ in terms of welfare provision – though that does not mean a feminist ecclesiology, for, as Edgardh notes, ‘the church with a female face is characterized precisely by its capacity to fill the space left by the contours of the church with a male face, and to use that space in a way that creates meaning and satisfaction’ (vol. 2, p. 102). Were more attention to be given to the social role of religion in Europe, it is suggested, a very different picture of religion in Europe would emerge. In the discussion of gender in this regard the special position of the diaconate in the Nordic countries in particular is noted, with a Finnish respondent suggesting a bishop for the diaconate, and that through the diaconate the voice and teachings of Jesus would be more visible.
In Thomas Ekstrand’s theological critique, after surveys of Catholic social teaching, Orthodox theology and practice, drawing particularly on the notable example of Metropolitan Anastasios of Albania, and Lutheran and Anglican teaching, the tension between the local delivery of welfare and the larger institution is noted, which raises questions of what in any context is meant by ‘church’. Other polarities are also noted, such as that between love and justice, and visions and missions. In the light of the individualizing context of modernity one of the major challenges Ekstrand argues is ‘how to develop an ecclesiology that can foster solidarity in church members’ (vol. 2, p. 150), and also how to draw on their rich resources for prophetic critique, when in the context of social norms of gender equality this can prove something of a two-edged sword.
In their overall concluding chapter Anders Bäckström and Grace Davie reflect on the overall project – both case studies and analysis – in the context of debates about secularization and what some have characterized as the ‘post-secular’. Imaginative solutions are needed to questions of welfare in twenty-first-century Europe, which see the churches and their associated organizations as a resource rather than as a problem. This implies ‘innovative, focussed and interdisciplinary thinking that not only includes both women and men, but enables them to escape from the roles which, our data tell us, are deeply ingrained in European mentalities’ (vol. 2, p. 171). This well-organized project is both informative and challenging and shows that the churches still have the potential to enhance rather than diminish the lives of Europeans, even though there may well be, as there always has been, a tension between the pastoral and the prophetic.
Diocese in Europe, Worth, West Sussex
J. Brian Benestad,
Church, State, and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine
, Catholic University of America Press, Washington DC, 2010; 512 pp.: 9780813218014, £30.50 (pbk)
Benestad does more than introduce Catholic Social Doctrine (CSD) in this excellent book. He argues for its importance in Catholic theology, its neglect by most Catholic theologians despite recent popes and bishops conferences, and shows what CSD might look like if it were taken seriously (with detailed reference to the United States).
In Part 1 Benestad traces the centrality of CSD by relating it to Augustine and Aquinas’s concerns with the good, just and virtuous Christian living in a fallen society. Benestad argues that too often CSD has been interpreted through the lens of contemporary concerns about rights and social justice and thus seen as mirroring the best of modern liberal culture. He criticizes this view, for he argues CSD is counter to modernity’s concerns with these questions precisely in foregrounding the cultivation of individual and civic virtues as the necessary means by which social justice can be attained; and the highest of these are faith, hope and charity. The individual’s passions and desires are twisted (sin) so no structural perfection can attain the common good without personal inner conversion to Christ. Even if the ‘Big Society’ is back in England and the United States, Benestad is keen both to emphasize the structural role of civic groups such as the church and family and to highlight the substantive contents of the ‘common good’ as envisaged by Catholic groups (properly educated). He gives case studies of how CSD could be applied through law and public policy.
In Part 2 Benestad focuses on the role of key mediating civic institutions: the Church, the family and the Catholic University. The first has the prime responsibility as teacher and developer of CSD within the context of a worshipping community .The second and third, composed primarily of the laity, must be educated in CSD and more widely to engage with the complex prudential judgements that they face as Catholics. What emerges is a concrete and particular picture of cultivating Catholic ‘culture’ as harnessed towards attaining the common good. Sectarianism is countered by the fact that Benestad is solely oriented towards attaining the common good precisely by forming civic communities with a strong sense of the virtues to pursue these in all spheres of life.
The final two parts turn to the economy, immigration, the environment, international community and the just war. Benestad cannot be classified as a partisan of the American right for, as his exposition unfolds with prudential judgement applied to the US situation, he moves in unpredictable and challenging directions. However, sometimes he moves too quickly and unconvincingly (on the environment, for example). He is deeply critical of many cherished American idols and in every area poses unsettling alternatives. Readers will differ about particular prudential judgements but the biggest challenge lies in Benestad’s thesis regarding the premodern genesis of social doctrine and his interpretation of its contents. He is a kind of Catholic response to Milbank and Hauerwas, but running closely parallel with their projects.
University of Bristol
Charles Mathewes,
The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times
, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2010; 288 pp.: 9780802865083, US$20.00 (hbk)
In a convenient and lucid work, Charles Mathewes’s latest book, The Republic of Grace, provides an audacious attempt to reorient Christians around a ‘new’ worldview. This worldview can be seen by taking a step back from our modern interpretations of ‘What Jesus would do?’ and replaced with a more appropriate question: ‘What are the categories that a believer should use to see the world and its challenges, and how will such a believer use that vision to act?’ (p. 5). The answer, in short, is an obligation to the political sphere to help ‘reignite a fierce commitment to the common good of our society – to care for the least and most vulnerable, and to use your gifts and power and wealth as a force for good and justice in the world’ (p. 6). The consequence is an accessible if not slightly bizarre rendering of Augustine for modern readers.
Part 1 consists of three short chapters that attempt to connect Augustine with America’s modern dilemmas. For example, Chapter 2, ‘9/11: Terror, War, and Hope’, connects America’s wars on terror with Augustine’s complicated relationship with the Donatists. What makes for a bizarre reading is Mathewes’s theological reflection immediately followed by a scathing critique of the Bush administration’s handling of Middle Eastern affairs. The latter effort reads a bit like an op-ed in the New York Times: ‘The Bush administration repeatedly showed short-term political savvy in avoiding making hard choices and evading the serious costs of its decisions’ (p. 56). No matter the political persuasion, what remains is Mathewes’s belief that human beings are fundamentally patriotic creatures; humanities’ ties to their respective countries and political spheres are fundamental to humanity: ‘Patriotism is just our working out of our fundamental faith vis-à-vis some political community or other’ (p. 105).
The reader is left curious as to whether or not Mathewes is giving a fair and holistic treatment of Augustine. For example, when juxtaposed with John Milbank’s reading of Civitas Dei, it appears that Mathewes may well be guilty of anachronistically projecting Reinhold Niebuhr or R. A. Markus onto Augustine. My fears run deeper, though. Those who share an affinity with this book have already (most likely) identified themselves with the Democratic Party; and thus we are left with less ‘commingling’ and more of an amalgamation of Church and state.
However, what would be a ‘new’ and ‘reoriented’ worldview is not rushing to the ballots, but rushing to the Church. Inasmuch as Augustine thought government should exist, he also was its greatest critic. When contrasting the Heavenly City to the earthly city, Augustine notes that the earthly city’s peace exists only for itself; it imposes ‘its own dominion on fellow men, in place of God’s rule’; thus, Augustine goes on to say, ‘it is not even worthy even of the name of peace’ (CD XIX 12). And this is precisely where the Church must be: only the city of God knows true peace and true justice; what governments provide is neither true peace nor true justice; at best, governments may be shadows of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. This is why Mathewes’s book is a good read: the governmental critiques he does make are important; though I remain unconvinced with his solutions.
Washington DC
Marion Grau,
Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion
, T&T Clark: London, 2011; 304 pp.: 9780567280886, £24.99 (pbk)
Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony raises important questions about the nature of religious identity, the influence of Christian mission in conversion during the colonial and postcolonial periods, and the meshing of power and marginality in the formation of Christian community. It asks what stories people tell, what rites they perform and what symbols they recognize as they engage in mission, whether as messengers, converts, or both. Significantly, it is written out of and for the network of progressive theologians in the western world. As Grau explains, this is a forum which has usually disdained or ignored Christian missionary endeavour and has been reluctant to acknowledge the missional aspects of Christian identity. She challenges this approach, calling for a ‘polydox constructive theology of missionary encounter’ (p. 25) which moves beyond the binaries of oppressor/oppressed to recognize variant and shifting beliefs and the different levels of agency and adaptation taking place in mission. To do this she integrates an emerging postcolonial theology (a sub-discipline developing from postcolonial literary studies and history), with missiology and mission history.
Mission scholars and theologians from the global South have already turned their thoughts to postcolonialism, having addressed related issues for some time. Those familiar with this literature will recognize the questions Grau raises but will probably find thought provoking and challenging Grau’s rigourous questioning of the intentions and outcomes of Boniface’s mission to the Saxons, Colenso’s relationship with the Zulu’s or Maori and Anglican exchange. Her historical scope presents opportunities for comparative assessment but sometimes lacks the detail that would demonstrate the complexities she seeks to elucidate. In infering that the debates over human sexuality within the Anglican Communion can be easily explained by recognizing an adaption of missionary conservativism she falls for her own criticism of failing to examine all the varied cultural, political and historical factors at play and understanding how they work together to create a particular discourse.
Grau is often working at the edges of meaning and at the interface of a number of academic disciplines. She intentionally walks around complexities, examining each facet, and exploring every emerging hybrid identity in what she calls ‘a hermeneutical circumambulation’ (p. 2). In doing so she necessarily strains the English language to express her concerns, a process that at times provides arresting metaphors and poetic phrases that draw the reader into her argument but which, more often, render the prose laboured and opaque. For this reader the ‘departures’ presented in the first three chapters, outlining the intention of her project, were more persuasive than the ‘itineraries’ given in later chapters. Grau is to be commended for bringing new perspectives to debates concerning power and conversation in Christianity across the globe. It is to be hoped that further reflection will bring greater facility in expressing them.
Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge Theological Federation
R. S. Sugirtharajah,
Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: History, Method, Practice
, Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester, 2012; 224 pp.: 9781405158572, £19.99 (pbk)
R. S. Sugirtharajah’s new book Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism points towards the shifts in postcolonial theology and hermeneutics. At the rise of radicalization in biblical hermeneutics in the 1970s with a number of contextual hermeneutical methods emerged across the globe, postcolonial reading strategy has taken a prime place. Over the last three decades as a writer and mentor, Sugirtharajah challenged many in terms of observing and exploring ‘reading practices informed by Marxism, feminism, and African-American and Third World interpretation’ (p. 1). His introduction to the book expresses the ‘changing faces of a discourse’ (p. 16), namely, postcolonial biblical interpretation, and showing the ability of local cultures and religions in determining the agenda for biblical hermeneutics. What major factors influenced the colonization of biblical studies? He evaluates it in the second chapter ‘The Late Arrival of the “Post”: Postcolonialism and Biblical Studies’ by assessing the economic and cultural damage promoted by the colonial powers. Thus, the chapter argues the legitimacy of using postcolonial reading tools in interpreting the Bible, especially in postcolonial contexts.
Chapter 3, ‘Postcolonial Biblical Studies in Action: Origins and Trajectories’, written by Ralph Broadbent, projects origins, practices and multiple voices in the field of postcolonial biblical criticism by elucidating varied contributions of postcolonial biblical writers. Broadbent also asserts the link between postcolonial studies and feminist biblical discourses. At the same time, in the fourth chapter, ‘Enduring Orientalism: Biblical Studies and the Repackaging of Colonial Practice’, the author examines the ‘other attempts by both Western and Eastern scholars who studied European images of non-European peoples’ (p. 96). It is noted that this chapter is simply a survey of names and key words rather than a serious and careful examination of the issues. However, the evaluation is clearly interwoven with Orientalism. The next chapter, ‘Postcolonial Moments: Decentering the Bible and Christianity’, is a kind of assessment of ‘mutual amalgamation of each other’s science and spirituality’ (p. 136), a specific study of the ‘spiritual and cultural heritage’ (p. 136) of the sub-continent.
Chapter 6, ‘The Empire Exegetes Back: Postcolonial Reading Practices’, analyses the patterns of interpreting biblical texts with the help of insights from the native Scriptures and cultures, specifically exposing the connections between Budha and Jesus. However, the author’s attempts to propose a solution for Romans 13 and the issue of representation of the poor in Luke by pointing out the concern of ‘late style: texts and twilight’ is unconvincing because of various reasons. At the same time ‘it encourages readers to look anew and question their preconceived notions both of the Bible and their own understanding’ (p. 172). Chapter 7, ‘Afterword: Postcolonial Biblical Criticism the Unfinished Journey’, is certainly a shift from the traditional postcolonial reading methods to a forward-looking and futuristic reading strategy as it addresses the ‘metropolitan issues’ (p. 184).
In Sugirtharajah’s vivid and challenging writing, postcolonial biblical interpretation is a very meaningful and effective tool in understanding the meaning of the text in a postcolonial context for building up an inclusive society. It is also laced with a sense of history that looks sincerely at colonial intervention in many fields of human history. This book is brilliantly presented with appropriate biblical texts and hermeneutical insights.
UT College, Bangalore, India
Sebastian C. H. Kim and Jonathan Draper (eds),
Christianity and the Renewal of Nature: Creation, Climate Change and Human Responsibility
, SPCK: London, 2011; 176 pp: 9780281063314, £12.99 (pbk)
This volume is the outcome of the Ebor Lectures of 2009, held alternately at York Minster and York St John University to promote public conversation on contemporary issues from the perspective of the Christian faith. The contributors include leading theologians and ethicists such as Rowan Williams, Jonathan Draper, Tim Gorringe, Mary Grey, Sebastian Kim, Michael Northcott and Clive Pearson as well as John Sauven (the Executive Director of Greenpeace), Martin Redfern (an award-winning BBC science producer) and Clare Short (the former Secretary of State for International Development in the UK).
A number of books addressing climate change from the perspective of Christian faith have been published recently in English (e.g., by Bergmann and others, Clifford, Conradie, McDonagh, McFague, Northcott, Primavesi, alongside many ecclesial statements). All these contributions in different contexts are most welcome. What, then, does this volume contribute specifically within the context of the United Kingdom?
One feature of most of the essays in this volume is the way in which (Christian) activism is related to biblical exegesis (Williams on Lev. 25.23–28; Gorringe on Rev. 8.1; Grey on Luke 12.22–31; Northcott on Luke 10) and theological reflection. Another feature is the role of envisioning, bringing to bear the Christian vision of hope with apocalyptic images in the media around the long-term impact of climate change (see p. 101f.). Together these features allow for an exploration of Christian living and appropriate virtues in a context where climate change may threaten the very survival of the human species. Indeed, what does one do today if disaster may be in the making within the next 100 years? Where does the recognition that people do not learn from their past mistakes and that it is unlikely that decisions will be made soon enough to avoid catastrophe leave us now, if it is almost already too late?
This question becomes especially significant in a context defined by reductionism in science and dualism in religion (see pp. 54–6). The world’s climate cannot be saved by technology alone; the solution will also require less consumption and addressing the culture of consumerism among the consumer class and the consumerist aspirations elsewhere in the world (see pp. 64, 68). Moreover, a concern for social justice requires renewed reflection on the meaning of loving one’s neighbours (p. 90–1), that is, the victims of climate change. This also suggests that what is needed is a retrieval of non-profit values such as dignity, justice, generosity and the common good (p. 69) in order to resist a monetary reduction of the notion of value and the idolatrous commitment to economic growth (p. 75). As this volume indicates, the rich symbolism of the Christian tradition may help to recover appropriate virtues and values for the ‘renewal of nature’. Will that be sufficient to stem the tide of carbon emissions? As Sauven observes, the root of the word ‘credit’ is the Latin credere (to believe) (see p. 68). If so, the question is not only how Christian beliefs may be relevant but what beliefs undergird the global economy.
University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Nicholas Papadopulos, God’s Transforming Work: Celebrating Ten Years of Common Worship , SPCK: London, 2011; 176 pp.: 9780281063901, £14.99 (pbk)
Can it be that Common Worship is more than ten years old? In this set of essays edited by Nicholas Papadopulos, reflections on the impact of Common Worship on the faith and practice of the Church of England during its decade of use are gathered from practitioners, theologians, educators and commentators. With an elegant Introduction by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and an Afterword by the editor written as a tribute to David Stancliffe, Chair of the Liturgical Commission during the years that Common Worship was in process, these chapters attempt to assess the state of the liturgical question in the post-Common Worship church and look to its liturgical future.
Williams’s Introduction, which explores the capacity of contemporary human beings for ritual and the socio-cultural impediments to authentic Christian worship in the time Common Worship has been in the pews, sets a high bar for these essays. Perhaps a steadier editorial hand might have enabled them more consistently to meet that bar. And some introductory material by the editor explaining the shape and intention of the book would not have gone amiss. It is not that some essays are ‘better’ than others; all have real merit. It is simply that some stray quite far from the core issues raised by a decade of Common Worship worship and into more general liturgical and theological reflections.
There are certainly some highlights among these essays. Michael Perham’s piece on the kinds of changes embodied in the rites of Common Worship that have made it a nourishing liturgical diet for the Church at this moment in its history is clear, concise and penetrating. Similarly helpful is Anders Bergquist’s trenchant discussion of the Common Worship ordination rites and their predecessors, informed as it is by the author’s understanding of the roots of ordination theology and practice. And Jeremy Fletcher’s essay on the Service of the Word (1993) gives a very good sense of the challenges of worship planning in the years between the publication of the Alternative Service Book in 1990 and Common Worship in 2000.
But there are several missed opportunities here, points at which the connection between a given essay and Common Worship is tenuous at best. One or two examples will suffice. Given Bishop Stancliffe’s care to remind the Commission periodically in our deliberation that the singing of the liturgy must always stand alongside the saying and embodying of the liturgy in Anglican worship, Simon Reynolds’s otherwise excellent essay (‘Believing in a God Who Sings’) fails to use the specifics of Common Worship to assess the place of music in Christian formation. How do the particular liturgical sensibilities embodied in Common Worship aid or hinder this process of ‘singing our faith’? Is the dialogue between music and Christian identity destined to be more or less fruitful as a result of Common Worship?
The other significant disappointment is in the chapter on the space within which the liturgy is celebrated. When the author, Richard Giles, was Dean of the Cathedral in Philadelphia, he not only gave us penetrating theoretical work on matters related to the shaping of liturgical space but also completely reordered the cathedral to reflect his liturgical-architectural principles. But again his essay is unmoored from the stated focus of the book. Anyone who has read his seminal Re-pitching the Tent (Augsburg/Fortress, 2000) will find nothing new in this essay, ‘The Tent Re-pitched’, and we can only wish that he had put his considerable talent to work reflecting on the specific space requirements for the liturgy to which Common Worship invites us.
Of course a book of this kind cannot do everything. But mention of the Lectionary and Calendar, the addition of one or more lay liturgists or those from outside the Church of England to the list of contributors, as well as some attention to the place of Paul Bradshaw’s two-volume Companion to Common Worship (SPCK, 2001/2006) in the process of liturgical affiliation would have been most welcome. But these are minor matters, as is the lack of clarity with regard to the place of the various components within a coherent whole. For those with interest in contemporary issues related to the Church’s worship, this volume will surely encourage further reading and reflection. It is a worthy birthday gift for Common Worship.
Norwich, Vermont
Kenneth Stevenson,
Liturgy and Interpretation
, SCM Press: London, 2011; 272 pp.: 9780334044024, £55 (pbk)
This book is important; it gathers into one volume fourteen papers delivered by the late scholar-bishop Kenneth Stevenson. Together they cover three major areas of Bishop Kenneth’s liturgical interest: the Lord’s Prayer, the Transfiguration of Christ and the sermons of Lancelot Andrews. Two concluding papers deal with the apocalyptic imagery of the man, the lion, the ox and the eagle and with the eucharistic theology of Bishop Michael Ramsey.
Such riches alone ought to be commendation enough, but Stevenson applies a history of interpretation (common in biblical studies) to the field of liturgical research. In truth this book begs to be included on reading lists for liturgy in seminaries and theological colleges and faculties throughout the world.
Of course, from time to time there is overlapping material. Papers start with certain common introductory elements which in a book become a little repetitive. In a posthumous collection, however, one can understand an editorial reluctance to tamper with the texts.
However, it is the editorial and publishing failures which scupper this book. The proofreading is sloppy. I counted at least four examples of the seventeenth-century word ‘doth’ printed as ‘cloth’ – an extraordinary example of the inability of spell-checking software to read, and the transliteration of the Greek ‘parrhesia’ appears as ‘pawhesiat’. The editor, like Homer, has nodded. Bishop Kenneth would not have missed such basic errors, and the publisher has served the author badly.
One might overlook this by considering the eagerness to publish Stevenson’s last book – mistakes are easily made when time is tight. But there is more. In the final book of so distinguished a writer, one might have looked for a list of Stevenson’s publications; there is none. Nor is there a select bibliography drawn from the footnotes. Both of these tasks could have been done in a day. Even worse, the index is so thin as to be almost transparent.
How could one put such a book on a reading list? Students would have to do the work that the publisher should have done. Well, perhaps the really keen might persevere. Or they might if they didn’t have to pay £55 for a print-on-demand book.
What student can afford such a sum for a paperback book? What sensible tutor will ask students to shell out for a book so deeply flawed by the publishers? While we understand that liturgical textbooks are unlikely to sell like Harry Potter, it is the duty of publishers to make books available to the public.
The publishers of this book have failed in their responsibilities to potential readers and so have failed their author. This is a tragedy. Bishop Kenneth deserved a better memorial than this.
Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford
Paul Hedges,
Controversies in Interreligious Dialogue and the Theology of Religions
, SCM Press: London, 2010; 304 pp.: 9780334042112, £30.00 (pbk)
The main ‘controversy’ that this book examines is between ‘particularisms’ and ‘pluralisms’ in the theology of religions. Paul Hedges argues that a contemporary impasse between the two can be resolved through appeal to an intercultural theology that recognizes that religions are not mutually excluding systems but mutually related realms of cultural activity.
In presenting his argument, Hedges demonstrates an impressive and sensitive awareness of his field, combining theology with cultural theory. Situating himself as an Episcopalian Anglican with ecumenical leanings, and both a theologian and a scholar of religious studies, he first examines contemporary theories in the theology of religion, adding ‘particularities’ to a typology of exclusivisms, inclusivisms and pluralisms. He links each with a different motif: discontinuity, fulfilment, openness and difference respectively. The first is dismissed as untenable and the second as problematic. It is the tension between the last two that he concentrates on.
The second chapter explores interreligious dialogue, a term Hedges prefers to interfaith dialogue in spite of controversy over the term ‘religion’. A variety of contemporary forms of dialogue is surveyed, including scriptural reasoning and multiple religious belonging, drawing characteristically on a wide range of sources. Hedges eventually comes down on the side of dialogue characterized by radical openness (p. 88). In the third chapter, Hedges places the pluralist hypothesis under the microscope, acknowledging its critics but defending it, for instance, against those who would accuse pluralists of intellectual colonization.
The fourth chapter on the particularist agenda draws on scholars such as Foucault, Barth, Gavin d’Costa and George Lindbeck. It is described as a post-liberal philosophy rooted in the conviction that religions are incommensurable and therefore cannot be compared without an illegitimate exercise of power. Religions are so different that it is impossible, for instance, to judge from outside whether they are salvific. Hedges rejects particularism on the grounds that the premise on which it is seemingly based, that religions are ‘monolithic cultural islands’, is historically untenable. Feminist perspectives are then discussed. A commendable awareness of their importance is demonstrated, although I would have preferred a more equitable balance between citations of male and female scholars throughout the book.
Hedges’s method of moving beyond the impasse between particularisms and pluralisms is to argue that both are flawed in that neither adequately takes into account the fluid and syncretic nature of the boundaries between religions and religious identities, both historically and in the present. While both particularity and pluralism must be respected, therefore, the way forward, for all religions, is a radical openness to the ‘other’ within dialogue so that all can be changed and challenged.
I commend this book particularly to those teaching and studying the theology of religion at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Strictly speaking, it is about one controversy and one solution to that controversy but the scope of the discussion moves far wider than this, providing a sound guide to contemporary discourse in the theology of religions.
Liverpool Hope University
Amos Yong,
The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination
, Pentecostal Manifestos Series, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2011; 240 pp.: 9780802866127, £21.99 (pbk)
This book is the fourth in the Pentecostal Manifestos series of books. The series aims to make a distinctive contribution to theological discourse from within the Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions and aims to influence the wider conversations in the academy. This current book by Amos Yong fulfils this aim in a significant way and leads the Pentecostal scholarly engagement with science from the perspective of a systematic theologian. The very personal question which motivates Yong in this enquiry is stated as follows: ‘Is the Pentecostal-charismatic worldview within which I have been raised defensible in our contemporary scientific context?’ (p. x). To put it another way, ‘what does a “premodern” supernaturalistic religion like Pentecostalism have to do with the naturalistic and rationalistic world of modern science?’ (p. 1). The book attempts to address this concern by tracing the existing relationship, such as it is, between Pentecostalism and science before reviewing the social science research on Pentecostalism. Yong then proceeds to discuss a Pentecostal perspective on divine action in the world before engaging with natural law, evolution and emergence theory and cosmology.
Methodologically, Yong believes that a Pentecostal or pneumatological approach to the theology and science discussion can complement other approaches and thereby reinforce the complementarity of the different discourses. Neither theology nor science could be said to be homogeneous and the various disciples of science and sub-disciplines of theology can be seen as contributing different perspectives. The ‘many tongues’ of Pentecost suggest a pluralism to theological discourse and a diversity of human knowing. This multi-perspectival approach recognizes the validity of different approaches: even as a theologian Yong wishes to privilege the theological categories over the scientific ones. The ‘many tongues’ of Pentecost are understood ‘analogically as providing a theological rationale for the many scientific disciplines’ (p. 29). For Yong the various scientific discourses function like distinct languages and we need to respect the integrity of each language, as well as recognizing the possible translation from one discourse into another through interdisciplinary study. As part of this study, Yong advances a theological hypothesis, namely, that a pneumatological theology of nature and creation can counter scientific reductionism and its materialist exaggerations. Towards this end Yong develops a Trinitarian theology of divine action by developing a pneumatological cosmology. He develops a thesis of ‘an emergentist cosmology that provides nonreductionistic accounts of pneumatic or spiritual realities while, at the same time, challenging dualistic construals about the relationship between the spiritual and the material world’ (p. 31).
Once again theological scholarship is in Yong’s debt because this volume is another example of his acumen and broad vision. This text fulfils the aims of the Pentecostal Manifestos series admirably. It certainly provides a distinctly Pentecostal interjection into the discussion and outlines possible trajectories that can be developed further. There may well be different ways to characterize the relationship between divine agency and creation than those proposed by Yong (for example, around his use of emergence theory) but his pneumatological approach certainly advances the discussion. It now remains for scholars engaged in the science and theology debate to digest this contribution and take its suggestions forward in a constructive manner.
University of Birmingham
Jonathan Roberts,
Blake. Wordsworth. Religion
, Continuum: London, 2010; 144 pp.: 9780826425027, £16.99 (pbk)
The impetus behind this book arises out of the author's concern at the antagonistic, binary nature of contemporary religious debates. The book offers a corrective to that through an extended reflection on two popular, much anthologized Romantic poems: ‘To my friend Butts’, by William Blake, and an extract from The Excursion, by William Wordsworth. Roberts employs various hermeneutical approaches (Biography and History, Mysticism and Psychedelics, Theology, Religion) and his principal aim is to show how each of these can contribute to a contemplation of the religious sensibility he locates in the two poems; and thus how a pluralistic, inclusive approach to interpretation has yielded more than any one of these perspectives is able to do on its own. Underlying all this is an important theoretical statement regarding the whole enterprise of seeking textual meaning. As Professor Christopher Rowland puts it in his Foreword : ‘[T]his book takes seriously Blake's aphorism “without contraries is no progression” and resists mutually exclusive approaches by advocating instead a more complex, multifaceted dialogue that reflects our own human complexity’ (p xii). Using this multifaceted approach will, Roberts hopes, ‘help us to think about: (i) the nature of religion and religious experience today, (ii) how these phenomena might be communicated, and (iii) what happens when we describe them according to different interpretative paradigms’ (pp. 1–2). The philosophical point here it seems to me is a recognition of the need for a hermeneutics that approaches the interrelationship of religious and textual meaning by acknowledging the subjectivity of the interpretative process and the existential realities of human experience. In this, Jonathan Roberts's book is an important contribution to the development of a new, more heuristic hermeneutics, one not predicated on a theoretically univocal perspective which simply seeks to coerce a text into asserting its own ideological or dogmatic preoccupations but makes space for reticence, multiplicity and open-endedness.
What Roberts offers the reader is a number ways of looking at his chosen poems which together neither theoretically cohere nor constitute a particular interpretative stance. Rather, collectively they illustrate the complex reality of notions of religious experience and textual manifestations of truth. As a whole, this book's refusal to flatten out or reduce these poems through an antagonistic privileging of one reading over another suggests the conclusion that, at a time when debates in both theology and literary studies are characterized by such ideological polarization, the greatest possibility for escaping this impasse is one confident enough to take a non-foundational approach to reading and interpretative practice. This, however, requires a level of courage and humility on the part of practitioners in both fields of scholarship. At present this is not much in evidence and Jonathan Roberts is to be applauded for drawing our attention to both its need and its hermeneutical potential.
Wadham College, Oxford
A. N. Wilson,
Dante in Love
, Atlantic Books: London, 2011; 400 pp.: 9781848879485, £25.00 (hbk)
‘This book’, says A. N. Wilson, is ‘an attempt to sketch Dante and his age’ (p. 338). It has been written to help the reader who is in danger of leaving unexplored one of the sublime texts of western literature because of the amount of information needed to make sense of its author's imagined universe.
Wilson sketches Dante's life with a generous empathy for the loves about which we can only speculate: what did Beatrice Portinari, whom Dante seems hardly to have known, really mean to him? Was there in the same period some adolescent homosexual involvement with Brunetto Latini? What was his relationship with his wife Gemma Donati, to whom he was betrothed at the age of eleven and about whom he tells us virtually nothing? Was the writing of the Comedy triggered by a new love for some other woman?
Dante's age is sketched with huge energy. Wilson writes with easy familiarity about the Florence Dante lived in for the first of half of his life and the cities of his subsequent peregrinations: Rome, Padua, Verona and Ravenna. He introduces the reader to a rich cast of characters who were caught up in the violent and confusing politics of Dante's Italy and then populated his imagined cosmos. When Wilson tell us about the scheming Boniface VIII (whom Dante consigned to hell), Bernard of Clairvaux, preacher of militant devotion, who became Dante's guide in heaven, or the uncompromising Francis, whose critique of usurious bankers like Dante's own father was as savage as anything put forward by today's ‘Occupy’ movement, he can be excellent. Wilson's emphasis on the emergence of the doctrine of Purgatory in the thirteenth century and the use made of it by Dante (to explore responsibility and forgiveness), and by Boniface (to make money), is particularly illuminating. He speculates engagingly about the friendship between Dante and Giotto, which may have blossomed in Padua when Giotto was working on the luminously beautiful Arena Chapel (paid for by another dynasty of usurious bankers). When he traces the strife between Ghibellines and Guelfs, it is, however, all too easy to lose the plot.
Wilson is constantly concerned to relate the concerns of Dante's age to those of later generations, but his references to Berkeley, Freud and Proust could well have been pruned. He helps us understand what Dante meant to the Romantics, the Victorians (Wilson clearly enjoys demolishing Gladstone's theory that in his exile Dante visited Oxford), to Eliot and to Pound, for whom he has considerable respect. Wilson makes it clear he does not consider himself in the strict sense a Dante scholar. Nevertheless, like Vergil, he proves himself a trustworthy guide through territory that can cause the faint-hearted to lose hope. Above all, he understands and expounds with clarity the Christian faith. Readers of Theology will no doubt appreciate the fact that this engaging and beautifully produced book is dedicated to ‘Rowan and Jane Williams’.
Roehampton University