Abstract
Warren Carter and Amy-Jill Levine,
The New Testament: Methods and Meanings
, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2013; 376 pp.: 9781426741906, £25.00/$39.99 (pbk)
This is an accessible introduction to the New Testament with an important difference. Although both authors are American New Testament Professors, the first is a Christian and the second a Jew. They summarize recent background critical scholarship on the different books in the New Testament, taking one at a time, but they also focus upon the passages within them that appear particularly challenging in the modern world. Understandably they look carefully at those passages that appear (to modern eyes) to be anti-Semitic. They also look at those that accept gender differences and slavery, as well as those at variance with sexual practices prevalent today. They do all of this with balance and sensitivity and without using too much technical language. An ideal discussion book. As a course-book, however, it strangely lacks a bibliography or even many clear references to the secondary sources used.
John S. Peart-Binns,
Herbert Hensley Henson: A Biography
, Lutterworth Press: Cambridge, 2014; 212 pp.: 9780718893026, £25.00 (pbk)
If you read clerical biographies you may already have enjoyed the clearly written work of John Peart-Binns. This is his twentieth biography of Anglican bishops. Herbert Hensley Henson was Bishop of Durham 1920–39 and, like David Jenkins half-a-century later, was outspoken on public issues and regarded with suspicion for his ‘modernist’ theology. Unlike Jenkins, however, he angered the Durham miners and seems to have lacked his affability. This could be read alongside Richard Holloway,
Austin Farrer, Scripture, Metaphysics and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass Vision with Critical Commentary , ed. Robert MacSwain, Ashgate Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts, Ashgate: Farnham, 2013; 234 pp.: 9781409450832, £60.00 (hbk)
Austin Farrer’s 1948 Bampton Lectures (republished here) continue to fascinate despite his many unsupported and unreferenced generalizations and stylized prose. But then he was a pioneer of an imaginative and symbolic approach to Scripture that went beyond the dominant historical criticism of his time (even though he also contributed significantly to the last by disputing the existence of Q and defending the short ending of Mark). Robert MacSwain has done a good job, adding some of the footnotes that Farrer’s original lacked, and republishing critical but largely appreciative commentaries written by theologians (then in their youth) such as David Jasper, David Brown and Gerard Loughlin. They still read well.
Dean G. Stroud (ed.),
Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich
, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2013; 216 pp.: 9780802869029, £14.99/$20.00 (pbk)
I found this collection of sermons – all delivered at considerable personal risk in defiance of Hitler’s Third Reich – deeply moving. Most were preached by the giants of the Confessing Church – including Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller and Helmut Gollwitzer. One of Rudolf Bultmann’s remarkable sermons, preached at Marburg on the Sunday that Germany attacked the Soviet Union, is also included, as is the Catholic Bishop Clemens August von Galen’s 1941 sermon denouncing the Nazi programme of enforced ‘euthanasia’ for people with disabilities. The editor provides a helpful introduction and commentary.
John Eliot Gardiner,
Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach
, Allen Lane: London, 2013; 672 pp.: 9780713996623, £30.00 (hbk), 9780141977591, £10.99 (pbk)
A must-buy for all Bach lovers. In this magnificent book John Eliot Gardner combines his first-hand experience as our greatest living conductor of Bach with his considerable scholarship and command of German. He would have benefited from a tougher editor – there are many digressions, repetitions and deviations – but he is wonderfully sensitive to the connections between Bach’s profound music (especially his Cantatas and Passions) and his deep Lutheran faith. It takes days and days to read this long book, especially if you are constantly driven back to listen to Gardiner’s seminal Bach Pilgrimage Cantata recordings made at the turn of the Millennium.
Nicola Slee, Fran Porter and Anne Philips,
The Faith of Women and Girls: Qualitative Research Perspectives
, Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology, Ashgate: Farnham, 2013; 278 pp.: 9781409446187, £65.00 (hbk), 9780754608868, £19.99 (pbk)
Nineteen contributors, all women, offer feminist research in applied theology, mostly based upon semi-structured interviews with small (sometimes too small) but diverse groups of women and girls. The collection displays great engagement and enthusiasm across a number of areas, including the exclusion of women from church hierarchies, women’s religious attachments, gender imbalances and women’s spiritualities. Despite claims that it could be used as a textbook (women, after all, outnumber men in theology and religious studies undergraduate courses), it is too uneven and unsystematic for that. But its varied contributions do put down a marker for future research.
James Barr, Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr , ed. John Barton, Volumes I–III, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013; 2048 pp.: 9780198261926, £350.00/$560.00 (hbk)
Vol. I: Vol. II: Vol. III:
The brilliant biblical scholar James Barr died aged 82 in 2006. John Barton has edited this rich collection, devoting the first volume to Barr's essays on Interpretation and Theology, the second to those on Biblical Studies and the third to Linguistics and Translation. An astonishing achievement and a worthy, albeit expensive, tribute.
Mathew Guest, Kristin Aune, Sonya Sharma and Rob Warner,
Christianity and the University Experience: Understanding Student Faith
, Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2013, 256 pp: 9781780936017, £65.00/$120.00 (hbk), 9781780937847, £21.99/$34.95 (pbk)
The book is based upon an extensive empirical study of students – involving some 4,500 questionnaire returns and 60 face-to-face interviews – in several different types of English universities. The results are surprisingly undramatic. Students who are practising Christians seldom feel their faith to be challenged by their studies and are more likely to attend campus services if they have already been churchgoers back home.