Posts Tagged book review

Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do

by Phillip Cary

197 pp.  Brazos Press.  $14.99.

Phillip Cary was one of the best guests ever on Homebrewed Christianity, and given the quality of the folks that Tripp and Bo bring on to that program, that’s saying something.  What I did not know when I listened to his episode was that the book on which his interview was based would become one of those “arm’s reach” books when I’m teaching my Christian college students.  But the book, which my mother gave me as a Christmas gift, is going with me when I return to the office tomorrow, and the next time I have a student worry about “finding God’s will for my life” or “letting God be in control,” I’m going to be sure that this book lands in said student’s paws.  (I’m one of those professors who lends books to students.  I might find myself regretting that some day, but so far, so good.)

What makes Cary such a Christian Humanist hero is that his book, as far as I can tell, relies almost entirely on arguments and elaborations upon arguments from sixteenth-century theological sources.  Although he does not directly quote much Luther or Calvin, those who know those good old Reformers will hear their echoes in every chapter, and Cary wields his learning lightly enough that they sound like they’re responding to Christian college girls as much as to John Tetzel.  Like some other books I’ve particularly liked lately, Cary’s argument draws on the resources of old books to address problems that have taken on new shapes.  And as anyone who listens to our podcast can attest, that’s just the sort of intellectual activity that we find compelling.

Cary names  his main target in the book “the new evangelical theology,” and it’s the sort of thing that should ring familiar with those who spend much time at all around young evangelicals (and by young I mean Baby Boomer or younger).  This is a theological phenomenon that seeks divine guidance from the inner recesses of the human heart, that calls into question even the best of human acts, wondering if they’re “really” done for selfish reasons, that looks for “God’s will in my life” and for the next great “mountaintop experience” to rejuvenate the soul.  Its sermons are heavy on “practical application,” and although its practitioners might never have read the phrase “moralistic therapeutic deism,” linking the two phenomena ain’t hard.  In short, this is the sort of mentality that too many of my own students, faced with changes of major and opportunities to study overseas, have to overcome when they drop in to my office.  Cary, a philosophy professor, encounters it mainly through assigned papers, and what he has read I’ve certainly heard.  This is a layer of guilt and anxiety overlaid onto traditional Christian confession, an obsession with the self (Cary argues this point particularly well) that renders moral responsibility and wise judgment far more difficult than they should be.

Cary’s goals in the book progress through stages: after he deals with those ideas that diminish the Christian’s responsibility to take the talents given and make something of them (he returns to that parable quite a bit), he gives the reader permission not to be anxious about self-examination (one should only do so after the fact, in a spirit of repentance, Cary suggests), and he finishes the book examining the structure of “the new evangelical theology” and noting its parasitism on nineteenth-century German liberalism and encouraging pastors and teachers to note just how well liberal Protestantism has been doing of late.  This relatively brief book, in other words, is at turns pastoral, hard-nosed, and interesting intellectually, something that’s not easy to do even in a much longer book.  And with his repeated (and very sixteenth-century) insistence that the Bible should be the foremost and the governing source of revelation for the Christian, Cary nicely highlights the central irony of “the new evangelical theology”: although it pretends to transform the soul, in reality, because it’s a function of consumerism rather than an outgrowth of a true theology of divine gift, such theology can only increase anxiety and guilt, never bring the assurance of divine forgiveness.

In short, I can recommend this book to anyone who works with young evangelicals (see previous aside) and thinks that the sixteenth century might yet say something to the twenty-first.  Whether Cary sets the doctrine of Scripture over against individualism or the preached Word over against self-help sermonizing, this book is a breath of fresh air, a clearly written and compelling case against some of the more irritating developments in evangelicalism in my own lifetime.

If you discern that it’s God’s will to pick this up, then let God be in control, and read it! (That was a joke, folks.)

Insurrection: To Believe Is Human, To Doubt Divine.

by Peter Rollins

185 pp.  Howard Books.  $16.00.

In 2009 I started a journey into existentialism, a body of philosophy and literature that I’d heard of in my college days, largely skirted through graduate school, and only returned to because my friend Michial Farmer (you might know him from the podcast) talked me into reading and discussing Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time with him as he prepared for his comprehensive exams.  Once we’d worked our way through that, I turned around and read most of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and (because a student of mine is using it in his senior research project), Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus.  Before 2009, for other reasons, I’d also read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov and several of Nietzsche’s books, which also usually get listed as influences on existentialism.  I did all that reading before 2009, and I taught Brothers Karamazov this spring.  So when I wrapped up Peter Rollins’s book Insurrection, I knew that I was looking at a popularization of existentialism for Christians, and I knew that Rollins has put together a pretty good treatment of the intellectual movement for non-specialists: coming away from this book, someone without the background in literature and philosophy that I happen to have will be able to say that there’s a strain in Christianity that emphasizes the felt absence of God as a valid part of the experience of confessing Christ; that the trappings of popular piety often serve as psychological defense mechanisms that keep people from having to confront unpleasant things in life; and that the crucifixion names not only a historical moment but also a way of relating to the world.

Rollins breaks down the “movements” of existentialism (though he does not call it that) into a movement that holds up God as the one who protects everything for the sake of the believer, a movement that gives up everything for the sake of God, and a movement that gives up everything, including  God (30).  Turning to Christ’s call on the cross, Eloi Eloi lama sabbachthani (Mark 15:34, Matthew 27:46) as his central text, Rollins spends the first half of the book articulating a psychological theology with the felt absence of God as its starting point.  The end result reminds me of Saint John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul (I refer to the longer version, the one I’ve spent the most time with) in its focus on the long periods of dryness in which the presence of God gives way to a sense of absence.  In Rollins’s vision, the experience of being-abandoned-by-God is not something that happens to some but not others but something that lies at the heart of Christianity, something that the cowardly can block by means of ideology (chapter 2) or by holding onto Church liturgy as a sort of security blanket (chapter 3) but which, for those Christians who choose honesty over self-deception, is the shape of most of the Christian life.  Such is the main focus of the book’s first part.

Before I move to the second part, I should note where I depart from Rollins’s sort of Christian existentialism.  Perhaps it’s because I work so regularly with college students and church congregations rather than with book publishers and conference audiences, but I found Rollins a bit tiresome as he reduced other people’s differences from his own ideology as satisfactions of “psychological need” and as he referred to those who differ from him as possessed of “infantile faith” (50) and as he took again and again the role of the Nietzschean psychologist, ignoring the content and substance of other people’s ideas in favor of swipes at other people’s inner states.  I point to these not as limitations of Rollins’s own intellect (he could very well have actual arguments published in other texts) but as shortcomings of this book: in the first part at least, Rollins tends towards grand suspicions of other people’s motivations and consciousness rather than self-examination in the face of difference.  The difference between my own existentialism and Rollins’s is not so much in the content as in the approach to difference, but it’s not unimportant: where his prose tends to treat those who differ as inferior, I’m far more inclined to think that the difference might distinguish different kinds of goodness rather than always between goodness and badness, and furthermore I’m far more suspicious of myself: after all, if there is a distinction to be made between better kinds of being-Christian and worse kinds, I always suspect that mine might be the worse.

Part two, labeled “Resurrection,” takes readers past the existential angst of “Eloi Eloi” and into a way of life that Rollins calls Resurrection life but which bears little resemblance to the traditional Christian doctrine of the same name.  Rather than turning to 1 Corinthians 15, which in my own thinking is the best starting place for thinking about Resurrection as a horizon, or to Romans 12, which is as fine a place as I can immediately imagine for thinking about how Resurrection informs life in the Saeculum, Rollins turns to Camus and Nietzsche as helps to say what Resurrection looks like.  Invoking a very Camus-flavored Sisyphus in the sixth chapter (128), Rollins calls Resurrection life an affirmation not of the hope of a life filled with goodness where this existence so often falls short but of life as already experienced (129).  Resurrection for Rollins is not a rejection of a Nietzchean sense of eternal recurrance but an embrace of the same, a yea-saying to life as it is, with all of life’s horrors rolled into it (130).  In short, nobody gets resurrected for Rollins: some just stop crying out for a life that makes human beings suffer.

Such an embrace of power as the core reality of existence rather than a corruption of the same logically leads, as far as I can tell, nowhere in particular: I’ve known Nietzscheans (and Foucaultians, the English department’s version of the same) who were right-wingers and Nietzscheans who were left-wingers.  After all, when there is no good life to which one might compare and by which one might judge this life, any difference is just more difference.  Or, if you can’t resist (as I can’t), it’s difference, difference, difference all the way down.  Rollins, when his coin got flipped, landed on the left, so the second half of the book early and often names typically New-Left causes as the true outgrowths of mature Christianity.  Rollins makes the typical and the unreflective move of equating racism, sexism and homophobia (140), sneering at people who volunteer at homeless shelters and hold down jobs that those homeless people cannot have (151-52), and even at one point going after Batman as someone who could use his money better for school improvement than for Batmobiles and Bat-Caves (142).  Rollins’s earlier embrace of Eternal Recurrance quickly enough falls away in this section as he holds forth the hope that the same stuff, with the proper social agitation, won’t happen to the next generation as it did to the current one (148), and by the end of the book, Rollins, in his fervor for New-Left protest, seems to make of that group of folks something like a cross between Hegel’s world-historic souls and Plato’s philosopher-kings (174).

None of this is to take away from the first half of the book, which even as it shows seeds of the later elitism, still does a good job of popularizing Christian existentialism.  But when Rollins ventures to step beyond Eloi Eloi, he becomes, for better or for worse, a fairly typical avant-garde New-Left liberal, one happy to fly from continent to continent speaking at conferences while decrying the “bourgeoisie” (the folks Marx would likely have called workers) and their clinging to superstition.  Because Eternal Recurrence has no content, has no telos against which to compare the recurring, Rollins easily enough turns his affirmation of “life” (a word which is always contested, even when a book pretends that it ain’t) into a programmatic progressivism and folks of his ilk, as they wander from conference to conference as the harbingers of “life.”

Those who have read more than one of my reviews know that I tend to be suspicious of the traveling consultant, much preferring the Benedictine stability of the parish preacher or the small-college professor to the grand ideas and finger-pointing from the guy-from-out-of-town.  So it goes.  But I still assert, and may those with ears to hear listen, that one tells trees apart by the fruit they bear.

Why Read Moby-Dick?
By Nathaniel Philbrick.
144 pp. Viking Adult. $25.

If such a thing as the Great American Novel exists, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is almost certainly the finest example of the species—and not just because of its high quality. Moby-Dick serves as a model for the way that American writers of “literary fiction” see themselves, in that it was composed by an autodidact who had one foot in with the working class and one with high culture; that it supports dozens upon dozens of interpretive frameworks, including one that posits the book as the key to understanding America itself; and, of course, that it was (the story goes) widely hated upon its initial publication, only to be understood, accepted, and praised a full lifetime later. Most American writers of serious novels, I suspect, see themselves as heirs to this tradition.

Unfortunately, as Nathaniel Philbrick notes in his new apology for the novel,

Moby-Dick may be well known, but of the handful of novels considered American classics, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, it is the most reluctantly read. It is too long and too maddeningly digressive to be properly appreciated by a sleep-deprived adolescent, particularly in this age of digital distractions.

No Melville fan who has attempted to discuss Moby-Dick with nonbelievers will disagree with this statement. An otherwise educated and thoughtful person will twist her face into a grimace when you bring up Moby-Dick. “Oh,” she will say with a strange mixture of shame and disdain. “I’ve never read that.” And who can blame her? Moby-Dick is a glorious mess of a novel, pieced together from multiple drafts with little apparent effort to make its pieces cohere. My advice for those approaching the novel for the first time is always the same: Do not try to interpret every piece of it, and for crying out loud, don’t waste your time trying to figure out what the whale “represents.” You have to steer into the skid with Moby-Dick; submit yourself to its strange whims and demands, and you will emerge better for the experience. Try to fight it, and you’ll end up in a snow bank.

That’s not to say that interpretations of Moby-Dick have no value; it’s just that one can’t approach the novel with a scalpel. Some of the world’s greatest literary critics, from the early rediscoverers of Melville in the 1920s to Lionel Trilling to Andrew Delbanco, have written with great insight and originality on Moby-Dick, and we as readers are all better for it. Philbrick, for his part, does not seem to aim to join the ranks of academic scholars; in the afterword to Why Read Moby-Dick?, he cites Delbanco’s 2005 biography of Melville as a major influence but does not engage directly with any other scholars. Rather, this short, eminently readable book is aimed at a general-market reader who is otherwise educated but who might grimace at the mention of the novel. Philbrick does not “explain”; rather, he contextualizes and ultimately makes a fairly convincing case that every educated person should at least dip into the novel.

His approach is rather like that of the great “heroic critics” of the middle of the last century. While the book lacks a coherent message beyond “You must read this,” Philbrick returns again and again to the idea that

Contained within the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country’s ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

It’s a good thing that Philbrick is writing for a popular, rather than an scholarly, audience, because this sort of grandiose language—intense fandom couched in the terminology of national history—is no longer permitted by the guardians of academic prose. (Delbanco is an exception to this and most other rules.) I will admit that Philbrick’s new heroic criticism appeals to me. When he says that “As individuals trying to find our way through the darkness, as citizens of a nation trying to live up to the ideals set forth in our constitution, we need, more than ever before, Moby-Dick,” I am inclined to agree—although I doubt that our politics would be made less odious by a national book club.

Philbrick goes into quite a bit of detail about the background, composition, and historical context of Moby-Dick, quoting generously from the letters of Melville and of his once-friends Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. These details serve to make his appeals simultaneously specific and universal, concerned simultaneously with the importance of Moby-Dick to Melville’s life and with its importance to our grand national mythos. These two concerns occasionally sit uncomfortably next to each other, but that discomfort is entirely appropriate for a book about a book like Moby-Dick, where thousands of words on the practical issues of cetalogy sit wedged between chapters on philosophical idealism and bizarre Shakespearean playlets about monomania and power.

Indeed, Philbrick is savvy enough about the structure of Moby-Dick to make his book similarly fragmented and crooked. Like Melville, he utilizes a series of very short chapters. Each approaches the book from a different direction. In this way, Philbrick creates a pattern of thrusts and parries surrounding the interpretation of the novel. His major theme is his understanding of American history and myth through Moby-Dick, but his minor themes are legion: religion, homosexuality, race, politics, environmentalism, and so forth. The novel is not “about” any of these things in the sense that high-school English teachers sometimes tell their students that the white whale “represents” God or the id or the vanishing wilderness—but Philbrick is quite right in pointing out that it contains all of these subjects, and he writes about them thoughtfully and with gusto.

Sometimes, in fact, he writes with a little too much gusto. Early in the book, he attempts to take on Melville’s authorial voice in a discussion about—of all things—clam chowder. The results are decidedly mixed: “Remember this, all ye modern-day clam chowder makers, forgo the cloying chunks of needless potato and go with the biscuit bits!” The sentence is going along fine until Philbrick slips in the modern slang “go with,” at which point the effect is ruined.

But I’ll take a cheerful if unsuccessful attempt at talking like Melville over Philbrick’s occasional lapses into a more conversational tone. The worst of these occurs in his discussion of Melville’s filthy joke in “The Cassock,” chapter 95 of Moby-Dick. Something about Melville’s vulgarity turns Philbrick into the smirking frat boy in your American literature survey: “Ishmael begins by describing how the mincer, the sailo who cuts up the whale blubber into thin pieces known as bible leaves, secures a very special coat made from—get this—the foreskin of a sperm whale’s penis…that’s right, the foreskin of a whale.” These lapses are, thankfully, rare, and most of the time Philbrick treats his readers like adults.

These are minor complaints, of course, and they don’t really mar what is on the whole a delightful apologia for a Great Book that many know only by reputation. I do wonder how many non-readers of Moby-Dick will be readers of Why Read Moby-Dick?; I suspect that, despite Philbrick’s noble efforts, the people who have been scared away by the length and opacity of Moby-Dick will not want to read a book that attempts to change their minds. I hope I am wrong.

Philbrick, for his part, attempts to keep his expectations modest at the outset. “I am not one of those purists,” he says, “who insist on reading the entire untruncated text at all costs. Moby-Dick is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase, will do.” This is a profoundly stupid thing to say. Very few people will insist on anyone reading every word of Moby-Dick; I have been through it four or five times now, and I am certain there are paragraphs I’ve never read. But a sentence? A phrase? Be reasonable.

Besides, Philbrick contradicts his magnanimity in the very next sentence: “The important thing is to spend some time with the novel, to listen as you read, to feel the prose adapt to the various voices that flowed through Melville during the book’s composition like intermittent ghosts with something urgent and essential to say.” Philbrick does not say how he thinks a reader will be able to hear these “various voices . . . with something urgent and essential to say” when he stops at “a mere phrase” of the novel. We do not need people who read a tiny fragment of Moby-Dick any more than we need people who read a tiny fragment of the Bible. The same is true for any great book with something to say.

So my advice is to ignore Philbrick’s advice and instead watch the way he actually reads the book—watch him rhapsodize and puzzle and swoon over Melville’s prose and ideas. Why Read Moby-Dick? doesn’t break an inch of new ground in Melville scholarship, but it serves as a useful guide for laymen and, perhaps, a reminder to scholars of why we loved the novel in the first place.

Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith

by Matthew Lee Anderson

231 pp. $14.99.  Bethany House.

The preface to Matthew Anderson’s book is subtitled, “In Which I Clear my Throat.”  How could I but love this book?  Oh, and in one of the concluding chapters, he takes an “emergent” Christian author to task for putting the Western preference bodily presence at the feet of Descartes.  Yes, those of you who have read some Enlightenment philosophy, he said that Descartes regards the body too highly.  And Matt Anderson takes him to school in a blistering and funny endnote.  What chance does someone like me stand?

What’s really remarkable about this book, though, beyond the erudite sense of humor, is the strong balance between self-criticism and an insistence that some ideas are better than others.  Some books are so self-critical that it’s hard to understand why the author wanted to write a book in the first place, and others (the majority of bad books) become so convinced of their main ideas that they treat any who differ as idiotic, morally deficient, and otherwise unpleasant as human beings.  Anderson, instead of these extremes, starts out each of his first few chapters reciting common pronunciations and then qualifying them.  Do people say that evangelicals shade into Platonism as they hate the body?  Behold, Anderson insists, the evangelical delight in weddings and our language of being bodily present with God in the resurrection.  And while you’re at it, read some Plato beyond the Phaedo (54).  Does modern Christianity shade into Gnosticism in its preference for disembodied bliss as a picture of the afterlife?  Go read some actual Gnostic texts, Anderson suggests, and stop using “Gnostic” as a catch-all pejorative (37).

(I have to note that I too have noticed the almost infinite flexibility of “Gnostic” as an insult for one’s enemies.  But Anderson published it in a book, where my observations have been mainly conversational.)

Earthen Vessels is my sort of book because it knows and owns its influences.  Although Anderson cites a wide range of ancient, medieval, and modern theologians along the way, his intellectual framework is without a doubt an Augustinian one: his account of the Fall (66-67) is one in which material creation, human beings included, are good, very good.  Logically prior to the distortions and travesties of the sin-warped world are the inherent goodness and God-belovedness of bodies, of minds, of all things seen and unseen.  Not once in the course of the book does Anderson pine for a world without bodies, even as he treats with deft exegesis those passages in the Bible that seem to point to such states.  At all points in the book he proceeds not as one trying to articulate “a new kind of” anything in particular but as someone who’s inherited a rich tradition.

Anderson’s humble Augustinianism serves as a handy toolbox as he takes on questions as diverse as tattooing (chapter 6), the death of the body and contemporary America’s obsession with vampire stories (chapter 9), the importance of architecture for Christian worship (chapter 5), and abortion as the logical outgrowth of consumerism and individualism (chapter 4–this was the second time in the first four chapters that I experienced at once the gratification of seeing a published theologian writing what I’d been saying for some years and the horror of realizing that I’d have to quote Anderson if I published my own thought at this point).  The real joy of this book is seeing how Anderson unpacks Augustinian theology as a genuine guide to Christian faithfulness for the twenty-first century.

One especially helpful move that the book makes early on is to step beyond the impasse that happens when, to use Anderson’s terms, one side of a question deploys the “legalist card” and the other side the “libertine card” (28).  Taking his own reasoning beyond that impasse, Anderson calls for a (tentative) stance of suspicion towards arguments that make the individual’s conscience the final arbiter of such things (29), preferring public reasoning that actually might bind the lives of Christians if we take seriously the contours of our own tradition.  Of course, such a move puts him in a position where both the civil libertarians (“you can’t tell me what to do with MY BODY”) and the economic libertarians (“you can’t tell me what to do with MY CASH”) will likely call foul, but from that starting point he can actually proceed to think theologically about the ways that we human beings relate to God, to self, and to others.

As someone who’s tried to think theologically about LGBTQIAW questions on this site, I especially appreciated his chapter on homosexuality, a chapter that begins with entirely too many provisos and apologies but really articulates some interesting points about the ways we frame the debate.  (In other words, even where my answers might differ from Anderson’s, we share a sense that folks tend to ask questions that won’t lead to answers that do any of the work that we want those answers to do.)  The chapter begins with the concept, central to an Augustinian theology of the human person, that desires are integral to who human beings are but are not constitutive in way that makes the death of those desires an entirely bad thing in all cases.  In other words, he begins with the conviction that conversion is possible and that conversion might actually transform what once we thought of as the core of our being (143).  He rightly points to the rhetoric of gay-marriage and gay-ordination advocates as having its roots, historically, precisely in evangelical speech about sexuality’s place as the core of identity and about sexuality as being constituted of “needs” that one gets fulfilled by means of marriage (146).  Rejecting the idea that traditional Christian theologies of sex begin and end with “clobber verses” condemning temple-prostitution and pederasty exclusively, Anderson uses the image of the iceberg (153) to indicate that the traditional Christian teachings on marriage and sexuality do not get the prohibitions of “abominations” and “pederasty” tacked on as meaningless codas but rather have at their “underwater” core a picture of mutuality and complementarity that logically leads to a picture that holds forth a robust picture of mutual self-giving that renders alternatives not terrifying so much as sadly inadequate by comparison.  In other words, Anderson’s is a theology of sexuality that attempts to find its roots not in the “needs” language of modern psychology but in the mutual self-giving of the Trinity, which in turn takes its shape from the counsel of Scripture.

Such is not to say that the question thus becomes easy, and Anderson readily admits that pastoral concerns, such as those that might arise should atheist gay couples adopt children and then convert to Christianity, will require some genuinely difficult deliberation (158).  Such thoughtfulness does not mean that ultimately Anderson’s theology of sexuality is going to satisfy those with genuine and strongly-held political differences, but I for one respect his honesty as he takes on more interesting questions than I see answered in most exchanges on the subject.

The other chapter in this fine book that particularly interests me is that on “spiritual practices” as often advocated by liberal (or progressive, if you prefer that name) Christians.  Anderson’s chapter argues that such “spiritual practices” as yoga and Eastern meditation could be harmless or destructive, that variables as complex as interior disposition, influence from other human beings, and the ability to assimilate body positions into an orthodox account of existence make any attempts globally to say “good” or “bad” about such things inescapably reductionist.  Following up and addressing those who say that their “spirituality” happens when they take walks on windy days, hike mountain trails, or play with children; Anderson makes a helpful (and very Augustinian) distinction between bodily pleasure, which is inherently good but subject to abuse, and those means of grace that Scripture sets aside as genuinely spiritual, namely reading and meditation on the Scripture, solitary prayer to God after the manner of the Psalms, and gathering around the Eucharistic table.  Anderson grants that listening to particularly good rock albums and laughing at an particularly good joke are good things but insists that they’re simply not the same as those practices that Scripture and traditions set aside as particularly Christian (190).  After yours truly got a slap in the face from a certain Cynthia for neglecting a range of spiritual practices mentioned in another book, Anderson’s chapter on Christian spiritual practices was a welcome read.

For the sake of the suspicious, I will mention here that Anderson contacted me and sent me a complimentary copy of this book for review, but as the review just mentioned should tell anyone who’s suspicious, a free book don’t always become a book that I like.  To his credit, Anderson contacted me the day after that review went live, showing that he does not fear the scrutiny of a reviewer with a nasty little personality like my own.  For that reason, but for many other and better reasons within the book itself, I can recommend this volume without reservation to thoughtful Christians looking to think through some of the hardest questions about living as embodied existences in this fallen but God-beloved world.

Kissing Fish: Christianity for People who Don’t Like Christianity

by Roger Wolsey

393 pp. Xlibris.  $19.99

Certain books stand out in my mind less as conversation partners and more as moments for anthropological reflection.  Such books give me a decent picture of how people whose outlooks differ from my own see the world, but I don’t come away from reading them feeling compelled to incorporate that picture of things into my own active imagination.  Off the top of my head Richard Dawkins, James Dobson, Bart Ehrman, and Rick Warren are among the living authors whose texts I’ve read recently but whose ideas haven’t really challenged mine so much as given me occasion to say, “Nope.  That’s not me.”  This month (and it took me dang near a whole month to read this book), Roger Wolsey joined that list.

I know that my reviews tend to pick nits with people’s missteps citing historically important texts, and I’m afraid that I couldn’t suppress that tendency as I read Wolsey.  As the world looks to Wolsey, ancient and medieval people thought the earth was flat (78; anyone who’s read Dante could tell him otherwise), literal readings of the Bible did not become standard practice until after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (102; apparently Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana doesn’t count), Abelard invented the idea of personal/individual salvation (again, I have to point to Augustine), and Quakers are Anabaptists (159; granted, some Quaker groups eventually adopted water baptism for converts, but the core of the Quaker tradition rejects bodily sacraments in favor of spiritual communion).  I know that to some this must look like “Gotcha!” review-writing, but as with other cases, I must insist that people who want readers to take their points seriously must research seriously, and the historical blunders in the book (I limited myself to three early ones) tell me, as a reader, that Wolsey doesn’t take the subject matter seriously enough to do basic fact-checking.

Beyond matters of sloppiness in isolated points, the book tends to set up binaries between “conservative Christianity” and “progressive Christianity” that do not do much to point beyond themselves towards greater complexity.  Granted, periodically through the book Wolsey takes time to offer a proviso to the tune of “there are some progressives who believe this,” but on the level of organization, just about every chapter begins with a rather flat caricature of conservative evangelicals, one that might capture the worst of the pack but certainly doesn’t account for the diversity within that camp, and proceeds to a longer description of what progressive Christians might have to say about the question at hand.  As Wolsey goes into each topic, the footnotes might offer somebody’s blog URL, the title of a magazine article, or one of Wolsey’s own sarcastic comments that didn’t fit into the flow of the book.  Periodically the typesetting changes for a “Break it Down” section that either follows a tangent that came up or quotes somebody else’s text at length, often addressing the question at hand but rarely integrating it into the larger argument.  So it goes through chapters on God, Jesus, sin, salvation, the afterlife, the Bible, the problem of evil, and eschatology, and rarely in those chapters does the book indicate that evangelicals disagree among themselves about how best to articulate answers to the questions, much less that there might be Christian writers like N.T. Wright or Will Willimon who call into question the paucity of Christian imagination instead of answering those questions in that order. Instead, if the structure of the book even in part constitutes the argument (or, if you prefer, if the medium is even partly the message), then that part of the argument seems to hold the binaries as relatively uncomplicated and unworthy of even structuring the book as anything but a series of binaries.

I should admit that Wolsey got on my bad side early when he reproduced the classic “blind men and the elephant” riff early in the book (67).  Once I see someone use that unironically (after all, if someone can see the blind men and the elephant, doesn’t that person claim an objective perspective on God that the parable seems to be warning against?) as an argument against doctrinal assertions, I lose respect for that person’s thought processes.  Beyond that, the book makes assertions about contemporary evangelicals that do not at all ring true to my own experiences.  He pushed me further towards the Dark Side when he accused conservatives of denying that the Spirit was operative in the world before Pentecost (93), apparently accusing conservatives of never reading the gospel of Luke.  He offers a positively screwy etymology of the Hebrew ha-’adam, reading the initial aleph as the first-person imperfect stem of a becoming-verb (165) and seems to ignore the fact that the Sermon on the Mount Olivet Discourse is spoken to people already willing to follow Jesus up a… wait for it… mountain who are already following Jesus right up to the Last Supper scene, noting with some sense of triumph that very little of the sermon is dedicated to convincing people to follow Jesus (181).

Of the content of the book I won’t say much more beyond the observation that this is a catalog of early-twenty-first-century tendencies of thought among Protestant liberals and not much else.  They’re not Calvinists and they’re not Catholics and they’re not Fundamentalists, but they’re not saying much about why they’re not.  There’s very little sense that Wolsey seeks to convince any conservatives to become otherwise; they’re mainly there in the book for a sense of contrast and so that to demonstrate, over and over, that Wolsey ain’t them.  After two hundred fifty pages of this they-say-we-say pattern, the final run of the book is a list of spiritual practices that liberal Christians tend to undertake, from versions of lectio divina to listening to rock and roll albums to public advocacy for New-Left causes, nothing that surprised me but also nothing that runs against my sense of what liberal Christians are about.  At the end of this (very long) book, I’m no more convinced than I was at the beginning to become a progressive, and I haven’t learned much about progressives, but I have seen a decade’s worth of web reading compiled in a book, just in case someone wants to see all of the places where liberal Protestants differ from (something like) conservative evangelicals.

Ultimately, a book like this reminds me that, when I’m tempted to say that my more-conservative sostren and brethren that they’re stereotyping liberal Christians, sometimes there are people to whom they (the conservative siblings) could point and say, “Look!  That’s just what I was talking about!”  Indeed there are people who say that the forgiveness of sins isn’t at the core of the gospel because , in human conflicts, the main fact that both sides ignore is that “we’re both fine–just as we are” (269) and that there’s really nothing beyond a “mess-up” or two to forgive anyway.  And there are people who think that “literal” is the opposite of “nuanced” (193) rather than literal sense being one component of a (medieval) nuanced reading that also encompasses other things.  And yes, there are people who quote the incendiary blog of an angry evangelical and assume that said blog post represents and encapsulates a theology of “Divine child abuse” (155) which in turn represents most evangelicals.  All of those stereotypes do have roots in the real world (I have a book in my hand that proves it), and likely the stereotypes that people heap on me do as well.  Mercifully, there are certain books out there that might well begin with stereotypes but eventually articulate arguments powerful enough to take seriously in spite of their genesis.

This book just ain’t it.

*A note to the reader: As Roger Wolsey notes in a comment below, I did refer to a section of his book treating Matthew 25, part of Jesus’s Olivet Discourse, as the Sermon on the Mount.  That was a careless oversight on my part, and the text above that’s stricken through reflect my retractions and corrections.

The outline for Greil Marcus’s approach to analyzing Bob Dylan in his latest book, the aptly titled Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, can be found in two pieces.

The first is a review of the famously messy 1970 album Self Portrait, in which a young Marcus, apparently too stunned to form a proper argument, strings together fifty short observations over twenty pages. Some are fragments of conversations; some are takedowns of the album’s attitude and atmosphere (“I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.”); some are muted appreciations of individual songs (Marcus is fond of “All the Tired Horses,” “Living the Blues,” “Copper Kettle,” and precious little else); and some are lengthy quotations from other people. The point, obviously, is that Self Portrait is such an exquisite and inscrutable train wreck that every approach the listener makes toward it is always already doomed to failure; another must immediately be formulated, though one knows from the outset that it, too, will be discarded–and probably sooner rather than later.

It’s not surprising to see this method of analysis resurface in a piece written for the October 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone, in which a much older Marcus, apparently too stunned to form a proper argument, strings together fifteen quotations over four pages. The subject this time, of course, is the terrorist attacks of September 11, and Bob Dylan is involved only insofar as one quotation comes from his greatest late-period album, Love and Theft, providentially released on that terrible day:

High water rising, rising night and day
All the gold and silver being stolen away
Big Joe Turner looking east and west from the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there

Dylan’s words on “High Water” are pretty close to perfect for the apocalyptic carnival that followed the collapse of the Towers.  The whole of Love and Theft is like that, really: The narrator of “Mississippi” walks calmly past a “sky full of fire / Pain pouring down.” That fire returns with a comic vengeance on the next track, wherein Dylan attends the wedding of a former lover and drunkenly announces that he will “break the roof in–set fire to the place as a parting gift.” Elsewhere, “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” drips with the sort of nonchalant cowboy justice that George W. Bush clearly believed himself to possess in spades:

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again
You do so at the peril of your life
I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound
I’ve seen enough heartache and strife

Not even the 9/11 “Truthers” claim that Dylan orchestrated the attacks to boost his record sales, of course. But I wouldn’t put it past him. I happened to be nineteen when Love and Theft was released, a sophomore in college trying to define himself in an environment in which he was not wholly sure he belonged. I owned several Dylan records already–at the very least I had Another Side of Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited, and I suspect I had Bringing It All Back Home, too–and I was, let’s say, intrigued but not completely sold. The power of Dylan’s music had its locus in the past, and there are very few nineteen-year-old classicists.

Even so, I’d planned on driving that Tuesday the hour to the closest record store to get Love and Theft, and no terrorist attack could stop me. (I chalk this up less to any sort of bravery than to sheer boredom and fear–getting on the road felt better than sitting around talking about the uncertain future.) I had to go even farther than I expected to, to a Target (my sense of irony was not yet fully developed) in a northern Atlanta suburb. I listened to the record twice on the long drive north, and I was hooked. Dylan had become for me the sort of prophet he must have seemed to an earlier generation. But the easy platitudes of “The Times They Are A Changin’” didn’t apply anymore; Dylan had reinvented himself as a prophet of ambivalence and ambiguity–the only sort of prophet a thinking person can accept anymore–as typified by the bickering identical twins on “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” or the winking lasciviousness of “Bye and Bye.” I’m fairly sure I had the album memorized by October.

I bring up this story because it demonstrates, I hope, the degree to which writing about Bob Dylan is akin to shooting at a moving target–and one that mocks you when you miss it. He belongs in the great line of American shape-shifters and self-creators, from Benjamin Franklin to Mark Twain to P.T. Barnum to Dylan’s early idol, Woody Guthrie. Because Dylan steadfastly refuses to stand still–because, furthermore, he quite clearly thinks of himself as a sort of cosmic trickster figure–because his public statements range from the only seemingly helpful to the cryptic and bewildering to the blatantly misleading–Marcus’s approach in this book is a helpful one. His approach is, of course, not an approach at all; these pieces were uncollected and unconnected until now, and they certainly don’t combine into a cohesive, let alone a monolithic, statement about their collective subject. (If that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere in Marcus’s catalogue–he is the author of two other books on Dylan, both of which deal with narrower topics in greater detail and neither of which, I’m sad to say, I have read.) One walks away from Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus feeling that one has a better grasp on that its subject but understanding that its subject is in some sense fundamentally not understandable.

Marcus has been generous in the inclusion of what looks like every article he’s ever written that has even a tangential relationship to Dylan. Thus, in addition to his polyvocal take on 9/11, we get reflections on the great folk-music collector Harry Smith, the semi-obscure folk-singer Richard Farina, and of course, The Band, to whom Marcus dedicates several long articles without mentioning Dylan at all. These sidetracks are interesting for several reasons: Besides breaking up the monotony of article after article on the same basic subject, they serve to position Dylan, making it clear–and this is something Dylan fans are sometimes tempted to forget–that Dylan existed alongside other artists, that what he did and does depended and depends on the work of others. (Marcus even makes me want to listen to The Band, a group I’ve never been able to stomach.)

Along the same lines, Marcus occasionally writes about the geography of the music he loves, as when he discovers that he lives in the same Berkeley neighborhood where Harry Smith quite literally moved underground. More to the point, I suppose is “A Trip to Hibbing High,” in which Marcus stands in awe of the palatial public school, interviews Dylan’s aged English teacher, and examines the stage where his high-school band played the talent show. These geographical journeys are more than mere tourism, for to understand an artistic force like Dylan, one must examine the ground from which he grew. Or, as an unnamed woman in the article puts it when someone wonders aloud how someone like Dylan came from a place like Hibbing,

You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’d been to Hibbing, you’d know why Bob Dylan came from there. There’s poetry on the walls. Everywhere you look. There are bars where arguments between socialists and the IWW, between Communists and Trotskyists, arguments that started a hundred years ago, are still going on. It’s there–and it was there when Bob Dylan was there.

These remarks are a microcosm of the book as a whole, in that they seek simultaneously to demythologize the Legend of Bob Dylan and to remythologize it, showing the material circumstances that produced him and then endowing those circumstances with their own sort of mystic aura.

As for Marcus’s writing, the book’s chronological structure allows the reader to witness the development of his signature style–what little development there is. Aside from a few early pieces for Creem in which he latches on to that magazine’s famous mescaline verve, Marcus settles into his own voice remarkably early on. Appropriately for a college professor, it’s far more academic and rigorous than the writing of the only two other contenders for the greatest music critic of the rock era, Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau. And yet the writing was always for popular magazines and remains instantly accessible.

All in all, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus might mimic a so-called “beach read” for those readers who, like me, don’t much like to have a good time. The writing is so pleasant that one is apt to forget how Marcus stretches and plays with Dylan’s mythos. The book is essential for fans of its subject, of course, but it’s worth looking into for those who are interested in how good rock writing is supposed to work–or those who are interested in the deconstruction and reconstruction of an American legend.

Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and Waht to Do About it

by Julia Duin

180 pp. Baker Academic, $12.99

What makes books by journalists so fun is that, when they’re actually being journalists rather than amateur psychologists or philosophers, there’s usually no overarching thesis to such a book.  Instead, the news story becomes the paradigm, and chapters can inform one another, contradict one another, and in other ways make such a book a very different sort of read from a tightly-argued academic treatise.  Julia Duin’s Quitting Church is that sort of journalistic book, one moment pointing to Brian McLaren and Mark Driscoll as the hope of American Protestantism because their Sunday services are driven by the big personalities’ (lengthy–in the services Duin visited, both men preached for more than 45 minutes) sermons and the next pointing to American pastors’ tendencies to make themselves the main event on Sunday morning as a prime reason that the faithful are splitting the evangelical scene and going Orthodox or house-church.  In some moments an abandonment of Biblical literacy in the vain pursuit of being “hip” is the main problem with the way that evangelical congregations teach their members, and in others preachers are upbraided for preaching sermons about 1 Kings (which I just did this last Sunday) rather than giving talks about topics that are “relevant.”

The picture that I took away from this interesting and wandering book is one in which consumerism, once a force that drove the growth of denominations, then of post-denominational megachurches, but a force that ultimately does not sustain any form of Christian life for more than a generation or three, is starting to change the shape of Christian life once again.  This time, if Duin is right, the space that megachurches once shared with small congregations is going to be split unevenly between the megachurches (which, in Duin’s reports, were largely religio-entertainment experiences, both in conservative and liberal varieties) and the house church movement (which Duin is careful to describe in its complexity–because of its decentralization, it often lacks good teachers and the ability to check itself when someone with a gift does rise up).  The future is going to be really big or really small, if Duin is right, and in my own estimation, that seems about right.  Even though I’d not heard of Duin until recently, I’d been saying to people for a while that the megachurches were only going to leave room for home-churchers by the time the dust had settled, and it’s vindicating to see that a respected religion journalist came to that conclusion before I did.

Duin is at her most confusing and her most enlightening when it comes to the Charismatic movement.  On one hand, she writes of the Jesus Movement of the seventies, with its outpourings of the Spirit and its lively gatherings, as someone who was there and longs for a return to the same.  On the other, she can turn a journalist’s critical eye on contemporary movements like the Toronto Blessing without flinching.  Again, I took her willingness to hold both in tension as a strong point of the book: Duin is no apologist for everything with the label “Charismatic,” but she also does not hold back from self-identifying as Charismatic and narrating the courses of various church movements in terms of Charismatic expectations.  Realizing how strong Duin’s Charismatic background is in the penultimate chapter made much sense of her criticisms of controlling pastors, strange attitudes towards single people, platitude-riddled sermons, and the exclusion of women from significant spoken ministries in contemporary congregations, and Duin’s own time away from congregational life, which she narrates frankly and without excuses, has a particularly Charismatic shape.  When Duin finally does get to suggestions on “What to Do about It” (as the subtitle promises), her recommendations are local rather than large-scale, pointing to her preferences for house-church democracies over megachurch monarchies, and as someone with some sympathies that direction myself, I found them both humble and thought-provoking.

I’ve said a number of times that my own failures, because I try to confess them as they happen, make me gradually less judgmental.  I used to look around the English department at UGA and wonder when these people were ever going to finish their dissertations.  That’s before I was staring down year four on my own.  If ever I thought that other people weren’t all that great at raising their children, two of my own have cured that in a hurry.  There was a time when I looked down upon those who “bailed out” of congregations when things got rough.  Now, two North Georgia congregations later, I have less of an elevated platform from which to condemn.  The point is that, as I read Julia Duin’s book, I still find myself wondering whether the folks who are leaving traditional congregations might have hung in and worked a bit harder for change from within, but thirty-four years of my own failures keep me from passing judgment.  Instead, I took on Duin’s book in the spirit that it sets forth, that of inquiry rather than of superiority, and for that, it was a good read.

Telling God’s Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation

by John W. Wright

164 pp.  $19.00  IVP Academic

I actually became aware of this book while reading Stan Hauerwas’s Working with Words (which I reviewed here) earlier this summer.  Hauerwas, in an essay on preaching, suggested that the rhetorical character of preaching, its spoken-to-you-right-here character, was a faithful genre for Christian discourse in ways that the academic monologue cannot be.  Then, in a footnote, he suggested this book, and I figured I should check it out.

I should note that, although I preached probably a dozen sermons a year when I was in seminary, I preach only four or five a year now.  In other words, preaching is not my primary public discourse by any means.  (For the sake of comparison, I teach college classes five days a week and lead faculty training sessions eight times a school year in my current professional capacity.)  That said, I’m always interested in preaching  better next time than I did last, and I agree with Hauerwas and with Wright that preaching, because of its particular situation in the life of the Church, the sermon is a moment and constitutes a practice that can shape the Christian imagination even as some in futurist circles decry the genre as obsolete.  Wright in fact names the sermon as the primary site of interpretation (31), taking a stand against theological education that regards academic biblical studies, with its monographs and articles, as the proper place for interpreting text and the sermon as a time merely for “packaging” the work that the academic commentator does.  By taking this stand, Wright articulates a particular theology of the Scriptures, holding that there is certainly a place for books about the gospel of John but that they’re always helpers to the congregation and the preacher rather than standing on their own as logically prior practices.

Much of Wright’s book is dedicated to a theology of the congregation, and his formulae stand in contrast to what he calls the North American narrative, a way of life characterized by individualism, consumerism, and a duality of mind that divides the world between the managerial/objective/scientific and the therapeutic/subjective/spiritual.  Drawing from the hermeneutical work of Gadamer, Wright lays out two visions for the homily, what he calls the comedic and the tragic.  These are not exact analogues of the dramatic genres but instead point to two relationships between sermon and the North American narrative.  The comedic sermon sets forth ways to adjust to the North American Narrative, leaving the basic structures of modern life to stand as given.  There may or may not be jokes, but what a comedic sermon never does is point to the world and say, “Sin.”  Instead, the comedy-sermon suggests small ways that one can relieve the pressure of the objective/material world by means of a temporary retreat into the subjective/spiritual. Wright holds that the comedic sermon has become the norm because of several reasons, among them the removal of preaching from the eucharistic context and its placement in revival and street-preaching scenarios; the personalization (in Wright’s terms, the diminution of the gospel from a cosmic drama) of the Christian message in the course of North American history; and pressures on preachers in a free-market context to please religious “consumers.”

By contrast, the tragic sermon disrupts the order of things by naming the soul-killing nature of the system, letting the people know that the “gods” of the marketplace are only interested in human sacrifice.  The tragic sermon thus sets up a moment for repentance rather than for adjustment-therapy and for affirming one’s place in the system–the idea is to imagine the preacher himself and the folks gathered for worship that they are in fact pilgrims and aliens, that the way the North American Narrative teaches us to imagine the “self” and the self’s “needs” are not philosophically prior to the sinfulness that pervades all historical moments and the vices that give North American life in the twenty-first century its particular flavor.  Because the congregation, as the saved people of God, is already situated within the Biblical narrative when they gather (83), the homily’s role is to remind the congregation that their minds should be renewed in accordance to the forgiveness into which God’s grace has brought them.  The “how-to” section of Wright’s book lays out a rhetoric of the homily based on David Buttrick’s concept of “moves” within the sermon but steers clear of Buttrick’s theological liberalism, which Wright holds as incapable of anything but a comedic sermon and certainly incapable of forming the people called the Church into anything but nice citizens of the liberal state.  This rhetoric of turning, as Wright calls it, starts out describing truthfully (and therefore with some appeal, but not so much that the turn becomes a sucker punch (95)) the vision of human good that governs “normal” life in North America, then moving by means of a transition paragraph into a section that sets forth Biblical alternatives to those visions.  In other words, the tragic sermon becomes a microcosm of the conversion narrative, hence the book’s subtitle.

The last third of the book consists of a discussion of pastoral and congregational practices that go along with the rhetoric of turning, everything from hospitality to Biblical-narrative counseling to congregational Christian education.  Along with the book’s conclusion, which is an extended commentary on Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana (the great preacher’s manual of the early Church), this finishing section gives a strong sense of the practices that make something like a sermon of turning intelligible, and together they give a strong sense, once again, of how congregational life and the shape of the sermon inform one another.  Wright warns that too many turning-sermons will wear a congregation out and that the turning-sermon should not be every Sunday’s fare (103), but he never does lay out what the other Sundays’ sermons might sound like.  Perhaps he’s setting up demand for a sequel in that omission, but it does make for a less than satisfying experience when, two-thirds of the way through the book, one realizes that one has been reading about “special occasion” sermons without any sense of how “ordinary sermons” might contrast with them.

Wright’s book therefore is not a comprehensive guide to sermon-writing so much as a theoretical exploration, but that’s precisely the sort of thing that helps many of us, myself included, to think about what the practice of preaching means.  Wright’s greatest contribution, then, is to remind the reader that there can be no truthful “how-to” without a prior ethics of the congregation and that the pastor or the priest or the elders or whoever shapes the imagination of the congregation are doing so at all moments, whether in consistent or in hypocritical ways.  Thus repentance is always a practice, the sermon is one component of that practice, and all such components must always fall under the scrutiny of the theologians (whether pastors or priests or elders) whom the congregation calls “preacher” or “teacher.”

On the Verge: A Journey into the Apostolic Future of the Church

by Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson

366 pp. $19.99  Zondervan

Perhaps, at their roots, all church planters have to be Platonists.

I’ve been aware of the church-planting movement since I started seminary in 1999: while the “cool kids” were all about striking out into promising urban and suburban areas, gathering a core of dedicated go-getters to be the nucleus of the Next Big Thing, the old-school traditionalists like me tried to make a case for the humility of moving into an established congregation (perhaps even in rural and poor urban areas) and earning one’s place therein.  It wasn’t really a fair fight back then: as students and some faculty spoke with derision about “maintenance ministries” and waxed eloquent about “vision casting,” all my kind had to fall back on was the nuanced and difficult language of theology and history, languages that we hadn’t really grown into yet.  In the face of marketing slogans, we really didn’t stand a chance.

All of this came back to me as I read through Alan Hirsch’s and Dave Ferguson’s On the Verge. Within forty pages of starting the book, I realized that I was going to drown in the MBA lingo, that the writers had a tenuous grasp (at best) of Church history, and that I had three hundred pages of both to go.  As I’ve noted before in other book reviews, I’m probably one of the worst people to review a book like this: I’ve spent the last fifteen years drifting from one small, poor congregation to another (though I did do a brief stint as a Sunday school teacher in a would-be megachurch before they chased me and my wife away), and even a decade away from seminary, my first reaction to church-planters is to be suspicious of their ego rather than to fawn over their go-getter demeanor.  But once again I’ll note that those things might just make my review one that spots things that other people overlook.

Now back to Plato.

As I plowed through the neologisms and the slogans, I actually never would have thought of old Flat-Head while reading this book, except that one of Alan Hirsch’s chapters (he wrote the first run of chapters and Ferguson the last run of chapters, though each chapter ends with an “amen” response from the other writer) he makes the common Emergent/Missional move of attempting to establish credibility by being a “Hebraic” thinker rather than a “Hellenistic” thinker (and completely botching both, but more on that later), and with the Greeks in mind, the next few chapters made me realize that church planting, in its structure, is not unlike what Plato proposes in Republic: rather than attempting to reform cities, the best way to establish the real form of civic dikaiosyne is to start over, with a clean slate, so that the laws and the culture and the overall workings of the new polis were not at the mercy of tradition and history and other accidents not as illuminated as the philosopher-king but were part of the palette of the city’s grand artist.  A generation later, of course, Aristotle articulated what I call the great conservative vision, looking not to abstract ideals for the measure of goodness but to the embodied virtues that the best citizens of one’s polis already exhibit and examining what already makes them excellent.

I note this bit of ethical history to say that, although I wasn’t literate enough to grasp this as a young seminarian, the debate between church-planters and congregation-sustainers was, and remains, a reiteration of that old Greek dispute.  And in Hirsch and Ferguson’s book, the Platonic moves are obvious ones: both authors encourage teaching an elite core of leaders to imagine reality differently (54-55) on a philosophical level (a concept for which Hirsch appropriates, in good MBA fashion, Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm” language) while setting forth practice (178) and stories (152-153) and even modern hero-stories (153-154) for the rest of the community in order to “act our way into a new way of thinking” (179).  Those who demonstrate that they are the “innovators” (a group that, for Hirsch’s Malcolm-Gladwell imagination, consists of 2% of the population) can become paradigm-people, but for the most part, people enter into the “ethos” of the community by means of the programmatic practices set up by the ideas-people.

Of course, such things are not insidious: the nature of communities is that some people have the ideas, some people defend the ideas that the founders establish, and most people go about their lives producing and consuming for the sakes of family and comfort, sustaining the life of the community by means of their daily work and contributing to the complex culture of the community in their better forms of leisure.  That much one can find in the Torah and in Plato and in Confucius.  What makes Hirsch and Ferguson think of their project as a departure is that they, in the spirit of the corporate consultant, encourage a culture of saying “yes” (218-219) to ideas from the rank and file rather than insisting that all ideas come from the “professionals” (which do not seem to include the consultant-types who write church-planting books, but I’ve already gotten in trouble casting suspicion on consultants, so I’ll stop there).  As long as the new ideas operate in the spirit of the Missional Paradigm (what Hirsch brands as mDNA, ignoring perhaps that the letters in DNA stand for biological words), they’re good to go.

Of course, folks who know the Greek philosophical tradition know that Plato has anticipated this as well: the abandonment of the patriarchal family in favor of the city-household in Republic means that leaders can come from any class so long as they’re educated within the system that the good city sets up, and once Plato has established the central ideas and educational system of Callipolis, he reads like a Ron Paul Libertarian when he finally gets to the operations of the marketplace.  On the Verge‘s call for flexibility within the paradigm-determined culture is only an extension of the same.  I mention all of these points of continuity first to note that Hirsch’s call for an abandonment of “Hellenistic, specifically Platonic” conceptions of learning (177) in favor of “a Hebraic understanding” (177) of things rings strange to anyone who’s actually read any Plato, Aristotle, or really much Greek writing at all.  Hirsch attributes to Plato the classroom model of education (something that really doesn’t make sense until the advent of the printing press) and the conception that education needs to begin with the impartation of facts from lecturer to student (something that Plato opposes in the Meno among other places) among other things, and along with his loose grasp on the Roman office of Pontifex Maximus (on page 33 he implies at least that said office began with Emperor Constantine), he damages his credibility with anyone whose education has included any exposure to actual translations of actual ancient texts.  I think that we Christian Humanists might need to start offering ourselves as consultants when Emergent and Missional folks write their books: for a small fee we can make sure that they don’t alienate people with liberal educations.  Yes, I think that might work.  But more on that later.

My main concern with this book is neither its shaky grasp on classical philosophy (that’s all too common) or its reliance upon corporate slogans and neologisms like “chillax” (93) and “simplexity” (186) and “movementum” (255) but that it exhibits at all points a pervasive anti-Catholicism that, if taken seriously, would alienate Christians in 2011 from a rich tradition and a political imagination that extends beyond the world of advertising consultants.  As a wannabe Hauerwasian, certainly I can’t deny a certain tendency to lay the evils of the Christian era at the door of Constantine, even if I use his name more as a figure than as a historical claim.  But when I say “Constantine,” because the tradition of Yoder and Hauerwas has shaped me, I have in mind the strange coupling of military cultus (whether from warrior-cultures or from soldier-societies) with the Way of the one who died on the Empire’s cross.  When Hirsch says “Constantine,” he means the local Catholic parish.

Among the things that Hirsch and Ferguson cannot see because they imagine the Catholic Church as always “cultural” are the Catholic hierarchy’s resistance to the Pinochet regime when the Capitalists were singing the torture-regime’s praises (as detailed in William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist and as ignored in Hirsch’s first chapter), the invention of modern global missions by the Jesuits (as told in any respectable Church history and as ignored in chapter nine, a Ferguson chapter), and the fact that Patrick’s mission to Ireland was in fact not the first Christian mission to venture outside of the Roman Empire (as Ferguson claims, and knocks me out of my chair, in chapter ten).  Their assessments of “traditional” churches such as the Presbyterians and the Baptists are not much more flattering, and their scorn for the “institutional” megachurches is not hard to detect, but their special place in the outer darkness always seems reserved for the Catholics.

Although that’s about the extent of the open anti-Catholicism, the ethos of the book (I’m trying to use this in the Aristotelian sense rather than the MBA-lingo sense) suffers because nothing from Church history before 1990 seems worth talking about.  There are no martyr stories in the book, but there are plenty of stories from the Hallmark, Google, and Starbucks corporations.  The rich traditions of medieval philosophy and Reformation Biblical commentary make no extended appearances, but there are plenty of quotes from late-twentieth-century CEO’s and management gurus to be had.  And there are no mentions of Dante or Dostoevsky, but Dave Ferguson does write in praise of James Patterson (208).  I won’t say that Hirsch and Ferguson have anything but the best motives for putting forth their blend of management theory and self-help philosophy, but to misappropriate Gertrude Stein when she talked about Oakland, when I finished the book, I felt like there hadn’t been much there there.

To be fair to them, both writers insist that Jesus must be the center of what they’re doing, and they criticize those movements for whom “mission” has taken the central place that Jesus alone deserves.  Moreover, when they do slow down to write about Jesus (rather than about paradigm shifts and chillaxing and movementum), they do note that the biggest challenge to discipleship in the twenty-first century West is consumerism.  My concern, I repeat, is not that they fail to name Jesus but that there’s little sense of how the calling of Jesus upon the Church translates into their MBA lingo.  I see the former in some passages, and I see the latter in many more passages, but the logical connections between the two I simply do not see.  Perhaps someone with a business or advertising background could help me here, but I just don’t get it.  And if I’m the worst sort of person to be reviewing this book, perhaps my failure, as a non-specialist in the vocabularies of management theory, to comprehend their project should be a sign that their call for a flight from “the professionals” might in fact be a call for a shift in power from one sort of professional (the theological scholar) to another (the management guru).

The good news, for those of you who are mad at me for writing bad things about these church-planting gurus, is that, in their words, folks like me will “self-select out” (265) of where the action is and consign ourselves to irrelevance while the great “people-movement” that they’re spearheading is taking on the world.  And I think that’s great.  I suppose my comfort comes from the fact that, when those folks who find themselves burnt out by the go-getter culture of church planting, where nobody is allowed to get old or to slack in their “kingdom productivity” (207), my office door will always be open to hear their stories, and I’ll always try to have copies of Julian of Norwich and St. John of the Cross and Dante to lend to them.

Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian

by Stanley Hauerwas

295 pp.  $37.00 Cascade Books

I often review books that publishers and book-review Internet books send my way, but it’s nice once in a while to take a look at a book that I read because I heard about it and bought it.  The nice parallel here is that Stanley Hauerwas’s recent book Working with Words came about because of people like me, folks who enjoy reading Hauerwas’s essays and sermons and who have learned to “speak Christian” to a large extent because of his influence.  (I still maintain that I’m not visible enough to constitute part of this particular “mafia,” but I do consider it a compliment when folks assume that I might be.)  The result of such a book is a collection that does not seem to have any overarching “point” at the outset beyond celebrating the intellectual influences and persistent questions that have animated Hauerwas’s significant writing career.  At the outset of my review I’ll say that this is some of Hauerwas’s best stuff, and that’s saying something.

The end section of the book (my own favorite section) features a series of essays (some co-authored) on Charles Taylor, H. Richard Niebuhr, Alasdair Macintyre, Thomas Aquinas, Papal Encyclicals, Methodist theology, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Each one features the sort of careful thought and rhetorical swagger that has made Hauerwas such a fun read over the years: to the extent that I’m familiar with each of these texts and writers, I can say that Hauerwas opens up new ways to engage them while remaining true to what their own projects are after, and to the extent that I’m unfamiliar, I came away from each wanting to read more.  The essay on Encyclicals particularly struck me as really good material: Hauerwas makes a compelling argument that labeling some of the encyclicals as “social teaching” and others as “teaching on sexual morality” ignores the fact that the Catholic tradition resists a strong separation between the two precisely because its imagination has not been co-opted by Capitalism the way that most modern politics has.  As one of the few intellectual traditions genuinely to resist Liberal Capitalism as well as Dialectical Socialism (because, as a tradition, its memories extend farther back than the inventions of Capitalism and Socialism), the Catholic intellectual tradition thus becomes one of the places where both a strong claim for private property and a strong claim for civil government as an absolute check on mercantile overreach can make sense (240).  In all of this, because this is Hauerwas I’m reading, the reason for the Church’s authority on these questions is not some sense of disembodied “expertise” (a la the Acton Institute’s party line on why Catholic bishops should not call for economic regulations) but because God is God over the markets just as much as God is God over all of creation (239).  The conclusion of the essay, in which Hauerwas proposes that abortion, fair wages, and family are only intelligible in traditions where “woman” is a theological category (254), is a provocative and eminently Hauerwasian place to end, bringing a question forward that I had never thought of as informing such a range of social-intellectual problems.

For a long time medicine is one of the places where I’ve disagreed with Hauerwas, having read his book on theology and medicine when I was a seminarian.  Perhaps because I’m a decade older now but perhaps because the argument is clearer here, his essay on the secularization of medicine in this anthology has almost convinced me that Hauerwas might have been right all these years.  Hauerwas lays out a thesis that the particularly American problem of medicine is that it’s lost the conservative vision that animated Classical Greek and later Christian-era medicine, namely the refusal to abandon human beings (155) even though each one of us is incapable of “getting out of life alive” (155).  He makes perhaps the most controversial suggestion I have yet to read regarding the ongoing debate about health-care expenses and funding, namely that Christians should seriously consider undergoing a sort of medical martyrdom, refusing massively expensive life-prolonging medical treatment as long as the system continues to render the poor and uninsured (often the same group) invisible to the best physicians (162).  Such a martyrdom would not solve the “problem” of medical funding, but for Hauerwas solving the world’s problems has never been nearly as important as bearing faithful witness to Christ and the gospel of the Kingdom of God.  Hauerwas suggests early in the essay that the imagination of supply and demand has made thinking faithfully about medicine nearly impossible (158), and he suggests the new sort of martyrdom precisely as a way to jar the imaginations of our neighbors the way that the martyrs of old jarred the imaginations of pagan Rome.

Perhaps the most helpful essays for my own thinking (which were different from the ones I enjoyed most, specifically the late pieces on Thomas Aquinas and Alasdair Macintyre) were the pieces early in the anthology on Augustine’s Confessions and the book of Acts.  Because I think of Hauerwas’s essays (as opposed to his sermons) mainly as engaging theology as it’s fallen from a sort of Thomistic golden age, seeing a sustained engagement with much older sources was refreshing and helpful.  Contesting a critical commonplace that Acts is a sort of pro-Roman-Imperial sop thrown to the powers that be in order to ingratiate Christians with power and stave off the wrath that falls on the genuinely revolutionary, Hauerwas does a reading of Acts that puts Caesar not in the role of legitimate authority but usurper of the authority that rightly belongs to Christ (57).  On the way there, he notes that the risen Christ, and the mission of bearing witness to the risen Christ (Acts 1:8), constitute a story so revolutionary that even within the so-called benign text of Acts agents of Empire accuse the followers of the Way of turning the world upside down (Acts 17:6).  For the text of Acts, as read by Hauerwas, ultimately the resurrection becomes the central political starting point, and the reactions of Empire to the Gospel as well as the faithful journeys of the saints require the resurrection of the Christ to make sense of them (48).  By the time I had finished this essay, I was eager to re-read and once more to teach Acts in a Sunday school setting.  Perhaps I shall some time soon.

The Augustine essay started out in a way that made me question my own judgment in buying this book (it’s the first full-length essay in the collection), but by the end of the opening piece, I knew I had once more struck Hauerwasian gold.  Hauerwas begins the piece with the strange claim that theodicy, the project of reconciling the reality of evil in the world with the confession that God is love, is inherently an imperial project (13) rather than the sort of thinking that anyone who’s read and internalized the Psalms would undertake.  Unable to decipher this riddle from Stanley the Sphinx, I continued to read on, only to be confronted with a further assertion that pointing to sin in the world can only happen when the larger narrative of fall and redemption is already in place (16).  Now the critique of theodicy started to make sense: because most versions of theodicy have something other than the reconciliation of Creator and Creation at the heart of their conception of “good” (both what a good God acts like and what a good world looks like), they relate only tangentially to the dispatches-from-the-front lamentations and praises of the Psalms, and they usually involve human beings’ presuming to know what cosmic justice and goodness looks like rather than taking on the humility of Job in the face of the divine interrogation on goats and Leviathans and what not.  Therefore, Hauerwas asserts, sin can never be an explanation of the evil in the world (26) but only an agnostic outcry: what efficient causes led to evil we cannot say, but we’re sure going to let God know that it sucks living in a world where evil is dominant.

If this review seems disjointed, it’s because the book itself never does pretend to have a unifying “project.”  But for folks who still think of ourselves as learning to think and to write faithfully, this set of latter-day Colloquies takes on some of the big questions of our day, some of the figures who have influenced my own thought as well as Hauerwas’s, and some of the more enjoyable genres of theological reflection (the sermon and the essay rather than the system or the treatise) and offers the reader some wonderful opportunities to learn.  The volume is probably a bit overpriced (I got it at a significant discount from Wipf and Stock’s monthly email newsletter), but the education that it offers is worth a few shekels.