Posts Tagged book review

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.

The Nature of Love: A Theology
By Thomas Jay Oord.
195 pp. $25.99 (hardcover)

Perhaps I’m odd for thinking of Aristotle’s Poetics after I’ve read a book on Christian theology, but there it is.  By the time I got to the end of Thomas Oord’s latest offering all I could think about was Aristotle’s classic pairing of fear and pity as the proper results of a good tragedy.  Such words struck me here not because, as in Aristotle, they go together but because, in Oord, one seems to supplant another.  Oord sets out with what I take to be the best of intentions, namely to give comfort to those who live in fear of what seems, in certain systems of theology, to be a capricious god, damning five souls and saving one without any particular reason to do either.  As a counter-assertion to this tradition, Oord proposes to reconceive theology not with God’s sovereignty and freedom at its core but with divine love as the starting point.  At the outset of this review, I grant that Oord’s book addresses a genuine intellectual problem within theology, and his account of the logical conclusions of such theology seem to be accurate.

Unfortunately, in trying to make his case that God is not to be feared airtight, Oord ventures into another sort of difficulty, namely writing a theology that leaves God to be pitied.  Oord’s god, by the end of the book, seems unable really to do much of anything other than to ask nicely if the big, powerful human beings can help out a bit.  By the end of the book, in other words, I can already hear Nietzsche’s madman calling in the town square.  But first, the course of the book.

Take Etymology All the Way

Oord is right on target when he begins his discussion with a note that the New Testament Greek word agape does not include all of the concepts that the English word “love” names.  In fact agape, though it does appear in a few places in Homeric and Classical texts, takes on its real cultural force in the text of the New Testament, and it largely supplants Plato’s dikaiosyne and Cicero’s officiis as the organizing principle for the Christian community.  Unfortunately, Oord’s book treats the English word “love” itself as a sort of ahistorical sign, ignoring its own roots in the glory-language of Old English texts and instead placing on it a definition that seems to come from utilitarian discourse rather than heroic poetry.  His definition is as follows:

To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic/empathetic response to God and others, to promote overall well-being. (17)

Oord’s text does provide a little bit of New Testaement exegesis and a little less Old Testament exegesis to demonstrate that his definition works in some passages, but there’s little sense in this book of the historical complexity that surrounds theological vocabularies: instead, agape and eros and philia and hesed and ahab and caritas all just point back to love-according-to-Oord.

More significant than the historical reductionism, however, is the assumptions that the definition seems to make about power and knowledge.  Oord’s repeated emphasis on “overall well-being” seems to assume a sort of omniscience with regards to the consequences of act, which would be fine for divine love, but he insists throughout that human beings are to love one another and even to love God.  Thus human beings, if Oord’s definition holds, are capable of improving the overall well-being of God, which is the first move that rather diminishes the infinite Trinitarian theos that Gregory of Nyssa has given the Christian tradition, preferring instead a being-among-beings who needs human help lest he remain overall worse off.

Creation as Infinite Regress

That sense of the limited god plays out most clearly in Oord’s revision of classical theologies of creation.  Opposing creatio ex nihilo by calling it a “Gnostic-originated doctrine” (80) at first, Oord does, to his credit, come back later and revise that claim, noting that the particular words that Christians have used to talk about creation took their present form in disputes against Gnostics (102).  That said, Oord still denies that creatio ex nihilo is ultimately adequate to the Biblical text, preferring Jon Levenson’s reading of Genesis 1 and other creation-texts as a divine shaping of primordial matter rather than speaking essence into existence (103).

And that’s where Oord’s theology of creation gets weird.

I know that Levenson’s modern-Jewish critique of classical Christian theology is a popular one among Old Testament scholars, but by and large, those scholars are very forthright about the fact that such a move marks a return to the combat-myth cosmologies of the ancient Babylonians and Greeks, among others.  Oord does briefly mention the combat-myth (103), but then he makes the strange move of saying that a narrative in which God beats down primordial chaos-monsters is somehow less coercive than creatio ex nihilo and thus more adequate to a theology that makes love the center of the project.  How a grand fight stands as less violent than a spoken word eludes me, and Oord does not dwell on the point long enough here (he does offer a footnote to another of his books, which I have not read) to explain the seeming disconnect.  By the end of his section dedicated to creation, Oord asserts (in a move he names as “non-dualistic”) towards an assertion that all things are in fact created (108-109, a swerve back towards creatio ex nihilo?), but in the book’s closing chapter, the theology gets even weirder.

In opposition to creatio ex nihilo, Oord’s final chapter proposes a new formulation, the creatio ex creatione a natura amoris, or creation out of what’s already created, according to the nature of love (134).  Again, on its surface, this could stand as a move to reconcile Levenson’s scholarship on Ancient Near Eastern creation texts on one hand and classical Christian theology on the other–in fact, this has helped me to think about the relationship between Biblical and systematic theology perhaps relating as primordial systematic assertion (God has created all that is or has been) with careful textual exegesis (God seems to separate and form things, rather than initiate the existence of matter in Genesis 1).  But Oord does not stop there–instead, although he denies that reality is dualistic, with God and matter being coeternal, he also denies that there is any divine nature prior to the title Creator, that there is no Trinitarian community of divine persons except as also in relationship with matter.  I’ll grant that I, a poor and simple English teacher, might just be missing out on the nuance of Oord’s position, but as I read it, Oord’s unflinching denial of creatio ex nihilo runs him into the dilemma of an infinite regress: if indeed God cannot coerce nothing (think about that phrase) so that it becomes something and therefore by necessity created out of what was already created, and if the already-created was created out of what was already created, and the already-already-created was… you get the point.  Unless other texts in Oord’s corpus deal with this problem of infinite  regress, I’m afraid that he still hasn’t surmounted Thomas in this respect.

On Human Freedom and Divine Bondage

Oord’s theology of creation gave me my first set of fits, and the second came from his discussions of freedom as a theological concept and its relationship to love.  As I noted earlier, Oord’s project is to make divine love the core of his theology, and therefore he insists from the beginning of the book that, in a system defined by love, God’s creations must have the freedom of will that allows for free return of love (10).  In the three chapters between his setup of the problem and his articulation of a revised systematic theology, Oord criticizes in turn Anders Nygren (chapter 2), with his sense that agape is the only genuine love and can only originate in God, not in mortals; Augustine (chapter 3), with his division between caritas and cupiditas and therefore (what Oord takes as) a moral neutralization of love; and Clark Pinnock (chapter 4), whose Open Theology does leave room for human freedom but insists so strongly on divine freedom that God remains in theory capable of hateful or apathetic act rather than loving act.  A proper Christian theology, asserts Oord, must hold that God’s act is in fact limited by his definition of love (110).

The logical problem does not show up in any one chapter–one must hold those two groups of assertions a bit closer to one another to get the real impact: a proper theology must maintain a robust sense of human freedom, but a proper theology must deny divine freedom.  Here we have the final outworking and overreach of Oord’s theology: rather than transcending the classical Protestant imbalance of divine freedom and human bondage, Oord makes man the master and God the servant.  Furthermore, in his insistence upon “involuntary divine self-limitation” (125, emphasis original).  Stepping beyond the obvious logical problems there (though perhaps I shouldn’t), the upshot of this sort of limited-deity theology is that Oord means precisely what Oord says when he says that human beings should look out for the “overall well-being” of God–God, after all, cannot make very many things happen in the world, so without the involvement of genuinely-free human beings, the hardly-free God is relatively impotent.

Oord’s motives, to repeat this point, seem to be good ones: by denying that love is the same as desire (per Augustine), he cuts off the possibility that God could have bad desires.  By bringing eros and philia and agape into his system, he makes sure that God does not lack any of the sorts of other-regard of which human beings are capable.  But when God becomes incapable of anything resembling wrath or historical act, the point of praising such a god becomes somewhat hard to see aesthetically, and although God is relieved of the blame that comes from being able to prevent evil but not doing so, the fear of a capricious deity gives way not to worship but to pity.  And while Christian piety has at times historically seen pity for Christ crucified as a genuine form of devotion, such devotion, as far as I can tell, is itself best framed by a grand narrative in which the goodness of the suffering Christ is itself vindicated eschatologically.

Overall Impressions

I realize that, with my relative ignorance of intellectual figures like Whitehead and process thinkers, I probably am missing some significant ideas that Oord is trying to bring to a popular audience.  That granted, I do think that The Nature of Love falls victim to the same sorts of problems that trouble other self-proclaimed “more biblical” systematic theologies.  In its rush to make a small set of Bible verses the center of the project, books like Oord’s ride roughshod over much of the rest of the Biblical tradition, forcing texts that on the obvious reading head in other directions into Procrustean readings where they acknowledge them at all.  While quoting Pinnock, Oord seems to miss the joke on him when Pinnock refers to his own reaction to evil as “lament” (100).  To present God as relatively impotent the way that Oord does makes nonsense (or at best “primitive” and thus inadequate theology) out of many of the Psalms (most of which are lament-Psalms), of Job (which consists largely of lament-speeches from Job), and of the prophetic oracles (many of which lament the fall of cities).  Much of the New Testament and more of the Old Testament proceeds from the working assumptions that God is perfectly capable of smashing evil out of existence (as Levenson himself recognizes) but, for reasons invisible to human intellect, has not yet done so.  That’s why the Psalms are always asking God to do so (not explaining why God is incapable of doing so), and that’s why the book of Revelation is full of scenes where God promises to coerce the Hell out of the persecutors of the Church.  (Okay, God actually coerces them into Hell, but you get the point.) Although Oord’s system solves some problems, it magnifies others.

In terms of the overall project, as I noted, I think Oord does a nice job of shaking up standard categories, and although I’ve not read Whitehead, I have to assume that he presents a fairly workable version of Whitehead-flavored systematic theology.  My objection is not to the shape of his system (I’m incapable of systematic theology myself, so I have to rely on folks like Oord and Hart and Milbank and Sanders) but to his claim that his system is unqualifiedly more biblical than his competition.  Perhaps part of the point of having a multivocal (66 books if you’re a Protestant) Holy Book is precisely to keep systems unstable, to confront strong systems of deterministic fore-ordination like Luther’s with all those pesky imperatives and conditionals and to refer open systems like Oord’s to all those promises of salvation that does not hinge on the might of the faithful.  And to show my own utter hypocrisy, I’ll point to Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament as perhaps a more adequate description (not system) of Biblical revelation: it’s testimony and counter-testimony, always unsettling the settled in a continual insistence upon God’s freedom and mortals’ freedom and ultimately more freedom than systems can easily handle.

Except where it doesn’t.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University
By Louis Menand.
174 pp. W.W. Norton. $14.95 (paperback)

I missed The Marketplace of Ideas when it was first released early last year, but its message has not faded in relevance in the intervening months–even as new books that seek to define what, exactly, is wrong with the American educational system are released weekly. Menand writes as a simultaneous outsider and insider, as he is both a professor of English at Harvard University and a well-loved staff writer over at The New Yorker. This dual position allows him to see and feel what’s wrong and right about the current state of the American university without getting too radical about his suggested changes. Indeed, Menand is no radical reformer. “There are things that academics should probably not be afraid to do differently,” he tells us, “but there are also things that are worth preserving, even at a cost, because the system cannot operate without them” (17-18). This measured reform is appreciated in a world–even an academic world–that would often prefer to deal in extremes.

Even so, Menand demands change on a systemic level. He is apt to pin the failures of the modern university on its birth in the late nineteenth century: “To the extent that this system still determines the possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge, trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall” (17). Many academics are likely inclined to agree with him; the problem is getting us to agree on how specifically the system should change. We’ve suggested on both the blog and the podcast, for example, that a return to Great Books-style education would be a vast improvement over the German Research model currently in place in most major American schools, but in his chapter on general-education curriculum, Menand does not work up any particular passion for core-curriculum programs. In the end, his conclusions are surprising, maybe even baffling–but more on that in a moment.

Menand, as he announces in his introduction, sets up the book as providing historical context (and occasional answers) to four questions: “Why is it so hard to institute a general education curriculum? Why did the humanities undergo a crisis of legitimation? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ become a magic word? And why do professors all tend to have the same politics?” (16). These questions will be familiar to anyone who hangs around an English department for any extended length of time, but Menand investigates them with great clarity. He approaches each topic as a historian rather than as an ideologue–so when, for example, he discusses general-education curriculum, the reader gets a delineation of several types of curricula, as well as a grounded history of Columbia University’s Lit Hum program (who knew it began as a course called War Aims?) and of Harvard’s famous “Redbook,” General Education in a Free Society. He also ties most of this history back into his central thesis, that the “modern” university system is a byproduct of the late nineteenth century and rather unsuitable for the demands of the contemporary world–which means we also receive a biography-in-miniature of Harvard presidents Charles William Eliot. (If you have problems with the modern university, feel free to blame Eliot, who, as Menand puts it, can be “identified with almost everything that distinguishes the modern research university from the antebellum college,” from “the abandonment of the role of in loco parentis” to “the introduction of the elective system for undergraduates” [44]).

Menand also has the appealing habit of refusing both conventional wisdom and factional assertions in academic battles. He does not even suggest that general-education curriculum is essential–let alone take sides on the electives vs. core curriculum battle that’s still raging in humanities departments. When discussing the legitimacy crisis, he refuses to pit Critical Theory in its many forms against Great Books programs (as lesser minds have done), instead noting that “Poststructuralism and cultural studies were not alien invasions in literary studies. They grew out o the normal practices of literature professors” (82). He praises certain advantages of interdisciplinarity but asserts that “It is not an escape from disciplinarity; it is the scholarly and pedagogical ratification of disciplinarity” (96-97). Menand, in his moderation, thus comes off like a voice of reason; you can disagree with him–and I do in several places–but you can’t accuse him of ideology, not with a straight face anyway.

Still, I find The Marketplace of Ideas lacking in a few areas. Menand does not discuss Christian colleges in even the most cursory of ways. This is, perhaps, not his job, but it’s interesting to me that at least two of his four questions don’t apply to most of the Christian schools I’m familiar with: With the centrality of the Bible and theology at these institutions, interdisciplinarity has always been a fact of life, and the battle over offering general-education curriculum typically never happens at Christian colleges–even if there’s a battle over whether it should be elective or core-based. It falls to some future scholar to demonstrate why Christian colleges can save education from the problems Menand delineates.

Even disregarding this omission, I find Menand’s final advice rather baffling. The solution to the group-think of college professors–Menand is open-eyed enough not to deny that it exists, although he notes that Roger Kimball probably should have called his book Tenured Moderate Liberals–could also, he implies, be the solution to the crisis of legitimacy and the problems of interdisciplinarity and general-education curriculum:

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with PhDs, then universities should stop giving so many PhDs–by making it harder to get into a PhD program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more PhDs, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction–and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. (154)

Well, yes, those things would be great. The problem is that the world has already nearly completely devalued a high-school education and is well on the way to devaluing the bachelor’s degree. A BA or BS is already standard for nearly every decent job in the world–even most receptionist positions, as I can tell you from personal experience, require an AA and prefer a BA–and many or most of them require a master’s. If we make the threshold even higher for decent work, Menand’s very democratic and reasonable educational system will undo itself. The solution, it seems to me, is to stop telling every high schooler to go to college and for employers to stop requiring college degrees for jobs that don’t really need them.

The solution can’t be as easy as all that, of course–I and many of my colleagues would likely be out of a job–but it would at least begin the process of purifying the college experience. Those students who wanted to go into careers that realistically required advanced degrees–or those who wanted to develop themselves in the language and thoughts of Western culture–could attend college. Others could go to trade or business school and learn skills that might actually be useful for their careers. I’m not 100 percent behind the plan I’ve outlined here, but I like it more than I like Menand’s, which is so democratic that I fear it will end up undoing the educational system altogether.

Even so, The Marketplace of Ideas is well worth a read for anyone who’s interested in the successes, failures, and future of American education. Menand asks the right questions and gives the reader enough background to decide on his or her own solutions.

Generation iY: Our Last Chance to Save Their Future
by Tim Elmore
228 pp.  Poet Gardner Publishing.  $16.99

Tim Elmore came to Emmanuel College in early August as our guest speaker for faculty workshop week, and every faculty member present got a free copy of this book.  His workshop presentation derived more or less point-for-point from the book, and I could tell that he imagined the speaking tour and the book as two parts of one whole.  (For what he’s doing, that’s not a bad thing.)  I’ll admit that I’m more impressed by the book than I was by his talk–for whatever reason, his talk spent much more time on the “side charts” that aren’t part of the book’s central argument, and I fear that he missed an opportunity to advance what in the book stands as a fairly clear-minded analysis of things.

Elmore’s diagnosis of Generation iY (those born between 1990 and 2001) is somewhat bleak, reminiscent of Mark Bauerlein’s in The Dumbest Generation. (Not coincidentally, Bauerlein and Elmore are friends.)  Their attention spans are shorter than those of earlier student cohorts, their sense of morality will condemn a litterbug but shrug at someone who falsifies information on a resume, and their sense of entitlement makes them nightmares to have in a classroom or to hire as an entry-level employee.  (It’s gratifying to read that folks in the corporate world, who hold a paycheck over their heads, also can’t get anywhere with them.)  Elmore, an evangelical Christian and longtime friend of Emmanuel College, points to certain tendencies among these kids’ Generation X and Baby Boomer parents as the root causes: the parents of affluent teenagers and twenty-somethings (I’ll get to my critique of his apparent sample later) have tended to be parents who refuse to let their kids taste even a small bit of failure; who overschedule their kids’ lives so that they never have to decide what to do with an afternoon; who run damage control so that there are never any consequences for unwise decisions; who inflate their kids’ egos and expectations of the world in an overreaction to (what I see as) the Social Darwinism within which they grew up; and who put attention-sucking electronic devices in kids’ hands and then fawn over how “tech-savvy” they are (any college teacher who’s ever assigned even a rudimentary web project knows how funny this claim is).  He’s not all gloom and doom, of course.  (If he were, he’s just be plagiarizing Bauerlein.)  He thinks that this group of students adapts just as well to adult responsibility and perhaps has an even more developed sense of morality than us jaded Gen-Xers; their main problem is that adults, and especially parents, have kept them from developing such capacities.

One of the striking images he provides for this (not that his stories are uniformly helpful) has to do with a butterfly emerging from a cocoon: As a child, as Elmore tells it, he discovered a cocoon on a branch just as the organism inside started to make its way out into the world.  Being the helpful soul he was, he used his fingernails to help the little booger force the cocoon open a bit wider.  When the butterfly still did not emerge, he forced the opening a bit wider, and when that still did not yield a butterfly, he broke the cocoon entirely open.  What emerged, in the story, was a deformed animal, nothing like a butterfly but without the promise of a true caterpillar.  It died shortly thereafter.

The point of the allegory is clear enough: he was acting as so many parents have, and the overgrown children that have resulted are not ready to fly.  Elmore diagnoses nicely a generation of American youth that’s at once overscheduled but without much of an aim in life; convinced that they can do anything they set their minds to but without the discipline to set their butts down and study (I’ll save the joke about whether they have minds); and ruthlessly amoral one minute but moralistically self-righteous the next.  His solutions for parents, unfortunately, seem to hinge upon the assumption that every middle-class parent has access to the social connections to which he, as a corporate trainer, has access.  He tells stories about how he introduced his daughter to Congresswomen and surgeons to act as short-term mentors but has few suggestions for folks (like me) who don’t have personal connections with Congresswomen.  When he gets to his son the boasting gets even more grand: he had Tony Dungy talk to his son and some of the neighborhood kids; had USMC colonels visit with them; and received personal letters for each of the neighborhood’s teenage boys from the President of the United States.  (He doesn’t specify which one, but that’s not material to my point.)  I can imagine rough analogies to these experiences that a small-time English professor might bring to bear, but if I were to go strictly from the text itself, I’d assume that Elmore knows that there’s going to be an aristocracy, based on the ability to expose one’s children to the powerful,  that rises out of this moment, and that he’s the proud papa of two of those aristocrats.

But not all is that far over the top.  For college teachers (and I are one), these changing realities within the students we teach (and I’ve been at this long enough to teach the last Gen-Xers at the outset of my teaching career and observe the early Gen-Y shade over into the text-message-addicted iY) mean that students are going to complain more, do less of the traditional work assigned, and otherwise buck against the ways of teaching that have certainly changed with the advent of mass-printed textbooks but nonetheless have remained basically static for a couple hundred years.  His pedagogical solutions actually strike me as more helpful than his parenting tips: he calls for teachers to adapt as the students will have to, not trading content for toys but imagining how differently to frame and deliver the content (as in the fifth canon of rhetoric, not as in UPS).  It’s a philosophy of education I was on-board with even back in 2000, when I constructed rudimentary html pages for my composition courses, and although I’m less optimistic about Len Sweet’s EPIC model of communication than Elmore is, I do agree that education, because a historically contingent practice, gains and loses horizons as history happens, and clinging to horizons no longer available is not properly conservative but antiquarian.  And although I love me an obscure old text as much as the next guy, I know full well that such things are the province of the specialist researcher, not the dedicated educator.

Although the book’s diagnosis of the glut of electronic distractions, and especially his solutions to the problems, tend to center almost exclusively on affluent suburban American (and to some extent western European) families, he does note well that, due to rising birth rates and sharply dropping infant mortality rates in the last twenty or so years, this global age-cohort has actually eclipsed the vaunted Baby Boom of the early automobile age.  And as geographic mobility became easy and accessible (so that young men could easily enough leave town when girls got pregnant) and social mobility declined (so that fewer and fewer could support a family financially), giant swaths of this enormous global younger generation have known nothing of life with a present father.  (If any feminists are still reading at this point, I’d love to read your take on the complexities of this reality.)  In America, where that global swell of mobile-but-desperate human beings has meant that the wealthy and powerful can find abundant desperation to exploit (they call the phenomenon “cheap labor” and attribute it to “global economic forces,” but I for one prefer to call it what it is), this has translated into a job market for the children of affluence which rewards the intelligent and tenacious but which cannot seem to find any tenacity.  And in the two-thirds world, this has meant a deterioration of the wisdom of the elders and a ready supply of young, bored men for warlords, terrorists, and other postmodern criminals to exploit. And they have.  The book does not say nearly as much about women of this generation, and for that reason, again, I welcome feminist reactions to the book and to this review.

Overall, although the book tends towards alarmism at points and towards boasting rather than solutions at others, the diagnosis end of things is worthwhile–Elmore recognizes that whatever moral and professional shortcomings “kids these days” exhibit are best studied with an eye on the complex interactions of global economic/political trends, changes in the mindsets of parents, and an array of other variables.  For college teachers and youth ministers and other such folks, this easy-reading book is not a bad place to continue our thinking on such things.

Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life.
By Ed Cyzewski
233 pp. NavPress. $14.99.

I have to admit that I enjoyed reading an optimistic book, even one whose optimism I don’t always share.  In the closing pages of Coffeehouse Theology, Ed Cyzewski, a seminary graduate who apparently read all the same books I did while he was in seminary (I found myself guessing at the further-reading list as each chapter progressed and usually guessing right), issues the following two-statement manifesto about the study of theology: “Theology isn’t about constructing an arsenal of knowledge that we can use to shoot down the beliefs of our ‘opponents.’  Theology is about loving God and one another more perfectly” (214).  Along the way to that hopeful rallying call, Cyzewski provides a nice introduction to missio dei as a framework for doing Christian theology and lays out a theology simultaneously conservative and willing to hear from those outside of traditional evangelical circles.  In short, he has distilled the experience of attending a relatively traditional seminary for the Sunday school teacher, the youth minister, or the person in the pew to enjoy, and the ride is a smooth one.

Cyzewski’s project in Coffeehouse Theology is to render in readable terms what literary types (like me) call the hermeneutic circle: the assumptions that one brings to the text affect the way that one reads the particulars of a text, but then that text’s particulars stand to alter the assumptions that one carries away from the text.  Cyzewski, though I don’t remember his using the word hermeneutics at all (he might have, but I don’t remember it), discusses this circle in terms of culture and conversion.  Every reader brings the assumptions of the reader’s culture to, say, the letter to the Romans, Cyzewski argues, but the text of Romans does not (or ought not to) leave the reader unaltered but itself asserts a certain sort of world that the reader must embrace, reject, dismiss, or otherwise incorporate into what was there prior to the text.  Along the way Cyzewski notes repeatedly that the Scriptures ultimately stand as uniquely inspired texts, that although listening to the voices of global and historical Christianity are crucial to a full understanding of these sacred books, the books themselves stand as authorities over church history and over global Christian thought.  Since Cyzewski does not offer any extended discussion about how those relationships between texts, readers, and communities operate, I won’t speculate or attribute theories of such things to him.

The book, of course, has its strong runs and weak runs: especially helpful was Cyzewski’s discussions of the split between modernists and Fundamentalists in the nineteenth century (118-120) and the vocabularies that Christians bring to bear on questions of faith and understanding (122).  His section on the nature of Christian faith (102) is not nearly as strong, but overall the book asks interesting questions about living in a late-capitalist world (I hesitate to call it “postmodern”) and does not attempt to answer those questions without the struggle that such things require.

Throughout the book Cyzewski does a good job of introducing these sorts of questions to a literate but non-specialized reader, and I would recommend the book heartily for small group Bible studies, Sunday school settings, and personal reading.

For the sake of disclosure (since I’m usually far more venomous than this), I did receive a copy of this book as part of the Ooze Viral Bloggers book review program, but the receipt of the book did not affect this review.

An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible
By Walter Brueggemann.
212 pp. Fortress Press. $22.00.

I first encountered Walter Brueggemann’s project as a senior at Milligan College, but I really became a disciple of Bruggemann’s in 2000 when as a seminarian I read his gigantic 1997 Theology of the Old Testament. Here was a teacher who certainly wore his ideology on his sleeve (no friend of the Enlightenment’s arrogance or the national security state’s duplicity here) and whose attention to relationships between texts still impresses me a decade later.  I’ve since had the privilege of attending a few of his public lectures, and this book continues to remind me why being a disciple of Brueggemann is still the most faithful way to read the Bible that I can figure out.

Brueggemann states in this book’s introduction that, after ten years, he had decided to revisit some of the central ideas of Theology of the Old Testament, and at several points in the book he retracts certain points of technical scholarship (that is to say, stuff that’s so specialized that eight years in English lit have rendered me unable to sustain interest in them), but his more interesting project is to expand significantly on his idea of theology as a dialogical practice.

The idea, although it uses a Hegelian-sounding word, is really just a recognition of the relationships implicit in the Bible: for one, the voice known as YHWH becomes known not by rational deduction but in disruptive, memorable moments of revelation.  Moreover, most of the text of the Bible (with very important exceptions) has to do with YHWH’s relationships with the Abrahamic clan, then with the Hebrews, then with Israel, then with the Church.  The continuities and discontinuities in that succession of relationships is worth thinking on, but the common thread that Brueggemann highlights is that YHWH always and only comes to us in relationship with other entities, and each section of the book treats one large category of those relationships.

After the first introductory section, section two deals with “Israel as YHWH’s Partner.”  Brueggemann breaks up the classical Protestant dualism of works and grace in the opening of this chapter and reminds his reader again and again that it’s simply inadequate to the Old Testament.  Israel’s ethical obligations are real and binding, Brueggemann insists, but those obligations only make sense as responses to entirely gratuitous acts of grace on YHWH’s part (38).  Moreover, Biblical narrative tends to follow a pattern, though not slavishly, that gives the lie to the hermetic separation of grace and obedience.  The steps to that pattern Brueggemann lays out thus (52):

• love for Israel (God’s election of Abram, God’s rescuing Israel from Egypt)
• command to Israel (covenant of circumcision, Torah of Moses, institution of Torah-cultus by Josiah)
• scattering of Israel (era of oppression after the Exodus, Assyrian conquest, Babylonian exile)
• YHWH turns back to Israel (Isaiah 40, restoration of Hosea’s wife and children)
• gathering back to YHWH (rise of Davidic monarchy, return from Babylonian exile)

Brueggemann argues that not only is the overarching narrative of Israel shaped roughly thus; in addition, the Psalms often reflect this narrative sequence.  And beyond that, texts like Job, which treat non-Israel individuals, often follow a similar pattern (59).  And beyond that, oracles against the nations in Isaiah and other prophets, not to mention the primordial story of the tower of Babel, indicate that the same series of relationships governs how the Bible imagines non-Israel nations (134).  And beyond that still, some prophetic oracles, especially those that envision re-enactments of the Exodus plagues, imagines the same series of relationships governing God’s relationship with the whole of creation (149).  To repeat, Brueggemann is not asserting that every section of the Bible adheres in some sort of neo-classical manner to this pattern; instead, what Brueggemann would point out is that the relational moments (oracle and text, revelation and recipient of revelation, witnessing people and witnessed-to nations) in which the faithful always encounter God extends, in the Bible’s imagination, to every relationship that God maintains with every part of creation.

Brueggemann’s point here is that the Bible does have a full and robust sense of providence, but that providence is always in tension with an equally full and an equally robust sense of real and powerful agency on the part of YHWH’s partners.  In other words, although the most frequent and often the most memorable testimonies about God in the Bible are in regard to YHWH’s power, authority, and sovereignty, for Brueggemann (and as I said before, I think of myself as his disciple), when a theological datum arises to disrupt that larger picture, the faithful reader of the Bible must take heed and resist the urge to erect systems that silence the datum.

Datum, of course, is the singular where “data” are plural.  (My own composition students know well that in my classes, even if not on the cable news, “media” and “data” are always plural.)  What Brueggemann means by a theological datum is one of those moments of revelation in which, contrary to the conclusions to which mortals come, God reveals something.  Perhaps it’s that the sins of mortals actually increase divine wrath, indicating that there was less wrath before the sin and more after and that, therefore, something at the core of divine being really does respond to human agency.  At other times a theological datum might be a story in which a mortal’s pleading convinces YHWH to refrain from massive destruction.  At any rate, contrary to some systematic theologies that make a regular practice of dispensing with such moments as “anthropomorphic” or “primitive,” Bruggemann insists that, so long as they share the page with the texts that support systems of theology, they deserve the same sort of weight as those texts bear, even if that means that the text remains paradoxical rather than neatly sorted.

Perhaps it’s the English major that I completed before I started seminary, or perhaps it’s the sense I have that airtight systems of thought, be they materialistic or theistic, tend to miss some important things about real life, but I remain convinced that this absolute devotion to the text as it stands is going to continue to govern my own theology as I go on teaching and preaching.  Brueggemann’s book concludes with his expressing a hope that this sort of reading will inspire “different questions” (176) from the ones that theology has classically inspired.  If my own career as a Christian teacher counts, it’s working already.

About You: Fully Human, Fully Alive
By Dick Staub.
207 pp. Jossey-Bass. $22.95.

Dick Staub is the host of what may well be the finest podcast out there on the subject of Christianity and the arts, The Kindlings Muse. He has a knack–clearly derived from his previous life as the host of a three-hour daily interview-based radio show–of picking the right panel of guests and then stepping out of the way. He apparently saves his opinions for his pop-theology books, of which About You is the fourth. Staub clearly counts C.S. Lewis as his role model, and indeed, his writing has the same go-down-easy aura of gentle rigor one finds in Lewis’s nonfiction. They both delight in speaking about heavy ideas in a way that makes the lay reader feel smart and engaged–without talking down to him, as so many works of popular theology do these days.

In About You, Staub’s topic is one I’ve heard a lot–especially from Eastern Orthodox Christians–and which appeals to be quite a bit: the notion that Christ’s death and resurrection accomplish more than mere penal substitution, that in fact salvation involves our becoming more “real,” more “fully human” in the sense that Christ Himself is fully human and fully divine. There would be several ways to get this message across. The easiest would be a syrupy self-help volume about the value of each individual. Staub veers uncomfortably close to this method at times, but as he says, “the simplistic bromides of positive thinking have turned me off” (4), and for the most part he avoids formulas and one-to-one correspondences. He also mostly avoids treacle of the Max Lucado variety, though at times he seems too bent on telling his readers how incredibly special they are.

His main technique is an entry-level existentialism–not the California “full potential” kind but something less flattering, something that acknowledges that we are what we’ve done but also a better self that races always ahead of us. That we strive to be “fully human” at all suggests, as Sartre puts it, that “we are what we are not,” that a nothingness lurks deep in our being, and Staub chalks this discrepancy up to the Fall of Man, a barely remembered event that nevertheless has imprinted itself on our “collective memory” (ix). Therefore, while he begins his book with the affirmation that each of us is a genius (on the sketchy grounds that “Webster’s second definition of genius is ‘an individual’s natural abilities and capacities’ [4]–actually, this merely suggests that we all have genius), he immediately backtracks to discuss the world’s creation as perfect and man’s destruction of that perfection.

Staub is a bit slippery in this chapter, and not without good reason in this highly politicized area of theology. He insists that our creation by God is the important thing and then invokes Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria:

I am serious about both my faith and contemporary science. I think they are compatible. I do not believe issues of apparent disagreement between faith and science can be resolved by ignoring or dismissing one or the other; rather, we need to see them as equally important albeit different ways of looking at the same world. (17)

He doesn’t take any clear stand on evolution, which probably bothers Ray Comfort but not me: what matters is that the God described in the Bible created the world, not how God did so. Staub does a great job teasing out the implications of the Imago Dei and explaining why creation in a broad sense matters. His whole argument hinges on this chapter. If we’re not created in the image of a creative and loving God, he says, our miniature creations and imperfect loves are mere delusion. If we are, on the other hand, then to express ourselves creatively is to get closer to being fully human.

The book does a good job of branching out from this beginning, and Staub discusses things like alienation, salvation, and individual destiny with ease and depth. He’s particularly effective in his critique of the evangelical pitfall of solipsistic individualism. More conservative than most of the Emergent Church, he nevertheless takes the best insights from that movement, mixes them with the little-read Mark Twain piece Extracts from Adam’s Diary, and comes to the measured conclusion that “our essential need for company counterbalances our undeniable individuality. We thrive on camaraderie and companionship as much as or more than we crave occasional solitude” (41). This is not an original thought, of course–but then Staub never claimed it was. It’s refreshing, in a world where Christian popular-press authors feel obligated by arrogance or agent to tell you that their every book is something you’ve never seen before, to find someone happy with being a popularizer. Lewis would be proud.

In fact, one of Staub’s most interesting points revolves around this issue. The problem with contemporary society, he says, quoting a friend, is that we’ve lost our middlebrow culture:

In his definition, “middlebrow individuals” are interested in thinking through ideas and issues, but are turned off equally by both highbrow pretensions and lowbrow mindlessness. Middlebrow culture is where academics and mere mortals once met to converse; it is where we forged a path that shunned academic theory without application and rejected the dumbing down of culture. (88)

This diagnosis certainly flatters those bloggers and podcasters who, like me, are planted firmly in the realm of the middlebrow. But is it true? The middlebrow is all around us, and not just on the Internet: Cornel West is on Talk of the Nation every other week; folks have bestsellers with books like Freakonomics and Hot, Flat, and Crowded; Stanley Fish has a regular column in the New York Times; and even a charlatan like Glenn Beck finds an academic to conspicuously worship. It’s true that we lack a Christian public intellectual along the lines of Lewis or Karl Barth, but the enormous machine of the Emergent publishing empire demonstrates that it’s not for lack of trying. I agree with Staub that there’s a problem with the middlebrow–but it’s not as simple as saying that it doesn’t exist. I will likely expand my thoughts on this subject in a future post–so stay tuned if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

I’m not really the target audience for About You, I suspect, for the same reason that Nathan Gilmour isn’t the target audience for A New Kind of Christianity: I know the material he’s popularizing too well. But for a therapeutic, relatively conservative introduction to existentialist ideas–keeping in mind that Staub never claims outright that he’s writing such an introduction–you could do a lot worse than this book. I assigned it to my high-school-level Sunday School class, and it’s driven the students to a higher caliber of question. And it’d make a good gift for a recent Christian-college graduate, on his or her way to the crisis of faith that so often comes next. Just ignore the ugly, non-descript cover.

Colors of God: Conversations about Being the Church.
By Randall Mark Peters, Dave Phillips, and Quentin Steen.
231 pp. Authentic.  $15.

Three years have passed now since I stopped posting over at theooze.com’s message boards, and I have to admit that I don’t entirely miss the experience.  When I did decide to leave, the tone in general had for the most part (with happy exceptions) become belligerent, and I grew tired over time of people’s scoring “gotcha” points when I was trying to explore what I took to be important ideas and intersections of ideas.  As folks know who read here and who used to read over at Hardly the Last Word, I’ve come to enjoy blogging more than message-board posting because blogs allow for paragraphs that explore ideas, and for the most part, folks who read blogs don’t mind reading those paragraphs and allowing some exploration.

Oh, and I can moderate the comments.

The sad thing about my departure (and no, I’m not returning) is that, in the three years or so that I posted there, I was interacting (I found out later) with some folks who would become at least moderately well-known in Emergent circles, but I didn’t have enough of a grasp of that cluster of phenomena to say much about it.  (Whether I’m part of it or not I’ll allow others to judge.)  Colors of God is another artifact that makes me realize that the line that Emergent folks so often use, the bit about Emergent’s being a conversation, is not some bit of pop-culture fluff but in reality a key to understanding what’s going on in that loose coalition of thinkers, speakers, and book-writers.  To say that the whole shebang is really just the latest public face of Evangelicalism is to ignore figures who really do wish to popularize some of the more liberal/mainline theologies that have developed in places like Union Theological Seminary.  To say that it’s all a front for theological liberalism is to ignore that a relatively conservative intellectual like Scot McKnight is at the core of the conversation’s history.  And to say that it’s somehow a repudiation of the core principles of the Reformation is to ignore books like Colors of God, a joint project of Randall Mark Peters, Dave Phillips, and Quentin Steen, a project unintelligible except in the context of a radical Lutheran theology of grace.

The core of their theology as presented in this book is a Lutheran understanding of the gospel, namely that human wretchedness is forgiven and forgotten, without remainder, by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  That core conviction is the blue color in their four-color scheme, and taken in a large sweep, there’s little with which to quibble.  Asked to give in brief form the broad outlines of Christian theology, certainly something like that contention would appear in my own account.  My concern is that the broad sweep becomes totalizing, resulting in a tendency to rule out certain interpretations of Biblical texts without considering the shape of the texts themselves.  I first noticed the trend on page 40, when Randall Peters says that certain (apparently obvious) interpretations of the Parable of the Good Samaritan categorically can not be right, but throughout the book the three authors in turn declare that this or that reading cannot be allowed because it doesn’t fit without remainder into the first principle of their theology.  As readers who look at my lectionary posts know, one of the functions I believe the Bible should serve is to correct us, and my fear at the outset in this book was that a rigid adherence to a system would disallow the rise of a “theological datum” (Walter Brueggemann’s term) in any part of Scripture.  Without that possibility, I feared, the Scriptures become rather impotent to correct, since they can only tell us what we already think.  As I proceeded, my suspicion never did get extinguished.

The green color in their four-color scheme represents health, and this is where some of my past concerns about Luther’s formulations come to fruit.  Since forgiveness is without remainder, no action (in the scheme of Colors of God, mind you) can please or displease God more than God is currently pleased.  (I’ll get to the Hell bit later.)  Therefore all actual human life, in this system of thought, is to be judged not in terms of obedience or holiness but in terms of health, both physical and psychological.  This is where the strong psycho-therapeutic background of Dave Phillips comes to dominate the conversation, and it’s where the book does not oppose but largely dismisses giant parts of Christian tradition with regards to sexual fidelity, disciplines of prayer, and other such things not because they’re “bad” but because they’re irrelevant in terms of the blue color.  This is also where the authors hint at the possibility of a counter-cultural or prophetic critique of what they refer to as “the kingdom of man” (but don’t give anything like the details that Augustine gives to his civitas terrana) but can’t seem to muster any good reasons why one would want to oppose consumerism, advocate for environmental protection, or perform any of the other (new-left-flavored) actions that they seem to want to commend.  As I noted before, when all human action becomes irrelevant for the big picture (the blue color), there’s little reason to do something as “unhealthy” as to live counter to the prevailing ideologies of the day, and this book provides little reason, other than the avoidance of seeming “religious,” to discipline one’s life in any intelligible fashion.

The red element is inclusive community, and once again, it’s an outgrowth of the previous two.  The only aim of such a community, it seemed as I read, was to make sure nobody got too “religious” or did anything “unhealthy” in terms of contemporary psychological research.  As with the first two colors, the authors showed themselves willing to cherry-pick both Scripture and Christian-era theologians to demonstrate their points, but never did there seem to be even the slightest room for novelty, a thought which challenged the big frame.  In fact, when they addressed the possibility of Hell, they did acknowledge it, because they want to remain orthodox, but they insisted that Hell would be filled not with persecutors (a la Revelation) or those consumed with lustful desire (a la the Sermon on the Mount) but with the “religious,” those who would exclude anyone.  For a book trying so hard to be “conversational,” there was little room for anything like a consideration of other possibilities for interpretation in these matters, and I remembered a thought that I’d formulated back in seminary: to see what people truly value, ask them who’s in Hell.

I have to say at this point (I’m honest to the point of rudeness that way) that this book’s “conversation” format irritates me.  Throughout its pages I kept thinking that it shouldn’t have been a book in the first place but a video production of some sort.  The book is a long transcript of a conversation, complete with requests by one author that another explain a concept just mentioned and interjected jokes (and responses to those jokes) that one expects at a panel discussion but not in the run of a long-form prose essay.  This probably would have worked nicely as a DVD series or an online video-content feed or something else; as a book it doesn’t work that well.  I’m certain that other reviewers will commend it for “thinking outside the box” or making things “dialogical,” but in my mind it’s kicking a field goal at a chess match: it might have been better to do DVD things on a DVD.

The final color, yellow, has to do with engaging pop culture as a site for theological reflection, a rather uncontroversial point which they insist flies in the face of “religious thinking.”  I did find some of their choices for pop culture theology amusing (extended meditations on Green Day’s “Good Riddance/Time of Your Life” and Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” just for starters), but since this is something that I try to do (to the extent that I keep up with pop culture) in my own ministry, I don’t have all that much to say about it.

In sum, I think Colors of God is a good example of one way that folks have taken historical theology (in this case Luther’s doctrine of grace) and attempted to articulate that theology in actual ecclesial communities.  It’s also a helpful reminder that Emergent, whatever else it might be, is a place where radical Lutheran psychotherapy can, for the moment, exist comfortably along side Hegelian evolution-theology and the environmentalist-liberation theologians, and even if the hard-nosed, foul-mouthed Calvinists have left the party, there’s still room for genuine difference in that strange cloud called Emergent.  And for my money, that’s not entirely a bad thing.

Super Sad True Love Story
By Gary Shteyngart
334 pp. Random House. $26.

Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, the awkwardly if endearingly titled Super Sad True Love Story, is a dystopian vision of America’s future. But the dystopia in question is not the one of Brave New World or 1984 or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?–it is too recognizable our own world to really be science fiction, though I suppose that’s the realm in which its genre hovers. It is set in the not-at-all-distant future, just far enough out so that Shteyngart can stretch out the flaws of our age like silly putty–just far enough for the world to be easily mockable yet pathetic, and, in its way, far more chilling than anything Orwell and Huxley dreamed up, simply because we can see its decay and desperation all around us.

Its closest literary analogues are Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, though Shteyngart’s milieu is more futuristic and funnier than DeLillo’s and lacks the urgent Catholicism that always pulses beneath the surface of Percy’s. The nearest thing I can think to compare it to is Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, though the book is far more serious than the movie. In any case, we’re given a future in which America’s star has been eclipsed and the country has begun a slow, technology-fueled slide into the intellectual Stone Age.

It is a sad and banal world of casual vulgarity. All Americans carry an iPad-esque device that broadcasts their rating for a word that begins with F- and ends with -ability; women wear clothes made of onionskin that display their breasts and genitals to anyone who cares to take a look; and futuristic podcasters are on the air 24/7, talking shamelessly about the abuse they suffered as children and the explicit details of their meaningless sexual encounters. Orwellian doublespeak runs rampant, though it is not imposed on the citizenry by an all-powerful government. Instead, it spreads like a disease on the streets. In one scene, for example, our protagonist, Lenny Abramov, believes his friend Vishnu Cohen has suggested that they commit a lewd act in a Staten Island bar:

“Jeez, cool it, Nee-gro,” I said, already slurring my words. You’ve got a little cutie at home” . . .

“It’s F-A-C,” Vishnu explained. “I said, ‘Let’s F-A-C.’”

“What does that mean?”

“He sounds like my granny in Aventura!” Noah was bellowing. “‘FAC? What’s that? Who am I? Where’s my diaper?’”

“It means, ‘Form A Community,’” Vishnu said. “It’s like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you.”

The social commentary would be hamfisted were it not so horrifyingly true to our own time. One can hear conversations very close to this–sarcasm under the guise of friendship–in hipster bars from Greenpoint to Silver Lake.

Indeed, Shytengart has a particular ear and eye for the speech and lives of hipsters–and in the world he describes in this novel, if you’re not elderly and dying or a soldier and killing, odds are you’re a hipster. There may never be a takedown of the overeducated, oversexed, overironized “creative class” as bitterly accurate as the following, which comes after Lenny’s friends learn about a National Guard attack on the homeless:

Meanwhile, at the Cervix [an impossibly cool Staten Island bar], the stunned silence had already been replaced by a general mood of frivolity mixed with practiced outrage, people throwing around their near-worthless unpegged dollars and crowning themselves with Belgian ales.

Those readers who have stumbled too close to a party thrown by a certain type of humanities graduate student will smell the real world in descriptions like this one: Political activism is knee-jerk and related to sexual conquest, and intellectual self-congratulation mixes with the basest hedonism into a thick, bilious stew.

Lenny skirts close to this attitude, but for the most part he is outside of his circle of insufferable friends. He is saved by a certain cultural conservatism, which is to say that he more readily identifies with the generation before our own, as do many of us. In our day, this conservatism manifests itself as a conscious striving toward a vanished literary culture. Lenny’s protest is at once simpler and more radical than our own: In a world absolutely obsessed with electronic youth, he clings stubbornly to the low-tech past, in the form of books. His peers, and especially people a few years younger than him, cannot read in any meaningful way–even the best liberal-arts colleges teach only “skimming.” Books themselves are malodorous doorstops, and the younger generation can only look at them quizzically, wondering when the interactive animation will start up. Teachers of literature will recognize that this attitude is only barely satire on Shteyngart’s part.

The major plot of the novel involves Lenny’s interaction and romantic entanglement with Eunice Park, a Korean-American fifteen years his junior. Because of the terrible cultural shift, this decade and a half may as well be a lifetime: In Eunice’s eyes, Lenny is ancient and rotting and impossibly square. A child of an ange in which one either looks like a movie star or is regarded as Sasquatch, she is disgusted by Lenny’s physical appearance (average by any fair standard). And yet she is drawn to him for reasons she cannot really understand but which clearly revolve around his being “like what Prof Margaux in Assertiveness Class used to call ‘a real human being.’” Lenny’s attraction to her is his kicking against the grave–he is obsessed with death from the first sentence of the novel–and a product of his needing to be her savior, to rescue her from things she’s not aware she needs to be rescued from.

Their relationship rings true to the sad ambivalence of so many real-life relationships: We’re not sure if Lenny and Eunice love each other, but it’s clear that they need each other in a not-particularly-healthy way. We are inclined to root for them, even as we know that their relationship’s inevitable end will be the best thing for both of them. We know they are doomed (from the title, if nothing else), and we are glad, in a way, even if it breaks our heart.

Meanwhile, America is essentially coming apart at the seams all around them. A privatized National Guard has set up checkpoints all over the city, protecting nothing in particular; the country is at war with Venezuela; and China, sick of propping up another nation’s dying economy, very reasonably demands their money back. Everything coalesces into a catastrophe no less terrifying than DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event,” and it’s a testament to Shyteyngart’s deft handling of the interpersonal aspects of the novel that the reader cares far more about the relationship between Lenny and Eunice than about the firestorm swirling around them. The catastrophe exerts a strange effect on their relationship, and like everything else connected to them, it feels terribly and devastatingly real.

This is the plot–though I have left out a great many lovely and nasty surprises–and it would have been enough to make Super Sad True Love Story interesting. It is made great, or at least very good, by Shteyngart’s amazing powers of description, manifested in particular in two ways. The first is the majestic depictions of New York City. Lenny notes as he takes the Staten Island Ferry back to Manhattan that “Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city?” His answer: “It is. And if it’s not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.” He suggests a sort of geographic salvation, and he finds it with descriptions like this one:

Noah told me that there’s a day during the summer when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic, unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear at the edge of your vision, and that when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day.

This sentence is an emblem of the entire novel: Beautifully sad, lonely but searching for connection, finding the unlikely moment of grace, however fleeting, in the declining fortunes of a once-great empire. The city redeems Lenny with its soft, hazy light, and Lenny redeems the city with his willingness to comb its tired streets for moments like this one. Parts of the novel read like a love letter to Shteyngart’s adopted hometown, and they underscore the degree to which he belongs to the tradition of Jewish New York humor, which, from Dorothy Parker to Woody Allen to Larry David has always been as sad as it is funny.

It’s no surprise, then, that Shteyngart’s other great skill is finding the supreme and existential sadness coiled around the heart of his supremely funny satire. Most of the novel’s characters are too plugged-in and media-savvy to betray their fundamental loneliness–but it’s obvious that in their rare moments of self-reflection they must feel as empty as does Lenny, whose experience writing in his diary qualifies him to discover other people’s terrible secrets. He notes of his elderly Russian-immigrant father: “Sometimes when he spoke I surmised that, at least in his own mind, he had already ceased to exist, that he thought of himself as just an empty spot cruising through a ridiculous world.” In Shteyngart’s fading empire, everyone who gives it fifteen seconds of thought–a small category, to be sure–must feel this way. Knowing this, we understand why people live their lives through electronic devices and anonymous sex: It’s a way of forgetting, of never remembering in the first place.

In the Heideggerian nightmare of Super Sad True Love Story–a world ruled by technology, a world of sein without the da, a world where death is on the verge of being eliminated, at least for the very rich–Lenny Abramov is the most important sort of rebel. He is willing to look deep into his own being and to be honest about what he finds there. And in a world of electronic ephemera, he writes it down so that future generations can return to it again and again. Shyteyngart, it goes without saying, has done the same.

Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World
By Nick Bunker
Illustrated. 489 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.00.

Two eras of American history seem to be of perpetual interest to readers: the Revolutionary War and the Puritan epoch. Our attraction to the former stems, I think, from our desire both to emulate the bravery of the Founding Fathers and to claim them for our own political ends. We study the Puritans for the opposite reason: We want to avoid making what we view as their mistakes. (There are exceptions to this general rule, of course. Certain members of the religious right admire the Puritans as much as the Revolutionaries; and neo-Calvinists likely admire them more.)

Each year brings a new surge of books attempting to supply us with a new angle on what is a very familiar story, albeit one that has been so heavily mythologized that the average layman would not recognize the truth if he were transported back to the 1620s. Proper history must defuse the convenient and attractive myth; until that happens, further books on the Puritans will be necessary.

The latest book of this sort is Nick Bunker’s Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World. The subtitle–appealing, no doubt, to fans of Brian McLaren–reads “A New History,” a claim that is simultaneously true and false. Bunker gives us much that is new (though he also repeats debunkings that earlier scholars have already performed), but it’s rather misleading to refer to this book as “a history” of anything. Rather, the phrase “and Their World” provides a more accurate summary of the book’s contents. Making Haste contains multitudes and would be more accurately subtitled “New Histories,” for Bunker does his best to discuss everything that went into the voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Plantation. As is so often the case, this expansiveness is both the book’s major strength and the termite that threatens to chew through its foundation.

Among the topics Bunker covers in Making Haste: the comet of 1618; King James’s obsession with health and illness; the Royal Chapel at Whitehall; the geography of Englands Old and New (many, many times); the importance of the beaver hat to 17th-century fashion; Robert Browne, the notorious Separatist; and a violent earthquake that shook England in 1580. All of these topics can inform our understanding of the Mayflower Pilgrims, of course, but most of them could serve as books in their own right, and Bunker’s narrative is continually in danger of collapsing under the collective weight of his diversions.

Much of this danger would be alleviated if Bunker had a clear thesis beyond “Here’s what happened to the Pilgrims,” but most of the time the book feels scattershot. He will return from an excursion in the informational wilderness long enough to discuss Plymouth for a few pages, before heading right back out again. Occasionally he will even jump from diversion to diversion without going back to the Puritans at all, as when he begins a discussion on “The Entrails of the King,” only to immediately head down another rabbit hole: “But before we venture into the depths of his mind, there is a story of surfaces to be told” (150). One closes the book with an image of Russian nesting dolls, a never-ending series of progressively more arcane topics.

The problem with my criticism is that the way Bunker’s book proceeds is, to the best of my knowledge, the way history as a discipline proceeds. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied history in a professional or an academic way, aside from the two American history courses I took as an undergraduate and the dozen or so history books I’ve read in my capacity as a literary scholar, so if a professional historian reads this and wishes to correct my misconceptions about her field–well, much obliged.) History is by its nature interconnected; to learn one thing properly, one must learn every subject that touches it. So forth and so on, until you’re stuck in a mise-en-abyme, a house of mirrors with no exit. One solution to the problem is to pretend the interconnectedness doesn’t exist. This is how we end up with the so-called “whiggish histories” that propagate the oversimplified myths that in turn clal our for intentional complication, such as we find in Making Haste from Babylon.

What I look for in a history book, then, is the treacherous middle ground. The author must acknowledge the dizzying complications of his discipline–he must stay true to the real world–but he also must make cosmos from the chaos of his materials–he must stay true to the reader. The historian’s task is to draw a narrative where there exist only multiple narratives; the reader of history’s task is to read different accounts of the same events, in order to turn the monolithic myths of her primary school back into the twists and contradictions of real life. But it is very much a two-person job, and both reader and writer must confess to each other their finiteness; that is, they must admit that they cannot possibly cover it all.

This has rapidly turned into the sort of book review I hate, the review that talks about everything in the world except the book at hand. So let’s return to Bunker, who, though he’s bitten off a bit more than he can chew, nevertheless opens up some very interesting aspects of a story most Americans believe themselves to be familiar with. Bunker suggests early on that his being an Englishman gives him a new perspective on things, that heretofore English historians

have done what the Pilgrims did not do, and left America to the Americans. This is why so much of the Pilgrim narrative remains in shadowy monochrome, like a photograph in sepia, or a silent film, deprived of color, light, and sound. (5)

And indeed, this reviewer, at least, learned much that he did not know, most of it taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. Bunker is fastidious in sifting through 16th- and 17th-century records, which he uses as much as or more than he uses canonical histories like William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation. (When he takes a Pilgrim’s side, incidentally, it is usually Bradford’s–and if he disagrees with the governor from time to time, most often he goes a pretty long way toward vindicating Bradford’s opinions.)

By far, Bunker’s most interesting discovery is the role of the beaver in the survival of the Plymouth Colony. Our national story on the Puritans is that they sailed from England to find something abstract like “religious freedom.” Bunker doesn’t disagree, and he spends dozens, maybe hundreds, of pages discussing the theological positions and religious context of the Puritans. But he does add an economic motivation.

As is well-known, the Pilgrims did not leave England and immediately head to the New World. The original plan was for them to live unmolested in the Dutch city of Leiden, a textile powerhouse and world city on the make that Bunker memorably compares to “Chicago in 1890 . . . a new metropolis with the same extremes of inequality, the same volatile politics, and a religious divide” (213). But religion does not seem to have been the major problem for the English refugees in Leiden. Rather, they came to the city and found it exceedingly dangerous for the working classes and especially for immigrants. Leiden was a closed economic system:

In Leiden, wealth and influence belonged to very few. More than half the city’s property was owned by a narrow class of no more than 250 people, led the brewers and overseas merchants. . . . No Englishman could penetrate the clique of oligarchs who ran the towns, and neither could most of the Dutch. (216)

In the 1610s, Leiden was, like the rest of Europe, sliding toward recession, and things were starting to get ugly. Bunker points out that, of the four reasons Bradford gives for leaving Leiden, theology comes last. More important “was what he called ‘the hardness of ye place’: poor conditions, endless work, and a harsh diet” (219). The New World was thus an opportunity for economic rebirth.

The North American beaver, in Bunker’s estimation, is as responsible as any other factor for the survival of the Mayflower colony. He reveals the surprising fact that

At the peak of their activity, in the 1630s, the Mayflower Pilgrims sent more than two thousand beaver belts home to England . . . Without the fur trade, the colony would have failed, and the name of the ship would have faded into oblivion. (233)

The author admits that he is just exapnding on a reference Bernard Bailyn made half a century ago to the importance of the fur trade to the Puritan colony in Massachusetts–and yet his exploration of the subject carries the weight of new revelation because he is, he claims, the first historian since Bailyn to discuss this aspect of the settlement. Determining whether this claim is true is beyond my ability, but I had certainly never heard this part of the story before reading Making Haste from Babylon.

The irony is delicious and unsettling. The Puritans, known above all else for their renunciation of worldly decadence–this is the sect, after all, who banned all visual art from their churches and who stereotypically wear drab outfits of black and gray–were kept alive by selling beaver pelts back to the country they’d left. The pelts had only one use: They were made into beaver hats, luxury items that were the biggest status symbols of the mid-17th century. Some idea of their symbolic value to the era can be gleaned from the fact that Bunker quotes Coco Chanel in order to explain them.

He also discusses two English chapeliers, Richard and Samuel Arnold, noting that while “Later historians have often portrayed Puritan merchants as troubled souls, afflicted by an inner conflict between religion and the stress of conflict[,] this does not seem to have worried men such as the Arnolds” (235). Maybe not–but I would have liked to have heard about how Bradford and the other Mayflower Puritans walked this fine line, proclaiming a simple lifestyle while selling objects that inspired tremendous envy and vanity. As it is, Bunker hints at a complex dialectic of sin and economics, then leaves it for the theologians to untangle.

If there were a unifying thread to the histories Bunker weaves together in Making Haste from Babylon, it would be the role of the beaver, which he brings up many times and discusses at length in at least two chapters. But it’s not enough to provide a unified thesis for this messy, ambitious book, carved up by rabbit trails. This is apparently Bunker’s first book, and it’s not without either interest or promise. But here’s hoping that his next effort will present a better balance of order and multiplicity.