Tag Archive - Book Reviews

Reluctant Pilgrim

May 24, 2011 in Book Reviews, Church, Culture with 3 Comments

Death, communion, and the people of God. That’s my title for it. But Enuma Okoro and her editors went with Reluctant Pilgrim: A Moody, Somewhat Self-Indulgent Introvert’s Search for Spiritual Community (Fresh Air Books, 2010).

It is a beautifully poetic memoir of a 30-something who has weathered the storms of death, of love lost, of God distant. (You can read an excerpt here.)

I have noticed a trend toward young writers setting their pens to tell the stories of their lives. A couple of common threads recur in these writers’ journeys.

Often, they process the reality of their pain and loss in ways that would be deemed blasphemous by the church. These people continue to believe in God by fighting with God, by writing of a God who’s not afraid of PG-13 language on the lips of people who are struggling with God and/or the world that too often seems to fail to reflect God’s presence.

These are folks who have known rejection from the church, or the need to reject the church, only to continue clinging to God; or, as it turns out in the end, discovering that God has been clinging to them all along.

The particular place where Enuma knows herself to be clung to and met by God is the Eucharist. The supper recurs as a motif throughout the book, bookending her story at one end as a childhood of simple faith and love of both heavenly and earthly Father and at the other as a marker of God’s provision for the longing hearts of all God’s broken and beautiful children.

The book chronicles three stages of life. The first processes the death of her father as the inauguration of a distancing from God. The middle speaks of a year of anticipatory introspection. And at that year’s end we learn of a new kindling of the heart toward the church and God.

In story after story we learn of a broken family and a family of privilege. We learn of a revered daddy and of a father selfish in his brokenness. We learn of the power of friendship of the power of being alone. We learn of longings for community among God’s people, and of the God who sometimes does, sometimes doesn’t provide it.

What is the great lesson she learns as she lives and assesses this story of hers?

Grace.

Embodied in that body broken for you and in that cup of the covenant for forgiveness of sins is grace. It is God waiting to lavish love to all.

At several points along the way I found myself cheering the narrative language: the need to believe a new story about ourselves, to reframe our lives within a new narrative (a narrative of grace, it would seem). Here, though, is a story that tells the Story.

That story of Eucharist and cross embodies itself, at last, in community.

Raw, brutally honest, and funny; at times sad to the point of tears; often poetic in the richness of the writing, Reluctant Pilgrim carries within it the power to offer hope: hope not only that God is present in the messes of life, but that through and out of those messes God is refracting the light of God’s goodness to the world.

Disclaimer: In accordance with Federal guidelines, I hereby disclose to you, the unsuspecting reader, that I was provided with a free copy of this book for review. I did not, however, promise, intimate, or otherwise bind myself to giving a positive review of it.

Self-Flagellation

January 20, 2011 in Book Reviews, Humor with 3 Comments

I am indebted to Michael Bird for alerting me to what is definitely the greatest comment yet made in review of my work, and perhaps rates somewhere in the top 100 comments ever made in an academic book review.

Jane Heath of the University of Aberdeen writes:

    Kirk’s passionate chronicle of the evils of some Reformation emphases in exegesis of Romans may be somewhat one-sided self-flagellations of his own church tradition. Yet his monograph is very welcome for both its exegetical and systematic insights, which provide a new and useful vantage point for the scholarly endeavour as it continues to stand under the long shadow of the sixteenth century. (ExpT 122(4): 202-3)

“Self-flagellations”?! Outstanding!

In all seriousness, the review does a very nice job of dealing with a short space in which to communicate the point and tenor of the book. Thanks for the good work, Jane. (You know? Jane Heath also happens to be the maiden name of my mother-in-law… Very disorienting…)

If the Story’s the Thing…

January 7, 2011 in Book Reviews, Kindle Reading with 3 Comments

… then shouldn’t we be training ourselves how to tell compelling stories that communicate the Story?

My sometimes student Jon Huckins thinks so, and he’s written a book specifically geared toward youth ministers to help them cultivate that craft.

Why should we tell stories? How do we go about creating parables that communicate the message? What might such a story look like?

Though specifically geared toward youth ministers, Jon’s book raises a challenging question that is important for all of us to wrestle with in our increasingly story-driven culture: how do we communicate the “greatest story ever told” to our own world if not through stories of our own?

Convicted Civility

December 31, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, blogging, Book Reviews, Culture with 1 Comment

Once upon a time, I had a blog called Sibboleth (may it rest in peace). I was quite proud of the cleverness of this title (ok, am proud of that moment of inspiration that brought the title to mind). But in addition to being clever, it also signaled something about my theological place and posture. I had been, for many years, incapable of saying things “just so,” and thus found myself on theological outs with my denomination, Presbytery, church, and even some friends.

So I proudly took the label of “mis-pronouncer” of theology, began my blogging career with an extended review of why N. T. Wright should be beloved by people who had walked the Reformed theological trajectory, and created a soap-box to give myself voice in the controversial issues of the day.

When my blogging life was raised from the dead this past January, I wanted to strike a different note. Rather than defining myself as reacting against what others see as the crucial shibboleths, I wanted to engage in a more constructive, and possibly even, at times, winsome project of engaging a host of issues from the perspective of what I’ve been calling narrative theology.

I often fall short of this ideal, but I pray, and have hope, that I am growing into it.

Enter Rich Mouw.

Rich is the president of Fuller Seminary (full disclosure: that makes him my boss, and the boss of my bosses), and a person whose life and speech reflect the sort of winsome engagement with those who agree and disagree alike that most of us could only aspire to attain in this life. And his book, Uncommon Decency extends the invitation for us all to strive after a convicted civility in our conversation with one another.

Mouw recognizes that people tend to fall off the horse in one of two directions: those with deep convictions have a propensity toward belligerence or triumphalism in their articulation, propagation, and embodying of their beliefs while those who are civil tend to be people of little definite conviction, pluralists in the sense of affirming that anything goes.

In Uncommon Decency Mouw makes a case for Christians to pursue and hold to robust convictions while at the same time cultivating a civility in our conversation with other people. As he does so, he engages thorny issues of interfaith dialogue, conversation about sexuality, how to embrace conviction and civility in the church, Hell, and even the mundane issues of parking spaces and rental car disagreements.

The book engages in both the theological, Christian underpinnings of our need to be convicted and civil and how this looks in practice.

This is a book that most of us need to read ourselves–as much as most of us know a person or two to whom we’d like to give a copy!

It was interesting to me to read this book immediately after having read through David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom. I think that in theory Mouw and I are on much the same page in terms of being cautious about imposing Christian values on the culture from without, and the idea that it’s good for Christianity to pursue a religiously pluralistic environment so that we, too, can continue to thrive.

If there’s one thing I would have liked to see more of in the book, it would have been a more central place for the death (and resurrection) of Jesus in laying out the theology and articulating the approach to modern issues. The cross came up in one important place, to balance out the sometimes-triumphalist Abraham Kuyper, but I would have liked to see more. That’s what happens when a Paul scholar reads a work by a philosopher, I guess!

In all, this is a book well worth reading–it’s updated and expanded from an earlier version and as timely now as it was then.

Future of the People of God

November 30, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 4 Comments

Remember when I was blogging through Mark 13, exploring the possibility that the whole thing was about the conquest of Jerusalem in AD 70? (If not, here 1, here 2, here 3, here 4.) Well what if the fall of Jerusalem as God’s great, in-time act of judgment accounts for more than the “eschatology” of Mark 13? What if it accounts for Paul’s eschatology as well?

That, in brief, is the perspective that Andrew Perriman takes up in his new book, The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom (Cascade, 2010), a perspective that gives him a unique reading of much of Paul’s letter to Rome.

Perriman creates a reading in which Paul is looking forward to the coming judgment of God, but not a great final judgment that will mean the end of the world of suffering and death. Instead, Paul is looking forward to the time when God will judge the world, beginning with Israel, by toppling the presumptions of people and gods of Rome–until at last Rome itself has bowed the knee to Jesus as Lord with the conversion of Constantine.

For Perriman, the allusion to Psalm 2 in the resurrection-enthronement text of Romans 1:4 highlights the coming subjugation of the nations to Israel’s God and Israel’s Messiah, Jesus. He sees the same sort of subjugation in view in the parallel text of Romans 15.

This is representative of a consistent disagreement I had with Perriman: I see more transformation of these OT texts. Where the OT at times envisions the subjugation of the nations, the surprise Paul is wrestling with in Romans is that God has brought the Gentiles in on equal footing–even if this might mean that the gods and lords of the nations will be brought low.

On a similar question of how much reinterpretation is involved in Paul’s use of the OT, Perriman suggests that the invocation of Habakkuk 2:4 indicates that those who are faithful to God throughout the coming day of this-worldly wrath and destruction (of Jerusalem by Rome and then subsequent wrath on Rome itself) will find themselves delivered. Thus, even into the talk of coming wrath and judgment in ch. 2, Paul is talking about what will happen in a concrete, historical, geopolitical unfolding, not a final, cosmic day of judgment.

These pointers set the basic trajectories along which Perriman’s reading of Romans develops. In this way, the book becomes much less about entering eschatological salvation and much more about enduring this-worldly tribulations by imitating the suffering Messiah.

And the point of eschatology is where I am not yet convinced. To my mind, the resurrection of Jesus creates a cosmic frame of reference for Paul’s eschatology that does not bear sufficient influence on Perriman’s framing of the eschatology of the letter. Hints in this direction include the groaning of creation to which human groaning and redemption are not only compared but also tied.

The implications Perriman draws from his study are significant and on point. He puts his conclusion provocatively: “A narrative-historical, non-idealized reading of Romans teaches us that the question of the righteousness of God is a contingent one and may be revisited under very different circumstances” (155).

He then goes on to summarize our journey thus:

    Similarly, refugees from the fallen city of Christendom are on a long journey from their captivity to oppressive, corrupting, demoralizing, destructive social and intellectual forces, through a traumatic self-examination, through disintegration and despair, through countless experiments in renewal and emergence, towards–one hopes–a new self-understanding, a new paradigm, a new mode of being, a new construction of what it means to be a credible new creation in the midst of the peoples and cultures of the earth. It is too early to guess what that new paradigm might look like, but we are certainly beginning, consciously and unconsciously, to re-imagine the place of the church in the world in keeping with the promise of Abraham, in the light of the hope that all things will be made new.

I arrive at that same conclusion through a different path. But the path Perriman has laid out is worth walking, as it opens our eyes afresh to assumptions we might be making as we read the text, and as it challenges us to articulate for ourselves why this particular letter (Romans) was written to this particular people at this particular time–and what God may have had in store for the Empire within which it was circulated.

Book Review: Chasing Francis

November 24, 2010 in Book Reviews with 2 Comments

Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, a wave of question-asking was swelling. People were trying to intentionally come to grips with the Christian story within a western world that was changing.

A young generation was arising. And it wasn’t rejecting the faith of its mothers and fathers, but it was in a liminal space between desiring to follow Jesus while old ways of speaking and living the gospel no longer worked for it.

And so there was an Emergent theological conversation. And so there was the growth of conservative Reformed movements. And so there were faith experiments like reImagine in San Francisco. And so there was the new monasticism in Durham.

Now I’m finding that books are falling into my hands that narrate the experience of this generation—the creative writing of people who aren’t theologians but who have walked the path of conversion within the Christian faith, conversions to new expressions of what they have always held dear.

A few years ago it was Blue Like Jazz. Earlier this year it was Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town. Now it is a work of fiction, Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron.

Chase is the main character and narrator. He is a late 30s church planter turned mega-church pastor whose faith is about to collapse. The God he has constructed cannot withstand the onslaughts of the real world.

His emotional and spiritual bankruptcy erupts in an impromptu moment during a Sunday morning sermon, an outburst that earns him a leave of absence.

He ends up in Italy with his cousin Kenny, a Franciscan monk, who wants to lead him on a pilgrimage of sorts to find the way of Jesus as lived by St. Francis of Assisi.

The book is about his pilgrimage and transformation.

Readers of this story will find themselves stirred, given a (re)new(ed) vision of the gospel, and instructed in how the life of Francis might serve as a call to live the gospel in our own world in such a way that our light would shine before people and they might turn to glorify our Father in heaven.

This story encourages Christian leaders to minister beginning “at the ragged edges of our own pain,” from within “the joy and wreckage of life.” The polished image might help you build a movement, but reality fosters growth and transformation.

An encounter with a musician sets the stage for Chase to realize that art and beauty are means by which God is known and seen and felt. At its best, art is not giving us pictures of God who is light, but showing us that the light illuminates the darkness.

In these and other moments, the book helps weave a tapestry of a rich and variegated gospel, touching all creation. Its vision is a kingdom vision, a daring call to live “as if”: as if this world is where God’s kingdom come and will is done, as if the resurrection changes everything, as if there is a wealth from heaven that makes good on what earthly riches can only mimic and mock.

Quoting from St. Francis and the Foolishness of God, the story hammers home the need to proclaim a gospel message that emanates from our lives. This resonated deeply with me, especially as there was a discussion on this blog last week about the value of apologetics—and how the apologetic of a life faithfully lived might be more compelling in our day than an apologetic of an argument well articulated.

The main themes of the book I found convincing and compelling. They struck a chord with me, likely because I am breathing the same post-conservative evangelical air as the main character in the novel, the Anglican priest who wrote it, and many others in American Christianity.

Throughout, the words and works of Francis are described using terms that will make evident their applicability to Christians living in a power-wielding consumer culture.

The strengths of the book and themes outlined above weave well with the story, but I found myself jarred at several points by theologically thin conversations, advocacy of spiritual forms I don’t necessarily find compelling, too obvious an attempt to work in historical summaries, and once or twice by sloppy editing.

On theologically thin conversations, here is an example: the significance of going on pilgrimage to a holy place was likened to the exhilaration of being present at a ballpark where some historic moment had occurred. I thought that if this was what pilgrimage was all about that a U2 concert in Fenway Park would be just as good as heading to Jerusalem, but I’m not sure that’s the case.

There was also some extolling of the idea of a great chain of being in a way that I wasn’t all that thrilled with.

The advocacy of liturgy wasn’t all that compelling to me. I’ve been there. I appreciate it. I know there is a trend in that direction especially among conservative evangelicals, but it doesn’t work for me and thus felt a bit forced.

This book is an entry into the life and practices of St. Francis via the journey of its main character. Especially early on in the book Cron uses the literary device of Chase writing in his journal to give us data about St. Francis. That felt contrived. The whole point of writing a story is to show us so that you don’t have to tell us.

That and the final speech Chase makes when returning to his church felt too self-conscious about trying to be preachy about Francis rather than showing us the value and worth of Francis’ piety. I don’t care about Francis as such, and don’t think Francis wants me to. The book showed me that Francis’ practice and piety are compelling, and those effects of the gospel should have stayed the focus at these other junctures in the book.

In spite of these weaknesses, however, the book comes off as a good story that presents a compelling picture of a saint of the church who has a radical message for the church of today—radical because Francis dared to believe that Jesus meant what he said. Be peacemakers. (Really.) Don’t worry about your money—you can’t serve that master and God. (Really.)

When the book closes we discover, if we hadn’t already, that the whole is a gospel story. The book’s opening epigraph cites the first few lines of Dante’s Inferno. The last lines cite the final lines of that same book. And so the story of Chase becomes a story of a descent into Hell, a baptism into death, and coming out again into newness of life.

My advice? Take and read.

Disclosure: This review is part of #ChasingFrancisSpeakEasy. I received a free copy of this book in return for reviewing the book on my blog. This book was provided without any requirement that the review be positive.

New Formating Requirement for Book Reviews

August 27, 2010 in Academia, Humor with 7 Comments

I’ve decided that in the future all academic book reviews should add a common courtesy. When I’m about to read the summary of a film or a novel, those that give away crucial plot twists will dutifully declare, *Spoiler Alert!*

Academics, however, have not typically been so thoughtful.

I therefore call upon all of you, my comrades in the guild, to elevate the thoughtfulness of our discourse. If you give away the punchline of a book in your book review, please indicate this at the very beginning by using the phrase, “Spoiler Alert,” preferably well placed to draw attention to itself before someone gets too far into their skimming.

The Only True God

March 8, 2010 in Book Reviews with 8 Comments

This weekend I was able to finish reading James McGrath‘s The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context.

The book explores the extent to which, if any, early Christian monotheism is a “Christological monotheism”. Did the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus cause a redefinition of “the only true God” in the time period represented by the New Testament documents?

McGrath answers no.

The exegetical forays focus on indications that Jesus was treated as God in Paul, John, and Revelation. In short, McGrath avers that early Judaism had a category of agency that explains the God-language applied to Jesus without requiring a redefinition of God himself. “The one sent is as the sender.”

In developing its argument, the book helpfully discloses many assertions about Jesus’ divinity as question-begging. “Is Jesus being depicted as God?” “Yes, because early Christians depict him doing x, y, and z and Christians treatign him as m, n, and o.” “Indeed, but the question is, does being depicted doing x, y, and z, or treating Jesus as m, n, and o truly entail a redefinition of the identity of God such that this second person is included within it?”

Too often, the idea that God does the action, or is the recipient of such devotion, is insufficiently weighed against depictions of other creatures, agents of God, being put in the same positions in other early Jewish works without compromising or transforming early Jewish monotheism.

At very least, McGrath has shown that many recent studies have failed to answer the question. And often, he has provided a more compelling reading that does better justice to the texts at hand.

One important piece of evidence that needs to be seriously weighed is the apparent absence of conflict over Christian depictions of God. That is to say, monotheism itself does not seem to be a point of dispute between Jews and Christians in the first century, which would seem to indicate that Christians are not depicting God in a way that Jews find inherently offensive.

The Gospel of John is the most likely place to go to find counter-indications to this general rule. But McGrath argues that the point of Jesus’ conflicts in John is that he is making himself to be this representative of God, not that such a representative might exist at all. McGrath is able to point to Jesus”s own clear subordination of himself to the Father.

But what of the logos who is God? Here, McGrath uses the helpful analogy of a river. For early Jews, and he argues for Christians in the first century as well, the logos formed a boundary between God and humanity in the way that a river does: touching both sides, but perhaps with the hard line between Creator and creatures falling between God and the logos, when that eventually had to be drawn, rather than between humanity and the logos. The early creeds drew the boundary on the other side of the river, such that the intermediary logos belongs within the creator himself.

In all, the book makes compelling arguments. I thought that the chapter on Revelation was the least amenable to the thesis being advanced. In general, the notion that sacrificial worship is the dividing line between God and God’s emissaries serves McGrath well, but Revelation seems to come quite close to breaking through it. On the other hand, much of what is true of the Lamb is true of the saints as well–including that people come and bow down before both. So there is more to be said here.

In all, this is a timely and important book. It provides an alternative construal of the data than one finds in Hurtato, Bauckham, Wright, etc. and can in no way be ignored in the ongoing discussions of New Testament Christology. Go get it. Or, if you’re poor, tell your library to order it for you.

Book Notes: Samuel Wells, Improvisation (Part 3)

February 18, 2010 in Book Reviews with 2 Comments

In the final chapter of Part 1 of Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, Sam Wells moves from “narrative as drama” to “drama as improvisation.”

The idea that Christian theology and ethics is dramatic leads to the notion that these are to be performed. And there is a great deal in such a view that Wells find commendable. The notion of performance reminds us that, as communities, we are to enact the life commended by scripture while “remaining faithful to the character of God that emerges from the biblical witness” (62).

But performance is not a sufficient category for articulating the Christian vocation, Wells maintains. The idea of performance can create the false impression that the script given in the Bible is sufficient to cover every eventuality and circumstance. Relatedly, it can create the false impression that scripture covers the entirety of the drama when we are living in a new act, and anticipating another, that scripture does not script.

The answer? To recognize that our performance is not simply performing a story but improvising within a drama. We are part of a play “that has to be improvised on the spot” (65). Wells maintains that improvisation is inevitable–we are always improvising whether we realize it or not. He also argues that it is biblical (look at the scenes the disciples play out in Acts) and ecclesial.

Of the several objections Wells meets, I want to focus on one: that improvisation can mean (or means in practice) anything goes.

No, this is not how improvisation works. Improvisation happens within a drama that has already begun to unfold. Improvisation is about acting as saints within the play that finds its climactic action in Christ. There are ways of faithfully playing the script, and ways of unfaithfully playing it. “Blocking,” that is, introducing story-disrupting discontinuity, is not good improvisation.

This will all be dovetailed with a vision of ethics that often goes by the name of “virtue”: to be involved in Christian ethical reflection is to become the kind of people who can faithfully live Christianly in the situations in which we find ourselves. Or, if you prefer the words of Paul, Christian ethics is about being “transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you can prove what the will of God is–that which is good, and acceptable, and perfect.”

I don’t know if I’ll blog through the remainder of the book, so I want to conclude with this: I think that what Wells is doing is right on, though I’m not sure you have to latch on to the same heuristic of “Improvisation” to make the point. Doing so holds onto another of other important elements (such as the narratival shape of Christian theology, the need to enact it in community, etc.), but I see, for example, Richard Hays advocating much the same end using narrative as his heuristic. So I’m not sure that the theoretical framework is as important as keeping all the elements on the table.

If narrative works for you (as it does for me), great. If drama is better, cool. If improvisation really draws you into the idea that the NT intends for us a “conversion of the imagination” so that we can live faithfully in the here and now, so much the better.

Book Notes: Samuel Wells, Improvisation (Part 2)

February 17, 2010 in Book Reviews with 1 Comment

Part 1 of Samuel Wells‘ Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics traces a movement from Ethics as Theology (ch. 1) through Theology as Narrative (ch. 2) and thence from Narrative as Drama (ch. 3)  to Drama as Improvisation (ch. 4). Having covered the intro and thoughts on theology and narrative last time, we move now to drama.

Wells insists that the church must move from a narrative understanding of theology to a dramatic understanding. Narrative is insufficient because it does not inherently entail performance. And the theology and ethics we advocate must be embodied, the story must be interpreted through the practices and performances of the community (46).

Riffing off of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Wells warns of a couple possible mistakes: an “epic” construal of our story can leave the story so “other” that we fail to engage it or live it out–the supper becomes merely a memorial; a “lyric” construal of our story is too subjective, experience and expression trump objectivity and truth. Both elements must be in place to create a viable Christian drama.

Moreover, Wells insists that we view time as a friend. This is one of the most profound contributions Wells makes in the first part of the book. Let me summarize.

Wells begins with N. T. Wright’s suggestion that the Christian story is a five-act play, and tweaks those five acts as follows: 1. Creation. 2. Israel. 3. Jesus. 4. Church. 5. Eschaton. Putting act 5 as “eschaton” is a crucial move for Wells, as it reminds us that we are not the end of the story, we are therefore not charged with getting everything right in our act, and that things will be better and finished–but only when God dramatically intervenes to finish setting the world to rights.

Because we are not in the final act, and because we are not in a one-act play, we are not charged to “effective or successful but to be faithful” (55).

Finally, Wells warns against placing oneself in the wrong act of the play. To this, I respond with a hearty Amen! We’re not in Act 1, we’re not the creators, and we’re not living in a pristine world. We’re not in Act 2, and it is a mistake to live (and I’d add, read our Bibles as though the Messiah has not yet come. We are not in Act 3, charged with the herculean task of bringing the drama to its climactic, decisive moment (or acting faithfully therein). We are in Act four.

Although I’m not completely on board with his downplaying of this stage of the play, Wells suggests, that “the shape of the five-act play reminds the church that it does not live in particularly significant times. The most important things have already happened. The Messiah has come, has been put to death, has been raised; and the Spirit has come. This is a great liberation for the church. It leaves Christians free, in faith, to make honest mistakes” (57).

We’re not in Act 3, but we’re not charged to bring Act 5 to its glorious conclusion, either.

Up next: Wells will talk about the need for improvisation.

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