Tag Archives: Book Review

Timothy Gorringe. Salvation

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Timothy Gorringe. Salvation.  Epworth Press, 2000.

British theologian Timothy Gorringe has written several important books that combine in an exemplary way solid scholarship with direct engagement with present social issues (my favorite is God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation). Here he addresses the general theme of salvation in an self-consciously popular-level way. I think it is a very helpful book and would work well in a study group.

Gorringe uses the story of a young couple who are beginning a romantic relationship–one a charismatic evangelical, the other an agnostic. He recounts their conversations, interspersed with more overt theological reflection. In the end, the couple meet kind of in the middle, in a socially-engaged, thoughtful, theologically-inclusive common ground (likely close to the kind of faith Gorringe himself affirms).

In Gorringe’s God’s Just Vengeance, he traces the historical link between retribution-oriented doctrines of salvation and the practice of state-sponsored violence in the treatment of convicted criminals. In the final part of the book, he outlines an alternative understanding of salvation. In his little book, Salvation, he does not develop his constructive theology any further, but he does helpfully set it in the context of contemporary life and shows its relevance by looking as the stories of his two main protagonists.

In short, Timothy Gorringe deserves our gratitude for giving us an antidote to the problematic views of salvation that are so widespread among “people in the pew.” It’s too bad that this book is hard to find–it deserves to be used widely.

 

Peace Theology Book Review Index

Jouette Bassler. Navigating Paul

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Jouette M. Bassler. Navigating Paul: An Introduction to Key Theological Concepts. Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.

We have no shortage of short, accessible, clearly-written, and thoughtful books on the theology of Christianity’s most important theologian–Paul the Apostle. However, since Paul’s thought is so fascinating and complex, and because Pauline theology remains so relevant to the life of faith today, and because one’s interpretation of Pauline theology is such an indicator of one’s views of so many other things, we should welcome all attempts to help us with such important material.

So, I feel compelled to welcome this book by Bassler. However, I would rank it well below recent similar books such as those of N.T. Wright (Paul: A Fresh Reading) and Michael Gorman (Reading Paul). She engages contemporary scholarship in an accessible way in a series of short studies on various Pauline themes (e.g., grace, the law, and the “future of Israel”). However, I found very little here that made Paul come alive. Bassler’s book especially pales in relation to Gorman’s Reading Paul–a book that helps us see why Paul remains so relevant for our quest for faithfulness to the way of Jesus today. In Bassler’s telling, Paul seems more like a kind of boring first-century Christian.

 

Peace Theology Book Review Index

Richard Horsley, ed. In the Shadow of Empire

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Richard A, Horsley, ed. In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance. Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

I recommend this collection of short, clearly written, and perceptive essays providing a comprehensive overview of the centrality of resistance to empire in the Bible–from Genesis through Revelation.

Several big names are here–Norman Gottwald, Walter Brueggemann, John Dominic Crossan, and Richard Horsley for example–but the strength of the collection is the consistent high level of all the essays.

Maybe the most important contributions this book makes have to do its accessibility and its touching on so many bases. It’s an overview, and introduction, to an easily overlooked theme. We see in just over 180 pages how the entire Bible is best understood as anti-imperial literature. The social context for all varieties of biblical literature must be understood as God’s people living amidst the Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. There are no major biblical writings that do not touch on this theme.

Though they focus on the biblical text, most of the writers are sensitive to our raised awareness in the present about parallels between biblical anti-imperial perspectives and our lives amidst the contemporary American empire. I think these parallels are important, and I appreciate this book pointing to them.

Once you read the Bible with empire on the mind, you will see how much of the Bible is relevant; this book is not faddish imposition of a present-day agenda on the Bible (though it is true at present-day alarms about our empire have pushed us to be more aware of what is clearly there). For me, the frustration lies with how blind Bible-readers have been to the anti-Empire agenda of the Bible, not that we now are being helped by books such as these to pay more attention to it.

 

Peace Theology Book Review Index

David Clough and Brian Stiltner. Faith and Force: A Christian Debate About War

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David L.Clough and Brian Stiltner. Faith and Force: A Christian Debate About War. Georgetown University Press, 2007.

A timely and interesting book. Clough is a British Methodist pacifist; Stiltner an American Catholic non-pacifist. They are friends and have gathered the results of a debate they had with one another over the moral acceptability of war, especially in the context of the U.S. and British war on Iraq.

I highly recommend it, not so much because either writer is necessarily extraordinarily able in presenting his views but because of their honest, respectful, and detailed give and take. They perform a great service in showing how the arguments supporting both pacifism and the acceptability of war might be challenged.  In most writing on this topic, you have one side or the other, allowing writers to evade the hard challenges.

Of course, as a pacifist, I prefer Clough’s presentation. But both writers make many good points and represent their viewpoints ably.

My biggest criticism would be that they treat the just war position mostly as the view that war should be prevented or even abolished. This is the view of some in that camp, most notably the American Catholic Bishops in their 1983 letter The Challenge of Peace. However, the view that war should be restrained (which is much more favorable concerning the moral acceptability of warfare) is not presented as being in the mainstream of the just war tradition–even though this is the view of several of the most important just war theorists (e.g., James Turner Johnson, Paul Ramsey, William T. O’Brien, probably John Courtney Murray).

In this way, the distance between pacifism and just war thought comes across as much less than if the restraint view were considered as the determinative view in the just war tradition. That is, the common ground these writers affirm may give a false impression that the differences in the “Christian debate about war” might be more amenable to resolution than is actually the case.

I am coming to suspect that the “just war” view is actually quite unstable. Those in the just war school who believe in preventing war are being pushed ever closer to pacifism. Those in the just war school who affirm restraining war (that is, making war more moral and therefore more acceptable) end up being very close to what I would call the “blank check” view (that when it comes to war, citizens essentially give their governments a blank check). 

So perhaps Stiltner may be moving closer to pacifism, but he does not represent the just war position as a whole, only one important strand within it.

John D. Caputo. What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

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John D. Caputo. What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church. Baker Academic, 2007.

Though I have long been sympathetic to what I have understood to be some of the main concerns of the philosophical movement known as “deconstruction,” I never put in the energy to read much of the literature. Partly, writings on deconstruction had the reputation of being inaccessible; partly, they had the reputation of being quite unfriendly to religious sensibilities. I wasn’t sure if either generalization was fully accurate, but somehow those assumptions were enough to deter me.

This past summer I presented at a conference where the featured speaker was John Caputo. I figured I better give his writing a shot before finding myself face to face with him. On the cross-country flight, I read What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and was delighted to find it both totally accessible and quite friendly to Christian faith (at least to the kind of Christian faith I affirm). As fate would have it, I found myself in a car traveling from the airport to the conference site with Jack Caputo and his wife Kathy. We had a nice visit and I was happy to be able to compliment him on this book.

What Would Jesus Deconstruct? is aimed at an evangelical audience (Caputo himself is a very liberal Catholic), intending to present the ideas especially of Jacques Derrida (and Caputo himself) as relevant to faith concerns, as useful for the task of applying Christianity to our contemporary world, and, especially, as having significant resonance with the life and teaching of Jesus.

I think Caputo succeeds admirably. Even if one is not as sympathetic to Derrida’s and Caputo’s views as I am, one still would greatly benefit from encountering the admirable way those views are presented here. They are an important part of our current philosophical and theological landscape. Too many have taken my own path of least resistance and avoided direct engagement with deconstruction. Caputo here leaves us without excuse–like his suggestions or not, we will all benefit from an encounter with them.

N.T. Wright. Paul: In Fresh Perspective

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N. T. Wright. Paul: In Fresh Perspective. Fortress Press, 2005.

If this book were written by just about anyone but N.T. Wright, I would praise it to the skies as a clear, accessible, but substantial introduction to the Apostle Paul’s thought. The author puts Paul theology in the context of 21st century discussions about empire and Paul’s Judaism in a way that draws on the insights of these discussions without coming across as faddish. The Christian faith community both in Paul’s context and ours is taken as the locus for deliberations on Paul’s thought–an emphasis much to be welcomed.

Yet, since it is N.T. Wright that wrote this book, one feels a bit disappointed. Wright promised years ago that the next volume in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series would be on Paul’s thought. He ended up devoting his energies to a volume of Jesus’ resurrection instead. How many more of these massive, magisterial tomes does Wright have left in him? 

If Paul: In Fresh Perspective is a volume meant to tide us over for the main course, I am willing to be patient. It’s quite good for what it is, a popular-level (in the sense of being accessible to a general, non-specialist audience of thoughtful Christians) summary of some of the latest thinking about Paul’s thought. And we should appreciate this effort–even as it joins numerous other similar books in the field.

However, Wright is uniquely situated to give us more, something few other contemporary writers (if any) could–an epoch-defining treatment of Christianity’s most important theological writer that takes his historical and theological context into account and is also engaged with present-day concerns.

Wright has gained his current stature because of his unique combination of an engaging writing style, extraordinarily clear thinking, sympathy to theological and social currents in our contemporary world that highlight the need to read the Bible as a resource for present-day discipleship, and an unmatched engagement with just about any scholarly literature that matters.

If one is interested in Paul, this book is as good a place to begin in understanding the Apostle as any basic-level book I know of. And let’s hope the main dish will arrive in due course.

Naomi Wolf. The End of America

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Naomi Wolf. The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007.

I found many things to like about this book, a best-seller written by a leading American feminist social critic. Wolf presents her polemic against American social and political trends in recent years as reflecting her one “conservative” (as in affirming the democratic traditions pioneered in the U.S. and reflected in our Constitution and Bill of Rights). She sees herself in the long tradition of dissent against oppressive government dating back to colonial days, especially evoking Thomas Paine.

Wolf gives us a clear and carefully thought through portrayal of how recent trends in our country, when looked at carefully, put us clearly on the road to fascism–this is a persuasive argument, I think. Her writing is accessible, well-reasoned, logical, and passionate.

I also like how Wolf, already a very prominent figure and sure of selling a lot of books, chose to publish with a truly independent publisher rather than making money for the very corporations that are underwriting our journey away from democracy.

I haven’t read any of Wolf’s reflections following the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. I would expect she would draw some hope from that election–our democracy may still have some vitality. But I would hope she would also raise some strong words of caution. We are far from out of the woods. The temptations facing Obama to live too comfortably with the perks of the imperial presidency will be powerful. Citizens must sustain, even heighten, their efforts to make sure we decisively turn from the path toward fascism.

Robert S. McElvaine. Grand Theft Jesus

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Robert S. McElvaine. Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America. Crown Publishers, 2008.

For people like myself, practicing Christians horrified at the general image of Christianity as a violent, intolerant, right-wing religion widespread in our culture, this book comes as a kind of relief. McElvaine is a professor of history at a Bible Belt church-related college (Millsaps in Jackson, Mississippi). His basic argument, presented in a lively, in-your-face style, is that the Christian Right in America has profoundly corrupted the basic Christian message and needs to be called to account.

The author is a political and theological liberal, but places himself in the mainstream of biblical Christianity. He names names and minces few words in his harsh critique. He is not so much setting out to find common ground and persuade those on the Right to moderate their views as to rally the troops among Progressive Christians and to help those outside the churches to see a different perspective on the core values of Christianity.

I find myself quite sympathetic with McElvaine’s basic perspective. I like his constructive suggestions and agree with just about all of his criticisms. And I think it is good and important to have such criticisms. At times his take no prisoners style made me smile, but mostly I did find it a bit off-putting. Maybe it’s good to have someone write such an attention-getting polemic, but one wonders a bit whether such bitter sarcasm is fully consistent with McElvaine’s portrayal of Christianity as a faith centered on love. I don’t think Christ-like love is incompatible with sharp criticism, but I do miss a more compassionate, gentle sensibility that probably would have actually made the critique more powerful.

If you are unhappy with the general portrayal of Christianity in cahoots with the political Right in 21st century America and you don’t feel like you know enough about those who presence has set the tone for this portrayal, this would be a good book to read. And for many of us, it may serve as an encouragement to do something about this portrayal.

Christine Wicker. The Fall of the Evangelical Nation

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Christine Wicker. The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church. HarperOne, 2008.

I’d like to believe the main argument of this book–that “evangelical Christianity is dying” (“evangelical Christianity” here meaning basically the kind of Christianity linked with right-wing politics and the culture wars in America). Wicker does give us some strong evidence indicating that the claims for evangelical power have been greatly exaggerated and that trends indicate that even the less powerful that assumed movement is losing steam and beginning to fade.

She looks at facts and figures concerning conversions, baptisms, membership, retention, participation, giving, attendance, and impact upon culture at large. The indicators all point downward. In part, her argument makes sense because the claims for extraordinary power and influence have never been subject to much scrutiny. And it has served the interests of many politicians, et al, that there be the general assumption that those claims be taken at face value.

To some degree, Wicker’s book was prescient leading up to our recent presidential election and the ending of the Right Wing hegemony in American politics.

Yet, the breezy style and lack of precision (such as her slippery definition of “evangelical” itself) foster a bit of a sense of skepticism on my part. This was a quick read and confirmed many of my suspicions about Right Wing Christianity’s actual power being based much more on perception than reality. But we need more solid research and careful writing on this topic.

The bigger issue for me that this book raises has to do with how “secular” is the American culture. Are we moving away from organized religion as many sociologists have been asserting for a long time? How do we account for the rise of the Christian Right? And has this movement actually (and ironically) accelerated the long-term diminishment of the influence of Christianity in the broader culture?

Michel Odent. The Scientification of Love

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Michel Odent. The Scientification of Love. Free Association Books, 2001.

If one approaches this book with the right attitude, it will be a stimulating and encouraging read–though maybe it’s not one I’d recommend for everyone. Odent, who is French, is an obstetrician who has pioneered humane childbirth practices. He’s philosophically aware, up-to-date in the scientific literature, and deeply committed to thinking through the implications of what he has been learning from his experiences of childbirth for our broader culture. What he’s not is an engaging writer. It’s not that his writing is overly-technical nor that his ideas are unclearly stated. But he is concise to an extreme, and this book is essentially a fairly disjointed series of short reports.

Nonetheless, the content is important–and for more than people directly involved in the various aspects of childbirth. Odent, essentially, is presenting the case that the scientific evidence is becoming more clear (though still too often ignored and even repressed) that human beings are naturally loving–and that treating others as if love is not central to all aspects of life has devastating consequences across the board in our world.

Specifically, he discusses the importance of immediate close human contact with newborns as a key to increasing the likelihood that the child will be able to thrive as a human being. He shows how we have powerful physiological as well as psychological bases for recognizing the importance of this contact.

The implications of Odent’s argument, which he does not spell out, point strongly in the direction that human beings are born with a strong need for and ability to connect with other human beings–that is, our basic instinct is toward love and we must be socialized (against the grain of our natural inclinations) to be detached, autonomous, and even violent.

This is an important contribution (even if not self-consciously expressed in this way) to a pacifist anthropology.