Gregory Metzger
The need for discernment.
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The ecclesiological challenges facing the church in the West are the subject of intense debate across confessional and denominational lines. In what sense is there a crisis of church identity and leadership? What are the roots of the crisis? How do categories like “postmodern” and “post-Christian” affect Christian mission in the West? These are the kinds of questions being addressed in a steady stream of books and conferences. The missional church movement has made a major contribution to this discussion through leaders like Timothy Keller and scholars like Christopher Wright. In one of his reflections on the missional movement, Keller identified five key elements of the missional movement. One of these elements is to “practice Christian unity as much as possible on the local level.”[1] This instinct for what John H. Armstrong has called “missional-ecumenism”[2] is part of what has made the missional movement such a strong influence on the church catholic—to be “missional” has meant, in part, to “not spend our time bashing and criticizing other kinds of churches,” as Keller puts it. To put it another way, the missional movement has seen itself working within a number of ecclesiological contexts and helping to transform, not overturn, denominational structures. That is why missional organizations such as the Gospel and Our Culture Network[3] draw on membership from a wide range of Christian traditions—Catholic, Orthodox, Anabaptist, Mainline Protestant, Pentecostal, emergent, independent evangelical, and so on.
The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church
Alan Hirsch (Author), Tim Catchim (Author)
Jossey-Bass
368 pages
$14.49
The humble ecclesiology of the missional movement is fitting given the ecclesial career of the man widely considered the father of the movement, Lesslie Newbigin. Newbigin served in a leadership capacity in a number of Protestant denominations and was a key figure in ecumenical organizations, including the World Council of Churches, which he served for a time as Associate General Secretary. Of course, Newbigin was not a “progressive” churchman in the sense evangelicals typically associate with the World Council of Churches, but he was a man steeped in the Great Tradition of the church, deeply conversant with it and profoundly respectful of those church bodies that were birthed by classical orthodox Christianity. Newbigin’s profound critique of what are often called “Christendom models of ministry” was tempered by his respect for the ecclesial offices and structures of the historic Christian bodies.
Given the historically ecumenical character of the missional movement and the humble ecclesiological claims of its leading thinkers, it is surprising to see a number of missional leaders being drawn to the radical ecclesiology of Alan Hirsch. The center point of his proposal is the notion, increasingly popular in “third wave”[4] charismatic circles, that the five roles mentioned by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4—”apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers (APEST)”—are all meant for the church in all places and times.
While Hirsch has been urging adoption of this “APEST five-fold ministry” model for years, he has been ambiguous about what he means by “apostolic movements” and whether or not he believes that actual apostles should be active in the church today.[5] In his newest book, The Permanent Revolution, coauthored with Tim Catchim, he makes his most comprehensive case for turning the missional movement into an apostolic movement. Hirsch leaves no doubt that, for him, this shift calls for the restoration of apostles acting decisively as the “primary custodian of the DNA of the church.” This suggestion is so radical that the noted missional thinker Darrell Guder says in his surprising foreword that Hirsch’s is a “revolutionary missional ecclesiology.” Armed with the support of a range of leading Christian thinkers like Guder, and plugged into a burgeoning network of church consultants and media savvy organizations, Hirsch speaks with some justification of being “on the verge” of penetrating the American evangelical consciousness with the notion of five-fold ministry in general and apostolic leadership in particular.[6]
The ramifications of such a shift in theological language and ecclesial practice are profound. For virtually the entire history of the Christian church in all its startling diversity, there has been unity around the parameters of “apostle” and its various grammatical derivations like “apostolic” and “apostolate.” One could even go so far as to see this unity as representing the catholicity of doctrine. At the center of this unity is the notion that there is a sharp distinction between the apostles of the New Testament and any leaders thereafter. Even Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican communions that hold to a doctrine of apostolic succession claiming a certain continuity between present-day bishops and New Testament Apostles acknowledge a significant difference between bishops (even the Bishop of Rome) and the original apostles. Catholics do not, as general practice, refer to any of their leaders as Apostles. The 1997 Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church contains within its robust assertion of Petrine succession through the papacy and general apostolic succession through bishops a significant acknowledgment that the New Testament apostles alone are “the chosen witnesses of the Lord’s Resurrection and so the foundation stones of the Church.” This statement echoes the language of Ephesians 2:20, which says the Church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,” and makes clear that even in official Roman Catholic doctrine the “successors to the apostles” read Paul as limiting the successors’ authority in a way that clearly distinguishes it from that of the New Testament apostles. At the risk of stating the obvious, the Protestant Reformers and their heirs over the centuries have never criticized the Roman Catholic Church for too narrow a reading of Eph. 2:20, but rather have rebuked Rome for asserting too great a power for bishops and have rejected what they see as Rome’s exaggerated assertions of authority. But for Hirsch even the Roman Catholic limitation of present-day apostles is wrong. He explicitly “reject[s] the traditionalist, procrustean interpretation that this [Eph. 2:20] applies only to the original apostles and prophets.” The only distinction Hirsch has made, in the book and in other settings, is to say that present-day apostles cannot write new Scripture. Hirsch’s jarring assertion that the apostles he wants to see restored today should be viewed as having the same ability to set the church’s doctrinal foundation as the apostles who Paul is speaking of in Ephesians 2:20 explains why thinkers like Guder believe that this view calls for a reordering of the Nicene Creed’s wording about the church.
But is Hirsch’s ecclesiology grounded in the biblical, historical, and contemporary wisdom that Guder claims for it? Does a faithful mission-centered Church require apostolic movements responding to the “apostolic imagination” of present day apostles? How should Hirsch’s intended audience—”the key leaders in the churches and other organizations that make up the heartland of biblical Christianity—from Conservative evangelical to Pentecostal, from missional to traditional, and anything in between”—respond to his argument?
I hope that these leaders will not simply ignore Hirsch’s proposal because it seems so outlandish to them. As surprising as it will be to some, the notion of a restored apostolic ministry is increasingly popular within the global Pentecostal/Renewal movement. Because the phenomenon is so new, it is hard to speak with certainty of the numbers of people worldwide that attend churches that are said to be under the leadership of apostles; the World Christian Database (WCD) estimated in their 2001 encyclopedia that of the approximately 524 million Christians that fell into the Pentecostal/Charismatic/Neocharismatic orbit, anywhere from a quarter to two-thirds were a part of churches utilizing five-fold ministry. Whatever the exact figures, it is beyond debate that the numbers are growing each year, particularly in Asia and Africa. Though by no means a household word among American evangelicals, this “Neo Apostolic Reformation,” as the WCD has labeled it, is growing in popularity within the mainstream of evangelicalism to a degree that many are unaware of. For instance, it is an underappreciated fact that well before a sex and drug scandal engulfed Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), he was known as a leading proponent of apostolic ministry who had rewritten the bylaws of his New Life Church to reflect apostolic governance.[7] In fact, the preeminent proponent of apostolic government of the church, C. Peter Wagner, moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1999 to co-found with Haggard the World Prayer Center. Haggard described his partnership with Wagner in his 1998 book, The Life Giving Church:
When I arrived, I met … Peter and Doris Wagner and several other recognized leaders. From that meeting, New Life Church formed its mission for the 1990s—to support … Peter and Doris Wagner specifically … a calling that led to the creation of the World Prayer Center and much more. We as a team coordinated the Prayer Through the Window series that had 22,500,000 participants in 1993; 36,700,000 participants in 1995; over 40,000,000 in 1997.[8]
In that same book, Haggard says that Wagner has “accurately recognized the [apostolic] changes as so dramatic that they are creating an actual reformation within the body of Christ.”[9] Haggard’s enthusiasm for five-fold ministry extended to his time as president of the NAE. While serving in that capacity Haggard contributed a chapter to the 2005 book Understanding the Five Fold Ministry.[10]
I mention Wagner and Haggard’s shared enthusiasm for apostolic leadership because it is all too easy to assume that radical ecclesiologies such as that proposed by Hirsch will have no appeal within mainstream American evangelicalism. In my research for this article, I was amazed at how many evangelical leaders either were not aware of the growing trend toward apostolic restoration or were so convinced it was, as one put it, a “kooky idea” that they had not given it serious thought. The Permanent Revolution should change that stereotype. While it will become clear that I find Hirsch’s core arguments for apostles fundamentally flawed, I believe Hirsch is an important thinker with a deep desire for genuine renewal of the church. Hirsch frames his argument for apostolic ministry much differently than Wagner does, and he engages in a much wider conversation than Wagner ever has.[11] More than a few evangelicals will give Hirsch a serious hearing because on subjects less controversial than his five-fold plan, his writing and speaking offer compelling insights. In The Permanent Revolution, I found his exposition of the differences between Peter’s and Paul’s apostolic ministries quite suggestive, as was his rich explanation of “sodalities” and “modalities.” I am in Hirsch’s debt for making me aware of Markus Barth’s commentary on Ephesians, and I agree with Hirsch that Barth’s work deserves a wider reading.[12] I am sure that all thoughtful readers of Hirsch will find themselves moved, as I was on numerous occasions, to prayer for the church and repentance for their own narrow vision of her mission. But while I commend The Permanent Revolution for these strengths, I strongly disagree with the agenda that drives the book. While few evangelicals would disagree with Hirsch’s cry for what has in the past been called “apostolic zeal,” fewer still should agree that this renewal of missionary vision requires contemporary apostles leading an overthrow of “the iron cages of oligarchy” that currently obstruct the “holy chaos” Hirsch envisions from his revolution. I believe his analysis of the Western church and his argument for apostles today is based on a narrow reading of Scripture and contemporary biblical scholarship, a shallow reading of church history, and a mistaken interpretation of Pentecostalism’s growth.
Biblical Interpretation
I disagree with four interconnected claims about Scripture stated explicitly and implicitly by Hirsch throughout the book. First, that “there is nothing in the New Testament itself to suggest that” apostles were to be limited to the early church; second, that because of the absence of arguments against ongoing apostolic ministry it is obvious that the five-fold APEST ministry of Ephesians 2 and 4 is the definitive teaching on ecclesiological ministry; third, that Hirsch’s understanding of apostles as people who “individuals” and “churches” relate to “only because it is meaningful for them to do so” is consistent with the New Testament’s description of apostolic authority; and four, that the only reason these three claims are not obvious to biblical scholars and church leaders is because they have a vested interest in maintaining the power of the “STs” (Shepherds and Teachers) at the expense of the “APEs” (Apostles, Prophets and Evangelists).
What is so frustrating for the reader is that his final claim about the bias of New Testament scholars gives Hirsch a rationale for his failure to engage in a substantive way with even the most elementary New Testament texts that challenge his first three claims. So, for instance, this crucial passage from 1 Corinthians Chapter 15, which seems to suggest if not demand the conclusion that Paul saw himself as the final apostle, receives no comment:
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received … that Christ was raised on the third day … and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time … then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles.” [Emphasis added]
The Letter to the Galatians, where Paul responds to a direct assault on his apostleship, is another key text that Hirsch gives scant attention to. This letter, so crucial to any understanding of Pauline conceptions of apostles, seems to emphasize an understanding of apostolic authority at odds with Hirsch’s, while also affirming the Corinthian sense that apostles are those who have personally encountered Christ. You will recall that the critics Paul responded to in Galatians claimed that Paul could not be a true apostle because he had not seen either the pre- or post-Resurrection Christ. If Paul held the view of apostles that Hirsch holds, namely that such an encounter is not necessary to being an apostle and apostolic authority is not central to Pauline conceptions of apostles, this would seem like the place for Paul to say so. Instead we have Paul saying in the very first verse that he is “an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man but by Jesus Christ and God the Father,” and later saying, “I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
I am not here claiming that these passages, taken alone, prove conclusively that Paul was the last apostle, nor is it self-evident that these readings cannot be squared with Hirsch’s understanding of Ephesians apostles as ongoing and non-authoritative. However, at the very least these texts challenge Hirsch’s assertion that only those who have a vested interest in silencing apostles would ever say that apostles and their unique authority ended with Paul.
When we move beyond this cursory reading of Corinthians and Galatians and engage with the kind of rigorous biblical scholarship that the missional movement has traditionally valued, we have even more cause to question Hirsch’s simplistic assertion that there is one, clear, apostle-centered ecclesiology taught in the New Testament. But Hirsch fails to engage this scholarship because of his conviction that biblical scholars are part of an entrenched bureaucracy tilted towards preserving power for shepherds and teachers. Because he assumes that disagreement with his interpretation of Ephesians 4 is due to institutionalized bias at best, and demonic activity at worst,[13] he does not avail himself of the vital work done in recent decades by evangelical New Testament scholars, some of whom are leaders in the missional movement. If he had done so, he would have discovered a lively debate around early Christian ecclesiology and the nature of the New Testament’s uses of the term apostle.[14]
To the extent that Hirsch does engage this scholarship, he makes judgments that raise more questions than answers. For instance, he acknowledges in a footnote the research demonstrating that two of the earliest Christian leaders, Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, set up ecclesiological governance that was not five-fold. But instead of rethinking his assertion that five-fold ministry was the singular vision of the first apostles, he makes the audacious claim that by their decision Clement and Ignatius had planted the “seeds of shepherd-teacher hegemony.” Although Hirsch usually blames institutionalization on post-Constantinian Catholics, it is clear that he dates the start of the problem to Clement and Ignatius, making them among those who “effectively rejected their apostolic heritage” and “rewrote the ministry codes,” instituting “an often oppressive ecclesial system that was to become known as Roman Catholicism.”
It is worth emphasizing that Hirsch is here claiming that two men who led Christian communities clearly founded by New Testament apostles—and who may well have known these apostles (Tertullian has Peter consecrating Clement)—were already undermining a key element of the apostles’ teachings. For the church to so quickly have abandoned a principle that Hirsch believes is so central to her health raises far more questions about the coherence and integrity of the overall message of the early church than he seems willing to acknowledge. A more charitable reading of Clement and Ignatius, and one that does not cede their teachings and practices to the post-Constantine Roman Catholic Church, suggests they were acting on the basis of teachings and practices of at least some of the original group of apostles referred to in the New Testament. But as will become clear below, charitable readings of anyone Hirsch deems in collusion with the “Christendom model” of ecclesiology are few and far between in The Permanent Revolution.
Church History
Hirsch’s treatment of Clement and Ignatius leads us to his broader narrative of church history, summed up as “movement-to-museum.” As Hirsch tells the story, the “foundational, pioneering, translocal, and custodial leadership of the apostolic ministry was eventually eclipsed by the leadership roles of bishops, elders, and deacons.” This “process of institutionalization,” he argues, weakened genuine apostolic movements and led to a silencing of Ephesians 4‘s call to five-fold ministry. For Hirsch, this distortion is a major way that Satan has weakened the church. He considers the doctrine of “apostolic succession” that developed in Catholic and Orthodox teachings as nothing less than an intentional, “direct way to try to supplant apostolic ministry.” Although he never claims a demonic origin for it, he does make the stunning comparison of the Catholic/Eastern Orthodox teaching on apostolic succession to “the sin of Simon Magus to seek to procure and control the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit,” an act Hirsch warns “we do well to remember” caused Simon to be “cursed.”
What goes unexplained is how his opinion of a direct effort by the Catholic Church to supplant apostolic ministry can coexist with his steady invocation of Catholics, including numerous bishops, as outstanding examples of the apostolic ministry he wants to see unleashed in the world today. At various points in the book Hirsch identifies St. Patrick, St. Francis, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of Western monasticism St. Martin of Tours, St. Columbanus, and Saints Cyril and Methodius as embodying the apostolic mindset. Hirsch’s one attempt to explain the incongruity between wholesale condemnation of apostolic succession and embrace of the best fruits of that doctrine is to say “institutions, although they can delegitimize, cannot snuff out callings because they are ultimately derived from God.”
One need not be a papist to suggest a better explanation: an ecclesiology need not embrace Hirsch’s conception of “apostles” in order to produce apostolic virtues. At the very least, Hirsch’s embrace of these staunch Catholics raises two questions: 1) If these church bodies were able, in spite of their lack of five-fold configuration, to produce leaders and movements that embody missional virtues, then why should we consider these same bodies incapable of producing missional leaders and movements like these now? 2) Is it fair to the memory of these leaders to align them with an argument that derides apostolic succession when they believed that the success of their ministry was caught up in the grace of their priesthood that is in their view intrinsically linked to apostolic succession?
While Hirsch’s determination to cast traditional Catholic and Orthodox conceptions of apostolic succession in the worst possible light has precedent in Protestant theology, it is more surprising to see his strong condemnations of Protestant bodies that reject apostolic succession but fail to embrace five-fold ecclesiology. For Hirsch, the failure of Reformed thinkers to rethink Ephesians 4 is clear evidence that “the Reformation, while rescripting our theology of salvation, failed to deconstruct the embedded Christendom paradigm of the church.” Thus the Protestant churches are as guilty of maintaining an “anachronistic, procrustean reading” of Ephesians 4 as Catholic and Orthodox churches were, because they followed the pattern of narrowing the five-fold gifts to the two-fold gifts of shepherd and teacher.
Here again, Hirsch fails to appreciate, much less appropriate, significant developments in evangelical scholarship, developments that attest to multiple understandings of ecclesiology among the Reformers, including multiple interpretations of Ephesians 4. It is true, as Hirsch highlights, that Calvin (along with other Reformers like Jean Diodati) completely ruled out the offices of apostle, prophet, and evangelist and thus only saw an ongoing role for shepherds and teachers; but it is also true, as Gerald Bray demonstrates in his volume on Galatians and Ephesians in the Reformation Commentary on Scripture series, that other reformers allowed for the ongoing role of prophet and evangelist while specifically ruling out apostles because they “are those who were sent by Christ himself,” as the Lutheran Reformer Erasmus Sarcerius put it. To cite just one other example of a Reformer who did not teach the two-fold ecclesiology Hirsch finds so troubling, there is the German Reformer Martin Bucer, whom Bray translates as saying evangelists “still exist … God makes them wonderfully effective.” Bray’s scholarship also makes clear that even in the case of Calvin, where as we have seen there is at least a superficial congruence between him and the Roman Catholic hierarchy on Ephesians 4, his understanding of apostles and apostolic succession was so different from Catholic teaching that equating the two as examples of a single, oppressive “Christendom model” obscures more than it illuminates. Bray translates this gem from Calvin’s reflections on Galatians 2, where Paul describes his confrontation with Peter: “Paul did not simply reprove Peter, as one Christian would another, but he did it officially, by right of his apostolic office. Here the Roman papacy is struck down because this one man reproves Peter in the presence of the whole church, and Peter obediently submits to correction.”[15] It seems hard to make the case that an understanding of “apostle” that claims to discredit the Roman papacy should be described as being in significant continuity with Roman ecclessiology simply because Calvin agrees that the offices of apostle, prophet, and evangelist ended with the New Testament era.
Contemporary Pentecostalism
I began this essay with a nod to the contemporary situation of the church in the West and to a growing sense of crisis that one can perceive among church leaders in a variety of denominations. This perception of crisis in the West dovetails with a growing perception of Christian triumph in the global South. Given that much of the extraordinary growth of the church globally has been in Pentecostal churches, it comes as no surprise to see earnest attempts to duplicate in the West the seeming success of Pentecostalism elsewhere. In that vein Hirsch offers, in addition to his biblical and historical arguments, a pragmatic case for five-fold ministry. Hirsch’s explanation for why “the institutional church in the West” is dying and the church in the global South is rising could not be any clearer: The West’s “inherited forms of church are not equipped for the missional challenges because they refuse to recalibrate their ministry along the lines suggested in Ephesians 4,” whereas the non-Western world has “literally hundreds of millions of believers, hundreds of thousands of churches, and thousands of movements … that do believe in and appropriate the teaching of this text.”
But while Hirsch’s endorsement of contemporary apostolic ministry allows him to claim the kind of numeric success that evangelicals crave, it creates a problem he cannot solve. Simply put, Hirsch can only arrive at the staggering number of believers, churches, and networks practicing five-fold ministry by counting a vast sector of Christians identified with the Neo Apostolic Reformation (NAR) by the late David Barrett.[16] Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia and its companion volume, World Christian Trends, describe the NAR as a grouping of third-wave charismatics having “no interest in and no use for historic denominationalist Christianity” and “emphasizing a break with denominationalism.”[17] The post-denominational ideology of NAR churches is so strong that the historically Pentecostal denomination the Assemblies of God, hardly an example of a dying Western church, issued a sternly worded response in 2000. “Structure set up to avoid a previous structure,” the AOG leadership warned in their missive, “can soon become dictatorial, presumptuous, and carnal while claiming to be more biblical than the old one outside the new order or organization.”[18] Given this sober judgment by a Pentecostal denomination, it will come as no surprise that the Christian Reformed Church saw fit to “strongly warn” its members of the “distinctive tenets of the NAR,” particularly C. Peter Wagner’s contention that denominations are an “old wineskin” to be replaced by the “new wineskin” of apostolic governance.
But the decidedly anti-denominational ideology of contemporary apostolic movements is not the only point of concern for Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal observers. Just as troublesome is the authority and power claimed by large numbers of these “apostles” of the global South and their North American allies, including C. Peter Wagner and Cindy Jacobs. Though silent about the NAR’s anti-denominational ideology, Hirsch does comment on the authoritarian style characteristic of this movement, because it is so starkly at odds with how he envisions modern-day apostles acting. However, his attempt to distance the “hundreds of millions of Christians” that he wants Western Christians to emulate from the deplorable apostolic models he rightly characterizes as “hierarchical and elitist” forms of leadership is an exercise in sophistry. It leads Hirsch to the nonsensical argument that these authoritarian views are somehow irrelevant because they come “from the twentieth-century charismatic and Pentecostal wings of the church” when that is the very wing of the church that his “hundreds of millions” comes from. It defies all that we know about the NAR for Hirsch to claim that there is a vast group of non-charismatics in the NAR’s midst practicing some sort of distinct, non-authoritarian five-fold ministry. At some level Hirsch himself clearly understands that his vision of apostles is not at all the reality of apostolic ministry among the masses; in his entire book, he never cites a single contemporary example of five-fold ministry in the global South embodying his particular vision of apostles.
Hirsch is free to imagine a Church functioning with apostles empowered to shape the doctrinal foundation of the church while not acting in authoritarian ways, but his attempt to suggest that hundreds of millions of Christians are happily living under such apostles should likewise be seen as imagination not fact. Unfortunately, rather than acknowledging the distinctiveness of his proposal within the larger apostolic movement, Hirsch chooses to blame critics of five-fold ministry for putting these authoritarian leaders forward as “straw men.”
The uncomfortable truth is that some of these very “straw men” stand at the height of leadership within global Pentecostal bodies. It is, after all, not a critic of five-fold ministry but one of its most important champions, the well-respected Jack Hayford, acting in his capacity as co-chair of Empowered21, who has elevated Cindy Jacobs to a key position on Empowered21’s Global Council.[19] Empowered21 is a major new alliance of charismatic groups attempting to unite both apostolic and non-apostolic groups.[20] The fact that Hayford sees Jacobs as representative of the apostolic movement and worthy of a place at the table within Empowered21 should be enough to demonstrate that critics of the apostolic trend are justified in seeing her as a legitimate leader.
I have no doubt that Jacobs’ writings and practices represent to Hirsch the worst of apostolic leadership, and I see nothing in Hirsch’s writing to suggest that he would do anything but condemn her style of leadership. But in making figures like Jacobs out to be obscure outliers within the apostolic phenomenon that he holds up as worthy of Western emulation, he does a disservice to his readers.
Clearly Hirsch desires to see non-authoritarian apostles exercising apostolic leadership in the church today. Alas, I see precious little in The Permanent Revolution’s biblical exegesis, historical reflections, and understanding of the contemporary church to suggest that such would be the result of Western evangelicals following his lead and embracing five-fold ministry.
1. Tim Keller, “The Missional Church,” redeemer2.com/resources/papers/missional.pdf
2. Armstrong’s most comprehensive explanation of missional-ecumenism is found in his 2010 book Your Church Is Too Small (Zondervan).
3. A succinct summary of the history and purpose of this group is found at their website, gocn.org/
4. A charitable overview and thoughtful analysis of the “third wave” is found in the Majority and Minority Reports of the Christian Reformed Church’s Committee to Study Third Wave Pentecostalism II, available at crcna.org/site_uploads/uploads/resources/ThirdWavePentecostalism Report.pdf
5. See, for instance, Hirsch’s 2010 book On the Verge: A Journey into the Apostolic Future of the Church (Zondervan), which he wrote with Dave Ferguson, and his 2006 book The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Brazos).
6. Hirsch is a major presence in North American missional groups. He is a cofounder of Wheaton College’s Masters in Missional Movements program, as well as a leading voice in Shapevine.com, Forge Mission Training Network, and Future Travelers.
7. In his foreword to Haggard’s 1998 book The Life Giving Church (Regal Books), Wagner draws special attention to the change in bylaws. “I hope you don’t miss the last chapter on bylaws. I know that very few will read it from beginning to end, but keep in mind that these are new apostolic bylaws and therefore quite different from traditional church bylaws” (emphasis in original).
8. Ibid, p. 35.
9. Ibid, p. 44.
10. Understanding the Five Fold Ministry, edited by Matthew D. Green (Charisma House, 2005). Haggard contributed the chapter “The Pastor and the Fivefold Ministry.” I am indebted to the work of Bruce Wilson for seeing the significance of Haggard’s work with Wagner. See, for instance, Wilson’s “Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World” at Religion Dispatches, religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/1273/
11. For instance, Wagner is quite explicit in seeing an eschatological meaning to the contemporary restoration of apostles. He views the phenomenon as a final stage in history preparing the way for Christ’s return. Hirsch never grounds his belief in apostolic restoration in eschatology.
12. Barth’s commentary was published in two volumes in 1974 as part of the Anchor Bible Commentary. Although Hirsch considers Barth’s commentary a rare example of “open-minded and focused thinking on Ephesians 4,” Barth explicitly rejects interpretations that Hirsch holds dear. Under Barth’s reading, for instance, there would only be a 4-fold ministry, since he interprets “Shepherds and Teachers” as shepherd teachers. Barth also presents a much more nuanced reading of Ephesians 2:20 than Hirsch allows.
13. In a section titled “The Devil Made Me Do It,” Hirsch asks how Ephesians 4 came “to be such a pro-foundly unexamined teaching” and answers that “the only conclusion we can reach is that this must ultimately be the work of the Devil …. It is a classic divide-and-conquer strategy: divide the foundational ministry of the church, completely delegitimize some of the players and overlegitimize the others by institutionalizing them.”
14. I think in particular of the work of Scot McKnight. The landmark Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (InterVarsity Press, 1992), which McKnight edited with Joel Green, contains a lengthy article, “Apostle,” by C. G. Kruse, that highlights the profound complexity around the term within the four Gospels and the broader New Testament. Later volumes in this series, such as the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters and the Dictionary of the Later New Testament and its Developments, have numerous essays that provide a window into current evangelical understandings of issues related to apostles and church governance.
15. Reformation Commentary on Scripture: Galatians, Ephesians, edited by Gerald Bray (InterVarsity Press, 2011).
16. World Christian Encyclopedia, edited by David Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
17. David Barrett and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends (William Carey Library, 2003), p. 5.
18. “End Time Revival—Spirit-Led and Spirit-Controlled,” ag.org/top/beliefs/position_papers/pp_downloads/pp_endtime_revival.pdf.
19. Anyone familiar with the literature surrounding C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation will notice that the leadership of Empowered21 includes not only Wagner’s close colleague Cindy Jacobs, but other pro-ponents of Wagner’s ecclesiology. For a helpful introduction to the views of Wagner and Jacobs and their vision of the New Apostolic Reformation, see National Public Radio’s interviews with both Wagner and his leading critic, Rachel Tabachnick. The Wagner interview is here: npr.org/2011/10/03/140946482/apostolic-leader-weighs-religions-role-in-politics. Tabachnick’s interview is here: npr.org/2011/08/24/139781021/the-evangelicals-engaged-in-spiritual-warfare
20. Hirsch is well aware of Empowered21 having spoken at its most recent North American conference: converge21.org/c21-schedule.pdf.
Gregory Metzger is a writer now living in Rockville, Maryland. He is at work on a book for Cascade on C. Peter Wagner.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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By a happy accident, shortly after a copy of Christopher Scheitle and Roger Finke’s Places of Faith fell in my hands, I received Books & Culture’s 2011 Book of the Year, God Is Red, by Liao Yiwu. I thus read the two books simultaneously and was struck by how similar the two projects were and yet how distinct the results. Both books are studies of religious communities through the enabling vehicle of the travelogue: Finke and Scheitle describe a road trip across the United States in search of its “religious landscape,” visiting churches, temples, synagogues, and an Islamic community center as they drive coast to coast; Liao chronicles his rambles through villages in southern China and jaunts around the cities of Dali, Chengdu, and Beijing in order to learn “how Christianity survived and flourished in Communist China.” By adopting the travelogue form, moreover, each book aims to do more than recount religious history or document changing trends in religiosity. Scheitle and Finke, both established sociologists, well summarize the projects of both books when they write of their “hope that our stories, pictures, and experiences give life to lifeless statistics and bring far-removed historical accounts into closer view.” In other words, both books attempt to portray the life of religious communities with immediacy and vitality through personal accounts and encounters rather than large-scale survey data or government reports (the sort of stuff that Finke, for example, normally studies in his role as director of the Association of Religion Data Archives).
Places of Faith: A Road Trip across America's Religious Landscape
Christopher P. Scheitle (Author), Roger Finke (Author)
Oxford University Press
264 pages
$18.96
Both books have their merits, but Liao’s is by far the more effective in employing the travelogue in the service of documenting the lives, practices, and histories of religious communities. The key difference between the texts on this line is Liao’s ability to present himself as a character in his account without detracting from his stories of the various Christian communities that he encounters. This character is naïve, bashful, and, at times, feels a bit contrived, but he is a helpful guide and interviewer. More significantly, he pauses to reflect on what it personally means for him, a nonbeliever, to be present in doing field work on Christians. Here, for example, he is describing his attendance at a mass in Dali:
Not knowing how to sing hymns, I hummed the melody. At the altar, against the background of four big Chinese characters proclaiming God Is Love, a middle-aged priest and two young acolytes were immersed in an ancient ceremony. “For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him,” the priest intoned. I felt a little self-conscious about my presence in the church, a nonbeliever here to observer the behavior of the believers. I knew the passage the priest was reading and hoped they did not think the betrayer was me.
In this and other episodes, Liao allows the reader to see him in the process of entering a foreign space, navigating alien practices, reflecting uncomfortably on what he is hearing and what it might mean for him as one who is not a member of the fold. The travelogue form of the book makes this kind of reflection not only possible but welcome. In watching him move between different kinds of Christian community, the reader easily sympathizes with his very human response not only to the changing conditions but also to the passionate conviction of the people whom he witnesses and respects but with whom he does not share core beliefs.
Scheitle and Finke, by contrast, share almost nothing about themselves and are problematically silent about their own religious beliefs. They are, to borrow a phrase from the novelist Robert Musil, “men without qualities.” While useful in research directed at academic peers, this dearth of personal detail detracts from the interest of their narrative (road trips demand intriguing travel-mates) and leaves important questions about their project unaddressed. In particular, what does it mean for them to participate in religious services in which they do not believe in the deity being worshipped or theology being espoused? In their descriptions of the practices of the various Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities that they visit, they do not interject, as Liao, to describe private reservations, confusions, disagreements. Their silence on this count, moreover, leaves hollow the book’s claim that it is “about experiencing and discovering America’s local religious communities and traditions.” Each chapter of the book contains a subsection called “the religious experience.” And certainly these sections provide detailed records of the stages of worship at various venues. But the book is far too reticent regarding what it feels like to participate in a worship service in which something or someone is worshipped, especially when one does not know what do or finds the spiritual experience of one’s neighbor strange, ridiculous, or unattainable.
Knowing more about the authors, for example, would help us to know what to do with this moment noted during their visit to First Tabernacle Church of God and Christ in Memphis: “Pastor Cole called on all the men of the church, even the visitors, to go to the back of the church for prayer.” There is no further comment on what took place during the prayer session, though this scene strikes me as exactly the kind of moment where we would benefit from hearing the authors describe their experience, as presumably they are included in the call to “even the visitors.” Are Scheitle and Finke Christians? Did they pray? If not, then what were they doing in the midst of the prayer? I dwell on this point because the book’s beginning and ending suggest that its project is repeatable—that is, that their quest can be undertaken by the reader in his or her locality. Both Liao’s and Scheitle and Finke’s books offer rich descriptions of the hospitality of religious communities; however, Liao Yiwu’s book provides the more apt commentary on the complexity of the experience that would follow if one took up Scheitle and Finke’s charge.
Despite these defects, Places of Faith remains an informative book, gathering a remarkable amount of information within a few short, approachable chapters. The chapters are then subdivided into sections—the religious history, the religious landscape, the religious experience, and so on—that encourage the reader to think comparatively about religious groups and their practices. This book will be particularly useful for those who are looking for a primer on the religious composition of the United States. It seems to me, for example, a likely candidate for the future syllabi of introductory courses on the sociology of religion or American religious life.
In Memphis, Scheitle and Finke visit an African American Christian church; in Houston, Joel Osteen’s megachurch; in Colorado Springs, parachurch organizations; in San Francisco, Buddhist temples; in Salt Lake City, a local Mormon church; in central Nebraska, various Protestant and Catholic churches; in Detroit, an Islamic Community Center; and, in Brooklyn, three Jewish congregations. The book’s conclusion returns the authors to State College, Pennsylvania, where Finke is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Penn State and Scheitle, now on the faculty at Saint John’s, was formerly a doctoral candidate and researcher.
One thing that is immediately apparent about the itinerary is that the authors have focused on places where there is a particularly high concentration of the congregational type or religious group they seek to show. This feature is likely to turn away more seasoned observers of religion in the United States, as these are places and communities that have already been well documented (they are also for the most part in major cities that receive considerable media attention and tourist traffic). This approach may leave the reader with the impression that America’s religious landscape is best discovered through enclaves—whether it’s Mormons congregating in suburbs of Salt Lake City or Jews of various traditions living among kosher shops and services in Brooklyn.
The religious landscape is painted with a broad brush in this book, and each of the elements seems to be exactly where we’d expect to find it.
Scheitle and Finke’s book, then, would have benefited from the inclusion of examples of religious communities that defy our familiar generalizations. They include “views from the road” between the chapters seemingly to offer such moments, but these sections are largely predictable and unfortunately kitschy (there’s a section on religiously themed graffiti and road signs, for example). The book would profit from looking in an unexpected place for its religious communities—such as a Jewish synagogue in the Bible Belt. I wondered, as I read, what the road trip would have been like if the authors had, for instance, visited Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina—the second oldest synagogue building in the United States and oldest in continuous use. Charleston, to my knowledge, is not commonly recognized as a crucial city for American Judaism, and yet Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim was one of the major (perhaps the first) conduits for the transmission of Reform Judaism from Germany. To speak of such a community effectively, however, would require discussion of the wider religious character of Charleston, which is also home to a number of historically significant and largely white downtown churches and to a number of historically important African American churches, including Gullah congregations. In other words, to discuss the history and continuing life of a Jewish congregation in such a city would require that one situate it within a complex local habitat.
I cite the example of Charleston not to criticize its exclusion from Places of Faith but to point out an alternative approach to the subject matter that would have better shown diversity within a local space. Here, again, God Is Red offers a salient example. Liao opens the first chapter by describing a lunch with Ze Yu, a Buddhist monk who resembles “one of those smiley, big-bellied Buddhist statues,” at a Muslim halal restaurant in the southern city of Dali. Following the meal, Ze Yu leads the author on a religious tour of the city:
But concentrated here were worshippers of many gods and deities. The indigenous Bai people venerated thousands of them in their temples …. [Ze] showed us Muslim mosques and Buddhist temples and Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant. Less conspicuous, he said, were practitioners of Baha’I and Falun Gong, who used their homes, as did those Christians who refused to recognize government-sanctioned churches.
This tour helps the reader to appreciate the complexity of the religious background of Liao’s search for Christianity in China, a complexity that is then mirrored in his interviewees’ accounts of trying various spiritual paths before joining Christian communities.
The vision of Dali is also striking here because it offers a vision of a cityscape abundant with religious spaces. Yet the cityscape has not always been as it is now: Laio’s interviews help him, in turn, to describe the cityscape of the early 20th century, in which Christian communities were still more visible. Other chapters describe, for example, the search for forgotten, defaced cemeteries that house the remains of foreign missionaries. His chronicle, moreover, reveals the continuing question of visibility for Chinese Christian communities. What this means for Liao is that he must gather a network of contacts to help him to maneuver the cityscape, finding religious communities not only in expected places—such as an old chapel and buildings with signs outside—but also in places that only members could lead him to—such as in an inconspicuous house in the midst of a suburban village. Liao’s narratives of his treks through cities and villages add much interest to his book, but, even more important, they help the reader to see the spatial complexity of the religious communities of modern China, whether they are attempting to reclaim lands seized in the Cultural Revolution or are essaying whether to participate in the public churches (usually state-sponsored) or in more secretive congregations.
“What’s your road, man?” Kerouac’s question from the greatest of all American road-trip narratives offers the right note on which to end. Places of Faith and God Is Red plot their courses through two divergent roads, and they are likely to please different audiences. Yet the books are joined in the common belief that the study of religious communities is facilitated through immersion, even intimacy. If Liao’s book is more successful, it is exactly because he admits that so much is at stake for those who worship—and that, in turn, being the guest of such a community prompts a panoply of emotions, including perplexity, apprehension, admiration, and joy.
Richard Gibson is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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LaVonne Neff
A crime fiction series worth catching up with.
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Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond has problems. At age fiftysomething, over-weight, with high blood pressure and poor eating habits, he’s a walking heart attack. A wid-ower, he lives alone except for his cat. Churlish, pig-headed, a bit of a bully, he antagonizes everyone on his staff—including even those he most appreciates. His superiors value his insights but dislike working with him, since the authority he most respects is his own. He has maybe one friend.
Diamond is the creation of British author Peter Lovesey, 76, winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement as well as many other awards for his more than 30 books. Lovesey’s newest mystery, Cop to Corpse, is the 12th installment in the Peter Diamond series. As the story begins, Diamond’s world has become exceptionally dangerous.
At about four o’clock on a Sunday morning, police constable Harry Tasker, on foot patrol near Bath’s city center, is shot dead by a sniper using a high-velocity assault rifle. This is the third murder of a policeman in the Avon and Somerset constabulary in just 12 weeks (an amazing toll when you consider that, in the real world, there were only 18 murders in that district all last year). Diamond is understandably worried. Apart from being police, the victims seem randomly chosen. Is anyone on his staff safe?
At the scene, Diamond learns that Chief Superintendent Jack Gull of the Serial Crimes Unit is in charge. This does not bode well. Gull, at least a decade younger than Diamond, is a foul-mouthed climber who readily takes credit for other people’s ideas. Diamond has ways of dealing with difficult people, but he never lets them get in the way of his own investigations. Put these two men together and sparks will fly. Still, on Sunday afternoon, when a suspect is sighted in a nearby wood, Diamond and Gull join forces and rush to the scene. For two nights they and a team of police—mostly young and unarmed—patrol the densely forested area in hopes of capturing an armed murderer who, they believe, knows the area well and will readily shoot any policeman on sight.
It takes five stressful days and four nerve-wracking nights for Diamond to solve the puzzle and once again assure the relative safety of the Bath police force—a hundred hours packed with suspenseful stake-outs, cryptic threats, tangles with a hustler and a neo-Nazi, the pursuit of several plausible but false leads, and the near mutiny of his entire staff. As Diamond tracks lawbreakers, a parallel story unfolds involving a trio of amateur detectives, a seller of stolen goods, and a secretive man in the midst of a nervous breakdown, or worse. The stories come together in a hair-raising dénouement: one misstep by Diamond, and the series will abruptly end.
Superintendent Diamond isn’t easy to like. After following his exploits for a book or two, some readers give up trying (they probably don’t care for Harry Bosch, Kurt Wallander, or Inspector Morse either). Others of us—despite our love for sweethearts like Adam Dalgliesh and Tom Barnaby—have grown fond of the prickly detectives who investigate so many fictional murders. If the murder mystery, with its drive toward justice in spite of overwhelming odds, is the quintessential biblical story, then the flawed detective must be the quintessential biblical hero: full of original sin, but nevertheless instrumental in repairing the world.
At first, though, I was put off by the flawed detective from Bath. “What I know about Peter Diamond,” I wrote when I’d finished reading Cop to Corpse: “He is big. He has a beer belly. His wife was murdered four years ago. He lives alone. No mention of children. He has a friend with privileges, Paloma, who serves more as a foil than as a romantic partner. He pushes himself. No indication of hobbies or outside interests. No inner life. No moral quandaries. Competitive, but willing to back down. No enemies.”
This wasn’t nearly enough information to make the burly detective lovable. Pure procedurals and puzzles can be entertaining, but the most engaging series also draw us in to their characters’ personal lives. Cop to Corpse did not do that. Its central puzzle, however, was compelling; and besides, Books & Culture had asked me to answer a couple of interesting questions: Is it OK to jump into the middle of an ongoing detective series, or should a reader start with the first book? And having begun with book 12, was I motivated to go back and read previous Peter Diamond stories?
Despite my reservations, I was motivated. Maybe if I read an earlier book or two, I thought, I’d grow fonder of Mr. Diamond. So I grabbed The Last Detective off the library shelf … and a month later, when I came up for air, I’d read 11 of the 12 books in the series (Skeleton Hill was at the bindery). I now know that Peter Diamond is much more than a grumpy detective who keeps the plot moving. Mostly bald with a silver fringe, possibly resembling actor Timothy Spall, he hates post-mortems and fast driving, does not read Jane Austen, resists technology, is uncoordinated and accident prone, should not be allowed to perform simple household repairs, admits his mistakes, pursues the truth whatever the cost, eats beans on toast, wishes he had children, excels at thinking on his feet, hates acronyms, is phobic about theatres, and—though he resists talking about his feelings—loves deeply. He is real, he is good, and I am thankful he is not my boss.
Even so, plot, not characterization, drives the Peter Diamond books. Though Lovesey’s plots are not labyrinthine—you can follow them without taking notes—they usually weave two or three stories together and often bring in interesting sidelights. The Vault, for example, has a lot to do with Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein; The Secret Hangman touches on extremist religion; and Bloodhounds looks at detective fiction itself: it features a book club whose members find themselves embroiled in a real-life locked-door mystery.
Besides plot, place is fundamental to all 12 books. The stories are situated in and near the city of Bath with its Roman artifacts, Gothic abbey, Georgian buildings, peaceful parks, and painfully ugly police station. Humor is something else the books have in common. Cop to Corpse, though grimmer than most, gives us the hilariously bumbling D.I. Polehampton and the “cello shaped blonde” witness Sherry Meredith. Stagestruck introduces the hope-lessly pedantic wannabe detective Sergeant Dawkins. A champion sumo wrestler swoops to Diamond’s rescue in Diamond Solitaire. And Upon a Dark Night had me from the moment the adipose, foul-mouthed, persistent, good-hearted shoplifter Ada Shaftsbury waddled into the story.
So what about beginning a detective series with the last book? After reading the earlier Peter Diamond volumes, I re-read Cop to Corpse. I liked it better the second time around, now that I knew more about the detective and his city. My advice? Don’t start this series with book 12. If you’re patient and methodical, read the books in the order they were written. But it’s also fine to begin reading somewhere in the middle. If you want to get well acquainted with Peter Diamond (and don’t mind spoilers), start with Diamond Dust. If you’re a fan of cozies, go for Bloodhounds or The Vault. If you lean toward thrillers, try The Summons. Or just grab a Peter Diamond book at random and start reading—the whole series is a delight.
The Last Detective, 1991
Diamond Solitaire, 1992
The Summons, 1995
Bloodhounds, 1996
Upon a Dark Night, 1997
The Vault, 1999
Diamond Dust, 2002
The House Sitter, 2003
The Secret Hangman, 2007
Skeleton Hill, 2009
Stagestruck, 2011
Cop to Corpse, 2012
The Series So Far:
When LaVonne Neff isn’t reading detective stories, she is blogging at livelydust.blogspot.com and neffreview.blogspot.com.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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James C. Dekker
A Canadian story of darkness and grace.
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You’re a postwar Dutch immigrant and a lifelong member of the Christian Reformed Church. You also write stories. You know fiction does not always mix easily in your confessional tribe or the broader evangelical world. We like the facts, Ma’am, just the facts—which too often we confuse with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That could make your life difficult. Funny thing, though: your people tell stories too. Maybe they yearn for something “just the facts” can’t always deliver.
So, you teach English for decades at Redeemer University College (Ancaster, Ontario). You absorb true stories from the immigrants and the wider Canadian world into which they have dived, prospered, and suffered. You discover an affinity between all those stories and the poetic and historic truth of the Christian faith whose people always need their storytellers, even if they don’t always understand them.
All the while, you keep writing with a saint’s dogged perseverance. Your precision, your unerring eye for place and faultless ear for conversation coalesce into two collections of short stories and two novels since 1985. A steadily growing readership hangs on every word, every character, every unpredictable slip, shift, and drift in the unfolding tales.
In the early 1980s, you publish Cracked Wheat. Those stories tease community foibles while re-framing moral choices made by Canada’s newcomers. In one memorable story, a college student—was that maybe you?—drives a Lower Mainland British Columbia summer bread route for college tuition. He manages to veer away from sexual temptation along the way. Old values count in a new land.
Over the years, your eye, ear, and imagination sharpen. In Homecoming Man, you draw an aging, ill, war-surviving widower. Turned secretive and morose, he suffers mutely. His doctrinaire piety is often a dry well that can’t lave his memory’s festering horror and guilt. His son, hoping to reclaim home after broken ventures in fast-lane North America, clashes with his father. Though largely rejecting his father’s arid faith, he thirsts for spiritual rebirth. He digs a new well that, astonishingly, taps the old man’s deep biblical-theological springs and finds hopeful freshness.
For years you listen to students from backgrounds other than your own who crowd your classes. You record conversations with people you meet around the corner, in coffee shops or on the road. Those all condense into Home in Alfalfa‘s twenty closely linked stories. Of course, you describe the Dutch Reformed folks becoming saints. But now their Canadian neighbors mix colorfully in a new pattern. This comic collection relieves Homecoming Man’s deep pain.
You teach for seven years after Alfalfa, then retire early to knit a new, longer novel, more ambitious in structure, story, and characters than earlier offerings. After your daily five-kilometer run, mornings and afternoons fly by as you mold characters, tune dialogue. You stitch five main characters’ lives together like sleeves finally sewn on a sweater. In an interview you say, “500 words make a very good day.” How many 500-word days does it take to shape sentences and paragraphs, all blossoming into chapters full of color and honesty? Fourteen years after Alfalfa, you present us with Heron River, as lovely a novel as I have read in a long time. Long in the making, the wait was worth it. Thanks, Hugh Cook.
Heron River is also a physically attractive book. I wish the evocative cover photo of a blue heron by Jamie Felton were gracing a dust jacket on a hardcover rather than a paperback. This book merits a binding to endure repeat readings. Here Cook carries readers ever deeper into Canadian culture without abandoning the community that spun the yarns of earlier books. Now that immigrant community is second- and third-generation, its Dutch accent heard only softly in the whisper of Madeline’s invalid father. Madeline’s and her son Adam’s stories carry the other three characters and their interwoven plot-lines.
Adam, apparently an innocent like his biblical namesake, nevertheless lives with juvenile fantasies that other twentysomethings would have outgrown. Adam, however, is unlike his peers. As a boy, he fell into an unknown well hidden in his backyard. Nearly drowned, he recovered physically but suffered lasting brain damage. Like all of us, Adam lives a mix of joy and anguish; like of all us, he must make choices. Emily, who needs a room close to a bathroom, moves into his group home. Adam gives up his room reluctantly. In deep turmoil, he runs off, is rescued by a compassionate older gentleman, and resolves to live in his new room—a grand, difficult moral choice.
Madeline embraces her own deep suffering. Years earlier, burdened by guilt for not averting Adam’s accident, she finds her marriage dissolving. She teaches for years, even after developing multiple sclerosis that slowly shrinks her world. Still, she sees Adam almost daily, giving him as much independence as he can handle away from his group home. She also gently attends her father. Having not attended Bethel Church for years, Madeline is surprised by grace when she learns that the young pastor has been visiting her father too and reading him psalms in Dutch. Madeline: perhaps an echo of Magdalene, another enigmatic woman whose suffering was resurrected to loving loyalty by Jesus’ healing?
Cook also gives us Jacob, an adopted boy, no athlete like his sister, but clever. So clever that when he gets stop notices from his paper route customers, he breaks into their homes almost unnoticed. He doesn’t steal; he just wants to sate his curiosity. Or is he compensating for being adopted? Jacob’s a deceiver, all right, but also a confirmed Anglican. Cook massages that conflict movingly as the deceiver becomes an altar boy. Jacob agonizes over his own unworthiness. In the mystery of the Eucharist he finds grace that promises to turn deception into devotion. This is no deus ex machina but rather winsome gratia ex sacramento.
Evil flashes darkly in Orrin, a brutal young man with a broken past. His petty and larger violent crimes stain the stitches of the novel’s plot, reminding us that not even small-town Ontario is really safe.
The orderliness of benevolent law, so often caricatured today, draws the reader in through sympathetic policewoman Tara. Her tooth broken in the line of duty—among other daily indignities experienced on the job—does not turn her cynical. She remains a dedicated constable while also a gracious and graceful harried mother.
Cook places these people in the plain yet compellingly attractive geography of southwestern Ontario. Locals will recognize his “Lakeport” as Hamilton—a steely lunch-bucket town. “Caithness” could be Caledonia or Dunnville. The “lake” is Lake Erie. The road that Adam takes on his lonely hike to the lake could be any country road driven by farmers in pick-up trucks and the thousands of bikers heading to Port Dover every Friday the 13th.
In a time when we wander, often aimlessly, from career to career, to and from unknown places we try to make into homes, Heron River gives us a stirring literary hint that stability and order are not utopias but livable possibilities. Kathleen Norris in Dakota, Will D. Campbell in Forty Acres and a Goat, and Ronald Jager in Eighty Acres gave us palpable senses of place in memorable nonfiction. Now Hugh Cook has done that in 278 pages of multi-layered, high-reaching fiction that tells a lot of truth.
James C. Dekker is pastor of Covenant Christian Reformed Church in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
Back to the city.
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If you watch enough episodes of House Hunters, Property Virgins, or any of the other myriad reality shows in which people search for and eventually purchase a home, you will find that buyers, and especially young buyers, want three things (in no particular order): a kitchen with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, an open floor plan, and a location within walking distance of shops and restaurants. When I began to watch these shows a few years after my own move from the city to the suburbs of New York, I was a little surprised by how commonly this last factor was mentioned, especially by couples with children or children on the way. I nearly fell off the couch when I saw a young couple demanding that their realtor find them a place “within the Cleveland city limits.”
I once lived in a place with my husband where you could walk to everything—the park, the drycleaner, the independent bookstore, the coffee shop, the outrageously priced supermarket—but the idea of raising kids there barely occurred to me. My neighbors were in a constant battle with the landlord. They wanted to leave their strollers in the hallway so they could eke a few more feet of living space out of their cramped apartments; the landlord said it was a fire-code violation. It was ridiculous enough lugging our drycleaning and groceries back and forth—who could imagine doing it with kids in tow? We had no car: parking one would have required spending hours of our lives each week to play musical vehicles, or paying hundreds of dollars a month to put it in a garage 11 blocks away. Our neighborhood was safe by New York standards, but kids on our street were never allowed to play by themselves in the park a half-block away. Instead, their parents—who paid $40,000 a year to rent a two-bedroom apartment (I shudder to think what it is like now, ten years later)—tied a milk-crate to the lamppost and allowed them to shoot baskets on the sidewalk out front. And don’t even get me started on the public schools.
In other words, it seems clear to me that Michael Bloomberg was right when he said living in New York City was a “luxury good.” It turns out, though, that I am in a minority in my view of the impracticality of urban life for people with kids. And the evidence is not merely in reality shows, or among the folks in my old neighborhood who liked bringing their newborns to hip bars to hang out. As Alan Ehrenhalt argues in his new book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, “we are living in a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. And we need to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs and urban mobility as a result.”
In the 20th century, Ehrenhalt observes, “virtually every city in the country had a down-town, where the commercial life of the metropolis was conducted; it had a factory district just beyond; it had districts of working class apartment buildings just beyond that; it had residential suburbs for the wealthy and the upper middle class at the far end of the continuum …. People moved ahead in life by moving farther out.” Ehrenhalt’s evocative descriptions of the vibrancy of life in some European cities make one wonder how we even ended up with that arrangement. The boulevards of Paris designed by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann in the 1860s are a particularly fine example:
Haussmann was an artist of street furniture. The most trivial-seeming objects were designed with ingenuity and great care: Litter bins, sun and rain shelters, drinking fountains, public bathrooms, awnings, kiosks, pillars, and especially lampposts were decorated with silver or even small amounts of gold. The apartment buildings that lined the boulevards were highly desirable living spaces.
Observers at the time marveled at the tree-lined streets and the vibrant streetlife everywhere. One historian called it “an all-day circus and fair accessible to everyone.” As Ehrenhalt observes, “Those lucky enough to live in flats about these sidewalks could watch the circus from second- or fifth-floor balconies—and they could be watched themselves by pedestrians looking up from below.”
What relevance does any of this have for American cities? I couldn’t help but think of a t-shirt that became the running joke of my hometown in Massachusetts. It read: “Worcester: Paris of the 80s.” Still, it does seem as though there are modern American builders and architects who are paying attention to those desirable aspects of 19th-century city life. One builder in Phoenix who has had success putting up smaller apartments in the downtown area explains, “Life happens under five stories …. Everything above is just a place to pack people.” These European cities certainly were not perfect places. The lower classes mostly lived in squalor outside the city limits, but more Americans today seem to want these vibrant multi-use neighborhoods. Ehrenhalt, now Information Director at the Pew Center on the States, makes a convincing case that most of us want to live and work and socialize in the same places. Psychologically, perhaps, there is much to be said for this. Happiness studies (all the rage these days) suggest that people think moving into a bigger house with nice appliances will make them happier, but, in fact, reducing commuting time is the only real estate choice that seems to affect personal satisfaction in the long term.
A New Yorker piece a few years ago by Nick Paumgarten described people who drive two or three hours each way to get to their workplace. Nor was it a temporary situation for most of them—dealing with a long commute while a spouse looked for a closer job, for example. As Paumgarten wrote: “Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods. The number of commuters who travel ninety minutes or more each way—known to the Census Bureau as ‘extreme commuters’—has reached 3.5 million, almost double the number in 1990.” The people Paumgarten interviewed, though, were not wealthy. They were secretaries and workers in auto parts dealerships.
The lower classes now live further out. In fact, Ehrenhalt’s “Great Inversion” goes a long way to explaining how our biggest immigration conflicts seem to be happening in places like Hazelton, Pennsylvania. Immigrants don’t live on the Lower East Side anymore. Who can afford it? Instead we find that the suburbs of Atlanta have come to host one of the largest Hindu temples in the country.
The wealthier professionals have no desire, generally speaking, to spend a lot of time commuting. When they look for a home they want a fast way to work. They’re even willing to use public transportation. Ehrenhalt describes the rise of an inner suburb of Chicago called Sheffield. In 1970, it was riddled with crime and run by gangs. Today, writes Ehrenhalt, “it is rich …. It is a neighborhood of stable and substantial affluence where scarcely any of the people we normally consider gentrifiers can afford to live.” And Sheffield is only a 14-minute commute by train to downtown. Even people who don’t use public transportation tend to see the presence of a train or subway station as a sign of the kind of urban area they’d like to live in.
Still, funky cafés and attractive housing stock and a train stop do not by themselves make a hip urban enclave. You also need jobs. You need a city with some kind of economic activity. And Ehrenhalt, who was editor of Governing magazine, is careful to show how politicians, not just urban planners and architects, can make an urban area rise or fall. Whether it’s the burdensome public pension obligations of Philadelphia or the high taxes of Cleveland or the rampant crime of Detroit, the public policy issues are not going to go away by themselves. And young professionals are only willing to endure so much in order to live in one of these neighborhoods.
Ehrenhalt cites a number of studies showing that gentrification brings more benefits to neighborhoods than it takes away. But the Great Inversion is ultimately about much larger trends than just a few young professionals who want to find affordable urban housing. It’s about major demographic shifts that will occur in this country over the next few decades. Baby boomers have become empty nesters and have started to downsize and move to more central locations. Meanwhile, only about a quarter of American households will have children by 2030, compared with about half in the 1950s. More Americans are simply remaining single. And fewer are predicted to become homeowners, particularly after this current mortgage crisis. Who knows? Maybe Cleveland is bound for a comeback.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is working on a book about interfaith marriage to be published by Oxford University Press.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Noah J. Toly
A vision for cities of the future.
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With Aerotropolis: How We’ll Live Next, John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay have given us a sprawling parable of efficiency that begins with the true story of New Songdo, South Korea, a city already being built but not yet completed. With every square inch wired for the digital age and each residence and workstation equipped for video-conferencing, this “Cisco Smart+Connected” city could be built from scratch anywhere with an Internet connection. According to conventional wisdom, cheap land plus broadband ought to be the recipe for success. If place is elided by advances in communication and information technology, New Songdo—so it might seem—could be built in the middle of nowhere.
But New Songdo’s developers chose to break ground in the middle of everywhere. New Songdo is just minutes away from Incheon International Airport, one of the world’s newest and busiest hubs and the center of Asian air traffic. Along with its sustainability plan and IT architecture, the New Songdo website highlights the city’s accessibility to the rest of the world—”3.5 hours to 1/3 of the world’s population”—suggesting that globalization is at least as much about the efficient movement of people and goods as it is about the transmission of ideas. When complete, New Songdo will be “the urban incarnation of the physical internet.”
The book’s greatest insights are reserved for the seeming paradox of increasing urbanization in an age of globalization. Why is human settlement at unprecedented density occurring at the same moment as an unmatched movement of people, goods, and ideas? What is the relationship between extraordinary concentration and unparalleled diffusion? The answer is that “every technology meant to circumvent distances electronically … will only stoke our desire to traverse it ourselves,” and as time is increasingly valuable, so is the ability to travel the globe at record speed. People gravitate toward places that provide the infrastructure necessary for air travel and transport, “crowding closer together so we can scatter across continents on a moment’s notice.” This union of “the Jet Age and the Net Age simultaneously [favors] aggregation and dispersal,” changing the three rules of real estate from “location, location, location” to “accessibility, accessibility, accessibility.” Rather than settling in cities principally because of their characteristic propinquity—the density of relations between actors within a community—we settle in cities mainly because of their network of relations to other cities around the world. Today, those networks are connected by sophisticated infrastructure for air travel and transport.
This helps explain the growing populations of existing cities with excellent air-travel infrastructure—Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo. But these “proto-aerotropoli”—cities inefficiently and only incidentally built up around older airports—will not accommodate the burgeoning population of globe-trotting urbanites. The new wine of the global-urban age would burst the old wineskins of these accidental hubs. Anyone who has traveled through Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest airports, knows that London cannot sustain large future increases in air traffic without major, and probably controversial, overhauls. What the world needs are hundreds of New Songdos, purpose-driven cities built for access to the rest of the world.
Kasarda and Lindsay make their case in a well-written and fast-paced account of the challenges, dilemmas, and potentialities of organizing human community around a node in the worldwide air transport network. Kasarda is a sociologist and business professor. Lindsay is a journalist who regularly writes about globalization and technology. While Kasarda didn’t invent the term “aerotropolis,” it’s fair to say that he pioneered the constellation of concepts most important to the plans of aerotropolis boosters. In 1991, his “Global Air Cargo-Industrial Complex” modeled urban agglomerations intended to link up once again the factories, call centers, branch offices, and headquarters that had dispersed all over the world since the early 1970s. At the turn of the century, “Plans for the aerotropolis sprang from Kasarda’s head fully formed … as a way to explain this, control it, plan for it … and maximize it.” Since then, the itinerant Kasarda has formulated and sold plans to dozens of cities suggesting what they must do to obtain prosperity in our globalizing world. Recently, he has collaborated with Lindsay to popularize the aerotropolis concept. Kasarda is the brains behind the work, while Lindsay is the brawn, in a pen-is-mightier sort of way. Together the enterprising pair spreads the good news of Aerotropolis Business Concepts™.
The book is an easy read that sheds light on global commerce, airports, and the shapes of the cities that surround them. The authors’ ambition to balance accessibility, clarity, and academic sensibility is both palpable and admirable, even if unfulfilled. Concepts like Saskia Sassen’s “global cities,” Richard Florida’s “spiky world,” David Harvey’s “spatial fix,” and Manuel Castells’ “network society,” which have sometimes felt too big and too complex even for these authors’ own lengthy expositions, predictably confound Lindsay’s attempts to relate them in a sentence or two. While it is easy to see the relevance of these landmark works in sociology and geography, such perfunctory treatment merely signals to insiders that the authors have done their homework.
The book also falls short in communicating governance challenges facing would-be aerotropoli. Choices about where and how to invest scarce resources to advance the common good are complicated. Should resources be invested in education, pollution abatement, community development, or a world-class airport to attract thriving corporations? How do benefits accruing to the transnationally mobile relate to the challenges of cities with large communities of relatively immobile citizens? These thorny issues involve difficult tradeoffs. Yet much of Aerotropolis leaves readers with the impression that the weightiest decision facing planners might be like the dilemma faced by Orange County, California—a choice described by Kasarda and Lindsay as an existential crisis over whether to “become the new Silicon Valley or preserve the gilded country club America imagined as the O.C.” How tragic.
Still, the most disturbing aspect of Aerotropolis is its thoroughgoing embrace of efficiency, what French social theorist Jacques Ellul called “technique,” or the “one best way.” In 2006, The New York Times included “Aerotropolis” on its list of “The Year in Ideas,” where it was joined by such inventions and schemes as “The Social Cue Reader,” an “Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthesis” meant to take subjectivity out of human relationships; “Tushology,” the quantification of the human backside in pursuit of the perfect buttocks (because “if you stand naked and stare backward into the mirror, you have to confront reality”); and “Wine that Ages Instantly.” While they betray the scope of technique, neither relying on gadgets to read social cues nor depending on systems for shapely derrieres portends the sort of dystopian world with which Ellul was preoccupied. And while the longtime resident of Bordeaux would likely have been appalled at “Wine that Ages Instantly,” it is the aerotropolis that most troublingly submits to technique as a norming norm for social relations.
An “aerotropolis is an urban machine not for living but for competition,” the one best way to organize human life for increasing interconnectedness in the global economy. All other aspects of human community and urbanism are subordinated to this demand for efficiency. For example, we may like to think that cities grow up more or less organically, developing their own aesthetic imprint, but aerotropoli are being built with the aesthetic sensibility of Disneyworld’s Wilderness Lodge, where simulacra reign. While Kasarda and Lindsay skewer pre-worn façades and faux neighborhoods, they suggest we will simply have to live with a spooky lack of the cultural depth that typically characterizes even the most antiseptic suburb. Efficiency rules.
The authors are nevertheless sanguine about the contributions of aerotropoli to a sustainable and just future. They admit that the rapid deployment of new cities to serve the needs of global air transit carries massive environmental risks and tends to compromise democratic practice, but they trumpet the aerotropolis as our only hope for sustainability and equity in a cutthroat world where, as Ellul suggests, “Efficiency is a fact; justice is a slogan.” In our technological society, only wholehearted devotion to technique holds any promise of saving the planet or the poor. Anything less flirts with disaster.
At this point, Aerotropolis evokes the conclusion of Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. Judge Holden, his ruthless band of mercenaries having met its demise, accuses one of its few surviving members, “the kid,” of undermining the group’s success through lukewarm commitment when only complete submission would do: “It was required of no man to give more than he possessed nor was any man’s share compared to another’s. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not.” Aerotropolis leaves the impression that Kasarda and Lindsay feel the same way about global air-transport nodes. If the future holds social and environmental oblivion, we will have only our halfhearted commitment to aerotropolis, “the logic of globalization made flesh,” to blame.
The subtitle of Aerotropolis suggests a descriptive account: how we will live next. But for those with ears to hear, the extended parable betrays a normative argument: how we should live next. According to Kasarda and Lindsay, if we want to compete in the arena of the global economy—and compete we must—then we should organize human community in the service of efficiency, though it may efface all other ends. We should empty our hearts into the common and demonstrate unwavering commitment to making cities in the image of efficiency. Luckily, we will soon have a model of such surrender. The kingdom of efficiency is like New Songdo, and it is close at hand.
Noah Toly is director of the Urban Studies Program and associate professor of urban studies and politics & international relations at Wheaton College.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Jesse Covington, Maurice Lee, Sarah L. Skripsky, and Lesa Stern
Teaching and Christian practices.
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For the last several years, the four of us have met weekly to eat, pray, and explore texts on Christianity and education. Against the backdrop of these working lunches—sustained with food, punctuated by laughter, and formed by friendship—one book has proven especially thought-provoking. In Desiring the Kingdom (Baker Academic, 2009), James K. A. Smith argues that we humans are social creatures of embodied, meaning-filled habits. That may not sound like a controversial thesis—on the face of it, who would disagree?—but Smith unpacks it and situates it against some notions that have wide currency, especially in the evangelical world.
Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning
David I. Smith (Editor), James K. A. Smith (Editor), Dorothy C. Bass (Foreword), Craig Dykstra (Foreword)
Eerdmans
237 pages
$20.25
When we read Desiring the Kingdom last year, we were particularly stimulated by Smith’s critique of “worldview” models of Christian education as overly cognitive and individualistic, to the neglect of the communal practices (“liturgies”) that shape human affections toward a particular vision of the life worth living (“the Kingdom of God”). We were therefore delighted to have the opportunity to read the newly published collection of essays Teaching and Christian Practices (TCP), edited by James Smith and his Calvin College colleague David I. Smith, with contributors from a variety of American Christian colleges and universities. The authors of TCP undertook to integrate classic Christian practices into their teaching and mentoring of students, and the book reports and reflects on the results. As we made our way through the book, four questions in particular emerged as thematic for our discussions: What is “Christian” about these practices? How do people change? What does TCP teach us about pedagogy? What might have to be sacrificed in order to create space for such practices?
What Is “Christian” About These Practices?
From the front cover to the last page of text, the modifier “Christian” characterizes the practices being recounted and analyzed. There’s nothing wrong with that—in fact, it seems only appropriate, given the book’s focus on “the practices involved in teaching and learning … in an explicitly Christian frame.” However, one might reasonably ask: What, precisely, makes a practice “Christian”? The editors endorse the definition offered by Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra: Christian practices are “things Christian people do over time in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the life of the world.” The salutary result is to widen the set of “Christian practices” considerably beyond baptism, Eucharist, prayer, and Bible study. But is it sufficient to say that practices are Christian because they are what Christians do?
This question is worth asking because what is at stake in the book’s proposal is the specifically Christian formation of students in specifically Christian educational contexts. But the kinds of practices at issue are not religiously neutral, encoding a generic, featureless spirituality which becomes “Christian” simply by virtue of being exercised by Christians. Practices form persons according to particular narratives, particular visions of the “good life.” The recurring arguments over the legitimately Christian use of certain forms of meditation, for example, are about whether the internal logic of such practices—the story they tell—runs counter to the formation of genuinely Christian faith and life.
How, then, is a given practice to be identified as “Christian”? One possible criterion might be membership on a “historic” list—a list appealed to (although never fully spelled out) by TCP. But this does not help us to understand why these practices form people as Christians. To their credit, the contributors to TCP pause often, as they narrate their experiences, to reflect on the significance of the practices they describe. For Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, for example, Christian practices contribute to “Christ-like” character and living. For Carolyne Call, hospitality involves “recognizing the stranger before us (as Christ or as the image of God).” For Julie A. P. Walton, in shared meals “Christians … acknowledge that all food is God’s providential gift.” For Ashley Woodiwiss, pilgrimage is “a form of spiritual worship.” And so forth.
Implicit—and usually very far from the surface—in these accounts of Christian practices is their grounding in God as specifically identified, as truly revealed, in the mutual love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. At one point, David Smith signals agreement with Miroslav Volf: “Practices are Christian insofar as they are ‘resonances’ of God’s engagement with the world.” But God’s “engagement” with the world has a form, a face: that of Jesus Christ. Practices such as testimony and hospitality, pilgrimage and liturgical time-keeping—not to mention baptism and Eucharist—conform persons to Christ as they enter by the Spirit into Jesus’ concrete life of obedience to his Father, the God of Israel. Practices find their meaning and coherence in a community whose historical memory celebrates God’s mighty acts on behalf of his people, culminating in Jesus, and whose anticipation of the future is animated by the Spirit of that same God. Practices open to personal and social experience often a foretaste of the world reconciled, renewed, and at peace within the triune God’s embrace. Thus Christian practices affirm both the sacramental goodness of the created order and the transformative teleology of creation’s redemption, as given and as promised by the Trinity.
All of this will certainly be familiar to readers of Books & Culture. So what exactly is the point? Are we complaining that the authors of TCP should have articulated more explicitly the distinctively Christian—the Trinitarian, ecclesial, and eschatological—nature of the practices they depict and commend? Not necessarily. Perhaps such articulation is adequately reserved to separate, more “theoretical” treatments such as the very fine chapter by Paul J. Griffiths, “From Curiosity to Studiousness.” And, of course, simply stating the Christian content of the practices in question risks the unbalanced privileging of the cognitive that an attention to practices is meant to resist. The “Christianness” of Christian practices is to be not only understood and told, but also lived. But in whatever mode, it would be worth asking and answering, more deeply and more positively—assuming agreement with TCP‘s high estimation of the role of practices in forming faithful people—what makes Christian practices Christian. The authors’ students, their colleagues (including readers), and their churches would benefit.
How Do People Change?
By focusing on the formative role of behaviors, the authors of TCP evoke Aristotle’s well-known account of habituated virtue: “[S]tates of character arise out of like activities …. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another …; it makes … all the difference” (Nicomachean Ethics, II, 1). Here, Aristotle appears at odds with the New Testament’s heart-centered model of the human person. “Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit,” Jesus says. “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Matt. 12:33-34, NIV). Can Jesus’ words be reconciled with Aristotle’s? In TCP (just as in Desiring the Kingdom), readers are confronted with the neo-orthodox challenge of Smith and others: can’t behavioral fruit produce changes in the tree itself? The praxis-oriented re-visioning of education in TCP requires exploring the extent to which people change from the inside out (renewed cognitions and hearts which then bear fruit in action), and the extent to which they change from the outside in (modified actions producing reformed hearts and cognitions). TCP‘s authors treat this puzzle in largely constructive and encouraging ways. Indeed, many of the chapters resist dichotomies that give absolute priority to interiority or exteriority, instead offering (or assuming) a more complex interrelation of the two.
One feature of interiority that is central to education is cognition. Are humans creatures for whom thoughts lead and behaviors follow, or do cognitions follow our practices? Perhaps retreating from the linearity of his claim in Desiring the Kingdom that “we are the sorts of animals whose orientation to the world is shaped from the body up more than from the head down,” in TCP Jamie Smith apparently rejects a practice-reflection dichotomy. While other accounts in TCP seem to make similar assumptions, DeYoung offers explicit elaboration: “So we need practices, and we need reflection on practices. Practices enhance and expand our reflection, and reflection enriches and sustains our practices.”
A second aspect of interiority that is central to a Christian understanding of education and formation is the regenerative and sanctifying role of the Holy Spirit. The editors touch on this point in their introduction, and David Smith’s concluding chapter helpfully recognizes that practices are not decisively causal for students’ formation—Christian practices offer no guarantees of success. Likewise, DeYoung resists any mechanistic construal of habituation, firmly relying on divine participation rather than human efforts. Moreover, Griffiths observes that the formative nature of liturgy is most active in the corporate worship of the church, emphasizing its dependence on God as initiator and primary teacher. While some of TCP‘s authors are less explicit about God’s role in formative change, what they propose and assume throughout is certainly more theological than Aristotle’s account of habituation.
Of further interest are developments that connect various aspects of formation—an area in which community features prominently. DeYoung suggests that humility and willing submission to the practices of a tradition show an internal acknowledgement that one needs to be formed by external influences. In reflecting on faith-based revisions to his Western Civilization courses, Glenn E. Sanders lists “community-building” and friendship as two of the practices “essential in a classroom engaged with moral and spiritual concerns.” David Smith’s concluding argument that people change in community suggests an outside-in aspect to transformation but may also begin to hint at reconfiguring what identity is in view: within the church, change may occur from the inside out corporately, but this dynamic may also mean that individuals embedded in such communities are shaped individually from the outside in by the church’s alternative practices. Ongoing thinking about the nature of the college-as-community and its relation to the church could prove an important exploration.
TCP offers helpful developments in these ongoing conversations. More needs to be said about practices in relation to how formation occurs. Among many facets, such reflections might fruitfully explore how God’s grace can be actively mediated by and manifested in multiple, interrelated modes—including cognition, affections, behaviors, and communities.
What Does TCP Teach Us About Pedagogy?
In addition to thinking about what makes practices “Christian” and the ways these practices affect change, TCP prompts faculty to question how to make tangible changes in teaching. Faculty members in various disciplines share their attempts to make pedagogical changes and reflect on the effects of those changes. What can the reader learn from these narratives? Rather than providing definitive answers or models, these essays prompt faculty to experiment with and reflect on their own pedagogies. First of all, the authors ask questions relating pedagogy to faith. Some of those questions include how to model Christian faith in their classrooms and how they are different from faculty who do not profess such faith. Additionally, TCP prompts us to think about how faith affects how we define and model “excellence” within the classroom.
Most of the contributors spend considerable time reflecting on pedagogy in relation to challenges of student engagement and spiritual change, as well as the overall manageability of practice integration. It is apparent that the changes instituted in courses are just the beginning of spiritual growth. That is, desired effects are meant to transcend any individual course. What kinds of practices might be best within the context of a Christian college to help students adopt healthy, long-term habits of heart and mind? Are there certain practices that are best to introduce students to at this developmental stage in their faith and life? Carolyne Call reflects on how she practiced hospitality—how can a hospitable classroom invite dignified student engagement with the instructor, peers, and course content? Walton wonders if eating a meal together would help promote a collaborative spirit in a class typically seen as competitive.
These and other chapters raise additional questions related to embedding practices within specific courses but also related to holistic change in students. For example, given that there may be many different ways (practices) to encourage change in the hearts and minds of students, which practices (and how many of them) should the faculty member choose per course? TCP practices ranged from shared dining to fasting, from testimony and confession to observing the liturgical calendar. As readers, we wonder which practices are best engaged in together (such as prayer and fasting, as opposed to just fasting alone). Another challenge to integration is how often to “practice a practice” to have the intended effect. Walton had students eat together twice during the semester: is this frequent enough to be called a “practice”? And even if this fellowship has a positive effect on student relationships, is it teaching the right kind of lesson about fellowship? Others in TCP wonder whether a class that meets once a week is enough to achieve the depth of a Christian practice. Is it enough to talk about a practice and then model it once with students, encouraging them to continue the practices outside of class on their own time? Given the time constraints of many college classrooms, it’s worth reflecting on practices that can be faithfully enacted within a limited amount of time. Faculty do not want to cheapen a practice nor stunt its effects by rushing. Conversely, if such practices are more expansively practiced, faculty may struggle with how often they should require these practices when the practices are to be undertaken outside of class hours.
Related challenges for faculty include choosing appropriate practices and making those choices manageable. Do faculty always have to choose Christian practices with clear con-nections to the course? Might a professor adopt a practice that is not directly related to course content? For example, Kurt Schaefer notes that while his teaching of econometrics has little obvious relationship to practices such as prayer and confession, he “wanted to adopt … practices … connected to the epistemic distinctives” he sought for students. Similarly, TCP‘s authors chose the targeted practices for their students. We wonder if the students could choose practices of their own as a means of ownership of learning and personal transformation. Even if the students choose practices not as clearly appropriate as what faculty might have instituted, would there not be significant value in a cooperative process and shared vision rather than a teacher’s well-developed plan?
TCP also motivates reflection on which practices are best left for the church (such as communion) and which practices are best for the college context. We do not believe that a Christian college is a substitute for the church. However, Christian practices in the context of a college course might better support and extend the role of the church. Similarly, these readings prompt us to consider if there are practices that are corporate by nature (or should be practiced in groups where people have a commitment to one another) and other practices that are more individual.
In addition, TCP highlights the challenge of students’ varied religious backgrounds and knowledge. Just as we can no longer assume substantial biblical literacy, even among the much-churched of our first-year students, we also cannot assume that students know much about Christian practices such as prayer or meditation. Therefore, TCP contributors note that they had to spend time educating and preparing students for these practices. How much time and depth should be provided such that students have a shared vision before a practice is instituted? Is it acceptable for students to “learn by doing” without the background knowledge? Faculty cannot assume that what students “take away” will match what was intended—hence, course reflection, assessment, and refinement may be needed. Given that student learning from Christian practices may vary, reflective exercises seem critical and are a common theme in TCP. Such exercises (whether written, conversational, or otherwise) deepen student understanding and also provide opportunities for faculty to answer questions or deal with misconceptions that arise.
Faculty also note a range of positive and negative effects for themselves. How may faculty be impacted spiritually, emotionally, and relationally by engaging in these practices? The quest for faith-learning integration can take a toll on faculty and students alike (in terms of resource and time costs) but may also offer fruits to the faithful (DeYoung and Sanders). In considering relative costs and merits of applied Christian practices in higher education, we might imagine multiple models for such integration.
What Might Have to Be Sacrificed?
It’s no secret that Christian higher education tends to be under-resourced in both financial and human terms. We are vulnerable to economic stressors as well as ideological stressors. We may also be under-resourced in imagination, as David Smith suggests in his closing chapter, “Recruiting Students’ Imaginations.” In Smith’s view, faculty must not only require students to practice Christian behaviors but also stir students’ imaginations to participate in a shared vision of the “good life”—envisioning, desiring, and pursuing the Kingdom together. Yet in responding to the imaginings of TCP, we should also consider the practical pressures of adding or extending Christian practices within academic programs that may already feel saturated by a mass of academic standards and goals. Christian practices seem necessary for faithful living, but we may understandably question the practicality of these practices within our institutional environments.
So how might we, as Christian educators, newly imagine the integration of faithful teaching practices? Three distinct models emerge from such practical imagining: two models emerge quickly (as a false binary), and one more slowly (as a third way). The first two models are supplemental and sacrificial integrations: we must either supplement our academic teaching practices and goals with Christian practices, or we must sacrifice something from our current habits in order to “prepare the way” for faithful disciplines. However, these models assume a limited, material economy: do Christian practices really occupy curricular space and time in the same way as traditional academic elements do? And if so, what are the consequences?
If we conceive of “space for God” in higher education in terms of time for something like reflection on practices (e.g., Walhout’s “reflective infrastructure” of labyrinthine learning), then perhaps we must concern ourselves with traditional academic and material economies. If we do, we might consider supplementing existing courses with unusual field trips (e.g., Woodiwiss’ pilgrimages) or more traditional supplements (e.g., labs and discussion groups) without sacrificing any content or lowering any standards. We might also link courses more closely to existing chapel, ministry, or student life programs and rely on campus staff to help students practice Christian behaviors (indeed, much of Christian higher education already relies on this staff-driven supplemental model). However, the supplemental model assumes that “more is more” and can overburden faculty, staff, and students alike without attending to Christian disciplines in which “less is more” (e.g., silence or fasting). In holding to supplemental imaginings, we may unintentionally mimic the frantic pace of the rat race rather than walking faithfully and reflectively in Christ’s steps. If such supplements require investments of human or financial resources, we may also anticipate resistance from those stewarding resources in climates of significant stress.
Another option is to address academic economies boldly and counter-culturally, reflecting on what we may sacrifice from academic habits in order to allow more space and time for Christian practices. In a sense, this model claims that “less is more”—or even that “more God is more.” In promoting charitable approaches to reading, David Smith was willing to make “some modest sacrifices of previously assigned texts” in order to allow time for repeat readings of a single poet, among other attempts at charitable reading. While some may understandably resist sacrificing any academic content for faith-learning integration, we might profitably consider alternative standards of (behavioral) excellence from within the Christian tradition, standards typically ignored by the contemporary academy.
Finally, a third way for integration emerges: the way of synergy. Rather than assuming that integration of Christian practices necessarily requires either supplementing or sacrificing, we should imagine possible synergies among traditional academic standards and alternative Christian standards and practices. In this imagining, we can seek surprising, high-impact practices in which either “less” or “more” can be “most.” DeYoung found that implementing rhythms of practice and reflection on practice in her philosophy class allowed space for powerful metacognition as well as motivation for her students to teach peers in residence halls about vices and their remedies. Her pedagogical model included sacrifices of speech (i.e., a week of silence about the self) as well as supplements of speech (such as “reflective theorizing”). Such synergism between sacrifice and supplement can lead to students’ deeper comprehension of philosophical content (a traditional academic teleology) as well as more powerful self-examination as part of spiritual formation (a Christian teleology). A number of TCP‘s contributors demonstrate such imaginative, synergistic relationships among Christian practices and student learning, engaging with high-impact practices.
Jesse Covington (assistant professor, political science), Maurice Lee (assistant professor, religious studies), Sarah L. Skripsky (assistant professor, English),and Lesa Stern (associate professor, communication studies) teach at Westmont College.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Caleb J. D. Maskell
An anthropologist at the Vineyard.
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T. M. Luhrmann’s fascinating new book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, is an attempt to understand how is it possible for a living God to become real to modern evangelicals. To be a 21st-century modern, she claims, is to live in a technologically-mediated world built on the fruits of reductionist scientific skepticism and devoted to the empirical evidence of the senses. Modernity thus poses unique challenges to American evangelicalism, whose democratic, existential, individualistic faith calls people to stand before God and hope for what their eyes do not see and their ears do not hear. Such faith, she says, “asks people to consider that the evidence of their senses is wrong.” How can this tension be overcome?
When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God
T.M. Luhrmann (Author)
464 pages
$36.59
The answer, according to Luhrmann, lies in sets of practices that allow “evangelicals” (we’ll come back to that) to cultivate what she calls a “new theory of mind” by which God is experienced as an intimate, unconditionally loving, best friend who communicates personally with believers—a God who “talks back.” Luhrmann argues that it is the inner experience of this personal communicative relationship in the imagination of her subjects that overcomes the disabling effects of skepticism about many other aspects of Christian faith. God’s presence in the imagination is more powerful than God’s apparent absence in the disenchanted sensorium, and, in fact, attention to God’s presence in the imagination often leads subsequently to sensory manifestations. Doubt about God’s presence does not disappear for Luhrmann’s subjects because of this imaginative exercise—the difference is that they can meet doubt with a cognitive subjective relational response, as opposed to an empirical argument. Like Job, they can say in the face of radical alienation, “I know my Redeemer lives.”
Luhrmann saw these practices in action over the course of several years by immersing herself as a participantobserver in the lives of two Vineyard churches near the universities where she taught, first in Chicago and then in Palo Alto. She joined Bible studies and prayer groups and attended weekly services and occasional worship nights. She sang songs, read Scripture, retained a spiritual director, and spent hours, formally and informally, with Vineyard congregants. But most of all she prayed. Vineyard people, she discovered, pray all the time, and it is in the context of these practices of prayer that God is most often experienced as alive and communicative. Thus, the core of Luhrmann’s book is an examination of responses to a wide variety of theologically rooted and therapeutically self-conscious practices of prayer, designed to train the imagination of individual participants to know God as real, personal, and unconditionally loving.
This cognitive training is not about adopting a particular style of prayer. In her experience of the Vineyard there is no formula for praying correctly. All that is required is willingness to risk and expectation manifested in concrete practices. First, one must be open to the possibility that, if one prays and waits, God might speak, and second, one must undertake practices that reinforce that openness. For example, some of her subjects self-consciously took conversational prayer walks with Jesus. Another rode the bus with Jesus. One pastor suggested that congregants pray while drinking morning coffee, and set out a second cup of coffee for Jesus. This practice was intended to reify the reality of his presence and the possibility that he might speak—everyone involved knew that it was an imaginative exercise. If the coffee from Jesus’ cup began to disappear, sip by sip, this would have been cause for extreme alarm. The point was not that Jesus might drink your coffee, but rather that the pursuit of practices in which imaginative space was made for God to speak would lead, more than likely, to an experience of God speaking.
And this was precisely what Luhrmann’s subjects reported. When God Talks Back narrates a wide variety of experiences of divine communication on a broad spectrum of specificity, from a general but palpable sense of God’s protective presence in their affairs to very acute auditory and visual cues—some perceived internally (i.e., feeling in inner impression) and some, rarely, perceived externally (i.e., an audible voice). These experiences were not received uncritically by most of the people Luhrmann describes, but rather subjected to an array of criteria for discernment, often discussed in community: Did the experience bring peace? Was it surprising? Was it distressing? Was it consonant with the character of God as known in Scripture? And so on. (In a chapter cheerily entitled “But Are They Crazy?”, Luhrmann argues that this process of discernment is one of the major ways that her subjects are distinguished from psychotics.) If, after this process, the experience seemed kosher, then it was admitted as possibly having been the voice of God. And possibly not. It remained up to the individual to make that determination—this is, after all, a story of American evangelical spirituality, crackling with contingency and volition.
In this way, the Vineyard churches that Luhrmann studied established a culture that encouraged imaginative practices of the presence of God. In technical terms, they were promoting a “participatory theory of mind,” involving the development of a “porous … mind-world barrier” in which the individual learns to become open to the possibility of perceiving mental interaction with a living God. Charles Taylor has famously argued in A Secular Age that the disappearance of the “porous self” is one of the chief characteristics of modern disenchantment, and that such a state is attainable in our moment only through a lens of nostalgia, declension, and loss. Luhrmann’s account of the Vineyard suggests something entirely other than this—that Vineyard spirituality brooks no sense of loss, but in a thoroughly modern, therapeutic mode, actively cultivates practices of enchantment.
Luhrmann’s most striking finding, developed through descriptions of participant observation as well as a controlled social-scientific study, is that people get better at hearing God through practice. By repeatedly praying with the kind of imaginative openness described above, her subjects could increase the frequency with which they heard God speak to them. She describes a handful of psychological experiments based on the Tellegen Absorption Scale, originally developed to study hypnosis and “openness to … self-altering experiences,” which contain two key findings. First, some people do have more of an inherent aptitude for imaginatively interacting with God as a living, loving person; and second, even those with minimal natural aptitude reported improvement as they worked at it.
For some people, particularly Christians who don’t go in for this sort of thing, the notion that God speaks more to people who practice hearing him can raise eyebrows. In drawing this conclusion, Luhrmann does not intend to demythologize the experience of her subjects. But she does intend to explain, at least partially, how their experience works cognitively. Her account of this way of experiencing God is voluntaristic, imaginative, and collaborative; God’s communication is known subjectively in the mind but is best interpreted in community. It is also paradoxical; God becomes a personal friend, and his presence can be sensed as close, but God is also an object of pursuit and mystery. Indeed, several of Luhrmann’s interviewees suggest that the process of pursuing God’s communication adds to the sense of God’s intimacy. Again, practice brings improvement. Luhrmann’s is a complex picture, and so it should be.
What is irreducibly important to the whole process is having a little faith, manifested via imaginative risk, that God’s voice can actually be heard. This belief is not new, of course. There is an extensive tradition of this kind of imaginative prayer in Christianity, represented archetypally by the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. The significance of the appropriation of this tradition by Vineyard churches is not that it is an innovation but rather that it’s a practical democratization of imaginative Catholic mystical practice, teaching such spiritual techniques as a basic part of the toolkit that enable modern people to know God without having to surrender the benefits of a world built on technologies of skepticism.
On the merits of its sharp analysis alone, When God Talks Back deserves the highest praise. What is more, Luhrmann is also a mellifluous writer. Throughout its nearly four hundred pages of descriptive analysis, When God Talks Back grasps the reader in a manner more akin to a well-paced novel than a work of social science. It is an outstanding contribution to the genre of erudite, sympathetic literary study of religious practice made famous by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Questions linger, of course. Luhrmann, who states that she does not identify as a Christian, is clearly trying to change the way that evangelicals are perceived in popular culture by considering them in light of the practices of their spirituality rather than via the threadbare tropes of “swing-vote politics” and “anti-pluralist theology.” While even this move elicits contempt from some quarters—the early New Yorker review seemed most worried about the extent to which Luhrmann had “gone native” due to her sympathetic relationship to her subjects—it has by and large been quite successful. Luhrmann’s book exposes an important strain of contemporary American spirituality by asking questions about desire, getting at the identity of her subjects less by asking who they are, theologically and politically, than who they intend to become, spiritually. This is a productive line of inquiry, though of course limited by what it brackets. It would be very interesting to know about the politics of her subjects, for instance. Do their practices of intimacy promote any particular political commitments? It would also be interesting to hear more explicit analysis of the gender dynamics in the book—much of the language that Luhrmann’s subjects use to describe their experiences of God is gendered, and many of her most responsive subjects are female. Surely this has significance.[1] But when a book is already 434 pages, one can forgive an author for what she leaves out.
Does When God Talks Back “explain the American evangelical relationship with God,” as the subtitle promises? It is clear that something akin to the experiential spirituality that Luhrmann describes has been present throughout the history of American evangelicalism. From Jonathan Edwards’ rhapsodic account of his conversion to Charles Finney’s experience of “waves of liquid love” to the chorus of C. Austin Miles’ famous hymn “In The Garden,” in which Jesus “walks with me … talks with me … and tells me I am his own,” it is clear that Luhrmann’s everyday mystics did not emerge de novo, strumming guitars and drinking coffee with the Ancient of Days.
Epistemic crisis has a history in American evangelicalism as well. In 1829, James Marsh, a Congregational minister and president of the University of Vermont, published an popular American edition of Coleridge’s Aids To Reflection with an influential prefatory essay arguing that orthodoxy required a new “philosophy of mind” to overcome the corrosive effects of empiricist doubt on the foundations of propositional belief. Marsh’s solution: the rehabilitation of the reflective imagination as a cognitive faculty whereby the presence of God could be known, internally and directly. The parallels to Luhrmann’s story are unmistakable.
Luhrmann suggests, however, that Vineyard churches are representative of a sea change in the story of American evangelicalism in which the “wrathful God” of Jonathan Edwards was gradually replaced by a “new American Christ,” best known personally, as an intimate lover, and without too much theological interpretation. Here, her historical account is too simplistic. There is not, nor has there ever been, anything like univocality in American evangelical culture. As Thomas Kidd, Mark Noll, Catherine Brekus, Curtis Evans, Gary Dorrien, and many others have shown, theological, experiential, and stylistic diversity is a constant in the American evangelical experience. Luhrmann acknowledges this diversity, but the acknowledgment does not make her dependence on the category any less problematic.
For example, Luhrmann is right that there are large numbers of self-identified American evangelicals today who do not instinctively think about God in traditional Protestant theological categories of sin and grace, judgment and redemption, and so on. But there are also large numbers who do. I would venture that many of them are helped through their battles with modern doubt by theology. It is true that fewer pastors will preach about hell this Sunday than would have in 1712—and this is not insignificant. But it does not mean that American evangelicals as a group have generally ceased to think in theological categories, or even that hell has ceased to be a meaningful concept in evangelical discourse. The recent racket over Rob Bell’s Love Wins gives the lie to that suggestion.
The decline in preaching about God’s wrath does, however, seem to reflect a change in the way that evangelicals perceive the needs of the people in their pews. Here we can come back around to Luhrmann’s observation about late modern doubt. Since the 1960s, the American Protestant church has undergone a crisis of authority. In the face of burgeoning pluralism and the rise of religiously unaffiliated “Nones,” amply documented by Robert Putnam and David Campbell in American Grace, it has had to directly face the question of why anyone should listen to anything that it has to say. People generally don’t come to church worried about their eternal destiny any more. Rather they come suspecting that God is alive and wondering whether Christians can help them find him. When God Talks Back beautifully documents the response of one stream of American Christian piety to this shift. I am uncertain about whether or not the Vineyard churches that Luhrmann studied are actually representative of broader trends in evangelical spirituality. Indeed, there are many people in Vineyard churches who love Vineyard spiritual practices precisely because they cultivate an epistemic approach to knowing God that is at variance from some other version of evangelicalism, whose propositions they came to doubt, in just the way that Luhrmann describes. This is not an argument, of course, but an observation. So the question remains: Is the thoroughgoing practical epistemic supernaturalism Luhrmann describes typical of American evangelical experience? She draws on resonances with the teaching of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels to suggest that it is. I am not (yet) convinced—Luhrmann’s account is chiefly about Vineyard spirituality. Only further study will show how much more widely her observations can be applied.
I am comforted in my questioning by the certainty that much further scholarship will emerge in the wake of When God Talks Back. This book is here to stay, and every scholar, church leader, and pundit who cares about American evangelical culture is the better for it. It will reshape the study of American spirituality for years to come.
1. Luhrmann has since written an article for Christianity Today that reflects on these dynamics. See christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/mayweb-only/why-women-hear-god.html
Caleb J. D. Maskell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Princeton University, studying religion in America. He also leads the Steering Committee of the Society of Vineyard Scholars.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Jerry Pattengale
Assessing a revisionist account.
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In The Bible Now, Richard Elliot Friedman and Shawna Dolansky set out to clarify “what the Bible has to say about major issues of our time.” They believe that on a range of “controversial matters: homosexuality, abortion, women’s status, capital punishment, and the earth,” appeals to biblical authority are routinely based on misreadings and misunderstandings. Moreover, they say, these distortions are not limited to one side on this or that issue. What’s needed, then, is the bright light of “critical biblical scholarship.” At the same time, Friedman and Dolansky say in their preface, they seek to address
The Bible Now
Richard Elliott Friedman (Author), Shawna Dolansky (Author)
Oxford University Press
220 pages
$23.85
orthodox and fundamentalist readers with courtesy and respect. And as long as we keep to the facts and to honest method, what we have to share from our research should be useful to both traditional and critical, religious and not-religious, readers.
Friedman is an eminent scholar, widely published; his coauthor, Dolanksy, is the author of a book on magic and religion in the Hebrew Bible. When they talk about the Bible, they explain at the outset, they mean exclusively the Hebrew Bible,
because that is the area of our expertise. We have had the experience of people asking us all sorts of questions about matters that lie outside our area of expertise: about the New Testament, about rabbinic Jewish texts, and much more. Don’t go to a gynecologist for a broken leg.
That’s disarming. How does it play out?
You can get a pretty good idea from the first chapter, on homosexuality. An oft-cited verse from Leviticus (20:13) says that men who participate in homosexual intercourse shall be put to death. Friedman and Dolansky’s treatment of this verse is learned, lengthy (though not tedious), ingenious, and complex. A key point, for instance, is a distinction they make between an act that is “offensive” to someone and an act that “is wrong in itself and can never be otherwise.” They claim that a technical term in the verse in question has the former meaning, not the latter. “So,” they conclude,
whatever position one takes on this matter, Left or Right, conservative or liberal, one should acknowledge that the law really does forbid homosexual sex—between males but not between females. And one should recognize that the biblical prohibition is not one that is eternal and unchanging. The prohibition in the Bible applies only so long as male homosexual acts are perceived to be offensive.
Here and elsewhere, the authors fulfill a promise made in the preface—that in “every chapter we expect to bring something that you have not already heard a hundred times: either new texts or new perspectives or new evidence.” But is the result a better understanding of the biblical text, or is the meaning of the text obscured? And is their “method” genuinely even-handed and unbiased?
Recall for a moment the authors’ explanation that they are just going to stick to their area of expertise. What this entails, in practice, is citing evidence from a wide range of radically different religio-socio-political settings while ignoring not only New Testament texts (written by authors rather familiar with Jewish culture and living on the bookend of the Old Testament’s time of composition) but also Jewish sources from the first two centuries of the Common Era. Friedman and Dolansky draw on ancient sources from pagan cultures across the Aegean; furthermore, many of these comparative sources are a millennium earlier.
In their treatment of abortion, Friedman and Dolansky expend considerable energy contrasting usage of the Hebrew mwt (killing) with rsh (murder), arguing that readers cannot use Scripture to show that abortion is intentional homicide. But today we might easily say “he killed a man and is serving time” (instead of “murdered a man”) without fear of being misunderstood. In their discussion of the miscarriage case (Ex. 21:22-25), in which fighters strike a pregnant woman—prima facie a lex taliones scenario, including “a life for a life”—the authors discount the likelihood that the passage is concerned at all with the death of the baby, inside or outside the womb.
Friedman and Dolansky say that the passage in Exodus is about “accidental miscarriage” and “unintended consequences” (to the mother). Full disclosure: this gets a bit personal for me. My wife became a widow when a teenage football player slugged her unsuspecting husband, a passerby, at a Toledo dock next to their yacht. Her husband fell unconscious into the bay and drowned on Father’s Day eve, with three boys ages five and under. “Involuntary manslaughter” was the 17-year-old’s verdict, not “murder.” The verdict was correct, but that young man was nevertheless responsible for taking an innocent life. That’s the bottom line.
When they align supporting ancient sources for their position on abortion, starting with the Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550-1500 BCE), Friedman and Dolansky note that “Middle Assyrian Law is the only ancient law code that prescribes a penalty for a woman who has a ‘miscarriage by her own act.’ In other words, the Middle Assyrian code actually contains a law against abortion.” Once again, their methodology is a bit perplexing. The “only” ancient law code they cite is from the same group of laws that, in other places in their book, is given considerable weight in the argument. Is not this “one” endorsement of abortion a rather significant find in light of the paucity of texts from this era? We only have one discovery of Scripture predating the Dead Sea Scrolls, the apotropaic silver amulets found by my former professor, Gabriel Barkay (1979, Book of Numbers). However, these portions of the Priestly Blessing found at Ketef Hinnom speak volumes.
Perspective indeed reigns supreme in The Bible Now. This was underscored for me when I came to the afterword. Again, the authors’ tone is genial. “You do not have to agree with everything here,” Friedman and Dolansky begin, and they recall “the pleasure of exchanging thoughts (and arguments) with our friend Mary Douglas,” the distinguished anthropologist (and devout Catholic) who, near the end of her life, produced provocative studies of Leviticus and Numbers. “We do not mean that biblical scholars are the only ones who can contribute to understanding the Bible,” they write. “We know of wonderful contributions from non-biblical scholars, whose insights have been felt far afield from biblical studies. We have especial appreciation for some of Freud’s insights.” What? Surely they are not referring to Freud’s pseudo-historical Moses and Monotheism? Alas, they are. Perhaps such a standard for “wonderful contributions” and valuable “insights” helps explain my frustrations with The Bible Now.
Jerry Pattengale is assistant provost at Indiana Wesleyan University, Director of the Green Scholars Initiative, and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Baylor University, Institute for Studies of Religion.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Matt Lundin
Already forgiven in Christ.
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Modern scholars have not been particularly kind to Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), the leading painter of the German Reformation. Critics have called him “a spiritual whore,” a “bootlicker of established political power,” a “PR man” for the Lutheran Reformation, a pornographer who supplied nude pictures to leering men.[1] Renowned for his “fast brush,” Cranach managed to keep up with an apparently limitless demand for his work. Well over a thousand paintings bearing his name survive, though many of these were executed by assistants in his workshop. To some, such profligate production suggests a Renaissance artist who sold out, a businessman who catered to all comers, be they evangelical or Catholic, sacred or secular, bourgeois or noble. Cranach may have begun his career in the early 1500s as a worthy rival to Albrecht Dürer. But by the 1530s, detractors contend, the Cranach “painting factory” was churning out shallow, repetitive images—pictures that could be quickly translated into cash or theological talking points.[2]
The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation
Steven Ozment (Author)
344 pages
$16.05
In The Serpent and the Lamb, Steven Ozment paints a far more compelling portrait of the preeminent Reformation artist. In Ozment’s vigorously narrated biography, Cranach was neither a cynical opportunist nor a Lutheran tool. Nor were Cranach’s later paintings as devoid of aesthetic merit as some critics allege. Rather, he played an active, pugnacious role in the early events of the Reformation. A close friend of Martin Luther, Cranach intervened at key moments in the 1520s to protect and promote the fledgling Protestant movement. His later paintings, moreover, were expressive, innovative, and playful, free of the ponderous realism that the high-minded Dürer had introduced into German art. Where other scholars see a “chameleon adaptability” (or, worse, a shoddy opportunism),[3] Ozment finds an inner logic to Cranach’s life and work. That logic, however, lies less in a high vision of the artist’s mission (à la Dürer) than in Cranach’s full-blooded engagement with his times—the “great war” he carried out with his age. Far from signaling bad faith, Cranach’s exuberant output—including his Catholic altarpieces and his erotic nudes—reveals a man emboldened by the Protestant proclamation that God had already forgiven everything in Christ.
Lucas Cranach was indeed a painter of remarkable drive and gusto. As a young man, he admired and emulated the work of Dürer. During a stay in Vienna, Cranach imbibed humanist culture, transforming himself from a crude painter into a Renaissance master. Contemporaries began to compare his altarpieces, portraits, and woodcuts favorably with those of Dürer. Already Cranach’s painting showed a distinctive lightness of touch and freedom of form. According to Ozment, even as the early Cranach shared Dürer’s dualistic perceptions of a life suspended “between freedom and bondage,” he was already parting ways with his early role model and rival. “Where Dürer displays idealized human forms with scholastic precision,” writes Ozment, “Cranach captures the transient moments of everyday life, ranging from the grotesque to the erotic to the naive and fanciful.” Throughout the book, Ozment makes clear that he finds Cranach’s stylized compositions and expressive faces more compelling than Dürer’s classical forms and studious realism.
It was thanks in part to Dürer that Cranach received a call in 1504 to serve as court painter to the Saxon Elector Frederick the Wise, a powerful German prince and proud owner of one of Europe’s largest relic collections. A rival to the imperial Habsburgs, Frederick recruited top talent to his kingdom, including, in 1511, a rising theological star named Martin Luther. At Wittenberg, Cranach found himself caught up in the Saxon court; he cultivated friendships with court poets and humanists and traveled as the Duke of Saxony’s ambassador to the Netherlands, where he briefly met and sketched the young boy who would become Charles V. In the 1510s, Cranach settled down as a burgher, marrying and starting a family. His skills as an entrepreneur were prodigious. Even as he produced paintings and decorative art for his lord, Cranach ran an apothecary, set up a publishing house, amassed real estate, and served three times as Wittenberg’s mayor.
Where critics interpret Cranach’s worldly success as evidence of venality, Ozment reads it as a sign of the health and vigor of an increasingly assertive and confident laity.[4] During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the urban laity had grown restive. Although Europe’s demographic rebound from the Black Death created new opportunities for commoners and allowed marriage and household life to flourish as never before, the church continued to treat married life as an inferior calling. At the same time, late medieval piety offered few cures for a laity suffering from spiritual malaise. An anxious amassing of relics and pilgrimages and indulgences suggest that laity were unsure how to make amends for their worldliness or escape purgatorial fires. By contrast, Luther’s simple message of complete forgiveness in Christ freed the laity from paralyzing introspection and from a sense of inferiority, encouraging them instead to live active, worldly lives.
Though Ozment’s interpretation of late medieval piety is controversial, a narrative of spiritual and psychological release does make sense of Cranach’s career. In 1511, Frederick the Wise commissioned his court painter to compile a woodcut “sampler” of his relic collection. The task seems to have troubled Cranach. At the end of his sampler, he depicted his friend Sibutus, a court poet and Renaissance intellectual, as a man at his wit’s end, disheveled, distraught, and confused. In so doing, Cranach may have been revealing his own frame of mind, his inability to attain the rational self-composure, courtly grace, and spiritual knighthood celebrated in humanist circles.
More direct evidence of Cranach’s spiritual attitudes comes from his later depictions of “Melancholy,” in which he illustrated the dangers of self-preoccupation. In these unsettling compositions, a distracted young woman sits in a clean and well-furnished room, whittling a sinister stick while young children play on the floor and—out the window, in the background—a menacing horde of witches, demons, and beasts ride in the darkening sky. Here again Cranach departed from Dürer, whose famous engraving of a pensive and deflated Renaissance man—a scholar who peered too deeply into the nature of things—implied that melancholy was a product of genius, a divine affliction that beset the gifted. Cranach, by contrast, presented melancholy as a demonic trial, a dangerous spiritual funk best warded off, as Luther suggested, with earthy jokes, festive company, and familial joy.
Luther indeed found an intellectual and spiritual ally in Cranach. In the early years of the Reformation, Cranach enhanced Luther’s growing celebrity by mass-producing images of the renegade Augustinian monk and his courageous, chiseled chin. He helped to create the iconography of the Lutheran movement, clarifying the evangelical message in a series of stark contrasts—between law and gospel, between Christ and the anti-Christ (i.e., the Roman Curia), between human helplessness and the relief of unmerited grace. More surprisingly, Ozment reveals just how active Cranach was in the early Reformation—how he used his positions as court painter and one of Wittenberg’s leading citizens to protect the fledgling evangelical movement. In 1522, Cranach resisted the iconoclasm that threatened to denude Wittenberg’s churches, buying time until Luther could return from hiding at Wartburg Castle. Not long afterward, Cranach’s publishing house churned out copies of Luther’s newly translated New Testament, adorned with Cranach’s own woodcuts. Thirty-six other works would follow in just three years. And in 1525, when Luther took the momentous step of marrying ex-nun Katherine von Bora, Cranach, who harbored renegade nuns in his mansion, stood in as a surrogate father of the bride and as Luther’s best man.
This historic wedding, insists Ozment, was every bit as central to the Reformation movement as its theological polemics. Where medieval asceticism had treated worldly vocations as inferior spiritual callings, Luther and Cranach both affirmed the inherent goodness of sex, marriage, child-rearing, and the household economy. Cranach’s winsome 1535 painting of Christ blessing children—children held tenderly by Wittenberg matrons—celebrated worldly joys. Esteem for the divinely ordained institution of marriage also entailed a respect for the “awesome power and divine blessing of human sexuality”—the force that peopled the world, drove history forward, and caused endless heartbreak and tragedy. Thus, while Cranach’s profane art was a response to changing tastes, especially the shrinking German market for traditional altarpieces, it also expressed the Lutheran rejection of facile distinctions between the spiritual and the secular.
There is little question that Cranach’s post-Reformation nudes were erotic. Necklaces, hats, translucent veils and kerchiefs—such accoutrements adorn lithe young women, many of whom throw a frank glance at the viewer. Quite unlike the ponderous, classical females of Dürer, Cranach’s nudes have inspired artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and John Currin. Some modern critics have dismissed Cranach’s nudes as pornography, pictures that reduced women to “playthings” for wealthy, powerful clients. Ozment offers a more complex reading of these images, showing how Cranach’s paintings of nude mothers with babies at the breast celebrated marital sex even as they praised matronly love and spousal fidelity. Meanwhile, his famous depictions of scenes of temptation—including David and Bathsheba, Lot and His Daughters, and The Judgment of Paris—offered complex meditations on sexual politics and the power of lust to undo a man.
In keeping with his argument that Protestant marriage liberated both sexes from the strictures of medieval asceticism, Ozment suggests that Cranach’s paintings departed radically from misogynistic clerical traditions, which deemed female sexuality foul and polluting. Yet in praising Cranach’s positive view of marriage and sex, Ozment may at times obscure its limitations. One should not forget that the gaze to which Cranach offered his paintings was that of the patriarch—the head of household whose position Lutheran theology sought to strengthen. When depicting assertive biblical women such Delilah, Salome, and Judith, Cranach clearly played into patriarchal fantasies about “dangerous” women—women who could decapitate or emasculate a man.
Even if Cranach was no crass pornographer, did his images somehow lack artistic and spiritual integrity? To a modern critic such as Joseph Koerner, Cranach’s later work betrays the poverty of Protestant visual culture.[5] Using a flat, didactic style, Cranach rejected not only Catholic tradition, which viewed the image as a window onto eternity, but also new schools of Renaissance painting, which sought to capture ideal beauty on canvas. A Dürer painting attempted to present a life that was larger than life—to show the spiritual essence of the thing it represented. Cranach’s Lutheran altarpieces, by contrast, were self-effacing. They announced their own impotence, their inability to do anything other than to illustrate a verbal message.
Viewed from this angle, Cranach’s paintings appear as a powerful expression of Protestant iconoclasm. As Luther argued during the 1522 controversy, reformers who wanted to smash icons and whitewash church walls ironically treated images as if they really were idols, ascribing to them an innate power to harm the Christian soul. For Luther and Cranach, images were “things indifferent”—objects without any special significance or power. Their value depended entirely on the use the believer made of them. To some modern critics, such a “demystification” of the image was a profound loss—the beginning of a long history of desacralized art. As an example of this history, critics point to the opportunism of Cranach himself, whose workshop churned out images to suit the diverse tastes of Catholic, Protestant, and secular clients. Stripped of its sacred aura, the Lutheran image became an interchangeable object within networks of verbal communication and commercial exchange.
Ozment’s biography rightly cautions us against such a simple reading. To hold Cranach up to anachronistic notions of spiritual sincerity or aesthetic integrity is to miss the true dynamics of his art, his faith, and his age. Ironically, the modern ideal of the artist as something of a high priest—an aesthete who sacrifices worldly concerns for the higher calling of his work—bears striking resemblance to the spiritual and sexual asceticism that Cranach and Luther so powerfully rejected. To Cranach, the gospel was not a call to an unattainable perfection. Rather, the forgiveness available in Christ freed one to engage vigorously with the world as God had created it, not as one might wish it to be.
1. Eamon Duffy, “Brush for Hire,” London Review of Books (August 19, 2004); Friedrich Engels, quoted in Ozment, The Serpent and the Lamb, p. 20; Eamon Duffy, “Spiritual Surrender,” The Guardian (February 29, 2008).
2. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 238.
3. Duffy, “Brush for Hire.”
4. Ozment has developed this interpretation elsewhere. See, for instance, Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution (Doubleday, 1991).
5. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image.
Matthew Lundin is assistant professor of history at Wheaton College. He is the author of Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His World, a study of a Catholic diarist who struggled to make sense of the Protestant Reformation and the changes it brought about (forthcoming from Harvard University Press, Fall 2012).
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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