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Baptist Catholicity with Dr. Steve Harmon

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You’ve provocatively titled your book Towards Baptist Catholicity.  There will be those who see that title as being roughly analogous to something like Towards A Square Circle.  Aren’t the terms “Baptist” and “Catholicity” contradictory?

In the popular mind, those probably are contradictory terms—they represent the extreme poles on the spectrum of types of churches or denominations, in the way most people understand them.  I suppose only “Pentecostal Catholicity” might seem even more contradictory, unless it occurs to one that adherents to both of those traditions actually expect something supernatural to happen when they gather for worship!  At any rate, the title was intentionally provocative.  If it made anyone wonder how the book would put those things together, the title did its job.  A fellow Baptist theologian thought I should have titled it No Creed But the Bible?—with the question mark—since in the book I repeatedly called that mantra for some modern Baptists in the United States into question, but I’m satisfied with the title.

Where did the term “Baptist catholicity” originate and can you give a summary definition of what “Baptist catholicity” is?

In a 2004 paper presentation that served as the basis of a published essay that in turn was revised as the first chapter of Towards Baptist Catholicity, I employed “catholic Baptist” as a descriptor for an emerging movement among younger Baptist theologians who have been dissatisfied with the theological categories bequeathed by the recurring skirmishes of the twentieth-century Modernist/Fundamentalist conflict in Baptist life and who have sought a “third way” that values both the community gathered under the Lordship of Christ and the continuity of this community with the larger Christian community through the ages.  These Baptist theologians therefore have an interest in the tradition of this larger community, the creeds and forms of liturgy that have transmitted this tradition, and the sacraments that belong to the embodied life of this community.  I didn’t coin the label, however; Curtis Freeman, director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School, had suggested the label “catholic baptists” in an essay in his co-edited book Ties That Bind: Life Together in the Baptist Vision.  Freeman’s lower-case spelling of “baptists” reflects the usage of James Wm. McClendon, Jr. in his Systematic Theology with reference to a larger pattern of Free Church Christianity of which Baptists, upper-case, are representative.

When I wrote of a “catholicity” towards which I thought Baptists ought to move, I had in mind the ancient sense of the Greek katholike employed by Ignatius of Antioch early in the second century to describe the pattern of an incarnational, sacramental, embodied form of fully orthodox Christian faith and practice that distinguished catholic Christianity from Docetism, Marcionitism, Gnosticism, and all manner of other heresies and sects—a qualitative catholicity.  This is a fuller notion of catholicity than the etymological sense of “pertaining to the whole”—catholicity in a quantitative sense—which is sometimes associated with affirmations of the universal church, understood as all the redeemed of all the ages.

I’d like to ask you about the accessibility of the terminology you and others have used.  Do you feel that the term “catholicity” might ultimately be an impediment to the proposal getting a fair hearing among Baptist laity as well as a number of pastors?  Do you think that the proposals of the programme will be heard over the prejudices that many hold surrounding the root of the word “catholicity”?  If so, do you think that an alternative way of stating the case would be helpful?

Some folks will probably not be able to get past the anti-Catholic prejudices that the term “catholicity” may arouse.  Another of my fellow Baptist theologians has called anti-Catholicism the last remaining acceptable prejudice among Baptists.  I think this prejudice needs to be tackled head-on instead of sidestepping it by employing a less troubling term.  I have similar thoughts about the practice of replacing “catholic” in the Apostles’ Creed with “Christian,” as in “I believe in the holy Christian church.”  When Luther substituted christliche for katholische in the vernacular version of the Creed—a substitution unfortunately retained in the worship books of the Evangelische Kirche in Germany today—he was trying to undercut an association of the church with a particular form of institutional life.  Today it only serves to reinforce anti-Catholicism, I’m afraid.  For that reason, while I was thrilled that the Centenary Baptist World Congress in Birmingham, England in 2005 recited together the Apostles’ Creed as an act of solidarity with the historic and global church (as the first congress of the Baptist World Alliance did in 1905), I was not thrilled with the substitution of “Christian” for “catholic” in the version they recited.  When Alexander Maclaren led the first BWA congress in confessing the Creed, it included the confession of belief in the “holy catholic church.”  We should have done likewise in order to confront anti-Catholicism in our midst instead of acquiescing to it.

On p.19-20 you acknowledge that the “catholic Baptist programme” seems to be being discussed almost exclusively among “academic theologians,” but then you state that it could be that these theologians will ultimately have the greatest effect on whether or not Baptist catholicity ever reaches the laity.  I’m curious to know how hopeful you really are that the proposals of Baptist catholicity will ever receive anything like a widespread hearing among Baptist laity?

This has to happen first in the context of theological education.  The future ministers of the church must be formed in such a manner that they see the need to recover our catholic roots in the worship and Christian education of local congregations.  A few of us are trying to teach with these things in mind; we’ll have to let a future generation be the judge as to whether we’ve succeeded in having some impact.

Is it unfair to suggest that you have introduced a careful and highly nuanced theological proposal in the midst of a church climate that appears to be increasingly a-theological?  Do you think that a great deal of foundation-work is going to have to happen before many are even able to give such a proposal a fair hearing?

The current church climate is indeed increasingly a-theological, and you’re right that this can hinder reception of the book’s proposals.  But I don’t think the solution is necessarily to hold seminary-like theology classes in the local church (though that’s not such a bad idea).  I think that instead of simply emphasizing the teaching of second-order theology in the churches, we need to invest ourselves in doing well the first-order practices that, if done rightly, can be the primary things that form Christians theologically: worship and catechesis, both of which should be informed by good second-order theological reflection even while remaining first-order practices of the church.  But I suppose if that happened, then much of what I hope Baptists will move toward will have happened, whether or not the specific proposals of my book have been received.

You’ve called for a “thick ecumenism” (p.16).  Is “Baptist catholicity” simply a synonym for “Baptist ecumenism”?  I have read one criticism of your work that seems to assume this to be the case.

The recovery of a catholicity to which all other traditions are also heirs does have important ecumenical implications, but it would be wrong to equate my call for “Baptist catholicity” with a mere call for Baptists to have more positive relationships with other Christian traditions.  Many Baptists associate ecumenism with “thin ecumenism,” the unity-via-lowest-common-denominator sort of ecumenism I decry in the book because it takes away any motivation for an earnest contestation of a shared tradition.  For that reason I prefer to write and speak of a Baptist catholicity that involves a thick ecumenism in which the doctrinal reasons for our divisions are not insignificant and must be contested on the basis of a mutual reading of Scripture and the tradition.  Some have called this perspective “particularity in the service of unity.”  I resonate with that, and I would add that an open-minded revisiting of the early history of Baptist particularity will reveal some surprising connections with a more catholic pattern of faith and practice than what now characterizes many expressions of Baptist life today.

You’ve spoken in your book of a “Baptist tradition of dispensing with tradition.”  Are you suggesting that tradition is unavoidable?  Are you suggesting that Baptist churches in fact have a liturgy, a traditioned hermeneutic, a traditioned ecclesiology?  If so, does not the very suggestion of the inescapability of tradition conflict with the frequent Baptist self-designation, “people of the Book”?

In a public radio interview with Jaroslav Pelikan on “The Need for Creeds” a year or two before his death, Pelikan observed that “The only alternative to tradition is bad tradition.”  Baptists do have a tradition at all the points you mention, but I fear that when we claim to be doing without tradition in doing worship, reading the Bible, and advocating a certain form of ecclesiology, we’re doing those things on the basis of very bad sorts of tradition.  In many expressions of Baptist life here, that unacknowledged tradition is a highly individualistic stream within the political tradition of American liberal democracy.

Now to be a “people of the Book” is in fact to be a people committed to a tradition.  To be committed to this Book, and not another book or another variation of that Book, is to be committed to a traditioned faith that has already ruled out Gnosticim, for example, as a viable configuration of faith and practice; thus the Book to which Baptists are committed does not contain the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, or any number of other alternative gospels that ended up in what Robert Grant called the “rubbish heap of the second century.”  A preacher in the most self-consciously progressive Baptist church imaginable is not likely to stand in the pulpit, read a text from the Gospel of Thomas, and then preach a sermon on the basis of that text.  That this is not a likely scenario illustrates the enduring power of the patristic traditions that configured our Bible, even if they are unacknowledged.

In your third chapter, you confront what you call a “radical Sola Scriptura hermeneutic.”  You suggest that this approach to Scripture is, in some sense, the-other-side-of-the-coin of postmodern deconstructionism.  Are you suggesting that the phrase “me and the Bible alone” is, in fact, a heresy?

In making the comparison with deconstructionism, I’m suggesting that certain radical applications of the Sola Scriptura principle treat the classical Christian tradition in precisely the same way that deconstructionism does; the only difference is that the commitment to the authority of Scripture keeps the Bible itself, at least in theory, from being subjected to the same deconstruction.  In both cases the individual who is reading the tradition is superior to the tradition; the tradition has no claim upon the one who interprets it.

“Me and the Bible alone” can lead to heresy if it represents an insistence on determining Christian faith and practice for oneself apart from the larger community that is also under the Lordship of Christ.  Last spring I attended a lecture by Richard Hays, whose New Testament scholarship many Baptists admire, delivered as part of the program of the conference on Preaching, Teaching, and Living the Bible sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology and Duke Divinity School.  Dr. Hays’ address had to do with reading the Bible as the authoritative text of the church, and a question from the audience after the address asked about implications for more individualistic approaches to reading the Bible—no mention of Baptists in the phrasing of the question.  Dr. Hays responded, “What some Baptists do with the concept of ‘soul competency’ is a dangerous heresy that the rest of the church ought to resist.”  (My apologies for any inaccuracy in quoting.)  I think he’s right—though I think one can legitimately speak of the competency of the Spirit-empowered, church-equipped, socially-embodied soul.  If that’s what one means by this language, I have no quibble with it.  But if it means something like “All you need is a brain and a Bible,” then I think the end result of that is “All you really need is a brain,” since the Bible in that case will mean whatever you end up deciding it will mean, and this interpretive decision will probably reflect the way you already understood the world quite apart from divine revelation.

On p.43-44 you note that adherence to Sola Scriptura ironically accepts “the authority of at least one post-biblical doctrinal tradition” because it must depend on the Church that canonized said Scripture.  Is it fair to say, then, that all Baptists are, in fact, already catholic in a sense?

Yes—in the sense that the Christian canon (with both Old and New Testaments) is already qualitatively catholic, for it is an anti-Docetic, anti-Marcionite, anti-Gnostic canon.  It is catholic in the Ignatian sense of catholicity I mentioned earlier.  We simply need to be more conscious of the catholicity of our biblical faith.

You say this on p.59:  “The retrieval of tradition does not have to be an uncritical return to past doctrines and practices.”  Does this not open up a Pandora’s box, however, and place the individual above tradition, thereby once again falling into the “Enlightenment individualistic rationalism” that you criticize on p.56?  Will not those whose churches are more consciously associated with “The Great Tradition” see this as a kind of sola-ex-machina whereby we still get to pick and choose at the end of the day when things aren’t to our liking?

I grant that this is a problematic aspect of what I propose, and I have to admit that I’m not entirely comfortable with where this leaves us.  How do we go about determining which aspects of the tradition need retrieving and which ought to be left in the past?  Who should do that?  We run into the question of teaching authority in the church—magisterial authority, in other words.  It may be that communities in the free church tradition will need to look to the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican communions for liturgical guidance, for example, rather than borrowing from the liturgical tradition in a very eclectic and idiosyncratic manner.  We could take a cue from Karl Barth’s patterns of interacting with theological dialogue partners in the Church Dogmatics, in which he privileges communal sources—the ecumenical creeds and conciliar decisions—over the contributions of individual theologians.  And it may be that those in the free church tradition should develop the habit of reading papal encyclicals and bishops’ letters as models of communal moral discernment, since we lack a tradition of this sort of ecclesial ethical reflection.  Free church Christians could thus regard the communion of the saints as something like a magisterium of the whole—but that still returns us to the problem of who will decide what to appropriate from these sources of guidance, and how.

You seem to be fairly appreciative of Thomas Oden’s paleo-orthodoxy project, yet you’re uneasy with the blind-spots of the Vincentian Canon (p.48-49).  Is consensus really so elusive?  Has there not been a rather surprising degree of consensus on the core of the faith, “mere Christianity”?

Again, I think Barth offers a model in his handling of the tradition.  And if we take stuff of early Christian doctrine as essentially narrative in character and the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed as concise summaries of the Christian narrative, then I think the creeds should qualify as expressions of fundamental consensus.  The broad outlines of the Christian story, summarized by the creeds still in essentially narrative form, can be considered “mere Christianity.”

I’m curious to know whether or not you are calling for the creation of a new Baptist confession on p.85:  “A Baptist confession conceived as an exposition of the Creed would flesh out the plot of this narrative summary with a Baptist spin on the story.”  Would you like to see this happen?

Baptist confessions have historically sought to accomplish at least two things: to demonstrate to non-Baptists that Baptists are in fact in continuity with historic Christian faith, and at the same time to set forth the points at which Baptists differ from other Christians.  More recent attempts at Baptist confessionalism have tended to be preoccupied with who the “real” Baptists are and have not had the ecumenical audience of the confession in mind.  I don’t know what sort of Baptist ecclesial body would do it or when it could happen, but I would indeed like to see some Baptist group adopt the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed as the expression of the convictions Baptists share with other Christians, supplemented by commentary on the Creed that sets forth distinctively Baptist beliefs and practices.  Some of the European Baptist confessions approach this, notably the confession of the German Baptists that affirms the Apostles’ Creed in the introductory section as a sufficient statement of the beliefs Baptists share with the rest of the church.

It seems to me (in the conversations I’ve had with non-Baptists about your proposals) that baptism, or, more specifically, re-baptism is “ground zero.”  The common sentiment I hear is that any attempt at “catholicity” that would require the re-baptism of somebody who was baptized as a baby is utterly vain.  You seem to be sympathetic to this when you write (p.126):  “At the very least, the ancient Christian consensus on the unrepeatability of baptism ought to give Baptist congregations pause before quickly requiring those whose infant baptism in another Christian communion was joined with subsequent faith to be re-baptized when joining a Baptist congregation…”  What will you say to the Baptist who says that this is not, strictly speaking, re-baptism since the person was never baptized in the first place?  Do you not have to sacrifice a Baptist distinctive in order to even use the phrase “re-baptize”?

I myself am convinced that Baptists ought to commit themselves to the call for mutual recognition of baptisms issued in Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (WCC, 1982) and embrace the theological rationale offered therein for mutual recognition.  Not all Baptists agree, and I grant that most early Baptists (with a notable exception—see below) would disagree with this.  But if what the early Baptists insisted on was a baptism joined with personal faith, and they were convinced that Anglican infant baptisms, for example, did not always join the act with personal faith, then there may be more room for convergence on the basis of historic Baptist principles than one might imagine.  BEM insists that infant baptism must be joined with subsequent personal faith; for that matter, the Catechism of the Catholic Church insists that infant baptism must be joined with subsequent personal faith.  With this we can agree, and on the basis of this we ought to be able to say, “we recognize your baptism as a valid baptism.”  If we do not, then we are really saying, “your church that administered your baptism is not a valid church,” and if we do not believe their church is not a valid church, then the theological implication of this is that we do not really believe they are truly Christians.  Much has been made in the media about recent re-assertions of the Catholic teaching that ecclesial communities not in communion with Rome are not, strictly speaking, churches in the fullest sense.  But the fact remains that if I decided to seek reception into the fellowship of the Roman Catholic Church, I would not be re-baptized; I would only be chrismated, and my Baptist baptism would be regarded as a valid baptism, as an instance of the one baptism of the church.

How sympathetic are you to early Baptist attempts (i.e., John Bunyan) and modern attempts (i.e. John Piper) at removing re-baptism as a condition for membership in a Baptist church?

See above!

I take it that “closed communion” is utterly incompatible with “Baptist catholicity”?

Not necessarily.  The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, it should be noted, are also “closed communion.”  Whatever else may be said about the Landmark Baptist tradition, its emphasis on closed communion represented a high view of the importance of the sacraments—or “ordinances”—of baptism and the Lord’s Supper for the life of the community, and I respect that.  Nevertheless, I myself do advocate that Baptist churches invite all baptized Christians to participate in the supper.

You say on p.152-153 that the “greatest contribution that a Baptist retrieval of patristic Christianity may make to the renewal of contemporary Baptist life is not through the retrieval of specific patristic theological perspectives…but rather through the recovery of worship as the primary means by which people are formed in deeply Christian faith and practice, accompanied by the recovery of particular patterns and practices of worship that are patristic in origin yet have great potential for forming the contemporary faith of the church.”  Why worship instead of theological renewal?

Theological renewal is indispensable, but unless that translates into a renewal of worship so that the practices of worship form Christians deeply in the faith, the average layperson who will never go to seminary but who will attend Sunday worship faithfully will remain unaffected by theological renewal.

Do you find it odd that many Baptist churches celebrate Mother’s Day with a passion bordering on violent, but not Lent?

Indeed I do.  I’ll do you one better: frequently Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost, coincides with Fathers’ Day.  Guess which one gets attention and which gets ignored?  And the result, of course, is that most Baptists have heard little, if anything, in church about the concept of God that sets the Christian understanding of God apart from all other understandings of the divine.  As fellow Baptist theologian Curtis Freeman has observed, “Most Baptists are really Unitarians who haven’t yet gotten around to denying the Trinity.”

You have called for a measured-sacramentalism regarding the Lord’s Supper.  Do you feel that Zwinglianism has had a hold on Baptists for too long?

I would be happy if Baptists would only recover the fully-orbed sacramental theology of Zwingli himself, who would never have claimed that the supper is “merely symbolic,” as have not a few modern (and mostly American) Baptists.  For Zwingli, there is an inseparable bond between the symbol and the thing signified.  The reductionistic version of Zwinglian memorialism embraced by many recent Baptists breaks that bond and reduces the bread and wine to nothing more than symbols.  Interestingly enough, Calvin had a much richer sacramental theology that featured a form of real presence that didn’t depend on an Aristotelian metaphysic of substance, and there are possibilities for retrieving this from the stream of the early Baptist tradition that was more heavily influenced by Calvin’s theology.

I’m deeply appreciative of your work here and am thankful that you’ve taken the time for this interview.  I wonder if you could close by sharing your own thoughts about the future of Baptist theology and church life.  What hopes do you have for the spread of “Baptist catholicity”?  How optimistic are you?  What do you see on the horizon?

And I’m grateful for your interest in my book.  I have no aspirations of launching a movement; in Towards Baptist Catholicity I have reported some surprising trends in that direction among Baptist theologians and situated my own work within those trends.  Since the publication of the book, however, I’ve received correspondence from quite a few Baptist Ph.D. students in theology and related disciplines out there who found that I named some perspectives at which they’d arrived independently.  And this is happening not just among Baptists proper, but in other free church/evangelical traditions as well.  The last few years the Evangelical Theological Society has sponsored a patristics working group at their annual meeting, and more and more seminary students from those traditions are choosing to go on to do Ph.D. studies in patristics.  This really wasn’t happening before the past decade; who knows where it will lead?  I’m encouraged by the possibilities.

Calvin Miller’s The Path of Celtic Prayer: An Ancient Way to Everyday Joy

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One of the most inspiring and enjoyable devotional reading experiences I’ve had in a long time is Calvin Miller’s new book, The Path of Celtic Prayer: An Ancient Way to Everyday Joy (a video introduction can be seen here). Celtic spirituality is so faddish and chic that I likely would not have purchased this book had it been written by anybody other than Calvin Miller or a few other authors. Miller is aware of this phenomenon, thus his first sentence: “I am not a groupie. I am not a celebrant of any new form of ‘hula-hoop’ theology” (p.7). And, sure enough, Miller shows that this is true.

The Path of Celtic Prayer is a well-researched and thorough introduction to six kinds of Celtic Prayer: Trinity Prayer, Scripture Prayer, Long, Wandering prayer, Nature Prayer, Lorica Prayer, and Confessional Prayer. In each of the six chapters (each dealing with one of these forms of prayer) Miller gives Celtic examples of these prayers and then shows how that particular form could greatly enrich modern Protestant practices.

One of the strongest chapters, in my opinion, was the first chapter on Trinity prayer. For one thing, I was unaware of the intense Trinitarianism of Celtic prayer. This was encouraging, especially in a day with the Trinity is seen by many to be a theological oddity, some bizarre scholastic holdover that smells a bit of Roman Catholic medievalism. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. We need the doctrine and reality of the Trinity today as we’ve never needed it before. Miller’s examples are compelling:

Consider this prayer taken from the Black Book of Carmarthen.

I praise the threefold

Trinity as God.

Who is one in three,

A single power in unity

His attributes a single mystery,

One God to praise

Great King I praise you,

Great your glory.

Your praise is true;

I am the one who praises you. (p.40)

This is theological prayer at its greatest. It opens up for us new vistas of prayer, new ways of thinking through and articulating our heart of worship to the living Triune God. And Miller uses this and other examples as a platform on which to chastise our Evangelical shallowness when it comes to thinking in a Trinitarian way:

We generally thank God the Father for the big stuff: sunrise, rainfall and the Rocky Mountains. We are also prone to ask him to protect us from the devastating “acts of God” that mess with our views of his lovingkindness and providential protection. Hurricanes, earthquakes and the like seem to be more the Father’s province, and so we generally talk to him to amend the weather, stop the Asian flu or feed the hordes of starving people.

To Jesus we delegate the personal work of our own affairs. Healing, improving our income, stopping our toothache or giving us our daily bread: these are things that Jesus takes care of. This, we unconsciously assume, is compassionate in our thinking, for it saves God the Father from piddling with our petty needs. We see Jesus as far less austere and far more approachable than the Father. We would never sing What a Friend We Have in God. Jesus is our friend. He takes care of our intimate needs and bears our heavy burdens “upstairs” where the Father can take care of them.

Finally, the Holy Spirit generally gets slighted in our prayers. He’s so invisible that we have no fixed mental image of him, unlike the Father and Son. God, to many, is Grandfather Zeus, powerful and to be feared. He thunders around the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and keeps a comfortable distance from trembling and weak humans. Jesus is on the wall of the Chapel and a lot closer to the floor, where we live. Even though he is generally friendly with children and widows, he still wears a toga and looks Romanesque.

But what does the Spirit look like? He’s invisible – amorphous and cellophane. He may indwell us, but it rarely occurs to us to pray to him. At best he is just a supporting actor in the divine drama. The Holy Spirit is nice, and sometimes he makes us feel good in church. Be we rarely have conversations with him. Jesus takes care of our personal stuff. God takes care of the Grand Canyon. And the Holy Spirit gets honorable mention at Communion and baptisms (33-34).

This is the kind of thing you’ll find time and again in Miller’s book. In addition to this chapter, I was most challenged by the final chapter on confessional prayer. For example:

We must confess our wretchedness. We are hiding out in Eden with the fruit – half-eaten – still in our hand, and we have been discovered. We look down in shame and suddenly realize that we are exposed, with no place to run and no place to hide. We are, to say the least, wretched. There is no justification for our state. What do we do? It’s too late for paltry excuses. We cannot pass the buck. But as hard as it is, we must confess our willful disobedience to the holy and righteous God.

We must be willing to stand with God and look at ourselves, agree with him that we are naked, and seek the wholeness that prefaces our first step toward union with Christ. In short, when we confess we say, “Lord, this is me, and here’s what I’ve done.” We confess as Patrick did: “Here I am…a sinner.” Sedulus Scotus cried as Patrick cried – in a day far separate from our own.

I read and write and teach, philosophy peruse.

I eat and freely drink, with rhymes invoke the muse,

I call on heaven’s throne both night an day,

Snoring I sleep, and stay awake I pray.

And sin and fault inform each act I plan.

Ah! Christ…pity this miserable man (146-147).

You will not regret buying and reading The Path of Celtic Prayer. If you are like me, you will want to write down some of these prayers to incorporate into your own prayer life (i.e., there are a few morning and evening prayers that are really quite good). What I like about Miller is that he seems to me to stand between sentimental devotionalism on the one hand and dry theology on the other. This is theology as it ought to be written: biblical, thorough, winsome, challenging, and inspirational.

Jerry Bridges’ The Pursuit of Holiness

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Let me begin this review with a point of tragic irony.  The version of Jerry Bridges’ The Pursuit of Holiness that I have is the 25th Anniversary Edition that was published by NavPress in 2003 (the book was published first in 1978).  For this edition, new endorsements were apparently collected from a number of respected authors and leaders:  J.I. Packer, Charles Colson, and John Piper to name a few.  Then there is this endorsement at the bottom of the back cover:  “The Pursuit of Holiness has helped so many believers navigate the tricky but vitally important road to personal holiness.  This book should be on every Christian leader’s shelf.”  The author of this endorsement?  “Ted Haggard, president, National Association of Evangelicals.”

My point in mentioning this is not to heap scorn on Haggard, but rather to illustrate a point:  holiness is a tricky business, and public avowals of holiness must be tempered with a recognition of how easily any of us might fall into the sin that besets us.

It was a friend of mine who recommended that I read this book.  I was pastoring a small church in Woodstock, Georgia, at the time, and my friend was a former pastor there.  I had seen Bridges’ book and knew of its status as a modern classic, but had never gotten around to reading it.  I’ve just finished doing so, and I must say I regret not reading this book earlier on.

Bridges is a meat and potatoes writer who does not delve much into literary flourish.  That’s a compliment, for too many frills would obscure the central contention of his book:  that a holy God has called a people to holiness through the sacrifice of His Son.

One of the Bridges themes is that we have made the matter too complicated.  We speak of needing “victory” over this or that, when, in reality, what we need to do is use the minds God has given us, work hard to develop sustained habits of obedience, and put some personal exertion into it.  Bridges rejects the notion that Christians are incapable of doing anything towards holiness.  Of course we rely on the Holy Spirit and the power of God, but we also study the Word, pray, avoid sin, and think carefully about what we’re doing.  In this, he sounds like some of Dallas Willard’s writings…or, rather, Dallas Willard sounds like him.

This is no semi-Palagian reliance on the self.  Bridges arguments are biblical, practical, and helpful.  They avoid the “quick fix” mentality that there’s a shortcut to holiness.  He calls for a sober recognition of the fact that the more we sin the more we’ll want to sin, but the more we walk in obedience, the more we’ll want to walk in obedience.  And the point is, we can walk in obedience. “Surely,” writes Bridges, “He has not commanded us to be holy without providing the means to be holy.  The privilege of being holy is yours, and the decision and responsibility to be holy is yours.  If you make that decision, you will experience the fullness of joy which Christ has promised to those who walk in obedience to Him” (212).

The only possible criticism I might have is that Bridges’ illustrations are, at times, a bit quaint:  the girl whose love for tennis got a little out of hand, Bridges’ realization that he was coming to love ice cream a little too much, etc.  They do make the point, but I wonder how the heroin addict would take all of this?

Regardless, this is a work of great importance that ought to be read widely…and it has been for thirty years now.  So I’m a latecomer to this classic, but that’s better than not coming to it at all.  I was challenged, encouraged, and convicted by this work.

G.R. Evans’ John Wyclif: Myth & Reality

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“Wyclif,” writes G.R. Evans at the end of the Preface to her John Wyclif: Myth & Reality, “may not be lovable, but he deserves sympathy and a kind of respect.  What kind, and for what, the reader may judge from the following pages” (p.11).  Based on the pages that follow her Preface, I would say that the respect Evans appears to think Wyclif deserves is minimal at best.  Two-hundred-and-forty-five pages later, Evans concludes her biography with this:  “History gains rather than loses when it becomes possible to treat a hero as a complex and fallible human being, with all the dimensions which enrich as much as they challenge the earlier, simpler pictures of the man who was hero and villain” (p.256).  True enough.  Balance is important.  It’s unfortunate that this book didn’t seem to have much.

Let me stop before I’m guilty of being as unfair to Evans as she occasionally appears to be to Wyclif.  The book is very well written, even if it is fairly tedious at times.  The problem seems to be the scant biographical evidence that actually exists on Wyclif, at least the kind of interesting and anecdotal personal information that has become the staple of the genre in modern times.  This is, in fact, a historical and intellectual biography of the enigmatic figure that has been called (Evans believes naively) “The Morning Star of the Reformation.”

And, to be fair yet again, Evans does make her case very well that what biographical work has been done on Wyclif (and there has not been very much at all) has tended to be hagiographical.  That’s common enough.  Such romanticizing and glossing is common in John Foxe, for instance, as well as in the writings of those who wish to present the Reformation, and, in the case of Wyclif, its precursors as a monolithic movement of like-minded saints driven by pure conviction and principle.

Evans demonstrates that this is, indeed, naïve when it comes to Wyclif.  Wyclif was an enigmatic figure:  an Oxford intellectual who appears to have smarted about being passed over for career advancement in the heady intellectual, ecclesiastical, and civil crosscurrents that intersected in and around 14th century Oxford.  Evans also demonstrates clearly enough that Wyclif was prone to brooding, bitterness, and anger.

I cannot help but believe, though, that Evans overplays her hand.  Time and again we are told that Wyclif is bitter, that Wyclif is angry, that Wyclif seemed unable to pull himself out of a pit or resentment.  When Wyclif returns to a favorite theme of his – that true religion is, as James said, caring for the orphan and widow – Evans opines that there’s no real evidence of any concrete philanthropic tendencies in Wyclif and that his appeal to this definition of true religion was more a polemic against the friars and religious orders he detested as being predatory and parasitic on the laity than an actual conviction that this was, in fact, the true nature of religion.  In fact, Evans suggested that most of Wyclif’s positive assertions were probably, in fact, responses to his enemies and not so much positive convictions.

We are told that Wyclif’s views of Scripture really weren’t so revolutionary.  There were plenty of others who wanted the Word to be made available to the people.  Regardless, Evans assures us, it’s unlikely that Wyclif actually did any translation work himself anyway.  We are told that he was a snobbish preacher, insulting the congregations he should be nurturing.  We are told that he drove most or all of his friends away, that he was inconsistent in what he thought should be and in what he actually did.  We are told that, in most respects, he was a typical medieval scholastic.  We are told, in essence, that Wyclif was essentially a man of his times…which does seem odd indeed.

In short, I believe that Evans goes too far even while making an overall helpful contribution to Wyclif studies.  Her appeal for biographical balance seems to lean towards the negative in ways that are disheartening.  We do not need to naively gloss our heroes.  And it’s probably true that Wyclif’s role as a pre-Reformer has been glossed in this way.  But without Evans’ consistent meanderings that probably what Wyclif was actually writing and arguing was driven more by anger than conviction, we would probably see from the same raw data that Evans presents that Wyclif’s views were, in a very real sense, precursors to what would become the fully bloomed doctrines of the Reformation two hundred years later.

It seems to me an uncharitable way to do biography.  But, you will learn a great (excruciating?) deal about the workings of Oxford as well as of Wyclif’s own views.  You will get some fascinating insights into the tumultuous religious, political, and intellectual landscape of Wyclif’s day.

Was Wyclif “The Morning Star of the Reformation”?  It’s a bit hard to say after reading Evans’ biography.  He was an imperfect man, prone to fits of temper, but he did articulate Reformation tenets in a pre-Reformation era in ways that were compelling and admirable.

Ben Witherington’s Troubled Waters: Rethinking the Theology of Baptism

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When I saw an ad the other day for Ben Witherington’s new book on baptism, Troubled Waters: Rethinking the Theology of Baptism, I knew I’d have to read it.  Witherington is a tremendous New Testament scholar and I’ve benefited personally from his work, especially his commentary work.  He’s a Methodist, I believe, and I knew, judging from his past work, that his treatment of baptism would be fair and, likely, provocative.  It proved to be both…and a bit frustrating.

Published (ironically?) by Baylor University Press, Troubled Waters seeks to show that traditional credobaptist and traditional paedobaptist arguments have been stunted by allowing theological assumptions and presuppositions (as well as no shortage of hot air and idiosyncratic exegesis) to trump the witness of Scripture.

Over against credobaptist claims, Witherington seeks to show that the normal pattern throughout most of the New Testament is “water baptism” then “Spirit baptism”.  Water baptism therefore precedes that which truly saves:  Spirit baptism.  This is evident, Witherington says, first and foremost in the baptism of Jesus.  Baptists, of course, reverse this order and ask for saving faith before baptism.  Witherington sees this as violating the biblical norm.  (One caveat:  some of Witherington’s views of what Baptists believe struck me as frankly very odd and did not sound like anything I’ve ever heard in a Baptist church…and I IS one!  He almost seems to think that Baptists believe that baptism saves ex opera operato.  I think in some ways he has confused us with the Church of Christ or other groups along those lines, but I may have misread him.)

Anyway, I get the general point about the order of the baptisms, but I do feel that for Witherington’s argument to stand he must show that there is a substantial significance in the order, and probably that significance will have to be shown in a period of time between the two to prove the point that I think he’s wanting to prove.  This becomes problematic, though, when you look at Jesus’ own baptism and other biblical examples.  Sure, it was water baptism then Spirit baptism, but Witherington’s attempt to highlight the fact that the Spirit came not as Christ was coming up from the water, but up out of the water, seems too strained and forced to me.  Even granting the point, I don’t really get it.  It does not seem to do justice to the language of “immediacy” that both Matthew and Mark use.  The fact is, the coming of the Spirit in the case of Jesus came at the baptism, not some years later, and, frankly, it would have been difficult to do while Christ was under the water (Witherington grants that he was under the water).  Furthermore, using Christ’s baptism as a norm is problematic on a number of fronts, but, to Witherington’s credit, he does not appeal only to this example.

A number of things about Witherington’s book I really did like:  he says more than a couple of times that the New Testament mode was almost certainly immersion, but then he lets it die “the death of a thousand qualifications” by talking about the mode being determined by the amount of water available (with the customary appeals to the conditional language of The Didache).  Allow me to put on my crusty Baptist hat and say that one does grow weary of these rather frequent paedobaptist admissions of immersion, only to see it die the death of qualifications.  The fact is…now watch this…there is no water shortage in North America(though there’s getting to be one in South Georgia).  Please understand that this point is coming from one who believes in immersion, but does not believe that immersion is salvific or primary.  I’m almost tempted even to call it adiaphoric, but it was the biblical practice, and there is more than a bit of evidence that it was practiced in the early church, so I don’t see why we should have such a problem immersing.  (Above all, it fits with the symbolism of the death of Christ perfectly, a point that Witherington himself makes.)

Witherington also shows through careful exegesis that the household baptisms not only don’t mention infants, they also almost certainly could not have involved infants.  This is an honest admission, and says a great deal about the integrity of Witherington’s exegesis.  Furthermore, sounding like a good Baptist, Witherington calls on paedobaptists to consider how much more meaningful for the baptismal candidate postponing baptism will be than if they are baptized as an infant.

Yet, Witherington ultimately sees in the aforementioned order (water then Spirit) as well as in the Pauline parallels between circumcision and baptism enough evidence to warrant the baptism of infants, so he does allow it, with cautions.

One point that I didn’t quite get is the argument that in Acts we are dealing with first generation missionary baptisms and therefore not so much with the question of what to do with children who are born into the church.  I agree with that and I think I get the gist of it, but I keep coming back to this thought:  what of those among the 3,000 that Peter addressed who were capable of “repenting” and “being baptized” (and, in fact, did so) who were holding babies on their hips when Peter answered their question about what they should do to be saved?  If paedobaptism is warranted as a New Testament parallel to circumcision, would not Peter have simply asked them to baptize their whole families?  What does the fact that they are first generation or missionary converts have to do with their children being baptized?  I think Witherington would harken us back to Jewish proselyte baptism, which he shows to be the antecedent model of Christian baptism, but I never could quite get this straight in my head.

As an aside, I found one of Witherington’s most powerful points in his argument that the church has become primarily a nurturing body for families that are already Christian and not a missionary body as it clearly was in the New Testament.  This was, in my opinion, profound and really raised the whole level of discourse above the technicalities of the baptism debate.  The fact is, says Witherington, we ought to be bringing in non-believers and having to baptize non-believing adults, but, as a rule, we are not.  So we’re left with a question that was never the main question for the early church:  what to do with the infants of believers?

Witherington calls on Baptists not to treat the children of Christians as pagans, an idea I certainly agree with.  He also calls on us to have dedication ceremonies to draw these children into the fellowship, which we do.  I agree on both counts.  He also wisely cautions about the impossibility of knowing who really has saving faith, pointing out that a confession of faith is not faith.  I agree, but the conclusion that we should never proceed to an act on the basis of another’s faith simply because we cannot know with certainty that they do in fact have faith seems odd to me.  Wouldn’t this train of thought keep any pastor from ever administering the Lord’s Supper to anybody at all because he could not know if he was giving it to a saved person?

Witherington also speaks of the possibility of causing the children of Christians to feel guilty because they have not had a dramatic conversion experience.  This is right on and I think he’s wise to point this out, though I fail to see that credobaptism necessarily causes this.  (I do not, however, deny that it happens.)

I really enjoyed this book.  It challenged me and it really made me appreciate some paedobaptist arguments, while it failed to convince me on other points.  I appreciate the point about the order of the baptisms, and I certainly concur about which is salvific.  This is something I’ll definitely have to chew on.

This book was thought-provoking, challenging, and edifying.  I recommend it wholeheartedly as a fascinating and balanced look at baptism from an author who takes the text seriously and is equipped to take those of us who are not New Testament scholars below a merely surface reading of the text.

Thomas C. Oden’s Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements

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Note to self:  do not, I repeat do NOT get Thomas Oden mad.

Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements is Oden’s partially autobiographical story of his movement away from 60’s liberal radicalism (here called “The Feast I Left”), around Roman Catholicism (“The Feast I Missed”), and finally into postmodern Protestant paleo-orthodoxy (“The Feast I Did Not Expect”).

I’ve been intrigued with Tom Oden’s theological programme of paleo-orthodoxy ever since I heard him lecture at Southwestern Seminary while I was a student there, and I’ve read some of his more didactic works on the theological programme in which he must be considered the key player.  I’ve only just read, however, Oden’s fascinating Requiem (1995).

Now, anybody who has read any Oden at all knows that he has a flourish for polemics.  In fact (though I gather that Oden would deny this or not be pleased with it) his writings often seem primarily polemical in their thrust and focus.  Oden, by his own admission, is building an iconoclastic programme in the ruin of modernity, a period of time that he defines as resting roughly between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  But this collapsing and collapsed modernity is a sphere in which Oden used to be quite a major and fad-obsessed player.  In fact, I would be tempted to question exactly how Oden could have been involved in all of the movements (he says that he was a movement theologian) that he claims to have been involved in were in not for the fact that he has a lifetime of publishing in these movements.  But the movement is now dead, and Oden drives a rhetorical nail in the coffin of modernity in ways that only a child of the movement could.

Oden identifies the four hallmarks of the collapsed modernity as “autonomous individualism”, “narcissistic hedonic assertiveness”, “reductive naturalism”, and “absolute moral relativism and modern chauvinism” (p.118).  For Oden personally, the last straw in the failed experiment of modernity was a eucharistic service at the chapel of Drew University (where he was a member of the faculty) in which a radical feminist explicitly invoked and called for the worship of the goddess Sophia instead of Jesus Christ.  Oden walked out of that service, the first time he had ever walked out of an observance of Holy Communion.

Oden is now calling the church away from such faddish blasphemies into the rich and fertile ground of a postmodern retrieval of what he sees as the classic consensual tradition of patristic exegesis.  This call is most effectively seen in his Agenda for Theology (later republished as After Modernity…What?) and more recently inThe Rebirth of Orthodoxy.  He’s worked this paleo-orthodox program out in a myriad of impressive and significant works touching on exegesis (the multi-volume IVP Ancient Christian Commentary on Scirpture), his three-volume systematic theology, his work on pastoral care and ministry, and his patristic readers on issues like justification.

But here, in Requiem, Oden seems primarily concerned with diagnosing a cultural and university/seminary climate where the last vestiges of the dying/dead modernity still hold sway.  Oden bemoans “the McGovernization” of the seminaries, the rise of radical feminism, the maddening proliferation of new fads and movements, and the reduction of theology to just about anything that a professor with a fetish and the freedom to define elective courses might wish for it to be.

In Requiem, Oden levels one of the most blistering attacks on the modern tenure system that you’re likely to ever see in print.  His advice to orthodox students within modernistic seminary settings is fascinating and insightful.  Again and again, Oden shows that he’s no hack with a grudge.  Rather, he’s seen the belly of the beast and lived within its dying walls.

This is what separates proper polemics from irritating screeds:  genuine heartbroken concern.  And, though perhaps Oden occasionally gets lost in his very impressive verbiage, there is no doubt that he is genuinely heartbroken.

For a fascinating former-insider’s look at the machinery of modernity run amuck, and a compelling call for a return to what the late Robert Webber called “ancient future faith,” you’ll want to read Oden.  He is indeed the granddaddy of postmodern paleo-orthodoxy, a proposal that, while not without problems (i.e., Oden’s own idiosyncratic acceptance of certain portions of the paleo-orthodox tradition and rejection of others and the ever-vexing question of just how this classic consensus is to be defined), nonetheless is, in my opinion, the most significant and helpful proposal before the church today.

Here is provocative and edifying theology at its best.  Put on your helmet and give it a read.

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited

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A couple of years ago, a friend mentioned almost off-handedly that I should pick up a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.  He recommended it because of some conversations that we had been having about the Catholic Church.  At the time, he mentioned that it was a fascinating picture of twentieth-century aristocratic British Catholicism.  I stored the recommendation away.  I had, ironically enough, purchased The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (a collection of his short stories) some months prior to his recommendation, and so was somewhat familiar with Waugh’s unbelievable abilities as a writer (i.e., the deceptively simple “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” and the powerful short story “Out of Depth”, for instance, continue to stay with me).  So when my friend recommended the book, I thought at the time that I would simply have to get Brideshead Revisited at some point in the future.

My wife and I finished the novel about a month ago, and I felt that I must recommend it to anybody who wants to read a heart-rending and fascinating Christian apologetic from one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating, eccentric and brilliant writers.

Written in 1944, Brideshead Revisited is the story of Charles Ryder (who at the beginning of the story is a young Oxford student and at the end a highly accomplished architectural artist) and his relationships with the members of the Brideshead family:  an aristocratic, dysfunctional, Catholic family whose home, Marchmain Manor, serves time and again as the recurring stage on which many of the story’s great scenes are acted out.  The story progresses through different periods of Ryder’s life:  (1) his initial Oxford friendship with Sebastian, the pampered and debauched Brideshead son who evolves throughout the course of the novel into a full-fledged alcoholic, (2) Ryder’s artist’s sojourn to the wilds of South America in search of artistic inspiration and an escape from the doldrums of his hapless marriage to Celia, (3) his return to England and affair with Julia Brideshead, the jaded wife of a largely disinterested and self-abosorbed political opportunist, (4) the dissolution of his affair with Julia at the deathbed of her father, Lord Brideshead (who returns home with his mistress from his years-long exile from Mrs. Brideshead in Venice so that he can die at Marchmain), and (4) his time in the army during WWII in which he returns to Marchmain, which has become a mere shadow of its former glory and is being used by the army.

Charles Ryder is, at most, an indifferent agnostic.  The Church, to him, is merely an antiquated institution that preys on the gullibility and guilt of an unsuspecting public.  The claims of the Church are “bosh” to Ryder.  The Brideshead family, on the other hand, with the exception of Lord Brideshead, are, in varying degrees, Catholics.  Sebastian, for all of his debauchery and excess, refuses to join Ryder in his wholesale dismissal of Christianity.  He holds a prodigal’s affection for the Church, if only from a distance, and, as the prodigal son did, Sebastian too eventually returns to God.  The eldest Brideshead son, called “Brideshead” in the novel, holds to the faith, though with a kind of belligerent lack of couth and understanding that makes him utterly unattractive to the reader.  Julia is a svelt modern, a quasi-agnostic who, in the end, is driven back to the faith by the blind hostility that Ryder shows to Christianity, especially as it reveals itself in ugly contrast to the priest presiding at the deathbed of her father, Lord Brideshead.  Finally, Cordelia is the most devout of the Brideshead children, a somewhat naïve but strong believer with a stringent sense of piety and a heart that yearns to care for the hurting.

When I read Brideshead Revisited, I had to undergo a journey of my own.  I was not sure of my friends’ intentions in recommending the work, but I thought, perhaps wrongly, that he recommended it as an indictment of cultural Catholicism.  On a certain level, it is.  But I came to believe, as I read the novel, that it was much more.  I came to believe, and now am firmly convinced, that what Waugh was actually attempting in Brideshead was a strident apologetic for the faith.  Furthermore, it is a powerful indictment of the emptiness and futility of secular man as seen in the person of Charles Ryder as well as in the ultimately self-absorbed and self-defeating lifestyles of most of the Brideshead family.

Evelyn Waugh himself later said that Brideshead Revisited was primarily about God’s relentless pursuit of man (see George Weigel’s excellent 1993 First Things article “St. Evelyn Waugh”).  And it is.  For as the novel progresses, we see time and again the eventual return of its characters to the grace of God.  Sebastian’s debauchery ends in a struggling but definite faith and return to the Church. Julia comes to realize that she has fallen into idolatry, the elevation of her own self, and must reject Charles Ryder and turn to God instead.  The apex of the book is the dramatic and heart-wrenching deathbed scene in which Lord Brideshead, the old pagan and antagonist to the Church, finally makes the sign-of-the cross and so calls out for repentance.  And, in the end, as he returns later to the decaying Marchmain and stands in the chapel on the grounds, Charles Ryder himself comes to see it as well.  In the chapel, at the book’s close, he notices something, “a small red flame – a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, farm from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem.  It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”  Ryder, of course, is that soldier, the one who is “farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem.”  He is the one who comes now to see and understand Who and where our true home is.  Like Augustine in his Confessions, Ryder sees that our hearts are never truly home until they are at home in God.  The story ends with Ryder walking out of the chapel and a fellow soldier commenting on how cheerful he looks.

Evelyn Waugh has been rightly praised for Brideshead Revisited since its appearance.  It deserves a continued reading and hearing.  Read this book.

N.T. Wright’s The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture

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There are few figures today who claim the name “Evangelical” that are as controversial as the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright.  There are also few figures as prolific in the output of their writings as Tom Wright.  As polarizing figures are apt to do, Wright seems to have inspired two different camps:  those who hang on his every word and those who seem determined to condemn his every word.

I am sure, though, that there must be others who, like myself, are uneasy with Wright’s primary arena of controversy (the so-called “New Perspective” on Paul and the potential implications of this view on the traditional Reformation doctrine of justification by faith), but feel that the Bishop might have much to add to evangelical life in other regards.  (Unlike many of his critics, however, this is as strong as I will state my unease, for my own reading on these issues has been primarily in secondary works and in the lectures of critics.  The fact that I have not grappled with and worked through Wright’s magnus opum, the multi-volumeChristian Origins and the Question of God, will keep me from going any further in this direction, an approach that other critics who have not read his primary works might consider adopting themselves.)

I am happy to say that this is the case with Wright’s The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture.  Not only is there very little here that establishment Evangelicals could be uneasy with, there is much here that will challenge and inspire Evangelicals who feel as if they are mired in these so-called “Bible wars” and who are seeking to have and hold a robust view of biblical authority that honors the God who gave us Scripture while recognizing the complex issues that accompany biblical inspiration as well.

I found particularly helpful Wright’s diagnosis of the hermeneutical blind-spots that those on both the right and the left inevitably hold.  As a pastor “on the right,” I must say I by-and-large agree with his assessments.  Escapist eschatologies, idiosyncratic and eisegetical readings that do not seem to hear, much less heed, various biblical justice issues that might challenge certain political presuppositions that many on the right appear to uncritically accept, and a host of other blind-spots are diagnosed with the precision that only one who has spent much time in the house of conservative Evangelicalism could offer.  Of course, his critique of the left’s blindspots were, I believe, spot on, and much less painful for me to read.  But for Wright’s critics on the right who fear nascent or full-orbed leftist tendencies in the Bishop, his list of leftist eisegesis will give some comfort that the good Bishop has both of his eyes wide open.

I must confess to being mildly irritated by what appears to be a rather consistent anti-Americanism within Wright’s writings (specifically here and in Simply Christian as well).  I don’t so much disagree with the main thrust of some of his concerns as I find them myopic, simplistic, and lacking in any real effort to see the other side of his primary concerns (i.e., America’s wealth and the war).  In truth, when it comes to American politics Wright sounds not only like a member of the Democratic party but also like any number of legions of anti-American Brits with an axe to grind.  But I digress…

What strikes me when I read Wright is his consistent desire for balance.  He wants a healthy respect for the role of tradition but eschews the mantras of Catholic traditionalists who see the Bible as the Church’s property.  He wants us to respect the valid contributions of critical scholarship, but wants us to see clearly the arrogant Enlightenment assumptions behind the supposedly neutral hermeneutic of modern skeptical elites.  He wants us to be “whole Bible” theologians, seeing the Hebrew Scriptures as the Word of God, but he also wants us to realize that those in “the fifth act” (“the church” in his five-fold schema of reading Scripture) cannot act as if they are in the first four acts.  I found this particular insight – how Christians are to read the Old Testament – to be the most fertile ground in The Last Word, and the one section that made me most want to delve into his larger works.

Wright’s work, in many ways, is a profound philosophical diagnosis of modernity and postmodernity and the challenges that these realities present to the modern reader.  His discussion of the concept of authority is quite helpful and few books have made me think as deeply about the words we toss about so casually in our discussions of Holy Scripture as Wright’s book.

Above all, my one reading of The Last Word has reminded me again of C.S. Lewis’ opinion that we’ve not really read a book until we’ve read it at least twice.  I will likely follow this advice with this book, though I need some time to digest this meal that has proven to be very solid, and, I believe, will prove to be quite beneficial for my own spiritual health.

The Last Word is worthy of a close reading.

Donald S. Whitney’s Family Worship: In The Bible, In History & In Your Home

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I would like to recommend Donald S. Whitney’s Family Worship: In The Bible, In History & In Your Home.  In this short work, Whitney paints a bleak picture of home life within Evangelicalism and supports the picture with compelling and convicting statistical data.  The picture is of Christian families who have neglected the family altar to such an extent that the church eventually loses an alarming percentage of the children of these families when they leave home.  In reaction to this dilemma, Whitney provides a clear exegetical foundation for the family altar, showing that Christian instruction in the home is time and time again called for in Scripture.  He uses a number of compelling illustrations of Christian heroes who practiced family worship even in the midst of busy Christian ministries.  Spurgeon’s example is notable here, and Whitney uses it to great effect.  The book is extremely practical and Whitney addresses a number of questions that readers who have neglected the family altar might have.  He has also produced an audio reading cd that can likewise be purchased through “The Center for Biblical Spirituality.”  This work would be ideal to give as a gift to the families of your church and is priced affordably enough (especially the bulk rates) that this could be done without tremendous financial stress.  Check out Don Whitney’s Family Worship.  Highly recommended.

Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons: A Novel

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Well, it grieves me to write this, but here is my review of Charles Frazier’s second novel, Thirteen Moons: A Novel:  Don’t buy it.  It grieves me because Cold Mountain, Frazier’s first novel, remains one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read, and I’ve been waiting for Frazier to write again.  He was reportedly given an $8 million advance for writing Thirteen Moons, and maybe that’s the problem.  Maybe that’s not a healthy thing to do to a new author.

Thirteen Moons is the story of Will Cooper’s life among the Cherokee Indians of the Smokey Mountains before, during, and after the Civil War.  It chronicles the dissolution of the Indian Nation and their deportation to the West, all told through the eyes of Will Cooper:  a white man who lives among the Indians and becomes something of a surrogate chief and advocate for them during these tempestuous years.

Here are the good points:  Frazier can flat-out write.  He has a great command of words and tells a story well.  The chapter on the duel was tremendous and has stayed with me.  He tells the story of the Indians very well and you feel like you’ve not only learned what American Indians must have been thinking when the U.S. Government began sending them out West, but you’re also drawn into their world with such effectiveness that you truly sympathize with their plight.  Also, his depictions of ante-bellum Washington, D.C., and Will Turner’s meetings with John C. Calhoun, Davy Crockett, et al. are memorable and oftentimes humorous.

The bad:  I’m going to sound like a prude here, and I really don’t care.  Too much foul language and too much gratuitous sex.  After 300 pages you think, “Man, this is meaningless and random and unnecessary.”  Also, there is no real plot.  What’s the point?  Also, nobody is terribly likeable in the story, least of all Will Cooper.

I don’t know, it was a good opportunity squandered.  Here’s hoping that Charles Frazier will do better next time around.