Well, not surprisingly given everything that has gone on this last month, there was very little time for cover-to-cover book reading.  Regardless, here are the books I did finish.
1. The Last Word and the Word After That: A Tale of Faith, Doubt, and a New Kind of Christian by Brian D. McLaren.
Many thanks to Mike Morrell from The Ooze for this review copy!
This book, the third in McLaren’s ‘New Kind of Christian’ trilogy, is focused upon the question of hell and, more significantly, what beliefs about hell imply about the character of the God who is said to create and maintain such a place.  This is not to say that other topics aren’t addressed here and there throughout the book — matters related to struggles for justice and the mission and identity of the Church being two significant subplots — but the relation of hell to the character of God is the driving theme of the book.  Stated in an overly simplistic manner this book poses the question: “Can one believe in some sort of eternal or postmortem ‘hell’ in light of the affirmation of God as good, powerful, and loving?”  The answer is that if it is, perhaps, too much of a stretch to say that one absolutely cannot believe in such a thing as this sort of ‘hell’, at the very least one should not affirm such a place.  Thus, while many explore the topic of hell within the theological category of eschatology (understood as the ‘last things’ or the ‘last word’) the word that McLaren asserts must come after all that is ‘grace’.
Now, this is all well and good, as far as I’m concerned.  I have personally rejected what has sometimes come to be called the ‘traditional’ view on hell, even more than the characters in this book.  Of course, to refer to only one view on hell as the ‘traditional’ view, is something on an ideologically-weighted misnomer as the Christian tradition, from its inception, has always contained multiple and divergent views on hell… but I digress.
I enjoyed this book because, to a greater degree than the previous books in the trilogy, McLaren’s engagement with the relevant biblical texts was quite substantial and well-rooted in serious scholarship.  In a way McLaren is simply popularizing what has been argued in more detail elsewhere (which is something that needs to be done).  Also, on another positive note, I felt that McLaren was finally starting to hit his stride as a fiction writer within this book.  The flow of the story seemed more natural, the characters more genuine, and so on.
So, once again, I would recommend this book to those who were raised within Conservative or Evangelical Christian circles and who have been asking questions about their faith.
2. Alexander Herzen and the Rise of Russian Socialism by Martin Malia.
This book is a detailed biography of Alexander Herzen, the 19th-century Russian émigré and populist (although he could also be described as a socialist or an anarchist).  The biographer, Martin Malia, is especially concerned to understand Herzen in relation to his times, and so the book contains many fascinating and detailed studies of Herzen’s relation to the works, acts, and thoughts of people like Schiller, Schelling, Saint-Simon, Hegel, Sand, and Bakunin.
Malia’s thesis regarding the rise of Russian Socialism is that the socialist revolutionary, in Russia, was rooted not in the proletariat but in the gentry.  Therefore, contrary to an element of Marxist theory, Malia argues that it is a certain segment of the aristocracy who rebelled against the autocratic power of the Tsars, precisely because the Tsars were so autocratic that these members of the gentry were made to feel alienated from the Court.  Thus, according to Malia (who agrees with Lenin on this point), the socialist dream is born amongst members from the possessing class, but who do not feel that are of this class (this also fits with Weber’s thesis that the revolution arises when the culture-makers move into solidarity with the proletariat).
Herzen, then, becomes Malia’s illustration of this point — a member of the gentry, who always felt alienated from his own class (particularly because he was an illegitmate son of is father), who was exiled by Nicholas, and who ended up being one of the key voices from Russia regarding Socialism.
Now I personally found this all very fascinating, particularly as I am continually asking myself: ‘What is required to produce social change today?’  Equally fascinating, although not explicitly explored by Malia, are the ways in which Herzen’s location amongst the gentry functions as an obstacle to his embrace of Socialism.  Thus, while Herzen does arrive at an affirmation of an anarchic form of Russian populism, this is largely the result of his consistent application of beliefs related to personal dignity and individual freedom (indeed, it should be noted that this sort of anarcho-syndicalism — and not something like a liberal democracy — is the proper conclusion to those post-Enlightenment trajectories).
Therefore, in Herzen, Malia provides us with an illustration of both the ways in which people with wealth and property can contribute to the revolution, and ways in which that wealth and property becomes and obstacle to meaningful contributions.
3. & 4. Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest by John Updike.
These, the last two books in Updike’s Rabbit Series, continue to follow Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom through his life at ten year intervals.  In Rabbit is Rich, we encounter Harry in his late forties, running a car dealership, playing golf and having drinks at the Clubhouse, and dealing with a son who got his partner pregnant.  Then, in Rabbit at Rest, we encounter Harry in his late fifties, semi-retired in Florida half the year, dealing with his first heart attack and trying to help his son with an addiction problem.
As I’ve stated before, I found this series to be rather terrifying in its portrayal of both suburban America and of people, and life, in general.  It makes me wonder, ‘Good God, is that all there is?  Is that what we really are?”

Well, given that I was spending so much of my allotted ‘reading time’ on thesis research, I’m surprised, when looking back on 2008, to discover that I was still able to read 72 books cover-to-cover.  Once again, I’ve listed them by category, although instead of picking one or two of the best and the worst, I’ve simply put a (+) sign by those I found especially good and a (-) sign by those that were not at all suited to my tastes.

Biblical Studies (26)

• Beale, G. K. We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry.

• Cullmann, Oscar. Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History (revised edition).

• (+) Elliott, Neil. The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire.

• Georgi, Dieter. Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology.

• (+) Gorman, Michael J. Reading Paul.

• (+) Green, Joel B. The Gospel of Luke (NICNT).

• Horsley Richard A. (ed). Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society.

• ________. Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation. Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl.

• Judge, E. A. Social Distinctives of the Christians in the First Century: Pivotal Essays by E. A. Judge. Edited by David M. Scholer.

• Lopez, Davina C. Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission.

• Malherbe, Abraham, J. Social Aspects of Early Christianity.

• Marshall, I. Howard. A Concise New Testament Theology.

• (+) Oakes, Peter. Philippians: From People to Letter.

• Pate, C. Marvin. The End of the Age Has Come: The Theology of Paul.

• Price, S. R. F. Rituals and Power: The Roman imperial cult in Asia Minor.

• Roetzel, Calvin, J. Paul: A Jew on the Margins.

• Sampley, Paul J. Pauline Partnership in Christ: Christian Community and Commitment in Light of Roman Law.

• ________. Walking Between the Times: Paul’s Moral Reasoning.

• (+) Tellbe, Mikael. Paul Between Synagogue and State: Christians, Jews, and Civic Authorities in 1 Thessalonians, Romans, and Philippians.

• Thielman, Frank. Theology of the New Testament: a canonical synthetic approach.

• Walker, Peter. In the Steps of Paul: An Illustrated Guide to the Apostle’s Life and Journeys.

• Winters, Bruce. After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change.

• ________. Seek the Welfare of the City: Christians as Benefactors and Citizens.

• Wright, N. T. Christians at the Cross: Finding Hope in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus.

• ________. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.

• Yung Suk Kim Christ’s Body in Corinth: The Politics of a Metaphor.

• Zanker, Paul. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus.

Theology/Christian Living (20)

• (+) Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II.1: The Doctrine of God.

• Bell, Rob and Dan Golden. Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.

• Betcher, Sharon V. Spirit and the Politics of Disablement.

• (+) Cavanaugh, William T. Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire.

• Claiborne, Shane, and Chris Haw. Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals.

• Dear, John. Put Down Your Sword: Answering the Gospel Call to Creative Nonviolence.

• (-) Herringshaw, Mark and Jennifer Schuchmann. Six Prayers God Always Answers.

• McLaren, Brian D. A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey.

• ________. The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian.

• Metzger, Paul Louis. Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Divisions in a Consumer Church.

• Mobsby, Ian. The Becoming of G-d.

• Moltmann, Jürgen. A Broad Place: An Autobiography.

• (+) ________. Experiences in Theology: Ways and Forms of Christian Theology.

• Ramachandra, Vinoth. Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping our World.

• (-) Sanguin, Bruce. The emerging Church.

• (+) Sobrino, Jon. No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays.

• Stackhouse Jr., John G. Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World.

• Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. A Theology of History.

• (+) Woodley, Matthew. Holy Fools: Following Jesus with Reckless Abandon.

• Wright, Christopher J. H. The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Thought Questions of Faith.

Philosophy/History/Social Theory & Commentary (10)

• Barnholden, Michael and Nancy Newman, with photographs by Lindsay Mearns. Street Stories: 100 Years of Homelessness in Vancouver.

• Cran, Brad and Gillian Jerome. Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

• Chomsky, Noam. What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World. Interviews with David Barsamian.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle.

• (+) Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire.

• (+) ________. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.

• Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

• (+) Kropotkin, Peter. Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

• Roszak, Theodore. The Making of the Counter Culture: Reflections on the tecnoratic society and its youthful opposition.

• Seabrook, Jeremy. Travels in the Skin Trade: Tourism and the Sex Industry.

• (+) Žižek, Slavoy. In Defense of Lost Causes.

Literature/Classics/Plays (15)

• (+) Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot.

• (+) Camus, Albert. Les Justes.\

• Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year.

• DeLillo, Don. White Noise.

• Eliot, T. S. Murder in the Cathedral.

• France, Anatole. The Gods Will Have Blood.

• Juvenal. Sixteen Satires.

• Kourouma, Ahmadou. Allah is Not Obliged.

• Petronius. The Satyricon.

• (+) Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea.

• Seneca, The Apocolocyntosis.

• (-) Stennet, Rob. The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher: A Novel.

• Updike, John. rabbit, run.

• ________. rabbit redux.

• Walter, Chris. Shouts From the Gutter.

Other (1)

• A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Introduction to Bhagavad-Gita.

1. The Gospel of Luke (NICNT) by Joel B. Green.
Two or three years ago, I decided to begin reading my way through the New Testament (NT), by reading a commentary on each book.  So, when it came time to choose a commentary on Luke (sometime around the end of ’07), I asked a friend of mine, who is a NT professor, for a recommendation, and he recommended Green’s 900 page behemoth of a book. So, for most of ’08, I was slowly chipping away at this book and, in the end, I found it to be a meaningful and rich experience to spend so much time moving slowly through Luke’s text with Green’s assistance (for example, at Christmas last year, I was reading Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth; at Christmas this year, I was reading Luke’s account of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension).
Green’s commentary slowly, steadily, and text by text, builds an irrefutable case, demonstrating just how deeply Jesus challenges the socio-economic, political, and religious conventions of his day.  With steady blows, Green hammers into the reader the ways in which Jesus overturned (a) the standard conventions of an honour/shame based society, (b) the family values of his society, and (c) contemporary reflections upon the significance of wealth.  B y the end of it all, it becomes impossible to imagine Jesus as anything but committed to deep, practical solidarity with the poor and marginalised — within an alternative, subversive community (of disciples) that becomes a new family (with all that implies) centred around Jesus himself.  This, then, carries implications that cut to the core of what it means to live as disciples of Jesus today, particularly for those of us who are not amongst the poor and marginalised but rather (a) have high status; (b) are overly focused upon our biological families; and (c) possess property and wealth.
Therefore, Green’s study is an highly important contribution to our understanding of Jesus.  Many other scholars (Ched Myers, Warren Carter, Richard Horsley, etc.) have also offered us images of Jesus that are deeply counter-cultural and politically, economically, and religiously subversive, but these scholars tend to be relegated to some sort of ‘radical’ fringe, and not taken as seriously as they should be.  However, Green is not known as a member of this group — rather, he is known as a strong evangelical scholar, given especially to literary criticism and narrative-based theology — and so Green is able to bring this gospel message to audiences that would otherwise dismiss this sort of thinking without a fair (if any) hearing.
I highly recommend this book.  If you can get over how large it is, and just work away at it slowly and steadily, you will be rewarded.
2. We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry by G. K. Beale (Downers Grove: IVP, 2008.
Many thanks to Adrianna from IVP for this review copy!
The thesis that Beale pursues throughout this book is this: What we revere we resemble, either for ruin or restoration.  More specifically, Beale argues that worshipping the true God leads us reflect the divine image and be restored to truly human status; whereas worshiping idols (by which Beale means allowing anything else to take the place of God in our lives, and become that which we cling to for ultimate security) leads us to reflect the image of these (physically but especially spiritually) blind and deaf idols and thereby become ruined and less-than-human.  In this regard, we are presented with a stark either-or.  Beale argues that humans are ‘imaging’ beings, necessarily reflecting one image or another, and so it becomes crucial to determine who or what we are reflecting and to whom or what we are becoming conformed.
Having established this thesis, Beale spends most of the book supporting it by demonstrating how the Bible presents this argument, beginning with Isaiah 6 and moving through the rest of the Old Testament, the intertestamental literature, the Gospel, Acts, Paul’s epistles, and the book of Revelation.
As I mentioned in a prior post, I found a lot of Beale’s initial Old Testament exegesis to be fascinating.  In fact, what Beale wrote about the Golden Calf incident, reminded me of why I fell in love with biblical studies in the first place — biblical studies has so much potential to bring life, light, intrigue, excitement, and coherence, to the many seemingly dead, dark, dull, and disparate stories, I grew up hearing about in Sunday school.
Unfortunately, biblical studies can also get quite dry and repetitive, as an author goes through text after text in order to make the same point over and over again.  To my disappointment, I found the later half of this book going that route.  This surprised me as I don’t think that Beale’s thesis is as new, or as in need of proving, as he imagines it to be.  For example, in his writings on Paul (unmentioned by Beale), N. T. Wright has been making this same point about worship and idolatry, since at least the early 1990s.
Be that as it may, I still enjoyed this book a great deal, and I appreciated Beale’s more pastoral and applied conclusion (subtitled, ‘So What Difference Does it Make?’).  Too often biblical scholars avoid such reflections, leaving the reader to make whatever connections he or she might make between the word at hand and the world at large, so I am glad for Beale’s effort to cross this divide.
3. The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Thought Questions of Faith by Christopher J. H. Wright (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).
Many thanks to Chris Fann and now Andrew Rogers from Zondervan for this review copy!  I will be posting a series (probably in five parts) about this book — hopefully engaging in a dialogue about it with one of my brothers (who is not a Christian) — in January, so I’ll simply mention this now, and save the review for later.
4. Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire by William T. Cavanaugh.
This book received a lot of hype this year.  And deservedly so.  It’s a good book and an excellent introduction to practically thinking through with it means to be Christian within the world of global capitalism.  Thus, Cavanaugh describes this book as a ‘theological microeconomics’ particularly focused on four issues: (1) so-called ‘free’ markets, and the Augustinian notion of freedom as the embrace of the telos of life in God; (2) the detachment of consumers from production, producers, and products, and Christian eucharistic consumption that attaches participants to God and others; (3) competing understandings of globalisation and the relation of the global to the local; and (4) capitalism’s narrative of scarcity and the Christian narrative of abundance.
Having said that, it is important to emphasise that this book is really introductory reading on this matter, and that there is much more that can and must be done if Christians are to properly engage with the local and global structures and ideology of capitalism.  Indeed, I am half inclined to wonder if a book like this receives so much hype because most Christians aren’t doing any reading at all on this topic.  If this is the case, then I can only hope that these readers will press on and continue to engage this topic in both their thinking and living — because I am convinced that it is global capitalism that presents the single greatest challenge to living Christianly today.
5. The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian by Brian D. McLaren.
Many thanks to Mike Morrell from The Ooze for this review copy!
Last month I read, and was pleasantly surprised by, the first book of McLaren’s ‘new kind of Christian’ trilogy.  In this, the second installment, McLaren basically tries to retell the biblical story as a  ‘redeeming story in which other stories can find their highest meaning and their truest fulfillment’ and not as an ‘exclusive story that seeks to vanquish, replace, or eradicate all other stories.’ It’s an interesting endeavour — one that I suspect is motivated by McLaren’s desire to distance himself, or emerge from, embittered and often hateful early modern and triumphalistic expressions of Christianity — but I’m not convinced that McLaren can succeed.  It seems to me that he is trying to have his cake an eat it too.  That is to say, he wishes to be distanced from Christians who focus upon exclusivity and a supposed superiority… while still maintaining a supposedly nicer or more palatable form of exclusivity and superiority (speaking of how other stories find their ‘highest meaning’ in the Christian story, and so on).  It’s as though McLaren wants the biblical story to be ‘the first amongst equals’ — which, as we all know, was simply the ideology employed by the Caesars (the Princeps) in order to take the edge off of their dictatoral rule.
Now, I stress this somewhat tangential point because it seems to me that a good many post-Evangelical or emergent Christians are engaging in something similar.  They are trying to renegotiate the exclusive and offensive claims of Christianity, not by making those claims less exclusive, but by making those claims sound nicer.  Yet this strikes me as a dead-end, not least because this has all too often been  the ideological means of continuing oppressive practices.  I believe that we would be much better served if we confronted and confessed that which is exclusive and offensive about Christianity, precisely so that we can prevent those things from leading us astray into oppressive practices.
Of course, doing this doesn’t mean we automatically resist all other stories.  Being clear about what Christianity does and does not claim, does make us more open to some other narratives (for example, as McLaren’s emphasises throughout this book, there is no fundamental or necessary contradiction between the Christian story of creation and some theories of evolution).  However, as Paul reminds us time and time again, there will always be elements of Christianity that are deemed scandalous and deeply shameful and embarrassing, so, even as we embrace others, we must also embrace that shame.
That said, I should get back to MacLaren’s presentation of the biblical story.  McLaren presents the bible as a coherent whole structured around the motifs and movements of creation, crisis, calling, conversation, Christ, community, and consummation.  Along the way, McLaren addresses many issues — evolution science, the relation of a general absence of miracles to the maintenance of genuine free will, and even a sermon in response to the events in New York on September 11, 2001, Again, as with McLaren’s previous book, I could take issue with this or that point (pretty seriously at times) but I suspect that this book has a good many significant things to say to those who have been immersed in the Evangelical subculture and I don’t want to rush in and take away from that.
However, precisely because I am not a member of McLaren’s target audience (or of his ‘tribe’ as emergent people might say), precisely because I read McLaren’s book as a student of a genuinely and deeply liberating biblical theology, I consistently find that he does not carry his points far enough.  That is to say, although McLaren may be building bridges between Liberals and Conservatives (especially in relation the false divide between science and faith) the whole endeavour still strikes me as entirely too bourgeois and, well, American.  Thus, for example, the single most important and formative event of the Old Testament — the exodus — is hardly mentioned; or, to provide another example, McLaren speaks of one’s duty as an American, of America as ‘a nation extraodinarily gifted’ (as though plundering other nations can be taken as gifts from God!) and allows that ‘a military mission’ may be one part of an appropriate response to 9/11.  All of this is deeply troubling to me.
At the end of it all, although McLaren may provide challenges to both those on the right and left wings, he offers a balm to the middle-class as middle-class.
6. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
In this, the truly exceptional follow-up to Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss the challenges (notably the perpetual state of war favoured by capitalism) to, and possibility of, developing a genuine form of democracy in our day.  In this regard, democracy is understood as the ‘rule of the multitude’, where ‘the multitude’ takes the place of ‘the people’, because ‘the people’ has become a concept that obliterates differences within a unity, whereas ‘the multitude’ speaks of a multiplicity of singular differences working together for common goals (thus, a recovery of ‘the commons’ becomes a significant part of Hardt and Negri’s proposal).  It is this form of democracy that the authors argue is not only necessary but possible.
I very strongly recommend this book.  There is no way I can do it justice in this little ‘review’ — it deserves to be read and reread.
7. Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Peter Kropotkin.
This is the story of the first half of Kropotkin’s life (he wanted to give it the title Around One’s Life, was assigned a much flashier title by the publisher).  These memoirs cover Kropotkin’s upbringing as a prince in the court of the Tsar, his conversion to anarchism, his time as an active revolutionary, and part of his exile.  Unaddressed is the later part of his exile, as well as his return to Russia after 1917, which, although Kropotkin’s latter life had led him to more moderate views, led him back into unequivocal anarchism (opposing both the communists and those who favoured foreign intervention into Russia) up until his death in 1921.
I must confess that I find these memoirs to be absolutely captivating and inspiring.  Kropotkin lived both an incredible life (from living as royalty, to engaging in geographical explorations in Siberia with Cossack parties, to smuggling revolutionary literature into Russia, to being imprisoned, exiled, and coming to work alongside of the Jura Federation and survivors of the Paris Commune!) and lived during an incredible time when a mass movement of young gentry in Russia were willing to give up their wealth and privilege in order to come alongside of the workers and (especially) the serfs in order to arrive at a more humanised society of the liberated.  Absolutely incredible stuff.  It makes me wonder what in the world is capable of creating this sort of movement today (although the aforementioned book by Hardt and Negri has some suggestions in this regard — notably change coming through the networking of the multitude — I still wonder how the prerequisite mass conscientisation and commitment can be brought into being).
So, this book is highly recommended.  Amongst other things, it finally pushed me over the edge and made me accept the fact that I am, indeed, an anarchist of sorts (don’t crucify me yet, I intend to write a post about this in the near future).
8. rabbit redux by John Updike.
This is the second installment of Updike’s rabbit series, and it focuses on Rabbit’s mid-thirties when his son is in his pre-teens, his wife has run off with a lover, and a couple of young people, involved in the street and drug culture of the day, have come to stay with Rabbit.  Once again, we have a stark portrayal of people as (I fear that) they really are — messy and broken and selfish and longing for love and sometimes wanting to be noble but mostly pathetic and petty and trapped.  Certainly a novel, and a series, without any sort of hero.  Just people here.
To be honest, this sort of book and others I’ve been reading lately — Nausea by Sartre, White Noise by Delillo, and even Crossing to Safety by Stegner — kind of scare me.  They scare me because I think that they might be right; they might accurately reflect the world as it is, and us as we are.  Each of our lives might actually be nothing more than a petty, broken moment of insignificance… and apart from lying to ourselves about ourselves (in order to try and create some sort of meaning or significance, goodness or value, that isn’t there), there is nothing we can do about it.  I sometimes wonder if a strict reliance upon empiricism or materialism — what I actually see in the world around me, and what I actually see in myself (when I’m honest) — leads inevitably to this conclusion.  So, yeah, scary stuff.
9. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
For some reason, the great plagues of Europe have been on my mind a lot this last year.  I’d been watching some documentaries on the subject, and then my wonderful wife surprised me with this book — Defoe’s account of what occurred in London in the plague of 1665.  Defoe writes sixty years after the event, and bases his narrative upon actual accounts from survivors and official documents.  As such it is something of a rambling and disjointed, but also totally captivating account as Defoe relates the stories of families boarded up in their homes and assigned watchmen (but still finding many ways to escape!), some who found a way to live on the river during the plague, others who went off and tried to survive by roaming the countryside (mostly unsuccessfully) and so on.  A fascinating glimpse into our not too distant past.
So why has the plague been on my mind?  Well, it seems to me that we’re actually living in a comparable time, only we’ve become numb to the plague that rages around us.  Millions of the global poor are dying all around us, but we can’t even find it in our hearts to give a couple dollars to the beggar we meet at the bus stop.  Thus, just as plague art revolved around macabre themes, and especially the triumph of death, I feel that our time is also one that is marked by the triumph of death.  Furthermore, just as the plagues threw Europe into a deep crisis of faith and how one lives one’s life, I feel that the current triumph of death should result in a similar crisis in each of our own lives.  I am amazed that it does not.
Bonus: A 15 Point Guide to Peeing in the City by Ray Tempus.
This fun little pamphet was a Christmas gift from a friend, and I promised that I would include it in my December books.  Thanks to this, I now feel much more equipped to pee wherever I might find myself, so I guess I don’t have to worry so much about using the bathroom before I go out.  Thanks, Robin (my favourite option is #11, the ‘faux trash pick’ which is effective because people think that it is rude to stare about a person picking through a dumpster… and so they don’t notice what you’re actually doing)!

Well, one of the many wonderful things about being off work and on disability is that I was able to do a little more detailed reading this month. Seriously, smashing up my ankle was one of the best things to happen to me in a long time!
1. A Concise New Testament Theology by I. Howard Marshall (Downers Grove: IVP, 2008).
Many thanks to Adrianna from IVP for providing me with this review copy (and with a review copy of We Become What We Worship by G. K. Beale, which I began to discuss here, but which will not be fully reviewed until the end of this month)!
This book functions as a concise summary of the Marshall’s earlier, award-winning volume, New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel. Consequently, what one finds here are Marshall’s conclusions and summary statements, without having to wade through extended and detailed scholarly and exegetical discussions. Thus, for the pastor or the lay reader this book in an invaluable aid. However, even for those interested in such detailed discussions (and I consider myself one such reader) this book is useful. In particular, it provides a wonderful overview of the broad strokes of the NT. The student, or researcher, or scholar, often becomes bogged down in his or her own area of expertise (say the synoptics, or Paul, or the historical veracity of Acts, or whatever else) and it is all top easy to lose sight of the rest of the NT. Now, granted, for the secular scholar, this need not be so troubling, but for the Christian scholar — and particularly the scholar who affirms the whole canon of Scripture as authoritative in some way — this should be a concern. Consequently, a book like this one is very useful indeed.
In this regard, the brevity of the book is a great strength. As Marshall rapidly works through the NT book by book (first by going through each book from beginning to end, then by tracing the theological themes of each book, and then by relating each book or corpus back to the rest of the NT — in roughly fifteen pages each), it becomes a great deal easier to relate the Synoptics to Paul, or relate Paul to the Johannine epistles, or relate Hebrews to Revelation, and so on. Further, given that the majority of biblical scholars do not relate their area of NT studies to other areas, it was refreshing to read an author who was very interested in doing this.
That said, I was somewhat surprised with a good many of the conclusions drawn by Marshall. In particular, it seemed that Marshall was regularly reasserting a traditional or ‘Lutheran’ understanding of the NT — in ways that actually seem untenable to me given the trajectory taken by NT scholarship in the last twenty or so years. Now it is obvious that Marshall is aware of this scholarship — for example, he will do things like mention that there has been heated scholarly discussion regarding ‘faith in/of Jesus Christ’ (pistis Christou) but then he will invariably restate the traditional position. Marshall’s commitment to such traditional affirmations is even obvious in the layout of his section on Paul. Although he states that he wishes to survey Paul’s letters in chronological order, he chooses to start with Galatians because ‘its theological content makes it a good starting place’. Hence, we also see major emphases on salvation by faith (which is is generally seen as affirming certain propositions), on the mission of spreading the Gospel (which is primarily proclaimed propositionally) and so on.
Of course, as I stated above, this book is simply a summary of Marshall’s earlier 765pp tome on the NT so, if anything, my surprise regarding Marshall’s reaffirmation of these traditional positions has simply whet my appetite for more. I would like to know how Marshall can hold on to some of these views and, just as importantly, some of these emphases, especially in light of the so-called New Perspectives on Paul and Jesus, and empire-critical readings of the NT… which means I’ll just have to go back to his earlier work!
2. Theology of the New Testament: a canonical synthetic approach by Frank Thielman (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).
Many thanks to Chris Fann from Zondervan for this review copy!
I tend to approach scholars with Evangelical or Conservative reputations with at least as much hesitation or suspicion as I approach scholars reputed to be on the far Left (actually, to be honest, I might approach them with even more suspicion). Consequently, I wasn’t too sure what to expect from Thielman’s New Testament (NT) theology, but I was afraid that I was going to find a good chunk of it disagreeable. Consequently, you can imagine my pleasant surprise when I began to read this book and found it to be absolutely delightful on a number of levels.
First of all, beginning on a fairly superficial level, this is a nice looking book. It has a great (hard) cover, well structured sections and headings, and wide margins. I’ve come to appreciate such things.
Secondly, moving to a literary level, I find this book a delight to read because Thielman is a damn good writer. I have encountered few authors who can so clearly lay out what they are going to say, what they are saying, and what they have said. Thielman is so good as this that I found myself enjoying sections that I normally would find a little more dull.
Thirdly, moving to the level of method, I was impressed with just how even-handed Thielman is in his research and in his conclusions. In this regard, Thielman reminds me of James Dunn — a scholar who holds certain convictions, but a scholars who, as much as possible, allows his research, and not his convictions (or his ideological location), to determine his conclusions (although I think Dunn is still more faithful to this approach). Thus, in Thielman’s work, one finds a beautiful and fruitful combination of insights from scholars who have emphasised different facets of the letter, author, or subject under discussion (this is especially true of the section on Paul).
Indeed, one of Thielman’s strengths is not only uniting scholarly voices that have spoken in opposition to each other, but is also revealing how a good many of the supposed contradictions between various elements of the NT are more projected than actual. However, I would not take things as far as Thielman does as he emphasises the unity of the NT to such a point that there appears to be no room for disagreement between the various NT authors. I’m not so sure about this, but I will leave my comments on this topic for a future post.
Of course, there were other conclusions drawn by Thielman which I found unconvincing (for example, is the ‘centre’ of Paul’s theology really ‘God’s graciousness toward his weak and sinful creatures’?) — but in these situations I found myself respectfully disagreeing with him, not feeling frustrated with him, or angered by what he was saying (which, alas, is all too frequently how I find myself reacting to other so-called ‘Conservative’ scholars).
I recommend this book. It was a strong reminder to me not to judge a scholar be those who sing his or her praises.
3. Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society edited by Richard A. Horsley.
This book, the first in a series put together by Horsley and the ‘Paul and Politics’ section of SBL, contains a number of selections that were foundational to the development of ’empire-critical’ or ‘political’ readings of Paul (although we do need to remember that every reading of Paul is necessarily political). Thus, we see selections from people like Dieter Georgi, S. R. F. Price, Paul Zanker, Helmut Koester, Neil Elliott, and several others.
Given my own area of expertise, I’ve already read a number of the books from which these selections are taken but for the unconvinced or the curious but uninformed, I would strongly recommend this collection. It is guaranteed to get your wheels ticking and should (in time) lead to a necessary paradigm shift!
4. Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation. Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl edited by Richard A. Horsley.
This book is the second in the series from the ‘Paul and Politics’ group at SBL and it contains the ways in which various members of the group — Pamela Eisenbaum, Mark Nanos, N. T. Wright, Antionette Wire-Clark, Robert Jewett, and others — have continued to develop the trajectory established by the various authors listed in the first volume. I found many of the contributions to be excellent, although — despite my own sympathies and my desire to be convinced — I must say that the essays focused upon removing (almost?) all conflict between Paul and Jewish groups, as well as some of the feminist readings, to be more suspect than the others.
5. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus by Paul Zanker.
As I mentioned in my ‘September Books’ post, there are two books that are always mentioned when one begins to engage in ‘political’ readings of the New Testament — the book I was reviewing then, Rituals and Power by Simon Price, and this book by Paul Zanker. Having now completed this book (which, by the way, is full of beautiful, and very helpful, photos and illustrations of images from the age of Augustus), it is easy to see why. Upon completing these two books, it is impossible not to conclude that the Roman imperial ideology was a dominant social force throughout the Empire. Thus, it only makes sense to accept Warren Carter’s repeated assertion that the Roman Empire is not ‘the background’ of NT studies. It is the foreground. Not convinced? Read this book!
6. Church Dogmatics II.1: The Doctrine of God by Karl Barth.
Upon completing CD I.1 and I.2 last year, I decided to take a break from Barth. I hadn’t really hit my stride in terms of coming to grip with Barth’s voice (I think that getting into an authors voice, or style of writing, is half the battle in terms of understanding what the author is saying), and I wasn’t too keen to read “The doctrine of God” because I usually find this part of dogmatics to be pretty, um, boring and redundant (i.e. one just rereads what one has read in a thousand other places).
However, since I injured my ankle I had some more time for reading and I decided to read fifteen pages of Barth each day. To my surprise, this became a really wonderful devotional experience — the last thing I expected! I found Barth’s sustained reflection on the being of God as the One who loves in freedom, and his consequent discussion of the perfections of God, to be beautiful and moving. I found it incredibly refreshing to just step back from everything and reflect, with Barth, on God.
Oh, and I think I hit my stride with Barth’s voice. He’s just one of those authors you can’t skim read. At all. Dangnabbit.
7. rabbit, run by John Updike.
Updike’s ‘rabbit’ series has been on my to-read list for a long time. Well, a recent date night with my wife led us to wander (or crutch) into a bookstore and I emerged with this story — described by Updike as his response to Kerouac (wherein he demonstrates the damage caused to others when a young family man goes ‘on the road’).
I think that one of the powerful things about this book is the way in which it portrays people as (I think) they really are — confused, caught up in shitty external circumstances, wanting to be respected, but continually sabotaging themselves and hurting others because of their own insecurities (I think that Sartre and Vonnegut also captured this, although in rather different ways). Thus, we have the portrayal of some characters who do some pretty nasty things (especially rabbit) but, at the end of it all, we can’t really dislike them. They’re just people. And this is what people do — to each other and to themselves.
Also, it may be the fact that I’m about to be a father, but this book contains one of the most terrifying chapters I have ever read by any author. I won’t give away what happens but the way in which Updike moves you from being unaware, to becoming suspicious, to growing scared, to becoming truly horrified is quite incredible.

Because I just felt like writing something fun…
3 Books that intimidate me:

1. Capital by Karl Marx
2. Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer
3. Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida

3 Books that have (permanently?) traumatised and unsettled me:

1. Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky
2. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
3. The Bible

3 Books that made me weep with joy:

1. Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen
2. Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
3. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

3 Books that made me weep with sorrow:

1. Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis
2. The Wars by Timothy Findley
3. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

3 Books that manage to take both hope and godforsakenness seriously:

1. The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann
2. Mysterium Pachale by Hans Urs von Balthsar
3. Hope in Time of Abandonment by Jacques Ellul

3 Books I love for reasons I won’t share with others:

1. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Anybody else?

Well, since breaking my ankle and going through surgery, I’ve had quite a bit of time off work. That means that October was a pretty good month for reading. When I was all doped up, I even managed to read some fiction I wasn’t expecting to get to for awhile. Good times.
1. Reading Paul by Michael J. Gorman (Cascade Companions. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008).
Well, I know that this has been said in a lot of other places, but this is a really excellent introduction to Paul and his (theopolitical) gospel. In many ways, this book acts as an handy summary of Gorman’s earlier (and equally excellent) books, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross of the the lengthier Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters. However, there is also a good deal that is new in this book, as Gorman continues to develop in his own thinking; hence, we see new emphases upon resurrection, multiculturalism, and nonviolence/peacemaking, within Paul’s life and experience.
This book also offers the best one sentence summary I’ve ever read of Paul (which, by the way, also acts as a summary of the book at hand). Here it is:

Paul preached, and then explained in various pastoral, community-forming letters, a narrative, apocalyptic, theopolitical gospel (1) in continuity with the story of Israel and (2) in distinction to the imperial gospel of Rome (and analogous powers) that was centred on God’s crucified and exalted Messiah Jesus, whose incarnation, life, and death by crucifixion were validated and vindicated by God in his resurrection and exaltation as Lord, which inaugurated the new age or new creation in which all members of this diverse but consistently covenantally dysfunctional human race who respond in self-abandoning and self-committing faith thereby participate in Christ’s death and resurrection and are (1) justified, or restored to right covenant relations with God and with others; (2) incorporated into a particular manifestation of Christ the Lord’s body on earth, the church, which is an alternative community to the status-quo human communities committed to and governed by Caesar (and analogous rulers) and by values contrary to the gospel; and (3) infused both individually and corporately by the Spirit of God’s Son so that they may lead “bifocal” lives, focused back on Christ’s first coming and ahead to his second, consisting of Christlike, cruciform (cross-shaped) (1) faith and (2) hope toward God and (3) love toward both neighbors and enemies (a love marked by peaceableness and inclusion), in joyful anticipation of (1) the return of Christ, (2) the resurrection of the dead to eternal life, and (3) the renewal of the entire creation. (Hey I didn’t say it was a short sentence!)

Over the last year or so, I have surveyed many books on Paul, and many introductions to his life and thought (by ‘many’ I mean something like 200-300), and this is definitely one of the best. I would recommend it to any reader interested in Paul, and especially recommend it to non-professional readers who are willing to read thoughtfully.
2. The End of the Age Has Come: The Theology of Paul by C. Marvin Pate (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995).
Many thanks to Chris from Zondervan for this copy.
In this book, C. Marvin Pate develops Oscar Cullmann’s thinking related to Paul’s understanding of eschatology. That is to say, Pate, like Cullmann, argues that Paul believed that in Jesus’ death and resurrection, and in the bestowal of the Spirit, the Old Age of sin and death has begun to end, and the New Age of Christ’s universal Lordship and God’s new creation of all things had begun. Hence, the present is a time of eschatological tension between the “now” and the “not yet” — for one lives between the ages, neither fully in one nor fully in the other.
What is especially helpful about Pate’s study of this topic is (1) the way in which he demonstrates how this sort of thinking makes sense for Paul in his context; and (2) the way in which this eschatological framework is then demonstrated to be the foundation Paul’s entire life and thought. Thus, it is this eschatological tension that shapes everything that Paul says about theology (the doctrine of God and God’s triumph), christology, soteriology, anthropology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, engagement with society, and eschatology (more narrowly defined as last things). Pate devotes a chapter to each of these subjects and their intimate link to Paul’s eschatological framework.
I enjoyed this book and found it’s thesis to be convincing. I would especially recommend it to those who fail to see the central importance that eschatology (properly understood) has within the Christian life.
3. Put Down Your Sword: Answering the Gospel Call to Creative Nonviolence by John Dear (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
Many thanks to Bill, at the Regent College bookstore, for this review copy from Eerdmans.
This is a somewhat eclectic collection of essays written by John Dear, a famous American peace activist. The essays are divided into five sections. In the first section, Dear reflects upon the Gospel vision of nonviolence, as embodied especially by God in Jesus Christ. In the second section, Dear relates personal stories from protests against the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratories, the School of the Americas, and the U.S. war on Iraq. In the third section, Dear provides his readers with excerpts from journals he kept while on peace-missions to ‘Gandhi’s India’ and ‘war-torn Colombia’. In the fourth section, Dear reflects upon peacemakers who have inspired him (many of whom he has known personally, and been imprisoned with) — the people included here are Dr. King, Ignacio Ellacuría , César Chávez , Philip Berrigan, Ten Nobel Laureates, Henri Nouwen, Denise Levertov, Joan Baez, Bill O’Donnell, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sophie Scholl, and Franziska and Franz Jägerstätter. In the final (and most scattered) section, Dear reflects upon care for the earth, the teachings of Thomas Merton, and ‘the vision of a new world without war, poverty, violence, or nuclear weapons.’
For those who have read of or about any of the folks listed in above, there is not much content that is particularly new here (except for Dear’s personal angle on things, of course). However, rather than reading this book as some sort of scholarly resource to be plumbed for it’s contribution to my own thinking (or whatever… which, come to think of it, is how I read too many books these days… I need to change that), I chose to read this book as a devotional, and I was quite surprised with how, in its gentle and yet persuasive way, it soothed my heart and offered me new hope.
You see, I have found myself increasingly hopeless these days. Specifically, I find myself with little hope that I (or we) will see any of the change for which we long. So, I find myself putting my head down, and trying to remain faithful, even though much of what I do ends up being pointless (say advocating for youth at my workplace or whatever else). However, reading Dear’s words, and the words of the people he quotes, breathed new life into me. What he writes is a beautiful, inspiring, and compelling call to persevere, not ploddingly or heavily, but to persevere with joy and with hope (this combination of perseverance in hard times, while simultaneously being full of peace and joy is also especially evident in the New Testament and in the writings of liberation theologians… and often notably absent in my own life. How does one get to, and remain within, this place?). For example, Dear quotes a conversation that often occurred between his friend Pete Seeger, and other parties:

“In the early 1970s, did you ever expect to see President Nixon resign because of Watergate?” “No.” “Did you ever expect the Pentagon to leave Vietnam the way it did?” “No, we didn’t.” “In the 1980s, did you expect to see the Berlin Wall come down so peacefully?” “No, never.” “In the 1990s, did you expect to see Nelson Mandela released from prison, apartheid abolished, and Mandela become President of South Africa?” “Never in a million years.” “Did you ever expect the two warring sides of Northern Ireland to sign a peace agreement on Good Friday?” “Never.” “If you can’t predict those things, don’t be so confident that there’s no hope! There’s always hope!”

Man, that is water to my soul. Furthermore, it made me revisit my own thoughts on protest movements, letter writings, public marches, all that stuff. Maybe all of those actions aren’t nearly as pointless as I concluded when I walked away from them in 2004. I must think some more about this… and maybe I’ll start joining a few more protests and trying to look at them with new eyes.
4. A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey by Brian D. McLaren.
Many thanks to Mike from The Ooze for this review copy.
Well, it was high time I read some Brian McLaren, so I was very grateful to receive this review copy (and I look forward to receiving the next two books in this trilogy). To my own surprise, I enjoyed this book quite a lot (which, once again, goes to show that you can’t judge an author by his groupies — or at least by the groupies I personally ran into who totally put me off McLaren and a lot of the so-called ’emergent conversation’). So why did I like this book so much? Because it allows people to ask questions. It creates an environment that allows people to genuinely and deeply struggle with their faith. Alas, this is something that has been almost totally absent from the experience of a lot of McLaren’s target audience — those who grew up in American Evangelicalism. Therefore, it is no wonder that this book hit some many people like an oasis in the desert. McLaren lets people know that you can still be a Christian and question where you came from; you can still be a Christian and have unresolved doubts; you can still be a Christian and not be like the other Christians with whom you grew up. From my own experiences working with young people who are not allowed to ask questions, raise doubts, or be different, I can see the value in this book (after all, I almost got fired from a camp — where I was leading staff bible studies — because I was asking open questions, and honestly trying to struggle with tough issues of the faith; I mean, a concerned mother wrote into the camp and said that the devil was speaking through me because I stated that universalism could be a Christian alternative, and because I said there might be times when swearing doesn’t matter all that much!).
Of course, there are some issues I would want to raise with McLaren — his stereotyping of modernity as almost entirely negative (or ‘inappropriate’ as he would say), and of postmodernity as almost entirely positive (‘appropriate’) is pretty superficial. Even worse, he labels modernity the age of consumerism and states that postmodernity is, or will be, postconsumerist and I think that this is a very, very serious error. As those like Frederic Jameson have argued, postmodernity is not post-capitalist. It is, in fact, the cultural logic of late capitalism. This then suggests that McLaren might have a blindspot in this regard, and opens him to the criticism that much of the emergent church is precisely an expression of this consumer mentality.
However, there was one point where I thought I would disagree with McLaren… but I didn’t. You see, I expect him to present “a new kind of Christian” as a better kind of Christian. After all, this is the vibe I have gotten from a lot of emergent folk — that they are leaving the rest of the Church in their dust as they carve the Christian path into the future. However, McLaren is explicit that being “a new kind of Christian” is not a better way of being a Christian, nor is it a worse way. It is simply another way. As one of the characters in the book states: “We’re talking about a new kind of Christian, not the new kind or a better kind or the superior kind, just a new kind”. Excellent.
There are other areas that I think McLaren needs to fill out more carefully — in particular, I think he needs to fill out some of his thoughts (and maybe he has elsewhere?) on what it means to “be a Christian and yet be culturally Buddhist, Muslim, or Navajo”. I can agree with the examples he provides (Navajo Christians engaging in sweats, etc.) but I would want to hear more from him on this point. By an large, it seems like McLaren takes a largely positive view of the dominant culture within which one finds oneself, and this does strike me as a wee bit optimistic.
Another point that I think is a bit objectionable, is the way in which McLaren seems to repeat the idea that Christians do far more harmful things to each other than non-Christians. Now, granted, since McLaren has lived in a largely Christian milieu, it’s not surprising that he would have this personal experience, but the fact is that Christians and non-Christians alike do harmful things to each other, and it isn’t helpful to suggest that one group is worse than the other. Christians aren’t the only ones to shoot their wounded. Everybody shoots the wounded.
However, leaving these sort of objections aside, I was very happy to have read this book, and it is exactly the sort of book that I would love to work through with a group of Christian high-school, or college-age, students.
5. Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell and Don Golden (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).
Many thanks to Chris from Zondervan for this review copy.
In many ways, this book reminded me of Claiborne and Haw’s recent book. Like Jesus for President, this book engages in a theopolitical rereading of the biblical narrative in order to inform and inspire a Eucharistic socio-political vision of what it means to be and do Church today. Thus, the authors begin with the bondage of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt — which, they are correct to note, is the true starting point of of the biblical narrative (for more reasons than the one they mention) — and move through the exodus, to Sinai, to the corrupt kings of Israel, to exile, to Jesus, Pentecost, the Church, and America today. What we discover in the process is something of a cyclical pattern. We start in bondage in Egypt — a place of oppression and bondage — we move to Sinai — the anti-Egypt place of liberation and active care for others — we then come to Jerusalem where the oppressed forget their roots and become oppressors — thereby restoring a sort of Egypt — and this results in a new bondage — exile — which then leads to a new form of liberation — Jesus — and a new Sinai — the eucharistic community of faith — which has now lost it’s way in America — resulting in a new Egypt and a new exile — and requiring the recovery of one’s identity in order to bring about a new liberation (hmmm… is that a run-on sentence?).
Now this is all well and good, and I am very sympathetic with what Bell and Golden are doing in this book. I think that their criticisms of empires are pretty bang-on, and I think that they call they issue to contemporary Christians is equally bang-on. In fact, I would want to push them further down this road and argue that they are too generous to the American empire. For example, they argue that the American empire has been ‘blessed by God’ and should, therefore, share that blessing with others. However, when you get down to the material economic details of all this, you will find that America is actually wealthy because she is plundering less powerful people, both at home and around the world. I wouldn’t call that a divine ‘blessing’, I’d call that theft and murder. (Before people charge me with being anti-American, let me say that the same criticism is true of Canada.)
However, I would like to challenge the way in which the authors understand ‘exile’, one of their dominant motifs. According to the authors this is what exile is:

Exile is when you forget your story.
Exile isn’t just about location; exile is about the state of your soul.
Exile is when you fail to convert your blessings into blessings for others.
Exile is when you find yourself a stranger to the purposes of God.

Therefore, according to the authors, the solution is to remember your story, begin to care for others, begin to live back in line with God’s purposes, and in this way be liberated from exile. It is to begin to cry out to God, so that one’s life can be turned around. For (and this is perhaps the most repeated assertion in the book), the God of the Bible is the God who always hears and responds to the cry of the suffering (like those suffering under exilic conditions).
However, what this misses the true depth of the biblical understanding of exile. Exile, at its core, is the experience of godforsakenness. Exile is when God stops answering our cries… because our hands are covered in blood and because we are members of a people who are up to their necks in the blood of others. Hence, we hear the laments of the prophets in the Old Testament — the laments of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and others — aren’t just that Israel is being dragged out of the land. The primary cause of their lament is that God has abandoned them. All of them. Not just the corrupt arms-dealers and power-mongers. God had also abandoned his prophets and all the citizens of the nation (except, as 2 Kings 24 reminds us, the very poor, whom God remembers and permits to remain in the land). Therefore, if the authors think that we are living in a time that could be described as exilic, I think that they need to wrestle far more seriously with this core aspect of exile, instead of glossing over it with lines about how God always hears and responds to our cries and the cries of the oppressed. Both history and Scripture teach us otherwise.
I have two further objections to raise. I have already alluded to the first when I talked about how the authors refer to America’s wealth as a sign of God’s blessing. My objection here is that the authors, despite their ‘revolutionary’ stance, might be more complicit in the structures of empire than they imagine (since, after all, they see blood money as a sign of blessing). A further sign of this is when they talk about practicing Eucharistic forms of charity, and describe this practice in this way:

The Eucharist is not fair.
Giving to those who cannot give in return, that’s not fair.
Serving those who have no way to serve in return, that’s not fair.

Two things need to be said in response to this. First, when we give to the poor, we are restoring to them that which is rightfully theirs. Thus, the only thing ‘not fair’ about this is that we had what belonged to them in the first place. Second, what one discovers when one begins to give to, and serve, the poor is that one takes, receives, and ends up being served even more. This has been my own experience, and it has been the experience of many others — Vanier, Nouwen, Day, Maurin, Mother Teresa, Sobrino, etc. Again, this might not be ‘fair’ but it’s not fair because we don’t deserve such grace, not because we’re doing so much or whatever.
My second further objection to what the authors say, is the way they talk about guilt. They write:

Guilt is not helpful.
Honesty is helpful. Awareness is helpful. Knowledge is helpful.
Guilt isn’t.

Again later:

And when we listen and go, it will never be about guilt.
It will never come on the heels of “Well, I guess I’m supposed to.”

I’ve noticed this sort of thinking seems to be fairly common in counter-cultural Christian movements. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the motive. I understand that it is important to be operating out of grace, and I understand that movements premised upon guilt are usually unsustainable and short-lived. However, my concern is that we then take away the Spirit’s role of convicting us of our sins and spurring us to repentance. The truth is that there is a proper place for guilt (for example, it is appropriate to feel guilty after sinning against another person) and guilt might be precisely what we need to feel to start us onto a new path. Of course, guilt won’t sustain us on that path, but if we never feel guilty, we may never get on it.
So, all in all, I feel as though Bell and Golden have begun a good process and a good conversation, and I hope that they continue to follow it through and explore the depths of some of these things.
6. Sixteen Satires by Juvenal.
These satires, on a number of topics, offer a great glimpse into civic and social life at the end of first century/start of the second century CE. After spending the last year and a half reading about the Graeco-Roman world at that time, I found that these satires really came alive for me. In fact, I even found myself chuckling at parts, which I think means that I’ve crossed some sort of geek line of no return. Oh well. I regret nothing!
However, as with the satires of Petronius and Seneca, my impression is that these satires actually reinforce the values and interests of the elite and the powers-that-be. The particular objects of Juvenal’s scorn tend to be freedmen, the nouveau riches, hangers-on, and other would-be social climbers. Hence, although Juvenal may appear to be speaking quite critically of Roman society, he is actually criticising those who would change Roman society into something else (something less beneficial for Juvenal!).
7. The Gods Will Have Blood [Les Dieux Ont Soif] by Anatole France (not sure why the title was changed so much in translation…)
I’ve kind of been on French literature kick lately. Well, I’ve wanted to be on a French literature kick, but I haven’t had the time for it. Hooray, then, for my broken ankle!
Based on what I had read about this book, I came with fairly high expectations. However, much of what this book is praised for is the mastery France shows of the French language in which it was originally written… so maybe a lot was lost in translation.
That said, this is a story focused upon an idealistic young artist, Gamelin, who lived in Paris during the French Revolution. It demonstrates the ways in which a stringent allegiance to lofty ideals can lead to terribly inhuman actions (hence, Gamelin develops from a youth full of ideals into a Jacobin magistrate who sends some of his own family to the guillotine). In contrast to Gamelin, is the Epicurean Brotteaux — a former nobleman now reduced to humbly living in an attic and selling puppets in order to survive. Brotteaux offers the reader with a character who doesn’t place much confidence in ideals, or in those who hold them, and who much prefers to try and enjoy life without hurting others.
I won’t give away how all of this plays out in the end, but I was somewhat disappointed in the presentation of the characters. I did, however, find this window into the French revolution to be quite captivating, and it made me think I should go and read some history books.
8. Shouts From the Gutter by Chris Walter.
Chris Walter writes like somebody with a Grade 7 education. That’s because he only has a Grade 7 education. So, the fact that Chris Walter is a successful Vancouver author, and the founder of his own publishing company (Gofuckyerself Press), despite the fact that he was a gutter-punk, street-involved, drug-user (and whatever else) for so many years, makes him something of an underground punk icon around here. Of course, not everybody feels this way about Chris. When you read the blurbs on the back of this book, two stand out more than the others. “Quill & Quire” writes: “Chris Walter? Who the hell is Chris Walter?” and Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s most famous authors, writes: “Chris Walter is a fucking asshole.”
This book is a collection of short stories, which blend real life experiences with fictional events and characters. As I implied above, given Walter’s background, you shouldn’t expect to find another Don DeLillo here. Instead, you can expect to find an insider’s perspective on street life. And that makes this book a real gem.

The fact of the matter is that every reading of the New Testament (NT) is a political reading of some sort.  Even readings that fail to find political significance in the NT are expressions of (often unconsidered) political positions — so-called ‘spiritual’ readings of the NT, which fail to find any significant political dimensions in Jesus’ teachings, or Paul’s epistles, or whatever else, are often expressed in life by a focus on one’s individual salvation, and a lack of attention to broader social structures… and this itself is a form of politics!  The same is true of any reading.
Therefore, the question is not whether or not we should read the NT politically; rather, it is about what type of political reading we should practice.
Consequently, I have begun to compile a list of ‘commentaries’ that can help us properly understand the politics of the NT.  This list is just beginning, has many holes, and I would be curious to hear what titles others might wish to add.  Here is what I have thus far:

• Mt: Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations by Warren Carter
• Mk: Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Gospel by Ched Myers
• Lk: The Gospel of Luke by Joel Green (NICNT)
• Jn: John and Empire: Initial Explorations by Warren Carter
• Ro: Romans: A Commentary by Robert Jewett (Hermeneia)
• Gal: Galatians and the Imperial Cult: A Critical Analysis of the First-Century Social Context of Paul’s Letter by Justin K. Hardin (WUZNT2)
• Phil: Philippians: From People to Letter by Peter Oakes (SNTS Monograph Series)
• Col: Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat
• 1 Pe: A Home for the Homeless: a social scientific criticism of 1 Peter, its situation and strategy by John H. Elliott
• Rev: Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now by Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther

There are, of course, several other studies that deal more generally with the politics of the NT, of Jesus, of Paul, and so on, but I am especially interested in exploring commentaries that take this ’empire-critical’ approach.  What would you add to this list?

Books discussed in this series:
Mobsby, Ian. The Becoming of G-d: What the Trinitarian nature of God has to do with Church and a deep Spirituality for the Twenty First Century. Monograph Series. North Essex: YTC Press, 2008.
Sanguin, Bruce. The emerging Church: A Model for Change & a Map for Renewal. Kelowna: CopperHouse, 2008.

Introduction
In any area of study, it is important to listen to the voices of those who actually partcipate within, or embody, the particular topic being studied. Thus, for example, when engaging in liberation theology, it is important to actually listen to ‘the Poor’ rather than simply listening to those who claim to represent the poor; or, to provide another example, when engaging in theological reflections related to ‘disabilities’, it is important to listen to those who called ‘disabled’, rather than simply listening to those who claim to present the disabled; and so on and so forth.
Therefore, given the hype, controversy, affirmations, and allegations that have swirled around the emerging church ‘conversation’, I figured it was about time that I actually spent some time listening to the voices of some of those who claim to speak from within this movement. Consequently, I am very grateful to Mike Morrell from the Ooze for providing me with review copies of The Becoming of G-d by Ian Mobsby and The emerging Church by Bruce Sanguin.
As with most large movements, the title of the movement is one that is claimed by many diverse people and groups. Hence, many things come under the name of the ’emerging church’. Really, the title might be best understood as that which is claimed by an organism in the process of developing rhizomatically (to use the language of Deleuze and Guattari). This, then, explains the consistent backlash against those who raise criticisms against the ’emerging church’. It is hard to criticise (or praise) something so diverse and when one criticises those on one end of many spectra, those on the other ends inevitably cry out. Consequently, having experienced or seen something of the ’emerging church’, one should be careful about applying one’s own experiences of a part, to the whole.
This divergence (perhaps the movement could also be called diverging church?) is well-illustrated by reading these two books back-to-back. The respective authors, Mobsby and Sanguin, take markedly different approaches to most things — their foci, their talk of God, their ecclesiastical models, their hermeneutics, and so on. However, there appear to be some things that they do have in common — and it is, perhaps, these commonalities that might be aspects of the emerging church more broadly. Therefore, in this post I will critically review Mobsby’s book, in the next post, I will do the same with Sanguin’s book, and then I will conclude with some tentative comments about the emerging church movement (in general) as that movement is represented by these two authors.
Review of Mobsby
As the subtitle makes clear, Mobsby’s book is focused upon developing an ecclesiology and a concomitant spirituality rooted within a trinitarian understanding of God. The central contention of the book, stated overtly in the preface, is that ‘God is seeking to draw us into deeper forms of spiritual community and relationality through God’s own, experientially revealed nature.’
In the first three chapters, Mobsby details a trinitarian understanding of God. Chapter One focuses upon the historical experiences of God (with a particular focus upon experiences related in Scripture, and the influence of the Cappadocian Mothers and and Fathers), which lead people to speak of God in this way. Mobsby then concludes that rooting our talk of God in our experiences of God is one of the strengths of the emerging church which ‘counters the superficial drive for objective certainty that boxes God in’ and which ‘seek[s] a reawakening of the Christian faith as an orientation of the heart’.
In Chapter Two, Mobsby focuses upon the Spirit, also known as ‘The Sustainer’, as an active and significant member of the Trinity, in order to counter current ‘impoverished’ views of the Spirit found within Western churches. Mobsby contends that one of the benefits of restoring the Spirit to the Spirit’s proper place is that the Trinity becomes a proper model of unity in diversity as, for example, the Spirit contains many attributes commonly considered as ‘feminine’ and so, inclusion of the Spirit in the ‘Godhead’ helps to de-gender God. Furthermore, this focus upon the Spirit leads to more passionate worship, and more innovative Christian living.
In Chapter Three, Mobsby then further explores the nature of the Redeemer and the Creator (titles Mobsby prefers to the more androcentric titles of ‘Son’ and ‘Father’). When speaking of the Redeemer, Mobsby emphasises the dual nature of Jesus, which he argues leads to a focus upon ‘incarnational theology’ (which focuses upon Jesus as a human servant and as a lover of the poor, and which, therefore, leads Christians to live in a similar way) and upon ‘redemptive theology’ (which focuses upon Jesus as divine and leads to an emphasis upon repentance and discipleship). When speaking of the Creator, Mobsby affirms a panentheistic theology which affirms God and his ongoing work, as that which grounds and sustains all of creation (which then leads to a focus on environmentalism and good stewardship).
In chapters Four to Seven, Mobsby then further applies this trinitarianism to Christian living. Chapter Four, focuses on the models and lessons provided by the emerging church. In particular, Mobsby highlights nine core values that appear to be (providentially) common to emergent congregations, all of which Mobsby believes are shaped by a trinatarian approach to perichoresis and kenosis. Thus, Mobsby identifies emergent congregations as those who: (1) Take the life of Jesus as a model to live; (2) and who transform the secular realm. (3) As they live highly communal lives. (4) Welcome those who are outsiders. (5) Share Generously. (6) Participate. (7) Create. (8) Lead without control. (9) And function together in spiritual activities.
Thus, drawing from Avery Dulles’ book, Models of the Church, Mobsby argues that the emergent church is a combination of the ‘Mystical Communion Model’ and the ‘Sacramental Model’, while also stressing the idea of the church as an alternative community. By this, Mobsby does not mean a church withdrawn from society, but a church that includes the excluded. Therefore, he stresses both the need for some sort of internal ‘rule’ or ‘rhythm of life’, while also stressing the need for mission and creative engagement with contemporary culture.
In Chapter Five, Mobsby points out the contemporary resurgence of interest in ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual experiences’ and how, when connected with recent technological developments, this leads to a new form of transcendence and the birth of the ‘hyper-real’. It is this hyper-real realm of ‘techgnosis’ that he wishes to transform (or modify) by combining it with ancient forms of mysticism and liturgy (hence the name ‘Ancient:Future’). Thus, whilst we must be careful about the dangers of ‘spiritual tourism’ and a ‘pick and choose’ spirituality, Mobsby states that:

Rather than spelling the end of religion, the concept of techgnosis gives me even greater faith in God’s presence, and it encourages my belief in the impossible… Personally I do believe that God, through the person of the Holy Spirit, is beckoning us through the joint effects of consumerism and techgnosis.

In Chapter Six, Mobsby connects ‘orthpraxis’ and ‘sacramentality’ in order to affirm our engagement in contemporary culture (‘Rather than fear culture and difference, we are called to trust that God is very much present in our world and in our culture’), and in order to especially affirm our engagement in political, environmental, and social circumstances by utilising ‘godly play’ and the means of ‘lectio divina’. In particular, Mobsby asserts that we need to engage with those whom we consider threatening (for himself, Mobsby includes the following as his ‘top six hates’: ‘aggressive and abusive homeless people, alcoholics, rascists, Islamic, Hundi, Jewish and Christian fundamentalists, those who demean women, and those who are homophobic’).
In Chapter Seven, Mobsby addresses the challenges facing this sort of human community within our current culture of individualism. In particular, Mobsby stresses that each of us, as individuals, are lessened when we are divorced from community — ‘community becomes an important environment for the realisation of our unique potential.’ Again and again Mobsby stresses this point: community is where we can each achieve our individual potential, health, and wellness (thus, Mobsby also stresses the connection between church communities and ‘therepeutic communities’). Key to all of this is the pursuit of an ‘authentic spirituality’, which is understood as a spirituality that ‘works’. Thus, in this and other ways, Mobsby notes that many in the emergent church are reacting to their up backgrounds in fundamentalist circles. Therefore, over against this background, and over against the culture of individualism, Mobsby concludes by stressing the becoming of community (through sharing and inter-dependency), of belonging (through openness and honesty), of forgiveness (through mentoring), of hope (through ‘healthy, culturally relevant expressions of worship, mission and community’) and of justice (through shifting from consumption to production and from taking to giving).
Finally, in Chapter 8, Mobsby concludes by stressing the importance of unity in diversity, and once again stresses the importance of trintiarian thinking and the approach of the emerging church. Chapter Nine functions as a postscript and contains a collection of poetic trinitarian devotions.
Reflection
What, then, are we to make of all these things? On the one hand, I am glad to see Mobsby diving into some of the unique aspects of Christianity — say the Trinity and the Sacraments — in order to try and live out a vibrant faith of mission and discipleship within today’s world. I also appreciate Mobsby’s emphasis that the ‘new monasticism’ seems to hold the best way forward for the emerging church (Mobsby appears to include ‘new monasticism’ within the emerging movement — and I think he considers his church to be a new monastic movement — but I would actually see these as two different movements).
On the other hand, I actually find it quite difficult to know what to make of Mobsby approach to Christian living. That is to say, his work is so full of hot contemporary theological catch-phrases — perichoresis, kenosis, trinitarian, incarnational, play, orthopraxis, sacramentality, etc. — that I’m left wondering what exactly all of this looks like in the day to day life of Mobsby’s Moot Community in the UK. My concerns is that this sort of language simply ends up functioning as an ideological gloss for positions arrived at by other means. Or, to put that another way, my concern is that Mobsby makes Christianity, and trinitarianism, relevant by taking themes that are already trendy within our contemporary Western world, and adding a layer of Christian overcoding to that discourse.
This, then, leads me to what is probably my biggest concern with Mobsby’s approach — his emphasis upon relevance. Again, another word fraught with ideological implications, I think we need to carefully define what we mean by ‘relevance’ or ‘irrelevance’ (something that I don’t think people on either side of this discussion have spent enough time doing). However, it seems to me that ‘relevance’ for Mobsby, means taking things that are currently hot within our contemporary society, and putting a Christian spin on those things — thus, within the Club scene, Mobsby speaks of Christian DJs putting on better shows than others, within the hipster scene Mobsby speaks of Christian churches structured like cafes, which act as hubs of their communities (actually, this seems to be the type of church that Mobsby likes the most, as he speaks highly of it on multiple occasions), and so on. Mobsby’s justification for this approach is that God is always present and active within our world, and so by embracing these things, we are simply embracing the work God is already doing amongst us.
The result of this is a largely acritical approach to contemporary culture, which fails to consider that (a) God might not be as present as we would like God to be; and (b) other forces are also operating within our culture, and these forces are acting in the service of Sin and of Death. What is needed, but absent, in Mobsby’s approach, is a much more careful analysis of the various things he embraces. For example, Mobsby’s love of technology (‘techgnosis’) fails to account for all the warnings we have received about technology from people as diverse as Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, George Grant, Neil Postman, and Slavoj Žižek. My fear is that this approach to church becomes little more than a cry that ‘Hey! Christians can be cool too!’ Further, given the reactive nature of much of the emergent church (as Mobsby notes, many members are reacting to their own conservative backgrounds) this wouldn’t be surprising but it isn’t particularly commendable. Indeed, given that so much of this is reactive, I would want to be a little more careful about crediting so much of what is done to the creative workings of the Spirit. Not that there is really anything wrong with having Christian raves and coffee shops — it’s just that the Spirit’s creative work might look like a little more than that.
This connects to the second thing that bothered me about Mobsby’s approach. Although Mobsby stressed justice issues, and spoke about the need of journeying in company with the excluded, I found that his approach, and his target audience, seems to be more about embracing hipsters than it is about embracing, and being embraced by, the Poor. Again, I would have to see how all of this actually plays out in Mobsby’s community, but my fear is that we, once again, have a lot of trendy rhetoric about social justice but very little real action or, most importantly, solidarity. Hence, when one reads Mobsby’s list of his ‘top six hates’, we notice that street-involved people are well-represented within that group (and that the list looks like a who’s who of the people hated by most ‘left-leaning’ folks today). So, Mobsby hates ‘aggressive and abusive homeless people’ but he doesn’t say anything about the people and structures that dehumanise and abuse the homeless, thereby driving them towards aggressive and abusive patterns of survival; Mobsby hates ‘alcoholics’ but he doesn’t say anything about the patterns of abuse and generational sin that perpetuate alcoholism; and so on. For someone who wants to talk about justice as much as Mobsby does, this is unacceptable — and really does make me wonder if he is just spouting a lot of hot air.
Finally, my third concern with Mobsby’s book is his pragmatic approach to spirituality — his emphasis upon needing a ‘spirituality which “works”‘. Again, on the one hand, I agree that we should be experiencing God in our Christian life together, but to focus so heavily upon a spirituality that constantly produces positive emotions, or some sort of ‘genuine’ experience, or whatever, seems to reflect Western pragmatism and impatience (i.e. we only pursue that which produces results, and only that which produces results now). The risk here is that of an overly realised eschatology. There doesn’t seem to be much room for experiences of godforsakenness, for the ‘dark night of the soul’, for the ‘not-yet’, or for stubbornly doing, and redoing things, not because of the results they produce, but because of our call to the faithful.
So, all in all, I am glad to have read Mobsby’s book, it is a useful glimpse into the emerging church, but I am left with a number of concerns and unanswered questions.