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Book Reviews
Up one levelReview of "As Christ Submits to the Church" by Alan Padgett
A reader’s first question in response to Alan Padgett’s title might run something along the lines of, “Shouldn’t that be the other way around?” Certainly the phrase “as Christ submits to the church” has a biblical cadence to it, imbuing it with authority, and yet it jars against other phrases and concepts that echo about in the Scripture-steeped mind. A reader’s next question, then, might be so bold and accusatory as, “Did he take the phrasing of some particular New Testament verse and flip it around? Is the rephrasing some clever, attention-snaring ploy to advance his (possibly nefarious, certainly liberal) purposes? Or worse” —for our uncertainty gives way inevitably to self-doubt— “is it possible that he is actually quoting the New Testament? Have I missed something? Does Christ submit to the church?”...
Review of Critical Issues in Ecclesiology: Essays in Honor of Carl Braaten
Carl Braaten is one of today’s Lutheran theological giants. Here is a Festschrift, a fitting tribute to his contributions from his peers and the students nurtured by his distinguished and skillful teaching. His bibliography of his published work included in this volume is 17 pages long!...
Review of Who Is Jesus? Disputed Questions and Answers by Carl E. Braaten
I have had the experience more than once before of spending most of my time reading a book being utterly perplexed as to what it was supposed to be about, not because of any unclarity on the part of the writer but because of the title. Perhaps this is a marketing department issue more than anything else. In any event, such was my experience in working my way through this latest offering of Carl Braaten. At the end, my hunch was confirmed by the author himself...
Review of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity
The past is always changing, which is rather confusing for us since we think of it as fixed and finished. But it does change, in the sense that what we know about it and how we interpret it changes. In particular, it is separating out our interpretations based on our contemporary notions from “the way it really happened” that makes a regular reassessment of evidence about the past an extremely necessary task. This is what Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson (the latter an ELCA pastor and professor at Notre Dame) set out to do...
Review of Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Meditations and Hymns
This latest in the massive Classics of Western Spirituality Series helps to fill in a hole in the anglophone world’s knowledge of Lutheranism after the Reformation. The three devotional writers featured here—Johann Gerhard, Heinrich Müller, and Christian Scriver—as well as the assorted hymnwriters were all seventeenth-century men, well after the Reformation but just before the flowering of Pietism. They held their own, Gerhard in particular, in the confessionalization of European Christianity, but, as editor Eric Lund is at pains to point out, that didn’t mean they were dry-as-dust concretizers of orthodoxy, penning erudite but irrelevant volumes on esoteric themes. Quite the contrary, living in one of the most traumatic periods of European history, and dealing with the fallout in their parishioners’ lives, they were very much concerned with the personal faith of Lutherans and how it was expressed in daily life...
Review of Parade of Faith by Ruth A. Tucker
“As church history marches into the twenty-first century, we find Billy Graham on the final night of his final crusade, March 12, 2006, leading a parade of sixteen thousand followers from the vast New Orleans Arena to Bourbon Street to claim the infamous French Quarter for Christ. Riding a motor scooter, Graham serves as grand marshal, as Christians lift their voices singing, ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ What a fitting climax to one man’s career and to a two-thousand-year parade of history! Problem is, the story is an Internet hoax. It is a reminder that even sacred history includes lies and urban legends.” So writes historian Ruth Tucker near the end of her remarkable nearly five hundred-page biographical pilgrimage through Church history. She willingly looks at the good, the bad, and the ugly of Christian history as she portrays many of the greats from down through the ages...
Review of Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels by James D. G. Dunn
In the compass of a relatively short book Professor Dunn has assumed a monumental task. He describes it, ‘to fill up the gap between Jesus and the Gospels, as well as to explain how the Gospels formed a new literary genre, and how the Fourth Gospel fitted with the others”...
Review of Martin Luther's Theology by Oswald Bayer
Martin Luther's Theology, a masterly and mature summary by the grand old man of Luther studies in Germany, is not just a review of the reformer's thought across the doctrinal loci: it is a handbook for life. This is quite deliberate on Bayer's part. "Intellectual knowledge about faith," he writes in the Preface, "is not separated from the affective experience of faith; the art of disputation serves the task of caring for souls" (xvi). Bayer consistently refuses the "God's-eye" approach to theology, which looks down from heaven upon a complete and seamless whole. Instead he, with Luther, with all sinners struggling toward faith, looks up from the midst of the struggle, sorting out the interplay of human hope and doubt surrounding the promise of Jesus Christ...
Review of Quest for the Living God by Elizabeth A. Johnson
Like many others, I first heard of Elizabeth Johnson’s 2007 book Quest for the Living God from the media frenzy following the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ criticism of it earlier this year. (The news release can be found here, but the link to the actual statement no longer works; if you can get your hands on paper copies of the Catholic news service Origins, you can follow all the exchanges between the bishops and Johnson.) A matter of particular dismay was that the whole process of criticism and subsequent publication of it was done, to all appearances, in secret; Johnson didn’t know about it much before anyone else in the general public did. There were procedural issues, not to matter principles of basic civility, that seem not to have been taken into account. Johnson herself eventually responded with a 38-page response concluding: “Ideas are taken out of context and twisted to mean what they patently do not mean. Sentences are run to a conclusion far from what I think or the text says. False dilemmas are composed. Numerous omissions, distortions, and outright misstatements of fact riddle the reading. As a work of theology, Quest for the Living God was thoroughly misunderstood and consistently misrepresented in the committee’s Statement”...
Review of The Pastoral Epistles with Philemon and Jude by Risto Saarinen
In the spring 2010 issue of Lutheran Forum, the Finnish Lutheran theologian Risto Saarinen contributed an article called “The Letter of Jude, a Christian Midrash,” based on his work for this volume in the Brazos series. But his whole commentary not only fleshes out Jude (“the most neglected book in the New Testament”) a bit further: it also gives extensive treatment on four pauline epistles. A curious combination—one wonders if the editors just rounded up the ragtag leftovers to be lumped together in one book—but Saarinen manages to treat each book on its own terms, which makes for rewarding reading, however odd the assortment...
Review of Our One Great Act of Fidelity by Ronald Rolheiser
I first encountered the writing of Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI, quite by accident. In 2008 I was visiting my cousin in England; we spent a day in Liverpool where her daughter was at university. After a visit to the Roman Catholic cathedral church there—surely a classic example of uninspiring modern church architecture—we browsed the bookstore. I spied a copy of Rolheiser’s best-selling book, The Holy Longing, bought it, and spent the plane ride home absorbed in reading it...
Review of Ezekiel by Robert W. Jenson
LF subscribers will recall the recent piece by Robert Jenson, “The Trinity in Ezekiel” (Winter 2010), a foretaste of the feast laid out in much greater length in his full volume on said prophet. Jenson is not only a contributor but also a series editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, the foundational conviction of which is that “dogma clarifies rather than obscures.” This is a timely and worthy correction to a tendency, sometimes more outrageous and sometimes more subtle, to isolate the Bible and the discipline of biblical studies from the church of disciples following Jesus Christ as well as from the whole unfolding history of that church discerning just what it means to follow Jesus. But correctives can over-correct, and my dabblings in other volumes of the Brazos series indicate that this danger remains ever-present. Some seem to lose all interest in the text itself in the eagerness to defend dogma or proffer interpretation; some seem to be mere exercises in cross-referencing and proof-texting. But not so with Jenson...
Review of Martin Luther: A Very Short Introduction, by Scott H. Hendrix
It was years ago that I first noticed Oxford’s “Very Short Introduction” series, seduced by their cute format and slim size, no doubt according to the marketing team’s dearest hopes. I bought the volume on Literary Theory, which was really more like Suspicion about Everything, Not Just Literature, Disguised as Intellectual Responsibility, but that didn’t sway me from affectionate feelings toward the series. There are now more than 200 titles with another prospective 100 on the way, ranging from The Blues to Choice Theory to Fossils to The Reagan Revolution to Wittgenstein. And now, of course, to Martin Luther...
Missouri’s War and Its Fallout
Some months ago I was asked to write a blurb for the upcoming Fortress book by James Burkee: Power, Politics and the Missouri Synod—A Conflict that Changed American Christianity. (Though I am sure Burkee was not responsible for it, the title is a bit grandiose. American Christianity has not been changed much, but a whole lot of Lutheran history in America has been.) Along with the request came the full electronic file of the book. I read it and came to this response: “What a dark, dark story, far darker than I had ever imagined.” But what sort of blurb to write? I certainly had no truck for the conservative Missouri insurgents of the 70s. They acted horribly. However, after this book, I thought, it will be easy for everyone else to “pile it on,” and that seemed superfluous for me...
A Book That Could Change American Lutheran History
If it is not already known to readers, I am a wounded veteran. Not from military service in Vietnam or Kuwait or Iraq or Afghanistan, but from the civil war in American Lutheranism. James Burkee uncovers and describes the hidden history of this war in his forthcoming book. It took place as I was entering into adulthood; along with many others of my generation, it robbed me of my church and the future that I planned. Like a repressed trauma, I submit, that conflict continues to condition all of us, some more directly than others, in debilitating ways to this very day...
Review of Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod: A Conflict That Changed American Christianity, by James C. Burkee
At the end of his twelve years (1969-1981) as President of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, Jack Preus granted an interview in which he lamented that the synod had become fully and openly politicized. James Burkee of Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, has now published a thorough account of Missouri’s war. James C. Burkee is the first professional historian to attempt an objective examination of those traumatic events in American Lutheran history...
Review of The Witness of God by John G. Flett
Mission has never had a place in systematic theology. This is exceedingly strange, since theology is born of the missionary encounter: re-read Romans with an eye to how St. Paul develops the doctrine of justification by faith precisely because of the surprising inclusion of Gentiles in the apostolic mission and you’ll see just how strange the omission has been. And that has had severe material consequences for mission and theology alike...
Review of Culture Making by Andy Crouch
Christians have adopted all sorts of attitudes toward culture. Sometimes they have condemned it. Sometimes they have intelligently critiqued it; other times they have strategically copied and accommodated it. All too often they have simply consumed it. One way or another they have often assumed it a certain distance between culture and themselves, as if culture were both optional and controllable. Andy Crouch challenges both this assumption and the usual postures Christians have assumed toward culture. Our God-given vocation is not chiefly to abstain from, condemn, critique, copy, or consume—though there is a place for each of these things. Our real task, the positive one and not simply a negative and parasitic one, is to create culture...
Review: Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics by Robert Benne
“Christianity is not first of all a religion of moral obligation or achievement. It is essentially a religion of salvation,” Benne writes (p. 41). But there is something to be said for the fulfilling of moral obligations. Distinguished Lutheran ethicist Bob Benne states in Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics something that is almost never said in Lutheran circles but should be shouted: that the Lutheran tradition of the Two Kingdoms has something valuable to offer both the church and the world. He starts with the premise that the chattering class’s writing and speaking on the subject is almost endless and also usually ill advised and ignorant. Much modern commentary is void of the Lord’s statements about rendering unto Caesar his due, Saint Paul’s further affirmations and sufferings attendant thereto, Saint Augustine’s City of God, and Luther’s left and right hand distinctions...
Review: Warrior Monk by Ray Keating
Espionage, romance, murder, Islamist terrorism, environmental extremists, church suppers, New York cops, revisionist theology, adultery, religious reactionaries, divorce, papal missions, organized crime, the press conference Mrs. Spitzer did not give, every congregation's usual suspects, conspiracy, the obligations of chastity, sleazy politicians, the geography of Long Island, police procedural, camaraderie among the clergy, obnoxious news media types, Christian ethics, the new ecumenism, and the real housewives of the Suffolk County suburbs… all in one single novel? ...