Adam Shields
Summary: A historical look at how Christian mystics understood mysticism and how that has changed.
Anyone reading along with my reviews is probably aware that I am about 18 months into a reading project on the idea of Christian discernment. And while I have not ended that exploration of discernment, I am at the point of a deep dive where I need to explore the connected ideas to discernment so that I can better understand how to proceed.
A number of years ago I was exploring the trinity and I realized that in exploring the trinity I needed to better understand the concept of hermeneutics and I think I ended up reading more books about hermeneutics than I did about the trinity. That exploration of the trinity comes up because one of the most helpful books for me in exploring the trinity was The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Early Church by Franz Dunzl. What made it so helpful was that it traced the early doctrine of the trinity but in doing so, Dunzl showed that part of the development of the language around the trinity was linguistic (there was a shift from Greek to Latin as the lingua franca) and part of the development of the langauge around the trinity was about shifts in philosophy and the language of philosophy.
If you have traced Christian doctrine over time, the way that cultural issues shift the way that we think of theology is common. Part of what mattered in the reformation was that thee was a shift in how we think of the state and how we think of legal realities and this corresponded to the increasing use of legal language in regard to the doctrines of salvation. In a more modern example, the shifts in understanding about gender and gender roles have shifted the language that some are using in regard to trinitarian theology with regard to the rise of supporters of the The Eternal Subordination of the Son or the The Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son and in a different area some of the changes in language and meaning of the economic trinity or social trinitarian theology.
I bring all of this up because Baxter's Introduction to Christian Mysticism has played a bit of a similar role as Dunzl for me. Mysticism is a notoriously difficult subject to discuss because the very nature of mysticism is discussion about what is "super natural" or what is above or outside of the natural realm. Because language is often referential, referring to something that is outside of nature makes it difficult to draw metaphors or analogy. Part of the differences in the way that we think of mysticism over time are differences of what is culturally being responded to as well as differences in philosophy and language. (The Mystery of God was a very helpful book on the right and wrong use of mystery within theological exploration.)
I picked up An Introduction to Christian Mysticism because I have recently read Baxter's book on CS Lewis and how his writing and thinking were influenced by medieval thinking. And as I think is appropriate, much of An Introduction to Christian Mysticism is concerned with the same broad time period. A short introduction like this cannot grapple with everything, but this is a good illustration as to how mysticism relates to knowledge, negative theology (or Apophatic theology), the role of action and contemplation with regard to mysticism. I think most importantly to my project, Baxter traces some of the ways that the changing understanding of the interiority of the human being (the inner self, personality, pyschology, etc.) influence the ways that we speak of mysticism. It is too strong to say that to know yourself is to know God, but that is how some mystics have come to see contemplation.
An Introduction to Christian Mysticism opens with a discussion of the rediscovery of mysticism in the 20th and 21st century. I have been reading The Celebration of Discipline and a book biography of Celebration of Disciple, Worth Celebrating by Miriam Dixon with the Renovare book club and they both also discuss this rediscovery. It has come in several waves, the Azuza revival brought a wave of interest in Pentecostal and charismatic worship and the Holy Spirit. Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, and AW Tozer, among others prompted a revival of evangelical and protestant awareness of the history of the mystics. And Celebration of Discipline and other books in the spiritual formation movement has brought about increased attention to the practices of mysticism. Baxter is almost entirely focused on the intellectual history of mysticism. It is not that he is unaware of the role of the practices, but that while he acknowledges the practices and discussed the role of a type of muscular Christianity in his discussion of the desert fathers and of St Francis, that isn't his main focus.
After the introduction to the topic of mysticism and its revival, Baxter traces both thematically and temporally from Plato and other pagans of antiquity to Augustine, the mystics interested in negative theology (Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa, and Meister Echhart), before returning to the desert fathers. And then returns to the later medieval world with lectio divina and the ways that Christian contemplation relates to God through contemplation of his word.
I listened to this as an audiobook and while the narrator was fine, this is a book that probably is not well suited to audio. Much of the book is oriented around ideas and Baxter is, as much as possible, oriented toward allowing earlier Christians to speak for themselves about mysticism. The sheer number of quotes and the way that Baxter mixes the quotes with his interpretive gloss means that it is very hard at times to know where the quote ends and where Baxter's commentary starts. And many of these quotes are either dense or coming from a very different cultural perspective and it would be helpful to read this in print so that you can go back and reread sections.
My plan is to watch the book price and pick it up the next time it goes on sale. But in the meantime, I am going to pick up some Evelyn Underhill and some of the older mystical books to read directly. I am still convinced that there is a very important role for understanding discernment in modern Christian discipleship. But I also think that without an understanding of mysticism and how we connect to a spiritual God, there is a limit to what we can say about discernment. Discernment involves understanding emotion, but it is not simply emotion. Discernment very much is interested in hearing from God and relating to God, but one of the important aspects of that is enough self awareness to grapple with what is ourselves and what is God. And then there is the ever-present question about what to do in the face of a God who appears distant or is not there when we feel like we want him to be there. All three of those questions and more have an aspect of mysticism in them.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/an-introduction-to-christian-mysticism/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: A historical look at how Christian mystics understood mysticism and how that has changed.
Anyone reading along with my reviews is probably aware that I am about 18 months into a reading project on the idea of Christian discernment. And while I have not ended that exploration of discernment, I am at the point of a deep dive where I need to explore the connected ideas to discernment so that I can better understand how to proceed.
A number of years ago I was exploring the trinity and I realized that in exploring the trinity I needed to better understand the concept of hermeneutics and I think I ended up reading more books about hermeneutics than I did about the trinity. That exploration of the trinity comes up because one of the most helpful books for me in exploring the trinity was The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Early Church by Franz Dunzl. What made it so helpful was that it traced the early doctrine of the trinity but in doing so, Dunzl showed that part of the development of the language around the trinity was linguistic (there was a shift from Greek to Latin as the lingua franca) and part of the development of the langauge around the trinity was about shifts in philosophy and the language of philosophy.
If you have traced Christian doctrine over time, the way that cultural issues shift the way that we think of theology is common. Part of what mattered in the reformation was that thee was a shift in how we think of the state and how we think of legal realities and this corresponded to the increasing use of legal language in regard to the doctrines of salvation. In a more modern example, the shifts in understanding about gender and gender roles have shifted the language that some are using in regard to trinitarian theology with regard to the rise of supporters of the The Eternal Subordination of the Son or the The Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son and in a different area some of the changes in language and meaning of the economic trinity or social trinitarian theology.
I bring all of this up because Baxter's Introduction to Christian Mysticism has played a bit of a similar role as Dunzl for me. Mysticism is a notoriously difficult subject to discuss because the very nature of mysticism is discussion about what is "super natural" or what is above or outside of the natural realm. Because language is often referential, referring to something that is outside of nature makes it difficult to draw metaphors or analogy. Part of the differences in the way that we think of mysticism over time are differences of what is culturally being responded to as well as differences in philosophy and language. (The Mystery of God was a very helpful book on the right and wrong use of mystery within theological exploration.)
I picked up An Introduction to Christian Mysticism because I have recently read Baxter's book on CS Lewis and how his writing and thinking were influenced by medieval thinking. And as I think is appropriate, much of An Introduction to Christian Mysticism is concerned with the same broad time period. A short introduction like this cannot grapple with everything, but this is a good illustration as to how mysticism relates to knowledge, negative theology (or Apophatic theology), the role of action and contemplation with regard to mysticism. I think most importantly to my project, Baxter traces some of the ways that the changing understanding of the interiority of the human being (the inner self, personality, pyschology, etc.) influence the ways that we speak of mysticism. It is too strong to say that to know yourself is to know God, but that is how some mystics have come to see contemplation.
An Introduction to Christian Mysticism opens with a discussion of the rediscovery of mysticism in the 20th and 21st century. I have been reading The Celebration of Discipline and a book biography of Celebration of Disciple, Worth Celebrating by Miriam Dixon with the Renovare book club and they both also discuss this rediscovery. It has come in several waves, the Azuza revival brought a wave of interest in Pentecostal and charismatic worship and the Holy Spirit. Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, and AW Tozer, among others prompted a revival of evangelical and protestant awareness of the history of the mystics. And Celebration of Discipline and other books in the spiritual formation movement has brought about increased attention to the practices of mysticism. Baxter is almost entirely focused on the intellectual history of mysticism. It is not that he is unaware of the role of the practices, but that while he acknowledges the practices and discussed the role of a type of muscular Christianity in his discussion of the desert fathers and of St Francis, that isn't his main focus.
After the introduction to the topic of mysticism and its revival, Baxter traces both thematically and temporally from Plato and other pagans of antiquity to Augustine, the mystics interested in negative theology (Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa, and Meister Echhart), before returning to the desert fathers. And then returns to the later medieval world with lectio divina and the ways that Christian contemplation relates to God through contemplation of his word.
I listened to this as an audiobook and while the narrator was fine, this is a book that probably is not well suited to audio. Much of the book is oriented around ideas and Baxter is, as much as possible, oriented toward allowing earlier Christians to speak for themselves about mysticism. The sheer number of quotes and the way that Baxter mixes the quotes with his interpretive gloss means that it is very hard at times to know where the quote ends and where Baxter's commentary starts. And many of these quotes are either dense or coming from a very different cultural perspective and it would be helpful to read this in print so that you can go back and reread sections.
My plan is to watch the book price and pick it up the next time it goes on sale. But in the meantime, I am going to pick up some Evelyn Underhill and some of the older mystical books to read directly. I am still convinced that there is a very important role for understanding discernment in modern Christian discipleship. But I also think that without an understanding of mysticism and how we connect to a spiritual God, there is a limit to what we can say about discernment. Discernment involves understanding emotion, but it is not simply emotion. Discernment very much is interested in hearing from God and relating to God, but one of the important aspects of that is enough self awareness to grapple with what is ourselves and what is God. And then there is the ever-present question about what to do in the face of a God who appears distant or is not there when we feel like we want him to be there. All three of those questions and more have an aspect of mysticism in them.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/an-introduction-to-christian-mysticism/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: An exploration of post-colonial practical theology in the Anglican world.
I am a fan of reading widely, but in my wide ranging reading I do not always know how to really write about what I read. This is a book that I appreciated and recommend, but I also need to say up front I am not qualified to evaluate. I have some understanding of post-colonial theory, but my understanding is very cursory.
I grew up baptist and have always attended baptist or non-denominational churches until the past 18 months when I started attending an Episcopal church. I used the Book of Common Prayer for years, which is the pull part of moving toward the Anglican tradition. The push part of that decision is my practical and theological changes from autonomous local churches in the face of abuse scandals and leader misbehavior. Episcopal structures are not immune to abuse and leader misbehavior (see George Carey and Justin Welby's resignations and the variety of scandals in ANCA and TEC). But part of the differences is that episcopal systems of church governance have the theoretical possibility of addressing sinful leaders, autonomous non-denominational or baptist church systems often do not have any ability to address sinful leaders in a meaningful way.
One of the themes of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective is that interaction is bidirectional. Yes, colonial harm went from the colonizer to the colonized, but there are other interactions. This is similar to the focus in David Swartz's Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity, which explores the ways that American Evangelicals were impacted by missions and interaction with world Christianity. Not all feedback is positive. In a complicated way, Swartz's exploration of the Homogenous Unit Principle and the way that was brought back from the mission field and was used to uphold church segregation beyond when segregation in other cultural areas was frowned upon, is an example of how not all feedback is positive.
But many areas of cross fertilization are positive. One of the examples in The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective is the fact that women's ordination occurred in Hong Kong about 50 years before it was approved in England. Women's ordination in Hong Kong and then China was a result of the realities of World War II. From that practical expediency movement on women's ordination moved first to other global south areas and then to the United States and the UK.
Postcolonial theory is particularly relevant to the anglican world. The Church of England was a state church and that state church was the state church of an empire that was one of the most extensive in global history. And that empire still has aspects of it in place and within the living memory of many, it was much more widespread. Post colonial analysis of the way that the global communion interacts and works makes a lot of sense, especially because of the stresses on that global communion.
The United States revolution changed the way that the Church of England related to the churches outside the geography of the UK. In 1867 the Lambeth Conference first met. There were several reasons for why the global Anglican communion were called together, but one of them was to discuss how and whether to accept polygamous men into church membership and if they were allowed to attend services, whether they should be baptized and given communion. It is not exactly parallel with the concerns around LGBTQ inclusion in the anglican communion now, but there are issues of sexuality and culture that are part of that discussion. The connection between sexuality and inculturation and local authority of the bishop has been at play in many of the meetings (that happen every decade) since that first meeting about 150 years ago.
I think like a good academic book, The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective complicates the narrative. It is not only that the global south is universally more conservative around sexuality than the US and UK. There are very conservative movements within the US and UK and there are inclusive areas of the global south. The issues are complex and listening to the whole church and paying attention to areas of post colonial theory as the global communion meets and discusses these complex and complicated issues is no silver bullet solution. But the reality is that the anglican communion was shaped by colonialism. And that has to be part of understanding the way forward.
Kwok Pui-Lan is herself from the global south but often working and teaching in the western contexts. She is rightly raising issues and pointing out areas of disagreement while noting the history which matters to how we proceed.
The past Archbishops of Canterbury have all have a level of taint or controversy from LGBTQ, sexual abuse and gender issues. Welby has resigned and the process of a new archbishop will be difficult. Rowan Williams certainly tried to find a way forward, but his academic chops did not seem to be up to the backdoor political wrangling. (I recently watched the movie Conclave and it does seem to be a relevant movie to the context.) And recently the George Carey (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002) resigned his priesthood because mishandling of sex abuse investigations.). Before Carey, Robert Runcie was the archbishop from 1980 to 1991 and oversaw the official recognition of women as priests in the UK. Every archbishop has had significant controversy around issues of gender and sexuality.
The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective by Kwok Pui-Lan will be too academic for some readers. It is not a difficult book to read, but may require a level of background theology, church history and other disciplines to fully understand some of the context. That being said, if people are interested in the issues, the very fact that they are interested probably means that they have the background to be able to read the book and will profit from it.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-anglican-tradition/ (there are lots of working links there.)
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: An exploration of post-colonial practical theology in the Anglican world.
I am a fan of reading widely, but in my wide ranging reading I do not always know how to really write about what I read. This is a book that I appreciated and recommend, but I also need to say up front I am not qualified to evaluate. I have some understanding of post-colonial theory, but my understanding is very cursory.
I grew up baptist and have always attended baptist or non-denominational churches until the past 18 months when I started attending an Episcopal church. I used the Book of Common Prayer for years, which is the pull part of moving toward the Anglican tradition. The push part of that decision is my practical and theological changes from autonomous local churches in the face of abuse scandals and leader misbehavior. Episcopal structures are not immune to abuse and leader misbehavior (see George Carey and Justin Welby's resignations and the variety of scandals in ANCA and TEC). But part of the differences is that episcopal systems of church governance have the theoretical possibility of addressing sinful leaders, autonomous non-denominational or baptist church systems often do not have any ability to address sinful leaders in a meaningful way.
One of the themes of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective is that interaction is bidirectional. Yes, colonial harm went from the colonizer to the colonized, but there are other interactions. This is similar to the focus in David Swartz's Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity, which explores the ways that American Evangelicals were impacted by missions and interaction with world Christianity. Not all feedback is positive. In a complicated way, Swartz's exploration of the Homogenous Unit Principle and the way that was brought back from the mission field and was used to uphold church segregation beyond when segregation in other cultural areas was frowned upon, is an example of how not all feedback is positive.
But many areas of cross fertilization are positive. One of the examples in The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective is the fact that women's ordination occurred in Hong Kong about 50 years before it was approved in England. Women's ordination in Hong Kong and then China was a result of the realities of World War II. From that practical expediency movement on women's ordination moved first to other global south areas and then to the United States and the UK.
Postcolonial theory is particularly relevant to the anglican world. The Church of England was a state church and that state church was the state church of an empire that was one of the most extensive in global history. And that empire still has aspects of it in place and within the living memory of many, it was much more widespread. Post colonial analysis of the way that the global communion interacts and works makes a lot of sense, especially because of the stresses on that global communion.
The United States revolution changed the way that the Church of England related to the churches outside the geography of the UK. In 1867 the Lambeth Conference first met. There were several reasons for why the global Anglican communion were called together, but one of them was to discuss how and whether to accept polygamous men into church membership and if they were allowed to attend services, whether they should be baptized and given communion. It is not exactly parallel with the concerns around LGBTQ inclusion in the anglican communion now, but there are issues of sexuality and culture that are part of that discussion. The connection between sexuality and inculturation and local authority of the bishop has been at play in many of the meetings (that happen every decade) since that first meeting about 150 years ago.
I think like a good academic book, The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective complicates the narrative. It is not only that the global south is universally more conservative around sexuality than the US and UK. There are very conservative movements within the US and UK and there are inclusive areas of the global south. The issues are complex and listening to the whole church and paying attention to areas of post colonial theory as the global communion meets and discusses these complex and complicated issues is no silver bullet solution. But the reality is that the anglican communion was shaped by colonialism. And that has to be part of understanding the way forward.
Kwok Pui-Lan is herself from the global south but often working and teaching in the western contexts. She is rightly raising issues and pointing out areas of disagreement while noting the history which matters to how we proceed.
The past Archbishops of Canterbury have all have a level of taint or controversy from LGBTQ, sexual abuse and gender issues. Welby has resigned and the process of a new archbishop will be difficult. Rowan Williams certainly tried to find a way forward, but his academic chops did not seem to be up to the backdoor political wrangling. (I recently watched the movie Conclave and it does seem to be a relevant movie to the context.) And recently the George Carey (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002) resigned his priesthood because mishandling of sex abuse investigations.). Before Carey, Robert Runcie was the archbishop from 1980 to 1991 and oversaw the official recognition of women as priests in the UK. Every archbishop has had significant controversy around issues of gender and sexuality.
The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective by Kwok Pui-Lan will be too academic for some readers. It is not a difficult book to read, but may require a level of background theology, church history and other disciplines to fully understand some of the context. That being said, if people are interested in the issues, the very fact that they are interested probably means that they have the background to be able to read the book and will profit from it.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-anglican-tradition/ (there are lots of working links there.)
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: The backstory on the Wicket Witch of the West in Oz.
I do not remember when I read Wicked the first time. My guess is that I read it after I saw the stage adaptation in 2007 or so. I have not previously written about it so it was likely before 2009 when I started blogging. After watching the recent movie, I decided to reread the book again because I really have no specific memory of the book other than the broadest strokes of the story and I suspected most of what I remembered was from the stage production not the book.
To the best of my memory, I think have seen the stage production either two or three times between 2006 and 2013 and now have read the book twice and watched the movie once. (My wife and I saw it together to see if our kids were ready for it and we will probably take them to see it over Christmas break.)
Part of what prompted me to read it again was all of the "don't let your kids read this" posts. I remember the book being for adults, but I didn't have any specific memories of it being overly crude or sexual or violent. One of my current pet peeves is classifying books with sex as "adult" instead of thinking about a wide variety of reasons why a book is written for an adult audience.
Yes, I don't think that Wicked was written for a pre-teen audience. I think putting the movie images on the cover is a bad idea because the stage musical and the movie are very different stories from the book. I hope that after the second movie is out, that there will be a movie novelization book. I think most pre-teen readers will be bored because the book is primarily concerned with adult issues, not adult as in sex (although there is sex in it) but adult as in questions of meaning, purpose and the role of naturalism and faith. Wicked is a slow story that that covers about 40 years of time.
The book is nearly 40 years old at this point so I am not going to worry too much about spoilers, but I also am not trying to ruin the book if you haven't read it. The book opens with Elphaba's parents. Her father is a fire and brimstone preacher who is calling the community to holiness. Her mother is a younger daughter who can't wait to get out of her home and marries the first man that shows an interest in her beyond her family's position and money. He travels on preaching tours and she is lonely and has many affairs and one night stands with whoever happens to come by in her rural poor community. She has a problem with drugs and alcohol, he has a problem with self indulgent navel gazing and not paying attention to anyone around him.
When Elphaba is born with green skin and razor sharp teeth, the father blames himself and leaves home even more on preaching tours as penance and her mother continues her own avoidance schemes. Eventually a refugee, Turtle Heart, from another part of Oz comes by and ends up moving in for years. He provides stability for the couple and as is hinted at in the early pages and is expressly discussed later, is sexually involved with both of Elphaba's parents separately and might be the father of Elphaba's younger sister Nessarose. The background and childhood of Elphaba is about the first quarter of the book, but isn't really even mentioned in the movie.
The stage show and movie really start with the Elphaba and Nessarose going away to school. Again, like many places the book differs in the story from the play and movie. In almost all cases, I think the play/movie are the better story arc.
The movie/play have basically no religious storyline, but in large part the book is a story of how different members of Elphaba's family use religion and religious ideas of make sense of the world. Elphaba's father is a fundamentalist who is trying to atone for his own sins through devotion. Elphaba's mother has no real faith, but she also is not opposed to faith. She just doesn't really let faith get in the way of her pleasure and self-interest. Elphaba, because of her green skin and being the child of a roving missionary (in the book) she has grown up with faith all around her but can't really believe. When she goes away to school and is allowed to explore her atheism, she becomes a naturalist who seeks to explain the world apart from faith. Nessarose is a true believer who commands faith for others as she comes into power.
I think the religious aspects of the story could be interested but largely fall flat because they are explored seriously. Faith here is largely about determinism and prophecy not a serious exploration of the supernatural. Elphaba seems to be destined to be magical even as she doesn't really believe in magic. In almost all cases, both she and the reader are not really sure if events are the result of magic or not. Toward the end of the book as Wicked has to account for meshing with the original Wizard of Oz story, Elphaba suspects she is going mad and there is bad luck and seemingly fate that drives the story.
There really are almost no aspect of the book vs musical/movie story arcs that I think are better in the book. There is more detail, but that doesn't mean better. Maguire tries to make Oz into a full economy and political system, but it feels more like satire than an actual system.
I think I like the book more on the second reading than the first. But I think it has the same problems of Lev Grossman's Magicians series and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Grossman and Pullman are good authors, but the point of the books seems to be opposing the themes and stories of Lewis and Rowling not honoring them. I am a big fan of the retelling of fairy tales. I think KB Hoyle does a great job of it in her books, but to retell a story well you have to be willing to honor the original.
Brett McCracken at The Gospel Coalition wrote a review opposing the Wicked movie as being post-Christian morality. I think that review was wrong on a number of levels. First of all, the book and the musical/movie are not excusing wickedness, but exploring how we tend to see wickedness. We showed my children (9 and 11) the Wizard of Oz the first time a few days ago. Glinda when she introduces herself to Dorothy she asks Dorothy if she is a good witch or a bad witch. Dorothy says, "I'm not a witch at all. Witches are old and ugly." And then when Glinda reveals that she is a witch Dorothy responds, "You are? Oh, I beg your pardon. But I've never heard of a beautiful witch before."
Part of what Wicked is doing is not denying wickedness as a reality, but playing with the assumptions that the original had about beauty and ugliness and the connection to morality. There seems to continue to be assumptions that we can see who is evil. That is regularly still something that people say in response to sexual abuser or murders, "but they seemed so nice."
Elphaba is treated throughout her life as if she is bad because of how she looks. Her father especially views her as his curse. While Glinda is assumed to be good inherently because of her beauty. But the movie/musical more than the book show that Glinda's character is the problem not her beauty. In the book Glinda ages and isn't really beautiful any longer when she meets Dorothy. She is all facade no depth.
My problem with the book isn't that it is trying to explore what it means to be wicked. My problem is that it doesn't do a very good job of that, everyone is really a bad character, or at least has the potential to be bad. Even the good characters like Doctor Dillamond, Ama Clutch and Nanny are not very good. While the most despicable characters are those who just are willing to be openly despicable. One of the minor characters from the group of school friends, Avaric, was rich and awful and at the end when Elphaba again runs into him, his primary feature is just not caring that people see him as as evil as he is, he is authentic in his evilness.
The only charm to the original wizard was his bumbling nature. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." In the movie, the wizard is less bumbling and more interested in his plans. He creates fear and hatred against the Animals not because he hates Animals, but because he is willing to harm for the sake of his power. Again, that is not opposed to morality as McCracken suggests, but rather emphasizes traditional warnings about power. In the book, the wizard is largely off stage. He is other and I think Maguire couldn't figure out how to make him anything other than more evil than he already was.
The tragedies of Elphaba's life, her skin and family, the death of her love, her inability to overthrow the wizard were largely outside of her control. But what was in her control wasn't handled well either. She isn't a particularly sympathetic character even if we can see more of how she came to be and that is where the book fails. Largely the opposite of McCracken's charge.
McCracken largely thinks the problem with the "post-Christian morality" is that Wicked embraces "woke" theory of ethics. But in McCracken's framing, there is no place for working for justice outside of traditional systems of morality. I don't think McCracken has read the book, because if anything the book would support his framing more than the movie/musical do. The movie/musical story is better because it is trying to tell a simpler story.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/wicked/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: The backstory on the Wicket Witch of the West in Oz.
I do not remember when I read Wicked the first time. My guess is that I read it after I saw the stage adaptation in 2007 or so. I have not previously written about it so it was likely before 2009 when I started blogging. After watching the recent movie, I decided to reread the book again because I really have no specific memory of the book other than the broadest strokes of the story and I suspected most of what I remembered was from the stage production not the book.
To the best of my memory, I think have seen the stage production either two or three times between 2006 and 2013 and now have read the book twice and watched the movie once. (My wife and I saw it together to see if our kids were ready for it and we will probably take them to see it over Christmas break.)
Part of what prompted me to read it again was all of the "don't let your kids read this" posts. I remember the book being for adults, but I didn't have any specific memories of it being overly crude or sexual or violent. One of my current pet peeves is classifying books with sex as "adult" instead of thinking about a wide variety of reasons why a book is written for an adult audience.
Yes, I don't think that Wicked was written for a pre-teen audience. I think putting the movie images on the cover is a bad idea because the stage musical and the movie are very different stories from the book. I hope that after the second movie is out, that there will be a movie novelization book. I think most pre-teen readers will be bored because the book is primarily concerned with adult issues, not adult as in sex (although there is sex in it) but adult as in questions of meaning, purpose and the role of naturalism and faith. Wicked is a slow story that that covers about 40 years of time.
The book is nearly 40 years old at this point so I am not going to worry too much about spoilers, but I also am not trying to ruin the book if you haven't read it. The book opens with Elphaba's parents. Her father is a fire and brimstone preacher who is calling the community to holiness. Her mother is a younger daughter who can't wait to get out of her home and marries the first man that shows an interest in her beyond her family's position and money. He travels on preaching tours and she is lonely and has many affairs and one night stands with whoever happens to come by in her rural poor community. She has a problem with drugs and alcohol, he has a problem with self indulgent navel gazing and not paying attention to anyone around him.
When Elphaba is born with green skin and razor sharp teeth, the father blames himself and leaves home even more on preaching tours as penance and her mother continues her own avoidance schemes. Eventually a refugee, Turtle Heart, from another part of Oz comes by and ends up moving in for years. He provides stability for the couple and as is hinted at in the early pages and is expressly discussed later, is sexually involved with both of Elphaba's parents separately and might be the father of Elphaba's younger sister Nessarose. The background and childhood of Elphaba is about the first quarter of the book, but isn't really even mentioned in the movie.
The stage show and movie really start with the Elphaba and Nessarose going away to school. Again, like many places the book differs in the story from the play and movie. In almost all cases, I think the play/movie are the better story arc.
The movie/play have basically no religious storyline, but in large part the book is a story of how different members of Elphaba's family use religion and religious ideas of make sense of the world. Elphaba's father is a fundamentalist who is trying to atone for his own sins through devotion. Elphaba's mother has no real faith, but she also is not opposed to faith. She just doesn't really let faith get in the way of her pleasure and self-interest. Elphaba, because of her green skin and being the child of a roving missionary (in the book) she has grown up with faith all around her but can't really believe. When she goes away to school and is allowed to explore her atheism, she becomes a naturalist who seeks to explain the world apart from faith. Nessarose is a true believer who commands faith for others as she comes into power.
I think the religious aspects of the story could be interested but largely fall flat because they are explored seriously. Faith here is largely about determinism and prophecy not a serious exploration of the supernatural. Elphaba seems to be destined to be magical even as she doesn't really believe in magic. In almost all cases, both she and the reader are not really sure if events are the result of magic or not. Toward the end of the book as Wicked has to account for meshing with the original Wizard of Oz story, Elphaba suspects she is going mad and there is bad luck and seemingly fate that drives the story.
There really are almost no aspect of the book vs musical/movie story arcs that I think are better in the book. There is more detail, but that doesn't mean better. Maguire tries to make Oz into a full economy and political system, but it feels more like satire than an actual system.
I think I like the book more on the second reading than the first. But I think it has the same problems of Lev Grossman's Magicians series and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Grossman and Pullman are good authors, but the point of the books seems to be opposing the themes and stories of Lewis and Rowling not honoring them. I am a big fan of the retelling of fairy tales. I think KB Hoyle does a great job of it in her books, but to retell a story well you have to be willing to honor the original.
Brett McCracken at The Gospel Coalition wrote a review opposing the Wicked movie as being post-Christian morality. I think that review was wrong on a number of levels. First of all, the book and the musical/movie are not excusing wickedness, but exploring how we tend to see wickedness. We showed my children (9 and 11) the Wizard of Oz the first time a few days ago. Glinda when she introduces herself to Dorothy she asks Dorothy if she is a good witch or a bad witch. Dorothy says, "I'm not a witch at all. Witches are old and ugly." And then when Glinda reveals that she is a witch Dorothy responds, "You are? Oh, I beg your pardon. But I've never heard of a beautiful witch before."
Part of what Wicked is doing is not denying wickedness as a reality, but playing with the assumptions that the original had about beauty and ugliness and the connection to morality. There seems to continue to be assumptions that we can see who is evil. That is regularly still something that people say in response to sexual abuser or murders, "but they seemed so nice."
Elphaba is treated throughout her life as if she is bad because of how she looks. Her father especially views her as his curse. While Glinda is assumed to be good inherently because of her beauty. But the movie/musical more than the book show that Glinda's character is the problem not her beauty. In the book Glinda ages and isn't really beautiful any longer when she meets Dorothy. She is all facade no depth.
My problem with the book isn't that it is trying to explore what it means to be wicked. My problem is that it doesn't do a very good job of that, everyone is really a bad character, or at least has the potential to be bad. Even the good characters like Doctor Dillamond, Ama Clutch and Nanny are not very good. While the most despicable characters are those who just are willing to be openly despicable. One of the minor characters from the group of school friends, Avaric, was rich and awful and at the end when Elphaba again runs into him, his primary feature is just not caring that people see him as as evil as he is, he is authentic in his evilness.
The only charm to the original wizard was his bumbling nature. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." In the movie, the wizard is less bumbling and more interested in his plans. He creates fear and hatred against the Animals not because he hates Animals, but because he is willing to harm for the sake of his power. Again, that is not opposed to morality as McCracken suggests, but rather emphasizes traditional warnings about power. In the book, the wizard is largely off stage. He is other and I think Maguire couldn't figure out how to make him anything other than more evil than he already was.
The tragedies of Elphaba's life, her skin and family, the death of her love, her inability to overthrow the wizard were largely outside of her control. But what was in her control wasn't handled well either. She isn't a particularly sympathetic character even if we can see more of how she came to be and that is where the book fails. Largely the opposite of McCracken's charge.
McCracken largely thinks the problem with the "post-Christian morality" is that Wicked embraces "woke" theory of ethics. But in McCracken's framing, there is no place for working for justice outside of traditional systems of morality. I don't think McCracken has read the book, because if anything the book would support his framing more than the movie/musical do. The movie/musical story is better because it is trying to tell a simpler story.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/wicked/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: An ethnographic study of an antiracism program in a Cincinnati evangelical megachurch.
Undivided was not a book on my radar. I had not planned on listening to the Holy Post Podcast which interviewed the author Hahrie Han. But then I got an email about a bonus segment which discussed the 2018 meeting at Wheaton College about what to do in response to Trump. I was well aware of that meeting and listened to that segment and then went back and listened to the whole podcast. If you are interested in just the interview, you can watch the YouTube video and skip to the 54 minute mark to get to the start of the interview.
Undivided in an ethnographic study of an antiracist training program in an evangelical megachurch. Hahrie Han became aware of it because of its involvement in passing a ballot initiative to provide free preK to Cincinnati students. She was told that the ballot initative was heavily influenced by a local megachurch. As she investigated she became intrigued because most DEI programs are not particularly effective at changing long term behavior. Han embedded herself in the church for nearly seven years to understand how the church and the program, which was eventually spun off to its organization, worked and what made it effective. Eventually the book discusses how it responded to the backlash to the program and the larger cultural backlash to antiracism programs within the US culture.
Undivided by Hahrie Han predominately traces four people while exploring the Undivided antiracism training program at Crossroads Church in Cincinnati. Han’s skill as a writer and researcher is evident throughout the book. Her four central characters are a Black male pastor (Chuck Mingo) who was the public face of the program. A white male participate in the initial program (Grant) who at the time worked for the Ohio Department of Corrections, eventually leading their social media team. Grant came to understand how much he didn’t understand about race, despite working in a racially diverse setting and having an adopted brother who was black. The third and fourth character are a Black woman (Sandra, a pseudonym) and a white woman (Jess). Undivided tells the story of these four characters of time and how they were changed by the program and by their relationships with one another. It is in large part the stickiness of the relationships with brought about the change within the characters.
I am a big fan of good ethnographic studies. Good ethnographic studies follow a group of individuals over a fairly long period of time to understand a context deeply. One of the best ethnographies I have read was Gang Leader for a Day, where a sociologist embedded himself in a Chicago housing project and local gang for years to understand how the culture and pressures of living in public housing and being within a gang worked. I was turned onto the model of ethnographic study after reading Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity
by Mitchell Duneier. I think I picked it up in the late 90s (it was published in ‘92) in part because I lived about two blocks from the restaurant at the center of that ethnography. Ethnography is inherently controversial because the act of embedding yourself into a community well enough to be able to report on the community impacts not just the community being studied (the observer effect) but also the researchers themselves are often changed because of the long term impact of the relationships. (At the end of the book, Hahrie Han say that her work with Undivided program and the people profiled and Crossroads church where the program was set drew her back to faith.)
I do not think I am an average reader for Undivided. I both have a good background in reading various ethnographies, but I am deeply invested in antiracism work in the evangelical world. I was interested in the book because I was well aware of a small meeting of Evangelical leaders which happened to be meeting at my Alma Mater, Wheaton College. Until recently I spent 15 years as a member of a different megachurch where I strongly advocated for racial awareness programs and called on the church to be more attuned to the need to center justice in their work. Throughout the 2016 to 2023 study of Undivided, I was involved in similar program in a different church and a different city. This story of Undivided is a largely positive one, but In 2021 I left my church after having lost faith that there could be change there.
There are a variety of reasons which I have mostly detailed in other places, but one aspect which I do not think got enough attention in Undivided, although it did get some, is that the megachurch model I think is inherently flawed. Even if I had full confidence in the leadership of my former church, I have come to believe that two aspects of the megachurch mean that I will never be satisfied. One, the megachurch model has been influenced by the Homogenous Unit Principle (HUP) of the church growth movement. Han mentions this in Undivided, but just in passing. The HUP was developed in a missionary context of India and then was brought back to the US and became part of a church planting and church growth movement in the 1970 to early 2000s. HUP suggests that the way to attract people to the church is to narrowly target a small demographic and cultural segment to meet the needs and attract just that group through culturally specific evangelism. A second aspect to the growth of the megachurch is not just HUP, but also targeting programming toward people who were not familiar with or uninterested in traditional church. My old church used to have the tag line, “A church for the unchurched.”
These two aspect matter to why predominately white evangelical megachurches are so bad at racial issues. The very DNA of most megachurches is a narrowly targeted cultural group. Willow Creek popularized Unchurched Harry and Mary as their target demographic and then proceeded to teach other churches to do the same. Part of my work in the late 1990s was working for a local association of churches and doing demographic reports for churches and church plants who were trying to find the narrow group they should be targeting in order to quickly grow. Once churches have this in their DNA, and then they prioritize being a comfortable place to go to church, avoidance of discomfort becomes the priority of the local church. A church that prioritizes avoidance of discomfort and who has a narrow cultural demographic as the base of its congregation, cannot address an inherently uncomfortable topic like race, which is not salient to most of the members because those members have been attracted because it is monocultural.
Again, it is mentioned, but the added layer to the problem is the increasing role of Christian Nationalism which has been empowered by the increasing reliance of fear of the other by the religious right. There have been whole books about the relationship of Christian nationalism to the rise of the religious right and how race is inherently tied into the very concept of Christian nationalism and to a lesser extent the development of the white evangelical movement. Books like Bad Faith by Randall Balmer and Religion of Whiteness by Emerson and Bracey approach the history and sociology of race within the evangelical church world.
The real draw to the book Undivided is how much the writing is centered on the characters. The reader learns about the program and about the issues of race within the evangelical world as the characters come to understand themselves and one another through the program and their relationships with others. These are not simply stories. As I hinted above in introducing the characters, each of them had significant changes in their life as a result of their connection to the program and one another. In many ways those changes were positive, but not all of them were. Undivided is in part about the cost that it takes to address race in a system that discourages the directness.
One of the difficulties of discussing race or economics or other topics that are “just in the water” is that language is difficult. For instance, Han occasionally uses the word “Whiteness” to describe the cultural belief in a system of racialization and hierarchy. Some readers view “whiteness” as meaning “all white people,” but the sociological definition does not mean all white people. Jonathan Waltonlikes to use the phrase “White American Folk Religion” instead of Christian Nationalism even if they have overlapping meanings because he wants to use language that is less fraught. The two different approaches of using whiteness to specifically name a problem with a name that can be misunderstood, or using a name like "White American Folk Religion" which needs to be defined but has less initial baggage is a topic that repeatedly comes up in Undivided. Studying the culture, something that people don't directly talk about because it is assumed to be understood, is necessary in a pluralistic world where people do not necessarily mean the same thing when using the same language.
The idea of ethnography centers the experience of the focus characters both as particular people, but also models who stand in for larger groups. The pastor, Chuck, grew up in the Black church and intially left Crossroads because of frustration over racial issues. But he came back and was hired and the social capital he earned through long term relationship with the church leadership allowed him some leeway to press in on difficult issues. But the tension on maintaining those relationships means that he was always wondering if he was not pushing enough or was pushing too much and if he was self censoring so that he could maintain relationship. Grant was a young white man who thought he knew it all because he had a black friend and a black brother. As he explored racial issues and the way that race played a role within his work at the Department of Corrections he became an activist. He started a prison ministry group at the church. And he work in his role as a social media manager to profile inmates through podcast interview and written profiles. But eventually he left the Department of Corrections because of backlash against his activism. Becoming a church staff members who continued his activism around racial issues there.
Sandra was a Black woman who was married to a white man. She grew up being taught by her father to not trust white people. After an early divorce and a young child, she was brought back to faith through Crossroads church. She eventually remarried a white man and had three additional children. Again, the book skillfully tells the story of how racial identity matters not just to white racism, but also the racial identity of those who are not black. It takes years and many small steps, but he comes to find her voice and understand how gender and race both play a role in her marriage struggles.
Jess is the youngest character in the book. She grew up in a family that was overt white supremacist, her father (who died when she was 11) had "White Power" and other similar tattoos and her uncle had a swastika tattooed on his chest while in prison. Jess also spent time in prison after a felony conviction and a serious drug addiction. While in prison she became a Christian and upon release she found Crossroads, regained custody of her son, and was just getting settled when she started participating in Undivided. She eventually completed college and becomes a social worker and presses back against the racism of her family and the systems she works and lives in.
It is very clear in Undivided that struggle is central to growth. The point is growth, not a particular destination. Even as the book is very clear about the struggle I think it may be too positively framed. The backlash, which is clearly the focus of the second half of the book I think is stronger than what just what is talked about. The book was published in September, 2024, which means it was largely finished in 2023 and written about events that were mostly 2022 or before. The reelection of Trump, the continuing overt Christian nationalism within the christian community and the backlash against DEI, immigration, and other topics I do not think have reached their zenith yet.
One of the strengths of Undivided is that Hahrie Han is not an evangelical insider. She is coming at the story with a different lens and different assumptions. But her not being an insider means that there are a lot of minor issues which I see as an insider. Some are minor fact problems like identifying Charlie Dates as the pastor of Progressive Baptist Church of Chicago starting in 2023. He actually became pastor of Progressive Baptist in 2011, but in 2023 also became senior pastor of Salem Baptist, jointly pastoring two different churches. The unusualness of the situation can be a part of why the detail was wrong. But there were a dozen or so similar minor errors that I think show a lack of evangelical editorial input. She also had some framing issues with describing people as "in the faith" in a way that felt very unevangelical. When she talks about Bebbington's evangelical quadrilateral and the National Evangelical Association, she incorrectly identifies them as nondenominational.
I think some of the lack of detail in the backlash section also is attributable to her outsider status. While she details the 2018 Wheaton meeting, she doesn't detail the 2018 MLK 50 or the 2018 T4G meeting which were both very much concerned with race in the Evangelical world. MLK 50 was jointly sponsored by the Southern Baptist ELRC and The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and is arguably part of the impetus of the national anti CRT movement. MLK 50 is regularly cited as evidence of those very conservative evangelical organization being "woke". TGC in 2019 published The Incompatibility of Critical Theory and Christianity, which directly identified the language being used in antiracism programs like MLK 50 or Undivided as being incompatible with Christianity. That eventually morphed into opposition to Critical Race Theory and the SBC's resolution about CRT and SBC seminary presidents unequivocally opposing CRT.That anti CRT eventually spread to school and political world with Trump's anti CRT statement in the fall of 2020. Part of the reality of the problem of race and Trump is that those who are opposing Trump and those who are trying to address race often, but not necessarily overlap.
As detailed more in the discussion on the Holy Post than in the book, many who were willing to speak out about racial issues are no longer willing or able to speak out because of the identification of discussion of race with political issues. One of the issues that led to my leaving from my church was the church's unwillingness to simply say that Marjorie Taylor Greene was not an active attender of the church. She was baptized in 2011, but according to staff who I have talked to, there is no evidence that she had any church involvement after 2013. In 2020, when she ran for congress she identified the church as her church and that she was involved in small group ministry there. The church was at the same time trying to address racial issues through small group and larger groups not unlike Undivided. In direct conversations with leaders at the church I told them that they could not be taken seriously as addressing race while avoiding other discussions trying not to offend. The problem is not conservative members of the church who are republicans, but the rhetoric being used.
I think Undivided made the very good point that to help people changes over time requires relationship. And that withdrawing from relationship precludes the ability to speak into people's lives. Undivided talks about how Jess' continued involvement with her uncle led to him having his swastika tattoo removed. And that she was able to discuss the problems of race within policing with officers who she regularly worked with in her role as a social worker. But the book also talks about how eventually Sandra and her husband divorced in part because of issues of race and his attraction to Christian Nationalism and how that impacted their relationship. There just are not simple solutions and what works in one case will not work in another.
What is helpful about Undivided, the book, is that is shows how slow on-going change through relationship matters. It also show why the context of a program matters as much as the program. It was not the six weeks as much as the context of putting people in settings where they can both build relationship and workout the ideas and context of what they were learning in settings where that matters. But the systems of white evangelicals and megachurches are not long term conducive toward addressing either race or broader justice issues. Isaac Sharp's The Other Evangelicals is in part about how choices have been made and are hard to unmake.
I do have some issues with some of the framing and there are some things that are mistakes more than framing problems. But I do think this is a very helpful book that I want to recommend to be read widely.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/undivided/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: An ethnographic study of an antiracism program in a Cincinnati evangelical megachurch.
Undivided was not a book on my radar. I had not planned on listening to the Holy Post Podcast which interviewed the author Hahrie Han. But then I got an email about a bonus segment which discussed the 2018 meeting at Wheaton College about what to do in response to Trump. I was well aware of that meeting and listened to that segment and then went back and listened to the whole podcast. If you are interested in just the interview, you can watch the YouTube video and skip to the 54 minute mark to get to the start of the interview.
Undivided in an ethnographic study of an antiracist training program in an evangelical megachurch. Hahrie Han became aware of it because of its involvement in passing a ballot initiative to provide free preK to Cincinnati students. She was told that the ballot initative was heavily influenced by a local megachurch. As she investigated she became intrigued because most DEI programs are not particularly effective at changing long term behavior. Han embedded herself in the church for nearly seven years to understand how the church and the program, which was eventually spun off to its organization, worked and what made it effective. Eventually the book discusses how it responded to the backlash to the program and the larger cultural backlash to antiracism programs within the US culture.
Undivided by Hahrie Han predominately traces four people while exploring the Undivided antiracism training program at Crossroads Church in Cincinnati. Han’s skill as a writer and researcher is evident throughout the book. Her four central characters are a Black male pastor (Chuck Mingo) who was the public face of the program. A white male participate in the initial program (Grant) who at the time worked for the Ohio Department of Corrections, eventually leading their social media team. Grant came to understand how much he didn’t understand about race, despite working in a racially diverse setting and having an adopted brother who was black. The third and fourth character are a Black woman (Sandra, a pseudonym) and a white woman (Jess). Undivided tells the story of these four characters of time and how they were changed by the program and by their relationships with one another. It is in large part the stickiness of the relationships with brought about the change within the characters.
I am a big fan of good ethnographic studies. Good ethnographic studies follow a group of individuals over a fairly long period of time to understand a context deeply. One of the best ethnographies I have read was Gang Leader for a Day, where a sociologist embedded himself in a Chicago housing project and local gang for years to understand how the culture and pressures of living in public housing and being within a gang worked. I was turned onto the model of ethnographic study after reading Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity
by Mitchell Duneier. I think I picked it up in the late 90s (it was published in ‘92) in part because I lived about two blocks from the restaurant at the center of that ethnography. Ethnography is inherently controversial because the act of embedding yourself into a community well enough to be able to report on the community impacts not just the community being studied (the observer effect) but also the researchers themselves are often changed because of the long term impact of the relationships. (At the end of the book, Hahrie Han say that her work with Undivided program and the people profiled and Crossroads church where the program was set drew her back to faith.)
I do not think I am an average reader for Undivided. I both have a good background in reading various ethnographies, but I am deeply invested in antiracism work in the evangelical world. I was interested in the book because I was well aware of a small meeting of Evangelical leaders which happened to be meeting at my Alma Mater, Wheaton College. Until recently I spent 15 years as a member of a different megachurch where I strongly advocated for racial awareness programs and called on the church to be more attuned to the need to center justice in their work. Throughout the 2016 to 2023 study of Undivided, I was involved in similar program in a different church and a different city. This story of Undivided is a largely positive one, but In 2021 I left my church after having lost faith that there could be change there.
There are a variety of reasons which I have mostly detailed in other places, but one aspect which I do not think got enough attention in Undivided, although it did get some, is that the megachurch model I think is inherently flawed. Even if I had full confidence in the leadership of my former church, I have come to believe that two aspects of the megachurch mean that I will never be satisfied. One, the megachurch model has been influenced by the Homogenous Unit Principle (HUP) of the church growth movement. Han mentions this in Undivided, but just in passing. The HUP was developed in a missionary context of India and then was brought back to the US and became part of a church planting and church growth movement in the 1970 to early 2000s. HUP suggests that the way to attract people to the church is to narrowly target a small demographic and cultural segment to meet the needs and attract just that group through culturally specific evangelism. A second aspect to the growth of the megachurch is not just HUP, but also targeting programming toward people who were not familiar with or uninterested in traditional church. My old church used to have the tag line, “A church for the unchurched.”
These two aspect matter to why predominately white evangelical megachurches are so bad at racial issues. The very DNA of most megachurches is a narrowly targeted cultural group. Willow Creek popularized Unchurched Harry and Mary as their target demographic and then proceeded to teach other churches to do the same. Part of my work in the late 1990s was working for a local association of churches and doing demographic reports for churches and church plants who were trying to find the narrow group they should be targeting in order to quickly grow. Once churches have this in their DNA, and then they prioritize being a comfortable place to go to church, avoidance of discomfort becomes the priority of the local church. A church that prioritizes avoidance of discomfort and who has a narrow cultural demographic as the base of its congregation, cannot address an inherently uncomfortable topic like race, which is not salient to most of the members because those members have been attracted because it is monocultural.
Again, it is mentioned, but the added layer to the problem is the increasing role of Christian Nationalism which has been empowered by the increasing reliance of fear of the other by the religious right. There have been whole books about the relationship of Christian nationalism to the rise of the religious right and how race is inherently tied into the very concept of Christian nationalism and to a lesser extent the development of the white evangelical movement. Books like Bad Faith by Randall Balmer and Religion of Whiteness by Emerson and Bracey approach the history and sociology of race within the evangelical church world.
The real draw to the book Undivided is how much the writing is centered on the characters. The reader learns about the program and about the issues of race within the evangelical world as the characters come to understand themselves and one another through the program and their relationships with others. These are not simply stories. As I hinted above in introducing the characters, each of them had significant changes in their life as a result of their connection to the program and one another. In many ways those changes were positive, but not all of them were. Undivided is in part about the cost that it takes to address race in a system that discourages the directness.
One of the difficulties of discussing race or economics or other topics that are “just in the water” is that language is difficult. For instance, Han occasionally uses the word “Whiteness” to describe the cultural belief in a system of racialization and hierarchy. Some readers view “whiteness” as meaning “all white people,” but the sociological definition does not mean all white people. Jonathan Waltonlikes to use the phrase “White American Folk Religion” instead of Christian Nationalism even if they have overlapping meanings because he wants to use language that is less fraught. The two different approaches of using whiteness to specifically name a problem with a name that can be misunderstood, or using a name like "White American Folk Religion" which needs to be defined but has less initial baggage is a topic that repeatedly comes up in Undivided. Studying the culture, something that people don't directly talk about because it is assumed to be understood, is necessary in a pluralistic world where people do not necessarily mean the same thing when using the same language.
The idea of ethnography centers the experience of the focus characters both as particular people, but also models who stand in for larger groups. The pastor, Chuck, grew up in the Black church and intially left Crossroads because of frustration over racial issues. But he came back and was hired and the social capital he earned through long term relationship with the church leadership allowed him some leeway to press in on difficult issues. But the tension on maintaining those relationships means that he was always wondering if he was not pushing enough or was pushing too much and if he was self censoring so that he could maintain relationship. Grant was a young white man who thought he knew it all because he had a black friend and a black brother. As he explored racial issues and the way that race played a role within his work at the Department of Corrections he became an activist. He started a prison ministry group at the church. And he work in his role as a social media manager to profile inmates through podcast interview and written profiles. But eventually he left the Department of Corrections because of backlash against his activism. Becoming a church staff members who continued his activism around racial issues there.
Sandra was a Black woman who was married to a white man. She grew up being taught by her father to not trust white people. After an early divorce and a young child, she was brought back to faith through Crossroads church. She eventually remarried a white man and had three additional children. Again, the book skillfully tells the story of how racial identity matters not just to white racism, but also the racial identity of those who are not black. It takes years and many small steps, but he comes to find her voice and understand how gender and race both play a role in her marriage struggles.
Jess is the youngest character in the book. She grew up in a family that was overt white supremacist, her father (who died when she was 11) had "White Power" and other similar tattoos and her uncle had a swastika tattooed on his chest while in prison. Jess also spent time in prison after a felony conviction and a serious drug addiction. While in prison she became a Christian and upon release she found Crossroads, regained custody of her son, and was just getting settled when she started participating in Undivided. She eventually completed college and becomes a social worker and presses back against the racism of her family and the systems she works and lives in.
It is very clear in Undivided that struggle is central to growth. The point is growth, not a particular destination. Even as the book is very clear about the struggle I think it may be too positively framed. The backlash, which is clearly the focus of the second half of the book I think is stronger than what just what is talked about. The book was published in September, 2024, which means it was largely finished in 2023 and written about events that were mostly 2022 or before. The reelection of Trump, the continuing overt Christian nationalism within the christian community and the backlash against DEI, immigration, and other topics I do not think have reached their zenith yet.
One of the strengths of Undivided is that Hahrie Han is not an evangelical insider. She is coming at the story with a different lens and different assumptions. But her not being an insider means that there are a lot of minor issues which I see as an insider. Some are minor fact problems like identifying Charlie Dates as the pastor of Progressive Baptist Church of Chicago starting in 2023. He actually became pastor of Progressive Baptist in 2011, but in 2023 also became senior pastor of Salem Baptist, jointly pastoring two different churches. The unusualness of the situation can be a part of why the detail was wrong. But there were a dozen or so similar minor errors that I think show a lack of evangelical editorial input. She also had some framing issues with describing people as "in the faith" in a way that felt very unevangelical. When she talks about Bebbington's evangelical quadrilateral and the National Evangelical Association, she incorrectly identifies them as nondenominational.
I think some of the lack of detail in the backlash section also is attributable to her outsider status. While she details the 2018 Wheaton meeting, she doesn't detail the 2018 MLK 50 or the 2018 T4G meeting which were both very much concerned with race in the Evangelical world. MLK 50 was jointly sponsored by the Southern Baptist ELRC and The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and is arguably part of the impetus of the national anti CRT movement. MLK 50 is regularly cited as evidence of those very conservative evangelical organization being "woke". TGC in 2019 published The Incompatibility of Critical Theory and Christianity, which directly identified the language being used in antiracism programs like MLK 50 or Undivided as being incompatible with Christianity. That eventually morphed into opposition to Critical Race Theory and the SBC's resolution about CRT and SBC seminary presidents unequivocally opposing CRT.That anti CRT eventually spread to school and political world with Trump's anti CRT statement in the fall of 2020. Part of the reality of the problem of race and Trump is that those who are opposing Trump and those who are trying to address race often, but not necessarily overlap.
As detailed more in the discussion on the Holy Post than in the book, many who were willing to speak out about racial issues are no longer willing or able to speak out because of the identification of discussion of race with political issues. One of the issues that led to my leaving from my church was the church's unwillingness to simply say that Marjorie Taylor Greene was not an active attender of the church. She was baptized in 2011, but according to staff who I have talked to, there is no evidence that she had any church involvement after 2013. In 2020, when she ran for congress she identified the church as her church and that she was involved in small group ministry there. The church was at the same time trying to address racial issues through small group and larger groups not unlike Undivided. In direct conversations with leaders at the church I told them that they could not be taken seriously as addressing race while avoiding other discussions trying not to offend. The problem is not conservative members of the church who are republicans, but the rhetoric being used.
I think Undivided made the very good point that to help people changes over time requires relationship. And that withdrawing from relationship precludes the ability to speak into people's lives. Undivided talks about how Jess' continued involvement with her uncle led to him having his swastika tattoo removed. And that she was able to discuss the problems of race within policing with officers who she regularly worked with in her role as a social worker. But the book also talks about how eventually Sandra and her husband divorced in part because of issues of race and his attraction to Christian Nationalism and how that impacted their relationship. There just are not simple solutions and what works in one case will not work in another.
What is helpful about Undivided, the book, is that is shows how slow on-going change through relationship matters. It also show why the context of a program matters as much as the program. It was not the six weeks as much as the context of putting people in settings where they can both build relationship and workout the ideas and context of what they were learning in settings where that matters. But the systems of white evangelicals and megachurches are not long term conducive toward addressing either race or broader justice issues. Isaac Sharp's The Other Evangelicals is in part about how choices have been made and are hard to unmake.
I do have some issues with some of the framing and there are some things that are mistakes more than framing problems. But I do think this is a very helpful book that I want to recommend to be read widely.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/undivided/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: A broad overview of the history of Black Christianity, with a second volume that is a collection of writing from Black Christianity.
Black Christianity in the United States is unquestionably tied to the (racial) history of the United States. That is a very basic statement but I think it is a good place to start when thinking about Walter Strickland’s new history of Black Christianity, Swing Low. Certainly good histories are contextually aware of the broader history while telling a narrower story. But it is not really possible to tell the story of Black Christianity without grappling with the racial history of the US because Black Christians in the US have always been subjected to that history.
I grappled with how to write that last line, because “subjected to” is a passive framing, and the Black Church has been anything but passive. At the same time, another incorrect framing would be to suggest that anti-Black racism in the US is a “Black problem”. James Baldwin was asked by Dick Cavett a variety of questions about that the “Black problem” in the United States. Baldwin answered Cavett’s questions about hope and frustration, but Baldwin also reframed the question to center racism as not a Black problem but a White problem. The problem of racism is not about the subject of the discrimination but the ones doing the discrimination. Part of what Strickland is doing in Swing Low is to show how Black Christians responded to racism by forming their own institutions and communities and theological beliefs and practices, but also that not everything in the Black church is a response to racism.
I have read several histories of the Black Church, most recently Anthony Pinn’s Black Church History, Henry Louis Gates’ companion book to his documentary This is Our Story, This is Our Song, Isaiah Robinson’s Black Church Empowered and Raphael Warnock’s The Divided Mind of the Black Church. These are four different approaches to telling the story of the black church. Of those four books Swing Low is most similar to Isaiah Robinson’s Black Church Empowered. Strickland is an academics historian and theologian, while Isaiah Robinson is a local church pastor. But they are telling the story as Black churchmen.
Esau McCaulley in Reading While Black talks about (and expands in a number of interviews later) the difficulty of who gets to tell the story of the Black church. Generally, the academy has prioritized Black Liberation theologians in the more liberal academic world. And those few Black professors in the predominately White Evangelical seminaries are similarly narrow. McCaulley suggests that the third group, the Black church pastors and preacher (like Isaiah Robinson) are rarely invited to the academy. Swing Low I think oriented toward that third group. Strickland is a professor at Southeastern Baptist Seminary, one of only a handful of Black professors at SBC seminaries. But the story here is framed to center the middle of the Black church and prioritizes theological orthodoxy in his five pillars of the Black church. Claude Acho details those five pillars in his review, so I won’t detail them here.
The last pillar is deliverance or liberation. And it is exactly in that last pillar that much of the controversy rests. Warnock suggests that Black theology must center liberation and the parts of the Black church which do not prioritize all forms of liberation are rejecting Black theology. Strickland is less polemical and more descriptive in his approach. The final five chapters of the book are split between telling the story of Black Evangelicals and Black Liberation Theology since the 1950-60s. As McCaulley talks about in Reading While Black, there has been a choice on whether to pursue higher education in more liberal schools where liberal and liberation theology is centered, which is often contrary to Black church orthodoxy or going to predominately white conservative seminaries that tend to be more conservative and orthodox, but are often more overtly opposed to the black church. That racism within the white evangelical world, one which has tended to spiritualize and individualize liberation has created significant frustration as well as organizations like the National Black Evangelical Association and The Witness.
The liberation theology side of the story starts with James Cone and J Deotis Roberts among others in the first generation and then continues with the following generations of womanist theologians and the second and third generation of liberation theologians. It is clear that Strickland places himself and most Black Christians in the Black Evangelical camp, but I do think he is pretty fair in his presentation of the liberation theology side. There are weaknesses every approach to theology and I think that Strickland is trying to present those weaknesses while maintaining his evangelical convictions. Strickland was called to be fired just for talking about Cone in his seminary classes when it was mentioned in a NYT article in 2019. The calls for his firing are a good example of the problems of staying in predominately white seminaries as a Black Evangelicals that he details in the three chapters on Black evangelicalism. But Strickland is also pointing out that there are many areas where liberation theology strays from his conception of orthodoxy, not just in the embrace of sexual minorities as Warnock details, but in what Christ did on the cross and the role of suffering among other areas.
Part of what I appreciate about this project is the second volume which I have not picked up yet. That second volume is a collection of writings from the whole history and tradition of Black Christianity in the US. I have previously read significant parts of Plain Theology for Plain People by Charles Octavius Boothe, which Strickland wrote a new introduction to and republished. Reclaiming older works by Black Christians in the US is part of the work of reclaiming the black church’s role in US Christianity. Swing Low is a project not just about telling the history of the black church, but also about recovering the voices of the Black church for a new audience so that they can tell their own story.
(links work on my blog where this was originally posted at https://bookwi.se/swing-low/ )
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: A broad overview of the history of Black Christianity, with a second volume that is a collection of writing from Black Christianity.
Black Christianity in the United States is unquestionably tied to the (racial) history of the United States. That is a very basic statement but I think it is a good place to start when thinking about Walter Strickland’s new history of Black Christianity, Swing Low. Certainly good histories are contextually aware of the broader history while telling a narrower story. But it is not really possible to tell the story of Black Christianity without grappling with the racial history of the US because Black Christians in the US have always been subjected to that history.
I grappled with how to write that last line, because “subjected to” is a passive framing, and the Black Church has been anything but passive. At the same time, another incorrect framing would be to suggest that anti-Black racism in the US is a “Black problem”. James Baldwin was asked by Dick Cavett a variety of questions about that the “Black problem” in the United States. Baldwin answered Cavett’s questions about hope and frustration, but Baldwin also reframed the question to center racism as not a Black problem but a White problem. The problem of racism is not about the subject of the discrimination but the ones doing the discrimination. Part of what Strickland is doing in Swing Low is to show how Black Christians responded to racism by forming their own institutions and communities and theological beliefs and practices, but also that not everything in the Black church is a response to racism.
I have read several histories of the Black Church, most recently Anthony Pinn’s Black Church History, Henry Louis Gates’ companion book to his documentary This is Our Story, This is Our Song, Isaiah Robinson’s Black Church Empowered and Raphael Warnock’s The Divided Mind of the Black Church. These are four different approaches to telling the story of the black church. Of those four books Swing Low is most similar to Isaiah Robinson’s Black Church Empowered. Strickland is an academics historian and theologian, while Isaiah Robinson is a local church pastor. But they are telling the story as Black churchmen.
Esau McCaulley in Reading While Black talks about (and expands in a number of interviews later) the difficulty of who gets to tell the story of the Black church. Generally, the academy has prioritized Black Liberation theologians in the more liberal academic world. And those few Black professors in the predominately White Evangelical seminaries are similarly narrow. McCaulley suggests that the third group, the Black church pastors and preacher (like Isaiah Robinson) are rarely invited to the academy. Swing Low I think oriented toward that third group. Strickland is a professor at Southeastern Baptist Seminary, one of only a handful of Black professors at SBC seminaries. But the story here is framed to center the middle of the Black church and prioritizes theological orthodoxy in his five pillars of the Black church. Claude Acho details those five pillars in his review, so I won’t detail them here.
The last pillar is deliverance or liberation. And it is exactly in that last pillar that much of the controversy rests. Warnock suggests that Black theology must center liberation and the parts of the Black church which do not prioritize all forms of liberation are rejecting Black theology. Strickland is less polemical and more descriptive in his approach. The final five chapters of the book are split between telling the story of Black Evangelicals and Black Liberation Theology since the 1950-60s. As McCaulley talks about in Reading While Black, there has been a choice on whether to pursue higher education in more liberal schools where liberal and liberation theology is centered, which is often contrary to Black church orthodoxy or going to predominately white conservative seminaries that tend to be more conservative and orthodox, but are often more overtly opposed to the black church. That racism within the white evangelical world, one which has tended to spiritualize and individualize liberation has created significant frustration as well as organizations like the National Black Evangelical Association and The Witness.
The liberation theology side of the story starts with James Cone and J Deotis Roberts among others in the first generation and then continues with the following generations of womanist theologians and the second and third generation of liberation theologians. It is clear that Strickland places himself and most Black Christians in the Black Evangelical camp, but I do think he is pretty fair in his presentation of the liberation theology side. There are weaknesses every approach to theology and I think that Strickland is trying to present those weaknesses while maintaining his evangelical convictions. Strickland was called to be fired just for talking about Cone in his seminary classes when it was mentioned in a NYT article in 2019. The calls for his firing are a good example of the problems of staying in predominately white seminaries as a Black Evangelicals that he details in the three chapters on Black evangelicalism. But Strickland is also pointing out that there are many areas where liberation theology strays from his conception of orthodoxy, not just in the embrace of sexual minorities as Warnock details, but in what Christ did on the cross and the role of suffering among other areas.
Part of what I appreciate about this project is the second volume which I have not picked up yet. That second volume is a collection of writings from the whole history and tradition of Black Christianity in the US. I have previously read significant parts of Plain Theology for Plain People by Charles Octavius Boothe, which Strickland wrote a new introduction to and republished. Reclaiming older works by Black Christians in the US is part of the work of reclaiming the black church’s role in US Christianity. Swing Low is a project not just about telling the history of the black church, but also about recovering the voices of the Black church for a new audience so that they can tell their own story.
(links work on my blog where this was originally posted at https://bookwi.se/swing-low/ )
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: An overview of the book of Acts, paying particular attention to the temple and how the early church integrated gentiles into it while maintaining integration with its Jewish background.
I may not have picked up The Challenge of Acts if I had not watched the last 15 minutes of an episode of the Holy Postwhere Skye Jehani was interviewing NT Wright about The Challenge of Acts. Skye asked about what NT Wright would say in response to churches who pragmatically say that you should narrow-cast to a narrow cultural group and not seek to be more inclusive because churches grow more quickly that way. (This has been the argument from the church growth movement who advocated for the Homogenous Unit Principle, which I have written about before here.)
NT Wright suggests in that video that part of the message of Acts is that the church is not really the church if it isn't grappling with the integration of the entire body of Christ. To narrow cast to a homogeneous cultural group is to distort the idea of the church so much that it ceases to be the church.
Other commentaries on Acts like Amos Yong's have suggested that much of the action of the book of Acts is the expansion of the church to a larger and larger group of people and each expansion had a sense of conflict that had to be dealt with. And Willie James Jenning's commentary on Acts spent a lot of time grappling with the role of empire, violence and prison.
NT Wright has several main points he is communicating with his book on Acts. First, he raises attention to temple motifs in Acts. That attention to temple motifs is part of what Wright's larger project with the New Perspectives on Paul movement is doing in trying to pay attention to Paul's Jewishness and not make Paul into an antisemite as some commenters on Paul have done historically. Wright instead suggests that Paul is trying to integrate Jew and gentile into the body of Christ, not as s replacement of the Jewish religious practice (supersessionism) but as an integrated reality.
Something I have not heard before that I do think is an interesting point is that Wright is suggesting that part of why Paul is seen in Acts as going first to Jewish synagogues is that he is trying to appropriate the Roman exception to communal idol worship that Jewish people had to Christians. Generally all people who were under the subjection of Rome had to come together to offer sacrifices together to appease the gods. Jews had been given an exception to that requirement. Wright suggests that Paul was trying to use that exemption, but he wanted to use it in a way that violated Jewish self-understanding.
Paul says that the gentile Christians did not need to be circumcised. If Paul had asked gentile Christians to be circumcised then it would have been easy to say to Roman officials that these gentile Christians were Jewish coverts and therefore not subject to Roman idol worship requirements. But Paul wanted to claim the exception while not making the gentile Christians live under full Jewish religious requirements. That both endangered Jewish exemptions from Roman law, and didn't given enough attachment for the gentile Christians to make them recognizably Jewish. This framing makes a lot of sense of the way Luke structures Acts' storytelling.
The Challenge of Acts was based on a series of lectures in 2022. The last book I read by NT Wright was Into the Heart of Romans, which was a whole book focused on a single chapter of Romans. The Challenge of Acts is the opposite approach, it is a broad overview of a whole book of the Bible, drawing connections to both Old Testament references, New Testament self understanding and the second temple culture of the era. Generally, Wright is taking about four chapters of Acts at a time. He gives quick overview of how Luke is structuring the story in the section and then highlights several points more thoroughly before moving on to the next section.
There are a couple of exceptions to this general approach. The introduction of the book of Acts takes a little more time as you might expect. And then Wright spends a whole chapter on Paul's sermon in Athens at the Areopagus. Wright suggests that this sermon has largely been misunderstood because it has been presented as if the Areopagus was a debating society and not a trial. Where Wright is often very helpful is drawing cultural connections that the average reader would not see, but the original readers would have assumed were clear. In this case, Luke seems to be referencing Socrates. Both Paul and Socrates were on trial for sacrilege or impiety. This is a connection that I have never heard before, but makes a lot of sense to the text. Paul was not simply using the altar to the unknown God as a way to build a bridge between them, but as a defense to show that Paul was not an atheist or impious person.
Much of the focus on The Challenge of Acts is on Paul as you might expect from a scholar who has specialized in Pauline studies. Wright suggests that the book of Acts may have been written as part of Paul's defense in Rome, which may be part of the reason that there are so many court scenes in it. Even before Paul, Peter and the other disciples were brought before officials to get them to stop preaching. And while John and Stephen were put to death, those deaths are shown as unjust punishments. The other courts scenes were largely showing that the officials did not find the early church guilty of sedition or impiety, even if the people continue to misunderstand them and kept bringing them before the local officials and courts.
Like pretty much all of Wright's books, this is one that I listened to on first pass. (And unusually, Wright narrates the audiobook himself.) I tend to pick up the print version later and take a slower second pass. I have read well over a dozen of Wright's books, many of them two or three times. Wright's strength and weakness is that he keeps coming back to similar themes over and over again. Part of the strength here is that in discussing Acts, he moves outside of his main areas of work on the Pauline letters and shows how the implications of his work in Paul matters to other aspects of New Testament study. The weakness is that some of these themes have been well covered in other books. But I think that is less of a problem here than in some other books because while there are overlapping themes here with Wright's other books, the setting of the book of Acts and the method of a quicker overview of an entire book, brings a lot of new insight into why Wright's traditional themes of study matter in new ways.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-challenge-of-acts/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: An overview of the book of Acts, paying particular attention to the temple and how the early church integrated gentiles into it while maintaining integration with its Jewish background.
I may not have picked up The Challenge of Acts if I had not watched the last 15 minutes of an episode of the Holy Postwhere Skye Jehani was interviewing NT Wright about The Challenge of Acts. Skye asked about what NT Wright would say in response to churches who pragmatically say that you should narrow-cast to a narrow cultural group and not seek to be more inclusive because churches grow more quickly that way. (This has been the argument from the church growth movement who advocated for the Homogenous Unit Principle, which I have written about before here.)
NT Wright suggests in that video that part of the message of Acts is that the church is not really the church if it isn't grappling with the integration of the entire body of Christ. To narrow cast to a homogeneous cultural group is to distort the idea of the church so much that it ceases to be the church.
Other commentaries on Acts like Amos Yong's have suggested that much of the action of the book of Acts is the expansion of the church to a larger and larger group of people and each expansion had a sense of conflict that had to be dealt with. And Willie James Jenning's commentary on Acts spent a lot of time grappling with the role of empire, violence and prison.
NT Wright has several main points he is communicating with his book on Acts. First, he raises attention to temple motifs in Acts. That attention to temple motifs is part of what Wright's larger project with the New Perspectives on Paul movement is doing in trying to pay attention to Paul's Jewishness and not make Paul into an antisemite as some commenters on Paul have done historically. Wright instead suggests that Paul is trying to integrate Jew and gentile into the body of Christ, not as s replacement of the Jewish religious practice (supersessionism) but as an integrated reality.
Something I have not heard before that I do think is an interesting point is that Wright is suggesting that part of why Paul is seen in Acts as going first to Jewish synagogues is that he is trying to appropriate the Roman exception to communal idol worship that Jewish people had to Christians. Generally all people who were under the subjection of Rome had to come together to offer sacrifices together to appease the gods. Jews had been given an exception to that requirement. Wright suggests that Paul was trying to use that exemption, but he wanted to use it in a way that violated Jewish self-understanding.
Paul says that the gentile Christians did not need to be circumcised. If Paul had asked gentile Christians to be circumcised then it would have been easy to say to Roman officials that these gentile Christians were Jewish coverts and therefore not subject to Roman idol worship requirements. But Paul wanted to claim the exception while not making the gentile Christians live under full Jewish religious requirements. That both endangered Jewish exemptions from Roman law, and didn't given enough attachment for the gentile Christians to make them recognizably Jewish. This framing makes a lot of sense of the way Luke structures Acts' storytelling.
The Challenge of Acts was based on a series of lectures in 2022. The last book I read by NT Wright was Into the Heart of Romans, which was a whole book focused on a single chapter of Romans. The Challenge of Acts is the opposite approach, it is a broad overview of a whole book of the Bible, drawing connections to both Old Testament references, New Testament self understanding and the second temple culture of the era. Generally, Wright is taking about four chapters of Acts at a time. He gives quick overview of how Luke is structuring the story in the section and then highlights several points more thoroughly before moving on to the next section.
There are a couple of exceptions to this general approach. The introduction of the book of Acts takes a little more time as you might expect. And then Wright spends a whole chapter on Paul's sermon in Athens at the Areopagus. Wright suggests that this sermon has largely been misunderstood because it has been presented as if the Areopagus was a debating society and not a trial. Where Wright is often very helpful is drawing cultural connections that the average reader would not see, but the original readers would have assumed were clear. In this case, Luke seems to be referencing Socrates. Both Paul and Socrates were on trial for sacrilege or impiety. This is a connection that I have never heard before, but makes a lot of sense to the text. Paul was not simply using the altar to the unknown God as a way to build a bridge between them, but as a defense to show that Paul was not an atheist or impious person.
Much of the focus on The Challenge of Acts is on Paul as you might expect from a scholar who has specialized in Pauline studies. Wright suggests that the book of Acts may have been written as part of Paul's defense in Rome, which may be part of the reason that there are so many court scenes in it. Even before Paul, Peter and the other disciples were brought before officials to get them to stop preaching. And while John and Stephen were put to death, those deaths are shown as unjust punishments. The other courts scenes were largely showing that the officials did not find the early church guilty of sedition or impiety, even if the people continue to misunderstand them and kept bringing them before the local officials and courts.
Like pretty much all of Wright's books, this is one that I listened to on first pass. (And unusually, Wright narrates the audiobook himself.) I tend to pick up the print version later and take a slower second pass. I have read well over a dozen of Wright's books, many of them two or three times. Wright's strength and weakness is that he keeps coming back to similar themes over and over again. Part of the strength here is that in discussing Acts, he moves outside of his main areas of work on the Pauline letters and shows how the implications of his work in Paul matters to other aspects of New Testament study. The weakness is that some of these themes have been well covered in other books. But I think that is less of a problem here than in some other books because while there are overlapping themes here with Wright's other books, the setting of the book of Acts and the method of a quicker overview of an entire book, brings a lot of new insight into why Wright's traditional themes of study matter in new ways.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-challenge-of-acts/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
<strong>Summary: An exploration of what could have been had evangelical history gone other ways.</strong>
I have always enjoyed history. But it has mostly been a reading hobby, not something I studied. Over the past decade, I have been more intentional about reading history to fill in gaps in my knowledge, but I have also read more about the study of history. I think it was John Fea’s podcast where I first heard about the 5 Cs of the study of history. Those five Cs are: change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency. All five are important to understanding history.
Isaac Sharp’s The Other Evangelicals does approach all five Cs in his exploration of five groups of people who have been marginalized in evangelical history, but in many ways I read this as a book primarily thinking about contingency, the “what could have been” had evangelical history gone other ways.
As with any recent history, my own story influences how I read. I grew up American Baptist. Traditionally American Baptists are considered a mainline denomination and would be included in the “liberal” part of Christianity. I didn’t really understand how liberal the denomination was as I was growing up in part because I was in an evangelical wing of the denomination. I do very much remember going to the only national youth gathering I attended as an American Baptist and one day of the youth conference primarily used feminine references for God. There was no explanation for it and it raised all kinds of questions for other students I was with. I spend a good bit of time that day talking to others about how there were feminine images of God in scripture and how God is not gendered as we traditionally consider gender in humans. I was mostly irritated by the poor presentation, but not at all bothered by the presentation of somewhat liberal theology.
In college I spent a year going to an intentionally interracial church (I only went one year because I didn’t have a car and it was a 35 minute drive into Chicago to go to the church. I never considered going to the Black baptist church that was within walking distance of campus for some reason.) I was aware of the problems of race within evangelicalism during college and explored the development of NBEA and Tom Skinner and John Perkins and other Black leaders within the evangelical world. I was hired to work by the SBC association in Chicago right out of college as I was going to grad school. That association at the time was one of three associations (of about 1200) in the country that was predominately made up of minority churches. I mostly worked with Black churches developing church-based non-profits and spent a lot more time in Black churches, some of whom identified as Evangelical, but most did not.
Part of my grad school was a Masters of Social Service Administration (an administrative focused equivalent to an MSW). I have always been on the progressive side of the evangelical works and have followed the work of Tony Campolo and Ron Sider and others since high school. Social justice and progressive causes were are always a significant focus of my work as a Christian.
It wasn’t until I was in college that I started to understand compmentarianism. The term was only coined a few years before I started college. I knew American Baptists ordained women and that not every evangelical denomination did. But I knew women pastors and just never really considered male only pastorate as a viable option. Another church that I went to for a little while in college was a very conservative church that had a large college contingent. Again, I went in part because I didn’t have a car and friends who did have cars went there. For several months the college ministry Sunday school class studied gender, including why that church was complementarian. I stuck it out through the whole study, but was completely unpersuaded. So I had context for the book in the feminist section as well as the liberal, progressive, and Black evangelicals sections. It was only the history of gay evangelicals that I really had no historical experience with.
One last point, I took two classes with Mark Noll in college and audited another when he was guest lecturer at University of Chicago Divinity School. Noll’s approach to rooting mid 20th century neo-evangelicals as part of a longer tradition of evangelical Protestants was my dominate way of thinking of evangelicalism until fairly recently. <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/92/1/37/7733057?guestAccessKey=f548926f-1249-4013-b4fd-9f3598c2ae09&login=false&utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=jaar&utm_medium=email">Matthew Avery Sutton’s essay about evangelical historiography</a> gave language to not just my concern about the use and definition of evangelical, but also to the method of thinking about evangelicalism as historically rooted group of people that arose out of the English reformation. I still strongly appreciate Noll, Marsden and other evangelical historians, but I am now going be reading their history with more nuance than I did previously. That is a very long introduction to a fairly straight forward book.
The Other Evangelicals looks at the history of the Evangelical movement that arose in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the ways that his five areas of self-identified evangelicals who were liberal, progressive, Black, feminist and gay. In most of these sections there were fairly clear lines of who was in and who was out regardless of self-identification. In the chapter on liberal evangelicals, the main focus was on biblical studies and the fight over inerrancy. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy was not the first fight to define what an Evangelical understanding of the Bible was, but by the time it was written in the late 1970s, it was clear that there was little tolerance for a more liberal stream of evangelicals who were less concerned with plenary inspiration and an error free bible.
The main illustration in the liberal chapter was Bela Vassady, a Hungarian WWII refugee who was one of the early professors at Fuller Seminary starting in 1949. Vassady was a European who identified as evangelical, but his stream of evangelicalism did not match up with Fuller’s understanding of biblical orthodoxy because he was too sympathetic to Barth and did not reject German methods of biblical theology outright. Vassady had helped to found the World Council of Churches and understood his role to be ecumenical. The story of opposition to Vassady was a good reminder that Christian colleges and seminaries have been accused of being “liberal” for a very long time. The influence of donors concerned about the mission of school and liberal drift has always been present.
The chapter of Black Evangelicals I think was important (although not new by any means) because evangelicals tend to think of themselves as theologically defined. The traditional definitions of evangelical by NAE or Bebbington are rooted in theological statements. But the chapter on Black Evangelicals makes clear that theology was never enough. Billy Graham opposed the methods of the civil rights movement, speaking against the 1963 March on Washington and MLK Jr explicitly on a number of occasions. Sharp quotes Graham, “There is only one possible solution to the race problem and that is vital personal experience with Jesus Christ on the part of both races…any man who has a genuine conversion experience will find his racial attitudes greatly changed.” (p127)
While the chapter on Black evangelicals includes a variety of people, the story is often similar to William Bentley’s. Evangelicalism was a theological tradition that took scripture seriously and at least claimed to value intellectually serious study. Bentley was exposed to white evangelicalism in the 1940s and was attracted to the theology, but was concerned that it “..could be doctrinally correct and, at the same time, hold backward attitudes toward such and important issue as race in America.” Bentley evangelically formed the National Black Evangelical Association in 1963 at a time when Wheaton and many other evangelical schools officially or unofficially still prohibited interracial dating on campus.
Much of the tension beyond explicit racism was rooted in different approaches toward evangelism and ministry. While many members of the NBEA agreed with Graham about the priority of personal conversion as the main method of solving social issues, the Black church historically had been more open to social action as a legitimate role of the church. (Although the National Baptist and the Progressive Baptists split in the 1960s along similar lines.)
The issues raised by Black evangelicals were not confined to just Black evangelicals, white progressives evangelicals also pushed the broader evangelical movement to think more clearly about social action as a role of the church. The 1960s protest movements, racism, war, and poverty were driving forces for progressive evangelicals who championed the working in marginalized communities as a central role of the church. But as the chapter concluded, the requirement for theological conservatism and the social requirement for individualism in approaching social issues like race, meant that progressive evangelicals had an uphill battle to draw attention to social conditions and social ministries that addressed the systemic causes of social problems.
The feminist story of evangelicalism is often assumed to be different than the actual history. The term complementarian wasn’t coined until 1988. While evangelicals were socially and theologically conservative, there were hundreds of women ordained within the SBC in the 1970 and the later orientation toward conservative gender roles was really a backlash to an earlier egalitarian movement.
Again, the concluding chapter on gay evangelicals prioritizes how evangelicals handling of scripture led to the cracks in the approach toward gay evangelicals. In many cases, those who were more inclusive rooted their inclusion on their reading of scripture. There was also a pragmatism that came to the fore as it became clear that changing orientation was not easy.
One of the problems of evangelicalism is a lack of imagination for any other contingency. In many cases, there are and have been many other paths that have been explored, but without knowledge of those paths, it is difficult to not make some of the same mistakes that have already been made.
The Other Evangelicals is very readable history. It is a history that I both knew a lot about but also had details and streams of evangelicalism that I was completely unaware of. I have been skeptical of the label evangelical since the early 90s when I was at Wheaton. The theological definitions of evangelicalism always seem to be less important than the social or cultural identity. The Other Evangelicals was far less political than I thought it would be. The progressive and liberal chapters were more about approach than particular content. And the chapters about feminists and gay evangelicals while they were more about content of those two areas again, came down to largely being about approach.
Evangelicalism grew out of a desire to be less fundamentalist than the early 20th century fundamentalism, but in many ways the evangelical movement never had a full break from fundamentalism. As fundamentalists of the early 20th century became less comfortable self identifying as fundamentalists and increasingly used the term evangelical, the fight over the approach that evangelicalism has toward culture has continued to be largely the same fight.
<strong>The Other Evangelicals: A Story of Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist, and Gay Christians―and the Movement That Pushed Them Out by Isaac B Sharp Purchase Links: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Other-Evangelicals-Progressive-Feminist-Christians_and/dp/0802881750/">Paperback</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Other-Evangelicals-Progressive-Feminist-Christians-ebook/dp/B0B831VVZ6/">Kindle Edition</a></strong>
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-other-evangelicals/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
<strong>Summary: An exploration of what could have been had evangelical history gone other ways.</strong>
I have always enjoyed history. But it has mostly been a reading hobby, not something I studied. Over the past decade, I have been more intentional about reading history to fill in gaps in my knowledge, but I have also read more about the study of history. I think it was John Fea’s podcast where I first heard about the 5 Cs of the study of history. Those five Cs are: change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency. All five are important to understanding history.
Isaac Sharp’s The Other Evangelicals does approach all five Cs in his exploration of five groups of people who have been marginalized in evangelical history, but in many ways I read this as a book primarily thinking about contingency, the “what could have been” had evangelical history gone other ways.
As with any recent history, my own story influences how I read. I grew up American Baptist. Traditionally American Baptists are considered a mainline denomination and would be included in the “liberal” part of Christianity. I didn’t really understand how liberal the denomination was as I was growing up in part because I was in an evangelical wing of the denomination. I do very much remember going to the only national youth gathering I attended as an American Baptist and one day of the youth conference primarily used feminine references for God. There was no explanation for it and it raised all kinds of questions for other students I was with. I spend a good bit of time that day talking to others about how there were feminine images of God in scripture and how God is not gendered as we traditionally consider gender in humans. I was mostly irritated by the poor presentation, but not at all bothered by the presentation of somewhat liberal theology.
In college I spent a year going to an intentionally interracial church (I only went one year because I didn’t have a car and it was a 35 minute drive into Chicago to go to the church. I never considered going to the Black baptist church that was within walking distance of campus for some reason.) I was aware of the problems of race within evangelicalism during college and explored the development of NBEA and Tom Skinner and John Perkins and other Black leaders within the evangelical world. I was hired to work by the SBC association in Chicago right out of college as I was going to grad school. That association at the time was one of three associations (of about 1200) in the country that was predominately made up of minority churches. I mostly worked with Black churches developing church-based non-profits and spent a lot more time in Black churches, some of whom identified as Evangelical, but most did not.
Part of my grad school was a Masters of Social Service Administration (an administrative focused equivalent to an MSW). I have always been on the progressive side of the evangelical works and have followed the work of Tony Campolo and Ron Sider and others since high school. Social justice and progressive causes were are always a significant focus of my work as a Christian.
It wasn’t until I was in college that I started to understand compmentarianism. The term was only coined a few years before I started college. I knew American Baptists ordained women and that not every evangelical denomination did. But I knew women pastors and just never really considered male only pastorate as a viable option. Another church that I went to for a little while in college was a very conservative church that had a large college contingent. Again, I went in part because I didn’t have a car and friends who did have cars went there. For several months the college ministry Sunday school class studied gender, including why that church was complementarian. I stuck it out through the whole study, but was completely unpersuaded. So I had context for the book in the feminist section as well as the liberal, progressive, and Black evangelicals sections. It was only the history of gay evangelicals that I really had no historical experience with.
One last point, I took two classes with Mark Noll in college and audited another when he was guest lecturer at University of Chicago Divinity School. Noll’s approach to rooting mid 20th century neo-evangelicals as part of a longer tradition of evangelical Protestants was my dominate way of thinking of evangelicalism until fairly recently. <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/92/1/37/7733057?guestAccessKey=f548926f-1249-4013-b4fd-9f3598c2ae09&login=false&utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=jaar&utm_medium=email">Matthew Avery Sutton’s essay about evangelical historiography</a> gave language to not just my concern about the use and definition of evangelical, but also to the method of thinking about evangelicalism as historically rooted group of people that arose out of the English reformation. I still strongly appreciate Noll, Marsden and other evangelical historians, but I am now going be reading their history with more nuance than I did previously. That is a very long introduction to a fairly straight forward book.
The Other Evangelicals looks at the history of the Evangelical movement that arose in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the ways that his five areas of self-identified evangelicals who were liberal, progressive, Black, feminist and gay. In most of these sections there were fairly clear lines of who was in and who was out regardless of self-identification. In the chapter on liberal evangelicals, the main focus was on biblical studies and the fight over inerrancy. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy was not the first fight to define what an Evangelical understanding of the Bible was, but by the time it was written in the late 1970s, it was clear that there was little tolerance for a more liberal stream of evangelicals who were less concerned with plenary inspiration and an error free bible.
The main illustration in the liberal chapter was Bela Vassady, a Hungarian WWII refugee who was one of the early professors at Fuller Seminary starting in 1949. Vassady was a European who identified as evangelical, but his stream of evangelicalism did not match up with Fuller’s understanding of biblical orthodoxy because he was too sympathetic to Barth and did not reject German methods of biblical theology outright. Vassady had helped to found the World Council of Churches and understood his role to be ecumenical. The story of opposition to Vassady was a good reminder that Christian colleges and seminaries have been accused of being “liberal” for a very long time. The influence of donors concerned about the mission of school and liberal drift has always been present.
The chapter of Black Evangelicals I think was important (although not new by any means) because evangelicals tend to think of themselves as theologically defined. The traditional definitions of evangelical by NAE or Bebbington are rooted in theological statements. But the chapter on Black Evangelicals makes clear that theology was never enough. Billy Graham opposed the methods of the civil rights movement, speaking against the 1963 March on Washington and MLK Jr explicitly on a number of occasions. Sharp quotes Graham, “There is only one possible solution to the race problem and that is vital personal experience with Jesus Christ on the part of both races…any man who has a genuine conversion experience will find his racial attitudes greatly changed.” (p127)
While the chapter on Black evangelicals includes a variety of people, the story is often similar to William Bentley’s. Evangelicalism was a theological tradition that took scripture seriously and at least claimed to value intellectually serious study. Bentley was exposed to white evangelicalism in the 1940s and was attracted to the theology, but was concerned that it “..could be doctrinally correct and, at the same time, hold backward attitudes toward such and important issue as race in America.” Bentley evangelically formed the National Black Evangelical Association in 1963 at a time when Wheaton and many other evangelical schools officially or unofficially still prohibited interracial dating on campus.
Much of the tension beyond explicit racism was rooted in different approaches toward evangelism and ministry. While many members of the NBEA agreed with Graham about the priority of personal conversion as the main method of solving social issues, the Black church historically had been more open to social action as a legitimate role of the church. (Although the National Baptist and the Progressive Baptists split in the 1960s along similar lines.)
The issues raised by Black evangelicals were not confined to just Black evangelicals, white progressives evangelicals also pushed the broader evangelical movement to think more clearly about social action as a role of the church. The 1960s protest movements, racism, war, and poverty were driving forces for progressive evangelicals who championed the working in marginalized communities as a central role of the church. But as the chapter concluded, the requirement for theological conservatism and the social requirement for individualism in approaching social issues like race, meant that progressive evangelicals had an uphill battle to draw attention to social conditions and social ministries that addressed the systemic causes of social problems.
The feminist story of evangelicalism is often assumed to be different than the actual history. The term complementarian wasn’t coined until 1988. While evangelicals were socially and theologically conservative, there were hundreds of women ordained within the SBC in the 1970 and the later orientation toward conservative gender roles was really a backlash to an earlier egalitarian movement.
Again, the concluding chapter on gay evangelicals prioritizes how evangelicals handling of scripture led to the cracks in the approach toward gay evangelicals. In many cases, those who were more inclusive rooted their inclusion on their reading of scripture. There was also a pragmatism that came to the fore as it became clear that changing orientation was not easy.
One of the problems of evangelicalism is a lack of imagination for any other contingency. In many cases, there are and have been many other paths that have been explored, but without knowledge of those paths, it is difficult to not make some of the same mistakes that have already been made.
The Other Evangelicals is very readable history. It is a history that I both knew a lot about but also had details and streams of evangelicalism that I was completely unaware of. I have been skeptical of the label evangelical since the early 90s when I was at Wheaton. The theological definitions of evangelicalism always seem to be less important than the social or cultural identity. The Other Evangelicals was far less political than I thought it would be. The progressive and liberal chapters were more about approach than particular content. And the chapters about feminists and gay evangelicals while they were more about content of those two areas again, came down to largely being about approach.
Evangelicalism grew out of a desire to be less fundamentalist than the early 20th century fundamentalism, but in many ways the evangelical movement never had a full break from fundamentalism. As fundamentalists of the early 20th century became less comfortable self identifying as fundamentalists and increasingly used the term evangelical, the fight over the approach that evangelicalism has toward culture has continued to be largely the same fight.
<strong>The Other Evangelicals: A Story of Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist, and Gay Christians―and the Movement That Pushed Them Out by Isaac B Sharp Purchase Links: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Other-Evangelicals-Progressive-Feminist-Christians_and/dp/0802881750/">Paperback</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Other-Evangelicals-Progressive-Feminist-Christians-ebook/dp/B0B831VVZ6/">Kindle Edition</a></strong>
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-other-evangelicals/
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Updated a reading goal:
Read 95 books by December 31, 2024
Progress so far: 75 / 95 79%