Buswell Bulletin: Book Highlights – January 2023
Each issue we highlight recently acquired books that are of particular interest or importance. (Inclusion on this list is not an endorsement.)
Uncommon Unity: Wisdom for the Church in an Age of Division
Richard Lints
Lexham Press, 2022
Publisher Description:
Our world is facing increasing hostilities. Political and cultural differences rage, even among people who otherwise show goodwill. And the church is no stranger to extreme polarization, theological backbiting, and political squabbling. Jesus’s prayer in John 17—that the church be one as he and the Father are one—seems increasingly unattainable.
But what if Scripture actually provides the key for thinking about unity in diversity?
In Uncommon Unity: Wisdom for the Church in an Age of Division, Richard Lints explores the nature of diversity and how Christians can think more clearly about unity in an increasingly polarized age. Drawing on theological, historical, and sociological resources, Lints exposes problems with the inclusion narrative of democracy and shows a better way forward for fostering unity in the midst of extreme diversity. If we are to think rightly about diversity, wisdom is required for the church in our late modern world. Through wisdom, Christians can display real unity in diversity and bear witness of the God who made them for himself as diverse members of his one body.
Readers of Uncommon Unity will be heartened that Scripture and Christian tradition provide an antidote to division.
Storied Witness: The Theology of Black Women Preachers in 19th-Century America
Kate Hanch
Fortress Press, 2022
Publisher Description:
The voices of Black women have historically been silenced, especially in theological and religious contexts. Prophets rarely have platforms; faithfulness to oneself, one's community, and one's God does not often lead to prestige. Nineteenth-century Black women preachers Zilpha Elaw, Julia Foote, and Sojourner Truth are not usually presented in systematic theology classes or texts and not often cited in sermons for their biblical interpretations, nor are they taught in church history courses.
They should be. These women present a liberating view of God and love for self and neighbor despite circumstances that would destroy them or relegate them and their ideas to the margins. As Elaw, Foote, and Truth preached, traveled, and ministered, they constructed a theology that affirmed their belovedness as Black women and enabled them to be both pastoral and prophetic. They modeled a way to do theology that wasfaithful to the biblical witness and Christian history, was pastorally attentive to their respective communities and themselves, and identified and challenged the evils of their day. They interpreted Scripture to show that God favored them and loved them, and their bodies, even when the world said otherwise. They recognized that in order to be pastoral, they must be prophetic, calling out structures of domination that would seek to harm. And as they preached a word of comfort to the oppressed, oppressors heard--and still hear--the judgment in their voices.
Kate Hanch conducts a careful reading of these 19th-century Black women preachers' narratives and their texts, both written and spoken, to make explicit their theology. At once a work of religious history, biography, and constructive theology, Storied Witness calls attention to the essential lived witness of Zilpha Elaw, Julia Foote, and Sojourner Truth. By paying attention to their stories, we discover and honor both their theology and their role as theologians. Thanks to their witness, we are challenged by a theology that testifies to a liberating Christianity in defiance of the dominant culture around them and us.
Becoming a Missionary Church: Lesslie Newbigin and Contemporary Church Movements
Michael W. Goheen and Timothy M. Sheridan
Baker Academic, 2022
Reviewed by Matthew Bennet in Themelios 47, no. 3 (December 2022): 652-654:
In 2018, Michael Goheen published The Church and Its Vocation as a distillation of Lesslie Newbigin’s missional ecclesiology. The Church and Its Vocation was to serve as a fore-runner to another volume that was released this year: Becoming a Missionary Church. Whereas the first volume sought to systematically lay out Newbigin’s insights regarding the missionary nature of the church, this companion volume, written in conjunction with Timothy Sheridan, attempts to assess contemporary movements that have drawn on Newbigin in various ways.
Both for those familiar with Lesslie Newbigin and those who might be less so, Goheen and Sheridan have provided an exceptional service of distilling his teaching and detangling it from those who have developed approaches that claim to inherit and extend his vision. While written under Baker’s Academic imprint, Goheen and Sheridan present a readily accessible treatment of the historical setting surrounding Newbigin and also the contemporary setting in which Newbigin’s ideas have been taken up into the strategies and methods of several movements. Whether the reader is a pastor or ministry leader or a student taking a missions class in a Bible School or a seminary, this book is both accessible and important…
...Goheen and Sheridan have admirably extended Newbigin’s incredibly helpful contribution to the missionary understanding of the church into the contemporary setting. The remaining step will be for churches to consider their principles, incorporate their thinking into local settings, and bring Newbigin’s vision to life in the everyday activities of the church. These specifics are lacking in Becoming a Missionary Church, but the building blocks are certainly there. I believe that this book would benefit every church, elder board, and even denominational entities as they seek to understand and express the missionary nature of Christ’s church.
Paul Copan
Baker Academic, 2022
Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Apologetics & Evangelism)
Publisher Description:
Critics outside the church often accuse the Old Testament God of genocide, racism, ethnic cleansing, and violence. But a rising tide of critics within the church claim that Moses and other "primitive," violence-prone prophets were mistaken about God's commands and character. Both sets of critics dismiss this allegedly harsh, flawed, "textual" Old Testament God in favor of the kind, compassionate, "actual" God revealed by Jesus. Are they right to do so?
Following his popular book Is God a Moral Monster?, noted apologist Paul Copan confronts false, imbalanced teaching that is confusing and misleading many Christians. Copan takes on some of the most difficult Old Testament challenges and places them in their larger historical and theological contexts. He explores the kindness, patience, and compassion of God in the Old Testament and shows how Jesus in the New Testament reveals not only divine kindness but also divine severity. The book includes a detailed Scripture index of difficult and controversial passages and is helpful for anyone interested in understanding the flaws in these emerging claims that are creating a destructive gap between the Testaments.
Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer
Trevor Laurence
Baylor University Press, 2022
Publisher Description:
To the modern ear, the concept of cursing sounds otherworldly, mystical, abhorrent. For some the idea may evoke images of terror―images not of God but of the devil. How then are Christians to understand the imprecatory psalms, which are violent and, for many, disturbing prayers for judgment that seem to contravene Christ’s command to "love thy enemy"?
Drawing together redemptive-historical biblical theology and narrative ethics, Trevor Laurence’s Cursing with God assesses the imprecatory psalms and the viability of their performance by the Christian church. Laurence argues that prayerful enactment of the imprecatory psalms is an obligatory exercise of the church’s God-given calling as a royal priesthood in God’s story. This study evaluates the imprecations within their intertextually constructed narrative world, presenting a biblical theological reading of their petitions as the faithful prayers of the royal-priestly son of God whose vocation is to guard God’s temple-kingdom from the forces that would defile it and to subdue the earth as sacred space. Attention to the New Testament’s polyvalent interaction with the imprecatory psalms discloses how the New Testament narrates God’s work in Christ with reference to the figures and structures of the imprecations.
With the resultant biblical theological synthesis as a narrative framework for ethical reflection, Cursing with God culminates with a proposal for faithful Christian cursing that coheres with the church’s royal-priestly vocation and inter-advent location in God’s narrative and contends that imprecatory performance has the dynamic capacity to stimulate faith, hope, and love while galvanizing the church to work for a more just world. With scholars, students, and trained clergy in view, Cursing with God aims to generate a recovery of the imprecatory psalms in Christian worship and piety.
Zoltán Dörnyei
Zondervan, 2022
Publisher Description:
For centuries, the fruit of the Spirit has rightfully served as a wellspring of reflection on the virtues that epitomize the Christian life and character-building. However, the notion of the fruit of the Spirit is not limited solely to forming the biblical foundation of ethical living.
Psychologist and theologian Zoltán Dörnyei argues that if we understand the nine attributes collectively as a concise portrayal of the ideal Christian self, this approach places the notion of the fruit of the Spirit at the intersection of several important theological themes, such as being conformed to the divine image, the gradual advancement of the kingdom of God, and new creation. In The Psychology of the Fruit of the Spirit, Dörnyei offers a scholarly exposition of the relevant theological content associated with the fruit of the Spirit. Complementing his theological reflections with findings from the field of psychology, he brings expertise in both psychology and theology to bear on this important biblical concept. His integrated perspective helps to uncover the full meaning and theological potential of the fruit of the Spirit by helping to clarify the nature of its nine facets, defining broader psychological dimensions that underlie the fruit, and offering practical lessons for cultivating it in the Christian life.
The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity
Jason A. Staples
Cambridge University Press, 2022
Publisher Description:
In this book, Jason Staples proposes a new paradigm regarding the biblical concept of Israel and how it was shaped by Jewish apocalyptic hopes for restoration after the Babylonian Exile. Challenging conventional assumptions about Israelite identity in antiquity, his argument is based on a close analysis of a vast corpus of biblical and other early Jewish literature and material evidence. Staples demonstrates that continued hopes for Israel's restoration in the context of diaspora and imperial domination remained central to Jewish conceptions of Israelite identity throughout the final centuries before Christianity and even into the early part of the Common Era. He also shows that Israelite identity was more diverse in antiquity than is typically appreciated in modern scholarship. His book lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the so-called 'parting of the ways' between Judaism and Christianity and how earliest Christianity itself grew out of hopes for Israel's restoration.
Understanding the Free-Will Controversy: Thinking through a Philosophical Quagmire
Thomas Talbott
Cascade Books, 2022
Publisher Description:
What is free will and do humans possess it? While these questions appear simple they have tied some of our greatest minds in knots over the millennia. This little book seeks to clarify for an audience of educated non-specialists some of the issues that often arise in philosophical disputes over the existence and the nature of human free will. Beyond that, it proposes a particular solution to the puzzles.
Many philosophers have argued that free will is incompatible with determinism, and many have also argued that it is incompatible with indeterminism. So, is free will simply an incoherent concept? Talbott argues that the best way out of this quagmire requires that we come to appreciate why certain conditions essential to our emergence as free moral agents—conditions such as indeterminism, ignorance, and a context of ambiguity and misperception—are themselves obstacles to a fully realized freedom. For a fully realized freedom requires that, as minimally rational individuals, we have learned some important lessons for ourselves; and once these lessons have been learned, some of our freest choices may be such that we could not have chosen otherwise because so choosing would then seem to us utterly unthinkable and irrational.
Always On: Practicing Faith in a New Media Landscape
Angela Williams Gorrell
Baker Academic, 2019
Publisher Description:
Many of us are "always on"--scrolling through social media, checking email, or searching the web. New media spaces can be sites and instruments of God's unconditional love, but they can also nurture harmful conditions and become sources of anxiety, jealousy, and despondency. Always On provides useful tools for helping students and congregants understand the world of social media and engage it faithfully, enabling Christian communities to address its use in constructive, pastoral ways. The book includes discussion questions and sample exercises for each chapter.
Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal
Esau McCaulley
InterVarsity Press, 2022
Publisher Description:
"Lent is inescapably about repenting." Every year, the church invites us into a season of repentance and fasting in preparation for Holy Week. It's an invitation to turn away from our sins and toward the mercy and grace of Christ.
Often, though, we experience the Lenten fast as either a mindless ritual or self-improvement program. In this short volume, priest and scholar Esau McCaulley introduces the season of Lent, showing us how its prayers and rituals point us not just to our own sinfulness but also beyond it to our merciful Savior.
Each volume in the Fullness of Time series invites readers to engage with the riches of the church year, exploring the traditions, prayers, Scriptures, and rituals of the seasons of the church calendar.
Juxtaposition and the Elisha Cycle
Rachelle Gilmour
Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015
Publisher Description:
This monograph examines the juxtaposition of narrative units in biblical narrative and the effect this has on interpretation. Early rabbinical and inner-biblical interpretations suggest that juxtaposition was an intentional device used by biblical editors and authors to shape the meaning of their material. Therefore, this monograph develops a framework for recognising the ways in which adjacent units interpret and re-interpret one another and presents this framework as an important hermeneutical tool. Stories and episodes that are linked chronologically affect one another through a relationship of causes and consequences. The categories of contradiction, corroboration and question and answer are also used to describe the types of interaction between narrative units and demonstrate how such dialogues create new meaning. Indicators in the text that guide the audience towards the intended interpretation are identified in order that a 'poetics' of juxtaposition is developed. The theoretical basis established in the first half of the monograph is then applied to the Elisha cycle. Each episode is interpreted independently and then read in juxtaposition with the surrounding episodes, producing a fresh literary reading of the cycle. Furthermore, in order to demonstrate how juxtaposition functioned as a diachronic process, attention is given to the literary history of the cycle. We conjecture earlier interpretations of the Elisha episodes and compare them to the final form of the cycle. Finally, the Elisha cycle is itself a story juxtaposed with other stories and so the same principles of interpretation are used to suggest the meaning of the cycle within the book of Kings.
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th edition
Edited by Andrew Louth
Oxford University Press, 2022
Review by D. S. Azzolina in Choice 60, no. 7 (March 2023):
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church has long been a foundational reference work in academic libraries of every kind. The most significant complaint about earlier editions was that they had an Anglican bias, which at best could be called endearingly quirky. The fourth edition mitigated that problem to a great degree and revised the third edition so thoroughly that it may as well be called a new work. For the first time, all entries are signed. Entries carried over from earlier editions are attributed where revised and their bibliographies brought up to date. The current editor, Louth (emer., Durham Univ., UK), broadens the dictionary's scope to include a wider variety of Christianities, reflecting the worldwide movement to the Global South since the first edition in 1957, and strengthens coverage of denominations outside mainstream Christianity. The resulting two volumes of more than 2,000 pages reflects the monumentality of the work. Louth ably fulfills his goal of creating a reference work that caters to a broad range of readers "from the beginner to the learned," and this work is one of the few that continues to belong in all libraries.