Book Notes

Calvin: A Brief Guide to His Life and Thought, by Willem van ’t Spijker (Westminster John Knox, 2009)

The author is “one of today’s leading John Calvin scholars” and author of many books (the vast majority in Dutch and, unlike this one, not translated at least as yet—including one on the Westminster Assembly). He also has taught at the Theological University at Apeldoorn. Professor Thomas Davis of Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis says: “This brief guide is long on insight and information. In a very readable manner it serves as a ready entry into the life of Calvin, fully embedding that life in the currents of sixteenth-century society and culture. The life and work of Calvin is on fully contextualized display here, as is the erudition of the author and the skill of the translator. Highly recommended.”

Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross, by Michael J. Gorman (Eerdmans, 2001)

Asbury’s M. Robert Mulholland says: “Gorman masterfully conjoins knowledge and vital piety [… and] interacts creatively and effectively with past and current scholarship on Paul and Pauline theology, and he provides cogent arguments against some of the special-interest readings of Paul. This book has the potential to challenge both the academy and the church to a reconsideration of Paul that could revolutionize Pauline scholarship and transform the life of the church in the world.”

Genesis, by Bill T. Arnold, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge, 2009)

The author teaches at Asbury. He did Who Were the Babylonians? (‘04) and 1 & 2 Sam. in The NIV Application Commentary (’03); he co-authored (with J. Choi) A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (’03) and co-edited (with H.G.M. Williamson) the Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books (‘05). The series builds on its popular predecessor, the Cambridge Bible Commentary.

Highlights from Faith and Philosophy

Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 1 (January 2009)

“As far as I know, this book is the all-time most sophisticated, well developed, and plausible defense of the idea that Christians may rationally believe and know apparently contradictory doctrines.”  So begins a review of James Anderson’s Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status (Paternoster, 2007). Although the reviewer sees no future in Anderson’s “mysterian defense of Christian belief” in the Trinity and Incarnation, for example (which Anderson deems paradoxes), “others will take it as presenting an exciting, well-motivated, and genuinely different apologetic option.” Anderson “relentlessly dismisses recent attempts to render these doctrines seemingly consistent, by the likes of Barth, Rahner, Cornelius Plantinga, Swinburne, Brown, Martinich, Rea, Brower, Feenstra, Davis, and Morris.” Anderson believes such efforts to avoid both paradox and heterodoxy can’t help failing on either count or even both.

DePauw U’s Erik Wielenberg writes “In Defense of Non-natural, Non-theistic Moral Realism,” in which he argues “that there are sui generis objective ethical facts that do not reduce to natural or supernatural facts.” And, “objective morality does not require an external foundation of any kind.” He defends this against objections posed by William Wainwright, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland. Other articles deal with Kant’s religious argument for the existence of God, with “The Sense of Deity and Begging the Question with Ontological and Cosmological Arguments,” and one on Kierkegaard and natural reason, and one on inductive evidence.

Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 2 (April 2009)

“The Vice of Pride” by Baylor’s Robert C. Roberts clarifies “pride by distinguishing it from emotions that are symptomatic of it and from virtuous dispositions that go by the same name, [and also] by identifying the disposition (humility) that is its virtue-counterpart, and by distinguishing” the “kinds” of pride.

In “A Leftovian Trinity” William Hasker argues that Brian Leftow’s proposed “Latin” doctrine of the Trinity—according to which “the Father just is God” and so are the Son and Spirit—is unorthodox because it renders the three identical. A “minor modification would enable Leftow to avoid this untoward consequence.” But even then his doctrine would “retain a strongly modalistic flavor” by implying, e.g., that Jesus’ prayers are instances of God-as-Son addressing himself, i.e. God-as-Father.  Hasker’s article begins: “The past half-century has seen a revival and outpouring of theological work on the doctrine of the Trinity that may be unmatched since the early centuries of Christianity.”

“Perhaps the most interesting and fruitful development in recent epistemology has been the renewal of interest in the intellectual virtues.” So begins a review of Intellectual Virtues: an Essay in Regulative Epistemology, by Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007). The reviewer is St. Olaf College’s Anthony Rudd. Because other books have tended to address general issues that this new work treats in Part One (the importance of the intellectual virtues, “their relation to the goods of intellectual inquiry,” etc.), it is Part Two that makes this book distinctive, dealing with the specific virtues themselves: Love of Knowledge, Firmness, Courage and Caution, Humility, Generosity, etc. And what the authors have to say is “fascinating, thought-provoking, and very readable.” The reviewer says that their “critique of traditional epistemology” and “their call for a reorientation of the discipline towards the regulative and the humanly relevant is enormously valuable.”  Other reviewed books deal with Pascal’s wager, immortality, the liberal conscience, John Locke (a new biography), the birth of secular ethics, and The Meaning of Theism.

Highlights from Evangelical Missions Quarterly

EMQ 45, no. 1 (January 2009)

• “How Cultures Work: A Roadmap for Intercultural Understanding in the Workplace” by Richard Lewis “asks what effective and efficient multinational partnership looks like and how multinational teams can function practically.”
• “Cutting the Purse Strings: How to Avoid and Overcome Paternalism” by Steve Murdock offers dos and don’ts for supporting any type of mission effort.
• “Toward a Cross-cultural Identity of Forgiveness,” by Gary Fujino looks at individualist and collectivist worldviews and “how the Church can move toward a cross-cultural identity of forgiveness.”
• Among several other articles is one dealing with witness to Muslims and one dealing with short-term mission experience.
• Valuable help appears in a regular section titled “Mission Resources on the Web”—under which the editor (Wheaton’s A. Scott Moreau) and the president of Global Mapping International (Mike O’Rear) this time list “Online Member Care Resources.” Among key sites are those found at www.membercare.org and www.missionarycare.org.

EMQ 45, no. 2 (April 2009)

Under “Mission resources on the Web” Moreau and O’Rear treat “Folk Religions” this time. Church planting is the cover theme. Welcoming international students, having sustainable theological education, and other topics also appear in this issue. The article “Decontextualization—A Much Neglected Element of Mission” argues that “there is a time and a place for challenging the cultural context with countercultural values of the Kingdom of God.”

EMQ 45, no. 3 (July 2009)

“Mission Associations” are the focus of “Mission resources on the Web” in this issue. “Finances & Money” is the cover theme, including funding of mission work.

Book Notes

American Apocalypses: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature, by Douglas Robinson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)

The author is Professor of English at the University of MS, did his B.A. & M.A. in Finland and another M.A. and Ph.D. at the U of WA in Seattle. If there weren’t ample MOBIUS copies we’d probably get this for Buswell Library. Here’s a sample…

Let us enter the hermeneutical fray, then, through R. W. B. Lewis’s “Days of Wrath and Laughter,” a seminal essay on the “comic-apocalypses” of contemporary American literature. Lewis begins by setting up a pair of apocalyptic hermeneutics, which he calls the “Lutheran” and the “Augustinian” strains, and placing himself in subtle opposition to the (considerable) exegetical authority of R. H. Charles [Lewis (1917-2002) was an author and scholar, winner of Pulitzer and other awards, and taught at Yale; R. H. Charles (1855-1931) is of course the English biblical scholar and theologian]:

“It was,” Charles argues, “from the apocalyptic side of Judaism that Christianity was born.” The statement is probably true, but it is misleading. The Christian vision of history is undoubtedly apocalyptic: if we grant the latter term a high degree of dialectical flexibility. But Charles tended to identify apocalypse with catastrophe, and hence with an uncompromisingly glum view of moral and spiritual potentialities of mankind. Given that identification, I should prefer to say that a certain great phase of Christianity was born out of Judean apocalyptic—and I am tempted to call it “the Lutheran phase,” as against the Thomistic phase, for example, or even the Augustinian; using quotation marks to indicate a strain as old as Christianity and one which seems to be in the ascendancy today, and not on unreasonable grounds. (195-96) [from Lewis’s Trials of the Word (Yale, 1965)]

[…] Lewis takes his own interpretive stance by identifying the “Lutheran” strain as a reductive or distortive interpretation of the Book of Revelation and the “Augustinian” as the representative or intended interpretation.  […]

[Lewis’s view] is, mutatis mutandis, Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of John’s Apocalypse from Book 20 of De civitate Dei. The cosmic battle depicted in the Book of Revelation is no historical prediction, as in the “Lutheran” strain, but a spiritual allegory, a narrative metaphor for man’s inner ethical growth toward God. […]

[…] True, predictive apocalyptic is a booming and vulgar industry these days; grocery store bookracks overflow with slick paperbacks promising swift retribution to the quiescent and eternal redemption to those who buy the books. But this is irritating, not threatening. Why is Lewis so concerned to take a stance against the predictive “Lutheran” strain?

[…] Exegetes now generally believe that the writers […] did believe that the end was near. […] The New Testament writers, for example, are unanimous […] 1 Cor. 7:29 […] 1 Pet. 4:7 […] 1 John 2:18 […] Rev 1:1 , 3 […] Rev. 22:20 […] Mark 9:1. […]

This suggests that Lewis’s “Augustinian strain” of apocalypse is a strong misreading of the Apocalypse. […] But […] the “Lutheran strain” too is a strong misreading […Robinson along the way here (writing in 1985) observes that Hal Lindsey “predicts the end of the world in 1988”].

In another sense, however, Luther and Hal Lindsey (along with many others who have adopted the same hermeneutic) remain firmly within the apocalyptic tradition of the Bible; for as Lindsey revises Luther’s revision of St. John, so too did St. John revise “Daniel’s” revision of Jeremiah [Jer. 25:12 is referenced in a lengthy endnote; in the preceding note, Robinson says that Lindsey “is by far the most rhetorically restrained and scholastically cautious of recent prophets of doom”]  […]

[…] What Augustine offers Lewis [who was a socio-political conservative with trepidations about the 1960s and so on] is not doctrinal credibility but a secure conservatism that stresses learning over revolution, through the infinite deferral of apocalyptic crisis.

Robinson has a good bit more to say about biblical material, but mostly proceeds through his book to treat certain noted American authors (e.g., Emerson, Melville, Poe, Twain) and some more recent figures such as novelist and short-story writer John Barth.

The most important mediation in a discussion of American apocalypses, however, is the mediation that is operative in the Romantic hermeneutic. American literature is a Romantic literature; its deviations from Romanticism are themselves definitively Romantic; and the American Dream as most mythically dreamed by our greatest Romantic apocalyptist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, is clearly the umbrella covering the entire range of apocalypses.

Christianity in Britain

In the latest issue of Anvil (vol. 16, no. 2), David Bebbington (a leading historian of evangelicalism) writes the lead article “Evangelical Trends, 1959-2009” (pp. 93–106), focusing on Britain, where over the years he sees a “decline in anti-Catholicism, Keswick teaching, premillennial eschatology, traditional missionary-mindedness and internal unity.” On the other hand, evangelicals grew as a proportion of their denominations, broadened their views, acquired ecumenical interest, and witnessed growth in the Reformed, charismatic, and black church sectors. Divisive gender and socio-political issues arose.

Open Evangelicals were generally much happier with contemporary approaches to biblical hermeneutics than members of Reform; charismatic churches were more likely to run Alpha courses while Reform favored Christianity Explored; there was normally a much more structured liturgy in an open than in a charismatic congregation; and so on. Underlying the differences […] was a more fundamental cultural orientation. Reform [I’m construing this as I would “Reformed”] promoted a logo-centric modernity, stressing accurate teaching, efficient ecclesiastical structures and resistance to contemporary fashions for the sake of the gospel. Charismatics embraced a postmodern delight in variety, authenticity and relevance to felt needs. The open grouping welcomed insights from the modern and the postmodern, being deliberately eclectic. Attitudes to cultural change fostered markedly contrasting stances. The former unity of Evangelicalism had been broken. (pp. 104–105)

In the same issue, “Britain Today: How we came to be here and what we can do about it” (pp. 107–122) by Michael Nazir-Ali looks especially at “the state of the family, the rise of homemade spiritualities and the phenomenon of scientific reductionism” (p. 107).

[The author then] sets out a vision for how the church can serve the nation by reversing our amnesia about our Christian heritage (especially in education), bringing Christian values and virtues into the public sphere and the marketplace, making our worship visible, and renewing our commitment to mission and evangelism rooted in friendship and witness. (p. 107)

Other articles deal with vibrant Anglicanism in Africa and with an analysis of the Church of England and ways to turn around its decline. Both articles have broader application. Abstracts for all the articles can be found on Anvil’s website.

Book Notes

Aquinas the Augustinian, edited by Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering (Catholic University of America Press, 2007)

Dauphinais and Levering are co-editors of Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas from this same press (2005) and of Knowing the Love of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, 2002). In this new book, we have eleven essays by as many contributors, who represent five nationalities (of the 3 editors only Levering contributes an essay). The influence of St. Augustine’s thought on Aquinas is “well known. With the exception of particular philosophical controversies, however, relatively little research has been done in this area.” This book brings to our understanding of Aquinas “a renewed awareness of his extraordinary indebtedness to his fifth-century teacher.” Summaries of medieval theology that see Aquinas “as a follower of Aristotle over the traditional” Augustinians of his day are simply misleading.

Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpers: Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research, edited by Herman J. Selderhuis, Reformed Historical Theology series, volume 5 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008)

Eighteen essays fall under four headings:

“Exegesis” has two essays, one on Calvin as a translator as shown in his 1557 Psalms commentary, and the other titled “John Calvin’s Nonliteral Exegesis” which focuses on his allegorical interpretation—but mentions the literal as well as four additional nonliteral modes:  a) replacement of problematic texts with meanings from other biblical texts; b) inferring of the author’s or character’s thoughts; c) discernment of rhetorical devices; and d) typological.

“Theology” comprises seven essays. Wim Janse is Professor of Reformation History at the Free University in Amsterdam and his “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology” caught my eye. He opens by distilling what he will present. Here goes an attempt to convey the gist of the distilling…

[…] My own favourite one-liner is: Calvin’s pneumatological instrumentalism moved between the Scylla of Luther’s sacramental realism and the Charybdis of Zwingli’s spiritualistic symbolism. Decidedly helpful is Brian A. Gerrish’s famous characterization of Calvin’s, Bullinger’s and Zwingli’s Eucharistic views as, respectively, symbolic instrumentalism, symbolic parallelism, and symbolic memorialism. I would say that, as in all of Calvin’s theology, these also center around the bipolarity and simultaneity of God’s being both far removed and very close. […]

However, these types of summaries give rise to misunderstandings. […] In spite of Calvin’s own —polemical—claim of consistency, his Eucharistic theology is neither the sum total nor the common denominator of all his pronouncements between 1536 and 1564.  […]

Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Here are some highlights from the November 2008 issue of Protestant Reformed Theological Journal (vol. 42, no. 1):

• Angus Stewart writes the third part of his article “John Calvin’s Integrated Covenant Theology.”
• Pastor James A. Laning writes the first part of an article titled “The Hermeneutics of Dispensationalism.”
• PCA Pastor Eugene Case writes the first part of an article titled “Survey of Southern Presbyterian History” (and in this part he takes the history up to the late 18^th century). Case wrote this based on his lectures at the Seminary of the Protestant Reformed Churches in April 2008 but went back to add footnotes.
• “Handopening” is the title of an article by Russell Dykstra. The title is the English rendition of a Dutch term meaning the requests by vacant-pulpit congregations for permission from classis [presbytery] to begin the process of calling a minister. The Protestant Reformed inherited this from the Christian Reformed (which they were part of until 1924), but with greater local church autonomy they eventually abandoned the practice and did so years before the CRC did in 1957. (In some Reformed bodies the classis has considerably less authority over congregations and even clergy and ordinands than presbyteries do in PCA polity, which itself is “grass roots” compared to the more “top-down” PC(USA).)
• Professor Barrett Gritters writes part one of an article titled “Music in Worship: The Reformation’s Neglected Legacy.”

Body, Soul, and Human Life

In the September issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (vol. 61, no. 3), the book Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible by Joel Green (Baker Academic, 2008) is reviewed by Talbot’s Scott Rae (pp. 191–194). Taking up serious grad study in neuroscience in mid-career as a NT prof, Green calls this book a “progress report” on his interdisciplinary work. Rae says…

[Green’s work is a] biblical defense of monism, or nonreductive physicalism, seeing human persons as unified, embodied wholes consisting of nothing more than their material “stuff.”

Green raises a number of important questions, which include the uniqueness of human beings, the grounding for human worth and morality, decision-making and free will, the focus of salvation, and views of life after death. […] Most chapters, except for the final one, begin with challenges to traditional theological views from the neurosciences, followed by lengthy, detailed, and well-documented explorations of biblical texts, attempting to demonstrate that his Christian monism is consistent with the Bible.  […]

[…Rae observes that] three different Nobel prize winning scientists (John Eccles, a substance dualist; Roger Sperry, a property dualist; and Francis Crick, a physicalist) all are quite aware of the neurosciences, yet that field cannot settle the debate. In fairness to Green, he is not claiming that the sciences settle the question, but it is clear that his exposure to the neurosciences is what is driving his re-reading of the Bible. […] I would challenge Green to point out a single discovery in the neurosciences that the substance dualist cannot accommodate.

Green then responds to Rae’s review (pp. 194–196)! He is glad for interaction with Rae, but says Rae’s claim about rereading the Bible in light of the neurosciences is wrong.  Green says that unlike those who see the NT writers as culturally-determined dualists, he takes seriously “the degree to which even Greek influence in the first-century Roman world was monist in its view of the human person” and that in any case it was Israel’s Scriptures that influenced the NT. And unlike those who see a real problem between the Bible and the neurosciences, he does not, and he cannot figure out why Rae deems him a “nonreductive physicalist” or as someone who views humans as nothing more than material “stuff” (which Green considers an egregious caricature). Green also wonders why Rae and other dualists are attracted to the writings of N. T. Wright and try to find support there, in view of Wright’s anthropological monism. “Over and over in Surprised by Hope, Wright draws a sharp line of demarcation between body-soul dualism and biblical faith.”

Christian Perspectives on the City

The theme of the summer 2009 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review is “Christian Perspectives on the City.” Inside, the introductory essay has 22 footnotes in its five pages, with some notes listing multiple works including a forthcoming one titled Keeping God’s Earth: Creation Care and the Global Environment in Biblical Perspective, edited by Noah J. Toly and Daniel I. Block, from IVP Academic. The three articles on the theme and their abstracts are as follows:

“Subdivided By Faith? An Historical Account of Evangelicals and the City” by Mark T. Mulder and James K. A. Smith (pp. 415-433). [Link for Students, Faculty, & Staff]

In an echo of Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s study of evangelicals and the racialized society (detailed vividly in Divided by Faith), Mark T. Mulder and James K. A. Smith attempt to trace the history and literature concerning evangelicals and their relationship to the city. While there exists an interesting literature about general urban antipathy in the U.S., the authors contend religion remains a salient and under-examined component within that phenomenon. This paper calls for more theologically-nuanced studies regarding evangelicals, anti-urban bias, and geographical habits.

“Nature and Nature’s God: The Religious Background of the Garden City Movement” by Lee Hardy (pp. 435-456). [Link for Students, Faculty, & Staff]

Is the discipline of urban planning a religiously neutral affair? If the English Garden City movement is to serve as a worthy example of this discipline, certainly not. After noting its considerable influence on American New Urbanism, Lee Hardy explores in this essay the religious motivation of the Garden City movement through the figure of its founder, Ebenezer Howard. The exploration takes place on three levels: the physical design of urban form; the socioeconomics of collective land ownership; and the religious hope of human transformation, which draws upon the cultural strategies typical of separatist Christian communities and the metaphysics of American Spiritualism.

“Ellul on New Urbanism” by David Wang (pp. 457-470). [Link for Students, Faculty, & Staff]

In this paper, Jacques Ellul’s theory of “technique” and his theology of the city are framed into a critique of New Urbanism. Against Modernism’s view of the city as a “machine for living in,” New Urbanism harks back to the ambiance of old New England towns. But far from assuring the sense of community it promotes, Ellul’s thought reveals this new paradigm to be as mechanistic as the one it replaces. The paper concludes by highlighting three Ellulian suggestions towards more authentic expressions of sense of community.

Search Fatigue

Beall, Jeffrey. “Search Fatigue.” American Libraries 38, no. 3 (March 2007): 46-50. [Link for Covenant Students, Faculty, & Staff]

Beall defines “search fatigue” as the phenomenon that results when people “repeatedly get results that do not match their information needs” (p. 47). He proposes that the cause is the increased use of keyword searching instead of “metadata-enabled” searching (p. 50).

Here “metadata-enabled” signifies things like standardized subject headings. As an example, consider a person searching for material on the doctrine of Perseverance. A keyword search for the term “perseverance” would miss a work like Rayburn’s Are the Sheep Secure? if it weren’t for a library cataloger giving it subject headings like “Perseverance (Theology)” and “Assurance (Theology)”. Meanwhile, a keyword search for “perseverance” would turn up diverse irrelevancies including names such as Perseverance Press and the Perseverance mine in AK. Or, to use Beall’s example, consider challenges for someone researching the Atlantic cod—for which there are 60 different names (such as codling, schrod, shoal fish, Newfoundland fish, winter fish) (p. 47–48).

Beall concludes:

If this process [of keyword only] continues, metadata-enabled searching will become a high-priced specialty service, one that is not generally available. Keyword searching, with all its flaws and weaknesses, will dominate and become the only type of search available. … The bad is driving out the good. …

[Keyword searching] does have some uses and can sometimes be an effective tool for information discovery and retrieval, especially in casual information-seeking.

However, search fatigue will certainly become more common as keyword searching becomes the main means of information discovery, as metadata-enabled search engines become fewer and fewer, and as full-text databases start to be measured in terabytes and petabytes rather than megabytes and gigabytes. (p. 50)