My latest: reviews of Andrew Wilson and Fred Sanders

This morning The Hedgehog Review published my review essay of Andrew Wilson’s new book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Here’s an excerpt:

Two big ideas define the book. The first is that the year 1776 explains, or contains in nuce, every major feature of the modern world as we know it. The second is Wilson’s expansion of Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s label for Westerners: not just WEIRD but WEIRDER. The acronym stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. These are the seven facets that define the unique, historically contingent character of “Western” societies today (Wilson does not like the W-word; he either avoids it, puts it in scare quotes, or replaces it with WEIRDER). Most of the book consists of recounting how each of these traits appeared, took hold, or otherwise began to be disseminated in and around the year 1776.

The story that unfolds is wonderful to read. Wilson has a light touch and an enviable ability to interweave telling vignettes with major events and countless names, dates, and locations without overwhelming the reader. More than two-thirds of the book is straight narrative. Commentary is present throughout, but Wilson clearly wants the work to be accessible to lay readers; his primary audience is not scholars.

Read the rest here. The book is not just great; it’s good fun, at times a rip-roaring yarn. Pick up a copy!

In addition, the academic journal Pro Ecclesia has just published my review of Fred Sanders’ book (not his latest, since just this month he’s published a new one!) Foundation of Salvation: Trinity and Soteriology, which came out about two years ago. Here’s an excerpt:

This is a marvelous work of sober scholarship by one of our leading theologians on the central Christian doctrine. It is systematic theology par excellence: a paradigm of the discipline by a thinker and writer at the peak of his powers. It is, moreover, one more fusillade in the ongoing counterattack by defenders of classic trinitarian doctrine against those would renew, by radically revising, that same doctrine. Following Scott Swain—and in line with John Webster, Lewis Ayres, Michel Barnes, Kathryn Tanner, Bruce Marshall, Karen Kilby, Matthew Levering, and many others—Sanders suggests that “the modern revival of interest in the doctrine of the Trinity” is a kind of renewal without retrieval (p. 184). Phrased more sharply, it is reclamation by erasure, inasmuch as the doctrine is redefined so profoundly that few of the doctrine's ancient architects, patrons, or custodians would recognize it, much less affirm it.

If, in other words, the writings and epigones of Barth and Rahner, Moltmann and Pannenberg, Jenson and LaCugna were once in the ascendant, it would seem that time is past. The upshot is not that this shift, if it is a shift, means the right side has won. But it does mean that those who saw the sheer fact of innovation as itself a sign of abiding vitality were wrong, as in the unfortunate confident tones of James Morris Whiton as he approached the turn of the twentieth century: “Doubtless, many will move on into the larger Trinitarianism which modern thinking requires. But quite as many will stay within the narrower lines of the past … [Nevertheless t]here is too much of the Holy Spirit now in the church to permit the new Trinitarianism to be again excommunicated by the old” (quoted on p. 194). In a candid aside, Sanders calls this way of thinking “a constant harassment by bright new ideas, and a relentless production of new schemas by which to distinguish the latest trinitarianism from the errors that have gone before.” The effect is ironic, given that the stated aim of so many revisers has been to serve the unity and mission of the contemporary church: “the doctrine of the Trinity itself has begun to seem unstable and indeterminate for several generations of theology students and church leaders” (p. 194).

Read the rest here. Another great book by another great scholar. More, please!

Anthropomorphism and analogy

Andrew Wilson has a lovely little post up using Herman Bavinck's work to show the "unlimited" scope of the Bible's use of anthropomorphism to talk about God. It's a helpful catalogue of the sheer volume and range of scriptural language to describe God and God's action. It's a useful resource, too, for helping students to grasp the notion that most of our speech about God is metaphorical, all of it is analogical, and none of it is less true for that.

In my experience not only students but philosophers and theologians as well often imagine, argue, or take for granted that doctrine is a kind of improvement on the language of Scripture. The canon then functions as a kind of loose rough draft, however authoritative, upon which metaphysically precise discourse improves, or at least by comparison offers a better approximation of the truth. Sometimes those parts of the canon that are literal or less anthropomorphic are permitted some lexical or semantic control. But in any case the idea is that arriving at non-metaphorical and certainly non-anthropomorphic language is the ideal.

But this is a mistake. Anthropomorphism is not an error or an accommodation to avoid. It's the vehicle of truth, the sanctified means of truthful talk about God. It may in principle speak more truly about God than its contrary. And Scripture's saturation in it would suggest that in fact it is God's chosen manner of communicating with us, and thus a privileged discursive mode for talk about God.

The upshot: theological accounts of analogy and language about God are meant not to sit in judgment on Scripture but rather to show how Scripture's language about God works. It is meant to serve the canon and to ground trust in canonical idiom, not to qualify it. "Given divine transcendence and the character of human language, how is what the Bible says about God true?" is the question to which the doctrine of analogy is an answer. Analogy does not mitigate the truth of Scripture's witness. It is a way of establishing it philosophically.

So that when the Bible says God has a face or arms or nostrils, or has wrath or grief or regret or love, or knows or forgets or begets or weds, the Christian is right to hear it as what it is: the word of God, trustworthy and true.