My latest: on Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis in LARB

This morning The Los Angeles Review of Books published my review of Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis. Here are the opening two paragraphs:

MARILYNNE ROBINSON HAS always been a theologian at heart. It’s merely convention that theology today is one among dozens of specialized academic subdisciplines. If that’s what theology is, Robinson doesn’t write like it—and thank God for that. Theology’s mother tongue is prayer and confession, the language of the liturgy, but these aren’t genres so much as modes that transform disparate genres into vehicles of divine discourse. Like Jacob’s Ladder, the traffic runs both ways.

It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point. She has been doing this for almost half a century. She has won all the awards, sold all the books, chatted with presidents, and garnered every laurel and medal. She has nothing to prove. And so, having just turned 80, she has chosen to mark the occasion by publishing a commentary on Genesis, the first book of the Torah.

Click here to rest the rest. (See also Francis Spufford’s review and Ezra Klein’s interview with Robinson.)

Three more reviews (two English, one German)

Three more reviews of my books have been published recently. The first is by Martin Hailer in the Theologische Literaturzeitung. He’s reviewing The Church’s Book; here’s the final paragraph:

Der Vf. legt eine analytisch klare, gelehrte und konstruktive Studie über das Verhältnis von Schriftlehre und Ekklesiologie vor. Kritiken sind mitunter deutlich, jedoch fair und übergehen auch die positiv rezipierte Position Robert W. Jensons nicht. Die ekklesiologische Typologie gegen Ende des Bandes verwendet sprechende Bilder und könnte dem notorisch schwierigen ökumenischen Gespräch auf diesem Feld aufhelfen. Zeitigt eine theologische Schrifthermeneutik (auch) hier positive Effekte, dann hat sie viel erreicht.

Being complimented in German is a new experience for me. I think this is when I wave at the camera and say, Look, Ma, I’m a real scholar now!

The second review is also of The Church’s Book; it’s by Robert W. Wall in Catholic Biblical Quarterly. He writes that I “offer both diagnostic and prognostic help to propose an orderly—or at least a more wakeful—approach to [the current] messy hermeneutical topology” in a “reworking of his brilliant Yale Ph.D. dissertation” (!). Final paragraph:

East has given us an important and wonderfully written book. Its constructive impulse is aptly captured by his concluding mention of Matthew Levering’s “participatory biblical exegesis,” which engages a Spirit-animated Scripture in ways that guide one holy catholic and apostolic church into a deeper understanding and more satisfying fellowship with the holy Trinity.

The final review is of The Doctrine of Scripture; it appears in Pro Ecclesia and is written by Brett Vanderzee. Brett’s review is a full 2,000 words long; it’s more of a review essay than a brief summary and evaluation. It also gets my project better than anything else I’ve seen in print; probably better than my own attempts to explain or defend it. Brett simply understands what I’m up to. If anyone wants to know what that is, you can now access it in clear, friendly prose that clocks in under 2K words. That’s 80K fewer than the book in question.

Brett says many kind things about me and the book. I won’t quote them here. What I will quote is a lovely image he uses that I will be borrowing from here on out:

In a sense, the church stands in relationship to Scripture like an art restorer in possession of a masterpiece; stewardship of the work’s welfare is entrusted to her unmatched skill and unimpeachable eye, but the masterpiece itself demands that the restorer answer to the integrity of the art. In the end, if the Bible and the church belong to God, they also belong to one another…

Scripture is a joy; the doctrine of Scripture is likewise a joy; hence, writing my book was a joy; and now, reading Brett’s exposition and elaboration of my book proves to be a joy, too. It’s joy all the way down. Thanks to Brett and to all other generous readers who make writing theology such a pleasure.

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!

My latest: a review of Mark Noll in The Christian Century

In the new issue of The Christian Century I have a review of Mark Noll’s latest book, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. Superlatives fail, as they usually do with Noll’s work. The book is more than a “mere” history, though. It has an argument to make. Here’s how I begin to lay it out:

The United States was, from the start, founded and widely understood as a repudiation of and alternative to European Christendom. Whatever the proper relationship between church and state, the federal government would have no established religion—would not, that is, tax citizens in sponsorship of a formal ecclesiastical body. On this arrangement, most nascent Americans agreed. What then would, or should, the implications be for Christian faith and doctrine in the public square? How could Christian society endure without the legal and political trappings of Christendom?

Answer: through the Bible. Not the Bible and; not the Bible as mediated by. The Bible alone. America would be the first of its kind: a “Bible civilization.” That is to say, a constitutional republic of coequal citizens whose common, voluntary trust in the truth and authority of Christian scripture would simultaneously (1) put the lie to the “necessity” of coercive religious regimes, (2) provide the moral character required for a liberal democracy to flourish, and (3) fulfill the promise of the Protestant Reformation. Sola scriptura thus became the unwritten law of the land. Regardless of one’s confession or tradition, the sufficiency of the Bible for all aspects of life—the canon as the cornerstone for religion, ethics, and politics alike—was axiomatic. For more than a century, it functioned as a given in public argument. Only rarely did it call for an argument itself.

Keep reading for more, including a disagreement with Noll regarding how to interpret prior generations’ disputes over how to read the Bible, in this case about chattel slavery.

Two reviews, a pod, and a Pole

A roundup of links…

My colleague and friend David Kneip interviewed me on the podcast Live From the Siburt Institute. We talk a lot about Christian tradition and digital technology. A bit less buttoned up than I usually am on pods, I think.

In the latest issue of Interpretation, Joshua E. Leim reviews The Doctrine of Scripture. He’s very generous. Here’s the last paragraph:

This is undoubtedly an excellent book, from which anyone hoping to reflect carefully—indeed devotionally—on the gift of Scripture will profit greatly. That is not to say that I agreed with everything in it. It seems to me, for example, that East leaves too little space for the disruptive potential of Scripture, i.e., its ability to stand over the church and rebuke it. Or, as another example, while East certainly does not reject tout court modern academic approaches to Scripture, he tends to lump together “biblical scholars” and their aims (e.g., pp. 183, 135, 137 n. 62) as problematic. Those concerns notwithstanding, this is a beautifully written, compelling theological articulation of the doctrine of Christian Scripture.

Likewise, in the latest issue of The Expository Times, Gregory Vall reviews The Church’s Book. He too is kind! Last paragraph:

This volume is a work of constructive criticism, and Brad East has mastered the genre. His critiques do not result in the denigration of the theological systems he engages. Rather, they disclose what is of true and lasting value in each of them. East’s own theological perspective proves to be broadly and deeply catholic and genuinely ecumenical. His writing is clear, precise, and refreshingly free of baroque diction and pretentious rhetoric.

Finally, Sławomir Zatwardnicki, who is part of the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Wrocław, Poland, has taken an interest in my work. He has written not one but two articles engaging The Doctrine of Scripture, albeit in Polish—not a tongue in which I have any facility. Nevertheless, I wanted to acknowledge this gift with gratitude as well as offer links for anyone who does know Polish:

• ‘Brada Easta doktryna Pisma Świętego,’ in Biblica et Patristica Thoruniensia

• ‘Protestant krytycznie o „sola Scriptura”. Brada Easta argumenty przeciw reformacyjnemu pryncypium,’ in Teologia w Polsce

A blurb, a reply, a review

A quick link round-up.

First, I neglected to mention the publication, earlier this spring, of a posthumous work by Robert Jenson titled The Trinity and the Spirit: Two Essays from Christian Dogmatics. Almost forty years ago Jenson collaborated on a remarkable multivolume work called Christian Dogmatics, coauthored with his fellow Lutherans Carl Braaten, Gerhard Forde, Philip Hefner, Paul Sponheim, and Hans Schwartz. The folks at Fortress pulled out Jenson’s contributions to that work and made a book out of them. My endorsement is on the back cover (alongside Bruce Marshall’s); here’s the full blurb:

Robert Jenson's contribution to the multi-authored Christian Dogmatics in the early 1980s has always been the most underrated part of his corpus, for the simple reason that few readers ever happened upon it. This stand-alone republication is therefore a gift to all readers of Jenson, whether seasoned veterans or those new to this great American theologian. The whole work is worthy of one's attention, but the section on the Holy Spirit is alone worth the price of the book. The ongoing reception of Jenson's thought will be bolstered by having his full pneumatology ready to hand, and the church will be edified once more by a pastor, scholar, and doctor of the sacred page whose love for the Lord and for his bride suffused all that he said and did, to the very end of his life.

What are you waiting for? Go buy the book!

Second: In the latest issue of First Things, both Ephraim Radner and Carl Trueman have written letters responding to my essay two issues ago on “Theology in Division.” The letters are generous and thoughtful. I do my best to reply in kind.

Third: My review of R. B. Jamieson and Tyler R. Wittman’s Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis in the International Journal of Systematic Theology is available to read in an early online version. Here’s the money graf:

The book is a triumph. It is a work of rich scholarship that remains accessible, stylishly written, spiritually nourishing, even devotional, while offering useful practical guidance for serious readers to avoid error and seek the living God in Holy Scripture. It does so not only by talking about the text but by exegeting it, with attentive care, on just about every page. One can only hope this book will become assigned reading in seminaries until such time as historical criticism releases its chokehold on the hermeneutical imaginations of pastors and scholars alike.

That comes about halfway through the review. I do raise some critical questions later, but this summary judgment is the relevant takeaway. Another book for you to buy.

Speaking of which. A friend alerted me to the fact that my second book—The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context—is available on Amazon for under $17. It’s usually $50! Nab a copy while it’s cheap, y’all! Bundle it with Wittman/Jamieson and Jenson. Come to think of it, that trifecta wouldn’t be unfitting…

Around the web

It’s been a happy last month, in terms of reviews and references across the web. I already linked in a previous post to the double-review of my two books on Scripture in Christian Century. Here are some other links and bits of news, gathered here, as in the olden days, on the blog, since I don’t have a Twitter or Facebook profile from which to share these things with the world:

• Cole Hartin reviews The Doctrine of Scripture in the latest Scottish Journal of Theology. He’s very kind, though he doesn’t think it’s perfect. He does call the book, and I quote, “jaunty” in the opening line of the review. Jaunty!

• Brandon Crowe reviews The Doctrine of Scripture in the latest issue of The Expository Times. He’s less enamored of the book, understandably so from his Reformed perspective. I do wish he might have found some virtues in the work, granted our theological disagreements. Though perhaps he didn’t find (m)any to speak of.

• I have it on good authority that reviews of The Doctrine of Scripture are imminently forthcoming in Stone-Campbell Journal, co-written by C. Leonard Allen and Lauren Smelser White, and in Pro Ecclesia, written by Brett Vanderzee. Also a review of The Church’s Book in The Expository Times by Gregory Vall. I’ve heard about others through the grapevine, but nothing as concrete or imminent.

• The week of Thanksgiving, Christianity Today published a short piece by Kaitlyn Schiess called “Thanks Be to God for Scripted Gratitude.” It references The Church’s Book alongside J. Todd Billings and Ellen Davis (not too shabby company, that) to talk about giving liturgical thanks for the reading of Scripture in worship. A former student of mine who follows Schiess pointed me to it. Lovely!

• On Thanksgiving Day, Comment published a wonderful essay by Caitrin Keiper, an editor at Plough and The New Atlantis I’ve had the pleasure to work with before. It’s called “Heartbeat of the World,” and uses her own story of giving birth to think about natality, motherhood, Christmas, and C-sections. She graciously quotes from my essay for Christian Century a few years back called “Birth on a Cross.” Very much worth a read.

• Back in April, Trevin Wax wrote a piece for The Gospel Coalition called “Bible Reading in an Age of Double Literacy Loss.” It uses my reflections on this blog about literal and biblical illiteracy as a point of departure for thinking about lay reading of the Bible today. Thanks to Trevin for a stimulating response.

• Finally, I noticed that, sometime after AAR/SBL/Thanksgiving, my second book—The Church’s Book (I know, I know, writing it out like that is so clunky)—which is usually a whopping $50, is now selling for a hair under $25. Buy it today! Even if it means patronizing the Bezos Beast. I’ll give you preemptive absolution, just this one time.

A double review of my books in The Christian Century

A few days ago a co-authored review of both my books on the Bible—The Doctrine of Scripture (2021) and The Church’s Book (2022)—appeared in The Christian Century. It was written by Zen Hess and Chris Palmer. The title is “We Do Not Read Alone.” Here’s a taste, from about a third of the way through:

East writes with engaging confidence as he moves through the writings of Webster, Jenson, and Yoder. It is no small contribution to offer charitable and careful interpretations of these three men’s doctrines of scripture. But East goes beyond the descriptive. The Church’s Book begins to lay the groundwork for an account of what scripture is. He gestures toward this in the final two chapters of The Church’s Book and turns to it more fully in The Doctrine of Scripture.

The latter book feels like it’s written to a more immediate audience: his students. East teaches at Abilene Christian University, in the heartland of American evangelicalism. If you live in Texas, like we do, it’s not hard to imagine him strolling through coffee shops filled with young Christians, their note-scribbled Bibles open, wondering how their underlined words will reveal God’s presence to them. East, we imagine, invites these students to deepen their reading practices and to move from the individual toward the communal, showing how scripture can be more fully understood within the economy of salvation and the historic faith of all God’s people. East’s basic word to his students is this: scripture needs the church as much as the church needs scripture.

They’re not wrong. It almost feels like they’ve been following me around, or interviewing my students. It’s eerie.

Go read the whole thing. It is generous, gracious, perceptive, and thoughtful. (Is this what being reviewed is always like?) I’m gratified and grateful. Thanks to the authors and to the editors at the magazine.

Rules for reviewing and being reviewed

Twelve rules for writing a book review:

1. The subject of the review should be the book and its ideas, not you or your ideas. If you are inclined to write a piece you could have written had you never read the book in question, beg off immediately.

2. Any reader of your review should know, after reading it, who the author is and in particular what the book is about.

3. A review should give the reader some taste of the prose, some sense of the voice of the author and not only the author as mediated by your voice.

4. The object of your review is the book as written, not the book as you would have written it.

5. If the review is under 1,000 words, then you do not have space to formulate either a wholesale critique of the book or an alternative argument. You have space, instead, for a few small criticisms or one main criticism.

6. Most books are bad, but few books are all bad. Find something positive to say about the book under almost any circumstances. (As Roger Ebert liked to say, don’t be parsimonious in your joy.)

7. It is all too easy to write a “take down.” Don’t do that. A book must be unremittingly wicked or dangerously foolish to merit the critical shotgun blast. And if you’re eager to pull the trigger, that’s a sign that you shouldn’t.

8. Be charitable: imagine why someone might think this book worth writing, exactly in the way it was written.

9. Be disinterested: if you have personal animus against the author or some reason to wish him or her ill, do not write the review. A reviewer is an arbiter, of merit and of preference, and the reader should be able to trust that the reviewer is a fair judge in the matter. Don’t be a hack.

10. Be critical, but not cheap. Hold the book to a high standard, but don’t go looking for flaws, and don’t view your review as an occasion to parade each of those flaws before the mocking eyes of a mob. If you expect the book to be substantive, hold yourself to the same standard; don’t suckerpunch an author under any conditions, but certainly not by means of a double standard.

11. If the form is a review essay, then your voice and views and arguments rightly enter the field of play. But it remains a review essay, not an essay simpliciter. Your many tangents, comments, and reflections ought to circle or spiral around the subject and substance of the book, intersecting at crucial moments. All of the above still applies; in fact, it applies more stringently. The review essay is a longer leash, but a tighter one.

12. In sum: Review unto others as you would have them review unto you.

Twelve rules for being reviewed:

1. To be read, by anyone, for any reason at all, is an honor and a privilege. Most authors go their whole lives without an audience to speak of. Be grateful.

2. To be reviewed is therefore a double honor. Not just an individual reader but multiple people—with busy lives, deadlines, finite attention, not to mention editorial demands, publication schedules, and a readership of some sort—decided that your book was worthy of public attention. Get down on your knees and thank God!

3. A review is not a personal comment on the quality of your character. It is not an expression of like or dislike. It is not an act of friendship or unfriendship. It is an intellectual (possibly scholarly) assessment of the quality of your writing: its style, its substance, its contribution to the world of letters and ideas. Receive it as such.

4. Do not write, give up the writing life altogether, if you fear or resent or otherwise cannot handle being reviewed. It is a vulnerable and often nasty experience. Being an author is not for you if you are, shall we say, a touchy person. Defensiveness is never a good look, but for authors—whose entire job description is assessing others (and their ideas) and being assessed (for the same)—it is a sorry state indeed.

5. A bad review is not the end of the world. It is to be expected. It is the ordinary run of things. It may hurt. But for a writer, getting a bad review is just another Tuesday. Likely as not, the review won’t matter. Sometimes, bad press is good press. Sometimes, even, the reviewer might be onto something.

6. A largely positive review that includes modest criticism is not a bad review. Every author wants adulation and affirmation. But even the best reviews place some question mark here or there next to the book’s claims. Charles Taylor and Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Ehrenreich and Mary Karr are allowed to expect “Good Reviews.” (Though, to be clear, all of them have gotten bad reviews!) You and I are not.

7. Because you are not a perfect writer and no one has ever written a perfect book, you should not only be unsurprised by criticisms of your work, you should expect and even welcome them. Go into a review presupposing the reviewer to be a good-faith interlocutor. What might they have to teach you, including about your own work? Probably not nothing. Learn!

8. Credentials will not save you. Do not use them as a crutch or as a lifeline. It doesn’t matter what letters run after your name or how many degrees hang on your wall. “Experts” write bad books all the time. No one is disregarding your training by suggesting your work needs improvement. (Don’t you agree that it does?)

9. Do not go reading in between the lines. Do not impute to the reviewer something that he or she has not put down in black and white. Do not suggest ulterior motives; do not conjure unstated beliefs; do not make accusations of malice. Do not go on the hunt for reasons to justify yourself in the court of public opinion. Most important, do not take the review as a personal slight, as though the reviewer has done you an injustice. That is a category mistake. Reviewers may be—they are allowed to be and sometimes encouraged to be—mean, caustic, brutal, uncouth, biting, sarcastic, disparaging, dismissive. Are you surprised? Welcome to the world of writers!—just about the most insecure, miserable, miserly, skeptical, and suspicious crew around. They are not easily pleased. You are unlikely to prove an exception.

10. If you receive a genuinely, objectively disingenuous review, a vicious piece of spite animated by everything but an unbiased evaluation of your work—then kindly ignore it. If you have the will power, don’t read it; if you do read it, don’t give it a second’s thought, don’t share it with others, don’t write about it, don’t reply to it, don’t respond in kind. Pretend that it doesn’t exist, that it was never written. Any such review wants your blood up as a result: that’s why it was written in the first place. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Like the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest, does an unfair, ugly review exist if the author doesn’t promote it and the world doesn’t read it? Answer: No. So don’t feed the trolls.

11. Where do trolls live and move and have their being? On Twitter, and social media generally. The most important thing you can do, then, is to delete every one of your social media accounts, Twitter above all. I repeat: Get. Off. Twitter. Twitter is poison, but it’s an addictive poison for writers. In truth, it’s nothing but an endless diet of empty calories for attention-starved, affirmation-seeking scribblers. But it never leaves you full. It just makes you hungrier and looking the worse for wear. For not only is it a giant waste of time. Not only does it steal your focus and rob your capacity for sustained, thoughtful attention. Not only does it warp your sense of the world. It’s bad for your writing. Without exception, every writer who spends time on Twitter is worse for it. So the very best thing you can do, hands down, is log off entirely, and for good.

12. But since there will, alas, continue to be writers either who suppose Twitter is good for them (I’ve never met one of these in the wild, but I’m told they exist) or (more likely) who know it’s bad but see certain benefits as personally or professionally indispensable, here’s how to navigate being reviewed on Twitter:

    1. Follow rules 1-11 above; they still apply in full.

    2. Always and only express gratitude for being reviewed at all.

    3. Share links indiscriminately, and don’t prejudice readers with passive aggressive framing.

    4. No matter what, do not make Twitter a therapist’s couch for your wounded ego. It is impossible to overstate how sad and pitiable this is. Come feel sorry for me—a review of my work was mildly critical! It even used a mean tone and a loud voice! Unfair, am I right? Get over yourself. The very fact that your instinct is to run to Twitter or Instagram to fish for compliments and bask in your followers’ pity party is prima facie evidence that the review in question was on to something. You are earning no one’s respect, and only confirming priors you’d rather not confirm. Avoid this at all costs.

    5. Do not use any review as an opportunity to hold an online referendum on the character, integrity, or credentials of the reviewer or of the venue in which the review appeared. Remember, apart from the merits of such a question or of the quality of a particular review or of your feelings in response to it: your followers constitute an echo chamber. There is no reason to listen to anything they have to say—even more than you, they are likely to perceive written criticism as a personal affront rather than what it is: business as usual. The temptation is great, certainly if you have a bona fide following or sizable readership. But don’t give in. Resistance is not futile.

    6. The sad fact is that (a) popular authors have modeled this habit for up-and-coming writers as an unquestioned norm rather than as a cautionary tale; (b) this trend is itself the leading symptom of the poor health that besets the current writing–reviewing(–academic–journalist–publication) ecosystem; (c) following the trend, rather than avoiding it, perpetuates the very dysfunction everyone is suffering from and seeking relief from. It’s certainly true that an individual writer opting out makes only a minor difference, maybe no difference at all in the grand scheme of things. But there’s no reason to be part of the problem, once you know it’s a problem. And opting out will absolutely make a difference to you: your writing, your mental and emotional health, and much else besides. So get out while you can, if you can. You won’t regret it.

I’m in FT on Andrew Root and “the church in the immanent frame”

Today First Things published my review of Andrew Root’s new book, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age. Here’s how the review opens:

If there is one thing everyone agrees about in America, it is that churches are in decline. Agnosticism and apostasy have, as ideas and as habits, been trickling down from Western elites for three centuries. First they came for the mainline; then they came for Catholics; now they have come for evangelicals. The “nones” are rising and long-time parishes are shuttering. One hears of consultants being brought in to help local churches “die well.” Even in the Bible Belt, for every thriving congregation there are five on hospice care.

Andrew Root’s new book is therefore a timely one. Titled Churches and the Crisis of Decline, it speaks directly to churches and pastors looking to survive, if not thrive, in a time of disorienting collapse. The book offers a theological vision for faithful pastoral ministry and church life that draws upon the writings of a young Swiss pastor who lived in similarly trying times a century ago: Karl Barth. Root wants us to see Barth’s theology—especially his commentary on Romans—as pastoral above all: that is, written by a minister for ministers tasked with the proclamation of the gospel and the care of a congregation. Just as St. Thomas wrote the Summa Theologiae for the practical tasks of his fellow Dominicans, so Barth wrote the bullet-stopping volumes of the Kirchliche Dogmatik for fellow preachers of God’s word. Rather than leave Barth to the systematicians, Root wants to reclaim him for the pastors.

Click here to read the rest.

I’m in LARB on Hauerwas, Barth, and Christendom

This morning Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay review of mine on Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book, which came out earlier this year, titled Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth. Here is the opening paragraph:

THIS YEAR STANLEY Hauerwas turns 82 years old. To mark the occasion, he has published a book on Karl Barth, who died at the same age in 1968. The timing as well as the pairing is fitting. Barth is the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, and probably the most widely read of any theologian over the last 100 years. As for Hauerwas, since the passing of Reinhold Niebuhr in 1971, he has been the most prolific, influential, and recognizable Christian theological thinker in American public life. Barth somehow graced the cover of Time magazine in 1962, even though he was a Swiss Calvinist whose books on technical theology are so thick they could stop bullets. Hauerwas has never made the cover, but in 2001 Time did call him “America’s best theologian.” That fall, Oprah even invited him onto her show. In short, given Hauerwas’s age and stature, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth has the inevitable feel of a valediction.

Click here for the rest.

This is now my fifth time writing for LARB; the first came in the fall of 2017. It is never not a pleasure. It’s a challenge writing about Christian theology for a highbrow audience that is neither religious nor academic—but one I’ve learned to relish. Usually my essays there come in between 4,000 and 5,000 words, but this one is shorter, at about 2,000. I hope it does both Hauerwas and Barth honor; I try to use the occasion to raise some important issues. Enjoy.

Burkeman’s atelic self-help

Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is well worth your time. It is a splendid meditation on what it means to be a finite creature and what follows for making decisions, down to the most mundane, about how to spend one’s vanishingly small allotment of hours in this, our only world, with this, our only life. Like all Burkeman’s writing, the book is crisp, clear, well-researched, offered to the reader with a sincere smile of solidarity as well as a light touch. Like his other exercises in anti-self-help, Four Thousand Weeks is a gold mine for people obsessed with productivity, self-improvement, and endless to-do lists. That gold mine has a simple goal: for such people to cut it out. That is, to accept their limitations and to do what they are able, with pleasure, in the time they have with the people they love and the values they affirm. For the efficiency-obsessed, this message is doubtless a necessary tonic.

As I approached the end of the book, however, a single glaring weakness stuck out to me. It is a weakness shared by other entries in the genre today, including the very best. That weakness is simply put.

Neither Burkeman nor his other self-help authors can tell us the purpose or meaning of life.

Now, that may sound like rather unfair criticism. Who among us can articulate the purpose or meaning of life? Must it fit in a tweet? Be reducible to clickbait? How about the long title of a memoir?

But no, I’m not being unfair. Here’s why.

Burkeman wants his readers to see two things. First, that our lives are far shorter, far more limited, far less consequential, in a sense far less significant than we usually want to admit. We will almost certainly make no lasting difference in the world. The world will keep on spinning; the human race and/or the earth and/or the universe will endure perfectly well in our absence.

And that is true. But Burkeman goes on, second, to insist that this dose of reality is not (or should not be) depressing or frightening. Rather, it is a revelation, and a liberating one at that. It frees me from my narcissistic and false sense of my own self-importance. It bursts the bonds of my illusion of infinitude. Emancipated to see and accept my limits, I am enabled thereafter (and thereby) to live within them. And surely to live within the hard limits that bracket my life, whether or not I believe in them, is a recipe for happiness by comparison to the alternative.

But that “surely” is doing a lot of work in the previous sentence. Burkeman provides not one reason to suppose that human beings are built for happiness, living in accordance with our finitude or otherwise. Perhaps, instead, we have been programmed by natural selection to live a lie, the lie being our unbound immortality, and only so long as we believe in that are we (a) satisfied and/or (b) maximally productive. Perhaps we achieve great things only when we believe falsehoods about ourselves, our desires, or the world as a whole. Burkeman appears to be agnostic or atheist himself, which means that he must believe this to some extent. For most of civilization’s highest accomplishments—in music, art, architecture, and so on—have been conceived and produced by communities driven by zeal for God, for transcendence, for eternal life. Are we in a position to know, even and especially if we are secular believers in no intrinsic purpose apart from what remains after natural selection has done its work, that such ostensible illusions are not the requisite (false) premises for human and cultural greatness, not to mention happiness?

The answer is No, we are not. But there is more to say.

*

Burkeman rightly remarks on the pleasures of “atelic” practices. Walking in the woods, for example. There is no “point” to such a walk except the walk itself. It doesn’t lead to a product; there is no “winning” at such an endeavor. It is nothing but itself, and experiencing it is the only point of the practice: the telos is the doing of it, not something beyond or following it.

The problem is that Burkeman supposes, or assumes, that life is atelic: that the meaning of life lies not beyond itself, for it is its own point. The purpose of being human, on this view, is just the doing of it: to be human. But this doesn’t work, even on Burkeman’s own terms. There are at least three reasons why.

First, if an ordinary human being asks, What is the point or meaning of life?, it is inadequate to answer, The living of life. For the premise of the seeker’s question is that something beyond one’s life gives that life meaning, or purpose, or a point. So unless one is satisfied to reject the terms on which the question is asked, something more is required.

Second, then, Burkeman might have recourse to a constructivist answer: namely, that the purpose of one’s life is what one decides that purpose is. So the question remains meaningful but is turned back on the asker: Well, what do you value? But this answer fails in multiple respects. For one, it makes life’s meaning arbitrary, even relative. By the same token it suggests a fearsome causal sequence, as if the meaning of my life were what I value, and what I value is what makes it meaningful. In other words, my apparently random act of valuing (whether received from my genetic and social inheritance or chosen autonomously as a mature adult) carries an impossible burden: to create life-level significance where there is none in itself.

Does Burkeman, or anyone else in the self-help crowd, believe that ordinary human beings are capable not only of this purpose-conferring power but of self-consciously wielding it, that is, of engaging knowingly in making their lives teleological from within? As a matter of fact, while plenty of that crowd does believe this, I don’t think Burkeman does. But then, whence his confidence in essentially atelic normies self-bestowing meaning on their otherwise meaningless lives, underwritten by the active self-awareness that they are doing so while they are doing so?

This is not even to mention that, absent some antecedently given and shared human telos—some basic but substantive account of the goods and ends common to human life—“what I value” or “what I make the point of my existence” or “what I find meaningful in human life” or “what I want to spend my 4,000 weeks doing” may with perfect consistency be evil. Perhaps my self-constructed telos is serial murder, or ferocious avarice, or treating women like objects to be used and disposed of, or belittling children, or making the earth uninhabitable for future generations. When “the good” is a function solely of my own will, it is transmogrified into something called “value,” which is just another name for whatever I happen to want, prefer, or take pleasure in. The realm of “values” is paradise lost, which is to say, it is hell; as Milton has Satan declare:

All hope excluded thus, behold, instead
Of us, outcast, exiled, his new delight,
Mankind, created, and for him this World!
So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new World, shall know.

Third and finally, therefore, Burkeman has no answer or antidote to despair. It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that I’ve written about Burkeman once before, in a post responding to his review of a book by Jordan Peterson. I note the very same problem there. Burkeman seems genuinely not to countenance the seriousness of the problem of despair, precisely as a philosophical or theological problem. Imagine a young man who reads Burkeman’s book and finds himself persuaded that life is short, each of us is unimportant, and the whole shebang is without any meaning except what we bootstrap for ourselves. Far from embracing limits and finding, to his pleasant surprise, that he is even more economically productive than before, he kills himself instead. After all, he came to the conclusion that life is meaningless, and his self-assessment was just: he was neither impressive nor sufficiently special to manufacture enough meaning to get on with life without unmitigated pain, self-loathing, and anguish. Best to avoid that, all things considered. Whom will it affect, anyway? The universe goes on, without so much as a flinch.

There is not a doubt in my mind that such a scenario would fill Burkeman, who seems enormously decent and thoughtful, with sadness, compassion, and lament. Obviously he does not want anyone to commit suicide, not least someone who reads his book. He intends his message, as I said above, to be one of freedom, not bondage.

But I see no reason, given the parameters of his project, to forestall the judgment that atelic finitude is a cause for despair rather than joy. Why view limits as anything other than chains? Many people have seen them as just that, including some of the wisest of our writers and thinkers. Indeed more than a few of them, consistent with their principles, chose suicide as young or middle-aged men and women for this very reason: to escape the bonds of life, which held them in sway the way a despot might. Only by forcing death’s hand could they exert real agency in the sole respect that mattered: how and when one goes out, and on whose terms.

I don’t mean to pick on Burkeman (who in any case is safe and secure from being picked on by anyone, let alone me). Every other self-help and productivity guru is far, far more liable to the charges I’ve laid out than he is. But in another way he is the most guilty of this lacuna, because his book takes on board many of the ideas that despairing, existentialist, relativistic, constructivist, and nihilistic philosophers have proffered throughout the last two centuries. So he ought to know better. Yet he seems honest-to-God incurious about the fork in the road he constantly faces. The reader knows that he sees it as a fork, because whenever he comes to it, he reassures the reader, in assertive and consoling tones, that the annunciation of their atelic finitude is good news rather than bad. That implies the possibility of interpreting it as bad. Yet apart from his own confidence and kindness, we are provided no reasons to share his cheerful demeanor, at least no reasons that are not question-begging or that do not fall prey to the criticisms outlined above.

*

Two dissonances mark the book from beginning to end, and it is these dissonances that illuminate, not to say justify, the book’s failure to reckon with the terrifying possibility (a) that life is in fact meaningless or (b) that some, perhaps many, people, faced with a life made meaningful only by their own self-generated efforts, would judge it to be meaningless (whether or not they would be right to do so). Those dissonances are politics and religion.

Burkeman’s politics are clearly left-liberal, if of a moderate bent. Numerous times he admirably allows the convictions to which he has honestly come, about finitude and the unknown future and the relative unimportance of my or your life in the grand scheme of things, to override or modify political convictions he might once have believed or might, in the present, feel social pressure to maintain. Nevertheless, there are odd occasional interruptions of his otherwise steady emphasis on that one tiny sliver of a time-bound life you and I have to live. These interruptions almost always concern what he calls (always with nodding approval) “activism,” but especially climate change. It seems to me that he needs it to be true not only that the earth today is in dire straits (a premise I have no reason to doubt or dismiss) but also that urgent cooperative political action on its behalf, namely, making every effort to keep it from becoming worse, makes intuitive and even self-evident sense. But the truth is that it does not. Not, at least, on his own terms, terms he believes you and I may and ought to share. There are quite a few additional premises, premises that might call into question some of his own, required to cross that particular logical finish line. Yet he seems not to notice. Why?

I think it has something to do with his calmly but firmly non-religious beliefs. I call them “non-” rather than “anti-” religious because he doesn’t have an axe to grind against religion, and he is laudably open-minded about learning from religious and spiritual authors. (The self-help crowd may be alone among our public-facing and popular writers to read religious and theological texts seriously.) For example, I was delighted to see Burkeman quote Walter Brueggemann’s book on the Sabbath. He is also an avid reader of Buddhists and other adherents of Eastern, non-Abrahamic, and spiritual-not-religious thinkers. Again, I say, this is all to the good.

Burkeman himself, though, is non-religious, or at least presents himself as such. There is no God, at least one we may know or name. There is no afterlife. There is no soul, no eternity, no transcending the confines of this life, this world, these 4,000 weeks. Now Burkeman makes no arguments for this perspective, nor even alludes to them. He takes it for granted. So far as I can tell, he takes it for granted not only for himself or his readers but for all “modern” people living in the secular West.

That’s fine. He’s certainly not obliged to be a believer, or even to take seriously the counterclaims of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology. But I do think the shortcomings of his book would be alleviated were he to do so. He would see that it is not obvious that a finitude absent God and ruled by death is a live worth living, much less a life capable of being made meaningful by one’s own labors. In this St. Paul and Nietzsche are of one mind. If Christ is not raised, Christians of all people are most to be pitied. Why? Because, as Paul says only a few verses later, death is the enemy of God—the “last” enemy, as he puts it—which means that death is the enemy of life, for God is the source and sustainer of life. Life without God is life without life. Or as St. Augustine puts it (anticipating Heidegger, but drawing a different conclusion), life defined by the inevitability and overawing power of death is not so much a life lived toward death as itself a living death. Which is no life at all.

That is why Burkeman is wrong to agree with the climate activist Derrick Jensen that life without hope is the only life we have, such that hopelessness is a spur to living life to the full rather than a sap to life’s vitality. To write such a thing is to betray a profound ignorance of actual human beings. Even if it were true—that is, even were it an undeniable and objective fact that there is no God, no hope, no meaning in life except what we construct of it and for it—it would be a recipe for despair for most of us, for all but the most heroic, most stoic, most self-possessed. Whether or not that tells us anything about the proposition’s likely truth or falsehood, to suppose that it is actually, really, believe-me-I’m-giving-it-to-you-straight a relief from unhappiness is pure folly. I share with Burkeman the premise that the truth sets one free. But I have grounds for believing it. He does not. His philosophy desperately wants, even needs, objective truth and personal happiness to be positively correlated. They may not be, however. The relationship between them might be inverted: the more of one the less of the other. Maybe there is no relationship at all. Best to face that uncomfortable fact, to admit it at the outset as an ineliminable question mark set next to all of one’s most cherished hopes.

But then, that would be to admit that hope is irreducible to the act of making sense of human life. And not only hope, but the irreducibly given. If we creatures who by nature not only pursue happiness but seek the truth, then we discover a telos within ourselves driving us beyond ourselves toward that which lies before, behind, and above us. The truth satisfies because and only because (a) it is other than us and (b) we were made to know it. That is, we were made for it. And it turns out that “it” is not an object but a person. St. Augustine was right all along; humans are teleological—rational, desiring, social, liturgical—creatures who, furthermore, cannot help themselves. We are not past saving, though. We just need to know where to look. Augustine knew. And so he prayed:

To praise You is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

Three new essays published: on chronic illness, supersessionism, and blood

I’ve had three new pieces published this week (with two more coming in the next six weeks: when it rains, it pours). Each is a longish review essay of a recently published book by a major author:

The first reviews of Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Titled “Dragons in the Deep Places,” the essay reflects on theodicy, nature, prosperity, and the fragility of medical epistemology, rooted in Douthat’s experience of chronic Lyme disease.

The second reviews Timothy P. Jackson’s Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism. Titled “Still Supersessionist?,” the essay follows closely Jackson’s argument that the Shoah was a unique crime directed as the Jews because they were Jews, and therefore calls for theological analysis of anti-Semitism as a sin. I affirm that argument while taking issue with some of the premises and conclusions he deploys in the book.

The third reviews Eugene F. Rogers Jr.’s Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk. Titled “Power in the Blood,” the essay explores and extends Rogers’ probing observations about blood’s role in society, culture, religion, sacrifice, and Christian faith.

It’s a pleasure to see these three pieces come out in a three-day span. Sometimes you read and write and revise and revise and revise, for months on end, only to wonder when anyone will see your work. Well: here it is, folks! Enjoy.

New essay: “Market Apocalypse” in Mere Orthodoxy

My latest is up at Mere Orthodoxy this morning. Titled “Market Apocalypse,” it’s a review essay of Rodney Clapp’s new book, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Here’s a taste:

Clapp’s book is titled Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. But you might imagine it renamed, à la Patrick Deneen’s bestseller, Why Neoliberalism Failed. Like Deneen, Clapp wants to draw critical attention to what is hiding in plain sight. “What goes unnamed” in such circumstances “is the neoliberal framework that entraps us all.” Entrapment is the proper image for Clapp’s view: we are seduced and deceived by neoliberalism’s lure, but once we fall for the trick, we’re stuck. And the consequences are comprehensive: “Neoliberalism has transformed us — heart, body, and soul.”

Clapp is uninterested, however, in merely naming neoliberalism: many writers and scholars have already done that. He wants to name it as a Christian. That is, he wants to reveal neoliberalism for what it is in theological perspective, and to propose a specifically theological alternative. He thinks this task crucial because neoliberalism can be neither fully understood nor adequately opposed without reference to God, specifically the gospel of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, and his people, the church.

Go read the rest here.

New essay published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: "Enter Paul"

I have a new essay published this morning over in The Los Angeles Review of Books, titled "Enter Paul," on Paula Fredriksen's two latest books, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle and When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (both from Yale University Press). Here's a sample:

"Put it this way: an itinerant rabbi from the Galilee — the backwaters of Palestine — leads a popular movement among the Jews, one that comes to an ignominious end when he is executed for sedition by the Roman authorities. Some of his followers form a small community in Jerusalem, proclaiming that not only was this rabbi and prophet the longed-for Messiah of Israel, but he is alive, in glory with God, vested with impregnable power and heavenly authority. These messianic Jews share goods in common and worship daily at the temple, praying and waiting eagerly for Jesus’s imminent return, when he will drive out the pagan occupiers and restore his people’s fortunes.

"Pause the frame there. Nothing about this picture offers even a hint that this same community — one defined by exclusive loyalty to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord — will, centuries hence, find itself filling the Roman Empire, legalized and endorsed by that same empire, dominated by gentiles, not Jews, and led by men like Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.

"How did this happen? Why did it happen? To answer, we need to leave Augustine behind and follow Fredriksen into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century of the common era, specifically Jewish life under the thumb of the Roman Empire."

Read the rest.

New review in the latest issue of Christian Century

I've got a critical review of Craig Carter's new book, Reading Scripture with the Great Tradition, in the latest issue of The Christian Century. Here's a taste:

"The spiritual sense that [premodern] saints sought—which is to say, prayed for, delighted in, and contemplated—was not a 'stable' 'layer' of meaning 'residing' in the text. It was the in principle infinite sacramental signification of human signs divinely authored and illumined. For the res of scripture, as a whole and in each of its parts, is Christ. Just how any one particular text of scripture signifies Christ, not to mention just what Christ might use such a text to say to the believing reader under the Spirit’s guidance, is limited neither by human authors’ intentions nor by ordinary rules of grammar and syntax, nor by the capacities, desires, or convictions of readers, believing or pagan. It is determinate, but only insofar as Christ is determinate. And Christ makes himself present and known in endless ways on countless occasions: in the determinate elements of the Eucharist, in the determinate bodies of the faithful, in the determinate words of the sermon, in the determinate sufferings of the least of these. Just so, we should expect countless, indeed endless, manifestations of Christ on the sacred page."

Read the whole thing here.