Book Reviews: Kym Bills 2023, 2024, 2025
Fergus McGinley, The God Who Doesn’t Exist: God in An Evolutionary World, ATF Press, 2025, 166pp. (A Forum for Theology in the World, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2025).
McGinley has a broad educational, theological and life background and is a member of the PCNet SA Task Group. He utilises a colloquial and pedagogically reinforcing writing style. Biblical quotations are mostly from the NIV, with a few from the KJB and one from the NRSVUE. The book is well-edited. McGinley also runs a relevant website: antitheologia.com
The book begins and ends highlighting forms of ‘polycrisis’ that threaten planetary survival which he links to widespread atheism especially in western countries, labelled a cultural evil that ignores or denies the existence of a God of love active in the universe and on earth. McGinley considers that much atheism is in response to ‘the God Who Doesn’t Exist’, a God created by ourselves through the organised religion/s of the established Church. McGinley’s ‘evolutionary tale’ follows three ‘entwined’ stories: the evolution of our species to self-consciousness; the unfolding of God’s ‘plan of salvation’; and human development from childhood to maturity with “parents acting, critically, in loco dei, in the place of God”.
His eventual solution to polycrisis requires a ‘great turning’ and McGinley concludes (p159): “The transformation of even just one person, from natural selfishness to serious selflessness, is beyond our powers, let alone the transformation of cultural realities, of systems of ‘wickedness’ which transcend individuals. This goes to the core of the thesis we are presenting in this book: only outside intervention can save us. … There is no solution, in fact, other than faith in and obedience to the invisible God of love.”
McGinley develops his argument using what he terms ‘anti-theology’ that starts from the ‘obvious fact of God’s non-existence’ (i.e, the God of religion) to demonstrate the existence of the invisible God of love. He argues that such a God is the ‘only possible explanation’ for a human capacity for selfless love, without which humans would have torn ‘ourselves to bits long ago’. While supportive of Darwinian evolution, he criticises science for being overly focussed on physical causes. Here his argument has similarities to Kant’s ‘transcendental argument’ used by Roy Bhaskar to better understand science using philosophical ‘Critical Realism’. This includes ‘powers and tendencies’ as well as physical causality. McGinley’s discussions of multiple fields (gravitational etc) and of ‘agency’ are compatible with this. However, he goes a step further to suggest ‘general agency’ by an invisible God of love who powers emergence and organises the universe (c.f. my review of Stassler’s Waves in an Impossible Sea). A God of general agency intervention seems to reopen issues of ‘freewill and determinism’ and of unnecessary suffering (c.f. a God of love).
Definitions of altruism are notoriously difficult and contested as Stanford Philosophy experts summarise (see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism/ & entries on both ‘biological’ and ‘empirical’ approaches to altruism). McGinley keeps ‘hammering home’ that selfless love is not natural and ‘little narcissist’ children require parental modelling based, originally, on God’s love. While rejecting ‘The Fall’ he argues that: “Sin is nothing more than natural human selfishness … We are born into a culture of sin-created evil … we are truly, naturally, selfish, bad people … [requiring] repentance … On our own, lost in a natural state of selfish sin, we are powerless to even get to the point of repentance, let alone come out the other side into a new transformed way of living”. Yet psychological research by Warneken et al suggests selflessness is a natural state among toddlers. Cooperative altruism appears to have provided an evolutionary advantage to homo sapiens. But adult survival also requires taking responsibility for one’s individual welfare and not selfishly relying on others.
McGinley argues: “Selfless love, in the moment of deciding to act selflessly, involves a letting go of any thought or possibility of personal advantage”. Kahneman’s Thinking, fast and slow argues that ‘fast thinking’ (less than 10 seconds), based on emotion or when overwhelmed, tends to be poorer for strategy but reflects an evolved cooperation and less selfishness than ‘slow thinking’. The quotation seems to underplay consequences, the possibility of a ‘win-win’ outcome, or that a selfless altruism that helps others need not involve self-sacrifice.
He is largely negative regarding the Christian Church after New Testament times and its role in hierarchy, colonialism and falsely teaching a God requiring the sacrificial atoning death of Jesus to address individual sin and escape Hell and reach an other-worldly Heaven. Liberal and progressive Christianity also do not escape criticism: “Liberalism … Like modern atheism replaces the old counterfeit Gospel with a new one … the new God it constructed to replace the old one is one who barely exists, a disempowered, non-interventionist God existing only faintly on the margins of life. The incarnation itself – the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus – is no longer a unique, explicit, historical intervention, rather, in more recent progressive Christian accounts, for example, an abstract, general, natural principle of life-death-rebirth.” Some of this has indeed been argued but it is far from being a consensus. McGinley is commendably open to the loving God’s presence in other religions and in aboriginal and native spirituality. He sees Jesus Christ as inaugurating ‘Humanity 2.0’.
McGinley considers that Jesus’ Kingdom’ is “an objective state of human relationships in the world based on selfless cooperation, inclusive of all people”. But in writing that this ‘is like ‘the ideal of democracy’ and that “genuine democracy and human rights seem to have come into the world exclusively through the Christian tradition” may be overly generous. Early New Testament communities that anticipated an imminent Second Coming would appear to be more like ideal socialist communes with religious leaders than voting democracies. Ancient Greece, Magna Carta and English Parliament, Enlightenment philosophers, and the French and American Revolutions roles in democracy and human rights did not just flow from the Christian tradition. I certainly agree that “liberal Christianity has had a profoundly positive impact on the development of social democracy in the west and around the globe”.
McGinley’s western-focussed diagnosis and solution seems unlikely to influence dictatorial autocrats such as in Russia, China and Iran (albeit increasingly the US). Sadly, I consider polycrisis options in McLaren’s book Life After Doom, that I recently reviewed, to be more realistic. Importantly, McGinley and McLaren agree that we need to selflessly cooperate to choose love and support each other to help institute God’s ‘Kingdom’ in this world. I do agree that a ‘great turning’ is possible in western countries as the full weight of polycrisis shakes all of our comfortable secular foundations leading to increased prayer and lament.
You can see that I did not fully support some of the arguments in the book. However, many are sound, interesting and important. For Progressive Christianity, I should emphasise that McGinley’s arguments led me to detailed questioning and thinking. The God Who Doesn’t Exist is therefore well recommended as a book providing highly engaging challenges.
Kym Bills, March 2025
Dr Matt Morgan, A Second Act: What Nearly Dying Teaches Us About Really Living, Simon & Schuster, 2025, 261pp.
Dr Matt Morgan is a 45-year-old Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Consultant doctor based in Cardiff who is married with two children. Unlike his parents, he is not a Christian but recognises the importance of spirituality and has Church links through the normal patterns of Welsh life and in dealing with critical illness, dying and death in daily work with patients and their friends, families, colleagues and the hospital chapel. His first book, published in 2020, was Critical: Stories from the Front Line of Intensive Care Medicine. Morgan ended that book with ‘simple’ words of advice to ‘Work hard, ask questions, be kind’ but writes that he would now prefer ‘Be kind, listen for answers, work hard at living life’.
A Second Act: What Nearly Dying Teaches Us About Really Living draws from a small red notebook that Morgan carries with him to record patient stories, particularly of those who are clinically dead but are among the ‘6 per cent club’ whose heart failure is not fatal. The book’s ten main chapters each highlight such a story, with a great deal of enrichment from Morgan’s own experience and medical, philosophical, psychological and literary wisdom. The chapters are bookended at one end by a Prologue based on the funeral of a cherished unmarried Aunt who died at age 97 and whose whole life was rich with love and service to family, friends and community. At the other end is a chapter in which recently Morgan and seven close friends celebrated their funerals and eulogies while still alive, and an associated Epilogue that encourages the practice to lead to a ‘Second Act’ of more meaningful life without nearly dying.
In chapter one, ‘Struck by Lightning’ one English teen friend died after being struck while the other survived his heart failure because he was slightly closer and able to receive from a nearby off-duty fireman CPR first. Random survivor’s guilt meant he relived the events daily but later his love for his son made life worthwhile. In chapter two ‘Blue Blood’ a mid-20s Italian pharmacist died of Covid until specialised equipment arrived to sufficiently oxygenate his blue blood to revive him. His post-death lessons included the power of words from his loving immediate family, doctors able to say be direct and say ‘I don’t know’, and healing through nature including planting trees in memorial of those who didn’t make it and those who cared for them.
In chapter three ‘Red Dust’ a FIFO worker in WA lithium mines had heart failure as a result of hefty wages that enabled consumerism, partying, and alcohol and drug addiction. He found meaning through ‘moments’ not drugs and things. In chapter four ‘Summer’ a young woman of that name with a history of depression, anorexia and attempted suicide had a relapse when life overwhelmed her and she swallowed sedatives that led to heart failure. During recovery, choosing the right people to be around, the love of her family and completing a mental health nursing course has given her renewed purpose.
In chapter five ‘Drowning not Waving’ a recreational fisher whose family was away for the weekend sought isolation but was swept out to sea and only revived by CPR because of a random conjunction of a handful of relevantly-experienced people. In chapter six ‘A Heart in a Jar’ congenital heart failure that would inevitably take the life of a young mother was avoided by a last-minute transplant.
In chapter 7 ‘Go Nuts’ a severe allergic reaction led to cardiac arrest for a young man who inadvertently ate cereal with tiny nuts. Seeking to vomit and his EpiPen could not counter the anaphylactic shock. He was revived in hospital and back at work within days. In chapter eight ‘3 Billion Beats’ (the average human number of heartbeats in life) an apparently fit similarly-aged intensive care doctor to Morgan had overworked himself in all areas of life. He would have died after heart failure without his wife’s CPR as their young children watched. He now does less and makes time for more music in his life.
In chapter nine ‘Heartless’ a former Welsh Rugby International recovered from a first heart attack that followed a playing chest injury but alcoholism lead, after five years, to another massive heart attack. Receiving help with alcoholism and self-forgiveness enabled him to become fit enough to be eligible for an artificial heart (which has no beat). In chapter ten ‘Frozen Solid’ a young mountaineer was caught on a ledge separated from his friend below in overnight freezing conditions and his unconscious body temperature was 26C when rescued. The cold enabled him to be revived after nine hours of heart failure and nine hours of CPR and 6 months later he was able to do what he loved and climb with his friend again.
Among other lessons outlined by Morgan along the way include the importance of crying to release stress, signal empathy and gratitude, and address grief and other emotional pain. Being present and remembering that ‘at our core we are all made of stories’. Look back at old photos and remember important events daily. Learn how to do CPR. Use checklists. Heed the advice of St David, Patron Saint of Wales, as he died whispering ‘Do the little things in life’ and find meaning in the small things. The ongoing wisdom in Viktor E. Frankel’s famous book Man’s Search for Meaning was cited several times.
This is a delightful and insightful book with many lessons for Progressive Christians and for each one of us individually and as members of communities – highly recommended.
Kym Bills, February 2025
Michael C. Jackson, Critical Systems Thinking: A Practitioner’s Guide, Wiley, 2024, 243pp.
“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong” H.L. Mencken, 1917, journalist and satirist known as the ‘sage of Baltimore’ (reprinted in his Prejudices: Second series, 1920).
The scientific method questions key assumptions and seeks to disprove established explanations almost as much as documenting evidence that may further confirm a theory or model. In the past century, much progress in science has come from the creation of new specialised disciplines and by splitting problems into constituent elements and addressing them. Often this scientific progress runs counter to ‘common sense’ and metaphors used to assist understanding are limited in their insight. Increasingly, problems are so complex that only a holistic ‘systems thinking’ approach that straddles multiple disciplines can address them. Examples include climate change, poverty, mass migration, and war. An understanding of systems thinking is important for a Progressive Christianity that preferences humble learning and questions to simple ‘facts’ of dogma and fundamentalism.
Emeritus Professor Dr Michael Jackson OBE has studied systems since 1978, with a first book on systems management published in 1991. In 2019 Wiley published his 700-page academic monograph Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity. It is not an easy read for non-academics and for the time-poor. Jackson’s 2024 Critical Systems Thinking: A Practitioner’s Guide is therefore reviewed as a much more likely to be accessed and read.
Around 2019, Jackson changed his long-term preference for using a form of philosophical ‘Critical Realism’ to underpin his ‘Critical Systems Thinking’ (CST) to instead favour a form of philosophical ‘Pragmatism’. In his latest book, Jackson argues that CST “is a systems approach that aims to assist decision-makers to better understand and address the complex issues they face”. His reviewed book contains the broad stated goal of “seeking to help people take decisions to improve situations that are of concern to them” and in particular to address increasingly complex local situational problems as well as ‘wicked’ global issues. The book incorporates less historical and theoretical material than the 2019 book and has a much greater focus on Critical Systems Practice (CSP) as a Weberian generalised ‘ideal type’ of ‘good systems practice’. In addition to an Introduction and Conclusion, the book has three main parts.
Part 1 ‘The Emergence of Critical Systems Thinking’ includes what Jackson considers to be ‘essential’ historical and philosophical background across three chapters. Competing systems thinking approaches and foundations, and the need to better understand emergence that produces systems with different properties at higher levels of complexity, leads to Jackson’s argument for a pluralistic approach to CSP underpinned by ‘Systemic Pragmatism’. He traces pragmatism’s heritage from Artistotle’s phronesis (practical wisdom) and ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’, Kant’s ‘pragmatic belief’, and especially from American 19th/20th century pragmatists C.S. Pierce, William James and John Dewey. Jackson considers that early systems thinkers Bogdanov, von Bertalanffy and Wiener all ‘lean towards’ philosophical pragmatism, as do a range of other writers (e.g., Deming) who address more general managerial and other problems.
Part 2 ‘Critical Systems Practice’ is the heart of the book and in five chapters considers how CST can be translated into practical action through four CSP ‘EPIC’ stages (Explore, Produce, Intervene, Check) each illustrated with examples and issues. Explore the situation of interest includes the use of five systemic perspectives termed: mechanical, interrelationships, organismic, purposeful and societal/environmental. To Produce an intervention strategy includes choosing an appropriate systems methodology from engineering, system dynamics, living systems, soft systems, and emancipatory systems. Intervene entails the flexible use of methodologies, models and methods and staying alert to the evolving situation of interest and being prepared to change. Check on progress requires systemic evaluation.
Part 3 ‘Towards a Systems Thinking World’ comprises one chapter in which Critical Systems Leadership (CSL) is held to be the approach that can best take advantage of the current upsurge in interest in Systems Thinking. Jackson argues that CSL can overcome barriers to successful implementation from the way it is presented and perceived and from various cultural and societal constraints and other contextual factors. CSL mindset, attributes, collaboration, ethics, and methodological competence are outlined which together can maximise CSP practical success.
Two general Systems Thinking classics cited by Jackson are: Peter Senge The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, and Donella Meadows Thinking in Systems: A Primer. More recently, Paul Salmon and colleagues wrote a chapter on Systems in the open source OHS Body of Knowledge (https://www.ohsbok.org.au/chapter-12-1-systems/). All three are recommended for readers who wish to know more about systems thinking. However, Jackson’s Critical Systems Thinking: A Practitioner’s Guide does add different and broader dimensions to the other material and deserves to be read alongside them. Critical Systems Thinking: A Practitioner’s Guide is not a simple ‘how to’ guide but is recommended.
Reviewed by Kym Bills January 2025
Paul E. Hardisty, In Hot Water: Inside the Battle to save the Great Barrier Reef. Affirm Press, 2024, 276pp.
This is an important book about the impact of human activity and climate change as seen through more than a century of the history, science and politics of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). I became an admirer of Dr Hardisty’s intellect and courage after we overlapped for several years in the mid-2010s while both employed by the CSIRO and based in Perth. Hardisty was head of the CSIRO’s Climate Adaption Science Program until it was cancelled under the Coalition Government led by Prime Minster, Tony Abbott, who considered climate change to be ‘crap’. Hardisty then led CSIRO’s Land and Water Business Unit and was critical of the new CSIRO CEO’s deep funding cuts for its scientists, and many in the Oceans and Atmosphere Business Unit, whose research linked to environmental and climate science. I am also a fan of Hardisty’s science-informed and climate-linked action novels.
Hardisty’s direct involvement with the 2300km long World Heritage listed GBR began in June 2017 when he was appointed CEO of the Australian Institute for Marine Science (AIMS) which is based near Townsville in Queensland. His term as CEO concluded in July 2023. AIMS is a scientifically independent Commonwealth Government research body with offices around the country and has a world-class reputation. The book provides both a personal insider view of the conflict involving “key actors attempting to shape the future of the reef since the major back-to-back bleaching events of 2016 and 2017” and “an exploration of the history of the reef” and why its protection is so important. For Hardisty, the GBR’s fate “is now inextricably linked to the fate of the planet, as ours is to both. The reef is a symbol of our struggle to rise above narrow self-interest and act for the common good.”
In Hot Water is packed with important data – both historical and scientific – but is rarely dry or boring. This is because of the author’s evident passion, willingness to name names, and to reveal his own emotions and occasional shortcomings, alongside pithy discussion of the latest science and its history. As an engineer-novelist Hardisty knows how to explain complex problems and to engage a readership. The history of the GBR also involves passionate and farsighted marine scientists and environmentalists.
In the course of the book we gain insight into the scientific basis for monitoring around 100 species of GBR corals and the threat they face as the oceans warm in response to inexorably increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide and methane). Hardisty’s hopeful note is that corals can be saved if we can delay the frequency and length of bleaching events to provide time to further research and implement adaption strategies. Understanding the history of whaling, depleting the ‘commons’ through over-fishing, the plight of turtle hatchlings near AIMS, and the insights of First Nations peoples adds great richness to the overall account.
We also gain insight into the use of political and media (mainstream and social) strategies to undermine public and stakeholder faith in careful and legitimate science. These include some taken from the US interest groups involving tobacco, fossil fuels and the ‘Karl Rove playbook’. Good science’s openness to probabilistic data and continuous improvement supported by transparency and peer review opens it up to being mischaracterised by opponents as uncertain. Hardisty does acknowledge that scientists need to take time to engage with key primary producer and other stakeholders to reduce misunderstanding and susceptibility to “simplistic thinking that was driving us towards catastrophe, step by step, sleepwalking towards the cliff.”
In his penultimate chapter, Hardisty powerfully summarises that:
“Global inequality has been growing too, among nations, between rich and poor, between old and young. … The more we have delayed action on climate change, the more we have pushed the costs of damage and eventual action onto younger people and future generations. … But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is still time to shape the future we want. … We don’t need soothing rhetoric about growth and ever-increasing wealth and no-pain solutions. No more pretending that we are somehow going to get through this without sacrifice. … And this burden can only fall to people alive now … The time is now … we already have all of the technology … The only thing we still need to find is the will and the courage to act. … Right now, there are battles that need to be fought”. Hardisty’s final chapter lists important individual actions, and organisational and government actions including in relation to taxing ‘bads’ not ‘goods’ and using other measures than GDP to measure success.
In many ways In Hot Water is a powerful Australian ‘case study’ complement to Brian McLaren’s broader and more pessimistic approach in Life After Doom. Both authors persuasively stress the need for informed, ethical and courageous individual and collaborative action to mitigate inevitable planetary environmental and social damage and disaster. In Hot Water is highly recommended.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, October 2024
N.T. Wright & Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies, Zondervan, 2024, 185pp.
The Rt Rev’d Emeritus Professor N.T. (Tom) Wright has, for 50 years, been a leading New Testament scholar in the Church of England. I met him about 20 years ago as part of a science and theology dialogue at St Mark’s National Theological Centre in Canberra. In this timely book he collaborates with Rev’d Dr M.F. (Mike) Bird who is Lecturer in Theology and Deputy Principal at Ridley College in Melbourne. While both are from the Evangelical wing of Anglicanism, they are serious academics and certainly not fundamentalists.
Wright’s long-expressed understanding of God’s already/not yet kingdom provides a key platform for the book’s theology (e.g., see his Surprised by Hope, 2007; and History and Eschatology, 2019). Launched by Jesus’ resurrection and the gift of the Spirit, Wright and Bird explain that “For the early church, the kingdom of God was never about going to heaven … [but] a vision and vocation for faithful action that works to bring God’s kingship over every facet of human life … curating creation for the day when God will be ‘all in all’… [so] what we do matters because it carries over into the final new creation”. Made in the image of God, we are to be stewards of this earth and not preferencing some form of disembodied Neoplatonist heavenly ‘rapture’. The ‘new Jerusalem’ comes down from heaven to earth not vice versa. They further argue that “As long as people are focused on ‘going to heaven’, they will have less compulsion to pursue the New Testament vision of a united trans-ethnic and trans-local family worshipping God and thus holding the powers of the world to account”. I consider these to be important insights and arguments for our society, culture and time.
Addressing ‘the powers’ of the book’s title is mostly in terms of political power, beginning with a discussion of Empire. Successive conquering empires are a key organising theme in the Hebrew Bible, often reflecting what authors considered to be God’s sought outcomes. For example, Cyrus the Great of Persia ended the Jewish Babylonian exile and brought many reforms. Cyrus is still revered in modern Iran. US ‘MAGA’ supporters have even suggested that former President Trump is a ‘new Cyrus’. For Jesus and New Testament writers, the Roman Empire provided the overwhelming political and military context, with Caesar asserting power as both emperor and ‘god’. Wright and Bird point to an ongoing Christian tension since that time ‘between submission and subversion’ – supporting God-given governments and order as against anarchy and tyranny, but resisting corrupt power such as various totalitarianisms (including Fascism, Nazism, Communism and nationalist or religion-based). Mostly, they consider that resistance should be undertaken in a non-violent manner.
Tensions involving State power and an appropriate Christian response continue today. While noting their own ‘Western’ bias (that I share), Wright and Bird argue convincingly that liberalism within a secular democracy, ‘expressive liberty’, and ‘confident pluralism’ provide the best political and governance framework to enable us to worship God and love our neighbour in practice. I would add, inter alia, the importance of property rights, the rule of law, and rigorous and transparent evidence-based scientific research and analysis.
The book’s footnotes are extremely insightful and many summarise important work published in the last few years, including by Wright. In doing so, they provide a helpful roadmap within Wright’s prolific theological output, alongside other relevant writers, including Bird. In the main text there are also many nuggets of historical and rhetorical gold.
The book is not perfect and in latter chapters, presumably drafted by Bird, I found some wording to be overly colloquial and repetitive and occasionally written in the first-person (p70, p80) rather than jointly. The book’s index of names is helpful but some, like Cyrus, are missing, undermining confidence in its thoroughness. This suggests a desirability for greater editorial input and control (and perhaps a revised edition). Terminology such as ‘bobocracy’ was new to me and appears to encompass a critique of: educated post-liberal progressives; tendencies towards wokeness; and over-regulation by government. While listed as a serious threat to democracy, alongside others it comes across as being more reflective of personal politics. Some elements of Evangelical doctrine and certainty may also jar with progressive Christian readers who tend to prefer engagement with questions and shades of grey.
Wright and Bird conclude that Christians are called to action as disciples of a ‘theo-political’ vision of the gospel towards our hope in God’s kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. While I am generally nervous about ‘theo-politics’ and its dangers (many of which the authors do acknowledge), within a context of pluralistic secular liberalism and freedom of speech and media, I agree that it is important for thoughtful and discerning Christians to engage in values-based non-partisan political discussion and maintain a form of witness that entails a ‘faithful presence’ within the public square. Indeed, the urgency of doing seems understated in an ‘age of terror and dysfunctional democracies’ as shown by McLaren in Life After Doom.
Overall, the scope and content of this book and sound elements of its argument outweigh its flaws. It can be recommended as a basis to stimulate robust thought and discussion.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, October 2024
Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, St Martin’s Essentials, 2024, 304pp.
You may have noted that since 2023 the world ‘Doomsday Clock’ has read 90 seconds to midnight, the most perilous position since its creation after World War Two by atomic scientists including Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer (see: https://thebulletin.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2024-Doomsday-Clock-Statement.pdf). The Clock is an assessment of combined existential threats including nuclear, biological, climate, and Artificial Intelligence.
In last year’s review of Do I Stay Christian?, I mentioned that Brian McLaren is respected as a prolific author aligned with Progressive Christianity. His Life After Doom goes far beyond the environmental messages in his 2009 Everything Must Change. Here, McLaren analyses years of research to propose four possible scenarios for our planet and its survival. These, and his discussion, address many more factors than in the Doomsday Clock. Shockingly, all four scenarios involving ‘doom loops’ and ‘tipping points’ are increasingly terrible (i.e., even the first one involves real terror). These are termed: 1. Collapse Avoidance; 2. Collapse/Rebirth; 3. Collapse/Survival; and 4. Collapse/Extinction. McLaren stresses the need to consider how to be ethical and loving humans living in the creeping shadow of such doom. The book’s 21 chapters are in four parts – Letting Go: A Path of Descent; Letting Be: A Place of Insight; Letting Come: A Path of Resilience; and Setting Free: A Path of Agile Engagement.
McLaren is open about his own despair and other emotions in dealing with the possible and likely scenarios of doom. He rejected early his fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren upbringing which sought and welcomed a ‘Rapture’ for its elect before the world’s expected End-times with eternal torture thought to await the others who are not saved. McLaren taught College English and was then an innovative liberal ordained pastor for 24 years before becoming a full-time author after turning 50. Now approaching 70, he is a grandfather, fly-fisher and active in a range of spiritual, community, educational, environmental and political causes.
Christian theologies that emphasise heavenly salvation for a predetermined elect contrast sharply with McLaren’s views on the need to work thoughtfully, collectively and hard for God’s kingdom now and save what remains of God’s wonderful creation. Accordingly, other theologies (e.g., US Southern Baptist Union) that support free market capitalism and small unregulated government and don’t address climate change are problematic. More extreme Christian, Muslim and Hindu theologies support autocratic nationalism. This, and increasing concentration of power, wealth and inequality, corruption and exploitation, and a growth ‘paradigm’, undermine our ability to adequately respond to an ‘overshoot’ of the Earth’s long-term carrying capacity, even when not already too late to avert climate catastrophe.
Some key themes in McLaren’s analysis include: our need to ‘wake up’ and humbly face reality and grief; grapple with doom and speak our mind in circles of trust; embrace contemplation, poetry and detachment; appreciate the beauty in our heritage; actively hope against hope and don’t give up; seek understanding and indigenous wisdom; avoid simplistic binaries and cognitive biases; love freely and know that our loving will count no matter what; prepare for our own death; and commit to work for justice, peace and compassion as long as we live based on thoughtful insight, agility and interdependence, because: “The things you are doing now as an individual really matter, and the many things we come together to do matter even more”.
All of McLaren’s books are worth reading but this one is particularly timely, deeply insightful and moving, and suitable as a basis for group discussion and action (including through ‘Dear Reader’ questions after each chapter and helpful appendices). Strongly recommended.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, October 2024
Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, Basic Books, 2024, 373pp.
Many Progressive Christians share core values that include humility in learning, preferencing questions over absolutes, and embracing the insights of contemporary science such as in relation to creation, cosmology, and protecting the Earth and its sustainability.
Matt Strassler is a theoretical and particle physicist who for several decades has researched and taught at Stanford, Princeton, Rutgers and Harvard. He has a gift for explaining difficult concepts in the English language without dumbing down the underlying mathematics and complexity. In this book, he explains some big questions addressed in the latest science including in relation to mass, energy, particles, waves, wavicles, fields, and quantum mechanics, while noting some important questions and major uncertainties that remain. To do so, he outlines relevant physics terminology and discusses why many theoretical concepts with strong experimental evidence are counterintuitive and do not conform to ‘commonsense’ (via our evolved human senses and intuitions) and may even seem impossible to a layperson (or to scientists of earlier generations). Strassler’s cumulative and integrated text provides a basis to better understand human life and our place in the cosmos, using helpful analogies such as musical resonance that apply across the universe.
A fundamental concept is the principle of relativity developed by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and updated by Albert Einstein (1879-1955). We can’t feel the earth’s daily rotation around its axis, orbiting our Sun at 20 miles per second or orbiting the centre of our Milky Way galaxy of nearly a trillion stars at over 150 miles per second. Under the principle of relativity “in quiet, undisturbed conditions, within an isolated bubble with no access to the outside world, there is absolutely nothing you can do to establish either the amount or direction of your motion”. In 1632 Galileo explained this using the example of a person belowdecks in a smoothly sailing ship where such motion was undetectable. The motion has ‘no perspective-independent meaning in our universe’ and always has to be expressed as relative to some other person or thing. In aviation, airspeed and ground speed are two key relative aircraft speeds. In the vacuum of space, without friction or drag, the law of inertia means that an object with mass will coast forever with the same speed and direction. Importantly, “matter is a substance out of which objects can be made, whereas mass and energy are properties of objects, not substances. … the definition of mass used in modern physics does not refer to matter at all”.
Strassler notes that while many aspects of the universe are relative, some are independent of observers. These include an object’s ‘invariant’ or ‘rest’ mass which is its ‘intransigence’ as a result of mass and inertia as measured by someone stationary relative to the object. All photons of light have a rest mass of zero but are affected by gravity and so have a non-zero gravitational mass. Photons travel at a speed ‘c’ of about 186,000 miles per second, where c is a ‘cosmic speed limit’ that is a property of the universe and not only of light (whether visible or invisible to humans like X-rays), e.g., c applies to ‘gravitational waves’. For many such elementary cosmic fields that exist throughout the universe physicists have some understanding of what they do rather than what they are (or their origins).
The ‘Higgs field’ throughout the universe is perspective-independent and provides electrons with all their rest mass, and partially impacts protons and neutrons, but ignores photons entirely. For Strassler, our universe is “vibrant, chaotic, diverse, full of structure and complexity … It is rest mass that makes it all possible: the atoms, stars, roses, books, and brains of our living universe”. Further, “Since any cosmic field exists everywhere in the universe, its medium, if it has one, must be an everywhere medium … transparent and permeable”. ‘Bosonic’ fields are ‘free spirits’ (of zero, small or large value) and can serve as long-distance intermediaries between objects – they include gravitational, electromagnetic, Higgs, gluon, W and Z. ‘Fermionic’ fields are ‘tightly restrained’ (microscopic wave amplitude with an average value of zero), their intensity can’t be adjusted and they can’t serve as direct intermediaries between objects – they include six types of quark fields, three neutrino fields, and three electron-like fields (electron, muon, tau). All fields are essential to our lives.
Strassler discusses the relationship between Einstein’s relativity formula E = mc2 and Planck’s quantum formula E = fh both dating from about 1905. The former expresses an important relationship between energy and mass but its interpretation can vary based upon differences in both mass and energy. Energy includes both stored capacity (internal energy) or motion activity (relative energy) and is not identical in each formula. Another way to write the relativity formula is m = E/c2 where an object’s rest mass is its internal energy divided by the conversion factor of the square of the cosmic speed limit. The latter quantum formula relates E and f, with Planck’s constant ‘h’ being a conversion factor. For example, the energy E carried by each photon is given by its frequency f and a ‘cosmic certainty limit’ constant of nature ‘particle-ness limit’ that can capture a momentary uncertainty trade-off between small size with sharp trajectory and greater/spreading size with fuzziness. In quantum theory a photon is a ripple or ‘wave train’ with one or more crests and troughs and can be counted by measuring properties such as energy that is linked to frequency, amplitude and resonant frequency. The smallest possible amplitude of a given wave-form (or ‘wavicle’ that includes both wave characteristics and particle characteristics such as its indivisibility) is called a ‘quantum’. In combination, m = f [h/c2] so “for an elementary wavicle, rest mass represents its energy of being … set by the resonant frequency of its field”.
A ‘Goldilocks’ hierarchy quality to our universe exists between a ‘Planck rest mass’ of the smallest possible black hole (as a result of a ‘cosmic mass-density limit’) and the ‘puny’ wavicle rest mass. It is well-known that our bodies and much of the inanimate and living material on the planet was forged in stars after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, but less known that our bodies are made from tiny waves, mainly electrons and quarks. Strassler writes that “our very substance is the cosmos in action … we are not merely residents of the universe … We are aspects of the universe, as seismic waves are aspects of rock and sound waves are aspects of the air … the Higgs field [as a sort of stiffening, resilience or restorative agent] is responsible for the masses of certain crucial elementary particles, including the electrons found in every atom … [in] the subatomic realm, we find that every fragment of our bodies is [literally constructed from vibrations] forever spinning, roving, vibrating”.
This is a very challenging book but for me well worth the investment of time and thinking. Reviewed by Kym Bills, October 2024
Colin Chapman, Whose Promised Land? The continuing conflict over Israel and Palestine, 5th edition, SPCK, 2024, 496pp.
The now retired Rev’d Colin Chapman was ordained into the Episcopal Church of Scotland and has lived and worked in the Middle East at various times from 1968 including as Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut. This fifth edition of his well-known book, first published in 1983, was released on 7 October 2024.
Chapman writes from a perspective that seeks to engage in a thorough and balanced manner with Christian readers’ background in the Old and New Testaments to help understand the history, politics and contested Jewish, Islamic and Christian understanding of Israel and Palestine. His latest revision incorporates the horrific violence perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and its aftermath and includes new chapters.
Chapman writes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was “a local conflict that began in a corner of the Ottoman empire in the 1880s”. In 1880 the 480,000 population of Palestine comprised 5% Jews who had been there for centuries and 95% Arabs who also trace centuries of habitation. Around 1880 a Zionist movement encouraged Jews to settle in Palestine and the Jewish proportion of the population grew to 13.6% by 1914. Conflict intensified during the 20th century, especially after the State of Israel was established in 1948 and 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes (they call this ‘the Nakba’ or catastrophe) with the majority forced to move to Gaza. Israel’s first Prime Minister, the Zionist movement’s Ben-Gurion, declared that ‘The Bible is our mandate’, particularly Genesis 12:2 & 17:8 where the land is given to Abraham and his descendants ‘as an everlasting inheritance’ and a ‘perpetual holding’. Jewish ‘colonial’ settlers continued to arrive from Europe (including Russia) and other Arab states.
Chapman notes that Muslim scripture also warrants claims to the land of Palestine, with three verses in the Qur’an particularly relevant. The first (5.21, Pickthall) links Arabs through their ancestor Ishmael to Moses encouraging the children of Israel to enter the holy land. The second (21.71, Dawood) refers to Abraham and Lot being brought into the land ‘blessed for all mankind’. The third (17.1, Dawood) refers to Muhammad’s night journey from Mecca’s sacred temple to the farther temple of Jerusalem whose surroundings have been blessed. This special blessing may extend across Jerusalem or perhaps the whole of the land.
After 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, where I later worked, challenged the Hashemite Kingdom government in a 1970 ‘Black September’. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon became ‘a state within a state’ and triggered the 1975-1990 civil war. More than 6 million Palestinians are registered with the UN as refugees and are often used as pawns by Iran and Arab state actors.
The Six Day War in June 1967 led to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the building of Jewish settlements on an increasing swathe of this land. In 1980 Israel’s Knesset declared Jerusalem to be the ‘eternal and undivided capital’ of Israel and the Golan Heights was formally annexed. From 2002 the building of a security fence was 85% outside of the pre-1967 green line border and encroaching up to 11 miles into the West Bank. Numerous roadblocks, searches and limited access to Jerusalem have compounded Palestinian deprivation and anger. Settler numbers have now risen to around 700,000 across 240 settlements. In total, Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan total around 7 million, about the same population as that of Israel.
Chapman has since his 2015 4th edition, considered that the opportunity for a two-state solution for Palestine has passed and has become unrealistic rhetoric. His hope, rather than a one-state militaristic future, is for a combination of international law, outside pressure, and religious compromise to enable a process of peacemaking and a viable pluralistic state. While conceding this is somewhat utopian, ultimately the land is God’s. In contrast to Genesis 12 and 17 he cites Leviticus 25:23 “the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” and Psalm 21: 1 “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it”.
Whose Promised Land? is a balanced and insightful book that I thoroughly recommend.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, October 2024
Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost. Jonathan Cape, 2023, 323pp.
This is the second novel by Isabella Hammad who explores her paternal family background to write rich and engaging historical fiction. Her British parents have Palestinian and Irish ancestries, with her father’s family having left Lebanon when he was aged 7. Hammad read English at the University of Oxford before moving to the US, initially to a Harvard literary fellowship, and then to a New York University Master’s degree and various other fellowships and literary awards. I was impressed by her first (2019) novel, The Parisian, that draws from the life of her great-grandfather in Nablus on the West Bank and in Paris during the interwar decades after World War I. Now in her early 30s, Hammad delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture Recognizing the Stranger at Columbia University on 28 September 2023.
The basic plot of Enter Ghost involves 38-year-old Dutch-Palestinian actor Sonia Nasir, needing a break after a failed marriage and soured affair with a director, travelling from London to visit her sister Haneen who has residency rights to teach at Tel Aviv University. In Haifa, Sonia meets Haneen’s friend Mariam who is planning to direct an Arabic production of Hamlet in Palestine’s West Bank and wishes to cast Sonia as Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. In addition to Sonia’s first-person narrative, internal insights and dialogue, Hammad uses rehearsals of parts in Shakespeare’s great play to draw views from Mariam and the other actors. We better understand and empathise with contemporary differences and challenges among various Palestinian groups facing life under ‘neo-colonial’ Israeli occupation, control and oppression in manner that is not overtly political but believably powerful. No essay on Hezbollah or Hamas terrorism or the violent fundamentalism underpinning Jewish West Bank settlers is provided or necessary. Hammad is suspicious of dogma and ideology.
The play is, of course, central and Hammad uses Jabra’s Arabic translation that she ‘freely’ translates back into English, helping to counter excessive familiarity with the standard English text. Ghosts typically suggest restlessness of soul, unfinished business and avenging. The Ghost that enters here is not just the subversive ghost of Hamet’s murdered father whose kingdom has been stripped away by his immoral brother. Sonia also remembers her own family life in Palestine a couple of decades before and vivid, somewhat repressed, memories and begins to deal with her decision to flee to London while her sister and others remained with some seeking to support the Palestinian people more directly. In this, there is perhaps an element of Hammad’s own anguished self-examination of her comfortable life and work outside of the West Bank and Gaza in Palestine. In the novel, older generations including Sonia’s now deceased father, collectively lived with the ghost of the 1948 Nakba catastrophe when the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel involved the killing of many Palestinians and the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands. Poignantly, Sonia returns to see her former family home that has been taken over by a Jewish family.
To establish the accuracy of the contemporary situation (of course, before 7 October 2023), Hammad’s own lived background is supplemented by research, interviews and a local visit in 2017 when Israel’s use of electric gates and metal detectors around the Al-Aqsa Mosque led to summer mass protests in Jerusalem.
Helpful background and insights into Hammad’s writing of the book are provided in several interviews including in hyphen https://hyphenonline.com/2023/05/03/isabella-hammad-my-relationship-with-palestine-is-complex/ and Literary Hub https://lithub.com/isabella-hammad-the-idea-of-apolitical-art-is-very-political/ In a Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, Hammad provides further detail: https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/enter-ghost-hammad/
While it takes a bit of time to enter into the worldview of the novel and to begin to enjoy it, Enter Ghost well-repays the investment and is recommended as an insightful and powerful approach to the role of art and protest for the people in the contested lands of Palestine.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, October 2024
David Bentley Hart The New Testament: A Translation. 2nd edn. Yale University Press, 2023
David Bentley Hart was encouraged by the Yale editors to prepare a full translation of the New Testament in preference to his preferred secular translation projects. He was glad that that he did. After publication in 2017, he saw some areas where he could do better leading to this second, and he says final, edition. Hart’s Introduction (pp xvii-xl) discusses a number of issues and key aims in translation. A Postscript (pp 533-602) expounds the difficulties in translation exemplified by the Prologue to the Gospel of John.
Hart found past NT translation overly influenced by past textual errors, Church history and theology, and compromise from least-offensive committee consensus. He writes that he has come to believe that all the standard English translations render a great many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built largely impenetrable, and that most of them effectively hide (sometimes forcibly) things of absolutely vital significance for understanding how the texts’ authors thought. For example, he says that the more evangelical New International Version has sometimes distorted the text to a ‘discreditable degree’. Unconstrained, his: principal aim is to help awaken readers to mysteries and uncertainties and surprises in the New Testament documents that often lie wholly hidden from view beneath layers of received hermeneutical and theological tradition.
An important example of mistranslation is the Latin Vulgate’s ‘inept rendering’ of the last four Greek words in Romans 5:12 that influenced Western Christianity’s understanding of ‘original sin’. Here is an extract from Hart’s translation of Romans 5:12-15: Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned … death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not commit sin similar to the transgression of Adam, who is a figural type of the one about to come. … if by the transgression of one the many dies, so much the more did God’s grace and the gift in grace of the one man Jesus the Anointed overflow to the many.
Hart sometimes chooses translations such as ‘Holy One’ and ‘Anointed’ Jesus in place of ‘Messiah’ and ‘Christ’, and he prefers to nor use loaded terms such as ‘eternal’, ‘redemption’, ‘justification’, ‘predestination’, and ‘hell’.
Five important points among those that Hart makes in his introductory material are:
(1) for the translation, he worked from the so-called Critical text, which is based on earlier and different manuscript sources (such as those of the Alexandrian Text-type), but I have also included a great many verses and phrases found only in the Majority Text (placing them in brackets to set them off from the Critical text).
(2) in the time of the original NT passages the partition between the natural and the supernatural, like that between the physical and the spiritual, did not yet exist … angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty spaces, in which spirit and breath and wind were all one thing (at once transcendent and materially palpable) … And above it all, literally seated on high in an empyrean beyond the turning heavens, was God in his true dwelling place, in light inaccessible, from whom humanity was separated by a gulf at once spatial and spiritual.
(3) passages that seem to imply universal salvation greatly outnumber the very few that appear to threaten an ultimate damnation for the wicked.
(4) it is an ‘early modern theological fantasy’ that Paul warned against ‘works-righteousness’ in favour of faith ‘justification’ by grace. Instead, Paul rejected righteousness obtainable through the Old Testament law and ritual observances like circumcision and keeping kosher and insisted, like Jesus, that ‘all will be judged in the end according to their deeds’.
(5) because of writers’ immanent expectation of a final terrible judgment, seemingly ‘extreme’ interpretations of NT passages, not our ‘commonsense’ hindsight views, are almost always correct. For example, personal wealth was considered a forbidden ‘intrinsic’ evil and not just a moral danger even if honestly procured and generously used. The first followers of the Way were to renounce private property and own everything communally. (Of course, that, and church leadership and structures, changed as the first NT generation died-out before Jesus’ Second Coming.)
As a non-Greek reader, I will continue to rely on well-regarded English translations such as the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition and on various scholarly commentaries. But Hart’s translation is fresh and thought-provoking and will provide additional insight to help challenge theological complacency.
Hart’s translation is highly recommended and currently available from Amazon Australia in paperback for $32.31.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, July 2024
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation Orbis Books, 50th anniversary edition, 2023 (original version in Spanish 1971 & English 1973; revised version with a new introduction by the author in 1988)
Late last year, this classic book was republished with an excellent new Introduction by Michael E. Lee. It was the text that launched and underpinned what became known as ‘liberation theology’. I first read it 40 years ago and it remains fresh and rich, perhaps more so because of the influence it has had, not only for the poor and oppressed of Latin America, but in responding to inequality and injustice around the world. It has also greatly influenced other theologies of the marginalised – feminist, Black, rainbow and many others.
Mestizo Peruvian, Gutiérrez (b. 8/6/28) had adolescent osteomyelitis and used a wheelchair between ages 12 and 18. He studied literature and medicine before theology, psychology and philosophy and was ordained a Dominican priest in 1959. On returning to Peru, driven by the principle of ‘love your neighbour’, he was determined to help address the structural poverty facing 60% of Latin American people. He considered that theological eschatology had focused too much on the life to come, rather than helping to bring about God’s Kingdom on earth, so his focus was on a ‘preferential option for the poor’ through their liberation from oppression and enabling economic gains. Gutiérrez has held many academic posts, most recently being Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
The book comprises four parts and 13 chapters. Part I ‘Theology and Liberation’ includes a critical reflection on theology including in relation to praxis (practice) and discusses liberation and development. Part II ‘Posing the Problem’ discusses options to address the problem including at a pastoral level and in relation to worldly salvation. Part III ‘The Option Before the Latin American Church’ discusses a process of liberation after a decade of ‘developmentalism’ and associated dependence, the Church’s role in liberation and an egalitarian form of development, and associated questions. Largest Part IV ‘Perspectives’ is split between a section on ‘Faith and the New Humanity’ (chapters 9 to 11) and a section on ‘the Christian Community and the New Society’ (chapters 12, 13 and the book’s Conclusion). Part IV section 1 chapters cover: salvation as a central theme of the Christian mystery with Christ the Liberator, a spirituality of liberation, encountering God in history including by understanding humanity as temple of God, Christ in the neighbour, and knowing God by doing justice, eschatology linked to politics and faith and political action, and a new political theology. Part IV Section 2 chapters discuss the Church as a universal sacrament of salvation, the Eucharist and human fellowship, poverty, solidarity and protest.
In addition to its interdisciplinary and well-argued content, Gutiérrez’s pioneering book illustrates the impetus and manner in which contemporary situations can be addressed by theologians revisiting and reinterpreting key Biblical teachings of Jesus such as in the beatitudes and more generally such as in relation to eschatology. If you have not read it, this landmark book is highly recommended.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, March 2024
Roger E. Olson in Against Liberal Theology: Putting the Brakes on Progressive Christianity, Zondervan Reflective, 2022
Roger Olson is Emeritus Professor of Christian theology at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. He describes himself as not a fundamentalist and always having a “warmhearted evangelical Christian faith and orthodox theology” so: “I do not hate them [liberal Christians] but love them. I just think their theology is seriously flawed to the extent that true liberal Christianity ought not to be considered authentically Christian … because it departs so radically from biblical and traditional Christian orthodoxy … it has cut itself off from all authority except that of the individual’s self and modern thought, and modern thought is basically secular … it may be spiritual poison … it ought to be considered a different religion”. This is his main argument which is vigorously prosecuted in an Introduction and eight chapters of the book.
Olson’s Introduction states that the book “is not a diatribe against progressive Christianity” but in practice, ‘prototypical’ recent theologians criticised as ‘liberal Christians’ such as Bishop John Shelby Spong and Dr Marcus Borg, are self-identified and known as leaders of progressive Christianity and he wants to ‘put the brakes’ on them. He warns of ‘how slippery liberal Christian can be’ in paying ‘lip service’ to Biblical concepts. Among rhetorical devices, Olson defines his own concept of traditional Christian evangelical orthodoxy to be ‘Christian theism’, leading to liberal and most progressive Christianity not being included within what is normally considered to be a very broad term. He claims that the “generally agreed-on definition of liberal Christianity, liberal theology, is maximal acknowledgment of the claims of modernity in Christian thinking about doctrines”. However, this is a much narrower view than his book then explicates. Such liberal Christian post-Enlightenment modern thought – with its ‘alleged’ support for science in rational explanation as against the supernatural – is then criticised as a potential ‘cultural fad’ and Olsen asks: “Is not postmodernity teaching us that much that was considered ‘settled truth’ in modern thought is now questionable?”. What he doesn’t say is that postmodernism is suspicious of all grand narratives such as orthodox Christian doctrine and encourages individual questions and not dogma.
Well into the book, Olson outlines that his own conservative orthodox theology includes: ‘all truth is God’s truth’; “belief in the special status of the Bible is found in the Bible itself (e.g., 2 Tim.3:16-17; 2 Peter 1:20-21)”; God is transcendent and immanent, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent; God can ‘have new experiences in relation to the world’; “God cares and intervenes both in nature and history with acts of power and love and justice that transcend any natural explanation … suspensions of the normal operations of natural laws”; God’s creation of the universe out of nothing; original human sin requiring an external holy God’s salvation; Jesus’s substitutionary atonement on the cross; ‘the very real threat of hell for not repenting’; ‘good biblical reasons for believing in’ premillennialism (Christ returning to earth in bodily form to rule for 1,000 years while Satan is bound to stop tempting people); and Christ returning to ‘judge the living and the dead’ and ‘open up heaven to those who embrace his love and grace’. Olsen implies validation for his orthodoxy by noting that liberal churches are ‘struggling to survive’ while “conservative churches (including ‘renewalist’ ones such as Pentecostal-charismatic) are thriving around the world” and ‘booming’. Of course, we know that Pentecostal churches do not typically follow Olsen’s conservative reformed orthodoxy, church polity and view of authority.
It should come as no surprise that Olson is particularly critical of liberal (and much progressive) theology’s: doubts with regard to the Virgin Birth and not considering Jesus to be pre-existent God incarnate, “disdain for bloody sacrifices, including Jesus’ atoning death on the cross”; bodily resurrection, miracles and divine intervention; redefining of sin and tending to view salvation as loving God, imitating Christ, and the human spirit cooperating with the divine Spirit; over-reliance on reason to ‘trump the Bible’; not considering the Bible ‘supernaturally inspired or infallible – even in matters of doctrine’ but only that it ‘contains’ the word of God; reinterpreting Biblical passages; modifying centuries of orthodoxy in light of science and modern culture; lack of emphasis on personal conversion; universalist concepts of salvation by grace; stress on God’s immanence on earth and in spirituality rather than balancing ‘his’ ‘almighty’ transcendence; doubts about the details of an afterlife; and support for panentheism and sometimes process theology. Describing the work of a more ‘evangelical’ liberal, Olson says “The question is whether DeWolf himself deserved to be called a Christian in light of his Christology and weak soteriology (doctrine of salvation)”.
Olsen states that “Christ does not stand alone at the center of liberal Christianity (if at all)” and liberal theologians are like early Unitarians and not Trinitarian, so: “The theologians and leaders of liberal Christianity ought to be honest and proclaim themselves Unitarians rather than Christians”. These are harsh judgments in stark contrast to the orthodox evangelical Bishop N.T. Wright’s respect for his late friend, Marcus Borg, loving Jesus and remaining a Christian despite questioning ‘the creedal Jesus’, and Bishop Spong saying what is important is ‘the Jesus experience’. There is liberal/progressive debate over Jesus being ‘fully God and fully human’ from the time of his incarnation and birth, or at least prior to his baptism with the Holy Spirit for ministry, and subsequent death, resurrection and ascension, but that does not preclude liberals and some progressives accepting the World Council of Churches affirmation that ‘Jesus Christ is [now] God and Saviour’. Olson omits or underplays liberal Christianity’s views on Jesus as the living Word. He also claims unfairly that liberal Christianity does not believe in the Holy Spirit being active in people’s lives. Many liberal and progressive Christians, presumably in the US like Australia, do not hold this view of the Holy Spirit and consider Jesus Christ a person within the mystery of the three-in-one.
Olsen argues that “Orthodox Christians of many denominations have long criticized liberal theology as heretical and even apostate”. He considers them not ‘authentically’ Christian and a ‘false gospel’. He concludes his book by stating (pp173-4): “Progressive Christianity is not a tradition or a movement or even a real identity. It is simply a label used by many individuals who do not want to be thought of as conservative and who are attracted to social-justice issues, often to the neglect of evangelism, sound doctrine, and traditional Christian norms of belief and life. … The message of this book to self-identified progressive Christians is: Beware of liberal Christianity, because it is not real Christianity at all. … [but Fundamentalism] is not the only alternative … discover a contemporary, relevant, biblical, and orthodox middle ground between the two.”
While US-focussed, the book is well worth reading for Olsen’s summaries and quotations from serious Liberal and Progressive books since Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl in the 19th century, and conservative evangelical reactions to it up until the present day. It also assists progressive Christians to consider the rationale for, and contours of, their views (without a new dogma).
Reviewed by Kym Bills, March 2024
Randal Rauser, Progressive Christians Love Jesus Too: A Response to Alisa Childers (and the heresy hunters), 2 Cup Press, Canada, 2022, 178pp.
Dr Randal Rauser is a systematic theologian and Professor of Historical theology at Taylor Seminary in Edmonton, Canada where he has taught since 2003, His books include Theology in Search of Foundations in 2009 and Jesus Loves Canaanites in 2021. In Progressive Christians Love Jesus Too Rauser responds to Conservative Evangelical critiques of progressive Christianity, by way of an extended rebuttal to Alisa Childers’s 2020 book Another Gospel?: A lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity. Rauser shared a somewhat similar fundamentalist background to Childers, including ‘dispensationalism’, a doctrine of secret rapture for an elect group taken to heavenly safety by Jesus before a broader Second Coming with fire and judgment.
Lee Strobel’s glowing foreword to Childers’s book reflects her view by stating that “in Christianity, the anchor is sound biblical doctrine”. But Rauser “could not disagree more … the anchor for Christianity is not doctrine. It is Jesus Christ.” He says that while we describe the reality of God’s saving actions in terms of doctrines, confusing God’s actions with our descriptions of them is a category mistake and what is truly foundational is loving Christian relationship. Such a relationship invites honest hard questions rather than binary thinking and blind assent to doctrines such as Biblical inerrancy and penal substitutionary sacrificial atonement as propounded by Childers.
Rauser is very critical of Childers’s uncharitable and blanket attacks on progressive Christian leaders whose motives and characters are impugned and who are variously described as post-modern, malicious, heretical, and non-Christian. He demonstrates and addresses this through detailed consideration of writing by five main exemplars: Peter Enns, Richard Rohr, Brian Zahnd, Rachel Evans and John Pavlovitz. Others also feature significantly including Brian McLaren, Steve Chalk, Rob Bell and William Young.
Nowadays, Rauser considers himself to be a part of progressive Christianity understood as “a broad coalition of interests to promote open questioning, critical reflection … diversity [and] … mutual understanding … as each of us considers anew what it means to be Christian in our day”. He emphasizes that humility about knowledge is not relativism about truth. Rauser is quite mainstream and for example, does not resonate with Marcus Borg’s difficulty in believing in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, let alone accept United Church of Canada Minister Greta Vosper’s longstanding atheism (with which I have personal difficulty).
Impressive aspects of the book are Rauser’s broad knowledge of historical theology and charity in considering complexity and non-binary views of Christian doctrine. Less impressive, is when he becomes a bit dogmatic himself and his debating style dismisses Childers’s genuine concerns about some progressive Christians. For example, her concern that “doubt has become a badge of honor to bask in” and perhaps overly intellectual. Rauser seems to disagree that “progressive Christians are challenging how God is depicted in portions of the Hebrew Scriptures”. But I support Rauser’s views on not labelling this as the heresy of Marcionism, on the need for safe spaces to discuss genuine doubts, and that “not all instances of atheism can be plausibly explained in terms of a sinful rebellion”. However, Rauser sometimes seems to lapse into a more literal understanding of some problematic biblical texts. For example, he admires a T-shirt slogan: “God said it. I interpreted it. … it does give me enough of a platform to base my values and decision on.” The Church is always reforming and to err is human “Set against that backdrop, the heart of the progressive conversation is an embodiment of just what it is to be Christian: seek truth and leave behind the error”.
On important matters, Rauser is rightly critical of Childers’s fundamentalism. This includes her attempts to justify, with like-minded evangelical conservatives, “biblical warfare texts that describe God as commanding and commending the eradication of entire people groups including the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15) and Canaanites (e.g., Deuteronomy 7: 2-5; 20: 16-18) … [and] Joshua 6 and 8”. Childers maintains that progressive Christian writers who consider such passages to be based on an ancient understanding and context that does not reflect God’s nature “believe we can now read the Bible … not as the authoritative word of God, but as our predecessors’ spiritual travel journal”. However, Childers favours New Testament texts supporting a Hell with eternal conscious torment (e.g., Matthew 24; 41, 46; Revelation 14: 9-111, 20:10) and rejects texts that refer to a general resurrection and universal salvation.
While somewhat North American focused and not without some weaknesses, this is a book that progressive Christians may consider interesting and well worth reading.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, February 2024
David A, Kaden, Christianity in Blue: How the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Theology Shape Progressive Identity, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2021, 187pp.
Rev. Dr David Kaden is Senior Minister of First Congregational Church of Ithaca, New York and has also taught theology and ministry at several universities. His thesis supervisor at Harvard was Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and at the University of Toronto it was John Kloppenborg. While understanding that a category like ‘progressive Christianity’ can be problematic and faces much recent criticism, Kaden’s “hope is that in reading the book, you will get excited about progressive Christianity, its vision for the world, its compassion for every human being and for all of creation, and its ancient roots in Christian tradition”.
Kaden’s progressive Christian church welcomes and embraces all, proudly flies a rainbow flag, can talk about God as a ‘She’ or ‘Mother, openly acknowledges doubts and questions, and empathetically works for peace and justice. He says: “the emphasis of progressive Christianity is on this life and changing this world for the benefit of people now”. He makes: “a case for progressive Christianity that is informed by theology, tradition, history, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and careful exegesis of the Bible. It’s a perspective on Christianity that treats the Bible and Christian tradition as compelling conversation starters”. It sees ‘God’ (an ‘unstable’ term) as loving all, and it shares a liberal and nonviolent heritage.
Years ago, Kaden broke with Calvinism after reading the complete Old and New Testaments to find that “God is not a uniform concept in the Bible; I discovered that the concept of God is flat-out contradictory. It does not fit seamlessly into a system; it is not balanced”. God was depicted as seeking or condoning bloody violence and slaughter such as in Exodus 14:26-30, 32:25-35; Joshua 6:15-17, 11:29-33; Judges 4:14-16,23, 16:23-30; 1 Samuel 15:2-3; 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9, 2:8; Matthew 13:42; Acts 5:1-11; and Revelation 19:11-16. Kaden writes that parts of both testaments and Christian tradition can be harrowing as well as stunningly beautiful so: “We readers of the Bible who call ourselves progressive Christians can freely admit the bad without losing sight of the ethical responsibility to affirm the good. … Biblical words tell us about people’s experiences of the divine or the sacred … not what the sacred actually is. The Bible preserves what people once said about God. Whether their words about God still resonate today is for us to decide in the context of our communities of faith. … Progressive Bible interpreters and preachers have an ethical responsibility to privilege those elements of biblical God-talk that highlight the best in God and God’s relationship to people … reading Scripture through the lens of Jesus’ first sermon in Luke’s Gospel … (Luke 4:18)”. For Kaden “relationship is the lens through which I read the entire Bible: God’s relationship to Godself, God’s relationship to people, people’s relationship to each other, people’s relationship to the planet, Christianity’s relationship to Judaism and to other religious traditions, and the relationship of society’s privileged to society’s underprivileged. … The word God is the word we use to describe [our] sense of connection”.
Kaden looks in depth at the many pictures of Jesus and varying emphases in the four gospels and states that: “As a progressive Christian, discrepancies and even outright contradictions in the Bible are not problems to be solved or threats to one’s faith but rather differences to be celebrated.” The gospels often reflect the values and interests of the writers and editors who compiled and reworked the earliest traditions about Jesus’ words and deeds for the context, needs and faith of the audiences who were hearing the stories. And “Progressive Christianity stands firmly on centuries of tradition – a tradition that is, as is the Bible we read, a place to start”. In considering the Pauline corpus, Kaden emphasises that any interpretation that degrades human well-being or breeds violence, hatred, or disdain should be rejected in favor of interpretations that uplift what it is to be human, to be more compassionate towards our fellow human beings and our precious planet. For example, Martin Luther’s treatise based on Paul’s letters titled On Jews and Their Lies is abhorrent. He emphasises that Paul was writing to a predominantly gentile audience who were increasingly excluded from synagogues and persecuted. The early hymn in Philippians 2:5-11 is but one example of “a progressive vision of a world where all people would be included and welcomed at the table of salvation”, a universalist vision that Kaden supports.
Kaden concludes that: “the version of progressive Christianity that I am outlining is … not trying to set up boundary markers that demarcate insiders and outsiders, true believers and heretics, orthodoxies and heterodoxies. This version of Christianity instead reinterprets Scripture and tradition in order to demolish such false binaries and invites us to privilege those features of our past that can help us live more compassionately in the present and future … instead of focusing on belief, we talk about belonging … At its core, progressive Christianity is an invitation to love … the triune God is love … our responsibility is to channel this Spirit of Love by living in love, connecting with Love through prayer, and thus conforming increasingly to the image of Christ, who is the image of Love. … At the compassionate core of progressive Christianity is a commitment to see every person as Christ sees them – as beloved human beings worthy of love and acceptance.”
This is a fine and challenging book and while inevitably readers will not agree with everything Kaden writes, overall it strongly recommended.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, February 2024
Sally Douglas, Jesus Sophia: Returning to Woman Wisdom in the Bible, Practice and Prayer, Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2023, 161pp.
Rev Dr Sally Douglas is the Uniting Church Minister at Richmond in eastern Melbourne and an academic at Pilgrim Theological College within the University of Divinity. Her 2014 PhD dissertation Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine: The Scandal of the Scandal of Particularity combines biblical studies and systematic theology and is available online at: https://cdm20081.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p20081coll12/id/53
It was published as a book of the same title in 2016.
Douglas appropriately acknowledges pioneering feminist Christian biblical scholarship about Sophia such as by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (In Memory of Her, 1990; Jesus, Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet, 1995), Elizabeth Johnson (She Who Is, 1992), and Martin Scott (Sophia and the Johannine Jesus, 1992). But a good deal of detail within Jesus Sophia draws from the evidence in her own PhD. In my view, the main contribution in Jesus Sophia is to make her academic arguments more accessible and to suggest ‘theological reflections’, ‘wondering questions’ and prayers at the end of each chapter that can facilitate study and congregational use.
Here, Douglas finds freedom to outline her own theology and critique that of some others. For example, when discussing reclamation of divine friendship, Douglas is rightly critical of ‘sentimental and dangerous’ ideas of Jesus as a ‘sky bestie’, (or as ‘meek and mild’) and of middle-class mainstream churches that focus on the right words at the expense of religious encounter and spirituality. She is moved to write that: A curious feature of the more recent Christian movement that identifies as ‘progressive’ is that religious experience is also often shunned in both ancient and contemporary settings. I am not surprised that younger people are not flocking to this movement. In my observation, while younger people are interested in rigorous discussion about theology and the Bible, they are also seeking authentic experiential encounter with the divine. This seems a tad harsh. Unfortunately, all-age people are not flocking to any movement within Christianity in Australia and too often Pentecostal and unthinking fundamentalist views lead many adults to leave the Church. In my view, it is possible to have science-based and progressive liturgies that are not lacking in spirituality.
After introductory material correctly highlighting idolatrous and inadequate male gender ascriptions to God and millennia of patriarchy, her Chapters 2 and 3 consider the evidence regarding Sophia in the Old Testament and Intertestamental Texts, and regarding Jesus and Sophia in the New Testament, including in some very early hymn fragments. Key characteristics of Sophia or Woman Wisdom include knowing God from the beginning, transformative wisdom, nonviolent anger at injustice, compassion, mercy and peace, vulnerable love, inviting all to a feast of abundance, abiding with God and us in freedom, and sustaining all things. These characteristics were demonstrated by Jesus in his actions and sometimes in quoting or speaking as Sophia within the gospels and in key Pauline literature.
I share Douglas’s view of the cross that eschews sacrifice and places it in an incarnational context with Jesus enduring the suffering and violence of humanity as discussed by René Girard and Jürgen Moltmann, and see much merit in a Trinitarian lens with a Sophia focus. For Douglas, even more shocking than the resurrection, is that from very early on, Christian communities celebrate Jesus in cosmic terms as the Holy Human One with characteristics drawn from the female divine Sophia.
Douglas seeks a return to the sacredness of all things infused with the divine presence and seen as interconnected. Sophia’s love of humanity and the earth can assist in countering views of human prosperity, dominion and apocalyptic rapture in favour of harmonious stewardship, generosity and, in the end times, heaven descending to earth (Rev 21:1-4).
This is a well written book that is accessible to a broad range of academic and non-academic readers. Including important feminist and theological implications of the scholarship for our understanding of the nature of Jesus Christ, and for a non-patriarchal and nurturing contemporary Church and liturgy, makes the book recommended reading.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, January 2024
Bruce Sanguin, The Way of the Wind: The Path and Practice of Evolutionary Christian Mysticism, Viriditas Press, Vancouver, British Colombia, 2015, 174pp.
Ordained in the United Church of Canada, Bruce Sanguin was in congregational ministry for 28 years until his early retirement in 2013. In that time, his faith emphasis moved from liberal Christianity to more challenging forms of Progressive Christianity based on evolution and spirituality. His various books along the way sought to encourage a new emerging church and faith based on universal and cosmic love and peace. Sanguin subsequently established a transpersonal psychotherapy practice in Vancouver and is an advocate for psychedelic drugs in healing, which is the subject of a 2018 autobiographical book.
Sanguin’s 2010 book If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics provides a wonderful resource for Progressive Christianity, both individually and liturgically as a congregation. Several of the collected prayer-poems are available to be sampled at: https://progressivechristianity.org/resource/if-darwin-prayed-poems/
The main subject of this review, The Way of the Wind: The Path and Practice of Evolutionary Christian Mysticism, is Sanguin’s most recent book with an explicit Christian message, albeit written from outside the established Church and seeking a ‘churchless incarnation’ in the human heart. Among others, Sanguin highlights appreciatively the writings of Teilhard de Chardin (eg, the ‘Omega Point’ drawing those of every spiritual lineage who surrender to love), Ken Wilber (eg, the ‘3-2-1’ or ‘it-you-I’ reintegration model) and the NT Progressive Christianity scholarship of nonviolence activist Walter Wink who wrote five books based on the cosmic ‘Powers’. Sanguin now considers that most Progressive Christianity, like many liberal and evangelical branches of the Church, is excessively rational and arid, lacking in mysticism and spirituality.
While accepting the extraordinary science describing cosmological and biological evolutionary processes since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, Sanguin is concerned that much of Western-based science has a reductionist, materialist focus and ideology with no place for mysticism and learning from other worldviews. He sees the evolutionary process as ‘a divine strategy for birthing and growing a world’ where ‘G_d’ or ‘Reality’ act in a non-interfering yet persuasive way, allowing humans to act in freedom for love and as love. In Sanguin’s evolutionary theology, G_d leads us from ‘up ahead’ to be co-creators of divine promise. Mysticism involves seeking and experiencing union with Reality and all that is.
Scientific support seems to be growing for a 1990s theory by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the human brain’s nerve cells. Moreover, quantum waves can link and explain phenomena throughout the universe without materiality. Such science need not exclude Sanguin’s view of a non-material emergence of consciousness and spirituality as part of an evolutionary love principle animating the whole universe through the ‘Holy Spirit’. Sanguin suggests that quantum ‘entanglement’ and ‘complementary relationship’ involves G_d. For Sanguin, Jesus of Nazareth was the archetypal ‘True Human’ to which Homo Sapiens can strive to emulate, evolve and become. Sadly, a positive outcome from this evolutionary possibility that saves our planet is far from assured.
Sanguin’s book includes a chapter on the ‘practices of evolutionary mysticism’. An initial self-emptying kenotic practice seeks to purge everything in us that is not love and to link us in surrender and trust to the flow of all life on earth and beyond. Multiple practices are then linked to each of Sanguin’s eight ‘core agreements for an evolving culture’. These are: listen for emergence; speak true words; exemplify the adventure of becoming (transform desire into holy longings); steward spaciousness (such as by meditation); fail bravely (including dying well); face crisis as opportunity; take responsibility, receive freedom; and surrender to grace. There is gold among both the agreements and practices but also some material that may seem better suited to American management gurus.
Overall, without agreeing with all aspects of The Way of the Wind, and Sanguin’s work more generally, it is almost always thought-provoking and well worth reading and reflecting upon.
Reviewed by Kym Bills, January 2024
Book Reviews: Sarah Agnew, Embodied Performance: Mutuality, Embrace, and the Letter to Rome.
Pickwick Publications, 2020, ISBN: 9781725257849
In mid-2023 the Rev Dr Sarah Agnew became Minister at Christ Church, Wayville, UCA. Her website https://www.sarahagnew.com.au/ outlines other roles as a storyteller, poet and scholar. The book is based on Agnew’s PhD research at the University of Edinburgh between 2014 and 2017 and her own dedication reads: “This is for Holy One, the people of Holy One, and our mutual embrace”. Drawing from Stephen Burns’s ‘Holy One, Holy Three’, depending on context, ‘Holy One’ is Agnew’s preferred translation for the mutually indwelling three-in-one Trinity God. She preferences ‘Creator’ for Father, retains Holy Spirit, and uses ‘Jesus Wisdom’ or ‘Liberator’ instead of Jesus Christ which, upon reflection, may work better to perform Pauline letters. Holiness is used to encompass righteousness, justification and repentance, and tyranny rather than sin and sinner. Embrace is preferred to greet.
Agnew states that her major purpose in Embodied Performance is to tell: “the story of my search for a framework to support my embodied practice of interpretation. It develops into an examination of my practice as a biblical storyteller, from which I construct the method of biblical interpretation for which I was searching. It is a story of mutual embrace – performer and composition, performer and audience together. … I tell this story in the hope that it, and the Embodied Performance Method, will support and encourage the practice of other performers, scholars and readers.”. A formal summary of her new methodology is: “Through preparation, performance and reflection, the performer-interpreter employs tools of the body, emotion, and audience integrated with a range of pertinent exegetical approaches, to discern meaning in a biblical composition, presented in an Analysis comprised of Performance Interpretation and Critical Reflection.”
Embodied Performance shows how far scholarly approaches to biblical understanding have developed since my first theological study at the start of the 1980s. Then, the major extension to the critical deconstructive insights obtained from Historical, Form, Content and Redaction Criticism was to consider the final text of the Canon as scripture, as pioneered by Brevard Childs. Agnew cites this work indirectly through her discussion of a 2016 PhD thesis on the Psalms by Melinda Cousins, but focuses more on insights from Narrative Criticism and Biblical Performance Criticism as stepping-stones towards her own Embodied Performance Analysis (EPA) method and methodology.
A major insight from this more recent scholarship is to reconsider the orality of scripture, not as a collage of pericopes but in near final form. From the early 1980s, Narrative Criticism, with a focus on the narrative texts within the Bible (rather than other OT genres or NT letters), emphasised the story behind the text and its polyvalent character. This quickly developed to include context and audience for reception of spoken narratives, such as the Gospel of Mark, for which orality and Performance Criticism became important. A landmark 1982 book was Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel by David Rhoads and Donald Mitchie. Agnew engages in detail with this and a 2011 book edited by Kelly Iverson and Christopher Skinner about its impact, and a 2012 third edition of Mark as Story that included greater emphasis on orality and performance. The focus of much of this scholarship was to seek to better understand the First Century NT environment for orality – how the text subsequently settled in the Canon of biblical books was delivered to initial audiences. While not dismissing this, Agnew’s own focus is on interpretation and meaning-making when scripture is embodied, spoken and performed by storytellers for particular contemporary audiences.
To achieve the academic rigour required of a PhD thesis, Agnew engaged with epistemology (how we can and do know) using data from a range of sources about emotional and bodily learning (embodied cognition) – from psychology, linguistics, posture, theatre studies, tacit knowledge about potential military ambush and even rapid Japanese chicken sexing. The Enneagram could have been another example where intellect, emotion and body are all considered sources of perception, knowledge and understanding. Most of the extensive references in Agnew’s footnotes and bibliography were refreshingly new to me. I detected potential parallels with Actor-Network Theory but this was not necessary for Agnew’s thesis. Rigour is further built into EPA through its focus on detailed and structured critical reflection, especially by the performer.
The four chapters in Part 1 of the book document Agnew’s search for a new method and outline EPA. The three chapters in Part 2 discuss EPA in practice based on a case using the Book of Romans. Appendix A (pp 211-38) provides the script for a performance interpretation of Romans. Appendix B (pp 239-79) comprises preparation and rehearsal notes. Agnew’s use of the Letter to Romans as her (non-narrative) test case, provided a substantive challenge to the EPA method which it was able to meet. Immediately before a 2016 performance, she told her Blackwood UCA audience that Romans was a letter composed by Paul, written down by Tertius and probably carried to Rome by Phoebe where it was read aloud in a succession of Christian house churches. Agnew notes that longstanding issues with reception of Romans as judgmental, anti-Jewish and anti-LGBTIQ meant that she had to struggle to carefully perform it. Appendix C to the book provides links to this and other 2016 video performances (accessed at the website above via the ‘Embodied Performance’ tab). While not the same as being in the live audience, the videos of impressively memorized, embodied text, performed with varying voice, pace, pauses, actions and expressions, form an essential part of Agnew’s thesis.
Agnew’s self-critical analysis and reflexive approach allows her to write in the first person and this helps to make a serious academic study more approachable for a non-specialised reader. For example, she writes: “I, Sarah, am the one embodying the text, bringing my physicality, and my interiority to the texts, and the circumstances of the particular audience to whom I perform the letter to the Romans”. Romans 9-11 was omitted in a performance crafted to take about an hour with Agnew noting that its anti-Semitic issues are better addressed in sermon, discussion or written commentary format. But her videoed performance did not excise all difficult passages. Even though she had provided a non-NRSV translation designed to be less aggressive, Romans 1:18-32 (especially 26-27) was shocking and hard to reconcile with Agnew’s progressive views that do not stress God’s wrath or condemn homosexuality but embrace the LGBTIQ community in love. Positively, it was impossible not to emotionally engage with, and reconsider, one’s response to this material. Agnew suggests that using a digital format with superimposed written commentary may help (her track 3).
To the extent possible without myself employing EPA, I became convinced of the power of contemporary storyteller/audience performative mutuality for biblical interpretation. For me, this was in addition to, but did not supplant, an interest in better understanding orality in the original historical NT settings through Narrative, Performance and other methods of exegesis and criticism. Of course, Embodied Performance does not purport to, and cannot fully address, problematic NT themes and concepts that share more in common with historical ideology or a militant HB/OT God of retribution than a God of love and peace. Other tools of biblical criticism and discernment are needed for that. Agnew is up-front that “performance alone is not always the appropriate approach for receiving biblical texts today” and, for example, she may choose to employ “Historical, Rhetorical, Socio-cultural Criticism”. Her last chapter canvasses further strengths and limitations.
As Richard Swanson’s Foreword suggested, I found this book to be insightful and transformative both personally and as a fresh and important interpretative methodology that taps into baptismal transformation. Embodied Performance is challenging but highly recommended.
Book Review by Kym Bills, October 2023
Book Reviews: Rebekka King, The New Heretics: Skepticism, Secularism, and Progressive Christianity.
New York University Press, 2023, ISBN: 9781479836147
Canadian Dr Rebekka King is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her long-gestated book reports on intensive PhD ethnographic fieldwork from 2008 to 2010 within five churches around Toronto to help define and understand Progressive Christianity. It is enhanced by King’s further academic development. Progressive churches studied were United Church of Canada George Street and West Hill, Holy Cross Lutheran, St Matthias Anglican and an Anglican Church (pseudonym St Peter’s) that was not Progressive Christian per se but featured a reading group engaging with progressive texts.
King describes a spectrum of Progressive Christianity that tends to be more radical in Canada than in the US. An Appendix to the book lists eight points (2003 version) in the US Center for Progressive Christianity established in 1996 which apply to progressive Christians and begin with an approach to God through the life and teaching of Jesus and which seek to embrace diversity, tolerance and questions rather than dogmatism. The eight points from the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity (2004 version) are mostly similar but refer only to roots in Christian heritage and traditions rather than ongoing belief in Jesus or God.
This difference is most apparent in the West Hill United Church. (The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 from a merger of Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational denominations.) In 2004, West Hill’s Minister, Gretta Vosper, founded and is president of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity based at her church, where atheists and sceptics could feel comfortable belonging but not believing and in rejecting specific beliefs and practices. King reports in an Epilogue that from 2013 Vosper explicitly described her beliefs as atheist rather than nontheist and she reportedly did not believe in God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit. In 2017-18 Vosper faced a United Church National Council challenge to her suitability to remain a Minister (dubbed a ‘heresy’ trial) but after legal action this was confidentially settled in her favour, perhaps because of a lack of procedural fairness involving the application of retrospective criteria. Atheism is also a characteristic of former Anglican Priest Don Cupitt’s ‘Sea of Faith’ movement in the UK referred to as ‘non-realism’ regarding God. While these two key radical figures are not currently representative of Progressive Christianity worldwide, King as a sympathetic researcher, suggests that the longer-term trajectory of Progressive Christianity, at least in Canada, is towards atheism. Her book “is about Christians who don’t believe in Jesus” rejecting his divinity as an ethical conviction and preferencing science, secularity, disbelief, scepticism and contestation.
The New Heretics is linked to Peter Berger’s 1979 sociology of religion book The Heretical Imperative and argument that “we are all heretics now” based on the etymology of heresy from the Greek hairesis ‘to choose’ against orthodoxy and concomitant anti-authoritarianism. Many Progressive Christians are proud of the ‘heretic’ moniker and seek to make an informed and ethical humanist choice. While King quotes accessibly from her lived participant observation and from 70 interesting and insightful in-depth interview transcripts, this is a serious academic book of 257 pages laced with anthropological, ethnographic, historical and theological theory. It is not for the faint-hearted casual reader. While space does not permit substantive engagement with the theory, an outline of the history and characteristics of Progressive Christianity can be given.
The initial theological driving force for Progressive Christianity in these five Canadian churches was the writing, lecturing and pastoral presence of ‘humble and charismatic’ US Episcopal Bishop John Shelby (Jack) Spong who died in 2021 at the age of 90. Spong was most active in the US and several of his 25+ books sold over a million copies. Spong was also a catalyst for Progressive Christianity in Australia including a 2001 lecture given at the Effective Living Centre of Christ Church Uniting Church in Wayville, SA. Spong popularised lessons from biblical criticism and demythologising the Bible, called out ‘texts of terror’ and theistic favouritism and capriciousness, and engaged with science and reason in contrast to miracles and traditional creeds and liturgies. He argued that the church must change or die and appealed to those who were thoughtful Christian ‘alumni’ and ‘believers in exile’.
Other Progressive Christian writers important to members of the studied Canadian churches and beyond include Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. A Living the Questions program of videos and discussion was said to be used as a progressive alternative to Alpha. Group collective reading and discussion of such material is characteristic of Progressive Christianity and increasingly part of a ‘deconversion’ process in place of the Bible which is considered a tool of colonialism and oppression. Liturgies and hymns are regularly rewritten to be more inclusive and to omit traditional divine understandings, miracles and militant evangelism.
King argues that Progressive Christianity is best understood as a reaction to and in dialogue with more conservative, evangelical and fundamentalist versions of Protestant Christianity. Progressive Christianity shares some characteristics with liberal Christians’ focus on humanitarian social justice but rather than dealing with ethically troublesome biblical passages in relation to their historical theological context or reading them metaphorically or retaining a sense of mystery about the nature of Trinity-God, many Canadian Progressive Christians considered that it was more ethically honest and created lower barriers to entry for secular seekers to dispense with biblical scholarship and ‘God’ altogether.
King (p144) summarises that: “the very ethos of progressive Christianity evokes a fluid, continuous, and unfinished evolution of beliefs, practices and identity. Progressive Christianity emboldens the assumption of a new way of being Christian … constructed in relationship with and resistance to a Protestant proximate other whose identity and discursive tropes are at times subsumed. This antagonism is observable in the deconversion narrative. Their use of linguistically performative tropes enables progressive Christians to suspend themselves between past, present and future, all three of which are ambiguous and inconclusive”.
I find myself seeing the claimed radical atheistic trajectory of Progressive Christianity in Canada as a warning to Progressive Christians in Australia with whom I identify. I am supportive of something like the US Center’s eight points but not at the expense of Trinitarian mystery, ecumenism and a resurrection faith that is embodied, performative and allows for emotion and Spirit-led prayer and gifts and not just intellectual knowledge and humanist ethics. The New Heretics is recommended particularly for its scholarship and ability to make us review and rethink our own faith and beliefs.
Book Review by Kym Bills, October 2023
Book Reviews: Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories: A Way through the Maze (2014); Old Rugged Cross: A History of the Atonement in Popular Christian Devotion (2016): and Pictures of Atonement: A New Testament Study (2020). Reviewer: Kym Bills July 2023
How are we to understand our salvation through the cross of Jesus? This issue is what theologians call the ‘atonement’: the reconciliation of God and humanity through Jesus Christ. If, like me, you find it difficult to get a handle on the complex doctrines and theories across Christian writing and denominations, a recent trilogy of books by English theologian Ben Pugh may provide helpful history and guidance.
Pugh, a former full-time artist and then defence bureaucrat, has charismatic evangelical roots (apart from his art, not a common background for a Progressive Christianity book review), lives in Nottingham with his family, and is a university lecturer who runs a research centre focusing on the work of the Spirit in the mission of the church. Pugh’s three books are interdisciplinary and scrupulously seek to be objective – to truly understand the context of those that came before and differing faith traditions – with a preference towards a ‘kaleidoscopic’ embrace – bringing together the changing colours of faith, history and culture like the patterns in a child’s kaleidoscope. Of course, no writer can be completely objective.
Among the Church Fathers, Pugh regards Irenaeus as the primary writer about the atonement. In c.180CE Irenaeus discussed Jesus’ role as an obedient second Adam, undoing Adam’s disobedience, a God-Man acting as our representative to unite us with God. Irenaeus wrote that Christ undid “that disobedience which took place at the tree by that obedience which was accomplished on a tree”; “summing up universal man in himself even to the end”.
The first book fully devoted to the atonement was written 8 centuries later in 1099 by Anselm of Canterbury. From a starting point that “the order and beauty of the universe” had been disrupted by human sin, he developed a somewhat feudal medieval ‘satisfaction theory’ of atonement. He saw a dilemma wherein God’s dishonour by humanity needed to be repaid but that only God had the power to provide such incalculable compensation. Anslem’s solution was that Jesus as God-Man, by freely offering himself, averted human punishment for the dishonour. This was satisfaction by self-donation. It was not the Father requiring a penal substitution by the death of his Son to take on and absorb humanity’s sin in our place.
Anslem’s contemporary, Peter Abelard, criticised Anslem and instead emphasised love and ethics. For Abelard, God’s love for us displayed on the cross allows us to turn to God and should motivate us to change the way we live. However, he also wrote that works alone do not save us but a ’mystical participation’ in Christ.
Pugh concluded his first book with a recommendation, based especially on the writings of Irenaeus, Anslem and some more modern theologians, that we use an ‘Incarnation Criterion’ to understand the cross and atonement. He argues that letting God the Father require Christ’s suffering on the cross leads to an inflexible, demanding and violent God. Such an image of the Father has turned many away from the Church. But letting our humanity define Christ’s saving work (as partly suggested by Abelard) is inadequate to explain the extremity of the cross and the inadequacies in our following Jesus’ example. However, to put Jesus Christ, the self-emptied Son, incarnate by the Holy Spirit “at the centre compels us to attend to him who is the God-Man of [the] Chalcedon [Creed], the bridge and mediator between the divine and the human”. For Pugh, while Calvary is full of mystery and contradictions and our minds cannot fully cope with God-Man on a cross, the central incarnational message is that God has come near. This allows Jesus’ cross and resurrection to embrace extremes of human despair and joy, and of pain and release.
Pugh’s second book extends this and considers how atonement theories have helped ordinary Christians live more devoted lives. His key theme here is a ‘Participation Imperative’ in which Christ is the representative human who “suffers with our sufferings and dies our death yet raises us up to newness of life with him. [Pugh says] The Church’s use of Eucharist, metaphor, and art has been all about the attempt to re-present, and hence participate all over again”.
Pugh’s third book adopts a theological interpretation of scripture that emphasises the reception of “God’s Word spoken to build faith for the formation of Christian character and action”, especially through the use of metaphor, and receiving the Holy Spirit. Key atonement metaphors discussed are victory, participation, redemption, sacrifice, reconciliation and justification.
Pugh writes that “Metaphor is a way of dealing with the shock of the new by juxtaposing the new with the familiar. The new thing was that the Spirit, dispensed by the glorified Christ, was revealing to people that the shamefully executed Jesus of Nazareth was the glorified King of all … metaphors of atonement are ways of expressing the significance of what happened” on the cross, at Pentecost and subsequently.
The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead was sent by God the Father and the risen Lord and now dwelt within the first Christians. A new life had begun, understood as a foretaste of the age or kingdom to come. Influenced by their context, the early Christians’ view of the cross and atonement was understood in hindsight based on experience of the risen Jesus and Holy Spirit, just as it is for us today.
Pugh suggests that early ‘victory’ metaphors of atonement were based on the first Pentecost and vivid experiences of the inbreaking kingdom and participation in the victory and vindication of Christ (a ‘kingdom-now’ focus). Subsequent persecution of the Church led to sacrifice, ransom and cost language and metaphors (a ‘suffering-now’ focus).
Pugh’s third book particularly emphasises atonement metaphors and theologies of: victory over powers both outside of us and within ourselves; our dying and rising with Jesus in baptism and living truly freely; Christ’s loving self-donation on behalf of all of us as a representative satisfaction; God‘s love taking all the initiative in reconciling us to himself; and God providing the possibility of a total relationship (or mystical union) not possible before.
In summary, Pugh eschews a violent God the Father requiring penal substitution and shows the importance of historical contexts and metaphors and the Holy Spirit to help understand the atonement. These include a Christ-centred ‘Incarnation Criterion’ and a ‘Participation Imperative’ for our sharing with the representative God-Man who suffers and dies with, and for us, and reconciles us to God.
Kym Bills, Christ Church UCA, Wayville
Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence. Cascade Books, 2022. Reviewer: Kym Bills April 2023
A former Roman Catholic Priest, Englishman Anthony (Tony) Bartlett is now a US (Syracuse University) academic who with his wife Linda jointly leads the Bethany Center for Nonviolent Theology and Spirituality (https://www.bethanycenter.community/whoweare). Bartlett’s Preface and Introduction in Signs of Change acknowledge that the book depends on the more academic treatment about ‘semiotic openness’ within his 2020 Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard. Signs of Change provides illustrations of the earlier arguments based on an approach that “is both semiotic and evangelical, looking to actual religious effects and outcomes, and above all the concrete word of the gospel producing them. … the gospel is eruptive and self-validating”.
In Signs of Change Bartlett shows that the arbitrary and violent God of much of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Kings, also evident among many prophets, reflects the anthropology, understanding and culture of the settings, authors and compilers, and that this is reflected in parts of the New Testament and how it has been read. Bartlett documents the roots and signs of an alternative understanding of God and God’s expectations of humanity including compassion, forgiveness, non-violence and peace begun in Genesis 1 and within Exodus and developed in most of Job, Second Isaiah’s servant passages, Ruth, Daniel and Jonah, and in many key NT words and actions by Jesus and Paul. These form an alternative semiotics (sign processes and meaning making) to challenge the dominant narrative and understanding of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and its continuing influence within the New Testament.
This is important for those who seek to reconcile a God of mercy and love with the many biblical passages that suggest the reverse, and to understand Jesus’ death on the cross not as a sacrifice of a Son required by God the Father but as a self-giving by the Son who eschews violence in the face of human power and authority that is underpinned by violence. Bartlett considers that Jesus’ break with his ‘mentor’, John the Baptist, was based on Jesus’ nonviolence as against John’s hope and support for the fiery apocalyptic judgement of Elijah (see, Mt 3: 7-12; Mt 11: 2-14). The book’s title Signs of Change encompasses both the indications of an evolving different approach and the semiotics of that transformative inbreaking ‘kingdom of God’ understanding. Bartlett considers the evolution towards divine nonviolence in the Hebrew Bible to be ‘consistent’ and the canonical passages and books examined do help make that case. But the continuation of assumed divine violence within books of the New Testament means that interpreting such signs will inevitably remain contested. Signs of Change is accessible and thought-provoking for an informed non-academic lay readership that is open to Progressive Christianity and is highly recommended.
(Amazon Australia link to the book: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1666703729/ref=cbw_us_au_dp_ags?smid=A4XRJ8S0WXSO0
An insightful review by Revd. Canon Professor Scott Cowdell of Charles Sturt University is at this link: https://www.pdcnet.org//collection/fshow?id=covrb_2022_0072_0016_0017&pdfname=covrb_2022_0072_0000_0016_0017.pdf&file_type=pdf )
Brian McLaren, Do I stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed and the Disillusioned. Hodder & Stoughton, 2022. Reviewer: Kym Bills April 2023
Former English teacher and pastor, the American Brian D. McLaren is a well-known advocate for ‘a new kind of Christianity’ and author of many well-regarded books since 1998 (https://brianmclaren.net/about-brian/ ). Do I stay Christian? is his latest book and for many good reasons, has been warmly endorsed by Richard Rohr.
It is a book for the times in the mostly declining church in developed Western countries. It is profoundly evangelical but not in the usual way. Rather, it honestly engages the reality that faces hurt and thoughtful members of congregations who have not yet left mainstream denominations and who harbour doubts about individualistic approaches to sin and salvation, are deeply disappointed by the behaviour of clergy and church leaders, and who are broadly disillusioned by simplistic preaching and theology, among many other things. Such constructive engagement may also assist those who have already left to reconsider.
Do I stay Christian? is structured in three parts in response to that primary question. Part One outlines the ‘no’ case including because Christianity: “Has Been Vicious to Its Mother (Anti-Semitism) … Suppression of Dissent (Christian vs. Christian Violence) … High Global Death Toll – and Life Toll (Crusader Colonialism) … Loyal Company Men (Institutionalism) … Real Master (Money) … White Old Boys’ Network (White Patriarchy) … Is Stuck (Toxic Theology) … Is a Failed Religion (Lack of Transformation) … Great Wall of Bias (Constricted Intellectualism) … Is a Sinking, Shrinking Ship of Wrinkling People (Demographics).
The ‘yes’ case for Do I stay Christian? in Part Two includes because: “Leaving Hurts Allies (and Helps Their Opponents) … Leaving Defiantly or Staying Compliantly Are Not My Only Options … Where Else Would I Go? … It Would Be a Shame to Leave a Religion in Its Infancy … of Our Legendary Founder … Innocence Is an Addiction, and Solidarity is the Cure … I’m Human … Christianity is Changing (for the Worse and for the Better) … To Free God … Because of Fermi’s Paradox and the Great Filter”.
Part Three provides advice on How to stay Christian if that is the choice made. Here the chapters are: “Include and Transcend; Start with the Heart; Re-Wild; Find the Flow; Reconsecrate Everything; Renounce and Announce; Stay Loyal to Reality; Stay Human”.
McLaren says he would be happy if readers could stay Christian and embody a form of (Progressive Christian) faith that will help reverse the problems in Part One and embody the aspirations in Parts Two and Three. But for those who: “need to discover that Christian faith wasn’t meant to be our tree. It was meant to be our song. Whenever we sing with love, joy, peace and patience, whenever we sing with kindness, gentleness, generosity and justice, there we manifest what being human means to us. Our song is our gift to the world”. (Amazon Australia link: https://www.amazon.com.au/Do-Stay-Christian-Disappointed-Disillusioned/dp/1250262798 A review by Jon Sweeney with a videoed author interview is at this link: https://www.pdcnet.org//collection/fshow?id=covrb_2022_0072_0016_0017&pdfname=covrb_2022_0072_0000_0016_0017.pdf&file_type=pdf )
Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire, and How to Want What You Need. Swift Press, 2021. Reviewer: Kym Bills April 2023
Luke Burgis is a somewhat self-effacing American Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Business lecturer at The Catholic University of America who lives in Washington D.C. and has a focus on philosophy, ethics and psychology (https://lukeburgis.com/ ). His work is based on a rich foundation by René Girard who, among many other things, has explicated the power of sacrifice and scapegoating through the centuries. Wanting is not a theological book. Its message and suggested practical tactics to counter the pervasive power of consumerist culture, advertising and social media draws from Girard’s concept of ‘mimetic desire’. This is broadly consistent with a Christian approach led by the Spirit and based more on the Beatitudes of Jesus and in contrast to substitutionary sacrifice and ‘prosperity’ gospels. It is therefore of great relevance to those seeking an inclusive, ethical Progressive Christianity.
Burgis’s book is about why people want what they want. To understand mimetic desires: “The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand”.
Wanting has two main parts. Part One on The Power of Mimetic Desire addresses Hidden Models, Distorted Reality, Social Contagion, and The Invention of Blame. Part Two on the Transformation of Desire considers Anti-Mimetic, Disruptive Empathy, Transcendent Leadership, and The Mimetic Future.
In the course of addressing the detail of these subjects, Burgis provides 15 ‘tactics’ to help ensure that our desires are grounded in our values and correspond to what we deeply desire (with some having echoes in Saint Augustine’s Confessions and others to books by the late American management and leadership guru Stephen Covey):
- Name your models; 2. Find sources of wisdom that withstand mimesis; 3. Create boundaries with unhealthy models; 4. Use imitation to drive innovation; 5. Start positive flywheels; 6. Establish and communicate a clear hierarchy of values; 7. Arrive at judgments in anti-mimetic ways; 8. Map out the systems of desire in your world; 9. Put desires to the test; 10. Share stories of deeply fulfilling action; 11. Increase the speed of truth; 12. Invest in deep silence; 13. Look for the coexistence of opposites; 14. Practice meditative thought; and 15. Live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want.
Those who choose to read this book and overlook its sometimes overly individualistic US management-speak may find that they never see and understand the world and our society in the same way again. I think that is an important read for those honestly seeking inclusive, ethical and practical ways to move forward within Progressive Christianity.
(Amazon Australia link: https://www.amazon.com.au/Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Want/dp/1800750560 A helpful overview review is provided by Dawn Berkelaar: https://inallthings.org/what-do-you-want-a-review-of-wanting-the-power-of-mimetic-desire-in-everyday-life/ )
Douglas A. Campbell, Paul: An Apostle’s Journey. William B. Eerdmans, 2018. Reviewer: Kym Bills April 2023
New Zealander Douglas Campbell is Professor of New Testament Theology at Duke Divinity School and a specialist on Paul (https://www.douglascampbell.me/ ). This book provides an accessible introduction to Campbell’s more academic work pitched at “students or adult learners who haven’t had much exposure to the dense scholarly conversation” about Paul which seeks to “recover the real Paul … (and) his authentic voice by being honest about our reasons and positions”. It provides an excellent overview of Paul’s apostolic journeys and theological development in response to his context and practical challenges and in my case updated Pauline scholarship that was mostly accessed decades ago.
Campbell ascribes Pauline authorship to most of the 13 New Testament letters bearing his name and provides an earlier dating for some of them than is the established mainstream theological consensus. This is not always convincing but is evidence-based and it does not mean that Campbell is a fundamentalist evangelical scholar. Indeed, he has been constructively critical of some of the more mainstream perspectives of N.T. Wright who writes from an deeply informed Anglican evangelical perspective (see, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/scottish-journal-of-theology/article/panoramic-lutheranism-and-apocalyptic-ambivalence-an-appreciative-critique-of-n-t-wrights-paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god/2B31450AEB9B2EB8B9BA384704B31534/share/358db35062c4402c013a5209d3361336aae4cf6a ).
Campbell reconstructs Paul’s life from his letters and uses “this information to control the information supplied by Acts” described as a later anonymous work that tradition ascribes to Luke that has ‘episodic’ but not ‘sequential’ veracity. Paul’s dramatic conversion (eg, Gal. 1: 13-17) is shown to influence all of his subsequent theology which is Trinitarian (eg, 2 Cor. 13:13 and opening to 1 and 2 Thes.) and that Paul considered was a direct commissioning by the risen Jesus to take the good news to the pagan nations. In occasional heated dialogue with Church leaders in Jerusalem, including James and Peter, Paul maintained that pagans could become Christian and participate in the Jewish hope of resurrection without embracing Judaism. In addition to his formidable intellect and experience, Paul facilitated agreement or at least acceptance to this by providing substantial financial support to Jerusalem. Paul’s successful pagan conversions were based upon genuine caring friendships, humbly working alongside tradespeople and by using connections and family introductions supplied by influential pagan converts – a relational networking strategy to establish loving Christian communities that sometimes went off the rails and needed Paul’s critical support.
Campbell’s book provided me with a useful corrective to a somewhat negative view of Paul that had accreted over the years. In particular, Paul’s loving ethical values of church communities that should be outward looking and dynamic. Campbell considers that for Paul faith is not an individual condition for salvation but rather, based on the faith of Jesus, salvation meant that resurrection is open to us. He says Paul was an implicit universalist in which God’s plan was that everyone would be raised in glory, pagan and Jew alike. That is good news that can appeal to Progressive Christians who seek to honour and include others.
(Amazon Australia link: https://www.amazon.com.au/Paul-Apostles-Journey-Douglas-Campbell/dp/0802873472 Publisher video interview with author: https://eerdword.com/eerdmans-author-interviews-douglas-a-campbell-on-paul-an-apostles-journey/ )
Book Review: ‘Why Weren’t We Told?’ Reviewer Don Sinnott June 2023
This is not a new book – it was published in 2013 – but a decade has not diluted the significance of the issues it explores. If you haven’t explored it, and you are drawn to the expansive view progressive Christianity takes, this may be a stimulating book for you. It is available as an e-book for very modest cost.
The book calls itself a ‘Handbook’ and it is just that: a compilation of pieces by many progressive Christian thinkers. The compilers and editors, Rex Hunt and John Smith, are both ordained Uniting Church ministers and the contributors they have assembled comprise a distinguished list of Christian thinkers from Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA.
The book does not pretend to be an ordered exposition of what ‘progressive’ means in a Christian context. Rather, it is a rich resource for all Christians and seekers who chafe under dogma and theistic thinking that seem of questionable relevance in facing the challenges of today.
In his introduction, Rex Hunt makes a telling point about the current state of Christianity: ‘we live in a time of transition rather than tradition’ and the cameos that populate the first part of the book reflect this theme of transition. Each is a self-contained commentary or reflection, of just one or two pages, and no attempt has been made to harmonise content or come to ‘an agreed position’ on any matter.
In addition to being a compilation of stimulating commentary that dares to question what many Christians might consider to be beyond questioning, there are longer essays addressing issues crucial to a progressive Christian stance and narratives from faith communities challenging Christian orthodoxy in many ways.
The book’s final section is a valuable resource for those responsible planning or leading worship. It has examples of hymns, prayers and liturgies that show that the progressive ‘time of transition’ for Christian worship is not a matter of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Rather, these examples of authentic worship speak to a world of today that is not satisfied with old certainties and conformities.
This is a thought-provoking book for the discomfited.
REVIEWS BY THE LATE JOHN PFITZNER 2011
The late John Pfitzner was a long-standing member of the PCNetSA committee. He was also an avid reader, and regularly contributed book reviews to the PCNetSA newsletter. His contributions to this page will be sorely missed.
A New Spiritual Home: Progressive Christianity at the Grass Roots, Hal Taussig
This exciting and encouraging book is about progressive Christianity in USA, a new and vital form of Christianity that has emerged in the last fifteen years and is growing rapidly. A strength of the movement, according to the author, is that it is a grass-roots phenomenon; it has not been initiated from above by denominational leadership but has developed from below, at the local level. It is not yet widely recognised in society generally, but it is beginning to challenge the perception that right-wing Christianity is the only new development on the contemporary religious landscape. That the book confines itself to the American situation doesn’t in any way lessen its value for or relevance to our situation here in Australia.
The author, who is visiting professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary and co-pastor at a progressive congregation, identifies five key characteristics of progressive Christianity: vital spirituality, intellectual integrity, the transgressing of gender boundaries, Christian vitality without an attitude of superiority, and an emphasis on justice and ecology.
According to Taussig, the emphasis on vital spirituality distinguishes progressive Christianity from the spiritual aridness of most of the liberal Christianity of the middle of the last century and has produced new and vibrant forms of worship. These new forms are participatory, combine older liturgical forms with new forms of expression, acknowledge and permit the expression of people’s joys and concerns, make use of a wide range of artistic expression and incorporate practices (eg meditation) from other religious traditions.
The combination of vital spirituality and intellectual integrity (freedom for people to question and to think for themselves) is a key distinguishing feature of progressive Christianity. It is a thoughtful version of faith that also involves spiritual experience and the expression of feelings.
The area where progressive Christianity has come to greatest public attention is in its courageous and groundbreaking stances around sexuality and gender. The rejection of homophobia and the affirmation of equal rights across lines of gender and sexual orientation have been fundamental for progressive Christians and have distinguished them from most other forms of present-day Christianity.
Another striking feature of progressive Christianity is its ability to combine an enthusiasm for Christianity with an increased awareness and appreciation of other religions and an avoidance of any attitude of superiority towards them.
In Part Two the author presents brief profiles of thirty-seven progressive congregations from a diversity of denominations and situations and also examines other progressive groupings and organisations, such as the Centre for Progressive Christianity. In this section he also has a chapter on ‘exiled Christians and their books’, in which he identifies Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Borg’s The Heart of Christianity as coming close to manifestos for progressive Christianity.
In Part Three the author critiques the movement and identifies some dangers (eg sectarian arrogance) and weaknesses (eg the lack of inclusiveness because of the absence of people of colour, poor people and working-class people).
In the final section the author examines and makes suggestions about future directions for the movement. He encourages the development of networks and opportunities for progressive Christians to meet together for mutual encouragement and sharing of experiences and materials, but without undermining the grass-roots character of the movement, which is its strength. He also advises that congregations remain for the time being within their respective denominational organisations, in spite of the decline of the mainline denominations, so that their energies do not become dissipated in organisational and bureaucratic activities. This section also includes a list of dos and don’ts for starting a progressive church.
This book is enlightening and encouraging for progressive Christians because it shows that, although they are a minority among Christians at present (and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future), they are part of a dynamic growing movement that is providing a new spiritual home for many disaffected Christians and people who had previously given up on Christianity. The book shows how these new communities of ‘self-confident, spiritual, open-minded, gender-bended, justice-seeking, Earth-loving Christians’ (p 53) are having a positive influence in our world.
Reviewer: John Pfitzner
Paul Was Not a Christian The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle
Pamela Eisenbaum
Someone seeing the title of this book for the first time might be excused for thinking it’s the work of a maverick scholar with a crackpot theory. However, the book is a serious piece of biblical scholarship by a reputable theologian who is at the forefront of a radical re-evaluation of Paul, underway for a couple of decades, that is being called the ‘new perspective’ on Paul. The author acknowledges that she is building on the work of other scholars but sees herself as taking it further.
Pamela Eisenbaum is associate professor of biblical studies and Christian origins at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. She is an expert on early Christianity and, as a practising Jew teaching in a Christian seminary, has a unique perspective on the origins of Christianity.
Eisenbaum’s claim, which she argues powerfully and persuasively, is that Paul has been seriously misunderstood throughout most of Christian history. In particular, she maintains that the doctrine of justification by faith, as developed by Augustine and then Luther, and largely accepted by all churches as Paul’s central message and the heart of the Christian gospel, involves a misreading of Paul.
Paul’s so-called conversion experience, Eisenbaum claims, was not a conversion from one religion to another, from Judaism to Christianity (Christianity as a separate religion didn’t yet exist at that time). She maintains that Paul never repudiated his Jewish identity. Even after his encounter with the risen Christ, he remained a devout Jew. His conversion, Eisenbaum says, is better understood as a call by God to a particular ministry, as an apostle to the Gentiles, similar to the call of the Hebrew prophets.
According to Eisenbaum, a crucial key to understanding Paul is to recognise that in his letters he is addressing Gentile Christians. It is within this context that Paul’s negative statements about the law (Torah) are to be understood. For Paul, Christ’s death and resurrection were a clear indication that the end-times were near, and this made it urgent that the Gentiles be brought to know the true God (Israel’s God) in order to escape God’s judgment. Previously, the way for Gentiles to be ‘saved’ was for them to become Jewish, that is, to come under the law
(Torah). But at this critical time in history, Paul sees that a new way for Gentiles to come to God has been opened up by the death of Jesus. Just as Jews have had the privilege of being made right with God through Torah, now Gen-tiles have the privilege of being made right with God because of Jesus.
Eisenbaum explains how the phrase traditionally translated ‘faith in Christ’ is more properly translated as the ‘faithfulness of Christ’, a reading being adopted more widely by biblical scholars. It is Christ’s faithfulness to God in going to the cross that opens the way to God for Gentiles, not their faith in Christ.
The book requires concentration from the reader because of the author’s close reading of texts and careful analysis of the evidence. It also requires patience, since the author takes time to build her case. She spends early chapters discussing the nature of Judaism in Paul’s time, refuting the Christian view of it as a ‘religion of works’ and showing that it was not as exclusive and intolerant as Christians assume. Since Paul was a Pharisee, she also examines what is known about Pharisees, showing that they were more flexible in their attitude to the Torah’s requirements than is usually thought.
Readers of this book will find it difficult to view Paul in the same way as before. Most of their fundamental assumptions about him and his message will be challenged. But they will also find a Paul freed of the doctrinal burden that later generations of Christians have put on him, and a Paul who is more recognisable as a person and whose message makes more sense. For progressive Christians in particular, this makes this book exciting.
Readers with an interest in this book might also be interested in The Authentic Letters of Paul: A New Reading of Paul’s Rhetoric and Meaning by scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar. The book presents new translations (The Scholars Version) of Paul’s letters, together with introductory and explanatory material. It reflects a similar understanding of Paul and his message to that of Eisenbaum.
Reviewer: John Pfitzner (2009, HarperOne. 318 pages)
Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos: An Ecological Christianity
Bruce Sanguin
Progressive Christians typically seek a faith that fits with a 21st-century scientific worldview and also tend to have a keen ecological consciousness. Both these concerns are central to this book.
The author, who is a minister of the United Church of Canada in Vancouver, weaves aspects of his own personal story into the dialogue he creates between the story of the universe given by the sciences and the Judeo-Christian narrative of the Bible. For a person who is neither a professional scientist nor an academic theologian he shows an outstanding grasp of essential aspects of present-day cosmology, biology and quantum physics and also current developments in biblical scholarship. The result is a book, written in a lively and lucid way, which challenges us, as human beings, to new ways of seeing our place in the cosmos and, as Christians, new ways of being church in today’s world.
Our present ecological crisis is a motivating influence for Sanguin. He sees this as the pre-eminent challenge for our time, requiring of us, as human beings, that we see ourselves as a connected part of the rest of creation, not separate from it, and that we change from dominating and exploiting the natural world to fitting in with it. He says, “If Jesus was conducting his ministry in today’s world, I believe his circle of concern would include the ecological crisis facing our planet” (p 168).
In the first half of the book (Part 1) Sanguin focuses on creation as a sacred text alongside the other sacred text for us as Christians, the Bible. Acknowledging his indebtedness to Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, he presents readers with a vision of the universe as the product of 14 billion years of evolution and a source of divine wisdom. He says, ‘The story of the universe, the story of evolution, is our story. It is not just happening “out there”‟ (p 123). He guides readers through the eight epochs of the universe’s evolution from the first fraction of a second of the big bang to the creation of heavy elements in exploding supernovas, the emergence of life and, eventually, the birth of consciousness. He presents this as an exciting story that can reawaken a sense of wonder in us and can re-enchant our world.
With this new story of where we have come from and how we are related to the whole of the rest of creation, we need, Sanguin argues, a new way of understanding the divine and how the divine is at work in the evolutionary process. An evolutionary God, Sanguin says, would need to be immanent in the process of evolution, not as a controlling presence but as the cosmic urge to self-transcendence. This God would be the hidden wholeness, the non-coercive intelligence nudging hydrogen and helium molecules to organise into galaxies; galaxies to birth solar systems; and cells to cluster together in formations of increasing elegance, beauty, and diversity. (p 121)
In the second half of the book (Part 2) Sanguin engages with the sacred text of scripture, bringing into dialogue the two sacred narratives: the narrative of nature and the narrative of the Bible. He shows how the great biblical meta-narratives can be read in a cosmic context. He also examines the teachings of Jesus from an ecological perspective.
Towards the end of the book, Sanguin examines at some length the biblical concept of Sophia (Wisdom) as the means of God’s creative activity in the world and shows how the early Christians linked the Sophia concept with Jesus. As followers of Jesus, we Christians need to be in tune with the divine wisdom hidden deep within the created world and in Christ.
In the book’s final chapter, Sanguin suggests various disciplines for Christians to practise in order to counter the false ideologies of today’s world (eg domination, consumerism) and to act in ways that show respect and care for our planet.
Sanguin says:
We have at our disposal a new under-standing of the universe, but we operate out of an old one. The work of integrating this new story represents a fundamental challenge to our theological and liturgical models. (pp 28–9)
In this book he himself has made an engaging and stimulating start towards meeting this challenge.
Reviewer: John Pfitzner
(paperback, 288 pages)
Progressive Christian Network SA 