Book Reviews

Book Reviews: Kym Bills 2023, 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):

1. 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)