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Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology by Eugene H. Peterson Eerdmans, 2005 368 pp., $25 |
How do you understand the first two chapters of Genesis? As the story of the creation of the world? Maybe as key texts in a pitched battle over intelligent design. Maybe the Creation story was the first story you learned in Sunday School, and maybe it was the first Bible story you taught your kids.
In Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, the first instalment of a projected five-volume spiritual theology, Eugene Peterson tells us that he once read Genesis 1-2 as merely the story of the beginning of all things. He was "distracted" from the "personal immediacy" of those chapters for many years—years spent wrangling about evolution, years spent contrasting them to Babylonian and Sumerian cosmology. "Then I became a pastor, and gradually realized what powerful texts Genesis 1 and 2 are for dealing with life just as it comes to us each day." In the pastor's study, he learned to "pray and teach and preach these Holy Scriptures into" the ordinary lives of ordinary people, to help them raise their children and tend their fields and go to their offices and knit socks and bake bread and pay their taxes inside Genesis 1-2. He began to see that the beginning of Genesis was not simply an "account of the beginning of all things," but also a beginning of how "to live right now."
This description of learning to inhabit Scripture is not just a handy hermeneutic for Genesis 1-2. It is also an apt summary of Peterson's oeuvre; he could not have written his particular books had he not spent so many years in the pastorate. Even though he subsequently took an academic post, and even though he is now "retired," his writing comes from the parish, from the pulpit, from the pastor's study.
This is what he learned, in the parish: that we are living in conditions very similar to the Hebrew exile; that we are uprooted and lost and not grounded and that we do not have a center. "I felt that I and my congregation were starting over every week," writes Peterson. "There was no moral consensus, no common memory, all of us far removed from where we had grown up. The lives of my parishioners seemed jerky and spasmodic, anxious and hurried." And so he began preaching the prophets of Israel, Isaiah among them. And he noticed that one of Isaiah's favorite themes is creation. And he noticed, further, that in Scripture, only God creates. This is, in essence, what separates men and women from God: God creates; we can't. God is the Creator, we are creatures. "When the conditions in which we live seem totally alien to life and salvation, we are reduced to waiting for God to do what only God can do, create." And in that key, Peterson found himself returning to Genesis 1–2, asking not what the texts had to tell him about Darwin but rather "How can I obey this? How can I get in on this?"
What he has given us in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (the somewhat awkward title comes from a Hopkins poem) is an investigation of, and an invitation to, "the Christian life as lived." Peterson opens with some housecleaning: there is some vocabulary we have to get clear on, some words that, like false cognates, mean one thing in contemporary American, and another thing in classical Christian. Spirituality, for example, and Jesus, soul, and fear-of-the-Lord. With this basic vocabulary in place, Peterson spends the bulk of the book exploring three stages on which Christ plays: creation, history, and community.
The first section moves through a reading of the Gospel of John to a reflection on the importance of Sabbath. The second section, "Christ Plays in History," confronts sin. Human history exposes the Whiggish lie that humanity is on an upward, forward march, getting better and better and nearer the realization of Heaven on Earth in each succeeding generation. The event that defines Christians' entry into human history, says Peterson, is the Cross. Here, our central texts are Exodus and the Gospel of Mark, and Peterson leads us from an account of the Crucifixion into the practices of Eucharist and hospitality.
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