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Here are the doctrines of the Fall, Jesus' work on the Cross, suffering and hope. Here are evil and free will and atonement and resurrection. Rienstra admits to occasional theological fuzziness—for example, not coming down firmly on the side of Calvinism or Arminianism but finding the basic common ground between the two positions. Her elegant and very accessible gloss on different theories of atonement—substitutionary atonement, sacrificial atonement, victory atonement, ransom atonement—acknowledges theological complexity. Her discussion of universalism strikes me as balanced and honest, though it may rub some evangelical readers the wrong way. "Christianity maintains that salvation comes through Jesus Christ," she writes, "but different strains of Christianity mean different things by that." She suggests that Scripture has universalistic impulses (such as Paul's assurance to the Corinthians that God will reconcile himself through Jesus to "all things"), but that many other passages of Scripture point to something starker, fiercer—the separation of the wheat from the chaff, the outer darkness and gnashing of teeth. Rienstra says that "The universalist strand and the outer darkness strand are in the Bible for good reason": one strand reminds us that God extends an invitation to everyone (TULIP Calvinists, gird your loins), the other strand works against a lazy arrogance about salvation. "Some confusion about who's in and who's out is probably quite healthy." Rienstra's discussion of the Trinity, found in her second chapter, is also noteworthy. If academic theology has renewed attention to the Trinity, many American Protestants are functional Unitarians. Kudos to Rienstra for reminding us that the Trinity is not abstruse or optional, but a crucial Christian basic.
Contrast Rienstra's first chapter with the first chapter of Mere Christianity. Rienstra's starting-point has nothing to do with natural law. Rather she begins with the intuition that there is something more than the harried daily grind, the morning latté at Starbucks, the push to fill one's Roth ira. So, as Lewis opens with "The Law of Human Nature," Rienstra opens by tugging at the reader's impulse toward meaning. You might be wading through grief after your father's death, she writes. Or you might be a young girl intrigued by the waddling penguin and leggy giraffe you saw at the zoo. Or you might be a new mother, blown away by the mystery of childbirth. Wherever, whoever you are, you know that "there must be something more" than "the morning commute … the half-lies we tell to get by … the evening news of crime and war, embroidered with empty banter and car advertisements." She nudges her reader to explore Christianity because the reader's own experiences nudge him toward transcendence (as Lewis himself persuasively did in his memoir, Surprised by Joy). Rienstra invites the reader not to march down the road of reason with her but to be "swept into meaning." We are pulled to the Cross through an "alchemy of perceptions, understandings, and memory."
The second half of So Much More lays out some basic Christian practices—prayer, Scripture study, worship, Christian community, service. At first I wished Rienstra had dealt with Christian practices that were more calculated to catch the imagination of seekers, appealing to yearnings that they're already trying to satisfy—practices such as simplicity, fasting, Sabbath-keeping. But my instinct was wrong, and Rienstra's was right. The five practices she lays out really are the basics, and one ought not delve into fasting, say, until one is grounded solidly in Scripture and prayer.
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