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This might be the finest feature of McKnight's book: he diminishes the role of will power in fasting, directing our attention instead to fasting's natural place in responsive spiritual living. To graph this idea, he offers a table—A á B á C—wherein A equals a sacred moment, B equals fasting, and C equals a result, be it forgiveness, hope, answers, or health. Often, he says, our approach to fasting is instrumental. We engage a fast (B) with a view toward results (C). McKnight reverses the direction of this table, suggesting that his study of biblical fasting shows that persons in Scripture fasted (B) in response to a divine encounter (A). "They were in B because of the grievous sacredness of A," McKnight says. Sometimes the fast yielded a result, but that was completely incidental to the spiritual pause that told their bodies this was a time to forgo food.

But here's where McKnight makes some big assumptions about his audience. He assumes that we are comfortable with undefined pauses and that we regularly grieve. Really, grievous is such a loaded word in McKnight's portrayal of fasting that I wonder why he doesn't reflect on it more. In his chapter titled "Fasting as Body Calendar," McKnight does give attention to the fact that evangelicals have largely done away with traditional Wednesday fasts, Friday fasts, and Lenten fasts because we "consider it something Catholics do … [and] we have been saved from such rituals." He uses this observation to counter that these fasts are not legalistic rituals but living reminders of our corporate identity in a story that centers on the Cross as much as it centers on the Resurrection.

But what's true about the liturgical calendar is only meant to reflect what's true about human existence: that we are seeds continually going into the ground to die so that our true identity in Christ might be born. Readers whose practical theology bypasses the uncomfortable passage of this waiting or this death, favoring instead a triumphant resolution or remedial approach to the problem, might not have a category for fasting as a natural bodily companion in the Christian life.

Or do we? McKnight's one-word title gives us the benefit of the doubt. Western Christianity is sated, he seems to suggest; perhaps we are positioned to welcome a grievous cutting back. McKnight calls on the witness of Scripture, church tradition, and such contemporary voices as John Piper to recommend this bodily engagement as a spiritual aid that can restore us.

Marcy Hintz, a staff member at Church of the Resurrection in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, works in the advancement office at Wheaton College.

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April 2009, Vol. 53, No. 4