Books

The Bible In A Post-Liberal Church

Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America,by Stanley Hauerwas (Abingdon, 159 pp.; $12.95, paper).Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination,by Walter Brueggemann (Fortress, 117 pp.; $10, paper). Reviewed by Robert Yarbrough, associate professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, Saint Louis.

On death row, the apostle Paul was in chains and knew his end was near. But, he insisted, “God’s word is not chained” (2 Tim. 2:9, NIV). Every generation has its ways of trying to shackle that word. Stanley Hauerwas and Walter Brueggemann offer two books that seek to shatter the fetters that confine the Bible’s message today. Both titles try to further the evangelical agenda of preaching the Word. Yet neither author is an evangelical, and both writers take eyebrow-raising tacks.

In challenging postmodernity, Hauerwas and Brueggemann may be conforming the gospel to it.

Hauerwas, a Duke University ethicist and cultural critic, has gained a wide readership among evangelical leaders in recent years. Brueggemann, professor at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, is among North America’s most articulate and prolific Old Testament scholars. Their studies arise within, and speak to, mainline Protestant constituencies. Both issue bracing calls for revamping our approaches to Scripture.

Hauerwas is willing to risk the label “unscholarly” if it will help “to free theology from its academic captivity.” He “resists the higher-critical method for study of Scripture.” For Brueggemann, “the end of modernity requires a critique of method in scripture study.” Speaking as a post-liberal, he insists that “the tyranny of academic criticism is no real improvement over the hegemony of ecclesial authoritarianism.” In other words, he thinks both conservatives and liberals are off the mark.

The Bible goes to church

Hauerwas’s great Satan is “our having accommodated our lives to the presuppositions of liberal democracies.” The church has lost its communitarian bearings. Only those who place themselves under “the discipline of the Church’s preaching” are capable of understanding Scripture.

Such counsel bears careful reflection. As Hauerwas insists, we cannot understand Scripture as it deserves “unless we have been transformed in order to be capable of reading it.” He decries the incursion of “the corrupt egalitarian politics of democratic regimes” into church life. He declares that “the Bible should be taken away from North American Christians” as individuals in order to be restored to the corporate assembly as the normative context for brokering the riches that Christian community offers.

The bulk of Hauerwas’s book consists of a dozen sermons. This accounts for the rhetorically supercharged tone. From the impassioned montage of messages emerges a clarion call for the Christian community to hark back to the biblical mandate of nonviolence rather than selfish agendas or bourgeois religion. Grace is not about a distant, loving God’s vague, inevitable niceness. It is about “a concrete historic people who embody the mediation of God’s good act for the world in the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Some may object that Hauerwas’s definition of Christian life is too narrowly Mennonite in conception. Others will object to his call for the dissolution of biblical authority into community consciousness (“the Church creates the meaning of Scripture”). His hermeneutical pragmatism will also find detractors as he pursues not “the meaning of Scripture” but “the usefulness of Scripture, given the good ends of Christian community.” He seems not to sense the problem created by separating “meaning” from “usefulness.”

Still, it is hard not to admire such plainspoken avowal that what the Bible says it means—or that what people confess, they ought to do. For this reason alone, Hauerwas’s contribution should be welcomed into discussions on proclaiming and hearing Scripture.

Inspiration or imagination?

Brueggemann charges that, in prevailing biblical interpretation, “the texts themselves are largely dismissed.” He seeks to redress this grievance. His study, unlike Hauerwas’s, is self-consciously academic in orientation.

If “community” is Hauerwas’s theme, “imagination” is central for Brueggemann. He inveighs against cultural subversion of our reading of Scripture. He asserts that “the Bible does indeed radically reconstrue and recontextualize reality.” He strives to map out an “infrastructure” in which the Bible can engage what he calls “postmodern imagination.”

What Brueggemann means is this: He thinks pre-Enlightenment Christian understanding of doctrine as normative for human thought is obviously passé. But so is nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalism, which, though progressive, was still “euro-American, male, and white” in character. We have reached the post-liberal, and in that sense, post-Christian, era. Doctrine is gone, along with sure scientific knowledge. The church has lost all “formal privilege.” Yet this provides a rich opportunity for the gospel ministry as Brueggemann understands it.

Specifically, biblical texts can be a prime resource for addressing the self-deifying tendencies of modern secularism. Biblical faith, says Brueggemann, affirms that life was created by God, who will also bring about life’s consummation. These “affirmations of past and future” can be a point of “continuing conversation” with secularism’s “rival imaginative constituais” of reality. Brueggemann offers exposition of six Old Testament texts to showcase “the counterworld of evangelical imagination,” his phrase for a gospel-bearing constatal of biblical faith in the postmodern setting.

“Evangelical imagination” is not to be confused with “evangelical Christianity.” Brueggemann states that those who hold eighteenth-century, premodern views—presumably such as beliefs that Jesus was divine, worked miracles, died to atone for sins, rose bodily from the dead, and so on—deserve nineteenth-century modernism’s refutation. Thus, while he cheekily coopts the word evangelical to describe his hermeneutical proposal, he scorns what evangelical means in popular parlance.

Both Hauerwas and Brueggemann offer compelling insights about the role of the Scriptures in today’s world. Yet an important concern is the extent to which each author, in challenging aspects of postmodernity, may, in fact, be conforming the gospel to it. In the end, does Hauerwas serve up much more than nonviolent social ethics, or Brueggemann anything other than warmed-over liberationist rhetoric?

Indeed, there may be room for an even more radical appropriation of biblical texts than either Hauerwas or Brueggemann, despite their books’ strengths, have managed to depict. Nevertheless, in very different ways, both of these authors commend the Bible as a resource for much-needed change in church and world.

Hearing The Voice Of God

In Search of Guidance: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God,by Dallas Willard (HarperSanFrancisco, 256 pp.; $10, paper). Reviewed by John Ortberg, pastor of Horizons Community Church in Diamond Bar, Calif.

In the tradition in which I grew up, there were two schools of thought on “how to know God’s will for your life.” One said God has a “perfect will” extending to a person’s significant life choices, and it is important to find it. The other said God has a general “moral will,” revealed in Scripture, and as long as a person is in that, he or she has total freedom for “neutral” decisions.

Dallas Willard’s In Search of Guidance (a revised version of an earlier work) is a more nuanced approach that does not fit either camp. Although written for popular audiences, it is a thoughtful exploration of the relationship between God and human beings as a relationship between persons. That means God, who has created and gifted human beings, will not be “neutral” about the choices that determine the fate of those gifts. But it also means God’s goal is the cultivation of freely loving human beings, which means many times his “will” for someone will simply be for that person to choose freely. Believers can be confident, Willard says, that God will offer guidance when offering guidance is appropriate. And believers, Willard further contends, can learn to receive it.

At a deeper level, however, this book is really about (as most of Willard’s religious writings are) learning to live in the kingdom of God. It explores what we really mean when we say we have a “personal relationship” with God. This is especially important in a time when the experience of many Christians (even many evangelicals) with God is neither personal nor relational. Willard’s subtext is this: discerning the will of God is a small task compared to becoming the kind of person who actually wants to do the will of God. With extraordinary insight, Willard calls us to explore the realm of the Spirit and to transcend the barriers that hold back many evangelicals from listening for God’s voice on a more intimate level.

“Amen! Praise The Lord!”

God Talk: The Triteness & Truth in Christian Clichés,by Randall J. VanderMey (InterVarsity, 193 pp.; $9.99, paper). Reviewed by Edward Gilbreath.

Before Pastor Cliff divides the Word of truth, why don’t we all just pray to ourselves that the Lord would ready our hearts through the ministry of Sister Holly’s special music.”

Translation: Before the pastor preaches, let’s listen to Holly sing.

For anyone new to the church, many of the words and phrases standard to the evangelical vocabulary could well require subtitles. Have we ever really listened to ourselves? Randall VanderMey has. And his observations in God Talk will open many ears clogged by overexposure to Christian lingo.

VanderMey, an English professor at California’s Westmont College, is not bent on condemning the clichés in our Christian speech (although he effectively manages to do this more than a few times); rather, he calls us to consider our usage of trite religious jargon, which may be blocking us from having a more living and vibrant faith.

Almost no Christian cliché is spared in VanderMey’s crusade. Habitual exclamations (“Praise the Lord!”), dinner openings (“Say Grace”), letter closings (“Yours in Christ”), and bumper stickers (“Honk if You Love Jesus”) all get the critical once-over. We are given history lessons on the roots of common terms (“Amen”), shown how a divine title becomes a comma (“Lord, I just come to you right now, Lord, and lay all these burdens on you, O Lord …”), challenged to exercise a greater reverence for names we are too accustomed to (“God”), and are encouraged to test our spiritual claims against Scripture (“God Told Me”).

Ever the English professor, VanderMey is mindful of the potential laboriousness of his theme. Hence, chapters range from standard essays and commentaries to winsome poetry and dramatic dialogues. These clever literary devices offer humor and give readers a captivating way to chase down the medicine.

Some may be bothered by God Talk’s sarcasm. VanderMey is often unapologetically biting in his evaluations of some phrases. He is, however, a keen observer of Christian speech and behavior, and this keeps us nodding and smiling at his insightful exposures of our common use and abuse of religious language.

God Talk’s most winning feature is its ability to turn linguistic analysis into devotional food for thought. To its credit, the book left me wondering if a revival of language could possibly spell a revival of hearts. VanderMey equates our passivity in Christian talk to our passivity in the faith itself. Thus, if we become more active and sincere in our verbal expression of Christianity, we may find this translated into our Christian living as well. In this way, VanderMey could be a linguistic prophet—pointing us toward a more meaningful communication of our faith.

Remembering The Ten Booms

Return to the Hiding Place,by Hans Poley (Lifejourney/David C. Cook, 205 pp.; $16.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Steve Rabey, religion editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.

Before her death in 1983, Corrie ten Boom told the world about her family’s stubborn but loving struggle against Hitler’s Nazis through the best-selling book and popular Billy Graham movie, The Hiding Place. Now we get to hear the story from the perspective of one of the many guests who took refuge in the ten Booms’ Netherlands house. Hans Poley, then a 19-year-old member of the Dutch Resistance, began his stay in the hiding place in May 1943. He stayed in the house on and off until early 1944, when he was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo—a fate that would eventually befall the ten Boom family.

Poley’s stay began with a gracious and faith-filled welcome from family patriarch Casper ten Boom, which set the stage for the following nine months: “Well, my boy, we are glad that you trust us to offer you shelter, but we have to expect our ultimate protection from our Father in heaven.”

Most of the book portrays the rhythms of daily life in the ten Boom house while Poley and as many as seven other people lived together in a state of siege. But Casper ten Boom’s zest for life and deep faith in God kept despair at bay. In this pretelevision world, the residents of the big house entertained each other with lectures on Italian culture, performances of arias by Schubert and Bach, and group games. Regular drills—designed to cut seconds off the time required to get the fugitives into the hiding place, which was behind a false wall in Corrie’s upstairs bedroom—were a frequent part of life.

Poley observed Mr. ten Boom’s deep respect for the many Jewish fugitives who streamed through their house. The ten Booms’ Christian home often took on an ecumenical flavor, with the group singing Hanukkah songs together and Mr. ten Boom engaging in lengthy debates about God’s mercies with Eusi, a Jewish man in his mid-30s who had served as cantor at a local synagogue.

Though his recollection does not downplay the horrors of living during a time when, as he puts it, “a demonic regime had taken hold of our country,” Poley’s story reveals that during this darkest moment of modern history, God’s amazing grace was plentiful and real.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.