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adamrshields's reviews
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If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I? by Angela N Parker
4.25
Summary: An introduction to hermenutics through the lens of Womanist Biblical methods.
Generally when I read a book, I try to write about it within a few days. This has become a spiritual practice of mine, not just because I like to encourage reading, but also because I want to incorporate what I am learning. Part of that incorporation is writing about the book so that I can put on paper what was important to me. But sometimes I get busy with my paying work or other aspects of life and at some point I am just too far away from a book to do it justice. In the case of If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? I read it in Feburary 2022, and then again in December 2022. It was certainly one of my favorite books of 2022 but because I hadn’t written about it, it was hard to talk about why in a suscinct way.
I have had a running book club since 2020 or 2021 depending on whether you count the Be the Bridge groups that it grew out of, or the later discussion of Color of Compromise that was the start of an actual book club., Since then I am told we have discussed 12 books. I have wanted to get a group to talk about If God Still Breathes for a while, and this spring seemed like a good time.
If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? is a fairly short book, only 128 pages and about 3 hours. But there is some weight to it. It was the most challenging book we have tackled so far. Most of the group was new to Womanist thought, so there was that aspect of difficulty. Only a couple of other members of the group had taken formal college-level Bible classes, either. Mixing womanist thinking and biblical hermenutics introduced many in the group to a lot of new vocabulary. One of the members expressed how happy he was to be reading on kindle because there is a bulit-in dictionary.
As someone with a seminary degree, and who has read Womanist theology as part of my seminary education, I did not think this was a hard book to understand. Still, the group's reaction did help me understand where there were ideas that I had come to think of as ordinary but were not common. I knew that the discussion of her being trained as a “White Male Scholar” and discussion Hagel and other German scholars would be a bit challenging, but the fourth chapter where she talked about translation theory and Greek language was more difficult than I rememebered it being. There is a lot of subtle nods to other things that if you have some background, show the brilliance of the writing. And if you don’t have the background, it isn’t that you need to know it to understand the main point, but I did find myself wanting everyone else to understand what was under the surface.
There are a lot of things going on in a very short book. She introduces a lot of biography in part because she is introducting the concepts of Womanist biblical interpreation and those biographical elements are a really good way of showing why Womanist is not just appropriate, but is an essential corrective to what some would consider more traditional biblical interpreation.
Chapter Four is the longest and most constructive of the chapters because after having laid out her background, she show through discusison of Galatians how Womanist biblical interpreation works. I very much wanted the book to be longer becuase I wanted to see other examples of Womanist biblical interpreation. But I also have read Wil Gafney and other womanist theolgogians and so I was not completely new. And I think the decision to write a short introduction was the right choice because it does something different from long biblical interpreation. If God Still Breathes is about introducing the method, not a longer commentary on scripture.
Because I have read it so many times and because I was leading a group through it, I have entirely too many notes and highlights. But if you are interested in nearly 70 notes and highlights from a 128 pages book, you can see them here.
This was original posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/if-god-still-breathes/
Generally when I read a book, I try to write about it within a few days. This has become a spiritual practice of mine, not just because I like to encourage reading, but also because I want to incorporate what I am learning. Part of that incorporation is writing about the book so that I can put on paper what was important to me. But sometimes I get busy with my paying work or other aspects of life and at some point I am just too far away from a book to do it justice. In the case of If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? I read it in Feburary 2022, and then again in December 2022. It was certainly one of my favorite books of 2022 but because I hadn’t written about it, it was hard to talk about why in a suscinct way.
I have had a running book club since 2020 or 2021 depending on whether you count the Be the Bridge groups that it grew out of, or the later discussion of Color of Compromise that was the start of an actual book club., Since then I am told we have discussed 12 books. I have wanted to get a group to talk about If God Still Breathes for a while, and this spring seemed like a good time.
If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? is a fairly short book, only 128 pages and about 3 hours. But there is some weight to it. It was the most challenging book we have tackled so far. Most of the group was new to Womanist thought, so there was that aspect of difficulty. Only a couple of other members of the group had taken formal college-level Bible classes, either. Mixing womanist thinking and biblical hermenutics introduced many in the group to a lot of new vocabulary. One of the members expressed how happy he was to be reading on kindle because there is a bulit-in dictionary.
As someone with a seminary degree, and who has read Womanist theology as part of my seminary education, I did not think this was a hard book to understand. Still, the group's reaction did help me understand where there were ideas that I had come to think of as ordinary but were not common. I knew that the discussion of her being trained as a “White Male Scholar” and discussion Hagel and other German scholars would be a bit challenging, but the fourth chapter where she talked about translation theory and Greek language was more difficult than I rememebered it being. There is a lot of subtle nods to other things that if you have some background, show the brilliance of the writing. And if you don’t have the background, it isn’t that you need to know it to understand the main point, but I did find myself wanting everyone else to understand what was under the surface.
There are a lot of things going on in a very short book. She introduces a lot of biography in part because she is introducting the concepts of Womanist biblical interpreation and those biographical elements are a really good way of showing why Womanist is not just appropriate, but is an essential corrective to what some would consider more traditional biblical interpreation.
Chapter Four is the longest and most constructive of the chapters because after having laid out her background, she show through discusison of Galatians how Womanist biblical interpreation works. I very much wanted the book to be longer becuase I wanted to see other examples of Womanist biblical interpreation. But I also have read Wil Gafney and other womanist theolgogians and so I was not completely new. And I think the decision to write a short introduction was the right choice because it does something different from long biblical interpreation. If God Still Breathes is about introducing the method, not a longer commentary on scripture.
Because I have read it so many times and because I was leading a group through it, I have entirely too many notes and highlights. But if you are interested in nearly 70 notes and highlights from a 128 pages book, you can see them here.
This was original posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/if-god-still-breathes/
Theologizin' Bigger by Trey Ferguson
4.25
Summary: Essays exploring the role of hermeneutics and theology for the Christian life.
I am the kind of person who picks up an audiobook of theology because I have a full day of work to do in my yard, and I need something to keep me motivated. Theologizin’ Bigger is exactly what I needed to keep me going.
There are a lot of books that I will listen to while working and then I will get the broad overview and decide if they are worth coming back to more slowly in print later. This is a book that I think is worth revisiting in print later, not because it is hard to understand but because it is well-written and deserves careful reading.
There are 17 chapters split into four sections, and I don’t know which is my favorite. I spent a lot of time grappling with hermeneutics (how we understand the role and message of the Bible) about 10 or so years ago. I went to seminary in my early 20s. I am glad I did because it was easier to do grad school when I was young, but there are questions that I didn’t have in my early 20s because I did not have the life experience yet. For me the role of scripture was a question for my late 30s. I was aware of a number of technical issues around the Bible and biblical interpretation, but it took me longer to see more bad uses to really start grappling with the ways that the methods of our bible reading were a real part of the problem of Christianity. The chapters of on the bible may seem simple, but they are not simplistic.
I started following Trey Ferguson on Twitter because I met one of the other co-hosts of the Three Black Men podcast at a conference back in 2019. My grappling with issues of race is why I was at a Jude 3 conference in the first place. I am not new to issues around distortions of Christianity because of Whiteness, but the second section of the book, on distortions of Christianity and how his life experience matters to correcting those distortion. The reality that Christianity and Jesus was about freedom does matter. A Christianity that is not about liberating people isn’t a real Christianity.
There is a real thread that goes through the third and fourth sections of the book, but I think it is more subtle than the first two sections. In many ways it is a continuation of the theme of liberation. Part of liberating people from bad Theologizin, that has a God and vision for faith that is far too small is confronting the wrong ideas. Trey Ferguson was on the Gravity Common’s podcast talking about the problems with Penal Substitutionary Atonement as it is normally presented and at the end of the podcast he was asked to preach the real gospel. That podcast I think showed the real focus of the last two sections, not that they are concerned solely with PSA but that like PSA, we have to “lean into mystery” and focus on a “rehumanizing project” as his last two chapters are called.
Faith matters, and part of why Ferguson is calling us to a large view of theology and our role in it, is because the small view of what it means to understand our role in the world needs a bigger view. A strong view of boundary setting, which is what many in the Christian world want to focus on, will limit what it is that we can do in the world. Even if our understanding of God is often too small, God is not a small God.
My one complaint is a standard complaint for me. I really do prefer that authors read their own books. Trey is a pastor and speaker. He hosts two podcasts and is regularly on other people’s podcasts. He has a distinctive voice, not just the sound of his voice but the content of his voice and while this audiobook was fine, it wasn’t his voice. And I would have preferred it to be his voice.
I originally posted this on my blog at https://bookwi.se/theologizin-bigger/
I am the kind of person who picks up an audiobook of theology because I have a full day of work to do in my yard, and I need something to keep me motivated. Theologizin’ Bigger is exactly what I needed to keep me going.
There are a lot of books that I will listen to while working and then I will get the broad overview and decide if they are worth coming back to more slowly in print later. This is a book that I think is worth revisiting in print later, not because it is hard to understand but because it is well-written and deserves careful reading.
There are 17 chapters split into four sections, and I don’t know which is my favorite. I spent a lot of time grappling with hermeneutics (how we understand the role and message of the Bible) about 10 or so years ago. I went to seminary in my early 20s. I am glad I did because it was easier to do grad school when I was young, but there are questions that I didn’t have in my early 20s because I did not have the life experience yet. For me the role of scripture was a question for my late 30s. I was aware of a number of technical issues around the Bible and biblical interpretation, but it took me longer to see more bad uses to really start grappling with the ways that the methods of our bible reading were a real part of the problem of Christianity. The chapters of on the bible may seem simple, but they are not simplistic.
I started following Trey Ferguson on Twitter because I met one of the other co-hosts of the Three Black Men podcast at a conference back in 2019. My grappling with issues of race is why I was at a Jude 3 conference in the first place. I am not new to issues around distortions of Christianity because of Whiteness, but the second section of the book, on distortions of Christianity and how his life experience matters to correcting those distortion. The reality that Christianity and Jesus was about freedom does matter. A Christianity that is not about liberating people isn’t a real Christianity.
There is a real thread that goes through the third and fourth sections of the book, but I think it is more subtle than the first two sections. In many ways it is a continuation of the theme of liberation. Part of liberating people from bad Theologizin, that has a God and vision for faith that is far too small is confronting the wrong ideas. Trey Ferguson was on the Gravity Common’s podcast talking about the problems with Penal Substitutionary Atonement as it is normally presented and at the end of the podcast he was asked to preach the real gospel. That podcast I think showed the real focus of the last two sections, not that they are concerned solely with PSA but that like PSA, we have to “lean into mystery” and focus on a “rehumanizing project” as his last two chapters are called.
Faith matters, and part of why Ferguson is calling us to a large view of theology and our role in it, is because the small view of what it means to understand our role in the world needs a bigger view. A strong view of boundary setting, which is what many in the Christian world want to focus on, will limit what it is that we can do in the world. Even if our understanding of God is often too small, God is not a small God.
My one complaint is a standard complaint for me. I really do prefer that authors read their own books. Trey is a pastor and speaker. He hosts two podcasts and is regularly on other people’s podcasts. He has a distinctive voice, not just the sound of his voice but the content of his voice and while this audiobook was fine, it wasn’t his voice. And I would have preferred it to be his voice.
I originally posted this on my blog at https://bookwi.se/theologizin-bigger/
When God Became White: Dismantling Whiteness for a More Just Christianity by Grace Ji-Sun Kim
Part of what Grace Ji-Sun Kim is grappling with is the ways that her Korean cultural bias toward obedience impacted the ways her biases about her faith in ways that she was unable to explore more deeply until well into her adult years. The memoir aspects of the book matters because she is recounting the ways the presentation of Jesus and God the Father as both male and white negatively impacted her faith There will be people who want to argue with her experience, but her experience isn’t unique, there are many who have a similar impact.
Central to the concept of the book is the idea of race and Whiteness.
People who have not explored the development of the concept of race often do not realize that the notion of race was developed slowly along with the reality of colonization.
It is not just that the concept of race is relatively new in world history, race as a concept was developed alongside Whiteness. Whiteness is an ideological concept not just that racial categories exist, but that there is internal to the concept of race a hierarchy of people within those racial categories. “White people are viewed as the norm, and everyone else is one or more steps away from the normative in society.” (p26)
The development of the concept of Whiteness had a historical context, the development of colonialism and capitalism.
From this basic exploration of the concept and development of Whiteness, she lays out the central problem, “Decolonization is a spiritual matter just as it is a physical, mental, social, and political one. Hence, we need to decolonize Christianity from its whiteness if anything is to change.” (p60) The next several chapters explore how Whiteness has impacted how we think of the mission of Christianity and the practice of Christianity. The reality that so many Christians (White and non-White) have absorbed the concept of Whiteness in regard to Christianity means that harm to both White and non-White people is pervasive because so many cannot separate Christianity from Whiteness.
There are places I would quibble and I think there are also places where she shifts the concept of Whiteness to include all hierarchy or suggests that Whiteness was present long prior to the 15th-17th century. In some sense I can agree to this because Whiteness is a tool of hierarchy, and not the entirety of hierarchy. In all cases, ontological hierarchy is contrary to Christianity, even if some believe it is central to Christianity. This impacts not just how we experience Christianity, but even things like basic translation methods.
Toward the end of the book Grace Ji-Sun Kim explores Korean concepts of Chi, Han, Jeong, and other ideas can help extricate Whiteness from Christianity.
The last chapter in particular where she explores a way forward, particularly in regard to language and the liturgy. I am going to put a long quote, stitched together to give a sense of the way forward.
While I have a few minor quibbles, I think that When God Became White is a helpful theological approach to bringing understanding and healing into Christianity.
I have about 50 public highlights and notes that you can view on Goodreads.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/when-god-became-white/
4.5
Summary: A mix of history, memoir, and theology to discuss the problem of God being portrayed as White and how this has communicated Whiteness (an ideology of racial hierarchy).
I have been looking forward to reading When God Became White since I heard it announced. I have only read her Intersectional Theology, but I own three of her books and I hope to read at least two of them this year. (Invisible, The Homebrew Christianity Guide to the Holy Spirit, Healing Our Broken Humanity). There are several reasons why I was looking forward to When God Became White. First, I wanted to explore the concept of Whiteness from a more theological perspective. Emerson and Bracey’s Religion of Whiteness explores it from a Sociology of Religion perspective, and I am familiar with its historical development from authors like Ibrahm Kendi and philosophical development of whiteness from authors like George Yancy. There are others working on theological development of the concept of Whiteness, but I expected (and found) that Grace Ji-Sun Kim broke out of the Black/White paradigm of discussing Whiteness and I knew from listening to a number of interviews and her writing that she would bring a gender critique as well.
The strength of When God Became White is its exploration of her own story and the way the Asian experience more broadly. The discussion of Whiteness is often limited to the White/Black binary. Throughout the book she discusses Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ thats her mother kept in an honored place in their home above the couch (Color of Christby Harvey and Blum has a lengthy discussion of the history and impact of Sallman’s painting.)
I have been looking forward to reading When God Became White since I heard it announced. I have only read her Intersectional Theology, but I own three of her books and I hope to read at least two of them this year. (Invisible, The Homebrew Christianity Guide to the Holy Spirit, Healing Our Broken Humanity). There are several reasons why I was looking forward to When God Became White. First, I wanted to explore the concept of Whiteness from a more theological perspective. Emerson and Bracey’s Religion of Whiteness explores it from a Sociology of Religion perspective, and I am familiar with its historical development from authors like Ibrahm Kendi and philosophical development of whiteness from authors like George Yancy. There are others working on theological development of the concept of Whiteness, but I expected (and found) that Grace Ji-Sun Kim broke out of the Black/White paradigm of discussing Whiteness and I knew from listening to a number of interviews and her writing that she would bring a gender critique as well.
The strength of When God Became White is its exploration of her own story and the way the Asian experience more broadly. The discussion of Whiteness is often limited to the White/Black binary. Throughout the book she discusses Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ thats her mother kept in an honored place in their home above the couch (Color of Christby Harvey and Blum has a lengthy discussion of the history and impact of Sallman’s painting.)
“The white Jesus on our wall was a depiction to me of how God looked as well. I pictured God as an old white man, just as everyone else did. There was no reason to question that notion. It was everywhere: in paintings, stained-glass windows, and storybooks. I never questioned it. I didn’t even think twice about whether Jesus was white or not. It was not in my consciousness to question anything that was taught by my mother or the church. Both pushed a white Jesus, and I just took it as the truth.”
“What I didn’t know then that I know now is how influential that picture was on my own theology and faith development. That image of a white Jesus was imprinted on my brain and body so that I could not even question whether Jesus actually looked like that. It was a given, as it was the most famous picture of Jesus. I went to visit family in Korea twice during my youth, and even my family members there had the same picture of the white Jesus in their homes. The Korean churches also had the same picture of white Jesus. Furthermore, when I traveled to India during my seminary years, all the churches that I visited had this same white Jesus picture. This confirmed to me that this must be the real Jesus, as it is universally understood to be the image of Christ. I just took it for granted that Sallman’s Head of Christ must be the real thing.” (P8)
Part of what Grace Ji-Sun Kim is grappling with is the ways that her Korean cultural bias toward obedience impacted the ways her biases about her faith in ways that she was unable to explore more deeply until well into her adult years. The memoir aspects of the book matters because she is recounting the ways the presentation of Jesus and God the Father as both male and white negatively impacted her faith There will be people who want to argue with her experience, but her experience isn’t unique, there are many who have a similar impact.
“As the center of Christianity, God being white implies that whites are the center of humanity and that God’s concerns and God’s desires center on white people at the expense of people of color. This has damaging consequences for people of color who experience grave injustices due to racism, discrimination, and xenophobia.” P13
Central to the concept of the book is the idea of race and Whiteness.
“The notion of race is based not on biology but on social meanings that are created and re-created due to changing contexts. The concept of race was created mainly by Europeans in the sixteenth century and is based on socially constructed beliefs about the inherent superiority and inferiority of groups of people.” p19
People who have not explored the development of the concept of race often do not realize that the notion of race was developed slowly along with the reality of colonization.
“Before the seventeenth century, Europeans did not think of themselves as belonging to a white race. Instead, they viewed themselves as belonging to different parts or regions in Europe and had a very different perception of race and racialization. But once this concept of white race was shown to be advantageous to Europeans and enslavers, it began to reshape and redefine their world….Before the late 1600s, Europeans did not use the term Black to reference any group of people. However, with the racialization of enslavement around 1680, many looked for a term to differentiate between the enslaved and the enslavers. Thus the terms white and Black were used to represent and differentiate racial categories.” (p20-24)
It is not just that the concept of race is relatively new in world history, race as a concept was developed alongside Whiteness. Whiteness is an ideological concept not just that racial categories exist, but that there is internal to the concept of race a hierarchy of people within those racial categories. “White people are viewed as the norm, and everyone else is one or more steps away from the normative in society.” (p26)
The development of the concept of Whiteness had a historical context, the development of colonialism and capitalism.
“White Christianity and missiology are intertwined with colonialism, and it has had devastating effects all over the world. Whiteness is the root of much colonialism around the globe, and there are four deadly weapons employed in white Christian conquests: genocide, enslavement, removal, and rape. These weapons divide people, separating them from land, people, story, culture, and identity. These weapons serve colonizers in gaining more land and low-cost or no-cost labor to grow wealth.” (p48)
From this basic exploration of the concept and development of Whiteness, she lays out the central problem, “Decolonization is a spiritual matter just as it is a physical, mental, social, and political one. Hence, we need to decolonize Christianity from its whiteness if anything is to change.” (p60) The next several chapters explore how Whiteness has impacted how we think of the mission of Christianity and the practice of Christianity. The reality that so many Christians (White and non-White) have absorbed the concept of Whiteness in regard to Christianity means that harm to both White and non-White people is pervasive because so many cannot separate Christianity from Whiteness.
There are places I would quibble and I think there are also places where she shifts the concept of Whiteness to include all hierarchy or suggests that Whiteness was present long prior to the 15th-17th century. In some sense I can agree to this because Whiteness is a tool of hierarchy, and not the entirety of hierarchy. In all cases, ontological hierarchy is contrary to Christianity, even if some believe it is central to Christianity. This impacts not just how we experience Christianity, but even things like basic translation methods.
Toward the end of the book Grace Ji-Sun Kim explores Korean concepts of Chi, Han, Jeong, and other ideas can help extricate Whiteness from Christianity.
The last chapter in particular where she explores a way forward, particularly in regard to language and the liturgy. I am going to put a long quote, stitched together to give a sense of the way forward.
For most of the church’s history, our prayers, hymns, and liturgies have been written by white European men. The language used in our church worship imagines, describes, and reinforces a white male God. From the beginning to the end of worship, we praise, read about, and pray to a white male God…The white male language used throughout our religious practice reinforces our perceptions and beliefs that white and male is superior to nonwhite and female. We memorize prayers, hymns, and creeds during childhood that become embedded in our thoughts, hearts, and behaviors that end up carried into adulthood. These white male liturgies have become part of our being and greatly influence our perception of God…We know that God is neither white nor male. That was merely a notion of God constructed by white male theologians. God is Spirit and, as a spiritual entity, cannot have gender or race, and this should be reflected in the liturgical languages that we use within the church. It is paramount that we rethink and re-create our liturgical language about God..in Korea, the concept of ou-ri, translated as “our,” is far more important than the individual. “Ourness” is a concept that has built up the Korean community with an emphasis on being connected to each other to protect and help others. Ou-ri in the Korean language is often used as a personal pronoun. So instead of saying “my family,” in Korea, we say “ou-ri family.” Instead of saying “my spouse,” we say “ou-ri spouse,” even though you are married to only one spouse. This different outlook and emphasis in life challenges us to become different individuals within the community, to prioritize the needs of the community. We need to adopt an ou-ri-ness in our theological journey so we can fight racism and overcome the other divisive beliefs we face as people of God. All people are invited to the banquet of God where we can dance, rejoice, and be merry in the presence of God. It is the ou-ri-ness of God’s love that we should be embodying as Christians.” (p168)
While I have a few minor quibbles, I think that When God Became White is a helpful theological approach to bringing understanding and healing into Christianity.
I have about 50 public highlights and notes that you can view on Goodreads.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/when-god-became-white/
Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day's Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times by D.L. Mayfield
4.25
Summary: A biography of a radical Christian who took seriously the call to help the marginalized.
Dorothy Day is someone that I have known about for a long time, but someone who I have not known much about. I have read one of DL Mayfield’s previous books and I know that she takes seriously the call for Christians to serve and live with the marginalized so I thought she would be a good author to read about Dorothy Day. (I have also read a book by her husband, a counselor.)
Unruly Saint is not a lengthy biography, about 250 pages. And most of its focus is on the founding of the Catholic Worker and its early years. Mayfield’s personal reflections on Day and her use of the research on Day as a way to grapple with her own Christian faith I think is one of the strengths of the books, but also one that may not appeal to everyone. I particularly read a lot of biography and memoir because I want to know how others have thought about what it means to live a good life or discern how to they can live in a complicated world. Reflective biographies like this give me insight not only into the subject of the biography but the author.
I was aware of the basic shape of Day. I knew she was a writer and that she founded the Catholic Worker Newspaper and various others activities to serve the poor during the Great Depression. I knew she was a radical and had been a communist prior to becoming Catholic. I knew that she had a child and was a pacifist. But I think that was really the extent of what I knew walking into this biography.
I am not going to rehash the book. But what I appreciate about Mayfield’s writing is that she is empathetic to both the strengths and weaknesses of Day and she doesn’t try to cover up either. At the end there is a grappling with the movement to officially recognize Day as a Catholic Saint. It is clear that Day wanted to try to live like a saint but didn’t want to be treated like one. There are several quotes about how Day was concerned about being minimized and reduced to “a saint” in a way that reduced the call to serve the marginalized to work that only saints did and not a calling on all Christians. Mayfield also reflects on the fact that Day was overwhelmed by her work often, but saw the need and couldn’t say no to giving away almost anything she had to someone who needed it because she understood the desperation of real need. Day assumed that others would react as she did when they also saw the need; but many do not.
There was a real community that formed around her, but it was also not a community that cared for Day as peers. She was lonely in part because she had such a strong call and skill at organizing. But I think she needed a community that would have shared responsibility and helped to get her to learn about her healthy, created limitations. There just do seem to be people with nearly superhuman capacity, but it isn’t unlimited capacity. There are people that I know who do so much more than I am physically capable of, but no one can operate without limitations.
More than anything else this made me want to know more about Dorothy Day. I already have a copy of The Reckless Way of Love by Dorothy Day, with an introduction by DL Mayfield and Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty, the biography written by her granddaughter. Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness is on Kindle Unlimited, so I will borrow that eventually.
This was originalaly posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/unruly-saint/
Dorothy Day is someone that I have known about for a long time, but someone who I have not known much about. I have read one of DL Mayfield’s previous books and I know that she takes seriously the call for Christians to serve and live with the marginalized so I thought she would be a good author to read about Dorothy Day. (I have also read a book by her husband, a counselor.)
Unruly Saint is not a lengthy biography, about 250 pages. And most of its focus is on the founding of the Catholic Worker and its early years. Mayfield’s personal reflections on Day and her use of the research on Day as a way to grapple with her own Christian faith I think is one of the strengths of the books, but also one that may not appeal to everyone. I particularly read a lot of biography and memoir because I want to know how others have thought about what it means to live a good life or discern how to they can live in a complicated world. Reflective biographies like this give me insight not only into the subject of the biography but the author.
I was aware of the basic shape of Day. I knew she was a writer and that she founded the Catholic Worker Newspaper and various others activities to serve the poor during the Great Depression. I knew she was a radical and had been a communist prior to becoming Catholic. I knew that she had a child and was a pacifist. But I think that was really the extent of what I knew walking into this biography.
I am not going to rehash the book. But what I appreciate about Mayfield’s writing is that she is empathetic to both the strengths and weaknesses of Day and she doesn’t try to cover up either. At the end there is a grappling with the movement to officially recognize Day as a Catholic Saint. It is clear that Day wanted to try to live like a saint but didn’t want to be treated like one. There are several quotes about how Day was concerned about being minimized and reduced to “a saint” in a way that reduced the call to serve the marginalized to work that only saints did and not a calling on all Christians. Mayfield also reflects on the fact that Day was overwhelmed by her work often, but saw the need and couldn’t say no to giving away almost anything she had to someone who needed it because she understood the desperation of real need. Day assumed that others would react as she did when they also saw the need; but many do not.
There was a real community that formed around her, but it was also not a community that cared for Day as peers. She was lonely in part because she had such a strong call and skill at organizing. But I think she needed a community that would have shared responsibility and helped to get her to learn about her healthy, created limitations. There just do seem to be people with nearly superhuman capacity, but it isn’t unlimited capacity. There are people that I know who do so much more than I am physically capable of, but no one can operate without limitations.
More than anything else this made me want to know more about Dorothy Day. I already have a copy of The Reckless Way of Love by Dorothy Day, with an introduction by DL Mayfield and Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty, the biography written by her granddaughter. Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness is on Kindle Unlimited, so I will borrow that eventually.
This was originalaly posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/unruly-saint/
Brown Faces, White Spaces: Confronting Systemic Racism to Bring Healing and Restoration by Latasha Morrison
4.5
Summary: A survey of systems perpetuate disparity, inequity or racism in various areas of society.
One of the aspects that is most frustrating to me within the church is the controversy that is liberation. Some people and parts of the church do not believe that liberation is a significant theme of what the church should be doing. There are various reasons for that. Some believe that liberation will only occur at the second coming of Christ, and some of those believe that working toward liberation will actually prolong Christ’s return. Some do not believe that the church’s work should involve physical realities and that the only liberation that should occur is spiritual liberation. So, it is not surprising that Latasha Morrison opens with a chapter on liberation, grounding the book in her survey of the themes of liberation found throughout the Bible. But honestly, the chapter just made me mad. I was angry not at what she said, but that she has to actually argue that liberation is something that the church should be involved in. This is such a central theme to both scripture and historic Christian theology that no book should need to make the case that liberation is something that we need to do.
The rest of the book is framed around nine areas of society where liberation needs to occur. She sets up a simple framework of Preparation, Dedication, and Liberation. Preparation is learning about and gaining an understanding of society’s problems so that we can correctly address them. Dedication is the steps that we take to address those issues while girding ourselves for long-term efforts. And that is done with the goal of liberation for all people. Morrison is addressing these areas because they are areas that have been traditionally seen as “White Spaces” and they have a legacy of systemic inequality or discrimination.
This framing reminds me of Kevin Kruse’s book White Flight, which is about the history of White Flight in Atlanta. One of the main points that Kruse makes in the book is that a segregated spaces (parks, schools, transportation, etc.) were seen by White people as white spaces prior to desegregation. But after integration, due to their cultural belief in white racial hierarchy, the spaces did not become shared spaces where all people had equal access, but as Black spaces where White people were no longer given priority. Kruse’s thesis is that this view of public space is a significant impetus for the rise of political libertarianism and decreased investment in public goods. If public spaces no longer privileged White use, and White people did not “feel comfortable” in shared spaces, and White people began to use private spaces that were economically or geographically segregated as a proxy for racial segregation, then White people would stop supporting the use of tax funds on shared public goods that they had previously supported. Michelle McGhee has a similar approach in her book Sum of Us, where she tries to get White people to see that racial equity is not a zero-sum game.
The book opens with a history of educational segregation and the long-term impacts of that segregation, as well as the ways that disparity continues to exist within education. This is an area where I have both professional backgrounds (I am a program evaluator for an after-school program primarily working with minority students) and I have a personal connection to education with my wife as a teacher and my mother-in-law was a principal in the district where my children attend elementary school. My wife and I intentionally enrolled our children in the school where she works because it is a school with a high minority population. The school is 90% racial minorities (mostly Black or Hispanic) and 70% low-income. A half mile from the school is another elementary school in the same district, which is 11% Black or Hispanic and 7% low-income. There are many historical and zoning reasons for the disparity. Still, it would be entirely possible to redesign the school boundaries so that both schools were equitable in income and racial diversity. But the divide remains. The school board itself is split between four White board members and three Black board members, although the student population has been predominately minority for over a decade. The racial acrimony on the board (race is a proxy for a political party) triggered an accreditation review with recommendations to be performed. Late last year, a judge threw out the district map for board members as an ille.gal gerrymander designed to maintain a White majority on the board.
The school my kids will go to for high school if they continue progressing with the students they go to school with now was opened in 1965, the year the district integrated. It was named for a Confederate general. In 2020, right before the election, the school board agreed to form a commission to review the naming of that high school and other schools in the district. After the election (where a predominately White and GOP board member was maintained), the school board dissolved the commission before its first meeting. When my wife and I were looking for a house, we looked at an open house where the seller’s realtor toured us around the home. But he suggested that he take us to other homes in the area because the elementary school where that home was zone had a high rate of minority and immigrant children, and he didn’t think that the school was very good. (My mother-in-law was the principal of that elementary school at the time, and it was one of the best in the district.) Most of the issues discussed in the chapter on education in Brown Faces White Spaces have local examples within my school district.
Other issues that are addressed are medical inequity, the criminal justice system and policing, minority double consciousness as a result of workplace discrimination and business practices, the military as an integrated and segregated space, land ownership, Black appropriation within entertainment and the interaction of sports and protest. All of these are handled well and with a focus not just on revealing that racial disparity exists, but asking the reader to reflect on how the status quo systems maintain inequity even if it is not always a desired outcome.
One of the editorial decisions that some will disagree with is the widespread use of both Brown and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color) to mean all racial minorities in the US. There are a number of Black people in the US that have spoken out again BIPOC as a blanket term for all racial minorities when what is meant is Black. The lack of specificity is what is usually objected to, but in this case she is using BIPOC inclusively, not as a way to not say Black. Similarly, there is history of the use of the term Brown to be inclusive, but there is some objection to the term. Morrison is particularly trying to be inclusive in her use of Brown and BIPOC, but there will be some complaints about that choice.
And conservatives that object to racial issues will still object to any discussion of the systemic nature of racism even as she gives many examples of their systemic nature. Georgia and a few other states have passed laws banning the teaching of systemic racism in public schools. The objection is that all discussion of systemic racism is rooted in Marxism and critical theory. Any who say that are ignoring the long history of objections to racial categories and hierarchy from the Black and Indigenous Christian communities that predated Marx. But those objections will continue because they are not rooted in getting to the truth but was a means of dismissing racial concerns.
I think this survey is a good next book for Morrison because her focus is education and one of the weaknesses of the Be The Bridge model is that it can be reduced to White consumption for pain for the purpose of education. I don’t think that is the intent, but White ignorance of racial issues and resistance to the idea that White people can be ignorant of racial issues often means that White skepticism asks for more and more trauma to be reveals as proof of the problem. This is what Esau McCaulley is addressing in his How Far to the Promised Land when he shares the story about being asked, “What is the most racist thing you have ever experienced” at a panel discussion.
A survey book like this, which is filled with a balance of stories and facts, will give a jumping off point for groups to have a discussion, and relate personal experiences, while not requiring members of the group to reveal their own pain and trauma, which they may not be ready to reveal to a group that has not yet proven itself safe.
I mostly listened to this as an audiobook. I am familiar with Latasha Morrison’s voice from her podcast and hearing her in person a couple of times at events where she spoke. I know her voice and know he capabilities as a speaker. The editing and engineering of the audiobook were not up to the quality that I would normally expect. The audiobook is not so bad that I would not recommend it. But it is choppy the editing is not great. There are portions that should be re-recorded and re-edited and my guess is that the deadlines did not allow enough time to do it right. I know Morrison is a good speaker and I even went to a book launch where she read a portion of the book and it was clear and well narrated. But the editing was mediocre. Again, I don’t think this is a matter of her skill, this is a matter of either editing or a compressed schedule. I hope that the audiobook is re-edited to make it better. That being said, I did listen to almost all of the book on audiobook and it is certainly not the worst audiobooks I have listened to, there are a number that I stopped listening to because they were so bad. This is a case where I think it should have been better and I am disappointed that it wasn’t better because I think it is important that authors read their own content as much as possible.
I have read widely on racial issues, both historic and current. Many of the chapters included details I was familiar with and in a number of cases I have read multiple books on a subjects that was covered here in a chapter. There always will be editorial choices about what to include or not include and how much data to present versus how much story to tell. Brown Faces, White Spaces framed these discussion with nuance and skill, including a significant level of detail, while not getting bogged down for readers who have less background. There are questions at the end of each chapter as well as footnotes and suggested readings for those that do want more details.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/brown-faces-white-spaces/
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/brown-faces-white-spaces/
Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America by Michael P. Winship
Part of what kept coming up in my mind as I read Hot Protestants is that current advocates of Christian Nationalism seem to have a very similar theology and practice. Puritans understood their role as not only revivalists but also social reformers. Those social reforms were not simply to improve society but to enforce social norms to fulfill the covenant with God. Magistrates had wide latitude to enforce religious laws that either had not existed or had not been legally enforced. The Church of England restricted ordination and the role of revival preaching, but those restrictions chafed against people (both men and women) who felt the call of God. England did not have legal freedom or religious consciousness as the United States does, and because of covenantal thinking, religious and civil legal violations became intertwined.
Eventually, the monarchs became wary of these Puritans because their willingness to challenge the church hierarchies also led them to start challenging the civil hierarchies. Two streams of Puritanism eventually arose. Presbyterianism maintained a type of hierarchy where elders voted in legislative sessions, which bound all Presbyterian churches to the will of the sessions. While Congregationalists took voting to the local level and understood each church to be autonomous and all (male) members in good standing were eligible to vote on religious matters within the congregation, however, those votes only applied to the local congregation, not to other congregational churches.
While Presbyterian and Congregational movements were both being persecuted, they were able to work together because they were both strongly theologically Calvinist. But once the Glorious Revolution occurred, the infighting became much stronger. Congregationalists were stronger in North America, in part because of the independence and distance between churches. The leaders of the Glorious Revolution in England attempted to change the Church of England into a formally Presbyterian ecclesiology. This tied Presbyterian to a type of anti-monarchism, and when the revolution fell apart, there was a religious backlash against Presbyterianism because of how it was connected politically to the revolution. The congregational orientation of New England ecclesiology influenced its political organization of local direct democracy that eventually influenced the development of US political systems after the US revolutions.
What is particularly helpful about Hot Protestants is that he grounds the religious history in appropriate civil and economic history to help the reader understand the social events that influenced the religious events. It was not simply that Puritans moving to North America were seeking religious freedom; they were seeking to create utopian societies to show those back in England how God's blessing would come when societies worked in harmony with their understanding of God's covenants. Those religious motivations were real, but the population of England was booming, and economically, some non-Puritans were seeking to invest in colonization projects to gain wealth as Spain was doing. Politically, many minor nobles were seeking to gain political, economic, and religious influence for themselves and saw the Puritan movement as a viable means to gain personal influence.
Part of what Winship does well is show the problems of generational transfer of ideology. Coverts who were "hot" had children and grandchildren who were themselves influenced by those original coverts but may not have had the same motivation. Children who do not have a direct memory of events their parents are responding to may either react against their parents' guardrails or harden themselves without understanding the original purpose. They may not have started as legalistic and controlling movements, but eventually, the covenantal thinking was not satisfied with personal piety and enforced their piety on others, which created a backlash and opened the Puritans up to charges of hypocrisy.
This is not at all an anti-Puritan book. In many ways, the handling of the Salem Witch Trials, I think, shows that the author respects his subject and is trying to give a broader understanding of the interaction of politics, theology, economics, and other social movements. Puritan New England, as well as Old England, had many witch trials. However, Puritans had strong guardrails on their judicial systems that had begun to be removed because the New England of the Witch Trial era had been forced to become more pluralistic because of English legal and political realities. Winship makes the case that the excesses, which were blamed on Puritanism, were actually a result of not following Puritan legal systems.
I am continually struck by how much of our current political and theological realities have echos in history. We just need to understand that history to have a level of humility about what reform movements can and cannot do in the light of human and systemic limitations.
This was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/hot-protestants/
4.25
Summary: A relevant history of a theological reform movement that became political.
Every once in a while, I come across history revealing areas where I did not realize I had a big hole, but once identified, many connections get made. I have read a number of English history books, but once I read Hot Protestants, I realized that they all seemed to stop around Elizabeth or James and not pick up again until George III. I had never read a book on the English Revolution and did not realize where that was in the timeline.
Hot Protestants is a history of Puritanism, a revival movement within the Church of England. Part of what struck me was how explicitly Puritans understood England to have a similar covenant as ancient Israel had with God and how that theological commitment led to many of their social and political commitments.
Every once in a while, I come across history revealing areas where I did not realize I had a big hole, but once identified, many connections get made. I have read a number of English history books, but once I read Hot Protestants, I realized that they all seemed to stop around Elizabeth or James and not pick up again until George III. I had never read a book on the English Revolution and did not realize where that was in the timeline.
Hot Protestants is a history of Puritanism, a revival movement within the Church of England. Part of what struck me was how explicitly Puritans understood England to have a similar covenant as ancient Israel had with God and how that theological commitment led to many of their social and political commitments.
"Fasting was a public responsibility as well as a private one. It was widely accepted that a Christian country like England was a successor to ancient Israel. Just as Israel had the true church before the Jews rejected Jesus, England had God’s true church, thanks to the Reformation. Like Israel, England was in a covenant with God, and like Israel, it would be blessed or punished to the extent that it followed or defied God’s law. Therefore, when it strayed, it needed to collectively implore God’s forgiveness, just as the ancient Jews had done. The Church of England ordered public fasts when faced with signs of God’s wrath—plague, famine, war, and the like.34 Church of England fasts, however, were called too infrequently to satisfy puritans, and unless undertaken in a puritan manner, they were too formal and short to generate and express the humiliation and repentance that a jealous God expected. Puritan ministers asserted the dubiously legal right to call public fasts on their own. Zealous Protestants would travel 10 or 20 miles for a puritan fast, which could easily last an entire day between the many long prayers and sermons from the ministers present." (p35)
Part of what kept coming up in my mind as I read Hot Protestants is that current advocates of Christian Nationalism seem to have a very similar theology and practice. Puritans understood their role as not only revivalists but also social reformers. Those social reforms were not simply to improve society but to enforce social norms to fulfill the covenant with God. Magistrates had wide latitude to enforce religious laws that either had not existed or had not been legally enforced. The Church of England restricted ordination and the role of revival preaching, but those restrictions chafed against people (both men and women) who felt the call of God. England did not have legal freedom or religious consciousness as the United States does, and because of covenantal thinking, religious and civil legal violations became intertwined.
Eventually, the monarchs became wary of these Puritans because their willingness to challenge the church hierarchies also led them to start challenging the civil hierarchies. Two streams of Puritanism eventually arose. Presbyterianism maintained a type of hierarchy where elders voted in legislative sessions, which bound all Presbyterian churches to the will of the sessions. While Congregationalists took voting to the local level and understood each church to be autonomous and all (male) members in good standing were eligible to vote on religious matters within the congregation, however, those votes only applied to the local congregation, not to other congregational churches.
While Presbyterian and Congregational movements were both being persecuted, they were able to work together because they were both strongly theologically Calvinist. But once the Glorious Revolution occurred, the infighting became much stronger. Congregationalists were stronger in North America, in part because of the independence and distance between churches. The leaders of the Glorious Revolution in England attempted to change the Church of England into a formally Presbyterian ecclesiology. This tied Presbyterian to a type of anti-monarchism, and when the revolution fell apart, there was a religious backlash against Presbyterianism because of how it was connected politically to the revolution. The congregational orientation of New England ecclesiology influenced its political organization of local direct democracy that eventually influenced the development of US political systems after the US revolutions.
What is particularly helpful about Hot Protestants is that he grounds the religious history in appropriate civil and economic history to help the reader understand the social events that influenced the religious events. It was not simply that Puritans moving to North America were seeking religious freedom; they were seeking to create utopian societies to show those back in England how God's blessing would come when societies worked in harmony with their understanding of God's covenants. Those religious motivations were real, but the population of England was booming, and economically, some non-Puritans were seeking to invest in colonization projects to gain wealth as Spain was doing. Politically, many minor nobles were seeking to gain political, economic, and religious influence for themselves and saw the Puritan movement as a viable means to gain personal influence.
Part of what Winship does well is show the problems of generational transfer of ideology. Coverts who were "hot" had children and grandchildren who were themselves influenced by those original coverts but may not have had the same motivation. Children who do not have a direct memory of events their parents are responding to may either react against their parents' guardrails or harden themselves without understanding the original purpose. They may not have started as legalistic and controlling movements, but eventually, the covenantal thinking was not satisfied with personal piety and enforced their piety on others, which created a backlash and opened the Puritans up to charges of hypocrisy.
This is not at all an anti-Puritan book. In many ways, the handling of the Salem Witch Trials, I think, shows that the author respects his subject and is trying to give a broader understanding of the interaction of politics, theology, economics, and other social movements. Puritan New England, as well as Old England, had many witch trials. However, Puritans had strong guardrails on their judicial systems that had begun to be removed because the New England of the Witch Trial era had been forced to become more pluralistic because of English legal and political realities. Winship makes the case that the excesses, which were blamed on Puritanism, were actually a result of not following Puritan legal systems.
I am continually struck by how much of our current political and theological realities have echos in history. We just need to understand that history to have a level of humility about what reform movements can and cannot do in the light of human and systemic limitations.
This was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/hot-protestants/
Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Modern Politics by Joshua Mauldin
4.0
Summary: A reappraisal of Barth and Bonhoeffer's thinking around modernity and politics.
I regularly recommend the Audible Plus lending library, where Audible members can borrow several thousand audiobooks at no additional costs beyond the membership. Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Modern Politics is a book that has been on my to-read list for a while, but currently, the Kindle version is over $70, and the Hardcover is $66. While I borrowed the audiobook, if I had purchased it, it was less than $10 when I picked it up. I am never going to make sense of that type of pricing disparity.
I was glad I listened to it, even if it may be a book that would be better read in print. It was a helpful book to think about and even had some aspect of discernment (and an ongoing reading project of mine) that I had not anticipated. But I do want to note that I did not love the narration. The British narrator did not pronounce some of the names and theological, philosophical, or political terms correctly. It is not just variations between American and British pronunciations. More importantly, I thought the tone of the narration was just off, but not so much that I didn't listen to the whole book in just a few days.
Mauldin is concerned about the state of democracy and is using Barth's and Bonhoeffer's political thought to grapple with how they addressed the changes in Germany. To start, Mauldin looks at the critiques of modernity by Brad Gregory, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Hauerwas. I read After Virtue recently and have read several books by Hauerwas over the years. However, I did not have any background on Brad Gregory. The introduction to their ideas was thorough enough that I felt like I was clear.
From that introduction, Mauldin explores Barth and Bonhoeffer's understanding of modernity, progress, ethics, and politics. I have read more by and about Bonhoeffer than Barth. But these are topical areas that I don't have much background in.
Mauldin was right that, quite often today, Bonhoeffer's theology and writing are overshadowed by his biography. There is a long history of Bonhoeffer being appropriated for political purposes, and Mauldin does a good job exploring the limitations of modern uses of Bonhoeffer.
Some of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Modern Politics was above my head, but I think I understood all the main points. I would like to explore more how philosophers and theologians influenced by those continental philosophers think about the relationship between God's sovereignty and progress and the limitations of knowledge regarding how to think about discernment by individuals and communities.
I was somewhat surprised that there was some overlap in Mauldin's exploration of how Barth and Bonhoeffer understood the church's role and how Michael Emerson and Glenn Bracey explored The Religion of Whiteness. In both cases, there is a grappling with what it means to prod the church to a more careful connection between church and politics and what happens when the church begins to follow something more than just Jesus. In Emerson and Bracey's case, they posit that a significant portion of White Christians in the US are treating Whiteness (the belief in racial superiority and hierarchy) as a type of religion (in the Durkheimian sense of the term.) In Barth and Bonhoeffer's cases, they were grappling with how Nationalist Socialism and the belief in Aryan superiority also became a type of religion that distracted the church from its proper role in society. The comparison has problems; not everything transfers, and going directly to comparisons with Nazi ideology does violate Godwin's law. However, in discussions about how to respond either to Christian Nationalism or support of Whiteness (overlapping but different issues), it is reasonable to think about where there are limited overlapping concepts.
After I finished Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Modern Politics, I started reading Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. That history is also relevant because, in many ways, the Puritans in England and America were attempting to enact a Christian Nation in terms that are not unlike the way that some current Christian Nationalists want to operate. Again, no history is completely parallel. The Puritans arose out of a desire for a more radical reformation than the Church of England as a whole wanted. The political realities of a monarchy and the congregationalism that arose in Puritan New England that was part of what gave rise to the impulse toward democracy in the United States is just different from the reaction to pluralism that seems to be central to Christian Nationalism today. But still, the parallels that exist can inform our thinking, help us be more humble about the limits of reform, and keep us from utopian thinking.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/barth-bonhoeffer/
I regularly recommend the Audible Plus lending library, where Audible members can borrow several thousand audiobooks at no additional costs beyond the membership. Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Modern Politics is a book that has been on my to-read list for a while, but currently, the Kindle version is over $70, and the Hardcover is $66. While I borrowed the audiobook, if I had purchased it, it was less than $10 when I picked it up. I am never going to make sense of that type of pricing disparity.
I was glad I listened to it, even if it may be a book that would be better read in print. It was a helpful book to think about and even had some aspect of discernment (and an ongoing reading project of mine) that I had not anticipated. But I do want to note that I did not love the narration. The British narrator did not pronounce some of the names and theological, philosophical, or political terms correctly. It is not just variations between American and British pronunciations. More importantly, I thought the tone of the narration was just off, but not so much that I didn't listen to the whole book in just a few days.
Mauldin is concerned about the state of democracy and is using Barth's and Bonhoeffer's political thought to grapple with how they addressed the changes in Germany. To start, Mauldin looks at the critiques of modernity by Brad Gregory, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Hauerwas. I read After Virtue recently and have read several books by Hauerwas over the years. However, I did not have any background on Brad Gregory. The introduction to their ideas was thorough enough that I felt like I was clear.
From that introduction, Mauldin explores Barth and Bonhoeffer's understanding of modernity, progress, ethics, and politics. I have read more by and about Bonhoeffer than Barth. But these are topical areas that I don't have much background in.
Mauldin was right that, quite often today, Bonhoeffer's theology and writing are overshadowed by his biography. There is a long history of Bonhoeffer being appropriated for political purposes, and Mauldin does a good job exploring the limitations of modern uses of Bonhoeffer.
Some of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Modern Politics was above my head, but I think I understood all the main points. I would like to explore more how philosophers and theologians influenced by those continental philosophers think about the relationship between God's sovereignty and progress and the limitations of knowledge regarding how to think about discernment by individuals and communities.
I was somewhat surprised that there was some overlap in Mauldin's exploration of how Barth and Bonhoeffer understood the church's role and how Michael Emerson and Glenn Bracey explored The Religion of Whiteness. In both cases, there is a grappling with what it means to prod the church to a more careful connection between church and politics and what happens when the church begins to follow something more than just Jesus. In Emerson and Bracey's case, they posit that a significant portion of White Christians in the US are treating Whiteness (the belief in racial superiority and hierarchy) as a type of religion (in the Durkheimian sense of the term.) In Barth and Bonhoeffer's cases, they were grappling with how Nationalist Socialism and the belief in Aryan superiority also became a type of religion that distracted the church from its proper role in society. The comparison has problems; not everything transfers, and going directly to comparisons with Nazi ideology does violate Godwin's law. However, in discussions about how to respond either to Christian Nationalism or support of Whiteness (overlapping but different issues), it is reasonable to think about where there are limited overlapping concepts.
After I finished Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Modern Politics, I started reading Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. That history is also relevant because, in many ways, the Puritans in England and America were attempting to enact a Christian Nation in terms that are not unlike the way that some current Christian Nationalists want to operate. Again, no history is completely parallel. The Puritans arose out of a desire for a more radical reformation than the Church of England as a whole wanted. The political realities of a monarchy and the congregationalism that arose in Puritan New England that was part of what gave rise to the impulse toward democracy in the United States is just different from the reaction to pluralism that seems to be central to Christian Nationalism today. But still, the parallels that exist can inform our thinking, help us be more humble about the limits of reform, and keep us from utopian thinking.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/barth-bonhoeffer/
The Religion of Whiteness: How Racism Distorts Christian Faith by Glenn E. Bracey II, Michael O. Emerson
And for religion, Emerson and Bracey are using Emile Durkheim's understanding of religion. They quote Durkheim's definition of religion:
So they say that Whiteness (the cultural belief in white racial superiority) functions as a religion in the Durkheimian sense. In their conception, it isn't an incidental overlap of some White Christians following a Religion of Whiteness, but that religious nature of Whiteness becomes a feature of their understanding of Christianity.
This is primarily a sociology book and deals with their data and why they think their descriptive model works. Many people who read (or judge without reading) The Religion of Whiteness will not limit their evaluation to Emerson and Bracey's definitions of either Whiteness or Religion. It will be very common for some to misread this as a condemnation of all people who are commonly labeled white instead of the much more narrow idea of Whiteness. And secondly, I think many others will not understand Durkheim's view of religion. Andrew Whitehead's book American Idolatry does not explicitly use Durkheim's understanding of religion. Still, he does suggest that Christian Nationalists (his focus and one that overlaps but is not the same as Bracey and Emerson's topic) are following a false idol but are not necessarily completely rejecting Christianity.
I would honestly like a much more cut-and-dried separation between the Religion of Whiteness or Christian Nationalism and "true Christianity." But I think Whitehead, Bracey and Emerson are trying to keep our reality complicated. It is not simple to separate these things, and I think we need to pay attention to Jesus' parable of the wheat and tares. It would be easier if it was simple to say, "You are a Christian Nationalist and therefore not a Christian," or "You are a follower of the Religion of Whiteness and therefore not a follower of Christ." There is a point where people have moved from Christianity, but that exact point where the line is crossed is not easy to discern.
One of the aspects of The Religion of Whiteness that I like is that it uses Betrayal Trauma as a descriptive model of the harm done to those who do not follow the Religion of Whiteness. The Betrayal Trauma model was developed out of research into marriage/partner domestic violence. And then, it migrated into the area of spiritual abuse and harm. I first came across the concept in this podcast, and while I am not an expert on it, what I understand of the model makes a lot of sense for it to be used here.
The main weakness of the book is a lack of clarity on White Christians who do not follow the Religion of Whiteness (ROW). I think they make the case that there is a difference between White Christians who are and are not followers of the ROW. They show through surveys that White Christians who do not follow ROW have a belief structure more similar to Christians who are Black or other racial minorities rather than other White Christians who do follow ROW. However, I was not convinced they had a clear handle on why the difference exists. I am convinced there is a difference, but it is unclear what makes people resist ROW.
In one section, they interview White Christians who were pushed out of jobs/churches for resisting Whiteness. In all of those cases, the people interviewed became aware of racial realities and then tried to work to help others become aware. But they had grown up in congregations where others did not become aware. As I read, there is no clear separation theologically, demographically, geographically, or behaviorally to fully explain the resistance by White Christians to the Religion of Whiteness. There is a slight tendency toward being in urban spaces, but that isn't very explanatory.
I think the book does have a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem with Christian Nationalism. Are Christian Nationalists more likely to follow a Religion of Whiteness because they are Christian Nationalists, or do people become Christian Nationalists because they follow a religion of Whiteness? It is more likely that these things overlap and confirm one another, but again, I would like more definition and separation than it is possible to give.
In the past two years, when I saw interviews, talks, or articles with Emerson, I thought there would be more disagreement between Emerson/Bracey and Perry/Whitehead, but after reading The Religion of Whiteness, I think the difference is in approach more than anything else.
I am not a bystander to this discussion. While I have not lost a job, I did leave a church because I became convinced that the church leadership, while speaking out against Christian Nationalism and extremism, was unwilling to go far enough to speak out against Whiteness. I didn't need the leadership to use the words whiteness, but there was a clear pattern of limiting its understanding of the problems of racism to explicit white supremacy as if to be racist meant that you were a member of a Neo-nazi group or the KKK. The church hosted discussions on race in 2018 and used sermon time to condemn racism. However, the clear pattern was to aim for moderation as the goal, not justice. It still took me a couple of months to admit it, but the final straw was the senior pastor speaking to a group of legislators, calling on them to work across political divides. He explicitly cited Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from a Birmingham Jail as justification for being a moderate. I realized that with this understanding there could be no real movement toward difficult issues in this topic because there was not a clear understanding of the problem. At that point, I had been a member for about 15 years. I had explicitly been talking to the church leadership and was involved in discussions and small groups around race for about ten years. I was not pushed out as the people cited in the book were. Instead, I became disillusioned that there could be change, which is a real difference.
The Religion of Whiteness, I think, rightly focuses on the problem of race as a significant contributing factor in the breakup of the Evangelical Church. But it is more than just the evangelical church. Mainline and Catholic Christians also have a significant problem with the Religion of Whiteness. The Religion of Whiteness is also not confined to politically conservative portions of the church. As has frequently been said, many in the deconstruction community also have not rejected the Religion of Whiteness in their rejection of some of the cultural components of Evangelicalism.
I have about 50 highlights and a couple of notes that you can publicly read. I want to reread this again because I do not want to miss important nuances. The Religion of Whiteness is a short book. It only has about 150 pages of main content, and I read it in a single day.
It is also worth noting that the release was staggered, which is odd. The Kindle edition was released on April 23, and the audiobook was released on April 30th. The Hardcover says it will be released on May 21st, but you can buy it at Amazon and presumably other vendors now, although Amazon says it won't ship until May 9th.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-religion-of-whiteness/
4.75
Summary: An exploration of how Whiteness (the belief in white racial superiority) functions as a type of religion in the Durkheimian sense.
I have been waiting to read this book for about four years now, ever since I heard that Michael Emerson was working on follow-up research to his Divided by Faith book. I read the Beyond Diversity report by Barna about some of the early research. And I have widely recommended this video where Michael Emerson introduces his Religion of Whiteness concept. And while it is now dated, I still very much recommend his book, co-authored with Christian Smith, Divided by Faith, because its use of the White Evangelical toolkit as a model to describe the cultural tools of handling race as White Evangelicals has been so influential to how many have spoken about Evangelicals and Race in the 25 years since the research for that book was done.
To understand the book, you need to understand both what is meant by Whiteness and what is meant by Religion. This is a good summary of what they mean by Whiteness:
I have been waiting to read this book for about four years now, ever since I heard that Michael Emerson was working on follow-up research to his Divided by Faith book. I read the Beyond Diversity report by Barna about some of the early research. And I have widely recommended this video where Michael Emerson introduces his Religion of Whiteness concept. And while it is now dated, I still very much recommend his book, co-authored with Christian Smith, Divided by Faith, because its use of the White Evangelical toolkit as a model to describe the cultural tools of handling race as White Evangelicals has been so influential to how many have spoken about Evangelicals and Race in the 25 years since the research for that book was done.
To understand the book, you need to understand both what is meant by Whiteness and what is meant by Religion. This is a good summary of what they mean by Whiteness:
"That is, whiteness is the imagined right that those designated as racially white are the norm, the standard by which all others are measured and evaluated. It is the imagined right to be superior in most every way—theologically, morally, legally, economically, and culturally. It is that power, now centuries upon centuries old, that is worshipped, felt, protected, and defended. As the legendary scholar W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1920: “ ‘But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?’ Then, always, somehow, someway, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is ownership of the earth forever and ever. Amen!” (p42)
And for religion, Emerson and Bracey are using Emile Durkheim's understanding of religion. They quote Durkheim's definition of religion:
"...a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things... beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called the Church, all those who adhere to them." Note that he defines religion by what it is and what it does, its function. And what is its function? To bring its followers into a single moral community..."
So they say that Whiteness (the cultural belief in white racial superiority) functions as a religion in the Durkheimian sense. In their conception, it isn't an incidental overlap of some White Christians following a Religion of Whiteness, but that religious nature of Whiteness becomes a feature of their understanding of Christianity.
This is primarily a sociology book and deals with their data and why they think their descriptive model works. Many people who read (or judge without reading) The Religion of Whiteness will not limit their evaluation to Emerson and Bracey's definitions of either Whiteness or Religion. It will be very common for some to misread this as a condemnation of all people who are commonly labeled white instead of the much more narrow idea of Whiteness. And secondly, I think many others will not understand Durkheim's view of religion. Andrew Whitehead's book American Idolatry does not explicitly use Durkheim's understanding of religion. Still, he does suggest that Christian Nationalists (his focus and one that overlaps but is not the same as Bracey and Emerson's topic) are following a false idol but are not necessarily completely rejecting Christianity.
I would honestly like a much more cut-and-dried separation between the Religion of Whiteness or Christian Nationalism and "true Christianity." But I think Whitehead, Bracey and Emerson are trying to keep our reality complicated. It is not simple to separate these things, and I think we need to pay attention to Jesus' parable of the wheat and tares. It would be easier if it was simple to say, "You are a Christian Nationalist and therefore not a Christian," or "You are a follower of the Religion of Whiteness and therefore not a follower of Christ." There is a point where people have moved from Christianity, but that exact point where the line is crossed is not easy to discern.
One of the aspects of The Religion of Whiteness that I like is that it uses Betrayal Trauma as a descriptive model of the harm done to those who do not follow the Religion of Whiteness. The Betrayal Trauma model was developed out of research into marriage/partner domestic violence. And then, it migrated into the area of spiritual abuse and harm. I first came across the concept in this podcast, and while I am not an expert on it, what I understand of the model makes a lot of sense for it to be used here.
The main weakness of the book is a lack of clarity on White Christians who do not follow the Religion of Whiteness (ROW). I think they make the case that there is a difference between White Christians who are and are not followers of the ROW. They show through surveys that White Christians who do not follow ROW have a belief structure more similar to Christians who are Black or other racial minorities rather than other White Christians who do follow ROW. However, I was not convinced they had a clear handle on why the difference exists. I am convinced there is a difference, but it is unclear what makes people resist ROW.
In one section, they interview White Christians who were pushed out of jobs/churches for resisting Whiteness. In all of those cases, the people interviewed became aware of racial realities and then tried to work to help others become aware. But they had grown up in congregations where others did not become aware. As I read, there is no clear separation theologically, demographically, geographically, or behaviorally to fully explain the resistance by White Christians to the Religion of Whiteness. There is a slight tendency toward being in urban spaces, but that isn't very explanatory.
I think the book does have a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem with Christian Nationalism. Are Christian Nationalists more likely to follow a Religion of Whiteness because they are Christian Nationalists, or do people become Christian Nationalists because they follow a religion of Whiteness? It is more likely that these things overlap and confirm one another, but again, I would like more definition and separation than it is possible to give.
In the past two years, when I saw interviews, talks, or articles with Emerson, I thought there would be more disagreement between Emerson/Bracey and Perry/Whitehead, but after reading The Religion of Whiteness, I think the difference is in approach more than anything else.
I am not a bystander to this discussion. While I have not lost a job, I did leave a church because I became convinced that the church leadership, while speaking out against Christian Nationalism and extremism, was unwilling to go far enough to speak out against Whiteness. I didn't need the leadership to use the words whiteness, but there was a clear pattern of limiting its understanding of the problems of racism to explicit white supremacy as if to be racist meant that you were a member of a Neo-nazi group or the KKK. The church hosted discussions on race in 2018 and used sermon time to condemn racism. However, the clear pattern was to aim for moderation as the goal, not justice. It still took me a couple of months to admit it, but the final straw was the senior pastor speaking to a group of legislators, calling on them to work across political divides. He explicitly cited Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from a Birmingham Jail as justification for being a moderate. I realized that with this understanding there could be no real movement toward difficult issues in this topic because there was not a clear understanding of the problem. At that point, I had been a member for about 15 years. I had explicitly been talking to the church leadership and was involved in discussions and small groups around race for about ten years. I was not pushed out as the people cited in the book were. Instead, I became disillusioned that there could be change, which is a real difference.
The Religion of Whiteness, I think, rightly focuses on the problem of race as a significant contributing factor in the breakup of the Evangelical Church. But it is more than just the evangelical church. Mainline and Catholic Christians also have a significant problem with the Religion of Whiteness. The Religion of Whiteness is also not confined to politically conservative portions of the church. As has frequently been said, many in the deconstruction community also have not rejected the Religion of Whiteness in their rejection of some of the cultural components of Evangelicalism.
I have about 50 highlights and a couple of notes that you can publicly read. I want to reread this again because I do not want to miss important nuances. The Religion of Whiteness is a short book. It only has about 150 pages of main content, and I read it in a single day.
It is also worth noting that the release was staggered, which is odd. The Kindle edition was released on April 23, and the audiobook was released on April 30th. The Hardcover says it will be released on May 21st, but you can buy it at Amazon and presumably other vendors now, although Amazon says it won't ship until May 9th.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-religion-of-whiteness/
Discerning the Voice of God: How to Recognize When He Speaks by Priscilla Shirer
She follows that will what she understands the purpose of discernment to be:
Primarily because of her theological commitments to the sovereignty of God and a cessationist understanding of the role of the spirit, we disagree on how discernment works and the method. Her method is summarized in her Five M model. She calls on us to look for the Message of the spirit, search for a Model in scripture, live in a Mode of prayer, submit to the Ministry of Eli (this is really about seeking after mentors and getting advice so the spiritualization of this one seems a miss), and expect the Mercy of confirmation. I would not disagree with any of these as tools of discernment.
However, throughout the book, her primary advice is to be a student of the scripture. I am all for understanding scripture. I think the Bible is the primary place we use to challenge our biases. All scriptural reading is interpretation and one of the book's weaknesses is a lack of understanding of how cultural bias impacts us. For instance, virtually all of her illustrations of discernment are gendered. Men go to men's bible studies or have business decisions to make; while women seek discernment about being stay-at-home mothers or home-schooling their children. If we do not understand how our cultural biases influence our scriptural reading, we will read our current cultural biases into scripture to confirm our desires.
This comes up in her discussion about drinking alcohol. She acknowledges that there is not a universal prescription against alcohol, but there is no discussion about how our current evangelical culture impacts her conviction against alcohol. Again, to be clear, I think she can have discerned that alcohol is wrong for her and that she can do that through reading scripture and seeking advice. But if she has not done any work to understand how other Christians at other times have understood alcohol, then she is not doing the work that her model seems to call on us to do.
And she regularly reads things into scripture that may be hinted at, but are not directly stated. For example, she says, "Wonder how many years Elizabeth and Zachariah disagreed with God’s timing on providing them a child. They never stopped praying until the days had obviously passed for them to conceive and bear children." But scripture doesn't say they never stopped praying for God to provide them with a child. She has read that into the passage and then takes that as a scriptural principle. Continuing to pray is a good idea, but when she invokes it as a scriptural principle instead of her interpretation of scripture, she draws on the authority of scripture to confirm her suggestions.
A lot of her somewhat off-handed advice is really good. For instance, she suggests that one of the ways we discern God's voice is that God is loving and that the loving voice would be from God while the condemning voice is not. That generally is good advice if not taken too far to confirm our prior cultural values. She also suggests that God is patient, and if there is a push to make decisions quickly, that can be a sign that the decision may not be from God.
Part of what I appreciate about this advice is that she understands how God speaks to her. One difficulty in discussing discernment is that personal experience differs from universal prescriptions. This is especially true because her commitment to a particular understanding of God's character and sovereignty is central to her understanding of discernment. For example, I have real questions about how she understands the character of God when she so positively commends this quote from Oswald Chambers, "Have you ever heard the Master say something very difficult to you? If you haven’t, I question whether you have ever heard Him say anything at all."
Earlier in the book, she talked about God's voice being loving, but then she assumes and directly says that if there is a choice between an easy thing and a hard thing, God's voice is probably to do the hard thing. My concern about her use of scripture again comes up here.
She suggests that Abraham has a history of immediately following God's direction. But that wasn't universally his mode of obedience. Hagar and Ishmael are counterexamples. We need the counterexamples in scripture to help us realize that the people of the Bible were not somehow different kinds of people. They were fallen, just like we are.
My final main concern is that her reliance on God's sovereignty feels like it can cause people to submit to harm because it is God's will. I believe in God's sovereignty; I question whether we, as finite creatures, can perfectly understand God at all times. I think we can tentatively understand God. But one of the things that has led to my research into discernment is exactly this: what are our limits of understanding in regard to discernment?
Toward the end of the book, there is this passage:
I read that section right after I saw on Twitter that Ann Graham Lotz wrote about the April 8 solar eclipse as the final portion of a Hebrew letter Aleph written over the US with the last three eclipses and was a sign of the end times. After the eclipse, she withdrew that post and rewrote it again. But that was an example of when you get into the habit of attributing to God our thoughts about God, it is easy to get into problems. And when we claim that we "always" do anything, we are probably fooling ourselves.
Overall, there was some good advice here, but I had a problem with the tone and orientation toward God calling us to do hard things. (That includes the concern about how the very gendered advice can lead women to submit to abuse.) I am also concerned about the problematic issues around her views on God's sovereignty. If you are new to the discussion of discernment, I suggest starting with Hannah Anderson's All That's Good.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/discerning-the-voice-of-god/
3.25
Summary: Discerning the Voice of God is a spiritual discipline that can be learned.
I am about eight months into a project to understand what people mean when they talk about discernment in the Christian context and how it can be learned and discussed. If you include the books that I read as part of my training to become a spiritual director and my previous general interest reading, I have read about two dozen books, many of them more than once, on the topic of discernment. I certainly do not believe that I have a clear understanding of all aspects of discernment. I continue to find new aspects of discernment that I had not thought about. And I have about two dozen more books on my list. But I have a handle on some aspects oft I have tentatively committed discernment tha to. That matters because in the case of Discerning the Voice of God, there are many areas of agreement, but my problems primarily come in three areas and my tentative commitments influence those.
First I want to mention the good. She is right that we can learn about discernment. And I think she is right to suggest that goal of discernment is to see is not to see if we will make the wrong choice. This quote from toward the end of the book I think is right.
I am about eight months into a project to understand what people mean when they talk about discernment in the Christian context and how it can be learned and discussed. If you include the books that I read as part of my training to become a spiritual director and my previous general interest reading, I have read about two dozen books, many of them more than once, on the topic of discernment. I certainly do not believe that I have a clear understanding of all aspects of discernment. I continue to find new aspects of discernment that I had not thought about. And I have about two dozen more books on my list. But I have a handle on some aspects oft I have tentatively committed discernment tha to. That matters because in the case of Discerning the Voice of God, there are many areas of agreement, but my problems primarily come in three areas and my tentative commitments influence those.
First I want to mention the good. She is right that we can learn about discernment. And I think she is right to suggest that goal of discernment is to see is not to see if we will make the wrong choice. This quote from toward the end of the book I think is right.
"But here’s what I want to encourage in you—the big message of this chapter, perhaps the big message of this book. Try never to forget it. Here it is … There’s no code for you to crack. No puzzle He’s waiting for you to put together. No stick He’s dangling in your peripheral vision, then snatching away when you turn your head toward it. He’s not sitting up in heaven with the cameras rolling and stopwatches ticking, testing whether or not you’re spiritually sharp enough to figure out the next move He wants you to make."
She follows that will what she understands the purpose of discernment to be:
When God speaks and causes your spiritual ears to hear Him, it is for the purpose of making Himself known to you. And not just in a textbook way. He wants to turn your knowledge of Him into your experience of Him. So when He speaks, you’ll recognize His voice because in following its directive, you will be put into position to experience God’s character in your life.
Primarily because of her theological commitments to the sovereignty of God and a cessationist understanding of the role of the spirit, we disagree on how discernment works and the method. Her method is summarized in her Five M model. She calls on us to look for the Message of the spirit, search for a Model in scripture, live in a Mode of prayer, submit to the Ministry of Eli (this is really about seeking after mentors and getting advice so the spiritualization of this one seems a miss), and expect the Mercy of confirmation. I would not disagree with any of these as tools of discernment.
However, throughout the book, her primary advice is to be a student of the scripture. I am all for understanding scripture. I think the Bible is the primary place we use to challenge our biases. All scriptural reading is interpretation and one of the book's weaknesses is a lack of understanding of how cultural bias impacts us. For instance, virtually all of her illustrations of discernment are gendered. Men go to men's bible studies or have business decisions to make; while women seek discernment about being stay-at-home mothers or home-schooling their children. If we do not understand how our cultural biases influence our scriptural reading, we will read our current cultural biases into scripture to confirm our desires.
This comes up in her discussion about drinking alcohol. She acknowledges that there is not a universal prescription against alcohol, but there is no discussion about how our current evangelical culture impacts her conviction against alcohol. Again, to be clear, I think she can have discerned that alcohol is wrong for her and that she can do that through reading scripture and seeking advice. But if she has not done any work to understand how other Christians at other times have understood alcohol, then she is not doing the work that her model seems to call on us to do.
And she regularly reads things into scripture that may be hinted at, but are not directly stated. For example, she says, "Wonder how many years Elizabeth and Zachariah disagreed with God’s timing on providing them a child. They never stopped praying until the days had obviously passed for them to conceive and bear children." But scripture doesn't say they never stopped praying for God to provide them with a child. She has read that into the passage and then takes that as a scriptural principle. Continuing to pray is a good idea, but when she invokes it as a scriptural principle instead of her interpretation of scripture, she draws on the authority of scripture to confirm her suggestions.
A lot of her somewhat off-handed advice is really good. For instance, she suggests that one of the ways we discern God's voice is that God is loving and that the loving voice would be from God while the condemning voice is not. That generally is good advice if not taken too far to confirm our prior cultural values. She also suggests that God is patient, and if there is a push to make decisions quickly, that can be a sign that the decision may not be from God.
Part of what I appreciate about this advice is that she understands how God speaks to her. One difficulty in discussing discernment is that personal experience differs from universal prescriptions. This is especially true because her commitment to a particular understanding of God's character and sovereignty is central to her understanding of discernment. For example, I have real questions about how she understands the character of God when she so positively commends this quote from Oswald Chambers, "Have you ever heard the Master say something very difficult to you? If you haven’t, I question whether you have ever heard Him say anything at all."
Earlier in the book, she talked about God's voice being loving, but then she assumes and directly says that if there is a choice between an easy thing and a hard thing, God's voice is probably to do the hard thing. My concern about her use of scripture again comes up here.
"Suffice to say, when instructions from God are difficult—like Abraham’s were, like yours and mine often are—we tend to be slow to obey. Yet when God told him to do the unthinkable, Abraham immediately left for the mountain. And because he obeyed at once, he experienced God’s divine intervention."
She suggests that Abraham has a history of immediately following God's direction. But that wasn't universally his mode of obedience. Hagar and Ishmael are counterexamples. We need the counterexamples in scripture to help us realize that the people of the Bible were not somehow different kinds of people. They were fallen, just like we are.
My final main concern is that her reliance on God's sovereignty feels like it can cause people to submit to harm because it is God's will. I believe in God's sovereignty; I question whether we, as finite creatures, can perfectly understand God at all times. I think we can tentatively understand God. But one of the things that has led to my research into discernment is exactly this: what are our limits of understanding in regard to discernment?
Toward the end of the book, there is this passage:
My friend and mentor Anne Graham Lotz once said, “I never make a major decision in life, especially one that will affect another person, before I have received direction from God.” Yes, I expected her to say that. I feel conviction that I should expect it of myself. But what penetrated my heart was what she told me next—that for every major decision she’s made in life, there’s a specific Scripture verse she can point to as the one that God used to personally direct her. “When circumstances would have made me doubt a decision,” she said, “His Word has carried me through. And not once has He led me on a wrong path.” That’s powerful.
I read that section right after I saw on Twitter that Ann Graham Lotz wrote about the April 8 solar eclipse as the final portion of a Hebrew letter Aleph written over the US with the last three eclipses and was a sign of the end times. After the eclipse, she withdrew that post and rewrote it again. But that was an example of when you get into the habit of attributing to God our thoughts about God, it is easy to get into problems. And when we claim that we "always" do anything, we are probably fooling ourselves.
Overall, there was some good advice here, but I had a problem with the tone and orientation toward God calling us to do hard things. (That includes the concern about how the very gendered advice can lead women to submit to abuse.) I am also concerned about the problematic issues around her views on God's sovereignty. If you are new to the discussion of discernment, I suggest starting with Hannah Anderson's All That's Good.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/discerning-the-voice-of-god/
Know Your Place: Helping White, Southern Evangelicals Cope with the End of The(ir) World by Justin R. Phillips
This thesis as I capture here is going to be too direct for some readers. That doesn't mean he is wrong, it just means that there is a directness that will cause some to be resistant to the message of the book. Phillips quotes Hauerwas, "Courtesy forbids direct speech", but does not practice Hauwerwas' quote. As an outsider to the South, it isn't my place to say whether this is the best approach for those who have grown up in the South. But I do think it is a truthful approach.
It is likely that many who grew up in the South won't have heard quotes like the following:
Another important theological issue that is still ongoing is the relationship between history and guilt. The issues in the quote below are not new. (Hudson Baggett was editor of the Alabama Baptist from 1966 until his death in 1994).
I think Know Your Place was well written and directly speaks to the issues of being a White Southern Christian (man) today. It isn't going to be the best book for everyone. But I do think it can be very helpful for those with ears to hear.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/know-your-place/
Summary: A series of essays exploring what it means to be Christian, White, and Southern in the context of the racial realities as they are.
Racism isn't solely a Southern phenomenon, but there are some aspects to the White Southern Christian culture, and it makes sense to look at it from that perspective. I have read a lot of history and theology regarding racial realities in the United States. I have not grown up in the South, but I have lived just outside Atlanta for nearly 20 years. Because I have been here for a while, but I have not grown up here, I am both an outsider and an inside observer. I very much have witnessed quite overt racism, and the racial innocence that is well described in Know Your Place.
I am going to have three brief illustrations about racial innocence that influenced my reading of Know Your Place. About 5-6 years ago, the church I was a member of had a series of midweek meetings about race and Christianity. The meetings had a large group and small group component. My small group was facilitated by a Black pastor (not from our church). The small group was about 15 people, and as we opened the first session, we went around and introduced ourselves. One of the men introduced himself and concluded, "I was born and grew up and spent my whole life in the Atlanta area, and I do not believe that I have ever witnessed something I would call racist." I believe that she was roughly the same age as my mother-in-law, who also grew up here; her education was segregated until her senior year of high school.
Another friend of mine is retired and grew up in rural Georgia. She privately emailed me after we were in a class together where I had talked about the racist history of Stone Mountain. She was unfamiliar with what I was referring to and wanted to know more about what I meant. We talked, and I sent her some articles about Stone Mountain being dedicated explicitly to white supremacy and being the site of the start of the second founding of the KKK. She had literally never heard of any of that history despite living in Georgia for much of her life.
Several years ago, Georgia passed a law that included a provision that says that teachers cannot teach that "the United States is a systemically racist country." I was discussing this law and the problems of how teachers can teach the required standards, including teaching about the Dred Scott decision in 8th grade, without violating the law. The person I was talking to expressed that all history should be taught but that it was wrong to teach that the country is racist. I continued to ask questions about the history of the US. It was clear that the person both did not know anything about the Dred Scott decision (which said that the US was under no obligation to recognize citizenship or other rights of black Americans regardless of whether they were free or enslaved) or other expressly race-conscious laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act.
I give that way too long of an introduction because one of the problems of discussing race is that we have very different starting places because there is a mix of ignorance, willful blindness, and bad education. Most of the time, there is a mix of the three, but providing history to someone who is willfully blind to racial realities is unlikely to make a difference. Similarly, accusations of willful blindness when the person is simply ignorant or has had a lousy education often will create a backlash. And there is the problem of people defending their "home" because they feel like it is being attacked.
Know Your Place has good history and understands the culture, psychology and sociology of the South well. Phillips also has the theological chops to bring in theological ethics to cultural realities in a way that has grace, but tells the truth.
Early in the book this quote lays out the thesis quite directly.
Racism isn't solely a Southern phenomenon, but there are some aspects to the White Southern Christian culture, and it makes sense to look at it from that perspective. I have read a lot of history and theology regarding racial realities in the United States. I have not grown up in the South, but I have lived just outside Atlanta for nearly 20 years. Because I have been here for a while, but I have not grown up here, I am both an outsider and an inside observer. I very much have witnessed quite overt racism, and the racial innocence that is well described in Know Your Place.
I am going to have three brief illustrations about racial innocence that influenced my reading of Know Your Place. About 5-6 years ago, the church I was a member of had a series of midweek meetings about race and Christianity. The meetings had a large group and small group component. My small group was facilitated by a Black pastor (not from our church). The small group was about 15 people, and as we opened the first session, we went around and introduced ourselves. One of the men introduced himself and concluded, "I was born and grew up and spent my whole life in the Atlanta area, and I do not believe that I have ever witnessed something I would call racist." I believe that she was roughly the same age as my mother-in-law, who also grew up here; her education was segregated until her senior year of high school.
Another friend of mine is retired and grew up in rural Georgia. She privately emailed me after we were in a class together where I had talked about the racist history of Stone Mountain. She was unfamiliar with what I was referring to and wanted to know more about what I meant. We talked, and I sent her some articles about Stone Mountain being dedicated explicitly to white supremacy and being the site of the start of the second founding of the KKK. She had literally never heard of any of that history despite living in Georgia for much of her life.
Several years ago, Georgia passed a law that included a provision that says that teachers cannot teach that "the United States is a systemically racist country." I was discussing this law and the problems of how teachers can teach the required standards, including teaching about the Dred Scott decision in 8th grade, without violating the law. The person I was talking to expressed that all history should be taught but that it was wrong to teach that the country is racist. I continued to ask questions about the history of the US. It was clear that the person both did not know anything about the Dred Scott decision (which said that the US was under no obligation to recognize citizenship or other rights of black Americans regardless of whether they were free or enslaved) or other expressly race-conscious laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act.
I give that way too long of an introduction because one of the problems of discussing race is that we have very different starting places because there is a mix of ignorance, willful blindness, and bad education. Most of the time, there is a mix of the three, but providing history to someone who is willfully blind to racial realities is unlikely to make a difference. Similarly, accusations of willful blindness when the person is simply ignorant or has had a lousy education often will create a backlash. And there is the problem of people defending their "home" because they feel like it is being attacked.
Know Your Place has good history and understands the culture, psychology and sociology of the South well. Phillips also has the theological chops to bring in theological ethics to cultural realities in a way that has grace, but tells the truth.
Early in the book this quote lays out the thesis quite directly.
"Here is the brutal truth about the people and places that I love: The dominant social imagination was, and is, a white-supremacist ideology, employed to enslave, terrorize, dehumanize, or restrict people of color, while at the same time absolving the offenders and their heirs from the guilt of any wrongdoing. These offenses were committed in order to keep people in their place and upon these shared values and stories American life was built, sustained, and defended. My social imaginary has, at its core, white supremacist foundations from which I and many others have benefitted. This is my place in our shared story." (p31)
This thesis as I capture here is going to be too direct for some readers. That doesn't mean he is wrong, it just means that there is a directness that will cause some to be resistant to the message of the book. Phillips quotes Hauerwas, "Courtesy forbids direct speech", but does not practice Hauwerwas' quote. As an outsider to the South, it isn't my place to say whether this is the best approach for those who have grown up in the South. But I do think it is a truthful approach.
It is likely that many who grew up in the South won't have heard quotes like the following:
Henry Holcombe Tucker, Baptist minister and former president of Mercer University and the University of Georgia, posited in an 1883 editorial four key litmus tests for racial orthodoxy: First, human races are and will be forever unequal. Second, Blacks are inferior to whites. Third, intermarriage was detrimental to all races. Fourth, free social intermingling of Blacks and whites “must have its origin in sin.” (p99)
and
Southern tradition, according to Lillian Smith, taught children three lessons that connected God, the body, and segregation: God loves and punishes children. We, in return, love and fear God. Parents possess a godlike quality, enforcing God’s ways, and themselves are deserving of love and fear. The second lesson concerned God’s gift of the body, which was to be kept clean and healthy. Be careful how you use this gift, for God’s morality is “based on this mysterious matter of entrances and exits, and Sin hovering over all doors.”
White skin was the most important feature of the body: This ‘gift’ gave whites status, dictated their control over space and movement, and children learned by watching their elders. The final lesson of southern tradition was that of segregation, an extension of the other two: You always obeyed authorities—“They Who Make the Rules”—and you valued and protected your white body. Even outside of the home “Custom and Church” would continue the education through words and actions. (p107)
Another important theological issue that is still ongoing is the relationship between history and guilt. The issues in the quote below are not new. (Hudson Baggett was editor of the Alabama Baptist from 1966 until his death in 1994).
Hudson Baggett, editor of the Alabama Baptist, rejected the statement, saying the convention “cannot confess the guilt or sins of all other Southern Baptists. Every person must confess his own sins, if they are confessed.” He added, “many people resist the idea of collective guilt, especially if it is connected with certain things in which people felt they have no part directly or indirectly.” Baggett’s words perfectly summarize the perspective that persists today among many whites, Christians included: In the absence of perceived guilt there is no reason to seek forgiveness. Sin works by blinding us to the realities of our failings, individually or collectively. (p145)
I think Know Your Place was well written and directly speaks to the issues of being a White Southern Christian (man) today. It isn't going to be the best book for everyone. But I do think it can be very helpful for those with ears to hear.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/know-your-place/