“The Fixed Point
In Whose Orbit We Move”

A Review of
Justification:
God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.
by N.T. Wright.

 Reviewed by Austen Sandifer-Williams.

Justification:
God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.
N.T. Wright.
Hardback: IVP Academic, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

God is bigger than us. The statement may seem trite, but Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision explains that many pastors and biblical scholars have missed that point when they cherry-pick certain passages and interpret them according to a Reformed tradition that focuses on individuals rather than according to the rich tradition that unfolds in the Bible itself, from the story of Israel to the story of the restoration of creation. In this book, N.T. Wright, esteemed New Testament scholar and Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, has done a remarkable job of condensing the weighty topic of justification into a single digestible volume.

Justification is the act by which God makes people (sinners) righteous to God. The details of justification (how, why, when, etc.) are the subject of significant debate, and Wright brings to life why this debate matters and what justification means to Christians as the inheritors of God’s promise for the world through Israel. He does this by delving into Paul’s writings in a way that connects them to an overarching biblical story, the story of God’s promise for the redemption of creation.

Wright’s book is superficially spurred by John Piper’s implicit challenge in his book, The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright, a critique of Wright’s analysis of Paul. However, Wright is clear that his intent is not only to answer Piper, but also to clarify Paul’s whole theology on justification for the church today, in opposition to “the truncated and self-centered readings which have become endemic in Western thought (25).” In this context, the differences between Wright and Piper become representative of larger differences in Pauline scholarship between the “new” perspective (Wright) and “old,” traditional Reformed perspective (Piper). (more…)

“Communing in a
Vibrant Corporate Life”

A Review of
People and Place:
A Covenant Ecclesiology.
by Michael Horton.

 Reviewed by Kent Ellett.

People and Place:
A Covenant Ecclesiology.
Michael Horton.
Paperback: WJK Books, 2008.
Buy now:  [ ChristianBook.com ]

People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology is the fourth and final volume in Michael Horton’s contemporary restatement of Reformed systematic theology.   His work is erudite and ecumenical in scope, but Horton is bold, unwilling to give an inch of what he considers Reformed ground.  Over and against the “chaos of Evangelical individualism” Horton describes the Church as the locus of God’s special gracious activity amidst covenantal relationships.   Here is a champion of grace, who finds the church’s identity in preaching, baptizing and communing in a vibrant corporate life.   The reader will find in Horton not just a Reformed thinker, but a conversation partner of the first order.

        Engaging (or more often contending with) contemporary movements within evangelicalism, post-liberal narrative theologians, and traditional Anabaptist, Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox traditions, Horton is particularly concerned to make sure that ecclesiology does not usurp Christology.  He fears that some doctrines of salvation take “participation language” too far and conflate Christ and the church.

        He traces what in his view is this deleterious theological tendency in Augustine’s conception of the “totus Christus” and the Eastern doctrine of deification.  Whether theologians spiritualize Jesus in order to make him just as present in the church as he ever was in the flesh (Origen and Schleiermacher) or by offering an over-realized eschatology that turns the Church into a “second incarnation” where the church becomes a self-justifying institution appealing to no higher authority than itself (the Roman tradition), Horton sees such thinking as disastrous.  For Horton, participationist soteriology and an over-realized eschatology that confuses Christ and church loom as ecclesial enemy number one and two in these pages. (more…)

“Applying Yoder’s Theo-political
Thought to the Question of History”

A Review of
Christ, History and Apocalyptic:
The Politics of Christian Mission.
by Nathan Kerr.

 Reviewed by Chase Roden.

Christ, History and Apocalyptic:
The Politics of Christian Mission.
Nathan Kerr.
Paperback: Cascade Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

How does the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord affect a Christian’s view of history?  Professor of theology and philosophy Nathan Kerr begins his recent book with this deceptively simple question.  And although it may seem esoteric, in the course of under 200 pages Kerr makes the case that the role of history should be a central question for 21st-century Christians.  Kerr believes that modernism has made an idol of historical processes, and therefore even the concept of “history” is a hindrance to the true confession of Christ’s lordship.  Kerr lays out the key features of an alternative, “apocalyptic” vision of history — one that places God’s interruptive action in the person of Jesus of Nazareth at the center of all historical interpretation.

At this point, you may be wondering how our concept of history can be so harmful as to be considered idolatrous.  The answer to that involves the issues of the book’s subtitle: politics and Christian mission.  Following John Howard Yoder, Kerr sees Jesus’s work on earth and the continued action of the Holy Spirit as inherently political; Kerr has an Anabaptist’s earthy, “real” concept of Jesus’s mission as involving not primarily the heart or mind, but the everyday lives and actions of individuals and communities with regard to one another.  For Kerr and Yoder, the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus inaugurate the reign of God, in which the Church doesn’t just carry out the mission of God, but in which the Church is God’s mission.  (more…)

In our continuing effort to fund the publication and free distribution of The Englewood Review, we are going to be collaborating more intentionally with Christian Book Distributors.  Primarily, we will be offering you the opportunity to buy bargain books from CBD that we think of are interest.  Buying books this way is a win / win / win proposition.  You get great books for a great price,  CBD gets the sale and we get an excellent referral fee from CBD.  These books make great gifts!

This week’s bargain books (Click to learn more/purchase):

A Brief Review of
The Next Evangelicalism:
Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity
Soong-Chan Rah.
Paperback: IVP Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

 Soong-Chan Rah’s recent book THE NEXT EVANGELICALISM: FREEING THE CHURCH FROM WESTERN CULTURAL CAPTIVITY is an insightful and challenging book.  What the title does not convey (thanks, undoubtedly to an editorial decision) but what Rah emphasizes throughout the book is that by “Western cultural captivity” he means “WHITE Western cultural captivity.” While noting that the demographics of the Church are rapidly shifting away from the North American orientation of the past and toward “a southern and eastern hemisphere-centered Christianity” (12), and that even the Church in North America is rapidly becoming more diverse, Rah also observes that the leadership of American evangelicalism is still almost completely white and male. Thus, Rah writes seeking “reconciliation and renewal” among God’s people.  Overall there are many powers that Rah wrestles with here that other authors — including myself at times — have unmasked (individualism, consumerism, imperialism, etc), but the most convicting of his points is the prevaling whiteness that is driving Christianity in North America.  This point is driven home most poignantly in his chapter on “The Emergent Church’s Captivity to White, Western Culture.”  Here he observes that, generally speaking, the leadership of the Emerging Church is still largely white and largely male.  He observes, “Dialoguing on race for most white emergents, becomes a luxury, not a necessity, as it is for many people of color” (119).  Rah’s chapter critiquing mega-churches and the church growth movement in general is excellent and is well-worth the consideration and reflection of the Church.  Rah’s work is disturbing in that it sheds light on the multitude of ways that churches in North America have been held captive, ultimately calls us — in the book’s Conclusion — to confession and repentance.  THE NEXT EVANGELICALISM would be a perfect companion to J. Kameron Carter’s recent epic theological work RACE: A THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT, elaborating in a more accessible fashion, on the theological history of racialism and racism that Carter has so compelling set forth in his work.  Both authors share a vision of a future Church that is necessarily more diverse.  In Carter’s words, they agree that:

[A]s a twenty-first-century discourse, Christian theology must take its bearings from the Christian theological languages and practices that arise from the lived Christian worlds of dark peoples in modernity and how such peoples reclaimed (and in their own ways salvaged) the language of Christianity, and thus Christian theology, from being a discourse of death – their death (RACE, 378).

Despite the many conflictions of my own theology and praxis, I believe that Carter and Rah are right, that North American churches are held hostage by their Westernness and whiteness and need to come to confession and repentance.  Jesus often proclaimed that he had come to set us free (cf Luke 4:16-21, etc.), but in order to be free in our twenty-first century North American context, we need first to recognize and repent of the unjust institutions to which we have been enslaved.  There are few books that take on this brutal and yet essential task with the clarity and the compassion with which Soong-Chan Rah has crafted THE NEXT EVANGELICALS.  I highly recommend it, for those who have the courage to face the mammoth cultural manifestations of our sinful state.

On Time
John Milton
(1608-1674)

Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race;
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet’s pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more than what is false and vain,
And merely mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain!
For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb’d,
And last of all thy greedy self consumed,
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And joy shall over-take us as a flood:
When every thing that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine,
With Truth, and Peace, and Love, shall ever shine
About the supreme Throne
Of Him, t’Whose happy-making sight alone
When once our heavenly-guided soul shall climb,
Then, all this earthy grossness quit,
Attired with stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time!

A Brief Review of the
First Two Books in the “Ancient Context, Ancient Faith” Series

The Bible and The Land.
( Ancient Context, Ancient Faith #1)
Gary Burge.
Paperback: Zondervan, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Jesus, The Middle Eastern Storyteller.
( Ancient Context, Ancient Faith #2)
Gary Burge.
Paperback: Zondervan, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

The first two books, both by Gary Burge, in the “Ancient Context, Ancient Faith” series have just been released by Zondervan.  Burge, a professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, does a fine job at setting an introductory historical — and to a lesser extent theological — context for certain biblical texts.  The first book in this series is THE BIBLE AND THE LAND, and it provides a basic contextual explanations for essential biblical elements like Land, Wilderness, rock, water and bread.  Burge’s work, albeit rather elementary in content, serves as a good introduction and the book itself is a really nice piece of work with glossy pages and relevant color photography supplementing the text on almost every page. Unfortunately, this first volume in its broadness — covering a specific set of terms across the whole of Scripture — does not cohere as well as the second one.  This second volume, JESUS, THE MIDDLE EASTERN STORYTELLER, is a lot more focused, namely on the parables of Jesus, and I imagine will prove to be a more useful text.  Similar in style and layout to the first volume, it begins with a brief introduction on the world in which these stories were told.  Burge writes in a super accesible style, occasionally weaving in a story from his own experience that sheds light on a particular topic.  He does a fine job at making sense of biblical texts, especially the parables of Jesus in volume two, in which the story’s significance has been obscured by our historical distance from the culture into which the story was originally told.  Either book would be appropriate for use in a Sunday School class or Bible Study group, but I believe that readers will find the second volume, on Jesus’ parables to be clearer and more helpful.

The Beautiful Creatures:
Trees in the Biblical Story
by Sylvia C. Keesmaat
For THE OTHER JOURNAL

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=837

In the beginning, there were no trees. There were no trees, for there was no rain to nourish them and no creature to tend them. In the beginning, there was the Voice. The Voice called the earth to birth the trees. As the Voice called and beckoned, the earth brought forth and the growth began: sap rushed up, limbs stretched, breaking the moist soil, reaching for the warmth of the sun. Roots groped, stretched, moved through the crumbly earth, embraced and cleft rocks, drew nourishment. Buds formed and leaves unfurled, fluffy and small, growing as the sun dried and warmed them and as sap filled them.

The Voice said, “Be trees full of life, be strong. Grow fruit for the birds and the animals, and branches for their homes. Be pleasing to look at, shout forth the grandeur of the Word. Dig your roots deep; draw nourishment from the earth.”

And the trees became living beings.

…

Read the full piece:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=837

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama pledged to renew the nation’s founding creed, to carry forward “that precious gift, that noble idea…that all are equal, all are free.” Some 1.8 million people gathered on the National Mall to hear the new president on that icy January morning. Yet a considerably larger mass — equivalent to adding the population of Boston to the celebration — spent the same day behind bars. For America is not only the land of the free, as the Navy chorus chanted from the presidential dais. It is also, to an extraordinary extent, the land of the unfree, the most incarcerated society on earth.

The United States was not always so locked down. For most of the twentieth century its incarceration rate hovered near one-tenth of one percent, roughly the same as in other industrial free societies. Then, from the early 1970s forward, the federal and state governments began extending sentences, curtailing judicial discretion and restricting early releases. The prison population soared. By the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, approximately one out of every 100 adults was in jail or prison, a proportion unmatched in the history of democracy.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2009_07_28

Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America.
Anne-Marie Cusac.
Hardback: Yale UP, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

To call Mark Nowak’s haunting new book a collection of poetry would be a bit of a misnomer. It would also be misleading to say Nowak is its author. The poems in Coal Mountain Elementary comprise three strands of found text; Nowak has selected and braided them, achieving an arresting effect. This is a book that exposes the darkest reaches of the global coal industry by using the industry’s own means—politely referred to as “extraction”—to lay bare the official language used to obfuscate mining’s human and environmental impact and to recover the far truer language of miners themselves.

Nowak’s first strand consists of verbatim extracts from thousands of pages of testimony given by family members, safety officials, and survivors of the Sago Mine explosion, which occurred January 2, 2006, in Sago, West Virginia. The explosion left twelve miners dead and became, for a couple days, a story of national heartbreak. The operation to rescue thirteen trapped miners was famously muddled, and incorrect information was released to the press, leading family members to cheers of deliverance, only for them to learn after hours of celebration that, in fact, only one miner had survived. Attempts to conduct a meaningful investigation into the disaster and botched rescue effort were thwarted by the mine’s corporate owner, International Coal Group, West Virginia mining officials, the United States Department of Labor, and the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, groups that opposed making public the very testimony Nowak has so carefully selected.

…

Read the full review:
http://bookforum.com/review/4016

Coal Mountain Elementary.
Mark Nowak.
With photographs by Ian Teh and Mark Nowak.
Paperback: Coffeehouse Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

The form a city assumes as it evolves over time owes more to large-scale works of civil engineering—what we now call infrastructure—than almost any other factor save topography. The collective imagination fixes on the most conspicuous symbols of urban identity: the grand architectural set pieces of political and religious authority that predominated until the last century, when spectacular high-rise monuments to financial might reshaped skylines around the world. But without the development of complex and often ingenious systems for providing increasing numbers of city dwellers with water, sanitation, transportation, energy, and communications, our unprecedented modern megalopolises could never have emerged.

With alarming frequency lately we have witnessed a series of American infrastructural disasters, including the collapse of a highway bridge linking Minneapolis and St. Paul; the explosion of underground steam ducts in midtown Manhattan; and inundations caused by failures of antiquated water mains, weakened dams, and inadequate levees, most catastrophically in New Orleans. Advocates of a comprehensive national initiative to repair or replace aging public works have stressed how such an undertaking would spur economic recovery. But whether it does so or not, the inescapable crisis of our crumbling infrastructure must be confronted, and sooner rather than later.

Another question that arises as cities mature is what to do with outmoded infrastructure. Many architectural preservationists were slow to concede the historical merit of utilitarian landmarks until the 1960s and 1970s. An unusual reclamation project from that period looms larger in hindsight: the land-scape architect Richard Haag’s Gas Works Park of 1970–1975 in Seattle, which recycled a defunct gasification plant into a new kind of public recreation space. Haag perceived the raw beauty of the lakeside site’s abandoned mechanical components—monolithic tanks, totemic gauges, Mondrianesque pipelines—and incorporated them into his scheme as found objects. Haag’s novel idea outraged traditionalists (not least the park’s principal benefactors, who refused to have it named after them), but to others the concept seemed reasonable at a time when artists like Mark di Suvero and Alexander Liberman were appropriating I-beams and drainage culverts for their monumental outdoor sculptures.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22954

Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street
Edited by Friends of the High Line,
with forewords by James Corner and Ricardo Scofidio
Paperback: Friends of the High Line, 2008.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Register Now!

THROUGH THE CONSUMING FIRE:
ECONOMIC FAITHFULNESS IN AN AGE OF CONSUMERISM
COMMUNITY – CONTENTMENT – CREATIVITY
Friday Nov. 13 and Saturday Nov. 14
Englewood Christian Church
57 N. Rural St. Indianapolis
Main Speakers:
Shane Claiborne   –   Will Samson    –  Kelly Johnson

The website is now up and registration is open!
http://www.englewoodcc.com/consumingfire/  

Consumerism is one of the greatest challenges facing the church in North America today.  Ultimately, consumerism is a form of self-indulgence that does great harm to our brothers and sisters around the world and indeed to all of Creation.  At the Through the Consuming Fire conference, we will explore what economic faithfulness would look like – particularly as shaped by denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following Jesus. 

Facebook Invite and More details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=73979927805&ref=share#/event.php?eid=70646854370

Here is a recording of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s talk “Tactics from Jesus for a Good Life Now” from the 2009 Ekklesia Project gathering. This is a great preview for his book God’s Economy: Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel, which will be out in October.

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