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Book Reviews
Up one levelReview of "The Deliverance of God" by Douglas A. Campbell
Salvation has been understood in terms of “justification by faith” for a long time. While the phrase itself is important in a few of Paul’s letters, what is “justification by faith” in all of its complexity? And is it the best or even most Biblically accurate construal of salvation? According to Douglas Campbell “justification by faith” has taken on a particular yet very complex form—one that cannot be pinned to one tradition, but touches all in some way. It has developed over time and influences the very bedrock of commonplace Christian thought and practice. It is married to a particular reading of Romans 1-4, yet it is fundamentally not Pauline. For Douglas Campbell, this understanding of salvation which shapes Christian existence has several problems as it has come to be understood and needs to go. This is the burden of Campbell’s book, The Deliverance of God, which contains 936 pages of text and 241 pages of endnotes—both full of complex argumentation—toward this end...
Review of "Luther and the Beloved Community" by Paul R. Hinlicky
I am writing in the hope of persuading pastors to read Paul R. Hinlicky’s recent books. They meet a crying need for the sort of books that were published in previous generations by authors like Gustaf Wingren, William Lazareth, Gerhard Forde, David Scaer, and Robert Jenson. Their books have helped pastors to orient themselves and their flocks, and Hinlicky’s books do, too. I recommend that you begin with Luther and the Beloved Community...
Review of “Preaching from Home” by Gracia Grindal
This book intrigued me in the first place because of my interest in Lutheran hagiography: I figured it might direct me to some givers-of-Christ I hadn’t known before. And it certainly did that—but learning about some remarkable Lutheran women is only a piece of the whole book’s project, which is packed with far more than the title would lead you to believe...
Review of "From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart" by Chris Haw
The author Chris Haw is part of a loose phenomenon known as the New Monastics. The outward appearance of the new monastics boils down to privileged young white evangelicals moving into intentional communities in economically devastated sections of older cities and attempting to live not under the older monastic imperatives of poverty, chastity and obedience but under a more progressive banner of justice and prophetic living. If you just read the names of who blurbed From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart you might be forgiven for immediately jumping to the conclusion that this is the latest offering from what used to be called the emerging church. Or, only reading Willow Creek in the title you might immediate assume it is the latest offering from the American evangelical publishing industry breathlessly proclaiming the new world-changing read. Normally I would have counted three strikes and called the book out. That umpire needs to get his reading glasses because From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart can’t be judged by its cover. There are many parts that make a Lutheran wince, but the overall read is much preferable to any of those cover assumptions and would make great source material for a study group...
Review of "Justification Is for Preaching"
Justification is for Preaching is either not a preaching manual, or it is the most Lutheran preaching manual ever written. It is not a typical preaching manual because it lacks recommended outlines and tips for poise and diction. It is the most Lutheran preaching manual ever written because it repeatedly hammers the point that preaching justification is not a method but a means...
Review of "Changing Churches: an Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran Theological Conversation" and "Essential Lutheranism: Theological Perspectives on Christian Faith and Doctrine"
These two books landed on my desk at the same time. It was fortuitous: the two (one with three authors) are closely related. Mattox and Roeber document their departure from Lutheranism; Hinlicky and Braaten document their determination to remain with Lutheranism in spite of its serious failures. It is no coincidence that the two appear at this time. We are at a time of discernment as Lutherans and our identity is being tested
Review of "Worship as Repentance" by Walter Sundberg
Challenges, both antiquated and modern, to the traditionally penitential posture of Lutheran worship are the subject of Walter Sundberg’s most recent monograph. In light of the mainline’s imminent collapse, this book represents a very needed corrective to the cheap grace and valueless absolution offered by contemporary Protestant liberalism. By interpreting the liturgical tradition, with special attention paid to the practice of penance in the early church, the development of confession and absolution in Lutheranism, and the influence of the liturgical movement, Sundberg offers a compelling alternative to the “grace sold on the market” (20) that is peddled by so many these days. Sundberg advances the radical proposition that to be a Christian is challenging; to follow Christ is costly; to worship is to repent...
Review of "The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of the Book of Concord"
I rarely prescribe a book as necessary but The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of The Book of Concord is an exception. Here is a book that I am willing to say is “A must have book!” That is, if you are a Lutheran pastor. It is a necessary companion to The Book of Concord (2000, Kolb & Wengert, ed.) just like Sources and Contexts of The Book of Concord (2001, Kolb & Nestingen, ed.). This book is the completion of the intended three volume project.
Review of "The Devil's Whore"
The provocative title of Dragseth’s edited volume embraces Martin Luther’s irreverent assessment of reason’s role in the life of faith. Throughout this text, words like “misreading,” “mischaracterization,” and “misunderstanding” appear repeatedly as theologians, historians, and philosophers reappraise Luther’s relationship to and influence on philosophy. Originating with a panel on the quandary of Lutheran philosophy at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 2008 (with some of the papers from that panel subsequently published in Lutheran Forum), this diverse and rich collection of articles is a must-read for anyone invested in Martin Luther’s life, thought, and legacy...
Review of "As Christ Submits to the Church" by Alan Padgett
A reader’s first question in response to Alan Padgett’s title might run something along the lines of, “Shouldn’t that be the other way around?” Certainly the phrase “as Christ submits to the church” has a biblical cadence to it, imbuing it with authority, and yet it jars against other phrases and concepts that echo about in the Scripture-steeped mind. A reader’s next question, then, might be so bold and accusatory as, “Did he take the phrasing of some particular New Testament verse and flip it around? Is the rephrasing some clever, attention-snaring ploy to advance his (possibly nefarious, certainly liberal) purposes? Or worse” —for our uncertainty gives way inevitably to self-doubt— “is it possible that he is actually quoting the New Testament? Have I missed something? Does Christ submit to the church?”...
Review of Critical Issues in Ecclesiology: Essays in Honor of Carl Braaten
Carl Braaten is one of today’s Lutheran theological giants. Here is a Festschrift, a fitting tribute to his contributions from his peers and the students nurtured by his distinguished and skillful teaching. His bibliography of his published work included in this volume is 17 pages long!...
Review of Who Is Jesus? Disputed Questions and Answers by Carl E. Braaten
I have had the experience more than once before of spending most of my time reading a book being utterly perplexed as to what it was supposed to be about, not because of any unclarity on the part of the writer but because of the title. Perhaps this is a marketing department issue more than anything else. In any event, such was my experience in working my way through this latest offering of Carl Braaten. At the end, my hunch was confirmed by the author himself...
Review of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity
The past is always changing, which is rather confusing for us since we think of it as fixed and finished. But it does change, in the sense that what we know about it and how we interpret it changes. In particular, it is separating out our interpretations based on our contemporary notions from “the way it really happened” that makes a regular reassessment of evidence about the past an extremely necessary task. This is what Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson (the latter an ELCA pastor and professor at Notre Dame) set out to do...
Review of Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Meditations and Hymns
This latest in the massive Classics of Western Spirituality Series helps to fill in a hole in the anglophone world’s knowledge of Lutheranism after the Reformation. The three devotional writers featured here—Johann Gerhard, Heinrich Müller, and Christian Scriver—as well as the assorted hymnwriters were all seventeenth-century men, well after the Reformation but just before the flowering of Pietism. They held their own, Gerhard in particular, in the confessionalization of European Christianity, but, as editor Eric Lund is at pains to point out, that didn’t mean they were dry-as-dust concretizers of orthodoxy, penning erudite but irrelevant volumes on esoteric themes. Quite the contrary, living in one of the most traumatic periods of European history, and dealing with the fallout in their parishioners’ lives, they were very much concerned with the personal faith of Lutherans and how it was expressed in daily life...
Review of Parade of Faith by Ruth A. Tucker
“As church history marches into the twenty-first century, we find Billy Graham on the final night of his final crusade, March 12, 2006, leading a parade of sixteen thousand followers from the vast New Orleans Arena to Bourbon Street to claim the infamous French Quarter for Christ. Riding a motor scooter, Graham serves as grand marshal, as Christians lift their voices singing, ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ What a fitting climax to one man’s career and to a two-thousand-year parade of history! Problem is, the story is an Internet hoax. It is a reminder that even sacred history includes lies and urban legends.” So writes historian Ruth Tucker near the end of her remarkable nearly five hundred-page biographical pilgrimage through Church history. She willingly looks at the good, the bad, and the ugly of Christian history as she portrays many of the greats from down through the ages...
Review of Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels by James D. G. Dunn
In the compass of a relatively short book Professor Dunn has assumed a monumental task. He describes it, ‘to fill up the gap between Jesus and the Gospels, as well as to explain how the Gospels formed a new literary genre, and how the Fourth Gospel fitted with the others”...
Review of Martin Luther's Theology by Oswald Bayer
Martin Luther's Theology, a masterly and mature summary by the grand old man of Luther studies in Germany, is not just a review of the reformer's thought across the doctrinal loci: it is a handbook for life. This is quite deliberate on Bayer's part. "Intellectual knowledge about faith," he writes in the Preface, "is not separated from the affective experience of faith; the art of disputation serves the task of caring for souls" (xvi). Bayer consistently refuses the "God's-eye" approach to theology, which looks down from heaven upon a complete and seamless whole. Instead he, with Luther, with all sinners struggling toward faith, looks up from the midst of the struggle, sorting out the interplay of human hope and doubt surrounding the promise of Jesus Christ...
Review of Quest for the Living God by Elizabeth A. Johnson
Like many others, I first heard of Elizabeth Johnson’s 2007 book Quest for the Living God from the media frenzy following the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ criticism of it earlier this year. (The news release can be found here, but the link to the actual statement no longer works; if you can get your hands on paper copies of the Catholic news service Origins, you can follow all the exchanges between the bishops and Johnson.) A matter of particular dismay was that the whole process of criticism and subsequent publication of it was done, to all appearances, in secret; Johnson didn’t know about it much before anyone else in the general public did. There were procedural issues, not to matter principles of basic civility, that seem not to have been taken into account. Johnson herself eventually responded with a 38-page response concluding: “Ideas are taken out of context and twisted to mean what they patently do not mean. Sentences are run to a conclusion far from what I think or the text says. False dilemmas are composed. Numerous omissions, distortions, and outright misstatements of fact riddle the reading. As a work of theology, Quest for the Living God was thoroughly misunderstood and consistently misrepresented in the committee’s Statement”...
Review of The Pastoral Epistles with Philemon and Jude by Risto Saarinen
In the spring 2010 issue of Lutheran Forum, the Finnish Lutheran theologian Risto Saarinen contributed an article called “The Letter of Jude, a Christian Midrash,” based on his work for this volume in the Brazos series. But his whole commentary not only fleshes out Jude (“the most neglected book in the New Testament”) a bit further: it also gives extensive treatment on four pauline epistles. A curious combination—one wonders if the editors just rounded up the ragtag leftovers to be lumped together in one book—but Saarinen manages to treat each book on its own terms, which makes for rewarding reading, however odd the assortment...
Review of Our One Great Act of Fidelity by Ronald Rolheiser
I first encountered the writing of Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI, quite by accident. In 2008 I was visiting my cousin in England; we spent a day in Liverpool where her daughter was at university. After a visit to the Roman Catholic cathedral church there—surely a classic example of uninspiring modern church architecture—we browsed the bookstore. I spied a copy of Rolheiser’s best-selling book, The Holy Longing, bought it, and spent the plane ride home absorbed in reading it...