Book Reviews

Summary: A history of the early Christian political and theological history.

I am not sure that the book’s subtitle, “How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years,” helped my perception of the book. I have read two previous books by Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity and The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. I am mixed, even as I am glad I read them. I bought Jesus Wars on Kindle years ago but never read it. I noticed it was free as part of my Audible membership, but it was leaving the free section soon, so I picked it up. 

Jesus Wars is part of my reading in response to Christian Nationalism, especially Noll’s America’s Book and Whitehead’s American Idolatry. A point that many pro-Christian Nationalists attempt to make is that their expression of Christianity is more consistent with historic Christianity than those that oppose Christian Nationalism. If their point is narrow, that there have been some aspects of Christianity that are similar to their understanding of Christian Nationalism, then I think that is accurate. But not all expressions of Christianity should be emulated.

Philip Jenkins is a historian of Christianity who tends to look at significant trends and demographics. I appreciate how he draws attention to both geographies and times to parts of Christian history that are less well-known or ignored. In all three books I have read, he draws attention away from traditional Western (European and North American) Christianity and toward Christianity of Africa and Asia. He is not anti-orthodox (in the theological sense), but he believes that some of the lines drawn in the past were more about politics, language, and culture than theology. Jenkins wants to introduce the reader to what is often called Miasophite or Nestorian Christianity. The introduction discusses why those descriptions are inaccurate but still commonly used. He concludes that there were fundamental differences in approach with these early theological battles but that the disagreements were not only about theology but also language, culture, and politics. I think Jesus Wars and Christianity The First 3000 Years are examples of trying to do Christian history by primarily looking at the political and social history as a contributing factor to the theological history. This is important to Christian history because, so many times, Christian history is presented as solely spiritual. Christian history is messy, as Jesus Wars presents.

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Summary: Anne, an orphan, is adopted and becomes a beloved family member. But there are SOOOOO many long descriptive passages that make it a less-than-great read-aloud.

I am not great about reading to my kids, but we do tend always to have a book that we are slowly working through. And this one was very slow. I picked it primarily because I knew there were several TV and film adaptations, and that has previously been a motivator to keep reading.

I read at least this first book of the series as a teen, but I really did not remember it beyond the broad outline of the story. I think I probably remember more from the TV adaptations than the book. I wanted to read an old book in part because I knew the vocabulary would be more of a challenge, and I wanted to introduce my kids to vocabulary they would not get with more recent books. And I got the vocabulary. The annotated edition is helpful both because I was reading on Kindle, which has a built-in dictionary, but also because the annotations helped beyond the dictionary.

If it were just unfamiliar words, that would have been fine. But what I did not remember was the pages of descriptions and the super long run-on sentences within those pages of descriptions. There were many examples of sentences that were several lines long. And paragraphs that were more than a page long. This is something that when I am reading myself, I do not notice, but when reading out loud, it is very noticeable.

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Summary: Theological discussion about God and gender.

Women and the Gender of God has been on my to-read list since it came out. I have watched or listened to several interviews with the author, including this one at Holy Post and the 40-minute bonus episode. I eventually picked up the audiobook. The author narrates it well, as I prefer. But this is a book that needs a second reading, at least for me. I am not completely new to the topic, but neither trinitarian theology nor gender theory are areas where I have expertise. I have enough background to understand but not enough background to evaluate.

I remember as a teen going to a national youth conference (summer of 1989 or 90), and on one of the conference days, God was primarily referred to with feminine pronouns. I was not disturbed by it because I was aware that God was not gendered in a human sense, but I do remember thinking that it was poorly handled because there was no explanation or teaching around it; they just did it. And I spent a while talking through it with some of the people I was with because they were disturbed by it. That was probably the point, but disturbing teens without discussion is not how to address a history of patriarchal teaching.

Good theology should be nuanced, and Women and the Gender of God is appropriately nuanced. That nuance means I probably should have read this in print, not listened to the audiobook. The advantage of audio is that you can get a broad overview quickly, but it is hard to flip back and reread sections to ensure you understand the nuance.

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Summary: A brief biography of Charles Johnson, a pastor in Meridian, Mississippi, and one of the witnesses in the Mississippi Burning Trial. 

I picked this up because it was free in the Audible Plus catalog. I am satisfied with the time I spent on the book because I was not aware of the story of Charles Johnson previously. But once I was about an hour into the book, I looked around for reviews to decide if I wanted to finish the book. This review discussed how this biography was framed as an old-fashioned missionary biography, giving me the language to accept the style. (I encourage you to read that link if you haven’t.)

The book opens with Charles Johnson as a young child. A white salesman worked in his Black community of Orlando. In his spare time, that salesman encouraged youth, occasionally hired them, and eventually opened a community center. Through his work, Charles Johnson became a Christian. When Johnson felt the call to ministry, that salesman helped him attend a Nazarene seminary in West Virginia. As the review notes, the Nazarenes were segregated, including their seminaries. So the only seminary Johnson could have gone to within the Nazarene movement was the one in West Virginia. Bush notes denominational racism several times in the book. Still, the book’s framing, even as it attempts to show how Johnson moved beyond the holiness pietism of the Nazarenes more generally, has that pietism in the background. He shows that Johnson kept to Nazarene pietism through the emphasis on evangelism toward the end of his life and in his rejection of acceptance of the invitation to the Carter inaugural ball because it served alcohol.

I have read many missionary biographies, and many of the genre’s tropes are here. They tend to be short; this was less than four hours in audiobook. They emphasize supernatural calling and intervention. They focus on the action, not the interior life or mundane everyday work. And they always talk about what was given up to serve God, including losing family or spouse. And the story of one of the KKK members who was convicted for the killings became Christian in jail and personally came to ask for forgiveness from Charles Johnson after leaving jail fits the genre’s tropes as well. I think of these types of books as hagiography. I can see how Chet Bush is attempting to subvert some of the genre by making Johnson the subject (he is Black in a predominately white denomination, and the story’s location is the US, not the international mission field).

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Summary: Anxiety is part of how we were created.

Like everyone (and in keeping with how anxiety is talked about in the book), I have anxiety. I hate conflict. I do everything I can to avoid situations where I might be in conflict, especially conflict with people close to me. Curtis Chang suggests that anxiety is part of how we were created. We should have anxiety because we care. Part of how care for the world and those around us expresses itself is being anxious over the fear of loss. No anxiety at all would not show that we have great control over our emotions, but instead, it would show that we may not have appropriate care or love.

“Love: We suffer anxiety because we are vulnerable to losing what we most love. This further explains why anxiety is unavoidable for anyone who is truly human. To be free of anxiety is to be free of any love (which is capable of being lost), which in turn would mean becoming inhuman.”

Chang uses formulas to illustrate how he wants to talk about anxiety. “Anxiety = Loss tells us that anxiety is generated by loss or, more specifically, by our fear of loss. Every anxiety is the fear of some future loss.” Once that basic idea is explained, he expands on it to show how anxiety can be made worse: “Anxiety = Loss x Avoidance.” Fear of loss is something that we all have. And he also identifies that a certain level of anxiety is also inevitable. But the part that moves us from normal anxiety to dysfunctional anxiety is our avoidance. It is common to speak about fight or flight (and sometimes fawn) as responses to stimuli. Chang also speaks about them as tools of avoidance.

“CEOs tend to have high-functioning anxiety, like I do. Also, like me, they tend to default to fight mode. They often plunge forward with their own versions of firing off long emails to their staff at three in the morning. Too often, their colleagues don’t push back. Team members don’t realize their leader’s behavior is anxiety-driven. Instead, they feel confused, insecure, guilty, and blamed. Anxiety spreads like a contagion throughout the entire organization.”

Others (like me) tend to avoid our anxiety by pretending anxiety doesn’t exist or by avoiding situations where it might pop up. One of the book’s more helpful sections was the discussion about how different responses to anxiety impact relationships. Chang suggested that he tends to default to a fight response, and his wife tends to default to a flight response and that those different responses are interpreted by the other and a lack of care about their anxiety.

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Summary: Many people know about Francois Clemmons because of his relationship with Mister Rogers, but this is Francois Clemmons’ story.

I picked up a hardcover of Officer Clemmons when it came out several years ago, but I just never got around to reading it. I was looking for a change of pace and picked up the audiobook a couple of days ago, and the audiobook is the right choice for this book. I am highly in favor of authors reading their nonfiction books in most cases. And this is an excellent example of why. Francois Clemmons knows his own story, and he can narrate it with the right emotion and inflection. He occasionally (not as much as I would prefer) sings when discussing one of the songs in the book. The story comes alive in a way that I do not think would have happened for me in print.

I have read many books by or about Mister Rogers, as did Clemmons. He says in the opening that when he decided to tell his own story of Mister Rogers, he read every book he could find and determined that his contribution could be telling the story as a Black Gay man because none of the other books had that perspective. Officer Clemmons is primarily a book about Francois Clemmons, not Mister Rogers—several reviews I have seen complained about that point. Francois and Fred Rogers met when Francois was in graduate school in Pittsburg and had a job as a singer at the Rogers’ church. It was Fred Rogers wife Joanne that Francois came to know first. And she and the music director at the church made sure that he met Fred. But that part of the story does not come until more than halfway through the book.

I am glad that there are many memoirs of people that were of the age to be in the civil rights era. People of that era are passing away quickly, and we must pay attention to their stories. Francois was born to a sharecropper family. The early violence, both racial and domestic violence, matters to his story. Early in the book, he tells the story of how the local landowners pressured his grandmother for sex for years. She complied because the threat of violence and repercussion were real. She was protecting her family and doing what the culture expected. At one point, her husband said she was not there when the landowner came to get her, and the landowners just shot him in cold blood. There was no legal intervention. No police came, and no inquiry was made. And this was not counted in any of the counts of lynching. At this point, Francois’ grandmother had never lived anywhere other than that home, a home that had not been painted in her memory. There is more to the story that is also tragic and important, but the proximate cause of Clemmons’ family to move from the south to Youngstown, OH, was ongoing domestic violence from his father. His grandmother tried to protect Francois’ mother and siblings from the violence, including shooting and wounding his father when his father attempted to force them to move back home.

In many ways, Youngstown was better, but it was not perfect. Racism was still prevalent even though the schools had been desegregated. And domestic violence was still a factor in his life. Eventually, after his stepfather beat him quite severely for going to a concert, he moved out into a friend’s home, a local pastor’s family. His parents attempted to go to the school to force Francois to move back home about a month after that last beating, but Francois resisted. In front of the principal and his parents and the pastor, and his wife, that was allowing him to stay with him, he took off his shirt to show the scars and bruises of the beatings. The (white) principal negotiated for Francois to continue to live with the pastor and his wife and for his parents not to interfere with the threat of reporting the violence to the police.

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Summary: A collection of sixteen sermons, an original introduction by Coretta Scott King, and a new introduction by Raphael Warnock. 

I have been slowly working through the audiobook of A Gift of Love for a couple of months. I tend to listen to a sermon about once a week as I am on a walk. I enjoy having audiobooks that I can dip into occasionally when I do not feel like anything else. Most of these sermons were compiled in 1963. And then, two more sermons were added along with a new introduction when it was re-released in the King Legacy edition. I have not looked to see which were the new sermons added.

None of the sermons in the collection are bad, but personally, the second half was more engaging than the first half. Some of King’s sermons felt more like speeches instead of sermons. But most of them were clearly a sermon given to a church and were in the black theological tradition, not the progressive tradition. There is a difference in the discussion of sin and the role of hope that differs from the progressive and the black theological traditions. That is not to say that some do not merge those traditions well. But I think King was at his best in these sermons when he spoke clearly about the reality of sin in a Christian theological register. This was not fire and brimstone preaching but a clear acquaintance with the reality of how sin impacted the world. Sin was not abstract. Sin was real and it impacted people that King knew, himself included. This was also not just individual or personal sin; sin here was a system or a force, not just individual wrongdoing or animus.

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Summary: An exploration of the role of the Bible in American public life from the rise of the new country until just before WW1.

I have read Noll’s work widely. And have had three classes with him in undergrad and graduate school. I am familiar with his work, and I respect him greatly. So it is not lightly that I think that America’s Book I think is my favorite of his books. Part of this is that it is just masterfully done. I can’t think of many books of this size that I read as voraciously. I have always appreciated Noll’s writing, but this book felt more incisive, important, and better written. But as I was thinking about it as I was finishing the book, I realized that part of it was the framing of the story concerning race. Noll is not new to examining how race has impacted American religious history. He has written two books that were particularly about the role of race, God and Race and American Politics and The Civil War as Theological Crisis, but with In the Beginning Was The Word and now in America’s Book, the history of American Christianity is much more intentionally the multicultural and multi-religious history of the US. The main focus of America’s book is looking at the different ways over time that the Bible (primarily the KJV for most of this time) was used by different communities within the United States. So minority communities (whether it is minority religious communities or minority racial communities) are central to telling the story of the differences in how the Bible was used.

America’s Book is the second in a planned trilogy. In the Beginning Was the Word looked at the public use of the Bible in North America before the American Revolution. Diversity of use was important to that story, but part of the thesis of this book is that after the revolution, there was an attempt to come together as a Bible culture. The American Bible Society (ABS) was founded early in the 19th century and became the dominant publisher, not just of Bibles, but of all books and pamphlets. (America’s Book makes me want to read John Fea’s history of the American Bible Society) There was a somewhat successful (depending on the region) push to get a bible in every home in the United States. The ABS was committed to publishing the KJV without notes or commentary, which prioritized the KJV (against the Catholic Douay Rheims and other translations) and was an attempt to avoid sectarian debate.

Noll sets up the main initial debate over the use of the Bible not between Catholics and Protestants (Catholics were a tiny minority initially) but between the “Custodial Protestants and the Sectarian Protestants”. In Noll’s conception, Custodial Protestants are those that “took for granted the comprehensive intermingling of ecclesiastical, governmental and social interests–as well as their own leading position as intellectual and moral preceptors.”(p54). There was a tension between the assumptions of European Christendom translated to the United States, where some sense of religious liberty existed. As sectarian Protestants became numerically and culturally stronger, especially after the second great awakening, the common understanding of the church’s role within the community fell apart, as did the bible’s role. Noll is not evaluating the rightness of sectarian versus custodial Protestantism. Noll subtly points out the difference between those custodial Protestants that took responsibility for the community and those that understood their role to be, in some sense, a divine right to rule based on chosenness.

That chosenness (my term) was part of the problem that arose as the discussion over slavery became more prominent. Slavery was the largest but not the only cause of the fracturing of how the Bible was used. As he points out in The Civil War as Theological Crisis, the Civil War broke more than just the legal entity of the United States, it was a theological fight as well. The other main fractures around the use of the Bible were its use in public schools and how Americans understood their self-conception. Early Americans saw themselves broadly as Christian and centered around a Protestant identity, which used the KJV as a rhetorical, literary, and cultural touchstone, but there was always more diversity than what that identity could hold. Noll has three successive chapters in the middle, all titled “Whose Bible?” that look at how Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Native Americans, Women, and other naysayers were not content with the status quo identity as a Protestant KJV-only social identity.

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