Book Reviews

This book is a lot of things. It’s a mini autobiography of the author and her transformation from liberal feminist and queer theorist to evangelical Christian; it’s a theological treatise on sin, identity, mortification, sanctification and the gospel of grace; it’s a discussion of sexual orientation and its Freudian roots as a 19th century category error; it’s about biblical hospitality and how to engage your neighbors and include them in your daily rhythms of life.

Butterfield writes from her 16 years of experience living faithfully as a Christian, and as one who admittedly learned from her queer community most of what she knows of living in openness and hospitality today. She is in a unique position, having lived on both “sides” of the tracks and fully embraced (at different times) both communities. She has the intellectual chops to articulate the biblical truth about human sexuality and brokenness, but her explication is comfortably paired with the gentleness, compassion and relational authority earned by her previous community experience.

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Summary: The central message of the gospel is grace. If the world around us understands the central message of the church to be judgement, then we have messed up the message that Christ came to give.

There are four parts to this book and even in the introduction Yancey says that this is essentially four different books. I just wish he had tried to do less.

The first part is all about the vanishing of grace from the message of the church. This part is five stars and I would like virtually all Christians to read it. He calls on Christians to not only recover grace as the central message of Christ and the church, but also to remember that the method of the message has to be in love. I really don’t think that basic message can be emphasized too much in Christianity because the natural temptation of Christians is to change the message of the gospel to one that is about earning our salvation through moralism or tradition. After all, a gospel of moralism or tradition is easy for Christians who tend to be already familiar with tradition and fairly good at presenting a moral facade to the world around them. But that changing of the gospel away from grace fundamentally changes the message of the gospel.

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Summary: Moving our psychological revulsion (based around food) to morality, ethics and people, fundamentally distorts our Christianity.

I appreciate Richard Beck’s outsider perspective on theology. Beck is a psychologist who writes theology. While he is not untrained in theology, that training is not formal, and it is not his primary academic area.

Beck approaches practical areas of theology in ways that many academic theologians do not. Previously, I read The Slavery of Death, which is probably the best book I have read about the power of sin and the practical understanding of how sin controls us.

In Unclean, Beck takes his understanding of psychology to help us as Christians understand how our faith becomes distorted when we allow the concept of revulsion (a natural feeling around unclean food) and apply it to people and/or ethics.

This book is full of insights into how we unconsciously avoid doing the work that we (as the church) are called to, by avoiding the messy people that are around us. What this book is not, is a simple prescription on how to change our own perception of those around us. Beck says that this is too personal of a problem for him to proscribe simple steps.

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