Bookwi.se

Summary: A helpful, constructive theology of the Holy Spirit written from an Evangelical perspective. 

I first ran across Flame of Love when Christian Century asked several theologians and biblical scholars for their lists of the Essential books of Theology of the last 25 years (in 2010). I compiled an Amazon wishlist of the books I wanted (and accidentally made it public), and a friend bought me a couple. I started with Flame of Love because Clark Pinnock wrote one of the preaching textbooks I read in seminary, and I remembered it as the best book I had read for that class.

I have been meaning to re-read Flame of Love nearly since I first read it, but it has taken me almost 13 years to get around to it. First, I was waiting until I could pick it up on kindle. And then, once I picked it up on Kindle, it sat on my bookshelf until I saw that a new edition was coming out. But again, the audiobook and some driving led me to pick it up.

Rereading that old review, I am struck by the fact that I compared Flame of Love to Francis Chan’s Forgotten God, a book I had completely forgotten. I have done a lot of reading since 2010, and I am aware of new connections in this second read. I was fairly new to atonement theories, and Pinnock and NT Wright were my limited introductions. Richard Beck and many others have expanded my understanding of the atonement, but I recommend The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge. She is a pastor, not an academic theologian (and I have read most but not all of the book), but as long as it is (and it is super long), it is very readable.

I find Flame of Love helpful because Pinnock highlights how the Holy Spirit is present in ways that Evangelicals tend to miss. There are seven chapters. The Spirit and Trinity, the Spirit in Creation, the Spirit and Christology, the Spirit and Church, the Spirit and Union, the Spirit and Universality, and the Spirit and Truth. Each chapter examines where the Spirt, who Pinnock sometimes talks about as “The Hidden God” instead of Chan’s “Forgotten God,” plays a prominent role.

Amos Yong’s commentary on the book of Acts is framed as the church, through the power of the Holy Spirit, doing the work that Christ had done in the book of Luke. And that framing, I think, makes a lot of sense of the type of work Pinnock suggests is common to the Spirit. It is not that the church does the work on its own in Acts. The church is being acted on by the Spirit and becomes the public face of God, but only because of the empowerment of the Spirit.

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Summary: Georgie is now out of morning sickness and decides to go to Paris to visit her best friend Belinda while Darcy is there “on business.” Trouble ensues. 

As I said in my post about Thrones, Dominations, I picked up Peril in Paris on audiobook as I was finishing reading Thrones, Dominations on kindle. I have long thought that Rhys Bowen was drawing some inspiration from Dorothy Sayers, and these two books, more than any except the first books in the series, contributed to that suspicion.

I really like the Her Royal Spyness series as fluffy fun. I often read them when I need a change of pace and some humor. I do get tired of some of the lack of confidence that Georgie has in herself. But generally, I like the series. I wouldn’t still be reading the 16th book if I didn’t.

It took forever for Georgie and Darcy to finally get married. But now that they are, there are still some adjustments that need to take place. Darcy has a job that no one will quite say, but it is a spy/fixer role for the British Foreign Office. Going off for long periods was not a big deal when he was single. Now that he is married, it is a bigger deal. He likes his work, but it is not particularly stable, it doesn’t pay well, and it is dangerous. And Georgie is also increasingly aware, especially of the danger. But she knows he loves the work, and she wants him to do it, but she doesn’t particularly want to think about the danger.

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Summary: Picking up after the honeymoon, Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane learn to live together as a married couple while solving a mystery.

Dorothy Sayers published the last full novel of her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series in 1937, Busman’s Holiday. Roughly 60 years later, an early draft of this novel was found in a lawyer’s safe, and Jill Paton Walsh was commissioned to finish the novel. Three additional novels entirely by Walsh continue to tell the story of the now-married couple, and I look forward to reading those eventually.

One of my complaints about Busman’s Holiday was that it was too much about Peter and not enough about Harriet. Thrones, Dominations balances the characters better without placing modern sensibilities on a couple from the mid-1930s. Harriet is trying to figure out how to be “Lady Peter”, as she is referred to throughout the novel. She wants to continue to write, and Peter really wants her to continue to write, but she has new duties as an aristocratic lady, and she has less pressure to write because she no longer needs to write to eat.

Peter has to learn to have someone in the house, and I think Walsh gets at his weaknesses (more than just his shell shock) better than Sayers. While the playboy was a bit of an act, there was a reality to his lack of attention to those around him. He has servants, especially Bunter, to care for everything he did not want to bother with. Harriet isn’t a servant nor a girlfriend to pine after. She is a real-life woman in his bed who expects to be fully inside his life and not just peering at the same facade everyone else sees.

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Summary: The history of the Black Power movement is the lesser-known story of the end of the mid-20th-century civil rights movement. 

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour is the third book I have read by Peniel Joseph, but it was Joseph’s first book, published in 2006. And as you would expect from an academic historian, his books tend to concentrate on overlapping characters and eras. He is a historian of the mid-20th century civil rights era, concentrating on the Black Power movement. I recommend his biography of Stokley Carmichael and the joint biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

I purchased the kindle book Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour about four years ago but did not get around to reading it until I picked up the audiobook for free as part of the Audible member Plus catalog. The audiobook was not well edited. The narration was fine, but it felt like the editing was not complete. There were many places with long pauses where it appears that the narrator was intentionally putting in a pause for editing purposes that the editor did not remove. And one where the narrator took seven or eight attempts at a name before saying it correctly and naturally in context, and obviously, the editing should have removed that. There were other places where the audio had short repetitions.

Those editing errors (except for the pauses) were all in the book’s first half. So I wonder if the audiobook editing influenced my complaints about the disjointedness of the book’s first part. And that may be the case. But the book felt like it took a while to really come together. The earlier portions of the book were more context of the development of the Black Power movement, which was also the part of the story I was most familiar with. So again, I may have been influenced by being more interested in the later sections of the book, where I was mostly hearing history that I was less familiar with.

I had three main takeaways from the book. First, I think the development of the Black Power movement was significantly influenced by white backlash to the civil rights movement. Stokley Carmichael’s use of Black Power during the 1966 march in Mississippi in response to the James Meredith shooting was not the term’s first use. (Richard Wright had a book in 1954 titled Black Power, and others used the phrase before Carmichael, but it was Carmichael’s use that popularized it.) By 1966, Brown v Board of Ed had been decided 12 years earlier, and much of the country was still segregated. The 1964 Civil Rights act (making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in restaurants or hotels, or other public settings) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act had both passed, but the march in Mississippi proved that the federal government was still reluctant to enforce the law. MLK Jr’s assassination less than two years later gave further power to the frustrations of how civil rights were increasingly being thwarted through less overt means.

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Summary: Based on journal entries, Richard Foster explores the concept of humility in the Christian life.

Yesterday I recommended Learning Humility to someone that I meet with for spiritual direction. He was familiar with Richard Foster and his other books, but the first comment to my talking about Learning Humility as a new book was that he didn’t know that Richard Foster was still alive. He is still alive, and he and his wife live independently in rural Colorado. But Richard Foster is in his early 80s and has not published a new book in over a decade.

I have read most of Richard Foster’s books, and Learning Humility is quite different. Generally, the other books are exploring spiritual formation concepts and are in a teaching mode. Learning Humility was very much an edited journal. Many sections ended with a variation of “I will have to think about that for a while.”

I listened to this as an audiobook, and while I think that Foster narrated it well and that his voice really helped bring out the emotion and thought of the book, this is probably a book that either needs to be read a few times or it would be better to be read in print. Again, that isn’t because the narration is bad (a different narrator would be worse) but because the prose is written in a way that invites the reader to sit with his words and go back and reread. Audiobooks just keep going. That is one reason I like them for some types of books. But other books, books that are more poetic in style or that are meant to be meditated on, need print.

Richard Foster discovered, around 20 years ago, that his paternal grandmother, who died before he was born, was Ojibwa. Since that time, he has been exploring Native American history and thought. To continue that exploration, he frames his journal using the Lakota calendar. This gives him 13 moons to explore the Lakota values corresponding to the calendar.

I think Foster handles this well. He is not claiming to be a member of a Native American tribe or that he has special insight into Native American culture. He is describing what he is learning and cites where he is learning it from. There is a fine line between positively honoring a culture that is not your own and humbly using the cross-cultural differences to inform your own culture and negatively appropriating another culture for your own purposes. I think he mostly stays on the right side of that line. Cross-cultural exploration is one of the best methods to help understand our culture. The way we understand the water we are swimming in is to grapple with other cultures and their similarities and differences.

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Summary: A memoir of how Tamice Spencer Helms came to faith in Jesus, but then how she had to disentangle white culture and Jesus. 

On the front end of this, I want to say that I have all kinds of tangential connections to Tamice Spencer-Helms, but I have never met her, and I am not sure that I have previously read anything by her. Faith Unleavened is the first book by the new KFT Press, which grew out of the Emotionally Healthy Activist project by Jonathan Walton at Intervarsity. An acquaintance also used to work with Tamice, so I was aware of the work of Sub:culture, which Tamice founded, and I started following her on Twitter because of her connection with my acquaintance. But I do not know Tamice, and while I am aware of or was connected to many of the organizations and events mentioned in the book, again, there are no direct connections. I say this partially because of the fact that reviews and endorsements have been a topic of discussion lately, and I want to disclose my relationship at the front.

I am a big fan of memoirs because while one person’s story is never exactly the same as another person’s story, one of the advantages of our current world is that we can learn from people’s stories and try not to make the exact same mistakes. We will make new mistakes, but when it is possible to learn from others, we should. I have been interested in the role of trauma, and disillusionment plays in spiritual formation because I am a spiritual director and need to grapple with my own disillusionment about Christianity.

I started reading Faith Unleavened immediately after finishing All My Knotted Up Life by Beth Moore. Both have trauma and disillusionment and working out who Jesus is for them over time. But the connections matter, as well as the differences. Tamice grew up in the Black church within a healthy family. Beth grew up in a White SBC church within a dysfunctional and abusive household. Tamice was convinced by white teenage friends that her faith and family were inadequate and that she had to reject the Black church and, in some sense, her family to find a deeper faith. In contrast, Beth found a church community that supported her and helped her find a way out of her abuse. In both cases, however, there was a limit, and they needed to discover a new faith expression because of the limitations of churches that were unwilling to allow them to be whole Christians in the ways that they felt called.

I wish either of these stories were new to me, but they are not. Abuse and cultish, authoritarian, culturally inappropriate expressions of faith are common. The ongoing discussion about the social realities of sin makes no sense to readers of either of these memoirs. Sin is rarely only harmful to an individual. And sin frequently impacts people even if there were good intentions.

Tamice, as a teen, went to a Hell House gospel presentation where she was confronted with images of hell and sin and manipulated into praying for salvation. The (white) youth pastor literally was dressed up as Jesus to save her at the end of the “play.” And for well over a decade after that night as a teen, she grappled with how white culture was confused with Christianity. She was all in following the White Jesus that she was told was necessary for her to be saved. In a podcast interview with KFT Press she summarized that the Hell House used fear to manipulate her. And then, once she was saved, fear became a driving force in manipulating her to do the next thing: drop out of college to work in a prayer ministry, vote in a particular way, live a particular lifestyle, etc.

I am paraphrasing here, but in the podcast, she said, “I was made to see that Jesus was a white man and that I was a Black woman. I could not be a white man, so there was no way to come to Jesus because I could not live up to the requirements.” This echoes the point of Willie James Jennings’ book After Whiteness on theological education. If we theologically shape people to be white men, then we are distorting people into a shape that God did not create them to be. (This, again, is part of the reality of the problems of that article at The Gospel Coalition this week, where the gospel becomes distorted by creating hierarchies where some people are more like Christ than others.) When we create requirements for people first to change before they can come to Christ, we are fundamentally distorting the message of Christianity, which is that all may come to Christ.

I do not want to make this post more about other things and not about Faith Unleavened, but Faith Unleavened was clarifying for me because it so clearly lays out the reality of why it matters that we explore the cultural constraints of our faith. It is a requirement that Christians, especially Christian leaders, expose themselves to cross-cultural Christianity so that they can see at least some of the ways that our cultural expressions of Christianity distort Christianity and how that directly harms them. In the case of Tamice, part of white Jesus was also gender hierarchy, which directly impacted her because she thought that submitting to her husband included submitting to his abuse. It directly impacted her when she turned to alcohol and drugs to dull pain because she could not contort herself to become a white man.

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Summary: A touching, funny, and poignant memoir.

Like many, I have known of Beth Moore for a long time. She was a women’s bible teacher. She is about 15 years older than I am, so she started leading aerobics classes when I was a pre-teen and moved to be a Christian motivational speaker (her description) by the time I was a teen. Her first bible study was published in 1994 (when I was in college), and from the late 1990s until now, she has published a book roughly once a year.

I have read one of her books and parts of another. I appreciate her writing, but I do think that the growth of the past few years addresses some of the concerns I have had with her early work. She is more aware of structural issues and more aware of cultural issues. And frankly, I am more open to her because I have been following her on social media for nearly a decade now and understand her role and perspective more.

I had known for years that Beth Moore was a victim of sexual abuse, even if, before now, she had not told her whole story. The memoir is loosely chronological, but many early chapters focus on her childhood living in an unsafe home. Her father sexually abused her, and her mother suffered a significant breakdown. And there was emotional, if not physical, abuse within the home. Like Julie Andrews’s memoir of her early years, Beth Moore tells the story, an often poignant and tragic story, of growing up with a father as an abuser, but with only enough details to get a sense of the abuse.

This is Beth Moore’s story, but she had the cooperation of her four siblings (one of whom passed away only days ago). Still, both her parents and grandmother, who lived with the family from the start of her parent’s marriage until Beth Moore was in the middle years of high school, have passed away. Later chapters grapple with her parent’s marriage, the emotions around their deaths, and Beth Moore’s internal grappling with forgiveness, accountability, and some sense of understanding about human limitations. One of the book’s themes is that she used to see the world as less nuanced than it is. People are neither wholly good nor wholly evil. There is good and bad within all of us. That does not mean that she condones her father’s sin, but it does mean that she grew to understand that there was more to her father than just his sin against her and against others.

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Summary: Time Traveling “historians” are sent back to block a couple falling in love because it will distort all of history. 

This is the second of Connie Willis’ books that I have read. The first in this series, Doomsday Book, is also centered on time travel, but it is a very different book. Doomsday Book is about going to a medieval community near Oxford, and it deals with the programs of a global pandemic (the Black Death) and the problems of observing evil that you cannot change.

In that first book, time travel was relatively new, and the thinking was that it was impossible to change history. However, history may have changed in the second book, and they are trying to figure out how to put it back again. And that involved going to Victorian England, playing matchmaker, and blocking a romance.

Connie Willis has a lot of humor in her writing. It is a good change of pace. But I think, like Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog is a bit long. I think the various threads and the false turns she brings the reader on as a means to get to the end are fun. But it could be cut a bit.

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Summary: An exploration of the ways that slavery as practices in the Caribbean and North America was “Christian.”

The rough thesis is that racial hierarchy developed not through an inherently racialized system but through a belief in Christian (and later Protestant) supremacy where Christianity was viewed as a type of ethnic identity, and only later was that Protestant (ethnic) identity slowly shifted over to white racial identity. Chapter four developed this idea most clearly:

“Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Protestant slave owners gradually replaced the term “Christian” with the word “white” in their law books and in their vernacular speech. Scholars have long recognized that whiteness emerged from the protoethnic term “Christian.” Yet the intimate relationship between slave conversion and whiteness has not been fully appreciated. By pairing baptismal records with legal documents, it becomes clear that the development of “whiteness” on Barbados was a direct response to the small but growing population of free black Christians.” (p74)

In the 17th Century, the British began to colonize what became the United States and the Caribbean. The split of the Church of England from the broader Catholic church started in the 16th century. Still, it was not until the early 17th century that the Church of England was firmly established as a religious/cultural identity. And even then, in the mid-17th Century, the English Civil War shifted that identity. This Protestant identity developed concurrently with the rise of colonization, the development of capitalistic enterprises, and increased interaction with different cultures and geography. The weakness of the Church of England in the colonies (the churches were culturally important, but often there was a lack of clergy and no real supervision from the ecclesiastical structure) meant that the direction of church policy was more directed by concerns of lay people than theological or missiological concerns. Similar to the arguments of Joel McDermot’s The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, Gerbner illustrates how the development of slavery can be traced legally through changes in law, but also points out how Christian theology was explicitly or implicitly used to create a justification for that law because of economic concerns.

One of the helpful aspects of Christian Slavery is that she looks primarily at the English-speaking Caribbean and then compares that with the British colonies in what became the United States and the Catholic colonies in the Caribbean. This methodology uses other English-speaking and non-Protestant non-English speaking communities to explore similarities and differences in how those areas approached the relationship between Christianity and slavery. There was significant communication between these groups, and within the English-speaking colonies, you can see legal language moving from community to community as they all attempted to address similar issues.

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