Presbytery of Genesee Valley

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Representing 69 Presbyterian (USA) churches in Rochester, NY and the surrounding five-county area

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Resource Center
Equipping You for Ministry!

Book Reviews

• Simply in Season by Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-West
• The Christian and the Pharisee by R. T. Kendall and David Rosen
• Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton
• Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline by Lauren F Winner
• A Multitude of Blessings by Cynthia M. Campbell
• Simply Christian by N. T. Wright
• Christianity for the Rest of Us by Diana Butler Bass
• Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor
• The Worship Sourcebook

Simply in Season

Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-West, Scottdale PA and Waterloo ON, Herald Press. 353 pp.

Reviewer: Sharon Hann

“Today, the average food item travels more than a thousand miles before it lands on our tables. We have become distant from our food, and not just in terms of geography. Who grows our food? What are their lives like? How is the soil tilled, cultivated, and prepared for the next year? How are the animals treated in life and in death? What are the growing conditions of the fruits, vegetables, and grains we eat? How does their production affect the land and the people who raise them? Does any of this really matter if we have plenty of food on our table?” (pages 6-7)

Americans are used to being able to buy almost any fruit or vegetable they want at any time of the year. Most of us probably don’t pay a lot of attention to where the produce originated unless there has been a scare about harmful bacteria and a subsequent recall of a particular item. Even if it’s expensive, if we can afford to buy it and we want it, we buy it. In the interest of frugality, we sometimes buy the cheaper product rather than the locally grown one, even if getting the cheaper one to us contributes to environmental costs.

“Simply in Season is a community cookbook about good food: foods that are fresh, nutritious, tasty and in rhythm with the seasons… Simply in Season is also a cookbook about the complex web of factors that brings food to our plates” (page 6).

Simply in Season attempts to raise our consciousness about the place of food in our lives and the impact of the choices we make about what we eat. It offers a variety of recipes for soups, salads, sides, main dishes and desserts along with suggested menus. The recipes are organized by seasons—Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and All Seasons. Recipes in each section use produce which is in season at that time of year.

There are some very good reference materials. A fruit and vegetable guide lists information on over 50 fruits and vegetables, including their seasons, descriptions, how to select them, how to store and handle them, preparation, and serving suggestions. There’s a picture of each one, too, which may not be very important if it’s corn; but if it’s celeriac or tomatillos, it would help you to actually buy it without looking foolish at the grocery store or at the farmers’ market.

There are also helpful sections on food preparation and cooking definitions, food preservation techniques, alternative proteins, and whole grains and flours.

Sprinkled throughout the recipe sections are stories and reflections from contributors that help us consider the place of food in our lives:

As I set a bowl of fresh raspberries in front of my guest, I remarked, “I feel so rich with all this wonderful fruit fresh from my garden.” My guest from Colombia gently reminded me, “Anyone who has enough food is rich”—MBL (page 157).

Looking at glistening piles of fruits and vegetables in supermarket produce departments, it’s easy to forget that most were picked and packed by human hands… In the best cases farmworkers in North America are treated humanely, sometimes working side by side with growers. In the worst cases workers in labor camps are kept in perpetual debt and virtual slavery. Most are somewhere in between, receiving no sick leave, vacation or pension, lacking adequate health care and vulnerable to mistreatment—CHW (page 302).

I tried three recipes. The White Chili (All Seasons, page 302) was very tasty, although I would have added a little more spice. I chose that recipe because I had some leftover turkey from Thanksgiving and it seemed to be a good use for it. I followed the suggestion in the book to serve it with corn muffins and a tossed salad, and my husband and I enjoyed a hearty meal.

I used Swiss cheese instead of the cheddar or Colby called for in the Rösti recipe (Winter, page 260). My version tasted very good with the Swiss cheese. You could really use any type of cheese you like or that you happen to have in the refrigerator. The only real problem I had following the recipe was when I got my thumb involved in grating the potato. Hint—don’t look away from the grater while you’re grating!

My natural frugality led me to the third recipe. My husband’s threat to throw away the little chunks of bread I had been saving in the freezer led me to try the Herbed Croutons recipe (All Seasons, page 328). They were very good, there are no preservatives in them, and I saved a bunch of money over store-bought croutons. If you won’t use them up quickly, I suggest keeping them in your freezer to keep them fresh.

The writers encourage readers to use the recipes as guides and to improvise, so if you enjoy being creative with food, go ahead. If you like to just follow the instructions, do that. Either way you will enjoy trying some new things.

One suggestion I would make is the addition of nutrition information to recipes. This would be very helpful for those who need to count carbohydrates, sodium content and calories.

The Invitations to Action at the end of each section offer practical suggestions about choosing and growing food as well as ideas for global and local community building and social action. The suggestions range from “Know what you are eating—read labels” (page 174) to “Befriend migrant workers. Promote fair wages and fair immigration laws” (page 334).

The Key Ingredient Index at the end is also very helpful. Under broccoli, for instance, it lists all the recipes which use broccoli as an ingredient. This is a great tool for those times when you want to use up something which you have in abundance, like the bushel of zucchini your neighbor gave you from the bumper crop in her garden.

I was drawn to Simply in Season because it reminded me of the More-with-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre, which was first published in 1976. I bought the More-with-Less Cookbook because it offered recipes for nutritious and inexpensive meals; at the time I needed “inexpensive.” My copy of the More-with-Less Cookbook now is dog-eared and stained from much use. I recommend it also as a companion to Simply in Season.

“Simply in Season does not have all the answers. It does offer a starting point encouraging us to feed both body and spirit with nutritious food and challenging ideas about the world around us” (page 7).

Making food choices according to what is in season is not an easy discipline to follow. It raises a lot of questions for me. I enjoy tossed salads. Do I forgo them in the winter? I like orange juice. Oranges don’t grow in New York State where I live. Do I decide not to drink orange juice? Do I decide to buy orange juice only if it comes from Florida? or California? But not from the Middle East?

I liked the book so much I bought my own copy. I love the local farmers’ market which I shop at from July through October, so I can probably do pretty well on a seasonal eating plan during those months. I’m not sure I’m going to be quickly converted to eating only seasonal foods, but this book is challenging me to take a serious look at the place of food in my life.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of eating locally grown seasonal foods, if you’re interested in helping your local farmers, or if you want to do something to help the environment, Simply in Season offers some great ideas on how to begin the journey.

The Christian and the Pharisee

R. T. Kendall and David Rosen, New York, Faith Words. 199 pp.

Reviewer: Rev. Bob Hann

There is a certain sort of Jewish-Christian dialogue which can be engaged in by liberal adherents of both religions. Having previously decided, perhaps on philosophical or theological grounds, that the essence of Christianity and Judaism is about morality or social reform, both parties agree that matters that have divided Jews and Christians are really peripheral to religion and can easily be dismissed from the conversation. The resulting arrangement seems to work like this: “I won’t say anything about Israel if you don’t say anything about Jesus. Deal?” “Deal.”

The Christian and the Pharisee represents a different and, to my mind, a more authentic approach to dialogue between Jews and Christians. Rabbi David Rosen, the Pharisee of the book’s title, and J. R. Kendall, the Christian, are both theological traditionalists within their respective religions. Rosen is an Orthodox Jew and Kendall is an evangelical Protestant. They debate about faith and scripture because these matters are not peripheral but central to each participant’s understanding of religion.

The discussions that culminated in The Christian and the Pharisee began at a Sabbath dinner in Jerusalem, when Rosen remarked to Kendall that not all Jews were like the Pharisees whom Jesus criticized, and that he himself took some pride in describing himself as a modern-day Pharisee (page xxi). This conversation led to an exchange of fourteen letters between the minister and the rabbi, each seeking to explain his perspective to the other. The letters seem to have been published as they were originally written, and there is only an occasional self-conscious hint that a larger eventual readership might be in the authors’ minds.

As might be expected, the most interesting discussion between the two writers concerns the idea of the Messiah. Rosen begins by quoting a remark by the Orthodox rabbi David Flusser that when the Messiah comes, he and his Christian friends will ask him, “Excuse me, sir, have you been here before?” (page 45). But then Rosen continues in a more serious vein, “That cute comment avoids the full issue. The real issue is not just whether Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, but what that function means!”

For Kendall the Christian, the Messiah is the divine Son of God, the savior of all who believe (pages 60-61). It is difficult for Kendall to understand that identifying and believing in the Messiah is not a particularly important matter for most Jews at all (pages 44-45).

Rosen notes that there is nothing heretical for a Jew to believe that a particular individual is the Messiah, whether Jesus in the first century, Simon bar Cochba in the second century, or, for that matter, a Hasidic rabbi who died just a few years ago (page 107). For most Jews, the test of a candidate for messiahship is whether that individual accomplished what the Messiah was expected to do. For Jews, Jesus could not have been the Messiah because he did not perform the task of the Messiah: he did not free the Jews from foreign domination and establish an era of universal peace. Thus, writes Rosen, his contemporaries “did not see any reason to acknowledge that any Messiah had arrived” (pages 45-46).

Lively exchanges take place between Kendall and Rosen about the meaning of Old Testament passages that Christians have traditionally understood as having been fulfilled in Christ. Doesn’t Isaiah 53 speak of a Messiah who would suffer for the sins of others (page 72, again on page 119)? No, replies Rosen, the prophet is thinking about Israel, the servant of Isaiah 49:3, in whom the Lord will be glorified (pages 83-86).

But what about Isaiah 9:6, with its language about a child who is called “Mighty God, Everlasting Father,” Kendall asks. “Is this not a promise that the coming Messiah would be God in the flesh?” (page 73) Again, Rosen points out an alternative (and historically more probable) interpretation: King Hezekiah bore these honorific titles “to recall the divine presence and promise fulfilled in his reign,” just as the king’s own name meant “God is my strength” (page 86).

The strength of this book is the frankness by which both contributors express their convictions. Rosen summarizes the greatest difference between the rabbi and the minister: “You see me as condemned because I do not share your faith, whereas I do not see you condemned because you do not share mine. I believe that you will go to heaven if you lead a just and righteous life as God commands, whereas you do not believe that that will save me” (page 82).

Perhaps the most important fact that the Christian learns from the Pharisee is that, although Kendall expresses great love for the Jewish people (page 15), the overwhelming majority of Jews would find his attempt to evangelize Jews “to be highly offensive” (pages 105-106). Kendall is surprised by Rosen’s statement, and abashedly replies, “I don’t think that I was aware of this at all” (page 114).

I once asked a candidate for ministry, “If Christ’s lordship extends over all, how can you account for the place and perhaps even the value of other religions under the lordship of Christ?” Rosen can propose a positive function for Jesus and Christianity from a Jewish perspective: it is through Christianity that God’s revelation has come to the world at large (page 130).

Kendall, by contrast, values the Old Testament as a preparation for the gospel, but has no notion of a place for post-biblical Judaism in God’s purposes. Perhaps, despite his affirmation of what he calls a “robust doctrine of election” (page 36), he has not reflected deeply enough on Paul’s struggle with that very subject in the eleventh chapter of Romans, and especially on verses 2 and 28-29: “God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew… as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” It is ironic that it is the rabbi and not the Christian minister who first brings that chapter into their conversation (page 23).

Mainstream Presbyterian readers may wish that the Christian point of view had been represented by someone of a different theological perspective. Kendall professes a special respect for John Calvin (page 12), but his theological roots are in the Church of the Nazarene and his leanings seem more Pentecostal than Reformed (page 13).

There are things to be learned, and even a few surprises, in The Christian and the Pharisee. I especially appreciated the shared commitment of both Kendall and Rosen to a peace in the Middle East in which the rights and aspirations of Palestinians are respected (page 148). Rosen acknowledges Kendall’s commitment to justice and peace in the Middle East, contrasting the latter’s position with that of Christians who support a militantly “pro-Israel” position, “condemning us to perpetual conflict… a battle to the last Israeli” (page 25).

Perhaps because it deals with matters that are often avoided in interfaith dialogue, The Christian and the Pharisee is an especially interesting introduction to the Jewish perspective on topics of interest to Christians and Jews. Presbyterian readers will appreciate many of the things that Kendall learns from his Jewish partner in the dialogue and may even learn along with him in the course of reading this book.

The Christian and the Pharisee is not, however, the best overall introduction to Judaism for Christian readers. For this purpose the very best resource remains Herman Wouk’s eminently readable classic (still in print) This is My God. If Presbyterian appetites are whetted by reading The Christian and the Pharisee, then This is My God is the book they should pick up next.

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers

Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, New York, Oxford University Press. 346 pp.

Reviewer: Rev. Bob Hann

What do teenagers today—perhaps even the teens in our churches—really believe? Soul Searching is an important book for anyone engaged in ministry to youth. This book is the product of an extensive study of teenagers’ attitudes toward religion and spirituality, conducted by the National Study of Youth and Religion from 2001 to 2005. Christian Smith, the principal investigator of the project, is professor and chair of sociology at the University of North Carolina. Melinda Lundquist Denton is the study’s project manager and a Ph.D. candidate at UNC with a research interest in the sociology of family and religion.

This study included an initial randomly-arranged series of telephone interviews of 3,290 adolescents and their parents. Of those who were initially interviewed 267 were selected for face-to-face interviews. The teenagers who were interviewed represented every region of the country and included Protestants of almost every variety, Catholics, Jews, and adherents of other religions including Mormon, Buddhist, Muslim, Jehovah’s Witness, Native American, and Wiccan (pages 292-303). It may well be, as the authors claim, that Soul Searching represents the largest study ever done of teenagers and their attitudes toward religion (page 7).

As the authors describe their project and its goals, their work is an exercise in sociology and not in theology or the practice of youth ministry. This, they write, is the first meaning of the book’s title: Soul Searching is a search conducted within the limits and by the methods of modern sociology. Their title has a second level of meaning as well. The researchers found that many contemporary teenagers are engaged in soul searching, in trying to sort through the meaning of their faith identities, beliefs and practices. But, as we shall see, there are theological and practical implications of their study for those who work with teenagers, and, as a third implication of their title, they hope that their findings will set readers to their own soul searching about the religious and spiritual lives of teenagers today (page 259).

Perhaps the “must-read” section of Soul Searching is the long chapter tellingly entitled “God, Religion, Whatever” (pages 118-171), which summarizes the results of face-to-face interviews with 267 teenagers about a variety of topics concerning religion and spirituality (page 118).

Among the important findings of this chapter is that, although those interviewed expressed a generally positive view of religion, religious faith did not make a great difference in teenagers’ everyday lives: Religion, Smith and Denton write, operates “as a taken-for-granted aspect of life, mostly situated in the background of everyday living, which becomes salient only under very specific conditions” (page 130). The authors summarize the responses they received: religion is “just how I was raised” (page 120), it’s “not worth fighting about” (page 122), and “it’s good for lots of people” (page 124). “There is no right answer,” and so “everyone decides for themselves” (pages 143-145).

The most common beliefs found among American teenagers were:

1. “A God exists who created and orders the world”;
2. God wants people to be good to each other (this, teenagers believe, is taught by most world religions);
3. The central goal in life “is to be happy and to feel good about oneself”;
4. “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to solve a problem”; and
5. “Good people go to heaven when they die” (pages 162-163).

The authors call this set of beliefs Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (page 162; hereafter, for brevity, MTD). It is moralistic because it teaches that “central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person” (page 163). It is therapeutic because it offers happiness to its adherents. Finally, the religion of contemporary teenagers is deistic because it “is about belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly involved in one’s affairs… This God is not demanding. He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good” (pages 164-165).

Like the deism of the eighteenth century and unlike alternatives to classical Christianity like Mormonism, MTD does not present itself as a distinct religious movement. There is no First Church of Deism down the street, competing with your church for the loyalty of young people. “Believers in each larger tradition practice their own forms of this otherwise common parasitic religion,” identifying themselves as members of their home churches while at the same time sharing the “core beliefs of their de facto common Moralistic Therapeutic Deist faith” (page 166).

“Parasitic religion,” the authors wrote in a sentence quoted above. Is MTD compatible with Christianity? The authors refrain from making theological judgments, but note that MTD departs from classical Christianity in several important ways: “This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one’s prayers… of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, etcetera” (pages 163-164). “The language, and therefore experience, of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, Eucharist, and heaven and hell appear… to be supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward (page 171).

If, as our authors are convinced is the case, MTD has become what teenagers in our churches identify as Christianity, we have some hard work to do. How do we evangelize the baptized and shape them into disciples? The authors offer several recommendations in a chapter that they call a “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” (pages 265-271). Among their suggestions are the following:

Those who are concerned about youth and their faith should become more intentional about teaching teenagers the contents of their faith. “Parents and faith communities should not be shy about teaching teens.” Teenagers, they note, are taught by adults in all sorts of contexts: “school, sports, music, and beyond… We believe that most teens are teachable, even if they themselves do not really know that or let on that they are interested.” (page 267).

Relatedly, churches need to work much harder on helping teens articulate the meaning of the Christian faith as a distinct worldview. The authors note that teenagers had been taught, and could articulate information about topics such as drinking, drugs, sexually transmitted diseases, and safe sex (page 268). But “very few of the descriptions of personal belief offered by the teenagers, especially the Christian teenagers, come close to representing marginally coherent accounts of the basic, important religious beliefs of their own faith traditions… Faith is usually just there around somewhere, and most teens do believe something religious or other. But religion doesn’t seem consequential enough to most teenagers to pay close attention to and get it right” (page 137).

Smith and Denton cite the philosopher Charles Taylor who argues that an inability to clearly articulate one’s faith “undermines the possibilities of reality.” If I cannot understand the meaning of my religion’s claims, I cannot even consider the possibility that these claims might be true. “Religious faith, practice, and commitment can be no more than vaguely real when people cannot talk much about them. Articulacy fosters reality” (pages 268-269).

A further recommendation is that teenagers should be encouraged to participate in the practices that make for spiritual formation. It is clear, the authors write, “that very basic practices such as scripture reading, prayer, and intentional acts of service and mercy mark and structure the lives of teens committed to faith.” Teens “should be taught to practice skills, habits, and virtues in the direction of excellence, analogous to musicians and athletes practicing their skills… We suspect that youth educators and ministers will not get far with youth, in other words, unless regular and intentional religious practices become an important part of their larger faith formation” (page 269-270).

The authors are doing sociology and not theology, but there are theological implications throughout Soul Searching. Latent in the writers’ description of MTD is an observation that they make explicit only later in a separate discussion of why many parents want their children to be religious. Parents know that religion typically leads to good outcomes for youth, building character, accomplishing things like keeping kids off drugs and using their seatbelts (page 270).

The authors call this utilitarian approach to religion, in which religion is a means to a non-religious end, “instrumentalism.” And they warn that valuing religion instrumentally, as a means to some other goal, undercuts religion itself because it “undermines larger and deeper questions of truth, tradition, discipleship, and peoplehood that matter to communities of faith” (page 270).

Now utilitarian appeals on behalf of religion have a long history, especially in American Protestantism, where people have been advised to come to church as a way of achieving any number of goals from meeting new friends to preserving their marriages (“The family that prays together stays together”). One may remember the advertisements of a Kosher hot dog firm a few years ago. “We answer to a higher authority,” the makers declared. But their ritually pure products were promoted as a way of ensuring good health and not as a means to holiness.

Smith and Denton do not make this point, but an instrumental approach to religion is also at the heart of teenagers’ attraction to MTD. What really matters to teenagers is happiness, they write, and they are quite willing to judge a religion by its effectiveness in making its followers happy. God’s job according to MTD, it will be remembered, is “to solve our problems and make people feel good” (page 165).

There turns out to be more similarity than one might have supposed between those teenagers who adopt MTD as a means of attaining happiness, and their religiously more traditional parents who want their children to go to church because it will make them better people. In both cases religion is valued as a means of attaining goals that are not in themselves religious. In both instances we are far from the declaration of the old catechism that worshiping and glorifying God is the chief end of human existence.

Instrumental appeals have greater theological respectability in the Catholic tradition than among the Reformed. Following Thomas Aquinas, who taught that grace does not abolish what we are by nature but completes it, Catholic spiritual practice understands that one may initially seek Christ for a number of reasons. Full conversion is what may occur later, when one comes to love Jesus for himself and not for any other purpose, not even for the sake of one’s salvation. Those who have drunk at the well dug by Karl Barth will be much more skeptical of seeking “church is good for you” points of contact for the gospel; the Word, for Barth, makes its own point of contact.

If the central findings in Soul Searching are correct, this book will be unsettling, even perhaps disturbing to many who are engaged in youth ministry. From a ministry perspective the authors’ recommendations seem, well, so conservative: teaching doctrine to teenagers, helping them understand and articulate a distinctively Christian worldview, inculcating old-fashioned Christian practices like scripture reading and daily prayer. Can memorizing Bible verses and reciting catechism be far behind?

If you’re in youth ministry, read Soul Searching, especially its key chapter, “God, Religion, Whatever.” Wrestle with it, perhaps even argue with its characterization of the attitudes of contemporary teenagers, but do not ignore it, for the sake of those whom you seek to mold into disciples.

Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline

Lauren F. Winner, Brewster MA, Paraclete. 161 pp.

Reviewer: Rev. Bob Hann

As Lauren Winner recounts her experience that Sunday, she had attended church, then cleaned out her car, then read a story to the children of a friend, and eventually went to the Mudhouse—a coffee shop—for a hot beverage and a half an hour with a good book. “It was not an ordinary workday, and I did feel more relaxed than I would on Monday morning. But it was not Shabbat… Shabbat is like nothing else. And Shabbat is, without question, the piece of Judaism that I miss the most” (page 3).

On one level, Mudhouse Sabbath can be read as a sequel to Winner’s earlier book, Girl Meets God, the (sometimes rambling) account of Winner’s journey to Christian faith. Winner, the daughter of a Reform Jewish father and a lapsed Southern Baptist mother, initially immerses herself in Judaism. Literally so: since to be “born Jewish” requires one to have a Jewish mother, Winner undertakes training toward conversion and is finally submerged in the waters of a mikvah, a ritual pool, as prescribed by Orthodox practice (GMG, page 51).

But Christianity continued to fascinate Winter even after her conversion to Jewish orthodoxy. She was especially attracted to “the idea that God lowered himself and became a man so that we could relate to Him better” (GMG, page 51). Her Jewish boyfriend warned her that, for a woman who had chosen to be Jewish, she was exhibiting too much interest in Christianity. “At the time,” she writes, “I thought Dov was overreacting. Now I think he could see something that I could not see. He could see Jesus slowly goading me toward Him” (GMG, page 55). In due course Winner was baptized at Clare College Chapel in Cambridge, England. Winner is presently a member of Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, and she has just been appointed an assistant professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School.

Winner intends Mudhouse Sabbath to be read, however, not as an exercise in spiritual autobiography, but as an expression of her conviction that Christians’ spiritual practices can be enriched by things which we may learn from Judaism. She writes, “Christian practices…would be enriched…thicker and more vibrant, if we took a few lessons from Judaism.” Perhaps the most important understanding that Winner has appropriated from Judaism is about the shaping and sustaining power of spiritual disciplines. “Your faith might come and go, but your practice ought not waver.” Indeed, she notes, “Judaism suggests that the repeating of a practice is the best way to ensure that a doubter’s faith will return” (page ix).

Winter discusses eleven Jewish practices: These are shabbat, the observance of Sabbath; kashrut, paying attention to what and how one eats; avelut, the practice of mourning; hachnassat orchim, offering hospitality; tefillah, prayer; guf, attention to the body; tzum, fasting; kiddur p’nai zaken, attention to the aging; hadlakat nerot, candle-lighting, kiddushin, weddings; and mezuzot, placing scripture on one’s doorposts.

Now, not all of these matters seem equally applicable to Christian practice, and there are places in Mudhouse Sabbath where Winner seems to be writing nostalgically instead of exploring matters of spiritual significance. In her chapter on wedding practices she quotes a friend’s comment, “My friend Shelby once remarked that Jewish weddings are just more fun than Christian weddings, and I have to agree” (page 121). Perhaps this chapter was written in anticipation of her own marriage ceremony (page 130). To which I respond, mazel tov! But I do not see how her remarks in this chapter assist me in my Christian journey.

But I was struck by Winner’s discussions of keeping kosher, of prayer, and especially of observing the Sabbath. Her chapter on keeping kosher begins with a brief summary of the laws governing kashrut (pages 15-18), which she follows immediately by the recognition that Jewish dietary practices are not binding on Christians. Remember Peter’s vision in Acts 10, she writes, “Christians are free to eat as many clams and oysters as they like” (page 19).

So what may we learn from the Jewish practice? Eating observantly focuses our attention on God. “Keeping kosher transforms eating from a mere nutritional necessity into an act of faithfulness. If you keep kosher, the protagonist of your meal is not you; it is God” (page 15). God “who provides for the sparrows and numbers the hairs on our head… is interested in how we speak, how we handle our money, how we carry our bodies—He is also interested in how we live with food” (pages 20-21).

Winner draws three observations from this statement: The first, citing Robert Farrar Capon’s wonderful book of theology and cookery, The Supper of the Lamb, is that we might pay attention to our food as part of God’s creation. (Quoting Capon, God “likes onions, therefore they are”: page 23). Another way of thinking faithfully about our eating concerns the environmental impact of our food choices. Winner writes, “shipping food from greenhouses around the world is America‘s second-largest expenditure of oil” (page 24). Finally, she reflects on the Sunday Eucharist and observes, “I remember why eating attentively is worth all the effort: the table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us” (page 26).

Jews pray, just as Christians do, and Winner devotes a chapter of Mudhouse Sabbath to tefillah, prayer. Jewish prayer, like traditional Christian daily prayer (see the forms for daily prayer in our Book of Common Worship), is “essentially book prayer, liturgical prayer” (page 55). There are occasions for spontaneous prayer in Judaism (think, she writes, of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof), but “the skeleton that gives all these various prayings shape is liturgical prayer—the set prayers that I read every day from my prayer book” (page 57).

Can’t ordered prayer become dull, mechanical, unspiritual? Of course (pages 59-60). But watch what happens in the absence of any pattern for our prayers: “I have sometimes set aside my prayer book… and I find, at the end of those days and weeks on end, that I have lapsed into narcissism.” Instead of praying as we are commanded, for all people, “I wind up talking to myself about my emotions du jour,” and “I never get much further than that” (page 60). Winner concludes, “Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It repoints the person praying, taking him somewhere else” (page 61).

Winner does not make this point, but, as stories from the Holocaust illustrate, Judaism teaches us how to pray not only when we do not feel like praying, but even when all that we presently see indicates that to pray is foolishness, an act of self-delusion. One holocaust story tells of the rabbis in the death camp who, in an act of biblical courage and character (think of Moses in Numbers 14), assembled a rabbinic court and declared God guilty in the events that were taking place. But then, after announcing the verdict, the same rabbis said, faithfully, “let us pray.” Winner writes, more generally, that in ordered prayer we are given “words that praise God even on the mornings when I wonder if God exists at all” (page 61).

Of all the Jewish practices that Winner writes about, I was especially interested in her discussion of the Sabbath. Her attention returns to that afternoon at the Mudhouse: “What, really, was wrong with my Mudhouse Sabbath? After all, I did spend Sunday morning in church, and I wasn’t working that afternoon, not exactly.” And then she continues by way of reflection: “A few fine hours, except that my Sunday was more an afternoon off than a Sabbath. It was an add-on to a busy week, not the fundamental unit around which I organized my life… I had violated a most basic command: to keep the Sabbath holy” (page 9).

Sabbath, Winner writes, “is like nothing else… a meditation of unbelievable beauty… And Shabbat is, without question, the piece of Judaism I miss the most” (pages 2-3). She summarizes the regulations that govern the Sabbath: “You are commanded, principally, to be joyful and restful on the Sabbath, to hold great feasts, sing happy songs, dress in your finest.” You are forbidden to do any work or to engage in any activity which, if continued carelessly, might lead to work (pages 4-5). You do not create anything on the Sabbath, because “Sabbath reprises God’s rest after He finished creating” (page 6).

The rabbis’ thirty-nine categories of activities to be avoided on the Sabbath stem from the mishnaic maxim, “make a fence around the law,” i.e., interpret the commandment so that behavior that might offend is deflected before it violates the letter of the holy law itself (Mishnah, Aboth, 1.1). So you do not carry a needle—the smallest tool the rabbis could think of—around on the Sabbath, not because to carry one would be a strenuous activity, but because you might forget what day it is and begin to sew, and that would constitute work, a violation of the day itself.

Winner believes that there are two flaws in most people’s thinking about Sabbath. The first, she notes, is “what we might call capitalism’s justification for resting for one day: it makes you more productive during the rest of the week.” While that may be true, rest for the sake of efficiency and productivity is “at odds with the Spirit of Shabbat” (page 11).

But Winner also rejects another rationale for taking Sabbath time, one that we might even justify spiritually by quoting Jesus: “the Sabbath is made for humans” (Mark 2:27). This, she says, is “the fallacy of the direct object.” We might take time for ourselves, for a day of rest, perhaps including a relaxing bubble bath. But Winner asks, “Whom is the contemporary Sabbath designed to honor? Whom does it benefit? Why the bubble-bath taker herself, of course” (page 11). By thinking of Sabbath as primarily for our own benefit, Winner argues, we miss “a true cessation from the rhythms of work and world, a time wholly set apart, and, perhaps above all, a sense that the point of Shabbat, the orientation of Shabbat, is toward God” (page 10).

“When do you take your Sabbath?” “Well, I take it when I can get it, a few minutes on this day, maybe an hour the next.” I forget which contemporary Christian writer observed that God knew that keeping Sabbath would be so hard for us to do, that he put it in the Ten Commandments, right alongside the words about not doing murder or committing adultery. Pastors note: this is probably the only commandment in the Decalogue that our congregations actively encourage us to break.

How can we reclaim Sabbath for God and for our souls? Or, to ask more generally, how do we make use of what may be learned about spirituality from Jewish practice? Winner writes, “As for me, I am starting small.” She has joined a Bible study group that meets late on Sunday afternoons as a kind of “bookend to my day that helps me live into Shabbat.” She avoids working and shopping on Sundays. She may visit some shut-ins, have lunch with friends. These are not much, she admits, “but still, the first arcs of a return to Sabbath.” And, she concedes, “sometimes you will find me at the Mudhouse” (p. 13). Seeking to be faithful but not a completed saint, Lauren Winner winds up looking a lot like the rest of us!

As a concluding observation, I wonder whether Winner’s book is best understood in terms on the one hand of learning new things from conversations between Christians and Jews, or on the other of remembering things that we too once knew but have forgotten. Simplicity and paying attention to what we consume; praying with discipline and not just when we feel like it; keeping the Sabbath holy as an occasion for a meeting with God: Reformed Christians seem once to have known about these things in ways that, under the pressures of secularism or busyness, we now have forgotten.

Winner’s book is an example of how dialogue between Christians and Jews—in Winners’ instance a mainly internal conversation—can help us recall those biblical practices that form us in faithfulness. For illustrating how this may be so, perhaps even more than for her specific thoughts about how one might accomplish these things, I am grateful to Lauren Winner.

A Multitude of Blessings

Cynthia M. Campbell, Louisville, Westminster John Knox. 118 pp.

Reviewer: Rev. Bob Hann

A Multitude of Blessings is a work of theology and ethics concerning the religious pluralism that confronts thoughtful Christians in America. Once, the author notes, the term “interfaith” referred to relations between Protestants and Catholics (“a Protestant-Catholic wedding was considered an ‘interfaith’ marriage”); now we meet Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in the workplace (pages 4 and 5). How are Christians to respond to the religious diversity that we experience around us in a way that allows us the appreciate the faiths of others while at the same time “live out our confession that Jesus is both Savior and Lord”? (page 8).

And this task, especially as the author sets herself to it, is not a simple one. Immediately she rejects three positions that, in one way or another, would have simplified the matter for her. She rejects exclusivism, the view that only those who have come to Christian faith can be saved. Noting that there are texts such as John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 that seem to support such a view, Campbell holds that exclusivism ultimately conflicts with other biblical themes and other things that we believe about God (pages 12-13).

Campbell’s reasons for rejecting exclusivism include an ethical observation that is worthy of deeper reflection than she herself devotes to it: She writes, “when Christian exclusivism has been reinforced by political and military power, the results have been devastating” (page 12). Suppose, however, the problem is not with the theologies of Christians but their close affiliation with power? Our Anabaptist friends suggest it is power and not traditional theology that must be renounced if the gospel is to be rendered visible and credible in our world, and they may be right. What Campbell wrote is suggestive, but I wish she had written more!

Perhaps surprisingly, Campbell also rejects notions of inclusivism, the doctrine that, although no one is saved apart from the work of Christ, salvation may extend to persons who never come to Christian faith. George Hunsinger has called this position “generous orthodoxy” (page 15), and it has a respectable heritage in Presbyterianism, going back at least to the 1902 General Assembly’s “Brief Statement of the Reformed Faith.” This statement stated, in part, “all who die in infancy, and all others given by the Father to the Son who are beyond the outward means of grace, are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who work when and where and how He pleases.” (It’s on pages xlii-xliii of my 1933 edition of the old green Hymnal.)

Why does Campbell reject this apparently generous notion? Her reasons are both ethical (“Is not such a view condescending to others?”) and theological (“And does such a view claim too much knowledge of God, knowledge which all Christians affirm humans will never have completely?” - page 16). And here one may demur. To say that our knowledge is incomplete does not entail that the knowledge we have is defective. A two-dimensional picture is incomplete as compared to the knowledge of the actual human being, but it is not on that ground unreliable. When I meet the actual person I will discover that she is indeed hazel eyed, light-brown haired, with a smile that curves just there. Meeting the actual person does not falsify a limited portrait but instead confirms it, and then reveals many more things besides.

The final position that Campbell rejects—correctly, in my view—is a particular sort of universalism which she calls pluralism: the notion that all religions point, in different ways, to a higher reality (“God beyond God”- page 18) that stands behind them all. And Campbell’s critique of this position is correct. Not only does the person espousing pluralism claim to know the real truth behind each religion better than its adherents themselves, the position glosses over the real differences that exist, “differences that must be taken into account if religious people are going to talk and work and live together” (page 18)

Campbell returns to her point about the differences among religions in her fourth chapter, “Everywhere That We Can Be: The Holy Spirit and Religious Diversity.” The author cites an important observation made by S. Mark Heim. The world’s religions think about things in very different ways and this is due to what Heim calls the multiplicity of religious ends” (page 76 and note): while all religions, like other broadly-encompassing worldviews, define what seems to be problematic in the human condition, the problem is not identified by each religion in the same way.

Heim and Campbell, following him, are correct: Only Christianity offers its adherents a Savior because only Christianity understands the human condition as one of being in need of salvation. To ask who is the savior for Confucianism is like a Confucian asking whether Jesus is the one who teaches Christians how to properly revere our ancestors. Both dialogue and witness are, as we shall see, very important to Campbell (pages 93-101), but we will fail in both if we regard “Jesus,” “Muhammad”, and “the Buddha” as interchangeable figures who, in each religion, perform essentially the same tasks.

Having rejected simplistic solutions that, in Campbell’s view, add up either to “we’re right and everyone else is wrong,” or “all religions teach the same things,” Campbell sets herself a more difficult assignment: to establish a way of regarding the world’s religions as “part of God’s purpose . . . part of God’s own providential ordering of creation” (page 84). She devotes three chapters to this task.

One need not concur with every point in Campbell’s argument in order to appreciate some of the things that she says along the way. I was intrigued by her discussion of the incident at the tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Following Theodore Hiebert, she suggests that the problem at the tower was not one of pride, as the story has been traditionally understood: trying to build to God. The problem was that the people of the story stayed put in one place instead of obeying God’s command to fill the earth. The scattering of the people at Babel was not divine punishment but an action to fulfill God’s plans for the diversity of humankind (page 27). Diversity, Campbell concludes, including religious diversity, is part of God’s providential plan (page 28; see page 40).

It seems to me that Campbell’s concluding chapter is more about ethics than about theology, and that the preceding chapters should be read as an extended prolegomenon, a theological rationale for what she really wants to talk about: how Christians should behave toward others in the face of religious diversity. Perhaps only a little tongue-in-cheek, one might suggest that this is a book that ought to be read backwards.

Campbell offers six “practical consequences” of the preceding chapters of her book. These are: practicing humility with respect to truth (pages 85-89), regarding others with “respect rather than tolerance” (pages 89-91), recovering distinctively Christian practices (pages 91-93), engaging in witness and evangelism (pages 93-96), working together for the common good (pages 96-98), and participating in interfaith dialogue (98-101).

There are helpful reflections in Campbell’s counsel, and it may be good to begin with interfaith dialogue, which she described as a “duty” (page 98), since everything else that Campbell commends as ethical practices seems to flow from this.

What does it mean to seek understanding in inter-religious dialogue? When I was a beginning graduate teaching assistant in Temple University’s Department of Religion we were asked, what does objectivity mean in the study and teaching of religion? Franklin Littell, the department chair, offered this definition: Objectivity in religion does not mean that we ourselves do not hold convictions. (Temple’s Religion Department included practicing Christians, Jews, Muslims, at least one Hindu, and a Buddhist or two.) Objectivity means being able to describe the other person’s religion in such a way that the conversation partner recognizes it as a fair presentation, with nothing distorted and nothing essential left out.

This, incidentally, might not be a bad goal for present-day Presbyterians: being able to describe the convictions of others with whom we disagree in such a way that they could acknowledge our descriptions of their positions and motives as fair would go a long way toward attaining peace and unity (and perhaps even a degree of purity) in the PC(USA).

Almost everything else that Campbell commends seems to flow from this. We can regard others with respect rather than with casual or grudging tolerance (page 90) only when we understand that their convictions are as important to them as ours are to us. We can work with others for the common good without compromising our own convictions when we know that the worldviews of others contain visions of the “good” that overlap our own (page 97). We can be motivated to recover our own Christian practices by observing how similar practices enrich the lives of others (page 93): we can learn something about Sabbath keeping from observant Jews; we can learn something about discipline in our prayers from Muslims.

But what about witness and evangelism? Isn’t this, as she asks, “at odds with life in a multifaith world”? Isn’t “witness” best expressed silently, with no overt mention of Jesus, through ministries of compassion and community service? (page 94) Campbell’s reply is unexpected: “to invite others to find faith in God through Jesus Christ. . . is part of the core identity of Christianity, and . . . to abandon it would be to take something essential away from what has made Christianity what it is” (page 95).

According to Campbell, Christian witness-bearing should be conducted first of all with a full awareness of the breadth of God’s love. Those with whom we speak are already beloved: “God cannot love them any more if they become Christian.” Second, witness-bearers should acknowledge how God is already at work in the lives of those to whom we bear witness. Third, Christian witness should be positive, proclaiming communion with God instead of offering warnings of damnation (page 96). But witnessing is what Christians must do because, as Campbell notes, “we cannot do otherwise” (page 96). Bearing witness is like offering praise in worship, it’s “our grateful and joyous response to God’s goodness.” Its value is to be assessed by its faithfulness and not by its apparent effectiveness. “Telling the story is our job; redeeming or saving the world is God’s, because salvation belongs to God alone.”

I was not persuaded by everything that Campbell wrote. (I was not persuaded, for instance, by her argument that God’s valuing of persons outside the Biblical covenant implies a positive regard for the religious ideas of such people [pages 33-40]. Does God’s regard for the diversity of all humans entail divine approval of their diverse political notions? Of their notions about gender and equality?)

But it may be important to recall that Campbell’s theological claims are modest: “This book is written for Christians who are concerned to make sense of this challenge of living with religious diversity. . . . What I will do is present one way that Christians can think about this topic from the standpoint of our faith tradition” (page vii). She seeks to explore one way, a way, clearly not the only way to think about these things.

Ultimately, Campbell’s theological efforts must be seen in the service of her ethical goals: to support the practices which she commends in her concluding chapter. If, as it seems to me, some of her arguments seem forced, this may be because her interest is really in her ethical applications instead of in theology for its own sake. She wants to make Christians more humane, more honest, more cooperative, more faithful to our own traditions, and even to make us more faithful witnesses in the face of present-day religious pluralism.

If only for, or perhaps especially for her last chapter, A Multitude of Blessings deserves to be read.

Simply Christian

N. T. Wright, Simply Christian. San Francisco CA, HarperSanFrancisco. 240 pp.

Reviewer: Rev. Bob Hann

I first drove an English-built car sometime in the late 1950s. My mother had bought what the British called a Standard Ten (sold as a Triumph 10 in the United States). I remember that car as vertical, underpowered, and tinny. The last time I drove an English-built car was about ten years ago. The Rover I rented at London’s Heathrow Airport was sleek and smooth, with power windows and a sunroof. A lot had changed in English carmaking since the 1950s!

And that experience was something like my response to reading N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian. In its title and premise it echoes C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, first published in the 1940’s. And yet Wright’s book is clearly not just a reworking of Lewis’ older book any more than my motorway-ready Rover was a mere redesign of my mother’s back-road Standard Ten.

Like Lewis, Wright finds pointers to God (what he calls “whispers” and “a memory of an echo of a voice”) in the midst of the experiences that all humans share. We all have a longing for justice (pages 3-15), a thirst for spirituality, (pages 18-27), a desire for relationships with others (pages 29-38), an appreciation of beauty (pages 39-51).

For Wright, however, these experiences do not constitute a compelling argument for the existence of God: “I do not believe that they, or any other paths, lead the unaided human mind all the way from reflective atheism to Christian faith” (Page 55). What are these “whispers,” then, and what is their significance for Christianity? Wright offers two observations. First, these universal human experiences can be best accounted for within what he calls “the Christian story” (page 55), and, second, they point to their eschatological fulfillment when the world will be put to rights, relationships restored, beauty reborn, and spiritual longings satisfied. Wright brings these observations together in his concluding paragraphs: “Having heard the echoes of a voice, we are called to come and met the Speaker… [N]ew creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise” (pages 236-237).

The remainder of Simply Christian, like Lewis’ Mere Christianity, is an introduction to the Christian faith in its ecumenical fullness (page xii). There are chapters on God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; there are chapters on the Christian response to God in worship and prayer, on the use of scripture, on the Christian life and the hope for new creation.

There are quotable and preachable gems throughout Wright’s book. I enjoyed the opening paragraph of his chapter on the Bible: “It’s a big book, full of big stories with big characters. They have big ideas (not least about themselves) and make big mistakes. It’s about God and greed and grace; about life and laughter, and loneliness. It’s about birth, beginnings, and betrayal; about siblings, squabbles, and sex; about power and prayer and prison and passion.” And then Wright observes: “And that’s only Genesis” (page 173).

I was intrigued by Wright’s discussion of the question of Jesus’ self-awareness: in what way did he think of himself as divine? “Jesus was aware of a call, a vocation, to do and be what, according to the scriptures, only Israel’s God gets to do and to be… He was obedient to the Father, simultaneously doing what only God can do” (pages 118-119). In another place Wright echoes a phrase which was used by Christians in the early centuries: Jesus is “God’s second self” (page 221).

And I especially appreciated Wright’s treatment of scripture and its authority. Scripture, says Wright, is a narrative, a story, but it “is not simply an authoritative description of a saving plan… It is part of the saving plan itself” (pages 185-186, his emphasis). Wright does not use the term sacrament in his discussion of scripture, but he comes very near saying that the Bible works sacramentally, as a means of grace: scripture is “part of the means by which, in the power of the Spirit, the living God rescues his people and his world, and takes them forward on the journey toward his new creation, and makes us agents of that new creation even as we travel” (page 191).

A useful teaching metaphor that Wright develops is that the Bible is a story, the narrative about “how the creator God is rescuing the creation from its rebellion, brokenness, corruption, and death” (page 186). Novelists often remark about how what they have written in the beginning of their books determines the subsequent behavior of the characters and the outcome of the story itself. Even fictional characters cannot be forced credibly into actions that contradict how they have been shaped by the writers’ opening chapters. In just the same way, says Wright, Christian are biblical people not because we can quote scripture but because God has written us into the Bible’s story and that determines what we do and who we are. “All that is non-negotiable. Anything that contradicts or undermines that doesn’t take the novel forward to its intended conclusion” (page 187).

Like other biblical theologians, Wright wants to affirm an eschatology that is decisively realized and which at the same time says “not yet.” On the one hand, Wright knows that the present world does not follow principles which lead to justice: “God does indeed intend to put the world to rights. . . . But to get from that longing and demand to anything that approaches God’s intended justice, we must go by a route very different from the one which the world naturally expects and even demands.” (page 225). To be a Christian therefore is to live eschatologically: “living as a Christian is learning to live with the life, and by the rules of, God’s future world, even as we are continuing to live within the present one” (page 124).

Yet Wright also wants to say that, in a decisive way, the eschatological future has already arrived in Jesus: “Something has happened in and through Jesus as a result of which the world is a different place, a place where heaven and earth have been joined forever. God’s future has arrived in the present” (page 116); “The whole world is now God’s holy land” (pages 125-126; his emphases).

Perhaps recalling discussions in the department of philosophy and religion where I once taught, I was waiting for the place in Simply Christian where Wright would point out some of the ways in which the world anno domini is tangibly different from how it might have been if Jesus had not come. But Wright offers no evidence, and appears instead to agree with the skeptic that not that much has changed after all: “The majority language of the world is violence. When people with power see things happen of which they disapprove, they drop bombs and send in tanks. When people without power see things happen of which they disapprove, they smash store windows, blow themselves up in crowded places, and fly planes into buildings. The fact that both methods have proved remarkably unsuccessful at changing things doesn’t stop people from going on in the same way” (pages 225-226).

The tension in Wright’s position leads to, but does not quite arrive at, the argument for Christian pacifism which was made by Origen in the third century. Christians affirm that a decisive difference has been made by the coming of Jesus, and yet it is difficult to point to evidence of that difference in the world around us. It is for this reason that Christians must be people of peace, wrote Origen, demonstrating by their behavior the character of the peaceable kingdom that Christ promised. And the reason why it is imperative that Christians do this, he argued, is that if there is no place on earth in which the peace of the kingdom is actually visible after the death and resurrection of Jesus, then the gospel is falsified and the claim that any real difference has been made by Jesus has been disproved.

Wright almost says this when he writes that “it was time to show the pagans what the true God was really like, not by fighting and violence but by loving one’s enemies, turning the other cheek, going the second mile” (page 101). He is only one step away from affirming Origen’s argument for Christian pacifism when we remarks “From the very beginning, in Jesus’ own teaching, it has been clear that those who have been called to be agents of God’s healing love, putting the world to rights, are also called to be people whose own lives are put to rights by the same healing love. The messengers must model the message” (page 204, my emphasis). As a Christian pacifist, I wish Wright had taken the step toward which his position leads. But he does not.

C. S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963. I think my mother’s Standard Ten must have expired around the same time. The Rover I rented years later was different from my mother’s English car: it was designed for motorway cruising as well as for exploring country lanes. In just the same way, Tom Wright’s Simply Christian is not merely a rewrite of C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, lightly revised for twenty-first century readers. There is more than a casual relationship between the two books, however. Both were written as introductions to the broad traditions of the Christian faith. Both have the curious unbeliever as well as the Christian reader in mind. And, perhaps as their most striking shared characteristic, both are typically English and Anglican, genial accounts of how thinking about things in a Christian way make sense.

And all of these remarks are intended as compliments to Tom Wright for writing Simply Christian.

Christianity for the Rest of Us

Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us. San Francisco CA, HarperSanFrancisco. 321 pp. Reserve this item

Reviewer: Rev. Bob Hann

Christianity for the Rest of Us is the product of the author’s Lilly Endowment-funded research into fifty American congregations which she found to display refreshing and inspiring signs of spiritual life. Her research took place in fifty churches which she labels as theologically moderate-to-liberal (p. 2), of which twenty-two were Episcopal, nine Presbyterian (USA), five Lutheran, six United Methodist, five United Church of Christ, and one Disciples of Christ (pp. 299-301). Butler Bass calls these “contemporary, mainline, brand-name Christians” (p. 2); they look like churches that we know very well.

It should be noted that, although the author’s opening remarks (p. 2) and the dust jacket’s blurb contrasts the churches in which she found spiritual vitality with “evangelical mega-churches,” Butler Bass in fact works the hardest to distance herself not from evangelicalism but from the sort of theological liberalism that dominated American main-line Protestantism during its 1950’s heyday. That liberalism, she writes, brought about important social reforms (p. 256), but it also became indistinguishable from mainstream culture and lost its sense of wonder before God (p. 192). “Many mainstream congregations became a kind of Christian version of the Rotary club,” she writes. “Everyone was welcome—with no spiritual demands other than to conform to some sort of generalized Protestant morality” (p. 36).

What happened in the churches which Butler Bass studied? As the author tells the stories of the churches, people discovered that they “wanted the Bible, prayer, and worship” (p. 42); they reached back “to recover lost traditions of the biblical story, worship, prayer, justice, and formation” (p. 237). They began to talk about Jesus and about healing and salvation (p. 64). In place of the culturally-accommodated liberalism of the mid-twentieth century, Butler Bass writes, Protestants of the mainline churches began “tracing their way back to a supernatural God” (p. 108). To pursue a different Johannine metaphor, Jesus showed up at Bethany and told an amazed Mary and Martha that Lazarus their brother, given up for dead, would live again!

Butler Bass’s book opens with a section entitled What Happened to the Neighborhood Church? (pp. 13-54). In contemporary America, the old village with its clearly understood relationship of faith to culture has vanished (pp. 15–25), and Christians find themselves to be “strangers in a strange land” (pp. 22-23). Butler Bass joins many others (most notably Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon in their influential Resident Aliens) in observing that church life in the twenty-first century takes place in a setting in which the church and its proclamation is no longer regarded as privileged or perhaps even as especially important or interesting by people in the world around us.

The largest section of Butler Bass’s book (pp. 71 – 214) is what she calls “signposts of renewal,” the evidence of spiritual rebirth that she found among the churches that she studied. These are:

• Hospitality: Welcoming Strangers,
• Discernment: Listening for Truth,
• Healing: Entering Shalom,
• Contemplation: Open for Prayer,
• Testimony: Talking the Walk,
• Diversity: Making Community,
• Justice: Engaging the Powers,
• Worship: Experiencing God,
• Reflection: Thinking Theologically, and
• Beauty: Touching the Divine.

How should Christianity for the Rest of Us be read? After several false interpretative starts I began to read Butler Bass’s signposts of renewal through the lens of the term “sign” in the Gospel of John. In John’s Gospel a sign, like the miracle of abundance at the Wedding at Cana, always points to something beyond itself. The event may itself be remarkable, but its function as a sign is to point not to the occurrence itself but to the presence of Jesus, without whom the event could not have taken place.

And this may be what stands behind the cautions which accompany Butler Bass’s discussion of the signposts of renewal. Hospitality, the first of her signposts, is first of all an act of God; it is how God welcomes other pilgrims into the community (p. 87). Hospitality it is not the same as “welcome wagon” efforts “to get newcomers to join the church” (p. 81). The reader may be intended to understand that one does not practice the behaviors which Butler Bass calls signposts in an effort to bring about church renewal. Signposts point to the presence and activity of God, from whom all renewal comes. A biblical sign is always about God, and is not reducible to technique!

There are gems in this section of the book: I especially enjoyed her discussion of beauty in worship (pp. 201-206). Why does worship demand our best, our excellence? “The Spirit drives us,” said one person Butler Bass interviewed (p. 204), but I liked the author’s way of putting it ever better: “God is elegant,” she says (p. 210).

Of all the chapters about the signposts of renewal, I was the most disappointed by the one entitled Justice: Engaging the Powers (p. 157). Butler Bass seems uncertain about the role of the church in today’s secular society. Perhaps the author has not fully set aside the liberal notion that the church’s task is to provide moral instruction for secular culture.

On the one hand, she retains the traditional liberal notion of the role of religion in society by saying that “the nation needs moral grounding in broad faith principles (Christian, Jewish, and others)” (p. 269). But she also cites a remark of one church member who believes that whenever the church allies itself closely with power, “the inevitable results are empire, war, and crusades.”

She quotes the member’s statement, “I am glad that my church is now marginalized in the secular culture… so that it might explore what it means to not be twinned with power” (p. 271). Butler Bass echoes the language of Walter Wink’s The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, but she seems uncertain about what “engaging the powers” might actually require of us. A useful introduction to Wink’s ideas is Charles L. Campbell, The Word Before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching.

One of Butler Bass’s evidences of vitality in a church is testimony, which she calls “talking the walk.” Although she believes that telling the story of one’s experience of God is evidence of spiritual vitality (pp. 120-132), the author criticizes the way testimonies were used among the old Puritans because she believes that they “used testimony as a way of stepping into roles that were already decided for them” (p. 138) To understand the matter more positively, however, listening to testimony has always been a character-shaping event: By hearing what God had done in the experience of another, a hearer might become more attentive to God’s actions in his or her life as well.

At its most basic and perhaps most important reading, this is what Christianity for the Rest of Us is: It is testimony: testimony to the power of God to renew the church, not by technique, but by the Spirit who moves and regenerates the people of God in amazing and always unexpected ways.

Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

Barbara Brown Taylor, Harper, San Francisco. 234 pp. Reserve this item

Reviewer: Rev. Bob Hann

Along with several thousand other people, I am a long-time fan of Barbara Brown Taylor. I have heard her preach, and I have especially valued her little book on vocation and ministry, The Preaching Life (Cowley, 1993). I have occasionally bought copies of The Preaching Life to give to inquirers and others considering the ministry. But notice that I said I have bought copies for others. My own copy, the one inscribed “to Bob Hann, with best blessings on your own preaching life, Barbara Taylor,” is going nowhere. That one will remain mine!

All of this is why, no doubt along with many others, I was saddened by the advance notices that I read about Barbara’s latest book, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. When my copy arrived from amazon.com I first noticed its cover illustration: a bird flying away from an ornate cage. Leaving Church? What had happened to Barbara Brown Taylor?

Leaving Church is a narrative about Barbara’s becoming the rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville, Georgia, in 1992, and of her leaving that position just five years later in 1997. A first response to reading Leaving Church is that Barbara’s story is a cautionary tale for clergy and people who care about them.

As I thought about Leaving Church I also found myself thinking about her earlier book, The Preaching Life, which was published just at the beginning of her solo-pastor ministry at Grace-Calvary. The Preaching Life reflected a sound theology of pastoral ministry. Evoking the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, she wrote:

My vocation is to be God’s person in the world, and that makes me the same as those among whom I serve. What we have in common is our baptism, that turning point in each one of our lives when we were received into the household of God and charged to confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share in his eternal priesthood. (TPL, p. 29)

I underlined that passage when I first read The Preaching Life. But I failed to notice a sentence that came just two pages later: Barbara wrote in 1993,

Those in ordained ministry are likely to wear a hundred different hats—social worker, chauffeur, cook, financial advisor. community organizer, babysitter, philanthropist, marriage counselor, cheerleader, friends—whatever hat they happen to be wearing at the time, priests remember that they wear it as God’s person, for God’s sake, in God’s name. (p. 31)

This is what Barbara wrote about “wearing a hundred hats” in Leaving Church as she looked back at her ministry at Grace-Calvary: “Drawn to a life of servanthood, I had ended up a service provider” (LC, p. 102).

Barbara’s story is a warning about the need for boundary-setting by pastors and about how disillusionment and burnout can happen even to those who are the most gifted for ministry. “I was out more nights than I was home. No matter how many new day planners I bought, none of them told me when I had done enough… The demands of parish ministry routinely cut me off from the resources that enabled me to do parish ministry” (p. 98). Symptom followed symptom: her “old back trouble returned” (p. 98); “I pecked God on the cheek the same way I did Ed, drying up inside for want of making love” (p.99); “I had begun crying on a regular basis” (p. 109); “My role and my soul were eating each other alive” (p. 111).

One day Barbara saw a flock of wild geese overhead. They seemed to be “calling to me… The tears simply fell out of my eyes, and it was not until the geese were gone that the words formed in the empty air. Take me with you” (p. 113). Barbara had to leave, not ministry, but congregational ministry, the ministry of being the rector at Grace-Calvary church. In 1997 she resigned from her pastoral position to become the professor of religion at nearby Piedmont College.

For all that, Leaving Church is also a grace story, about how ministry and the activity of the Spirit continue even after one no longer serves a congregation. In a few passages, Barbara considers leaving ministry altogether. She writes of a pool-party dunking as her re-baptism into ordinary humanity and out of the special class of the ordained (p. 153). She stopped wearing clerical attire and was refreshed to notice “how people talk when they do not think there is an ordained minister around” (p. 152). She considered officially renouncing her ordination. But, she writes, “I could not do it; I was not ready to abandon the idea that I might still be a priest” (p. 178).

Barbara concludes, “since I still serve as a guest preacher some Sundays, I will keep the collar” (p. 213). A quick reading of her website helps us interpret what “some Sundays” means: Barbara’s schedule for 2006 includes some 23 lectures, forums, book signings and other activities that she will be involved in this year. Twelve of her appearances this year are explicitly labeled “sermon,” and three others will also occur at churches.

I am aware that I am reviewing this book only shortly after I have concluded a pastoral relationship and have become a minister at large in our Presbytery. There is life and ministry beyond the congregation, Leaving Church tells us, even though, as Barbara’s story illustrates, the transition to that new form of ministry may require a special attentiveness to the Spirit and to grace. Barbara quotes Walter Brueggemann: “The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you… by the grace of God” (p. 122).

Finally, Leaving Church is a love story. According to Barbara’s vita, she had been married to Ed Taylor for about eleven years before she began to write The Preaching Life, but, except for a brief mention in that book’s acknowledgments, her husband does not appear in its narrative. One would have received the impression that all of Barbara’s most significant conversations took place not with a human who shared her journey, but with God. It is in Leaving Church that we see how her relationship with Ed and his love for her stood behind each important moment in her transition in and out of congregational ministry. Her new book is appropriately dedicated, “to Edward, always and again.”

Of course you will read Leaving Church if you are a Barbara Brown Taylor fan. Read it if you or someone you love is in ministry, and may be in danger of wearing too many hats in service to the congregation. Read it as a grace story, a human story, a love story, a story in which the Spirit is present and active in always unexpected ways.

The Worship Sourcebook

Baker Book House, Grand Rapids MI. 843 pp, CD-ROM included. Reserve this item

Reviewer: Rev. Bob Hann

Some say that all sermons and churchly communications should include memorable take-home summaries of their key points, so here’s mine for The Worship Sourcebook: Check this out at the Resource Center if you must, but you will want to own this book if you plan worship in a Presbyterian Church! Order it now!

The Worship Sourcebook is not primarily a book of worship services like our Book of Common Worship. Rather, the editors have assumed that a worship planner is seeking additional texts for worship in addition to the materials that are in resources like the BCW. And this book provides that: among its other selections there are 70 calls to worship and opening responses, 71 prayers of confession, 29 prayers of the people. Fourty-eight prayers and other materials are helpfully designated as “mindful of children.”

Many of the book’s texts are arranged according to the liturgical year. During the seasons of Lent and Easter which ended recently, I found myself repeatedly returning to The Worship Sourcebook for prayers, litanies, and other resources for planning congregational and smaller-group worship: The Worship Sourcebook has 113 pages of calls to worship, prayers and other resources for the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter!

Perhaps you’ll think that a prayer in The Worship Sourcebook is almost, but not quite, just right for your people on a given Sunday morning. The book comes with a CD-ROM that includes its entire contents, so it is a simple matter to copy, paste, and edit a particular text so its suits your taste or the needs of your congregation. In marked distinction from many books of worship resources, The Worship Sourcebook has a sensible copyright policy, permitting its use in bulletins and other church applications.

The Worship Sourcebook has its origin in a small Reformed denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, but it is a gift to the larger Presbyterian and Reformed community. The style throughout is both classical and contemporary, avoiding both historicism and trendiness as though either was an virtue in itself. The book is historically and theologically rooted, alert to issues in preparing contemporary worship, and reflective of the broad mainstream of Presbyterian and Reformed worship practice.

Ask Susan at the Resource Center to let you have a look at this book, but you will want to own it. I am amazed that this resource is available at its price, and I am happy to recommend it to anyone involved in planning Sunday worship for any church in our Presbyterian tradition!

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