Full Contact Christianity

It has been a while since I put up any book reviews, and I have been reading all along. I don’t intend to start writing detailed reviews at this point — too much else to do. But I’ve been reading some real beauties, and I want to share. So with no further ado, Gentle Reader, I present you with a tasty salad of good books on a variety of topics.

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James K. A. Smith’s Thinking in Tongues is a treat.

The basic insight is a version of lex orandi, lex credendi: “The law of prayer is the law of belief.” This ancient Christian principle means, in essence, that the liturgy, prayers and songs of the ancient church can be used to infer the beliefs of the church, even on matters (or in times and places) where they left behind no specific dogmatic writings.

Likewise, Smith is using the religious life of the Christian church generally, and specifically the pentecostal/charismatic churches, to infer a particular take on various areas of philosophy: what’s real, how we know, how we understand language, and so on. I’m not even going to try to summarize Smith’s thought as he pushes the implicit theology of pentecostal thought out into the corners — you can, and should, read it for yourself.

If you’re charismatic yourself, this is an important book, and you should read it. If you’re not, you might think you can just pass this one by, but I would encourage you to think again. In critical ways, many of us have simply not stuck to our guns as Christians engaging ‘secular’ fields like sociology, psychology, or philosophy. This is a chance to see someone doing it well, and even if philosophy is not your field, you might benefit from seeing an example of hardheaded Christianity in practice.

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Doug Wilson’s novel Evangellyfish serves up a large helping of brutal truth about evangelical church culture. While being a work of fiction — and, to the extent possible in today’s evangelical culture, something of a satire — it is unflinchingly faithful to reality. I’ve met these characters, far more than once.

Some readers will find Evangellyfish dark and painful, but it is also absolutely hilarious. Some critic aptly described it as a cross between Flannery O’Connor and P. G. Wodehouse. Although the book is a respectable 228 pages, it’s a fast read, unless you need to take breaks because the satire is hurting too much. I read it in a day — Christmas Day, actually. It was a much-needed rest and respite from the hurly-burly of the holiday season.

Obviously, I didn’t find it particularly painful to read, myself. But that’s because I’m so far outside mainstream megachurch evangelicalism that the satire made me laugh far more than it made me wince. And I did laugh — I howled, all day long. My wife later told me that’s the most she’s heard me laugh in years.

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The Vampire Defanged: How the Embodiment of Evil Became a Romantic Hero covers vampire lore through literary history. However, instead of writing a survey, which would inevitably skim the surface and bore at the same time, author Susannah Clements gives us a detailed study of five samples: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series, contained in the Southern Vampire Mystery books and the TV series True Blood, and Stephanie Myers’ Twilight saga. If you feel like this sample set skews heavily toward the modern, you’re right, but there’s a good reason for that. The vampire was a powerful metaphor for evil, sin and temptation in a predominantly Christian culture for a very long time. Recently, the significance of the vampire has shifted, hence the preponderance of modern samples.

The samples are well-chosen, and show how the vampire motif has shifted as modern authors employ it to address a variety of less theological themes. The closing three chapters bring it all together in a coherent thematic treatment of vampire sinners and saviors, drawing on a number of additional examples, and finishing with a challenge for Christians to renew their acquaintance with the genre. The current vampire fiction craze will pass, to be sure, but the vampire is also one of the enduring motifs of Western literature. The genre is ripe for a robust Christian treatment that will re-introduce the classic vampire fiction themes of temptation, sin, evil and grace.

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I have started Peter Leithart’s Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective. So far, it’s wonderful. This book was the inevitable fallout from Leithart’s earlier (and really outstanding) Defending Constantine. A sober treatment of Constantine’s life and what he meant to the Christian faith, the book raised a number of issues and questions that simply couldn’t be addressed without doubling the size of the book. Between Babel and Beast is in a sense a book-length footnote to the earlier book, but it stands alone.

Leithart’s thesis is that — contra nearly everybody — there is no such thing as examining “empire” in a biblical light. It’s necessary to talk in terms of “empires,” plural. There are two chief reasons for this: first, God begins His own counter-imperium with Abraham, and will culminate it in the New Jerusalem. It’s just irresponsible to talk as though empire is an evil in itself. Even within the boundaries of the “city of man,” though, the Bible speaks of different types of empire, with the main differentiating factor being how the imperial government relates to God’s people.

For a delightfully contrarian, throoughly optimistic take on political philosophy, I commend Babel and Beast to you. And Defending Constantine. And Against Christianity. But that’s another blog post.

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Just a couple weeks ago, on the recommendation of a teacher of mine, I got Sanford and Sanford’s massive Deliverance and Inner Healing. I’ve not had time to read very much of it yet, but I studied the chapter on praying over specific places in some detail, and it has already paid off. More about this later, maybe — but it has already proven a worthwhile book.

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So that’s the fun stuff I’ve been up to. Anybody have a recommendation for me?

I’m going to hear about this one, I’m sure, so let me just get the scary bits out in the open right away.  This is a book review of sorts–a very favorable one–of a science fiction novel.  It was written by a Mormon.  It takes evolution for granted.  The Christian characters in the book are all Roman Catholic, and some of them are portrayed quite sympathetically.  Adultery and domestic violence are major plot elements, although the action is implied, not described.  Author Orson Scott Card does his utmost to help the reader sympathize with both the physically abusive husband and his unfaithful wife, an emotionally abusive and neglectful mother — and Card knows what he’s doing.  If your heart’s not carved of granite, you’ll sympathize.  Pietists who don’t know how to read stories will find the experience traumatic and probably ought to steer clear.  Or then again, maybe not.  Not all trauma is bad; a knifing and a surgery are both traumatic, but they sew you up at the end of the surgery.

Ahem.  Anyway, the book is Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card.  It’s the second in a cycle of four stories (in order: Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind), but it stands alone well enough.  You can read Ender’s Game first if you want to, but you don’t really have to.  Late in the cycle, the peculiarities of Card’s LDS theology really come out into the limelight in some infelicitous ways, but Speaker is mostly free of that.  You ought to read it.

Moreover, you ought to read it for its epistemology.

The epistemology is personal, powerful, and simple enough: a person you don’t love is a person you don’t know, and can’t know.  As with most philosophical concepts, it is far easier to grasp fleshed out in story form than it would be in abstract discussion.  If it turns out that you don’t like the epistemology after all, it’s still a very good story.  You won’t have wasted your time.

If you want the abstract discussion, N. T. Wright’s Christian Hope in a Postmodern World makes the same epistemological point pretty concisely.  If you want it fleshed out philosophically and attended by (lots and lots of) footnotes, you can read Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology by Esther Lightcap Meek.  Wright’s presentation is personable and accessible; Meek is tougher to handle because she’s writing to fellow philosophers, but she’s very good at what she does.  But Speaker for the Dead is cheaper, and a lot more fun.  Just sayin’.

In the final stanza of his memorable poem “To a Mouse,” Robert Burns wrote:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us
An’ ev’n Devotion

Kevin Roose, nineteen-year-old journalist and author of The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, has given conservative evangelical Christians a rare gift.  Through his eyes–his raised-Quaker, somewhat left-of-center, normal American eyes–we have the opportunity to see ourselves as we appear to people who have never known a real, live evangelical Christian.

Roose was assisting his boss, author A. J. Jacobs, on a research trip to Thomas Road Baptist Church when he first encountered a group of Liberty University students. The interaction quickly took a turn for the strange…but I’ll let him tell you:

When A. J. left to take notes on another part of the church, I chatted up a group of Thomas Roaders I found in the lobby, two girls and a guy who looked to be around my age.  I introduced myself, told them why I was visiting, and asked how long they’d been coming to Thomas Road.

“We come here every week,” they said.  “We go to Liberty.”

I wasn’t sure whether “go to Liberty” was some sort of coded religious language, like “walk the path” or “seek the kingdom,” so I asked.  I had to chuckle when they told me that “Liberty” meant Liberty University, a Christian liberal arts college founded and presided over by  Rev. Falwell.  I mean, come on.  A liberal arts college run by Jerry Falwell?  How about an etiquette workshop run by Courtenay Love?

But I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, so I asked them to tell me more about their school.

“Oh, I love Liberty!” said one of the girls, an effusive blonde in a green sundress.  She spent five minutes making an enthusiastic pitch, which included statistics about Liberty’s recently opened law school, its top-ranked debate team, and its Division I athletic program.  She told me that Liberty has grown at a rate–from 154 students in 1971 to nearly 25,000 in 2007 (including more than 15,000 taking courses via the Internet)–that few colleges, secular or religious, have ever achieved.

It was impressive stuff, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted to know.

“So, what do you guys do for fun?” I asked.

They looked at each other quizzically, then back at me.  The blonde stammered, “I mean, we do different…things.  I don’t really know what you’re asking.”

This wasn’t getting off on the right foot.  Maybe I needed to break the ice.

“Any good parties around here?”

But I got no chuckles, only blank stares.  The guy, a long, lean boy-band type with jutting platinum hair, squinted and peered down his nose.

“Do you know Christ?”

I was new to evangelical argot, so I didn’t know that if a Liberty student has to ask this question, he probably knows the answer already.  The way I saw it, I could (a) tell him I did know Christ, which might not go so well if he decided to follow up, (b) try to deflect with sarcasm again, something like, “Yeah, he’s a friend of a friend.  We really don’t hang out much,” or (c) admit that I was a foreigner.

Too scared for (a) or (b), I chose (c).  I told him I didn’t know Christ, and after he spent five minutes explaining why I should consider meeting him, I said, as gently as I could, that I wasn’t interested in converting.

“Please don’t be offended,” I said.  “It’s just not my thing.”

They glanced at each other, all three a little mystified.  Not my thing?  How could it not be my thing?  They didn’t browbeat me, but I had definitely made them uneasy.  We made a little more small talk, and then, since church was starting, we parted ways with nods and hesitant half-waves.

The weirdness of the encounter stayed with him, and at a time when his fellow students at Brown were weighing the merits of cross-cultural study abroad in Munich or Barcelona, Kevin Roose found himself contemplating a semester at Liberty University.  The idea grew on him, much to the dismay of his nominally Quaker parents, gay-activist aunts, and generally left-leaning family.  While he did ultimately win their assent, the ongoing tension between Roose’s arch-conservative Liberty surroundings and his liberal family remains one of the central conflicts of the book.

Recalling the awkwardness of the Thomas Road conversation after he admitted to being an outsider, Roose decided to try to pass for an evangelical Christian, and after a weekend crash course administered by a sympathetic ex-evangelical friend, he packs his car and sets off to school.  This decision sparks the second major conflict of the book, the ever-present ethical dilemmas of an undercover participant-observer.  If his struggling seems at times a bit sophomoric, we would do well to remember that he was, in fact, a sophomore, and that these are the dilemmas of a fundamentally decent guy who can’t do his job without lying, and doesn’t like lying to his friends.

And he does make friends.  From the rebellious Jersey Joey to newly-converted football player Paul to future youth pastor Zipper, Roose introduces us to the kaleidoscopic array of students that he comes to know and love, and we with him.  Most of them are denizens of Dorm 22, the men’s dorm where he lives, but we also meet Aimee, a bubbly socialite, (and clearly not Roose’s type),  and Anna, the smart, sassy girl he dates for a while and then avoids, afraid that she’ll uncover the truth about him.  Rounding out the cast are professors, pastoral staff members, and of course, Jerry Falwell himself–“a complicated guy,” as Roose finally puts it to his dad.

We’re with him every step of the way for four months: learning to pray, perfectly chaste dates, men’s dorm hijinks,  creation science classes, a missions trip to Daytona Beach at the height of spring break, prayer meetings,  discipleship sessions where a concerned pastor helps him stop masturbating, singing in the choir at Thomas Road, his interview with Jerry Falwell for the campus newspaper…Roose chronicles it all.  Along with a deftly written record of what happened, we get a running commentary on how it all looked and felt to an outsider.

Roose is sensitive and clear-headed throughout, and not at all demeaning.  I highly recommend this book, particularly to folks who live in the “Christian cocoon.”  It’s easy to forget what you look like to an outsider, and if it hurts sometimes, well…”The kisses of an enemy are deceitful, but faithful are the wounds of a friend.”  Roose is not a believer, and politically not an ally–but he is a friend, and we ought to listen.

I’ll let you discover the many  joys and lessons of the book for yourself, but there’s one I want to point out here.  Roose finds himself regularly put off by the raging homophobia that he encounters in his environment.  He is responding, in part, to the simple and eminently biblical idea that homosexuality is a sin, and this is not something that we can avoid or apologize for.  But he is also responding to his roommate’s bone-deep, violent hatred of gay people, the use of “fag” or “gay” as all-purpose insults, and the blind fear of cloistered Christian kids who’ve never taken the time to get to know a real, live homosexual.  As a result, the whole thing comes off to him as simple bigotry and intolerance, and his effort to deal with the internal conflict this spawns in him forms one of the major themes in the book.  Roose is repeatedly rattled by the dissonance between the loving, caring, fundamentally moral character of his friends and (what he sees as) their bigotry on this one issue.

Which is to say that as a whole, the evangelical world is failing to make its case.  We are not successfully articulating a coherent, comprehensive vision of human life in the image of God, and our view of homosexuality as a coherent part of that.*  If we were, then our condemnation of homosexuality would be visibly of a piece with our whole life-affirming, biblical ethic, instead of striking a sympathetic observer as an arbitrary fly in the ointment.  Part of the reason we are failing is that most evangelicals don’t have a coherent, comprehensive view of life.  Another part of the reason is that within the mainstream Evangelical community, it has been socially safe to hate homosexuals, in the same way that it was once socially safe in white Evangelical circles to hate black people.  Some of the perceived bigotry, in other words, is actual bigotry. We need to clean up our own house on this point, and sooner rather than later.

For those willing to give a sympathetic observer a fair hearing, there are many more observations and lessons to be had…but I’ll let you read the book for yourself.
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*If you’re looking for a place to start, try this article.

Some while ago I recommended Doug Wilson’s fine little volume A Serrated Edge. For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure, it is a sterling defense of mockery and sarcasm as biblically appropriate means of communication…at times.  Must reading in our lily-livered age of Precious Moments figurines and sappy politically correct fears of hurting anyone’s feelings.

I once again commend the book to you heartily.  Buy it and read it — you won’t be sorry.

But some of you aren’t going to buy the book.  It would be nice if you could — for free — get your hands on a good chunk of related material, just to get your feet wet, as it were.  And for those of you who’ve read it…I know you want more.

Well, here’s your chance.  A little while ago I ran across John Frame’s detailed review of A Serrated Edge.  To which Doug Wilson published a detailed response.  Both of these items are available for free online at the links above.  Whether you’ve read the book or not, you will profit from reading this interchange. (The more astute observers will notice that I’m about 3 years late with the notice on this one. What can I say? Wilson writes faster than I can keep up with; I haven’t begun to conquer his backlist, especially if we’re counting online stuff.)

And a hint for the folks at Canon: Whenever you get round to reprinting the book, throw these two in as an appendix. The book will be much better for it.