Category: theology

New Books!

The words of the wise are like goads and like nails driven in — from the composers of collections, given from a certain shepherd. And more than these, my son, beware: of making many books there is no end, and much chatter is weariness of the flesh.

Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) 12:11-12 (trans. by Robert Alter)

Every year, BookExpo showcases books slated for release in the fall and beyond, drumming up buzz among independent booksellers, librarians, and the like. The books listed below, both recent and forthcoming, looked to be of greatest interest to readers of serious nonfiction.

A few observations from the show:

  • In my humble opinion, some of the best academic work across the board continues to be published by Princeton University Press, followed closely by Yale and Harvard. Nebraska and Minnesota remain interesting smaller presses.
  • Other academic presses, being focused on niche audiences or on monographs that sell at high prices to academic libraries, seem to have lost their ability to appeal to cross-over audiences. Chicago and California, mired in academic fads and fancies, seem to be shadows of their former glorious selves.
  • Among commercial publishers, W. W. Norton stood out at the show as standing by high-quality content while taking some risks on lesser-known but deserving authors and their books.

Language and Literature

Peter Martin, The Dictionary Wars: The Fight over the English Language (Princeton, May)

Ilana Pardes, The Song of Songs: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books, Princeton, August)

Peter Mack, Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions (Princeton, September)

Michael Schmidt, Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem (Princeton, September)

A. E. Stallings, translator, The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice: A Tiny Homeric Epic (Paul Dry Books, October)

Christian Wiman, editor, Joy: 100 Poems (paperback release, Yale, November)—I missed this when it was published in 2017.

Biography and Memoir

Andrew Gant, Johann Sebastian Bach (SPCK, October 2018)—I missed this when it was published last year.

Carlos Eire, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books, Princeton, June)—His history Reformations is magisterial.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race (W. W. Norton, October)

John Took, Dante (Princeton, January 2020)

History

T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America (Princeton, September)

George Weigel, The Irony of Modern Catholic History (Basic Books, September)

David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, September)

Roel Sterckx, Ways of Heaven: An Introduction to Chinese Thought (Basic Books, September)

Martin Goodman, Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books, Princeton, October)

Martin Goodman, A History of Judaism (paperback release, Princeton, October)—highly recommended!

Pekka Hamalainen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (Yale, October)

* Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, October)

David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton, November)

Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (Harvard, November)—Ryrie will also publish The Reformation in England: A Very Brief History (SPCK, August).

Religion

Joel Baden, The Book of Exodus: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books, Princeton, April)

Phillip Cary, The Meaning of Protestant Theology: Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us Christ (Baker Academic, June)

John Collins, What Are Biblical Values?: What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues (Yale, August)

Iain Duguid, The Whole Armor of God: How Christ’s Victory Strengthens Us for Spiritual Warfare (Crossway, August)

Paula Frederiksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (paperback release, Yale, August)—This book didn’t receive enough attention.

Edward L. Greenstein, Job: A New Translation (Yale, August)—I’ll bite, but it’s claim that “no English translation has come close to conveying the proper sense of the original” is difficult to believe, with Robert Alter’s, X’s, and Cline’s translations all on the market for years now.

Michael LeFebvre, The Liturgy of Creation: Understanding Calendars in the Old Testament Context (IVP Academic, August)

David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale, September)

David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (paperback release, Yale, October)—I’ll be curious to see if there are any differences from the first printing.

J. Ryan Lister and Anthony Benedetto, Emblems of the Infinite King: Entering the Knowledge of the Living God (Crossway, October)—illustrated book for kids ages 8-14, warrants comparison with The Bible Project books

Jack Miles, Religion as We Know It: An Origin Story (W. W. Norton, November)

Economics

Greg Forster, Economics: A Student’s Guide (Crossway, August)—A Christian perspective on (more or less) mainline economics

Lawrence Glickman, Free Enterprise: An American History (Yale, August)—A Cornell historian’s view

Deirdre McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale, October)

Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets (Harvard, October)

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics, Bad Economics: Six Ways We Get the World Wrong and How to Set It Right (PublicAffairs, November)

The Foremothers of the Messiah

I recently stumbled across an old audio recording of Tim Keller’s sermon, “Hannah’s Prayer for Family,” from October 2007. At minute 31:40, he makes an astonishing observation about the role of women of the Old Testament in the anticipation of the Messiah:

If you look at the forefathers of the Messiah, the penultimate forerunners of the Messiah—the forefathers of the Messiah were Samuel and Sampson and David and Gideon—they all brought salvation by being strong and getting glory. And so they [their descendants] looked at Jesus and said, “That can’t be the Messiah. The Messiah wouldn’t be weak. The Messiah wouldn’t be disgraced.”

Do you know what their problem was? They were looking at the forefathers of the Messiah but not the foremothers; they were looking at the men who were the forerunners of Jesus but not the women.

Because over and over again God gave a foretaste of the real gospel and the work of Jesus Christ in the fact that he continually brought his salvation of the world through the barren, through the rejected, through the unwanted women.
It’s old barren Sarah not beautiful fertile Hagar through whom God brings the royal messianic saving seed of Isaac.

It’s through Leah, the girl that nobody wanted, the wife that Jacob didn’t want, not Rachel the beautiful and the wanted; it’s through Leah that God brings the royal messianic saving seed of Judah.

Sampson is born to a barren woman who shouldn’t be able to have children.
Samuel is born to a suffering, disgraced woman, but through through the suffering and disgrace of Hannah salvation comes.

If you had looked at the foremothers, you would have known that Isaiah was talking about the Messiah when he said that the one who comes to save us will suffer disgrace and be crushed for our iniquities. Jesus experienced the reversal that Hannah was talking about. . . .

The women in the Old Testament show that Jesus Christ is not just a coming King but a suffering servant.

Interview with Richard B. Hays

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detail of Joseph von Führich’s Der Gang nach Emmaus

On June 4, 2016, Garrett Brown recorded an interview with Richard B. Hays, which was initially released as an hour-long podcast on the New Books Network. The transcript below, which includes 20 additional minutes of conversation, has been edited and revised by the authors. An abridged version of it first appeared in the November/December issue of Books and Culture.

The authors would like to thank Carey Newman of Baylor University Press for his comments on an early draft of this transcript and John Wilson of Books and Culture for his support and enthusiasm for the project.

About Richard B. Hays

Richard B. Hays, George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, is internationally recognized for his work on the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and on New Testament ethics. His scholarly work has bridged the disciplines of biblical criticism and literary studies, exploring the innovative ways in which early Christian writers interpreted Israel’s Scripture. He has also consistently sought to demonstrate how close reading of the New Testament can inform the church’s theological reflection, proclamation, and ministry.

Hays’s book The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation (1996) was selected by Christianity Today as one of the 100 most important religious books of the twentieth century. His more recent books include The Art of Reading Scripture (2003, co-edited with Ellen Davis), The Conversion of the Imagination (2005), Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage (2008, co-edited with Beverly Roberts Gaventa), Revelation and the Politics of Apocalyptic Interpretation (2012, co-edited with Stefan Alkier), Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (2014), and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016).

Professor Hays has lectured widely in North America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Japan. An ordained United Methodist minister, he has preached in settings ranging from rural Oklahoma churches to London’s Westminster Abbey. Professor Hays has chaired the Pauline Epistles Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, as well as the Seminar on New Testament Ethics in the Society for New Testament Studies, and has served on the editorial boards of several leading scholarly journals. Professor Hays received an honorary doctorate (Dr. theol. honoris causa) from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2009. He served as dean of Duke Divinity School from 2010 to 2015.

The Interview

Garrett Brown: Would you start by telling our readers a little bit about yourself and your background?

Richard B. Hays: I grew up in Oklahoma, went to an Episcopal day school as a high school student, and had a rich education there that included daily chapel. That had the effect of getting the Book of Common Prayer into my bones, although I was a Methodist by family upbringing.

I went to Yale as an undergraduate and ended up being an English major. I was particularly immersed in poetry and drama of the 16th and 17th centuries. After that, I went to seminary, graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1977, and continued on to a PhD at Emory in New Testament Studies. Continue reading “Interview with Richard B. Hays” →

Whither Subsidiarity?

Screen shot 2015-05-15 at 1.13.33 AMFor a long time, I’ve appreciated the role that churches, associations, and other nongovernmental institutions play in providing things that individuals and families need — outside markets and when markets fail — in civil society. Tocqueville wrote about them in Democracy in America. Edmund Burke called them “little platoons” (artfully rearticulated in Charles Murray’s In Pursuit).

From books such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, I also appreciated that these institutions, vital sources of social capital, were being worn down by various forces in modern life. However, I have only recently come to appreciate the fact that the size and scope of government is prone to expand in their absence.

Continue reading “Whither Subsidiarity?” →

Tozer’s Rules

Lately I’ve heard a lot of dismissive comments about “checklist” Christianity. The people who usually fret about such things are concerned that an over-reliance on a set of rules or prescriptions turns Christian discipleship into an exercise in legalism, works-righteousness, or “Churchianity.” But, as Kevin DeYoung highlights in his excellent book The Whole in Our Holiness, Jesus himself exhorted his followers—in the great commission no less—to make disciples, “ teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28).

Continue reading “Tozer’s Rules” →

Tolkien, Coleridge, and Subcreation

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Tolkien’s idea of subcreation has been much discussed by his fans and critics. Few, however, have located the source of that idea in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Biographia Literaria provides a clue. In chapter 13, on the imagination “or esemplastic power,” we read:

The imagination I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

According to Adam Roberts’s new edition, Coleridge crossed out the line set in roman above. But it is precisely this phrase that Tolkien and others seize in making a firm distinction between creative acts of God and those of artists. As Robert explains, “God has created the cosmos as an act of primary imaginative power. When creative artists create their work, they are engaged in a finite imitation, in a kind of ratio inferior, of that primary act. . . . Such work is necessarily secondary to the divine creation, but only in degree, not in kind.”

While we readily recognize Tolkien’s anti-modern sensibilities, we can see here that he was also clearly operating within a Romantic framework, where the artist retained his status as myth-maker and his labors were not yet unmoored from religious significance. That side of Tolkien’s thought deserves greater recognition and appreciation.

The Literal Meaning of Genesis

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In his short work entitled The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Saint Augustine provides excellent advice for all Christians who are faced with the daunting task of interpreting Scripture in the light of scientific knowledge:

In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture.

Continue reading “The Literal Meaning of Genesis” →

The Wit of the Carpenter

In 1964, the Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood published a short book called The Humor of Christ (Harper and Row). In it he challenged “the conventional picture of a Christ who never laughed.” He rightly observed that there is far more laughter in the gospels than is generally recognized. Further, he makes the excellent point that “there are numerous passages in the recorded teaching which are practically incomprehensible when regarded as sober prose, but which are luminous once we become liberated from the gratuitous assumption that Christ never joked” (p. 10). Continue reading “The Wit of the Carpenter” →

Be Still

At church this morning, I was reminded today how wonderful the following hymn is. The words were composed by Katharina von Schlegel in 1752; were trans­lat­ed from Ger­man to Eng­lish by Jane L. Borth­wick in 1855; and then set to the tune “Finlandia” (1899) by the great composer Jean Si­bel­i­us.

The Cyberhymnal notes, “Borthwick be­longed to the Free Church of Scot­land. In 1855, she and her sister, Sarah Findlater, co-produced a book of translations of German hymns titled Hymns from the Land of Luther. In 1875, while liv­ing in Switzerland, she produced another book of translations called Al­pine Lyrics. Borth­wick was al­so ac­tive with the Edinburgh House of Refuge, the Moravian Mis­sion in Lab­ra­dor, and other mis­sion work. She nev­er mar­ried.”

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change, He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul: thy God doth undertake
To guide the future, as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;
All now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know
His voice Who ruled them while He dwelt below.

Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart,
And all is darkened in the vale of tears,
Then shalt thou better know His love, His heart,
Who comes to soothe thy sorrow and thy fears.
Be still, my soul: thy Jesus can repay
From His own fullness all He takes away.

Be still, my soul: the hour is hastening on
When we shall be forever with the Lord.
When disappointment, grief and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past
All safe and blessèd we shall meet at last.

Be still, my soul: begin the song of praise
On earth, believing, to Thy Lord on high;
Acknowledge Him in all thy words and ways,
So shall He view thee with a well pleased eye.
Be still, my soul: the Sun of life divine
Through passing clouds shall but more brightly shine.

Strenuous Acts of Will

I recently stumbled across a delightful 2003 article by Judith Shulevitz about the difficulty of observing the Sabbath. In it, she writes,

Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. . . . This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation—at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction.

The exact same thing could be said of other aspects of our walk with God and our relationship to our communities. It’s not simply an act of will on the part of a single individual. Culture and habit are as important in living faithful lives as individual conscience.