Elliot Ritzema

Author: Elliot

  • A Contrarian’s History of Christianity: A Review

    I have been hooked on Rodney Stark’s writing since I read his The Rise of Christianity in college. Stark is a sociologist by training, and that book was his first foray into writing about the history of Christianity from a sociological perspective. What I appreciated about that book, and all of his books that I have read since then, was his data-driven approach, lively and clear writing style, and contrarian streak. Maybe it is because he works as a professor in the social sciences, a guild in which it is popular to see all religion as a social phenomenon and nothing more, but Stark seems to relish thumbing his nose at the “conventional wisdom” of the sociology of religion—especially Christianity.

    This book, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion, draws together and expands on several of his other works on the history of Christianity. His chapters on the early spread of Christianity draw on The Rise of Christianity and Cities of God; his chapter on the Crusades draws on God’s Batallions; his chapters on the medieval era, the Reformation, and after draw on For the Glory of God and The Victory of Reason. In it he continues his contrarian streak by arguing, among other things, the following:

    • The popularity of Oriental religions (in addition to Judaism) in the Roman Empire paved the way for the spread of Christianity.
    • In spite of some anecdotal evidence, the early Christian mission to Diaspora Jews was largely successful.
    • Most early Christians did not come from the ranks of the economically downtrodden, but from the upper classes.
    • It would have been better for Christianity if Constantine had not become a Christian.
    • Paganism was not stamped out by post-Constantinian Christians, but survived for centuries afterward and slowly died out or was incorporated into popular Christian practice.
    • “The Crusades were not unprovoked,” and “were not conducted for land, loot, or converts” (234).
    • The idea that there was “warfare” between Christianity and science is a later fabrication. In fact, Christianity was essential to the scientific revolution.
    • The Spanish Inquisition was not as cruel, and not as widespread, as it is often made out to be.

    As with any overview, there is some oversimplification. And even readers who largely agree with Stark’s premises, like myself, will find things that they disagree with. But overall, this is a highly readable and entertaining 30,000-foot overview of the history of Christianity. I recommend it.

    My only major complaint comes from the fact that I make a living as an editor. I know what good editing looks like, and this book was edited sloppily. A few examples:

    • page 156: Robin Lane Fox is referred to as “Robert.”
    • page 195: Peter Brown is referred to as “Roger.”
    • page 203: The island nation of Cyprus is called “Cypress.”
    • page 249: “Canvass” should be “canvas.”
    • page 334: Edgar Allan Poe’s middle name is misspelled “Allen.”
    • page 337: “Pouring over” should be “poring over.”

    If anyone at HarperOne is reading this, you know what to do. The rates for my work are quite reasonable, and the quality is no doubt higher than what you are getting now.

  • Is God a Threat to My Happiness? A Review

    Ron Highfield, a religion professor at Pepperdine University, thinks that even among people who believe in God, there is a suspicion that he might not always have their best interests at heart. Although they might be reluctant to admit it, they think that God might come between them and being truly happy, and so they hold him at arm’s length. There is a deep, and at times unacknowledged, fear that God will make them do things they don’t want to do, like become a missionary in some godforsaken corner of the world.

    Highfield has written God, Freedom & Human Dignity to calm those fears and give us a more accurate depiction of God than we are likely to get from quotes we see on the Internet, much popular Christian literature, and indeed, some churches. In part one, he tells the story of how we came to have such a “me-centered” self as our cultural default. He draws on the work of philosophers Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre to show that our modern understanding of the self roots human dignity and freedom internally: in the self and its autonomy. If we understand our dignity and freedom to be rooted within, then we will inevitably see God as a threat to our true fulfillment. Even if we acknowledge God, we treat him as a sort of superhuman vending machine that we can attempt to cajole into doing our bidding. He is the means to another end, rather than an end in himself.

    In part two, Highfield looks at the “God-centered” self, and shows that “the view of God, freedom and dignity brought to life in Jesus Christ addresses the pain and paradox of the human condition and secures the hope that we will experience our true greatness and inherit our promised glory” (113). He argues that dignity is not something that humans inherently possess, but instead is something that is conferred on us by the fact that we are loved. This love is not human love—which can decrease or ultimately cease—but God’s eternal, unchanging love. Likewise, freedom is not the ability to do what we like whenever we like, because not all of our momentary desires arise from our true selves. Rather, freedom is “the power to live as we were created to live and to be what we were meant to be” (183). Freedom has a goal beyond mere autonomy, and if freedom is not exercised toward that goal, it is not true freedom. Again: “Even if circumstances permit us to act for our self-realization, that is, to do what we want, we are not genuinely free in those acts unless we want the right thing. You cannot be free in willing evil because the desire for evil keeps us from realizing our true selves” (189).

    This is a powerful book, and it strikes at the heart of why the very thought of God in our modern world leaves so many people cold—even some people who believe in God. When I first started the book, I thought the central question Highfield was responding to—”Is God a threat to my happiness?”—was strange. Nobody really asks that question, do they? I still think that most people do not ask that question in so many words, but I do think that in many people there is a vague uneasiness that God might not want for me what I want for me. This is an excellent book for anyone who struggles with that kind of uneasiness.

    On the other hand, I think there is another issue in how our “me-centered” selves think about God that Highfield did not address. It is the sense that God is not “other” at all: he wants me to be happy the way I define “happy,” i.e., by giving me whatever my me-centered self wants. This book addresses well the concerns of those who might see an all-powerful God as a threat, but what about those who have such little awe for God that they have domesticated him? It isn’t fair for me to ask Highfield to address a different set of questions in an already strong book, but I do think that this would be fertile ground for a different book.

    Note: Thanks to InterVarsity Press for a review copy of this book.

    UPDATE: I noticed my friend James posted a review of this book the same day I posted this. Go on over to his blog and check it out.

  • Tell a Story that Captures Hearts: A Review

    Imagining the Kingdom is the second volume of a projected trilogy by James K.A. Smith called Cultural Liturgies. In the first book, Desiring the Kingdom (which I have not read, but Smith gets the reader up to speed in the early parts of this book), Smith argued that humans are primarily shaped more by the imagination than the intellect. It is the stories we inhabit, and not so much the arguments we believe, that give our lives purpose. In other words, “we don’t think our way through to action; much of our action is not the outcome of rational deliberation and conscious choice. Much of our action is not ‘pushed’ by ideas or conclusions; rather, it grows out of our character and is in a sense ‘pulled’ out of us by our attraction to a telos [end or goal].” We are shaped by the liturgies that tell attractive (not attractive in the sense of “pleasant,” but rather, “resonant”) stories and fuel our imaginations, whether those liturgies are secular or religious: “Through a vast repertoire of secular liturgies we are quietly assimilated to the earthly city of disordered loves…. So we toddle off to church or Bible study week after week … without realizing that we spend the rest of the week making bread for idols (Jer. 7:18).”

    In this book, Smith looks specifically at what that insight means for the practices of worship and Christian education. The book comes in two parts. In part 1, the theoretical part of the book, Smith walks the reader through expositions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu, asking what their theoretical models of how we are formed might mean for how we worship. In part 2, the practical part, Smith talks explicitly about how the theory discussed in part 1 reframes Christian formation and gives a fresh understanding of how worship works.

    Smith intentionally pitches this book to be accessible to both worship practitioners and the academy, meaning that one audience will think there are too many footnotes, and the other will think there are not enough.

    It is an enjoyable and thought-provoking (as well as, it is hoped, practice-provoking) read. Throughout, Smith attempts to practice what he preaches by telling his readers stories that enable them to imagine what he is talking about. One of my favorites comes early in the book, when he talks about the disconnect between thought and action he experienced when he was reading (and approving) the agrarian writer Wendell Berry while sitting in a Costco.

    But since the ultimate goal of the book is the renewal of practice, I was hoping for a bit more in part 2. How can this formation take place? What are some habits of worship that can be used to re-orient us? If we are shaped by stories, I wanted Smith to tell stories about how it has been done in a few communities. Smith points, for example, to the importance of the arts for the church, but by the end of the book I was not quite sure exactly what he meant: painting during a worship service? Liturgical dance? Preach stories instead of sermons? Although I deeply resonated with the argument of Imagining the Kingdom, I think there is a danger—like reading Wendell Berry in Costco—of reading, agreeing, and yet not having the map to get to the place Smith is pointing us to. Perhaps Smith plans on doing more of this in volume three.

    Note: Thanks to Baker Academic for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • Rodney Stark on “The People’s Religion”

    I’ve been reading Rodney Stark’s The Triumph of Christianity, and I’m struck by what he says about one of my major interests, Christian education, during the Reformation and post-Reformation:

     

    The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) noted that a preacher “may as well talk Arabic to a poor day-labourer as the notions” that the Anglican clergy preferred as the basis for their sermons. By the same token, Martin Luther’s efforts to provide religious education for the German peasants and urban lower classes failed so completely because the lessons were conceived by a university professor primarily far more concerned with intricate theological nuances than with basic themes….

    Luther’s error was not unique. All across Europe, the established churches failed to convert and arouse the “masses,” by failing to recognize that it was a job for preachers, not professors. But the clergy seemed unable to grasp the point that sophisticated sermons on the mysteries of the Trinity neither informed nor converted….

    As James Obelkevich explained, “what parishioners understood as Christianity was never preached from a pulpit or taught in Sunday school, and what they took from the clergy they took on their own terms…. Since the clergy were incapable of shaping a more popular version of the faith, villagers were left to do so themselves.”…

    Although the people’s religion did often call upon God, Jesus, Mary, and various saints, as well as upon some pagan gods and goddesses (and even more frequently invoked minor spirits such as fairies, elves, and demons), it did so only to invoke their aid, having little interest in matters such as the meaning of life or the basis for salvation. Instead, the emphasis was on pressing, tangible, and mundane matters such as health, fertility, weather, sex, and good crops. (265–66)

     

    In short: You have to meet people where they are if you want to hold their attention.

  • What’s Wrong with Capitalism? A Review

    The goal of the Church and Postmodern Culture Series is to examine some aspect of postmodern theory and determine what it might mean for the church. In this, the latest book in the series, theologian Daniel M. Bell, Jr. mines the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to see what they might be able to teach the church as it confronts capitalism.

    However, not all Christians believe the church ought to “confront” capitalism at all. Some Christians defend capitalism as beneficial to, or at least compatible with, Christianity. But as series editor James K. A. Smith writes in the foreword, “By locating the challenges for Christian discipleship in arcane cults or sexual temptation or the ‘secularizing’ forces of the Supreme Court, evangelicalism tends to miss the fact that the great tempter of our age is Walmart.” We are content to ask ourselves whether capitalism works, but Bell asks the question, “What work does it do?”

    When Bell criticizes capitalism, what he means by “capitalism” is not the free market, but the dominion of the market—the marketization of all of life. Bell does not propose socialism or communism or any other economic system as a viable alternative. Rather, he pits capitalism against what he calls “the divine economy.” He writes, “By setting Christianity against [capitalism] I am suggesting that the market should be neither total nor free. That is, it should not be the central institution in life and society, nor should its capitalist logic go unchecked. More specifically, I am suggesting that the market, and indeed the discipline of economics, should be subordinated to theological concerns.” The market economy, for Christians, should be subordinated to Christian virtues like generosity and justice.

    The main insight that Bell takes from Deleuze and Foucault is that capitalism is an economy of desire. That is, in spite of the claim that capitalism enhances freedom, it actually disciplines desire in a way that precedes and shapes what choices people are able to make.

    Bell’s alternative to capitalism is not a blueprint that he intends the world to follow; it is a call for Christians to act economically the way they say they believe. We were, Bell says, “created to desire God and live in communion with one another in God” rather than pursue individualistic self-interest, as capitalism instructs us to do. We were meant to find our rest in God, rather than experience a restless and unrelenting desire for more stuff. We were meant to serve the common good, because our neighbor has a claim on us; we are not limited to voluntary associations, as capitalism has taught us to believe. Bell claims that capitalism’s Christian defenders tend to have a distant God who is not active now in bringing about human sanctification. If God is not active, and we are left to shape life as we see fit, then all we can do is manage sin, and capitalism is superior to the economic alternatives. But even though the kingdom of God has not yet come in its fullness, God is active in bringing it about even now; and so an alternative to capitalism is possible.

    There is more food for thought in this book than can be contained in a short review. Even though it is challenging reading, particularly in the early chapters when Bell is discussing Deleuze and Foucault, it is rewarding. Bell does give examples of how the divine economy is being hinted at even now, such as L’Arche and the Catholic Worker movement, but I wish that he had made room to go into more detail and to tell more stories about how they challenge capitalism. I recommend it to any Christian who is interested in economics.

  • 10 Books I’d Like to Read in 2013

    Last year I wrote a post on 10 books I wanted to read in 2012. Of the nine that I listed (the tenth was a request for a recommendation), I read three: Pride and Prejudice, G. K. Chesterton’s Autobiography, and Political Visions and Illusions. Another, N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, I read about 300 pages of and decided to take a break.

    Even though I’m glad I read many of the books I ended up reading instead (like Unbroken, which I hadn’t even heard of at this time last year), I think the act of setting the goal was good. So here are 10 books I’d like to read in 2013:

    1. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I saw the musical and the movie this year, and enjoyed them both. And even though this book is well over 1,000 pages, I think reading it is an attainable goal. Especially since I’ve already read 600 pages so far.

    2. The Triumph of Christianity by Rodney Stark. This is another one that I started reading in 2012, and would like to finish. Stark is a bold historian and an entertaining writer.

    3. The Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard Hays. This was on the list last year, but I never got around to it. I can’t let this one go, though; I’m sure I’d love it if I got into it.

    4. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Another one from last year’s list. Whether I get to this one all depends on whether I can make it through Les Mis first.

    5. The City of God by Augustine of Hippo. Maybe I’m too ambitious with this one, but it’s a classic of theology and political philosophy and I’ve only read bits and pieces.

    6. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. A book on writing that everybody seems to recommend.

    7. The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith. A contrarian book on evangelical hermeneutics. Maybe I’m a nerd, but I can’t get enough of this kind of stuff.

    8. and 9. Center Church and Every Good Endeavor by Tim Keller. I enjoy Keller’s perspective on just about everything he has a perspective on, and he came out with two books in the last six months that both look fantastic.

    10. What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth by Wendell Berry. Part of my ongoing effort to make up for a serious lack of education in economics. And Berry, unlike most people who write on economics, is a wonderful writer.

    I’m sure I’ll end up reading some wonderful books this year that I have not yet heard of. My biggest challenge will probably be to resist the lure of reading free or cheap books (which some publishers are kind enough to offer me in exchange for a review) in favor of deliberately choosing books that will help me grow in important areas.

    What other books would you recommend I put on my list this year?

  • What’s Wise? A Review

    Andy Stanley writes books for two audiences: one is the audience that he speaks to when he preaches at North Point Community Church. The other is the audience that he speaks to when he goes onstage at leadership conferences like Catalyst. This book is for the first audience, not the second. If you enjoy his sermons, you’ll enjoy this book. If you prefer to hear him talk about leadership, you would do better to spend time with some of his other books.

    With that caveat out of the way, I’ll now review The Best Question Ever. Stanley keeps his readers on the hook until page 28 before he tells them what the title question is. The best question ever is, “What is the wise thing to do?” This is a revolutionary question, Stanley writes, because in our culture we are accustomed to ask different questions. These questions often take forms like “What can I get away with?” or “How close can I get to the line between right and wrong without going over?” The problem with asking these questions is that by the time we begin to ask them, it is often already too late to avoid the kinds of consequences we want to avoid. It is simply not possible to run at top speed toward the line between right and wrong and come to a full, instantaneous stop. Momentum carries us over, even if we might want to stop.

    After stating the question, and elaborating on how readers can apply the question to their unique makeup and life situation, Stanley goes on to apply the question to areas in which many people struggle to make good decisions: time, finances, and morality. Toward the end of the book he answers the question “What do I do when I don’t know the wise thing to do?” and encourages his readers to seek out wise counsel from other people.

    The concept of this book seems so simple and obvious that I felt silly just now writing a description of it, and I imagine perhaps Stanley felt a little silly sometimes writing it. But clearly there are a lot of people in the world who are making unwise decisions. We all know some of these people, and sometimes we see them when we look in the mirror. This book is so engagingly written that many readers will be able to blow through it quickly, but it will bear the most fruit if you internalize its message and truly begin to seek the way of wisdom.

    Note: Thanks to Waterbrook Multnomah for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

  • How Should Christians Engage with the Built Environment? A Review

    The year after I graduated from college, I lived in an apartment in the West End of Richmond, VA. There was a public library about a half mile away from my apartment. Occasionally I would walk to the library, but it was an unpleasant experience. In that half mile, I had to walk along two busy roads, neither of which had a sidewalk. Like many parts of cities that developed in the United States after World War II, the West End is primarily designed for automobiles, not pedestrians. “If you want to go to the library,” the city planner is telling you, “you’re supposed to use your car.” Even if the library is only a half mile away.

    Following my time in the pedestrian-unfriendly West End, I lived in three places that were much more pleasant to walk in: Prague, Czech Republic; Budapest, Hungary; and Vancouver, Canada. In the six years that I lived in those places, I did not have a car. I didn’t need one. With the help of public transit, I was able to go everywhere I wanted to go on foot.

    Being a Christian who recognized that my quality of life was affected by how different places I’ve lived were constructed, I was eager to read The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment by Eric O. Jacobsen. Jacobsen is a pastor who has done a lot of thinking about what human-made elements make a place pleasant or unpleasant to live in (you can read an interview with him about the book here). This is his second book on the subject, his first being Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith. Not having read the earlier book, I’m not competent to say how they differ. I can only say that this one is longer than Sidewalks in the Kingdom, and while it does talk about New Urbanism, that is not the primary subject. It seems broader in scope.

    Jacobsen sets out in this book to introduce the built environment to the Christian community, and to make the case that Christians ought to care about creating built environments that lead to human thriving. The book comes in three parts: The first part is Orientation, in which Jacobsen asks readers to think about who they are, and how they are situated in space and time. His primary audience is North American, and he gives a lot of history on how and why North America has been built in the way it has. The second part is Participation, in which Jacobsen asks readers to think about the different agents who enact community life in a particular place: families, political groups, and churches. The final part is Engagement, in which Jacobsen challenges his readers to ask hard questions about how their Christian faith ought to interact with the built environment, creating places that are sustainable and loved.

    This is a book both for those who already know and care about the built environment, and for those who have not thought about it much, but are curious. I fall into the latter camp, and over and over again I found that Jacobsen gave me language to name things that I already felt. I knew that certain built environments made me comfortable or uncomfortable, and now I know more why that is. It could be a challenging read at times, since a lot of the vocabulary was new, but it was worth the effort. Jacobsen’s chapter on sustainability was challenging in a different way; some of what he writes about human thriving, environmental stewardship, and justice will challenge assumptions held by some of his fellow Christians. That, in my opinion, is a good thing.

    For people in my generation, “The Space Between” is, first and foremost, a Dave Matthews Band song. But it is now also a welcome invitation for Christians to form convictions about how their faith should affect the built environment, and begin to act on those convictions. Not everyone will have the time or the ability to make large-scale changes in the places where they live—after all, the built environments we live in now have taken shape over generations, and sin is present with us even as we seek to build better places to live. But everyone can begin to make small changes that help to “seek the peace of the city” where God has placed them (Jer 29:7), as we ultimately look forward to the city “whose architect and builder is God” (Heb 11:10).

    Note: Thanks to Baker Academic for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.

    Publisher: Baker Academic
    Reading Length: 277 pages
    Rating: 4 stars

  • Yours Is the Day, Lord, Yours Is the Night: A Review

    I did not grow up in a church tradition that emphasized the praying of written prayers, but I have come to love them as an adult. I don’t use them as a replacement for my own spontaneous prayers, but as a way to “prime the pump,” giving me words to express what is in my heart.

    I was glad, then, to hear about Yours Is the Day, Lord, Yours Is the Night: A Morning and Evening Prayer Book by David and Jeanie Gushee. Before encountering the book I had already heard of David, who is a Christian ethicist. The book includes short morning and evening prayers for every day of the year, with each pair of prayers being for a particular date. The subjects of the prayers are also aligned with the seasons of the liturgical year, such as Advent, Lent and Easter. The prayers for those holidays that move around on the calendar are lined up with the days they will be observed in 2013; for example, the prayers for Easter are on March 31. In later years, readers will have to adjust a bit if they want to pray an Easter-themed prayer on Easter day. There is a handy chart that gives the dates for the next five years.

    The sources for the prayers are intentionally broad. They are from Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, men, women, and people from around the world. They range in time from the church fathers to the modern day; a few are from the Gushees themselves. Although they come from a variety of sources, they tend to be about the same length (50–150 words), thus making it easy for readers to create a rhythm of turning to these prayers for the same amount of time every day.

    I encountered this book just after I finished editing my own book of prayers for use in worship. From that experience, I would note that while this book is intended for devotional use, some of the prayers are also well-suited for a worship setting. The one thing I wish this book had is a ribbon for keeping your place as you go throughout the year.

    Publisher: Thomas Nelson
    Reading Length: 383 pages
    Rating: 4 stars

    Note: Thanks to Thomas Nelson for a review copy of this book.

  • The Anger Workbook: A Review

    When I was a kid, I had a bad temper. If things weren’t going the way I wanted them to, I would react by yelling and throwing things. Although I don’t yell and throw things much anymore, anger is still part of my life in more subtle ways when I see people acting unjustly or when I feel I have been personally wronged. I tend to be a rule follower, and it frequently bothers me when I see someone breaking (what I regard to be) “the rules” and not being held accountable.

    In The Anger Workbook, Drs. Les Carter and Frank Minirth have written a helpful guide for people who struggle to manage their anger. It is, as the title indicates, a workbook, which means it invites an active participation from the reader. On nearly every page, the authors ask questions and provide space for readers to write their responses. It comes in four parts: The first part is about identifying anger. In it, Carter and Minirth define anger as an intent to preserve personal worth, essential needs, or basic convictions (10). They make the case that anger has many manifestations. In other words, it isn’t just people who yell and throw things who might have a problem with anger. They argue that there are five ways to handle anger: Suppression, Open Aggression, Passive Aggression, Assertiveness, or Dropping It (26). They encourage their readers to avoid the first three, and choose which of the last two is most appropriate in the circumstances. In the second part, they argue that anger thrives on unmet needs. People tend to respond in anger, for example, when they feel unloved or controlled. In the third part, they explore how other emotions cause anger. The other emotions they look at are pride, fear, loneliness, and feelings of inferiority. They wrap up the book in the fourth part with three chapters: one for parents on dealing with anger in their children, one arguing that anger tends to linger when we rationalize it, and one encouraging readers to be accountable to others in their process of anger management.

    This is a helpful book for those who experience anger in any of its various manifestations, which is really all of us. Some people’s anger causes more problems than others, but I would go so far as to say that none of us is completely healthy in all the ways we express anger. We could all stand to grow in this area. One important thing to point out about this book is that Carter and Minirth write from a Christian perspective. Thus, this book will be most helpful to those readers who are Christians, or who are open to allowing the God Christians worship to help them express their anger appropriately and productively.

    Note: Thanks to Thomas Nelson for a review copy of this book.

    Publisher: Thomas Nelson
    Reading Length: 248 pages
    Rating: 4 stars