Category: Nonfiction Review

Beauty Will Save the World

Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

by Brian Zahnd

Charisma House, 2012. 234 pages.
Review written July 27, 2024, from my own copy.
Starred Review

In this book, Brian Zahnd makes the case that Christianity – as Jesus taught it and lived it – is inherently beautiful. Christianity as we practice it today, when we meld it with power and politics, not so much.

As I began reading, I glanced at the copyright page and realized he wrote this book before the age of Trump. I wondered if it would have changed if he wrote it today. Then today – the day I finished reading the book – Brian Zahnd posted this Tweet:

Christian

It was originally a mild derogatory term for the first followers of Jesus who sought to be Christlike.

Humble
Merciful
Gracious
Gentle
Forgiving
Compassionate

It had nothing to do with seeking political power.

It still has nothing to do with seeking political power.

So I don’t think the intervening years have changed the author’s perspective. I do think the message has become more important.

Here’s how he explains in the middle of the book that to follow Jesus, we shouldn’t be after the kind of power the world seeks:

Our first priority as the church is not to make all these things happen in the world through political action, but to be a prophetic witness to the hope of a world remade according to Christ. Every redemptive action – political and otherwise – must proceed from our faithful witness. In the midst of a hateful, violent, and idolatrous world, the church is to be an enclave of love, peace, and holiness. To be a faithful church, the church must be distinguished by holiness. Not holiness as puritanical moralism, but holiness as otherness – we are to be other to the values of this present darkness. Christian holiness is not based upon a certain set of rules but upon the fact that we are from another time. If we approach holiness as a legislative issue, we are prone to get it wrong. And even if we are not wrong in our judgment, we are likely to be ugly about it – haughty, condemning, and condescending. Holiness is not that. Holiness is not moralism. Holiness is not legalism. Holiness is not puritanical rule keeping. Holiness is otherness. Holiness is prophetic untimeliness. Holiness is the transcendent beauty that comes from belonging to the redemptive future. Holiness is a preview of the world to come. Holiness is a picture of the beauty that is to be. To live now according to the beauty that shall be because the future belongs to God is what the psalmist means when he calls upon us to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” We are holy when we are other. We are holy when we transcend the dominant paradigms of present corruption. We are holy when we are from the future.

He finishes up the book by going through each one of the Beatitudes, the heart of Jesus’ greatest sermon, which teaches the church how to be a shelter from the storm.

It is first of all vital we understand that the Beatitudes are not platitudes. They are not commonsense sayings. They are the very opposite. The Beatitudes are often paradoxes and deeply counterintuitive. The Beatitudes are subversive to the established order – they are the subversive values of the kingdom of God. The Beatitudes are the counterintuitive wisdom of God that turns the assumed values of a superpower culture on its head. The Beatitudes are the antithetical ethos to the superpower mantra of “we’re number one!” The Beatitudes are deliberately designed to shock us. If we’re not shocked by the Beatitudes, it’s only because we have tamed them with a patronizing sentimentality – and being sentimental about Jesus is the religious way of ignoring Jesus! Too often the Beatitudes are set aside into the category of “nice things that Jesus said that I don’t really understand.”

More about the Beatitudes as countercultural:

It’s also helpful to understand that the Beatitudes are not advice or instructions or qualifications. They are nothing like that. They are not dictates or laws; the Beatitudes are announcements. Jesus is proclaiming the arrival of the kingdom of God, and with the Beatitudes Jesus is announcing who it is who is going to be most blessed with its arrival. Jesus is telling us in whose ears the gospel of the kingdom is going to really sound like good news. It is an unsettling fact that the inauguration of the kingdom of God brings a radical change to the accepted order of how the world has always been run. The Beatitudes announce that change. This is why Jesus says things like, “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” It is at this point that those accustomed to confessing they are “number one” should squirm.

What Jesus is announcing in the Beatitudes is a radical reordering of assumed values; some will hear it as good news, while others will be threatened by it. Those for whom the long-established order has been advantageous – the winners in the game, the top dogs – are not really looking for things to change; they have a vested interest in the status quo. This is going to place Jesus at odds with the power brokers of the age – then and now. After all, it wasn’t the poor and marginalized who conspired to crucify Jesus; it was Caiaphas and Herod and Pilate – those who had a powerful stake in the present arrangement. But for the losers in the game – those scraping the bottom of life’s barrel, the marginalized and forgotten, the left out – what Jesus announces is indeed good news.

Reading this book gets me thinking about whether the way I live out my faith is beautiful or not.

brianzahnd.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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A Journey of Sea and Stone

How Holy Places Guide and Renew Us

by Tracy Balzer

Broadleaf Books, 2021. 228 pages.
Review written June 26, 2024, from my own copy purchased via Amazon.com
Starred Review

A Journey of Sea and Stone includes thoughts and meditations on spiritual direction – taken from the author’s experience guiding people on retreats on the Isle of Iona.

Now, I’ve been on Iona, and somehow when a friend proposed an exercise of visualizing where I want to be in ten years, I came up with the thought that future Sondy would be booking her annual personal spiritual retreat on the Isle of Iona. The spiritual retreat part being annual, the Isle of Iona part being special. I still hope it will happen – and meanwhile, this book let me do that in spirit, if not in person.

I read it slowly, a short section at a time. But it’s full of inspirational thoughts about sacred places and how the holy fits into our lives. Each chapter ends with Questions for Spiritual Direction. As an example, here are the questions at the end of the first chapter:

1. Where are the sacred places in your life? How have they changed you?

2. If you were to be honest with God about the deepest longings of your heart, what would they be? What is keeping you from admitting them?

3. When have you experienced kairos? Is there something in your life that creates an obstacle to kairos?

Even though it was a very different place than Iona, I took this book with me on my 60th birthday trip back to Germany and finished it there. I like the author’s way of raising thoughts and asking questions. She gets you thinking about how the holy touches your life.

tracybalzer.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Lamb of the Free

Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death

by Andrew Remington Rillera

Cascade Books, 2024. 325 pages.
Review written May 31, 2024, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com.
Starred Review

I purchased – and actually read – this book because of strong recommendations from progressive Christians I follow on Twitter. I was not sorry. This book is amazing, giving an in-depth look at the sacrificial system set up in the Torah and how those sacrifices are used to talk about Jesus in the New Testament. Along the way, we learn that there’s nothing in the sacrificial system that’s penal – about punishment – and nothing that’s substitutionary – about taking something in place of someone else so they don’t have to. No, we see that Jesus’s death is shown to be participatory – Jesus identified with humanity in our curse to the point of death, and now we participate with Jesus in his death and resurrection.

That’s all in there, and it’s amazing and good. But let me warn my readers: This is an academic book written for professional theologians. I very much want to see a layperson’s summary of this book written. In fact, I’d love to take that project on myself — if I were sure I understood this book well enough.

There are long footnotes on almost every page and Scripture references noted throughout the text. The arguments of other scholars are noted and referred to. (And I had purchased one of the books he refutes. That one is also academic, so now I can put it away without trying to slog through it. Whew!) But this is a good thing! Before a layperson’s summary can be written, this book is needed to establish the firm biblical foundation of these ideas.

So although it was hard to wade through, it made my heart happy as I read. Something Andrew Rillera made clear is that the Bible does not teach that God is mad at us and requires a horrible death before God could ever forgive us.

Now, I’m a person who since childhood has read through the Bible over and over again. And, well, I’ve memorized the entire New Testament, Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, and half of Jeremiah (a chapter at a time, anyway). But when I read through Leviticus, let’s just say that often my mind wanders. I’m very aware that there are many different kinds of sacrifices, offered in many different ways.

So I just loved that this author explained the different types of sacrifices, how they relate to Jesus, and how New Testament writers apply them to Jesus. Although I’d still like a chart of the types of sacrifices, next time I read Leviticus, I’m going to have a better understanding of what I’m reading and how the various sacrifices are distinguished between one another.

Let me just give some things that struck me:

The sacrifices were not about death.

Although this one is hard for me to explain, the author’s pages of explanation show that sacrifice is about accessing the offering’s life, found in the blood.

The sacrifices were not about suffering.

The offering was to be killed quickly and humanely. And this is interesting:

This is significant because we can now see that when it comes to sacrificial understandings of Jesus’s death in the NT, these never occur in the context of Jesus’s sufferings and passion. Put another way: when Jesus’s sufferings and/or death qua death are the topic, then sacrificial metaphors are avoided.

Sacrifices were often about ritual purification. And often about remembrance. Or establishing a covenant. (I’d like to see a great big chart, honestly. But it’s all detailed here.)

Something I did grasp is that there were two types of sacrifices: Atoning and non-atoning sacrifices. The person offering the sacrifice never eats of an atoning sacrifice.

So when Jesus established the Lord’s Supper, he was relating his death to non-atoning sacrifices — the well-being sacrifices and the covenant-establishment sacrifices of the Passover. They are about remembering and about participating in.

But he also makes the point that some offenses were never intended to be dealt with by the sacrificial system.

Forgiveness has always been wider and deeper than the sacrificial system. God’s forgiveness was always available via extra-sacrificial means (e.g., Pss 32; 51; 103; Isa 38:17), so the prophets are confident that God will have mercy and forgive Israel and restore them just because that is the kind of God that God is and this is the kind of thing God can do (e.g., Isa 43:25; 44:22; 55:7; Jer 50:20; Mic 7:18-19; Hos 14:2-7; cf. Zeph 3:15).

I also love the part where the author explains the way the Romans used altars commemorating a conqueror’s mercy – “votive gifts” – and how that gives us insight into what Paul is saying in Romans 5 through 8.

Paul is essentially saying:

Look at Jesus! God is not your enemy! You are the ones at enmity with God. God is justifying you even though you are ungodly. God has put forth Jesus as a conciliatory votive gift of peace and reconciliation to demonstrate this. Be reconciled to God! God loves you! If God did not spare God’s own Son, then nothing can separate you from the love of God revealed and manifested in Jesus Christ. Jesus eternally stands in the presence of God (like votive gifts stand in temples) interceding for us all.

That’s all a really poor summary of what’s going on in this book. If you can handle academic writing at all, and to anyone who’s ever been to seminary, I highly, highly recommend this book. Of course, he goes into great detail about every type of sacrifice in the Torah and every mention of Jesus associated with sacrifice in the New Testament. Hebrews and 1 John do associate Jesus with atoning sacrifices, and do not mention the Lord’s Supper, and he looks at the implications of that, while also paying close attention to the more frequent mentions relating to non-atoning sacrifices.

Here’s a paragraph from the Introduction that helps us see where the book is going:

Jesus’s death is a participatory phenomenon; it is something all are called to share in experientially. The logic is not: Jesus died so we don’t have to. Rather it is: Jesus died so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him, having full fellowship with his sufferings so that we might share in the likeness of his resurrection (e.g., Phil 3:10-11; Gal 2:20; 6:14; Rom 6:3-8; 1 Pet 2:21; Mark 8:34-35 with 10:38-39; 1 John 2:6; 3:16-18; etc.).

And here are some paragraphs from the end, summing up the journey he’s led us on:

Therefore, understanding the concepts of sacrifice and kipper properly is part of understanding the story of salvation the NT is telling. For instance, if we think sacrifice is all about punishment and retributive justice, then we will fundamentally misconstrue the sacrificial images applied to Jesus. This means we will misconstrue what “salvation” and “justice” mean because these terms will be informed and defined by alternative stories and frameworks. But getting the concepts and story right are crucial, not only for an individual Christian’s formation, but also our collective formation as part of a common and shared tapestry faithfully witnessing to the salvation of God in Jesus Christ as his body, the church….

So when we get the sacrificial concepts right by understanding the larger story of which they are a part, then we can find our place within that story, and as Paul says, become sharers and partakers of the body and blood of Jesus (1 Cor 10:16-17). And by so doing we become a living well-being sacrifice ourselves (Rom 12:1), narrating the death of Jesus in our bodies for the life and reconciliation of the world (2 Cor 4:10-12; 5:14-21).

So, let me challenge you. If you’re up for a deep dive into the details of the sacrificial system and what Jesus’s death means — you will be richly rewarded. I admit it will take some work and thought, but will yield a beautiful result.

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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The Book of Psalms

A Translation with Commentary

by Robert Alter

W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. 516 pages.
Review written November 8, 2021, from my own copy
Starred Review

I purchased this translation of Psalms after reading Robert Alter’s Notes on Biblical Translation, because I’m attempting to write my own book about Psalms.

This translation isn’t going after easy English reading. He’s going after the closest English version of what’s in the Hebrew text. The notes tell you about the many places where the actual Hebrew original isn’t clear, or where decisions had to be made about translating.

I don’t recommend this for casual inspirational reading of Psalms. But for those who want to study Scripture, there’s a wealth of material here to increase your understanding of what the Psalms contained in the original language.

I went through the book one Psalm at a time, reading the Psalm translation through, then reading through with the notes. There are extensive notes on each Psalm.

This book broadened my understanding of what we know about the original text of Psalms. Reading a new translation added beauty and insight to my experience of Psalms.

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!

Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs & In-Betweens

by Kate Bowler

Convergent, 2024. 204 pages.
Review written May 22, 2024, from my own copy purchased via Amazon.com
Starred Review

The title of this book perfectly encapsulates what’s so helpful about Kate Bowler’s writing. She is able to wish you a good day and uplift you, even while acknowledging that terrible things happen.

The content of the book is very like The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days (with Jessica Ritchie). It’s a little bit oversized, and each day’s meditation takes up a spread. On the left half of the spread, we’ve got a Bible verse on the side and some thoughts about the situation where you might find yourself. On the right side, there’s a prayer for when you’re in that situation, followed by a short reflection prompt.

As an example, here’s the text on the left side of the first meditation, “when everything is out of control”:

There is something people say when you are in a lot of pain or trouble or life is out of control. They say: “All you can control is your reaction.” And, sure, that’s often good advice. We can try to reduce the scale of our problem-solving to a small, manageable step. But I don’t want you to have to skip that first true thing you are allowed to say: “I have lost control. This is happening to me.” This blessing is for when you need to say, “God, this is out of control. People keep telling me that I have control over this, but I really don’t. I need help.” Read or pray this meditation aloud if you need some divine rescue plan and some acknowledgment of that reality.

And the prayer on the facing page finishes up like this:

You are there, somewhere out there,
though I can hardly feel it.
Send an angel, send a fleet, send them now.

Like the other book, I found the meditations in this book encouraging and uplifting. They gave me words to pray that I might not have thought of on my own, but that did help bring me near to God and remember that God is listening.

This book has a section for Lent and a section for Advent, but the funny thing about that is that they miss a whole week of Lent! The 40 days of Lent on the calendar do not count Sundays. If you check a calendar, there are not a simple six weeks to Lent, because it starts on Wednesday and ends on Easter Sunday. There are, in fact, six Sundays during Lent — but that does not count Easter Sunday. The sixth Sunday of Lent is Palm Sunday. In this book, Palm Sunday is listed as the fifth Sunday of Lent, which doesn’t fit the calendar. I went back and checked — she only has 35 meditations during Lent, plus four Sundays set aside for rest. Missing the last week.

However, I just went back and did one of the earlier weeks during that week. The book is still a wonderful book of prayers, but that was a funny little glitch that the mathematician in me can’t bear to not point out. (Sorry!)

All that said, I love the way Kate Bowler models turning to God when things are difficult. Going through one of these prayers each day makes a wonderful morning routine.

katebowler.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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