It’s been a while (too long, too long!) since I’ve posted over here at Evangel, having been busy slavishly beating the publicity drums for my own contribution to the evangelical world.  But after I put these original reflections together, I realized that they might find an audience here that would be interested enough to challenge me, and hopefully to take them further.

With that in mind, then, I offer the following reflections  on evangelicals and adoption.

1)  The conference was deeply theological, which was a good thing.  Yet the main stage speakers focused almost exclusively on the motivations for adoption and orphan care, rather than the shape of adoption or orphan care.  While the breakouts were primarily practical, the divide gave off the implicit feeling that theology ends precisely where reflection about what adoption should actually look like in practice begins.

But the Gospel does not simply provide us the proper set of motivations to do what everyone else in the world does.  Instead, it provides us unique insight into the structure of morality (Christ is our wisdom), such that we can open up new possibilities for action rather than staying within the framework provided to us by the world around us.  The Gospel is not only an internal reality that helps us to get our hearts in the “right place” with respect to adoption.  It is an external reality that should help us discern who we adopt and how we go about it.

In other words, I would have loved to have seen some theological ethics with respect to adoption being worked out.  A lot of people are very passionate about adoption, and that’s great.  But not all attempts at helping those in poverty actually succeed, and it is the task of theological ethics to help those who are considering adoption discern how their proper motivations should take shape in the world.  Some people will (rightly) say “no” to adoption,  and theological ethics will help those in the adoption movement counsel those couples and churches wrestling with the practical dimensions more effectively.

2)  It is a perennial temptation, I think, to frame the doctrine of adoption as a fundamentally individualistic doctrine (as opposed to a doctrine about individuals).  In adoption, God saves us as individual persons.  But he saves us within a web of relationships with others, with the world, and even with myself.  Like it or not, that web that simply does not go away at the moment of adoption (which is why, I think, in Romans 8 our adoption is framed as the final redemption of our bodies).  Consequently, the line between the “old man” and the “new man” is a lot more blurry than we might like.  We are never autonomous, never free-floating about the relationships that defined us (even when we deny them in order to follow Jesus).

In other words, orphans are not autonomous individuals, or atoms that have somehow achieved social isolation.  They still exist within a social network, even though their birth parents are no longer around.  In fact, the orphan is defined not by social isolation but by that absence, an absence that new parents simply will not fill in the same way.  A new spouse may stand in the same relationship as the first, but as long as the person is different than some absence will be noticeable.

In that sense, then, I worry our language about adoption is too individualistic, that we are not attuned to the fact that adopting the person means bringing that web of relations into our home.  The closest someone got to acknowledging this on the main stage was Bryan Lorrits, whose excellent talk highlighted the fact that adoption doesn’t make a black child any less black.  And the unique set of social relations that come with that simply do not go away.

3)  Proclaiming adoption as a doctrine is insufficient without its corollary:  a theological account of the nature of childhood.  What is the life we are adopting people into?  What is the good news we have to show children?  Is it simply better material comforts, better educational possibilities, the safety of living in a stable society?  If it’s hearing the good news about Jesus, what difference does that make to children as children?  A deeper and more comprehensive understanding of what childhood is will also help us understand what is uniquely destructive about orphanhood.  I would love to see the adoption movement (and evangelicals generally) spend more of their time reflecting about this.

This request for addition, I’d point out, is similar to the first one that I raised.  It is one thing to say that the Gospel grounds our adoption, while it is another thing to say what those Gospel-shaped adoptions actually look like.  Similarly, it is one thing to say that our adoption makes outsiders our own children, but another to say what the life of the child that they have now received looks like.  While there was a strong emphasis on parenting, we should also reflect about what sorts of things parents are raising.

4)  Adoption is one (important) strand of orphan care, but is not the whole of it.  And the emphasis on adoption as a means of caring for the child should not preclude our concern for children in impoverished areas and our efforts to correct the causes of poverty and adoption.  I didn’t make it to the (few) breakout sessions where economics were substantively addressed, but it would have been good to see some of those concerns more fully treated from the main stage as well.

Obviously, the conference primarily draws people interested in adoption (though the theme was care for orphans this year).  But even there, the economic aspects of adoption should play into our decisions about who to adopt and where we adopt from.  It may be better, for instance, in some emerging economies to not adopt children out of them, but to find better indigenous solutions to the problem.  Taking into account the economic dimension of adoption is incumbent on those who want to do all we can to ensure our helping doesn’t hurt.

5)  Related to that, I think while it is more difficult to think through the systemic causes of where orphans come from, the adoption movement doesn’t help foster such thought.  Most of the banners for the organizations represented, for instance, had faces of individual children or pairs of children.  We don’t see the system:  we see the face, and as such it is easier to think of adopting a child as a solution than addressing the problems in the social network that caused that child to be orphaned.

Which is why we should make sure our presentation on adoption is accurate:  it’s not a solution per se to orphanhood, even if it is a means of caring for a child and bearing witness to the reality of the Gospel.  We can still bear witness to the Gospel in working with orphans, but such care may not take the shape of international adoption.

Did you go to the conference?  Where are the above thoughts wrong?

Note:  An earlier version of this was originally posted at Mere Orthodoxy.  The above is slightly modified from that one. 

It’s a fair question.   I suspect that you can draw a line between more traditional evangelicals and the so called “young evangelicals” based on how they want to read Genesis.  And if I may unfairly stereotype for a moment, both sides of the movement tend to emphasize their preferred aspects of the book.

So on the one hand, old-school evangelicals discover both sanction for traditional sexual arrangements therein and that making the text compatible with evolution is extremely tricky, if not impossible.  On the other hand, the younger set takes their sexual cues from the resurrection (preferring not to think about the so-called “order of creation”) while using Genesis to highlight their culture-making activities and their environmental concerns.*

Of course, each side might want to claim elements of the other side for their own.  The above is simply what both sets tend to emphasize in their interpretations of the book.

I’d like to suggest–in strictly tentative fashion as a hypothesis that I am amusing myself with these days–that as important as each of those questions are, none of them should be the starting point for our doctrine of creation.  Prior to the question of how the world comes into being is a question of the nature of being itself.  Which is to say, metaphysics, which evangelicals seem particularly averse to.  In the order of questions, how the world came into being, or whether the world is good, or what responsibilities we have toward the world are all derivative upon the questions of what the world is and how it is to be understood in reference to the Creator.

In that sense, the doctrine of creation must be a doctrine. It must be explicitly theological.  And so our knowledge of creation cannot be separated from our knowledge of the creator, for what does it mean to know creation as creation if we do not understand its relationship to its Maker?  ”We believe in God, the maker of heaven and earth.”  It is a reality that we must confess, but it is a reality about God and his relationship to creation, not the means by which he created the creation.  While that can be read to provide cover for theological evolutionists (of which I am not one), my point is simply that our problems in the doctrine of creation might be further upstream than we imagine.

Here, then, is the second part of my hypothesis:  the evangelical focus on certain aspects of Genesis have to do with our sense that the Resurrection breaks with the created order, rather than re-establishes it. As Oliver O’Donovan has put it, “New creation is creation renewed, a restoration and enhancement, not an abolition…God has announced his kingdom in a Second Adam, and “Adam” means “Human.”

If we thought that, then we may be able to fit creation as a doctrine more easily into our theological systems, rather than reducing it to the relationship between science and the Bible or us and the environment.

In short, our doctrine of creation is simply too small.  We need to move back beyond the first pages of Genesis to the reality of God Himself, a God who brings being out of non-being (a metaphysical claim if I’ve ever heard one!).  Only when we know him will we understand the creation which he has fashioned.

*As a side note, I’m not sure how many people noticed in Andy Crouch’s excellent book how he integrates the family into culture, but it’s probably the most interesting aspect of his book that was maybe the least talked about.

Addendum: Did I mention that these are hypotheses?  I’m no expert in these matters, so if you want a full treatment on the topic, I suggest reading this.  And if you want the cliff’s notes version to that, check out here.

Specifically, I was pleased to see him affirm my point that the legal affects the culture in addition to reflecting it, a point often lost on my peers. One of my favorite moments is when he turns the civil rights narrative on his opponents to prove the point:

Second, I think that most of Greenwald’s examples of cultural norms that aren’t legally enforced actually tend to back up my belief that law and culture are inextricably bound up, rather than his case that they needn’t be. A stigma on racism, for instance, would hopefully exist even in a libertarian paradise, but it draws a great deal of its potency from the fact the American government has spent the last 40 years actively campaigning against racist conduct and racist thought, using every means at its disposal short of banning speech outright. The state forbids people from discriminating based on race in their private business dealings. It forbids them from instituting policies that have a “disparate impact” on racial minorities. It allows and encourages reverse discrimination in various settings, the better to remedy racism’s earlier effects. It promulgates public school curricula that paint racism as the original sin of the United States. It has even created a special legal category that punishes crimes committed with racist intentions more severely than identical crimes committed with non-racial motivations. In these and other arenas, there isn’t a bright line between the legal campaign against racism and the cultural stigma attached to racist beliefs; indeed, there isn’t a line at all.

Douthat suggests that as gay marriage is legalized, the stigma against those who have old-fashioned views of marriage will increase and the line between culture and law will continue to blur. That’s near the center of the social conservative anxiety over gay marriage, despite the Constitutional protections that are in place to preserve the “freedom of religion.” Like freedom of speech, the ability to practice our religion doesn’t seem to be absolute when the “harm” of other individuals is in question.

But the heart of Douthat’s case—so far—is his description of heterosexual relationships as “thick,” which I joked over at Mere Orthodoxy is a term philosophers use when they have nothing else to say. The argument is that the gender differences and procreative impulses add an additional layer of complexity to heterosexual relationships that distinguishes them from homosexual relationships, which inevitably have to be characterized by “love and commitment”—and nothing more.

On this account, the slippery-slope argument isn’t a social argument, but what I would call an “in-principle” argument. There is nothing that stops the “logic of gay marriage [from being] extended to encompass all kinds of relationships that we definitely don’t want to call marriages.”

That’s a more interesting way of framing the debate over marriage, in that it refuses to bow to the pressure to identify a single good as determinative of heterosexual relationships and instead identifies a inextricably linked cluster of attributes that demarcates them as unique.

But in terms of the state’s interest, Douthat seems to come down where social conservatives always have: procreation.

And the fact that this interplay determines how and when and whether the vast majority of new human beings come into the world is what makes it possible to argue — not necessarily convincingly, but at least plausibly! — that both state and society have a stronger interest in the mating rituals of heterosexuals than in those of gays and lesbians.

There’s a key point lurking here which he doesn’t make, but is worth teasing out: the complex relationship of procreation, gender differences, and reproductive impulses that is heterosexual marriage exists “pre-politically.” It is a relationship that only needs a man and a woman to exist, without any need for the surrounding society or its institutions, even while they might be interested in it.

The same, I suggest, cannot be said for gay marriage. It’s tempting to respond to Douthat by suggesting that the possibility of gay adoption resolves the “thickness” objection by introducing children into the equation. But that ignores the structural difference between gay unions and heterosexual unions. The former necessarily depend upon some third party for the introduction of children, either through adoption, artificial insemination, or some other method. They cannot be a child-bearing couple, and to be a child-rearing couple they have to get someone from outside the relationship involved. So while the adoption of children may make gay unions more “complex,” and hence more similar to heterosexual unions on that score alone, it is a complexity that is not intrinsic to the relationship itself, but that lives between the gay couple and the world.

There is, though, a corollary to this: gay families demand a higher level of social involvement than heterosexual unions, and by extension, political involvement. Within a legal order, adoptive parents are parents by virtue of the state’s recognition of them as such, rather than because they were the procreators of the child and hence naturally responsible for its well-being. Their obligations to their children exist by choice, a choice that exists within the structure of the state and its guidelines. In that sense, same-sex marriage necessarily depends upon the state to support and buttress homosexual couples in their pursuit of having children.

But let’s take another step back. Abortion proponents have suggested that the state’s interest in children is only in their rearing, and not in the fact that they are conceived. In that sense, the predominate position on the question is one of choice—”children” become the sort of things that are valid only when chosen, rather than having their own value by virtue of the fact that a mother conceived them. What constitutes the relationship between parent and child is not the biological fact that they are his progenitors, but the commitment, love, and acceptance that is expressed in the decision by the parents to keep the child.

Because the state (at a federal level) seems to have adopted this view of children and procreation (as measured primarily by Roe), the argument that procreation is enough to justify the state’s exclusive interest in heterosexual marriages has little weight. It certainly has little cultural weight, where the notion that children are chosen is so deeply ingrained that people thought Juno was a pro-life film. For our society, the state’s interest is in relationships that choose children, heterosexual or otherwise, not those that have or can have them. Hence, we have no ground to stand on to distinguish between heterosexual couples that have children naturally and homosexual couples that adopt them.

In that sense, it’s hard to separate the logic of the pro-choice crowd from the pro-gay-marriage crowd. Their view of children is fundamentally the same. What this means for those who want to be pro-life and pro-gay-marriage (even politically) I’m still working out. But I suspect there’s a deep dissonance at some level that inevitably leads to the downplaying of pro-life commitments.

To return to Douthat, though, I’ll simply note that the one thing he hasn’t yet clarified is his claim that the death of the marriage ideal might make the legal recognition of homosexual marriages “morally necessary.” Perhaps I’m pushing the worry too far, but it seems like the state has moral obligations not only to protect the rights of the people it governs, but to protect only those rights that the people actually have.

If heterosexual marriage is a different sort of thing than homosexual unions—as Ross has persistently and elegantly argued—then I’m curious to hear what legal and moral deliberation leads him to the surprising conclusion that those differences should not just be ignored by the law, but that the law would eventually be wrong to ignore them.

Cross-posted at Mere Orthodoxy.

Let’s review his conclusion:

After reviewing some of the key historical, biblical, and theological considerations that have been a part of the moral discussion of cremation within the Judeo-Christian tradition, ultimately the practice must be viewed as an adiaphora issue [i.e. an issue that Scripture is indifferent on]. This being said, however, it seems legitimate to draw the following three conclusions. First, church history witnesses considerable opposition toward cremation with the normative practice of the church being burial. Second, while Scripture is silent on the specifics of how to treat the deceased, both the example of biblical characters and the general trajectory of related passages seem to be in a pro-burial direction.Third, the body is theologically significant; thus, both the act of and the imagery conveyed by the treatment of the deceased ought to be weighed carefully. (emphasis mine)

At first glance, it’s a judicious conclusion.  It does allow for freedom in the individual believer’s decisions, while still preserving a place for Scripture as counsel.

But the structure of has troubled me throughout the long (and excellent!) conversation we’ve had on the matter below.

Jones seems to suggest that it’s ultimately an adiaphora issue because there is no clear prohibition against the practice within the pages of Scripture.  Fair enough.  But what of slavery, where there is also no clear prohibition in Scripture?

Let’s rewrite the second of his mitigating points.

“Second, while Scripture is silent on the specifics of [whether to abolish slavery], both the example of biblical characters and the general trajectory of related passages seem to be in a [pro-abolition direction].”

This is the exact argument that is often made to suggest that slavery is, in fact, not a “Biblical” practice.  The anthropology of Scripture undermines the institution, and any consistently Christian society or individual would work for abolition.  Or so the argument goes.

If that argument is correct–and like a lot of folks, I think it is–then it’s hard to see how the Bible is indifferent toward slavery as an institution or a practice.  There’s a moral judgment against it that is biblical, even if Scripture doesn’t explicitly prohibit it.

There are, of course, relevant differences between slavery and cremation, the most significant of which is that the one treats humans who are alive, and the other treats humans who are deceased.  My point here is also not about the morality of cremation (or slavery) per se. That conversation is still going on of at my other internet home, and there’s no reason to repeat that all here.

Instead, I want to know (and this is a real question):  If we adopt Jones’ conclusion that cremation is an adiaphora issue, despite the pro-burial trajectory within Scripture, must we also say the same thing of slavery?

And McDermott makes this seem easy.

The Great Theologians introduces a rather diverse crew of theologians, from controversial but invaluable Origen, to the monumental Karl Barth.  The selection alone might be enough to raise eyebrows in some quarters:  can we really learn anything from Friedrich Schleiermacher?McDermott answers with a cautious “yes,” patiently discerning the shape of their central ideas while pointing out minefields as they arise.

It would be easy in adopting McDermott’s format–a highly organized structure that is repeated in every chapter–to view the theologians as titans whose work was independent of the others and whose thought is isolated from the broader stream of church history.  But McDermott will have none of that.  He repeatedly locates the contributions of later authors in the context of their predecessors, creating a chorus of voices that offer distinct contributions, even where there is significant disagreement.

As you might expect in a book like this, McDermott’s own theological inclinations peak through.  He seems to be, for instance, excited about deification as a theological concept in a way that I am not (and in a way that will make many evangelicals skittish).  But such are the sorts of issues and conversations that arise when you begin discussing Athanasius and Augustine:  that they bear witness to the truth of the Gospel in a way that tills the ground for “deification” means we should listen carefully before rejecting it.

But as an introduction to the Great Tradition, the sort of thinkers who (in all cases except perhaps Schleiermacher) adhere to the sort of “mere orthodoxy” we are fans of around here, The Great Theologians is the best of its kind.  For those who are attracted by Jim Belcher’s notion of “deep church” and the “deep tradition” that accompanies it, McDermott’s book is the logical starting point.

But it must–as McDermott knows and tells us–serve as a starting point.  As he puts so well in his final paragraph, “We should not only readabout the great theologians, but the actual writings of these thinkers.”  McDermott’s book will whet your appetite for them–it will be up to you to find satisfaction.

Cross posted at Mere Orthodoxy, which you should also be reading. This copy was graciously provided to me for review by the kind folks at IVP.

As an undergrad, she was drawn to his vision of a Christianity, which fuses intellectual robustness with piety and a lively imagination.  She found in him a subtle challenge to the dominant regime of physicalism, a challenge made all the more attractive because it did not slip into the morass of relativism.

In short, Van Leeuwen was–and is–a fan.

Intellectual biography, yes.  But it is pertinent, as Van Leeuwen uses it to frame her new book A Sword Between the Sexes, in which she explores Lewis’s most contested area of thought:  his views on gender.  Van Leeuwen positions herself as an insider, someone who understands Lewis’s appeal and appreciates it, yet has significant reservations about his approach to femininity and masculinity.

First, the textual analysis.  Van Leeuwen contends that over the course of Lewis’ life, the “stereotypical masculinity and femininity” that we see in That Hideous Strength (and it’s corresponding suspicion of the social sciences) receded to the background and was replaced by a more egalitarian understanding of the sexes.  By the end of his life, he is able to write of his wife Joy:

A good wife contains so many persons in herself.  What was [Joy] not to me?  She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding these all in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow soldeir.  My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have had good ones) has ever been to me.  Solomon calls his bride Sister.  Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt almost inclined to call her Brother?

Gone is the essentializing of femininity, and absent is any hint of hierarchy.

Van Leeuwen quickly moves beyond, and behind, these texts to the sources that shaped Lewis’s thought, and the world that he inhabited.  Here she contends that Lewis was a “better man than his theories,” that his relationships with real women were quite collegial–even while he had “misogynistic tendencies” in his writings.   And she carefully and sympathetically articulates the Edwardian periods view of gender, and how Lewis actually liberalizes that tendency.

But she doesn’t stop there:  she also examines briefly the effect of Lewis’s work on our own time, highlighting the complementarianism/egalitarianism debate that has caught up evangelicalism the past decade and locating Lewis’ view within its context.  It’s worth pointing out that Van Leeuwen’s move here is anachronistic, and not free of difficulty.  It depends upon an explicit linking of Trinitarian theology with gender relations, a link that she never demonstrates Lewis to have made (and which there might be good reason to reject).

Which leads me to my other worry with Van Leeuwen’s book:  as I was reading I had a nagging feeling that I was in the situation of Mitya’s defense attorney in The Brother’s Karamazov:  ”the overwhelming weight of the facts is against the defendant and yet at the same time not one of those facts will withstand criticism if it is examined in isolation, on its own.”

Even the above excerpt from A Grief Observed, as compelling as it is, fails to deliver a knockout blow.  There is a sense in which any self-respecting patriarchalist who allows plenty of room for the erotic expression understands the mutual equality that giving and receiving implies (see JP2 for more on this).  What Lewis expressed in poetic terms fits uneasily with patriarchy, but doesn’t eliminate it.  While Van Leeuwen makes her case carefully, it seems to be missing that onelinchpin that would put the matter to rest, an outright and explicit repudiation by Lewis of his early views on gender.

But the criticism made, allow me to return to praise.  Van Leeuwen’s book is a provocative and thorough study of both Lewis the author and Lewis the man.  While I suspect it won’t prompt anyone in contemporary discussions to change their position, it should be read and considered carefully, for it serves an invaluable purpose:  returning us to the man and his works to read them again with fresh eyes, new questions, and an openness to the possibility that one of the patron saints of evangelical complementarians may not be one at all.

My thanks to the good folks at Baker for providing me a copy for review, and my apologies to the good folks at Baker for taking so long to get it up.  Also, cross-posted at Mere Orthodoxy.

But not for why you think.

No.  I shuddered because the news meant another round of conversations about evangelicals and homosexuality.  And that is a conversation which is fraught with danger.

There will be the obligatory (and alas,  necessary) posts about how evangelicals have failed to respect and act toward the gay community.  There will be questions and discussion on the proper pastoral response to gay Christians, and even about whether that modifier establishes an oxymoron.  And there will be attempts to walk that disappearing line between demonstrate grace toward those who need it without abdicating on the question of whether homosexuality is, in fact, licit.

In all this, Jennifer Knapp–the singer and songwriter–will likely be forgotten.  Her status as a person, a person with sinful inclinations that obscure the radiant, recalcitrant image of God, will be pushed to the background as we focus on the only salient fact for us:  that instead of simply being a minor Christian celebrity, she’s now a gay minor Christian celebrity.

Jennifer Knapp, object lesson.   For whatever we want to say.  Objectification happens in many forms–and turning someone into a flash card for our broader spiritual lessons is only one of them.

Of course, such objectification is probably inevitable.  After all, Jennifer Knapp isn’t in your church.  I’m going to guess she’s not reading our blogs.  And she’s probably not your friend.  She exists for most of us only as an icon of that funny phenomenon we call “Christian culture.”  And so because she has lent herself and her music–as all successful musicians must–to the objectifying press-machine that is Nashville, it’s tempting to say that she deserves whatever  she gets.

But that doesn’t mean it’s good, or that it justifies our own objectification of her.  Especially when in every interview I’ve read, she’s expressed reluctance and dismay that her sexuality will be used as a political football.  And she seems, if nothing else, to be properly respectful of her differences with the Christian community.  In other words, she seems to be want to left alone, even if her status as minor gay Christian celebrity doesn’t allow it.

And so maybe, just maybe, we should respect her subjectivity, not turn her into an object lesson, and move on.

This isn’t an appeal to ignore the questions of the relationship between homosexuality and Christianity.  Far from it.  Anyone who has read my work the last few years knows that I have not shied away from articulating my own views on the subject, and have always sought to do so graciously, patiently, and faithfully.

But the first step toward a good dialogue is recognizing that there’s a real person, with a real will, a real mind, and real problems at the other end of the line.   And in this case, from what I can tell, Jennifer Knapp the real person would rather not be in the thick of things.  I simply think respecting that would be a good start to whatever happens next.

Postscript:  I realize the many levels of irony that could be directed at this post.  I’m using her to make my own object lesson.  I’m contributing to a conversation that I’m afraid we can’t handle.  I’m responding to Knapp’s interview by suggesting that the proper response is to say nothing about Knapp. Well and good.  Right now, I have nothing to say to those other than that I think the point still has merit, and am open to be persuaded otherwise.

First, I subject our overlord Joe Carter (who is ultimately to blame for bringing together this rag-tag band of miscreants) to rigorous examination regarding his book, How to Argue like Jesus.

It’s a provocative name, and appropriately misleading.   It’s just cheeky enough to get people to read the first chapter, where Joe and John Coleman begin their systematic rehabilitation of Christian argumentation and persuasion.

Second, our own John Mark Reynolds has joined with Phillip Johnson to pen the latest critique against The New Atheists in Against all Gods, which you should pre-order.   I haven’t read it yet, but this review makes me think that it’s going to be a fair and candid contribution to the ongoing conversation about religion’s role in the culture and university.

Michael has been in the Christian blogging community for a long time, and it’s no lie to say that his voice and witness are irreplaceable.   He will be missed.

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.

I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

But I don’t quite know why I’m so excited by his decision.  After all, eight months is a relatively short amount of time, and I don’t know Piper at all.

But I suspect there’s a lesson here that all evangelical pastors and their churches need to pay attention to.  And I hope that Piper’s influence can help them learn it.

Growing up within evangelicalism, I saw almost no emphasis on sabbatical periods for pastors, especially in those evangelical communities that have under 200 members and a small support staff.  For them, sabbaticals require a greater level of sacrifice by the whole church community, as most pastors fill roles well beyond the pulpit.

But preaching the word of God every week, even when not writing a book a year, is (I have observed) incredibly difficult work and frequently spiritually draining.   While Piper cites a growing pride, I suspect that many pastors who have labored long and hard have a sense of numbness to the power of the Word of God and its ability to transform their own lives.

I don’t know what kind of Biblical warrant there is for this sort of sabbatical (though I’ve always thought that if the land got a break from producing every seven years, we ought to allow our pastors the same).  But it strikes me as enormously wise, and as bearing witness to the reality of God’s action in a significant way.

Within evangelicalism, we tend to expect a level of spiritual hyper-productivity from our pastors.  And so we rarely, if ever, let them enjoy the sort of sustained rest from their labors that is truly required to replenish their hearts and their minds.  Sabbaticals, in their core, are breaks from activity to let God be God, and to create space for him to work in us anew.  So it is encouraging to see one  of our most prominent relinquish his duties and simply enjoy the world and relationships that God has given to him.

I prayed today–and I don’t often pray for people I don’t know–for John Piper and his wife.   And you should too.

But more importantly, I pray that evangelical churches around the United States will seek to follow his example and allow their pastors space to replenish, space to delight in their wives, space to seek the renewal of their hearts in their from their labors.

In case you missed it, folks have been listing the ten books that either influenced them, they liked the most, or are best in their category (like Dr. Sanders’ theology list).

Problems of determining ‘influence’ aside, then, here’s my list of ten books (plus two!) that left a sizable impression on me and my thinking:

Phillipians. I’ve said this recently, but Paul’s brief letter to the church at Phillipi is a masterful and intricate examination of joy, our eschatological hope in the face of suffering, and the transformation that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus begets.  And for several years, it has functioned as a type of ‘home base’ for me, the book that I return to when I begin to forget the shape the Gospel should take in my life.

Orthodoxy. Is it a surprise, given that I write at a blog named for it?  It’s not Chesterton’s finest book (that’s The Everlasting Man, if you’re wondering), but it’s a close runner-up.  I first encountered this in a particularly rough patch, and it invigorated my sense of awe and wonder at existence and the Christian faith.

Till We Have Faces. It’s Lewis’ last novel, and his best.  And I couldn’t get through it the first three times I tried.  But my fourth time through, I was stunned at its depth.  I have since returned to it every year, and like any great work it has gotten better with each re-read.

Confessions. Probably the most quoted of the Church fathers (“Our hearts are restless…”), I’m never actually sure whether anyone has read it.  While it’s fashionable to loathe Augustine for all sorts of things these days, few thinkers have shaped my thinking about the world as much as his.   His reflections helped me deepen the process of confession in my own life, a confession that takes the dual nature of acknowledging sin and bestowing praise.

Symposium.  Of all the dialogs, I find this one the most intriguing–and the most rewarding.  Discussions about it my senior year dramatically altered and clarified my views on sexuality, beauty, and their relationship to the city.

On the Incarnation. Why did God become man?  Until reading Athanasius, I realized that I had never really wrestled with the question.  And after completing his most famous work, I became entranced by the fact of the Incarnation and its central role within the Christian faith.  It’s an entrancement that I hope never wanes.

Spirit of the Disciplines. This is the book that launched me on the trajectory that I’m still riding:  attempting to understand the role of the body within the Christian life.  Willard’s theology has come under scrutiny in recent years for his inclinations toward universalism, but there’s nothing heterodox here.  If anything, his exegesis of Paul’s understanding of the body remains the most insightful and faithful readings I have yet encountered.

A Hero of our Time. The only book I have ever thrown across the room.  Lermontov’s little gem is a reaction against the fragmentation of modernity and a call to action.  He also launched a genre within Russian literature, the ‘superfluous man,’ that informs later works like…

The Brother’s Karamazov. If I had to choose between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the former wins my vote.  The Brother’s K. remains my single favorite piece of fiction in the world.

Abide in Christ. I’m pretty sure I stole this book from my dad, and I’m never going to give it back.  Murray is a 18th century Reformed preacher who writes like someone who has seen the face of God.  In this, my favorite book of his, he presents the Christian life in all its simplicity:  there is but one thing for you to do, and that is abide.

Summa Theologiae, Prima Segundae Partis Questions 1-21.  Or, more simply, Thomas Aquinas on the nature of human acts.  My thinking through these questions has proved enormously valuable. If you want a section of Aquinas to start with that might be a bit more accessible, this is a good place to turn.

Resurrection and Moral Order.  I’m convinced this is the most important work for theological ethics in the past twenty years.  O’Donovan articulates an ethical framework that is wholly evangelical–that is, grounded in the proclamation of God in the person of Jesus Christ–and that refuses to reduce ethics to either God’s commands on the one hand, or the structure of (fallen!) creation on the other.  (You can read my synopsis here.)

*Cross posted at Mere Orthodoxy, which you really should be reading.

The latest update from his wife:

It is with a heavy heart that I bring my latest update on Michael. We have learned that his cancer is too advanced and too aggressive to expect any sort of remission. Our oncologist estimates that with continued treatment Michael most likely has somewhere between six months and a year to live. This is not really a surprise to us, though it is certainly horrible news. From the very beginning, both of us have suspected that this would prove to be an extremely bad situation. I don’t know why; perhaps God was preparing us for the worst all along by giving us that intuition.

I recently came across Evangel contributor Dr. Russell Moore’s astute analysis on the question from 2007 in the pages of Touchstone, the other ecumenical magazine of record.

Dr. Moore’s piece really needs to be read in its entirety, as he manages to thoughtfully engage the question without degenerating into overreaction or hyperbole.  He is in favor of evangelical ‘engagement’ with culture, but cognizant of its limitations.

But what struck me was this bit near the end:

Often at the root of so much Christian “engagement” with pop culture lies an embarrassment about the oddity of the gospel. Even Christians feel that other people won’t resonate with this strange biblical world of talking snakes, parting seas, floating axe-heads, virgin conceptions, and emptied graves. It is easier to meet them “where they’re at,” by putting in a Gospel According to Andy Griffith DVD (for the less hip among us) or by growing a soul-patch and quoting Coldplay at the fair-trade coffeehouse (for the more hip among us).

Knowing Andy Griffith episodes or Coldplay lyrics might be important avenues for talking about kingdom matters, but let’s not kid ourselves. We connect with sinners in the same way Christians always have: by telling an awfully freakish-sounding story about a man who was dead, and isn’t anymore, but whom we’ll all meet face-to-face in judgment.

This is a crucial point, and similar to one I made while speaking to a group of homeschoolers.  I argued that their unique experience as homeschoolers–a sometimes derided and disenfranchised population–would better prepare them for being comfortable in the discomfort that can come with believing and proclaiming the remarkable and surprising fact of the Gospel.

But for those of us who work in the church, Christian universities, or Christian non-profits, we tend to lose sight not only of the ‘freakishly bizarre’ nature of the Gospel, but also the weird nature of the lives that bear witness to it.  I will never forget my first job as a mature believer in a secular environment, which was the first dominantly secular environment I had been in for a sustained amount of time since high school.  There was simply no avoiding the reality:  I felt, and was, odd.  I didn’t live with my wife prior to marriage, I took religious holidays with the utmost seriousness, I was engaged in prayer and attempting to cultivate a meditative, thoughtful life….none of which fit well in my overwhelmingly unChristian environment.  While not the Gospel per se, these behaviors are an outgrowth of it, and fit no better into most people’s framework than the reality that grounds them.

But attempting to build bridges also fell woefully short.  Conversations about movies, music, and other cultural artifacts rarely proceed for most people beyond judgments of taste and emotional responses.  They don’t lead to the sort of conversation that Paul had with a bunch of trained philosophers on Mars Hill.

But we are not without hope.  The most meaningful tools we have to ‘build bridges’ are not the shared experiences of, music, or the news, but rather questions about family, frustrations, and the various dynamic that make up those aspects of our lives that extend beyond our entertainment choices.  They are a listening ear, and a keen attention to discern the deeper dynamics of the heart that are always bubbling to the surface.  We build bridges by cultivating a heart that listens to the movements of the Spirit in our own lives, and the lives of others.

And, as Dr. Moore points out, we build bridges most of all by talking honestly and candidly about the content of our faith, a faith which still has the power to command attention and inspire curiosity.

But that he did not is, I’m afraid, no excuse for the rest of us.  He and I are in complete agreement that the book must be read.

As I have been ruminating on his reply all weekend, I thought I would offer a few remarks in response.

But rather than continue the order in which I began my critiques, allow me to reverse them, for one simple reason:  my worries about Smith’s view of Scripture are worries that extend beyond the scope of Desiring the Kingdom. While I think they are relevant, I don’t want to give the impression that they are about the main thrust of Smith’s book.  They are not.  Even if Smith and I end up disagreeing on that point, we could still agree on his anthropology (as I think we do) and on his vision for Christian formation and the university (and I do think we’re closer than I let on).

I’ll start, then, with my final point, which was to suggest that the evangelical universities Smith critiques are actually much closer to his vision of the university than he supposes.

Smith’s argument is that all education is moral formation. And on this point, we certainly agree.  But his critique of evangelical universities seems to presuppose that all moral formation happens in the same way. Hence, his central response to my point about Biola’s integration of worship and of their practices of education is that its chapels and church worship services do not reflect the sort of historic shape of Christian worship he outlines.  And he’s right.  They don’t.

But it’s not clear why as a chapel within the cathedral they need to.  There is moral formation occurring in the classroom and beyond, as Biola consciously recognizes.  What’s more, Biola emphasizes the communal and spiritual lives of its students outside the classroom.  As a student who was on the council handling matters of discipline, I can attest that they situate the intellectual life of the university within a much broader, more holistic framework.  And if as a university they stay within their limited mission of the formation of disciples through the formation of the Christian mind, then it is not clear to me why their worship as a university has to take the same form as the local church.

But Smith’s point about evangelicals unconsciously adopting the practices of American corporate culture could be a decisive argument against this point.  If the chapel services at Biola are working against the robust moral formation happening throughout the university, then that is clearly a problem.  Outside of a more robust criterion, it is difficult to tell.  After all, we might say that evangelicals have baptized American corporate culture (which makes it sound much more theological, no?) the way that the early church baptized many of the elements of pagan culture (see:  the Church calendar).

But I should say that I am sympathetic to Smith’s critiques here.  I have spent time worshipping within both the evangelical and Episcopalian traditions, and would argue that evangelicals have much to learn from more embodied-oriented traditions.  At the same time, I think it plausible that evangelicals are encountered by the living God, and are encountered more frequently than many of those who worship in the ways that Smith outlines.  And it is, after all, God who is the source of our moral formation.

On this point, then, I look forward to Smith’s continued work on articulating a criterion for identifying the secular liturgies that cut against the Gospel.  I agree with him that his central point is that his central criteria is the vision for the Kingdom which is….where?  Smith contends “implicit in the practices of Christian worship.”  But while I agree such practices cut against political ideologies of both the Left and Right, it is less clear how they do so, or if they do so in the same way.

But this leads back to my first critique, which is really to raise the problem of the criteria with respect to Christian worship (and beyond).  Professor Smith has captured my intuitions on the question.  I do think that maintaining the normativity of Scripture entails giving it a higher priority than worship, if we are talking about our means of knowing the shape the Christian faith ought to take in the world, even if our primary encounter with Scripture is within the context of worship.

I don’t want to gloss over the historical difficulties of the “phenomena of Scripture,” as I agree with Smith that it’s important to take those into account.  But I suspect Smith is giving up a bit more than he intends in the admission that the Church was never without Scripture.  Even while the New Testament was being written and codified, their belief that Jesus was the Son of God was a belief that he came according to the Scriptures. In this way, Scripture seems to precede the Church, and the Church seems to be constituted in response to the revelation of the Son of God, a revelation who was seen as the Son of God and not as anyone else because he was according to the Scriptures.

Scripture’s home might still be worship, then.  And it clearly has a formative effect on the people of God when properly located within that context.  But our access to the normative content of the faith, the effect of that content on us, and the normative content itself must be kept distinct.  We might say that with respect to the first two, Scripture stands in a mutual relationship with the Church.  But with respect to the last, Scripture precedes the Church in an important way, and so extends beyond the formation we experience within Christian worship.

Again, this critique is beyond the scope of Smith’s book and argument. What’s more, it in no way invalidates Smith’s central point about Scripture’s effect on us.  Scripture does do something to us in worship, which is why it is a scandal that Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and other traditions have more public reading of Scripture in their services than we Bible-oriented evangelical Protestants.  But my worry is that focusing on Scripture’s effect within the worshipping body of Christ obscures Scripture’s position over the Church as its rule for faith and practice.  In acknowledging Scripture as the normative rule, I can’t see how we avoid giving it ontological priority, even if our epistemic access to its rule happens primarily within the context of the worshipping people of God.

But I will (again) reiterate one crucial point that Smith made in his response:  there is no substitute for reading the book. And I suspect there will be no substitute for reading his next two volumes, either. If they are half as fruitful, as challenging, and as interesting as Desiring the Kingdom, they will be enormously valuable indeed.

That is the starting point for Jamie Smith’s latest work, Desiring the Kingdom, in which he presents an important challenge to the dominant paradigm in Christian education.  While I do not agree with all of Smith’s conclusions, Desiring the Kingdom is one of the most challenging and enriching books I read in 2009, and its proposals deserve serious and substantial consideration.

Smith’s project is similar to that of Spears and Loomis.  But while he also wants to construct a pedagogy on top of a robust theological anthropology, his foundation and frame are considerably different.  For Smith, most contemporary Christian education is too focused on worldview analysis and “integration.”  Smith contends that such approaches rest upon a “reductionistic account of the human person—one that is still a tad bit heady and quasi-cognitive.”  Smith contends that these accounts of pedagogy fail “to accord a central role to embodiment and practice.”

Drawing upon Augustine and the phenomenological tradition, Smith argues that instead, humans should be viewed fundamentally, though not exclusively, as lovers, and—post regeneration—primarily as lovers of the Kingdom. Because of this, our nature is to push us outside of ourselves, and so is inherently teleological.

But Smith argues that the fundamentally non-cognitive, affective nature of humanity entails that the telos of love must be construed as a picture, otherwise it will not actually move us.  What’s more, Smith contends that these basic desires are “inscribed” into our “dispositions and habits quite apart from our conscious reflection.”  Not surprisingly, Smith argues that embodied practices are crucial to forming these pre-conscious habits.  He writes:

We feel our way around our world more than we think our way through it.  Our worldview is more a matter of the imagination than the intellect, and the imagination runs off the fuel of images that are channeled by the senses.  So our affective, noncognitive disposition is an aspect of our animal, bodily nature.  The result is a much more holistic (and less dualistic) picture of human persons as essentially embodied.

What has this to do with knowledge and education?  Smith argues that the concept of worldview is insufficient (if taken as primary) precisely because it fails to account for this pre-cognitive, embodied nature of humanity.  Worldview language is not enough because the Christian faith is fundamentally a set of worshipful practices that undergird our doctrinal commitments.  Writes Smith:

I suggest that instead of thinking about worldview as distinctly Christian “knowledge,” we should talk about a Christian “social imaginary” that constitutes a distinctly Chrisitan understanding of the world that is implicit in the practices of Christian worship.  Discipleship and formation are less about erecting an edifice of Christian knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively “understands” the world in the light of the fullness of the gospel.  And insofar as an understanding is implicit in practice, the practices of Christian worship are crucial—the sine qua non—for developing a distinctly Christian understanding of the world.

Smith explicitly states that he isn’t trying to eradicate the cognitive aspect of Christianity, or the role of propositions.  Rather, “the point is to situate the cognitive, propositional aspects of Christian faith:  they emerge in and from practices.”

With this foundation in place, it’s easy to see how the rest of the work will unfold.

Pedagogically, Smith argues that because our habits are formed by practices, to understand the world we have to examine the liturgies—both secular and religious—that make it.  Smith distinguishes between thick and thin practices by arguing that thin practices are generally done for the same of some other end (like brushing one’s teeth), while thick habits “play a significant role in shaping our identity.”  Such identity shaping habits may or may not be institutionally religious.

Smith is conscious of the slippery nature of the distinction, but proceeds with it anyway to point out that what we might think are thin practices (such as shopping at the mall) can be thick practices insofar as they grab hold of our loves.  Smith’s argument implies that there are no neutral habits or practices, as thin practices either serve the purposes of thick, identity-forming practices, or they are themselves identity-forming.  Writes Smith:

In other words, recognizing that there are no neutral practices…should push us to realize that perhaps some of the habits and practices that we are regularly immersed in are actually thick formative practices that over time embed in us desires for a particular vision for the good life.

The thickest of these practices, Smith argues, are ‘liturgies,’ which he describes this way:  “I want to distinguish liturgies as rituals of ultimate concern: rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate particular visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual formations.”  These thickest practices, which may or may not be institutionally religious, have a “liturgical function insofar as they are a certain species of ritual practice that aim to do nothing less than shape our identity by shaping our desire for what we envision as the kingdom.”

Smith then examines a number of secular liturgies, including the secular university, before turning to the practices of Christian worship.  Throughout, his focus is on the practices and what they do. He argues here that worship precedes worldview, and that insofar as it is formative, it is educational.  He writes,

Emphasizing the primacy of worship practices to worldview formation both honors the fact that all humans are desiring animals while at the same time making sense of how Christian worship is developmentally significant for those who can participate in rituals but are unable to participate in theoretical reflection.

For Smith, specifically Christian worship practices depend upon what he calls the “sacramental imagination.”  Christian worship is inevitably embodied, which is affirmed in the practices of worship prior to our cognitive affirmation of the goodness of creation. Smith’s careful explication of practices of Christian worship is worth the price of the book alone.

In the final chapter, Smith examines the university and its relationship to the church within the context of the anthropology he set forth in the first chapters.  Specifically, he critiques Christian higher education with being too interested in information rather than formation. He writes:

Thus Christian colleges have thought it sufficient to provide a Christian perspective, an intellectual framework, because they see themselves as fostering individual “minds in the making.”  Hand in hadn with that, such an approach reduces Christianity to a denuded intellectual framework that has diminished bite because such an intellectualized rendition of the faith doesn’t touch our core passions.  This is because such intellectualization of Crhistianity allows it to be unhooked from the thick practices of the church.  When the Christianity of “Christian education” is reduced to the intellectual elements of a Christian worldview or a Christian perspective, the result is that Christianity is turned “into a belief system available to the individual without mediation by a church.”

In short, Smith wants to do away with the “Christian college” and promote the “ecclesial college” or university.  If it is to be meaningfully Christian, it must be connected to the liturgical practices of the faith.  Smith provides a few examples for what this might look like in the context of a college setting, but is conscious of the limitations of these positive proposals.  This section functions (like Spears and Loomis’ work) as prolegomena for future work.

This is a much more extended summation than I was planning on giving, which is a credit to the rich density of Smith’s book.  It is carefully argued, and well researched, and while I hope I have faithfully expounded it, Desiring the Kingdom really must be read to be properly appreciated.

That said, I will register a few reservations with it:

First, Smith’s approach makes me wonder what role he thinks Scripture plays in Christian practices and understanding.  For instance, Smith writes:

The rhythms and rituals of Christian worship are not the “expression of” a Christian worldview, but are themselves an “understanding” implicit in practice—an understanding that cannot be had apart from the practices.  It’s not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly “express” these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship and articulated beliefs bubble up from there.  “Doctrines” are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we “understand” when we pray.

The absence of Scripture here is striking.  Smith contends elsewhere that to discern the “essence of Christianity” we should focus on what Christians do, rather than “texts, doctrines, and theological articulations of theologians.”

But elsewhere, Smith contends Scripture is the “constitution” of the church, in the sense that it is her “formal cause” that “constitutes the ‘way of life’” of her members.  Scripture “shows us the kind of people we’re called to be.”  Smith’s use of the “formal cause” is drawn straight from Aristotle, but it strikes me that for Aristotle, the ‘formal cause’ is that which identifies the essence of a thing—which directly goes against Smith’s own statement that to find the essence of Christianity, we ought look at the practices of the Church, and not the texts.

I sincerely hope I am not quibbling here, and  I suspect that Smith has a clarification at hand that would set my mind at ease.  But my worry is that his emphasis on the practices of the church have obscured Scripture’s status as normative basis for the church.

I take it that his use of Scripture as the “constitution” of the church is designed to supercede precisely this worry.  But his emphasis on what Scripture does in the context of worship minimizes (I think) what Scripture is prior to worship.  If the text is the constitution, then it governs our faith and our practices, which it seems Smith agrees with.  But then I wonder why we point to the practices—which may be imperfectly performed, and are performed by imperfect people—rather than the constitution.

This worry is not even an objection, so much as a request for further clarification.

Second, I worry that the slippery nature and the ambiguity of what counts as a “liturgy” allows us to see “liturgies” wherever people engage in practices that we disagree with.  Smith critiques patriotism and consumer capitalism rather strongly as secular liturgies, but he could have just as easily critiqued WTO protests or Whole Foods shopping trips (which are, to be clear, generally but unfairly associated with more “liberal” positions).  My point is simply that in the absence of clearer criteria, it is easy to deploy liturgical analyses to deconstruct the practices and ideas of those who believe in ideas that we disagree with.  That doesn’t have to be the case, and I don’t think that Smith has done so.  But a clear criteria helps us avoid confirmation bias, which is the practice of selectively seeing what we want to see.  I’m not sure Smith has provided a robust enough criteria to avoid this.

Third, I wonder about Smith’s critical characterization of the intellectualist approach of Christian higher education. While I suspect my own alma mater, Biola, would be a target of his criticism, I also think they might have more in common with Smith than he might want to grant.

After all, in my experience Biola actualizes an embodied learning environment of the sort that he describes in the final chapter better than any university I know of, despite its commitment to worldview and integration thinking.  His proposals for how an ecclesial college might look were surprisingly familiar, given that I had seen nearly all of them pursed during my time at Biola.

What’s more, Biola is institutionally committed to the idea that humans are fundamentally desiring creatures, and that the “Christian worldview” is not sufficiently “Christian knowledge,” as evidenced by the overt and conscious appeals and counsel for students to engage in regular church life and pursue ministry outside the university setting.

But this leads me to the heart of my criticism:  it is not clear to me why all Christian education has to be formation in the way that the liturgical practices of the Church are formation.  Smith’s critique of the intellectualizing of the faith that is inherent to contemporary forms of the Christian university seems to implicitly depend upon the notion that the Christian university is the totality of Christian education, and views itself as such.  Smith writes:

Such a transformation of the Christian faith into a belief system unhooks Christianity from the practices of Christian worship, and thus keeps its distance from the radical revisioning of society that is implicit in Christian liturgy.

That is true.  It might.  But this is more caution than outright criticism.  Such a university must be limited in its aspirations, self-conscious in its subordination to the Church and the formation that happens there, and push its members outside its own walls into both society and full communion of the people of God.

But a Christian university can do that by properly situating the cognitive aspects of the faith even while its distinct mission within the church focuses on those cognitive aspects. Smith’s critique only stands if the university is a totalizing institution, but I suspect no Christian university thinks it is the only or even primary means of Christian formation.  But if this is right, then Smith’s critique only works against those universities that conceive of themselves in this totalizing way.

The university, then, as a chapel could be a cognitivately oriented chapel.  That is, it’s specific role in Christian formation could be the formation of the mind, which does not necessarily preclude or even take priority over other means of formation.  That is, I think, the Christian university historically conceived, as it is an institution specifically ordered to the acquisition of truth.

However, that this does not mean I am rejecting Smith’s anthropological formulation.  Humans are fundamentally desiring creatures, a notion which even Plato agreed with and which Christians have repeatedly affirmed.  And I still may yet agree with his notion of the university, as there is much that is attractive about it.  The worries I have presented here are not defeaters as much as they are prompts for additional clarification and (in the last case) perhaps some additional argumentation.

I am still attempting to work through Smith’s proposals, which is perhaps the highest praise I can give it.  It is a challenging work that is very well-argued, and that I continue to return to it in my thoughts is a credit to the forcefulness and persuasiveness of Smith’s ideas.  Desiring the Kingdom is an important book, and I have no doubt evangelicals will continue to wrestle with it for many years to come.

Disclosure/Thanks:  I am grateful to Baker Books for providing a review copy of this book, and grateful to Professor Smith for his feedback on a previous draft of this review.

Tomorrow Professor Smith will offer a brief response here at Evangel.