Faculty Books

Recent publications by Austin Seminary professors

The Flawed Family of God: Stories about the Imperfect Families in Genesis, by Carolyn B. Helsel, Associate Professor in the Blair R. Monie Distinguished Chair in Homiletics, and Song-Mi Suzie Park, Professor of Old Testament, Austin Seminary

Westminster John Knox Press, 2021, 150 pages, $20 (paper). Reviewed by Rev. Kevin Ireland (MDiv’22), pastoral resident, Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas

We all have families—biological, adopted, or mixed, together or estranged, present and passed on. Whether we like it (or even acknowledge it) these ties bind us, forming us into the persons and people we are continually becoming. Perhaps this is why the scriptures of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all begin with stories about families. The Flawed Family of God: Stories about the Imperfect Families in Genesis celebrates our first families in all their messiness and discomfort, revealing new relevance for the complexities of families today.

Carolyn B. Helsel and Song-Mi Suzie Park set out three goals for the book: to encourage the reader to “see the relevance and connections between these biblical texts and the struggles of families today”; to “give voice to the characters that do not actually have a voice in Scripture,” reminding us to listen to voices silenced in our families today; and to “help readers deepen their relationships and make more meaningful connections with their families and communities of faith.” In this pursuit the authors encourage the reader to approach these sacred texts “relationally”—to “believe God speaks to us through these stories, though not necessarily in ways that we assume.”

Reading relationally distinguishes our relationship with the Bible from our relationship to God. The authors remind us that “the Bible is not the same as God. God is not the Bible.” This may be a new and challenging perspective for some. For many it may be liberating. “Reading the Bible relationally means that we can talk back to some of the texts” as we engage and wrestle with the paradox and ambiguity at the heart of the ancient family stories that connect the Abrahamic traditions. In doing so we wade beyond the shallow shores of childhood Sunday school classes into the wisdom of deeper waters. We find spaces for wonder in the Hebrew poetry of the creation story. We cry out with Hagar in the wilderness, perplexed by God’s justice. And we lament the sibling rivalries of Cain and Abel, of Leah and Rachel. The beauty of the book is the balance of the academic and the everyday, the way it interweaves linguistic and historical insights to Hebrew Scripture with stories of 21st-century families. The approachable prose invites all of us to consider how Hebrew grammar opens the creation narratives and questions our relationship to creation and each other. Subsequent chapters challenge us to change our perspectives on the stories we think we know well. For instance, they invite us to consider Noah’s family as survivors, prompting us to consider how that might inform our own care and recovery from trauma. They invite us to consider how our readings may change if the “bow in the sky” is viewed as a weapon. They reflect upon the ways the story of the three spouses, Abram, Sarai, and Hagar, speak to the concerns of trailing spouses or blended families. They invite us to consider how the sparseness of the Akeda (i.e., the binding of Isaac) makes motivations murky and adds “terror to this text by cutting all the music and noise from the scene,” and they ask us to consider where parents may be asked to “sacrifice” the identities of children for the sake of the church or their belief in God.

The Flawed Family of God turns stories that we think we know inside out and upside down, creating new spaces, providing new perspectives, and revealing new relevance and insight for our families and congregations. Helsel and Park resist pat answers, instead opening us to new possibilities for interpretation and insight. Each chapter focuses on a family from Genesis, framing the discussion with issues confronting families today and concluding with questions to provoke further theological thought and personal conversation. The accessible style invites the reader into a rich conversation that spills out of Scripture and into one’s own life and relationships. This format is well suited for an adult or intergenerational discussion class or book group, and the hermeneutical and exegetical insights provide fresh ideas for preachers. Whether approaching these ancient stories for the first time or after a lifetime, readers will find new wonder and relevance in the words and lives of The Flawed Family of God.

Tending the Fire That Burns at the Center of the World: Beauty and the Art of Christian Formation, by David F. White, The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education

Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2022, 192 pages, $42 (hardback). Reviewed by Dr. Bob Trube, associate director Faculty Ministry/Emerging Scholars Network at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/ USA

Since the Enlightenment, the formation of Christians in their faith has emphasized truth and goodness, reason and praxis, discarding aesthetics. David F. White argues for the recovery of a theologically shaped aesthetic in the church’s effort to form her people. He argues that the consequence of the neglect of beauty has been an excarnate spirituality, divorced from the materiality of being human in God’s good creation.

White begins by considering beauty as a phenomenon pervading all existence from microscopic life to the cosmos. He explores how beauty awakens us to the transcendent, displaces us from the center of existence, draws us into community, and bids us into living worthy lives. From this, he turns to the theological aesthetic of Hans Urs von Balthasar, explaining his aesthetic epistemology and how this leads to our attunement to beauty in creation and the re-enchantment of the world.

Ultimately, an aesthetic of beauty finds its focus in Jesus the person of Christ who reveals the beauty of God in human form. White encourages us to focus upon the material form of Christ and to engage in a kind of attuned play with the narratives of Jesus’s life, imagining them and embodying them ourselves. This leads him into the poiesis or “ideas of making” of John Milbank. Milbank begins with the transcendent God who comes as verbum, speech that creates. Since humans are created in the image of God, we are called into participation in this making as a gift.

This means, White stresses, that formation cannot remain in our heads. We must get our hands dirty, engaging in a kind of reciprocal gift-giving with others. White next focuses on liturgy as art. Here he draws on the insights of James K.A. Smith and the power of liturgies to form us, whether they be from the church or from the culture, and he considers how aesthetics can enhance the formative power of liturgy, particularly as beauty is understood as the telos of worship. White urges leaders to recover a vision of the beauty inherent in the rhythms and movements of liturgy, to weave artistic expression throughout our liturgies, and to use the eucharistic meal to focus on the beauty manifest in the form of Christ.

We live in a world that alternates between beauty and terror. In response to this hard reality, White advocates for the role art can play facilitating movement from lament to hope. A theological aesthetic, he says, looks for the beauty of people amidst brokenness and glimpses healing amid suffering. White concludes with the image of a church of people formed by beauty as a flash mob interrupting the stale banality of modern life with sounds and sights of exquisite beauty, reminding people of the other, better world for which they deeply long.

I believe White persuasively makes the case for an important claim in this book: that the church vitally needs to recover a theologically grounded aesthetic. He helps us to understand that this is more than just embracing the arts. It is understanding the role of beauty— especially in relation to our focus on both the materiality of creation and of Jesus Christ—in forming us as knowing makers, participating in God’s poiesis in the world. White takes a deep dive in attempting to summarize the dense writings of von Balthasar, Milbank, and Smith, but he communicates their ideas clearly and ably weaves them together into his own vision of a theological aesthetic. Like White, I’ve been captivated by flash mob videos, and, like him, I long for that the church to incarnate a theological aesthetic so that it might captivate the world in this way.