BOOK REVIEWS

The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology

by James K. A. Smith

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2021 | 253 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $44.99

JAMES K. A. SMITH’S READERSHIP has surged in recent years through accessible books, such as You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos Press, 2016). You Are What You Love argues persuasively for Christian discipleship focused on habits, virtues, and rituals. Physical embodiment saturates Smith’s recommendations and links his older works to his newest, The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology. This work, Smith explains, provides deeper justification for what he has written on a popular level, with an invitation to “a new depth of reflection” (8). “This book . . . could be read as the extended footnote. . . . In a sense, this book is meant to ‘show the work,’ so to speak—to provide a glimpse of the more careful analyses underlying the claims in my books for wider audiences” (8).

Through the centuries, philosophers have debated the relationship between words and reality. Can signs, even words, represent reality (res) without in some way compromising or distorting the reality? Is there any union between sign and signifier? Can there be a link that avoids reducing one to the other (179)? The Nicene Option claims that the incarnation of the Son of God guides us here. The immense and eternal Son of God, who cannot be contained or reduced to a human body, nevertheless became flesh. He is truly present in the flesh without being reduced to humanity.

At stake “is the possibility of revelation and incarnation” (183). Smith suggests “an account of language analogous to the Incarnation itself, which is a mode of manifestation that both makes God present to the immanence of human perception but also retains the transcendence of the Wholly Other” (175).

If all this sounds academic, it is. The Nicene Option is not for the faint of heart because it engages the notoriously dense world of continental philosophy.

A core challenge in continental philosophy has been to account for alterity and difference: How can we know the Other? How can we encounter that which transcends us without folding the Other into our sphere of perception, thereby reducing alterity to the sphere of the same? (236)

The Nicene Option thus builds on centuries of dialogue among figures, such as Ferdinand de Saussure (“The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary”), Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, and Gadamer, among others. Smith focuses his efforts on more recent philosophers, such as Derrida, Husserl, Levinas, Marion, and Charles Taylor. Readers should come prepared, as Smith assumes a basic familiarity with these figures. This is no Philosophy of Religion 101.

Furthermore, The Nicene Option presents an incarnational phenomenology. Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that emphasizes embodiment and personal knowing. It considers the subject—that we are not simply disembodied knowers but flesh-and-blood people with biases and various situations that shape how we approach the world. The first words of Smith’s afterword are quite striking: “There is no philosophical standpoint that is not, at bottom, confessional. Despite the pretension of Enlightenment claims, there is no neutral, objective, ‘pure’ reason” (235).

The first few chapters present Smith’s outline of “an Incarnational Continental Philosophy of Religion,” and the bulk of the book is devoted to the second major theme: “the Possibility of a Christian Phenomenology.” In chapter 1, “The Philosophy of Religion Takes Practice: A Methodological Manifesto,” Smith argues for “confessional” philosophy—that we should not be ashamed of our faith commitments. Furthermore, human beings are more than just thinkers; we experience religion not only in propositions but also in liturgical practices. We live out what we know; “understanding is ‘implicit in practice’” (26).

These initial chapters contain practical insights into humanity. In chapter 2, “Secular Liturgies,” Smith makes a compelling case that we are inherently religious creatures (38). This is a profoundly biblical point; we worship either the Creator or the creature (Rom. 1:25). Smith argues for the formative power of religious ritual, and he laments that we have absorbed an anthropology that divorces belief from behavior. He writes, “We become believers through ritual formation—and such formative rituals have the status of ‘liturgies’” (38). It is refreshing to see that philosophy of religion has caught up to what churchgoers have long realized: worship rituals shape us. Our knowing is embodied; we “sing” to know.

If Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then it could be argued that Western theology is a footnote to Augustine, especially given recent “retrieval” efforts. Smith engages Augustine extensively, particularly in chapter 8, “Beyond Epistemology,” and chapter 10, “Deconstruction—an Augustinian Science?” Although readers will likely not agree with everything Smith posits, he does make many compelling observations, such as lamenting today’s reductionistic anthropology that focuses so much on knowledge that it neglects the will (154, 167). Relying on Augustine, Smith argues it would be reductionistic to speak of “ethics, justice, and morality as instances of discrete decisions and acts; instead . . . a more persuasive and attentive moral phenomenology needs to see the ethical terrain as one of character, not simply discrete ‘acts’ or ‘decisions’” (167). Thus “a persuasive moral phenomenology needs to provide an account of the formation of the moral subject, and especially the formation of habits (virtues/vices) that then play a significant role in an account of decision-making attentive to these dynamics” (167). This is, in my opinion, part of what the Theological Interpretation of Scripture movement has sought to articulate: we ought to be certain kinds of people (2 Pet. 3:11) who typically grow in faithful churches.

Speaking of theological retrieval, Smith’s ninth chapter may be particularly timely, given recent arguments for a “Christian Platonism” (e.g., Craig A. Carter and Hans Boersma). Smith begins, “Our concern will be the relationship of Christian theology to Platonism. It is a curious phenomenon that, into the twenty-first century, the question of Christian theology’s relationship to Platonism remains an orienting and fundamental theme of reflection” (171). Here, Smith takes on Husserl and brings us back to his incarnational theme: “Husserl leaves us with two (heretical) options,” linguistic Docetism, where signs only seem to present the signified, or linguistic Arianism, where the sign is “reduced to immanence” (184). In contrast, Smith argues for the incarnational analogy: fully God and fully man, sign and signified united together truly.

Surprisingly, Smith ignores modern theologians who have discussed these matters, such as Barth, T. F. Torrance, and Tillich. Various theological loci relate: from the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper to analogical language versus univocal. Sharing Smith’s insistence on embodiment, Torrance, for example, discusses the parallel between the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures and the relationship between a word and its meaning, a sign and reality behind the sign.1 Incarnational analogies have been applied to the Scriptures’ dual nature as God’s word and the product of human authors. Just as Smith wants to avoid Docetism and Arianism, so too, as John Webster

has stated, we must avoid a scriptural Nestorianism that sees the human word as “only extrinsically related to revelation. . . . The res chooses to present itself in this signum, the biblical text in all its grammatical, literary and historical features.” 2

The final two chapters of The Nicene Option chiefly interact with Marion and Levinas, taking up two major themes of modern philosophy: the gaze and the gift. Touching again on the signs or words that we use to describe God, Smith considers the very possibility of Godtalk. With the second commandment in mind, he asks about the possibility of gazing at God through the signs that are words. Some may find this understanding of the second commandment idiosyncratic: Is there not a difference between a picture and a written or spoken word? But for Levinas, “As in Marion, the image is an idol precisely because of its semiotic failure: it does not point beyond itself” (214). Smith asks, “Can there be a non-idolatrous gaze?” (202). For him, this is a question of our ability to say anything about God without reducing him in some way. Must there be a “kenosis,” an emptying of God to reveal himself through human signs (209)? Smith asks, “Is there not an important difference between domestication and condescension?” (208). The answer may seem like common sense to most Christians (of course, we can speak about God!), but Smith interacts with philosophers and gives a philosopher’s answer. He points us to phenomena: creation and incarnation. Smith argues that creation and the incarnation prove that we can “gaze” (regard, attend) on God because an image does not exhaust the riches of reality: he affirms “a revelation of transcendence which inheres in the image without being reduced to immanence” (222).

Overall, readers should appreciate that Smith thoughtfully engages modern philosophers, even on their own terms, rather than through extensive biblical argumentation, and he deftly argues that the biblical (or “Nicene”) perspective makes sense of the world in a way that philosophy alone cannot. The Nicene Option therefore provides a cogent apologetic. At the same time, due to the nature of a collection of essays and the way Smith presents the material, readers may feel like they are jumping into the middle of a movie. I wished Smith had given a little more history behind each question and how each philosopher fit into the puzzle. Likewise, The Nicene Option is limited by its narrow focus on philosophers. The line between philosophy and theology is thin, and theologians have been discussing the same questions. Theologians arguably have a more difficult task, for they must interact with both philosophers and other theologians. Thus The Nicene Option should be paired with a work like Michael Horton’s Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (WJK, 2002), which not only dialogues with many of the figures that Smith does but also with theologians who have considered similar questions.

Andrew J. Miller is the pastor of Bethel Reformed Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Fredericksburg, VA.

1. T. F. Torrance, Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics (Edinburgh:

T&T Clark, 1995), 7. 2. See John Webster, Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (New

York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), 111–12.

Reclaiming the Reformation: Christ for You in Community

by Magnus Persson translated by Bror Erickson

1517 PUBLISHING | 2021 | 224 PAGES (PAPERBACK) | $21.85

MAGNUS PERSSON, A SUCCESSFUL PASTOR in the charismatic church for many years, is now a minister in the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church. How did that happen? In Reclaiming the Reformation, Persson answers that question en route to offering a larger call to reformational Christianity.

Persson structures the book around the perennial question: “What is central to the church and what are its most important marks?” (xi). He takes his cues from Luther’s 1539 “On Councils and the Church,” which laid out seven marks “that constitute and characterize the church where Christ is present and active: the Word, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the Keys, the Office, the Divine Service (worship), and the Cross” (xii–xiii).

In the book’s first section, Persson urges Protestants to recover their evangelical catholicity, since “the reformers . . . wanted to reestablish the genuine evangelical tradition.” Following Gustaf Aulén, he sees the “great break with the church’s catholicity” not in the Reformation but “in the new Protestantism . . . that began during the eighteenth century [as] church art was whitewashed and the liturgy truncated. The Lord’s Supper became ever more rare and finally fell into oblivion. The average contemporary Protestant too often turns away from such things that, according to the reformers, belonged to the church’s great treasure and were seen as common Christian property” (12). Contemporary Protestantism’s aversion to such things reveals the need to recover the sacramental nature of the church, where God’s grace “is proclaimed and mediated through the Word, the table, and baptism” (21). Churches with an “individualistic private Christianity where one emphasizes the ‘personal relationship to Jesus’ as that which constitutes the Christian life” tend to turn “one’s search for justification and piety inward” and stand in stark contrast to “the objective words of promise that are mediated through the Scriptures and sacraments” (23–25).

Persson then addresses each of the seven marks, starting with the word of God purely taught and rightly preached. “When the church neglects the biblical story of creation and the fall, the story of Jesus risks being turned into a moralistic improvement program which puts forth Jesus as a role model rather than as a savior” (57). Thankfully, “the historical and common Christian liturgy has been formed precisely for this reason, so that the great story and the gospel message should not be lost but proclaimed through all that is said and done in the church’s worship service” (58). This is one of the book’s consistent themes: that “what happens in worship exposes our theology” (158). Forms of worship “slowly but surely shape our thoughts, hearts, and actions” and “convey a message that either strengthens or weakens the gospel. The forms we use are therefore never neutral. They carry and mediate a message in themselves and shape us accordingly” (167). He concludes that historic liturgical forms most clearly “root us into the whole biblical story of salvation” (169).

Persson then turns to how the word is concretized. In baptism, “we are thus united in Christ across all borders; neither time nor space, ethnicity, gender, nor class are any longer markers of our deepest identity” (81). Similarly, “the Lord’s holy meal gives form to the whole gospel and makes faith physical and concrete. . . . The focus flees from us to God’s work through Christ; he comes to us and enters us from without. It is not about evoking feelings in the soul or about more knowledge in the head, but about actions that are repeated and which the gospel incorporates itself within the body” (107–8).

Next comes an exploration of the keys (confession and absolution) and the office of the ministry. He sees confession as a key tool of the seelsorger (clergy) in comforting “the guilt-laden conscience” with the “freeing power of forgiveness,” and he concludes that “this mark of the church needs to be reestablished so that miserable and plagued souls can be freed and experience God’s forgiveness and grace” (116, 120). The keys conjoin with the office of the ministry, which should “not be reduced so that the pastor becomes some sort of comforting uncle, social worker, lecturer, or a general project leader” (143). Such an office is not one of power and privilege, but one of sacrifice and suffering. This cruciform pattern is the final mark of the church that Persson unpacks using Luther’s theology of the cross as “the

interpretive screen through which the whole of our existence can be understood” (178).

Amid such a vigorous defense of the Reformation, a unique element surfaces in Persson’s vision for “a warm and bold Pentecostal spirituality that is deeply rooted in a solid reformational theology, formed and expressed by a common catholic liturgy and missional ecclesiology” (xv). He is sympathetic to “the charismatic renewal [finding] paths into the different historical churches” where now “charismatic expressions exist side by side with the sacramental life” (32–33). Persson argues for a distinction between the Schwermers (enthusiasts), whom Luther harshly critiqued, and proper charismatic expression, suggesting that Lutheranism is “sound and stable ground for a . . . spirituality that is both sacramental and charismatic” (39). This seems to be an uphill argument. Persson is right that “for Luther there was not a single area in the church and a not a single theological aspect where the Holy Spirit’s activity was not fundamental” (39). But didn’t Luther see the Spirit’s activity as never divorced from the word and external means? Consider Luther’s 1526 Trinity Sunday sermon: it is “the Spirit who reveals Himself in the external office which we hear and see, namely, in the preaching office of the Gospel and of the Sacraments. We are to seek the Spirit not without and apart from the external signs, but know that the Spirit wants to work in, through, and with the external signs and office” (Luther’s Works, vol. 78: Church Postil IV [St. Louis: Concordia, 2015], 37–40).

Persson distances himself from charismatic excesses and makes it clear that “the reception of the Holy Spirit is . . . not a ‘second step’ that follows salvation” (42). Yet his overall argument embracing certain aspects of the charismatic movement and his interpretation of relevant scriptural texts seems unpersuasive. This, however, shouldn’t diminish the overall thrust of the book.

In Reclaiming the Reformation, one finds a warm and robust vision of how the principles of the Reformation can help build thriving churches and thick community around Christ’s word and gifts. Persson’s convivial tone and wide range of denominational experiences make this a book that should be right for a wide variety of readers.

Joshua Pauling is a classical educator and head elder at All Saints Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Charlotte, North Carolina. He studied at Messiah College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University.

You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

IVP | 2021 | 232 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $22.00

LATELY, THE USE OF APOLOGETICS has fallen on rough times. To be sure, classical, empiricist, and presuppositionalist apologetics are still useful schools of thought and their arguments are no less important. But those who are ready and able to wax eloquently about them, the ones who are waiting to give a defense of the faith, find themselves all dressed up with nowhere to go. The questions about causality, teleology, and ontology, however important, are not being asked by my generation to the same degree they historically have.

Instead, the average Millennial and Zoomer is occupied with different phenomena. Our eyes are glossed over, strained from watching funny cat videos one second to watching citizens being bombed in Ukraine the next; our senses are partly numbed from scrolling in between memes and news about another mass shooting. What is wrong with the “kids these days”? Perhaps it is this:

A defining feature of life in the modern West is our awareness of society’s inhumanity and our inability to imagine a way out of it. This

inhumanity includes everything from abortions, mass shootings, and widespread coverups of sexual abuse to meaningless jobs, broken communities, and TV shows that are only good for numbing our anxiety for thirty minutes. (1)

Or so says Alan Noble, professor at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World.

Polished syllogisms and arguments for the existence of God are not always crafted toward animating jaded imaginations bent toward nihilism. If you find such a bleak assessment hard to believe, then I invite you to read Noble’s latest work to discover not only the burdens of modern society but also the hope that imbues our lives in an inhuman world.

Noble’s remarks about the inhumanity of modernity may sound melodramatic to some, but he doesn’t write to wallow in the woes of society. Unlike other works that are critical or polemical, Noble takes no pleasure in pointing out what is killing us. Like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Noble merely acknowledges and points out the helpless modern estate. Amid the existential plight of the West, Noble examines one of its key myths with which it soothes its citizens: that “I am my own and belong to myself,” which “means that the most fundamental truth about existence is that you are responsible for your existence and everything it entails” (3–4). The “lie of self-belonging,” as Noble calls it, is the creed of modernity.

While Noble is not writing as an apologist, this book functions as what Tim Keller calls a kind of Christian high theory; that is, a theory that critiques the myths and systems of secular modernity. Noble doesn’t merely poke holes in the claims about the self, morality, and spirituality encountered in the West; instead, he follows the logic of its doctrines:

The freedom of sovereign individualism comes at a great price. Once I am liberated from all social, moral, natural, and religious values, I become responsible for the meaning of my own life. With no God to judge or justify me, I have to be my own judge and redeemer. This burden manifests as a desperate need to justify our lives through identity crafting and expression. But because everyone else is also working frantically to craft and express their own identity, society becomes a space of vicious competition between individuals vying for attention, meaning, and significance, not unlike the contrived drama of reality TV. (4)

For those born into the mythos of selfbelonging, belonging to a God who calls us to be a part of churches, keep ethical laws, and “die to ourselves,” sounds suffocating. Jesus’ yoke and burden can be as easy and light as he wants them to be, but it’s still something you have to hitch yourself to.

Throughout the book, Noble describes how the promises of belonging to oneself and expressing oneself play out in society. Noble summarizes: “[Our] society is a constructed environment built for humans who are their own and belong to themselves. Each of [its] elements, like the pagan gods of ancient Rome, promises to aid us in living a good life so long as we pay them proper devotion and tribute” (69).

Christians do well to take note of the hopeless logic given by self-belonging, but they should also see what Noble is doing in his work: he is not rallying people to “look out” for these slogans, nor is he fearmongering to gain an audience or attention. Rather, his work is one that lets the myths of the modern West crumble under their own burdensome weight. At the end of his introduction, he does not give a thesis to the work as much as set a tone and posture for the journey we have ahead of ourselves:

I did not write this book as a critic positioned safely outside of society. It is very much the product of someone . . . affected by the same

problems, tempted by the same desires, and burdened by the same anxieties I describe. . . . Follow Christ. Follow in the footsteps of the wise, righteous elders in your life. And have grace for everyone. Lord knows we need it. (vii)

In a cultural climate where existential cynicism swallows up reasoned argument with a fog of apathy, this might be the best strategy for apologetics today.

So what must we do in a society of selfbelonging? Noble says we respond to our modern habitat often in one of two ways: the Way of Affirmation and the Way of Resignation. The difference between these groups can be described as the difference between those who see Sisyphus’s boulder and believe they’re able to win its game and push it to the top of the mountain, and those who give up before ever trying. Some believe that with the right productivity, guru’s advice, app, and meditation practice, they can game the system. This is the Way of Affirmation. Others, however, take a “sunk cost fallacy.” “They don’t choose to tap out of life because they think winning is meaningless. They tap out because they are taught that winning means everything and they cannot envision any path to winning” (82).

The ever-eroding dread of working a deadend job while having student loan debt, the constant anxiety to optimize your life, feeling so burned out that texting seems like an insurmountable task, and the surest way to cope with life’s stressors is by binging another season of the show you’ve already seen a hundred times on Netflix. This is the Way of Resignation.

There is something to the idea that younger generations are not as resilient as former generations; but instead of making the same tired jokes about participation trophies, Noble’s work acknowledges that the kids and grandkids of those who helped build the world of self-belonging are the ones killing themselves in record numbers. We need something deeper than mantras about washing our faces and picking ourselves up by our bootstraps, and something better than shamefilled tirades. Noble points out,

Humans are incapable of completely, unreservedly desiring the good of someone else. . . . Sometimes we only recognize how we have sabotaged ourselves long after the fact, when we can no longer protect ourselves or change our fate. We are uniquely capable of self-destruction and self-abasement. (126)

But the modern plight doesn’t need to end in what we and society are incapable of doing. As that old catechism reminds us, we don’t have to belong to ourselves. “We need to belong to someone who is perfectly able to desire our own good while desiring their own good, someone for whom there cannot be a conflict between our good and their good. . . . We need to belong to Christ” (126).

It’s this subtle candle flicker of hope that makes Noble’s work so striking and compelling. These sad discoveries do not extinguish Christian hope. The shining glimmer of You Are Not Your Own is how ordinary obligations in an inconvenient church community can provide us a means to live the good life amid a dark world.

For those who wonder how to respond righteously to “the crisis of our time,” You Are Not Your Own may not supply pristine syllogisms or a laundry list of action steps—such a list would make us like Sisyphus again—but it offers words of wisdom from a fellow traveler who will help ready you on your way.

Caleb Wait (MA Theological Studies, Westminster Seminary California) is the associate producer of Core Christianity and White Horse Inn.