Off the Shelf January 2009

OFF THE SHELF

A Credible Witness

By Brenda Salter McNeil InterVarsity Press Reviewed by Lisa Sharon Harper “Writing this book was a labor of love,” writes Brenda Salter McNeil in the first sentence of A Credible Witness: Reflections on Power, Evangelism, and Race. Neither a political, sociological, historical, nor theological treatise, A Credible Witness reads more like a modern-day epistle revealing the author’s deep love, first and foremost, for the church.

Salter McNeil warns in her introduction:“As Christians we are on the witness stand…The world around us is deliberating regarding the truth of the gospel.”

She defines credible witnesses as those who “can testify only to what they know is true based upon their actual experience.” To establish a credible witness— in our postmodern, multiracial, global, and relational age, when credibility is marked by the authenticity of one’s experience—Christians must demonstrate commitment to both reconciliation with God and reconciliation with

the other.

John 4 is the backdrop for Salter McNeil’s urgent call to the church. The Samaritan woman at the well is nameless in the text, so Salter McNeil calls her “Sam.” She writes as if she and Sam are best friends who meet over coffee once a week. A review of nearly 15 years of books, articles, and sermons by Salter McNeil reveals her profound bond with Sam—a connection dating back to the mid-1990s when she led Intervarsity Christian Fellowship in racial reconciliation. Since then, John 4 has become one of the author’s core texts.

A Credible Witness serves a 21st-century evangelical church groping for direction in the postmodern age. While today’s evangelistic strategists focus on the significance of story and cultural relevance, their tactics rarely link the credibility of the Christian witness to Christians’ intercultural conduct in the world.“Evangelism and reconciliation are two sides of the same message,” writes Salter McNeil.

“When we don’t live like this, proclaiming and calling others to this reality, we produce inept followers of Christ.”With this, she redefines “evangelism.”

Salter McNeil launches her plea with reflections on the symbol at the heart of the Christian faith—the cross. She declares it is not enough to be reconciled to God alone. Jesus died for more than that.

Salvation, and by extension evangelism, requires reconciliation across race, gender, nationality, age, class, social status, and religion. Thus, she calls Christians to “intercultural competency” for the sake of the gospel.

Salter McNeil identifies power dynamics corrupting the cross-cultural witness of the church, and she reveals her own intercultural competence by abandoning the archetypal black/white paradigm of US racial discourse in favor of a broader discussion of race.

Through clear direction and practical advice, Salter McNeil makes an important contribution to the church.

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No congregation in our postmodern, multiethnic, global world can afford to train evangelists without equipping them to understand dynamics of power and race. A Credible Witness is a labor of love that will make a great first step for churches on the road to effective witness in our complex times. n Lisa Sharon Harper is the executive director of NY Faith & Justice (NYFaithJustice.org), a diverse movement of churches, organizations, and individuals committed to following Christ, uniting the church, and ending poverty in New York City through spiritual formation, education, and direct advocacy.

Who Gets to Narrate the World?

By Robert E. Webber InterVarsity Press Reviewed by Benjamin L. Hartley The image of Professor Webber that remains etched in my mind from my student days at Wheaton College in the late 1980s is of a man with a bullhorn at a student protest.

Published posthumously, Who Gets to Narrate the World?

Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals is the literary equivalent of that bullhorn. And it deserves to be heard— even if it is prone to overstatement and sometimes fails to consider important factors in our narration of the Christian story at this point in history.

This short book is a cry from the heart for Christians to remember that they are part of a dynamic and powerful story told by God—a narrative which, as Webber rightly points out, is too often reduced to sound bites of privatized “principles” that fail to adequately shape

Christian disciples. For this reason, some readers will be tempted to skim the first chapter, which introduces the “cosmic dimension” of God’s story, out of a belief that they already know this story and an 18-page rehearsal of it is a waste of time.

But that would be precisely the wrong response.Webber’s life of teaching, writing, and living was a testimony to the importance of rehearsing, remembering, and embodying God’s story as Christian disciples. I suggest that if you read this book carefully you will hear the Christian story in new ways and be better prepared to resist the idolatries of modernity and postmodernity that Webber condemns.

The book is not without its problems, however. I have issues with the way Webber starkly frames the problem as one of rivalry between the classical Christian story and radical Islam.To be sure, there is much to be deeply concerned about with regard to radical Islam, and Webber mostly explains this well.Too many readers, however, will equate “radical Islam” with “all Muslims,” even though Webber warns his readers not to do so in the introductory chapter.Webber’s uncritical adoption of the worldview promoted by Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1998) does not help either.

Huntington’s text is too simplistic in its vision of a bipolar world. The complexities of cultural interaction caused by migration movements—to name just one problem with the Huntington thesis—simply must be more carefully considered.

Finally, as one who teaches missiology, I was struck by how little attention Webber paid to the world Pentecostal movement or even to world Christianity.

Empirically speaking, Pentecostals more than any other group of Christians are the ones narrating the world by the sheer magnitude of their numbers and rapid growth. The bullhorn is in their hands on busy street corners from Sao Paulo to Manila. American Christians would

be wise to listen carefully to how God’s story is being narrated by Pentecostals.

That, too, will give us cause for both celebration and concern.

The book would be a good fit for a variety of local church study groups. Each chapter concludes with a short list of books for further reading as well as exceptionally well-crafted summary bullet points.

Readers who are looking for philosophical speculation about postmodernity will find the book wanting, but Webber would have it no other way. It is the rich history and liturgy of the Christian church that points the way forward. n Benjamin L. Hartley is assistant professor of Christian mission at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa.

Culture Making

By Andy Crouch InterVarsity Press Reviewed by Eric O. Jacobsen As a card-carrying evangelical I sometimes bemoan the anti-intellectual tendencies of some of the members of this colorful subgroup of the Christian world, as well as their occasional inability/ unwillingness to understand “worldly” culture on its own terms. For this reason, I have long been a fan of Andy Crouch’s corrective influence. Through his work with re:Generation Quarterly, Books & Culture, and the Christian Vision Project, Crouch has helped sharpen our thinking in important ways. He has the ability to take complex ideas from the likes of Albert Borgmann and Peter Berger and distill them in a way that duller minds like mine can understand and appreciate.

Crouch also makes us more aware of the various “texts” that fill our world, drawing our attention to such seemingly ordinary things as Viking stoves and trends in men’s shaving products and then using PRISM 2009

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them as fodder for his masterful cultural exegesis.

As a devotee of Crouch’s occasional writings, I was excited by the news that he had produced a book-length treatment of his particular take on culture. And I am happy to report that his cultural navigation abilities hold up well in this format.

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling is a fresh and relevant take on how Christians should relate to the wider culture. Not only does Crouch provide his own answer to this fundamental question, he also provides a useful framework for understanding some of the major phases that evangelicals have gone through in wrestling with this issue.Crouch observes that evangelical responses to culture over the past century can be compared to bodily gestures: condemnation, critique, copying, and consumption. When these same gestures are repeated often enough, they have a tendency to calcify into postures and become our default response to all kinds of culture.The evangelical community has cycled through these various postures, and it has not served us well.

While any one of these gestures may be an appropriate response to a particular

cultural expression, as postures they don’t do a good job (individually or cumulatively) of faithfully conveying our biblical mandate toward culture.

Not only are such responses insufficiently nuanced, they also tend to be reactive rather than innovative, and Crouch points out the severe limitations of approaches to culture that are merely passive or reactive. He encourages us to seek change by discovering ways to contribute something new to the existing culture.

Drawing on biblical motifs of stewardship and creation, Crouch calls Christians to make cultural contributions as either gardeners or artists.This particular way of expressing the cultural mandate also brings into focus the kinds of settings that are antithetical to the goodness of our humanity. The wilderness poses a threat to our well-being because of its inherent danger, for example, while the theme park stifles our creative abilities with its heavily scripted and staged programming.

Crouch also includes some wonderful insights on the stewardship of power, the roles that various scales of community can play in shaping culture, and the necessity of grace. I only wish he had provided more room for cultural collaboration within his approach.While I wholeheartedly agree that Christians need to be at the forefront of cultural creation, some cultural products/projects are too broad in scope or large in scale for Christians to create by ourselves (legislation, institutions, community celebrations). In such instances, Christians must be prepared to partner with those who subscribe to a very different worldview.

This is, however, a minor quibble.

Overall, I think this book will make Crouch’s helpful approach more widely available to the evangelical community and will serve to make us more effective interpreters of and contributors to the cultural landscape. n Eric O. Jacobsen is senior pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Tacoma,Wash. He is

the author of Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (Brazos, 2003).

A Persistent Peace

By John Dear, SJ Loyola Press Reviewed by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove As a neighbor of Duke University, I have to confess that my greatest delight in reading John Dear’s autobiography, A Persistent Peace: One Man’s Struggle for a Nonviolent World, was in learning that God can save even a “spoiled, wealthy frat boy.” As a Baptist minister—writing in the midst of revival season, no less— I am surprised not so much that Jesus can grab hold of a self-absorbed individual and set him on a new path as that a young man groomed to walk the halls of power might find salvation in the way of the criminal Christ. “It requires good people to break bad laws,” Dear writes after 75 arrests and a quarter century of struggle to practice active nonviolence as a Jesuit priest. “It’s the way of the cross, the way of Jesus. The nonviolent struggle requires that we sacrifice ourselves and bet on the promise of resurrection.”

Dear is no Gandhi or King, which he readily admits. “I had nowhere near the inner strength… The roots of war lay deep within me.” With a relentless focus on the goal of disarming his own heart, however, Dear discipled himself to the great figures of the Catholic peace movement—the Berrigan brothers, Jim Douglass, Richard McSorley, Mother Teresa—to learn the way of peace.While the political actions to which this path led may seem radical, the spirituality Dear exudes is evangelical to the core.

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rooted in a personal relationship with the Son of God. But this personal intensity, as inspiring as it can be, is also what I find most unsettling about the book.Though Dear learned nonviolence from a host of heroes and has practiced it with an impressive array of movers and shakers (from Jackson Browne to Desmond Tutu), his story is, as the subtitle suggests, decidedly “one man’s struggle.” I don’t think Dear is to blame for this, though he confesses on more than one occasion how his own stubbornness has alienated others. The problem is bigger:We live in a time when the peace witness of God’s people is not a necessary part of discipleship but rather a specialized “calling.”Witnesses like John Dear remind us that Jesus has saved us not only from our sin but also from the myth of redemptive violence that fuels our wars against terror, drugs, crime, and poverty. But we don’t need more lone rangers crusading for peace despite the church.What we really need are churches where a persistent peace is the norm.

I suspect John Dear would be glad to fade into the anonymity of such a community. n Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is the author of Free to be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line (NavPress, 2008) and New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church (Baker, 2008).