Off the Shelf September 2009

OFF THE SHELF The Hole in Our Gospel

By Richard Stearns Thomas Nelson Reviewed by Jan Johnson The “hole” in our gospel, according to World Vision President Rich Stearns, is that it too often lacks “tangible compassion for the sick and the poor, as well as biblical justice, efforts to right the wrongs that are so prevalent in our world.”

Stearns maintains that the gospel is much more than a private transaction with God in which individuals secure eternity in heaven; God expects that his kingdom within us will change and challenge our fallen world in the here and now. The gospel doesn’t help us to escape the world but rather to take part in redeeming the world.

Stearns takes the Western church to task in a direct yet artful way by asking readers to imagine two different churches: a growing American congregation with a decent focus on missions and typically plentiful facilities and programs; a growing church in a developing country that is intimately involved in helping its neighbors and has almost no facilities or programs. He insists that the former is not a “bad” church, but it is preoccupied with programs and oblivious to the latter church’s suffering. He asks if Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 8:13-15 about how the churches spread out their resources so that no one was in need wouldn’t be a good idea today as well.

He illustrates just how good an idea it still is by recounting stories from churches in developing countries so that readers get a glimpse of powerful gospel communities without the amenities so prevalent in America.

While this book covers territory that PRISM readers are familiar with — statistics about world poverty, principles

for dealing with it, pertinent Scripture — it also relates the author’s struggle in moving from being president of a luxury goods company (Lenox, maker of fine tableware) to becoming president of World Vision. He initially told a recruiter that he was unfit for the World Vision position because it required being part CEO, part Mother Teresa, and part Indiana Jones. His honesty about his reluctance makes this book a good read and an appropriate gift for people, including many church leaders, who esteem success in business.

Because the book includes a study guide, it can also be used in small groups to broaden participants’ vision for the holistic gospel. The five-session study guide includes plentiful questions, an action step, and a prayer, and it also points to an interactive website (TheHoleIn OurGospel.com) which provides additional resources and a space for dialogue where readers can share their thoughts, ideas, action plans, and experiences. n Jan Johnson (JanJohnson.org) is a spiritual director, speaker, and author of 19 books, including Invitation to the Jesus Life.

PRISM 2009

34

A People’s History of Christianity

By Diana Butler Bass HarperOne Reviewed by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre A cover, as we all know, is not the thing by which to judge a book. But the cover of A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story, deliberately reminiscent of Howard Zinn’s best-selling A People’s History of the United States, delivers an important part of the book’s message. Remember Zinn’s radical retelling of American history? Remember how he affirmed good news about the power and resiliency of ordinary people when they united against exploitation, abuses of authority, and unjust systems?

Remember his willingness to acknowledge the dark side in order to get to the deep place where authentic hope may still be found? This book is going to do some similar upsetting and reordering.

Diana Butler Bass calls her book “a history of hope.” Like Zinn, she considers what has survived all the cultural cataclysms, schisms, hairpin turns, sectarian agendas, misreadings of Scripture, misleadings of the faithful, and divisions among Christians over the past two millennia.They have always been a disheveled lot, uncertain about how to live together and not very good, on the whole, at claiming the peace that passes all understanding. But every age has left its legacy — not only of doctrine and documents but also of a way of life embodied in the lives of recognized saints and of inconspicuous individuals whose practices were like the leaven that makes the whole loaf rise.

Bass addresses the project of corrective or restorative historiography in her introduction, where she acknowledges her debt to the man who radically reframed American history for so many:

“Like Zinn, I sidestep issues of orthodoxy and instead focus on the moments when Christian people really acted like Christians, when they took seriously the call of Jesus to love God and love their neighbors as themselves.”This appears to be a simple agenda, but it is actually a courageous experiment in creating a new cartography for an old landscape, mapping the byways where a “generative Christianity” has found its way in an inhospitable world — and sometimes an inhospitable church. The history of the church is often told in largely institutional, doctrinal, and political terms.

Though we have many lives of recognized saints, it has been harder to find stories of the ordinary faithful who were changed and reshaped by a faith that was, explicitly in the early church, a “Way” of life — day-to-day practices of caring for friends and strangers, speaking truth to power, and living faithfully when doing so entailed risk of life and property, social respectability, or family ties.

Each age, Bass points out, has articulated particular devotional practices and ethics in response to its political and social realities: imperial domination; threats of

war; neighbors from other faith traditions; institutional consolidation; revolution; and inventions that undermined stabilities, such as the telescope, gunpowder, the printing press, television, and blogs.Though Bass’ division of Christian history into “periods” is not new, her characterization of them possesses an exhilarating freshness. Early (1st- to 6thcentury) Christians lived subversively, communally, hospitably, with a common commitment to peacemaking. Medieval Christians (500-1450) left both a visible legacy of stunning architecture and a highly structured spirituality expressed in liturgy, monastic practices, and theological debate. Reformed Christians (14501650) focused on the Word — reading, writing, speaking, singing, and translating texts for the “priesthood of all believers.” Modern Christians (16501945) — shaped by secular learning, “enlightenment” science, cross-cultural access, and the politics of nation-states — worked across deep lines of division.

And contemporary Christians (1945today) find themselves in a “river” (a metaphor the author develops in generous and surprising ways) where political and theological crosscurrents mingle as waters rise, allowing strange mergings of faith traditions in the interests of spiritual renewal and planetary survival.

The urgencies Christians feel in our generation are not new, though they may be driven by new motives: pacifism, experiments in intentional communal living, resistance to imperialism, disengaging faith from patriotism, assimilation of multiple cultural traditions, 12-step programs, interest in Celtic spiritual practices, disputes over the use of images in worship, mother-language for God, ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, creation care, resistance to literalistic reading of Scripture, participation of women in church leadership. All these issues and experiments have histories. To trace those histories is to see how the Body of Christ has

PRISM 2009

35

grown in its understanding of what it means to claim citizenship in the “City of God.” Given the inevitable constraints of a narrative that encompasses two millennia, the book is remarkably coherent, lively, and helpful in providing a sense of how the communion of saints who have preceded us and who surround us lift and hold us as we make our way on this journey with and toward the one who assured us, “I am the Way.” n Marilyn Chandler McEntyre is a Fellow at the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif.

She is the author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, just out from Eerdmans.

The New Shape of World Christianity

By Mark A. Noll IVP Academic Reviewed by Benjamin L. Hartley Eight pages.That is how much attention the textbook for my first church history survey course at seminary gave to the history of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The textbook was Christianity: A Social and Cultural History (Macmillan, 1991), and it was co-authored by Mark Noll.That was 12 years ago. Much has changed since then, and Noll’s latest book, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith, provides readers with a good introduction to what Noll calls a “cascade of scholarship” in the area of world Christianity — an area to which Noll himself is a relative newcomer.

Noll introduces this subject by showing his readers the extent to which world Christianity reflects a familiarly American style of Christianity characterized by entrepreneurial faith, lack of state-sup-

ported religious institutions, responsiveness to urbanization, and a host of other social factors.

By telling the story of world Christianity with reference to an American template of religious development, Noll runs the risk of appearing to be the “ugly American” who sees all the world to be, well, like America! But Noll strenuously tries to prevent his readers from coming to this conclusion. His thesis is simply that the way American Christianity developed in the 19th century has intriguing similarities to the way evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity has developed beyond Western lands. This similarity does not mean that “Americans are dictating to the world,” but it does mean that the study of world Christianity may benefit from studying how Christianity developed in North America.

Noll’s central thesis is compelling in many ways, and his book certainly can be a good introduction for readers who know something about American Christianity but very little about Christianity elsewhere. Such readers can easily find a few “hooks” to connect their historical awareness across continents. But Noll’s argument that there is a correlation (not causation) between American Christianity and Christianity elsewhere is less convincing when the particular details of any given geographical and historical context are examined more carefully. In the first place, some of what Noll describes as an “American model” may also be said of the development of Christianity in other places well before Christianity’s expansion in North America.Evangelicalism in 17th-century Eastern Europe is but one example where revivalism took place within a chaotic setting similar to the American frontier a century later.

Second, because Noll points to the case of Korea without any reference to the centuries-long work of indigenous Roman Catholics in that country prior to Protestant missionary work in the

1880s, he fails to point out the ways this earlier Roman Catholic period of Christianity’s expansion in Korea departed from an American model. Noll ascribes to Protestant Bible translation such innovations as the hangul script, which was actually pioneered by Roman Catholics a century earlier, although more with liturgical texts than with the Bible.

Many examples of Christianity on the African continent today can likewise be noted, which would leave one wondering to what extent such manifestations were essentially American in their makeup.

The influence of African traditional religions and Islam on African Christianity, for example, departs rather significantly from American experience.

One could argue, however, that such criticisms about particularity are inevitable for a book that seeks to make a complex area of study more accessible through historical generalizations. Noll is well aware that individual contexts are complicated. That his first book on world Christianity would seek to make connections to the field of American religious history that he knows so well and that it would sometimes make gen-

eralizations a bit too easily are understandable. So long as the reader also keeps this in mind, The New Shape of World Christianity remains a valuable contribution for those who would like an excellent introduction to a growing area of historical scholarship. His suggestions for further reading and helpful charts and graphs about the shape of the American missionary force and the use of the Jesus Film around the world are in themselves worth a careful review.

What is abundantly clear is that this topic now must unquestionably be given far more than eight pages in any seminary’s church history survey course. n Benjamin L. Hartley is associate professor of Christian mission at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa.

The Next Evangelicalism

By Soong-Chan Rah InterVarsity Press Reviewed by Ning Zhang Two unambiguous reactions will surely be provoked by Soong-Chan Rah’s message in The New Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity.

Some people will embrace it enthusiastically; others will cringe and cover their ears. As I read through the book, I often compared Rah to a biblical-era prophet — people will either want to follow him or assassinate him.

Rah is calling the North American church to seek healing for its captivity to white,Western cultural trappings and to embrace a new evangelicalism that is more humble, dynamic, and multiethnic.

Recognizing that Western captivity is already waning, he urges the American church to seek reconciliation and renewal but warns that reconciliation is never

PRISM 2009

36

achieved without pain. Feeling disturbed, pained, and even guilty is a necessary step towards restoration.

Some might fear that Rah’s message of reconciliation will end up polarizing “us.” To this argument I can imagine Rah responding, “Who is ‘us’— white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the United States? Or is ‘us’ the body of Christ regardless of skin color, speaking accent, or immigration status? Jesus came to polarize and distinguish — the weeds and the wheat, the goats and the sheep, those who enter through the narrow gate and those who travel the wide road. He has come to bring fire, not peace but division (Luke 12:49-53)! How differently Jesus conceives ‘us’ from how we do!

Jesus considers peace and reconciliation not according to color, ethnicity, or even family but according to our membership in the body of Christ!”

Rah’s book does not seek to inspire the superficial reconciliation of people but to realize true reconciliation within the body of Christ. This reconciliation of Christian brothers and sisters has long been lost, despite — or perhaps because of­ — the founding principles of this

Ning Zhang is assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. Her current research interests are in how globalization impacts grassroots organizations.

Do you find our reviews helpful? What kind of books would you like to see on these pages? Send your feedback to kristyn@esa-online.org.

PRISM 2009

37

Celia Escudero Espadas

country. As Rah argues forcibly, “From Hellenistic philosophy to medieval thought to the Enlightenment and postmodernity, each phase of Western philosophy has put forth as its central tenet the primacy of the individual.” He points out that the American church has placed individual primacy at the center of its theology and ecclesiology and says that the church is “more likely to reflect the individualism of Western philosophy than the value of community found in Scripture.” All together, Rah argues, individualism, consumerism/materialism, and racism have shaped Western society and consequently shaped the American church, reducing Christian faith to an individual and pragmatic faith that exists along the line of personal likings, marketing efforts, and white privileges.

White churches are in decline, while immigrant, ethnic, and multiethnic churches are flourishing. The danger lies not so much in the fact that evangelicalism has long been held captive by its predominantly white cultural identity and history as it does in its lack of acknowledgement of this fact. Rah calls us to respond to this booming global Christianity, to reject the claim of cultural captivity no matter how comfortable we may be with it, and even to be willing to submit humbly to the authority and leadership of nonwhite Christians, for, as Jesus said, “whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” n

End Hunger in God’s World Celebrate Bread for the World Sunday

October 18, 2009 Renew Your Commitment Order and info at www.bread.org/sunday 1-800-822-7323

FREE Bulletin Inserts Sermon Study Prayers

www.bread.org