Author: Sara Palmer

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One New Book for the Preacher

Darrell L. Guder

Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey

Michael J. Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb Into the New Creation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011).

The discussion of the “missional church” has already fostered a broad diversity of publications whose use of the term “missional” makes clear that the term is rapidly becoming problematic. It is by now a popular cliché that is used for such a spectrum of themes that any discussion of it requires a basic clarification of terms. One of the more theologically centered outcomes of the emergence of the term, however, is the growing engagement with “missional hermeneutics.” Pioneered by David Bosch in the first third of his magisterial Transforming Mission dealing with the biblical foundations of mission, this approach to Scripture builds on the basic assumption that the apostolic mission strategy was the formation of witnessing congregations, and that the scriptural witness in its diverse forms continues that process of formation for faithful missional witness. To interpret Scripture in such a way requires, however, a rather significant re-orientation of biblical scholarship. There is, thankfully, a growing number of biblical scholars who are contributing to an emerging literature on the missional interpretation of Scripture. Among those is Michael Gorman, a Protestant Professor of Sacred Scripture on the faculty of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore. His recently published book on the interpretation of the book of Revelation is truly an exegetical and hermeneutical goldmine for the biblical preacher and teacher who wants to equip her congregation for faithful witness as a sent-out community. The basic hermeneutical question which serves missional formation can be formulated along these lines: How did this text continue the formation of a community for its missional vocation then, and how does it do that today in a particular context? Gorman’s exposition of the Revelation in its theological setting then, leading on to the exploration of its relevance for our communities in our late or post Christendom setting today, is a reliable and provocative resource for that process. The book is not a commentary, nor does it replace the work of the exegete who needs to work with the text directly in order to preach or to teach it. But the book illumines the message of the Revelation for its original context, traces the major themes whose trajectories continue to be major challenges for the church, and paves the way for exegesis and exposition in sermon and lesson today. It lays out the issues and questions with which the exegete should grapple when translating the book’s message into a contemporary context. In doing this, Gorman makes some bold moves that will challenge both the preacher and the listening community. These bold moves constitute Gorman’s truly prophetic and provocative engagement with the challenge of what I call “reductionist revisions of the gospel and of the theology and practice of the church,” which are the outcomes of the centuries of the western Christendom tradition. The author focuses his polemic upon the reductionism of the Christian church to a civil region in partnership, if not in subservience, to the

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social and political orders in which it located. His interpretation of both the seven letters and the visions of heavenly worship results in a persuasive articulation and rejection of the cultural captivities which have so pervasively shaped the Christian movement in the West. His exegetically grounded exposition of the problem of accommodation as over-accommodation or, to use the missiological lingo, over-contextualization of the church and its message is blunt, cutting, germane – and must be affirmed. This incisive prophetic polemic addresses the ways in which the church has allowed itself to be enlisted in the defense of the nationalisms and idolatries of cultural identity—and thus displaced the Lamb from the throne. For the Reformed theologian reading this interpretive guidebook, there are some obvious challenges. We are wary of approaches that might tend to withdraw the church from active engagement with its political and social context. That is clearly not what Gorman is contending with his argument for “uncivil worship and witness.” Quite the opposite: it is hard to contest the finding that the message of Revelation must lead us to ask some threatening questions. Do we not need seriously to entertain the removal of all flags from sanctuaries and patriotic hymns from songbooks, the foregoing of all invocations that “God [should] bless America ״at the end of political addresses or in the singing of the noted national religious anthem? Is it not necessary now to wonder about pastoral prayers at the luncheon meetings of highly secularized service clubs? Should the governments continuing provision for military chaplains as well as chaplains for legislative bodies not be a theme that the Christian church should raise for the sake of its own integrity? The list of questionable accommodations becomes ever longer the more we become aware of what the centuries of Christendom generated and what is now questionable as it disintegrates. What Gorman lays out as the prophetic implications of the Revelation’s meaning for the posture and action of the church within the world is entirely arguable from the text as he expounds it. His exposition of the Book of Revelation can challenge us to read it as a profound and incisive challenge of many of the assumptions that govern our churchly reality in the West today. When teaching the end of Christendom, I caution my students that it is not appropriate for us to place ourselves on some pedestal of spiritual purity and point back with righteous judgment to the compromises and captivities our predecessors acceded to over the centuries since Constantine. I suggest that it is important to learn to read, receive, and assess this complex legacy dialectically. We cannot assert that God has been absent from the history of Christendom -not even absent from the somewhat ambivalent story of Constantine’s spiritual journey. We cannot claim that the Gospel has not been heard, believed, and passed along in the centuries of our so-called Christian history – and often by the agency of “established Christianity.” We cannot act as though the Holy Spirit disappeared from the arena of western world history sometime between Constantine’s vision and the establishment of the claims of papal authority as a soteriological necessity – only to return to earth in the particular Christian movement which we just founded, in alleged direct succession to the New Testament. Our history is a dialectical mixture of divine faithfulness and human unfaithfulness in and through which God has been graciously willing to continue to be present, heard, and active. The Gospel has been proclaimed and responded to in churches with flags in them, and royal chaplains have at times been witnesses of great integrity and courage. We receive this complex legacy both gratefully and critically. We struggle

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with how to do this with integrity. But we are challenged by the clear message of Revelation to recognize how fateful our concessions have been. The encounter with the responsible reading of Revelation must clearly result in a call for repentance and a profound desire for our own conversion to our unpolluted vocation. Gorman’s book can help the preacher and teacher to prepare her or his missional congregation to acknowledge and understand the constant reality of our own ambiguity . We are communities of forgiven sinners. We live with the diversity of immature milk-fed faith and mature meat-eating faith. We see through glasses darkly. We are admonished, if we think that we are strong Christians, to be especially considerate and supportive of those whom we regard as weak. The New Testament is very candid about the human frailty of the called and sent community – as is clearly seen in the seven letters in the Revelation. The warnings and the imperatives in the New Testament documents seem to make clear that, from the outset, the church has struggled with diverse challenges to its faithfulness. For the churches in which the Revelation of St. John was originally read out, the issue was growing public hostility toward the church. The programmatic persecution of the Christian movement was becoming a recurring political strategy of the empire. Throughout the apocalyptic visions, the underlying theme is the confidence that Christ will have the final and decisive victory, and that the saints are being equipped by God’s Spirit to endure. That endurance is central to the church’s visible witness, more and more a witness of martyrdom. But with the coming of Christendom after Constantine, the situation changed. Instead of being a marginal movement without power in society, the Christian church under royal patronage become a privileged part of the power structures that defined emerging Christendom. One can argue that the New Testament appears to be oriented largely towards the minority, resident alien church rather than the institutional church with political and social clout. Does the New Testament prepare the church for how it should carry out its witness in a radically changed political reality? Does Christian faithfulness change when the church’s place in society changes from being marginal to being central? What kind of churchly conduct is “worthy of the Gospel” when the church is the favored religious institution in society. The account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is clearly realistic preparation for the church’s encounter with the seductions of power and wealth. But, as Gorman makes plain, the Revelation can, in fact, contribute powerfully to the formation of a witnessing congregation whose loyalty is solely to the Lamb upon the throne and which, because of that loyalty, can experience ever new forms of hostility. For the Revelation to work that way in the community, it must be read and interpreted as the Word that “equips the saints for the work of ministry” now, in their ambivalent and often threatening contexts. And it must be read as a radical questioning of the assumptions we still make about our special place in the public square. Those assumptions are subject to review and revision. Now, as Christendom fades away, we find ourselves in situations more comparable to the pre-Constantinian reality of the Christian movement than to the intervening centuries of privilege and protection. The Book of Revelation is re-emerging as highly relevant preparation for witness in a world whose reaction to the gospel ranges from diffidence to rejection to active opposition. It is not an exaggeration to claim that the last book in the New Testament confronts us today with the call to our repentance of our Christendom compromises and our conversion to radical obedience in a progressively more hostile

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world. If we do not yet experience that hostility in our particular setting, then there certainly are many faith communities around the globe today for which that harsh reality is their daily experience. Perhaps we need to read Revelation together with those sisters and brothers in order to have our own understanding of our context and its challenges refined and sharpened. How, then, should the congregational formation enacted by the Revelation relate to the challenge of the late or post-Christendom church in the West? It is certainly relevant, as just noted, to the situation of Christian minorities experiencing repression and even persecution in many parts of the world today. We are, however, focused upon the North Atlantic mission field in which cultural Christianity is alive and well. Does the Revelation of St. John require that the Christian church retreat from the world into enclaves of counter-cultural witness? Can it guide us toward faithful witness in the ambiguous world into which we are sent? These are crucial questions for the community that wants to be faithful to its missional vocation. Dr. Gorman’s book provides enormously important guidance for this struggle, as it fosters serious work with the Revelation in congregations and classrooms. It is also a catalyst for passionate discourse, if not argument, on how we should go about it. It provides much needed guidance for how to engage the challenges at the end of Christendom in ways that are “worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

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Page 51

One New Book for the Preacher

Elizabeth R. Goodman

Monterey United Church of Christ, Monterey, Massachusetts

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (Crown Publishers: New York, 2012).

I serve a quiet church. It’s small, yes, very small. But we’re also quiet, even Quaker-esque. Though we’re a United Church of Christ congregation, I actually believe that quietude is one of our spiritual gifts. My fondness, then, for quiet is likely what drew me to Susan Cain’s book Quiet. And, though I’d hesitate to say that preachers everywhere should read it (that distinction I’d give to Walter Brueggemann’s The Practice of Prophetic Imagination, a book that needs more to be read than to be boiled down to 1200 words in review), I will say that, since I first read Quiet, I’ve revisited many of Cain’s points—and not only as an introvert or as pastor of a quiet church, but as a mainline Christian in America, where the church’s Evangelical wing, this undoubtedly extroverted expression of the faith, increasingly seems to call the shots. Cain’s premise is that “our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race,” and “the single most important aspect of personality.. .is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum” (p.2). The central problem she sees is that, though introverts likely make up one-third to one-half of the population, we Americans (citizens as we are in the world’s most extroverted nation) “make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles” (p. 3), living with an “Extrovert Ideal” ever in mind .One study found that talkative people were seen as, among other things, smarter and better looking! Cain explains that, while all people need relationships and intimacy, the difference then between introverts and extroverts (categories that no one adheres to absolutely and always) is a matter of degree. Introverts prefer few and intimate relationships, require less outward stimulation than extroverts, and favor cooperative relatedness. Extroverts are more comfortable with conflict, but less with solitude. What introverts lack in quickness of action, they make up for with patience and persistence. Cain quotes introvert Albert Einstein: “It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s that I stay with problems longer” (p. 169). Cain uses cultural historian Warren Susman’s terminology to trace the rise of the Extrovert Ideal. He describes our collective pivot from a Culture of Character to the more recent Culture of Personality; this coincided with the age of industrialization and its “perfect storm of big business, urbanization, and mass immigration” (p. 2122 ). Cain writes, “In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private” (p. 21). In the Culture of Personality, notes Susman, “Every American was to become a performing self’ (p. 21). A word study Cain cites makes this plain. Early self-help guides emphasized “citizenship, duty, work, golden deeds, honor, reputation, morals, manners, [and] integrity.” Later ones featured words like “magnetic, fascinating, stunning, attractive,

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glowing, dominant, forceful, [and] energetic” (p. 23). But the pithiest illustration is this: Orison Swett Marden published a popular book in 1899 entitled Character: the Grandest Thing in the World, and another 22 years later entitled Masterful Personality . Naturally, our transformation was at some cost, which is a primary message of Cain’s writing: we went “from Character to Personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way( ״p. 33). Cain visits three temples of the Culture of Personality: a Tony Robbins UPW (Unleash the Power Within) Seminar, the Harvard Business School campus, and the Saddleback Church. JP readers who read Quiet will likely find Cain’s knowledge of church culture(s) lacking, as she seems to accept the Evangelical movement as wholly representative of Christianity in contemporary America. (And they’ll be amused, if not offended, by her reliance on Jesus Christ: Superstar in asserting that “even the Western God is assertive, vocal, and dominant: his son Jesus is kind and tender, but also a charismatic, crowd-pleasing man of influence” [p. 189]. Apparently, there ’s little critical distinction to be made between St. Mark or St. Luke and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber!) Regardless, this is an enlightening frame for focusing on the Evangelical movement, and by contrast, its generally quieter sibling, the Mainline. I particularly appreciated the chance to reconsider the Mainline’s over-the-shoulder look at what the Evangelical church is up to, our mimicking their methods, and our even accepting their measure of what excellence in worship looks like. Of course, you can hardly visit such temples of extroversion as these without falling under the spell of just how essential extroversion is for effective leadership. As to demystify our thinking, Cain sites a study done by Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton School of Business, who found that “extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, but introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees” (p. 56). Well, that was worth the price of the book for me! As pastors we are, after all, to equip the saints for the work of ministry. Yet we so frequently lament that our congregations are so passive that we’ve got to wake them up! The assumed remedy is to become bigger, louder, more colorful versions of ourselves and to make over our congregational leaders as well. (Hear now Krusty the Clown’s aggravating laugh.) But this may be absolutely wrong. Perhaps to awaken a passive church, the pastor and leaders should sit quietly and prayerfully wait. Cain notes that following the economic crash of 2008, “it became fashionable to speculate whether we’d have been better off with more women and fewer men on Wall Street. But maybe we should also ask what might have happened with a few more introverts at the helm” (p. 162). She clearly believes that given the many and multivalent challenges we face—economically, ecologically, socially, etc.—recognizing what introverts bring to the table can only do us all a great and deep service. I’ve heard that most mainline pastors are introverts. Although I haven’t the numbers to back this up, it resonates with my experience of colleagues—we are largely introverts who’ve learned to ape extroversion. And why not, given that congregations describing their ideal pastor often focus on such qualities as those in this week’s Christian Century classifieds: “energetic and innovative,” “insightful preaching [and] visionary leadership.” Forget that “insightful preaching” on a weekly basis demands hours of study and contemplation—activities largely done in solitude. Forget that another ad’s “outgoing” and“spiritual” might well be mutually exclusive. I wonder if these congregations know not only what they’re asking for, but also what they’re

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foreclosing on. Cain writes that left to their own devices, “introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things…while extroverts are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing ‘what is’ while their introverted peers are asking ‘what if’” (p. 168). This especially piqued my interest. To wonder, to imagine, to ask, “What if?” seem like essentially spiritual and religious activities. So, if they are the preferred purview of the introverts among us, I humbly (introvertedly) assert that the Church, if no one else, should be eager to include these among its membership and leadership. If you don’t read Quiet, you might just buy a copy to leave lying around in your church fellowship hall. Then maybe some of your congregation’s members will pick it up, give it a read, and realize that you (introvert that you are!) are exactly the person they want and need in their pulpit.

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One New Book for the Preacher

Thomas H. Schmid

Santa Barbara, California

James Carroll. Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our World. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011.

“Urn, what’s this?” I looked over the new publications at a bookstore, now part of our memory, and came upon the above title. After a number of years and books, James Carroll is like an old friend. I know his story well from An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, his memoir of the relationship with his father so strained by the war in Viet Nam {Journal For Preachers, Easter, 1998), and then Constantinos Sword, his hefty chronicle of the problematic history of injustices wrought by Christians upon Jews. If one wants to know where Hitler’s kind of anti-semitism came from, Constantine ‘s Sword is a good place to start (Journal For Preachers, Easter, 2002). “Well, let me see.” Jerusalem, Jerusalem is not as heavy as Constantine’s Sword. Substantial, but not gargantuan. I picked up the book without having read reviews or even knowing of its publication and looked at it cleanly for the first time. Thumbing through the pages, I thought of the current strife in the middle east, the hostilities between Israel and neighboring countries, and how long this unrest has been present in my mind. Certainly I can go back to the six day war in 1967, when I was serving on active duty and wondered if that event would extend my service. I remember reading of Harry Truman’s pride in the creation of the state of Israel, hearing references to the Balfour declaration, knowing that the British had something to do with Palestine, even flashing back to the crusader and Robin Hood movies of the early to mid 1950s and the sense of excitement I had about Richard the Lionhearted and his quest to retake Jerusalem. How could anybody remembered as “lionhearted” be anything other than pure good? Then there were all those years in the pulpit, scriptural references to the faithful “going up to Jerusalem,” to the adolescent Jesus staying behind in the Temple, the adult Jesus some twenty years later weeping over the city, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, would that I could take you under my wing …,” the raucous welcome on Palm Sunday, the intrigue and tragedy of the week to come, and at last the mystery of the resurrection. “I think I’ll take this,” I said aloud to no one in particular. “I need to know more about Jerusalem,” and wondered why no one had written something like this before. After having read Carroll’s earlier memoir, I felt a certain kinship. He is my age, and his memoir makes sense in the chronicle of my own life. However, when I got to Constantine’s Sword, I found a good bit of Carroll’s personal history mixed into the history of Christian-Jewish relationships, and it was sometimes a bit distracting. I wondered to what extent Carroll would weave his own journey into his book/history /biography of Jerusalem. The answer comes fairly early as Carroll writes of a time of discernment, 1973. He had been ordained a Roman Catholic priest for several years, was struggling with a number of issues and how he might best live out his sense of call, and arranged

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for a retreat to Jerusalem to think through what his lifetime commitments could and would be. Journal readers and writers have all faced the question of what it means to be called, and we sympathize with Carroll as he wrestles with his questions even as we envy him his ability to struggle in what many of us will consider a privileged way. Fortunately, Carroll uses his personal experience merely and briefly to introduce the reader to his own fascination with the ancient city. Once we understand the author’s personal history, we move with him into his history of the world and the development of humankind. Certain portions of this seem unnecessary to the task, but we stick with Carroll because he has become an old friend, we like him, we admire his earnestness, and we have been reading him for a long time. He also does a good job. Some might skim over these portions, but he uses the ancient history to set up a time where Jerusalem and its culture of sacrifice come into being. Those of us who have spent our working lives teaching and preaching the Bible will have a good bit of the biblical outline of Palestinian and Jewish history and culture within our memories. It was in the Babylonian captivity that the Jewish identity crystallized and that Jerusalem began to assume a new centrality of the mind in the national character. The return, the rebuilding of the city and the Temple, all tell of an evolving faith and identity. Carroll fills in some of the gaps, reminds us of the successful Maccabean rebellion in the time before the Roman occupation. At last we come not only to the Romans, but to the time after Jesus’ life when, about 70 CE, the Temple and the city were destroyed, tens of thousands of rebellious Jews were killed in the most hideous ways, and those who could escape did escape to other parts of the middle East and the Mediterranean world. It is in this era that Carroll notes the beginning of what he calls the spiritualization of Jerusalem, e.g., although the Temple had been destroyed and there was hardly anything left of the former city, faithful Jews everywhere began to say at their seders, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Jerusalem as it had been became an idea to be treasured, to be sought after, to be recaptured. Whereas I was expecting a chronological timetable, a sequential historical development, what ensues is a biography of the idea of Jerusalem. We read of the American ideal rooted in John Winthrop ‘s sermon, “A City on a Hill,” and the English ideal in William Blake’s poem set to Parry’s music in the hymn, “Jerusalem,” sung so recently at the British royal wedding. Carroll does not ignore the chronology. We get it that the Byzantine empire dominated the city until the Persians took it in 614, that the followers of Islam took it several years after the death of Mohammed; we have a brief summary of the crusades and know that the successors to Saladin held Jerusalem even as the Zionist movement arose in the later nineteenth century, and that Lord Allenby took it during the First World War. The Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917, stated British support for the idea that there should be “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, and even Jews understood that the British intended for such a Jewish state to be a fief in the British Empire. With chronology in a distant background, Carroll examines and re-examines the ideas of war and violence in the name of God, the incongruity of the three monotheistic religions all taking their hostility out on each other, the regrettable events perpetrated by those who embraced the principles of non-violent faiths .Asa Christian, he continues his personal penance begun in Constantine ‘s Sword for the atrocities of our Christian forebears to both Jews and Muslims. Carroll’s chronology accelerates as the Zionist movement takes hold and

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Jews return to Palestine, particularly in their escape from German aggression in the 1930s and as refugees and death camp survivors relocate at the conclusion of World War II. His treatment of the dispossession of native Palestinians is not incidental. And his treatment of the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann makes fresh a memory for people of a certain age. “Centered on the holy city, we have been tracking the history not of religious violence but of an endemic human bipolarity that has often been pushed further into enmity, more savagely into war, by appeals to God. The pattern predates record keeping ” (page 296). Thus Carroll begins his concluding chapter which culminates in his summary of what good religion would look like: “Good religion would celebrate life, not death.” “Good religion recognizes in God’s Oneness a principle of unity among all God’s creatures, a unity that is also known as love.” “Good religion is concerned with revelation, not salvation.” “Good religion knows nothing of coercion.” “In the new age, good religion may, paradoxically, have a secular character” (pages 310-317). As he expands on each of his points, we remember why we read Carroll and how he became such an old friend.