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Here’s my latest article for the Christian Century, a review of five theology books from the past year:

When I was in high school, I worked as a volunteer for a Republican who was running in the twenty-seventh district for the Virginia General Assembly. A woman I knew only as Mrs. Smith was the district operative who told me where to post signs, stuff mailboxes, knock on doors, and— on election eve— take down the other candidate’s signs. For each one of my campaign endeavors, she drove me, along with a van load of other volunteers, from place to place all over the south side of Richmond. And every outing, with some AM squawker on the radio, she’d turn away from the steering wheel to proselytize us in her latest conspiracy theory.

“Did you know,” she told me as I rode shotgun into some planned community, “President Clinton is responsible for the murder of several witnesses in the Whitewater scandal? Well, I read about it on the INTERNET,” she said, “do you have it? It’s an INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY!”

I shook my head.

“Honestly, would you say if I told you Bill and Hillary were behind Vince Foster’s suicide being faked for political purposes? It’s a coverup!”

Because I was a recent convert to Christianity, who thought Jesus expected us to tell the truth (even if the President did not), I told her the truth.

“Honestly, I’d say you sound like an insane person.”

A few years later, I was home on break from college, at church. I was surprised to find Mrs. Smith in the row ahead of me. Even though I knew Mrs. Smith a militant pro-lifer, back in the day at least, she wasn’t a Christian.

“Mrs. Smith,” I said, “What are you doing here?”

She frowned, and then she smiled.

“Something took ahold of me,” she said, “Back then. What’s Jesus call him? The Prince of Lies? Anyways, thanks to these folks here I’ve been set free.”

I thought about Mrs. Smith last January as I watched the lie-driven mob storm the Capitol armed with zip ties and Christian paraphernalia. Numerous commentators have observed the extent to which the protest on January 6, 2021 should be understood as a Christian riot. If this is true, then insurrection represents not only the erasure of political norms or the breakdown public trust but a grave theological error across the Church. I chalk it up to providence that the past year has gifted us books that can equip preachers and believers to think theologically about the odd and trying time that has been given us.

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To be sure, theology is never done in a vacuum. Theology is always contextual, yet this is no guarantee we rightly discern the context in which we live. It is never easy to know where you are in the world or what time is in God’s history. Few anticipated, for instance, a year that began without the peaceful transfer of power would end on the dawn of a new Cold War. That we see our time as in a mirror dimly makes the work of theology and proclamation a fragile, always occasional endeavor. In his latest collection, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas explores Barth’s short volume Against the Stream, written in the uncertain years when Stalinism waxed as Nazism waned. Hauerwas finds Barth doing theology in light of politics in a manner more subtle than suggested by his claim that we should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other hand.“Karl Barth’s famous claim may be good advice,” Hauerwas observes, “but surely the newspaper is just as likely to mislead as it is to help us know where we are and/or what time we are in. Barth’s advocating reading the newspaper fails to answer the question of which newspaper we should be reading. I am not raising the problem of so-called fake news. Rather I am simply calling attention to the different worlds the different headlines of papers presume as well as create.” Because we live in a world of different worlds, worlds created by headlines and algorithms and amateur “experts,” Hauerwas shows the value in the way Barth refused to take a position against the Soviet Union based on abstract principles or general values. “For Barth,” he writes, “the Church’s obligations do not lie in the direction of fulfilling a law of nature but rather toward her living Lord.  Therefore, the Church never acts on principal but judges spiritually and by individual cases.” On such a case-by-case basis, Hauerwas proceeds in Full Alive to apply Barth’s apocalyptic humanism (that is, a humanism determined by the God revealed in Jesus) to individual subjects such as pastoral care, civil society, and race.

It may indeed be difficult to know where we are in God’s history, as Hauerwas writes, but it certainly appears that we live at a time where race, identity in general, is just one of the fissures tearing the body politic asunder. In a very helpful book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, Alan Noble identifies and dissects the, often unexamined, premises in our discourse about identity. No doubt the anger that animates many who stormed the Capitol— the Q Shaman is but the most obvious example— is that, try as we might, our identify is neither manufacturable nor achievable. Noble puts the lie to the assumption that we possess an authentic, unadulterated self latent beneath the surface of the life we’ve been given, a true self that we must discover, build upon, or to which we must be true. In a culture fraught with debates about individual liberty, Noble reminds us that we are not self-derived. We are another’s product and thus property. We belong not to ourselves but to God. In You Are Not Your Own, Noble buttresses his argument with persuasive examinations of how contemporary culture understands identity in ways that finally lead to the opposite of an inhuman expectation of the self, one that produces, on one end of the the pole, burnout and anxiety, and on the other end, anger and injustice. Noble’s is a culture crash course, taking us to Augustine’s epiphany that our hearts will always be restless until they find their rest in the God to whom we belong. That is, Noble provides us a fortuitous and real world reclamation of the promise proclaimed to us by water and the Spirit.

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How God applies the promise to us is the subject of Steven Paulson’s third volume of Outlaw God, series probing Martin Luther’s emphasis on the hidden and the preached God. The late Cardinal, Francis George of Chicago (definitely not a Lutheran) said famously that “Our culture permits everything but forgives nothing.” Every passing year it feels like our culture only doubles down on that dialectic. The third volume Outlaw God is invaluable for preachers, therefore, for it examines the agency behind preaching and the sacraments. In word and water, wine and bread, the Absolute gives himself to us in his absolution, apart from any earning and deserving. The pardon of God not only removes any need for constructing a Christianity founded on certainty, Paulson shows, it silences the accusation of the Law and thereby creates faith, ex nihilo. Not only does Paulson provide an account of the preacher’s office that preachers and church members will find reinvigorating, he excavates the language of Protestantism exactly at a time when we could use help silencing the din of accusation in our culture.

Of course, we’re not the only accusers in our midst. The blame game is literally Satan’s name. In over twenty years of ministry, I’ve often found that laity, like Mrs. Smith, exhibit greater nimbleness than seminary-educated, pensioned pastors in speaking about the one whom the New Testament names as the Enemy. Reinhold Niebuhr said original sin was the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the faith. The past year has made a case that what Paul calls the Principalities and Power also require little catechesis or conversion. For this reason, Means of Grace: A Year of Weekly Devotions is assuredly more than an entry into the Chicken Soup for the Soul variety. Like a sculptor chipping away, Laura Bardolph Hubers has distilled Fleming Rutledge’s thick, challenging sermons into shorter, weekly devotions. If the insurrection revealed a theological error widespread in the Church and a captivity binding many believers, then church leaders must learn how to do substantive, faithful theology in brief, digestible bits. Likewise, we need to recover the apostles’s language of the Powers. In Means of Grace, a deft editor has aided a treasured preacher in teaching other preachers how to speak of a world that is ruled by the powers of evil yet awaits the sure victory of the crucified and risen one.

Like Mrs. Smith learned, it’s no easy undertaking distinguishing the Holy Spirit from the spirits of this evil age. This year received a new book that wasn’t, Ernst Kasemann’s Church Conflicts: The Cross, Apocalyptic, and Political Resistance. Much like Karl Barth, Kasemann’s career was forged in the crucible of conflict and read like a man calling due the promise of God in a world enthralled to an Other. In this newly translated book of essays and sermons from the autumn of Kasemann’s life, we glimpse a theologian, like Barth, attempting, on a case-by-case basis, to obey his Lord in a time when it’s difficult to discern the time. The past year has demonstrated, I believe, how desperately, the Body needs the spiritual discipline of discernment. If scripture is right and the world is bondage to a Power that is not God, then we require a greater facility to discern, and so to resist, the forces of evil and oppression. No matter time it is or how clearly we can see through the glass of God’s history, Church Conflicts points us forward, not only to profess the Lordship of Jesus in our time and place, but to live, in dark, discombobulating times, clinging to the  promise of the Gospel.

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