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Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission
Nathan Kerr asks what mode of thinking about history and the historicist character of human agents an environment renders the 'truth' of the earliest Christian confession true for our world today. In this latest volume in the "Veritas" series, the author offers a defense of Christian apocalyptic as a mode of taking seriously the public, social, and political character of the Church's confession under the pressure of the modern historical consciousness.
256 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2008
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September 4, 2010
"Jesus is Lord." --The New Testament
"What's that supposed to mean?" --Troeltsch, paraphrased
Kerr posits an answer to Troeltsch. Other powers claim and maintain lordship by coercion and ideology. Jesus showed his independence from those powers in his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. We may participate in that independence through the Holy Spirit, by praise, in communities that appear from society's margins. The ancient Christian claim of Jesus' lordship is made true by the Holy Spirit's irruption into history in those communities, a kind of recurring event called "apocalyptic". Those communities, in turn, are defined and brought into existence by their mission of inhabiting the same freedom from coercion and ideology that Jesus himself displayed.
The constructive proposal, as I've summarized it above, is the book's point, but not its bulk. This is, if I'm not mistaken, a dissertation in systematic theology, or perhaps a collection based on a set of comprehensive exams. Its four central chapters comprise analysis and evaluation of Troeltsch, Barth, Hauerwas, and Yoder, all major figures in the field. The work is careful, responsible, lucid-- but highly technical, rhetorically lifeless, and thus subjectively boring. The thought is clear and, in itself, potentially compelling, but the read was a slog. As a doctoral student in systematic theology myself, I speak this language every day, but books like this always make me wonder whether I'm actually fluent.
If I were reviewing this book in an academic journal, or as part of a tenure review committee, I'd give it very high marks. This book will certainly be useful to me as a scholar: It clears a great deal of ground between liberal and post-liberal ways of thinking about history, and may even point a way forward. It makes me want to go read a bunch of Yoder-- and any contemporary work that makes you want to go read its sources is doing something very right. As it stands, I can't recommend the book to readers outside the field; but I hope my own work, and that of Kerr's students and colleagues, will discern the truth in this book and make it more widely available.
"What's that supposed to mean?" --Troeltsch, paraphrased
Kerr posits an answer to Troeltsch. Other powers claim and maintain lordship by coercion and ideology. Jesus showed his independence from those powers in his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. We may participate in that independence through the Holy Spirit, by praise, in communities that appear from society's margins. The ancient Christian claim of Jesus' lordship is made true by the Holy Spirit's irruption into history in those communities, a kind of recurring event called "apocalyptic". Those communities, in turn, are defined and brought into existence by their mission of inhabiting the same freedom from coercion and ideology that Jesus himself displayed.
The constructive proposal, as I've summarized it above, is the book's point, but not its bulk. This is, if I'm not mistaken, a dissertation in systematic theology, or perhaps a collection based on a set of comprehensive exams. Its four central chapters comprise analysis and evaluation of Troeltsch, Barth, Hauerwas, and Yoder, all major figures in the field. The work is careful, responsible, lucid-- but highly technical, rhetorically lifeless, and thus subjectively boring. The thought is clear and, in itself, potentially compelling, but the read was a slog. As a doctoral student in systematic theology myself, I speak this language every day, but books like this always make me wonder whether I'm actually fluent.
If I were reviewing this book in an academic journal, or as part of a tenure review committee, I'd give it very high marks. This book will certainly be useful to me as a scholar: It clears a great deal of ground between liberal and post-liberal ways of thinking about history, and may even point a way forward. It makes me want to go read a bunch of Yoder-- and any contemporary work that makes you want to go read its sources is doing something very right. As it stands, I can't recommend the book to readers outside the field; but I hope my own work, and that of Kerr's students and colleagues, will discern the truth in this book and make it more widely available.
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