Category: Book Reviews

Today I'm doing the Lenten post over at Hopeful Imagination. This year contributors introduce a book that is important in their own spiritual story. My choice is Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense by W H Vanstone, a book I've already mentioned a few times on Living Wittily.

The sub title is The Response of Being to the Love of God. This book taught me so much about the love of God, and flowing from that, so much else. You might think my comments on the book are the excusable exaggeration of the enthusiast, or sales talk inexcusable in academic criticism. Just read the book – still in print 33 years after it was published -  then decide which is the right response, enthusiasm or criticism. Neither word quite covers it for me – the word I would choose is admiration – for the man, and for the ability to write a book like that. If biography is theology, here's the real thing. And if pastoral theology has first principles, they are embedded in the mystery of that self-giving Love that risks, creates and redeems in the willed vulnerability of the Triune God.

I've got an elderly friend whose approach to his faith is much more straightforward than mine, who now and again signals part of a conversation is over by stating with all the authority of a Benediction, "Well, that's whit ah think onywey". Ditto me! 🙂

Hempton's chapter on Van Gogh is an exploration of Evangelicalism and Secularisation. Like many other cultural and church historians Hempton is sceptical of the received tradition that defined secularisation along lines like these: "the decline of the social significance of religion lay in inexorable processes of urbanisation, industrialization,  and societalization, all conveniently subsumed within the catchall concept of modernization…". Explaining the origins and onset of the secular age using such an overarching theory is no longer tenable for many cultural historians and analysts.

Using three of van Gogh's paintings Hempton suggests persuasively because illuminatingly, that van Gogh depicted in image and colour the decline in influence and decay of dominant presence of the Church in Europe. The above picture, Old Church Tower at Nuenen (“The Peasants’ Churchyard”), contains the telling clues of intentional art. The windows are boarded or bricked up, the steeple (that upward pointing finger) has gone, the birds have claimed the tower as well as the air, no human figure is present. The low horizon, broken by wooden crosses that mark the graves of generations of peasants, with a dominant ruin in the foreground, speak of past glories now in ruin, and human history still present in the symbols of a faith slowly but surely in eclipse.

Van Gogh's own interpretation has obvious precedence:
"I wanted to express how those ruins show that for ages the
peasants have been laid to rest in the very fields which they dug up
when alive – I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial
is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf, just a bit of
earth dug up – a wooden cross. […] And now those ruins tell me how a
faith and a religion mouldered away – strongly founded though they were
– but how the life and the death of the [people] remain forever the
same, budding and withering regularly, like the grass and the flowers
growing there in that churchyard. “Les religions passent, Dieu demeure”
[Religions pass away, God remains]." (Letters, 411.1)

 .

This is Van Gogh's father's Reformed Church in Nuenen. Hempton sees here a further portrayal of secularization and the demise of Christendom. "There is no doubt that van Gogh's portrayal of his father's small Protestant church with its mainly female worshippers in a predominantly catholic village serves as an excellent symbol of late nineteenth century European religion. Religious pluralism, confessional pride, respectability…and feminization, which historians interpret as both the signs and the engines of European secularization, are all on display." (page 133)

The Bible belonged to Van Gogh's father; it is open at Isaiah 53. It lies beside a well worn copy of Emile Zola's La Joie de Vivre. The suffering servant juxtaposed with a novel in which a central figure is described as "the incarnation of renunciation, of love for others and kindly charity for erring humanity". Ancient faith embodied in a book, the Bible alongside an unlit candle, and the fiction of modernity with its own capacity to convey the realism and urgency of the present.

Three paintings, in which van Gogh uses images depicting the powerful and personal undertow pulling people of faith away from ancient religious certainties. They reflect the religious consequences in van Gogh's personal life of inexorable changes in contemporary culture, as his own faith was transmuted from evangelical Christianity to a more poignant, compassionate view of nature and the world of human affairs. In place of rejection of a fallen world, in these and the later paintings human suffering and joy, natural beauty and ordinariness, the cycle of life, growth and death, became vehicles for a view of life with reversed polarities; no longer confident that God is love, van Gogh is rather seeking ways of saying, in painting after painting, love is god. And this credo, far from being sentimental humanist piety, conferred honest mercy and deep understanding of the human condition, upon a man afflicted by personality extremes of mania and melancholia. A recurring Pauline phrase in his letters to his brother was 'sorrowful yet always rejoicing.' The courage and cost of such defiance, the compassion and creativity triggered by such oscillating anguish, are part of the mystery of the triumphant tragedy of van Gogh's life and art and religion.

Did you know that Vincent Van Gogh went through an intensely evangelical phase in the 1870's? That he taught Sunday School, and attended prayer meetings and preached in Richmond Wesleyan Methodist Church? It didn't last of course. But his spiritual journey is one of the fascinating stories told in David Hempton's latest book, Disenchanted Evangelicals. There are seven studies of people who moved away from an earlier enthusiastic, dogmatic and activist Evangelicalism.  Each study allows Hempton to explore important evangelical social attitudes related to the move from Evangelicalism to a more open, liberal, pluralist or secular faith position. It would be a mistake to invest those words with negative head-shaking disapproval – an attitude far too readily available to evangelicals as first response to those inner shifts in others that signal the movement of personal conviction and faith commitment in new directions.

Reading the stories of these all too human people, and Hempton's sympathetically critical study of what was going on in their inner lives and outer circumstances, it becomes clear that these were people of strong principle, thoughtful criticism, ethical passion, and open-eyed honesty about the theological limitations, social consequences, psychological costs and moral censoriousness, of Evangelicalism as they encountered it, and for varying lengths of time were enamoured with and lived it. Their disenchantment with a form of Christianity that had initially been the driving force of their lives, points to a number of perceived shortcomings in Evangelicalism as a movement and form of Christianity, which for them called in question the capacity of Evangelicalism to sustain faith in the rapidly changing world of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

The story of George Eliot's evolution away from evangelical principles to a highly moralised form of agnostic humanism provides a superb case study in moral analysis. The laser-like precision with which George Eliot homed in on hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, dogmatic bullying, culture-denying piety, masculine chauvinism and much else, made it impossible that a mind so ruthlessly honest would for long tolerate, what she increasingly pereived as a full contrary mindset. Eliot's celebrated demolition of Dr Cumming's fundamentalism in her essay in the Westminster Review is here placed in the context of her later backward looking critique. It still reads as an extended moral exposure of malign tendencies Eliot believed were endemic to Evangelical piety; this piece of irresistible polemic should be set reading for evangelicals who suffer from yet another of the afflictions Eliot lampooned – smugness.

Then there's the chapter on Van Gogh. Hempton makes no attempt to add to the varied explanations of Van Gogh's psychological and mental ill-health. He is too good a historian to be caught out in the reductionism that often underlies such analysis, diagnosis and too confident conclusions. Instead he explores Vincent's letters, the available biographical material, and some of the paintings, to trace the spiritual development that occurs within the heart and mind of one whose inner anguish and whose art, whose faith and way of coping with life's demands, embodies one of the key moments in the fortunes of Christianity in late modernity. The chapter is sub-titled Evangelicalism and Secularization. The 'hard pilgrimage' of Van Gogh, from doctrinally strident Dutch Reformed orthodoxy, through Wesleyan Methodism and evangelistic mission work, to a faith position removed to another intellectual universe, is traced by Hempton in a chapter worth the price of the whole book. he provides an analysis of three paintings which offer a different master narrative of the secularizatuion process. This section of the book is much too important to skip over. I'll include a fuller post on it as the next stage of this review.

On a different note altogether, Ian represented our College at a recent colloquium on Baptist Hermeneutics held at South Wales Baptist College in Cardiff. He's doing several posts on it over at the College Blog.

 There are plenty reviews of this novel, and no need to add to the superlatives and hesitations of established critics. I read this book in keeping with my Advent goal of reading several novels that take me into countries, culture's and views of the world very different from my own. This book about the struggles and courage to endure of women in Afghanistan, spanning the 30 years from the Soviet invasion, the resistance of the Mujahideen to the fall of the Taliban, is an apologetic for those same immensely resilient women. If at times Hosseini comes close to stereotyping the central characters, that is because as a novelist he has set out with deliberate apologetic intent.

The interweaving of violence, at once intentional and random, domestic and military, with human qualities of love, courage, forgiveness and unselfish kindness, creates throughout the novel a constant tension of low-key menace that at times erupts into catastrophe and loss – and made it hard for me to read on. And through it all two women, thrown together by circumstances at once inevitable and tragic, and yet through which they discover ways of transcending fear, hate and suspicion, find in their relationship a final resolution both redemptive and passionately defiant of the forces that destroy.

I heard Khaled Hosseini interviewed on radio, explaining why he had worked so hard to portray the harsh realities of life for women and children in the recent history of his country. His capacity to portray the inner lives of the two key characters Mariam and Laila, I found uncannily persuasive, unflinching in exploring their aching loss, describing the inner impact of systemic dehumanising treatment, portraying their protective tenderness to their children. There is harrowing realism in the scenes of brutality, but I never found  them gratuitous, though at times near overwhelming. Why so much pain? Such scenes were however powerfully convincing, evoking in me responses of deep anger, particularly towards male characters whose religious rigidity or collusion in structures of cultural and social oppression of women, enabled, indeed required, such oppressive treatment systemic and sanctioned. There are times when imaginative literature of this quality is more effective than graphic TV footage – more morallly disconcerting, more emotionally galvanising. If that makes it a lesser novel, then perhaps there are times when the requirements of making truth heard are more urgent than the demands for technical literary excellence

Written by an Afghan novelist, set in contemporary international events, using the microcosms of two women caught up in personal tragedies that intersect, confronting in vivid storytelling the realities behind that evil euphemism "collateral damage", this is a novel intentionally making a point. Yet doing so not with comic-strip caricature, but by imaginative realism, creative empathy, and profound moral maturity in the handling of the unpredictable ambiguities and urgent choices that war and violence force on the innocent.

For these reasons, despite its apologetic tone, I still think this is a great novel – because it is a story hard for economically comfortable, culpably cocooned Western minds to credit unless it is writ large in the emotional drama of suffering and redemption. By which I mean it deals with immense issues of what it means to be human in a brutal world, to endure and sacrifice for the sake of the other. Great also because it is I believe a morally honest book. Under the Mujahideen and the Taliban the brutal violence against women, the suppression of women's educational and cultural potential, the warlords' complacency about women and children as necessary casualties on the road to influence and political power, is a story that both needs to be told and needs to be heard. Hosseini is not suggesting the situations in this book are universal in Afghanistan – then or now. But they are not uncommon. The great novelist is as necessary as the great journalists, poets, reporters, photographers and other chroniclers of our times.

I wanted to read several books that would widen my perspective – this one did, and I hope enlarged my capacity to understand, and care, more. The very strangeness of its context and tragedy, took me much deeper into the why of the Incarnation – a world broken but beautiful, where evil often flourishes but where love endures, and God is.

This final post is a collection of quotations from Disputed Truth. One of Kung’s gifts is a way of writing that has style, lucidity, and a restrained but persistent passion for his subject.

One of Kung’s most important books is Justification. The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection, English edition 1964, which along with Von Balthasar’s volume on Karl Barth, represents some of the best appreciative Barthian criticism, both still having to be reckoned with as interpretations of Barth -(though Bruce McCormack’s work has since ‘reckoned with’ Von Balthasar’s thesis). Kung  spoke with affectionate admiration at Barth’s memorial serrvice, and comments in his latest Memoir volume:

The relationship between Kung and Ratzinger, now Benedict xvi, is woven throughout this volume. Is there any love lost between them? Or found? It’s harder to read Kung’s inner feelings than to read the well written narrative, anecdotes, and comments; a mixture of fair-minded recall, reflection after the fact and not infrequent acid aside, which could be humorous, ironic or sarcastic, depending on the tone of voice – not discernible in print! Here are a couple of his comments:

The reading of Kung’s Memoirs has been an emotionally demanding and theologically enjoyable encounter with one of the few theologians whose theological and moral programme seek to span cultures within and beyond Christianity, and on a global scale. His ‘Global Ethic’ is not without its serious critics, and his theological reconstructions do read at times like an older form of demythologising and disowning of mystery, removing the sharp edges of a Gospel which both wounds and heals. Like many others, there are times when I think Kung is simply wrong, and in seeking to explain, explains away, and in seeking to communicate with the modern world is perhaps too accommodating to the modern, and now post-modern mindset. But in a world that manages to be both polarised and fragmented at the same time, a message of global responsibility and a way of moving towards a more responsible and hopeful way of human existence, Kung believes, arises out of the nature of the Church and its rootedeness in the life, death and present reality of Jesus Christ.

Kung is right about the Gospel of Jesus Christ as first criterion, judging both church and world. You don’t need to go to Nicea and Chalcedon to root such a message of global conciliation and human healing in the reality of Jesus Christ – ‘through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things…making peace by the blood of the cross’. Kung’s latest theological reflection published before this volume was on the Beginning of All Things. I hope he has time and inclination to write one on the End of all things, with Christ as the telos in whom meaning and purpose, in creation and in human life, finally and fully cohere.

Kung’s detailed and documented story of how his removal was engineered, even allowing for any partisan, partial, personal perspective as the one telling the story, is profoundly moving, and very hard to read without enormous anger, regret, sympathy- and a surprising second thought. Anger because, regardless of the rights and wrongs of his Church’s case, the long inquisitorial process, the final steps taken by an international class diplomatic service with endless resources to break Kung’s by political force and personal attack, the isolation of Kung by the withdrawal of support from a number of colleagues – (under pressure from higher up is Kung’s generous explanation) and all this against a priest professor whose right to fulfil his vocation is withdrawn in all but final terms on Christmas Eve, these tactics simply outrage one like myself who stands in a so different ecclesial position.

Regret because Kung, whose ego bestrides both volumes in ways that indicate how hard he would have been to overcome in a fair intellectual fight, is a theologian who could be an important bridge between church and world; a church which desperately needs to modernise and a world moving further away from modernity and now from post-modernity. On Being a Christian remains one of the great statements of how the Christian view of God is earthed in the person of Jesus Christ, and how the Gospel can be thought, believed and lived in the flux of contemporary culture. No such book can escape some criticism, and much disagreement. Kung himself acknowledges that what he has written remains open to debate, revision and adjustment to the changing landscape of human knowledge and understanding. At the same time I can think of no other book on this scale of intellectual and theological exposition, that in the last 50 years had such popular impact and was taken so seriously by many outside Christian faith who wanted to know what On Being a Christian would involve in a world like today.

Sympathy because Kung’s fate exposes a fundamental opposition between two ways of thinking about what it means to be Catholic. Kung’s own use of the paradigm model in this book makes this clear; his opponents worked predominantly within the Hellenistic and then the Medieval paradigm of Greek philosophy and scholastic dogmatic theology. Kung works within the Reformation and Enlightenment paradigms of reforming internal critique, historical criticism and systematic rational analysis. Both would claim to go back to the New Testament and early church paradigms as their norm, but do so using their own and different intellectual structures derived from their favoured paradigms. The result is that Kung claims the portrayal of the historical Jesus in the NT as recovered by historical criticism and textual exegesis is normative; his opponents claim that the dogmatic formulations on Christ at Nicaea and Chalcedon, and in high medieval scholasticism, enables a normative Christian interpretation of the NT. As Bultmann said, exegesis without presuppositions is impossible. So is a dialogue between fundamentally different forms of theological discourse.

And a surprising second thought. Kung himself acknowledges that his removal from his teaching post, actually removed him from Vatican control of his published and public statements. He remains a priest and catholic in good standing. But in the last 28 years he ahs become a figure of global stature. His search for a Global ethic, his studies of the religious situation of our time, his involvement at high political and academic levels of reflection on cultural and religious dialogue have made him what he could never have been within the reasonable constraints of traditional Catholic dogma as imposed by a conservative curia and papacy. Long before 9/11 Kung was on to the serious global implications of conflicting fundamentalisms, religious and political. His voice is now respected and heard (and listened to) across a wide range of human religious and political diversity.

So I finish this second volume with mixed feelings. A final post will be a series of quotations from this volume. They come from a passionately critical intellect determined towards truth. They demonstrate restless impatience with unexamined tradition privileged over honest critical enquiry. As such, his words reveal the integrity and yet the enigma of a man whose devotion to Jesus and the Church, whose passion for God and for the world, whose inability to flinch in the face of truth as he perceives it, whose own formidable intelligence and intellectual self-confidence may unintentionally create communication problems with anyone who has authority over him.

And who yet, for me, is one to and from whom I have learned so very much – in agreement and disagreement, through big books and thin books, as positive example of scholarship in the service of the church and as a reminder that truth and freedom, which lie at the heart of all genuine scholarship, also lie at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth and the life. What I take these words of Jesus to mean, I have no doubt, differs markedly from Hans Kung, but I wouldn’t like to try and argue it out with him in a classroom! Though in any such argument, it would never occur to me to think of him as anything other than a faithful follower of Jesus, seeking the truth of the One we are called to follow, asking awkward questions with the confidence of one whose self description includes phrases like ‘evangelical disposition’, ‘catholic Christian’ and ‘ecumenical theologian’.

Having read through this second volume, I am at a loss to explain the enigma of  Kung’s self-portrait as revealed in his attitude to his Vatican opponents, whose actions are essential parts of his life story. Intransigent and seeking consensus, razor sharp frankness balanced by a conciliating respect, aware he is accused of arrogance but insisting on his willingness to be convinced of his “errors”, a hermeneutic of supsicion about the motives of his opponents and a naive hope that they will see things his way- except that naivete and Kung seem oxymoronic.  Throughout he takes great care to insist that his overriding concern as a theologian is with the truthfulness of truth, and the right to speak truth in freedom. In his account of his controversies with the Curia, the German Bishops and fellow theologians, he tells truth even when it damages reputations and feelings, though not I think gratuitously. But he is a profound theologian who can write with the wit and literary savvy of a seasoned journalist who knows how to press the right buttons – on people and typepad keys! But he almost always finishes by insisting he harbours no ill will towards those who clearly intended him, and caused him, professional and vocational harm – whether or not for the good of the church. And it’s hard not to believe him – and even harder not to admire his restraint towards those who engineered his vocational derailment.

This sharply intelligent, intellectually combative and unrelentingly argumentative scholar succeeds in bringing incredible clarity and lucidity to complex theological discussions. It’s this quality that makes his big books like On Being a Christian and Does God Exist? seem far removed from other theological breeze blocks of compressed dogma. As a young newly ordained Evangelical Baptist pastor I got stuck into On Being a Christian and was given a guided tour of the intellectual passions; admiration, fascination, annoyance, concentration, discovery, resistance, wonder, contemplation, the joy of learning, the labour of argument, and on many an occasion a devotion rooted in an experience that could only be called further spiritual education in the meaning of Jesus for today.

In this second volume of memoirs, there is a long description of how On Being a Christian was written. Starting off as a modest introduction to Christianity over several years it became a thoroughly researched, carefully structured, crisply written apologia to the modern world on behalf of a faith that can be lived because centred on Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, risen and the foundation of the Church’s Gospel. Kung’s approach to a Christology from below was diametrically opposed to a dogmatic, Conciliar Christology from above as defined by the Ecumenical Councils and enshrined in the traditions of Roman Catholic Dogma. Throughout his account of the writing of the book, and its reception by millions of readers, Kung insists that though he started from below, the telos point of his understanding of Jesus Christ arrives, he believes by a much more intellectually secure route, at a view of Christ not incongruent with dogmatic orthodoxy, but with necessary restatement in the light of historical criticism and modern forms of thought. The Curia clearly did not hold so sanguine a view.

This volume covers 15 years of Kung’s life, told as two strands of a plot that at times reads like the Morris West novel that was never written. The tension created by an outspoken, provocative scholar who wishes to speak truth in freedom, but as a member of an increasingly authoritarian and hierarchical church, and the self-interests of power games and at times legitimate theological criticism of an institution which must pay some attention to public opinion, – is tightened as the book reaches its climax in the final removal of Kung’s permission to teach as a Catholic theologian. What I found depressing was the utter inability of either side to communicate; the negotiating, political and diplomatic engine of the Roman church has Rolls Royce quality, but in all the negotiations and meetings, letters and interviews, there is little sense of a meeting of minds and hearts such as would result in mutual understanding.

The next post I’ll try to sum up some reflections on why Kung and the Vatican simply couldn’t communicate – and how, perhaps in the providence of God, which lets none of the protagonists off the hook for their misjudgements and wrong turnings, the suffering of Kung the scholar opened the way to more expansive opportunities for his ecumenical theology.