Category: Book Reviews

  People who live with the difficulties created by Bipolar Disorder have to confront some of the most demanding and harrowing of human experiences, and absorb into their being the pain and desolation it can cause. Describing or explaining to others such complex and disruptive symptoms can be helpfully negotiated in some of those very helpful practical books aimed at helping sufferers or carers to cope. Then there are the more objective and descriptive accounts, packed with information and practical advice. But then there are the biographies and autobiographies which become significant personal testimony, brought back from those dark and dangerous territories of psychological and psychic disturbance, and which deserve our compassion, our admiration and not a milligramme of patronising critique.

It may be that in understanding such a difficult and complex illness we need all three style of writing- ‘the how to cope with’, ‘the how to understand the nature of’ and ‘the what it feels like from the inside’. This book is a bit of each, but its importance is in the autobiographical narrative within which the personal impact of severe mental ill health is described, its personal implications thought through from a theological and pastoral perspective, and clear advice given as to how to support, accompany and care for the person suffering from Bipolar Disorder.

Kathryn Greene McCreight is unflinching in her steady gaze at the multi-faceted reality of her condition. Depression as mental illness – yes. Mania as euphoric loss of control and accountability, yes. Feelings of suicide and fear of life yes. Anxiety about possible treatments, and long terms effects, yes. Dependence on the love, reliability and sheer dogged love of those closest, yes indeed. A lifetime of medication, therapy and lifestyle changes, yes, that too.

  But also she faces the pain of theological probing. What is the connection between her mental suffering and God? What is a human being, a human mind, the nature of that deepest core of the self we call the soul and how does mental illness cut so deeply into a person’s sense of self, and self worth? What is God up to? And what about suffering and sin? Is there any way of understanding how various forms of human brokenness fit together? Other thoughts are shared about despair, the dark night of the soul, the hiddenness of God – these aren’t dealt with at length, or in theological depth; which isn’t to say they aren’t dealt with in a deep way. because this is theological autobiography by a woman who has taken her illness, her faith and God with total seriousness and has clarified the hardest questions even if she hasn’t always found the clearest answers. How could she? There are mysteries and enough in a human life, which are in some ways multiplied and  intensified by mental ill health.

Here is one extract amongst many, that is both poignant and important:

I thought I knew who Jesus was. I thought I could sense his presence. But in mental illness, I weep like Mary, "They have taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they have laid him." My presuppositions about the love of the Lord have been turned upside down. my brain, my cognition and my memory can’t find Jesus. Only my soul itself is safe in the Lord, without my awareness. (page 111)

The last section of the book is required reading for those who want to be of help, and avoid venturing uninformed advice or offering theological superficialities. Staying too long on a hospital visit, the importance of Scripture and a Daily Office, the difficult human hermeneutical task of interpreting other people’s tears and responding non-invasively to what may be a cry of the heart, choosing the right therapy – all are discussed, matter of factly, by one who knows both sides. And a final, and fine chapter on ‘Why and How I use Scripture.’ Tucked away as an appendix, it is a gem of hermeneutical common sense.

This is a good book in several sense of the word. It is well written, honest and drawn like water from a deep well of experience. It is theologically informed and spiritually reflective, allowing the writer to explore the spirituality of her suffering. It is a book that will do good for those who struggle with the ravages of mental illness, and reassures by showing that no human being is defined or devalued by their suffering.

For sixteen pages Kathryn Greene Mccreight writes a first chapter entitled simply, and bleakly, ‘Darkness’. She attempts to describe the inner world of mental ill health, the deprivations that afflict emotional responsiveness, self-confidence, physical appetites, essential relationships. She walks the narrow path between self-pity and understatement of just how bewildering and  threatening depression can be. Throughout her illness she has struggled to ‘make sense of my pain with regard to my life before the triune God..and the apparent incongruity of that pain with the Christian life’.

Sometimes distraction helps, but to constantly know you need to constantly distract yourself is itself both tiring and subversive of the process, because you always remember what it is you have to distract yourself from. And then there is the loneliness. ‘Human love can seem particularly unreliable and fleeting. At times it is unattainable, at others inexpressible, and usually for the depressed human love is unsensed, and indeed nonsense’. Yet she persists against all the emotional and inner sense of love’s absence, to argue at the theological level that the love of God in Christ remains a fact even if all that is experienced is absence.

‘If it is the love of God that we see in the face of Christ Jesus that is promised to pull us through, a love that bears out to the edge of doom even for the ugly and unlovable such as we, then the statement that love heals depression is in fact the only light that exists in the dark tunnel.’ (page 24)

That is not trite optimism – that is a theologically grounded conviction that acts as a sub-structure to a faith at times searingly tested. And the darkness isn’t only the inner emptiness of a heart scooped clean of hope. There is the mania, the euphoria that threatens to push life beyond control by overspending, dancing wherever, singing loudly whenever. And deciding to be disciplined doesn’t help, ‘mania is almost defined by lack of discipline’.

And so Kathryn tells the story of an illness, which is also her story, and though she would not allow herself to be defined by her illness, there is no doubt that life has had to be lived through it, around it, with it. And that is the truth that Christians need to get clear. Mental ill health is a form of suffering and anguish that requires levels of courage, endurance and sheer resilience often as demanding as, at times more demanding than, many more visible physical conditions with their accompanying pain. What makes this book an important gift to the church is the honesty, courage and theological integrity of the author, whose faith is strong enough to bear the weight of her hardest questions. This is pastoral theology from the edge, the theology of a pastor who is familiar with the edge, and has looked over it, and has come back to speak of what is there with a hopefulness that is theological rather than emotional, and a realism that is both pastorally and personally informed.

Darkness is My Only Companion, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, (Grand Rapids: Brazos press), 176 pages, (Currently £7.91 from Amazon) – review copy courtesy of Brazos Press, for which thanks.

When Martin Luther said ‘Affliction is the best book in my library’, he wasn’t suggesting it was the most enjoyable book to read, but that it was the one from which he learned most. The word ‘affliction’ is now a bit old fashioned, and perhaps not even politically correct as a description of the conditions many people have to learn to live with. That Kathryn Greene-McCreight begins her story with Psalm 88, a Psalm of Lament, she acknowledges, that the condition with which she struggles, bipolar disorder, is an affliction. The title of her book is directly taken from Psalm 88, Darkness is My Only Companion. Throughout the book these words are a recurring motif as she reflects theologically and courageously on the kaleidoscope of dark and glittering colours that have made up her inner life and determined the quality and direction of her outer life.

Bipolar affective disorder, formerly called manic depressive syndrome, is not simply the swing between chronic sadness and temporary elation. It is a profoundly complex mental illness in which several factors are implicated, including neurobiology, chemical imbalance and genetic considerations. Those who live with this condition and those who care for them are aware of how far this condition reaches into the deepest places of human personality, often with disruptive and anguished consequences. That is what makes this book such an important contribution to pastoral theology. This is an honest report from someone whose illness has taken them to those darker more distant corners of human experience, when the impact of the condition seriously challenges those powerful instincts for life, security and the daylight of ‘normality’. And it is written by an Episcopal priest who is a scholar theologian with a PhD from Yale, married, a theological educator, a mother, and thus self-evidently able to include in her life much that would be expected in those without such a serious illness.

But the book is written as a Christian response to mental illness, and as a description of the realities and consequences of such a potentially disruptive condition. She takes on the glib irresponsible (and pastorally insensitive) affirmation of the perennially cheery Christian. And when various well meaning studies on how spirituality reduces the incidence of depression are published by a church seizing on apologetic ammunition because ‘religious people are less depressed, less anxious, and less suicidal than nonreligious people’, she becomes rightly angry and impatient. But her annoyance is channelled again and again in this book into constructive reflection on what it is like to have a mental illness, and also be a person of faith. Here is her own starting point for going public on what it is like to cling to faith in the loving reality of God when her inner world is filled with emotional forces that threaten her very sense of being?

Often those Christians who are  depressed or otherwise mentally ill…feel guilty on top of being depressed, because they understand their depression, their lack of thankfulness, their desperation, to be a betrayal of God. For mentally ill Christians belief in God is no longer objective but becomes subjective, interiorised, and thereby drawn  into the circle of doubt.

And the questions that arise from that circle of doubt are theological, personal, pastoral, and above all crucial, because in seeking to answer them, she is seeking an understanding of God, her faith, her illness and herself that will be to the benefit of the Body of Christ – within which all sorts and conditions of people are to be held, in a love that holds on even when we feel ourselves falling.

John Owen. Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, Carl Trueman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 132 pages.

(Review copy courtesy of Ashgate Publishing).

Somebody once described reading John Owen (17th Century Reformed theologian) as being like stirring porridge with a plastic spoon. That’s both unfair and true – he is hard reading because he is engaging with the sharpest minds in Europe on some of the most contested and complex problems of theology. His writings are exhaustingly exhaustive, his theological arguments are mathematically (at times mechanically) precise. His learning in an age before information overload was both deep and wide, ranging across the Western tradition of theology and philosophy. His writing on the Being of God, woven throughout much of his Works is a metaphysical tour de force; the treatises on the Holy Spirit and spirituality remain classics of Reformed spiritual theology.

It is one of the strengths of Carl Trueman’s book that he places Owen in his historical context as a Reformed Catholic and Renaissance Man. In other words Trueman severely qualifies the title ‘Puritan’ as applied to Owen because it is too narrow, too constraining both of his theology, and of his preferred sources for theologising. Thus Owen’s pneumatology should first be understood in its proper systematic context, which is Owen’s deliberately constructed Trinitarian framework. Only then is his encyclopedic treatment of the Holy Spirit to be held up as one of the most authoritative Reformed Orthodox spiritual treatises of the vastly productive, theologically argumentative 17th century.

Likewise, when Owen argues his powerfully, at times overwhelmingly persistent biblical theology, he is participating in a Europe wide campaign of polemical and constructive theology now described as Post Reformation Reformed Scholasticism. These Reformed theological and intellectual armaments were aimed at Arminian, Socinian and Roman Catholic errors. But even here Trueman is impatient with broad brush special pleadings by over-enthusiastic Reformed fans of Owen. While targeting obvious doctrinal errors in Roman Catholic teaching, he nevertheless valued and used much Roman Catholic learning, theology and biblical scholarship that was free from such errors. He was a discriminating admirer of Bellarmine, the most influential, able and erudite Jesuit apologist in Europe at the time. In other words Owen was a discerning and not ungenerous theological opponent, whose aim was fixing truth rather than discrediting opponents.

Now by ‘Catholic’ Trueman means one who holds the wider church tradition, its historical and theological diversity, yet its ecclesial continuity, as an indispensable source of theological wisdom, second only to Scripture in authority. Trueman makes a lot of Owen’s library catalogue to show the breadth of interests of this renaissance man – I particularly like the idea that alongside theological tomes Owen had books on parliamentary procedure (he preached before parliament), gardening, music theory, the life of silk worms and the advantages of warm beer!

Following the initial chapter on Owen as Reformed Catholic and Renaissance Man, Trueman goes on to examine Owen’s theology in three more chapters. In chapter 2 the conception of God Owen sets out in such intricately argued detail is thoroughly Trinitarian – the deity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, co-equal with the Father, are foundational presuppositions of Owen’s theology of God. In the third chapter, the covenant of grace and catholic christology, are placed at the centre of Reformed dogmatics – the foundational conception of God as sovereign, revealed in Christ for the salvation of those elect from eternity, defines the nature and means of atonement and justification. The article by which the church stands or falls, justification, expounded with forensic precision by Owen and explained with scholarly relish by Trueman, bring this study to a close in its final chapter.

Each chapter is closely argued, considering Owen’s historical milieu and engaging Owen’s writings with which Trueman is obviously and impressively familiar. Carl Trueman is one of several prominent historical theologians seeking to overturn the revisionist view that post Reformation European Reformed Scholasticism of the 17th and 18th centuries was the imposition upon an earlier Calvinism, of metaphysical categories, Aristotelian rationalism and arid biblical proof-texting in contrast to the Reformed Calvinism of earlier generations.

This apologetic and reactive thrust is felt all the way through Trueman’s book, and it gets in the way at times. For example, Owen’s spirituality is almost incidental, so that he does indeed come over as a cerebral, polemical, meticulous logician, using massive learning to establish what at times are quite speculative metaphysical concepts (such as the Covenant of redemption, or Owen’s construal of intra-Trinitarian relations). Again, Trueman is brilliant on John Owen’s contribution to the developing expertise of Reformed hermeneutics, but Owen’s fusion of speculative metaphysics controlled by biblical exegesis and Reformed dogmatics, argues a richer vein of spiritual experience than comes over in some of these patiently disentangled controversies. But that’s perhaps to ask for another kind of book which Trueman has already shown he can write. His Legacy of Luther is just such a consideration of historical context, theological exposition and intellectual biography. And his earlier book on Owen also provides some of the balance. But this book is in the series Great Theologians, and Owen’s greatness has deep spiritual roots as well as high metaphysical reach.

This treatment of Owen is, despite those comments, a very impressive example of how to answer those who accuse later Reformed Scholasticism of turning an earlier purer Calvinism, into an iron-cast predestinarian system. Trueman allows Owen to be understood as a man of his own times, defended from anachronistic criticisms by modern anti-Reformed and pro-Reformed writers and readers alike. So both R T Kendall’s revisionist thesis of original authentic Calvinism degenerating into later scholasticism, and J I Packer’s claim that Owen is a Puritan of the Puritans of the Banner of Truth school, are carefully and authoritatively corrected. Trueman is himself a scholar of the Reformed persuasion – but his Reformed stance is solidly grounded on historical and theological scholarship of the highest order.

This is an important exposition of a theologian beginning to be taken seriously after centuries of neglect by mainstream academic theology – which as Trueman’s book demonstrates, has been an irony and injustice, for Owen was cutting edge in his own theological engagements and scholarship.

The last sections of Wigley’s Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, examine Von Balthasar’s understanding of truth. The last three volumes of his trilogy he called Theo-Logic, an exposition of truth as reasoned truth about God, revealed in Christ, by the Spirit. By now Wigley has persuaded me – Von Balthasar’s masterpiece is shaped and formed in response to the theological pressures, both attractive and disruptive, that he believed were exerted by Barth’s theology. Here is one paragraph of Wigley, expounding Von Balthasar…and as I said earlier in this series, I’m not perturbed but strangely reassured when I encounter theological writing that has to be read twice! I’d find a God who could be done and dusted in strap line prose unpromisingly boring.

In his exposition of how the Spirit works to establish the universal truth of Christ…Von Balthasar establishes the Spirit as the one who "interprets" Christ, and in so doing "introduces" people into the Christian life, using three key themes for this mission of the Spirit, namely ‘Gift’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Witness’….He is looking to show how the Spirit is at work trinitarianly (and thus in creation and redemption) in both objective  and subjective terms. In subjective terms, this witness to the truth is seen in the life of the individual Christian in prayer, forgiveness and in the gifts and  of the Spirit, and in the witness of a ‘Christian life’. But equally, …it is also evidenced in objective terms, namely in the tradition, in Scripture and above all in the apostolic ministry of the Church. (Wigley, 134)

Scripture bracketed between tradition and the Church would always pose a theological obstacle for the Reformed Barth, just as Von Balthasar’s view that Barth lacks an adequate ecclesiology created inevitable distance for a mind so passionately Catholic.

What Wigley has achieved in this book is an account of two theological friends, whose differences were never negotiated away in a bland and ultimately false ecumenism. Instead, they spent their lives and their best intellectual energies, in creative dialogue carried out on a theologically gargantuan scale, each seeking to know what it might mean ‘for the Church to be the people or the place where the glory of God is revealed’.

Wigley has also shown that an ecumenical theology needn’t be about lowest common denominators, or agreed statements that understate difference. It can be discussion about the core doctrines of the Christian faith, as lived, thought and articulated by theologians from across the Christian spectrum, in which difference does not provoke defensive hostility, but evokes an exchange of truth as each understands it. Both Von Balthasar and Barth bore passionate witness to truth – together they were admirers of Anselm, and his famous dictum, faith seeking understanding.

Which brings me to a final comment on this fine book. There is a form of intellectual snobbery that thinks books about books, or theologians theologising about other theologians, lacks originality and is a kind of parasitic reliance on other people’s ideas. I’ve never shared that view. Some of the best theology I have read is by those who seriously engage the theology of others with sympathy and critical appreciation. In the past few years Bauckham on Moltmann, Mark McIntosh on Von Balthasar, Webster on Barth, Davies on Aquinas, Marsden on Edwards, Zachman on Calvin,  Lohse on Luther, have represented some of the best creative and interactive theological writing. From earlier years Rupp on Luther, Wendel on Calvin, Gilson on Aquinas, Busch on Barth, Burnaby on Augustine, Bethge on Bonhoeffer, remain theological classics.

Wigley’s study of Barth and Von Balthasar is more narrowly focused because it is exploring and explaining how one theologian influenced another – and does so by allowing us to overhear, and at times imagine, the conversation of two friends, whose agreements and differences arose from their own theological integrity. And though neither would countenance convenience-driven compromise, they seldom approached each other’s thought with less than appreciative criticism. One last extract from Von Balthasar, about the penultimacy of the Church and the ultimacy of Christ the Word, demonstrates considerable overlap in theological commitment:

The Church…is the moon not the sun; the reflection, not the glory itself. Put more precisely, she is the response of glorification, and to this extent she is drawn into the glorious Word to which she responds, and into the splendour of the light without which she would not shine. What she reflects back in the night is the light of the hope of the world.

Amen, and Amen.

The central panel in the triptych, which is Von Balthasar’s theological masterpiece, is goodness. The first panel is The Glory of the Lord and expounds beauty as reflected in creation from the beauty of God the Creator. The second and central panel is Theo-drama, a careful impassioned telling of the drama of redemption in terms of goodness, the goodness of God which is selflessly poured out in Christ, by sheer benevolence and personal expense of suffering.

It is in the chapter dealing with Von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama, and Karl Barth’s response to it, that Wigley’s book provides valuable and important perspectives on these two theological allies who differed, and despite the mutual respect and courtesy, never agreed to differ. The fundamental differences and even incompatibilities between Barth’s reconstructed Reformed perspective and Von Balthasar’s traditional Catholicism revived and revised, are brought out in Wigley’s careful detective work. In the Theo-Drama there are few explicit references to Barth, but as Von Balthasar wrestles with the immensity and infinite goodness of God as revealed in Christ, he is determined to hold the balance between the infinite and the finite, the divine and the human in Christ, and between divine freedom which is infinite and human freedom which is finite.

  [God in Christ] simultaneously opens up the greatest possible intimacy and the greatest possible distance (in Christ’s dereliction on the cross) between God and man; thus he does not decide the course of the play in advance but gives man an otherwise unheard-of freedom to decide for or against the God who has so committed himself. (Theo-Drama, Vol. 3, page 21)

Thus Von Balthasar in redressing the balance, expounds the importance of finite freedom as human response to the infinite freedom of God. The response in the drama of redemption of such central figures as Mary, the paradigmatic saints and the Church as the Body of Christ embodied on earth, is not so much a compromise of the ‘all of grace’ truth at the heart of the great Theo-Drama of God’s saving action. Human response is already written in to a creation which exists by the infinite freedom of God, that infinite freedom constricted by the free goodness of God, to invite the participation of creation, and humanity in the redemptive purposes of God in Christ. This is Von Balthasar’s response to Barth making the Revelation of the Word of God, and thus Christology, the sum of theology to the exclusion of other essential balancing truths.

Wigley is a persuasive guide, and fair-minded in allowing both voices to be heard in the conversation. So here is Barth’s response to Von Balthasar’s criticism that Barth made too much of Christology and not enough of the Church.

I now have an inkling of something which at first I could not understand: what is meant by the ‘christological constriction’ which my expositor and critic urged against me in mild rebuke. But we must now bring against him the counter question, whether in all the splendour of the saints who are supposed to represent and repeat Him, Jesus Christ has not ceased – not in theory but in practice – to be the origin and object of Christian faith. (Church Dogmatics Vol. IV.1, page 768)

And so the debate continued – and continues, as a high wire theological balancing act that’s been going on since the early days of the church. The arguments about the role of human response in the story of salvation, and whether the sole sufficiency of Christ as origin and object of faith, is compatible with making human response decisive in the drama – to which Barth’s answer is No! – and Von Balthasar’s answer is yes, if, out of the goodness of God’s heart, as Von Balthasar maintains, that human response of freedom is itself God’s intentional free gift of co-operating with God in the performance of the greatest, costliest drama in universal history.

I once heard Professor Donald Macleod preach on the ‘Glory of Christ’. He enunciated the English word ‘Glory’ with a particular Highland intensity and accent, a noticeable hushed sing-song tone, that left you in no doubt he was speaking of Reality of a different order. Von Balthasar wasn’t a Highland, Gaelic speaking Calvinist preacher, he was a Swiss ex-Jesuit Catholic philosopher theologian – but his theological and biblical fascination with ‘Glory’ as that expression of the reality and splendour of God in Christ, which captivates, ignites and ultimately satisfies human longing, was just as passionately articulate as that of the Free Church Professor in Edinburgh.

The seven volumes of Von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord are one long argument, meandering across and cutting deep into, a theological and philosphical landscape on the scale of the Alps. But meandering purposefully towards the conclusion that there is a divinely intended and divinely given connection, between the eternal and essential glory and beauty of the Lord, and the inherent grace given beauty of creation. And while there is a proper and necessary distinction between Creator and creature, between ‘that unique existence which pertains to God alone, and that sharing in being  which is common to the rest of creation’, there is nevertheless a divinely intended connectedness between creation and Creator, which enables purposeful and redemptive relationship to take place in this cosmic theatre within which the Lord of Glory produces and directs the drama of redemption.

The Glory of the Lord, Wigley argues, takes its inspiration from Barth’s Church Dogmatics Volume 2.1 and Barth’s treatment of ‘The Eternity and Glory of God’. I found this whole chapter, and indeed the argument of the whole book, to be convincing, but with a significant hesitation I’ll mention at the end of this series of posts.

Convincing in that Wigley has traces key points of interaction demonstrating how Von Balthasar’s theological work is constructively and self-consciously responding to what he sees as major weaknesses in Barth. Von Balthasar is offering a view of creation, createdness and creature, that allows for a God-given responsiveness in the contingent created order, answerable to the eternal transcendent beauty and glory of the Lord. For Von Balthasar, ‘The whole earth will cry glory’, is not only an eschatological statement, but expresses the purposeful generosity of the Creator anticipating the response of worship.

Barth is uncompromising in his position that theology begins and ends with the Revelation of the Word of God. Wigley has a fine section in which he shows Von Balthasar dissenting from this view, because it makes Revelation so dominant that other important theological truths are inevitably and disruptively eclipsed.

‘In light of the form of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ which unites creation and redemption through the Incarnation, there is more to theology than just revelation. There is a call to participate in the life of Christ which requires an understanding of being and the possibility of an ontological transformation of humanity….The biblical witness to God’s revelation leads to a response and participation in Christ. This means in turn that epistemology is insufficient without ontology, both in terms of the transformation of the believer and ultimately of the whole created order, as the Incarnation makes knowledge of God an engagement with being itself.’ (Wigley, page 83-4).

Wigley is a good theological intepreter, who like a well briefed interviewer, knows the relational history of those he interviews, understands the influences and the crises, knows how to interpret the important incidents that shape life and thought. And he is sympathetic to his subjects, representing them fairly and allowing them to not have to worry about the ambush question. This is a book that encourages you to like the two theologians whose friendship and differences gave us such a rich vein of Christian theology.