The Book of Judges
by Marc Zvi Brettler
Routledge, London and New York, 2002. 159 pp. $25.95. ISBN 0-415-16217-3.

Brettler’s introduction to Judges focuses on the question, “how . . . to read both the individual stories and the book as a whole?” (p. x), in conversation with current debate concerning the relationship between history and literature in the reading of biblical texts. The entrenched view is that Judges is a historical work that presents history as it happened, whereas an emerging view holds that Judges is a work of literary fiction that “invents” Israel’s early history. Brettler maintains that this dichotomy is false and misleading. Judges is a narrative that pursues both historical and literary concerns to “present the past.” To demonstrate his contention, he examines several topics, including the short story in Judges, the Samson cycle, poetry and prose in Judges 4–5, the concluding narrative concerning the concubine at Gibeah, and the “conclusion” that now forms the introduction in Judg 1:1–2:10. Although the narratives were composed individually, Judges is now an edited book that supports the Davidic monarchy.

Brettler’s discussion is exceptionally rich, both for its treatment of Judges itself and for his interaction with earlier scholarship. His discussion of the Ehud story (Judg 3:12–30) emphasizes the use of humor, particularly sexual innuendo, in the narrative. He attempts to resolve the differences between the narrative and the song concerning Deborah’s battle in Judges 4–5 by arguing that Judges 5 is not simply a victory song that celebrates the original event; it is a liturgical text that was recited to motivate Israelite soldiers in time of war. The narrative concerning the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 is a learned text that engages in the reading and interpretation of earlier biblical texts. Whereas his treatment of individual narratives is exciting and often innovative, his treatment of the book as a whole could be expanded. If Judges is in fact pro-Davidic, when was it written and why? In the time of David or later? How does the current arrangement of the individual narratives within the center of the book contribute to the editorial goal of the whole? Is the breakdown of Israelite society in Judges 19–21 somehow the result of the progressive disintegration that takes place in the book? Overall, Brettler provides readers of Judges with a stimulating introduction that leaves them with much to do.

Marvin A. Sweeney
Claremont School of Theology and
Claremont Graduate University
Claremont, California

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First and Second Chronicles
by Steven S. Tuell
Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. John Knox, Louisville, 2001. 252 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8042-3110-9.

There is a new day in the study of Chronicles, no longer seen as a secondary, somewhat unreliable, source for the history of Israel. Interpreters now agree upon the essentially theological nature of this material designed to speak to the needs of the post-exilic community. Tuell claims that “Chronicles is a Bible Study—an extended meditation on the Hebrew Scriptures, which seeks to draw from the texts meaning and direction for the community in the Chronicler’s own time” (pp. 7–8). Throughout his commentary, Tuell carefully elucidates the Chronicler’s interpretation of scripture, especially the legal materials. More importantly, Tuell reads these texts with a practiced pastoral eye that regularly makes helpful connections between the Chronicler’s message and the church’s proclamation to twenty-first century North America. This is the strongest aspect of the commentary.

Tuell’s position regarding matters of provenance and introduction is somewhat at odds with the present (albeit tenuous) scholarly consensus. He assumes that Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah are both a “single, intentional narrative” (p. 9) and that this “Chronicler’s History” was “written in stages” (p. 10). This problematic juxtaposition of past solutions to the question of authorship in these books has an effect upon his reading of crucial moments in the narrative. The most serious is his re-championing of Rudolph’s anti-northern polemic over the contemporary insistence that the Chronicler was rather positively inclined toward the northern tribes and held an inclusive view of Israel.

These criticisms, however, should not detract from the positive contribution Tuell makes to the preaching of these rarely heard texts. The depictions of the Judean kings especially in Second Chronicles deserve to be studied for the sermons that they are and the message they proclaim. Tuell’s insightful applications will provide much grist for the preacher’s mill.

Mark A. Throntveit
Luther Seminary
Saint Paul, Minnesota

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Lamentations
by F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp
Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. John Knox, Louisville, 2002. 159 pp. $21.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8042-3141-9.

Lyric poetry differs from other poetic forms because it lacks plotline, characters, and other structuring devices common to narratives. To provide meaning, lyrics rely upon evocative powers of language and a plethora of poetic devices. In an elegant introduction, Dobbs-Allsopp identifies linguistic and stylistic features of Lamenta-tions’ lyrics. Five chapters, corresponding to the five poems of Lamentations, sustain that attention and distinguish this commentary.

Dobbs-Allsopp’s conversation partners include not only biblical scholars but also contemporary poets and literary critics, giving rare breadth and freshness to his interpretation. He is more certain than some scholars of the book’s origins during the Babylonian period, but he does recognize the dearth of historical evidence within the text itself. More importantly, his attention to poetry reveals how the biblical book has been able to embrace multiple calamities throughout history. Although Lamentations expresses little hope for the future, Dobbs-Allsopp finds healing benefits even in God’s hurtful silence. Divine silence in the face of catastrophe leaves space for human sorrow, respects truth, and makes faith its own touchstone. And for Christians, God’s silence also invokes the cross.

One of the more vexing matters of interpretation is the question of the relationships of the five poems to one another. Despite formal features like acrostic and alphabetic structures that separate the poems, Dobbs-Allsopp rightly insists upon literary coherence across the book. Excur-suses on personified Zion, Egyptian captivity, conventional language, the choral lyric, and the silence of God bring other literary and theological questions to bear upon the commentary. This beautifully written book contributes much to the work of scholars, but it also shows contemporary readers how Lamentations can help us grieve and become more compassionate in the aftermath of unspeakable suffering.

Kathleen M. O’Connor
Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Georgia

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Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament
by Ellen F. Davis
Cowley, Boston, 2001. 208 pp. $13.95. ISBN 1-56101-197-5.

“This is a book about getting, and staying, involved with God—what it takes, what it costs, what it looks and feels like, why anyone would want to do it anyway” (p. 1). God’s intimate involvement in the lives of God’s people is demonstrated by an assortment of Old Testament texts in five thematic sections: Pain and Praise (various psalms), The Cost of Love (Exod 3, Gen 22, Song of Songs), The Art of Living Well (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job), Habits of the Heart (Prov 8, Exod 33, Ps 102, Ps 51, Isa 49), and Torah of the Earth (Gen 1–2, Num 11). For most passages, Davis provides homiletic exegesis of five to twenty-six pages each.

Davis is to be commended for her effort to reconnect Christians with their Hebrew heritage. She chooses passages that Christians may easily appropriate for “spiritually engaged reading” (p. 1). But the historical narratives, legal corpus, and prophetic texts are noticeably absent. Without treatment of the majority of the Old Testament, and especially those texts that seem to confirm Christian misperceptions about the God described by our Hebrew ancestors, the subtitle, “Rediscovering the Old Testament,” seems an overstatement.

Davis’s writing style is fresh and engaging, and preachers and teachers will find useful ideas for proclamation and education. In Davis’s hands, these Old Testament texts describe a God who is anxious and then relieved about human actions (p. 60–61), who “loves pizzazz” (p. 139), who “resists being taken for granted yet longs to be desired” (p. 157), and who is “terribly vulnerable to human sin . . . [as] a tearing pain in God’s heart and God’s gut” (p. 172). This collection is easily accessible by persons who are not biblical scholars and would work well for a Sunday School class or Bible Study.

Marty E. Stevens
Union-PSCE
Richmond, Virginia

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Life in Biblical Israel
by Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager
Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2001. 440 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-664-22148-3.

King and Stager offer the reader an introduction to the social, economic, and cultural history of biblical Israel. Their focus reaches all strata of society “from the courtyards of commoners to the courts of kings” (p. 1). Following an introductory chapter, topics are treated under five headings: The Israelite House and Household, the Means of Existence, Patrimonial Kingdom, Culture and the Expressive Life, and Religious Institutions. The discussions of individual topics are thorough and represent a synthesis of biblical and extra-biblical data. A detailed table of contents as well as three indices provides easy access to specific items of interest. Also, over 200 photographs, sketches, and site maps enhance the book’s presentation.
A few points require comment. First, although King and Stager state succinctly their understanding of the composition of the Hebrew Bible (pp. 2–3), some scholars will find problematic their consistently early dating of texts (e.g., a combined JE in the ninth century b.c.e.). Their reconstruction, however, is plausible, and it recognizes that literary evidence does exist for the earlier periods of Israelite history. Second, there is a certain amount of repetition in the book. Fortunately, this is mitigated somewhat in the subject index by a bold-faced type that marks the principal discussion of a given item. Last, though the intended audience is “all readers,” the text remains full of technical terms, abbreviations, and transliterations that are best comprehended by one with some background in the critical study of the Bible. These are minor quibbles that take little away from this helpful resource.

The book succeeds in providing a guided tour of the thought world and cultural milieu of those who produced the Hebrew Bible. Readers will gain fresh perspectives for understanding the ancient world. Such insight will strengthen the interpretation of the biblical text in the church and academy. Life in Biblical Israel is highly recommended for both pastors and teachers.

Brian D. Russell
Asbury Theological Seminary
Orlando, Florida

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Sabbath and Jubilee
by Richard H. Lowery
Chalice, St. Louis, 2000. 162 pp. $16.99. ISBN 0-8272-3826-6.

This volume is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature explicating the socio-economic referent in scripture’s “salvation” story by way of the “jubilee” theme. Lowery concisely but craftily demonstrates how the roots of this theme are developmentally intertwined with the distinctively Hebrew notion of sabbath. While most of his exegetical attention is to the text and context of the Old Testament, he also demonstrates the extended continuity of these themes into the gospels. His insights supplement and strengthen the similar analysis in other works, particularly Sharon Ringe’s Jesus, Liberation, and the Biblical Jubilee.

Lowery admits the difficulty in locating the precise period and circumstances of “sabbath, sabbath-year, and jubilee” legislation. He acknowledges the variant traditions within the text itself, with differing emphases and rationales for the traditional themes of debt release, manumission of slaves, land redistribution—even hospitality to resident aliens. He argues that, in all likelihood, the observance of seventh-day, seventh-year, and jubilee sabbaths did not develop in a linear fashion but more organically, with the weekly liturgical observance emerging later.

He also admits that this multi-tributary stream evinces utopian, sometimes impractical impulses and that ancient Israel rarely if ever implemented the full agenda of legislative imperatives. (Admitting as much has prompted some scholars to discount the jubilee motif—which is like saying that, since it’s unlikely the human community will be free of sin in the foreseeable future, the believing community need not focus its preaching on repentance.)

What Lowery and others insist—and here I add my own amen—is that “Sabbath-year and jubilee practices go to the very heart of Israel’s identity as a people redeemed by Yahweh from slavery in Egypt” (p. 23). Despite the continuing refinement of ethical norms—norms which begin in the household but also extend to public policy and the created order itself—sabbath and jubilee themes cohere in their equation of social injustice with blasphemy and oppression with idolatry.

Ken Sehested
Asheville, North Carolina

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Peoples of an Almighty God: Competing Religions in the Ancient World
by Jonathan Goldstein
The Anchor Bible Reference Library. Doubleday, New York, 2002. 589 pp. $36.00. ISBN 0-385-42347-0.

This big book covers an important period of ancient Near Eastern history, from the latter eighth century b.c.e., when the Neo-Assyrian empire was at its height and Israel and Judah among its tributaries, until the middle of the second century b.c.e., when the Hasmoneans won some measure of independent rule over Judah from their Seleucid masters.
The book, however, is not a narrative of political and military events. Rather, it focuses on understandings offered by Judaeans and Babylonians, primarily, and Iranians and Egyptians, secondarily, of the crises and setbacks they experienced, particularly at the hands of conquering imperial powers, in the eighth–second centuries. Goldstein selects these four first millennium peoples because he argues that they all held a common view of the divine that made them “peoples of an almighty god.” Such a people, in Goldstein’s words, “believes that a god stronger than all other powers combined is ultimately committed to be their protector, though temporarily the people may suffer adversity” (p. 3). The author examines the reactions of his four “almighty” peoples to their adversities in the eighth–second centuries. The principal concern is the biblical book of Daniel, whose multi-layered history Goldstein traces in great detail. He demonstrates how it was written, updated, and revised—by Babylonian and then Judaean authors, with echoes in Iranian traditions—to react to events over a three-hundred year period, from the reign of the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, through those of the early Ptolemies and Seleucids.

Goldstein brings to his book a well-established scholarship on the interactions of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, especially during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The result is a number of illuminating interpretations of the ancient texts he deals with and the political events they reflect (e.g., the Testament of Moses and its bearing on the Maccabean revolt [pp. 455–56]). On the other hand, some of his textual reconstructions, and the particular historical settings to which he assigns them, seem overly ingenious and much too specific for what the evidence allows (e.g., pp. 336–37, relating Babylonian and Zoroastrian traditions on royal successions). In addition, one might ask about the very category of “peoples of an almighty god.” Goldstein does not recognize that if the category is to be maintained, it had a far longer and wider historical span than he allows.

Goldstein’s book is full of dense analysis that is provocative and often rewarding, but not always easy reading. Its primary audience will be those already knowledgeable in ancient Near Eastern history of the first millennium b.c.e.

Peter Machinist
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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The New Historicism
by Gina Hens-Piazza
Guides to Biblical Scholarship. Old Testament Series. Fortress, Minneapolis, 2002. 94 pp. $11.00. ISBN 0-8006-2989-2.

Hens-Piazza surveys the terrain of New Historicism, looking for passage across the “sharply drawn border that currently separates historical studies from literary studies in the biblical field” (p. 2; cf. pp. 18–19). New Historicism, as she introduces it, names not a methodology but a literary-critical sensibility formed by certain enabling assumptions. Textual production and interpretation are both intertwined with other material practices in ways that call into question familiar distinctions between text and context, literature and history, and even past and present (pp. 6–7).

Hens-Piazza briefly details New Histori-cism’s theoretical diet—Marx, Foucault, feminism, and Geertz, to name only the main courses—and situates its emergence in literary studies and its appeal for biblical studies in terms of key shifts in political and academic institutions. Two central chapters draw out New Historicism’s difference from conventional historicism and pinpoint “recurring characteristics” (p. 37) that demarcate New Historicist writing. Hens-Piazza offers three brief examples of New Historicists in action before concluding with a positive assessment of New Historicism’s future in biblical studies.

Hens-Piazza remains faithful to reservations about fixed definitions and set methodologies. She draws a broad map of New Historicism’s heterogeneous theoretical landscape, zeroing in on its preoccupation with ideology, power, resistance, margins, and struggle. Yet without even a minimal methodological key to this map, newcomers to New Historicism are forced to rely upon the illustrations provided for them. However, Hens-Piazza’s summaries of New Historicist readings—as opposed to live textual encounters—fall a bit short as the needed trail-markers. To track the interpretive steps of a New Historicist beast more closely, readers will want to seek out more direct examples. Nevertheless, Hens-Piazza has prepared a clearly written and helpful guide to reading in a New Historicist mode.

Eric Thurman
Drew University
Madison, New Jersey

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Matthew 8–20: A Commentary
by Ulrich Luz
Translated by James E. Crouch. Hermeneia. Fortress, Minneapolis, 2001. 607 pp. $69.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8006-6034-X.

Luz’s commentary is a masterful and comprehensive treatment of the central section of Matthew’s gospel. Luz draws on an extensive bibliography of both ancient and modern sources (pp. xiii–xxxvi) and lists the relevant bibliographical citations at the beginning of each section. Luz provides his own translation of Matthew (retranslated from German to English for the Hermeneia volume). He offers painstaking and detailed historical-critical commentary on the text under the rubrics of “structure,” “sources,” “tradition history and origin,” “interpretation,” and “history of interpretation.” And he concludes each section with a summary reflection focused on the theological significance of the text for the present day church. Within the current field of Matthean commentaries, Luz’s work is a historical-critical tour de force.

The most prominent strength of this massive volume lies in the character and candor of Luz’s theological reflections on the message of Matthew’s gospel. Throughout the commentary, Luz wrestles deeply and honestly with the “big questions” Matthew places before the present day church: the meaning of “miracle” (pp. 52–58), the character of the “church” and its “mission” (pp. 124–28), the significance of “the kingdom of heaven” (pp. 295–98), the nature of Christian “community” (pp. 478–83).
Fundamental to Luz’s reflections is the central Matthean motif of “discipleship,” which Luz defines as “lived and suffered obedience on the way with Jesus” (p. 125). In Luz’s view, it is just such radical “discipleship” that not only represents “the ‘essence’ of the church” (p. 125) for Matthew but also provides the hermeneutical key to the understanding of Matthew’s gospel as a whole.

Dorothy Jean Weaver
Eastern Mennonite Seminary
Harrisonburg, Virginia

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Abraham’s Divided Children: Galatians and the Politics of Faith
by Pheme Perkins
Trinity Press International, Harrisburg, 2001. 200 pp. $18.00. ISBN 1-56338-359-4.

In this important contribution to Pauline scholarship, Pheme Perkins presents fresh insight into Paul’s argument in Galatians and Paul’s theology as a whole. With characteristic brevity and erudition, Perkins examines this much-disputed text in light of its social and cultural contexts as reflected in the Hellenistic literature of the period, both Greco-Roman and Jewish. In particular, Perkins grapples with Paul’s “rhetoric of identity politics” and absolutist theology. Given Paul’s strong and persistent language of exclusion that drives a wedge between Christian and Jewish identity, what does Galatians reveal about Paul’s understanding of appropriate relations between believers in Jesus and “others,” especially Abraham’s other children? Why is it permissible for Christian Jews to assimilate to a culture of believing non-Jews, but not acceptable for non-Jewish Christians to adopt Jewish customs? With such questions in mind, Perkins analyzes Paul’s argument and navigates the turbulent waters created by the many competing interpretations of the letter to see what Galatians reveals about the communal boundaries between Jewish and Gentile converts to the Christian faith, as well as between Christians and Jews at large. Perkins finds that the boundaries are not as clear as many commentators suppose and that Paul’s communication to the Galatians also dichoto-mizes groups of Jews. Thus Perkins finds the blessing of Christ-believers (Gal 6:16) to include the Law-observant Israelites who do not believe in Jesus, both Jew and Gentile. Christians are to practice the Law of Christ by bearing the burdens of “others” in love, including the burdens of Abraham’s other children.

This perceptive and careful study challenges much recent scholarship on Galatians and is sure to invigorate further exploration of this text. Perkins’s analysis may not convince every reader at every point, but a close reading of this volume will reward every student of Paul. It not only presents a rich depository of information about Galatians and Paul’s thought but also offers many new insights drawn from her own rigorous research. It is a timely work for twenty-first century Christians who must wrestle with widespread anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic sentiments.

Robert A. Bryant
Presbyterian College
Clinton, South Carolina

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Paul in Chains: Roman Imprisonment and the Letters of St. Paul
by Richard J. Cassidy
Crossroad, New York, 2001. 317 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8245-1921-3.

Cassidy argues that Paul’s attitude toward the Roman state underwent a dramatic transformation between the time Paul penned his early letter to the Romans and when he composed his final letter to the Philippians. In Romans, Paul advocates a seemingly blanket submission to Roman authorities: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” (13:1). Years later, writing to Christians in Philippi, a group made up predominantly of Roman citizens, Paul calls on them to live as citizens of heaven (1:27; 3:20) and emphasizes that all beings (including Roman authorities) must someday bow and acknowledge Jesus’ sovereign lordship (2:9–11). In Philippians, then, Paul repudiates any basis for the kind of submission to Roman authority advocated in Romans. Cassidy attributes this change of perspective to the fact that when Paul wrote Romans he had experienced only brief imprisonment at the hands of the Roman authorities. By the time Paul wrote from a jail in Rome to the Philippians, he had endured Roman imprisonment for an extended period of time and faced impending execution at the hands of the Roman government. The longevity of this incarceration, as well as its injustice, allowed Paul time to reflect upon the implications of loyalty to Jesus in the face of the morally depraved rule and rulers of Rome. Paul’s change of perspective toward Roman authority was the result.

Although scholars will dispute Cassidy’s interpretation of individual points in this broad-ranging investigation, he effectively makes his overall case for development in Paul’s thought. Cassidy adds to the growing corpus of literature illuminating the political context of Paul’s writing, forcing us to think again about familiar texts. Furthermore, Cassidy provides a needed corrective to the exclusive focus on the much-abused text, Romans 13:1–7, as the sum and substance of Paul’s stance toward the state. Cassidy’s study is highly recommended.

James C. Miller
Daystar University
Nairobi, Kenya

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Revelation
by Simon J. Kistemaker
New Testament Commentary Series. Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 2001. 635 pp. $39.99. ISBN 0-9810-2252-5.

This handsomely produced commentary on Revelation argues that the Apocalypse was written by John the son of Zebedee during the reign of Domitian. The author adopts what he calls an idealist perspective, treating “Revelation as a book of principles” with fairly universal applicability to all believers in all times and places (p. 42). Following Eusebius, Kistemaker adopts a mirror reading of Revelation 13 assuming that, under Domitian, people were forced to participate in the emperor cult (p. 392; Kistemaker cites S. J. Friesen’s and S. R. F. Price’s monumental works in support, but neither would agree with him that emperor worship was mandatory in this period). Nevertheless, wherever John stresses a special reward for martyrs only, Kistemaker broadens the reference, citing G. E. Ladd’s dictum, “Every disciple of Jesus is in essence a martyr” (p. 232). The author therefore focuses more on placing Revelation into a broadly New Testament theology than on seeing it as a message to first-century believers.

The strength of the commentary is its emphasis on Revelation’s internal dialogue, its repetitions, parallel passages, and disjunctures. Kistemaker maintains a steady emphasis on a symbolic interpretation throughout and shows how the author can discuss the same topics or events in different ways. The author interacts primarily with evangelical scholarship on Revelation and does not see much value in liberationist interpretations, let alone postmodern or postcolonial readings.

Each section of the commentary gives the author’s translation, comments on the English text, and provides brief notes on grammatical features of the Greek text. The commentary is readable and accessible to pastors and lay people.

Richard Vinson
Baptist Theological Seminary at
Richmond
Richmond, Virginia

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Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context
by Brian K. Blount
Abingdon, Nashville, 2001. 232 pp. $21.00. ISBN 0-687-08589-6.

This book is a bold and challenging project that, for various reasons, few scholars these days would even dare attempt. It aims to bring together the methods, approaches, and agenda of “cultural interpretation” of the New Testament, “biblical ethics,” and the study of “African American Christianity.” In many ways the synthesis and culmination of his previous works, Blount nonetheless makes clear the primary focus and agenda of this book—“to help readers who live outside of an oppressed circumstance read the New Testament through the circumstance of oppressed others” (p. 9). The primary agenda is to challenge (dominant world?) readers to interpret the New Testament in terms he associates with African Americans, their experiences of slavery, and their persistent quest for liberation from slavery and its aftermath. This focus, in Blount’s view, makes his reading of the New Testament an ethical reading. The interesting title of the book, drawn from Zora Neale Hurston’s writing about a folkloric figure’s appearance first as a “whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song,” then as an entity in the “flesh” (pp. 14–15), reflects Blount’s interest in construing biblical interpretation that is focused upon African Americans and is attuned to “a liberation kind of ethics” (p. 15).

The book treats four major parts of the New Testament—the Synoptic Gospels, John, Paul, and Revelation—in terms of their significance for liberation ethics. These four chapters are framed by two introductory chapters and by a concluding chapter.

What Blount attempts to do in this book is very important but enormously complicated. The challenges and pitfalls are many, and they are reflected in this book. But Blount has advanced the cause. All other attempts in this direction will need to take this book into account. It deserves reading and consideration.

Vincent L. Wimbush
Union Theological Seminary
New York, New York

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Capital Punishment and the Bible
by Gardner C. Hanks
Herald, Scottdale, 2000. 288 pp. $16.99. ISBN 0-8361-9195-1.

Five years after publishing his overview Against the Death Penalty, Hanks has produced a companion volume that expands on the first two chapters of his earlier work, focusing entirely on the biblical material. He places the Hebrew law codes in the context of Israelite history, showing the relevance of social practices such as human sacrifice and the blood feud for understanding ancient tribal societies. His contrast between values found in Hammurabi, for instance, and those found in Mosaic law provides stimulating insights.

His chapter on “Yahweh’s Grace and Forgiveness” underlines the Lord’s redemptive use of three acknowledged murderers—Cain, Moses, and David—in the carrying out of the divine salvific plan. Hanks formulates seven basic principles drawn from the texts to serve as a “bridge” between ancient Hebrew culture and our own. He then applies each of the seven to the current practice of the death penalty in the United States and finds that practice entirely lacking in every instance. He concludes that capital punishment “cannot be justified by the use of the Hebrew scriptures” and is actually “a pagan practice that has nothing to do with Yahweh’s way of justice and mercy” (p. 137).
If “the real story of the Hebrew Scriptures is Yahweh’s steadfast love for his people, the real story of the New Testament is God’s love for all people, despite their sins” (p. 147). The specific text that he places at the center is the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 8:2–11). Here, he contends, Jesus “refused to become an executioner himself, and touched the consciences of others so that they too turned away from this act of vengeance” (p. 160).

Hanks devotes two stimulating chapters to a look at “New Testament Executions” and “Atonement and the Powers.” In the process he dismantles the typical (mis)use of Rom 13:4 as a justification for capital punishment and rejoins it with Romans 12, which teaches all who would follow Christ never to seek revenge.

Finally, Hanks provides an overview of the “early Church Fathers,” who largely opposed the death penalty, so that Christians today, when they reject the death penalty, are “not stepping away from tradition . . . but back into our most pure and primitive tradition” (p. 230). His conclusion is a call for courage on the part of all who would take the Bible seriously to accept its moral priorities, acknowledging that “love overcomes death and forgiveness overcomes violence.” This is a timely book for anyone seriously interested in a contemporary biblical perspective on the controversial issue of capital punishment.

James J. Megivern, Professor Emeritus
UNC-Wilmington
Wilmington, North Carolina

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The One in the Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship
by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J.
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2001. 234 pp. $22.00. ISBN 0-8028-4892-3.

The inadequacy of classical, “monarchical” models of God’s relation to the world, thought to be inconsistent with modern science and inappropriate to democratic politics, is a pervasive theme in contemporary theology. Bracken attempts to replace classical models by outlining a new and ambitious “intersubjective” metaphysic. His proposal relies heavily upon White-head’s philosophy, but also features several innovations. Bracken draws upon systems theory to portray Whiteheadian “societies” as entities in their own right, rather than mere aggregates. This allows him further to democratize reality by locating the integrity of societies apart from the influence of dominant individuals. He employs classical Trinitarian thought to depict God as an internally differentiated community, whose existence and unity is dependent upon a shared “ontogenetic matrix,” identified as the divine “nature.” This eternal divine nature is offered, by God’s free decision, as the ground of creaturely existence. Finite, temporal reality is seen as participating in the same matrix of life that eternally brings forth the Triune community. The deep relationality of the world is grounded in the intersubjectivity of God.

This is an impressive, though somewhat difficult, book. Bracken introduces the reader to a wide variety of thinkers whose work informs his own, and the resulting conversational tone is welcome. Unfortunately, this strategy also yields difficulties. Bracken employs an array of vocabularies, from field theory in physics, to systems theory, to deconstructionism, and the relations between them are often fuzzy. His strategy of engaging a number of thinkers at length, moreover, leads to a haphazard distribution of his own argument. Consequently, some of the controversial aspects of his proposal are not sufficiently defended. Perhaps the most surprising of these to readers familiar with process thought will be his recovery of a fair number of traditional Christian doctrines, including “subjective immortality” and an apparently literal Trinity of divine persons. In a purportedly radical reconstruction of classical theology, one might like more elaborate justifications for inclusions of this sort.

Thomas A. James, Ph.D. candidate
Union-PSCE
Richmond, Virginia

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He Shines In All That’s Fair
by Richard J. Mouw
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2001. 101 pp. $14.00. ISBN 0-8028-4947-4.

Mouw sets himself the task of re-thinking the matter of “common grace” within the Reformed tradition, in part to account for the mysteriously perduring presence of good in a fallen world, and in part to offer a Reformed perspective on the way in which naming that good bears witness to the divine intent in creation. His book is both a reflection on the fragmentation of contemporary culture and an attempt to show how some ancient and not so ancient theological controversies might offer help in healing these divisions.

One might get the impression that Mouw is only concerned with sorting out a problem within the confines of a scholastic Calvinism. However, he knows that the temptation to dismiss the created order in the name of some deeper salvation is both very old and as contemporary as certain “post-liberal” claims against culture. Mouw argues for a more open engagement of the church with that culture and a deeper appreciation for that “common grace” rooted in God’s creative activity in the world.

Mouw’s gifts of penetrating insight, clarity of expression, and apt quotation serve him well in making his case. However, one wonders if the problem he poses does not deserve a better answer than he gives. There is little talk about Jesus Christ or the sense in which a solution might be found in a Christology that includes both the rejected and the elected, creation and covenant. He concludes that there is a need within Calvinism for exercising a compassion that is rooted in “the fact that all human beings are created in the divine image”(p. 100). Compassion is better than narrow-mindedness, and a respect for the integrity of creation is a vital part of what it means to believe in the Christian God. That neither of these is self-evident and that both of them might be rooted in the beginning of all God’s ways and works in Christ are matters about which Mouw seems surprisingly incurious. As a result, his otherwise helpful and generous perspective is unable to engage, at the depths commensurate with the need, the fragmentation of our culture or the divisions within the church.

Thomas Currie
Union-PSCE at Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina

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Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation
by Mark I. Wallace
Trinity Press International, Harrisburg, 2002. 256 pp. $20.00. ISBN -56338-82-9.

The often-neglected third person of the Trinity receives overdue consideration in this book, which attempts to redeem the Holy Spirit from the mire of metaphysical speculation. According to Wallace, the metaphysical question of being has so influenced the Christian theological tradition that the concept of the Spirit has become dislodged from its biblical foundation. Thus, Wallace assesses Western philosophy as injurious to the Christian theological enterprise and begins his biblically attuned pneumatological reconstruction. Positioning his hermeneutic between foundational metaphysics and radical historicism, Wallace concludes that the concept of the Holy Spirit should be rhetorically rendered in a performative model of truth. Only within this framework, Wallace argues, can the Spirit reclaim its place in Christianity as the cosmic healer and sustainer of all forms of life. The author concludes by emphasizing the ethical implications of a Spirit reimagined. Although issues of social transformation are discussed in light of this model of the Spirit, Wallace tackles the current ecological crisis most explicitly in this constructive work. He offers a pneumatology consistent with a “revisionary paganism,” a phrase used to describe the non-anthropocentric mandate espoused by Wallace’s preserving and renewing Spirit.

The analysis of Christian theology’s culpability in light of social and ecological crises proves plausible in Wallace’s sound reasoning. His use of diverse and abundant sources strengthens the coherency and validity of his analytical argument. Although he provides incisive analysis, Wallace only offers cursory construction; hence, the reader is left with an amorphous notion of Wallace’s pneumatology. However, this may have been intentional, as the theology outlined in his book is one of openness and flexibility. His lack of specificity encourages the reader to continue theological reflection long after the book’s conclusion.

Stacy Martin
Princeton, New Jersey

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Feminist Theologies for a Postmodern Church: Diversity, Community, and Scripture
by Loraine MacKenzie Shepherd
American University Study Series. Peter Lang, New York, 2002. 252 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-8204-5572-5.

Shepherd attempts to analyze the systems of power at work in making decisions about exclusivity and inclusivity in churches. She is particularly concerned with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people in faith communities, but defines “feminist” broadly to show concern for the multiplicity of oppressions within churches and society at large. The book is divided into two parts. The first is an analysis of four major feminist thinkers, each of whom she sees as representative of a particular approach: critical modern, poststructural, postcolonial, and postliberal. Following a critical comparison of the four, Shepherd turns to an analysis of United Church documents on issues of sexuality published between 1960 and 1988. She is particularly concerned with how a community’s particular “canon” and approach to revelation and authority combine to create “local” or community-internal frames of meaning, and how marginalized groups can serve as “resisting regimes” (p. 222) to these dominant voices.
Shepherd states that her intended audience is primarily “those working in academics as professors, researchers, and graduate students,” as well as those responsible for making policy in Protestant denominations (p. 7). The strength of the book, however, appears rather to be in Shepherd’s ability to translate difficult methodological concepts (the glossary is particularly helpful for those not versed in postmodern theory) from the academic to the pastoral and lay realm. Indeed, the book is strongest not in its critical analysis of major feminist thinkers (the author’s methodological “boxes” of analysis don't quite work) but in her ability to draw from varying methodologies to create an alternative approach to theology for those who serve increasingly diverse faith communities and those who exist in the margins.

Laura Beth Bugg
Harvard Divinity School
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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On Niebuhr: A Theological Study
by Langdon Gilkey
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001. 261 pp. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-2934-6.

This volume is a tribute to Reinhold Niebuhr and his contribution to theological ethics. Placing Niebuhr within the intellectual context of his day, Gilkey draws a sensitive portrait of a theologian struggling with the issues of his time.

Mindful that many of Niebuhr’s interpreters have emphasized his political and social concerns, Gilkey delves into the theological presuppositions of Niebuhr’s normative insights. Against those who have assumed that Niebuhr’s ethics can be “secularized,” Gilkey argues that Niebuhr’s social ethics cannot be extricated from his faith in the reality, power, and goodness of God. He investigates Niebuhr’s reflections on human nature and the meaningfulness of history (standard fare in a study of Niebuhr), but distinguishes this work by relating them to Niebuhr’s mature and subtle understanding of God.

Without a doubt, Niebuhr’s career was characterized by opposition to the liberal culture of the day, with its confidence in progress and human goodness. He was neo-orthodox in his approach, drawing upon classic Christian symbols for a substantive alternative to the prevailing worldview. Yet, according to Gilkey, Niebuhr’s theological and moral imagination is also rife with modern assumptions about humanity, culture, history, and myth. “Hence Niebuhr can as easily be termed a ‘neo-liberal’ as he can be called neo-orthodox” (p. 27). He provides a synthesis between classic Christian faith and modern culture that “reshapes and redefines them both” (p. 248).

The most enjoyable part of the book comes at the very beginning. It is a firsthand account of the intellectual, cultural, and political turmoil of the early twentieth century that gave rise to Niebuhr’s theology. This introductory chapter sets the tone for the entire study by describing the way in which contemporary culture and Christian belief interact in the mind of a creative theologian responding to the issues of his generation. A thought-provoking and helpful assessment of Niebuhr’s theology, this book also offers the broader argument that theology is an appropriation of Christian belief in a particular historical and cultural location.

Timothy A. Beach-Verhey
Davidson College
Davidson, North Carolina

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Theology After Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology
by Dan R. Stiver
Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2001. 257 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-664-22243-9.

This book is about Paul Ricoeur, but also much more. Despite the book title’s emphasis, it is primarily a comprehensive, integrative, critical, and constructive interpretation of the whole corpus of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophical thought and what it offers to contemporary theology in response to the challenges of postmodernism, pluralism, and praxis.

No preious book on Ricoeur has so constructively integrated many of the brilliant but previously dangling ideas that Ricoeur has introduced into hermeneutical discussion over the past sixty years. Such a project has only become possible with Ricoeur’s more recent publications. Here one finds ideas that several generations of philosophy and theology students have encountered in more isolated thematic contexts—the centrality of the text, the hermeneutical arc, surplus of meaning, the distanciation of the author and text, metaphor and narrative, the hermeneutics of suspicion, ideology critique, oneself as another, attestation and testimony, and much more. Along the way, Stiver writes about postmodernism, the history of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, the Yale School, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s proposals on divine discourse, and many participants in the past half-century’s hermeneutical dialogue.

Stiver recognizes that his work is only one possible interpretation of Ricoeur’s thought, which has its own surplus of meaning and provides texts that engage other readers and may provoke their thought in different directions. Stiver at times integrates unreconciled elements of Ricoeur’s thought, pushes Ricoeur’s ideas beyond what Ricoeur has yet seen, and criticizes Ricoeur for not always remaining faithful to his own best thought. Stiver’s larger agenda is clearly his probing toward a centrist postmodern theology.

Stiver has the touch to make understandable complex ideas and intellectual movements and traditions for non-specialized readers. The book is a “must” read for anyone interested in Ricoeur, postmodern thought, or theological construction in the contemporary era.

Richard B. Cunningham, Retired
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky

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Biblical Religion and Family Values: A Problem in the Philosophy of Culture
by Jan Newman
Praeger, Westport, 2001. 357 pp. $82.95. ISBN 0-2759-7137-6.

“The most general aim of this inquiry is to contribute to philosophical understanding of basic relations between religion and the family as fundamental forms” (p. 2). As the subtitle suggests, this is philosophy, not theology and certainly not advocacy. The author has written ten previous books, mostly on various aspects of religion. Here he tackles the biblical materials on family life, both descriptive and prescriptive, well aware that what are touted as contemporary “biblical” family values have little to do with most of what is presented as family in the Bible. He is well informed and well read both historically and socially and about the claims of “religionists.” He shows how the family is presented biblically in ever-wider circles to clan, tribe, and nation, or in the New Testament to local church and universal church.

In search of an interpretive key, the chapter on the New Testament swings all the way into the twentieth century and back into the Hebrew Scriptures by way of contrast. The author seems to follow a line of thinking that the Bible is no help as a support to contemporary family life because it is not a unified witness. It is too difficult to find common themes. The philosopher’s search for system is frustrated. Religion and family are not natural allies but natural competitors for personal loyalty.

The book is written in a dense, flat, unrewarding style. The author lays out well the interpretive problems, but seems not to know what to do with them.

Carolyn Osiek
Catholic Theological Union
Chicago, Illinois

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Ichabod Toward Home: The Journey of God’s Glory
by Walter Brueggemann
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2002. 150 pp. $15.00. ISBN 0-8028-3930-4.

Two questions. What is the church today doing when it stands before the biblical text? And what should the church today be doing when it stands before the biblical text?

The answer to the first question, many would agree, is that the church too often waters down scripture to its simplest, most agreeable, least offensive pronouncements. Unfortunately, one of the consequences is that the church’s message often becomes scarcely distinguishable from that of the culture at large.
The answer to the second question, according to Brueggemann, is as follows: The church should read scripture in a non-foundational way; that is, it should not tame the text by appeals to history, reasonableness, or doctrinal consensus. Rather, the church should read the text as guerilla theater, and thus as a dramatic performance from the underside of society that engages us in surprising and ever-new ways. But Brueggemann does not just recommend such a reading strategy to us; he also models it by undertaking an exegesis of the so-called Ark Narrative in 1 Samuel 4–6, an exegesis that moves back and forth between texts in Exodus, Second Isaiah, Kings, and Philippians, and thus is also densely intertextual.

The book’s five chapters originated as a lecture series; the text retains much of the informality and accessibility of orally delivered lectures and, hence, is an easy read. But by emphasizing the ways in which the wild, primitive, strange, and strong texts of the Old Testament can be a powerful resource for the church, the book also offers a fresh, surprising, and even radical strategy toward revivifying the preaching and ministry of the church today.

Karla G. Bohmbach
Susquehanna University
Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania

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Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation
by Ivone Gebara
Translated by David Molineaux. Fortress, Minneapolis, 1999. 230 pp. $22.00. ISBN 0-8006-3183-8.

Gebara presents an ecofeminism rooted in the experience of the common degradation of poor women and the rest of the natural world, hence her insistence that ecofeminism and liberation are, in reality, inseparable. Gebara describes her efforts as tentative. This is a work of constructive theology that is systematic in design but not dogmatic in nature. She claims tentativeness positively, beginning with a chapter that calls classical theological and philosophical certainties into question before proceeding in subsequent chapters to explore basic elements of any Christian theology: human personhood, God, the Trinity, and Jesus from a liberation-oriented ecofeminist perspective. Her lyrical epilogue is full of hope.
I found the chapters on Jesus and on religion to be the strongest. They contain material that illumines and coheres with her approach. While I find her premises compelling and many ideas meaningful, she dismisses possibilities without thorough explanation of her grounds. Some of the constructive efforts in the chapters on God and the Trinity need much development and clarity to provide the more adequate expression of Christian faith Gebara seeks. Given that her goal is to open up areas for consideration, she succeeds. I would, however, argue that her treatment of moral evil and the destructive forces of nature heads in the wrong direction entirely. Gebara is at her best when she tells her own story, when she takes the time to explain in relatively simple terms the implications of dominant epistemologies and the debates over essentialism. She engages in dialogue with genuine questions that have been put to her, and she finds the telling detail that grounds her argument in the life that shaped it, such as the automatic teller machine placed strategically near a shrine frequented by reverent, but impoverished, believers. These make the book eminently worth reading.

Nancie Erhard
Union Theological Seminary
New York, New York

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Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences
by Richard H. Roberts
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 334 pp. $23.00. ISBN 0-521-79508-7.

The title of this volume could be misleading, for the essays collected here do not constitute yet another dry, academic treatise on the relation of theology to the social sciences. On the contrary, this is a full-blown polemic against the unrestrained expansion of the “invasive commodification” and “managerialism” (p. 2) of both church and academy that have characterized the dozen or so years since the tumultuous events of 1989 were declared the “End of History.” Roberts offers an engaging critique of the “McDonaldised” church and academy subject to the strictures of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control (p. 300).

North American readers should not be put off by the fact that this analysis is set in the British context. What may appear as foreign territory—British ecclesiology, academics, and politics—actually proves salutary, as we are provided a lens through which to see realities that are so close to us that if the examples were more familiar, they would be easily missed or dismissed along partisan political lines. Instead, we are left to ponder developments in assessment, accreditation, and church growth with a fresh perspective.

Although not an easy read, Roberts’s critical analysis is compelling and worth the effort. His constructive proposals are less developed. He presses for theology’s constructive engagement with the social sciences in the hope that together they can revitalize religion’s emancipatory potential for renewing human community. Here the perceptive reader will find resonance with “political theology” and Moltmann in particular.

For those less sanguine about the liberative potential of Protestant liberalism, even when adapted to the exigencies of these “postmodern” times, Roberts’s constructive vision is not likely to persuade. Unfortunately, Roberts does little more than caricature and dismiss (as “quasi-fundamentalistic”) contemporary theological efforts to resist capitalist encroachments that advance on Augustinian and Barthian premises. Nevertheless, his perceptive analysis of the capitalist times in which we live makes this book worth the read.

Daniel M. Bell, Jr.
Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary
Columbia, South Carolina

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Christianity Incorporated: How Big Business is Buying the Church
by Michael Budde and Robert Brimlow
Brazos, Grand Rapids, 2002. 187 pp. $22.99 (cloth). ISBN 1-58743-026-6.

The authors have a point. In fact, they have four and maybe more: that global corporations are “capitalizing” on the Christian gospel; that especially regarding funerals and cemeteries, the church has “bought into” capitalism; that in many ways the Christian church serves as chaplain for nations and corporations; and that the church originally existed to promulgate a gospel quite different!
Regarding transnational corporations and the co-opting of churches, the authors give some illustrations of recent attempts to make Jesus speak for capitalism, principled management, and business leadership. The Man Nobody Knows, Jesus CEO, and sales efforts in the Archdiocese of Mexico City are among them. They take special aim at credit cards affiliated with Christian-based non-profits, and they decry the use of the faith by capitalists. “[T]o the extent that capitalist formation succeeds, Christian formation fails” (p. 61).
Concerning the death industry, Budde and Brimlow point to the profitability of cemeteries especially for the Roman Catholic Church. They lament the consolidation of funeral homes into corporate entities. They laud Catholic Worker communities that offer resources for the poor. “The church needs to stake out its own ground on matters of death discipleship, and community—somewhere that is neither throwaway nor gaudy . . .” (p. 107).

Dwelling extensively on the encyclical Centesimus Annus by Pope John Paul II in 1991, the authors argue that Christian leaders have become chaplains for big business. Market capitalism and political democracy are viewed by the pope and by Christians generally as a “guarantor of human rights, dignity, and the just distribution of the wealth generated” (p. 113).

The authors employ the image of a soup line as a countercultural metaphor for Christians—a charity where no one serving pulls rank and where feeding the hungry is the aim. Church-based consumer cooperatives, Black church economic revitalization efforts, and the Catholic Worker movement win approbation.

The writers draw conclusions about the church based on “worst-practices,” they generalize in a Jeremiad, and they deprecate the churches for seeking to redeem host cultures. They have a point. But they underestimate the resourcefulness of Protestant and Catholic Christianity to translate the gospel and practice it.

Louis B. Weeks
Union-PSCE
Richmond, Virginia

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Preaching Genesis 12–36
by A. Carter Shelley
Preaching Classic Texts. Chalice, St. Louis, 2001. 174 pp. $17.99. ISBN 0-8272-2973-9.

This book is intended as a resource for preachers and worship leaders. In its twelve chapters, Shelley deals with fifteen texts that carry forward the storyline of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis 12–36. Each chapter includes sections on biblical background, theological reflections, preaching strategies, a biblical character sketch, and a sample sermon.

Rather than presenting one interpretive viewpoint throughout the book, Shelley highlights a diversity of scholarly perspectives in her discussions of various texts. For example, in reflections on the Hagar stories, she introduces feminist insights from Phyllis Trible (pp. 53–57). In the chapter on the sacrifice of Isaac, she quotes from the Jewish writer Elie Wiesel (pp. 94–97). When discussing the early stories of Jacob and Esau, she draws on the liberation theologies of James H. Cone and Gustavo Gutierrez (pp. 129–30). This eclectic approach invites broader insights into the interpretation of these texts and their relevance to contemporary issues. The sections on preaching strategies and character sketches may also spark new ideas for approaching familiar texts. The sample sermons included reflect a variety of styles, with mixed results. This reader would not imitate (or advocate) all of them. However, the book offers diverse models for the preacher who is looking for new ways to approach the homiletic task.
The nature of the series in which this book is included obviously necessitated limitations of space and format. But often this reader wanted a more thorough, in-depth discussion—particularly in the theological reflection and biblical background sections. Consequently, the best use of this book would be as an additional dialogue partner in conversation with various excellent commentaries available on Genesis as part of the preacher’s own study, reflection, and sermon preparation.

Marsha M. Wilfong
University of Dubuque Theological
Seminary
Dubuque, Iowa

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Preaching Mark
by Bonnie Bowman Thurston
Fortress Resources for Preaching. Fortress, Minneapolis, 2002. 218 pp. $18.00. ISBN 0-8006-3428-4.

The great strength of this volume is its unwavering level-headedness. Pick almost any pericope: if there’s scholarly consensus on its most convincing interpretation, you will find that accurately represented here, alongside honest acknowledgment of questions resisting easy closure. The author is manifestly uninterested in shoehorning the Second Gospel into exotic yet improbable theories; her approach to Mark is as mainstream as can be. The evangelist’s views on God, Jesus, discipleship, and faith command Thurston’s attention, which she maintains by regularly inviting the reader to step back from particular trees to survey the entire forest. Though I am puzzled by a few suggestions (3:7–12 “provides rich material for a sermon on prayer” [p. 38]; “by the end of [Mark] . . . the women disciples are standing at the foot of the cross” [p. 40; cf. 15:40]), most of Thurston’s homiletical tips flow credibly from her exegesis. Consistently she offers preachers more than one textual handhold, while warning them away from red herrings, bad habits, and lack of charity.

Thurston is playing on the same field with Lamar Williamson’s commentary in the John Knox Interpretation series (1983). How do they compare? Williamson refers but minimally to the commentary tradition, engaging himself with Mark on its own terms. While grappling with the primary text, Thurston locates herself with respect to interpreters bygone (Origen, Victor of Antioch) and contemporary (most often, Morna Hooker). Relative to the text’s exegesis, Williamson may build more hermeneutical bridges to the pulpit than does Thurston, who renders a somewhat clearer snapshot of the text’s intricacies and disputed points. As the British say, what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts. In any event, Thurston’s is a clear, companionable guide for Preaching Mark, which sets a high standard for subsequent Fortress Resources for Preaching.

C. Clifton Black
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey

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A History of Christian Education: Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Perspectives
by John L. Elias
Kreiger, Malabar, 2002. 301 pp. $34.50 (cloth). ISBN 1-57524-150-1.

Elias traces the major themes of Christian education as a dialogue between religious concepts and dominant theories of education in various historical cultures. Throughout, Elias assumes a dialogical interchange between Christianity and the historical culture, giving the impression that the two have always been distinguishable from one another. The first three chapters are committed to educational paradigms from the Greco-Roman era, through the increasingly dominant Christendom, and into fifteenth- century humanism. Chapters four and five explore the impact of Enlightenment philosophy on Western religious assumptions, and how those enlightenment ideals reshaped Protestant and Catholic educative practices. Chapters six, seven, and eight are respectively devoted to Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This is no introductory volume to church history, for Elias assumes the reader already possesses some background knowledge. Those familiar with the broad strokes, especially the events surrounding the Reformation and Counter Reformation, will delight in Elias’s historical interpretation of the educative practices of the time. The main concern of the work is an historical survey curriculum theory, consistent with Elias’s previous contributions to Christian education. The reader is engaged in the ongoing dialectic between living Christian heritage and changing contemporary culture. Elias does not attempt to resolve these differences. Instead, he provokes readers to evaluate their own religious assumptions and cultural context for the practice of Christian education.

Thom Bower, Ed.D candidate
Union-PSCE
Richmond, Virginia

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