Valuable History

When I began my theological education, I thought I would lose my mind on account of all the references to past theologians about whom I knew little or nothing. A friend might call someone else a ‘Barthian’ or a ‘Thomist’, or a lecturer would question whether a particular idea can be believed after Kant, or someone would laugh about what we would all believe even today if it hadn’t been for Anselm. I knew that I would eventually study many of these figures, but I also knew that I would not study all of them, and that much time would pass before I got to some of them. There are, of course, massive reference books with copious information to which I could (and did) turn, but I also needed something compact, something I could keep on my desk for the quick reference between lectures.

Then a friend introduced me to a very handy little book, Jonathan Hill’s The History of Christian Thought. It was just what I needed. This succinct volume packs a load of useful information. Hill divides the history of the Christian Church into roughly chronological categories: the Church Fathers, the Byzantine Empire, the Middle Ages, etc. Each section opens with a brief introduction to the important cultural, ecclesiastical, or philosophical movements that marked the particular era. Hill then turns to the main content of the section, which consists of a series of entries – each a few pages long – for the major theologians of the era. These entries are then punctuated by more general entries providing further background information – perhaps on an intellectual movement or a church council or a city that became an important centre of thought for the time.

So, are you confused about Calvin? Unsure about Schleiermacher? Ignorant of Irenaeus? In just a few minutes you can have the gist of the thought of any one of these. Each entry is clear and easy to read. Hill does a fine job of simplifying complex ideas without being unduly simplistic. Of course, certain details and nuances are glossed over because of the nature of the book, but if you’d like to know in broad strokes about the ideas of a major Christian thinker, there is a very good chance Hill will provide you what you need.

Another notable characteristic is that Hill treats different schools of thought in a balanced and objective way. To illustrate, a review on Amazon.co.uk says in essence that the book will crush any conservative impulse, while feeding the inner radical. I found nothing akin to that effect, and further, the latest edition of the book is published by IVP Academic, an Evangelical label. So Hill’s objectivity is vindicated – if your starving soul seeks further impoverishment, this work does not seek to dissuade.

Two caveats are needed, both in the category of the book’s strengths also being its weaknesses. First, because Hill does an excellent job of locating each thinker in his or her context, after reading an entry for a thinker you might realize that you need to know more about that context in order to fully understand the entry. So you might read the preceding entry, then the next preceding entry, and each entry will just be illuminating enough to drive you to its predecessor and you may find it difficult to stop. Second, because the book is of a manageable size, not all thinkers and movements are covered. For example, Eastern Orthodox thought after the Byzantine era is ignored. Neither is there mention of the recent phenomenon of Radical Orthodoxy, the writers of which are so hopelessly opaque as to beg for a concise interpreter. And perhaps most importantly from my perspective, nearly two centuries of Lutheran and Reformed confessionalist thinkers are left out in the cold.

Still, if you are not a theologian and yet are interested in the history of Christian thought, do not let these caveats keep you from purchasing The History of Christian Thought.

 

Understanding the Hadith

Understanding the Hadith
Ram Swarup

A Muslim friend of mind sometimes reminds me that westerners often do not grasp the nature of Islam. Islam is not a religion the way westerners conceive of religion, he tells me. Islam is an all-encompassing religion (or, perhaps more appropriately, an ideology) that overshadows everything. Islam dictates everything from how one is to use the toilet to how one should rule an empire and everything in between. In other words, Islam is especially a legal religion.

One cannot simply pick up a Quran and learn about the particulars of what it means to submit every aspect of your life to Allah, however. The Quran certainly contains legal prescriptions such as what you find in 4:34: “Men are the protectors and administrators of women, because God has given the one more strength than the other, and because they support them by their means. Therefore, righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in absence (of their husband) what Allah would have them guard. As to those women from whom you fear disloyalty and bad conduct: warn them, refuse to share their beds, and beat them.” There are of course other laws revealed in the Quran, but not enough to provide a legislative structure for dar al-Islam.

And Muslims don’t just arbitrarily make this up either. Before employing analogical or deductive reasoning to formulate laws not revealed in the Quran, they turn to a large collection of sayings and deeds of Muhammad that weren’t revealed through him by God. But because he was a prophet and, they would add, the most perfect man (how else could he bed 40 women in one night?), they are still in a sense revelatory. This collection of narratives describing how Muhammad responded to questions posed to him of a legal or ethical nature, how he dressed, and what he did in particular circumstances is referred to as the Sunna (tradition) of the prophet and each particular narrative is called a hadith.

To obtain a comprehensive understanding of Islam one absolutely has to be acquainted with the Sunna (or ahadith [plural for hadith]). The problem is that they are voluminous. The two most authoritative collections, Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, comprise nine and four volumes (respectively) in the modern Arabic-English editions. And they are an absolute bore to read, unless, of course, you are a Muslim jurist.

Ram Swarup has thus accomplished something tremendous in his summary of the contents of Sahih Muslim. Everything from Muslim articles of faith, ritual purification, prayer, taxation, fasting, pilgrimage, marriage and divorce, business and inheritance law, punishments for crime, jihad, government, hunting, food, drink, clothing, behavior, and much more are described in the 258 pages of Understanding the Hadith. Although Swarup is a Hindu, and occassionally his bias comes out in his critiques, all-in-all this is a great book for obtaining an overall contour of orthodox Islam. I dare say it’ll be an eye-opener for readers not already acquainted with the hadith.

 

Hypothetical Universalism, Real Scholarship

English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology

Jonathan D. Moore

Historical theology is, as its name implies, a hybrid discipline. Its practitioners usually favour one aspect over the other. Either theology predominates over history (that is, ideas over events and political manoeuvring and power bases) or vice versa. It is an unusual scholar who captures both history and theology, events and ideas, with equal effectiveness. My specialty, the English church from Henry VIII to the civil wars, seems currently to be dominated by historians. Diarmaid MacCulloch is a scholar in the field who combines historical and theological insights extraordinarily well, and the same can be said for rising star Alec Ryrie. And there are some others. But I have found most of the prominent scholars to be better historians than theologians.

As one for whom theology is more central than history, I find Jonathan D. Moore’s English Hypothetical Universalism to be a breath of fresh air. Moore takes on the conventional wisdom that the 17^th-century puritan divine John Preston was a Calvinist thinker of the William Perkins school, and blows it away. Specifically, Moore examines Preston’s beliefs about the extent of Christ’s atoning work (did Christ die for all in any meaningful sense of that word, or did he die only for those God elected from eternity?), comparing them and contrasting them with the particularist views of William Perkins. What is brilliant and, for a geek like me, exciting about Moore’s work is that his theological acumen is impeccable. He sees the interrelationships among doctrines and comes at the problem of the extent of the atonement from various theological angles. It is not just the divine decree of predestination that matters, but the death of Christ and the effect of the Gospel call on its various hearers. The result is a picture of Preston as a Calvinist thinker of a kinder, gentler sort. One who believes that Christ did indeed die for all. He was a hypothetical universalist – univeralist because Christ died for all, hypothetical because dying for all doesn’t necessarily mean saving all, for not all who hear the Gospel call are transformed by it.

Moore’s approach is sound and methodical. He analyzes his foil, Perkins, thoroughly. He then compares and contrasts Preston according to the same doctrinal categories, leading the reader inexorably to the conclusion that Preston was just who the author thinks he was. If hypothetical universalism were a crime and Moore a prosecutor, the jury of readers would convict Preston without deliberation.

But Moore does not stop there, he goes on to re-evaluate Preston’s role in the historic York House Conference of 1626 in light of this better understanding of Preston. Moore demonstrates that a correct understanding of a person’s ideas can and, at least in this case, should, colour one’s understanding of the person’s role in events.

English Hypothetical Universalism is a must-read for students of the early-Stuart church or of the history of puritan thought. It would also be a helpful book for those having a decent understanding of the doctrine of predestination who want to deepen and broaden their perspective. Moore’s methodical approach should be both accessible and educational for the informed lay person. Those seeking an introduction either to the doctrines surrounding predestination or to the early-Stuart church should bypass this rather more advanced work.

 

Saracens

It was the great medieval historian R.W. Southern who advanced the idea that the most far-reaching problem for Europe during the Middle Ages was the expansion, if not the mere existence, of Islam. And his Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages is a classic narrative analysis of this intellectual and geopolitical conundrum. But it does not descend into the details and is somewhat dated.

 

A few historians have tried to fill in the gaps. The most comprehensive narrative by far, and to date, is John V. Tolan’s Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. Beginning with the initial reaction of Christians living in the Levant and North Africa to the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, he takes off and examines what seems like every extant medieval text on Islam through the early fourteenth century.

 

Undoubtedly this is a comprehensive work. Tolan certainly does a great job of explaining how Europeans dealt with the existence of Islam as well as how they responded to the various theological problems it raised. And he contends throughout that Europeans were really only interested in Islam in order to caricaturize, criticize, or demonize it. They certainly weren’t interested in any sympathetic analysis or understanding.

 

There is a lot of truth to this. Medieval Christian scholars didn’t approach their subjects without affection or bias, although some could approach Islam quite ambivalently (see T. Burman’s recent Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560). However, if there is a weakness to Tolan’s examination, it is in his failure to account for the convictions of the medieval mind and its criticism of Islam. Medieval Christians, unlike much of liberal Protestantism and Catholicism, were convinced of the truthfulness of Christianity. It thus makes sense that they rigorously rejected the Muslim religion, for the two carry very different and mutually exclusive theologies.

 

Nevertheless, there is much to learn from Tolan’s work. At the very least, it will expose enthusiasts of medieval European intellectual history to an underrepresented aspect of medieval thought. And for those interested in theology it summarizes otherwise unexamined and untranslated historical theological treatises in clear English prose.

 

Lost Soul a Good Find

When I embarked on my theological education in 2003, I was an Evangelical. Or at least I was mostly Evangelical, perhaps with a smattering of Anglo-Catholicism thrown in for the sake of depth. I never felt fully at home as an Evangelical, but that’s what I was. Then, as I studied theology—and specifically Reformation thought—I became increasingly estranged from my Evangelicalism. The more I identified with Luther (and to a lesser extent Calvin), the less I fit in with my Evangelical friends. And particularly my Charismatic Evangelical friends. But this made no sense to me, because I wasn’t becoming more liberal. I had always thought of conservative Protestantism and Evangelicalism as being one and the same thing. And I had always thought of Evangelicalism as based in the Reformation tradition. But there I was, conservative, Protestant, steeped in the Reformation, and yet far from Evangelicalism.

I discussed this with a friend more schooled than I in the roots of Evangelicalism. He recommended that I read D. G. Hart’s The Lost Soul of American Protestantism, a pithy sub-200-pager packed with insight into the dilemma that I was clearly not the first to encounter. He was right, Hart’s book is indeed all of that.

The conventional wisdom in the study of American religion has been that American Protestantism is rightly understood as divided between conservative and liberal camps. Conservatives (Evangelicals and their sub-group, Fundamentalists) believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture, supernatural conversion, and aggressive evangelism, whereas liberals (mainline Protestants) discount these in favour of beneficent social action. This is the convention into which I had bought, but Hart effectively dismantles it. He argues instead that the most important divide in American protestantism is between confessional and pietistic camps.

Confessionalism, Hart argues, is conservative but it is not Evangelical. It defines the Christian life in churchly terms: creeds, ordained ministry, liturgy, church polity. This is the sphere of holy endeavors. The common sphere, i.e., the activities shared with non-believers such as business and politics, is not where the Christian life is measured for the confessionalist. Pietism, on the other hand, has ‘dismissed’ churchly matters like creeds and liturgy as irrelvent because they are only ‘skin deep’. Instead, pietism ‘attaches great religious significance to public life and everyday affairs’. This is true of both Evangelicals, with prayer groups and a desire to ‘take back the country for Christ’, and mainliners, with social activism.

As Hart demonstrates, the similarities between conservative and liberal pietists are not coincidental. Both groups are outgrowths of early American revivalism. When pietism came to dominate the American religious scene in the 1800s, Hart argues, it was confessionalism that suffered most. That is why confessionalism is today only a limited presence in the American religious scene—Hart focuses on confessional groups within the Presbyterian, Reformed and Lutheran traditions. Furthermore, the rout of confessionalism has left it sidelined in the historiography of American religion. Thus, it is confessionalism that is the ‘lost soul’ of American Protestantism.

Hart’s argument goes far in clarifying for me a disconnection I was already experiencing. On that account I am grateful for this book. But I do have one quarrel with Lost Soul, which is that Hart emphasises that pietists differ from confessionalists in that the former believe faith is ‘supposed to make a difference in all areas of life, not just on Sunday but on every day of the week’. But he never elaborates on this distinction, leaving the impression that confessionalists see faith as a matter of routine with significance only for Sunday. As though confessionalists say goodbye to God as they leave the church building, not to think of Him again until next week. “Prayer? That’s for pietists. And the reading of Scripture too. We confessionists don’t do such things. And I’ll never let my faith come between me and a fast buck!” I trust Hart would see this as a gross parody of confessionalism, but at points he allows room for a disagreeable reader (perhaps an Evangelical) to see confessionalism in just such terms. Greater elucidation of this point would be useful.

With that caveat, Lost Soul is helpful and informative book, accessible for the informed lay person as well as the clergy person and the student of church history.