Volumeth e Number
119 e x p o5s Pages
i t o 251–259
ry times
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
DOI: 10.1177/0014524608088854
http://EXT.sagepub.com
book reviews
CALVIN ON PRAYER
John Calvin, On Prayer: Conversation with God
(Louisville, KY: WJK, 2006. $17.95. pp. 146. ISBN
0–664–23022–9).
I continue to be amazed by people who see John
Calvin as a cold, rationalistic systematizer. Such
impressions seem to arise from skating on the surface
of Calvin’s Institutes. When one goes deeper and
listens more intently, one discovers a pastor-theologian
of extraordinary sensitivity to the subtle workings of
the Holy Spirit in daily life. His intimations of warm
personal union with Jesus Christ have the ability to
inspire deep and rigorous piety. His intense humility
before the glorious majesty of the First Person of the
Trinity takes one’s breath away (not to mention one’s
pride). The pedagogical problem for those who have
developed an abiding love for Calvin is often about
how to lead newcomers to the ore-filled veins found
in the depths.
Those scholars of Calvin are surely right who have
argued that one must enter into Calvin’s thought
through the portal of Book Three of the Institutes.
The place to begin is not where Calvin tells us to
begin; instead, a true read on the man and his work
best comes into view by beginning with his account
of ‘The Way in Which we Receive the Grace of
Christ’ in the book on the Holy Spirit. Westminster
John Knox Press has encouraged this approach by
reproducing nearly the whole of Calvin’s teachings
on prayer found in chapter twenty of Book Three.
Through the prism of Calvin’s teachings on the
practice of prayer, the reader discovers all the
signature themes in practical perspective.
This handy little volume comes with some features
that attempt to make Calvin a bit more user friendly.
In addition to breaking up the text of Institutes 3.20
with brief summaries and questions for reflection or
group discussion, the volume includes an insightful
introduction by noted Calvin scholar, I. John
Hesselink. It also includes a few examples of prayers
written by Calvin. Hesselink’s introductory essay
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situates Calvin’s teachings on the practice of prayer
in the Institutes within the much larger corpus of
Calvin’s written works. Perhaps most helpful of all,
Hesselink helps us to see the rich trinitarian grammar
of the practice of prayer in Calvin’s vision.
This volume would serve as an excellent resource
for adult study groups in congregations who want to
learn more about the practice of Christian prayer. It
would also serve well as an introduction to Calvin’s
thought as a whole. Pastors will find this a helpful
handbook on prayer and it may encourage some to
see Calvin as a conversation partner in the practice
of ministry. The book could find some use among
theological students as part of a course on the
practice of prayer or as an introduction to Calvin’s
work as a whole.
Gordon S. Mikoski
Princeton Theological Seminary
CAN GOD RIDE A BICYCLE
Brian Davies, The Reality of God and the Problem
of Evil (London: Continuum, 2006. £16.99. pp. 264.
ISBN 0–82649–241–X).
A characteristic feature of this book is the use of
down-to-earth and entertaining illustrations (often
featuring Smokey, Davies’ long-suffering cat), to
identify and clarify serious issues such as, ‘What can
appropriately be said about God?’ We should start
there, Davies believes, because the problem of evil
cannot be properly addressed without getting God
right first. So after a useful introductory critique of
traditional theodicies, Davies argues the case for God
as Creator who is definitely not a creature like other
creatures. He proceeds to explore what that means for
God in relation to materiality and morality. On the
same basis Davies mounts a sustained and rigorous
critique of arguments against the existence of God on
the grounds of evil and suffering. He also criticizes
what he sees as misguided attempts to exonerate God
(such as the ‘freewill’ or ‘ways and means’ defences).
252 the expository times
To quote, ‘Theodicy . . . typically goes astray at the
outset in so far as it construes God’s agency as that
of a moral agent modelled on human moral agency’.
Thus Davies challenges not only the opponents of
theism, such as Hume, John Mackie and William
Rowe, but also its supposed allies, such as Richard
Swinburne and John Hick. By contrast Aquinas is
viewed throughout as the most reliable guide.
Although I had to read some pages twice, Davies
generally argues his case with clarity and humour,
aided by vivid illustrations (and numerous bracketed
asides). He engages with many more issues than
can be examined here (such as causation, goodness,
and love). Non-philosophers might be tempted to
regard this book as a typical philosophical frolic,
divorced from the Biblical message or the challenge
of living the Christian faith today. This would be
unfair. In the last few pages Davies admits he is no
theologian; he acknowledges that this is a work of
philosophy, but he believes his conclusions are more
in accord with biblical teaching about God than are
other widely held views. Some of these conclusions
are controversial (he takes issue with Moltmann
and Sobrino over God’s suffering), some startling
(‘evil suffered does not in a serious sense exist’), but
Davies doesn’t profess to offer explanations; what
he offers is a rigorous examination of a perennial
problem which perhaps more than any other leads
many to deny the reality of God. Davies has provided
an excellent resource for anyone willing to engage
with that problem.
TREVOR WILLIAMS
Trinity College, Oxford
‘Telling it slant. . .’
Emily Dickinson urged us to ‘tell all the truth but tell
it slant’, an approach to the development of ethics
that Traci West follows in her new book, Disruptive
Christian Ethics: When Racism And Women’s Lives
Matter (Louisville, KY: WJK, 2006. $24.95. pp. 216.
ISBN 0–664–22959–X), the slant that she brings is
revealed in the book’s sub-title: ‘when racism and
women’s lives matter.’
West weaves together story-telling, social analysis,
biblical references and some reviewing of historic
ethical approaches into what she identifies as a
‘liberationist’ approach. Her aim is to develop
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a Christian social ethic arising out of a ‘primary
concern for socially and economically marginalized
people that shapes both core notions for conceiving
ethics as well as overarching goals for practising it’.
One of the most ‘disruptive’ elements in her book
is the imaginative way in which she presents the
story of the Harlem Housewives League in the 1920s
and 1930s as one of the contemporary contexts
alongside which Reinhold Niebuhr was developing
his ethical reflection and which exposes what she
sees as his overestimation of disinterestedness as a
moral ideal.
For West, fostering an ethical vision depends on the
recognition that there are multiple, dissimilar sources
of moral knowledge, a dissimilarity which emerges
not least from inequalities in status and esteem.
That description of a mixed moral economy
is hardly new, but she does make a convincing
argument that it is not enough to take the experience
of the oppressed as simple case-studies in a moral
framework. Thus, ‘Harlem is not just a place to
find illustrations for ideas about social morality as
preconceived by theologians and other great thinkers
. . . [while] the moral knowledge of and actions by
. . . Harlem women sometimes exemplify . . . ethical
principles that are already well known . . . their voices
and ethical actions offer alternatives and challenges
to what is assumed to be the essential terms for
describing human behaviour’.
West’s desire in this slanted approach is clear:
to recover an authentic Christian morality for the
United States, a culture she describes as being so
saturated by soft Christian sensibility that it stifles
any imaginative witness in opposition to the public
culture. For her a liberative ethic is necessary if
there is to be the possibility of developing a new
communal, public ethic, open to the insights of other
religious traditions. It is what Emily Dickinson might
have recognized as the need for a truth which must
‘dazzle gradually or every man be blind’.
KEVIN FRANZ
Scottish Churches House, Dunblane
THE ORIGINS OF EARLY PENTECOSTALISM
Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary
Nature of Early Pentecostalism (London: SCM, 2007.
£22.99. pp. 312. ISBN 987–0–334–04063–7).