A couple of weeks ago, I got my hands on a preproduction proof copy of Spencer Burke's A Heretic's Guide to Eternity and this is the second installment of my review/thoughts. See the first part here. A few notes before I begin: First, this is not the sort of book review that you'll find in academic journals. It is more like my general thoughts and impressions as I read through the book. Secondly, I wrote the "review" in an "as I am reading" fashion. That means that I wrote the review for the first section after reading the first section and before reading the second. I think you'll see some changes in my thoughts as the review progresses - these posts reflect my thoughts as I was reading through the book.
Section One is called "Questioning Grace: The Future of Faith," and it follows in a long line of introductory sections of books questioning the wisdom of some of the patterns that emerged from the past few hundred years of modernity as it relates to the Church and faith in general. I say "follows in a long line..." because I've been around this conversation for a while now. And I think that I understand as well as the next guy the arguments against the Enlightenment Church. But Spencer doesn't stop at rehashing some of the same old cliches - he pushes the envelope just a bit further...
It seemed to me that the main thrust of the first section was Spencer's pitting of "religion" against "spirituality." Again, if you've been reading pretty much anything (but especially "emerging church" sort of literature) for the past, oh, two decades, then you'll understand the argument that religion is dying. The sort of cold, industrial, decision-oriented, numbers-focused religion that seems to have trapped Western Evangelicalism for a while. And you'll have read about the emergence of "spirituality" - the desire to connect with God outside the framework of traditionalist religion. So far, so good. I agree. And I can even get onboard when Spencer seems to advocate a sort of spirituality outside of what we might recognize as the church. Because to me - and this is me talking - just because we might not recognize "it" as the church doesn't mean that "it" isn't the church. Perhaps our thinking has become too conditioned by our culture to see beyond our own imaginations. So I can go there.
But even with that sympathy and understanding already present as I approached the text, I felt myself being drawn a bit too far down the path of logical conclusions. Because I read Spencer pitting religion versus spirituality in a way that posed no possible victory for religion. And to me, religion is the practicing of faith. And the practicing of a faith that follows Jesus involves some boundaries that an ethereal spirituality doesn't. Get rid of bad religion? Yes! Is there a lot to be gotten rid of? Yes! But get rid of it all? Well, maybe we're having a problem with our terms, but when Spencer criticizes religion in most of Section One, I found myself agreeing. But then I often read the next sentence and found myself wondering if Spencer is equating "religion" with the "Church" or even the "church." And I am deeply in love with and hold out great hope for both the Church and the church. In short, each time I read about religion, I found myself saying, "Yes! That's a problem. So let's deal with it." and I seemed to read Spencer as saying, "Ditch it completely." Maybe the Church and religion aren't synonymous in the rest of the book and I'll come around... we'll see.
Onto grace: can grace be contained by religion? I suppose I'm still struggling to understand exactly what definition we're working with here for the term "religion," but I started to sense that pull in an uncomfortable direction here. Did Jesus defy the religious elite of his day? I'd submit that he defied the bad (for lack of a more precise term) religious elite of his day. In other words, he wasn't out to destroy religion - which I consider the practicing of one's faith - but to correct it. He pointed it in a different direction - towards Himself. By setting up all religion as the same bad boogey monster and saying that Grace operates outside of that bad system, then it leads to a place where Grace operates outside of Jesus, and that's not a place that I'm willing to go. Does Grace operate outside of the bounds of what we might see as the Church because of our cultural conditioning? Yes. Outside of Jesus? No. At least not according to any theology that might properly be called "Christian" (which may or may not be congruous with "Christianity"). I'm addressing what I sense is coming in the book - it isn't quite there yet, so I reserve the right to strike this entire paragraph from my thoughts at a later date...
And about the use of the word "heretic:" I imagine that Spencer and co-author Barry Taylor might catch a lot of flak for that choice of word, but it doesn't really bother me. Spencer uses Copernicus and Galileo (and later Martin Luther) as examples of those branded heretics, and we all know how the whole "the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it" thing worked out. Being a heretic means challenging the religious authority of the day and sometimes it takes a few martyrs before the rest of us figure it out. But it's a dangerous job, and far more heretics turned out to be far from what we call orthodoxy and orthopraxy than near it. The odds aren't exactly in your favor as a heretic, but every now and then we wind up naming schools after them... I guess Spencer is just going to wait and find out which sort of heretic he is. :)
Finally a note about contextualization in non-Western settings (since Spencer wanted to know - see comments). I find myself in the strange position of reading with my American eyes and agreeing with the "death of religion" march and then looking out the window upon Africa and seeing how completely mistaken this is. The Church (and indeed other religious institutions like Islam) are growing and spreading like wildfire across this continent. So while Europe and North America are fading fast, Africa and the rest of the Global South are rising in their places. Soon, Africa will be home to more Christians than any other continent, and in some countries where the Church is growing the fastest it is growing slower than Islam. Religion is on the rise here. One fundamental difference is that the majority of African Christians belong to "African-Initiated" or independent churches - so there is an element of the death of institutions like the RCC and the Anglican Church. Yet even that is not the whole story, as Catholicism and Anglicanism are expanding faster here than anywhere else on the planet. The African future will undoubtedly look different as a post-colonial Church emerges, but the bells are not tolling for "religion" no matter how you define it.
Next up: Section Two - "Questioning What We Know: New Horizons of Faith"
