Abstract
Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land
by Norman Wirzba
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. 264 pp. $29.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-268-20309-2.
Through an agrarian lens, Wirzba traces how Scripture testifies to God’s ongoing involvement in a gift economy and ecology that join creaturely life with the life of God. Wirzba draws particular attention to what the incarnation of Jesus Christ means for creaturely life. All created life is intended to be drawn fully into the life of God incarnate in Jesus Christ (Col 1:15–17). The God we see in Jesus creates and redeems all creation, not just humanity. For Wirzba, to affirm that God created the world means that created beings and places are sacred gifts, “the material means and the embodied expressions of divine love” (p. 5). God is here and now as a creating, healing, and beautifying presence to and through each creature and place. As the reality of incarnation bears witness, God’s desire for each kind of creature is that it “realize to the full all the capacities within it that are made possible by God’s love” (p. 6).
In reframing Christian spirituality through an agrarian lens, Wirzba invites us to place our soul in local habitats and neighborhoods rather than ethereal realms. Grounding our soul in the material stuff of soil and place helps us escape the dualistic lens of Gnosticism that informs the anti-creation economies and spiritualities of Western society. This Gnostic worldview has long denigrated the body and the earth as lesser realms of existence to be either escaped or transcended.
As we learn to practice agrarian spirituality, an alternative gift economy comes into view that draws us into communion with places and creatures, both human and nonhuman. We learn local ways to participate in the flow of God’s self-giving love made manifest in the God-breathed, giving-receiving dynamic animating creaturely life. We learn embodied ways to participate in God’s agrarian Spirit through our particular entanglements with other creatures and the emerging ecological and economic story of our place.
Refreshing moments of insight emerge from stories illustrating an agrarian spirit. For example, Wirzba turns to the earthy mysticism of Wendell Berry to introduce the discipline of descent. Rather than ascending into a transcendent cloud of unknowing, Berry models mysticism as a descent into the “dark night of the soil” (p. 112). In this dark night, the mind and heart root down into the soil to gain an intimate knowledge of the forests, fields, watersheds, and communities populating one’s place. Berry describes how rooted existence on a farm transforms his self-understanding. He comes to see himself “growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants” (p. 110). He experiences his body and daily motions “as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place” (p. 111). Berry’s experience beautifully illustrates how becoming an apprentice to the land and one’s place helps us discover ourselves as creatures with all our human dependence on, as well as responsibility for, the gifts of life offered there.
Wirzba makes it clear that an agrarian spirituality is not about another “back to the land” movement. It is about helping modern people remember who they are as earth-bound creatures dependent on the air, land, water, and other creatures to sustain their lives. It is about remembering that all life is sacred. Agrarian spirituality is needed to live faithfully in both the countryside and cities. Our creaturely vocation, wherever we dwell, is to develop skills and sympathies to nurture the place and fellow creatures that nurture us. Scripture itself, notes Wirzba, begins God’s creation story in a garden (Genesis 2) and culminates the story in a heavenly agrarian city where God dwells on earth in the midst of a flourishing creation (Revelation 21–22).
An attractive Sabbath delight infuses the agrarian spiritual path Wirzba maps out. So many writers calling for a response to our ecological crisis leave their audience with a pervasive sense of urgency but no clear way forward. Wirzba, however, charts a steadfast course of spiritual transformation that requires slowing down to attend reverently to our entanglements with creaturely life that hums all around us. This turning from the grueling pace of our profit-driven economy, as well as from the distractions of an increasingly virtual life, requires a turning to the soil and the real, embodied world of creaturely existence where our spiritual energies are enlivened. There we learn to participate in the creative and healing ways of God’s self-giving love pulsing within all life.
A book study group, inside or outside the church, would find Agrarian Spirit a fascinating read that challenges common Gnostic-informed assumptions about spirituality, the Christian faith, and life. For pastors, church educators, and spiritual directors the book provides a wealth of material for developing various sermon series, Bible studies, and spiritual counseling resources that help seekers and people of faith reconnect Christian faith with ecology, economic life, and embodied spirituality. For example, in Wirzba’s chapter on prayer, he revisits the Lord’s Prayer and offers an introduction to the biblical theology that grounds agrarian spirituality. For an earth-inclusive approach to stewardship season, a study of his chapter on the discipline of generosity will cast new agrarian light on biblical economics. A course or sermon series based on the chapter about humility will provide an introduction to the notion of creaturehood, which is basic to an agrarian faith.
Compared with Wirzba’s This Sacred Life (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Wirzba’s Agrarian Spirit examines the historical antecedents and implications of the Anthropocene, with a lighter touch. In This Sacred Life, the violence against the land and people of the land, the commodification of life, our modern profit-driven economy supported by unjust and racist policies, and futurist visions of a technology-supported transhumanist world are more critically linked to Gnostic, dualistic Christian thought and practice that denigrates the body and earth.
To fully benefit from the wisdom Wirzba offers in Agrarian Spirit, therefore, this spiritual guide could be read as a companion piece to This Sacred Life. A skill Wirzba has demonstrated throughout his scholarly career is his ability to write for different audiences. This Sacred Life addresses a wide audience of philosophically and theologically minded persons to argue the logic of creation as a corrective to the violent earth-destroying logic of the Anthropocene. Wirzba then follows with Agrarian Spirit to provide seekers of an earth-rooted and Christ-centered spirituality with a guide to a way of being that is consistent with the logic of creation. Together these two books move us towards an ecological conversion in the pattern of self-giving love that we see incarnate in Jesus Christ.
For Wirzba, a hopeful future for humanity rests not in technology but in a spiritual transformation that takes root in the habitats and stories of local places. Through spiritual practices that are at once communal, embodied, and economic, we learn to participate in God’s incarnate love active in the biological and ecological processes sustaining life. We grow to appreciate that “the incarnation of God’s love did not end in Jesus Christ” (p. 101). Our human vocation is to cultivate creation’s telos, which is for creation to be filled with the fullness of God.
In a world that seems to be racing towards ecological collapse even as it promises a technology-supported transhumanist future, Wirzba provides a spiritual path to honor and protect our creaturely humanity—no matter what trials and uncertainties the future holds. As we grow in the disciplines of agrarian spirituality, we will learn to give and receive love through the creation God loves and animates, patiently cultivating the flourishing of people, creatures, and land all together.
The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture
by Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter; translated by Peter Lewis
Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2021. 448 pp. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-674-2483-80.
But what is the Bible? How did it come to be? What led to the writing, revising, transmission, reception, republication, canonization, and translation of biblical texts? And what constituted the process? Once, there was no Bible. Now there are billions of them in thousands of languages. What explains the move from there to here? These are the questions that Schmid and Schröter set out to answer in this volume. The book was originally published in 2019 as Die Entstehung der Bibel: Von den ersten Texten zu den heiligen Schriften (Munich: C.H. Beck). The authors are distinguished scholars of Old and New Testament, respectively, in Zurich and Berlin. Translator Peter Lewis has done the Anglophone academy a great service in making their work available to readers without facility in German.
On the whole, The Making of the Bible is an impressive and up-to-date account of its subject matter, simultaneously comprehensive (spanning thousands of years, dozens of cultures and languages, and multiple scholarly disciplines) and concise (under 350 pages, not counting endnotes and bibliography). The prose is accessible to non-specialists. And while biblical scholars will already know much on offer here, even they will be surprised by the occasional fact or theory. The book will be most useful as an introductory textbook in masters-level classes and as an entrée to the topic for outsiders to the guild. The sheer amount of information packed between the covers is an achievement in itself.
The shape of the book is straightforward. After an opening chapter on the state of biblical manuscripts, their antiquity, their preservation, canonical ordering, and so on, chs. 2–4 discuss the origins of Scripture in ancient Israel and bring the story up to Philo in the first century CE. Chapters 5–6 turn to early Christianity and the fate of both Jewish and Christian writings within the nascent messianic community. Chapter 7 briefly concludes the Jewish story with the Mishnah, Talmud, and the solidifying of the Tanakh. Chapter 8 closes the book by tracing the course of the Christian canon from its patristic stabilization to its Protestant contestation; the authors then reflect on “the Bible” in the “modern” world, with an eye toward the rise and role of historical criticism in the interpretation of the Scriptures.
Because the Scriptures are the product of a particular people, their history can be told only by telling the history of that people. In this way chs. 2–6 function as a narrative précis of Abraham’s children, in the context of which the Law and the Prophets, the Psalms and the Proverbs, the Gospels and the Epistles took shape and began to gain authority. Schmid and Schröter are level-headed in their judgments here. One example is their treatment of the so-called “parting of the ways” between synagogue and church. Was there a global rupture between rabbinic and messianic Jews following the destruction of the temple? Did gentile Christians hate and resent the Jews, and vice versa? If Jews were baptized, did they thereby cease to be Jews, to observe Torah and attend synagogue? Scholars too often resort to sharp answers to these questions. But Schmid and Schröter demur: “We may fairly presume that attitudes varied from region to region, from one community to another, and from one individual to another.” It is best, in their eyes, “to use the metaphor of a house with many rooms, some of which were connected to one another, or, following Paul, the image of a tree with a common root and different branches” (p. 232).
Also helpful is the authors’ gentle debunking of perennial fables about the church’s canon. They write that the canonical process “came to a provisional close by the mid-fourth century—‘provisional’ because not all Christian churches share the same biblical canon and also because the church never issued an official edict identifying the Scriptures that composed the ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament.’ There was simply a de facto recognition of which ones were included” (p. 237). In sum, “the formation of the New Testament cannot be ascribed to the resolution of a church synod or a directive issued by a council of bishops. There were no such resolutions or directives. Listings of scriptures, which start to resemble the eventual complement of Christian Bibles only from the fourth century on, instead hark back to developments whose beginnings can be traced all the way back to the writing of the New Testament scriptures themselves” (p. 276). The next time a headline alludes to Constantine’s selection of which Gospels were to be included in the canon, Schmid and Schröter’s pithy reply will stand at the ready.
The book is not without its shortcomings. The perspective of the book is decidedly Western and German. After the time of the apostolic fathers, the Christian East lies on the periphery of the main action, and Orthodoxy is a stranger at the ecclesial table. Moreover, once the informal canonical process reaches a kind of terminus—with Origen, Athanasius, and Jerome—the next characters in the story are Luther, Erasmus, and Calvin. Neither Augustine nor Thomas Aquinas (much less John Chrysostom or Ephrem the Syrian or Gregory the Great) receive mention. Philo’s exegetical methods take up eight pages, but the fourfold hermeneutic of the Middle Ages is missing. One gets the impression that nothing of much significance happened, scripturally speaking, between the production and codification of the New Testament, on one hand, and the revolutions of the sixteenth century, on the other. For the authors, three crucial things have occurred vis-à-vis the Christian Bible since the time of Jerome: the Protestant reformations; the rise of historical criticism; and the discovery of ancient manuscripts along with other recent archeological findings. These events are indeed important, but a disproportionate emphasis on them leads to an imbalance in the narrative.
In the final pages of the last chapter the authors put their cards on the table. They write in unqualified praise of historical criticism. They state that the discipline is an unvarnished good that “has fundamentally changed” Christian and Jewish faith and theology alike. It had the effect of dissolving “the unity of the Old and New Testament as well as the boundaries of the biblical canon.” It initiated a “process of ‘demystifying’ the Bible, shifting it from an inviolable sacred document to a collection of writings open to critical reading” (p. 317). As historical criticism revealed how the biblical canon is socially and culturally conditioned, it “made it possible, indeed imperative, to regard its viewpoint not as valid for all time but as historically determined.” The biblical texts, we are told, are “underlain by cultural, religious, and ethical principles very different from those which prevailed in Europe and the United States” across the past two centuries (p. 318). This is true, if obvious. Are we to assume that the differences in view reflect poorly on the canon? It appears as though, for the authors, critique runs in only one direction.
Following these observations, Schmid and Schröter commend “a modern approach to the Bible” (p. 319), one that is “enlightened and ethical” (p. 321). Having done away with the unity and authority of the Bible, the “critical method” remains “imperative” in the process of finding a “new social relevance” in the Scriptures (p. 321). For whom, I wonder? Certainly not ordinary Christians, who “continue to regard the Bible as infallible”; the authors report with dismay that “such an attitude is not entirely absent from the academic sphere.” They tut-tut the work of the late Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), in whom they detect “a certain reserve toward historical-critical biblical scholarship” (p. 317). This is not the only time they imply that Roman Catholic doctrine is incompatible with an intellectually serious reading of the Bible.
This overall posture mars an otherwise commendable book. Historical critics somehow continue to fail to reckon with the founding vice of their discipline: hubris. They write with confident certainty about that which admits only probabilities. Over and over Schmid and Schröter report as simple fact what many scholars reasonably dispute. Regarding the Catholic Epistles, for example, the authors state that they are “all, without exception, pseudepigraphic writings,” as are the six disputed letters of Paul (p. 273). The authors do not discuss alternative analyses, and their style of writing does not allow for the possibility of views and interpretations that dissent from their own.
Constructing Mission History: Missionary Initiative and Indigenous Agency in the Making of World Christianity
by Stanley H. Skreslet
Minneapolis: Fortress. 2023. 462 pp. $39.00. ISBN 978-1-5064-8189-0.
It is important to identify what type of book this is. It is not a history book, but it does analyze history with a particular framework in mind. It covers much of what would be called mission theology, but it does not provide a theological analysis. There is much about sociology and even politics of mission, but that is not the main purpose or driving concern. After going back and reviewing the structure of the book and the introduction, I find it most helpful to see this as an analysis of modern mission (post-Reformation) in terms of purpose and agency, with a particular concern for power (that of empires and money, in particular). The concluding section on subversive witness captures Skreslet’s main focus on how some missionaries and mission agencies have subverted the injustices of empires, money, and attendant oppressions. I find this both creative and a very important development in postcolonial historical studies.
Carefully thought out but complex in structure, Skreslet provides a very helpful schema for analyzing what has happened in Christianity during the long period of modernity and now postmodernity. In the first three chapters (Part I), Skreslet follows a roughly chronological survey of each of the three drivers. As a historian, I find this very helpful. We can see, beginning with the Jesuits, how missionaries were mediating or preaching or guiding toward a salvation message for those who had not encountered Christian teaching. I found Skreslet’s pattern of drilling down on representative examples across the globe a very useful guide in analyzing drivers and later performance. His discussion of each topic, beginning with salvation, is wide-ranging, covering Roman Catholics, Pietists, and Anglicans, among others. This wide coverage reveals both the similar contexts and issues that were encountered as well the unique ways that Jesuits or Congregationalists reached out to indigenous peoples of North America or in China. The use of particular examples, as short biographical sketches, is both engaging and academically responsible: engaging because history is valuable to the degree that it is the story of people in contexts making decisions; academically responsible because general principles or ideas that are not embodied in the lives of real people are little more than abstractions.
I found the second chapter (on mission as knowledge-sharing) particularly engaging. In the wake of the Enlightenment, European and North American missionaries had much to offer in terms of new science and knowledge of the earth (including maps). The role of schools, literacy, translation, and the teaching of science as part of Christian mission were critical issues for hundreds of years. Conflicts emerged, especially when science was identified as a mission itself (not just part of mission). In many contexts (especially in East and South Asia) missionaries were scholars, and many scholars (regardless of their faith) were missionaries. These discussions between scholars and missionaries are very important still. I wish Skreslet had carried the discussion into the later part of the twentieth century, when education took on a different role than during the colonial period.
Another reason this is a very important chapter is that it raises to visibility a seldom articulated priority of Western missionaries for reaching out to more civilized peoples with long histories of literacy, philosophy, and intercultural religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, and the religious practices of Confucianism). Many nineteenth-century missionaries first went to China. Later, missionaries would go to Japan, Korea, and finally India. Many of these missionaries came out of the Student Volunteer Movement in North America and were thoughtful missionary candidates who were reading progressive and evolutionary books on early sociology, urbanization, and anthropology. The mixture of Darwinian, social sciences, and academic excellence prepared missionaries who understood the missionary mandate as that of uplifting through education and social (as well as political) reform. This engaging chapter could be expanded into a book at a later date.
Part Two, which focuses on “matters of performance,” begins with power encounters and the nexus of issues related to such encounters. Again, the complexity of “power” in mission entails the unequal value of currency, local government (including its power and stability), and its alliance with national religions, colonial and then imperial power, and the support or prevention of mission by Western (or Asian) empires. There are very few general rules or guiding principles regarding power, for at some times and in some places the British Empire aided missionary expansion (paying for schools and medical buildings), but at other times and places it forbade these as a way of preserving order (e.g., the Pangkor Treaty of 1874). All empires, whether African, Asian, or Western, are self-serving. Thus, when missionary work was seen as harmonious with imperial aims, it was often supported by the empire, and the results generally softened the harsh imperial rule.
While reading this fourth chapter on power encounters, I was struck by the overlapping categories of the book. For example, in a discussion on “Digging Foundations,” Skreslet notes that missionaries who faced imperial resistance would carefully build foundations through education and long-term, patient presence. He uses examples of Jesuits and Capuchins in sixteenth-century Europe missionizing to re-convert Protestant Geneva to Roman Catholicism. He also discusses the work of Calvin Wilson Mateer in Shandong to set up schools after failing at peripatetic evangelistic work throughout this Chinese province. Educational work constitutes a response to power (imperial as well as religious and social), and so this discussion is included in the chapter on power encounters, too. It could also have been discussed in the chapter on vernacular Christianities, for throughout their whole careers, Mateer and his wife Julia worked on a dictionary and on translating Scriptures and other literature. In fact, education also represents resistance or subversion. This does not mean that the categories are imprecise, simply that they should not be reified. They overlap, helping us to grasp Christianity as a complex world movement.
Suffice it to say what Skreslet has provided a broadly researched volume on Christian mission in the period from the Enlightenment to the present by using helpful lenses, engaging biographies, and making broad comparisons. There are extensive references to the Society of Jesus (more than to any other agency of mission) and to China, India, and Japan, yet fewer references to missionary work in Africa or Latin America. My reading of the volume has helped me think more clearly about the complex themes of mission history and assess the unexpected results of Christian mission that have given us the world Christian movement we have today.