Abstract
In troubled times, when many of us are painfully aware that “something is amiss in the world” (1), Volf's and McAnnaly-Linz's narrative of the world as the home of God is designed to provide a faith-filled response. Emphasizing that God dwells in and with people and with the world despite all struggle and strife, the authors are building their arguments on a wide arc of biblical traditions from creation, Exodus (where the book begins its theological exploration), incarnation, to the eschatological hope for the New Jerusalem. The main interlocutors of the book, as stated by the authors, are Martin Luther, G.W.F. Hegel, Jürgen Moltmann, and Kathryn Tanner.
The metaphor of world as God's home is given preference over other metaphors of the world as God's temple or kingdom, which represent priestly and kingly themes, in favor of emphasizing God's presence (while noting that this presence cannot be totally contained in the world). The theme of God's home is further developed with some awareness of cultural differences, but the “broad features of home” the authors feel are “fairly widely recognizable” (13). “Home” includes relationships of those who live there, as well as relationships between individual homes. This means that homes are not merely domestic places but also the location of politics, economics, and religion. Significantly, the authors are also aware of the distortions of home, which can include both harm to those inside and those on the outside.
Readers should find some of the engagements with the troubles of the world engaging. The Exodus, for instance, is described as God's resistance to and deliverance from “centralized and exploitative political power” (32; emphasis in original). Next, God's covenant with Abraham and the people of Israel demonstrates the central theme of God's mercy but also how this covenant is broken, an ongoing tension in the lives of those who seek to follow God. The Gospel of John is at the heart of an extended argument of how God dwells among us in the world. This dwelling includes the pain of suffering and death on the cross, which points to some of the tensions between Jesus and the “Judean authorities” and “Roman rule” (111). Here, an “alternative politics” (113) is rooted that refuses to play along with power politics, prefiguring a new kind of presence of God. The third part of the book then moves to the topic of the Holy Spirit and “life in the household” (chapter 6), and part four explores “the fullness of life,” which includes a discussion of struggle against the dragon in the book of Revelation and the alternative power of the lamb.
In their conclusions, the authors observe that “the Bible ends in the middle of the struggles of history” (230). These struggles place before people “a stark choice”: Babylon or the New Jerusalem—one representing absolute power and the other a place where “everything is shared” (233). In this way, religion, politics, and economics must always be negotiated together. Unfortunately, this is where the book's limitations become most visible: rather generic notions of dominant power do not quite help us understand how power flows throughout history and especially at present, including hard and soft forms of empire. Visions of abundance and sharing (“Jesus promises abundant life,” 158) fail to spell out how abundance is produced and by whom (whose productive and reproductive labor, human or other-than human), and how sharing might become a religious, political, and economic reality (let alone the question of what needs to be shared—toothbrushes or means of production?).
In sum, while reclaiming the world as the home of God captures a substantial part of the biblical traditions without ignoring the limits and tensions, this theme would deserve to be developed today more profoundly in the way the ancients did: in the midst of Egyptian enslavement and Exodus, religious domination engaged by the Johannine communities, the Roman occupation of the times of Jesus, leading up to the all-encompassing exploitation and extraction system of global capitalism today. Readers might be able to do some of this work for themselves, but the authors are not off the hook.