The Five "Most Moving" Works of Academic Theology I Have Read
Academic works of theology rarely suffer the accusation that they are also beautiful. Even now when I hear the words "academic theology" I think back to the time I first read Hans Frei's The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative. It is a work of stunning scope and erudition; of precision and magnitude. But poetry it was not. It was, for me at least, more a grueling ascetic exercise than ecstatic experience. Of course in the end both paths might achieve enlightenment, but certainly one is much more enjoyable than the other along the way. Nonetheless even in my limited reading experience I have encountered those rare works that manage to be both rigorous and sublime; where even when one lurks within footnotes the soul soars into the world's mysteries, or becomes fragmented by a glorious sadness; where imagination is invited to ignite under trusted tutelage, or even vibrate sympathetically with an argument with which one ultimately disagrees. Works which, despite their density, you simply drink in.
Hence here is a brief list of five works I would recommend to anyone interested in academic theology. For those more well read than I, these will perhaps seem obvious, and the omission of other works naive. In that case I can only plead guilty and confess my ignorance. There are other works I would have added, by C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton for example, yet however much I love their writing and however much they have influenced me I do not consider them, properly speaking, "academic works" of theology. If having read the list you feel other books could have been added, please leave them in the comments! The only criteria I ask are works you feel to be both "academic" but which you also found "beautiful." These of course are notoriously subjective criteria so in some sense the field is wide open. To perhaps flesh these criteria out a bit more: while academic, the work must be something that has profoundly affected your emotional relation to theology and the world. I look forward to (hopefully) hearing from you so that I can start creating a reading list! Yet without further ado (and in no particular order) here are the five I have chosen:
1.) A. N. Wilson God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (402pp.)
Many think Darwin killed God. In this fantastic book A.N. Wilson however shows that the seeds of doubt were sown long before, and that Darwin was merely the figurehead, the capstone and ultimate stumbling block for a church long carved from within by unbelief. It may seem odd that I, as a Christian, would find such a book beautiful. What is marvelous about it is that it traces the history of rising atheism with such an eminent sense of its profound ambiguity. (Notice the wonderful--if perhaps unintentional--double entendre of the title: the decline of faith in western civilization. Presumably this is meant as a summary of the narrative of rising Godlessnes; yet read literally it also is the narrative of those who no longer put their trust in western civilization itself). Wilson's prose and wonderful sense of story never fail him, and the result is a scintillating blend of biography and intellectual history, the ultimate upshot of which is that Wilson desires to narrate the death of God as the ultimate tragedy of the 19th century: God (or man's faith in him) died, yet the desire, and indeed the ultimate need, to worship, continued unabated in all of the most influential thinkers. None of the great and tortured geniuses that Wilson portrays could ultimately face the ends of what appeared to be insurmountable logic. Atheism may have been their intellectual position, yet at a deeper level they remained that animal which prays. Religion, the need to worship, was in some sense basic to their humanity. The receding of God--"God's funeral," a name taken from a poem written by Thomas Hardy--was, in Wilson's words "a story of bereavement as much as adventure." (4) It is perhaps of only anecdotal, and of no systematic interest, that though Wilson wrote this book as an atheist, two years after its publication (and quite famously, given his status) he returned to the Christianity he left behind in the early 1980's. I read this with the same delight that I think many read tragedy. The abyssal depths themselves sometimes give rumor of the transcendent.
2.) Jürgen Moltman, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (346pp.)
This is an example of a book with which I have many disagreements, and yet still find utterly absorbing. Moltmann's book is pervaded by an intellectual and creative energy that is undeniable. What does it mean that Christians worship a God whose highest example of love is to die as a criminal, a rebel to the existing order of power, a subversive, a soul who can overturn a government with gentleness? In our post-Constantinian world, where Christianity is more often than not associated with the powerful Religious Right's almost militaristic bid to take back America, what does it mean to truly understand that God's ultimate act of power--one which we as Christians are called to imitate--was to die on behalf of others, to travel a ceaseless path of love and to be interrupted by those who did not want to see it completed because it subverted all common social mores and expectations? Moltmann's resolute thesis is that the cross of Christ is a restless and perennial question mark hung over all Christianities which seek power, stability, control. More than that, God is the God of the oppressed, of the weary, the hungry; God is the God who came into the world to take the suffering of humanity onto Himself. God has intervened as human on the behalf of a humanity that constantly betrays itself and its true nature. "The idea of following Christ has been neglected by the bourgeois Protestantism, because it no longer recognized or wished to recognize the suffering church, the church of martyrs, but established itself in a situation of harmony with the 'Christian world.'" (54). It is to Moltmann's eternal credit that a man found slaughtered, dying as he distracted his military attackers from his family and several others who refused to cease their worship of Christ, was holding a copy of The Crucified God as bullets tore him down. May we all realize we can likewise live ceaselessly for others because God has already secured us, and we have nothing to secure for ourselves. The cross of Christ is ultimately a sign that we are gifts, for the other as servants.
3.) David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (448pp.)
This is perhaps an ironic choice, given that Hart is an everlasting opponent to a majority of Moltmann's work above. Among my five selections there is none that is so supernally beautiful in its prose, so penetrating in its insight, and yet so often mind numbingly difficult to read. Part of Hart's artistry is not just his breathtaking grasp of intellectual history, but also his vocabulary. Some fault Hart for his trenchant prose; yet it is difficult for me to do so. I try, on occasion, but can never escape the analogy that this is much like faulting a painter for using too many colors, or a horse for running too fast. Hart's artistry is that he displays the beauty of Christian conviction with such robustness, while yet also taking many of Christanity's postmodern philosophical detractors--Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Deleuze--and displaying that their deconstructions have indeed tilled much more than earth, and have overturned being itself to reveal the nothingness that underlay all solidity once Christianity as a historical belief has been abandoned. It is not merely that they are wrong--as so many Christian apologists would champion--but that their view of the world is too small, parochial; too bland, repetitive, even doctrinaire. When one neglects the Christian position that the world is a free display of God's gift, everything then suffers an identical repetition (which is to say that because each thing in its own particularity is no longer viewed as a unique gift of God, it fades into the nothingness of identity and indifference. Everything is the same nothingness. Every that is, is nothing because its own meaning can no longer be sustained apart from God). For Hart, unlike, say, Sartre, God is not the despoilment of the world, nor its disempowerment; rather God is the very vitality of the temporal activity of the world worlding itself--it gives this vitality to the world insofar as the nothingness inherent in the world conceived in itself is now founded in the original fecund act of charity of the Trinitarian life of God which gives difference meaning and allows the other than God to continue to flourish for its own sake. While not pantheistic, the Christian God shows His own glory not merely "as the nimbus of otherness that dwells like a phantom glamor about all finite things, the absence that indeterminately determines them, but as quantity kabod [Hebrew for "glory; weight"]. The infinite excess of every new movement and thing moving toward the future expresses the infinite and ever expansive joy the Father has in His Son, which is expressed in the power of the Spirit which is the inner secret of the world's movement. Hart's work is ultimately a joyous paean to God's creation and redemption; and reading it is like bathing in the radiance of God's light.
4.) David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse (332pp.)
If I could have a secret favorite amongst this non-ordered list, this book would probably be it. Part of its beauty comes from the--for me--unexpected profundity. I bought this book because, on a whim, it looked interesting (and was on sale). Yet this obscure gem riveted me from the moment I opened it that night, to the final night I closed it two weeks later. Toole is a first rate theologian, philosopher, sociologist. And above all else he somehow told a story amongst his footnotes of how in a world that bespeaks so often the nihilism or tragedy spoken of in poems--in Homer or Nietzsche, in Schopenhauer or Foucault--these all lead ultimately to the apocalypse of Christ. Christianity and nihilism share the border of an exceedingly thin line. And Toole argues that the ultimate difference between them is the line of Christ and the hope displayed upon His cross and resurrection. Perhaps just as interesting as the line of story in Toole's book--which travels from Susan Sontag's report of the play Waiting for Godot as it performed in the war-torn districts of Sarajevo, to Nietzsche and John Milbank, Foucault and John Howard Yoder--is that it appears Toole's work which created this book ultimately led him, much like A.N. Wilson's book did for Wilson, to Christianity. Which is to say, when faced with a very academic line of inquiry (which involved also literature) of how to go beyond nihilism and tragedy, Toole discovered Christ like a light glowing beyond that one last hill you no longer have the energy to climb.
5.) Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (477pp.)
Perhaps stacking the deck a bit, this is both a book that is the culmination of the life-long research of a devout professor, but is also a book written, and indeed not completed, as he struggled and ultimately lost to cancer. Already how can one not pick it as meaningful, beautiful? Even more than this, it is a reflection on the tension within Christianty as we hold on to hope while yet on the far side of the Easter resurrection. We are, so to speak, still within the Holy Saturday, where God is silent. Of course as Christians we know of Christ's resurrection, yet our triumphalism often tries to undo the tension we have between our believe that we are already victorious, and God's sometimes unreasonable silence. Like Moltmann, Lewis asks "who, in light of all that God is, and does, are we, in our humanity, in our present, our history and future destiny?...What, in other words, does it mean--globally, socially, individually-to be human if it is true that, even for God, fulfillment of selfhood lies along a path of self-abandonement and death? And perhaps above all, what does it mean to be Christian, to be the church, God's people, if even the people's God renounces majesty and safety....as the only way to secure on earth the coming of justice, grace, and peace?" (101). Metaphysically, some of Lewis' conclusions, to my mind, are quite suspect. Yet the no one can deny the gravity of this work; and indeed the sense of a man gracefully facing his own immanent death because God's grace and compassion have flooded him though a lifetime of searching, pervades the work in an implicit yet powerful manner--one silently demanding respect. He dies well because God has died; his hope in his current darkness lingers because we see that even when there was no hope on that first Holy Saturday, we see now it was full of Hope, pregnant with resurrection. I can only hope to die so well.
Hence here is a brief list of five works I would recommend to anyone interested in academic theology. For those more well read than I, these will perhaps seem obvious, and the omission of other works naive. In that case I can only plead guilty and confess my ignorance. There are other works I would have added, by C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton for example, yet however much I love their writing and however much they have influenced me I do not consider them, properly speaking, "academic works" of theology. If having read the list you feel other books could have been added, please leave them in the comments! The only criteria I ask are works you feel to be both "academic" but which you also found "beautiful." These of course are notoriously subjective criteria so in some sense the field is wide open. To perhaps flesh these criteria out a bit more: while academic, the work must be something that has profoundly affected your emotional relation to theology and the world. I look forward to (hopefully) hearing from you so that I can start creating a reading list! Yet without further ado (and in no particular order) here are the five I have chosen:
Many think Darwin killed God. In this fantastic book A.N. Wilson however shows that the seeds of doubt were sown long before, and that Darwin was merely the figurehead, the capstone and ultimate stumbling block for a church long carved from within by unbelief. It may seem odd that I, as a Christian, would find such a book beautiful. What is marvelous about it is that it traces the history of rising atheism with such an eminent sense of its profound ambiguity. (Notice the wonderful--if perhaps unintentional--double entendre of the title: the decline of faith in western civilization. Presumably this is meant as a summary of the narrative of rising Godlessnes; yet read literally it also is the narrative of those who no longer put their trust in western civilization itself). Wilson's prose and wonderful sense of story never fail him, and the result is a scintillating blend of biography and intellectual history, the ultimate upshot of which is that Wilson desires to narrate the death of God as the ultimate tragedy of the 19th century: God (or man's faith in him) died, yet the desire, and indeed the ultimate need, to worship, continued unabated in all of the most influential thinkers. None of the great and tortured geniuses that Wilson portrays could ultimately face the ends of what appeared to be insurmountable logic. Atheism may have been their intellectual position, yet at a deeper level they remained that animal which prays. Religion, the need to worship, was in some sense basic to their humanity. The receding of God--"God's funeral," a name taken from a poem written by Thomas Hardy--was, in Wilson's words "a story of bereavement as much as adventure." (4) It is perhaps of only anecdotal, and of no systematic interest, that though Wilson wrote this book as an atheist, two years after its publication (and quite famously, given his status) he returned to the Christianity he left behind in the early 1980's. I read this with the same delight that I think many read tragedy. The abyssal depths themselves sometimes give rumor of the transcendent.
Excerpt: "It is unremarkable that in cases of extreme pain, or grief, or wonder, men and women should seek, and find, consolation. Perhaps it is more remarkable that the intelligent human mind, knowing all it knows about the arguments against God's existence, should continue to practice religious observances; to be led, on some instinctual level, to punctuate the day with allah akbhar, with O God make speed to save us, with Glory be to the Father... Whatever conclusion the metaphysician draws, however, religion goes on. And by that one does not man that some people, against all reason, continue to insist on the validity or otherwise of the Ontological proof. One means that they live a life in God. You can try to get to grips with this phenomenon by point scoring...any attempt to explain the differences between falling in love and lusting or between Mozart and Salieri in terms of materialism look lame. But the truth is that you reach a stage, whether you are a believer or unbeleiver, when you are no longer making up your mind on a purely rational basis." (336).
This is an example of a book with which I have many disagreements, and yet still find utterly absorbing. Moltmann's book is pervaded by an intellectual and creative energy that is undeniable. What does it mean that Christians worship a God whose highest example of love is to die as a criminal, a rebel to the existing order of power, a subversive, a soul who can overturn a government with gentleness? In our post-Constantinian world, where Christianity is more often than not associated with the powerful Religious Right's almost militaristic bid to take back America, what does it mean to truly understand that God's ultimate act of power--one which we as Christians are called to imitate--was to die on behalf of others, to travel a ceaseless path of love and to be interrupted by those who did not want to see it completed because it subverted all common social mores and expectations? Moltmann's resolute thesis is that the cross of Christ is a restless and perennial question mark hung over all Christianities which seek power, stability, control. More than that, God is the God of the oppressed, of the weary, the hungry; God is the God who came into the world to take the suffering of humanity onto Himself. God has intervened as human on the behalf of a humanity that constantly betrays itself and its true nature. "The idea of following Christ has been neglected by the bourgeois Protestantism, because it no longer recognized or wished to recognize the suffering church, the church of martyrs, but established itself in a situation of harmony with the 'Christian world.'" (54). It is to Moltmann's eternal credit that a man found slaughtered, dying as he distracted his military attackers from his family and several others who refused to cease their worship of Christ, was holding a copy of The Crucified God as bullets tore him down. May we all realize we can likewise live ceaselessly for others because God has already secured us, and we have nothing to secure for ourselves. The cross of Christ is ultimately a sign that we are gifts, for the other as servants.
Excerpt: "In coming to terms with this Christ event, the christological tradition closely followed the Christ hymn of Phil.2. It therefore understood the incarnation of the Son of God as his course towards the humiliation on the cross. The incarnation of the Logos is completed on the cross. Jesus is born to face his passion. His mission is fulfilled once he has been abandoned on the cross. So it is impossible to speak of the incarnation of God without keeping this conclusion in view. There can be no theology of the incarnation which does not become a theology of the cross. 'As soon as you say incarnation you say cross.' God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be: an outcast, accursed, crucified. Ecce homo! Behold the man! is not a statement which arises from the confirmation of our humanity...When the crucified Jesus is called the image of the invisible God, the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation...Here he himself is love with all His being...even if this means death and revulsion." (204-205)
This is perhaps an ironic choice, given that Hart is an everlasting opponent to a majority of Moltmann's work above. Among my five selections there is none that is so supernally beautiful in its prose, so penetrating in its insight, and yet so often mind numbingly difficult to read. Part of Hart's artistry is not just his breathtaking grasp of intellectual history, but also his vocabulary. Some fault Hart for his trenchant prose; yet it is difficult for me to do so. I try, on occasion, but can never escape the analogy that this is much like faulting a painter for using too many colors, or a horse for running too fast. Hart's artistry is that he displays the beauty of Christian conviction with such robustness, while yet also taking many of Christanity's postmodern philosophical detractors--Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Deleuze--and displaying that their deconstructions have indeed tilled much more than earth, and have overturned being itself to reveal the nothingness that underlay all solidity once Christianity as a historical belief has been abandoned. It is not merely that they are wrong--as so many Christian apologists would champion--but that their view of the world is too small, parochial; too bland, repetitive, even doctrinaire. When one neglects the Christian position that the world is a free display of God's gift, everything then suffers an identical repetition (which is to say that because each thing in its own particularity is no longer viewed as a unique gift of God, it fades into the nothingness of identity and indifference. Everything is the same nothingness. Every that is, is nothing because its own meaning can no longer be sustained apart from God). For Hart, unlike, say, Sartre, God is not the despoilment of the world, nor its disempowerment; rather God is the very vitality of the temporal activity of the world worlding itself--it gives this vitality to the world insofar as the nothingness inherent in the world conceived in itself is now founded in the original fecund act of charity of the Trinitarian life of God which gives difference meaning and allows the other than God to continue to flourish for its own sake. While not pantheistic, the Christian God shows His own glory not merely "as the nimbus of otherness that dwells like a phantom glamor about all finite things, the absence that indeterminately determines them, but as quantity kabod [Hebrew for "glory; weight"]. The infinite excess of every new movement and thing moving toward the future expresses the infinite and ever expansive joy the Father has in His Son, which is expressed in the power of the Spirit which is the inner secret of the world's movement. Hart's work is ultimately a joyous paean to God's creation and redemption; and reading it is like bathing in the radiance of God's light.
Excerpt: "Both our being and our essence always exceed the movement of our existence, lying before us as gratuity and futurity, mediated to us only in the splendid eros and terror of our in fieri, because finite existence--far from being the dialectical labor of an original contradiction--is a pure gift, grounded in no original substance, wavering from nothingness into the openness of God's self-outpouring infinity, persisting in a condition of absolute fragility and fortuity, impossible in itself...Our being is simply the rapture of arrival...creation is always, in every moment, liberation, a freedom in which the possibility of loving all things in the love of God or turning to things from God both present themselves, and in which, consequently, we are judged. The event of our being is already emancipation from metaphysical necessity, the ontic ecstasy of the ex nihilo, prayer, worship, awakening, a displacement of nothingness by openness, a reflex of light; and our response to this original ontological vocation can be only, in any moment, acceptance or rejection." (244)
If I could have a secret favorite amongst this non-ordered list, this book would probably be it. Part of its beauty comes from the--for me--unexpected profundity. I bought this book because, on a whim, it looked interesting (and was on sale). Yet this obscure gem riveted me from the moment I opened it that night, to the final night I closed it two weeks later. Toole is a first rate theologian, philosopher, sociologist. And above all else he somehow told a story amongst his footnotes of how in a world that bespeaks so often the nihilism or tragedy spoken of in poems--in Homer or Nietzsche, in Schopenhauer or Foucault--these all lead ultimately to the apocalypse of Christ. Christianity and nihilism share the border of an exceedingly thin line. And Toole argues that the ultimate difference between them is the line of Christ and the hope displayed upon His cross and resurrection. Perhaps just as interesting as the line of story in Toole's book--which travels from Susan Sontag's report of the play Waiting for Godot as it performed in the war-torn districts of Sarajevo, to Nietzsche and John Milbank, Foucault and John Howard Yoder--is that it appears Toole's work which created this book ultimately led him, much like A.N. Wilson's book did for Wilson, to Christianity. Which is to say, when faced with a very academic line of inquiry (which involved also literature) of how to go beyond nihilism and tragedy, Toole discovered Christ like a light glowing beyond that one last hill you no longer have the energy to climb.
Excerpt: And whats the difference between tragedy and apocalypse? For Vladimir and Estragon the difference is that Godot will finally arrive. For Nietzsche the difference lies between Dionysius and the Crucified. John Howard Yoder sums up the difference in a word: Jesus. The Slain Lamb. The One who took up the cross and not the crown. What this means for Vladimir and Estragon is not only that Godot will arrive one day, perhaps one day soon, but that he has already come and that they can, therefore, wait with confidence and patience. Indeed such dignified protest, as the priest showed us, is possible even in Auschwitz. (270)
Perhaps stacking the deck a bit, this is both a book that is the culmination of the life-long research of a devout professor, but is also a book written, and indeed not completed, as he struggled and ultimately lost to cancer. Already how can one not pick it as meaningful, beautiful? Even more than this, it is a reflection on the tension within Christianty as we hold on to hope while yet on the far side of the Easter resurrection. We are, so to speak, still within the Holy Saturday, where God is silent. Of course as Christians we know of Christ's resurrection, yet our triumphalism often tries to undo the tension we have between our believe that we are already victorious, and God's sometimes unreasonable silence. Like Moltmann, Lewis asks "who, in light of all that God is, and does, are we, in our humanity, in our present, our history and future destiny?...What, in other words, does it mean--globally, socially, individually-to be human if it is true that, even for God, fulfillment of selfhood lies along a path of self-abandonement and death? And perhaps above all, what does it mean to be Christian, to be the church, God's people, if even the people's God renounces majesty and safety....as the only way to secure on earth the coming of justice, grace, and peace?" (101). Metaphysically, some of Lewis' conclusions, to my mind, are quite suspect. Yet the no one can deny the gravity of this work; and indeed the sense of a man gracefully facing his own immanent death because God's grace and compassion have flooded him though a lifetime of searching, pervades the work in an implicit yet powerful manner--one silently demanding respect. He dies well because God has died; his hope in his current darkness lingers because we see that even when there was no hope on that first Holy Saturday, we see now it was full of Hope, pregnant with resurrection. I can only hope to die so well.
Excerpt: "Easter's promissory demonstration of the superfluity of grace--that love's plenitude always exceeds in creativity evil's ample but barren negativity, is what gives us hope, as opposed to optimism, for a benign rather than a tragic end to history; and it motivates us to ensure that a demonic denouement, though its possibility cannot be excluded, in fact does not occur. That God would still be God after the worst terminus of human destiny, summons God's own people to accountability for their fellows, energizing their struggle to prevent that worst from happening...[What shall the Christian gospel say but] surely this: that trust, defenselessness, and vulnerability are in themselves, despite all appearances, finally more productive and protective than all stratagems for aggression or defense, attack or retaliation, self-assertion or self-protection...[this is] the superfluity of love, a greater power and strength hidden within weakness and defenselessness, says the story of the crucified but risen Christ, than ever resides in sheer omnipotence and invulnerable might. And it is to make that mystery credible, its riskiness wroth hazarding, that Christians surely are summoned to peacemaking political activity."
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