A Few of My Favorite Reads from 2015
It is about that time when everyone lists their favorites from the previous year, and who am I to resist? 2015 was by all accounts a fantastic year for good theology, philosophy, and history books--extraordinary, even (disclaimer: extraordinariness may vary). In fact there were so many books that I enjoyed this year, limiting myself to only ten works seems criminal.
Nonetheless, I have attempted to do just that. This list contains only theology, philosophy, and history books. Fantastic novels I read this year like All the Light We Cannot See, The Book of Strange New Things, Lila, and, of course, The Martian were all brilliant (and in fact, especially All the Light, books that haunt you for weeks after you read them). But as wonderful as they are, this list was already hard enough to make without including fiction.
As always, these list reflect both my own idiosyncratic tastes, and the limits of my reading (and certainly not all are actually from 2015). But, hey, you have to start somewhere. So here are my ten picks for 2015 (in no particular order):
1.) Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 320p.
2015 was particularly strong for the history of science and religion. Though they didn't end up making my list, Adam Shapiro's Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools , and David Livingstone's Gifford Lectures, Dealing With Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements With Evolution (technically from 2014, but so be it) are bright spots in the upward surge in academic literature making hash (rightfully) out of the so called "Warfare thesis" arguing science and religion have been perennial foes.
But no work, to my mind, stood out quite like Peter Harrison's 2011 Gifford lectures-turned-book, The Territories of Science and Religion (you can view all of the original lectures upon which the book is based starting here). Instead of merely pointing out how Science and Religion were related in more complex ways, Harrison traces the evolution of the concepts themselves. What he finds is quite remarkable: both our modern categories of science and religion evolved together and the borders of their conceptual territories that we take for granted today contain vestigial elements of the history that produced them in the first place. In fact, many of the conflicts taken for granted today are artifacts of the historical creation of these categories themselves. If you are at all interested in the dialogue of science and religion, this is the most important book on the topic in the last two decades. Buy it, or read my review here.
2.) Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 688p.
Some books are bigger than they need to be. This is not one of them. It is massive, erudite, awe-inspiring. Exactly what good scholarship should be. In some sense, this is the anthropological corollary to the earlier thesis of Michael Allen Gillespie, that Modernity is in a sense the outworking of dilemmas imposed by the nominalist theological revolution. Pfau traces the concept of person, will, judgment, action, and many other corollaries of human agency as they were constructed and reconstructed (and, as Pfau's argument goes, deconstructed) through the works of many including Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Hutchinson, Hume, Adam Smith, and many more.
Pfau's is a genealogy of amnesia, if we can put it so: the modern subject, through the rise of an extreme focus on will and self-expression through theological and anthropological voluntarism, has left us condemned to the present. While one can, for example, take Jean-Paul Sartre's view of man as "condemned to freedom", yet this is not a neutral observation, but an artifact of historically contingent circumstances that have produced and naturalized a particular view of human agency. While no justice can be done to Pfau's sprawling work here, his is a stunning repost to those who attempt to "objectify" the humanities through scientific (or quasi-scientific) methodology. Personhood and ethical grammar themselves stand under erasure, if arguments like Pfau's are not taken seriously.
3.) Matthew Levering and Gilles Emery, The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2014), 656p.
Sarah Coakley has written a recent essay on what she considers "third wave" trinitarianism. One of the aspects that defines this movement is the questioning of many historical narratives that drove (implicitly or otherwise) much of the theology of the latter half of the twentieth-century. While many revisionist manifestoes have been released, for example on Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa (more than one, in fact), pseudo-Dionysius, even Stephen Holmes' lucid summary of such scholarship, the real turning point for the general introduction of this "third wave" even beyond her own work was truly this edited volume by Levering and Emery.
In fact, it speaks to the nature of the "third wave" as Coakley has identified it, that two Thomistic scholars should be heading a project such as this. For, of course, Thomas Aquinas was an object of scorn for the past half-century or more, especially in Trinitarian circles. Ever since Rahner identified the Angelic Doctor's separation of his work "on the One God" and "on the Triune God," Aquinas has been held up as an example of how not to structure theology. In this sense, Aquinas and Schleiermacher find themselves odd bedfellows, for this accusation also plays out in how Schleiermacher's placement of the Trinity in his "Conclusion" (not, we should add, an "appendix") was interpreted by the vast majority of Trinitarian theologians in the 20th century. Part of the "third wave" mentality (to stick with Coakley's nomenclature for a moment) is precisely to question some of these ready-made structures and condemnations passed on down to us.
Thomas Aquinas, for example, never meant for a hard-nosed division between God as One and God as Trinity. Even the divisions--"On the One God," "On the Triune God" were not originally present in the Summa, but added later by commentators like Cajetan and Suarez. But if such historical commonplace turn out to be false or misleading, what of the constructive theological work which relies upon them? Thats precisely where this volume shines, giving us leading scholars talking not just about historical periods of trinitarian theology, but also essays giving insight into current avenues of discussion like gender theory, analytic theology, and politics.
As such, this is the perfect volume for anyone attempting to familiarize themselves with the history of the Trinity. Period. Its primary drawback is that it is less culturally diverse than its slimmer Cambridge Companion cousin, but you can't really do better than this volume if you are looking for a one-stop solution to your Trinitarian needs.
4.) David Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann's Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 988p.
Terry Eagleton once remarked that there are always topics on which even the most scrupulous minds will cave to the "grossest prejudice" with "hardly a struggle." For evangelicals, Rudolf Bultmann is just such a subject.
In some sense, it is hard to blame them. Even as astute a theologian as Karl Barth could fabricate a myth of "the whale and the elephant." That is, the idea of two creatures happening to meet that could not even communicate should they so desire. Between Barth and Bultmann lay an impassible gulf. Posterity has weighed in on which side misunderstood the other, and the weight of judgment typically falls on Bultmann. Congdon wishes to complexify this story, among other things.
This volume goes a long way not just in clarifying Bultmann's relationship to Karl Barth, along with giving clear and extensive detail on Bultmann's theology, it also shows David Congdon to be incredibly informed on a diverse array of topics in theology, philosophy, and history. It is fascinating not only to see Bultmann unfettered from some of the freighted misunderstanding that accrued over nearly three generations, but also to see how David applies Bultmann to other areas such as science and religion, realism and idealism, and post-Colonial/ anti-Constantinian theological projects.
Indeed, among the many facets of this work that are by themselves worth the price of admission, is Congdon's representation of Bultmann's theology as not only primarily missional, but originally one of the earliest and loudest critics of the Nazi regime. If the size of this volume is too intimidating (one can hardly blame you if it is), have no fear. David has released an additional Bultmann book this year, slimmed down and ready for your reading pleasure. Having read through this volume as well, I can tell you it is a real gem. While this smaller volume omits much of the discussion of Barth and Bultmann, it does an amazing job of targeting the major themes of its much bigger brother. And given the Christmas season, it is of special interest that the smaller volume ends with a wonderful chapter on Bultmann as the quintessential theologian of Advent.
5.) Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology Vol. I: The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 539p.
Perhaps the highest and most ironic compliment I could pay to this volume is the fact that I have not enjoyed reading a Systematic Theology so much since I read Robert Jenson's. It is the highest compliment I could pay, because like Jenson's it is brilliant, learned, and incisive. Ironically, however, its mode and, to speak generally, its "style" are the exact opposite of the sensibility Jenson manifests.
Indeed, many of the sensibilities that Jenson represents for contemporary theology--narrative, revisionist metaphysics, a reaction against typical forms of "Western" trinitarianism, a high level of "Christocentrism"--Sonderegger, while not dismissing them, cuts against the grain of contemporary theology. As such, she emphasizes the Oneness of God (unpopular, of course, amongst the still ongoing trinitarian furvor), and though she is no rigid dogmatist, she does stay true to the more typical ways of picturing God's attributes--immutible, impassible, transcendent, and so on.
Which is not to say there is no creativity. It is truly difficult to summarize this volume using the categories of either "conservative" or "progressive," as it is a beautiful third-thing blended and presented with Sonderegger's beautiful prose as a garnish. In my opinion this is the best theology book of the year, and certainly the best systematic theology in recent memory.
6.) Alexei Nesteruk, The Sense of the Universe: Philosophical Explication of Theological Commitment in Modern Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 545p.
Let us begin provocatively: "Untestability is ... the constituting element of the ... intelligibility of the universe" (170). The universe "pre-sents" itself to us as a given, a whole untestable but necessary to assume within our inquiry. Nesteruk sets out in this lengthy (perhaps too lengthy) work to closely examine the interface between philosophy and contemporary cosmology.
In particular, it is an interface that Nesteruk explores by marshaling contemporary phenomenology and phenomenological theology. In the words of J. Ladriere, "This theoretical apparatus is ... not a description in the ordinary sense, a presentation of an entity, supposedly given, and its properties, it is the characterization of something which is not a thing, but a structural path along which a thing comes, from the ultimate horizon of every givenness, to the actual presence in which it is effectively given to presentation" (quoted on page 241).
I typically find the language of phenomenology to be a bit abstract, but this work brings many of those abstractions home by ultimately wanting to demonstrate that "cosmological discourse of constitution and explication of the universe is inseparable from the problem and explication of the nature of human subjectivity" (246-247).
Previous to this book I had not heard of Nesteruk, who has done some very interesting-looking work on science in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. If they are as interesting as this work is, it should keep me busy for a while.
7.) Kimlyn J. Bender, Confessing Christ for Church and World: Studies in Modern Theology (Downer's Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 391p.
Though the more I read Barth, and about Barth, the more I enjoy him, admittedly I have found Barth studies as of late to be stale. While I always appreciate George Hunsinger's work, like many I've grown a little weary of the whole "election" controversy on how to interpret Barth. Thus Hunsinger and Molnar's contributions to the debate this year, while undoubtedly staggeringly learned and erudite, were a bit boring for my current taste. Obviously, it is reductive to both to suggest that all they were doing was attempting to weigh in on this debate, and I do find the debate itself very interesting (in fact one of my favorite reads from last year was Stephen Long's work Saving Karl Barth). I just need a little more of Barth than is currently dreamed of in the commentaries on McCormack's Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth essay.
Enter Kimlyn Bender's collected volume of essays. This was not an easy choice, as there were several other interesting Barth volumes lately. In particular it was a close race to choose either Bender's work, or Kevin Diller's really fantastic work Theology's Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response. I ultimately chose Bender because of the variety of essays and topics: from Barth as Gifford Lecturer, to having Barth "engage" the work of Barth Ehrman, Barth and American Evangelicalism, Barth and atheism, and many more.
This was just a really refreshing volume for me. Bender is a clear-headed and charitable theologian, and I was increasingly impressed with his wide-reading as I worked my way through this volume. Probably the best thing I can say about it is that it re-kindled my excitement over Barth's theology.
8.) Jennifer Newsome Martin, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 320p.
Joshua McNall, A Free Corrector: Colin Gunton and the Legacy of Augustine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 329p.
Jason Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers: A Reformed, Evangelical, and Ecumenical Reconstruction of the Patristic Tradition (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 248p.
Cyril O'Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar's Response to Philosophical Modernity (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2014), 688p.
Ok, I am clearly cheating by calling all four of these "number 8." But this is my list and I do what I want (I am only going to display the cover to Martin's work, as I like it the best). For whatever reason, I have come to immensely enjoy intellectual "genealogy." I just find it to be a fascinating opportunity to interface historical and constructive or systematic work. I really first got into it when I started doing some of my own work on the Trinity and how contemporary theologians use the tradition to bolster their own systematic work.
Aside from what I consider to still be the best representation of such literature, Morwenna Ludlow's Gregory of Nyssa, this has remained a strangely untapped market, aside from the now route repetition of decrying "De Regnón" and the East-West paradigm (somewhat falsely) attributed to him. This is beginning to change, and these four books for me represent the exciting new work being done on the Trinity and historiography. While each are different and represent the genre in their own wonderful way, they are all related in that they look at popular misconceptions of contemporary takes on history and the Trinity (well, they are doing much more, but that is how I find them most helpful).
book on
Jennifer Martin and Cyril O'Regan both tackle the complex topic of the vast work of Hans Urs Von Balthasar. O'Regan extends his now typical argument for a "Gnostic" genealogy showing up in Modernity (that is, modern thought can be seen as related to a variety of discourses inflected with gnostic principles). Despite its largeness (some editing was needed, I feel) this is actually a relatively breezy read compared to O'Regan's usually obtuse prose. His student, Jennifer Martin, tackles von Balthasar by looking at how his work is related to three Eastern Orthodox theologians: Vladimir Solovjev, Nicolai Berdyaev, and Sergius Bulgakov, and how their work interfaces with Von Balthasar via a common relation to the philosophy Frederich Schelling. While obscure in many ways, this was a gratifying work for me to read because I had the chance to look through Martin's Ph.D. thesis while I was working on my own Master's work, but too late for it to be incorporated.
Radcliff tackles the complex topic of T.F. Torrance's extensive engagement with the church fathers. I have done this a little bit myself, and it was gratifying to see some of my hunches confirmed, and others challenged, by Radcliff's in-depth analysis. The same goes for McNall's work. For so long Augustine was the whipping boy of Trinitarian theology. While Colin Gunton did not start this, he certainly fanned the flames. Unfortunately, lately, Gunton has turned into the new whipping-boy because of his take on Augustine being nearly universally dismissed (except a few, like Robert Jenson, who in general still support Gunton's work in the face of criticisms from Ayres, Barnes, and Weinandy). As I work for one of Colin Gunton's students, Paul Louis Metzger (who laments the naive discounting of Gunton's work because of the Augustinian genealogy he used) it is nice to see a critical but also very appreciative defense of Gunton, who was a vastly learned figure who cannot be reduced to his "take" on Augustine.
9.) Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multi-Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 360p.
I have already written a review, so I won't linger too long here. Needless to say this is a gorgeous and clearly written work on the history of the concept of "many worlds." Rubinstein traces its lineage through history, beginning in early philosophy, through theology, even up to contemporary discussions of the multi-verse. Among the list, I probably had the most fun reading this one, Rubinstein has a wonderful way with words, and makes a perplexing subject understandable to someone like myself. While you are better off picking up works from those like Brian Greene if you want an in-depth look into current theory, as far as general histories go this cannot be beat.
10.) Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings -- J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giraux, 2015), 656p.
I am, admittedly, still working my way through this one. Yet it has been such a well done telling of the Inklings (of whom I knew very little before this) that I had to include it. While the Inklings as a group were much more than the four listed on the cover, the Zaleskis do well, I think, to "zoom in" on the four most influential.
What I am enjoying most about this volume is how it represents the growth that the four authors went through. Their friendship and sympathy with one another, their often blistering criticisms of each others work, are all told in a way that picks out how each emerged into the authors we know them as today. Sometimes in fits and starts, sometimes with exhaustion and a distinct sense of failure (though lauded, Williams felt he failed in his writing The Figure of Beatrice and was quite depressed about it), we see all four figures emerge in a complexity that I, for one, have not previously known. As a bonus, it makes for particularly good Christmas-time reading as it is an engrossing and absorbing book that also lets the imaginative eyes of faith flourish by being nurtured by the work of these four geniuses.
Nonetheless, I have attempted to do just that. This list contains only theology, philosophy, and history books. Fantastic novels I read this year like All the Light We Cannot See, The Book of Strange New Things, Lila, and, of course, The Martian were all brilliant (and in fact, especially All the Light, books that haunt you for weeks after you read them). But as wonderful as they are, this list was already hard enough to make without including fiction.
As always, these list reflect both my own idiosyncratic tastes, and the limits of my reading (and certainly not all are actually from 2015). But, hey, you have to start somewhere. So here are my ten picks for 2015 (in no particular order):
2015 was particularly strong for the history of science and religion. Though they didn't end up making my list, Adam Shapiro's Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools , and David Livingstone's Gifford Lectures, Dealing With Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements With Evolution (technically from 2014, but so be it) are bright spots in the upward surge in academic literature making hash (rightfully) out of the so called "Warfare thesis" arguing science and religion have been perennial foes.
But no work, to my mind, stood out quite like Peter Harrison's 2011 Gifford lectures-turned-book, The Territories of Science and Religion (you can view all of the original lectures upon which the book is based starting here). Instead of merely pointing out how Science and Religion were related in more complex ways, Harrison traces the evolution of the concepts themselves. What he finds is quite remarkable: both our modern categories of science and religion evolved together and the borders of their conceptual territories that we take for granted today contain vestigial elements of the history that produced them in the first place. In fact, many of the conflicts taken for granted today are artifacts of the historical creation of these categories themselves. If you are at all interested in the dialogue of science and religion, this is the most important book on the topic in the last two decades. Buy it, or read my review here.
Some books are bigger than they need to be. This is not one of them. It is massive, erudite, awe-inspiring. Exactly what good scholarship should be. In some sense, this is the anthropological corollary to the earlier thesis of Michael Allen Gillespie, that Modernity is in a sense the outworking of dilemmas imposed by the nominalist theological revolution. Pfau traces the concept of person, will, judgment, action, and many other corollaries of human agency as they were constructed and reconstructed (and, as Pfau's argument goes, deconstructed) through the works of many including Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Hutchinson, Hume, Adam Smith, and many more.
Pfau's is a genealogy of amnesia, if we can put it so: the modern subject, through the rise of an extreme focus on will and self-expression through theological and anthropological voluntarism, has left us condemned to the present. While one can, for example, take Jean-Paul Sartre's view of man as "condemned to freedom", yet this is not a neutral observation, but an artifact of historically contingent circumstances that have produced and naturalized a particular view of human agency. While no justice can be done to Pfau's sprawling work here, his is a stunning repost to those who attempt to "objectify" the humanities through scientific (or quasi-scientific) methodology. Personhood and ethical grammar themselves stand under erasure, if arguments like Pfau's are not taken seriously.
Sarah Coakley has written a recent essay on what she considers "third wave" trinitarianism. One of the aspects that defines this movement is the questioning of many historical narratives that drove (implicitly or otherwise) much of the theology of the latter half of the twentieth-century. While many revisionist manifestoes have been released, for example on Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa (more than one, in fact), pseudo-Dionysius, even Stephen Holmes' lucid summary of such scholarship, the real turning point for the general introduction of this "third wave" even beyond her own work was truly this edited volume by Levering and Emery.
In fact, it speaks to the nature of the "third wave" as Coakley has identified it, that two Thomistic scholars should be heading a project such as this. For, of course, Thomas Aquinas was an object of scorn for the past half-century or more, especially in Trinitarian circles. Ever since Rahner identified the Angelic Doctor's separation of his work "on the One God" and "on the Triune God," Aquinas has been held up as an example of how not to structure theology. In this sense, Aquinas and Schleiermacher find themselves odd bedfellows, for this accusation also plays out in how Schleiermacher's placement of the Trinity in his "Conclusion" (not, we should add, an "appendix") was interpreted by the vast majority of Trinitarian theologians in the 20th century. Part of the "third wave" mentality (to stick with Coakley's nomenclature for a moment) is precisely to question some of these ready-made structures and condemnations passed on down to us.
Thomas Aquinas, for example, never meant for a hard-nosed division between God as One and God as Trinity. Even the divisions--"On the One God," "On the Triune God" were not originally present in the Summa, but added later by commentators like Cajetan and Suarez. But if such historical commonplace turn out to be false or misleading, what of the constructive theological work which relies upon them? Thats precisely where this volume shines, giving us leading scholars talking not just about historical periods of trinitarian theology, but also essays giving insight into current avenues of discussion like gender theory, analytic theology, and politics.
As such, this is the perfect volume for anyone attempting to familiarize themselves with the history of the Trinity. Period. Its primary drawback is that it is less culturally diverse than its slimmer Cambridge Companion cousin, but you can't really do better than this volume if you are looking for a one-stop solution to your Trinitarian needs.
Terry Eagleton once remarked that there are always topics on which even the most scrupulous minds will cave to the "grossest prejudice" with "hardly a struggle." For evangelicals, Rudolf Bultmann is just such a subject.
In some sense, it is hard to blame them. Even as astute a theologian as Karl Barth could fabricate a myth of "the whale and the elephant." That is, the idea of two creatures happening to meet that could not even communicate should they so desire. Between Barth and Bultmann lay an impassible gulf. Posterity has weighed in on which side misunderstood the other, and the weight of judgment typically falls on Bultmann. Congdon wishes to complexify this story, among other things.
This volume goes a long way not just in clarifying Bultmann's relationship to Karl Barth, along with giving clear and extensive detail on Bultmann's theology, it also shows David Congdon to be incredibly informed on a diverse array of topics in theology, philosophy, and history. It is fascinating not only to see Bultmann unfettered from some of the freighted misunderstanding that accrued over nearly three generations, but also to see how David applies Bultmann to other areas such as science and religion, realism and idealism, and post-Colonial/ anti-Constantinian theological projects.
Indeed, among the many facets of this work that are by themselves worth the price of admission, is Congdon's representation of Bultmann's theology as not only primarily missional, but originally one of the earliest and loudest critics of the Nazi regime. If the size of this volume is too intimidating (one can hardly blame you if it is), have no fear. David has released an additional Bultmann book this year, slimmed down and ready for your reading pleasure. Having read through this volume as well, I can tell you it is a real gem. While this smaller volume omits much of the discussion of Barth and Bultmann, it does an amazing job of targeting the major themes of its much bigger brother. And given the Christmas season, it is of special interest that the smaller volume ends with a wonderful chapter on Bultmann as the quintessential theologian of Advent.
Perhaps the highest and most ironic compliment I could pay to this volume is the fact that I have not enjoyed reading a Systematic Theology so much since I read Robert Jenson's. It is the highest compliment I could pay, because like Jenson's it is brilliant, learned, and incisive. Ironically, however, its mode and, to speak generally, its "style" are the exact opposite of the sensibility Jenson manifests.
Indeed, many of the sensibilities that Jenson represents for contemporary theology--narrative, revisionist metaphysics, a reaction against typical forms of "Western" trinitarianism, a high level of "Christocentrism"--Sonderegger, while not dismissing them, cuts against the grain of contemporary theology. As such, she emphasizes the Oneness of God (unpopular, of course, amongst the still ongoing trinitarian furvor), and though she is no rigid dogmatist, she does stay true to the more typical ways of picturing God's attributes--immutible, impassible, transcendent, and so on.
Which is not to say there is no creativity. It is truly difficult to summarize this volume using the categories of either "conservative" or "progressive," as it is a beautiful third-thing blended and presented with Sonderegger's beautiful prose as a garnish. In my opinion this is the best theology book of the year, and certainly the best systematic theology in recent memory.
Let us begin provocatively: "Untestability is ... the constituting element of the ... intelligibility of the universe" (170). The universe "pre-sents" itself to us as a given, a whole untestable but necessary to assume within our inquiry. Nesteruk sets out in this lengthy (perhaps too lengthy) work to closely examine the interface between philosophy and contemporary cosmology.
In particular, it is an interface that Nesteruk explores by marshaling contemporary phenomenology and phenomenological theology. In the words of J. Ladriere, "This theoretical apparatus is ... not a description in the ordinary sense, a presentation of an entity, supposedly given, and its properties, it is the characterization of something which is not a thing, but a structural path along which a thing comes, from the ultimate horizon of every givenness, to the actual presence in which it is effectively given to presentation" (quoted on page 241).
I typically find the language of phenomenology to be a bit abstract, but this work brings many of those abstractions home by ultimately wanting to demonstrate that "cosmological discourse of constitution and explication of the universe is inseparable from the problem and explication of the nature of human subjectivity" (246-247).
Previous to this book I had not heard of Nesteruk, who has done some very interesting-looking work on science in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. If they are as interesting as this work is, it should keep me busy for a while.
Though the more I read Barth, and about Barth, the more I enjoy him, admittedly I have found Barth studies as of late to be stale. While I always appreciate George Hunsinger's work, like many I've grown a little weary of the whole "election" controversy on how to interpret Barth. Thus Hunsinger and Molnar's contributions to the debate this year, while undoubtedly staggeringly learned and erudite, were a bit boring for my current taste. Obviously, it is reductive to both to suggest that all they were doing was attempting to weigh in on this debate, and I do find the debate itself very interesting (in fact one of my favorite reads from last year was Stephen Long's work Saving Karl Barth). I just need a little more of Barth than is currently dreamed of in the commentaries on McCormack's Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth essay.
Enter Kimlyn Bender's collected volume of essays. This was not an easy choice, as there were several other interesting Barth volumes lately. In particular it was a close race to choose either Bender's work, or Kevin Diller's really fantastic work Theology's Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response. I ultimately chose Bender because of the variety of essays and topics: from Barth as Gifford Lecturer, to having Barth "engage" the work of Barth Ehrman, Barth and American Evangelicalism, Barth and atheism, and many more.
This was just a really refreshing volume for me. Bender is a clear-headed and charitable theologian, and I was increasingly impressed with his wide-reading as I worked my way through this volume. Probably the best thing I can say about it is that it re-kindled my excitement over Barth's theology.
Joshua McNall, A Free Corrector: Colin Gunton and the Legacy of Augustine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 329p.
Jason Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers: A Reformed, Evangelical, and Ecumenical Reconstruction of the Patristic Tradition (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 248p.
Cyril O'Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar's Response to Philosophical Modernity (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2014), 688p.
Ok, I am clearly cheating by calling all four of these "number 8." But this is my list and I do what I want (I am only going to display the cover to Martin's work, as I like it the best). For whatever reason, I have come to immensely enjoy intellectual "genealogy." I just find it to be a fascinating opportunity to interface historical and constructive or systematic work. I really first got into it when I started doing some of my own work on the Trinity and how contemporary theologians use the tradition to bolster their own systematic work.
Aside from what I consider to still be the best representation of such literature, Morwenna Ludlow's Gregory of Nyssa, this has remained a strangely untapped market, aside from the now route repetition of decrying "De Regnón" and the East-West paradigm (somewhat falsely) attributed to him. This is beginning to change, and these four books for me represent the exciting new work being done on the Trinity and historiography. While each are different and represent the genre in their own wonderful way, they are all related in that they look at popular misconceptions of contemporary takes on history and the Trinity (well, they are doing much more, but that is how I find them most helpful).
book on
Jennifer Martin and Cyril O'Regan both tackle the complex topic of the vast work of Hans Urs Von Balthasar. O'Regan extends his now typical argument for a "Gnostic" genealogy showing up in Modernity (that is, modern thought can be seen as related to a variety of discourses inflected with gnostic principles). Despite its largeness (some editing was needed, I feel) this is actually a relatively breezy read compared to O'Regan's usually obtuse prose. His student, Jennifer Martin, tackles von Balthasar by looking at how his work is related to three Eastern Orthodox theologians: Vladimir Solovjev, Nicolai Berdyaev, and Sergius Bulgakov, and how their work interfaces with Von Balthasar via a common relation to the philosophy Frederich Schelling. While obscure in many ways, this was a gratifying work for me to read because I had the chance to look through Martin's Ph.D. thesis while I was working on my own Master's work, but too late for it to be incorporated.
Radcliff tackles the complex topic of T.F. Torrance's extensive engagement with the church fathers. I have done this a little bit myself, and it was gratifying to see some of my hunches confirmed, and others challenged, by Radcliff's in-depth analysis. The same goes for McNall's work. For so long Augustine was the whipping boy of Trinitarian theology. While Colin Gunton did not start this, he certainly fanned the flames. Unfortunately, lately, Gunton has turned into the new whipping-boy because of his take on Augustine being nearly universally dismissed (except a few, like Robert Jenson, who in general still support Gunton's work in the face of criticisms from Ayres, Barnes, and Weinandy). As I work for one of Colin Gunton's students, Paul Louis Metzger (who laments the naive discounting of Gunton's work because of the Augustinian genealogy he used) it is nice to see a critical but also very appreciative defense of Gunton, who was a vastly learned figure who cannot be reduced to his "take" on Augustine.
I have already written a review, so I won't linger too long here. Needless to say this is a gorgeous and clearly written work on the history of the concept of "many worlds." Rubinstein traces its lineage through history, beginning in early philosophy, through theology, even up to contemporary discussions of the multi-verse. Among the list, I probably had the most fun reading this one, Rubinstein has a wonderful way with words, and makes a perplexing subject understandable to someone like myself. While you are better off picking up works from those like Brian Greene if you want an in-depth look into current theory, as far as general histories go this cannot be beat.
I am, admittedly, still working my way through this one. Yet it has been such a well done telling of the Inklings (of whom I knew very little before this) that I had to include it. While the Inklings as a group were much more than the four listed on the cover, the Zaleskis do well, I think, to "zoom in" on the four most influential.
What I am enjoying most about this volume is how it represents the growth that the four authors went through. Their friendship and sympathy with one another, their often blistering criticisms of each others work, are all told in a way that picks out how each emerged into the authors we know them as today. Sometimes in fits and starts, sometimes with exhaustion and a distinct sense of failure (though lauded, Williams felt he failed in his writing The Figure of Beatrice and was quite depressed about it), we see all four figures emerge in a complexity that I, for one, have not previously known. As a bonus, it makes for particularly good Christmas-time reading as it is an engrossing and absorbing book that also lets the imaginative eyes of faith flourish by being nurtured by the work of these four geniuses.
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