Evangelical Circles Research Articles

Mimesis in the Johannine Literature: A Study in Johannine Ethics

As the author notes in his preface, various earlier versions of portions of this book were presented at scholarly conferences in 2012–15. Two preliminary studies appeared in Novum Testamentum (2014) and in a WUNT volume (2016; p. 3 n. 12). The present volume gathers these various studies united around the theme of mimesis (imitation) in the Johannine writings (by which Bennema means the Gospel and Epistles but not Revelation).As Bennema notes at the outset, perhaps the most popular publication on this topic is Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century work The Imitation of Christ. Toward the end of the 20th century, the rallying cry “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) became popular in North-American evangelical circles. The author chooses to remain agnostic regarding the authorship of both the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles as well as regarding the order in which they were written (which raises the important but unanswered question “Whose ethic are we talking about?”).Bennema notes that some are skeptical regarding the concept of imitation as they perceive it to detract from the Gospel’s focus on the uniqueness of Christ and the centrality of the redemption he provides (though unfortunately, he summarily dismisses any such concerns at the very outset without ever seriously addressing them). Others, such as Wayne Meeks, have alleged that ethics is altogether absent from John’s Gospel (though admittedly this is a rather extreme position). Bennema credits Ruben Zimmermann and Jan van der Watt, co-authors of Rethinking the Ethics of John (2012) to whom he dedicates this work, with the exploration of Johannine ethics, though he believes they failed to identify correctly the center of John’s moral thought, which he believes to be mimesis. In fact, Bennema notes later that Zimmermann explicitly distances himself from such a notion, contending a “role model Christology should not be confused with a misunderstood imitatio ethics” (Zimmermann, “Ethics in the Gospel of John,” p. 73, cited on p. 13).While a few others have explored the topic previously, the author claims that his is “the first organized study that elucidates the Johannine concept of mimesis” (p. 4). Since the mimesis word group is virtually absent from John’s Gospel and letters, Bennema argues for the centrality of the idea on a conceptual level (see appendix 1, somewhat misleadingly titled “Occurrences of Mimesis in the Johannine Literature,” pp. 207–9). He says that the Johannine text, not the Greco-Roman background, informs his study.Chapter 1 is devoted to a survey of previous research. However, the survey is not always to be trusted, as the author paints with an unduly broad brush. A single, ten-line paragraph discusses the 30 year-period 1970–2000 (!). My work on the subject is lumped together with sectarian views simply because he focuses on John’s love ethic, even though he does so within a context of the Johannine mission motif, which is anything but sectarian. These kinds of inaccuracies do not inspire confidence in the author’s fairness in representing the views of others, though hopefully this example is the exception rather than norm.The author posits the following “working definition” of mimesis: “Person B represents or emulates person A in activity or state X [in order to become like person A].” He contends that “believer-Jesus” and “believer-God” are the primary forms of mimesis in John’s Gospel and epistles, with the divine Son-Father mimesis serving as the underlying paradigm (pp. 25–26; on the author’s aim and method, see pp. 26–27).Bennema explains the lack of attention to Johannine mimesis in previous scholarship by the lack of the actual term in the Johannine writings (except for 3 John 11) and the neglect of Johannine ethics until recently. However, he unduly presupposes the validity of his thesis at the outset without sufficiently engaging any objections, which means the entire monograph essentially represents an advocacy piece of his position.What if scholars did not discover the centrality of mimesis in John’s writings because the concept is not in fact as central as Bennema contends? If any real and lasting impact on the broader field of Johannine scholarship were to be made, the author should squarely consider and address this possibility. As it stands, the most viable approach continues to be one that finds John’s ethic centered in Jesus’s “love commandment” (John 13:34–35) as demonstrated at the footwashing (13:1–20).This is not to say that Bennema’s monograph is entirely without merit. He raises a number of interesting questions and interacts with a broad range of scholarship. If a work is as strong as its main thesis, however, the jury is still out as to whether Bennema has proven his point. At least to my mind, after everything is said and done, the case for mimesis as central in Johannine thought remains rather weak, though I am sure that there will be some who will be more receptive to this novel proposal.

Eschatology and the Western Missionary Movement

The article considers the influence of eschatological concepts, especially in Puritan and Evangelical circles, on the development of Protestant missions from the early mission efforts among Native Americans to the mid-nineteenth century and notes the major changes introduced by a move from the expectation of a period of notable response to the Gospel to the expectation of the return of Christ to a worsening world. It is argued that very divergent eschatological expectations at different times brought stimulus and direction and that eschatology in African and Asian Christianity needs fuller investigation.

Manifest Destiny’s Child: Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade and the Literature of American Empire

This article discusses how, following in the footsteps of United States imperial children’s writers Jacob Abbott and Edward Stratemeyer, Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade (1860–1936), the original author of the Our Little Cousins series (1901–1905), contributed to the American culture of empire. Wade was one of the most prolific and popular imperialistic turn-of-the-twentieth-century American children’s authors. Yet, she remains understudied and virtually unknown, except among a few scholars who have examined, briefly, a few of her most prominent texts. Given Wade’s current popularity within certain Christian Evangelical homeschooling circles, and the resurgence of imperialist and othering discourses as part of the War on Terror, revealing her project and understanding its messages and relevance for the twenty-first century, is today all the more urgent.

An Overview of the Study of Imprecatory Psalms: Reformed and Evangelical Approaches to the Interpretation of Imprecatory Psalms

This article looks at some interpretive issues regarding the so-called imprecatory psalms, focusing on the debate within reformed and evangelical circles. Introductory issues regarding these psalms abound, such as their definition and scope and the question whether they constitute a specific genre or subgenre within the Psalter. More important are hermeneutical issues regarding the rationale or motivation behind these psalms, namely the reasons why they were written in the first place. These issues also inform the relevance for the present day reader, specifically the New Testament reader, or vice versa: the perceived relevance informs the interpreter's stance on the rationale of these psalms. The article argues that reformed and evangelical scholars’ interpretations of imprecation Psalms are largely led by their presuppositions about the relation between the Old and New Testament. The article concludes by suggesting that the deadlock in approaches could be resolved by an in-depth exegesis of the specific psalms taking into account the divergent presuppositions of contemporary interpreters.

Scientia and Radical Contingency in Thomas Aquinas

Historically, Thomas Aquinas has been controversial for his use of Averroistic-Aristotelian metaphysics. Because of his doctrine of simplicity many of argued that this entails a necessitarian view of nature—a debate that would pass through Spinoza, Descartes, and even to this day. Nevertheless, Thomas would prevail, not only to sainthood, but to become the patron of education and the Teacher of the Church. The task in this paper is to demonstrate that, contrary to many current contentions in Protestant, and especially Evangelical circles, Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics remains a suitable, viable, even preferable framework for Christian Theism and, for the purposes of this paper, scientific thought. The specific focus will be on creation metaphysics and the relationship between current science and Christian thought raised by Lydia Jaeger. I will conclude with an example of the ability of radical contingency in Thomas to both satisfy contemporary physics and frame a consistent and coherent Christian Theism.

Growing up gay and religious. Conflict, dialogue, and religious identity strategies

Homosexuality has become a divisive issue in many religious communities. Partly because of that, individuals growing up in such a community and experiencing same sex attractions need to negotiate the messages about homosexuality with their own experiences. This paper explores the identity strategies of religious communities as the background of individual identity struggles. Following a discussion of Bauman's grammars of identity/alterity, it describes four different discourses employed in conservative protestant and evangelical circles: holiness, subjectivity, obedience, and responsibility and four modes of negotiation: Christian lifestyle, gay lifestyle, commuting (compartmentalisation), and integration. By combining an analysis of discourses on the community level with individual strategies, this narrative research helps to better understand the interactions of (group) culture and individual coping.

Not "Forsworn with Pink Ribbons": Hannah More, Thomas De Quincey, and the Literature of Power

De Quincey's conception of the literature of "power" as opposed to that of "knowledge," has proved to be one of the most influential of romantic theories of literature, playing no small part in the canonization of Wordsworth. De Quincey's early acquaintance with the Lyrical Ballads was made through the Evangelical circles of his mother, who was a follower of Hannah More and a member of the Clapham sect. In later years, however, De Quincey repudiated his early Evangelical upbringing and wrote quite scathingly of the literary pretensions of Hannah More. This paper attempts to uncover the revisionary nature of De Quincey's later reminiscences of More and to indicate thereby the covert influence of Evangelical thinking on his literary theorizing. Far from absolving literature of politics, however, colonialist and nationalist imperatives typical of Evangelical thinking may be seen to operate within the spiritualized and aesthetic sphere to which literary power is arrogated by De Quincey.

What Hath Happened to 'the War-Prayer'

New Perspectives on “The War-Prayer” Essays on “The War-Prayer” What Hath Happened to “The War-Prayer?” Ron POWERS “What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loy- alty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world.” Thus ran a query posed by an evangelical professor of religion early in 2006. 1 The “mistaken loyalty” at issue was that of the writer’s brethren—the 87 percent of all Ameri- can evangelical ministers who had thrown their inuence and Christian authority behind the president and his advisers in their prosecution of the Iraq war. The professor’s anguish was palpable, yet respectfully phrased; his moral outrage unmistakable, yet constrained by the rules of “polite” discourse. “Many of the most re- spected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president’s war plans,” he went on to remonstrate—reasonably, decorously—“even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.”

What We Can Learn from Jonathan Edwards

What We Can Learn from Jonathan Edwards Sarah Rivett (bio) Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth. Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Caleb J. D. Maskell . Lanham: UP of America, 2005. 175 pp. Jonathan Edwards: America's Evangelical. Philip F. Gura . New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. 284 pp. The two books reviewed in this essay form an interesting though somewhat unusual pair. One is a biography by Philip F. Gura that distinguishes itself from George Marsden's recent thoroughly comprehensive biography on Edwards (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 2003) by presenting an "American portrait" of how Edwards's intellectual and evangelical contributions come together to generate an enduring legacy. The second book consists of a collection of thirteen essays written by some of the most influential Edwards scholars of recent generations who came together at the tercentenary of Edwards's birth (2003) to reflect upon the state of the field of Edwards studies by "thinking broadly and generally about Edwards's place in American life and letters" today (39). Gura masterfully and eloquently presents the mind and works of Edwards as a prism through which we see the religious and intellectual currents of the mid-eighteenth century channeled and refracted in a new form to constitute a sustainable religious culture for subsequent generations. The collection of essays makes these currents more explicit, separated into orderly subheadings of the exemplary topics in Edwards studies of recent years: theology of history, scripture, culture, society, race, and biography. [End Page 423] Reading these books alongside each other highlights the different objectives of each: the essay collection seeks to make scholarship relevant to contemporary life while Gura seeks to make the life of Edwards resonate in new ways with contemporary scholarship as well as a broader audience of interested readers. Yet despite these distinct purposes, there are several points of intersection between these books. Both carefully consider the numerous tensions or points of possible contradiction in Edwards studies: To what extent was he a solitary genius versus a man of his time? Was he a universal thinker or an integral though historically bound participant in mid-eighteenth century evangelical and Enlightenment culture? Are we to understand Edwards within a transatlantic framework of Anglo revivals and Newtonian physics or within the American exceptionalist paradigm of religious culture? As scholars, how are we to adjudicate the need to compartmentalize our study of Edwards in order to increase our comprehension of certain areas of his life alongside our desire to take a step back and view the full picture, the portrait as it were, of someone equally at ease and adept in his various roles as revivalist, theologian, and Enlightenment philosophe? The subtitle of Philip Gura's book, America's Evangelical, does much to answer these questions, for it evokes Edwards as a singular individual with a fairly specific identity, while also alluding to the multifarious influences constituting this identity. Edwards is America's evangelical, the progenitor of modern American Christianity. But as the narrative of Edwards's life recounted in Gura's book demonstrates, Edwards achieved this status through the catalyst of Lockean psychology, the philosophical debates about original sin that characterized an era struggling to place humans rather than God at the center of the universe, and the transformative impact of John Wesley's Methodism, as it countered the Arminian divinity rapidly gaining hegemony at Oxford. These were the contextual, transatlantic, and philosophical influences that allowed Edwards to achieve his singular status as America's Evangelical, a status acquired as his life works made Calvinism modern, religious experience correspond to enlightened understandings of sensory data and human faculties, and revivalism adaptable to new media forms. America's Evangelical succinctly and powerfully captures the place of Edwards at the tercentenary of his birth, alluding not only to the scholarly historiography on this luminous figure but also to Edwards's status as a [End Page 424] cultural and religious icon in contemporary evangelical circles that continue to claim Edwards as their prime progenitor. Both books reflect on this rather unusual juxtaposition, which as the introduction to Jonathan Edwards at 300 explains, has become remarkably more pronounced since the 1990s. Summarizing Kenneth...

Reclaiming the (Swiss) nation for God: the politics of Charismatic prophecy

Using an ethnographical approach, this paper examines the relationship between Charismatic prophecy found in Evangelical circles and a discourse that envisions the concept of “the (Swiss) nation” as the basis and horizon for understanding God’s activity within history. We will demonstrate the intricacy of various modes of participation, ranging from ecstatic involvement in church Sunday worship and Charismatic youth meetings to citizenship in the national community. In such settings, participants are urged to connect the religious and political realms in order to restore the nation through the (re)establishment of an ancestral purity which is seen to have its source in Christianity. “Spiritual warfare” is the framework assumed by the members to perceive the issues at stake, this framework is then extended to the public domain. The analysis will try to shed light on the nature of the communities envisioned, the diverse modes of participating in them and the role of the Holy Spirit as an empowering agent for reshaping those communities and society.

Geopolitics, Ethics, and the Evangelicals' Commitment to Sudan

When considering the intersection between geographical knowledge and geopolitical practice, emphasis generally falls on the state and the state's self-serving calculations. This paper, instead, focuses on geopolitical civil society, emphasizing the role that rationalized norms and emotive care-ethics play in molding and facilitating certain forms of geographical knowledge and subsequent foreign interventions. The case to illuminate this theoretical focus centers on American evangelical actors and their specific geopolitical vision, which is largely based on the perceived universal authority of the Bible. The case illustrates how the religious normative imperative to evangelize the world has led to geographically blunt imaginaries that present spaces of alterity as being in urgent need of spiritual and also geopolitical intervention. Opposed to such imaginaries, however, this paper also traces the emergence of an ethics of care that has developed within evangelical circles regarding the people of southern Sudan. This more specific and immediately felt ethical impulse is shown to maintain a more nuanced understanding of heterotopic place. It is argued that there is a frequent clash between such universalist ethical impulses, which tend to code global space according to a particular normative paradigm, and particularist ethical impulses, which are based on a care-ethics that is rooted in an attachment too and an understanding of a particular place. This paper makes the case that, given the right communication channels, these varying ethical impulses can lead to a transformative communication in which universalist geopolitical visions are adapted to place-specific heterotopic geographical realities.

Human personhood and social benevolence – reformational

In spite of the academic interest in human rights in reformational- evangelical circles during the past 100 years, the existence, necessity and importance of such rights, in particular the right to human dignity, have not been provided with an underlying Scriptural foundation for the understanding and evaluation of these rights. In this article the reformational perspectives of Martin Luther are utilised and developed in order to establish a moral framework for the human right to dignity and for determining its meaning and purview as a foundational human, political and legal value.

W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (review)

Reviewed by: W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy Phyllis D. Airhart W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy. A. Donald MacLeod. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. Pp. 402, illus. b&w, $29.00 A. Donald MacLeod opens his biography of W. Stanford Reid with the image of a granite boulder in rural Quebec. It marks the site of Reid's church, where members of the family worshipped until it closed in 1952. Although students still recreate the area's past as a tourist attraction, MacLeod finds what remains 'strangely alien'; the cairn's inscription is an 'epitaph for a way of life irretrievably gone.' One wonders after reading this book if the same can be said of Stanford Reid's brand of Calvinism. The core of the book deals with Reid's confessional evangelicalism, which was rooted in Calvinist doctrine as presented in the Westminster Standards. MacLeod deftly analyses how it differed from related varieties, notably the dispensationalist theology of fundamentalism and the narrow morality of pietism. It differed as well from the liberal evangelicalism of those who founded the United Church of Canada in 1925. Church union divided not only the Presbyterian Church but Reid's own family, with his father and uncle taking different sides. He remained a critic of the doctrinal ambiguity he associated with the United Church's founding, but was just as dogged in confronting those in Presbyterian circles who were wandering toward the same slippery theological slope. This suspicion of ecumenism was reinforced by an ongoing relationship with Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he studied soon after it was founded by fundamentalist leader Gresham Machen. MacLeod is at his best as raconteur, presenting in graceful prose Reid's family life, academic accomplishments, theological battles, and complicated relationships. Along the way he attends to Reid's work as a historian at McGill, his witness to the end of Anglophone influence in Quebec higher education, and his move to Guelph to launch the Scottish Studies program. Although MacLeod uses words well, one occasionally wishes for a few less of them. Details such as the particulars of the purchase of a boat in a chapter on life at McGill may be an effort to [End Page 133] match the rich texture of the sections on church affairs (which sometime have the feel of 'family gossip' in their juicy tidbits). But occasionally words get in the way of effective analysis. For example, a blow-by-blow account of the dismissal of a Westminster Theological Seminary professor accurately portrays the defence of fine points of theology that set Reid apart from his Presbyterian co-religionists. But Reid himself tends to become lost in the minutiae of correspondence and board minutes. There are a few organizational slips as well. Reid's professional and religious activities are separated into chapters that overlap more or less chronologically, a strategy that is not always effective. Chapter 7 is a case in point. The title refers to the period 1951–62 and purports to deal with 'McGill during and after Duplessis.' It concludes with Reid's resigna- tion – in 1965. Meanwhile there is no significant analysis of the significance of Duplessis's defeat, and the situation of Anglophones in higher education in Quebec in that era is highlighted in a later chapter that covers (again) the period from 1958 to 1965. MacLeod suggests that Reid paid a professional price for his religious observance, but received little thanks for it in evangelical circles: They respected him as a 'secular' historian but declined to hire him when church history positions came open. His is also a cautionary tale of cultural and generational change – bruised by political wrangling time and again, considered too conservative for most of the next generation, and yet too liberal for some younger confessionalists. Those he mentored, including a group led by his biographer (who oddly refers to himself in the third person as 'Donald MacLeod' when describing events in which he was involved) moved in directions he could not support. Particularly intriguing is MacLeod's role in a Presbyterian renewal movement that Reid saw as a challenge to his own leadership of...

The Queen's Majesty's Passage and Related Documents (review)

Reviewed by: The Queen's Majesty's Passage and Related Documents Agnes Juhasz-Ormsby (bio) Germaine Warkentin , editor. The Queen's Majesty's Passage and Related Documents. Assisted by John Carmi Parsons Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 158. $15.00 Germaine Warkentin's edition of the primary source text of Elizabeth I's royal entry to the City of London on 14 January 1559 is a particularly welcome contribution to the growing number of studies on early modern continental and English ceremonies and spectacles. This concise edition fills a gap in the extensive literature on Elizabeth I and provides an excellent supplement to the forthcoming volumes of John Nichols's The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. In accordance with the format and goals of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies' Tudor and Stuart Texts series, Warkentin presents a modernized text of the official pamphlet of the entry, hitherto accessible only in facsimile, in a critical edition aimed both at a scholarly audience engaged with Tudor history and European festivals, and students of Elizabethan literature and theatre. The annotated bilingual (English and Latin) text of The Queen's Majesty's Passage, attributed to the humanist scholar Richard Mulcaster, is accompanied by informative secondary material including translations of Latin passages (prepared with the assistance of John Carmi Parsons), a series of illustrations, a glossary and gazetteer, and a comprehensive bibliography. In addition, a group of related documents locates the narrative account within the context of civic pageantry staged specifically for a monarch's coronation. Directed with a strong propagandistic overtone both to a popular and a learned audience, The Queen's Majesty's Passage was the first English news pamphlet ever to publish a description and interpretation of the entry alongside the English and Latin verses recited or displayed at the pageants. Warkentin's thoroughly researched and insightful introduction offers a lively reading of Elizabeth I's rather precarious debut on the politically and religiously charged public stage of sixteenth-century England, following her brother Edward VI's devoutly Protestant then her sister Mary I's turbulent Catholic rule. She sensitively delineates how the uncertainty posed by the ascension of the young unmarried Queen regnant influenced the overall design of the entry and the carefully orchestrated encounter of Queen and her people within the ritual space of London. Apart from the conventional themes of royal entries, Warkentin draws special attention to the political imagery specific to Elizabeth I's entry: the receiving of the English Bible by the Queen, the pageant of Truth as the daughter of Time, and the aptly biblical antecedent of Deborah and her counsel (with its veiled advice about collaborative rule) that signalled the firmly Protestant agenda promoted by the municipal authorities and the evangelical circles around the Queen. Furthermore, Warkentin underscores the ironies of the continuity of Tudor power manifested not only in the reappropriation of [End Page 252] the Marian image of the decayed and flourishing commonwealth in the pageant at the Little Conduit and the alteration of Mary I's robe for Elizabeth's entry (the record of which is included in the appendix and famously preserved on Elizabeth's 'Coronation Portrait'), but also in the symbolic rehabilitation of Anne Boleyn at the Gracious Street pageant. In the appendix, the edition usefully prints the Italian Aloisio Schivenoglia's court-centred report to the Catholic Castellan of Mantua, which is interestingly juxtaposed with the pronounced civic interest and evangelical views of Mulcaster's pamphlet. Moreover, the accounts of contemporary English chronicles and the miscellaneous records, ranging from the documents of the City's governing bodies to those of court officials, provide illuminating details of the complex organizational process and well illustrate the broad variety of available sources. Apart from offering inspiration for further research, the edition, which my upper-level undergraduate students found extremely helpful in a course on Renaissance festivals, pointedly calls attention to the marginalized texts of royal entries and lord mayor's shows written by such prominent playwrights as Nicholas Udall, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Anthony Munday. More importantly, it highlights the need to integrate such source texts not only in university courses on...

‘The Sincere Pagan is Sincerely Wrong and Therefore Lost’: A Critique

This paper challenges the assumption, often canvassed in evangelical circles, that personal sincerity is salvifically insufficient, and argues that those who are inclusivists must reject the assumption. The stress in modern theology on attitude over dogma is traced from Kierkegaard and assessed with some reference to Scripture. The possibility of sincerely worshipping the wrong God is considered with some uncomfortable conclusions for Christians.

Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845

Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. By Catherine A. Brekus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. x, 466. Illustrations, tables. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $17.95.) More than one hundred evangelical women, white and black, tramped the roads of America preaching the Gospel during the century following the Great Awakening. Most were poor by the standards of the advancing market economy. Even those who defied and left their families to bear spiritual witness remained dependent on male clergy for occasional access to pulpits. Less educated than the men who led their own sects, the women professed reliance on divine inspiration, sometimes with humility but at other times in a brash and contentious mood. They drew crowds-curiosity-seekers and penitents-and reportedly moved listeners to tears and conversion. As quickly as they appeared, they typically disappeared from the historical record. Some married and gave up preaching, some were overcome by life's problems. Almost no one, including many of the women themselves, thought it important to keep a record of their work. Catherine A. Brekus constructs an intriguing portrait of early American women preachers from bits of evidence: ministers' memoirs, denominational trials, advertisements of preaching engagements, drawings, and photographs. The great contribution of her study is how well it reveals the conflicted mind-set of evangelicals not only about women but about progress. Female preachers were not found among sedate Protestants; they inhabited the religious margins as Separates, Baptists, or Shakers in the eighteenth century, and as Methodists, African Methodists, or Millerites in the nineteenth century. Unusually attached to the Bible, these populist evangelicals, male and female, were wary of the acquisitive spirit and social freedoms of modernity. Probably none of them conceded that women had rights. It is ironic that their religious conservativism drove them to radical measures. Eagerly harnessing new media such as mass-- circulated publications and photography, they denounced established society's complacency and sought restoration of biblical standards. By conventional measures, the same women preachers who disdained women's rights advocates such as Fanny Wright were dangerously immodest. They were, in Brekus's words, `biblical' rather than secular feminists (6). Awkwardly, they risked their good name even in evangelical circles by obeying God's call. It is often said that the value of women's history is the new light it casts on history overall. Strangers and Pilgrims succeeds well on these terms. Women preachers-poised between self-abnegation and self assertion, pious submission and social resistance, traditionalism and innovation-are an apt symbol of radical evangelicalism during this long period of religious awakening. The sweeping quality of Strangers and Pilgrims, so helpful m staking out a new field of inquiry, also contributes to the study's imprecision on issues of thesis and context. …

Ecojustice Principles

It is clear to anyone who moves in Protestant evangelical circles that concern for the environment is infrequently expressed. I have never heard any sermons preached on the environment other than those I have preached myself. There is a flurry of books being written by evangelicals urging Christians to care for the environment, but with a couple of exceptions they are at the popular level and have a breath-less feel, as if they know they are late in jumping on the environmental bandwagon. There is an International Evangelical Environment Network, but its concerns are not widely discussed in the evangelical mainstream (see the websites at Evangelical Environment Network [UK] 1998; Evangelical Environment Network [USA] 1998). I know of no general evangelical text in missiology that mentions either the environment or ecojustices in its index.

1, 2 Chronicles (review)

Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) 180 Reviews ter really "the supreme truth and guardian of human freedom" and the only thing which unifies culture (p. 149)? Another section of the book is perplexing. On page 132, Craig quotes Martin Luther's comment that he wished Esther and Second Maccabees did not exist at all because they "judaize too greatly and have much pagan impropriety ." Then Craig goes on to write, "His sentiment still finds expression today among both Jewish and Christian commentators." To what sentiment does he refer? Anti-semitism? The wish that these books did not fonn part of the canon? He does not say, but follows with quotations from Bernhard Anderson and Claude Montefiore which are apparently intended to support his assertion. The fonner was published in 1950 while the latter was published in 1899. Hardly "today." Craig is to be commended for the pioneering task of bringing Bakhtin and his important work to the reading of the Bible, and his insights into specific texts, especially those which concern the book's many reversals, are well worth reading. Tighter editing would have made this good book much better. David COller St. John's University Collegeville, MN 56321 1,2 CHRONICLES. By J. A. Thompson. The New American Commentary . Pp. 411. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1994. Cloth. This volume can only be evaluated in the context of the series in which it stands. The New American Commentary is subtitled "An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture." It is aimed at a popular, evangelical Christian audience. According to the editors' preface, all authors in the series "affinn the divine inspiration, inerrancy, complete truthfulness, and full authority of the Bible" (p. 7). Moreover, the perspective of the series is "unapologetically confessional and rooted in the evangelical tradition" (p. 7). The editors list two concerns which comprise the unique contribution of the NAC: its emphasis on the theological unity of each biblical book and of scripture as a whole as well as its conviction that the Bible belongs primarily to the church, so that each work in the series strives to provide practical, applicable exposition for a church setting. The Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) 181 Reviews NAC series uses the New International Version of the Bible, probably the most popular version in evangelical circles, as the basis for its commentary. Finally, the editors' preface explains that issues in contemporary scholarship and technical matters of grammar and syntax are generally relegated to footnotes, the text of the commentary being devoted to exposition. A 25-page introduction covers such topics as the name and place of Chronicles in the canon, textual witnesses, the Chronicler's sources, literary forms attested in the book, authorship, date, historical situation, theological themes and vocabulary, and an outline of the book's contents. Thompson treats Chronicles as a distinct work from Ezra-Nehemiah. He is vague about the date of the book, saying that it could have been written any time in the period 539-180 B.C.E., although he does hint at a preference for the fourth century. About half of the introduction is devoted to the list and discussion of the major theological themes of Chronicles, including "all Israel," the temple and worship, kingship, retribution and repentance, the popular response, messianism, and the repetition of historical patterns. The exposition that follows is well-organized, generally well-written, and easy to follow. It is ironic that this "American" commentary is written by an Australian scholar, particularly since there are a number of evangelical scholars in North America who have focused on Chronicles as their primary area of interest and expertise. One wonders whether this strategy was designed to put some distance between the work's audience and its author after the editors despaired of finding a qualified scholar who would be as conservative as they and their audience. The distance may account for the omission from the bibliography of certain works that might have altered or enhanced the author's treatment (e.g., R. Duke, The Persuasive Appeal of the Chronicler: A Rhetorical Analysis [1990] and M. Throntveit, When Kings Speak: Royal Speech and Royal Prayer in Chronicles [1987]). Thompson's conservatism is evinced primarily in his frequent...

Magdalen's Skull: Allegory and Iconography in Heptameron 32

Skulls. Finalities. They emerge towards new beginnings.Charles TomlinsonFew readers of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron will easily forget the sinister scene in novella 32, where a young, beautiful but unfaithful woman is forced by her vengeful husband to drink out of her dead lover's skull. Although equally cruel analogues could be found in Boccaccio's Decameron, Marguerite's strikingly macabre scene seems to be unique in Renaissance literature. Representations of human skeletons are, of course, plentiful in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century iconography, a period often characterized by its obsession with death. Certainly Marguerite may have been influenced by the pervading vanitas and memento morimotifs. At the same time, the whole scene could be viewed as a staged perversion of relic worship, a practice much frowned upon in evangelical circles favored by Marguerite.

Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Appraisal by Norman L. Geisler

BOOK REVIEWS 529 Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Appraisal. By NORMAN L. GEISLER. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1991. Pp. 195. $12.95. The avowed aim of this hook is to win for Aquinas a more sympathetic hearing in evangelical circles. An evangelical who has himself been an admirer of Thomas for many years and has made extensive use of thomisitc writings, Geisler is keenly aware of the immensity of his task. Prominent evangelicals have manifested a pronounced hostility towards Aquinas, accusing him of a variety of sins, from being a proto-humanist to reducing Christian faith to a faulty Aristotelianism. Geisler nevertheless believes the rehabilitation of Thomas worth the effort and offers in this hook ample testimony to the ways in which Aquinas is in accord with the best of evangelical thought. Geisler appears to have adopted a threefold strategy. He begins hy rehearsing the odd ideas about Aquinas that evangelicals such as Francis Schaeffer have advanced; Geisler successfully demonstrates that the most serious charges made by evangelicals against Thomas are groundless. Geisler also devotes considerable effort to establishing Thomas's own credentials as an ' evangelical '; here, he argues in particular for Thomas's fidelity to scripture, and his concern for some epistemological and metaphysical issues of significance for evangelicals. Finally, Geisler occasionally highlights the contribution that Thomas can make to contemporary evangelical work. Not only would Thomas aid in the encounter with process theology (pp. 114ff.) ; hy his teaching on the difference between the preambles and the articles of faith, as well as by his nuanced ways of figuring the relations of faith and reason, Thomas can help to overcome the present impasse between presuppositionalists and evidentialists (pp. 20-1; p. 69) (for a more complete list of the possible contributions of Aquinas to evangelical thought, see pp. 21-2). While few would doubt the nobility of Geisler's ambition, the hook is flawed in several respects. Most notably, the presentation of Thomas's thought falls short of Geisler's purpose. Geisler is basically content to summarize Thomas's positions on certain issues, often merely stringing together quotes from Thomas or offering paraphrases of Thomas's ideas. Evaluated as a simple summary of these issues, the hook is for the most part satisfactory, although hy bringing together discrete claims from remote and disparate parts of (especially) the Summa theologiae, Geisler may be guilty of imposing an order foreign to the thomistic original. Only occasionally does Geisler slip, changing or distorting Thomas's thought in the reporting. For example, in pro- 530 BOOK REVIEWS viding an overview in the third chapter of Thomas on revelation, he writes (pp. 37-8) : "The Bible is inspired and inerrant, even in matters that are not essential to our redemption. No other Christian writing, neither the fathers nor the creeds, are inspired or revelatory. They are only human interpretations of God's revelation in Scripture." Even apart from the anachronistic introduction of the language of evangelical orthodoxy to frame Thomas's position ("The Bible is ... inerrant, even in ..."), the rendering can be questioned on two counts. For one thing, in support of his first claim, Geisler refers in a note to ST I l, 10 ad 3. As another use of that reply discloses (on p. 47, when he returns to the closer examination of the inerrancy of scripture) , what has caught Geisler's eye is the declaration there that 'nothing false underlies the literal sense of scripture'. Yet, Geisler ignores the context of this declaration. Thomas's concern is with the character of the parabolic sense of scripture: does parable convey literal or spiritual meaning? There is, in fact, a rich tradition of speculation on the matter , beginning with Origen, that informs Thomas's own analysis. Geisler leaves Thomas's main point unconsidered and thus misses the real novelty of the reply, that Thomas sees parable as functioning at the literal, not the spiritual, level. In fact, in the light of what he says elsewhere (p. 50), it is quite possible that Geisler has misunderstood Thomas's teaching about the parabolic sense (the choppiness of that rendering, however, makes it difficult to be certain of Geisler's point). Geisler's slip in...