This is the first of Gary Dorrien’s long books that I have read. I have read his memoir, which I think is one of his shortest books. And I took Homebrewed Christianity’s class on Gary Dorrien, Theology for Troublemakers. I have the second book in this trilogy as well as The Spirit of American Liberal Theology. But that is just scratching the surface of his writing. A friend I talked with last week recommended his The Remaking of Evangelical Theology and I want to many more including his book on Anglicanism. 

I think that The New Abolition is going to be too long and detailed for many readers, but this is a nuanced history. There are a lot of players to the story, some that are fairly familiar like Booker T Washington, Walter White or Ida B Wells, but many are lesser known like Bishop Reverdy Ransom or educator Richard Wright.

Raphael Warnock’s book tells a shorter history of the tension in the Black church between personal piety and social activism, but this is a much thicker history that grapples with ways that often the same people changed over time. WEB DuBois argued against Washington’s accommodationist tendencies but at other times used very similar rhetoric. Washington preached accommodation, but also quietly supported more active community organizing. Many arguing against the white supremacy of the time still accepted some level of racial hierarchy. Similarly much of the Black Social Gospel movement was either patriarchal in its assumptions, or was in favor of women’s suffrage, but still assumed a gender hierarchy or opposed gender hierarchy had regular affairs. There was a number of the social gospel proponents who were holiness absolutists who had very high standards of morality that seem to suggest a type of politics of respectability which also assume hierarchical class assumptions. And it was fairly common in this history to see alcoholism, which I think is in part a trauma response to the reality of this history.

I do not want to draw too many parallels to the anti-DEI backlash that is going on today with the rise of the post Reconstruction Jim Crow world, but often the story of civil rights in America is told from the perspective of ever increasing civil rights. This is an era where rights were being lost and I think we need to remember that backlashes exist (see White Rage for a history of that.)

All history is a history of imperfect people, but I think it is helpful for Dorrien’s type of long detailed (and maybe a bit rambling at times) narrative history to include the details of the imperfections because it helps remind the readers that modern movements will also be imperfect. There will be people that break up organizational partnerships over personality conflicts not ideology. There will be people who self-sabotage and bring down movements that are already disfavored in society because of personal addictions or other bad behaviors.

At the same time, this book is filled with brilliance and self sacrifice. Ida B Wells stood against not only the white culture that assumed that lynching was done for cause, but also against much of the Black leadership who also assumed that lynching was largely done for cause. Du Bois was brilliant even if he didn’t get along with others very well. And many of these lesser known church officials were nearly superhuman in their work to organize the Black church not just internally, but for community empowerment. The prime movers of the Black Social gospel were not just organizing for civil rights, they were also organizing their own denominations at a very basic level. And they were almost always underpaid and under appreciated and opposed inside the Black community as well as outside of it.

I spent a month reading this 600 page history and I will pick up the second volume soon, which is several hundred pages longer. I did originally get this as an interlibrary loan because I didn’t want to spend the $30 for a kindle book. But my reading habits are such that I just can’t read long paper books. I broke down and bought the kindle edition because I need the adjustable print and the better lighting. I was talking to a friend last week who is the exact opposite. He has largely given up on kindle books because the paper works better for his eyes and reading methods. We have different preferences. I am just glad that in most book there are options.

The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel by Gary J. Dorrien Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition

I have hosted an online book club for about six years now. James was the first fiction book we have read and it was very well received. When we started most of the group had read Huck Finn, but no one had read Huck Finn within 20 or 30 years. (I had not read Huck Finn when the group started reading James.) As we read both myself and another person read Huck Finn. And as much as I did not like Huck Finn, I do think I understood James better because I read Huck Finn.

I am not going to repeat my previous post on James, but I am going to repeat that the act of discussing a book in a group will cause you to understand it more than reading it alone. (My one negative is that I pretty consistently have found that I love a book that I have read on my own, that I often like it less after reading it with a group.)

While much of the book is constrained by the framing of the original Huck Finn story, I was surprised by how much was different. In both Huck Finn and James, I kept being irritated by how naive Huck was portrayed in one scene and then how mature he was in another scene. I do think there is a sense of truth in that because teens can be both mature and childish. But I also think that this was a bit of a crutch because the a lot of racism was hidden in that naiveté.

I am pretty convinced that Everett is referencing James Baldwin at several points and that tone of love and anger carries the awakening of Jim toward James. I won’t give away any of the twists of the story that are not in Huck Finn, but it is those differences that matter. I also think that the Mississippi River changes character in the shift between the two tellings. It is a character in both, but the type of character is different.

I do think that Everrett has the far better book. Yes Huck Finn is a classic. But I don’t think it is as good of a classic as many others. It was really creating a new genre and I think it ends up being beloved for being a classic young adult novel more than it being beloved for being a classic novel. The role of nostalgia in people remembering something that they read long ago is playing a role here.

And while I do not support the wide use of the N word here (nearly 300 uses) I suspect that it is one of the reasons that the book has held on to its cultural place in a perverse way that allows it to be transgressive.

James by Percival Everett Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I have previously read Lerone Martin’s biography of J Edgar Hoover. So I preordered the audiobook without paying attention to who the narrator was. The narrator was Blair Underwood. I was in high school and college while he was on LA Law. I was never regularly watched the show, but it was impossible to not know who Blair Underwood was in the late 80s and early 90s. I didn’t know this until this book, but he has written or co-written three books and narrated about 20. I don’t want to take way from Lerone Martin’s writing, but once I got used to Blair Underwood’s style, I think he really helped to make the book. (Generally in a nonfiction book I prefer a fairly straight reading. Underwood did consistent voices for the regular characters, he laughed when the content suggested that the character would have been laughing and he did a very good impression of MLK’s voice. Not everyone could have pulled that off well, but Underwood did.)

I have read a number of biographies about MLK. I have written about Stephen Oates, and Jonathan Eig‘s full biographies and Piniel Joseph’s joint biography of King and Malcom X (and I have read but not written about Cone’s book on King and X). I have written about King’s sermon collection, A Gift of Love, The Radical King and his last book Where Do We Go From Here. And then there have been a number of books about aspects of King’s life, The Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the fallout of his death, Coretta’s memoir and a comparison of King and Bonhoeffer’s Christian ethics. The closest to Young King is Patrick Parr’s The Seminarian. The Seminarian is much more focused on King’s time at Crozier, but Young King is a far better book.

I think I would label Young King as a developmental biography. The point here isn’t what King did, but how he became the man that we now know. Contextually Lerone Martin is trying to paint a psychological and sociological picture of the boy and his community. Of course there are chapters on faith and family and racism, but I think it is also important that there were both long sections on how King was shaped by his father and the conflict he had with his father. Similarly, there were sections not just on how he was shaped by the Black church, but on the ways that he rejected the Black church as overly emotional and for a while was an atheist, before coming back into the church and eventually feeling a call to ministry. King was both brilliant and highly academically underprepared for both college and seminary, and that was made worse by his youth and immaturity (going to college at 15 and going to seminary for a masters at 19).

I glanced around at some reviews and there were some complaints about the speculation or contextualization of the book. One such speculation was that it appears that Malcolm Little (eventually Malcolm X) was selling suits to the tobacco workers in the same community where Martin Luther King was working in the tobacco fields when he was 15. There is no evidence that they met, but I think it was well worth noting that they were both working in the same area and there is evidence that Malcolm sold suits to men that Martin was working with. Much more common is that Lerone Martin is telling the broader story of the context that King grew up in. There are long descriptions of what train travel was like for Black people in the south during the era when King took the train by himself for the first time. Or what how the Hartford, CT area was receiving Black migrant workers in the era when King picked tobacco over two different summers.

I know a good bit about King, but I think Young King did a better job looking at who King was and his strengths and weaknesses than pretty much anything I have read. Eig’s book I think also was very clear about King’s weaknesses, but I think that Lerone Martin is exploring how he developmentally came to some of them. The womanizing, the sexism, the plagiarism, the style of speaking, the confidence and orientation toward “doing something big” are all explored here. That isn’t to say this is a book that overly focusses only on negatives, I think Eig and Lerone Martin, and what I know from Jeanne Theoharis’ approach in A More Beautiful and Terrible History or her narrow look at King’s Northern campaigns, all know King’s limitations were real.

As I read Young King, I was reading the first of Gary Dorrien’s trilogy on the rise of the Black Social Gospel movement. Flawed leaders within the Black civil rights community were not new. (There is no such thing as a non-flawed leader.) I think Lerone Martin has done a great service here focusing on the young King in a way that no full biography can. There are places where I would probably cut a bit, but there are always editorial decisions that have to be made. But Young King is well worth reading.

Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. by Lerone A. Martin Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

As I have said a number of times, I don’t feel like I have a great philosophy background, especially modern philosophy. I picked up Process-Relational Philosophy after reading Thomas Oord’s A Systematic Theology of Love. Oord is a Process Theologian and as much as I thought his book was clearly written, I thought that I needed more understanding of process philosophy to better understand Oord’s positions.

Process-Relational Philosophy was the most recommended intro that I came across and I can see why. It was helpful and relatively short. And even thought it avoided the technical aspects of Whitehead in the main text (there is an appendix that attempts to get much more technical after the main text), I think that a good number of concepts were related well. My only complaint is that I think I wanted about 50% more book because I felt like it may have been too introductory. I think that after the descriptions of Oord and then the descriptions of Mesle, I think I can go back to Oord and reread it with better understand.

One note is that this is oriented toward philosophy and not theology and while there is a lot of overlap in the ideas of process philosophy and process theology, they are not the same. And even more, Mesle I believe is buddhist, not Christian, which also has some separation from the ideas that Oord is trying to communicate.

I have about ten highlights that I think get at the point fairly well.

Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead by C. Robert Mesle Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition

Last year I read James by Percival Everett. This year my book group chose to read it and I decided that I needed to read Huck Finn as well. I have not previously read Huck Finn, and while a number of the group had read Huck Finn in school, no one had read it recently when we started. (Although two others read it as we read James, just like I did.)

I HATED Huck Finn. I like the book James. But I honestly can’t figure out why so many people love Huck Finn. Maybe it is simply that it was a young adult adventure book when that was fairly new and so people have fond memories of books that they read as children. I have reread a number of books as an adult that I remember fondly from my childhood. Some of them still work, but some do not.

Tom Sawyer is an awful character. I can’t read the end of Huck Finn with Tom Sawyer’s foolishness without wanting to throw the book across the room. There is no sense of Tom having thought for Jim as a person. While at times Huck has naive wisdom and plays like he knows the Duke and King were bad men, his continued desire to save them or go back to them did not make any sense. Huck at times treats Jim as human, but much of the time Jim is a pet.

I know that people suggest that this is satire, but that doesn’t do it for me. I can tell that Mark Twain is trying to write satire. But while the ridiculousness of the “escape plan” at the end can only be read as satire, it is just cruelty. The N word is used 219 times by several web articles I found. That is more than once every two pages.

I did understand James more because I read Huck Finn. There was more deviations from the Huck Finn story line than I assumed when I read James the first time. But honestly I think I like James less after reading Huck Finn than I did before I read Huck Finn.

I alternated between reading the text and listening to an audiobook narrated by Elijah Wood. The audio was well produced, but the audio just confirms that this is not a book that should be read by kids. It is not that kids can’t hear the N word in any book. But that Huck Finn whitewashes slavery and encourages dehumanization and uses humor to cover up the story. We already have problems telling the real history of slavery and reconstruction in United States history, we do not need to perpetuate fictionalized white washing as to confuse the history.

If I had not been reading James with a book club and wanting to have the comparison between Huck Finn and James I would not have finished the book. Even so I had to force myself to finish it.

I am in a season where I have too much data entry work to do, and I have been reading long heavy books recently. With the interest in Project Hail Mary and the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, I have been seeing a lot of social media posts asking for suggestions for science fiction books recently. A series that I have seen frequently recommended is the Murderbot series. All Systems Red is the first book and it was novella length and available from my library and I finished it in one morning.

The robot refers to themself as “murderbot” but doesn’t have a name. The narrator is male, but the book says they are not gendered as a security robot (only sexbots are gendered, the rest are not.)

After an accident where murderbot, I think accidentally, killed a bunch of people on a previous job, the robot figured out how to hack its security system so that it would not be required to follow orders from “the company”.

The robot has very high social anxiety and would prefer not having to interact with humans and tries to spend as much time as possible watching TV, especially soap opera serials. This book was novella length (as is the second in the series) with a simple plot. The character is engaging and I enjoy the dry humor, and the audiobook narration. At the end of the first book, you understand why this is framed as a first person narrative style and it works as a good set up to a longer series.

______

I listened to Artificial Condition, the second book, on the same day as I listened to All Systems Read.

Both are novella length and each made sense of the length for the story presented. But they felt “chapters” of a longer story more than fully self contained books. I enjoyed both enough that I want to keep reading.

The first set up the framing of the larger universe and introduced the character. The second book set up the “quest” for what I assume will be the rest of the series. This is a wandering hero story who can never stop wandering because they are being chased. This feels like A-Team or the 70s version of the Hulk. There is a quest from the main protagonist, but along the way he will be helping those around him, the poor, the defenseless and the vulnerable. He is putting it to the man (the company) while searching for his own history and story, which presumably will further bring down the corruption of the man.

It is a good way to write a novella length series. I don’t love books of this length but I get the attraction. When I was a kid, many of my uncles were long haul truck drivers. And they were fans of old westerns. I picked up a number of their Louis L’Amour or Zane Grey books. There was never that much difference between the plots from one book to another, but they were short entertainment. You could read the whole thing in a couple hours. And that feels similar.

All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries #1 by Martha Wells Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

Blood at the Root was a bit of a surprise hit. I read it about 9 months after it released and a number of friends or acquaintances had been recommending it. Blood at the Root was a very good opening fantasy book. There was good world building and character development. I alternated between ebook and audiobook for that first book and then I just listened to the audiobook for this second book.

This series is clearly producing audiobooks with the intent of drawing in the YA audience that is used to TV and movies. I don’t traditionally love sound effects and music in audiobooks because I think it often sounds cheesy. And there are definitely some aspects of the audiobook production that I think lean in (intentionally I think) to the cheese, especially during fight scenes where magic duels sounds like star wars blasters being shot back and forth.

As I skimmed through reviews on goodreads, there is a clear split between people who are five stars (“it was great”) and those who thought it dragged. I both really enjoyed it as a whole and thought that the middle dragged and that the book as a whole was trying to do too much. This is a second book and they need to develop differently from first books. I get the point of why it was slow in the middle. It was oriented toward character development and complicating the story by exploring the motivations for a variety of characters to keep them from becoming too cardboard. But I think this is where Ladarrion Williams shows that he is a fairly new writer. He is skilled in plotting and I think he has great intentions with writing a complex story, which I appreciate; but that complexity needs to be shown without as much explicit explication. I agree that the middle of the book drags. (The second book is about 1/3 longer than the first book and I think with some better editing it would have been better if it had kept to the length of the first book.)

At the same time as I think that the middle of the book drags, I am all for the attention to mental health and breaking generational cycles. And I am all for the various storylines about the way that different forms of discrimination often are not addressed together. (I am also reading a book about Jim Crow era Black social gospel, and there are so many examples of opposing racism but being sexist or opposing racism but being elitist, or knowing that white supremacy is a problem but buying into various forms of respectability politics that are rooted in hierarchy.)

In a post-womanist world, Williams is paying attention both to the use and misuse of calls to move together against oppression in all forms. And paying attention to the need to do internal personal work to prepare for the work against systems of oppression. My problem isn’t the politics, or the fact that this is a fantasy novel that is paying attention to political and social issues (all fantasy novels do this or don’t do this in a way that reveals the politics of their authors.) My problem is that the political and social and psychological work that is is being done her can’t bring the story to a grind. And there is only so much angst that a character can express before the reader gets a bit annoyed.

The novel opens with an author’s note about the need to allow for novels about Black boys that allow them to be messy and grow. I think Williams is right both in the content of the note and right to have it at the start of the novel to remind the reader to do that here, not just have it as a theoretical possibility. I think one issue here is that I keep needing to be reminded that Malik is supposed to be 17 here. At the end of this novel, we are only about six months from the start of the first novel. I think it would feel more realistic to have spread the development of the book out over a couple years instead of a couple months. Malik barely got to know his grandmother before she died. Malik has not even finished a whole semester when the main action of the novel happens. The first novel was entirely during part of a summer school quarter. As much as a reader I am rooting for health and wholeness in Malik and those around him, as a guy in his 50s, I know that change takes real time and what has happened here hasn’t been enough time.

One of the themes in the book is that as a 17 year old, Malik deserves to have a childhood. He is tired of having to fix things he didn’t break. And all of that is true. But as a reader, it is conflict and resolution that generate interest, so while I agree that Malik deserved to have a childhood and do the fun developmentally appropriate stuff that a 17 year old should be done, we are reading the book because he isn’t just any other teen.

I know that when I wrote about the last novel, I said I was going to pre-order this book and read it immediately. But I didn’t get to it until almost a year after it released. But the third book is still four months away. I have enjoyed the audiobooks. But I think I will end up reading the third as a kindle book because the audiobook feels like it slows the book down a bit. This second book was nearly 20 hours (or 529 pages in print) and I think I could have read it faster and not have felt the drag in the middle as much.

Bones at the Crossroads by LaDarrion Williams (Blood at the Root #2) Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I listened to this as an audiobook. I put it on in my car and listened when I had short drives by myself. It wasn’t a “one chapter a day listening”, but it was roughly about a month of occasional listening.

My initial impression is that this is a book about discernment more than anything else. There are definitely chapters that are explicitly about discernment, but most chapters have some aspect of understanding the world how it is.

Hanna Reichel is a German academic and theologian with a history of studying the theological response to WWII. There is one other book she has in english about theological method, but otherwise her books and articles are in German. She most recently is a systematic theology professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. That matters to the context of this book because she is writing particularly to United States Christians from her background. She is widely familiar with Bonhoeffer and Barth and other Christians within Germany who responded to Hitler. I know that the comparisons between pre-WWII Germany and current US can be over played, but there are a number of academics who study Germany who think that the parallels are worth drawing, as this Bonhoeffer scholar does.

I saw that one reviewer on Goodreads suggested that this was a Christian version of On Tyranny and I thought the same as I was reading it. I thought On Tyranny was worth reading and I think this is worth reading. So that is not a complaint, but I think you need to know that going in, it is not a devotional in the traditional sense. Although the chapters are very short and devotional in length, each was about 5 to 7 minutes in audio.

Stylistically, I think Reichel is trying to warn the reader of the what is potentially coming so that we can be prepared. And like much wisdom literature, biblical or otherwise, there are points where she seems to give diametrically opposed advice. In one place she talks about how to work inside the system to slow it down and oppose oppressors from the inside. And in another place she talks about how we should never give in or participate in the least bit. There are places where she is explicit in saying that we have different callings and we need to have grace for those who are called to a different task than what we are. But I also think that this is part of what discernment and wisdom are, if we have different backgrounds and skills and histories, then we will have different roles and understandings going in.

Much of the underground movement that Bonhoeffer was connected to was made up of the German elite, often with military connections. Some of them objected to the human rights abuses against Jews and others, but many of them had political objections, not theological and human rights objections. Those in the Confessing Church may have had theological or ecclesiastical objections (they didn’t want the state running the church) but may have agreed with the antisemitism. Demographics plays a role in what we see and how we see it. And a large part of discernment is being self aware enough to know when the tide around us seems to be moving us.

I have seen some objections from Black Christians about how white Christians seem to be more inspired by Bonhoeffer, than by the Black church’s historic response to oppression within the US. And I think it is a very valid critique. But I also think that in this case, Reichel is writing what she knows and that isn’t the Black church. Black Church historians and theologians should be writing what they know and white Christians should be reading both (or all because there are other examples like Native American theology, or the critique of Catholic imperialism and colonialism in Central and South American which are also valid and necessary.)

As someone who read On Tyranny and who has read about two dozen books by or about Bonhoeffer there was not much here that I thought was particularly new. But I thought this was a good introduction to thinking theologically about how systems of government can be used to oppress. And how we should respond when we see it.

For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional by Hanna Reichel Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I continue to have mixed feelings about Kazuo Ishiguro. I really like Remains of the Day and re-reading again recently made me want to pick up another of Ishiguro’s books. I have previously finished When We Were Orphans and I gave up on The Buried Giant.

Part of the issue I think is that Ishiguro very much uses unreliable narrators and understatement in his writing. While unreliable narrators works in Remains of the Day, it tends to make the reader not like the unreliable narrator. And I think that the understatement, at least today, tends to go over the head of people who are not fairly sophisticated readers.

I have not previously read this book or watched the movie. (I didn’t know there was a movie until after I finished the book.) But I was had figured out what was going on pretty early on in the narrative. The understatement of the horror of the concept and the orientation of the narrative to focus on the daily struggles of teens in a boarding school and transitioning to adulthood means that I am pretty sure many readers missed the horror. That stylistic choice, which I appreciate from an artistic perspective, clearly went over people’s heads, at least if I take the Goodreads reviews as exemplary of the general reading public.

I didn’t struggle to read Never Let Me Go like I did When We Were Orphans. I was engaged and kept reading it straight through. Ishiguro left me enough bread crumbs to know what was going on. But I also didn’t think the book rose to the level of Remains of the Day.

The story is told by Kath. She is an adult looking back at her growing up years and trying to understand her role. She is trying to justify her own choices and understand the choices of others. It is this self justification that really brings in the unreliable narrator. And because Kath is not sure of her own narrative recollection, the reader can’t be sure.

I think Tommy, Kath’s friend and a boy early in their lives who was bullied at the boarding school, was the hero of the story. But it is clear from very early on that Kath had a crush on him and even though she was frustrated with him for not being more popular and getting along with everyone, that seems to be more about Kath wanting the boy she liked to be popular, not that he was deficient. The narrative clearly suggests that he “knows” more than others and that is part of the reason that he was unpopular. He was unwilling to just go with the flow.

This is a book primarily about teens, but it is not a young adult novel. It can be read by young adults, but the perspective is a reflection on being young by someone who is no longer young. There is discussion of sex and the confusion about sex and desire, but there isn’t anythings particularly graphic. The “adultness” of the novel is the theme.

Never Let Me Go: A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I have heard Thomas Jay Oord interviewed on several podcasts, including Gravity Commons and Homebrewed Christianity, which is why I picked up A Systematic Theology of Love in the first place. I had not realized it came out in February until I saw that a friend was reading it. It took me the whole month of April to read it.

I have a mixed relationship to systematic theology. I both appreciate that it is trying to be comprehensive because it is clear that theology is interrelated and choices in one area do impact choices in another areas. But I also am wary of systematic theology because of its attempt to categorize everything and I am just not sure that we can know it all. Many of my complaints here are about the fact that this is only volume one, and I have questions that are not answered yet (because they are going to be in the next two volumes, which Oord is going to try to get out in the next couple of years).

I am pretty persuaded by A Systematic Theology of Love. I think the orientation toward God as love and a God who is loving in a way that we traditionally think of love, is easy to get on board with. John Armstrong’s The Transforming Fire of Divine Love: My Long, Slow Journey into the Love of God I think is a good introduction to God’s love and has a number of overlaps with the early chapters of Oord’s book.

In particular I think it is easy to see that the influence of greek philosophy on the early church makes it hard for the early church to conceive of a God that loves in a way that we think of as loving.

“Although biblical writers mostly use “love” to describe actions that promote abundant life, blessedness, or well-being, Augustine defines love as desire. Countless theologians adopt his mistaken approach. In Teaching Christianity, Augustine poses a question: “How does [God] love us?” Because Augustine defines love as desire, he thinks God desires by either enjoying or using us. If God “enjoys us,” says Augustine, “it means he is in need of some good of ours, which nobody in his right mind could possibly say.” We have nothing of value, according to Augustine, because God already has all values eternally. So, God can’t love/desire us in the sense of needing us. Because he defines love as desire, Augustine says God loves by desiring what’s valuable. Being wise, God desires only the most valuable. This means, says Augustine, God only desires/loves Godself…In short, God only loves Godself. By defining love as desire, therefore, Augustine is forced to conclude God doesn’t love the world.” (p12)

The mix of thinking about love as desire and thinking of immutability as necessary for perfection, means that it is hard for the early church to think of God as loving in the ways that we see scripture talking about love. (This is an example of the problems of systematic theology when commitments to internal consistency trump the larger scriptural evidence.) I find Oord persuasive as he walks through why love matters and points to both scripture and other traditions within the church that require love as the fundamental preconception of God. I already have this as my primary orientation theologically so I am easily persuaded here.

Oord does spend time on how he understands love.

“To love is to act intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being.” (p27)

and then later

“In sum, I propose a definition of love as acting intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being. This definition applies to divine and creaturely love, although I’ll argue that God’s love differs in scope, duration, mode, etc. This systematic theology aims to provide a coherent theological framework with love at the center. It addresses key issues of existence, while seeking to maintain rational consistency and fit with widespread experience, including the experience of diverse others.” (p30)

I know that for many, the reasons for, or against, belief in God are significant issues. While I am most drawn toward the constructive orientation toward Love, part of what has drawn Oord toward process theology as a method and love as an orientation, is the problem of evil, the hiddenness of God, and other sovereignty problems. As Oord points out, “Whether explicitly or not, most theologians have prioritized omnipotence.” (p78) and that orientation toward omnipotence shapes the whole rest of their theology. Oord is committed to love as the primary driver of his theology.

Because of Oord’s orientation toward love, Oord is committed to love as seeking “overall well-being”.  When we say “God is Love,” then we say that:

“Deity is the source, instigator, or inspiration for our loving. As John puts it, “we love, because [God] first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19). “Whoever doesn’t love doesn’t know God,” John also says, indicating this necessary connection (4:8). This shows us what it means for God to “abide” in those who love.” (p83)

This is one place where I follow the logical jump. If God is loving, then loving that seeks well-being can’t also mean love that is coercive or overpowering. Oord does not talk about sexual consent here, but I see that concept in the background that one who forces themself on others by definition cannot be expressing love if love is a relational response that seeks to promote the well being of the other. So Oord says, “God’s prevenient love empowers rather than overpowers others.” (p84)

This leads to discussions of justice and mercy which I think I follow and largely agree with. And then a very lengthy discussion of how God is spirit. I am not going to detail it here, but these chapters are important and at the same time while I feel like I follow, I am pretty sure there is more going on that I realize because of my lack of background in process theology and Whitehead. I will note that as I have read The Systematic Theology of Love, I have been finding youtube videos, either lectures or discussions for background. There was one with Oord and Tripp Fuller talking about questions of process theology that included a discussion of the Trinity. I am pretty oriented toward the social trinity, and in the video Oord talked about different ways process theology tends to understand the trinity, he included the social trinity as one of the potential views, but the discussion of God as spirit in the book does not have a discussion of the trinity. This is one of those areas where I don’t want to preemptively disagree because there are two more books left, but it is an area where what I know lends me to think I may disagree eventually.

I am not fully persuaded by the book a a whole, in part because this is just a part. I also do not have enough philosophical background in Whitehead and other process theology to fully follow long with all of the arguments. There are places where I just do not follow the logical leap. I think his discussion of Creation ex nihilo as being problematic for love does not really make sense to me. I follow his point that Creation ex nihilo is a theological position more than a biblical one and I do not have an issue with his suggestion of creatio ex creatione sempiternalis en amore (The Spirit always creates out of or alongside creation in love). I understand how it relates to his larger argument with the problem of evil, but I am not fully persuaded yet on that point. And I wonder if there are other ways to get to the same result.

My current plan is to read an introduction to Whitehead and then reread The Systematic Theology of Love to see if I understand more. I think Oord is clear and the writing is good, but there are still concepts here that I just don’t fully understand the implications of and I think a second reading and more background on Whitehead will help at least some. I am going to a small conference in June and a friend that I will see there finished reading this last week. We have exchanged a couple of emails about it, but I would like to talk in person about it, so I want to finish a second reading before then.

I went back and forth about including some of my other theological presuppositions here. I have already mentioned that an orientation toward love matters deeply to me. I mentioned in my last post that I am a soft universalist and that matters to me. I also think that fundamentally, Christ was here to liberate us and so that is a significant role of the church, which means we should oppose ontological hierarchy wherever we find it. This is why social trinity is part of my theology and why egalitarian ideals matter. And ironically, why I have moved more toward episcopal ecclesiology because I think the church leadership should believe in the ideals of church leaders being those who serve. You may think I would tend toward Baptist theology here, but I think that Baptist theology tends to uphold “the rights of all” in the theory of the priesthood of all believers. But I think in reality that it tends to harden church leadership as a “calling” that makes it harder for church leaders to embrace a type of servanthood that is appropriate. (I think most episcopal ecclesiologies suck at carrying out their ideals, but they often still at least verbalize them.)

There are many areas where I think the presumptions, lend themselves to the type of theology that Oord is laying out here. And I am intrigued enough that I am taking it very seriously. But I still have questions that are not answered and I need more time and information and prayer and meditation and community before I am ready to say much more than that. I think my main areas where I want more are on the trinity, the person of Christ and the incarnation and prayer. I did find an article about prayer that was adapted from another book, but that was just not enough of what I was interested in.

Just one note on the format. I read this on Kindle. I picked up the audiobook so that I could listen to the last two chapters as I did some yard work and because I am going to reread it and on the second reading I am going to mix in audio with the print. But the Audible version of the audiobook is only the first 10 chapters (parts 1 and 2) and there is supposed to be a second audiobook that has part 3 of the print version. But that does not seem to be available, so I just finished the rest in print and I will listen on the second reading.

A Systematic Theology of Love: Volume 1 by Thomas Jay Oord Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook