CGR Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter 2006)

Introduction

One of the most fruitful directions of recent theology focuses on the connection of narrative, virtue, and character formation. In this regard, the theological world is beginning to take notice of Anabaptism. Scholars such as Stanley Hauerwas and James McClendon, and popular theologians like Brian McLaren and Anthony Campolo, have cited Anabaptist ideals like ethics, community, and biblicism as positive new directions for the twenty-first century church. Yet a careful look at past appropriations of the Anabaptist story reveals that its appeal is more narrative than ideological. The grand testimonies of pacifist martyrs can be transplanted into any already existing ideologies, and in fact have been. An examination of three recent interpretations of Anabaptist history—those of H.S. Bender, twentieth-century Marxist historians, and a recent techno-anarchist Italian novel—reveal that Anabaptism’s spread may have more to do with the drama of its story rather than the purity of its ideals.

Academics often argue that ideas make their way carefully into the public consciousness via papers, conferences, and lecture series, in a rational and orderly way. This may be partially true. The spread of Marxism, however, probably had more to do with rousing speeches on the soapbox than Das Kapital as required classroom reading. In other words, our thinking comes after our images and experiences of life. Ideas travel crouched on the back of character and plot, because otherwise most people’s brains cannot retain them.

The magnetic draw of sixteenth-century Anabaptism emanates from the drama of its inception. Anabaptism’s beliefs cannot be separated from its story. Its theological emphases of discipleship, community, and pneumatological biblicism are inextricably linked to the stories of resolute martyrs dying in flame with their tongues cut out. The Martyrs Mirror collected hundreds of pages of eight-point-type death monologues and added some etchings to heighten the pathos. This pastiche of grisly narratives symbolized Anabaptist mythology for so many years that it was traditionally given as a Mennonite wedding gift. The Martyrs Mirror wedded the simplistic beliefs of a Christ centered nonresistant faith to vignettes of a faithful people bravely standing against overwhelming odds. The early Anabaptists were iconoclasts, rebels, lone gunmen at high noon with Bibles in their mental holsters. It was not the Anabaptists’ systematic formulations but the drama of their lives that enabled their church to blossom and survive.

After these initial dramas had faded, however, theology overruled story in the interests of institutional survival. Menno Simons and other Anabaptist leaders turned drama into doctrine. In recent history, H. S. Bender, the “dean of Mennonite scholarship,” rejected the Anabaptist stories with the most violence, the most blood, and the most pathos and tragedy. Bender’s influential essay “The Anabaptist Vision”[1] specifically excludes apocalyptic revolutionary groups as belonging a priori outside the Anabaptist fold. Bender concluded that scholars “know enough to draw a clear line of demarcation between original evangelical and constructive Anabaptism on the one hand . . . and the various mystical, spiritualistic, revolutionary, or even antinomian related and unrelated groups on the other hand.”[2] Of course, scholars did not yet know enough, but Bender pointedly urged them in that direction. His attempt to steer the church between what he perceived as vapid liberalism and violent fundamentalism required a definitive history that definitively rejected violence back to its very origins. To Bender’s credit, his vision sustained the Mennonite church through the fundamentalist/ modernist debates, lasting well into the 1960s.

The contrast between Bender’s chosen story and that of secular German historians shows that one group’s ideological trash can be another group’s narrative treasure. Marxists saw in the early Anabaptists the seeds of the original proletariat revolution. Friedrich Engels cited the Anabaptists as proto-Marxists even before the ideology of Marxism had fully coalesced. Marxist historians of the German Democratic Republic claimed the German Peasants War as their direct ancestor, concentrating on Anabaptism as the original revolutionary force and dismissing pacifist Anabaptism as the degenerate leftover of the commoners’ attempt to nip capitalism in the bud. Even non-Marxist social historians were forced to acknowledge the multiple societal forces that birthed the stepchildren of Radical Reformation. Marxists provided a new narrative/interpretive framework to read Anabaptist theology. The sixteenth-century Anabaptists served the mythological interests of a movement fundamentally opposed to religion in all its manifestations.

Literature, however, was never regarded as one of Marxism’s strongest suits. The grim attempt to unilaterally root Marxist thought in Hegelian dialectical materialism left little room for fanciful expression. The collapse of the Soviet Union called into question Marxism’s metanarrative pretensions, leaving room for a new story in which could be read the early Anabaptists. This surprising interpretation recently presented itself as a novel written by four Italian anarchists using the name of former soccer star Luther Blissett.[3] Their novel Q[4] implicitly linked the most radical of the radical reformers with postmodern anarchists, the store-window-bashing, computer-virus-writing faceless guerillas of today. With markedly divergent results, the authors of Q utilize the same selective historiography as Bender and the GDR materialists. Just as Bender connected his Anabaptist theology to selective modernist pacifism, and East German historians to Marxist socioeconomic theory, Q’s unique narrative connects the theology of Müntzer and Münster to the weblogs, Black Bloc anarchists, and rogue computer hackers of the twenty-first century.

The Plot of Q and the Radical Reformation

Q concerns an unnamed protagonist who finds himself swept up in the more dramatic fringes of the Radical Revolution of the sixteenth century. The protagonist, also the first-person narrator, accompanies major historical figures throughout the shifting plot. The novel is set up in three parts. Part One, The Coiner, recounts the drama of the battle of Frankenhausen, Thuringia and the protagonist’s involvement with Thomas Müntzer. Part Two, One God, One Faith, One Baptism, moves through the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement toward the apocalyptic capture of the city of Munster. Finally, Part Three, The Benefit of Christ Crucified, shifts away from traditional European Anabaptist history to examine the Radical Revolution in Venice and southern Italy.

As the protagonist fights his way through the decadent underside of the Radical Reformation, his name changes to protect his identity and that of his companions. The protagonist’s pseudonymous subterfuge highlights the narrator’s Everyman quality, and also hints at the authors’ view of the fluid nature of postmodern existence. The narrator comments in the opening in medias res section, “I automatically turn around when people call me Gustav, I’ve become accustomed to a name no less strange to me than any other.”[5] The date and location of the protagonist’s action also change rapidly and frequently, always indicated by headings at the beginning of the book’s 117 short chapters. This leapfrogging of character, time, and setting mirrors the fluid identities of Q’s multiple authors, who reject the linear conceptions of reality typified by the East German historians’ dialectical approach.

Q opens with an appropriately fragmented film-like account of the battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525. The protagonist personally accompanies Thomas Müntzer, “the Coiner,” an apocalyptic Spiritualist who eventually joined the peasants of Thuringia in their unsuccessful rebellion against their oppressive landowner. The Anabaptists are being pursued by a secret agent of the Roman Catholic Church nicknamed Q (after Qoelet, the author of Ecclesiastes); this nemesis provides the title of the novel. After this impressionistic beginning, the action shifts to Wittenberg in 1519, where the protagonist witnesses the debates between Martin Luther and his mentor and foe, Andreas Karlstadt. Rather than choose between them, he gravitates to the brash charisma of the young preacher Thomas Müntzer—“his voice: the flame that set Germany ablaze”[6] —and inserts himself as one of Müntzer’s lieutenants. The protagonist’s education and literacy aid in Müntzer’s integral role in the rebellion of the surrounding peasants (he watches the conflictleery Hans Denck flee the battle of Frankenhausen before the fighting begins). Part One ends in the protagonist’s crazed, profane monologue against the disciplined resolve of the princes’ troops. This splintered use of language recalls the truncated sentences and dismembered corpses that began the novel’s portrayal of the horror of revolutionary war.

Part Two chronicles the protagonist’s flight to the Martyrs’ Synod in 1527 and his transferal of identity to Lienhard Jost—the sole incidence of the protagonist’s assumption of a historical personality. Melchior Hoffmann and Jan Trijpmaker appear in succession, but the protagonist feels that reformation requires something more than Hoffmann’s apocalypticism. After picking a rusted sword off the ground, he confesses, “I felt a strange shiver as I clutched a weapon once again and I understood that the moment had come to try something magnificent.”[7] The protagonist saves the life of Jan Matthys, the eventual leader of the mad apocalyptic city-state of Münster, and finds his ticket to the “magnificent” life of the sword. The impatient protagonist finds Matthys’ revolutionary rhetoric seductive: “He wanted to fight this battle, he wanted to fight it with a passion, he was just waiting for a sign from God to declare war on the wicked and the servants of iniquity.”[8] Both the protagonist and Matthys have little inkling of the true nature of the following war on iniquity.

Blissett portrays Münster as a medieval carnival turned Waco, Texas. The section of Q that details the fall of the city bears the subtitle “The Word made flesh.” The initial days of Matthys’ success are filled with wine, women, and song, but Bernhard Rothmann’s apocalyptic preaching soon shifts the party to a fascist rally. Matthys declares, “The kingdom of God is a jewel that you can win only if you get your hands dirty with shit, mud and blood.”[9] Arriving back in Münster during the book burning on 16 March 1534 (a historically recorded event), the protagonist sees on the burning pile “a copy of Erasmus, showing that this God no longer needs our language and will not give us peace.”[10] The “holy pimp” Jan Bockelson takes over the new “kingship of David,” the city falls, and the nameless protagonist is forced to change his name once more.

The third section of the novel shifts its attention to Italy and away from sixteenth-century Anabaptism proper.[11] Part Three focuses on a subversive plot to distribute an anonymous Catholic apologetic for justification by faith titled “The Benefit of Christ Crucified.” The protagonist realizes his ancient enemy Q is still haunting him, and poses as an Anabaptist named Titian to lure the double agent out into the open; Q is symbolically buried under the collapsing nave of a Gothic cathedral. The printing cabal of humanists and Jewish merchants is exposed, Q’s benefactor Gianpetro Carafa is elected Pope Paul IV, and the protagonist escapes Western culture altogether, heading for the Muslim Middle East to become one of the first successful exporters of coffee. The revolutionary German has become a medieval international proto-Starbucks capitalist.

Q and Anabaptist Historiography

Although not identical, Blissett’s interpretation of Anabaptist history exhibits fraternal similarities to the Marxist reading of the sixteenth-century Radical Reformers. At the heart of the Marxist interpretation of history lies the struggle between the actual laborers and the capitalist overseers who make money off their labor without actually laboring themselves. Based on the Hegelian dialectic, Marxism predicts the workers rising up and claiming their fair share of the capital produced by their labor, moving into a restored “Golden Age” of equitable distribution—the famed “From each according to their ability to each according to their need.” History is therefore read through the lens of the struggle between labor and capital, production and exploitation—“dialectical materialism.” Ideology—including theology—serves only as veiled exploitation of those who rightfully create the necessities of society, the justification of keeping the oppressed productive class in its exploited social niche.

Friedrich Engels, one of the fathers of Marxism, mentioned the Anabaptists in his research on the German Peasants War. He searched German history for examples of the upsurge of the proletariat (productive) class and found its original prototype in the Peasants War of 1525. Engels saw that war as the initial impulse of the productive class to oppose burgeoning capitalism before it began, a protest against the emerging bourgeois subculture to which both nobles and peasants were indebted. In typical Marxist fashion, the theology attached to these uprisings was merely a veneer over the interests of material production:

In the so-called religious wars of the Sixteenth Century, very positive material class-interests were at play, and those wars were class wars just as were the later collisions in England and France. If the class struggles of that time appear to bear religious earmarks, if the interests, requirements and demands of the various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen, it little changes the actual situation, and is to be explained by the conditions of the time.[12]

Engels’s lens of dialectical materialism did not allow him to regard theological interests as a fundamental part of the peasants’ revolution. The rhetoric of biblicism and anticlericalism was merely a convenient way for the peasants to express their material frustrations.

Later German historians in the Marxist German Democratic Republic (GDR) followed Engels’s materialist line. In fact, some tension existed between church historians, who viewed theology as the primary causative factor in the Radical Reformation, and Marxist historians, who saw the class struggle as underlying theological rhetoric. Paul Peachey observed that both sides utilized an a priori conception of reality that necessarily influenced their interpretation of radical reform. In other words, the Marxists had ideological assumptions which subjectively colored their research as much as the church historians:

Intruding into the [Marxist] empirical formula is a non-empirical postulate, ‘dialectic materialism,’ which, however, is accorded empirical status within the scheme . . . . What to the non-Marxist is thus a metaphysical postulate, parading as an empirical construct in the historian’s arsenal, is to the Marxist historian the most scientific of all laws.[13]

Abraham Friesen points out that Engels’s concentration on the admittedly biased historical data of Wilhelm Zimmerman led to characterizing the Zwickau Prophets and Thomas Müntzer as the true fathers of Anabaptism.[14] The belief in the class struggle of production as the most fundamental fact of history obscured Marxist historians to the influential power of ideas and theological beliefs.

The GDR historians’ essays in volume IX of the Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies series, Radical Tendencies in the Reformation,[15] provide some concrete examples of the Marxist emphasis on dialectical materialism. One of the first and most shocking is Adolf Laube’s concentration on “the willingness to use force as a decisive criterion of radicality.”[16] When the clashes of history are driven by the proletariats’ desire for physical justice, the Marxist historian necessarily excludes pacifism as a second-rate cop-out toward the bourgeois class. Laube sees Müntzer as a prototypical example of Anabaptist proletariat revolution at its finest; Müntzer’s leadership in the Peasants War “acted as catalyst for the formation and radical development of this theology for appealing to ordinary people, as it activated the people as the carrier of the force of the sword and the driving power of revolutionary change.”[17] Günter Vogler saw the violent apocalypticism of Münster as the only way the proletariats could break out of their ideological oppression, the “radicalization of the radicals.”[18] A concentration on forceful uprising against the middle and upper classes led Marxist historians to concentrate on the violent, apocalyptic strains of Anabaptism as the truest strains of radicalism, leaving the pacifist, ecclesiological Anabaptists as footnotes to the continuation of the bourgeois state.[19]

The anarchists Blissett share the Marxist affinity for the material basis of the Radical Reformation. Influential figures who rejected the sword, such as Conrad Grebel, Michael Sattler, and Menno Simons, are notably absent in the action of Q. The Hutterians make an appearance, only to have their sectarianism rejected: “Being pure doesn’t mean cutting yourself off from the world, condemning it, in order blindly to obey the law of God; if you want to change the world of men you’ve got to live in it.”[20] The protagonist explicitly rejects Melchior Hofmann’s emphasis on pacifism as unhelpful to the radical reformers’ cause: “Trijpmaker continued to preach meekness, witness, passive martyrdom as Hoffman had directed him to. I knew it couldn’t last. ... As far as Hoffmann was concerned, we should have been a herd of meek preachers, skilled and not too noisy, lining up to be butchered one after the other in the name of the Supreme One.”[21] Hans Denck says of the protagonist’s opportunist survivability, “You must have a guardian angel, my friend,” to which the latter replies, “These days you’d be better off with a decent sword.”[22] Most pointedly, the protagonist rejects any conception of a transcendent God or spiritual reality as part of the Reformation project. “Frankenhausen had taught me not to wait for a host of angels: no God would descend to help the wretched. They would have to help themselves.”[23] In keeping with a materialist concentration on physical rebellion and action over word, Q’s protagonist travels only with the rebellious and the militant, not with the nonresistant or the meek, his sword strapped to his side and ready for action against the upper classes.

Blissett also paints the larger picture of the political undercurrents of reformation, both magisterial and radical. The letters of Q to his patron, Archbishop Gianpietro Carafa (later Paul IV), reveal the Roman Catholic Church’s supposed political machinations. The Church attempts to suppress the Reformation solely to maintain its physical, political, and military power. Q schemes behind the scenes to counter the power of Emperor Charles V, the German noble princes rebelling against the church, and particularly the Anabaptists as a symbol of the military power of the lower classes:

The past few weeks have seen this city shaken by the suppression of the so-called Anabaptists. These blasphemers take to their extremes the perfidious doctrines of Luther . . . in this they are worse than Luther—they also refuse to obey the secular authorities and claim that they are the only Christian community to accomplish civic administration. They wish to subvert the world from head to toe.[24]

Q nurtures Müntzer’s popular ascension to weaken Luther’s power against the church[25] but encourages Müntzer to fight the battle of Frankenhausen when he in turn becomes too dangerous.[26] Q also sneaks into Münster as the historical betrayer of the city, Heinrich Gresbeck, to feed Bernhard Rothmann’s apocalypticism so that Q can reveal the city’s weaknesses to the invading Catholic army. Q’s Machiavellian intrigues are couched in theological terms, but clearly his interests and those of his master are fundamentally military and political.

The novel also addresses the Radical Reformation’s economic roots. Müntzer’s original appeal to the protagonist results from his preaching against “everyone who claims to want to bring the food of the soul to the people while leaving their bellies empty.”[27] Müntzer rejects the Lutheran churchstates because “the purpose of the German rulers is clearly apparent. It is not faith that fills their hearts and guides their actions, but their greed for gain.”[28] In the person of Lienhard Jost, the protagonist rebels against the luxury of middle-class theologians “talking and talking, presenting themselves as great thinkers of the Christian faith. ... It was wealth that guaranteed the fame of Strasbourg. It was that fame that brought writers and students flooding to the city.”[29] He bluntly characterizes the background of the rebellion of Münster as “lucre, the accursed lucre of the Dutch traders.”[30] Part Three depicts a subtle prolonged rebellion against the pre-eminent bankers of Western Europe, the Fuggers, using forged letters of credit in order to destroy the credibility of capitalism and undermine the financial backing of the Catholic Church. “Money is the real symbol of the beast,” says Q’s co-conspirator Ludwig Schaliedecker, and the authors implicitly agree.

However, Part Three points to one important difference between Marxist historiography and the historiography of the Messrs. Blissett. Rather than seeing ideology as a veil for material interests, the authors of Q see it as a powerful weapon in its own right. A letter to Müntzer outlines Frederick’s fear of the printing press at the latter’s disposal, “and that your words might reach the hearths of revolt that are gradually being lit throughout his territory and beyond.”[31] The protagonist sees the press as the most powerful weapon in the revolutionaries’ arsenal, “rapid glances and agile fingers composing the Magister’s writings: projectiles fired in all directions by the most powerful of cannons.”[32] He himself invents the very notion of fliers—Flugblätter—to distribute to the peasants the revolutionary notions that will drive them to armed rebellion.[33] The intent of the publication cabal of “The Benefit of Christ Crucified” is to liberate the people from the oppressive political power of the Catholic Church by the book’s theological support of justification through faith by a Roman Catholic author. Rejecting the Marxists’ modernist notions of the objective basis of history, the metanarrative of dialectical materialism, the anarchist authors of Q see the postmodern value of ideas distributed without regulation as the keystone of rebellion against the political and economic power of the state.[34]

Marx, Bender, or Q?

The polygenesis stream of Anabaptist historians has generally refuted H. S. Bender’s characterization of the true heritage of the Radical Reformation as “evangelical and constructive Anabaptism.” These historians point to multiple streams of ideologies and causative factors in the early Radical Reformation rather than to Bender’s concentration on Swiss-German Anabaptism.[35] Even a firmly committed Marxist like Laube admits that “Marxist historians now recognize that theology and belief did not simply reflect social issues within the conflicts of the Reformation, but had their own relative importance.”[36] Paul Peachey, while admitting his use of the “positivist” model of scientific inquiry in his study of Anabaptist history, nonetheless “recognizes that while the positivist model is valid and indispensable within its own limits, it does not eliminate or itself escape the metaphysical problem which in the end confronts every effort to investigate human behavior.”[37] Clearly, modernist concentrations on either theology or materialism as the bedrock of historical inquiry have not yielded adequate fruit. Contemporary critical perspectives suggest that a reading of Anabaptist history must concentrate on more than static abstract patterns of ideology.

Blissett’s novel provides an alternate way to understand the essence of sixteenth-century Anabaptism, and by extension to suggest a missionary strategy for the twenty-first century Anabaptist church. The Luther Blissett project, and the Wu Mings after it, accurately taps into our contemporary zeitgeist; ideologies are more effectively communicated by amorphous, dynamic narratives than by linear and static creeds. In their very rejection of separate authorial identities, says reviewer Franco Berardi, “Luther Blissett’s dis-identity is awareness of the language’s becoming, mutation of roles, becoming community, bodies meeting up with one another, desertion and going adrift.”[38] Q’s unnamed protagonist distributing fliers to the peasants of sixteenth-century Europe also celebrates the precarious position of language and truth in our contemporary context:

The ground stalked by all these precariously named characters is that of the frenzy and madness produced by an historical change in the infosphere, the invention and spreading of a new information technology, that is the press, the possibility of reproducing texts.[39]

In other words, Blissett uses the violent birth pangs of the modernist paradigm shift in the Radical Reformation to point out a similar radical shift in the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century Western world. As the Anabaptists used the newly printed word to mobilize the oppressed of their day, so postmodern radicals use the shifting “infosphere” of the Internet, text messaging, and freely distributed intellectual property to undermine the hegemony of the capitalist superpowers with their radio, television, and outdated notions of copyrights.

As mentioned in the opening of this article, many theologians and church leaders are looking at the genesis of Anabaptism to see if its novel approach to the Christian way of life can inform the theological malaise of our postmodern era. Yet in examining past interpretations of sixteenth-century Anabaptism, it seems clear that the Anabaptist story can be molded to fit whichever ideological biases the reader brings to the text. Is there such a thing as “the” Anabaptist history? Is there such a thing as “pure history” at all? This small study suggests that our quest for objective knowledge is more difficult than we would like.

However, acknowledging our cultural biases and the existence of multiple interpretations of history need not deter theologians and historians from attempting to re-read the Anabaptist story with fresh eyes. Theology and church history, in both their best senses, exist as second-order tools that help the Christian church focus its primary activities of worship, mission, and discipleship. Both readers new to Anabaptism and those who consider themselves the Anabaptists’ spiritual descendants can combine the interpretations of the past to appropriate the Anabaptist story in ways that will encourage the church’s faithfulness today. The dramatic narrative of Anabaptism can combine Bender’s emphasis on pacifism and discipleship, the Marxists’ acknowledgment of economic and political realities, and the Blissett’s use of the power of information. The value of narrative, as illustrated by Q, lies in its multiplicity of interpretation and its ability to speak anew to every generation.

Notes

[1] Harold S. Bender, “The Anabaptist Vision,” MQR (April 1944): 3-23.

[2] Ibid., 6.

[3] The Luther Blissetts now refer to themselves as the “Wu Mings,” Chinese for “no name.” See “Wu Ming: A Summary Account” at http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/ biography.html, accessed 11 June 2004.

[4] Luther Blissett, Q: A Novel, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Harcourt, 2003).

[5] Ibid., 33.

[6] Ibid., 35.

[7] Ibid., 231.

[8] Ibid., 236.

[9] Ibid., 354

[10] Ibid., 361.

[11] Tom Finger pays some attention to the neglected branch of Italian and Polish Anabaptism in A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). See pp. 40-45 for an introduction by a more traditional historian.

[12] Friedrich Engels, The German Revolutions: “The Peasant War in Germany” and “Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Quoted in C. Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1995), 405-06.

[13] Paul Peachey, “Marxist Historiography of the Radical Reformation: Causality or Covariation?” in Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, Vol. I., ed. Carl S. Meyer (St. Louis, MO: Foundation for Reformation Research, 1970), 11.

[14] Abraham Friesen, “The Marxist Interpretation of Anabaptism.” in Meyer, 17-34.

[15] Radical Tendencies in the Reformation: Divergent Perspectives. Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, Vol. IX, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1988).

[16] Adolf Laube, “Radicalism as a Research Problem in the History of Early Reformation” in Hillerbrand, 17.

[17] Ibid., 20.

[18] Günter Vogler, “The Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster in the Tension Between Anabaptism and Imperial Policy” in Hillerbrand, 105.

[19] For a more recent materialist slant on early Anabaptism, see Adolf Holl’s brilliantly readable but similarly short-sighted account of Müntzer in The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit, trans. John Cullen (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 1997), 221-39.

[20] Blissett, 404.

[21] Ibid., 228, 230.

[22] Ibid., 189.

[23] Ibid., 215.

[24] Ibid., 150.

[25] “If such a man existed somewhere, he would have to be more precious than gold, because he would be the most powerful weapon against Frederick of Saxony and Martin Luther.” Ibid., 49.

[26] “May I be prepared to say in all frankness that, in the face of the spread of Anabaptism, the advent of the Lutheran faith is a great deal more desirable.” Ibid., 255.

[27] Ibid., 53.

[28] Ibid., 59.

[29] Ibid., 216.

[30] Ibid., 237.

[31] Ibid., 69.

[32] Ibid., 90.

[33] Ibid., 92-94.

[34] The Wu Mings claim that “the practical critique of intellectual property had been at the core of the Luther Blissett project’s activities.” Wu Ming, 1.

[35] Snyder, 3.

[36] Laube, 10.

[37] Peachey, 16.

[38] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Bifo on Luther Blissett’s ‘Q’”: www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/ netttime-1-9907-msg00102.html, 27 July 1999. Accessed 11 June 2004.

[39] Ibid., 2.

At the time of writing, Jeremy Garber was entering the final year of an MDiv program at AMBS in Elkhart, IN.

Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

This creative book engages the fact of Christian expansion in the world from the point of view of culturally sensitive Christians concerned that people are “abandoning their values and way of life in favor of a foreign religion” (113). Lamin Sanneh’s overall objective is to catalyze an attitude shift in the academy and post-Christian societies that are predisposed to view world Christianity as “the creature of impulses originating in the west” rather than as the result of “mother tongue mediation and local response” (85).

Despite his description of Protestant sola scriptura use of the Bible as breeding sectarianism and reducing the Bible to “ecumenical shrapnel,” Sanneh shows the positive role Bible translation has played in the expansion of Christianity worldwide. Challenging popular assumptions that world Christianity threatens a return to Christendom—what he calls “Global Christianity”—and that Bible translation necessarily results in an injection of outside power interests into indigenous communities, Sanneh is unambiguous that the Bible in the vernacular “does not coerce nor compel.” Translation “guarantees nothing beyond the fact than an inculturated personal response is a necessary and legitimate basis for moral and social empowerment” (123). Sanneh’s own experience of conversion likely influences his opinion that indigenous communities are discovering Christianity and not vice versa. (See Jonathan Bonk’s interview of Sanneh in Christianity Today 47:10 (Oct. 2003), 112-113, at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/010/35.112.html.)

By using the pedagogical style of interview and dialogue, Sanneh covers a vast amount of intellectual territory, exposing a multitude of questions about how western people who value “cultural sensitivity, diversity, and inclusiveness” can relate with solidarity to Christians outside the west. His ability to compare and contrast expanding Christianity with Islamic resurgence makes this book even more relevant and useful.

Sanneh’s primary reference point is Africa. His thesis depends on a commitment to religion and state separation, while affirming that Christianity values human worth in a way that can have positive influence on political structures. It remains to be seen if his explanation of authentic local response to Bible translation can be applied to the Latin American context, where Pentecostalism is blazing within the residue of imperial Christianity.

Sanneh’s book provides a shelter under which people from widely divergent Christian commitments could meet and discuss its multiple implications. The author is confident that intentional dialogue between the west and the rest of the world regarding their different experiences of Christianity will result in increased mutual respect and understanding, as well as in the “fruit of obedience and the gift of genuine solidarity” (6). By voicing a wide variety of questions and exposing commonly held presuppositions about western involvement in the expansion of world Christianity, Sanneh convincingly argues that Christianity has broken “the cultural filibuster of its western domestication” and explains why “attitudes must shift to acknowledge this new situation” (130). This book has something for everyone: sceptic or missionary, scholar or layperson.

Susan Kennel Harrison, ThD student, Toronto School of Theology

Craig Bartholomew and Fred Hughes, eds. Explorations in a Christian Theology of Pilgrimage. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004.

Christian pilgrimages are becoming increasingly popular. Each year thousands of pilgrims travel to Iona, Taize, Santiago, Medjugorie, Jerusalem and other locations of religious significance. In Western Europe alone, 60-70 million religiously motivated travelers annually find their way to sacred sites. Is this burgeoning practice an outbreak of genuine spiritual fervor? Or are pilgrimages simply an elite form of religious tourism—respectable entertainment for affluent Christians?

Explorations in a Christian Theology of Pilgrimage provides a thorough discussion of the current resurgence of Christian pilgrimage. Editors Craig Bartholomew and Fred Hughes organized an academic conference held in January 2000 by the School of Theology and Religious Studies at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education in England. This collection of conference essays examines the phenomenon of pilgrimage from biblical, theological, historical, literary, and anthropological perspectives in order to contribute to creating a coherent theology of pilgrimage. Although excellent descriptive and historical studies of pilgrimage are now available, much less attention has been given to theology. This book seeks to remedy that lack.

Defining pilgrimage as “a journey to a special or holy place as a way of making an impact on one’s life with the revelation of God associated with that place” (xii), the authors quickly acknowledge that pilgrimage is not unique to Christianity. Pilgrimages flourish in many religious traditions (e.g., Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca) and even appear in secular life (e.g., the continuing popularity of places like Graceland, home of singer Elvis Presley). Even though the idea of pilgrimages has been discredited and denounced at certain points in Christian history, such as the Reformation, the authors are especially interested in examining the enduring desire to go on pilgrimage that seems to be located deep in human experience and spirituality.

The book contributes two main ingredients to discerning a theology of pilgrimage. One is a careful review of Old and New Testament perspectives on pilgrimage, in which both their literal and metaphorical role is examined, along with the relativizing of sacred space experienced in the coming of Jesus and the missionary activity of the church. As one essay states, “If God has an address on earth, it is no longer in Jerusalem but in the incarnate Logos” (39)— and, we might add, in the community called by Christ’s name. The second ingredient is a thoughtful discussion of the spiritual formation potential of pilgrimage. Although literal pilgrimages were not encouraged by the NT church, and despite the ethical and economic issues raised in the Reformation and since then, many Christians long to see and experience the places where Jesus lived, taught, suffered, died, and rose again. Also, the lure of locations associated with the saints or vibrant Christian communities continues to have broad appeal.

Recognizing their enduring fascination, the writers suggest that pilgrimages potentially nourish both personal faith and a lively sense of connection with the Christian church in places near and far. “At its best,” one writer says, “pilgrimage is a seeking after roots that refresh” (88). Our imaginations are stimulated, our minds gain new understanding, our vision of the church’s mission is expanded, and our hearts are renewed as we personally encounter the faith of other Christians. At the same time the writers denounce the exploitation of religious heritage sites and caution against the escapism that sends some people seeking religious thrills in places far from home.

As someone who has led spiritual pilgrimages to ancient, medieval, and modern Celtic Christian sites, I am aware of both the potential and pitfalls of pilgrimage. The sense of Christian community that emerges among a group of pilgrims and the transforming encounters with local Christians in pilgrimage locations are wondrous gifts. So is the opportunity for prayer and reflection in places of incredible natural beauty, such as the Isle of Iona in Scotland, Glendalough in Ireland, or Holy Isle in England. Because pilgrimage often strips one of the usual sense of security and certainty, pilgrims are opened to new perspectives on life, vocation, and the church. Admittedly, no pilgrimage can guarantee such an outcome. As the ancient Irish Christians understood so well,

To go to Rome Is much of trouble, little of profit;

The King whom thou seekest there,

Unless thou bring him with thee, thou wilt not find.

– Kuno Meyer (tr.), Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (Constable, 1911, new ed., 1959), 100

Explorations in a Christian Theology of Pilgrimage opens up key issues for the church and provides a rich biblical framework as well as historical and pastoral perspectives. Perhaps a useful next step would be to engage in this conversation with economically deprived parts of the church. Are the gifts of pilgrimage meant only for those who can afford to travel or are they meant for the whole church?

Marlene Kropf, Mennonite Church USA, Elkhart, IN

Karl Koop, Anabaptist-Mennonite Confessions of Faith: The Development of a Tradition. Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2004.

This book’s title recognizes and describes its subject matter, namely the diachronic identity that defines the continuity and discontinuity between the original Anabaptist movement in the Netherlands and its development into denominationalism in the following centuries. The author contends that the sixteenth-century Anabaptist concerns and character were essentially preserved in the seventeenth-century Dutch Mennonite confessions as their socio-economic situation and political standing changed rather radically.

The study focuses on the seventeenth-century Dutch confessions, especially three: the “Short Confession” of 1610, the Jan Cents Confession of 1630, and the Dordrecht Confession of 1632. Each of these confessional statements represents what might be called denominational factions within the Holland Anabaptist-Mennonite movement—the Waterlanders, the Frisian- High German, and the Flemish. Each statement represents continuing socialcultural developments, and the author tries to show how the groups attempted to maintain authentic continuity with the original movement in Holland and North Germany, which itself was highly fractured.

Koop notes that the nature and uses of these confessions characterize them as “confessions,” not creeds, and locate them within the Anabaptist movement. In his words, “the [confessional] tradition is not some normative, externally-fixed authority . . . ; rather, it is a constantly changing expression of belief, representing a plurality of perspectives, which can provide an orientation for theological reflection. . . .” (22). Although too often unsuccessful, a good number of the confessions within the purview of this study were intended for rapprochement, not as definitions of orthodoxy for the exclusion of those who differed.

In addition to their function of seeking consensus, confessions in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition have provided self-identity markers and teaching standards, as the author notes. They depict “a unique and coherent tradition shaped by the broader Christian milieu” (114). In general they are characterized by a close approximation to biblical language and voluminous textual referencing. They approach theological definitions more from the perspective of ecclesial, experiential, and ethical applications of Christian behavior than from technical precision. However, as one might expect, they reflect the time and place of their origin, and generally follow Protestant and Catholic theological precedents. Judging from these seventeenth-century confessions, one concludes that their framers were very aware of, and engaged in, the ongoing theological and ecclesiastical debates of the century.

Besides filling a gap in English language historical studies of Anabaptist- Mennonite developments, this descriptive analysis of seventeenth-century Mennonite statements of faith when Dutch Anabaptists were moving from their original societal position as a radical Gemeinde to participation in the politico-economic order (Gesellshaft) is highly relevant to the twenty-first North American Mennonite church experience. As Mennonite denominational groups continue to splinter and regroup, the need for self-identity and reconciling consensus statements continues unabated! And when we add the globalization factor of mission expansion and Mennonite World organization, these needs are maximized. Churches around the world that are related to the European and American Mennonite churches are asking what it means to be Mennonite and/or Anabaptist. Karl Koop is to be commended on a carefully researched, well-written, and thoroughly documented essay.

C. Norman Kraus (Professor emeritus, Goshen College), Harrisonburg, VA

Thomas N. Finger, A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004.

In A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology, Thomas Finger first sketches today’s North Atlantic cultural context of a globalizing society in transition from modern to postmodern cultures. Is theology with its “universal truths” able to engage “postmodernity’s affective, popular, fragmenting and pluriform sensibilities” without appearing imperialistic? He believes theology must face this challenge and submits that aid may come from an unexpected source: the small, unassuming Anabaptist communions, descended from the Radical Reformation. These communions may offer help to a society with postmodern tendencies and possibly bridge the gaps between the historical Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches, and between them and the evangelical churches (11f, 103).

Part one (chs. 1-4) deals with “the contemporary and historical context,” including a masterful sketch of Anabaptism’s “tumultuous beginnings” (polygenesis) in diverse regions; part two (chs. 5-7) treats “the coming of the new creation,” which the different Anabaptist groups held as their common center (157) despite differing theological emphases; and part three (chs. 8- 10) outlines “the convictional framework” that powered historic Anabaptists and is needed today for engaging the world with the Gospel. Throughout, the author critically relates the theological works of current Anabaptist-Mennonites to the legacy of the Anabaptists, and creates a dialogue between these and historic and current “mainline” and “marginal” theologies.

Although discussion of “The Last Things” comes at the end (ch. 10), the eschatological dimension reverberates throughout in the theme tying the book together: “The coming of the new creation” (106). This theme, Finger argues, necessarily involved three distinct-yet-inseparable dimensions in early Anabaptist groups: the “personal, communal, and missional” (106). In contrast, he says, most current Anabaptist theologians focus largely on the communal (and perhaps missional) dimension(s) at the expense of the personal dimension. Their soteriology concentrates, like that of ecumenical churches, on “horizontal” issues and suppresses the “vertical” transcendent dimension, leaving the latter mostly to evangelical churches.

Overall, Finger’s knowledgeable, friendly-critical engagement of various faith traditions results in truly fruitful theological dialogue and mutual learning. Thus, ecumenical, post-Christendom churches are today questioning the adequacy of infant baptism, Christian involvement in so-called Just War, and how to witness from the margins of society, whereas evangelicals are beginning to address all aspects of life with the gospel. While historic Anabaptist believers’ and peace churches can speak to these issues, they in turn can learn from the rich theological-liturgical heritage of ecumenical churches and from the dynamic witness of evangelical churches (101). From this dialogue, the author undertakes to “construct” a richer contemporary theology for all churches, in which all traditions are taken seriously, with the Bible still as his sovereign norm (175).

Despite the book’s considerable achievement, Finger sometimes sells short the work of others. For instance, is John Howard Yoder “reducing” baptism and the Lord’s Supper to “social-ethical dimensions” (184, 207,180) or is he elevating (“transubstantiating”) these “community practices” (bridging ethnic divisions, food sharing) into their proper eschatological framework, when he says that in them the resurrected Christ becomes present among us? Finger is reading Yoder’s work reductionistically. Moreover, the three core dimensions, rightly emphasized by Finger, are all pervasively present in Yoder’s theology even though he opposes individualism. Yoder’s church is as much in the “public square,” living “before the eyes of the watching world” (Yoder’s phrase), as Finger’s church aspires to be (308). Nor does Yoder envision an isolated, purist church, but advocates both its “conscientious participation” in society and its “conscientious objection” to it (Yoder, The Politics of Jesus [2nd ed., 1994]). For Yoder the church is a sacramental presence in society: “The people of God is called to be today what the world is called to be ultimately” (Yoder, Body Politics [1992, rep. 2001]). Finger argues similarly: “The church . . . makes God’s desires for all people visible as its members live and work among them” (255; cf. 321).

Further, Finger demurs on “Murphy, Ellis, Kraus, and Yoder . . . regard[ing] the powers’ redemption as a mission task” (308). According to Finger, only Col. 1:20 considers the powers redeemable (313); he himself is pessimistic about it (314). In dealing with the biblical “principalities and powers” passages, Finger could have found important resources in Hendrik Berkhof (Christ and the Powers, 1962, 1977) and in Yoder’s treatment of “Christ and Power” (The Politics of Jesus, ch. 8.). In view of the importance he places on the “missional dimension,” I wonder why Mennonite and otherdenominational missiologists are so sparsely represented in his discussion. Examples might include Jacob Loewen, Donald Jacobs, Hans Kasdorf, Lois Barrett, James Krabill, David Bosch, Andrew Walls, and C. René Padilla.

These criticisms not withstanding, the Anabaptist-descended churches and indeed the world family of churches are in the author’s debt for presenting in one volume this wide-ranging, substantive, biblical, historical, constructive theology. I expect it will generate rich ecumenical dialogue for some time to come.

Titus F. Guenther, Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, MB

Daniel Schipani, The Way of Wisdom in Pastoral Counseling. Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2003.

The Way of Wisdom in Pastoral Counseling is a carefully argued, thoroughly documented book offering a biblical and theological model that addresses what the author sees as two primary problems facing the field. The first is “a sense of incompetence on the part of many pastoral caregivers in the face of pastoral counseling clinical specialization and professional certification” (4). The second is a “lack of congruence and continuity between pastoral counseling and other ministry arts, especially teaching, preaching, mentoring, and spiritual guidance” (4-5). Schipani attributes these problems to the predominance of the clinical-medical model concerned with “curing” pathology, and the existentialist-anthropological paradigm “with autonomy and self realization as its primary goals” (7). His model reconnects pastoral counseling to its ecclesial foundation and identifies the minister as the normative pastoral counselor.

Schipani proposes the biblical motif of wisdom in the context of the reign of God as an overarching metaphor for pastoral counseling, and suggests wisdom in the light of God as a guiding principle. Jesus, he states, models the one who most fully embodies the wisdom of God. The wisdom tradition illuminates fundamental existential questions such as “How shall we live in conformity with the normative culture?” and “How shall we fashion together the kind of world that pleases God?”(39) Wisdom in the light of God provides a framework for counseling that offers guidance to live wisely, discernment between cultural wisdom and God’s alternative wisdom, perspectives on wholeness and holiness, and reflections that connect human experience to the faith tradition. Setting wisdom in the context of the reign of God keeps in focus “the ultimate normative culture in which God’s dream for the world is being realized and will be fully realized beyond history”(39). Concern for peace, justice, ethics, transformation, right living, salvation, and liberation are all contained within an understanding of that reign.

The author likens pastoral counselors to biblical sages, the practical theologians of the Hebrew wisdom tradition. They both reflected on the tradition and kept its meaning “practical and life-oriented”(42). While acknowledging the value of psychology and other human sciences, Schipani recalls counseling to its roots in the biblical tradition and calls for “awakening, nurturing, and developing people’s moral and spiritual intelligence”(54).

This book raises several questions. One of the primary theological and philosophical questions underlying counseling is, How do people change? Do they change in the presence and context of an enhancing, liberating, and affirming relationship, or through transforming negative cognitions to more realistic beliefs and views? Schipani cautions against a “relational model” with its connection to Rogerian and psychoanalytic approaches to psychotherapy (95-96), and promotes a cognitive approach that assists people to develop and live into a new vision of reality for themselves and their world.

But surely our theology is inherently relational. That we are created in the image of God is a relational affirmation; the Christian affirmation is that we most fully know ourselves in relation to God through Christ. And while Jesus was a teacher of wisdom, his approach to ministry was relational. I suggest that pastoral counselors not promote one approach as more theologically grounded than another, but instead ask which one best suits the needs of the care receiver.

This concern leads to my second question. Schipani rightly notes that a relational model has greater potential to create conditions for boundary violations, including sexual misconduct, and requires engagement with psychological mechanisms such as transference, counter-transference, projection, and resistance. This is beyond the training of most congregational pastors, whose focus is more short-term and problem focused (96). But can’t we affirm both their invaluable counseling, and that of those with specialized training to work with care receivers who may respond to a more long-term, depth, relational approach?[1]

This then leads to my third question. Couldn’t the role of “specialized pastoral counselor” be seen as a missional activity done on behalf of the church, and the counselor be seen as a missionary? Just as contemporary missionaries use the tools and training of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, cultural studies, and social psychology in addition to Biblical studies in order to be a “presence” or witness, so a pastoral counselor uses psychological tools, among others, to provide a ministry of care and witness to persons on the edges psychologically or ecclesiologically, or both. And just as a missionary is commissioned by the church and accountable to it, can’t the work of a specialized counselor be blessed in the same way?[2]

In this volume Schipani wrestles with important questions. He moves beyond challenging what was the predominant pastoral counseling paradigm to offer a thoughtfully constructed biblical and theological framework with guidelines for this work. It is a significant contribution that will be most useful for pastors and pastoral students who engage in time-limited, solution-focused pastoral counseling interventions.

Marianne Mellinger, Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo, ON

Notes

[1] Self-psychology, Object Relations, and more recently Intersubjectivity, are all relational models of psychotherapy that offer an alternative to the existentialist-anthropological paradigm.

[2] The idea of Specialized Pastoral Counseling as a missional activity was first raised with me by John Hershberger in a personal conversation. It is more fully developed in Brian Grant’s A Theology of Pastoral Psychotherapy (Haworth Press, 2001).

Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

This compilation of articles approaches reading scripture as an art rather than a science. The critical methodologies that have dominated and limited the objectives of Bible study in seminaries and universities are here demoted from masters to servants that assist in revealing God’s “action to rescue a lost and broken world” (xiv) in order to “claim us and make us into new people” (xvi).

The articles are guided by “nine theses on the interpretation of scripture,” the product of The Scripture Project, a seminar of scholars and pastors that met at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey from 1998 to 2002 to “recover the church’s rich heritage of biblical interpretation in a dramatically changed cultural environment” (xv). These theses unapologetically accept the New Testament’s witness to Jesus’ identity and treat the Old Testament as part of a single drama for which the death and resurrection of Jesus is the climax. Members of the Church, in which many academics find their home, should welcome this willingness to question the presuppositions of critical scholarship and to consider ways of reading that will reclaim the Bible as the central, authoritative voice in the Church.

The first of four sets of essays, provided by Ellen R. Davis, Robert W. Jenson, Richard Bauckham, and David C. Steinmetz, should be read by all teachers of the Bible in church colleges and seminaries. The critique of higher criticism and modernity is not new, but the articulation of how we move towards a confessional approach to scripture is refreshing. The essays address a number of modern tendencies including the failure of Bible courses to inform faith, the paucity of sermons based upon scripture, and the steep decline in biblical literacy. They offer a framework by which to acknowledge the authority of scripture without shackling oneself to a notion of truth that both limits the capacity for scientific inquiry and the exercise of imagination and denies the presence of troubling passages.

For example, Davis discusses how the OT can be read to illuminate our understanding of Jesus without ignoring the rich tradition of Jewish interpretation. She emphasizes that the Bible should not be reduced to the single theme of salvation but should be read as a revelation of God’s nature and will for God’s people. Bauckham’s essay tackles how we approach scripture as one coherent story without straying into the meta-narrative reading that has legitimized various forms of imperialism in the past.

The essays in part two, provided by Brian E. Daley S.J., James C. Howell, William Stacy Johnson, Christian McSpadden, and L. Gregory Jones, explore the recovery of reading practices employed in the early Church but neglected by modern methodologies. In particular, Daley’s essay “Is Patristic Exegesis Still Usable?” and Jones’s essay, in which he invites us to read scripture the way that Augustine and Martin Luther King, Jr. did, may inspire a renewed engagement with scripture. McSpadden’s essay “Preaching Scripture Faithfully in a Post-Christendom Church” encourages pastors to preach from the Bible by directing them away from a naïve or literalist reading or a dry explication of meaning and toward the creation of a space for wondering about a story or passage.

In the third section, subtitled “Reading Difficult Texts,” Ellen F. Davis introduces the awkward language of “critical traditioning” in order to draw our attention to a tendency within scripture to challenge passages that cease to be edifying or ethical. R.W.L. Moberly, Gary A. Anderson, Richard B. Hays, and Marianne Meye Thompson then illustrate how to use the nine guiding theses to reinvigorate our reading of a selection of passages.The final section contains six sermons given by Davis and Hays, along with brief reflections on how interpretation of lectionary passages informs their homiletics.

Warning: Anabaptist readers may find they must suppress feelings of pride. Authors frequently arrive at a point from which early Anabaptism began. Repeatedly, they conclude that if we read scripture with the presupposition it is making a demand upon us – not simply telling us what to believe but rather in what we should place our trust – we will be called to a life of self-giving and humility.

Jo-Ann A. Brant, Professor of Bible, Goshen College, Goshen, IN

Sean Freyne, Jesus, A Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus- Story. London: T & T Clark International, 2004.

The quest for the historical Jesus has imagined his first-century Galilean setting as either Gentile borderland or Jewish homeland. In line with his previous study (Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988]), Sean Freyne’s Jesus, A Jewish Galilean re-asserts the latter alternative and offers a careful rehabilitation of the Jesus of gospel tradition. For Freyne, the dual context of Israel’s foundational story, and the movement that subsequently came to present Jesus within that story, locates the historical Jesus and defines him as both thoroughly Jewish and deeply Galilean. Although Freyne also references archaeological data and sociological theory, it is the narrative tradition of the gospels and particularly how it participates in the reception of the Hebrew scriptures in the Second Temple period that directs his inquiry. For him, this tradition stands closer to the social reality of first-century Galilee than do later reconstructions “of our own making.”

However, the book is less about the material constraints of Jesus’ Galilean ministry than the Galilean Jesus’ self-conscious engagement with the religious tradition of Israel. Freyne suggests that Jesus’ attitude toward the ecology of Galilee was grounded in the Israelite tradition of the creator God (ch. 2). He finds in Jesus’ travel from barren desert to fertile lower Galilee a sense of “potential blessedness” (42-43); in his association with Caphernaum by the Sea of Galilee, an affirmation of the divine overthrow of chaos (53); and in his tour of “the Hermon region” of upper Galilee, a consciousness of the sacred character of the natural world (57-58). Freyne’s Galilean Jesus likewise engages the Israelite tradition of election (ch. 3).

If ideal Israel functions within the scriptural tradition to express both the universalist impulse of the Genesis narratives and the triumphalist impulse of the Deuteronomist, then Jesus’ interest in the “territorially marginalized” Jews of upper Galilee and openness to their pagan environs locates him securely within the former impulse. Freyne encounters much the same fault line within the Zion tradition of Israel (ch. 4). Even in Isaiah, he argues, Zion functions as a symbol of the restoration of Israel and salvation of the nations as well as the triumph of Israel and enslavement of the nations. Like the Isaian “servant community” (Is 65:8-15; 66:2,5,14), Freyne’s Jesus embraces the former, though not without prophetic critique; only insofar as it could include especially the socially and geographically marginalized of Galilee (whether Jew or Gentile) did Zion remain for Jesus a meaningful symbol (116).

Chapters five and six turn increasingly toward the confrontation of tradition and empire. Freyne sees first-century Galilee as characterized by a threat to Jewish identity like that posed by Antiochus Epiphanes in the midsecond century BCE (126). Accordingly, the apocalyptic response of Daniel’s “wise ones” to that crisis (Dan 1:4,17; 11:33-35; 12:3) provides an analogue to the response of Jesus and his followers to the challenge of the Roman Empire. Jesus’ apocalyptic imagination is only further evinced in his avoidance of the Herodian centres of Sepphoris and Tiberias, his critique of Herodian rule (Mk 10:42-46; 11:1-10), and his confrontation of imperial power with the kingdom of God. Jesus’ resistance to that power also challenges the hegemony of the Temple aristocracy in Jerusalem. His attack on the Temple system is seen as a call for radical renewal according to the inclusive Isaian vision of the eschatological temple (155). Since such prophetic “globalization” of Israel’s God had always incurred the resistance of both religious and political authorities, the result for Jesus cannot have been unexpected (168).

Freyne’s assimilation of the canonical framework will doubtless be found problematic. He privileges such narratives as Acts 10:36-41 (Jesus’ “basis-biography”), Lk 4:16-30 (Jesus’ inaugural address), Q 13:34 (Jesus’ prophetic lament over Jerusalem), and Mk 11:15-19 (Jesus’ Isaian condemnation of the Temple) without attending to their redactional intent, and presumes a degree of scriptural engagement on Jesus’ part that begs the question of his “inherited tradition.” The result too often is a Jewish Galilean indistinguishable from his canonical counterpart. Nevertheless, Freyne’s contribution is both timely and erudite. Few scholars command a comparable knowledge of first-century Galilee and fewer still have turned it toward a study of Jesus’ self-understanding. The author’s privileging of Jesus’ inherited religious tradition as the primary context for reconstruction of the quest is as productive as it will be controversial.

Rene Baergen, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto