A Calvinist Reads: The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

It’s rare for me to read a book that’s modern and trending but when I heard an interview with Jonathan Rosen, I was intrigued enough to line up in my library’s queue and wait my turn for The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

{Warning: this post contains spoilers.]

The Best Minds was worth the wait, but it is not a book that is ultimately satisfying in many ways. It gives us problems but does not give us the solutions. On a societal level, the solutions are not easy and a book like this is just not going to have all the answers, though it does a decent job of painting a picture of the problems. On a more philosophical/theological level, there are answers out there (or rather one Answer) but Rosen is not able to give them to us.

Rosen’s story is non-fiction but it is filtered through his own experiences and perceptions. It is the story of his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a brilliant if cocky boy who seemed destined to conquer the world but was afflicted with schizophrenia and ultimately committed a horrible crime and was sentenced to life in an institution.

For Rosen a lot of the focus is on how this could happen, how our society, through well-intentioned policies enacted in the 1960s and 70s, ends up failing those who have the greatest need. His analysis here is good though ultimately a bit unsatisfying. As is often the case with social programs, there are no easy answers. We went from casting too big a net and sweeping in people who didn’t need institutionalizing and were hurt by that to not casting any net at all and letting those who really did need help forced upon them out to wander the streets in delusion. One would hope that there could be a middle ground. We don’t seem to have found it.

There are a couple of ideas behind the policies that Rosen acknowledges, one good and one bad. On the plus side, a major driving factor behind the move to deinstitutionalization was a respect for the personhood of the individual, even mentally unstable individuals. There was a recognition that we as a society had done things to people — confining them, medicating them against their will and often to a state of catatonia — which violated their rights and their personhood. On the down side, there was a lack of norms, an inability to say what is or isn’t good, what is or isn’t normal, and even ultimately what is reality and what is hallucination. So if the individual chooses to live on the street, naked and covered in lice, the society has no standard by which to say, “no, that isn’t normal and it isn’t good.” And should this individual say that he is a flowerpot that woodchucks are out to get him, there is still no grounds to say this isn’t true. The only standard, the only barrier left is that of violence; only when someone hurts themselves or others can society intervene in any way.

We always struggle with this same basic issue — how to balance the respect for the divine breath in man with the recognition of his fallen, sinful nature. We struggle to be able to say “I value you but I do not accept or approve of everything you say, do, and think.” It is almost trite to say it so we shy away from “love the sinner, hate the sin” but there is still a lot of truth there. And who I am to say what in you is wrong or sinful? We need a standard outside ourselves, outside any human being, that allows us to say both “that is sin” but even “it is not good to live on the street in filth.”

Another concern for Rosen, though one that operates a little more below the surface, is “why him and not me?” In the first part of the book, the dynamic between the two boys feels very familiar. It’s a story that I feel like I have seen in a lot of movies: two males, as close as brothers, alike in many ways but one is the golden child. He outshines all others. Everyone can see his future is bright but, Icarus-like, he flies to close to the sun, or he is cut down by illness or accident, and the remaining boy is left to go on wondering why the one everyone agreed had more potential was taken and he, imperfect being that he is, was left. Rosen gets what both boys wanted — a wife and family and, because both dreamed of being authors, books deals — but with is comes a kind of survivor’s guilt, amplified by a sense of unworthiness.

But the truth is that Rosen is not as unworthy as he seems. Even in their youth there are clues that Laudor is not such a wonderful golden child after all. There is an arrogance and an inability to admit wrong. When Rosen is attacked, Laudor stands back, not only does he not interfere (which might have been dangerous) or run for help, he never admits to his own failings and retells the incident in such a way that his own cowardly part in it is minimized. When the boys compete for a position at the school newspaper, Laudor refuses to be anything but number one. You have to applaud the teacher who seems to be the only one to see that brilliance is not always as important as being able to see others, to compromise and work with them. Rosen, who perhaps today would be diagnosed with some kind of dyslexia, does not do drugs because he feels that his hold on his own faculties is tenuous but Laudor takes what he has been given for granted.

It is a Cain and Abel story, a tale that Laudor himself becomes obsessed with. It is easy to say that Laudor, like Cain, is proud and that as in the biblical story his downfall comes because he fails to appreciate what he has been given. But there is a deeper level as which we can ask why God made each boy as he was. Why is one destined for blessing and the other for a curse? It’s one question that we are never given the answer to.

Though I am not sure Rosen ever uses the word “sin,” he does a wonderful job of describing the far-reaching effects of Laudor’s crime. When Rosen finally snaps and does a horrible thing, he is affected, and of course his victim is, but so are so many others in an ever-widening circle around them. There is a lot of pain and grief to go around. There is also a lot of vicarious guilt, a lot of questioning: “What if I had done…? Could I have prevented this?”

We are given the fall, but, sadly, there is no redemption here. Rosen’s book, in which he himself is a character, ends with pain and with some half-hearted attempts to offer solutions (perhaps we can manage to construct a policy which better helps the mentally ill?) but really with no answers. For the social issues, there are not going to be easy answers because they are not easy questions. But for the stain of this crime — this sin (for it is a sin, even if Laudor was hallucinating at the time) — which has spread like a pool of black ink slowly creeping over so many lives there is ultimately hope. There is no sin so awful that it is beyond divine forgiveness.

I am reminded of the Netflix documentary in Jeffrey Dahmer (which I reviewed here). Dahmer, who makes Laudor’s crimes pale in comparison, learned the lesson when he saw another serial killer repent: If he can be forgiven even for that, then so can I. Laudor himself as the book ends does not seem to have learned this. After his crime, he retreats into himself and never has true clarity again because he cannot face what he has done. He can’t face it because he sees no hope of healing and of redemption.

As one reads The Best Minds it is easy to identify with Rosen. He is the everyman, the imperfectly human character. But ultimately that is not where we need to place ourselves in this story. We are all Laudor. Perhaps we are even more guilty than he is (if one can measure such things) because while most of our misdeeds will not be so headline-grabbing, neither do most of us have the excuse of mental illness. But we need to be able to look and say not “how can some people be like that?” but “the same basic tendencies that are in him and in me.” It is the same fallenness and we, like Laudor, could easily be left in despair. But there is hope because there is forgiveness and redemption. There is One who can wash away all that staining black ink of sin if we trust in His ability and not our own.

2023 Book Read

It counts as long as I get this post out in January, right?

Books Read 2023

Fiction

The Gilded Age: a Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner — A lesser known Twain book but good.

Three Men and a Maid by P. G. Wodehouse (audio book) — Wodehouse=humorous

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh — Also humorous. A short read.

Murder Your Employer by Rupert Holmes — An easy, funny read.

East of Eden, Travels with Charley, The Winter of Our Discontent, The Grapes of Wrath, and Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck — As I did in 2022, I tried to read a number of books by one author. I like East of Eden (though the bit of biblical interpretation that forms a key concept in the book is just not supported by the Hebrew) but I think The Winter of Our Discontent is the overlooked volume which may be his best.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf — I know it’s supposed to be a feminist manifesto of sorts. Is it wrong that my main thought was: Of course the woman is the one who got everything done while no one noticed; tell me something I don’t know. I did enjoy the book though.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath — Another book I had never read that is supposed to be significant. I liked the story but the message seemed to fall flat.

The Reef by Edith Wharton — I like Wharton. This is not her best.

The Claverings by Anthony Trollope — I like Trollope for easy, older books.

If Winter Comes by ASM Hutchinson — A hidden gem of a sweet older book

Theology

Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright — I don’t recommend Wright’s theology generally but I think he is on target with a lot of what he has to say about the afterlife.

Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence  by Jon D. Levenson — By an old professor of mine. A lot of what is here is just what I was taught in grad school. It’s hard not to feel sadness at what is being missed in his theology.

General Revelation  by G.C. Berkouwer — I reviewed this book here. This one is dense and so probably not to everyone’s taste.

Worship Feasting Rest Mercy by Daniel Howe — By my pastor 😉

The Sabbath, the Covenant and the House of God by Ken Hanko — Another short book on the Sabbath. This one is pretty basic and easy to digest but it did make me think about the Sabbath in new ways. I wish it had had more practical discussion of Sabbath-keeping.

Mountains in the Mist, A Bunch of Everlastings, and Casket of Cameos by F.W. Boreham — Boreham is a favorite of mine. His books are comforting, not deeply theological. Some of these were re-reads.

“The Greatest Thing in the World” by Henry Drummond — I honestly don’t remember a lot about this one. It is short and inspiring.

“Christ’s Mediatorial Kingship: A Developing Doctrine” by The RPCNA Synod’s special committee
on Christ’s Mediatorial Kingship — I found this paper very helpful in understanding a key RP doctrine and how the language around it has developed over time.

The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism by Daniel Hummel — long and somewhat hard to follow if you don’t already know all the names but an interesting read, especially to see how many of the ideas we take for granted came to be

The Unseen Realm by Michael S. Heifer — reviewed here. Short take: I don’t recommend it.

Reformed Thought: Selected Writings of William Young edited by Joel Beeke and Ray Lanning — I had never heard of Young but stumbled across him. He helped me understand some things about how the Dutch Reformed tradition has evolved (not necessarily for the better). I wish I could find more of his writings, particularly his thoughts on education.

Strange New World by Carl Trueman — This is the shorter version of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self which I had previously read. We did this as a women’s book study. I do really like it. It’s not an easy read but it very helpful for understanding how our society got to be where it is on gender issues. We found as a group that we had more compassion and understanding for those we would disagree with after reading this volume. I do wish the book had more practical applications.

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield — I read this one pretty quickly hoping it would be a good follow-up book to study after Trueman’s. There is a lot here that is good. Butterfield shines when she gets to the practical ideas on how to deal with a child with gender issues. There are other bits that give me reservations about recommending it or reading it in a group though.

The Other Worldview by Peter Jones — Butterfield’s book led me to this one. At times Jones seems to go too far with his thesis but the basic paradigm of every philosophy being Oneist (all things are connected) or Twoist (creation and Creator are separate) is helpful for understanding a lot of what is going on in one’s social media feed these days.

Tell Her Story by Nijay Gupta — If any book were going to convince me to be egalitarian, this would be it. Gupta does well when he is dealing with historical scholarship but ultimately, as with many modern Christian books, his arguments are based on an ever-growing (yet unstable) pile of “possibly”s and “perhaps”es. Where we start and what verse we take as normative when discussing gender roles in the Bible seems to make so much difference. Gupta like many (most? all?) egalitarians starts with descriptive passages (eg. Was Phoebe a deacon?) and discusses the prescriptive ones (eg. “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority…”) only at the end as an epilogue. This just seems like a backwards approach to any biblical issue.

What God has to Say About Our Bodies by Sam Allberry — This may be the one we study next. I listened to it as an audiobook (because I could access it for free that way) and really liked it. It touches on issues of transgenderism and all that is trendy but is much more comprehensive on its view our our bodies.

Education

Teaching from Rest by Sarah Mackenzie — I wish I had had this little book when my kids were younger. Well worth the read for anyone homeschooling.

Miscellaneous

From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks — On how we think and finding what you should/want to do later in life. (Am I “later in life” already?)

Book Review: The Unseen Realm

I seem to see more and more lately in the reformed world on spiritual beings and their influence. Michael S. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm was recommended by one source and so I picked it up, not fully knowing exactly what it was about or who Heiser was.

It turns out we actually share an academic pedigree (up to a point at least). Heiser received a Ph.D. in biblical Hebrew from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is the same small (but quite good) program where I did my undergrad¹ and got a Master’s in biblical Hebrew.² It appears that he was there a few years after I left so we did not overlap but I think we must have known people in common. All of which is to say, I know where Heiser is coming from, academically speaking. We have a common intellectual background and many of the observations he makes, particularly those that arise from the text of the Old Testament, are things that I was taught as well.

I will add that Heiser was a Christian (was, because he passed away not long ago).³ From the little bit of poking around I have done online, I have no reason to doubt the reality or sincerity of Heiser’s faith. But there are also some pretty big differences between his brand of Christianity and mine. Specifically, I am reformed (aka Calvinist) and he is not. While we start from many of the same places, this difference proves pretty significant in where we end up.

My short take on The Unseen Realm is that Heiser has some good observations that I think could be very useful to bring to a more general Christian audience but that he also makes some assumptions and has some ways of dealing with the text that cause him to push things too far so that he ends up in places I would not go. Ultimately, I cannot recommend his book.⁴

Heiser’s story is a well-known, even cliched, one: Christian student goes to study the Bible at a secular institution, is confronted with new ideas, and has his faith shaken.⁵ For Heiser, this did not lead to an abandonment of that faith but it did lead to some pretty big readjustments.

The text that initially threw Heiser for a loop is Psalm 82:1 which, as Heiser quotes it,⁶ reads:

God [elohim] stands in the divine assembly;

he administers judgment in the midst of the gods [elohim].

The picture we are given here and in a number of other places in the Old Testament is of a kind of divine assembly. It is not God alone but God in the midst of what is essentially a small congregation of gods (little “g”). This idea that there is a divine council is the basis for all that follows, for a whole system that Heiser goes on to develop. This is a bit of a stretch. We can accept the idea that the Bible speaks as if there is a divine council, even that there is something like this, without drawing all the conclusions that he does.

Having told a bit of his story and introduced his subject, Heiser gives us the “rules of engagement” in chapter 2. This is key because it is Heiser’s presuppositions and the ways that he deals with the biblical text that are going to explain why he goes one way and I would go another.

Heiser says that Psalm 82 caused an intellectual crisis for him because it broke his filter. He had been reading the text through a lens and didn’t even know it. So he threw away his filter. As a part of his desire to get rid of his “filters,” Heiser argues that we must read the biblical text as its original audience would have done:

“The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of then biblical writers — the context that produced the Bible. Every other context is alien to the biblical writers and, therefore, to the Bible. Yet there is a pervasive tendency in the believing Church to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions, and denominational differences.” ⁷

(p. 18; emphasis original)

On the surface, this may sound good. It has a ring of sola scriptura to it — just the Bible in its original context. But this is not how we read and understand the Scriptures. None of us come to the text without what Heiser calls “filters.” We always have ideas, often unconscious ones, that are lurking in the back of our minds influencing how we understand the text. It is always good to consider what the human author of a text would have known and how his original audience would have understood him, but this is not all there is. Even apart from the Bible, it is an open question how we understand any form of art whether the artist’s or author’s intent defines the meaning of the piece or if there can be meaning that he never intended. This is even more true when it comes to the biblical text which we believe has not just human authors but a divine one. God’s Word was for the original audience but not just for them. It is also for us and the Divine Author knew what was coming though the human authors often would not have. Finally, there is the rejection of creeds and confessions. Now creeds and confessions are not infallible. I believe that the Bible is the “only infallible rule for faith and life.” That is, it is the only rule that is infallible. But it is not all we have. We know, even from Scripture itself, that God’s Word can be misused and misapplied (Luke 4:1-13). As Christians we believe that God the Holy Spirit reveals to us the meaning of His Word and guides us in a right understanding of this. He does this not primarily individually but over time through His church. The creeds and confessions are records of how the church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, has understood His Word. While Heiser is correct that “biblical theology does not derive from the church fathers” (p. 118), we must also have the humility to acknowledge that our forefathers in the faith may be good people to consult when it comes to interpreting the Scriptures.

A second assumption that Heiser makes is that “if it’s weird, it’s important” (p. 23). What he means by this is that the odd passages that we often want to gloss over in Scripture (eg. Genesis 6:1-4) are vital. Now I am not going to say that any part of Scripture is unimportant but there are certain principles that we use to interpret the Bible and one is that the obscure should be interpreted in light of the clear. Heiser demonstrates in this book a tendency to elevate the obscure and to derive from them theories with which he then interprets all of Scripture.

Beyond techniques of interpretation, Heiser comes to the text with a certain theological framework (a “filer” even) which I do not share. Specifically, I am reformed and he is Arminian. Though he never uses that language or openly identifies himself as such, we see his views clearly when we talks about God’s management style, man’s ability to image God, and God’s foreknowledge.

Heiser has a particular, and very non-reformed, understanding of how God relates to His creatures. “God decrees his will and leaves it to his administrative household to carry out these decrees” (p. 61). God’s management style (if you will) is relatively hands-off; He decides what is to be done but leaves the specifics up to His servants. He bases this primarily on 1 Kings 22:19-22 and Daniel 4. I will not spend a lot of time on the specifics of his argument except to say that it is always tricky to base a theological position on a narrative text (or two in this case). The passage from Daniel comes in a dream or vision so we have to allow that it may not be literal. In passages like the one from 1 Kings that Heiser cites, we have to consider that we may be getting a story from a certain perspective and again these passages should be read in the light of others which are more clear on these issues.

At times Heiser speaks of God as a slightly distanced manager who is nonetheless still in control of the final outcomes. At other times, his God seems to be one who is not really in control but is dependent upon the whims of His creatures. His plans are thwarted: “God’s plan that all the earth be Eden came to a screeching halt almost as soon as it began.” (p. 143). His creatures are able to obstruct His plans (p. 429) and so He is dependent on their actions and responses: “We mustn’t conclude that God didn’t try to turn the heart of his people back to himself.” (p. 257) He is not a God who planned the salvation of His people from before creation but One who had to come up with a plan B and adapt to circumstances He did not control: “As Israel reached the final stages of failure, God announced through the prophets that plans had changed.” (p. 245)

Heiser spends some time on what it means that man is made in the image of God. After discussing some of the options, he concludes that the image of God is something man does rather than an ability or characteristics he has. He argues that the image cannot be an ability like intelligence, reasoning ability, or communication because then those who die in infancy or who are severely handicapped could not be in God’s image and any pro-life stance who would undermined (p. 48). He concludes instead that the image of God is something that we do, a calling if you will. Specifically, it has to do with being like God in having dominion. Now this is not my position but neither is it a unique one. I would say it is well within orthodox Christian theology.⁸ The problem is that Heiser seems to circle back around on himself. Having said that the image is not an attribute but a thing we are called to do, he then makes this calling to image God dependent on one human ability: the ability to choose freely. Imaging for Heiser is only possible because of an ability and that ability is the free will: “If humanity had not been created with genuine freedom, representation of God would have been impossible” (p. 70). Here he seems to contradict his own pro-life argument when we says that imaging God is something that those “who survive birth without suffering severe impairment” are able to do (p. 70). I am less concerned with the pro-life argument here than with the rampant Arminianism. Heiser, without reference to the biblical text, maintains both that man is free to choose to image God or not and that he can actively do good by imaging God. As reformed people, we would say that man apart from saving grace can neither do actual good nor even will to do good. Heiser says man can do both — he wills good and he does good. His argument is that since God is not a robot or automaton that we, to be like Him, must also be beings able to freely will (p. 70) though he has argued elsewhere that we cannot just identify the image of God with characteristics or abilities of God (p. 48), even including free will on the list of attributes which we are not to identify as the image of God in man (p. 46).

If this all seems confusing, that’s because it is. To sum up, Heiser’s line of thought seems to be:

1. The image of God has been identified with one of more of these attributes of God, giving a list that includes free will. (pp. 46-48)
2. The image of God cannot be limited to these attributes or the unborn and handicapped people could not be said to be in the image of God and pro-life arguments would be undermined. (p. 48)
3. The image of God is rather something we are called to do: “To be human is to image God” (p. 50).
4. In order to do this thing — which Heiser assumes we are able to do — we must have free will (p. 69).
5. Free will is an attribute of God and so to be in His image, we must have it or we wouldn’t be like Him. (p. 70)
6. Oh, and by the way, it is only people who survive birth and develop more or less normally who can actually image God. (p. 70)

Not content to weigh in on the free will debate, Heiser also tackles the issue of predestination (p. 71). Here again, his methodology is suspect because he bases his understanding of what is a pretty big theological issue on one text, and that one a narrative, without considering other texts which speak more directly to the issue. As Heiser begins to discuss this issue, he again makes the appeal that we need to lay aside our theological systems and think like an ancient Israelite (p. 72). While there are many instances in which knowing how the original audience thought will help us gain a better understanding, we also need to allow that man’s understanding of God has evolved over time, not because God Himself has changed but because He has revealed Himself with progressive clarity to His people. There are many Old Testament texts that we are going to have more clarity on than the original audience did or even than their human authors (remember that the disciples did not see fully Christ in the Old Testament until after the resurrection; Lk. 24:27).

Heiser’s position is that God can have foreknowledge without predetermining events. The passage he goes to for this is 1 Samuel 23:1-13. Here David asks the Lord if the men of Keilah will deliver him into Saul’s hand. The Lord says yes, they will, and so David changes course and the men do not deliver him over to Saul. Heiser argues that since God was wrong (he said the men would deliver David over and they did not) that He did not predestine or predetermine what happens.⁹ God’s knowledge was conditional. There is another way to read this passage, however. David is not consulting the Lord just to know what will happen. As those going to battle in the Old Testament often do, he is consulting the Lord before going to fight so that he can decide what course of action to take. There is an implied conditional —if I go to meet Saul, will they hand me over? The answer he gets is yes, if you do, they will, but the “if” never happens because David changes course. God was answering a hypothetical. He was not wrong just because the “if” didn’t happen. It is not that Heiser’s interpretation is impossible, but when deciding how to interpret this passage, we should do so in the light of other biblical texts which speak more clearly to this very complicated theological issue.

Heiser often shows a lack of understanding, or at least a carelessness, of basic theology. He says that after the Fall “God, the Life-giver, forgave Adam and Eve” (p. 143). No doubt God did forgive them; but only later through the death of God the Son. Again, he says “We affirm that Jesus is on of those Persons. He is God. But in another respect, Jesus isn’t God — he is not the Father.” (p. 172) I don’t think he is meaning to make a heretical point here but the language is careless; there is no way in which Jesus isn’t God.

Heiser also seems to make little, unsubstantiated assumptions which can spiral into larger issues. A small one would be that, had the Fall not happened, “Adam and Eve would have been the mediators between God and other humans, their own children.” (p. 261) And similarly: “Had the fall not occurred, humanity would have been glorified and made part of the [divine] council” (p. 56). Working off of this, Heiser further argues that, once God has gone to plan B and worked around the obstacles thrown in His way by His creatures, that His original plan will come to fruition and believing humans will be made divine.

This idea that humans will be divinized is called theosis and it is not unique to Heiser. But neither is it good Protestant theology. (Theosis, as the term is usually used, is generally associated with the Eastern Orthodox church.) In Heiser’s defense (if it is a defense), I will say that it not entirely clearly what he means by divinization. At times he seems to use the term “divine” to just mean “spiritual.” Early in the book, when arguing for the concept of a divine council and divine beings other than God Himself, he is clear that to be “divine” as he uses the term is not to be like God in all ways. The elohim are not omnipresent or omnipotent (p. 35) but are merely “inhabitants of the spiritual world” (p. 37). And yet at the end of the book, when Heiser says that we humans will become divine, he does equate divinity with becoming like God (p. 357). He says that: “Joining God’s divine family is inextricably linked to the New Testament concept of becoming like Jesus — becoming divine.” (p. 363). This is not how we usually speak. We do believe that God’s people are being and will be conformed to Christ’s image (Rom. 8:29) but we do not say that we will become divine like He is. Heiser seems to conflate these concepts when he says that “theosis” is “being transformed into his likeness” and that our destiny is “immortality as a divinized human” (p. 364).

When he looks at the Sons of God and the Nephilim in Genesis 6:1-4, Heiser says that the marriages in this passage are what corrupted the earth and led to the flood (p. 115). Now these few verses do seem like a kind of prelude to the flood story but the Bible does not connect them or blame these beings (however we identify them) for the flood. We are told that it is humanity’s sin that led to the flood (Gen. 6:5). Heiser later argues that either the flood was not universal and did not kill everyone or that the sons of God again had relations with human women and produced more Nephilim (p. 218). This is a theory he plays out as he argues that the reason the Israelites were told to kill the inhabitants of the land was that they were not fully human; there were among them partial descendants of the sons of God (and if any fully human people were killed in the process, they were unfortunate collateral damage; pp. 232, 240). This may be pleasing on some level as it seems to mitigate one of the classic thorny issues of the Old testament — how could God order what was basically a genocide of the Canaanites? The problem is that there is little scriptural basis for any of it.

The Unseen Realm is a long book and there is much more we could discuss. Though my review has been largely critical, Heiser does make some good observations based on the Hebrew text and the world that the original Israelite audience would have known. Unfortunately, these are obscured by Heiser’s flawed methodology, his unclear and often imprecise thinking, and above all his own theological filter of which he does not seem to be aware but which is so very, very Arminian.

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1. As far as I know, I am the only one who actually majored in biblical Hebrew as an undergrad so all of my coursework in the department was done with grad students. ↩︎
2. Having gotten a BA and an MA in biblical Hebrew from UW, I had done most of their coursework so I went on to a Ph.D. program at another school (it rhymes with Shmarvard) though I never finished the Ph.D. since I began having kids, something that affected my academic path as a female more than it would affect that of my male colleagues. ↩︎
3. This was not uncommon in the program at UW. At least when I was there, most of the grad students were Christians and most were what I would call “solid” Christians. The professors tended also to be what you might call people of faith, though as likely to be Jewish as Christian. This was not so true at that other school. ↩︎
4. Some more internet searching has shown me that Heiser is a fairly polarizing figure. He has some strong proponents who seem quite devoted to his ideas but he also has his critics. ↩︎
5. In case you are wondering, I really didn’t have this experience. Though I was raised in the Catholic Church, I didn’t come to faith until college. I was in the biblical Hebrew program at the same time I was becoming Christian so perhaps I just didn’t have as much of a sense of dissoance as others. ↩︎
6. Heiser uses the Lexham English Bible. ↩︎
7. I read the Kindle edition and my page numbers are from that. I apologize if they do not line up with the page numbers in the print edition. ↩︎
8. Heiser would also include the created spiritual beings (what he calls the lesser elohim) among those who image God (p. 71). Again he is not the only one to make this case so I will not say he is unorthodox on this point, but the Scriptures do not tell us that spiritual beings are made in the image of God. ↩︎
9. Heiser speaks only of “predestination” without any nuance. If we wanted to be more precise, we might confine predestination to the doctrine that God has an elect people chosen before the creation of the world and call His control of events such as this one predetermination. ↩︎

Book Review: General Revelation by G.C. Berkouwer

I came to G.C. Berkouwer’s Studies in Dogmatics: General Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1955) with a bit of an agenda. I have said in my own philosophy of education that God’s general revelation is the fodder of education. Put another way, all that stuff we learn and teach our kids — math and literature and science and history and the arts — are subsumed under the heading we call general revelation. Yet there was something is this idea that I didn’t feel I had quite worked out. It is perhaps easier to envision how the knowledge we gain of the physical world could fall under the heading of general revelation, but what of literature and the arts which are mediated through the minds of men, even unredeemed men? How do we justify studying these things?

I had really liked Berkouwer’s work on the image of God in man so I was hopeful that his General Revelation would help me clarify my own thinking. I am not sure it has done so, but there were also a number of places that gave me some insight into how we might think about education.

General Revelation is a long and very meaty book. Berkouwer spends a great deal of time discussing various approaches to the issue at hand and arguing for or against them. A lot of that discussion is not really relevant to my purposes. To briefly sum up Berkouwer’s own take on general revelation I would say:

• Christians have tended to fall off the horse one way or another when it comes to general revelation. There are those who want to deny its existence altogether and there are those who make so much of it that special revelation becomes all but unnecessary.

• General revelation is not natural theology. It does not, as in Roman Catholic theology, rely on the human reason and our ability to know God through creation.

• Rather, general revelation is revelation. That is, it is an act of God in which He reveals. Revelation is a light that comes from God and shines on men whether they are able to perceive it or not. And men, apart from the work of the Spirit, cannot see it. Revelation has not changed but our ability to perceive it was damaged by the Fall. God did not withdraw His revelation post-Fall; it was men who hid themselves from God.  It is not that nature leads us to Christ but that salvation in Christ leads us to be able to see God in nature again.

• Before the Fall, God’s work and His word were intimately connected. They were never meant to be severed, but in the Fall they were. So now too when God’s word is not heard, His working is not understood. The tendency to confine God’s revelation to nature led to an association between general revelation and the natural sciences which in turn led to a dichotomy between scientific and religious knowledge. And, along with it, an opposition between general and special revelation. But, Berkouwer argues, God’s work and His word were originally united. His works are defined by his word so they are not so distinct as we may think.

• We must be careful not to too closely identify general revelation with nature and nature alone. One temptation is to tend toward a pantheism in which God is present in creation simply because it is. But revelation is always an act of God. It is a deliberate revealing. It is not merely that the creation reflects the Creator in a passive way.

• Nor is general revelation confined to nature. Calvin distinguishes three categories: nature, history, and man. Nature, the created world, is God’s work. History is the story of God’s acting. And man as created in the image of God also is a means by which God reveals Himself.

With this last point we begin to get at some of the implications for education. There can be a temptation when we think of education as general revelation to put nature on a pedestal, thinking that it comes most directly from God and therefore is of most value in teaching us. Berkouwer dispels this myth. History as God’s work is revelation. Man, as one created in the image of God, is if anything even more a means of revelation. Berkouwer speaks of man as a mirror of God. In this he gives us a justification for our study of the humanities.

If we are to learn from our fellow men, we must ask: which men? One question I have wrestled with is how much non-Christians can truly know and how much we can learn from them. Berkouwer does not address the educational aspect directly, but he does argue that apart from God, man can only know humanly. “Men,” he says, “may examine and analyze many aspects of human life but in their synthesis they will not get further than a sum total of what they discovered in the different realms of human life” (p. 221). They are limited in their understanding.

Yet the world we live in as a part of western culture is one which is thoroughly steeped in Christianity. It may not seem so when so many around us are just incredibly biblically illiterate and when the most educated seem to despise faith, but the roots of our culture are Christian and the ideas upon which it is founded, and upon which our academic study is based, are Christian ideas. It is Christian because it believes in God as an orderly Creator, which assumes a logical world, one that we as humans can study and make sense of. Christianity gave us science. “The Western-European world, for instance, cannot be conceived of apart from the Gospel and it strongly influences anthropologic thought” (p. 226). It is easy to say that non-Christians can never get to the Truth (capital “T”), but living where and when we do, we cannot know what men entirely devoid of Christianity would understand because even the most pagan modern scholars still rest on the people and ideas which came before them, many of whom were devoutly Christian.

Berkouwer’s purpose in General Revelation is not to discuss education but there are some good insights we can gain from his work. Because of the density of this book, I am not sure that I would recommend it if your purpose is to think about education but if you are looking for a good discussion of views of general revelation from a reformed standpoint, Berkouwer is well worth the time.

A Calvinist Looks at Netflix’s Dahmer (A Video Review)

I have hesitated to write this review because I know that the series itself is controversial. I am even a bit abashed to say that I did watch Netflix’s Dahmer series, but, well, I did. Towards the end of last year I had a lot of work that required my hands but not my brain so I wanted something to watch and I had heard that the series gave a pretty good presentation of the gospel message. Plus I was living in Wisconsin when Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes were discovered so there was a base level of interest there and a feeling of connection to the events.

A couple of caveats before we begin — First, since I did watch this some months ago, there may be inaccuracies in my memory but I will try to describe the series as I recall it. And second, while I will speak of Dahmer and the other characters, I recognize that the Netflix series is a fictionalized account and so my remarks are not really about Dahmer the historical person but the fictionalized movie Dahmer. One critique of the series is that it does take some creative liberties, for instance merging the experiences of a few neighbors into the one prominent neighbor character in the series.

Let’s start with the bad. Dahmer is violent and has a fair degree of sexual content. I wouldn’t say that it is gratuitous and really not much is actually shown but the series does not shy away from the reality of events that were inherently violent and sexual. It is not explicit in the sense of showing nudity but takes the “let the audience know what is happening and then pan away” approach which can at times be even more creepy. I had heard that the gospel content came in episode 7 or so but it actually comes later so I persisted through the series thinking I would get to the good bits any time. If I had known I would have to keep waiting, I might have abandoned the whole enterprise because this was so very hard to watch.

The other bad is the controversy surrounding the series. It seems that its creators did not get the consent of the victims’ families. That is really what makes me hesitant to write this, because I do not want to pile on to that. I can understand that for those affected by these events, that there is probably a desire never to see them recreated and certainly not to see others make money off of them. But I will say that the series did a really good job of showing just how profound the effects of Dahmer’s crimes were, not just on the families but also on all those around him including his neighbors and his parents.

Which brings me to my first observation: the sins, the very heinous sins, of this one man were utterly corrosive, not just to his own soul and to his victims but to everyone around him, anyone even tangentially involved. The series does not shy away from the degree of trauma and disruption that was brought into the lives of so many. While most of us will not become cannibalistic, homosexual murderers, it does make one pause to think about how profound the effects of our sin can be, not just in our own lives but in the lives of those around us.

There is somewhat of a sociological message to Dahmer. Its creators are clearly trying to show that the system failed Jeffrey Dahmer. As an example, his father at one point asks a judge to require him to get help and is turned down. There are also choices that his parents make that may have contributed to his behavior. Yet one is always aware that this is not the whole story. Dahmer himself never says that others failed him or made him who he is. Indeed, he seems always aware of his sin. He knows he is different and that what he does is wrong. Yet — to paraphrase Paul in Romans 7:15 — he does what he hates. Again, the sins here are over the top, more than most people will ever even contemplate, but the basic tendency is so very human. The difference between Dahmer and any of us is a matter of degrees but not of the basic heart condition.

In my denomination, when we have our children baptized, we promise to teach them of their sin nature. This may sound harsh to modern ears, but I have come to think that it is so very essential. The world will tell them a lot of things but it will not tell them this. In fact, it will do everything it can to teach them the exact opposite — that they are good, that they can change on their own, that they don’t need a Savior. Jeffrey Dahmer did some of the worst things we can even imagine and yet (as this series portrays him) he was closer to salvation than many “good” people because he knew he was evil.

Dahmer also knows that he deserves death. It is not clear that he sees is as a punishment and there is no indication that he sees his own death as in any way atoning for his crimes, but he seems to desire death as an escape and the only way to end his sin.

Dahmer’s salvation comes when, in prison, he hears that another infamous serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, has repented.* This leads him to conclude: “If there can be salvation for him who is even worse than me, maybe I too can be saved.” Think about that for a moment. What does this say to us, the audience? As Gacy is to Dahmer so Dahmer is to us. If even Jeffrey Dahmer can repent and come to faith, maybe there is hope for all of us.

At last we are at the gospel presentation which lured me into even starting this series. It is brief but it is not awful. The emphasis is on grace, the fact that we bring nothing to the table — because what could a Dahmer possibly bring? Again, the story before us is an extreme one but none of us have any more to offer to our own salvation than Jeffrey Dahmer did.

I am a little less enamored of the effects of Dahmer’s salvation as the series portrays them. We see him repenting to his father but there is no indication that he reached out in any way to the many, many people whom his deeds impacted. Maybe the series just doesn’t show it, maybe he didn’t have time before his own death. I can’t say if Dahmer’s conversion, which was much touted in Christian circles at the time, was real. I hope it was. But as the series portrays it, there does seem to be a lack. It is not our deeds that save us, but faith and salvation should come with sincere repentance and a desire to atone for one’s deeds in some way. When Dahmer dies at the end, killed in prison, all those people who were affected by his sin are still left with their trauma and pain. It doesn’t magically disappear.

(Side bar: One interesting tidbit that is thrown in at the end of the series, the Dahmer character mentions that he was into occult things as a child. This is said very quickly and not much commented on, but from a Christian perspective, it is hard not to wonder if early childhood experiences with the occult lead to the profound degree of sin in Dahmer’s later life. I don’t want to get too woo-woo about this but I do believe that these things are often related and that there is no harmless experimentation with things that are truly evil.)

The creators of the Dahmer series took liberties with the story and I have no reason to think that they are Christian or intended to give a religious message. Yet from a Christian perspective, they present a compelling story that should lead us not to say “look at how horrible that guy was; I am so much better than him” but “all those things which were so profound and obvious in his life are latent but no less real in mine.” This horrible, horrible story (which I can’t actually recommend since it was so hard to watch) should lead us to repent of our own sin and to see our own need for a Savior who can free us from it.

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*This is one of the details my memory is fuzzy one. It may be that Gacy did not repent per se but just had a priest with him at the time of his own execution or some such. At any rate, it is made clear that Dahmer’s reaction was one of “if him, why not me?” and not just a fear at the thought of his own possible death because, as I said, he wanted to be put to death though he was actually only given life sentences.

Books Read 2022

It is amazing how these pile up, even when you don’t feel you are getting a lot done. Charlotte Mason-style, I like to keep a few books going at once. I find it keeps one from being too bored. I also like to do one really long book a year. This year was The Brothers Karamazov. I don’t have anything picked out for 2023 so I am looking for suggestions there (recent years have included Anna Karenina and Moby Dick).

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky — I think I had read this previously. At least, it seemed really familiar. Like most Russian novels, it is a project and there can be slow sections but they are well worth the effort.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck — A really amusing, short book by Steinbeck. I read this towards the beginning of the year but I believe it had slightly adult themes. I would let my teen read it though.

Cultish  by Amanda Montell — On how language makes cults (or cult-like groups). I found this fascinating. It made me more conscious of how my church and family (two perhaps somewhat cult-like organizations) use language. I don’t think that is all a bad thing — we want to form community and we can use language to do so. But we also need to be aware it is a powerful tool. I did a longer review of this book here.

Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge by Lawrence Weinstein — I found this book through a Facebook ad which is a very odd way to find reading material. I didn’t quite buy into everything the author said but I did like the idea that grammar can make our lives better and enjoy the book.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen — I picked this one up because it covers a time period we were studying. It is not child, or even teen, appropriate. I am not sure it is adult-appropriate. The story is good but it would be better if there just weren’t so much gratuitous stuff. Some of what happens is integral to the plot but I wish modern authors would understand that they can communicate what happens without describing what happens.

When You Rise Up by RC Sproul Jr. — One from the conservative Christian homeschooling movement. There was a lot to agree with but also a lot to object to. I think there are much better books one can read on education. See my full review here.

On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior — I don’t agree with Prior’s take on every book but I love how she approaches books. My review here.

The Call of the Wild + Free by Ainsley Arment — A book popular in homeschooling circles. Arment presents her own philosophy of education. While I don’t agree with her approach, my biggest complaint is that in the process she minimizes other philosophies by saying they can be adapted into her own and not allowing their own fullness to shine through. I did two posts on this one here and here.

Longing to Know by Esther Lightcap Meek — Meek tells us how we know. I loved this book and recommend it highly. Another volume by Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing, which I also read this year, boils things down a bit too much I thought and is not as good. My review of Longing to Know with a particular emphasis on its implications for education is here.

Another Look at “Common Grace” by Hanko — Is Common Grace really grace at all? Hanko makes some good arguments, though not every one is convincing. My review here.

The Sexual Reformation by Aimee Byrd — I don’t think Byrd deserves all the flak she has gotten but honestly her book isn’t great. It is the scholarship itself which is poor and the book doesn’t know quite what it wants to be. My review here.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman — I listened to this on audiobook (because it was free from my library) which is not a great way to tackle a weighty book like Trueman’s. There is a lot to wade through here. I can’t really speak to whether all of what Trueman says is true but he certainly paints a picture of how modern man views himself and how we got here.

Puritanism and Natural Theology by Wallace W Marshall — I don’t have a lot to say on this one. I think I was looking for more than what it was. It is a fairly easy read given the topic.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding — A longer, older book. It’s not going to be in my top 10 favorite books but it was engaging.

“Enoch Arden” by Tennyson  — A poem.

Villette, Shirley, and The Professor by Charlotte  Brontë — I went on a Brontë kick this year. I am not a big fan of the best known books by Brontë sisters, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. These Charlotte Brontë works are much better IMO, Villette and Shirley in particular. The Professor has many of the same elements but with much less actual plot.

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë — And one by Anne Brontë. This one is good too. At one point I also read her Tenant of Wildfeld Hall and recall enjoy that also.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike — Another one what would be a good story if only the author didn’t give us all the adult-themes stuff (and again, yes, it is integral to the plot here but still doesn’t have to be described as much as it is). I wouldn’t give this one to children or teens.

The Wall of Partition by Frances Barclay — A hidden treasure of an older book. I found it on Kindle. The style at first is a little old-fashioned in a too obvious, preachy way but it grew on me and the story is well worth it.

Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene — I really like Greene’s books. This one is very humorous. It reminds me a little of Wodehouse in tone. Some adult themed stuff.

I Say No by Wilkie Collins — I also really like Wilkie Collins. This was another audiobook for a long car ride. It is good for that. I found the ending a little flat but the story is good.

Book Review: The Sexual Reformation

I wasn’t going to read Aimee Byrd’s The Sexual Reformation [1], but then I heard her on a podcast (and then another and another) and I needed to know what she was talking about. Byrd has come to be somewhat of a controversial figure in the reformed and evangelical world. Her last book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (my review here), got her a lot of flak to say the least. My very short take on that book was that while I tend to agree with Byrd in principle, at least on the big issues, I did not find her argument well-reasoned and I have particular concerns about her handling of the biblical text. While I didn’t particularly want to engage with this new book, when I heard her talk and learned that the book is on the Song of Songs and that she draws particular theories about gender from its words, I was intrigued. Since my own background is in biblical Hebrew, I couldn’t resist the pull to see what she was saying about this controversial Old Testament book and how she applies it to modern problems.

There is a lot to discuss here and I think I could write something almost as long as the book itself (which is just shy of 200 pages, by the way). I am going to divide the material up into sections and try to present Byrd’s arguments and my reactions in each one.

Why This Book

In the interviews I have heard, Byrd makes clear that this book comes out of her own experiences over the last couple of years. In a time when she felt oppressed, even by members of her own denomination, the Song of Songs was a comfort to her.

Beyond her personal connection, Byrd aims to restore the Song in modern interpretation. Too often in recent years it has been used as a kind of marriage manual with a focus on the horizontal relationship between husband and wife (p. 2). Byrd looks back to earlier interpretive frameworks which have understood the Song more typologically (p. 43) [2] while also seeking to find some middle ground between “flat-footed” modern approaches and earlier allegorical ones (p. 35).

As she did in her previous book, Byrd also seeks to counter the view of complementarianism espoused by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). Though I think her critiques of this particular movement are at times overstated, I agree with her when she says that “[e]ven the church is still confused about what it means to be a man or a woman.” (p. 1) In the time we are in, the Church needs clear answers to the question of what it means to be male and female and why it even matters that we have two genders. While there are some good resources out there [3], broadly speaking we just don’t have answers to the questions our society is asking.

Byrd’s stated goal in writing The Sexual Reformation is “[t]he recovery of the dignity and personhood of both man and woman” (p. xv). “With the Song of Songs guiding us,” she says, “we will explore the theological meaning behind our sexes, helping Christians to better understand our sexuality as a gift and to grasp the eschatological story our bodies tell of Christ’s love for his church.” (p. xiv) Her purpose is not just theoretical but also practical as she calls us to act upon this new understanding of the sexes: “I’m calling for a small-r reformation in the church regarding the way we understand what the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches about our sexuality.” (p. 17)

While I am not as convinced as Byrd that the Song of Songs is the key to answering all our questions about gender, I do think she is right that there are questions to be answered and that the Church as a whole has not done a good job at finding those answers.

Byrd’s Thesis

Byrd presents her approach to the Song of Songs as a new synthesis of older typological or allegorical interpretations with a modern application for marriage and gender. In these older interpretations the man and woman in the Song are types representing Christ and His bride, the Church. Byrd builds on this, relating the male and female figures not just to Christ and the Church but seeing in the Song an “enfleshing” of “the whole metanarrative of Scripture” (p. 21).

The marriage relationship is a microcosm, an encapsulated version, of God’s relationship with His people (p. 135). For Byrd this relationship and the spousal love of Christ for His Church is what all Scripture is about (p. 93). There is “a typology in God’s design of man and woman, one that unfolds throughout the canon of Scripture” (p. 25). The Bible begins and ends with a wedding (p. 32) and here in the Song, in the middle of the canon, we find another wedding. It is in the Song that we learn “what it really is to be loved, all about desire, all about beauty. The meaningfulness of our sexuality, and our own identity as the bride of Christ.” (p. 25)

The story that Byrd sees playing out in Scripture is also “enfleshed” (a word she uses frequently). That is, our bodies also speak (p. 44) and “tell the story of a gift given in eternity . . . Imagine man and woman revealing the deep mystery of an eternal trinitarian covenant that is prefigured in creation” (p. xi).

I like that Byrd is going back to a more typological interpretation of the Song. I think some recent uses of the book have gone far afield (and even become rather pornographic). The connection between the man/woman and Christ and His Church seems undeniable and is supported by other biblical passages. I would stop short, however, of saying that this is the metanarrative of Scripture. It is an important relationship, certainly, and there is no doubt that God in creating two genders is teaching us about Himself and about our relationship to Him, but is this the story of Scripture? It seems to miss elements. There is much in Byrd’s interpretation about love but little about fall and redemption. I am wary as well of those who connect gender so closely with the Trinity. This is one of the failings of some corners of the complementarian world which Byrd herself criticizes, that they read human gender issues back into the Trinity, but she seems to fall prey to the same tendency (p. 202).

Expanding the Typology

The many types of the woman in particular are significant for Byrd: She is connected to water and wellsprings (pp. 47, 66). She is the New Jerusalem, the holy city (p. 87). She is Zion (p. 81). Her body, her womb particularly, is typological of the tabernacle, the Levitical sacred space (p. 46; cf. p. 181). [4]

There is a duality between the man and the woman as well. In addition to the Christ/Church typology, Byrd connects the man to earth and the woman to heaven, explaining that “in the first man and woman we see representation of the anticipated union of earth (man, as from the dust) and heaven (woman, as not from the dust)” (p. 108). For Byrd, second implies better. The fact that the woman was created second gives her a kind of preeminence, just as Christ was the second and better Adam (p. 179). This is seen both in the order of her creation and in its substance. “She was the crown of creation. She was not from the soil of the earth but was an eschatological marker. When Adam saw the woman, he saw his telos, what he was to become . . . “ (p. 44). And again: “ . . . her very presence [is] beckoning him to the ultimate hope – or telos – of mankind as the collective bride of Christ. Created second, she represents the second order – the final act of creation . . . . “ (p. xii).

One again my reactions are mixed. I do think the Christ/Church typology is strong. I think there are also clear connections in Scripture between women and wells, though whether this is typological is less clear to me. I think there are also good reasons to connect the woman of the Song with the holy city and the New Jerusalem. Here Byrd’s interpretation makes sense of language which we otherwise might not find to be a very flattering description (Song 8:10).

On the other hand, I think Byrd goes much too far in connecting the man/woman pair with earth and heaven. She misrepresents the creation account when she speaks of man as being made from the earth but woman of heavenly substance. Genesis 2 tells us that Eve is made from Adam and therefore also, albeit secondarily, from dust. The witness of Scripture is very clear that they are made from the same stuff. Man and woman together, not woman alone, are the crown of creation. To the degree that the woman represents the Church, I suppose she does point to humanity’s “telos” (another favorite word of Byrd’s), but here again Byrd goes too far. In her attempt to redeem women from those who may degrade them, she errs on the other side, elevating women to a status above that of men. In doing so, she not only degrades men but even perhaps Christ Himself as the woman/Church is exalted over the man/Christ figure.

Practical Applications for Men and Women

One of Byrd’s primary goals is to enable us to better understand and live a biblical conception of gender. While our tendency is to define male and female in opposition to one another, Byrd largely rejects this kind of dualistic interpretation. To the extent that she does distinguish between masculinity and femininity, she looks to the model of Christ and His Church, arguing that “[w]e need to begin with Christ’s spousal love for his bride” (p. 91). Christ’s love is the model of all human love (p. 66) but especially of the love of husband for wife. He is first to love; she responds to this love. In one aspect, we are all feminine in that we are part of the Church, His bride, and as such are receivers of God’s love (p. 68). Men do not need to behave a certain way in order to be men. They are masculine because they are men and women are feminine because they are women (p. 111). There is more similarity than difference: “We are not directed to masculine manhood or feminine womanhood. We are not even directed to biblical manhood or biblical womanhood. We are men and women who are together directed to Christ.” (p. 112)

While Byrd does not draw hard lines between masculinity and femininity, she does implicitly acknowledge male leadership and she does draw conclusions about what it means to be a good leader with the implication that this is how men in power should treat women, and all laypeople, in the Church. As stated at the beginning, one of Byrd’s goals is to restore the dignity of men and women. In her language dignity and personhood are closely linked. She relies on a definition of personhood which she takes from Diane Langberg who defines it in the context of abuse. For Langberg the three components of personhood are: to have a voice, to be in relationship, to have power and shape the world (p. 172). Christ, Byrd says, empowers His followers and so good human leaders, following His example, do not fixate on their own power but seek to empower others (p. 128). Conversely, to limit another’s power is to deny their personhood (p. 121). Just as the lover in the Song calls for and longs to hear his beloved’s voice, so good “[l]eadership brings out the voice of others . . . It gives power to, because leadership recognizes personhood and dignity in men and women and sees them as gifts” (p. 188).

Byrd also brings her ideas about power back to the first chapters of Genesis. To have power she links to being made in the image of God (p. 190). As an aspect of the image, it is inherent in all people, not just males. She spends some time on the last part of Genesis 3:16 which the ESV (in line with CBMW interpretations) translates as: “‘Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.’” For Byrd, this “desire” of the woman’s is a good, God-given desire for her husband which mirrors the right desire of God’s people for Him. As such, this desire is something we should all cultivate (p. 95). It is a desire which is frustrated in this life and in as far as it focuses on one’s spouse because only Christ can rightly fulfill it (p. 78). She lists a few possible interpretations of the man’s “ruling” at the end of the verse. But in the end opts for that of Anna Anderson who says that  “ . . . the woman’s good desire is now thwarted or unrequited . . . “ (p. 96). Byrd at once redeems the woman’s reputation in this verse while impugning the man’s. It is not, she would say, that all men are domineering but “[t]he first ten chapters of the first book of the Bible reveal ‘the striking link between male domination and violence.’” (p. 97) Genesis 3:16 “is not telling us that all men are violent, but that male dominance and violence as the result of sin would be a key factor in thwarting the woman’s desire.” (pp. 97-8). 

I start out agreeing with Byrd — I do think we overdraw the distinctions between masculine and feminine and that we share more in our discipleship than we differ in our gender. But then I think she goes too far again she starts talking about personhood and power. To begin with, Langberg’s definitions may be helpful in the context of abuse, but they do not give us a biblical definition of personhood. There are plenty of people in this world who have no voice and no power whom I would still consider persons. Victims of severe abuse whose tormenters rob them of voice and power and relationship may feel robbed of their personhood but Scripture tells us that they are still people, valuable in the eyes of their Creator.

I could say a lot on Genesis 3:16. (In fact, I am preparing an essay on it which looks back at the Hebrew to understand the words it uses.) For now I will just say that Byrd in an effort to redeem women from a perceived slur shifts the fault to men who, while perhaps not all domineering jerks, are apparently so prone to abuse their power that they are the main cause of violence in the world. I would also quibble with Byrd’s contention that Christ’s example of leadership is one of empowerment. There is a sense, perhaps, in which Christ does empower us — to resist sin, for example — but I am not sure we can take this as a model for human leadership.

Concluding Thoughts

There is a lot more I could say about the content of Byrd’s book (including a number of more minor points I am itching to refute), but I would like to try and stay focused on the big picture. My zoomed out take on The Sexual Reformation would be that it starts with a very real problem, how the Church defines male and female and how they relate to one another. It takes us back to a better footing in our interpretation of an oft-misunderstood book, the Song of Songs. In the process, Byrd makes some good and valid points, for example in reemphasizing the typology of the man and woman of the Song as Christ and the Church.

But my biggest criticism is that Byrd often just goes too far. Another book I read recently talks about how we know and the patterns we form of the world [5]. Byrd clearly has a pattern and she seeks to apply it to such a degree that she tends to overstep and see what she expects everywhere. In her effort to bring back dignity to women in the Church, she swings too far the other direction and robs men. I find her scholarship a little sloppy as well. She has a tendency as well to present an interpretation as a “perhaps” and then to run with it or to present a variety of interpretations on a given point and then to select the one she likes without actually giving evidence in support of it.

Beyond that, I am just not sure Byrd makes the case she thinks she does. She is clearly very invested in her subject and she is good at identifying the problems, but in the end I still don’t see how our bodies “tell the story.” I don’t find myself walking away from this book with an explanation of gender that I can explain to others.

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Notes:

[1] Aimee Byrd. The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2022.

[2] One pet peeve would be that she uses words like allegorical, typological, and symbolic, and even speaks of “echoes” within the text but does not clearly delineate these terms or even make clear where her interpretation falls.

[3] I would recommend to you my own denomination’s publications: The Gospel & Sexual Orientation and Gender as Calling: the Gospel and Gender Identity (Crown and Covenant). You can see my booklist for gender issues here.

[4] For this last point, the Levitical sacred space, Byrd cites Richard Whitekettle. She does not fully explain his argument, however, or tell us what the connection is between womb and sacred space. She does relate the laws to protect women and to purify them after their periods or childbirth to their tabernacle typology (p. 48). Later, in another statement which is not fully explained, she says: “In the act of giving birth, woman typifies the birth of the church through messianic suffering. The womb is a prototype of that true, fortified city.” (p. 201)

[5] See my review of Esther Lightcap Meek’s Longing to Know.

Book Review: Another Look at “Common Grace”

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Though one of my criticisms of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education has been that she attributes too much good to human nature [1], my own philosophy assumes that there is good out there that we are able to access apart from the Scriptures and that all people, regardless of their election, are able to do this to some extent. I have referred to these good things [2], the fodder of education, as “general revelation,” but I realize that this brings up some theological issues about how we define general revelation, if we even acknowledge that there is a general revelation of God.

For the sake of my own understanding, I have been picking up books on general revelation along with the related concepts of common grace and natural law with an eye to fleshing out my thought. It is perhaps not hard for Christians to accept that studying the physical creation will tell us something about its Creator. The Scriptures themselves point us to this study (Prov. 6:6; Job 12:7-9; Matt. 6:26-28). But why should we immerse ourselves in art or literature? What is the value in studying these very man-created works?

In my current expedition, the first book I have finished is one that denies both Common Grace and General Revelation: Another Looks at “Common Grace” by Herman C. Hanko. [3] Hanko is a minister in the Protestant Reformed Church and the position he presents is not unique to him but typifies his denomination. It is by no means the mainstream reformed position and yet it is also not completely to be discounted as a mere fringe element.

I was initially attracted to Hanko’s thought by a portion of his book which I read online because it seems to present a view of the image of God which at least has some resonance with my own. When I say that I think the image of God in man was lost in the Fall and that people, apart from saving grace [4], do not bear the image, that produces a strong reaction because one may assume that I am saying other things as well — that abortion is okay; that I don’t value my non-Christian neighbor. This reaction comes because we have defined “the image of God” very broadly, but, I would argue, not very biblically.

Hanko says the same sort of process is happening when we speak of common grace and general revelation. He is seeking to define these terms in a particular way, a biblical way. We may have a knee-jerk reaction to what seems like a denial of basic reformed doctrines, but we must hear his arguments out to see what he is actually saying. Hanko himself makes clear that he is not rejecting everything that is usually encompassed by those two doctrines.

Before we turn to Hanko’s argument, it is worth defining the terms as they are generally used. Hanko himself gives very good summaries of the prevalent views. Common grace refers to “‘the natural blessings which God showers upon man in the present life'” (p. 11; quoting Bavinck). These blessings are sent not just to the elect but to the wicked as well as “fruits of God’s kindness” (p. 14). Common Grace “prevents chaos and preserves the creation; it gives power to man, order in creation, and produces science, government, art, etc.” (p. 16). Its effect is not just negative and restraining but also positive and active (p. 17).

The doctrine of General Revelation tells us that God has communicated to man through two books: Scripture (special revelation) and Creation. “[T]he general idea is this: God reveals Himself in two ways to men. He reveals Himself in Scripture and He reveals Himself in creation and history.” (p. 141) General Revelation is included — along with government, public opinion, and divine punishments and rewards — as one means of Common Grace (p. 12). In particular, it is a means by which God restrains sin (pp. 109, 140) and enables man to perform civil good (p. 140). It comes “to all men without exception through the creation” (p. 119).

Hanko does not deny all that is meant by these terms. His argument is that there is no grace that is common and no revelation that is general. The key for him is how we define these terms — grace and revelation. He looks to how the Scriptures use the terms as his starting place. Grace in the Bible, Hanko argues, means “good pleasure, favor, goodwill” (p. 35). It is “spontaneous favor” which God bestows because He in His nature is gracious (p. 37), not because of any merit on the part of the recipient. The term grace, Hanko says, is never used in the Scriptures other than to refer to God’s saving grace by which He redeems the elect (p. 36). Thus, he concludes, grace as it is used in the Bible is always particular (pp. 41-2, 50); it is never “common.”

Yet Hanko does not deny that ” . . . God’s gifts are good and that He gives these good gifts to all men” (p. 99). “Let it be clearly understood: the good gifts which God gives are indeed good . . . He bestows good gifts on men. Rain and sunshine, health and well-being are good gifts. No one has, so far as I know, ever denied this.” (p. 75) We forget as well that just as evil people receive what we term “good” so “good” people receive what we term evil. “The rain and sunshine are, indeed, the good gifts of God; the drought and floods are His judgment. And all, without exception, receive both.” (p. 87) The difference is not in what comes to us but in its effect in our lives: “Disease and trouble, sorrow and pain, come to the righteous, as well as to the wicked. But these evils, which are judgments upon wicked men, are blessings for God’s people.” (p. 89) [5] So too God’s good gifts are ultimately a curse in the lives of the reprobate: “These good gifts are, themselves, the means to reveal the wicked as wicked, for they despise God’s good gifts.” (p. 94) And again: “God’s good gifts to reprobate sinners harden them in their sins so that they are without excuse; God’s good gifts to elect sinners bring them to repentance and faith through the work of the Spirit in their hearts.” (p. 100)

In a similar way, Hanko does not deny that God can be known through His Creation, even saying that He “manifests” Himself to all men through it, but he does dispute the use of the word “revelation” (p. 143). Revelation, he argues, is an unveiling and presupposes “the ability of the part of the audience to see what is unveiled” (p. 144). For Hanko, revelation, like grace, is always particular (p. 145) and is only something that is given to the elect. And yet it is not for Hanko that the reprobate do not know the truth: “Now it ought to be clear that if the wicked suppress the truth [as Romans 1:18-25 indicates], they know that truth. One cannot suppress what he does not know.” (p. 147) In Hanko’s language, God “shows” and “manifests” His truth through Creation to the wicked so that they “know” it (p. 148) and yet he does not deem this revelation.

As with God’s good gifts, so with His manifestation of Himself in Creation, the purpose is different for the reprobate and for the elect. For the unbeliever the book is open but they cannot read it yet it renders them without excuse (p. 168). The believer can know God through the book of creation (p. 163). Its purpose is to lead him to contemplate the things of God (p. 166). From it we learn of Creation and Providence, including God’s working in history: “All that happens in the world, both in the brute creation and in the history of mankind, is a part of that book.” (p. 164)

In making these arguments, a primary concern seems to be that one preserve the doctrine of man’s total inability to do good (apart from saving grace). Hanko is very wary of any interpretation which seems to negate the effects of the Fall to any degree or which begins to speak of any inward change in the reprobate. He does not, for instance, deny that there is restraint of sin in the world (p. 105), but he argues that “although God in His providence has created many ways in which sin is restrained, the nature of man remains unchanged” (p. 133). The effects, for Hanko, are always exterior and never interior to the hearts of the reprobate. Man, apart from saving grace, remains totally corrupt and “incapable of any good” (p. 134). “A man may not be ‘as bad as he can be’ in his outward actions, but this does not mean that he is not ‘as bad as he can be’ in the depravity of his nature.” (p. 135) To admit inward change, to admit Common Grace, would be to devolve into Arminianism. It would be to say that man is not totally depraved in his nature and that he is able to make some decision, some act of the Will, for his own salvation (p. 136).

I find myself mostly convinced that we misuse the term “grace” when we apply it to Common Grace. I am not as convinced that “revelation” is misused. I do not see much distinction between “revelation” and God’s “manifesting” and “showing.” The key to the whole thing seems to be Hanko’s assertion that for something to be revelation it has to be seen by the audience. He uses the example of an art piece which is uncovered before blind people, saying that since they do not see it, it is not revealed (p. 144). I would say that it is revealed even though they do not see it. The act of revelation is in the revealer, not in the reception it gets. [6]

I am concerned as well for the implication for our knowing. In particular, in Hanko’s conception, is there anything that we can learn from non-Christians? Do they have any true knowledge at all? Though he says that God and His law manifest in “the warp and woof of creation” (p. 153) yet the unbeliever cannot read this book (p. 168) and it can only be understood in the light of Scripture (p. 173). For the larger reformed world, Common Grace and General Revelation are are source of culture (p. 28). If we, with Hanko, discard these doctrines, how are we to understand the contribution of non-Christians to the greater body of human understanding? Even within the Scriptures we see that unregenerate people contribute to culture (Gen. 4:21-22). Hanko does not address this question though he alludes to it early on when he speaks disparagingly of science and higher criticism (p. 8).

Overall I found Hanko’s book an interesting and thought-provoking read. Some of his arguments are persuasive, others less so. Since my own concern is education, I would like to have seen some more discussion of practical implications.

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Notes:

[1] For a brief overview of Mason’s philosophy see Introducing Mason. For a summary of my differences with her see this post and also this more recent addition.

[2] “Good things,” I realize is a little vague. I use it to refer to all that is good and true and beautiful, those things which Philippians 4 urges us to concentrate on: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:8; ESV)

[3] Herman C. Hanko. Another Looks at “Common Grace”: Careful Analysis of Some of the More Recent Developments and Expositions of the Doctrine by Mainline Theologians. 2019. Originally published as a series of articles in the Protestant Reformed Theological Journal 1992 to 1997.

[4] You can find my most recent post on the image of God here.

[5] Hanko here goes on to say that we are redeemed through judgment (p. 89). I am not sure what he means by this; he does not seem to be referring to the judgment that fell on Christ for our sake but to judgments we suffer in this life.

[6] This is reminiscent of how Fesko speaks of natural law in his Reforming Apologetics (my review here). It is not that God’s self-revelation in Creation is corrupted (though Hanko would say to come extent it is) but that our ability to see it is corrupted.

How We Know and How it Affects Education (a Book Review)

To read Esther Lightcap Meek’s Longing to Know [1] is to do exactly what the book describes — to begin to know. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It takes bit and pieces that I had previously and, with Meek as guide, weaves them together into a coherent pattern that has helped me understand what it is to know, not just in a theoretical way but also on a very practical level. And this process is exactly what Meek herself proposes. It is her theory of knowing.

Meek begins with a little historical overview of epistemology [2] in western philosophy. She then proposes her own theory of knowing. This is on one level a very bold move. More than 2,000 years after Socrates and Plato, can we really have anything new to say about such a basic human activity as knowing? And yet everything Meek says makes one say, “Oh, yes, that makes perfect sense.”

Meek’s main focus is on what it means to know God. My main interest on this blog is education, which may include knowing God but is not limited to it. What I’d like to do today is to give a brief flyover of Meek’s theory of knowing and then to talk about how we can apply her ideas to education. For a fuller understanding, I do encourage you to read Meek in her own words [3].

Meek’s Epistemology

Narration-style, then, here is my attempt at summarizing Meek’s philosophy of knowing:

We need to think of all knowing as not just learning facts but as something akin to how we know a person. I may say I know a celebrity when I really just know a lot about them, but to truly know is analogous to how I know my friend or my child or my spouse, or even, as in Meek’s extended example, my auto mechanic (Meek knows hers pretty well). In this conception we have to realize that knowing is not an all or nothing affair. There are degrees of knowing which means there is also continued growth in knowing and rarely if ever is there an end-point when we can say “I know all about that” and move on.

The process of coming to know is like doing a connect-the-dots puzzle that has extraneous dots. We have to decide what dots are important and we need to connect them in a way which allows us to begin to see the pattern in them. We start out with a lot of information and we may have some intuitions about it but we don’t really know what is important and what isn’t. Meek talks about clues, subsidiary knowledge, and body sense as things that begin to guide us. We may also have a guide, someone who gives us some direction and helps us know what is and isn’t important or who gives us some idea of what we are looking for.

We begin to truly know when we can see a pattern. We take the many dots, the bits of information we have, and we connect them in some way. We are also then able to look back at all the input we have had and to say which dots are important and which aren’t. There may be dots that didn’t seem to fit and now we can see how they relate. Maybe there are have been gaps and once we see the pattern we can say: “Aha, I don’t see a dot there but now that I have the pattern I know there must be one because . . .” In this way we use the threads of information we started with to create the pattern but we also use the pattern to be able to look back and reevaluate the threads.

As we begin to see patterns we develop something coherent, something that hangs together. All this can happen on a small scale but on a bigger scale what we are forming is what we might call a worldview or a framework.

One big question that other epistemologies raise is how we can know truth. When knowledge is propositional, truth is an either/or. In Meek’s view there can be degrees of truth and no one is likely all right or all wrong in their views. There can be wrong patterns, of course, but even someone with a wrong pattern may still have some aspects correct and some degree of truth in what they believe. We can know that we are right when our pattern accounts for the gaps and for new information. (Of course one wonders if confirmation bias also plays a role here; we likely seek information which confirms our pattern.)

Implications for Education

My own philosophy of education is based largely on that of Charlotte Mason. There is a lot on Mason’s philosophy that I see echoed here in Meek’s thought. Though Mason did not advance a theory of knowing per se, my inclination is that if she had it would have been very like Meek’s. For Mason the goal of education was not to know facts but to build relationships with the material. She called education “the science of relations.” This is about connecting disparate areas of knowledge but also about the relationship the learner builds with the material itself.

Meek’s main concern is knowledge of God so she speaks to very big picture issues but I think it is helpful as well to consider what knowledge of other, more mundane, subjects looks like. When we truly know a person — as Meek does her auto mechanic — we can predict what they would do in a new circumstance. We can see the same sort of knowing in the art expert who is able to look at a newly discovered painting and know (or at least make a very good guess) if it is a real Michelangelo or a forgery. Most of us will never get to that level of knowing Michelangelo, but we will have those moments of recognition. It may be simply that we recognize a painting we have studied in a museum. Or maybe we recognize a bird call in the wild for the first time. Or we can sense where a story is going because we have read so much of that author. These examples fit Meek’s theory of knowing but they also are very “CM.” They are the sorts of knowing that a Charlotte Mason education aims for.

There used to be a kind of saying in the CM world (sorry I don’t know the origin) that in classical education one learns facts first but in Mason’s philosophy ideas are needed first like pegs to hang the facts on. The image given was of a coat rack — you can’t hang the coats without the pegs. Meek’s philosophy seems to say there is a little of each. The pattern is the idea, the relation that is made. You need some input to even form a pattern but once formed the pattern also makes sense of all the dots of information, both those one already has and any new ones that come up. I am not sure what the practical application is here but it could be interesting if there were a way to study how younger children make patterns and incorporate facts. One thing I think we can say is that even the youngest are pattern-building creatures. We can see this even in the first years of life. Babies born into loving environments with the appropriate stimulation form a solid basis for future development and relationships. And, conversely, those who don’t have loving adults in that first year of life establish patterns of relating to others that are very hard to overcome even well into adulthood. This makes sense within Mason’s philosophy. Children are in her words “born persons” [4] and share all the capacities of adults. They form relationships and build knowledge in the same way that we do.

As they grow, we may perhaps have to think more about the bigger patterns as well. I have in the past spoken of the necessity of a framework. Others have called this a worldview. We might also call it a template. Whatever the language, it speaks to the importance of helping children develop a model or a lens through which they can understand the world. For people of faith, of course, this model will very much be about God, who He is, how He acts, and how He relates to man and to the individual specifically. Which brings us right back to Meek’s work — she speaks primarily of knowing God. Though we establish other patterns in life, it is our God-pattern (if you will) that to some degree controls all others. We cannot truly know anything else apart from our knowledge of God. [5]

Because we are worshipping creatures, every child will develop some kind of “God-pattern” even without an acknowledged belief in a deity. While for Mason the role of the teacher is in selecting materials and is relatively hands-off, Meek’s paradigm argues for a slightly more involved role as the parent/teacher serves as a guide as Meek speaks of them. I say this with caution because I think it needs to be done in a very careful manner because we cannot establish patterns for another and it is important that we don’t go overboard here. The child needs to form their own patterns, but at the same time I do think that sometimes they will need help in knowing which “dots” are important or even in knowing what kind of pattern they are looking for. This gets back to what has been one of my main differences with Mason — I don’t think she accounts enough for the fallenness of our natures. She trusts too much to an innate goodness, or at least an ability to chose and do good, in children. I tend to think that we need to give them a little more direction and correction (and I think it is biblical to do so).

The best analogy I can think of for this is in how we do picture study. We began very simply by just looking at pictures. The children were asked to observe and narrate what they have seen but there was little if any direction. Then we tried a curriculum that gave us a little direction. We learned to look at the painting’s composition and to ask questions: Where are the figures in the painting looking? Is there a triangle shape? How are the figures framed? Where does one’s eye go and how does the artists get you to look there? On this way we gathered some tools for looking at pictures and we could take those skills and apply them to others we studied later so that we didn’t need to keep using the curriculum. This is how I imagine the direction we give children working. We give pointers, perhaps often in the form of questions, that allow them to discover the patterns for themselves. The goal of the questions ultimately is not to get at certain answers but to give them the tools they need to find their own patterns.

Wrapping it Up

I very much enjoyed Longing to Know and would call this one a “highly recommended.” I am intrigued as well by the implications for how we know in other areas and particularly for education. Meek has helped me clarify some things in my own thinking and given me new ideas about how education should work to explore as well.

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Notes:

[1] Meek, Esther Lightcap. Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003.

[2] Epistemology is the study of what it means to know and how we know.

[3] Meek seems to have at least two other books on knowing, Loving to Know and A Little Manual for Knowing. I am not sure how the three relate to each other in terms of the development of her ideas beyond that fact that A Little Manual (which is sitting beside me waiting to be read) is indeed much shorter.

[4] This is Mason’s first principle.

[5] Meek didn’t get into this as much as I like but I feel she would say that all true knowledge, all Truth that is, ultimately resides with God. I would like to see more discussion of this specifically and perhaps how it relates to Plato’s idea of ideals.

Karen Swallow Prior’s On Reading Well

I heard Karen Swallow Prior being interviewed on a podcast and knew I wanted to read one of her books. On Reading Well (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2018) provides a brief introduction to Prior’s theories on reading and books and then analyzes a dozen pieces of literature with an eye to drawing out the virtues their characters typify. From the foreward, written by another favorite author, Leland Ryken, I knew I would like what I found.

I don’t know if Prior is familiar with Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education, but I think the two would find themselves kindred spirits. In so many points, Prior’s language mirrors that of Mason. She does not use the phrase “living books” (Mason’s 13th principle) but she gives us a wonderful description of the transformative power of the written word (pp. 10, 12) — if that word comes in a literary form (p. 11; Mason’s principle 13c). Like Mason (and citing Milton), Prior also sees the main task of man as developing virtue by the choosing of good over evil (p. 7; Mason’s 19th principle). To do so, she says, we must read both widely and well. “Literature embodies virtue, first, by offering images of virtue in action and, second, by offering the reader vicarious practice in exercising virtue . . .” (p. 7). She urges us to read hard books and to read slowly. She speaks of books as the food of the mind (Mason’s 8th principle) and speaks of “making connections” (Mason’s 12 principle) through our reading (p. 9). Prior also describes something like narration (Mason’s 14th principle) when she talks about asking her students to restate a passage, a process which “requires deliberation” (p. 8).

Though literature gives us examples of virtue — positive and negative examples — Prior, again like Mason (and citing C.S. Lewis) “cautions against using books merely for lessons” (p. 10). Her emphasis in this volume is on virtue, language much more tied to classical education. For Prior, a Christian, the end of virtue is not virtue itself or human happiness or flourishing but, in the words of the catechism “to glorify God and enjoy him forever” (p. 14).

For the bulk of the book Prior goes through twelve literary works and draws out the cardinal virtues they can teach us. I read this book through which is probably not the best way to approach it. It would be much better to read each work and then the chapter on it (though I had previously read a large number of the works she discusses). One could even do this with teens for a year’s literature course; there are discussion questions at the end as well. There was a time or two when Prior’s analysis rubbed me the wrong way. Her explanation of Ethan Frome, in particular, not necessarily because I disagreed but because it made the characters too understandable, if that makes sense. It is the complication in their characters and their relationship, the contours that are hard to grapple with, that gave them appeal and I did not find that I wanted them explained. This is not a fault on Prior’s part, just a caution from me if you find one of your favorite books here discussed. As Prior acknowledges, there is not one right interpretation of a literary work, though there can be wrong ones, not supported by the text (p. 17).

Perhaps it is only my own aversion to modern classical education (or some incarnations of it), but on a broader level, I am not overly enamored of the focus on virtue. I am not at all sure, though, that what Prior is saying is that all books should only be read with this focus on virtue.

With a few small caveats, then, On Reading Well is a book I would highly recommend. Personally, I would love to know also who Prior’s influences are. If she does not know Charlotte Mason, then she has through different means come to many of the same beliefs in an almost eerily close sort of way.