Contending for the Faith: the Church's Engagement with Culture

Christian Century, Dec 13, 2003 by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

By Ralph C. Wood. Baylor University Press, 281 pp., $26.95.

RALPH WOOD, professor of theology and literature at Baylor University, is an astute literary critic. His The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists is a seminal work for anyone interested in religion and American literature. In recent years he has branched out from his early concentration on Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy to publish and speak on the intersections of the Christian faith and culture. This collection of essays presents a microcosm of Wood's current engagement with postmodernism.

Wood targets two main antagonists: those who, in the interest of promoting the church's engagement with culture, have allowed the tyranny of individualism to flourish; and those who have too readily dismissed as secularists authors and thinkers (like Dickinson and Twain) from whom the church has much to learn. Evangelical culture in particular, he insists, must admit its debt to the historical church, must establish modes of reconnection to it, and must recover its sacramental identity.

As a professor who has taught in three Christian universities or seminaries, Wood is well aware of the lack of theological substance in many of his students, who do not approach Bible study or worship with anywhere near the same vigor as they do their classroom studies. Wood calls for major changes in core curricula with sustained attention to the great texts. He is not slavishly attached to traditional texts, but he is committed to teaching careful analysis and critical thinking. Though the latter are expected outcomes for institutions of higher education, they need more activist proponents among faculty. Wood relates how a careful reading of Huckleberry Finn shook him into moral awareness when he was young, and how Faulkner's "The Bear" brought him to a new level of racial consciousness.

In many churches, Wood observes, students "receive ... a religious version of the same therapeutic pabulum that is being hawked in the non-ecclesial world. Thus does their unecclesial kind of Christianity break the church's irrefragable covenant with the world." Professors in Christian higher education must address this deficiency intentionally, challenging their students to true worship in their chapel services, to excellence even in their commencement exercises. They must expose their students to holiness and mystery. A primary enemy of the faith, Wood contends, is religious sentimentalism, which is characterized by a "devotion not to the Fatherhood but the Daddyhood of God." This goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of worship as performance, which includes polite rounds of applause following each musical contribution.

On a visit to the U.S. in 1962 Karl Barth was asked if he had been saved. When Barth said yes, he had indeed been saved, he was asked to talk about his "salvation experience." Barth replied, "It happened one afternoon in A.D. 34 when Jesus died on the cross," Wood relates. That the cross is a scandal does not seem to have occurred to many evangelical students. In example after example Wood uses literary texts (from DeVries, Dostoevsky, Dickens, O'Connor) to suggest that the truth is not easy or really very "nice." Worship must reveal true beauty--not the trivialization of beauty found in Warner Sallman's Head of Christ painting or in sappy praise songs but the beauty of Christ's sufferings, which is never "pretty."

Wood also addresses the meaninglessness of an abstract "spirituality," as the term is currently used in over 10,000 Web sites. He concludes the book with a list of eight theses meant to challenge evangelical students to approach faith with intellectual and theological rigor.

Wood is the kind of teacher Christian higher education needs more of. He identifies weak thinking; he calls all involved in Christian education to a higher standard than our culture expects of us; he does not let us get away with the religious cliches which roll so easily off our tongues; and he clearly loves his students.

Reviewed by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, dean of humanities and theology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.