Reviews of Random Books

My family recently moved (a local in-town move), and when packing up my 27 boxes of books, I created a stack of used books I have barely read. And then I wondered: “would anyone else be interested in learning about these random books?” I’m starting a new Substack series, on the venture that others might enjoy short random reviews of random books. This might be a once a month post, or once every other month. We’ll see!

---

I love used bookstores. Not because of the savings, but because of the books. What I really love is finding books I’ve never heard of. With today’s oversaturated market, there are hundreds and thousands of books sitting on second-hand shelves that the algorithm and social media will never tell me about. So I go, and I browse, looking at each title one by one, head tilted for hours as I search for hidden treasure. My criteria for buying used books is not “is this cheaper than Amazon?”, nor “will I actually read this?” My criteria is, rather, twofold:

A) Does this look interesting? And,

B) Will I ever come across this book online?

If the answer to A is “yes,” and the answer to B is “no,” then chances are I will buy the book (if the price is right; money does matter, and some used books are strangely expensive.¹) I don’t always read these books. It’s more like building a library. Often enough, weeks and months go by until I remember a used book and pull it of the shelf because I’m studying or writing on a subject for which it’s relevant. But some of these purchases get neglected for a long time. Like this one.

The first random review in this post is about The Mystery of Continuity: Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine by Jaroslav Pelikan. I’m sure 90% of you just decided to close this email or click to another post. But wait just a minute! Despite its boring title, this is a fascinating book. Whatever your denomination or theological tradition, if you are a Christian, you are influenced by Augustine of Hippo. Even if that’s merely because your tradition disagrees with Augustine. Pelikan, an outstanding church historian who taught at Yale for over 30 years, writes,

“There has, quite literally, been no century of the sixteen centuries since the conversion of Augustine in which he has not been a major intellectual, spiritual, and cultural force. For more than a millennium and a half, continuity with the thought of Augustine has been one of the most persistent themes of Western intellectual history. Thus, although Alfred North Whitehead suggested in his Gifford Lectures that the history of Western thought could be read as a ‘series of footnotes to Plato,’ he could as well have said ‘a series of footnotes to Augustine’” (140).

I have my fair share of disagreements with Augustine², but I have also been deeply moved and edified by his writings. If you’re interested in an overview of Augustine’s most important contributions to Christian thought and Western civilization, this book will meet that need.

Brief Summary

The Mystery of Continuity is a combination of two sets of lectures Pelikan delivered at the University of Virginia in 1984 and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1986. In the first half, Pelikan engages with Augustine’s most influential works: Confessions, City of God, and De Trinitate (On the Trinity; I don’t know why that retains it’s Latin title while the other titles are in English). The second half deals with Augustine’s writings on nature and grace, on the church, and the sacraments. Pelikan artfully traces a thread through of Augustine’s thought that runs through all of those subjects: continuity and discontinuity between God, the human self, history, redemption, the church, and the sacraments.

Some Random Gems

Part of my reason for starting with this book is that Augustine’s work has many connections to the two sections of this newsletter, Theology & Therapy and Thesis 96. Here are some random, relevant gems.

• One of Augustine’s most famous ideas is “faith seeking understanding.” Quoting De Trinitate, Pelikan writes,

  “This meant that ‘faith seeks, understanding finds,’ but also that ‘we ought to believe before we understand.’

  Here is the gem that really caught my eye:

  “The method, then, was to begin and to end with faith, but in between to seek for understanding” (56).

  If you’ve read Iain McGilchrist, or are familiar with some of my adaptations of McGilchrist’s work³, this “method” should sound familiar: right, left, right. In healthy brain functioning, the right hemisphere openly receives new information (whether sensory input, texts, experience, etc.); the left hemisphere analyzes and reasons with that information to understand; and then that information is sent back to the right hemisphere for lived, relational application. RLR for short. Or, FUF: faith, understanding, faith.

• The chapters on the church contain many gems for me, but more challenging than encouraging. I wonder if you’ve heard of the Donatist controversy of the 4th and 5th centuries? If not, the debate will surely sound familiar. The Donatists, named after Donatus Magus, believed that the Catholic church had failed to maintain its holiness during seasons of Roman persecution. The details of that criticism would take us too far afield right now. Pelikan gives Augustine’s nutshell of the conflict:

  “the question between us [Catholics and Donatists] is, ‘Where is the church?’”

  This is a question that gets raised time and time again throughout the past 2,000 years. The Protestant reformation is just one notable instance. And that is one of the main questions among Christians today, is it not? Where is the church of Jesus? How do we know? Who gets to ask and answer that question? One answer Augustine gives is inspired by John’s Gospel, and so obviously that interests me. And it’s a challenging answer:

  “That a man should be a true priest, it is requisite that he should be clothed not with the sacrament alone, but with righteousness, as it is written, “Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness.” But if a man be a priest by virtue of the sacrament alone, as was the high priest Caiphas, the persecutor of the one most true Priest, then even though he himself be not truthful, yet what he gives is true, if he gives not what is his own but what is God’s; as it is said of Caiphas himself, ‘He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied.’” (109).

  Could we, and should we, use that line for someone like Mark Driscoll or Ravi Zacharias or Bill Hybils—if “even though he himself be not truthful, yet what he gives is true, if he gives not what is his own but what is God’s”?

Here is one final quote, which shows that this issue of Donatism is incredibly relevant⁴:

“Until the end of history, then, the pilgrim church would be a mixed body of good and evil, a threshing floor with both wheat and chaff, a flock in which the sacraments were often administered by wolves to wolves. While insisting that church discipline must be practiced and was being practiced within the Catholic Church, Augustine acknowledged that ‘everywhere, on both sides,’ there was a ‘multitude’ of cases of clergy who had fallen into sin, so that ‘the churches are few and far between, whether in cities or in country districts, which do not contain men detected in crimes, and degraded from the ministry.’…[T]he Catholic theory of continuity took account of the reality that the sacraments were often administered by evil men; for if a minister was a good man, he was a partner in the working of the gospel, but if he was an evil man, he did not cease to be a dispenser of the gospel. Thus the church was indeed a congregation of saints, but one in which, ‘by the prayers of the saints who are spiritual within the church," the sacraments also of evil ministers were valid.’ (119, emphasis added)

Question

Was this post interesting to you? Would you be interested in more short reviews from random books? For example, I found a biography last night of Jacobus Arminius for the right price. As a Presbyterian who didn’t learn much unbiased history about the person of John Calvin until after Bible college and seminary, I’m sure very few people know much of anything about Arminius (aside from the theological tradition of Arminianism.)

1. Eg, this book I considered last night while at Half-Price Books on a date with my wife for our eighteenth wedding anniversary. $25 is too much for a book I will probably use too little, but it is 50% cheaper than Amazon, so I really was tempted.

2. Eg, this post:

3. For example, this post, Neither Blender Nor Computer: On metaphors and the mind in your body. In a footnote I made a comment that shows my pattern with used book purchases: “This subtitle comes from Mark Johnson’s book The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. I found it at a local thrift store, but the title will have to do for now, as a cursory glance showed it is way beyond my reading ability.”

4. We could also trace the relevance of this issue throughout history. Eg, early reformer John Hus was accused of and sentenced to death for the heresy of Donatism.