This review is based on digital review copies provided by NetGalley.
Justin Holcomb's new books from Zondervan, Know
the Heretics and Know
the Creeds and Councils,
make good companion pieces for
the lay reader who wants greater familiarity with the history of the
Christian faith. Creeds and Councils is
the stronger work, but Heretics has
a more important goal.
I assumed, from
certain tell-tale tics of vocabulary and theological emphasis, that
the two volumes were aimed primarily at an evangelical-leaning
audience. It surprised me to learn that Holcomb is an Episcopal
priest; I rather suspect he went out of his way to be accessible to
the popular evangelical subculture of the US. (Of course, he might
just be more conservative than me. He did get his PhD from Emory, and
I was specifically warned off applying there because I would be too
radical for them.) In my experience, evangelical Christianity tries
to put the Bible above all else. The trouble is, an awful lot of
Christian tradition cannot possibly be derived by the individual from
scripture alone – for example, the Trinity. Creeds and
Councils would be a valuable
book for readers in a position like my own of about five years ago:
unclear about the relationship between certain church doctrines and
scripture, unsatisfied with the answers provided in an evangelical
context, uncertain where to look for a history of doctrine that is
not geared too specifically toward a single denomination.
It's a nicely
laid out book, first explicating the differences between a creed, a
confession, a catechism, and a council, and then going on to examine
a number of important examples of all four. Holcomb hits all the
biggies, from Nicaea and Chalcedon through the Thirty-Nine Articles
and the Westminster Confession down to Vatican II (and, somewhat
surprisingly to me, the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical
Inerrancy). Each chapter provides historical background for the creed
(or council, etc.) in question, a summary of its contents, an
exploration of its theological relevance, discussion questions, and a
list of further reading. It's a solid structure that should have
particular appeal for evangelicals, with their love of expository
preaching. Throughout, Holcomb tries to stress the importance of
knowing this history, critiquing those who “decide to ignore
history altogether and try to reconstruct 'real Christianity' with
nothing more than a Bible” (10). Holcomb's critique has a
particularly evangelical flavor to it, focusing on “being faithful
to God” (10) and how “Jesus continues to build his church” (22)
– not arguments I would personally have used, but appropriate ones
for his audience.
Know the Heretics is
a more exciting and potentially more challenging idea for a lay
evangelical readership. I can't be the only ex-evangelical who has
been told not to even read certain books because of their poisonous
theological content, and I think it's still a pervasive attitude in
certain strands of Christianity that faith is a fragile thing that
must be protected from too strong a challenge lest it crumble. The
distinction between heterodoxy
and heresy is one of
the reasons I left an evangelicalism that seemed narrowly
prescriptivist for the broad theological tent of Anglicanism, and
Holcomb's solid Episcopalian emphasis on that distinction is a
crucial contribution to evangelicalism as I experienced it.
Structurally,
Heretics is similar to
Creeds and Councils,
providing background, content, relevance, discussion questions, and
further reading for each heretic – Gnostics, Marcion, Docetists,
Arius, Pelagius, and so on. However, I have three major reservations
about this volume.
First, at an
epistemic level, I find Holcomb's truth-claims unsatisfying. Again,
this reflects my viewpoint as both an ex-evangelical and a graduate
student in theology and philosophy, but frankly any definitive
statement of theological truth or falsehood makes me uncomfortable. I
am willing to accept value judgments of a given theological statement
as good or bad (referring to its intellectual honesty, its coherence,
its fruitfulness or harmfulness, among others), but in general I
think that to call theology true or false is to make a category
mistake. For example, modalism and partialism are models of
understanding the Trinity; a model is not true or false, but is
misused when it is taken literally or ontologically, rather than
being seen as a way of understanding at least one aspect of something
bigger than itself. To me heresy is not a matter of giving the wrong
answer to a legitimate question, as Holcomb defines it (12), but of
elevating the finite to the level of the infinite. (You could also
call this the
fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Or idolatry.)
Second, I find
Holcomb's soteriology inadequate, and borderline disingenuous.
Substitutionary atonement is throughout presented as the only
orthodox soteriology, and is used to bolster Holcomb's Christology:
“Only a divine Savior can bear the weight of God's wrath in
atonement. Only Jesus as the God-man can satisfy the enormous debt
and penalty caused by human sin against God. … Only a divine Savior
can pay the costly price for redeeming us from our bondage to sin and
death” (97). A major reason for my drift from evangelicalism is my
no longer finding substitutionary atonement sufficient. Frankly, I
think it's an example of the very fallacy I described in the above
paragraph: one specific model of atonement has been concretized above
all other models. The anthropocentrism of this soteriology is
distasteful to me, especially given than John 1:14 states not that
the Word became human (anthropos),
but that the Word became flesh (sarx).
To me, a good soteriology must stress the redemption of all creation,
and thus a good Christology must understand Christ not narrowly as a
“God-man” but expansively as Creator-creation. Holcomb hedges the
possibility of alternate soteriological models, discussing only
Socinus' view (“Jesus' death is only an example,” chapter 12)
which is set up as an unacceptably extreme alternative to
substitution, instead of a different model that demonstrates a
different (but still important) aspect of salvation.
Third, the
heretics of the first chapter, whose heresy is summarized as “The
old rules still apply,” are referred to unreflectively as
“Judaizers.” Christianity's history of antisemitism is such that,
if you're going to use a term like “Judaizers” and be
unrepentantly supersessionist, you had damn well better acknowledge
the embedded anti-Jewishness here and actively combat it. That
Holcomb doesn't is not a minor point of theological disagreement but
a major and unfortunate misstep.
With these
reservations taken under advisement, I do think these two books
provide a generally sound and accessible introduction to the history
of church doctrine, especially for Christians whose denominational
background under-emphasizes the role of tradition and history.
