Book Reviews

Written by: Elizabeth Webster

Created: 01 September 2022

Byrd, Aimee. The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman.
Zondervan Academic: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2022.

Aimee Byrd’s take on Song of Songs is a lot less risqué than it may seem, or is it? Byrd ventures through this oft ignored - because we don’t know what to do with it - part of Scripture to try to give us a new way to look at the relationships between genders. Her aim is to show the intertwined nature of male and female voices in the story of God and call the church to reconsider the way it has limited the voice of women over the centuries. She does so without being heavy-handed, though sharing some of her own personal struggles in using her voice in the church sphere. Byrd is calling us to go beyond the mechanics of the egalitarian v complementarian debate and get to the heart of the matter, the love of God for all his people and his desire to see them flourish.

She does a fantastic job of relating each of her posits to the whole story of Scripture tying her ideas through Genesis to Revelation, wanting to explore a renewed understanding of the dignity and personhood of each gender. She wants to get away from defining genders based upon roles and move towards a new, or reformed, understanding of what it means to be men and women. For someone who already subscribes to the idea of mutuality between genders, Byrd’s take was refreshing. She’s not trying to tell us what we can or can’t do, but rather, encouraging us to find value in our biological sex, something that the world around us is currently breaking down.

Overall, the book gave me a fresh understanding of the Song of Songs, showing the different ways to read it, and encouraging a broader look at the beauty of the language held within, without getting caught on the erotic nature of some of the text. The book seems to say, it’s time for the church to stop feeling uncomfortable in these conversations, and try to step forward and encourage healthy conversation around gender and sex.

While anyone with a good biblical knowledge can probably get around it, I would recommend a read through the Song before you venture into this book.

Elizabeth Webster is an Assistant Minister in the St Hilary’s Network, Melbourne.

Written by: Tim Horman

Created: 01 June 2022

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody
By Helen Pluckrose And James Lindsay, 2020.
Pitchstone Publishig, 2020
Reviewed By Tim Horman

Helen Pluckrose, editor of Aero magazine, and James Lindsay, a mathematician and cultural critic, have written Cynical Theories to explain how Critical Theory has become a driving force of the contemporary culture wars, and to propose a “philosophically liberal way to counter its manifestations in scholarship, activism, and everyday life.” Their book traces the evolution of postmodern and post-structuralist theory over the last 50 years, showing how these theories have moved beyond the academy and into popular culture, particularly the modern Social Justice Movement. Cynical Theories is a story about how the “despair and nihilism” of postmodernism found confidence, which then developed into the sort of radical conviction “normally associated with religious adherence.”

The story, as Pluckrose and Lindsay tell it, begins with the ‘postmodern turn’ of the late 1960’s. Postmodern and post-structuralist academics such as Jean Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, began to deconstruct what the authors call the “old religions” of human thought, which included traditional religious faiths like Christianity, secular ideologies like Marxism, and “cohesive modern systems, such as scientific approaches to knowledge, philosophical liberalism, and the concept of progress.” Early postmodern theory achieved this by questioning the capacity of language to produce meaning, by rejecting the legitimacy of metanarratives, and emphasising the endless deferral of truth or objectivity, since ‘truth’ is merely the socially constructed effect of language games. Such ideas were effective at dismantling those ‘old’ modes of thought, but not particularly useful for reconstructive social change.

Read more: Book Review: Cynical Theories

Written by: Tim Foster

Created: 01 June 2022

Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and what to do about them
JESS WEST
WHEATON: CROSSWAY, 2020

This recently published book offers excellent advice to church leaders. It’s great to see a non Christian writer who recognises the impact of sin, both on the way we lead and on the behaviours of others. You can substitute ‘parishioner’ here for ‘co-worker’ and find good advice on how to deal with challenging people who sap our time and emotional energy. As a social psychologist West categorises different kinds of toxic co-workers (the kiss up/kick downer, the free rider and the gaslighter, to name a few) and describes how best to engage with each of them.

Tim Foster is the Vice Principal of Ridley College and the Director of the Ridley Centre for Leadership.

Written by: Rhys Bezzant

Created: 01 June 2022

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
Carl Trueman
Wheaton: Crossway, 2020
Reviewed By Rhys Bezzant

I don’t often say it, but this book was so good I read it once then listened to it as an audiobook! Carl Trueman, an Englishman teaching in the US, has written an extraordinary overview of the last three hundred years of Western culture, to help explain how the sexual revolution came to pass, and how transgenderism can be understood philosophically within that story. I am a sucker for grand vistas when they help me to investigate the minutiae of an event, and that he admirably achieves. The heart of the book is an evaluation of Rousseau as the fountainhead of modern views of the self, but he goes on to explain how the great Romantic poets Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake reinforce the subjective turn, with Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche rendering the subjective a political force. All that is then needed is the contribution of Freud to sexualise the political. This layering of cultural sediments is a fine example of intellectual history, explaining where great thinkers got their ideas from, how they reshaped those ideas given their own historical moment, and how they passed them on. Ideas matter, for it is not just our material environment that impacts who we are.

Trueman takes up the language of “expressive individualism” to capture the goal of the modern search for identity, with questions of sexuality a case study. So many in the West work with a default position, like Rousseau the French educationalist, that culture is corrupting, so we long for the “state of nature,” in which we were free to express ourselves without the shackles of social expectations. The great Romantic poets worked initially within this mimetic frame of mind, which assumed that meaning was given to us (rather than created by us) and discovered through art. This was in time overturned, as philosophers and poets came to understand that what we had previously accepted as universal and static was actually the dynamic and local product of oppressive historical forces, from which we needed liberation. Christianity was regarded not as offering freedom, but something from which we needed to be freed! As Shelley wrote, “Religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude” (p155).

Expressive individualism, in Trueman’s estimation, therefore doesn’t assume a worldview but instead a social imaginary, as Charles Taylor the Canadian philosopher has argued. We create our world and create ourselves within it. We become plastic people, who find meaning in self-expression: “Freedom for Nietzsche is freedom from essentialism and for selfcreation” (p174). If Marx believed we need a new social self-awareness, if Freud believed we should be open to deep sexual motivations that lurk just beyond our recognition, and if Darwin undermined an exalted and purposeful role for human beings in history, then together they set up profoundly modern ways of grasping what a human being is. Better to begin within ourselves, and from there to invent our own identity according to our own lights. Though with any model for understanding what it means to be human there are philosophical challenges, in this model there is a new danger: “Where once oppression was seen in terms of economic realities (eg poverty, lack of property) or legal categories (eg slavery, lack of freedom), now the matter is more subtle because it relates to issues of psychology and self-consciousness. The political sphere is internalized and subjectivized” (p250). Learning to express ourselves as individuals has a deep prehistory.

Set within the development of expressive individualism, and against the backdrop of longer and larger philosophical shifts in the West, Trueman ultimately wants to explain how a concept like transgenderism makes eminent sense to our contemporaries though it made no sense to his own grandfather. This change within a generation is not to be explained by referring to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s alone! He sets all these particular concerns (and others!) within the sociological analysis of Philip Rieff, who has generated categories like “the triumph of the therapeutic” or “the anticulture,” and the ethical reflections of Alasdair MacIntyre, who has argued that in the modern world truth claims are more like “expressions of emotional preference” (p26). Trueman’s breadth of reading gives great depth to his analysis, even if along the way we might want him to explain or qualify a point further.

This book has won notable awards, for its prose is lucid and its argument coherent, as it tries to guide Christians through a short course in intellectual history and an outline of a way of understanding the process of secularisation. His concluding reflections may at points highlight the weakness of a historian trying to be a prophet, but he is surely right when he concludes: “If sacred or metaphysical order is necessary for cultures to remain stable and coherent, then we currently face an indefinite future of flux, instability, and incoherence.” (p394). I recommend the book to readers who want to find ways to understand the pressure points in contemporary culture.

Rev Dr Rhys Bezzant is Senior Lecturer and Dean of The Anglican Institute Ridley College and Visiting Fellow Yale Divinity School. First published in TMA.