Stoner is the story of the titular character’s journey from the farms of rural Missouri to the halls of the great state’s university. On the journey, William Stoner epitomizes the intellectual transformation that many 19th century Americans took when they migrated from the hollers of rural America to the classrooms and institutions that would define the 20th. For Stoner, the catalyst of his transformation is an encounter with Archer Sloan. Sloan is the consummate mentor who has a genuine life of the mind and, through his revulsion and rejection of the first World War, illustrates his keen grasp on human nature and its value. After encountering Sloan, Stoner is seduced by the university life and becomes a professor of the humanities. Though the life of his mind is his only solace in a life fraught with emptiness, bitterness and disappointment, even the intellectual life is something he only briefly makes contact with here and there because of the pressure of global conflict, interdepartmental struggle, and familial unrest. I think that his brief affair with Catherine Driscoll which coincidentally is intertwined with their shared passion for the world of ideas seems to illustrate how brief, fleeting and elusive the joy of discovery is. The affair with Catherine is just one of the extended conceits that seem to operate allegorically in the novel. Another is the way that Williams describes Stoner coming to be aware of the look and feel of his own body as he begins to study the humanities illustrating the way his studies expand his understanding of human nature; or the physical deformities of both Charles Walker and Hollis Lomax that seem to display on their exterior the true nature of the institution that Stoner inhabits for his entire academic career. In the end, Stoner’s life is brief, fleeting, and only rarely punctuated by moments of true beauty, and in that way, his existence is a mirror for all of us.
Category: Book Reviews
Reviews of the books that I read
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Five Views of Christ in the Old Testament ed by Gundry, et al.
In one of the more intriguing and dramatic post-resurrection encounters, the gospel of Luke records Jesus meeting two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The disciples don’t recognize Jesus, and so they explain to him the incredible things that have happened in Jerusalem. Jesus, disappointed by their surprise, scolds them for failing to believe, and then beginning with Moses and the prophets, he “interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”
In Five Views of Christ in the Old Testament, in the Counterpoints. Bible and Theology series, five biblical scholars debate what Jesus must have said to Cleopas and his friend that day on the road to Emmaus. Did Jesus scold the disciples for failing to see the significance of OT passages and their relevance to his life and work (First Testament Approach)? Was he disappointed that they failed to see typological, messianic patterns in the OT (Redemption-Historical, Christological Approach)? Or, was he grieved by their failure to submit to the Spirit’s intent in the fuller sense of the OT (Christotelic Approach)?
In other words, how does the Old Testament bear witness to Christ and are certain methods of interpretation more suitable to the task of revealing him? The answers to this question pertain not only to the nature of the biblical text, but also the nature of “reading” itself. So, each contributor articulated their view of the nature of Scripture, the steps interpreters must take to identify Christ’s relationship to the OT, and finally they illustrated their methodology in three test cases.
- First Testament Approach – Goldingay: John Goldingay insists, emphatically, that Christ is not present in the Old Testament. For Goldingay, there is a sharp distinction between meaning and significance. Our priority as interpreters is to understand what the author intended the text to mean to the original audience (whether Goldingay means the original audience of the text as its been received canonically, or at some other stage in development he doesn’t say). What the text means is what we are attempting to discover as interpreters, but as Christians, we take that meaning and apply its significance to our lives. Through theological reflection and studying the meaning of the New Testament, there are ways that the significance of the Old Testament pertains to Christ, but nowhere is Christ present in the meaning of the OT. One of the essential difficulties with Goldingay’s position is the supposed difference between meaning and significance. As Dr. Pennington illustrates in Reading the Gospel Wisely, if two interpreters both read the command “thou shalt not steal,” but one thinks it applies to embezzling and the other to pick-pocketing have they missed the meaning or the significance? Furthermore, does the command to “not steal” mean that the original person that received this command shouldn’t steal? Or does it actually just mean that Moses received this command among nine other commands? Or does it mean that I, today, should not steal? Since words don’t merely mean, but they also do certain things attempting to rigidly distinguish significance from meaning only obscures the complexity of interpretation.
- Christotelic Approach – Longman: Tremper Longman argues that the goal of the Old Testament is to reveal Christ. But, it would be naive to think that every Old Testament author fully understood God’s salvation-historical redemptive program as they were writing. Instead, interpreters should read the Old Testament according to each authors’ intent, and then read the Old Testament a second time in light of what we know about Jesus after the resurrection. The dynamic relationship between these two readings will reveal how Christ is present in the Old Testament, even if Christ is most clearly seen in the sensus plenior (fuller sense), of a particular text. Longman recognizes that biblical interpretation is more of an art than a science (86). But, he prioritize the historical-grammatical method in his view of interpretation. While undoubtedly, historical-grammatical tools of interpretation are necessary for any robust reading of a text, they are still a limited set of tools that will tend toward certain readings that prioritize historical and grammatical conclusions, rather than theological, literary, or anagogic. Also, as DeRouchie points out (113), Longman appears to suggest that a Christian can perform the “first reading” without knowledge of the resurrection and its impact on salvation history which seems just as naive as suggesting that an OT author could have written with the knowledge of the resurrection. So, while I appreciate that Longman recognizes the value of separate readings, his narrow focus on only two readings, and his prioritization of the historical-grammatical reading, limits the power of his methodology.
- Reception-Centered Intertextual Approach – Dharamraj: Havilah Dharamraj advances the idea of a Common Reader, a term borrowed from linguistics, who has access to the public meaning (the corpus of meaning generated by a collection of texts) of the Old Testament and New Testament. From the public meaning, the Common Reader will select a Christocentric “icon” (a dominant theme) in an Old Testament text that relates to an “icon” in a New Testament text. Dharamraj then suggests that by reading these two texts in relationship with each other certain fruitful Christocentric aspects of the meaning of each text will arise. The advantage of Dharamraj’s approach is that it is open and conscious of the way that connections between texts generate meaning. All connections between texts highlight certain aspects of texts and minimize others. And, not all readers are aware of the ways that they are bringing their own preconceived notions about how texts relate to the interpretive process. The downside of Dharamraj’s approach is that it’s not a very good answer to the question of the book. Certainly, bringing disparate Old and New Testament texts together will be a fruitful way to uncover aspects of Christ’s presence in the Old Testament, but what interpretive tools does Dharamraj have to distinguish typology from predictive prophecy? Also, how does theological perspective influence the way the Common Reader groups texts, or should it? Certainly, awareness of the value of reception-centered intertextuality is essential for interpretation, but without theological conviction, it’s incomplete.
- Redemption-historical, Christocentric Approach – Derouchie: – Jason DeRouchie argues that the unity that holds the Scripture together is God’s saving activity in the person of Jesus Christ. According to Derouchie, we should be attempting to read the Old Testament, today, with the same principles of interpretation as New Testament authors, and if we do, then we’ll discover how Old Testament authors intended for us to see Christ’s role in the Old Testament. Derouchie suggests that reading the Old Testament involves consideration of three contexts: the close context, the redemption-historical context, and the canonical content. He also advances seven principles for interpretation that will lead to seeing and celebrating Christ in the OT: predictive prophecy, redemptive-historical trajectories, continuities and discontinuities between covenants, typology, YHWH’s activity, ethical instruction that reflect’s Christ’s character, and the law of love. I appreciate the specificity of DeRouchie’s principles for seeing and celebrating Christ as he’s identified several clearly identifiable patterns in the OT that are literarily sensitive. In general, DeRouchie and interpreters of his ilk, tend to be more literarily sensitive than typical biblical interpreters who emphasize the role of authorial intent. DeRouchie’s principles rely on trajectories, themes, leitmotifs, and other literary qualities that often allude the grasp of more historically oriented scholars. On the other hand, as is typical of biblical scholars that emphasize typology and redemptive-historical trajectories, DeRouchie’s felt need to ground his interpretation in authorial intent leads to specious and motivated exegesis. For instance, DeRouchie argues that because Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac as a “burnt offering” he must either be a sinner or substitute because of the stipulations of the law, and because Isaac isn’t presented as a sinner then he must be a vicarious substitute for the community. It’s also possible that “burnt offering” is being used here much more broadly, without the theological specificity added by the law code, and that DeRouchie is over-reading.
- Premodern Approach – Craig Carter: Craig Carter summarizes premodern exegesis by identifying five ways that Christ was identified in the Old Testament: predictive prophecy, typology, the fourfold sense, Jesus’ recreation as the people of Israel, and prosopological exegesis. According to Carter, modern readers fundamentally misstep, listening for what human authors are saying in the biblical text rather than God who is the primary author of Scripture. In fact, God’s authorship of Scripture is the theological presupposition that should supplant the modern fixation with method. From this foundation, Carter provides four principles for reading: the Scripture is a unity; the literal meaning is the priority; the spiritual sense is real; and, there is a Christological control on meaning. Carter admits that Dharamraj is right that what he articulates isn’t a method (290): Carter suggest that de-centering method is a feature, not a bug, of premodern interpretation. But, attempting to interpret without method seems just as naive as suggesting that OT authors were aware of how their words would be fulfilled by Christ. Also, it’s hard to imagine that any premodern reader would be able to identify their own reading habits in Carter’s depiction which has been heavily shaped by modern and postmodern categories. On the other hand, he’s rightly suspicious of two modern tendencies: ignoring the role of theology in interpretation and assumed methodological naturalism.
I found helpful aspects in almost all of the approaches. But, I was also frustrated while I read the book. Why should we assume that one particular approach to the Old Testament will be more or less correct than any other methodology? Especially, as Longman says, if biblical interpretation is more of an art than a science, than should we be articulating principles of interpretation? Or would it be better to develop dispositions, attitudes, techniques, perspectives, and habits of interpretation? Did the travelers on the road to Emmaus need lessons on biblical interpretation or did they need to have the eyes of their hearts opened to Jesus (Matthew 13)?
For these reasons, my response to this book is that it helped me to think more critically about the methods and methodologies that I appreciate and use, and it motivates me to continue thinking harder about how to talk about the instincts and intuitions that drive my use of the Biblical text. Below are a list of principles, in no particular order, that I’d offer to answer the question: how do I find Christ in the OT?
- The Old Testament is Christian Scripture meaning it’s God’s authoritative and binding words to me, and meaning that it does things that no other book can do like revealing the almighty God in Christ.
- No interpreter can or should read the Old Testament Scripture without theological convictions so they must be examined and utilized while reading.
- Meaning is generated by context, so interpreters must consider context as broadly and deeply as possible.
- Close and careful reading honors the text because these are the primary disciplines that prevent a reader from exerting himself arbitrarily onto a text.
- Biblical texts reward re-reading, especially re-reading in light of new and helpful questions.
- Reading well requires mentorship, and mentors, because the aptitudes and attitudes of a good reader usually cannot be acquired in a depersonalized manner.
- There is no virtue in rejecting methodology just as there is no virtue in privileging one methodology over another. The best readings arise from multiple, densely overlapping, and rich methodologies.
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Becoming Dallas Willard by Gary Moon
Over the last ten years the tide of Young Restless and Reformed evangelicalism has noticeably subsided as a new day has dawned. The best-seller list is now dotted by a few pastors and authors who are also drawing hordes of evangelicals to large conferences that have surpassed Desiring God, T4G, or G3, like the Holy Spirit Conference 2025 hosted by Bridgetown Church. These authors–John Mark Comer, Tyler Staton, Tim Mackie, and Jon Tyson, among others–share a brand of charismatic evangelicalism that focuses on spirituality and owes significant debt to authors from the previous generation like Richard Foster and Eugene Peterson. But, if influence can be weighted by citations in books and podcast episodes, then perhaps no figure is more influential to this new movement than Dallas Willard.
Dallas Willard grew up in poverty in the midwest, and faced significant adversity in his upbringing. His mother died when he was two and his father remarried a woman who didn’t want anything to do with him. Willard would mostly be raised by his older brother and sister-in-law who were both committed Southern Baptists and fundamentalists. Willard eventually went to a fundamentalist bible college Tennessee Temple where he met his wife and graduated with a degree in psychology (a new discipline at the time). After graduation he began to serve in pastoral ministry, but all the while was reading widely in theology and Christian history. His personal reading led him to question whether he was truly equipped to provide answers to the questions his parishioners faced.
He convinced his wife that he needed more education and moved to Baylor where he began to study philosophy. Oddly when he first began his education at Baylor he worked for John R Rice and Jack Hyles, famed fundamentalist church-growth experts of the sixties and seventies, but quickly realized he had little in common with these men. After graduating from Baylor, he pursued a PhD in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Madison. There he discovered the work of Edmund Husserl who would become the subject of most of his academic work.
During his PhD, he arrived at a few theological convictions that informed his work as a pastor. First, Willard believed that the Kingdom of God was a here and now reality. He believed that embracing the gospel should directly inform and impact a person’s daily life. Second, Willard believed that salvation was life with God and that it couldn’t be reduced to a decision or a moment in time. And, finally, Willard believed that ancient spiritual practices were a way to objectively pursue spiritual formation.
With these new found convictions, Willard found tremendous joy ministering to a small congregation outside of Madison. After he completed his studies, he labored over the decision as to whether he should pursue academic work or ministry, but someone told him that if he stayed in the academy the churches doors would always be open, but the same couldn’t be said in reverse. After his doctoral work, he took up a post as a professor of philosophy at USC and taught there until his retirement.
Willard is hardly known today as a philosopher, but instead as a guru of spiritual formation. The two aspects of his work, however, are deeply intertwined. Moon identifies four key themes in Willard’s thinking. First is metaphysical realism. Willard became an professional philosopher because of his interest in classical philosophy. He was interested in answering the big questions, but he found success in the academy because he latched onto a modern philosopher, in Husserl, who was attempting to carve out a path for realism. Willard’s interest in realism was applied to concepts like soul, Kingdom of Heaven, and God as he insisted that they really existed and should be contemplated as such. His book Divine Conspiracy applied metaphysical realism to spiritual concepts. Divine Conspiracy also explores his second major theme: epistemic realism. Willard believed that human persons had direct unmediated knowledge of reality.
The third major theme of his work was the need for a coherent and integrated anthropology. Willard believed that it was essential for Christian theologians and ministers to think deeply about the human condition and articulate the nature of spiritual formation in light of a sophisticated portrait of human nature. Renovation of the Heart is Willard’s book on spiritual formation and human nature. The fourth theme is the objectivity of spiritual disciplines. Willard believed that the spiritual disciplines were an objective and observable process by which human persons can change. His book on spiritual disciplines is Knowing Christ Today.
All of Willard’s thinking flowed from the big four questions: how can one be happy, what is the good, how does one know anything, and what’s real. Jonathan Pennington in his book Jesus the Great Philosopher argues that today very few people are attempting to wrestle with these questions systematically or with any depth. Willard was an exception as a man who brought significant intellectual ability and genuine spiritual sincerity to the task. Though Moon’s biography borders on hagiography at times, it told his story in a compelling and clear way. I’m eager to read more of Willard’s work.
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Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner’s pulitzer prize winning novel, Angle of Repose, is a story told from the vantage point of Lyman Ward, a fifty-eight year old former history professor crippled by a degenerative bone condition. The novel presents as a collection of his voice recordings about a season in his life where he is dedicated to telling the story of his grandmother Susan Ward and her husband Oliver.
Susan Ward is an artist and author who gains some notoriety for cataloging her adventures in the west with her husband Oliver. Oliver, an engineer, bounces from one remote late nineteenth century western location to the next attempting to find work. Throughout the novel, Oliver is described as a quiet and honest man; he’s honest to a fault seemingly unperturbed by the modern world and its degrading tendency, but also never civilized or cultivated to the tastes of his wife Susan. With her immense talent, Susan could have earned a place among the literary elite in the east alongside her childhood friends Augusta and Thomas, but her life becomes an exile away from civilization because of her Quaker influenced commitment to her husband.
As the story progresses, Susan’s resentments of her husband’s failure to provide her the life that she wishes grows despite his honesty and the purity of his intentions. In the shadow of her resentment, lurks Oliver’s best friend and sidekick Frank Sargent. The story of Susan climaxes as she capitulates to her bitterness and takes solace in Frank who has professed his undying love for her. Lyman Ward speculates that while Susan and Frank were together was when Oliver and Susan’s youngest daughter Agnus drowned. The next day Frank killed himself and Oliver retaliated against Susan by ripping up all of her rose bushes.
This story is stitched together by Lyman’s reflections on his own life. As the book careens towards its end, I realized that Lyman’s own life is in many ways illustrated by the story of Susan and Oliver. Lyman’s wife Ellen had left Lyman when he was diagnosed with his condition to be with his surgeon who mysteriously disappeared later. Lyman carries a deep resentment and bitterness for a betrayal that he could never have imagined.
The book ends with wild dream sequence where Lyman imagines his wife returning to make peace with him, but he’s attacked by his assistant because Ada has fallen ill. Lyman reflects on the dream as the book closes imagining whether he will ever be able to forgive his wife Ellen or if he should to merely have the contact.
The book is ambitious in how it paints a portrait of the western frontier through the eyes of a woman through the eyes of her grandson. The picture painted is bleak, but visceral. The emotional dynamics are similar; bleak, but visceral. In characteristic Stegner fashion, there’s a sequence in the book where Shelly tells Lyman that she plans to move to a hippy commune. Lyman sounds off on the inanity of hippy ideologies. A common theme for Stegner he finds the pseudo-romantic notions of the hippies offensive to people who have deeply thought about the flaws and faults of the modern west.
Angle of Repose is the angle at which dirt no longer rolls. It’s a metaphor for the body that’s lying prone because it’s dead or dying. But Lyman’s closing reflection is that it is only a matter of perspective. The angle of repose is death to one person, but seen vertically it’s the posture of someone who is standing straight despite the pain of life.
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Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.” And how beautiful that temporary survival is. Crossing to Safety tells a profound story of friendship and hardship as two couples struggle to survive. And it is definitely a survival worth reading about. I can commend a lot about this story, but here are some of the highlights.
First I loved Stegner’s impeccable sense of place. One of the main settings is Madison, Wisconsin. In Madison–back when you could still drive down State Street–Larry Morgan and his wife Sally face the challenges of professional life for the first time. There they meet their lifelong friends, the Lang’s, who help them explore Lake Manona and force them to take long walks in the cool Midwestern fall. Stegner skillfully highlights Madison’s ironic power; it’s here, in this small city, Midwestern dairy farmers would study under the world’s best and brightest without even leaving the state. Having spent quite a bit of time in Madison, I think he nailed it. Overall I deeply enjoyed my journey back between the lakes with these new companions.
Also I profoundly appreciated Stegner’s portrayal of friendship. CS Lewis in the Four Loves said, “In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company.” Stegner captures Lewis’s idea of grace in friendship through Larry and Sid, the protagonists of Crossing to Safety. Larry admires Sid’s natural grace and powerful presence, and mutually Sid admires Larry’s genuine artistic genius in writing. But they both think that they don’t deserve the other’s friendship. Fundamentally they feel that grace is the foundation of their friendship, and it’s this grace which unites them till the end.
Last I appreciated how Crossing to Safety wrestled with the most difficult questions of life. For instance, near the end of the novel, Larry glimpses his disabled wife, Sally, from a distance. She has braces on her legs and can barely walk, but she is hobbling after her terminally ill best friend trying to help. This image outrages Larry, and he reflects on what he is angry at,
“at it, at fate, at the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man: at what living had done to the woman my life was fused with, what her life had been and was.”The author expresses how he must have felt years before as he nursed his own mother while she lay dying of cancer. Stegner had risen from poor nomad to distinguished literary hero. But no amount of literary success could assuage the cruel ache of his temporary survival.
For Christians, Stegner’s written rage is a gift. We have spent too much time reading sanitized Christian fiction, cheering for Kirk Cameron and hanging old Thomas Kincaid’s. Stegner might not have had all the answers but at least he hated the enemy.
Overall I loved Crossing to Safety. It was compelling and provocative, and I would recommend it to anyone.