Writing a book review is a little bit like brushing my teeth at this point; I do it without thinking. Ever since I discovered the wonder that is goodreads.com and got a bit more serious about tracking my reading and setting reading goals, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing at least something about every book I read. And so whenever I read something particularly interesting or engaging, I tend to write a lengthier and more detailed review.
My approach to writing reviews is definitely more whimsical than a typical academic book review. I like to focus in on a few salient points that struck me particularly and then to engage the book via reflection, sometimes bringing in another conversation partner as well. The classic “summary plus evaluation” equation for book reviews has always been rather unsatisfying to me because I enjoy a writer who involves himself or herself more directly in the review. Context matters here. For some publications, such as academic journals or professional association publications, it makes sense for the reviewer to fade into the background. But frankly, the kind of depersonalized prose this approach produces is so stripped of human vitality that no one would ever be able to tell if it was written by ChatGPT or not.
In contrast to this, I prefer to read (and write) reviews that emphasize the reviewer’s encounter with the book. One label for this is the review essay: a piece of writing where the reviewer uses his or her encounter with the book as a launching point. This means the resulting piece has a lot more personality in it; more of the writer and slightly less of the book. Sometimes such an essay can actually take two books and put them in conversation with each other. When done well, this approach makes for a compelling piece of writing.
Lately I’ve had a couple of book reviews published. First, at Faith Today, I have a review of Harold Ristau’s book, Spiritual Warfare and Deliverance: How to Minister to the Demonically Oppressed and Possessed. Faith Today has a very limited word count for their reviews, so I wouldn’t say this piece manages to feel like the kind of review essay I prefer. Nevertheless, I’m always grateful for the chance to be published in a print magazine, and the book was very interesting. Second, at TGC Canada, I have a review of Brad Littlejohn’s book Called to Liberty: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. My editor at TGC, Wyatt Graham, prefers the review essay, so I appreciate the freedom to do those.
In an earlier piece, I reflected on the contents of the opening chapter of Samuel G. Parkison’s book To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice. I have since finished that book, and I gave it 4.667 stars over at goodreads. Here is the brief review I left there:
This book is a great achievement. It succeeds in its mission, which is to retrieve the doctrine of the beatific vision for evangelicals, and in so doing, reintroducing new generations of Protestants to the riches of their own tradition. The introduction and opening chapters do a great job situating the modern reader in terms of where we are in late modernity and how that relates to the metaphysical foundations that undergirded earlier eras of Christian thought. The book self-consciously situates itself within the ‘Great Tradition’ and calls evangelicals back to classical Trinitarian theism from the barren wilds of modernist biblicism.
Having been thus oriented, Parkison takes the reader through a number of major figures from the early church, the middle ages, and the Reformation, and explores how the church’s view of the beatific vision has evolved over the centuries. The author then attempts to synthesize the best of these views into a coherent whole that is digestible for modern readers. His distinctive contribution seems to be a more thoroughly trinitarian formulation of the beatific vision, drawing on and continuing the work of Protestant giants such as John Owen and Jonathan Edwards.
One of the book’s strengths is the affective tone, the marriage of academic and spiritual concerns. In other words, the book is edifying and, when rightly read, is sure to bring the reader to worship. That being said, it is still quite dense, and some of the middle chapters felt like a bit of a slog at times. Perseverance, however, is richly rewarded. I recommend it most heartily.
In the Salinas Valley of California, a novel was born. John Steinbeck wove together strands from his own life, the character of the land, and the first few chapters of Genesis to form a story that is epic, loaded with meaning. The book is both broad and narrow in scope; broad in its tracing of multiple generations of the two main families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, and narrow in the way it focuses its gaze into the lives of its main characters.
The book was criticized by some as being too heavy-handed in its message. It’s true that the author does not try too hard to hide what he really believes about human nature, good and evil, and the purpose of life. And yet, Steinbeck is an excellent prose writer, and aside from a few bits of dialogue that I felt were clunky, the book holds together, flows easily, and stands as a massive achievement. I found the clarity of the message to be a positive, not a negative, and the clear allusions to Scripture gave it added depth for me.
While some might complain that the self-conscious patterning of the narrative after the Cain and Abel story betrays a lack of imagination or creativity, this objection is a characteristically modern stupidity. In previous eras, it was expected that great art would be patterned after earlier works. Authors were less originators of novel ideas and more stewards of literary traditions. As they retold the same stories, they modified and added to the tradition, making it their own to some extent, leaving their imprint upon it. Although I love creativity and originality, I think there is a particular kind of literary genius in the older kind of storytelling. And what we think of as original work is often drawing on traditions and stories we simply don’t know, so it feels fresh and new to us even though it isn’t. In fact, there is a special joy in discovering the sources that one’s favourite authors have drawn from: “Oh, that’s where she got that from.”
Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be his magnum opus. It has that kind of feel, both in its length (300,000+ words, 600 pages) and in its gravitas. There is not much levity in the book. It takes hold of the heaviest themes that trouble humanity and wrestles with them page after page. It took eleven years of gestation and one year of uninterrupted writing to complete it. Steinbeck said of it, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” And also: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”
One of the ways this shows up is in the little bits of wisdom Steinbeck seems to have wanted to include in the book. They adorn the narrative but are not in any way necessary to it. For example: “You can boast about anything if it’s all you have have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.” Or, describing how some years were rich and others were lean in the Salinas Valley, “it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
The Salinas Valley in California
The book certainly deals with adult themes—prostitution and murder—but not in a prurient way. I much prefer this handling of such themes to what I encountered in Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth, or what sounds like a similar pornographic quality to the Game of Thrones books by George R. R. Martin. Art should be able to depict sin without tempting the reader to it; great art depicts sin in utterly realistic ways and yet manages to encourage virtue in the reader. The divorcing of art from virtue is one of modernity’s great achievements, to our profound detriment. The modern novel is often a kind of literary nihilism, depicting with indifference the beauty and filth and goodness and evil of the world, as if they were all interchangeable and, after all, who can really tell the difference?
In my reading of 20th-century literature, this amorality has often been a prominent feature. Steinbeck himself was known for it. And yet East of Eden concerns itself with good and evil as real categories, and in that sense it feels different from something like Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, or The Stranger by Camus. Steinbeck, who grew up Episcopalian (Anglican) but called himself an agnostic, held on to solid moral categories even as he lost the surest foundation for them. It is said that his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, explores the moral decline of Americans. It was not especially well received, which makes me think I might like it.
Back to East of Eden. I really enjoyed seeing how Steinbeck shaped his story to mirror the Cain and Abel narrative. But more than that, he included in the novel itself an extended reflection on the Cain and Abel story by some of the main characters, including a detailed discussion of the Hebrew translation into English of Genesis 4:7, “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him” (KJV). The crux of the matter is the last phrase. The KJV renders is “thou shalt rule over him [sin].” Now I happen to have studied this verse in some detail in Bible College during my ‘Exegetical Methods’ class, with a focus on the word translated desire. But here the focus is the verb shalt rule, transliterated as “timshal” (תִּמְשָׁל). In contrast to the KJV, the ASV rendered it do thou rule over it. In the novel, the wisest and best character, the servant Lee, rejects both of these translations because the KJV seems to promise that Cain will rule over sin, while the ASV seems to merely command it. Lee concludes that it should be rendered thou mayestrule over it. The key, for Steinbeck’s purposes, is that it is conditional, that it comes down to Cain’s choice. The consensus among all the main modern translations is that the verb should be translated as you must. I see why Steinbeck did what he did, making clear the conditional aspect that I think is nevertheless present in all the translations.
This central challenge to overcome sin and evil is what animates the drama of the book. Will the Cain-like characters give into the malicious impulses that course through their veins, or will they choose to master sin? In the novel, this struggle is personified in Cal, who learns that his mother is a sociopath, a deeply wicked and malicious person. He finds in himself a mix of malice and goodness, and this discovery tempts him to believe that he is in some way fated towards evil, or helpless in the face of it. Lee, who raised him and knows him best, discerns this and speaks directly to it:
Cal drifted toward the door, slowly, softly. He shoved his fists deep in his pockets. “It’s like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know—because I’ve got her in me.” His head was down and his voice was heartbroken.
Lee jumped up. “You stop that!” he said sharply. “You hear me? Don’t let me catch you doing that. Of course you may have that in you. Everybody has. But you’ve got the other too. Here—look up! Look at me!”
Cal raised his head and said wearily, “What do you want?”
“You’ve got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn’t even be wondering if you didn’t have it. Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now—look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it—not your mother.”
The novel intends to leave us with the same challenge.
But for all of its moral force and Biblical pathos, the novel is Christless and devoid of redemption. (This is an observation, not necessarily a criticism.) It manages to capture the essence of life East of Eden, that is, life outside of the garden, life among the thorns. Steinbeck captures as much beauty and goodness as can be found in the created world, and I would argue he borrows heavily from the accumulated capital of Christianity in that effort, but ultimately we are left confronted with a moral law, the imperative to choose between good and evil, and the haunting sense that we have not the power to choose rightly, so powerful is the pull of sin.
Here is where a writer like Tolstoy or Dickens would, after a few hundred pages of wallowing in the deepest human misery, bring in the transformative power of love and of grace to serve as an illustration of the gospel. Steinbeck therefore reflects the exhausted and lifeless character of so much mainline Protestant Christianity in the 20th century. It reminds me of what Alan Jacobs described so movingly in his book, Original Sin, where he traced the views of human sinfulness throughout various times and cultures. He showed how many people have tried to deny the depth and severity of human sin, recasting it or ignoring it. This can be a pleasant sort of delusion. Others accepted the true nature of our depravity but then entered into the joy of salvation in Christ, who alone can solve the problem at its root by generating a new heart, new birth, and new creation within the human person. But the bleakest prospect, and the darkest literature, is produced by those who fully accept the depth of human depravity while, for whatever reason, remaining outside of Christ. These people see and feel the problem rightly but not the solution. East of Eden is firmly in this category.
What we don’t find in East of Eden is any mention of the seed of the woman, the promised one who would crush the head of serpent with bruised heel. But this shadowy figure stands above the entire Genesis narrative and alone gives it cohesion. Why was it important that Abel should live? To produce the promised snake-crusher. And contra Steinbeck’s claim in the novel, we are not the descendants of Cain, but of Seth (see Gen. 5). Yes, we have a little bit of Cain in each of us, but it’s Seth, who Eve says God has given her “in the place of Abel,” who produces both Noah and eventually the Messiah himself, Jesus.
Ultimately, it isn’t our ability to choose good over evil, to resist the sin crouching at our door, which makes the decisive difference. That choice, which we make every day to some extent, is a reflection of what is happening more deeply in our hearts, and what is happening on the vertical, spiritual plane which is all but absent in the novel.
The world-historical event that serves as the great hinge of history occurred on a hill not too terribly far from the land of Cain and Abel, on which a man who was also the Lord bled and died like Abel, murdered by his brothers. Hebrews 12:24 says that Christ’s blood “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” Jon Bloom explains: “For though Abel’s innocent blood cried out for justice against sin, Jesus’s innocent blood cried out for mercy for sinners. Abel’s blood exposed Cain in his wretchedness. Jesus’s blood covers our wretchedness and cleanses us from all sin.”
This may not have been Steinbeck’s understanding, but as I ponder the meaning of the magnificent work of fiction he wrote, I cannot help thanking God that he did not leave us to our own devices in the arid lands East of Eden. Rather, he made a way, through the blood of the cross, to a place even better than the Salinas Valley in the spring.
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For those of you who asked, it seems the only way to secure a copy of the second edition of the Fellowship History book, A Glorious Fellowship of Churches, which was released for the annual convention in November 2023, is to call the Fellowship National offices and request one, old-school style. The cost is $30 (CAD) + shipping.
I thought I’d share a few thoughts about some of the books I’ve been reading. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to an audio version of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Some of those characters, so vividly portrayed in all their individuality, miraculously conjured up by that singular imagination, live on in my own mind: Mr. Peggotty, Mrs. Gummidge (poor, lorn creetur), Wilkins Micawber (too eloquent), Mr. Barkis (Barkis is willin’) and the loathsome, too-humble Uriah Heep. It was a long book, but the longer I listened the less I thought about the length, so immersed and invested was I in the characters and story.
I also got around to reading a classic in the realm of the modern psychedelics renaissance, a topic that I have been researching and writing on for some time now. The book is Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. Pollan is a seasoned journalist and a good writer. The book is made up of two parts; the modern history of psychedelic use in the West and the story of his own psychedelic trips, which he undertook with the help of underground guides & counselors.
The book presents the best case for the use of psychedelics as modern healing medicine, and anyone with compassion for the suffering of others will be drawn to agree that these experiences can engender a sudden change of thinking. The brain science behind all this is all quite fascinating. The adult mind can and does get stuck into ruts of routine, patterns of narrow thought, and obsessive dark loops. The way some of these chemicals affect cognition and allow novel perspectives, the way they engender awe at the world, are all analogs of other experiences. That is why gazing at the starry sky, the ocean, or the grand canyon is so good for us. These are experiences of the transcendent and they make us feel small. They can be healing in the sense of jumping our patterns of thinking out of those ruts and seeing our relationships, our past, and our lives with fresh perspective.
But what about the spiritual aspect to all this? Pollan is a materialist. And despite his experiences that he freely describes as spiritual (the sense of being dissolved into the cosmos and a flood of love for everything in the universe), he remains atheistic. I was a bit amazed at the tenacity of his unbelief; an unbelief that was by no means the norm among the psychedelic practitioners he spent so much time around while writing this book. What was especially revelatory for me was just how deeply the academic and medical side of all this was interwoven with spiritual concepts and aspirations. The key researchers usually had some personal experience of psychedelics that set them on their particular path. Other key stakeholders in the movement were not shy about their own hopes, such as Bob Jesse, whose organization sponsored some early studies, who Pollan describes as having a mission whose focus is “not so much of medicine as of spiritual development.” Joe Welker has done some excellent writing on this particular aspect of the topic over at his Substack called Psychedelic Candor. I really appreciated his article in Christianity Today, which took a different approach to exploring the spiritual dangers of psychedelics than I did.
Pollan’s book is ideally attuned to presenting the promise of psychedelics to a secular audience, and it does this very well. I remain somewhat ambivalent about the gray areas of lower-dose therapies, or MDMA (which does not act like DMT, LSD, or Psilocybin mushrooms in transporting the user to other realms). I know those coming out of occult and New Age practices, including psychedelics for spiritual enlightenment, would oppose any and all use of these substances. Their conscience on the matter is understandably like the recovering alcoholic towards drinking alcohol – weak in the New Testament sense of being more restrictive. The more cautious side of me says why play with fire? Mark and avoid all of this as spiritually dangerous. The more compassionate side of me thinks of the soldiers tormented by PTSD, nightmares and flashbacks; those with stubborn depression that will not lift. Can these substances, in moderation, help? Unfortunately, the findings in the book seemed to show that the biggest results were tied to the most powerful trips. No Christian should be able to ignore the consistent testimony of those who have come to Christ out of heavy psychedelic use.
As for writing, I recently found out I will have a book review of Samuel James’ Digital Liturgies published in the March/April edition of Faith Today, which is probably the lead Christian periodical in Canada. I have another piece in the works, but all in all the writing has been slow these last few weeks. What can I say? It’s deep winter up here, and everything slows down.
Phil's Scribblings 