Review: Home is the Road

March 16, 2023March 16, 2023 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Home is the Road, Diane Glancy. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022.

Summary: The traveling memoirs of a literature professor listening to the messages the land speaks and what within her answers these messages.

This is a book constantly on the move, as is its author. Diane Glancy is an emeritus literature and creative writing professor, still a visiting professor at various institutions across the country. She lives on the road, driving from place to place in an old Chevy with 180,000 miles on it. She believes the land has messages to which she listens as she drives. Her home is the road. She sleeps at rest stops, eats at roadside restaurants, and offers exquisite descriptions of what she sees.

She writes:

My creative scholarship is on the road by myself, sometimes within the shadow of other cars. When I am working on a project, I am following the trail of some historical character. The land has memory. It keeps a journal of what has passed upon it. It is in the elements–if I stand there long enough. There is something in the solitary that I find its shape and that I find its shape and connection to the past.

She is part Native American, raised in a fundamentalist Christian tradition where “everyone accepted Christ as their Savior.” As fashionable as it is in her circles to scorn Christianity and as problematic as it may be she states, “It has been foundational in my life–even its incomprehensible and off-setting parts. I believe in the Christ who was crucified.”

She chronicles her adventures with movers transporting her household from Kansas to California and her own parallel travels, who break and possibly abscond with some of her stuff, and yet she prays God’s mercy on men who brought fishing poles in their truck.

The book reads like the musings one has when driving alone on a long trip, watching a train in the distance, the slowing of trucks on a steep incline, the “shredding of self” that occurs as the miles pile up, the challenges of faith and the failures of her life, including a failed marriage. Will there be driving in the beyond? She thinks Jesus would have loved interstates (all this on two pages). Another chapter, “At Dawn, When You Drive Again,” consists of fragments of memory, mostly of childhood.

Her chapters on disenfranchisement are perhaps the most powerful. Once again, she holds terrible injustices and gospel truths in tension:

But I stayed. I have always stayed. I always will stay. I belong to Christ. I believe within the gospel is everlasting life. The missionaries came with soldiers to teach us this and to rid us of the desperate attacks of panic.

Movingly, she captures the tragedy of the Dakota Access Pipeline, once more, the imposition of American power over indigenous peoples during a visit to see what was taking place.

What made this travel memoir so powerful was this process of listening to the land, to its story and her own, often painful and yet held in tension with an unwavering belief, a hope that would not let her go any more than her love for the road. This is also an American story, in the grandeur of the landscape, the expanses we see from our network of highways, the spirituality that roots us, even as we wrestle with the pain of our own stories and the moral ambiguities of our national story. But will we listen? Will we stay?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.

Community Doesn’t Stop At Your Feet

September 8, 2021September 8, 2021 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

I’m in the middle of several long books, hence fewer reviews in recent days. So I thought I might share one interesting idea from one of the books I’m reading. In Majority World Theology, theologians from around the world write on the major themes of Christian theology. The situation of various writers offers unique perspectives. One of these was from some Christians from Canada’s indigenous peoples. Writing about community, one writer observed that land for indigenous people was considered part of their communal life. For indigenous peoples, separating people from the land, as occurred with the Cherokee tribes who traveled (and died along) the Trail of Tears in U.S. history, is devastating

Certainly this was true of ancient Israel as well, and part of the grief of exile was the parting of people from their land. I wonder if this is actually true of many people in the world. It makes me think that many of us modern urban Euro-Americans may be the anomaly. We live on land but often think little about it. We live in places from which we draw our life but often think little about its care or future.

Even the quarter acre on which I live is vibrantly alive and I’m part of a complex community of microbes, creatures in the soil (including the grubs of the seventeen year cicadas who emerged this summer and created cacophony), and insects and spiders. Hundreds of species of vegetation draw nutrients and water from the soil and the air and return them as they decay. Squirrels, chipmunks, the occasional skunk, rabbits, possums and raccoons and birds from sparrows to vultures visit our property.

St Francis of Assisi spoke of the animals as his brothers and sisters and preached to the birds. Hildegard of Bingen commented, “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity.” John Paul II loved to ski and hike in his native Poland and urged an “ecological conversion.”

I wonder if our own lack of connection to the land and community with its creatures makes us less sensitive to those around the world who face displacement from their homes, and what a wrenching decision it is to flee one’s home. Even if they leave as a family, they leave a “family” behind, a part of themselves. As sea levels rise, as temperatures and drought in some areas, or inundations in others displace these “climate refugees,” will they find those who grieve with them or will we close our doors to them?

I’m struck that many of our burial rites even sever our relationship to the land. Where at one time, we committed the remains of those who died to the earth, now we keep them in columbariums, or even on a shelf in our homes. We believed “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). In past days, churches had graveyards, where we remembered the “saints of old,” a communion of land, and people past and present.

Might a renewed awareness of our community with the land around us begin to teach us to love the wider world? And might that awareness help us care for those displaced, including those our own forebears displaced? I’m reminded every time I hear the name of a river in my state, and even the name of my state that people lived here long before it was “discovered” and “pioneered.” Many of our roads began as their trails. They left their impact on the community in which I live, even as I will for another generation. And the land ties us together.

Review: The New Christian Zionism

July 31, 2017July 30, 2017 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

The New Christian Zionism, Gerald R. McDermott ed. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016.

Summary: Argues that the Old Testament promises of restoration for Israel, including restoration to the land, can be supported in the New Testament, and that Christian Zionism enjoys a long history of theological support not rooted in premillenial dispensationalism.

A book arguing for a fresh perspective on Christian Zionism strikes me as a brave project. Zionism, once representing the hopes of an oppressed people, now is often cast at the source of oppression of other peoples, particularly Palestinians. Likewise, “Christian” Zionism, often associated with premillenial dispensationalism, has fallen in disrepute in both liberal circles for whom any form of Zionism is reprehensible, and among a significant portion of the evangelical community who reject the two “dispensations” or covenants of dispensationalism, and see the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy through a new people of God comprised of both Jew and Gentile which heralds a trans-national kingdom of God. This view, with which I will admit to being sympathetic, is often referred to as supersessionism. It is for example, reflected in these summary comments on Romans 11 by John R. W. Stott in his exposition of Romans:

“It is clear . . . that the ‘salvation’ of Israel for which Paul has prayed (10:1), to which he will lead his own people by arousing their envy (11:14), which has also come to the Gentiles (11:11; cf. 1:16), and which one day ‘all Israel’ will experience (11:26), is salvation from sin through faith in Christ. It is not a national salvation, for nothing is said about either a political entity or a return to the land. Nor is their any hint of a special way of salvation for the Jews which dispenses with faith in Christ” (p. 304).

Gerald R. McDermott and his other contributors have mounted a formidable rebuttal to this contention. In the introductory section, McDermott contributes two chapters arguing that Christian Zionism has enjoyed a long history in the theology of the church, from the earliest centuries to Barth and Niebuhr in more recent times and that this has by no means been confined to premillenial dispensationalism.

The next section makes, beginning with Craig Blaising’s chapter on hermeneutics, the argument that the advent of Christ does not nullify the promises and hope of Israel, which may be found in the New Testament as well as the Torah. Joel Willets then shows how this is the case in Matthew noting the early Jewish context, the geographical perspective, Davidic messianism, the “turfed” kingdom, and the focus on Jerusalem, the temple, and the atonement. Mark Kinzer makes a similar argument for Luke-Acts, particularly noting the repeated returns to Jerusalem in Acts. David Rudolph tackles Romans giving a memorable summary of his argument in the acronym “GUCCI”:

G The Gifts of Israel
U The Uniqueness of Israel
C The Calling of Israel
C The Confirmation of Israel’s promises
I The Irrevocability of Israel’s election

Part Three concerns “Theology and its Implications.” Mark Tooley traces the mainline embrace, and eventual disenchantment with Zionism, more recently followed by some evangelicals. Robert Benne contributes one of the most fascinating chapters, exploring Reinhold Niebuhr’s Zionism that flows from his theo-political realism as well as his sense of the unique place the Jews have occupied in human history. Robert Nicholson then makes a case that present day Israel has neither violated international law, nor, to any significant degree, the Torah in its occupation of land and treatment of ethnic minorities. Shadi Khalloul, an Aramean Christian makes a similar case, while acknowledging ways Israel has failed in areas of human rights. He contends that as the one democracy in the region, they have done far more to uphold religious and civil rights than the surrounding nations. The book concludes with recommendations for continued scholarship and implications for the church.

One of the subtexts of this discussion is the existence of the present day State of Israel, and how it is to be understood in light of prophecies concerning restoration of Israel to the land and how it is to be regarded as a moral actor on the world stage. Concerning the former, they resist the temptation of dispensationalists to fit this into a “last days” scheme while conceding that the survival of the Jews through history and near-miraculous victories against surround foes may argue for some form of “pre-consummate,” or proleptic fulfillment, anticipating the final fulfillment of all things in Christ’s return. Several authors even argue for a restoration of the nation to the land prior to any form of spiritual transformation. While arguing that support for Israel never warrants support for unjust policies, the authors are fairly muted in their discussion of Jewish settlements of occupied territories and the “fence” that has made life so difficult for many Palestinians.

I was most interested in the arguments from the New Testament but in the end personally found them wanting. They seemed to be readings between the lines that extend promises for the people of Israel to the land that are not explicit in the biblical text. Darrell Bock acknowledges this problem (p. 312), but did not, to my mind give an adequate response. The review of historical theology was helpful, because I, like many would have equated Christian Zionism with premillenial dispensationalism. In terms of making the case for the State of Israel from Christian principle, I thought the four essays in Part Three were the strongest part of this work. In particular, the last two, by Nicholson and Khalloul, provide a counter to the media treatment of Israel, which has been increasingly hostile, and often one-sided in their view, in recent years.

The work challenged me to look harder at the texts around Israel’s hope and how we understand these. In particular, when we speak of a “new heaven and new earth,” and a “new Jerusalem” as the focus of a physical existence in the resurrection, what place is there for Jews, whether as a corporate entity, or at least for Jews, as John Stott speaks of, who trust in Christ? Is there a landed hope for them? Is there any significance in the present day State of Israel?

I do think these scholars have more work to do to make their case. They, along with the publisher, should be commended for engaging this discussion afresh. At the same time, while the term is convenient shorthand and connects to historic realities, I would hope that a better phrase than “Christian Zionism” might be found, for I fear some will never get past a title with this phrase, which would be unfortunate.