by Glenn Harold Stassen
Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Ky. 256 pages
REVIEWED BY RIDGEWAY ADDISON
In this book, heralded by its publisher as Glenn Stassen’s magnum opus, Stassen argues that a critically refined return to the theo-political life and teachings of Jesus as a “faithful and solid identity for faith and ethics” — or what he terms the path of “incarnational discipleship” — would help third-millennium believers make better lived sense of the origins, challenges and opportunities of “our rapidly changing and interactive age” and the high tide of secularism that is driving it. Stassen devises this “‘thicker’ Jesus” as metaphor for “incarnational discipleship.” He believes that, to authentically live as contemporary disciples, we have to reground our intents and actions and especially our lifestyles in the essentials of the biblical Jesus’ kingdom platform. Stassen identifies the components of that platform as inclusive community, reconciliatory justice and prophetic, humble dialogue with one another and with our with next-door and global neighbors. According to Stassen, those neighbors often see disbelief in our well-worn creator God as “only one human possibility among others.”
He organizes “A Thicker Jesus” in two parts. In Part One, “Incarnational Discipleship,” he qualifies the shifting sands of contemporary culture, names three dimensions of incarnational discipleship (historically oriented theology, holistic divine sovereignty over all culture and creation, and repentance for ideological captivity to various “-isms”) and argues such discipleship as a critical-realist corrective to Platonic idealism’s sterilization of Christian morality. In Part Two, “Meeting the Seven Challenges of A Secular Age,” Stassen places his model of incarnational discipleship in dialogue with specific markers of contemporary culture that the philosopher Charles Taylor treats in his 2007 text “A Secular Age” — namely, human rights, science, individualism, sin, the cross of Jesus, love and war.
“Thicker Jesus” was thin for me exactly where I hoped it would be more holistic and practical (read “thick”). It was thin in his tertiary use of feminist theology and theologies of interreligious dialogue; thin in his token consideration of Lester and Day as exemplars of radical discipleship; thin in its lack of pastoral consideration for the affective dimensions of Christian spirituality, and the need for our formation in contemplative disciplines. I tend to see those disciplines as even more vital to our faith development as Christian selves and communities than they were to Bonhoeffer and King and their respective flocks.
Stassen could have brought more diverse, practice-based voices to the table and served up less formal theology and more critical, constructive spirituality in this innovative work of Christian ethics. Such a shift would have made his sapient voice more welcome and convincing in the ears and lives of the spiritual seeker, and perhaps even in those of the committed but also very tired, possibly cynical, experience-hungry Christian.
RIDGEWAY ADDISON is an assistant professor in Georgetown University’s School of Nursing and Health Studies, teaching and writing in the areas of spirituality, ethics and practical theodicy.
