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Thomas E. Jenkins, The Character of God: Recovering the Lost Literary Power of American Protestantism, Oxford University Press, 1997

Thomas E. Jenkins's insightful work, The Character of God, explores the changing conception of God’s character over a three-hundred year period in American history. Jenkins centers his discussion on the attempts by various American theologians, preachers and writers to understand God’s anger as expressed in the Bible. For the more sentimental types, wrath portrayed in the character of God was considered unbecoming, while restraint and serenity and love exhibited the heroic ideal. The only way to understand the Biblical passages which demonstrated something otherwise was to view such texts in the Bible as an accommodation to the Israelites primitive state and undeveloped world view.

Jenkins relates the shifts in theological perspective to those in literature. During the time of neoclassicism, a character in a novel had an emotional singularity. There was a clear demonstration of the desirable virtue. A person exhibited reason or restraint or charity as the classical ideal. He or she was challenged by forces on the outside. There was a clearer demarcation between the good and the bad. With the rise of romanticism, the literary character became more complex. There was emotional ambivalence; there was tension. A character was challenged as much by this inner conflict as by any forces arising from without. Anticipating the Freudian revolution, it was thought that the deeper one delved into a particular character, the more inner conflict would be found. Against this backdrop, the author explores how various theologians -- such as Willam Ellery Channing, Horace Bushnell, Charles Hodge, Henry Ward Beecher, Reinhold Neibuhr, Walter Rauschenbusch, and J. Gresham Machen -- conceptualized such matters as God’s character, the person of Jesus Christ, and the meaning of the atonement.

There is much of interest in this work, and it stimulates considerable reflection on the act and aim of Bible reading. How do theologians deal with “problem passages”? What Bible passages are lopped off to fit the Procrustean bed of our belief system? How do we negotiate the differences between the world of then and the world of now? Do we ignore the cultural milieu of today, the complex questions, the emerging issues in science and ethics, confining our thinking solely to the time of the Bible’s composition? Or do we send the Bible to a nursing home, making the perfunctory visit on the holidays while essentially ignoring its continuing relevance to our daily life? How does the Bible inform and transform what is to be believed about God, the world, the self? Jenkins's book is a valuable study for understanding what has been at issue in the debates between liberals and conservatives during the past few centuries. Most of these debates are not just disagreements about the respective issues, but rather are fundamental disagreements over the theological method employed indeciding them.

-- TLT (June 24, 2004)