welfare state and higher taxes—while identifying the need toaddress governmental corruption and injustice. As a result,there are unresolved and dissonant elements of Via’s politi-cal philosophy that a more informed student of politics willnote.

Jennifer JefferisRegent University

PRACTICING THE POLITICS OF JESUS: THEORIGIN AND SIGNIFICANCE OF JOHN HOWARDYODER’S SOCIAL ETHICS. By Earl Zimmerman. Telford,PA. Cascadia Publishing House, 2007. Pp. 273. $22.95, ISBN978-1-931038-43-0.

While the passing of J. H. Yoder in 1997 closed an era forone of the most prolific Christian writers of the twentiethcentury, his legacy and impact endures. Zimmerman adds toan ever-growing collection of theological, exegetical, andethical treatises with his study on the origin, development,and application of Yoder’s teaching. Zimmerman sketches abiographical portrait of Yoder’s personal, educational, andprofessional journey that culminates with the publication ofThe Politics of Jesus, Yoder’s magnum opus. Along the way,Zimmerman narrates the influence upon Yoder by Europeanmentors such as O. Cullman and Barth and, to a lesserdegree, J. Lasserre, A. Trocmé, and H. Berkhof. Zimmermanconnects the collective impact of these thinkers and friendsas well as the formative function of Yoder’s dissertation onthe relation between Swiss Anabaptists and ProtestantReformers as central for the development of the YoderianJesus. As the scholarly body concerning Yoder’s theologyand ethics accumulates, Zimmerman should prove enduringnot simply as a biographer, but also as an interpreter ofYoder. Zimmerman offers practical application that includesa proposal of ten basic principles from the Politics of Jesus,and highlights Yoder’s passion for the centrality of Jesus’slife as paradigmatic and prophetic for the contemporarychurch. While Zimmerman stands within the Anabaptist tra-dition and calls upon contemporary Anabaptists to heed theprophetic and countercultural call of the Yoderian Jesus,Zimmerman also makes Yoder’s work relevant to all Chris-tians. This study is a valuable interpretative resource along-side Yoder’s primary works.

Martin W. MittelstadtEvangel University

Arts, Literature, Culture,and ReligionART AS THEOLOGY: FROM THE POSTMODERN TOTHE MEDIEVAL. By Andreas Andreopoulos. Cross Cul-tural Theologies. Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2006. Pp. vii + 179.Cloth $95.00, ISBN 978-1-84553-170-6; paper $29.95, ISBN978-1-84553-171-3.

This book investigates the changes that have occurredin the role of art and the artist, with an eye to the differences

between Eastern and Western Christianity. Andreopoulostakes a “double approach” to the subject: he writes both as ascholar interested in theology and as a former professionalmusician. The intersection of these two perspectives bringsout a crucial fact: art is not simply something about which totheorize, but should be understood in experiential terms aswell. In the first chapter, the author traces select episodes inthe relationship between artistic production and theology,highlighting the contrasts between Eastern Orthodoxy andthe West. He introduces several issues that he develops inlater chapters: for example, the bifurcation of art by Judaicand Greek modes of expression, the meaning of the icon, andthe supposed secularization of art in the West. In many waysthis chapter is the heart of the book. The second chapterfocuses on the changes wrought by the Renaissance para-digm of the artist, showing how this period influences theplace of the artist today. The final two chapters focus onmore contemporary understandings of art and the artist: theway to interpret the “death of art” in postmodernity, and theplace of spirituality in contemporary art. While the argu-ment is at times diffuse, the author offers some insight for atheological reading of culture. Of particular note is his treat-ment of contemporary music, including composers likeTavener and Pärt, and his take on the dialogue betweencommercial and “classical” art.

Forrest ClingermanOhio Northern University

THE ETHICS OF MODERNISM: MORAL IDEAS INYEATS, ELIOT, JOYCE, WOOLF AND BECKETT. ByLee Oser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Pp. ix + 185. $85.00, ISBN 0-521-86725-8.

Oser’s opening shot rings through this book: “humannature restores a perspective on modernism that has beenlost.” After modernism, human nature and, with it, the ratio-nale underwriting the modernist project, was discarded. Butthe “old question”—“what good is there in human nature?”—remains; and that enables us to rethink the “modernist moralproject, which is to transform human nature through the useof art.” Oser rejects Pinker’s neo-Darwinian answer in favorof an Aristotelian one that distinguishes a physical “Aristo-telian body” from an aesthetic “modernist” one, giving hisrethinking a decidedly critical edge. Beginning with Yeats,he dismisses a precursor, Blake, for “unlimited forgiveness”lacking “a principle of discernment”—then concludes that“Yeats’s metaphysic has not aged well,” a judgment heextends through readings of Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett.Woolf’s “painterly” (as opposed, presumably, to “writerly”)writing breaks human nature; her reading of Shakespeare is“bardolatry.” Beckett’s ethic is “mystical”; the body of hiswork rises out of two centuries in which “men and women ofgenius have tried to yoke the oxen of Indic asceticism to theplow of western romanticism.” Oser reads Beckett as boththe last modernist and the first postmodernist; and all fivefigures in this study are among those he damns with faintpraise as men and women of genius whose attempt to link

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incompatible traditions first retreats from a physical to anaesthetic body, then (as in Levinas) “denies the existence ofhuman nature” altogether. That denial is the problem asOser sees it. His solution lies in a resurrection of the Aristo-telian body, a return (as Beckett’s Hamm put it) to “the oldquestions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” If theold questions go, Oser believes, we go with them. Nobodycan argue with that, and there is still nothing like the musicof the argument from Beckett to Blake to answer the Aristo-telian sense Oser makes of the world.

Steven SchroederChicago, IL

RELIGION AND THE MUSE: THE VEXED RELA-TION BETWEEN RELIGION AND WESTERN LIT-ERATURE. By Ernest Rubinstein. Albany: State Universityof New York Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 262. $70.00, ISBN 978-0-7914-7149-4.

There are some conceptual cruxes of Western thoughtabout which literature and religion seem to be diametricallyopposed, such as the value of fiction or the function ofbeauty. But Rubinstein discovers that though the relationsbetween religion and literature may certainly be vexed, theyare not always combative, especially when Western religionis broadly conceived to include Platonism as well as theJudeo-Christian tradition. The initial chapters outline someof the major points of contention between religion and litera-ture, and point out the way that the two worldviews critiqueeach other. Later chapters complicate the scene of mutualcritique by examining sites where religion and art variouslydiverge and overlap as they draw upon each other forimagery and support. One such chapter is “Creation andCreativity,” which explores the twin analogs of divine andartistic creation. Much of the book is taken up with theestablishment and explanation of lineages of thought thatextend through religious and secular philosophers as well asliterary and biblical authors. The points of conflict and ofagreement are seen where these lineages overlap. In addi-tion to the Bible, which appears in all of them to somedegree, there are a number of authors mentioned in Rubin-stein’s genealogies, some of whom appear with more fre-quency than others, among them Plato, Dante, Milton, Blake,Kant, Hawthorne, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Earlier chaptersmay be of most interest to literary scholars working withreligious themes, but the final, short chapters on individualconcepts (including “Love,” “Death,” “Evil,” “Suffering,”“Forgiveness,” and “Saintliness”) could serve as useful intro-ductions to those concepts for less expert readers.

H. G. S. JohnsonIndiana University Bloomington

THE BEAUTY OF GOD: THEOLOGY AND THE ARTS.Edited by Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands, and RogerLundin. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007.Pp. 233. $22.00, ISBN 978-0-8308-2843-2.

This book of ten essays emerged from the 2006 WheatonTheology Conference, which brought together artists andtheologians. Divided into three sections, the essays followthe biblical narrative, moving from creation to fall toredemption. The result is a distinctive evangelical contribu-tion to the field of theological aesthetics that aims to movebeyond static formulations of beauty toward dynamic under-standings rooted in the drama of redemption and the cen-trality of the crucified Christ. The concept of a “brokenbeauty” (drawn from a 2005-06 traveling exhibition and pub-lication by Christian artists) captures this approach, point-ing to a beauty that emerges from the transfiguration of thedisfigured. Begbie’s opening essays provide the Trinitariantheological ground for this approach, while subsequentessays explore examples of a “broken beauty” in music,painting, relationships, film, poetry, and scripture. The finalessays, drawing from Barth and von Balthasar, emphasizethe redemptive and apologetic potential of a Christologicaland Trinitarian approach to theological aesthetics. Despitethe initial and concluding call for a fully Trinitarian theologi-cal aesthetics, however, the Holy Spirit tends to fade into thebackground in the majority of these essays. Furthermore,not everyone will be convinced by their almost sole focus onthe cross and redemption (contra creation and incarnation).Nevertheless, this is an exciting and valuable contribution tothe dialogue between theology and the arts that takes sin andsuffering seriously, even as it highlights the excessive loveof God that shines through. It should be welcomed by theo-logians and practitioners alike.

John W. NelsonLuther Seminary

Ancient Near EastTHE REVELATION OF THE NAME OF YHWH TOMOSES: PERSPECTIVES FROM JUDAISM, THEPAGAN GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD, AND EARLYCHRISTIANITY. Edited by George H. van Kooten. Themesin Biblical Narrative: Jewish and Christian Traditions 9.Leiden: Brill, 2006. Pp. xiv + 264. $170.00, ISBN 978-90-0415398-1.

Delivered originally at the 2004 annual conference heldat the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, the thir-teen essays are organized into three parts reflecting perspec-tives from the OT and early Judaism, the Graeco-Romantraditions, and the NT and early Christianity. Part oneexplores the meaning of the divine name in relation topiyyutic and kabbalistic traditions, its connection to theAaronic Blessing in Num 6:22-27, its significance in Kingsand Chronicles, its adaptation by the second-century BCEJewish poet Ezekiel Tragicus and several other rabbinic lit-eratures from the second-century CE, and its relation to thecommand in Exod 3:5 (remove your sandals from your feet)that foreshadows the priestly customs in the Tent of Meetingand later the Temple. Part two offers papers discussing

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