For many ex-Evangelicals, the process of breaking ties with American White Evangelicalism is two-fold: there is the breaking away from and also the clinging to. The "breaking away from" part is pretty straight forward and much discussed these days. White Evangelicalism in the United States has (despite the heroic efforts of many outstanding Christians) aligned itself with forces of authoritarianism, racism, and exclusion, forces that (to borrow from this book's observations) align more often with oppression rather than with the oppressed. All this is well documented and properly discussed. But it is never enough to know that you are not part of a thing, and many of us who have left Evangelicalism remain deeply committed to Jesus and his Way. The first great joy of Solus Jesus for me is that it proposes a vision of what next might look like for us—more than being a book which calls us to leave or fix the broken thing, it is a vision for what is (and I will say always was) better.
This is a book I have been looking forward to since I first heard that Ken Wilson and Emily Swan, the co-pastors of Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor, were working on it. I have already done some writing on how the concept of Solus Jesus has been of significant benefit to my theology and life as a whole, so it should not be surprising to hear that I was thrilled. There is a LOT going on in this book. It certainly did not disappoint, but it did surprise me—in a remarkably encouraging way.
When I sat down to read Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance, I was expecting an extended explanation and defense of what Blue Ocean Faith people mean when they talk about the concept. As someone who has been hanging around the fringes of the Blue Ocean Faith community (and cheering it on) for a while now, I was already familiar with the idea in broad terms. Essentially Solus Jesus is a riff on, and reaction to, the reformation credo "Sola Scriptura". Inspired by Phyllis Tickle's suggestion that the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, will begin to work in a fresh paradigm every five hundred years or so, Solus Jesus recommends a decentering of the Bible as a source of certainty and instead placing our confidence in the person of Jesus Christ. Ken Wilson and Emily Swan are both post-Evangelicals who were put through the ringer by the Evangelical "machine" over the issue of full LGBTQ+ inclusion (Ken Wilson tells the story of this in his previous book A Letter to My Congregation). It was probably for that reason, as well as the general timeliness of the subject, that I expected this book to be that defense and explanation.
It turns out that the vision Swan and Wilson had for their book was much bigger than mine. While there is some defense of the concept (I found Chapter 4: In Defense of Experience—Wilson and Chapter 5: The age of the Spirit—Swan particularly helpful here) the greater portion of the book is devoted to a theological and practical working out of what Solus Jesus can look like in the contemporary world. In essence, the authors delivered to my expectation in Part 1 (Solus Jesus) of the book, and then went well beyond, bringing the titular concept into conversation with Girardian scapegoat theory to recommend a more developed and ambitious theology in Part 2 (A Theology of Resistance), and then working though some of what an application of this theology might look like if implemented by the contemporary Church in Part 3 (A New Way Forward). While all three cohere nicely and the chapters all build effectively on one another, each part really could have been its own work. In fact, the only critique I can think of for this book is that I would have really enjoyed a bit more of each section, so maybe a trilogy would have worked well.
Both Swan and Wilson have engaging and complementary writing styles and they are both up-front with their backgrounds and perspectives. As a result, Solus Jesus is both accessible on a popular level and "challenging and thought provoking" as a book of theology. The co-authorship takes the form of independently written chapters with Wilson and Swan each writing from their respective strengths.
In terms of the actual ideas presented, Solus Jesus represents a serious candidate for a Girardian post-evangelical (and possibly renewed mainline Protestant) theology. Taking the title to represent the two major themes of the book in conversation: First Solus Jesus as a re-centering of Jesus and de-centering of the Bible-as-source-of-certainty in the life of the Christain, then A Theology of Resistance built on the foundation of Solus Jesus and complimented by Girardian mimetic and scapegoat theory. In both cases, Swan and Wilson come across far more as offering, than as arguing, their ideas.
The Solus Jesus thesis is grounded, not in a rejection of the Bible as such, but in a rejection of the Bible as a source of certainty, first, because certainty isn't turning out to be a realistic demand, and second because the Bible itself points more to Jesus of Nazareth than to its self as a source for confidence. While the book does lay out a case for this, it strikes me that Wilson and Swan are writing this book at a time when the evangelical (and post-evangelical) case against rigid understandings of Biblical authority and infallibility have already been made (Pete Enns' The Sin of Certianty is both referenced and relevant here). Swan and Wilson are, I suspect, largely done with attempting to justify their Christianity to the Evangelical machine and have moved on to offer their insights to those who are already searching for something more.
So, too, with their Theology of Resistance. Swan and Wilson waste almost no time attacking or critiquing existing Evangelical theologies of ethics, politics, and atonement beyond sharing a few of their own helpful stories of times and ways in which those theologies came up short for them in the past. Instead, the authors work to interpret much of the (particularly Western) Church's crisis of being and failure through the lens of Girardian mimetic and scapegoat mechanics. While I don't find Girard to provide any sort of perfect, comprehensive model for human behavior or a theology of the atonement (nor do Swan and Wilson claim that he does), I was impressed with how well the model fit both the atonement and as an explanation for the repeated failure of the Church to take the side of justice as it has interacted with an unjust society throughout history. In line with the aphorism "all models are wrong, but some are useful", Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance demonstrates clearly that Girard's is a useful model in understanding God's actions in the world and through the church.
Ultimately I found Solus Jeusus: A Theology of Resistance both satisfying and challenging in all of the best ways, and I sincerely hope that it will have a place in determining the direction that post-evangelicalism will take at this juncture in history—it certainly deserves to.
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