Life isn't Binary

This book by Meg-John Barker & Alex Iantaffi seeks to dismantle the binary - the binary what? Exactly. The binary many things, perhaps aspiring even to everything. Taking sexuality & gender as a starting point, the authors go on to apply holistic thinking to a range of fields with startling results.

   We proceed in six straightforward chapters:

1. Sexuality - like, bi people exist, hello
2. Gender - like, non-binary people exist, hey
3. Relationships - questioning the dividing line between monogamous or not, or friend & partner, us & them, etc
4. Bodies - questioning the dividing line between different races, health or disability status, fatness, etc
5. Emotions - encouraging us to be more self-perceptive, as dichotomies like sane/mad or rational/emotional have hitherto constrained our feelings
6. Thinking - encouraging us to be more fluid-minded, as harsh opposites like good/bad & right/wrong have dominated historically

   Alongside the discussion in the main text, each chapter is supplemented with a few little features that really add to the reading experience - such as thought experiments, where the authors encourage you to thinkingly imagine your way through something; or quotes from real people (other than the authors) talking about their experiences relating to whatever the chapter's about. These additions do a lot to make the text more engaging & practical.

   Sadly this is another one of those books where the people I think most need to read it are also the people least likely to. Humans are stubborn creatures - we don't like being shown we're wrong, we don't like learning that entails unlearning too. But this book would be an eye-opener to people trapped in binary thinking patterns, so if you're more amenable to non-binary sensibilities I would recommend reading this to furnish yourself with better points to use in discussion with the people who really need to read it.

the Will to Change

This book by bell hooks is a reflection on masculinity, more specifically how our grotesque normative patriarchy renders masculinity a force that resists the giving & receiving of love, thereby stunting the hearts of men & driving violence against women. Men are discouraged from getting (or staying) in touch with their genuine feelings, never learn to express themselves healthily, never develop appropriate faculties for managing their insecurities, so it spills out as hostility. It is with a true sense of hope & love that feminist theory as here beckons men to abandon such rigid & non-life-giving patterns of being & be brave enough to become vulnerable, which is an essential step on the road to becoming gentle & grounded. This book shows more clearly than anything else I've read or seen that patriarchal norms damage men arguably more than women - true, it is still women who will bear the brunt of the aggression spilling over from un-grasped emotions, but at least those women have stable & authentic inner lives. An absolute must-read for all men.*

* Yes, all men, I said it. Though as is oft the case, the people who most need to read this book are probably among the least likely to, because it's feminist theory & real men don't read that shit. Well, real men barely read anyway, right

the Coming of God

This book is the fifth and final of Jürgen Moltmann's contributions to systematic theology, and as the title may suggest to the astute reader this one deals in-depth* with eschatology. As with the posts about the previous four I will give a rough overview of the book's contents before giving a bit of commentary, and as this is the last book in this series as is my wont I will then dive into some broader thoughts and reflections on the five book series as a whole. The contents of this book are split into five broad chunks:

1. Eschatology today - the transpositions of eschatology into time and eternity respectively; then the notion of God's comingness; then a tour through some key thinkers in Judaism who have contributed to a rebirth of messianic thinking.
2. Personal eschatology (i.e. eternal life) - conceptions of death as the end of life; contrasting ideas across the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body; a consideration of whether death is a natural ending or the consequence of sin; the prickly question of exactly "where" the dead are; and finally the psychospiritual experience of grief and mourning.
3. Historical eschatology (i.e. God's Kingdom) - political and apocalyptic versions of "the end" of history; the messianic picture; three wildly differing conceptions of millenarianism followed by a sharply nuanced consideration of whether millenarianism is even necessary; a look at exterminism (the idea that through military, ecological, or economic factors humankind may simply commit itself to an apocalyptic physical end - that is, death); a further consideration of whether apocalypticism is a necessary component of eschatology at all; and lastly an optimistic but grounded view of God's promises about the restoration of creation, in which he meticulously walks us through the theological and biblical cases for and against the idea of universal salvation (and I'll be honest - this was a big red flag initially given the particular flavour of Protestant orthodoxy I grew up in, where Hell is a necessary given, but I'm far more agnostic about the whole tangle since reading this chapter).
4. Cosmic eschatology (i.e. the New Creation) - firstly using Sabbath and Shekinah as springboard concepts into the future of creation; then the question of whether when the end comes creation will be annihilated, transformed, or deified; the ends of time and space in the eternal presence of God; and finally the scriptural metaphor of the heavenly Jerusalem as God's conclusive cosmic temple.
5. Divine eschatology (i.e. God's glory) - how all eschatological issues ultimately lead to the total and perfect self-realisation and self-glorification of God, in which a redeemed humankind is included as participant to the eternal experience, as God and His creation experience a total and perfect endless fulness, a feast of pure unending joy.

   So that's what's in here. Much of it was initially surprising to me, especially the universalism, but as I read and considered I realised more and more that the gravitational centre and methodological nature of Moltmann's theological system is so finely tuned to the core concepts of who we know God to be and logically extrapolating (with an almost outrageously generously ecumenical list of inspirational sources for these arguments) how, God being as God is and the world being as we understand it, the biblical worldview tends to lean further one way than another, and it all points not to fear and exclusivity but to redemptive renewal and inclusion and hope and joy.

   I trust it is abundantly clear that I am coming at this not as a professional academic with anywhere near enough experience or learning to start poking series critiques into Moltmann's system; I have approached these books as an enthusiastic amateur thirsting for a solid and coherent basic framework to hang my comprehension of Christian theology upon, and old Jürgen simply happened to be the first theologian who had composed such a framework that I happened to decide to pick up and work through. But I am deeply glad for that fact. These books have been an intellectual challenge, to be sure, but the more of them I read the more all the rest of what had come before made sense, and the richer my grasp of many of the fundamental tenets of Christian faith became. Obviously there are the big three caveats, which I have mentioned in posts about previous books in this series - firstly, that these books have been translated from German, so sentence structure is often quite difficult to follow; secondly, that Moltmann, being an academic theologian primarily writing to contribute to ongoing discourse within academic theology, while far from being recklessly obfuscatory or obtuse, is not writing for an entry-level audience, and so much of what he's talking about is quite difficult to get one's head around on first reading (or even second or fourth); and thirdly that Moltmann, being an academic in general, has a nasty habit of dumping in a random phrase in Greek or Latin (or even French or German sometimes) without offering a translation for it, even in the footnotes.** These pre-warnings aside, I think most moderately-educated-in-theological-terminology folks would find this series of books largely agreeable in style and especially in substance; Moltmann throughout this systematic theology has drawn widely and humbly on everything from Eastern Orthodox mysticism to strictly Reformed doctrinal positions and Catholic catechisms to Latin American liberation theology, and managed to work all of it into a cogently and compellingly structured model of what we must be talking about when we talk about the Trinity, or creation, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, or the apocalypse, or many other enormous and intimidating themes in the thought that has grown up around Christian faith - a model that while intellectually satisfying still leaves one with a sense of immense mystery and wonder at God's ways and being; a model that is not dry and stultifying but openly celebratory of the goodness of God and the life-giving truths that He has left us to work out and live in.

   As I said, this is the first systematic theology I've read, and I hope I won't be mentally lazy enough in the rest of my reading journey that it's my last - but it's been a thoroughly engaging and liberating one, and I would heartily recommend this whole series to any Christian who like I was finds themself in search of a holistic roadmap to thinking about their faith. Heck, I'd even recommend it to non-Christians who simply find Christian theology to be full of inconsistencies and contradictions, as they may well realise through Moltmann's rigour and breadth that there is far more internal logic at play than an external observer would easily guess.

* I say in-depth because all five of Moltmann's books in this series dig pretty deeply through eschatology, but only in this concluding volume is it front and centre in consideration.

** Which is frankly absurd, I mean, it's not like the footnotes couldn't spare the time. There's a lot of them (and honestly many of them add an excellent clarificatory point to the main text) in all five volumes.