Minor, The Spirituality of Mark

A book review of Mitzi Minor, The Spirituality of Mark: Responding to God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996).

Vast amounts of scholarly attention have been devoted for several decades now to the study of the historical Jesus, which debate has had an impact on attitudes towards the four gospels.  They are often seen as impediments to the discovery of the "real Jesus" and widely viewed with suspicion for the "agendas" their unknown authors brought to their presentation of Christ.

In The Spirituality of Mark, Dr. Mitzi Minor works different ground and brings to the Gospel of Mark a very different perspective.  She trusts the author of the gospel and values it for what it is, a spiritual work of faith in response to what the author took to be God's act in Christ.  Her intent is to mine the gospel for its spiritual insights, which she believes continue to be of value twenty centuries later.  She herself labels this book "an exercise in biblical spirituality" and writes, "I believe Mark offers a profound perspective on what it means to be Christian." (p. 2).

In this book, Minor seeks to link two worlds, the world of biblical scholarship and the world of the personal spirituality, which includes the church.  The Spirituality of Mark is a rewrite of her doctoral dissertation—"The Spirituality of the Gospel of Mark" (Ph.D. dissertation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1989)—and it starts out feeling very much like a scholarly work.  The Introduction and Chapter One contain a number of definitions and a description of Minor's methodology, which may not be the best way to begin a work aimed at bringing Mark's spirituality into the present.  While biblical scholars may be reassured by such a beginning, the book starts out as a "slow read" for those more concerned primarily with the gospel's spirituality.  That being said, with Chapter Two the book picks up the pace and ably directs the reader's attention to Mark's spirituality rather than Markan scholarship.

Focusing on eleven key passages, Minor examines each one of them to discover what the author of Mark portrays as authentic and inauthentic spirituality, that is "the way of the Lord" as opposed to "the way of humanity."  Minor believes that Mark intentionally crafted the gospel to make clear the contrast between these two ways, which with careful reading can still discerned today.  In the process, Minor entirely ignores the contemporary search for the historical Jesus.  She understands that the Jesus of Mark is very much "Mark's Jesus," a term she uses regularly.  The author of the gospel was in her estimation a spiritual individual himself and in a sense used Jesus as a vehicle to communicate the author's own sense of spirituality as shaped by the emerging Christian tradition and its understanding of the person of Christ.  Minor is not interested in the Gospel of Mark as historiography but as work of spiritual discernment, a key faith document from the early days of the Christian movement.

As she proceeds through her analysis of each passage, Minor pays attention to important nuances that modern readers of the gospel will miss.  In her analysis of Jesus calming the storm (Mark 4:35-41, pages 41-47), for example, she notes that the language used by Mark's Jesus is that of an exorcism to remove a force of chaos and evil.  It also echoes language from the Hebrew Bible used in reference to God's power over the sea thus associating Jesus with divine power.

Minor's perspective is that of a feminist, progressive Protestant Christian concerned with social justice.  In Mark's Jesus, she sees the spiritual and prophetic sources of her concerns.  He challenged the corrupt temple system of his day and the self-concerned religious leaders that rode that system to personal wealth, power, and prestige.  He also challenged his own disciples who seemed unable to see and hear his call for a radically new, just community that would foreshadow the Kingdom.  They, Minor notes, only wanted to replace who benefitted from the current system (p. 103).  Thus, for Minor, Mark is relevant for its call for a new age, one that is just and inclusive.  The gospel teaches that faith requires sacrifice and it is about service all directed to the end that the Kingdom (she prefers to use the Greek, basileia) comes.

At the same time, The Spirituality of Mark also points clearly to the applicability of Mark's spirituality to the personal life of followers of Jesus.  In her summary of authentic spirituality (pp. 98-101), thus, Minor brings together the many qualities that constitute Mark's spirituality, and most of those qualities are personal ones—admittedly lived out in a community of faith, but still personal.  Her description of authentic (and inauthentic) spirituality according to Mark is not in and of itself new, but what is helpful is the way in which she extracts that description from the gospel.  The Spirituality of Mark takes the reader through a process of discovery, which is well worth the time and effort spent in reading the book.

As a work that straddles the worlds of scholarship and spirituality, there is a bit of an issue concerning the audience The Spirituality of Mark addresses.  It may be a little too general for scholars that is not a serious contribution to the scholarly literature on Mark, and it is a tad too academic for lay readers who are not familiar with New Testament scholarship.  It is worth noting that the book seems to have received little attention, if any,  from reviewers which may be a further indication that it doesn't have a natural audience.  It deserves more attention than it seems to have attracted for the very reason that it does bring biblical scholarship to bear on one of the key issues facing local (mainline) congregations, namely the recovering of a vital spirituality.

In sum, The Spirituality of Mark is a relatively brief, well-written book that is useful for those exploring the meaning of Christian spirituality in its biblical context.  Minor unlocks the ancient meaning of the Gospel without engaging in esoteric jargon.  She treats the text of Mark with respect and clearly admires its author.

Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals

A book review of David Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

In just about every sense of the term, David Bebbington's Victorian Religious Revivals is a good history book.  It is well-researched, clearly written, and consistently to the point.  It makes an important contribution to its field by offering new insights built on a thorough grasp of "the literature" in that field.  This is solid journey-men's history, which demonstrates how the craft should be done.  Admittedly, not everyone is going to pick up this specialist's work, but then it is not written for everyone.  It is written for those who have an interest in subjects and fields related to nineteenth-century Protestant revivalism in the English-speaking world.  For those who do have such an interest, it is a fun and informative read.

Bebbington pursues a number of themes and topics built around the premise that nineteenth-century revivals in Britain, North America, and Australia reflected both local and global elements.  Each was its own event built on local conditions and factors.  By that same token, however, each revival drew on a common international pool of forms, techniques, and ideas.  As the book's subtitle puts it, all of these revivals drew on local and global cultures and pieties.  Bebbington proves his point by describing and analyzing seven specific revivals spanning the years 1841 to 1880 and taking place in the Republic of Texas, England, North Carolina, Scotland, South Australia, and Nova Scotia.

Victorian Religious Revivals begins with two general chapters before it moves on to its seven local portraits.  In Chapter 1, Bebbington provides an introductory overview of nineteenth-century revivals in the English-speaking world, which includes a description of the various patterns of revivals in that era.  The particular patterns he identifies include Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, combined, and "modern" approaches to revivalism.  It should be noted that Bebbington begins Chapter 1 precisely where he should with an overview review of definitions of the terms "revival" and "awakening."  Chapter 2 follows with a review of the literature, which concludes with the author's own perspective.   He writes of revivals that revivals, "...ought to be considered in a global framework and as local events.  When a revival is investigated in its locality, its specific characteristics are open to discovery.  The most important features fall into the categories of culture and piety." (p. 52)

From this base, Bebbington marches through his seven investigations of Victorian revivals beginning in Texas in 1841 and concluding in South Australia in 1880.  Each chapter is a well-written description of the events of the particular revival it recounts followed by detailed analysis, which is sensitive to local factors and concerns but also teases out the larger and more global themes embedded in the particular awakening.  I read this book because one of his seven studies involves a Presbyterian revival that took place in Union Church, Moore County, North Carolina, in 1857, which was led by the Rev. Daniel McGilvary, a recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.  I know McGilvary from my research on the history of the church in Thailand.  He served as a Presbyterian missionary in Siam and then in the northern state of Chiang Mai for over fifty years down to 1911.  In the course of my research, I became familiar with the events in Moore County.  Bebbington's treatment of those events is impressive.  He describes the background to the 1857 revival, the personalities involved, and its particular nature as a classic example of an emotionally restrained, Calvinistic Presbyterian revival.  The McGilvary he describes is recognizably the same Daniel McGilvary who so capably pursued his long missionary career in Southeast Asia.  Bebbington's chapter on the Moore County revival and McGilvary (Chapter 6), in fact,  makes a contribution to the study of Thai church history because it provides important background material locating McGilvary in his own home cultural context.  This is good stuff.

One of the things that is especially helpful in Victorian Religious Revivals is the way in which Bebbington organizes his analyses so that one can actually enumerate factors involved.  In Chapter 8 on an 1875 revival in South Australia, for example, he describes at least seven (by my count) factors in the "spiritual culture of Methodism" (pp. 205-212) that contributed to the revival and then, later on, six (again by my count) elements in the style of that revival (pp. 216-227).  (Bebbington doesn't do the "first, second, third, etc." routine very often, but his clear writing style facilitates identifying elements that can be enumerated).  Through all of his analysis and attention to details, Bebbington never loses sight of his main interpretive framework, which is the interplay of local and global, cultural and religious (generally denominational) forces and factors.  Thus Chapter 9 is even entitled, "The General and the Particular: Baptist Revival in Nova Scotia, 1880."

The book ends, as it must, with a summary chapter that describes the dozen or so (by my count) "reasons for revival" (pp. 263-269) and the roughly six "characteristics of revival" (pp. 269-274).  Bebbington's conclusion (pp. 274-275) to his last chapter could serve as an overview of the book for a review of it.  The final sentence of the book—"Local revivals illustrate global developments."—is itself a good summary of the whole book.

It should also be noted that Victorian Religious Revivals is an academic work and all of the paraphernalia that goes along with such work are present.  There is a very good bibliography, and I was esp. pleased to see real and actual footnotes (rather than endnotes or no notes), something rarely seen anymore.

I do have a couple of minor quibbles.  The maps are not particularly helpful.  They are too narrowly focused on the locality of each revival and very barebones.  For my money, Bebbington dismisses too quickly the leadership role of the clergy in the revivals he describes.  For him, the revivals were marked by a prominent role for the laity (p. 271), which is true but does not necessarily mean as he seems to assume that the clergy did not also play a prominent role.  He himself points to the important role clergy played in the revival(s) in Nova Scotia in 1880 (see pp. 250, 253, 255) without picking up on it as a key theme in his analysis of those events.

Frequently in the reviews I've done for this website, I have observed that the reader of a particular books has to want to read it in order to get through it.  That is most certainly not the case with Bebbington's Victorian Religious Revivals.  It is a specialist's academic work, and the reader will surely want to read it before buying it (esp. because it is pricey), but having begun the reader will not find it a hardship to continue.  Like all good history, it is a specialist work that does not indulge in the gibberish and jargon that makes so much academic writing unnecessarily difficult to read for a general audience.  Good history clears away all of that so that general audiences can participate fully in the joy of discovering the past.  This book is good history.  Its prose is not flashy but it is well-written, easy to follow, and facilitates the stories Bebbington tells.  If you have even a passing interest in its subject, I highly recommend Victorian Religious Revivals to you.