CHRISTIANITY IS A BOOK RELIGION. It may well be more than that, but it is certainly not less than that. Holy Scripture is simply indispensable to any version of Christianity worthy of the name.

The “bookishness” of Christianity brings with it a number of benefits and not a few difficulties. On the plus side, the centrality of Scripture offers the church a lodestar. The church knows (or should know) where its most careful and reverent attention must be paid, where it must look to find supreme insight into the God the church confesses as triune. On the difficult side is the fact that the book in question is, to put it mildly, complex. Few, even among the truly pious, have the patience to sit with it for very long any more: the world is fast and information is cheaply gathered. (Of course, cheap information is typically worth the asking price.) Adding to this complexity, if not lying at its root, is the Bible’s antiquity: few, even among professionals, can long stomach its ancient and diverse literature, let alone read it in its original languages in order to conduct an informed conversation about it, especially about its meaning(s).

Unfortunately, there is a third sticky spot: for a book that is supposed to be “useful for life,” the Bible’s given form seems singularly unsuitable for the job. Policy is not written, at least not easily, on the basis of a Hebrew psalm or a Greek parable. The parts of the Bible that seem most conducive to “life application” (whatever that means—and that remains a question) are, ironically, the ones that many Christians have little knowledge of: namely, the first five books of the Old Testament known as the Pentateuch or Torah. To be sure, there are plenty of “preachy,” ethically rich parts elsewhere in Scripture, especially in the prophetic and Wisdom books, but these texts, too, are increasingly off the beaten track. Yes, Isaiah has a role to play in the Advent season, but many churches these days know little of the Christian calendar let alone the lectionary. As for the Wisdom literature, it is often robbed of its long-form shaping of the moral self and thinned down to “Bible promise” one-liners, at best, or, at worst, to simplistic justification for corporal punishment of children or some other stupidity that makes Christians look like they still live in the Stone Age. Unfortunately, even the parts of Scripture that are most familiar to Christians are seldom straightforward. How, exactly, does one practice “the kingdom of heaven is like yeast, which a woman took and hid in a bushel of wheat flour until the yeast had worked its way through all the dough” (Mt 13:33; CEB)? Again, policy (polity, too) is not usually based on aphorisms and psalms. The translation process from these genres to “actionable intel” is tricky to say the least.

This conundrum—the Bible as sine qua non for Christianity but manifesting difficulties that lead Christians increasingly away from it to other, more seductive resources—is a real problem but not one without recourse. In fact, recourse is exactly the issue: clearly, what we need now is help. Not unlike Israel at Sinai, who called on Moses as intermediary, or the Ethiopian eunuch, who asked for Philip’s assistance in Acts, the average Christian needs an interpreter from back then in “Bibleland” to help here and now in our world. As was the case with Moses and Philip, such an interpreter should be a figure with knowledge and experience, one who is close to God and to God’s ways in the world—someone, to borrow a phrase from John Wesley, who is a real Christian.1

At this point we come to the current book and its author, Michael J. Rhodes. I first met Michael in England and in Idaho: he was in England defending his dissertation, I was in Idaho examining his dissertation (via video conferencing). I was surprised to learn at that time that the author of the Trinity College Bristol/University of Aberdeen dissertation under discussion that day was not British at all, but an American from Memphis, Tennessee. To backtrack a wee bit, I admit that when Michael’s dissertation arrived several months earlier, I felt sucker-punched. The initial invitation to serve as Michael’s external examiner indicated that the dissertation was about Deuteronomy, something I know a little bit about, but when the dissertation showed up in the mail, it was clearly not about Deuteronomy—at least not primarily—but about community formation especially around shared meals. Deuteronomy figured in the discussion, as did the eucharistic practices reflected in 1 Corinthians, but these were exegetical case studies in a much larger, far-reaching argument. Indeed, the first hundred pages or so were an extensive discussion of virtue ethics. That is not my expertise, but there was nothing to do in the face of this bait-and-switch than to roll up my sleeves and start reading…

…and learning. I found Michael’s dissertation educational, as all theses ought to be, but his hit that standard at a more existential level than any others I had read. Here was not merely (!) new knowledge that made a distinctive contribution to a scholarly subfield. Here was a thesis that argued for a better way in the world, that showed how Scripture, from Torah to Epistle—despite its complex, ancient, and odd form—could affect real change in real communities and in real lives, even over something as simple as a shared meal. I was informed and also profoundly moved. Needless to say, the thesis passed with flying colors.2

A few weeks after the dissertation examination, Providence had me traveling through Memphis, with Michael back home, and so it was that he picked me up on a downtown street early one summer morning and we had breakfast in a delicious hole-in-the-wall dive. There I learned more about Michael the person, not just Michael the biblical scholar and theologian. I heard of his upbringing in the still-segregated city of Memphis. I learned of his missionary work in Africa and his family’s decision to live in impoverished communities in Memphis on their return. Michael did not brag about this; it was simply a matter of fact, just what he and his wife Rebecca and their kids did as part of their everyday lives. The life of faithfulness, the poet Robert Bly once wrote, “goes by like a river, / With no one noticing it.”3 Saintliness, in other words, is baked into the saintly life: a river doesn’t have to try to flow downstream. What I read from Rhodes the scholar, in the theoretical mode of his dissertation, and what I heard from Rhodes the person, that day over scrambled eggs and hash browns, matched. Together they testified to a saintly life, as regular as a trustworthy river—one that was making a difference in Memphis, a difference based on, rooted in, and shaped by nothing less than the odd, complex collection of texts we call Holy Scripture.

Once again I found myself deeply moved. I, not unlike Michael, have devoted my life to the study of Scripture because I am convinced that it matters above all else: that it is the church’s only “sure thing.” But I also admit to feeling my fair share of despair over the actual place of Scripture in Christian experience, where the sure thing is often the last thing on anyone’s mind, let alone on their mobile devices (these are increasingly identical entities).4 Michael’s work gave me hope; Michael’s life gave me more of the same. And what gave me the greatest hope of all was that Michael’s biblically rooted work and Michael’s real-Christian life were integrated, connected, ultimately of a piece.

I could say more about all that, but what I most want to say is this: here is an author you can trust. What Michael and his family have attempted to live out in Memphis to the best of their ability, they are now replicating in New Zealand in his teaching post there. And what Michael tried to do in his thesis he does even more broadly and accessibly in the present book. Michael has real experience and real expertise. He also has real integrity; he is a real Christian. And that means that he is precisely the kind of person we need: one who can offer assistance as a helper and guide from the back-then Bible to life here and now. Let me put it even stronger: I think Michael is one of the best guides we presently have on offer for this kind of work. People talk a lot about justice and discipleship. Sometimes they define those things. (Oftentimes they don’t.) Michael has studied these things, and can define them, but, most important of all, he lives them. In the present book he shows the rest of us how to do the same: how, for example, Deuteronomy’s tithe and feast legislation cultivate dispositions of solidarity that lead directly to the contemporary practice known as relocation (something that the Rhodes family has done more than once on three different continents); or how Job’s transformation, which moved him from all-sufficient giver to one who gives-and-receives from all members of his community, can transform our own present-day structures that facilitate oppression. With gritty and insightful exegesis-into-practice engagements like these, Rhodes shows all of us how to become just, and how to do that precisely as disciples—how to become, as he puts it “militants of reconciling love and justice.” That is the type of militancy even the strictest Christian pacifists could get behind, lest the discipling and justice-loving ways of Scripture fade from a Christianity increasingly adrift...