Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship, reviewed by Amos Yong
The Politics of Discipleship will be challenging for most renewal readers in part because Ward speaks a language far removed from that of the renewalist constituency and in part because what he says here challenges many of the assumptions about politics prevalent across the global renewal. If I might be so self-serving, my own book, In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology (Eerdmans, 2010), is concerned with many of the issues that Ward deals with, but does so in an idiom more familiar to those within renewal circles. I am certainly not suggesting that my volume renders Ward’s superfluous – there is a sophistication to his thinking I do not match, reflecting his having abided for much longer at the intersection of theology and the political than I – but only that it may provide a point of entry into the larger discussion Ward represents for renewalists who are interested in expanding their horizons in thinking about the political. In the end, Ward and I may disagree about as much as we agree (that itself would be a conversation I would enjoy having), and The Pneuma Review readers might also then further disagree with us both. In any event, how all of this unfolds requires that at least some of the readers of this review take up and work through Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship, and that itself may be a portal for a new work of the Spirit to emerge in a postsecular and postmaterial age.
Reviewed by Amos Yong
Preview this book: books.google.com/books?id=58EKuwyTk9MC
Category: In Depth, Pneuma Review, Spring 2011
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