“His engraved precepts shall be on my tongue as long as I live,
as the fruit of praise and portion of my lips.
I will sing with knowledge;
all my music shall be for the glory of God.
The strings of my lyre sound for his holy order;
my lips play flute after his guiding line.”
—Community Rule, 1QS 10:8-18 (p. 8, bold mine)

When we consider the inter-testamental period, we might assume that God was silent and that Israel—God’s chosen people—were spiritually adrift. My Lips Play Flute for the Highest was written to dispel such notions. Author Torleif Elgvin asserts, “Jewish literature blossomed in this period,” and demonstrates repeatedly that there were Israelites who prayed for their nation, for Jerusalem, for redemption from their sins, and who faithfully awaited God’s intervention. Elgvin focuses on the liturgy and psalms discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, offering often moving and sometimes revelatory insights. One may conclude, as I have, that Jesus’s arrival was not only “in the fullness of time” (Gal 4:4) but also an answer to the fervent prayers of a faithful remnant.

“Save me from the power of evil spirits, those who rule over the thoughts of men, so that they do not lead me away from you, my God! Strengthen me and my descendants through all times, so that we never go astray!”
—Jubilees 12:19-20

While Dr. Elgvin professes to be a Christian, this is an academic work designed to appeal to both the traditional Jewish community and Christians. He contrasts both perspectives, presenting them objectively and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.

Spanning 225 pages, the prayers are followed by brief commentary and organized into sections:

• Hymns of Praise
• Prayers for Israel
• Prayers for Zion
• Psalms of Confidence
• Longing for God
• Revelation and Illumination to the Humble
• The Lord’s Anointed
• The End of Days and the World to Come

Images and maps enhance the overall presentation.

My Lips Play Flute for the Highest serves as an excellent reference book. Though millennia old, these prayers remain fresh and biblically consistent, making them suitable for congregational prayers or liturgical readings today.

Reviewed by Kevin Williams

Publisher’s page: https://wipfandstock.com/9781666770018/my-lips-play-flute-for-the-highest/

Andrew Wilson has written a highly readable, engaging volume seeking the integration of the streams that are regularly treated as contrastive: sacrament and Spirit. It is not that these are actually contrastive, but too many folks imagine they are distinct. Those who worship with candles, lectionaries, church calendars, and vestments versus those who worship with shouts, dancing, speaking in tongues, and altar calls. Yet Wilson contends these are not contradictory and nor should they be. While he is not proposing an explicit apologetic for these two streams to be joined, he is offering an implicit one. Even more so he is speaking to those who already may think these should be found together and offering them support toward a more biblical reflection of integration as basic to the church. The movements of this book are simple (though not simplistic): (ch. 1) Spirit and sacrament, (chs. 2-3) charis “gift” and chara “joy”, (chs. 4-5) eucharistic and charismatic. The intent is a proposed (ch. 6) “eucharismatic” (eucharistic/sacramental and Spirit-ed/charismatic) expression and experience for the life of the local church. This new term (eucharismatic) is intended to bring the two expressions into a fruitful intertwining as expressive of the fuller life of the church.

One of the many values of this volume is its positive framing of church expressions that are often put into juxtaposition as if antithetical. A similar sort of distinction was noted fifteen years ago in Sam Storm’s testimony and articulation Convergence: Spiritual Journeys of a Charismatic Calvinist (Enjoying God Ministries, 2005) that juxtaposed “Calvinist” and “Charismatic” as poles that deserve to be brought together. Wilson’s own vision is less narrow by opening up to those which are sacramental/historic/liturgical and those which are charismatic/Pentecostal/renewal (with none of these terms intended as intentionally limiting to what might be offered). Wilson contends that the church that is committed to embodied life expresses itself in dress, smells, sounds, tastes, and movements that consider the whole person as incorporated into the life of the worshiping community. The integration of all of these as gifts and joy makes of a meaningful contribution to reflecting on the life of the church as it seeks faithful expression in local (and global) contexts.

Wilson does not dictate what the eucharismatic life and church looks like as this is a work of the Spirit in the context of specific congregations seeking to live faithfully in their contexts. However, he reminds his readers that just as “the church encompasses the whole body of Christ—cerebral and emotion, high and low context, introvert and extrovert, spontaneous and controlled, Asian, African, American, European, and so on—then local churches need to worship in ways that help everyone find joy in God, through Christ, by the Spirit” (57, original emphasis). This is enabled both by the many tongues of Pentecost and the many prayers and liturgies of the church historic and global.

As a full-time pastor of 22 years and one who still serves pastors globally through teaching, mentoring, and discipleship I will be recommending this book to fellow pastors and those I disciple in the pastorate. This book would serve a local church or group of pastors seeking to reflect on these issues (whether they consider themselves more “eucharistic” or more “charismatic” or even already a bit of a blend). It has the great potential to offer language for carrying forward conversations and seeking further reflection on this field of study. This book is precisely the kind of entry level work on the subject to spur further readings and deeper reflections perhaps moving to engage other works which likewise seek to integrate such things at a more advanced and detailed level of reflection.

Reviewed by Rick Wadholm Jr

Publisher’s page: https://zondervanacademic.com/products/spirit-and-sacrament

For Christian believers not engaged in ‘typical’ church ministries, it may be difficult to find anything sacred about the day-to-day activities that occupy our mind and energy. Whether it’s doing housework, chauffeuring the kids to school or Little League, grocery shopping, or clocking in to a job, we can feel like our lives are mundane, boring, and almost certainly not a calling to live out God’s purposes in such unholy tasks. Warren, however, would beg to differ. The author draws parallels between the ordinary habitual practices of our everyday life and the spiritual rhythm of worship. We can live in tune with God’s purposes in this world, all the while we make the bed, brush our teeth, check email, and sit in traffic, to name just a few of those daily tasks. Moreover, Warren deftly reveals through these everyday examples how much we need God’s orderliness and purpose in our lives when we realize how often we fall short of meaningful goals and fail to notice the Spirit’s presence in the day-to-day.

Tish Harrison Warren

Reviewed by Michelle Vondey

Publisher’s page: https://www.ivpress.com/liturgy-of-the-ordinary

Editor’s Note: It has been reported that Liturgy of the Ordinary was the subject of major counterfeiting scheme. See: Kate Shellnutt, “Amazon Sold $240K of ‘Liturgy of the Ordinary’ Fakes, Publisher Says: A Christian bestseller (and CT Book of the Year) was targeted by a major counterfeiting scheme” ChristianityToday.com (July 8, 2019).

Matthew E. Gordley, in his monograph Teaching through Song in Antiquity: Didactic Hymnody among Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians, explores the variety of means that ancient poets, over time and in numerous locations, employed hymns to instruct their audiences. Gordley argues that many Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian hymns of antiquity, beyond praising a deity, also had the primary function of instructing and shaping the writer’s community (1-2).

The author maintains, “Didactic hymns, prayers and religious poetry are those which employ the stylistic and/or formal conventions of praise and prayer, but whose primary purpose was to convey a lesson, idea, or theological truth to a human audience” (5).

In this comprehensive work, the author claims through a study of form, content and strategies of a hymn, insight can be gleaned about issues facing the communities for which these texts were composed (2). Gordley also asserts that by comparing didactic hymns from a variety of cultural traditions, a greater appreciation and understanding of how ancient instructional strategies functioned can be achieved (2). A final goal of the author is to explore the types of lessons and instructions conveyed through hymnody (8).

Gordley’s book consists of eleven chapters, a bibliography, an index of references and an index of modern authors and subjects. Chapter one is critical as it conveys the methods Gordley utilizes to identify hymns intended to have a teaching function (9). The features, which may indicate that a hymn had a didactic purpose, are first, a poet’s invitation to his audience to learn from him, (such as Psalm 78:1, which opens with “Give ear, my people, to my instruction …”). A second indicator of a teaching purpose is the presence of prominent instructional language in the hymn.

When these explicit indicators are absent, Gordley notes other characteristics in the hymn that can point to a text with a didactic purpose. They are 1) the direct address of the audience by the author, 2) the presence of direct claims about the deity being praised and/or explicit claims about the community offering the praise, 3) the recounting of an event, in the form of a narrative, from the mythic past or recent past (10). Gordley also claims psalms or hymns that are embedded in a narrative or an epistolary text of the Bible or in other early Jewish and Christian literature could have had an instructional function in its new context (11). Gordley’s methodology leans on reader-response criticism, discourse analysis, performance criticism and the analysis of how communities have remembered themes over time (15-20).