What is the genre of your book?

The book incorporates aspects of practical spirituality and autobiography. However, it is best described as a cultural study.

What prompted the writing of this book?

The recent loss of my paternal grandmother, Esther Palma, and maternal great-Aunt, Esther Stigliano, catalyzed a fresh resolve to revisit and write on my roots. Both were nonagenarians and represented in life a window into the world and ways of a cherished yet overlooked generation. Embracing Our Roots harkens to their legacy who, as Italian immigrants, braved the New World on behalf of subsequent kin. Inspired by their legacy, I began to mine the treasures that had been passed down to me—family records, personal letters, and photo albums, retracing the footsteps of those whose legacies I carry on.

What is the overarching message of the book?

Drawing from my background as an Italian American evangelical, Embracing Our Roots considers the significance of rediscovering our ancestral history in a society where many are forced to repress, ignore, or reject their heritage. As a nation of immigrants, every American is, in some sense, an “ethnic” American and stands to benefit from considering how the people and places they come from make them unique.

What major themes are addressed?

The book addresses the issues of biblical living, faith-based traditions, food culture, immigration, social class, race, family dynamics, and mental health.

Paul J. Palma, Embracing Our Roots: Rediscovering the Value of Faith, Family, and Tradition (Wipf and Stock, 2021).

What makes your book unique from other similar books?

Other books have been written on the significance of ancestry, ethnic background, and building our family tree. This work is unique because it situates the entire project of retracing our roots within the larger referents of biblical redemption and a faith-entranced worldview. The significance of genealogy is a reoccurring theme in the Bible, harkening to the communal, familial dimension of God’s providence.

Who do you envision as the target audience for this book?

It is intended for scholars and laypersons alike. While I claim that genealogy and family life are best approached from a faith-entranced perspective, I hope this work will also be illuminating for those looking in on the life of faith from the outside. I invite non-religionists interested in their ancestral history to join in this journey of rediscovery.

Did the circumstances surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic influence your perspective in any way?

The work was completed at the height of the COVID 19 pandemic. Amid immense loss for our families, our nation, and the world, I realized there was something that nothing and no one can take from us—the value of our inheritance. Rooted in God’s constancy, we can have confidence that our faith and family legacy will endure.

The author of In Search of Ancient Roots, Kenneth J. Stewart, professor of theological studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, maintains that the roots of the evangelical tradition goes further back than the 17^th and 18^th centuries and even the Reformation era of the 16^th century and be found as early as the middle of the 3^rd century when Cyprian, about A.D. 280, questioned the authority of a single “pope” in his The Unity of the Church (De Unitate Ecclesia, PL 4.502).

Stewart is a specialist in the history of Christianity from the Reformation to the present, with particular interest in the development of the evangelical movement as it arose soon after the 16^th century Protestant Reformation. Stewart holds a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, and has been a contributor to the Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography. He bases his argument for an ancient heritage for Evangelical Christianity upon the work of a prior researcher, John Jewel, who in his preaching in England in the late 16^th century gave reference to Cyprian’s De Unitate Ecclesia in which this Church Father argued against the need of a pope and for the need of a plurality.

This reviewer feels that Stewart could not have done a better job of referencing. The reason for this reviewer’s praise is that as a student at the Divinity School of Duke University, this reviewer had the opportunity to read in Cyprian’s works in a Historical Theology class. Cyprian maintained that “upon this rock [petra]” did not refer to Peter since the feminine form for “rock” referenced his confession. Cyprian must have had Paul’s letter to the Corinthians alongside his other reading where Paul stated that no other foundation can be laid for the church than that of faith in Christ Jesus. That, in and of itself, is sufficient as an evangelical contention.

Chapter two of Stewart’s In Search for Ancient Roots traces the evangelical message as a recurring occurrence from the very beginning. In Chapter 3, Stewart addresses the need for appraising the Christian past prior to the 19^th 18^th, and 16^th centuries and not treating evangelical Christian faith as product of the camp meetings of the early 1820’s and the later emergence of both Charles Finney and Dwight L. Moody. Chapter 4 does just that by examining the use of the past by Protestants beginning with present-day Protestant denominations and working backwards to the 16^th Century and credits the advent of “type-setting” by Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468) as enabling mass circulation of the writings of both the early patristic era of the church and of the classical writers of the Graeco-Roman era.  Stewart found that among the most used by the Reformers was the Comminatory of Vincent of Lerian composed in the early 5^th century.

John Wesley

Wesley called attention to the inward, experiential dimension of faith. This emphasis was in part a reaction to the Calvinism that permeated the social and political life of the English world in the seventeenth century. Also undergirding the movement was the “living faith” Wesley imbibed from his encounter with German Pietism. Wesley’s contact with the Moravians, Pietists within eighteenth-century Lutheranism that drew from Catholic mysticism, gave him an awareness for the emotional dimension of faith. This led to his personal conversion, during which as he described, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.”[1] Wesley understood the Christian life as consisting of two separate experiences of grace—conversion (or justification), and Christian perfection (or sanctification). The first, justifying grace, covered over all the “actual sin” one had committed. Sanctifying grace, on the other hand, was given for the “residue” of sin that remained after one became a Christian—the inherited (original sin) from Adam.[2] According to Wesley, sanctifying grace occurred subsequent to the justifying grace of conversion. Wesley refers to the reality of this subsequent sanctifying experience as “Christian perfection,” “perfect love,” and “heart purity.”[3] While this experience is gradual and works itself out over the entirety of the Christian life, as Peter Althouse explains, there is also an instantaneous dimension of sanctification for Wesley. It is this latter “crisis” sense that undergirds the Holiness view of sanctification and the Pentecostal baptism in the Spirit.[4]

Historian Paul King introduces us to the origins of the controversial Word of Faith movement.

Paul King speaking at the 2014 Society for Pentecostal Studies convention.

A spate of articles and books have appeared over the past two decades debating the controversial teachings of the “Word of Faith” movement. Several blistering critiques such as those of D.R. McConnell (A Different Gospel) and Hank Hanegraaff (Christianity in Crisis) have claimed the movement as heretical or cultic, originating in New Thought metaphysics.¹ Others such as William DeArteaga, Joe McIntyre, Derek Vreeland have mounted defenses or reconstructions of modern faith theology, while still others such as Geir Lie, Dale Simmons, and Robert Bowman have presented more moderate critiques and scholarly studies.²

E. W. Kenyon (1867-1948) is generally recognized as the chief originator of the modern faith movement.³ The core of the controversy is found in the purported origins of Kenyon’s teachings. McConnell’s pivotal and influential book entitled A Different Gospel made a case for extensive influence from New Thought metaphysics upon the thinking of Kenyon, detailing noticeable parallels between Kenyon’s writings and New Thought writers. He thus concluded that Kenyon’s thought, and therefore modern faith teaching, is derived from non-Christian cultic sources and thus suspect. Hanegraaff built on McConnell’s research and conclusions to avow further that the modern faith teaching is heretical and cultic. Both books have made a significant impact on the evangelical Christian community in labeling the word of faith movement as heterodox and even sacrilegious.

Church historian Eddie Hyatt comments, “These critics … display a lack of knowledge concerning the historical development of the twentieth century Pentecostal movement from its nineteenth century antecedents and its influence of the modern movement. It is in the religious mileau [sic] out of the Holiness and Healing movements of the nineteenth century that the modern “Faith Movement” finds its primary emphasis.”⁴ Similarly, Simmons’ doctoral dissertation concludes:

As for Kenyon himself, it would appear that he is best placed within the Keswickean/Higher Christian Life tradition. … This is not to say that there are not aspects of Kenyon’s teaching—specifically those centering on one’s confession—that he stresses to a point that is only comparable to that of New Thought. … It would be going too far to conclude that New Thought was the major contributing factor in the initial development of Kenyon’s thought.⁵

Taking a more scientific approach than McConnell and Hanegraaff, Bowman compared 23 standard New Thought concepts with Christian Science and Kenyon. From this statistical analysis, he concluded that while there is much in common between Christian Science and New Thought, there is “little resemblance” between Kenyon and New Thought. Further, he concluded that Kenyon is “far closer to orthodoxy than is Christian Science.” Kenyon may share some similarity with metaphysical thought, but his views are “fundamentally different.”⁶ He demonstrates that McConnell’s methodology is faulty, and thus his conclusions regarding Kenyon’s connections with metaphysical New Thought are deeply flawed. While there may have been some metaphysical influence, Kenyon’s views are more unlike such concepts than like.

Peter Darg, host, Yeshua/Jesus: Exploring the Jewish Roots of Jesus (Gateway Films, distributed by Vision Video www.visionvideo.com). Starring: Barbara Babcock, Ken Howard and Ossie Davis.

As an introduction to Jewish roots studies, Yeshua/Jesus is a good start. It takes a wealth of available information, boils it down, and presents it in an 85-minute film (VHS). Written for the uninitiated, it assumes the viewer knows little and takes them on a whirlwind tour of Israel and Israeli life as it was 2,000 years ago.

Cinematically, it does not compare to a film like the Visual Bibles’ Matthew, but the visuals are adequate for the purpose.

As far as context is concerned, the film covers most aspects of Yeshua’s life with accuracy, save one. The producers, like many other Christians, take the biblical account of Yeshua’s visit to Jerusalem and the temple when he was 12-years old and assume he was participating in a bar mitzvah. As a matter of history, the tradition of the bar mitzvah took root in European Jewish society during the Middle Ages. Yeshua was likely accompanying his father to the temple to learn what would be expected from him the next year, which, being of age, he would be required to offer his own Passover lamb. That appeared to be the only subject where history met misinterpretation.

Overall, the film is a reasonable entry-level to Jewish Roots information.

Reviewed by Kevin M. Williams