Matthew Lee Anderson
Bethany House, 2011, 214 pp., $14.99
For several years, Anderson has been writing about doctrine, theology and life on sites such as Evangel.com and MereOrthodoxy.com. In his new book Earthen Vessels, Anderson argues that our bodies are more significant than we generally are told in the modern church.
“…part of the younger generation’s desire is to recover the body as a central part of human life. There’s a feeling of malaise, a feeling that we grew up in a tradition with something missing. For a lot of younger people, that has meant turning toward tradition, toward art, toward churches that are more liturgical. For others, that has meant turning toward tattoos in a search for permanence depth and stability.”
Anderson’s argument is that our bodies are important—really important—and we should have a better understanding of how the body affects all aspects of our lives. Evangelicals in particular have abandoned the wholeness of creation and of God’s intentions for how we relate to our own bodies. The cost of this abandonment has left evangelicals without a well-crafted position on many current issues regarding the body that regularly confront young people today.
He says: “I want to be perfectly clear; I am neither a postmodernist, feminist, philosophical naturalist nor a Catholic. But those streams of thought have raised important questions and produced valuable insights about the body that evangelicals need to attend to more carefully. At a minimum, if conservative evangelicals want to offer careful, gospel-centered responses to these various ‘isms,’ then we must overcome our inattention to the body and engage these communities on this ground in distinctly evangelical ways. It is not enough just to show that how they think about human bodies is wrong. We must also show them a more excellent way of thinking about—and of living in—human bodies.”
Earthen Vessels could be called “a theology of the body,” to borrow a phrase used by Pope John II in 1979. The book will help youth workers develop their thinking about current cultural issues that young people must address. Also, Anderson’s bibliography offers a wealth of information and research that will be useful for additional study on this topic.
