The new issue (September/October 2009) of Christianity Today’s Books and Culture has some strikingly good reviews centered on the relationship between race and justice in the United States.  For those who have been following Withered Grass, David R. Swartz’s pointed review of Peter Goodwin Heltzel’s Jesus and Justice (Yale University Press, 2009) is there, along with a critical assessment of Thabiti M. Anyabwile’s The Decline of African American Theology: From Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity (InterVarsity, 2007) by Vincent Bacote.  Heltzel himself reviewed J. Kameron Carter’s Oxford University Press book, Race: A Theological Account and, finally, Curtis J. Evans examined a 2008 Harvard University Press title, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion.

A couple of highlights from Bacote and Swartz:

– Bacote takes Anyabwile to task for “[neglecting] any engagement with the major African-American denominations,” specifically the Church of God in Christ, the National Baptist Convention, and the AME Church.  While he’s thankful for Anyabwile’s examination of rarely-acknowledged-yet-Reformation-centered African American preachers, theologians and teachers from the 19th and 20th century, Bacote is decidedly more skeptical about Anyabwile’s decline narrative as well as the book’s prescriptive section.  Referring to the afterword, Bacote writes:

Here, however, one finds indications that Anyabwile desires the African American church to become a kind of “truly Reformed” church if it is to find its way.  As a neo-Calvinist myself, I am warm to the legacy of Calvin, but I find it dubious to suggest the use of the “regulative principle of worship.”  Every tradition has had its debates about how the Bible instructs us to worship God, and I am unconvinced that introducing the regulative principle (a subject of ongoing debate within the Reformed tradition) will be much help, especially to those who are self-consciously in other streams of the faith.

– In Swartz’s view, Heltzel attempted to “integrate white and black traditions” (i.e. the two broad “streams” represented by Carl F. H. Henry and Martin Luther King, Jr.).  Swartz concludes that Heltzel over-reaches and, as a result, stumbles in his analysis.  Can you really put King and Henry together, Swartz asks, adding that sociologists and historians alike will probably be displeased by Heltzel’s analysis.  Sociologists will complain that Heltzel ignores the very really differences between black and (predominantly) white evangelicalism when it comes to “cultures, politics and religious practices,” while historians, in Swartz’s view, will insist that Heltzel detached King and Henry’s theologies from their respective contexts in order to integrate their perspectives. “…Heltzel can enlist only their [King and Henry's] theologies, not their social and religious networks, to support his thesis about an emerging evangelicalism that encompasses both traditional belief and progressive politics.  This makes,” concludes Swartz, “for a superb theological meditation but a less-than convincing statement regarding politics on the ground.”

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