June 16, 2004
BOOK REVIEW: An American Conversion by Deal Hudson
The pitch for this book was very compelling to me; Deal Hudson had a different conversion experience from me, but he also came from a Southern Baptist background. His conversion centered around his desire for beauty and his belief in philosophy and art. It sounds strange, but the book leads you through point by point in his journey.
Overall, the book is very good and offers a different take on the value of the Catholic Church. Rather than simply going through Scripture, he focuses on the unity of though in the Church and the lack of unity in protestant Churches. This unity ties together the body and the mind:
The unity of the material body and immaterial intellect through the form of the soul in human beings is central to the Catholic understanding of philosophy and theology, especially in ethics, politics, epistemology, and education. The loss of that unity, falling either in the direction of the soul or the body, is a challenge to the Catholic tradition and apologetics. Think only of the Catholic belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist verses the evangelical understanding of the bread and wine as symbols. For the evangelical at communion the flesh and blood is a name pointing away from itself toward what is not there. For the Catholic there is no need to look away; the Eucharistic feast in not understood in nominalist terms, meaning in name only, not in substance. The bread and wine are united with the divine presence analogously to the unity of the mind and body and the divine and human nature in Jesus Christ.
Deal Hudson’s thought process is highly philosophical - his readings of Aristotle, Aquinas, and others highly influences his relationship with God and his understanding of divine things. I think the journey is summed up close to the end of the book:
Evangelicals view human nature as fallen and the work of grace as extrinsic to an unredeemable human nature. In other words, I was asked to live in a radically divided world, described best in Luther’s words, “at once justified, at once a sinner” (simul justus, simul peccator).
This hard distinction leads, I believe, to the evangelical mistrust of human works of all kinds, not just claims to good works, but to the works of culture - the arts, philosophy, the humanities. Philosophy was studied among Baptists primarily to find out what it was lacking, how it was in basic discord with Scriptures. There was no spirit of cooperation, no instinct to wed the truth of philosophy with revealed truth.
In the end, Hudson accepts Aquinas’ mantra: “grace perfects nature; it does not destroy it.” In other words, grace “strengthens human love, inwardly ordering it once again to God.” This is far different from the protestant theology he started with.
I recommend this book as a must read. It’s full of rich theological insights that demand time to chew over them and meditate upon their effects on your life. It’s a quick read, but it will stay with you for a long while, I imagine. Click here to order from Amazon.com.
God bless,
Jay
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