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Pursuing an Earthy Spirituality: C. S. Lewis and Incarnational Faith

requires the intra-textualism of the New Criticism) “may be true of Frei’s early work, but is not an accurate description of Frei’s work as a whole” (39). Still other misunderstandings can be blocked by attending to secondary literature that develops Frei’s own positions (for instance, Werpehowski, DeHart, and Schwartzentruber on “ad hoc” “rather than ‘systematic’ apologetics,” 2). But most of Shin’s book is devoted to his own careful reading of Frei’s books and articles. There is no space here to give more than a taste of Shin’s careful arguments about Frei’s hermeneutics (part I), his christology (part II), and his theological method (part III). Shin argues persuasively that Frei’s scriptural hermeneutics came to center less on the literary genre of narrative (important as that remained) than on the church’s concrete practices of using Scripture centered on Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ’s unsubstitutable identity is public in a way that enables the church to receive enrichment from the world even as it engages the world in witness and service, including “a carefully circumscribed progressive politics” (94). Frei’s theological method is embedded in a concrete academy akin to Schleiermacher’s nineteenth-century University of Berlin, where professional education (including clerical training) and rigorous academic training coexisted in an “orderly eclecticism” (104), permitting and requiring theology to engage not only the academic publics of philosophy and history but also and even primarily literary studies and the social sciences. On all three scores (biblical hermeneutics, christology, and theological method) Shin’s book will provide novices to Frei’s theology a clear and careful commentary. Even long-time (or, if you prefer, older) readers like myself will find new insights throughout Shin’s readings of Frei. Shin proposes that “Frei’s position is perched somewhere between Barth and Schleiermacher” (131). This will surprise those who identify Frei with (usually wooden readings of) Barth, but Shin makes a strong case for this reading, at least on the methodological issues he discusses in the last part of his book. But should this really surprise? After all, Schleiermacher, Barth, and Frei were all Reformed Christians. But this raises a question: In what sense is a church divided Greek and Latin, Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and Reformed, and others a single “public”? Shin’s book puts us in an excellent position to extend Frei’s reflections into these issues, ecclesiological and eventually trinitarian.