Posted 288 days ago
Book Review of The Boundary-Breaking God by Danielle Shroyer
By Judy Naegeli, MSA team
Danielle Shroyer, The Boundary-Breaking God: An Unfolding Story of Hope and Promise (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 2009). 131 pp.
Each person you ask for a definition of narrative theology would say something slightly different. I understand it like this: as followers of Jesus, we should place our lives and experiences firmly into God’s story and let it shape us, instead of taking nuggets of God’s words out of context to serve our own ends. It’s a paradigm shift from the systematic theology of the past, but one that has many potential benefits.
Danielle Shroyer’s The Boundary-Breaking God: An Unfolding Story of Hope and Promise is probably the best example so far out there of narrative theology. She starts themes of hope, promise, and future and proceeds to retell some of the most important stories of the Bible. And through these stories, and stories from her own experience, she shows us how to position ourselves to live into God’s promises.
Shroyer starts with the story of God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah—the promise to build a great nation that would bring salvation to the whole world. She uses it to construct a continuing metaphor of “God’s expanding horizon” as the future we are journeying toward. The point she reaches in the last chapter on prophecy is that if we put our trust in God’s promises as Abraham and Sarah did, we will one day reach the Kingdom of God’s new creation.
The chapters in between teach us how to live into the promise as we journey. The exodus teaches us how to live with freedom from slavery and death. Epiphany teaches us that God’s Kingdom is not just for “us” but for anyone who recognizes Jesus Christ as King: “. . . God is not just God of the Israelites but God of foreign pagan astrologers too” (39). The Holy Spirit is a life-giving force bestowed upon us to unite us and help us “collaborate for the Kingdom” (100). And the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments serve to show us what we have to look forward to, not in specific terms but in the imaginative language of love.
It is very hard to pick a favorite chapter, so I picked two: “From Gatekeepers to Door Openers” about the priesthood of all believers and “When the End Is Just the Beginning” about the resurrection. The first starts with a story from Shroyer’s own pastoral journey, in which she discovered the benefit of wearing a clerical collar to pastoral care visits. She states: “Certain clothes have a way of calling up an idea about a person, of instructing you in how to address someone, whether that means telling them you would like a grande chai latte or prayer for your ailing parent” (54). At first I could not tell where she was going with this, and my spirit rebelled a little. I asked myself, “Shouldn’t we be treating everyone the same way—with dignity and respect—regardless of what they are wearing or what their job is?” It hit a personal chord too, because I routinely avoid situations where there are any requirements for my appearance; the idea of dressing professionally for a job interview makes me feel a little sick. But luckily, I read on and gleaned a very important lesson from Shroyer’s chapter on the priesthood.
After stories of priests, like Melchizedek, Moses, and the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, Shroyer states that when Jesus died, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies in the Temple was torn from top to bottom. “God performed a dramatic exit . . . to signal to all of us that God-with-us was more than just a name. It was a promise” (59). Jesus became our High Priest, sacrificing himself for us, breaking the power of “death machines” and human power systems. And now, we are all priests that point each other to Jesus the open door to God’s horizon. We are called to journey together and help each other along the way. And this is where Shroyer brings back the idea of the clerical collar. The collar created an open door. Without it, some people she visited would never open up to her or even let her pray for them. In conclusion to this chapter, Shroyer writes,
We can be door openers in plenty of creative ways. If we’re honest, we all have had times when we could use some help finding an open door. Jesus invites up to walk this life together as a pack for this very reason. . . . This is what it means to be the priesthood. It means doing everything we can to be good and faithful companions on the journey, side by side, hand in hand (69-70).
The chapter on resurrection, “When the End Is Just the Beginning,” makes the point that “eternal life is not a ticket we hold, but a lifestyle we inhabit” (84). She draws a lot from N.T. Wright’s recent book Surprised by Hope, which, she says in her notes, “seeks to correct the major misunderstandings of heaven, resurrection, and the coming of God in a wonderfully concise way” (129). Living in the Resurrection means routinely rejecting the work of “death machines” in our world. Shroyer lists injustice, torture, greed, political expediency, pride, tyrannical governments, selfishness, retribution, and murder as death machines and tells us that they have been “rejected as lasting currency in the world [and] time-stamped . . . there will come a day when they will expire” (77). This means that we are called to work for justice: “Following God requires us to treat people in a way that often bumps up against what is culturally acceptable” (85). Amen.
It is obviously that Danielle Shroyer is very passionate about the themes and stories she chose for this book. Hope, promise, and future are near to her heart. She says, “I imagine I could write another book structured in this same way, focusing instead on the theme of grace, or justice, or even human folly. As it is, the characters of hope, promise, and future have always been the ones nagging me in my head, so it is their story that I write” (xvii). This must be why she chose to start with covenant instead of creation. That was my biggest question when I started this book: doesn’t the creation story have a lot to tell about hope and the future of God? If nothing else, it describes what we are trying to get back to. It describes God’s first intention for the world and gives up hope in the fact that God loved us first, made us in God’s image, and wants to be in relationship with us. I think it would have made a wonderful beginning to her narrative book. But perhaps, as she herself suggested and I fervently hope, she will write another book with stories that continue to point us to God’s horizon—a future of lasting joy, fellowship, and overwhelming love.
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