I learned everything* we need to know about economics from a trading game

For a number of years, I've been using some odd moments to re-connect with economics which I learnt as a subject for A-level and which learning I have been able to marshal to understand the basic issues in national and political life ever since, to some degree. One of the consistently distressing things, given that background, has been the Thatcherite 'handbag economics' which essentially persisted having become the new common sense through to more recent times and enabled austerity politics to take hold. 

A couple of paragraphs digression...

It's worth noting too, that despite the austerity narrative, the Cons were not averse to using the 'magic money tree' quite copiously. In doing so they showed that it is the 'where the money is deployed to' in respect of the production of money that is at issue. -Because they paid out without taxing it back or calling in the debt. So how they justify 'where we don't insert money into the economy' -by a narrative of unaffordability- is really the thing to watch. "Do as I say not as I do".

Clearly by this point, the household budget analogy of Thatcher (often called 'handbag economics) had become so commonplace that it was straightforward to deploy it to justify political choices as if they were 'just the way things are'. It could take hold because it had the open goal of widespread ignorance about what was actually happening at a macro economic level. In that way austerity came to be seen as 'just common sense' (however unpalatable) to so many people. Unhappily also this affected many politicians most of whom should have known better, not least because they are, in a sense, supposedly paid to know better. But it seems that most of them didn't actually understand macroeconomics -as polling by Positive Money demonstrated. I'm hoping the following exploration of a certain famous trading game's economy will help readers to become better informed than many MPs appear to be. This may help those MPs raise their game (pardon the pun).

Back to the main points

So, one of the things that I've been musing over for a little while, is how we might displace the cultural fastness of the idea of handbag economics with something more accurate and helpful. In response to this challenge, one of the images or ideas that I keep coming back to is a certain famous property trading game. I think in part because when I was learning about fiscal policy I managed to persuade my sisters to play a game of Monopoly (tm) with me where I, as banker, was given tax-raising powers. This gave me the chance to observe over the course of a game, the contrast with all the other times we'd played. What we found, unsurprisingly, was that greater equality between players was possible and could be maintained for a long time. We observed that the fiscal (a progressive tax) mechanism countered the monopolistic dynamic of the game which is 'to those who have more will be given' -ie towards monopoly at the expense of others -'beggar your neighbour'. Of course, the game was originally designed to teach about just this monopolistic dynamic and I think I may have inadvertently reproduced to some degree, the other -original version- of what was originally called 'The Landlords' Game' which was a version with a land value tax embedded in the rules. I understand the two were to be used together as a learning tool.(*2) 

Since then one of the things I have found myself returning to in terms of understanding monetary dynamics in macro-economic terms, is summed up in the question,

"Do you know what happens in a game of Monopoly if the banker runs out of money?" 

Many people don't because they've not experienced a game where that has been necessary. I played enough games when I was younger for this to happen at least once. The answer to that question is that the banker simply creates more currency -literally just writes on bits of paper and these then become legal tender within the game. If this doesn't happen, the game grinds to a halt. In order to continue the exchange of money for properties, fines, rents, building, mortgaging etc (which is all the economy of the game), there has to be sufficient supply of money to support that activity. ^*

From this point of departure, I have been noting several parallels and helpful reflections to an actual, proper, scaled-up, economy with its own money-issuing powers. It's almost as if the game is a scaled-down model of a real economy. In fact it is and was designed to be so -the only question is whether the parallels between the two scales hold -and this is the topic of this little enquiry. 

As I have come to see it, 'handbag economics' (perhaps I'll stop scare-quoting that) is problematic because, seen in terms of the game of Monopoly, handbag economics takes only the perspective of an individual player and not the banker. The game enables us to see, if we ponder further, the way that money represents or is backed by the total economy. It also helps us to begin to grasp the importance of one of the core insights of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT); that the starting point for a government in an economy is not "tax" but "spend". 

Usually handbag economists start with the idea that you have to have money coming in before you can spend it. This is then transposed directly to the macro economy and is taken to mean you have to tax to get the money coming in so that it can be spent. This is the perspective of the ordinary player in the game: in order to function as a player you have to have money otherwise you can't buy or develop properties, nor can you pay fines or rents and your only recourse if you run out of money is to sell or mortgage properties or to hope one of your rivals will drop onto one of your properties and give you rent or that you will pass 'go' and get your 200 currency units (cu's -different national editions use different denominations: £ $ etc) income. 

However, just stating it in those terms does help us to understand a few things. One is that there is another perspective in the game; that of the banker. Another, and relatedly, is about where that 200 cu's comes from and what function it has in the economy-that-is-the-game. And the question of the 200 cu's for passing go (how are they earned and how does that work?) also relates to a third matter: starting the game. 

These are all tied together by the insight that if the game's economy runs out of money, the banker -as banker, not as a mere player- can simply produce more currency 'from thin air' in game terms: the banker has a magic money tree and doesn't run out of "other people's money". In fact the danger in the game is that other people run out of the banker's money (translation: the economy runs out of the government's money). 

To be sure, the banker doesn't normally just give the new money away. There are a few mechanisms which they can use to float new money into the game's economy. One is via the basic income given by passing go which can now be paid in newly-created (minted!) money, similarly those points where the banker is mandated by cards to pay players. The new currency tokens will then continue to be used and they will function in just the same way as the printed cu papers that were issued at the start of the game. Basically it is trust or confidence that makes this happen. As long as the players continue to treat the new tokens as currency, it actually is currency. That is, if players trust to accept it from one another as payment of the debts that the game's rules recognise and create, then it is functioning in the exact same way as the game's pre-printed currency notes. Probably, ultimately what holds that trust in place may be that the banker will accept those tokens in payment of fines, property deals etc and continue to re-circulate the new `notes` in payment of the banker's own obligations to pay the basic 'passing go' income to players along with any occasional card-mandated 'bonus payments'. 

I underline that the new notes are functionally interchangeable with the 'old' pre-printed currency unit notes that come in the game box. Now we understand better the banker's point of view. The banker is there to ensure that the currency functions to support the game's economy; to make sure that there is enough money for everyone to exchange in payment for the goods and services that the game consists of or for players to use to pay debts to other players or to the banker themself. The banker is spending that currency into existence. First of all in starting the game by creditting each player with a sum of money and then by topping up each player's account each time they pass go. That first amount is not earned in any way by any of the players: it exists to enable the game's economy to get started. This is essentially like the Modern Monetary Theory proposition that the proper order for understanding a macro economy is not tax-then-spend (the handbag economics' story) but rather spend-then-tax. I'm just focusing on the spend aspect for now, not the tax dimension. 

What MMT is saying is that for a money-using economy to start and keep going, money (currency units) must be made available to 'players' /economic actors to be able to represent\stand for goods and services that they can exchange. Once players\economic actors have currency units and have confidence and trust that others will accept them in exchange for goods or services, then they can engage in exchanges using the cu's -this is "economic activity". The necessary trust\confidence can be underpinned, enabled and strengthened by a sovereign token issuer being themselves prepared to accept the currency units \tokens in payment of (for example) taxes(*3). 

What if the banker couldn't introduce currency into the game regularly?

This section is a bit of a side-exploration. Feel free to move to the next section if the detail does your head in (headed "Micro model ...").

We could, perhaps, consider the reverse side of the banker's spending currency into play within the game. What would happen if money was not being brought into the game's economy -that is if it wasn't being spent into existence inside the game? Two scenarios here: one would be a game where no-one has any money at the start, the other scenario would be where no-one receives 200 cu's for passing go. If there was no opening credit for each player at the start of the game, then a game might look like the following situation. Since the rule is that no-one may buy properties on the first time around the board, then during that first round a player may find they have to pay a fine or receive moneys from other players or to give money to other players as a result of card mandates related to where players pieces land following a dice-throw. Clearly these things could not happen, and so having not cu's would mean that the first round only had the effect of determining the relative order and timing of players entering into the second round. No slight disparities in wealth would yet crop up. If the only income were from passing go, then some players would be able to begin buying properties. This would advantage those who had the highest dice throws to get round first. They would then be able to modestly buy properties and gain, perhaps, a modest income by taking rents from players whose aggregate dice throws meant they went past go last. It would probably take quite a lot of time for these initial gains and losses to add up. 

And we still haven't addressed the issue of the fines that may have accumulated in the first round -admittedly unlikely to be many but still possible. So, imagine a player ends up with a card mandating that they pay 50 cu's to the banker. Without any starting moneys, the would have to issue an IOU, assuming the banker accepts it: perhaps the deal would be that they'd only get 150cu's from the bank on passing go. Or, what if the mandate was to pay other players, say 10cu's each. Again an IOU could be offered and if accepted could potentially begin to work as a currency token if other players would accept it, which they would if they trusted that the debt would be paid with the basic 'passing go' income. The IOU note could then circulate as a currency unit. Let's notice here that the confidence in such IOUs relies on the prospect of a basic passing go income (hereinafter: "bpgi") introducing an accepted currency into the game's economy. This clarifies the function of money as a unit of account between players making it easier to settle debts more quickly and efficiently. 

If there were no basic 'passing go' income, there are two scenarios. One is that there was a start-of-game deposit of currency units to each player and that is 'it' -no more money comes into the game's economy, there is no further currency to be had. The other scenario could be that there is no starting money either. This latter scenario would be like the previous scenario but without expectation of any currency units becoming available. So the only way to proceed would be to issue IOUs against fines and hope that these became currency -but what would they be 'backed' by? How would they become a means to buy properties and so forth? Unless the players had the nous to agree together to independently create a banker with the kinds of powers the conventional rules set out, the game would seem doomed never really to begin. Or perhaps players would be allowed to claim the cards of any property they landed on and perhaps those could become the basis -the backing- for a currency of sorts provided all the players trusted one another to honour the debts created. 

There would be an interesting question here of how the relative valuations of the properties might then develop since the conventional rules set a price which rests in the authority of the banker to refuse to hand over deeds for less than that price. If the first of those two scenarios (where there is no bpgi of 200cu's) is followed and there is a starting set of moneys each player has but no other money in the game's economy then the play-out might look like this. Various exchanges would go on to pay fines etc. The banker would not be able to pay out for occasional card-mandated bonuses unless either they received moneys as banker from other players -fines etc or if this was a permitted way to introduce new cu's into the game. However, that would result in a patchy game where payments were a bit hit-and-miss and as a game, it'd be really slow to get going and would likely grind to a halt when money wasn't available to enable payments and receipts. (A situation historically like the depression situation that Keynes sought to remedy with his General Theory). 

Micro model to macro: parallels between game and national economy

This all helps us to appreciate that a currency is 'backed' by the economy as a whole. In other words, the cu's represent and correspond to the economy -the goods and services (potentially) available for exchange. It also helps us to appreciate the importance of the MMT insight that the actual order of things in an economy is "(government) spend and then tax". The two are interlinked. What the currency does is unlock the potential availability of the goods and services. The offer of a payment calls forth a corresponding offer of a widget or a service. No money, no economy. Without the currency being available, much of the potential exchange of goods and services does not take place: the game's economy and the actual economy are in recession: not much happens and many people are not provisioned. Not being provisioned is like the players having to go round the board without being able to buy -or sell, come to that: the property cards remain only potential but not active parts of the game; the houses and hotels sit in the box and are never brought out into use. 

To unlock the latent potential of properties, houses and hotels and bring them into the game, there must first be money. And sometimes, during the game, there must be more money added if the economy of the game gets locked up because, say, player C passed Go, but there are no more currency notes. The banker isn't in debt in any meaningful way, the rules of the economy simply require there to be more money than was originally printed and packed with the game. The banker's IOU is in effect currency -it can be recirculated because it can be relied on for exchange and ultimately the banker will accept it back in payment for property, a house, a hotel, a fine or to get out of jail. The game's economy is good for the extra currency units else the banker wouldn't have needed to 'print more money'.

This is in essence how it is in the big economy beyond the game. The country has loads of potential 'stuff' and activities to produce and distribute. To unlock that potential the banker (the government, essentially) can put currency into circulation. To be sure, it has more options for doing that than a trading game offers, though it could do the equivalent of giving people 200cu's for passing Go. This was proposed (helicopter money -it's what the USA did with covid payments) as a better idea than giving it to bankers who, in the event, just ferreted it away. With it just sitting in offshore accounts, it didn't function to unlock latent potential in the wider economy. In some cases they ferreted it away in property, and all that did was cause inflation in the property market. This is bad because it made it even more difficult for ordinary people by driving up their costs of living where those costs are related to property prices and rents. It would have been better  for the economy as a whole and ordinary people in particular if QE had been based on basic passing Go income.

In the game the players start with a load of money. They've not earned this. The purpose of this money is to prefigure the game's economy; in effect it says to the players, "This is your initial potential in the game, spend it to bring the game to life". It represents the capacity for the players to interact economically and to expand the scope of the game's initial conditions. The currency calls the game into being when it is used. It enables purchases and exchange. It brings properties into the game and enables development. Likewise the bpgi keeps topping up the game's economy often enabling some players to stay in the game. In the big economy, the government has to spend currency into the 'game' that is the economy in order to release the productivity latent in the resources, processes, labour and ideas of the country. If the currency is curtailed or allowed to be stashed away unproductively (this was Keynes' concern back in the day) the resources cease to be used because offers of money for stuff or activities dries up. We can see, in terms of the trading game, that if the banker does austerity, then the game seizes up. But the banker doesn't need to do austerity, the banker isn't in debt to anyone; the banker is merely making something available to enable the continued unlocking of the game's resources and the continuance of payments and exchange suitable to maintain and develop the game's present capacity.

Other lessons to learn from the trading game analogue

So we can see the idea of government "debt" is misleading at best and poisonous at worst. What is too often labelled 'debt' is actually a monetary shadow or a kind of virtual analogue of economic capacity. If it isn't ... let's say "invested"... then productive capacity cannot be brought into the economy. Government 'debt' is actually decisions about where to first insert that money into the economy to call forth productive capacity. It's not really debt in our ordinary way of understanding(*5), it's better thought of as investment or commissioning. When the banker gives a player 200 cu's bpgi, they are inserting that money into the economy of the game in a way that first assists the individual player but with the knock-on effect of supporting further transactions originating with that player. That 200cu's becomes a rent income for another player and perhaps a chunk fairly promptly goes back to the banker as a property purchase and a house built. This makes it easier to understand that this is not, as Thatcher would frame it, "other people's money" but that money is actually a collectively owned artefact which is meant to serve the common good. But everywhere it is in chains in privatised holdings and public-to-private capture-and-convert schemes -trickle up economics.

What about inflation? This is quite often asked. Mostly this is because either people have vague recollections of learning about the hyper inflation of the early 1920s in the Weimar Republic, or because they have picked up a monetarist argument which applies the basic idea of supply and demand to currency in use. Sometimes both. Well, the evidence seems to be very weak and the causes for the Weimar republic's hyper inflation was not really about money supply -but much more understandable in the terms of the analogy to the game I'm writing about here -a mismatch between currency and what it is 'backed' by in the form of productive capacity. The point is that if money represents and corresponds to productive capacity in an economy (or a trading game), then if you reduce that capacity (a war will do that) but don't take account of that in money issuing, then the mismatch will tend to show up as inflation -particularly if you have a punitive reparations regime in place to remove even more 'stuff' from that economy.

That the game grinds to a halt if the banker doesn't issue new currency also invites us to question why there is a huge amount of money somewhere 'in the game' but still more is needed. And this has a not-insignificant real-world analogue. The new currency is needed because all of the came-with-the-game notes are sat in players' possession. They are, if you like, savings. It would be fun perhaps to play around with the possibility that the banker might actually give them savings accounts and then mimic fractional reserve banking(*4) in the game -though that only delays the potential problem; if a player or two wanted all their cash back, there could be a 'run on the bank' and the banker would be back to having to produce new currency units. But I digress. The point being made is that savings which are merely sitting there, are not calling things into existence, they are unproductive. In the property trading game, these hoards don't recirculate cu's. If there's no mechanism to return those hoards into circulation in a timely fashion, then you have to 'print' more money to replace it. 

Don't forget the obvious lesson to learn -which the game was originally set up to teach: the tendency to monopoly (hence the name). The game very clearly shows how small, often chance-based, differences in wealth tend, over time, to accumulate at the expense of weaker \unluckier players. It's one of the reasons I don't like to play the game -the slow decline of the losing players into penury is not entertaining and the small chance of a reversal is not enough to offset that watching paint dry feeling. Just like in real life (except in real life people are being ground down into actual misery). The original Landlord's Game had a second version of rules for once players had understood the dynamics of unearned income via rents towards monopoly power. The second set of rules levied a land value tax and playing through those rules showed how progressive taxation could re-equalise the power of individuals and not only reward good luck and happenstance. 

Let's also not forget that the analogy helps us to understand that money is, in a sense, a public utility and one that we all create collectively. It relies on our trust and continued valuing of it. As we trust it enough to spend and be paid we maintain its value (try spending foreign currency at your local supermarket if you don't believe me! -it fails because 'we' don't trust it to be good for payments). We should, I think, be wary of allowing money to be privatised ie its value to be siphoned off unproductively or for private interests to cream off value from our collective creation. For them to do that, they should have a good public-interest case and we should have democratic accountability about the way that money is put into circulation and taken out. It's our collective money: individuals get to have it because 'we' agree it's in the rules of the game.

We might want to think about the possibility that the bpgi is like a UBI...

Things that don't carry across

Because the game narrowly focuses on property and rents, matters relating to production, everyday provisioning are not really in view. It's worth noting that property prices and rents are fixed and this usually is not the case 'out there'. The banker doesn't levy taxes -unlike a government (though I suggest playing modified games to explore that could be interesting -rename the banker as "chancellor" and the bank as "exchequer").

Modify the game to explore further

You could try these out singly or in combinations. Now that Hasbro have released a cheaters' edition of the game, we could emulate the selective modification of rules idea for our own progressive and educational purposes.

• Try out the counter-examples in the 'what if...' section above.
• Give the banker (>"chancellor") tax levying powers. You have different options. When the player passes go, maybe, a percentage of the value of their property cards? An income tax -have a starting point in terms of the money the player has in hand: say, 20% on income if they hold in cash anything above their starting account.
• Give the 'chancellor' powers to invest money in particular projects or to give poverty relief. You'd need to decide (democratically?) what parameters to use.
• Allow the 'chancellor' to acquire the utilities and redistribute the proceeds as dividends to all the players.
• Go completely 'free market': don't have prices for the properties but auctions, let property card holders determine their own rents... Make sure you have a plan to break up the fights.

Footnotes 

*To be fair, maybe not 'everything' -I just couldn't resist the pull of the popular phrase. 

*2 For a bit more info: http://landlordsgame.info/ and https://roamresearch.com/#:~:text=https%3A//evonomics.com/monopoly-was-invented-to-reveal-the-toxic-greed-of-capitalism/ . I found this book to be helpful and eye-raising: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/monopolists-9781620405710/ See also this article which also explores cheating in the game and real life.

 *3 it is likely that this is how money actually started -see Graeber or Mellor -or many other historians of political economy. This is not particularly controversial, just too little known. By 'sovereign token-issuer' I mean someone or some authority with sufficient clout to be able to command the respect to act in this way and issue monetary tokens. Usually this as a government apparatus.

*4 Quite a lot of sites and text books write as if fractional reserve banking is still practised. It mostly isn't -actual banking practice left this behind ages ago.

*5 Our ordinary understanding of 'debt' is based on the implicit equation to household accounting  and not national accounting. To go for that analogy by using that word, is to smuggle in a wrong understanding about national accounting which is misleading. It's a malignant, perhaps malevolent, rhetorical move. We can grasp the inappropriateness of the analogy by asking "who's the debt owed to?" -Well, the government borrowed from the Bank of England, which is ... drum roll... an arm of government. What's it backed by? -The nation's total capacity to do and to make stuff and our collective trust that the tokens we circulate (coins, notes and bytes) are 'good for it' (ie settling bills, debts and paying tax). The so-called 'debt' is actually the government providing and investing in maintaining the flow of goods and services that constitute the economy. The government 'owes' us the money, collectively, to do what we do in the economy. If the government is properly democratic, then we owe ourselves. If it's not then it is stealing from us or facilitating theft from the common wealth.

^* Update: I finally (10/1/2022) got down to reading Stephanie Skelton's The Deficit Myth, I discover in chapter 1 that she refers also to the Monopoly game principle that the banker never goes broke and the consequent rule that they simply issue promissory notes.

Furth update: Interesting research here. - A little insight into how privilege works.

A More Christlike Word -a review

 One of the biggest problems I think I come across in Christian education is what I think of as a flat reading of scripture. By this I have in mind treating the whole bible as some kind of text-book: all one kind of writing, pretty much all of it giving propositional truths. Even bits that are obviously poetic and literary are treated as if the poetic form is merely a more aesthetic delivery system for what are really, at base, propositional statements. Related to that is the way that the differences of time, human writing and collecting and the history of receiving a text is banished to a far horizon (I think this is touched on at p.115: "literalism is generally tied to believing that truth is reduced to actuality, factuality, and historicity, whether or not the human or the divine author intended any such thing [p.115]"). This mind set is deeply uncomfortable with different parts of scripture apparently saying contradictory things because 'contradiction' means falsity in some part. Though of course if your definition of falsity is in large part leaning on a limited idea of 'propositionally true', then, yes; you are in trouble. Of course, a lot of this could be stood-aside from by simply being less prompt in equating "God's word written" with a kind of uniform concept of propositional truth. To turn the matter around: if scripture is in some way 'God-breathed' (I'm happy to start there, as is Dr Jersak), then what kind of way does it speak to us in the different 'notes' it is breathed through? As in music, cannot the dissonances also speak? If God speaks in Scripture, what do the differences and divergences tell us? -It's not good, in the end, pretending they're not there.

So a related question about how the early Church read scripture starts to bob up to the surface. They didn't have what we now call the New Testament, only that pesky hard-to-understand Old one. Can their readings of those writings help us to do a better job of reading scripture to tune into God?

I'll confess that for me the Anglican liturgical practice (retained from its pre-reformation form) where we  stand for the Gospel (and indeed face the gospel book and its reader) has helped me in this. Symbolically, to me at least, it says, "Christ is the centre -the rest is commentary". The Word (who was at the beginning) is the heart of the word of God written, the rest is commentary and context enlivened by the Spirit of the Word. (interestingly echoed on p.97: "... the “divine liturgy” of the church is a medium that functions to frame the Scriptures within the canon of faith—the message of the gospel—showing how they work together within the drama of redemption that inexorably points to Christ crucified and risen")

My hope was that this book might help me to think this through more, perhaps give me a resource to pass on to people I converse with about such things from time to time and /or perhaps deepen or re-found my line on the matter.

While above I mentioned as the way I think of a certain approach to reading scripture -'flat'- is the word used in this book too -in a fairly similar way. I think this word is going around in discussions about how we receive scripture and I've clearly picked it up too.

The idea of Christ being the centre and re-establishing in our thinking and attitudes that the Word is primarily, first and foremostly, Jesus is also robustly expounded here. One of my other favourite terms comes in here too: seeing the scriptures as witnesses to the Word. And from there he quickly gets into noting the hard questions prompted by the dissonance between the Abba of Jesus and some of the frankly genocidal commands in, say, Deuteronomy. And in relation to this issue, I found myself very much resonating with this:

I would not opt for the functional Marcionism of inerrantists who ignored the “toxic texts” or pretended they don’t exist. Nor could I follow the biblicists —literalists who were willing to throw the character of God under the bus, painting him as a monster and calling it “good” without blinking. Nor could I follow many progressives who had seen the problem but left the Bible behind altogether—and with the Bible, sometimes Jesus too! (p.45)

I like the way that the author keeps the Emmaus Road encounter as a paradigm case. Though I must admit that his putting the prodigal son story as a master text by which to interpret and weigh all others much surely have vied for the headline label, but I guess that "the Emmaus way" is probably more disclosive in that role than, say, "the prodigal way".

I was a little shocked that the fundamentalist /literalist way of reading scripture was labelled a heresy -a modernist heresy, but I must admit that I have gone a long way down the road already to thinking that there is something in that label. I found the characterisation of this in this sentence, very arresting: " seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred text..."

So, I think that I found that overall, the book was confirming me in where I'd come to, and that I would want to have this book to hand to commend or pass onto people I talk with about scripture and spirituality and Christian formation. I read with a sense of recognition of both the problems being identified and of the ways forward trough the network of issues raised. It is good to have a winsome book which goes through things systematically, with clarity and in a way that shows clearly that this a a 'faith seeking understanding' issue not one to be mistakenly characterised as 'disobedience', unbelief or deception.

It's quite a fat book -over 280 pages- but not a hard read at all; it covers a lot of ground in a winsome way with occasional turns of phrase that help to attract and hold the imagination. It doesn't labour points but feels to give enough information and argument to outline the main points and there are useful further reading and resources signalled along the way where the reader can follow-up things that become of particular interest.

The first parts of the book look at how the bible gets misused and misinterpreted and in what ways flat readings are inadequate and downright unhelpful, while making a case for a biblical strategy for reading scripture chistotelically. The second parts of the book cash out the theory. I was particularly taken by the chapters on rhetoric and diatribe -so far I'd only seem them in fairly scholarly books, it's good to see an author widening the audience and appreciation of these ways in which scripture is full of texture which is easily missed. The second moiety of the book moves more into the nature of God in relation to scriptural language. The key thought to emerge is that God is love and that we need to be wary of language about God, especially 'wrath'. We are also treated to some of the writings of the early Church supporting this. The main point, though, seems to be that by flattening out the scriptures, there's no way to put characteristics asserted of God into order and so a mean-spirited wrath is put on a par with love.

One of the things I gained from reading this book which I didn't expect was the challenge to read more of early church writers like, well more specifically, Origen and Melito of Sardis (being introduced to an online version of his On Pascha seem like a good place to start). I noted too that there's a really helpful 'further reading' section.

Lines I liked

The Word of God is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. And when he was about eighteen years old, he grew a beard (p.29)

  if there is a God (forever a faith statement), that God is Love. And God is Love only, for every other attribute of God must ever only be a facet of that one pure diamond lp.56]

I invite you to make an honest inquiry of how the so-called “toxic texts” function as a mirror that reveals the human condition and our habit of projecting our own un-Christlike images onto God, especially in the form of religious violence. [p.58]

seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred texts... [p.114]

... whatever unrecorded words Jesus relayed on the road to Emmaus, they did not fit into the historical-grammatical-literal approach (i.e., literalism) of my education. Frankly, I felt ripped off [p.129] 

Imagine Jesus saying, in all humility, “I hate to make this all about me...BUT, yeah, it really is.” [p.142]

 

Thoughts I found helpful

An Emmaus reading of their accounts sees these agendas. When the authors rationalize bloodshed, we ask, “How do they prefigure the Sanhedrin’s rationale for Jesus’s crucifixion?” And when they problematize violence, we ask, “How do their critiques anticipate Christ’s denunciation of violence?” As I read any given text through Christ, I need to con-sider whether the author’s perspective reveals a veil that Christ has since removed or an unveiling that foreshadows his revelation of God [p.84] 

Imagine that the whole Bible is simply an incredibly long version of the parable of the prodigals. And conversely, imagine that the parable is Jesus’s ingeniously brief summary of the whole Bible, distilled into short-story format. We can do this because both offer us the same gospel narrative...one in an expansive library and the other in a tight paragraph. So, here’s what we can do: turn the parable into an imaginary walk-in closet organizer for every section, every book, and every chapter of the Bible. [p.97]

The traumatic training offered in the Bible’s R-rated material should not be read as the threats of a violent deity but as the loving (and dramatically memorable) warnings of a good Father in good faith. The people of God made countless missteps that become vivid moral lessons for avoiding landmines. God wastes nothing... because of Jesus’s instructions on loving, forgiving, blessing, and praying for our enemies, and his explicit rejection of retaliation, vengeance, and violence, we must never use a text where the Philistines are slaughtered to call for the slaughter of “infidels.” Rather, we might see how they foreshadow Christ’s victory over the nonhuman enemies of satan, sin, and death, and our personal battles with the spirit of pride, malice, and other un-Christlike attitudes within ourselves.[p.133] (Personal note: this has been the only way I have been able to appropriate these texts)

I will say this to all Christians, Jewish or Gentile: we have no business in the Jewish sacred writings without reference to our Rabbi and his Emmaus Way of reading them. And that way of reading always points to and prostrates before him... Christotelic reading  [p.141]

So, as we read Old Testament narrative, we are invited to watch and see:

•When the people of God experience suffering, Christ suffers with them.

•When God’s people cause suffering, Christ suffers in their victims.

•When the people of God achieve victory, Christ is the victor.

•When God delivers his people, Christ is the deliverer.

•When the people go into exile, Christ goes with them.

•When the people of God are led out of exile, Christ leads them.

•When the priest offered a sacrifice, Christ was the priest.

•When the lamb was sacrificed, Christ was the lamb.

•When God appeared, that was Christ.  [p.158]

 ... new consensus has been emerging around what we are calling a “Christ-centered hermeneutic.” This term describes what we have been discussing throughout this book: that we must read the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus. Christ is the chief cornerstone—the Canon par excellence—so that all Scripture is received as authoritative only after passing through the life, teachings, and gospel of Jesus [p.196]

Rather, the best theologians are those who analyze and describe what the praying and worshipping community has come to believe through its corporate experience of the reality of the triune God. In other words, worship precedes theology, often by several decades. As we experience the presence of God in prayer and worship, we begin to compose liturgies and songs that express what we have come tosee. Eventually, theologians become observant and follow suit. Teachers may begin to confirm the implications of what the congregation has already been singing and praying (which is to say, believing) over the past decades. Ironically, the first generation of these teachers are often regarded as heretical, sometimes even by the very congregants who spawned theoriginal revelation. Why? It may be that the congregation is still under the spell of previous teachers whom they regard as their authoritative prescribers of the truth.  [p.197]

 The voices of sacrificial religion that permeate the story of Scripture are at least threefold in tone and content. Sacrificial religion speaks to readers as “the voice of the accuser,” “the voice of the victim,” and “the voice of the law.” Each voice makes particular claims and demands ..a fourth voice emerges in the biblical text, corresponding to the revelation of sacrificial love. I call it “the voice of the Lamb.” The voice of the Lamb—the voice enfleshed in Christ as self-giving love—proclaims the way of the cross vis-à-vis the worldly religious way of the sword. [p.204-5]

...biblicism regularly fails to delineate between the omniscient Author and the limited or unreliable narrator. However, there are many examples in literature where we are required to do just that. For instance, in Don Quixote, Cervantes constructs an epic tale of a very strange protagonist—but he also writes the tale through multiple genres, stories within stories, and a famously unreliable narrator. That is, the true author (Cervantes) knows exactly what he is doing, but he tells the story through a narrator who does not. Thus, the author is not truly the narrator. Narrators are actually extensions of the character they’re describing or evenan independent character who speaks from a particular perspective. [p.218]

Quotes I want to put 'out there'

 the first Christians would not have asked whether the Bible was authoritative. Instead, they would have said that Jesus was their authority, and then they would have asked, “Which books testify to this?” Those that did were chosen for inclusion in their written canon, [p.76]

I confess to finding the pastoral and evangelistic damage literalism causes upsetting. The edge comes from seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred texts...with the ironic claim that this constitutes faithfulness. [p.114]

literalism is generally tied to believing that truth is reduced to actuality, factuality, and historicity, whether or not the human or the divine author intended any such thing [p.115]

Modernist literalism... constantly stumbles into thinking that if a text (such as Genesis 2, Job, or Jonah) is not accepted as factual history, then it isn’t true. But consider this: is the parable of the prodigal son not profoundly true? Is Christ’s story of the good Samaritan not supremely true? [p.123]

... the redactors who gathered the Hebrew canon consciously incorporated texts that challenge and subvert other texts across the Scriptures... without imagining that this might undermine or threaten the authority of their Bible. The narrative is allowed to stand as is, confirming the integrity and genius of the story of God and God’s people.[p.201]

I used to flip right to the “good stuff” in Job until I started seeing how “good” the foolish counsel seemed to me. Some of it appears to make good sense. Exactly! The important function of the friends’ speeches is to shine a light on our own idiocy. The friends’ speeches are an inspired revelation of our own error, not a divine thumbs-up to their error. [p.207]

Side note: Paul commissioned the female deacon Phoebe to deliver (preach!) his sermon to the Romans in person. He would have prepared her to communicate the tones such that his first audience picked up on the diatribe [p.245]

The emotional pairing of the terror of judgment offset by the relief of escape is effective(ish). But if our message focuses on fear that makes God the cause or agent of fear, we’ll either run from God or turn to him but have no desire to draw near to him. Spiritual Stockholm Syndrome

True justice for the prophets is the beautiful restoration of the shalomic state by means of mercy—defined as every manifestation of divine goodness. In that case, justice and mercy kiss [p.269]

Provocative or intriguing quotes

Origen included within his literal sense the need to discern and distinguish (1) actual history from (2) fictitious history (when we can) composed by the Spirit to communicate more-than-literal truth. In either case, the message the story conveys is true [p.130]

If we don’t see that Christ is the point, then the whole Bible remains Old Testament, but if we do, then the whole Bible becomes New Testament [p.218]

Link-Love for Review

A More Christlike Word on Amazon
A More Christlike Word website
Bradley Jersak’s website 

#AMoreChristlikeWord

I should say that I received this e-book as a review copy via the Speakeasy review scheme. I'm not obliged to say nice things about it (or the reverse, come to that), just to comment on it within 30 days of receiving it. Which I've done. 

Call of the Child -a bit of a review

The title pretty much tells you, but here's what the author says:

It is about two things, tightly interweaved but seldom thought of as connected. They are: Being a child, and being a peacemaker

And that's what draws me in -those two strands of Jesus' teaching- because they are strong themes from the gospels and it's good to see them in company with each other imaginatively and reflectively.

Further, he goes on to say something that felt like it spoke to where I'm coming to (again) at this point in time.

A child trusts. A child does not worry. A child can be oblivious to the challenges surrounding them. A child plays. A child is filled with wonder. A child knows that their father can fix anything. A child has no experience with fear or abandonment. A child has nothing to prove. A child has no need of reputation. A child feels inherently safe. A child sees no limitations and believes that anything is possible. A child is at peace.

So, of course, I was going to read this! (smiley face)

Bruce's starting point, theologically, is a fairly mainstream evangelical approach to bible and atonement. It is radical in pushing back against some evangelical views of God's love and punishment though arguably no less radical than the Reformers themselves. It is worth noting that he's not about asserting that background since he has no desire to argue about it but a willingness to discuss.

Bruce starts off by leading us into a reflection on the nature of God's fatherhood and the implications of a real Good News which is that God loves us fundamentally; that the Cross has created us as God's children irrevocably. You can get the flavour of this from page 18: 

This English translation of the Greek word huiothesia ... When translated as adoption it implies to us that we were not the Father's children until after we were adopted. But the Greek word does not mean that at all. The word actually refers to the act of placing a son. In the Roman context, that would be something more like a coming of age ceremony, or a proclamation that a son is fully the legal and rightful representative of his father. The point here is that we have always been the children of Father God. We were stolen, but the Cross has redeemed us and purchased us back from captivity.

It is in a footnote to this first chapter that Bruce makes the point that while it is common for people to quote Rom.3:23 "... all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God", in attitude this is often severed from the following verse which tells us that all are justified freely by God's grace. In a sense, he's trying to get us to think about that and weigh it more heavily in our estimation. I think that this is right.

Bruce mentions that he is from a military background, so it is interesting to read the chapter on war -I would commend it. Interesting, not least because of the discussion of the just war tradition and its misuse and abuse. As an American, he seems to be under no illusions about the USAmerican role in maintaning an unpeace-ful world.

I liked that the topic of peace and peacemaking is approached holistically -looking at social and political dimensions, a well-rounded view of security based in people-centred everyday living and psychological. This is all woven together with reference to the kind of personal attitudinal considerations that are the everyday concern of ordinary prayer with scripture in one hand.

Link-Love for this Review

I note that Bruce stays off social media -so there's only his blog/website and a buying location here.

The Call of the Child on Amazon
Bruce McKibben’s Website

Tag: #TheCallOfTheChild

Please also be aware that I'm reviewing here a book I had an e-preview copy of from the publisher via the Speakeasy network. The deal is that I review it within 30 days of downloading a copy. The deal is not that I have to be favourable; I'm free to like it, dislike it, be nuanced about it and whichever it is to tell it as I see it.

Posting peace -digital peacemaking

I got interested in this book because its "call us to embrace the radical ministry of peacemaking in response to our destructive online world." is very much been on my heart and at the back and sometimes the forefront of my mind for two or three years. To the point of trying to find others to work with in research and perhaps action. And peacemaking has been a core image in beginning to think about a Christian response. My concern has arisen mostly since the Brexit debate in the UK and I became aware of how polarised, hateful, uncompromising, spiteful, it could be. It was shocking to see and to be on the receiving end of trigger-seeking, mocking and reason-deflecting messages. When I used to play football (soccer) we had saying, "play the ball not the man". These trolls and bots were definitely in the other camp: "play the man, forget the ball". As I investigated further, it became evident that the business models, the way that the algorithms work to amplify the most basely emotive tweets and posts and the weaponisation of that by troll and bot farms aiming to sow dissent by disinformation and winding people up with ever greater degrees of hatred and contempt.

So I got to wondering what blessed peacemaking looks like amid all of that.. What is the calling of Christ-followers on social media? I've begun to experiment on Twitter with trying to engage differently, more humbly, asking questions, remembering that sometimes there are humans behind the words and expressions. At least sometimes I have succeeded to some degree. In doing this I've learnt from the failures and the pockets of relative 'success'. I've learnt about my own affectivity in relation to trolling, and about my own triggers.

As the author writes and with which I resonate:

I’m tired of the fighting. I’m tired of being afraid of the fighting. I no longer desire to engage in fruitless heated discussions and meaningless contentious debates that don’t have a redemptive or transformative purpose. I want my best energy directed toward Christ-centered, truth-advancing, life-affirming, grace-filled, reconciling communication. I want to be a Christ-motivated peacemaker.

So, that's what I came to this book with, seeking perspectives and ideas to underpin action and peacemaking presence. Does it help me/us?

I've been finding that it draws on a good range of thinkers and writers to situate our thinking about social media in wider cultural and psychological perspectives, and I think that this is helpful. There have been times when I've thought that the author was taking a rather negative view and not understanding the way that people actually use and deploy social media out of our God-given humanity but then quite often the more (shall I call it?-) appreciative case is made. This saves it from simply being a call to join a moral panic and begins to make it useful. 

I found it useful too that at the end of each chapter there are suggestions for experiments with social media and some of them are quite challenging at the level of personal formation -but then, that's important. I would commend this book as a way to help ourselves become digital peacemakers and I am considering using it with study groups. I'd say that the level is not simplistic or overly 'popular' but it should be accessible to anyone who is willing to think and to take seriously the insights of scholars of culture.

Occasionally, I think that the critical ideas relating to discarnation etc were overplayed. For example, I'm not sure I'm convinced by the idea that social media separates our communications and intentions from ourselves (p.61).  I think perhaps that social media extends, stretches, our attachment to what we 'say' through time and space. It thins it out. But the fact that we can feel in our guts the concerns about how what we post is received and responded to suggests that separation is not taking place. We are projecting ourselves, admittedly in an attenuated form, but we are invested. I think we may be in danger if we pursue the 'separation' thesis too strongly, of losing sight of the similarities between spoken wording and visually based wording. They both involve us concentrating some thoughts into a narrow medium and 'expelling' them to be received by others vai air or light. In that sense both are alienated from us physically. However, we do keep the connection emotionally, we continue to identify with our communication.

That said, I do think that the proposition that social media tends to involve self-expression rather than other-focus/concern is probably true. I'd see this as an effect relating to the affordances of the media in relation to the psycho-cultural hinterland of many users. And, of course, once a critical mass is reached, it creates a set of cultural expectations whereby more other-directed, learning-focussed communications are not well received.

I liked, on p.62 the comment that we post in a way like advertisers of products and services. And I think there is something important to that in foregrounding the expressivist culture of much of social media. However, I think that it is also important to notice that advertisers seek to post in ways similar to socmed users.

Quotes I found helpful or thought-provoking

press my attitude or the intentbehind my communication. I would gladly use an “I’m not angry” font or a “This is a sincere reply” filter or an “I’m honestly trying not to fight with you” typeface or an “I don’t know why you’re so angry at me right now, but I’m not angry with you and I’m sincerely trying my best to find a way to communicate in a way that doesn’t make things worse” emoji. As of yet, that technology is unavailable and a smiley emoji isn’t a sufficient substitute for in-person, in-flesh communication (p.59)

#PostingPeace

Posting Peace: Why Social Media Divides Us and What We Can Do About It

Hope/less

Since the beginning of Lent, the first few lines of TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday have been revisiting. It's not that I have any great insight into the poem but rather because a phrase is resonant for me just now: "Because I do not hope". It feels to speak to a growing awareness and a reluctant coming-to-terms with the humanly-slow, geologically-fast unfolding of environmental catastrophe. 

"Because I do not hope" -for those with the power to act wisely and in a timely manner. 

"Because I do not hope" -for lobbyists or the business-as-usual crowd to be stood down.

"Because I do not hope" -for systemic changes to take place.

 

In noticing this resonance, I realise that I had been hoping for things that now seem unlikely. 

I had been hoping that enough people would realise, yesterday, how dire the prognosis is. 

I had been hoping that governments would see beyond the next election

and be concerned about future generations

and so to prime collective action with policy, law and finance. 

I had been hoping that our collective consciousness would kick in before tipping points were reached. 

I had been hoping that if enough of us made greener decisions, spoke, wrote, pleaded and even, God forgive us,

shamed enough other people, then maybe disaster could be averted.

 

What to do? To go off-grid would be an act of despair.

What is needed is a turn to a way of living together where doing roughly the right thing by the environment is the default and not a special effort by a few enthusiasts with the time, money and curiosity to hug trees and eat organic.

 

"Because I do not hope to turn" people around me to living a one-planet lifestyle…

"Because I do not hope to turn" politicians and business leaders towards the common good

and becoming better ancestors…

"Because I do not hope to turn" a profit- and rent-seeking, mammonist, System

into a humane, modest and creation-respectful modus vivendi… 

"Because I do not hope to turn" any of these things I cannot hope.

For I am, like you, helpless in the current of hopeless, misdirected, collective striving.

I no longer strive to strive for such things?

I may no longer desire the constant flow of tat and novelty

but I am carried along by the powerful rip-tides of those aggregated efforts;

billions of decisions formed and constrained by the ecosystem-eroding business as usual,

further empowering it in turn. 

 

I know the obverse of lost hope too: anger: at the short-termism, the stupidity, the cupidity.

Anger that speaking, shouting and lifestyle changing during 40 or 50 years were dismissed; ridiculed even.

 

"Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?"

Civilisations -each in turn has been 'the usual reign'- have risen and fallen.

“Why should I mourn?”

Because billions of people some of whom I know and love personally will be harmed and traumatised.

If they survive the floods, the famines, the pandemics, the migrations, the resorts to violence,

they will hope that their new feudal lords may be kind and respond mercifully to their new skills of servility.

 

What is hope in the face of a sixth great extinction? Of another desperate dark ages?

 

Humanly speaking: little or none; only degrees of denial -refusing to think about it.

Perhaps this is a kind of hope. A hope that if we refuse to see it, it will turn out to be a bad dream or a mistake.

Understandable: we sense the lurking trauma in being disabused

of the deeply-embedded cultural hope of Progress and contemplating its casualties.

 

Time and again the usual reign has passed away. This is not new -though it is grievous. 

Yet the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. 

God knows us, eternally.

 

Also in Lent this year, the refrain from Psalm 42 has played recurrently through my mind.

"Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?  

O put your trust in God; for I will yet give him thanks, who is the help of my countenance, and my God."  

-I can answer the 'why?' in one sense:

my soul's heaviness and my disquiet are prompted by climate catastrophe

and the revealed priorities of our Westminster government in the face of the pandemic.

In the face of such entrenched greed, denial and veniality,

somehow, hope-against-hope, it feels like the only recourse is as these verses state.

And as I write that I am mobbed by centuries of teaching about trusting in God,

but it somehow feels like only now do I get it. Only now am I being disabused of a human pride

that somehow with enough motivation, knowledge or cajoling we can do it.

Like with step one in a 12-step program, we can only truly hope when

we admit that we are actually, truly, powerless. Only then can we hope.

But that hope is oblique to the sources of our despair.

Such hope feels small and underwhelming, fragile even. And yet …

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

    for his compassions never fail. (Lamentations 3) 

 

"I no longer strive towards such things" for myself.

But I do continue to strive because it is better to do good than not,

to live the change we desire to see God effect in the world.

I keep on striving because when the Day comes

we should be about our God-breathed business.

And who knows? -We may yet be surprised by hope.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins   

Innoculating British Christians against USAmerican rightist ambitions

I just read this:

Franklin Graham invested $10 million of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s money in his 2016 Decision America Tour to each state house in the country. Billed as “nonpartisan” prayer rallies, these gatherings framed the “moral crisis” as a decision between progressive atheist values and God. After the election, Graham called Trump’s victory an answer to prayer. 

The reason I'm concerned is that about 2 years ago, we nearly had a BGEA tour of the UK headed up by Franklin Graham. I was concerned at the time and this has made me more so. I was concerned that Graham was at least as much about networking so-called Christian right personnel with British Evangelicals with a view to creating a bridge-head to amplify an approach to values consonant with the USAmerican right-wing agenda. I wondered whether I was being too 'conspiracy theorist', but now reading this, I'm minded to think it would be precisely that bridgehead-building.

The article goes on to say this:

Today these influences — the Christian and religious nationalist organizations, religious capitalist and prosperity gospel movements, and independent charismatics — have access to the current administration in the form of its “court evangelicals.” The Values Voter Summit has become an important focus point for this coalition and its narrative. Through federal contracts and student aid, Liberty University has become the largest private Christian university in the country 

I'm thinking, having thought over the last 5 years in British politics, and recalling things I've read about the increasing reach of the American right into funding campaigns in Europe and further afield, that this is precisely an aim of Graham's deployment of the BGEA in this way. I think that they see an opportunity to leverage the current situation to build a stable if smaller base of right-wing support using somewhat Christian themes in the way they have in the USA.

As such I think that we need to be moving away from naivety in British Christian, especially evangelical and charismatic circles. We need to be in a position to resist Graham's next overtures. I'm pretty sure they will come once the dust is settling after the pandemic emergency.

So, my question is what do we need to do now to enable British evangelicals in particular to see through the rhetoric to the political agenda? To understand that this isn't the relatively benign BGEA of the 1980s and '90s but rather a vehicle for right-wing agendas which would struggle to answer 'WWJD' with responses that weren't more like responses to 'WWCD' (what would Caesar do?). There are UK evangelicals and charismatics who would covet the 'court evangelical' role, how do we pre-empt that? How do we innoculate against the cunning use of single issues to marginalise more Godly values (check out here for further reflection). It is a characteristic of some of the Pharisaism that Jesus criticised -maybe that's the way to pursue? (WWPD? -what would Pharisees do?)

My hope in this is that it seems that British Evangelicalism has tended to be more focused on justice and mercy than the USAmerican counterpart. I hope I'm not wrong in that, and I hope it is not too shallowly rooted.

This is going to be occupying some of my prayer-time for weeks or months to come.

And for the record, I think that such cynical usage of evangelism and co-option of the good will of those concerned for sharing the Good News of Jesus is despicable. If this is what Mr Graham is doing (and it does look likely given the history) then I think that puts him and those others who do it in the place of those pharisees and sadducees whom Jesus laid into for misleading the poor and the seeking. At the best they may be acting the part of 'useful idiots' at worst ... shudder ...

Source for initiating quotes: Our Demands – Poor People's Campaign:

Ephesians and All that Jazz -A review

Lately, I've been finding myself appreciating poetic writing more, and that's what drew me to the description of this book: I really delight in fresh expressions of thought and feeling that connect those concepts with different areas of our experience and throw light on them. That was the hope I began reading this book with as some of the blurb said "A fresh, new meaning must be created within the heart of a believer before these words can be understood and lived out. Objective truth must be internalized. The Word must become flesh once again. This is the essence of transliteration and what the Holy Spirit yearns to do in each heart, regardless one’s tradition. Jazz can begin to open up the possibility of God to a hungry heart." 

What struck me as I read the first pages is that it seemed to be a kind of midrash -especially in the way it offers a verse-by-verse 'commentary' but a commentary that is playful, sometimes poetic, always trying to connect with contemporary language, idioms and thought-forms. I guess that's why the word 'jazz' is in the title -it points well to the approach to the text. It comments not by looking into history or etymology or even intertextuality but rather by expanding, rephrasing and re-framing -riffing, you might say. That all makes for a lively, stimulating and sometimes intriguing and insightful read.

I think I'd classify it as devotional literature. It might be useful to refer to in sermon preparation because it might help shake loose an insight or a way to say something. It could also be helpful if  you're preparing to lead prayers referring back to Ephesians.

Links for this Review Ephesians and All that Jazz on Amazon Tom Anderson’s Website Tom Anderson Podcast Interview Tom Anderson Text Interview #EphesiansAndAllThatJazz Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this e-book free through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own