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J. P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit’s Power (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007). 237 pp., $19.99, cloth.
The intended audience for Kingdom Triangle is decidedly more popular than scholarly. What makes this book of interest to Pneuma readers, however, is the new articulation of a noncessationist position from a nationally recognized Christian scholar and public intellectual affi liated with a brand of Evangelicalism that tends to be allergic to, and suspi- cious of, Charismatic spirituality. Moreland, a Christian philosopher and apologist from Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, is a passionate general in the so-called “culture wars,” given to somewhat alarmist and rather angry responses to what he deems to be threats to truth and justice (in the sense of opposition to gay marriage rather than concern for the poor) — summed up, it seems, in “the American way.” Kingdom Triangle amounts to marching orders for culture war domination. The aim is not just to secure a seat at the proverbial table; the objective is to run the show. Thus Moreland laments that, thirty years ago, “Evangelicals were not ready to step into the vacuum and lead our culture to higher ground”; but now, “there has never been a greater window of opportunity for us to seize the moment and, by our lives and thought, to show our culture the way forward” (12).
Moreland’s threefold prescription — the recovery of knowledge, the renovation of the soul, and the restoration of the kingdom’s miraculous power — refl ects his threefold diag- nosis of “the crisis of our age”: postmodern relativism, a mushy and vague “spirituality,” and the sort of de-Spirited naturalism into which most Evangelicals have fallen. I won’t address the first two aspects here, except to say two things: First, Moreland’s diagnosis presents a caricatured account of “postmodernism” (which really amounts to a hyper-modernism) generated by his confl ation of a “Christian” account of “knowledge” that has drunk deeply from the wells of modernity. To put this another way, I’m not sure Saint Augustine’s episte- mology would pass a test in Dr. Moreland’s class. In that case, I’ll take Saint Augustine. Second, I think there is much to commend in his own commendation of spiritual forma- tion except for its insidious individualism. This is just a way of saying that the spiritual formation industry spawned by Willard, Foster, and others is insuficiently Catholic (that is, communitarian).
Of interest in this context, however, is Moreland’s admonition for Evangelicals to become “naturally supernatural” (182). In a way that is gently critical but ultimately inviting, More- land invites Evangelicals to see a Charismatic worldview as both biblical and crucial to the church’s witness. Working from a third-wave, Vineyard-ish standpoint, and drawing on testimonies from global Christianity, he paints a picture of the church operating in the Spirit’s power — attentive to spiritual warfare and demonization, expecting the miraculous. The result is a kind of Jack Deere primer.
But what if the core aspects of Charismatic spirituality actually call into question the philosophical assumptions of the earlier chapters? What if the Spirit operates in a way that upsets the tidy epistemic picture of Moreland’s foundationalism? What we get in Kingdom Triangle is, to paraphrase Pentecostal theologian Terry Cross, an Evangelical philosophy
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/027209610X12628362888432
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Book Reviews / Pneuma 32 (2010) 123-175
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with some Charismatic relish. A properly Charismatic philosophy, I suggest, would subvert the first two-thirds of this book.
Reviewed by James K.A. Smith
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
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