Book Review: Practice Resurrection, by Eugene Peterson

Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ

By Eugene Peterson
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010
Hardcover
290 pages, $28.99

Reviewed by Julie Lane-Gay

Every so often I wish someone would sit me down for a stern conversation. Tell me I’m sloppy, distracted and worrying too much about the wrong things, way too busy and way too tired. Make me wipe the dust off my sandals and get on the road again. I hope they’ll reorient my view and make me shift my gaze -- the way a high school teacher did long ago, and years later a pastor at a camp where I worked one summer. Problem is, once you’re an adult, few of us do this for each other.
 
Hats off to Eugene Peterson – for in his newest book, Practice Resurrection, he has done just that. In his fifth and last volume of his Spiritual “Conversations” series (a fine overview of Protestant spiritual theology) Peterson offers a detailed walk through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, lassoing in all the pieces of growing up in Christ and becoming mature. Emphasizing the Church community as the context where this maturing must take place, Peterson covers the crucial topics for each of us: grace, prayer, the Holy spirit, the union of love and worship, the Holy Spirit at work, life in our households and lastly, astute thinking about the ways of the Devil.
 
Practice Resurrection is a two-part dissection, simultaneously unbraiding the strands that create true Christian maturity and the components of Paul’s letter. But this is not a commentary. It’s broader and more nuanced, like seeing Avatar through 3-D glasses. Peterson’s analysis weaves his clear grasp of our post-modern culture, the state of the Church, and the state of North American Christianity into his exposition of Ephesians. If you ever distanced yourself from the Ephesian church, thinking Paul’s words are no longer relevant, you are unlikely to do so again.
 
Having spent fifty years as a pastor, Peterson is credible in being both bitingly critical and ardently devoted to life in church. You can’t dismiss his passion in either direction. To mature in Christ is to be deeply rooted in church – there is no way around it, for Peterson or for the Apostle Paul. He begins with some pastors’ priorities:

“Evangelism is essential, critically essential. But is it not obvious that growth in Christ is equally essential? … The church runs on the euphoria and adrenaline of new birth – getting people into the church, into the Kingdom, into causes, into crusades, into programs…. I don’t find pastors and professors for the most part very interested in matters of formation in holiness. They have higher profile things to attend to.” (p. 5)

Moving on to hopes and obstacles on this route to maturity, Peterson writes:

“This way of thinking – church as a human activity to be measured by human expectations – is pursued unthinkingly. The huge reality of God already at work in all the operations of the Trinity is benched on the sideline while we call a timeout, huddle together with our heads bowed and figure out a strategy by which we can compensate for God’s regrettable error into invisibility…. We can no more understand church functionally than we can understand Jesus functionally (p. 118).”
 
But as he heads through Ephesians 5, Peterson concludes:

“…if we want to embrace a truly spirit-formed church, we must embrace the messy conditions – the complexity of relationships both interpersonal and Trinitarian, the many levels of maturity and immaturity, the ever-present vulnerability of everyone to sin – out of which it is being formed. These are the conditions in which the Holy Spirit is working. If we are serious about church and want to participate in what the Holy Spirit is doing, these are the conditions (p. 221).”

While Practice Resurrection is all about life in the church, and life in us in the church, there are other treasures to commend it. Working his way through Ephesians 5, Peterson both attacks and sidesteps familiar anguish over the verses pertaining to relationships between husbands and wives. He takes on the competitiveness that permeates not just our work places, schools and churches (“when the competitive spirit enters the church, we end up with a real mess” p. 235) but our families and marriages. He turns our attention to approaching our relationships “out of reverence for Christ.”

Lastly, as Peterson focuses on evil, he is perhaps at his most original, explaining, “Paul is calling us to be alert to the evil that in fact, looks like the good…. the methods, the ways that the devil does things. You can’t see a method, a way – you can only see what it accomplishes” (p. 257). In closing, Peterson includes a fine Appendix, “Some Writers on the Practice of Resurrection,” with recommendations from Dante to Frederick Beuchner.

Practice Resurrection is so incisively true and blunt that it is bound to annoy and even offend. It is a conversation -- direct and personal -- but it’s a stern one. One reader said he thought Peterson, at seventy-five, was getting a bit cranky. I disagree. There’s nothing cynical or impatient here. Other readers will feel that just as his prescription for maturing in Christ is too circuitous and too slow, so is his book. You have to concentrate to read this book.  You have to think deeply. Practice Resurrection won’t translate onto Twitter.
 
But Practice Resurrection is a gem, a biblically rooted, exegetically precise, wisely expressed, gem. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in recent months, maybe years. Baptists and Presbyterians and Pentecostals and Anglicans – this one’s for us.