- First of all, some “retroactive congratulations” to Dr. Angela Carpenter, winner of the 2020 Dallas Willard Research Center Book Award for Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective(T&T Clark, 2019).
Thanks! I was surprised and honored to receive the award.
- A little background for our readers: what is your current position, and how long have you been there.
I am the Leonard and Marjorie Maas Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Hope College. I’ve been in the Religion department at Hope for eight years.
- For people who don’t already know your work, could you summarize your award-winning book in 1-3 sentences?
Responsive Becoming provides an account of Christian moral formation that understands it both as a work of grace and as an embodied process consistent with our human nature. One aspect of transformation that I really wanted to capture in this project is that human transformation takes place in and through affective personal relationships. From the perspective of God’s working, sanctification is a natural outworking of the Christian’s relationship with God in Christ.
- Your book is described partly as “an excavation of reformed thinkers John Calvin, John Owen (1616-83), and Horace Bushnell (1802-76) on the topic of sanctification.” Calvin is of course widely known as one of the leading theologians of the protestant reformation, but Owen and Bushnell are much less well-known these days. What led you to them, and what do they have to contribute to the 21stcentury conversation?
The answer to the first part of this question is, I’m afraid, a little anticlimactic—these figures were suggested by my dissertation adviser! I still find both of them to be very worthwhile conversation partners. If I had to pick one “take away” contribution from each on the topic of sanctification, I would say that Owen reminds us that whatever else we might want to say about the gracious nature of sanctification we must always keep in mind that explaining sanctification as a work of God’s grace means explaining it specifically as work of Christ and the Spirit. It’s easy to talk about terms like “sanctification” and “grace” in generic ways that ultimately don’t sound very Christian. Owen won’t let us get away with that. If we want to talk about sanctification in relationship to our everyday lives, we’re going to necessarily be talking about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And Bushnell…he was ahead of his time in terms of attention to the human context and especially human childhood. Bushnell encourages us to reckon with the kinds of creatures we are and how specifically as human beings we are formed and transformed. He paints such a vivid picture of how human infants become who they are in the immersive care of their parents, in very deep ways that we are not always conscious of and then he says that when this parent-child context is saturated with a sense of God’s love and presence, the child is organically brought into faith. I certainly don’t want to downplay conversion experiences, but I think anyone raised in a loving Christian home will find a lot here that resonates with their experience.
- Related question: the very word “sanctification” can sound strange and old-fashioned to modern ears, even Christian ones. Why is that?
I think there are a few reasons for this. One is the Christian insistence (for good reasons that I won’t get into here) that sanctification is God’s work. This claim has raised very reasonable and persistent questions that Christians have been wrestling with for centuries. If God sanctifies, what does this mean for our own efforts to try to become better people? What does it mean for the non-Christian who wants to be a morally good or virtuous person? For example, if a school or college wants to help form the character of its students, what, from a Christian perspective, do we think is going on here? Is this related to sanctification or is it entirely different? Add to this that we live in a pluralist society, and it’s not that terms like sanctification seem to suggest that Christians are morally better than non-Christians (although this can be one effect) but it’s that the term just doesn’t seem all that applicable. So, we reach for words like “character” or “virtue” that have a broader resonance. Part of what I wanted to accomplish in this book was to suggest that we can in fact talk about God’s work of sanctification and understand it in relationship to natural processes of formation.
- Your book is also described partly as a consideration of human nature through interdisciplinary dialogue with the human sciences. Have you continued to interact with the human sciences?
Yes! My newest book Grace and Social Ethics also has interdisciplinary chapters engaging social psychology and human evolution.
- If so, what sort of reception have you had from them? (The human scientists I mean. I would be surprised if you heard anything from Owen or Bushnell. Or even Calvin.)
Ha, yes—it’s interesting to speculate what they might make of these conversations though! It’s fun to talk to Christians who work in these disciplines, both at my own institution and at interdisciplinary conferences and such. Of course, they tend to be naturally sympathetic to the kinds of work I’m doing and sometimes it can be surprising to discover where we differ in perspective. That’s happened a time or two and it really pushes me to exam my claims more carefully. I’m not sure if the same is true in reverse, but I hope it is!
- How has your thinking developed in the last five years? Could you tell us about that in a sentence or two? What do you regard as some important but unfinished business in your field?
Hm… There is so much I could say here, but in terms of moral formation specifically, the most pressing “unfinished business” is pretty much inseparable from our present historical moment. There is so much cruelty in our public discourse and increasingly also in public action. I’m thinking of Christian support for a state whose military is intentionally shooting or bombing children who are waiting for international aid in Gaza. I’m thinking of masked federal agents seizing people off the streets who have committed no crimes and removing them from families and communities. And I mention this because at this current moment, Christians are unfortunately caught up in this and provide an important base of support for these regimes. And, as a theologian who writes about moral formation, I can’t help but ask myself, “What have I missed? What are we even doing here?” I mean, I am frankly heartbroken at what seems to be approach of many Christians to what is currently taking place. And what I keep asking myself is, what have I missed? How have we as the church in America failed so badly? How can I understand this theologically? This is maybe darker than where you wanted to go with this question but it’s honestly where my mind goes pretty much whenever I reflect on Christian formation today.
- Your award was from the Dallas Willard Research Center, which exists partly to stimulate and recognize scholarly work that addresses the sorts of things that Dallas Willard taught about, such as moral & spiritual formation. Just out curiosity: had you heard of Dallas Willard before you received the award? If so, how? (If not, you can say so. No one will get huffy about it.)
I had heard of Dallas Willard! When I was growing up, my parents were big Dallas Willard fans, so I had read The Divine Conspiracy. It was actually pretty cool to tell my parents I had won the award because they admire him so much.
- Have you interacted with his ideas since then? If so, what connection do you see between his ideas and your work?
Willard is one of several writers in what I would call Christian spirituality who were influential in my late teens and early twenties setting the patterns of my own personal spiritual disciplines of prayer, meditation, study of scripture and so forth. It’s been a while since I have returned specifically to some of these works though.
- Is there a piece of music (or visual art or a poem or a novel) that is making a difference for you these days? Would you mind sharing it with us?
I love this question! My husband, youngest daughter and I all just finished reading Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land with our church’s book group. I don’t want to spoil it too much but one of the main themes is the question of hope and redemption in the midst of the very real horrors of the world. And of how we face and live with those horrors. We had some internal disagreement as a family on the question of whether it was ultimately a hopeful story. I think it was, but it wasn’t as much hope as I wanted. For me it really highlighted the difference between the kinds of hope and redemption we can experience in this life, which can be beautiful and profound, and the ultimate hope of all things being made new and death and evil being vanquished by resurrection.
- Likewise, is there a passage of scripture that is much on your heart these days?
Well, this is not scripture, but in my personal times of prayer and meditation, I have been focusing on two prayers from Christian tradition: the Jesus prayer and the prayer (or bookmark) of Teresa of Avila. The Jesus prayer is core to my spiritual practice—I say it when I am falling asleep at night and often throughout the day: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The bookmark of Teresa of Avila (a saying or prayer found among her belongs after her death of unknown origin) is more recent for me but has been particularly grounding in the midst of present anxieties and uncertainties. It goes like this: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you. All things are passing away: God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices.”
- Finally, thank you for your work and for taking the time to talk with us today!
You are so welcome! Thank you for reaching out to follow up on some of the themes from Responsive Becoming.