Category Archives: Alan Lewis

The buried body

Posted by on August 10, 2010 1 comment

Years ago when I first read Alan Lewis’s magisterial Between Cross and Resurrection I remember thinking that the section on ecclesiology was kind of thin. Re-reading it now I can’t imagine being more wrong. The book is so breathtakingly alive with insight into the nature and mission of the church in the world; indeed I’m somewhat flabbergasted with how I missed it before.

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” The story of cross and grave, as we have been attempting to hear and think it and to ask about its living out, tells of a contradiction between God and the world, a conflict in which evil triumphs over good, death extinguishes life, and the creatures annihilate their Maker. But the contradiction is not absolute, not is the conflict finally resolved in favor of negation. For there flourishes even more grace beyond the great magnitude of evil, a divine fertility beyond the barrenness of the demonic; and and out of the mutual opposition of the world and its Creator, there sounds a final and decisive Yes to the creatures, powerful, living and redemptive, which promises them freedom and fullness within the expansive embrace of God’s own history and life. To this triumphal Easter Yes, which never cancels bud does transcend God’s judgmental No to the world on the cross and the world’s destructive No to God in the grave, ecclesiology must clearly correspond.

So then, just as the mutual hostility between the world and God which reigns on Easter Saturday is not the final state of their relations, but yields to affirmation, renewal, and redemption for precisely those who secured the death of the living God, likewise the protest of the church, God’s chosen, living people, against the sinful, corrupt, and frequently demonic world, cannot be the final word of the Christian community to those around it. Prophetic judgment upon the world and holy separation from it must actively promote and witness to the experiential impact on the world of the greater abundance yet of God’s resurrecting grace beyond the increase of its own hostility, foolishness, and brokenness. Whatever opposition the holy church properly directs to the unrighteousness and injustice of its alien, surrounding culture, that resistance itself expresses obedience to the church’s calling to be truly catholic, immersed in solidarity and presence in the seemingly godless and godforsaken world. And equally that catholic presence is not a supine, quiescent, inert companionship which does nothing creatively for the world in which Christians are quietly embedded. The church’s critical posture toward the world is not ultimately negative, nor is its hidden presence in the world quite passive. Rather, we must reaffirm that the Easter Saturday church, Christ’s buried body, is in essence and identity for the world, and that that identity is realized not just attitudinally or spiritually, but by way of active engagements with and infiltrations of the world. Such actions are not designed to supplant or masquerade as God’s own redemptive work; but certainly, through the Spirit of Christ, they are to provide a humble yet energetic and credible instrumentality for that divine transforming of the world which shall constitute the final kingdom. In that renewal of heaven and earth, the dynamic, eschatological favor of God’s grace toward the world which rejected, crucified, and buried God’s own Son, the church as Christ’s buried but resurrected body cannot but be involved, as servant and participant. (p. 384-85)

The Prayer of Holy Saturday

Posted by on April 3, 2010 Comments Off

Triune God, who loves in freedom and hast chosen us from all eternity to be your creatures and your partners: in humility majestic and in powerlessness almighty, you have made our humanity your own.  In Jesus, you came closer to us than we are to ourselves, yet more like us though so greatly different from us; and in him rejected by his own and destroyed by law, religion, politics, you lived our life, you died our death, and you occupied our grave.

God the Son, for us, between your dying and rising, you lay buried in a tomb and descended into hell.  Cursed for our sin and extinguished by our perishing, you suffered all our agonies of pain and judgment and abandonment, succumbing to the evil one who held us in the grip of fear and guilt, and our world in bondage to injustice and to death.

God the Father, for us you freely gave up your beloved Son, sacrificed and surrendered him to death; and thus bereft, you added to our tears of shame, bewilderment and rage your own infinity of broken-heartedness and indignation at the tragic, proud estrangement of your children, and the wasteful corruption of your beautiful creation.

God the Spirit, for us you held together the forsaking Father and forsaken Son with unifying, resurrecting bonds of love, while death’s hostility, our hearts of sin, and all the hatred of a crooked universe tore your divine family asunder.  And still you groan beyond all utterance for creation’s liberation, interceding for your church when our faith stumbles and our tongues fall silent before the continuing tyranny of evil.

God the Three-in-One, whose unity is realized in communal exchange between the Father, Son and Spirit; eternal Lord, whose changeless, ever changing being is fulfilled in the dynamic of history and becoming: across the abyss of separation on the cross and in the grave you have reconciled the world and swallowed up our death, making space for our humanity within your divine community.  Hear our prayer for a world still living an Easter Saturday existence, oppressed and lonely, guilty of godlessness and convinced of godforsakenness.  Be still tomorrow the God you are today, and yesterday already were: God with us in the grave, but pulling the sting of death and promising in your final kingdom an even greater victory of abundant grace and life over the magnitude of sin and death.

And for your blessed burial, into which we were baptized, may you be glorified for evermore.  Amen.

~ Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 455. (Repost)

A very different power

Posted by on March 30, 2010 2 comments

This is one of my favorite quotes from Alan Lewis’s superb book, Between Cross and Resurrection. I figured it was definitely worth reposting this week:

It is a very different God, and a very different power, that we have discovered in the story of divine self-emptying, God’s capacity for weakness, the ability - without loss of Godness – to suffer and perhaps to die. This is the triune God of Jesus, fulfilled, majestic, glorified through self-expenditure in the lowly ignominy of our farthest country. There is power here, resurrecting, death-destroying, Devil-defeating; but it is the power of love, defying human expectation, which flowers in contradiction and negation, allowing sin its increase and giving death its day of victory, but only the more abundantly to outstrip both in the fecundity of grace and life. To live in the face of death an Easter Saturday existence, trusting in the weak but powerful love of the crucified and buried God, is itself to be objective, turned outward, away from self-reliance and self-preoccupation, away from our own determination to conquer death, which is in fact self-defeating and destructive. Instead, we are invited bravely and with frankness to admit or own defenselessness against the foe and entrust our self and destiny to the love of God which in its defenselessness proves creative and victorious.

Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 431.

The new and alien kingdom

Posted by on February 23, 2010 1 comment

Sean the Baptist pulls out some great quotes from one of my all-time favorite books, Between Cross and Resurrection, by Alan Lewis. They simply must be re-posted:

“What frightens and frees us simultaneously about this new and alien kingdom of God which Jesus preached and told of is the simple fact that it is God’s and not our own. That is a dark menace to the complacency and contentment of those who flourish under the kingdoms of this world; a shining vision of release and new beginnings to the victims of the present order; and perhaps also a mocking rebuke to the programs, projects, and pride of those who hope to create a new order by themselves. It is tragic, therefore, that a gospel which promises justice, love and peace only by insisting that these are God’s own gifts, which remain alien, foolish, and impossible except for grace alone, has continually been misconstrued and misappropriated as the goal and burden of human and Christian aspiration. Piously or politically, we cripple ourselves with the need to bring about God’s righteousness on earth, failing to hear what Jesus so vividly declares: that we need not shoulder that burden because the goal itself does not need to be accomplished. The goal is a fact, God’s fact, the fact of grace and promise. No gap divides what God says from what God does; and the stories of the coming kingdom do not offer dreams and possibilities of what the Lord might or could do, but speak indicatively, and in the present tense, of what is happening, and of what the future is becoming. The kingdom needed not – and cannot – be worked for; it may only be accepted and awaited.” (23-24).

“To be quite blunt about a matter we must soon think through to its extremity, that story [the story told of Jesus] unites the Lord God with a human corpse – with a man who has in some eyes been murdered by criminals and in others executed as a criminal . The impossible foolishness of this – that after such a fate a man should be raised to life with God, and into such a human fate God’s very self, the Lord of glory should have fallen – is the supreme test of our willingness not to conform story to what we already understand, but to reconform our understanding to the story that we hear.” (25-26).

The Prayer of Holy Saturday

Posted by on April 11, 2009 Comments Off

Triune God, who loves in freedom and hast chosen us from all eternity to be your creatures and your partners: in humility majestic and in powerlessness almighty, you have made our humanity your own.  In Jesus, you came closer to us than we are to ourselves, yet more like us though so greatly different from us; and in him rejected by his own and destroyed by law, religion, politics, you lived our life, you died our death, and you occupied our grave.

God the Son, for us, between your dying and rising, you lay buried in a tomb and descended into hell.  Cursed for our sin and extinguished by our perishing, you suffered all our agonies of pain and judgment and abandonment, succumbing to the evil one who held us in the grip of fear and guilt, and our world in bondage to injustice and to death.

God the Father, for us you freely gave up your beloved Son, sacrificed and surrendered him to death; and thus bereft, you added to our tears of shame, bewilderment and rage your own infinity of broken-heartedness and indignation at the tragic, proud estrangement of your children, and the wasteful corruption of your beautiful creation.

God the Spirit, for us you held together the forsaking Father and forsaken Son with unifying, resurrecting bonds of love, while death’s hostility, our hearts of sin, and all the hatred of a crooked universe tore your divine family asunder.  And still you groan beyond all utterance for creation’s liberation, interceding for your church when our faith stumbles and our tongues fall silent before the continuing tyranny of evil.

God the Three-in-One, whose unity is realized in communal exchange between the Father, Son and Spirit; eternal Lord, whose changeless, ever changing being is fulfilled in the dynamic of history and becoming: across the abyss of separation on the cross and in the grave you have reconciled the world and swallowed up our death, making space for our humanity within your divine community.  Hear our prayer for a world still living an Easter Saturday existence, oppressed and lonely, guilty of godlessness and convinced of godforsakenness.  Be still tomorrow the God you are today, and yesterday already were: God with us in the grave, but pulling the sting of death and promising in your final kingdom an even greater victory of abundant grace and life over the magnitude of sin and death.

And for your blessed burial, into which we were baptized, may you be glorified for evermore.  Amen.

~ Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 455.

The Politics of Surrender

Posted by on October 4, 2008 5 comments

In current American political discourse the rhetoric of hope, change, peace, and justice is ubiquitous. Of course, the irony of it all is that this source of rhetoric is consistently deployed as a weapon, both rhetorically and physically. The language of hope, justice, and peace is everywhere, but it is always a venture toward victory without loss, hope without suffering. This stands in stark contrast to the politics of the cruciform and grave-shaped Lordship of Jesus. Here again is Alan Lewis,

“Though there is an Easter victory, a fecundity of life in the midst of death which shall redeem and transform history, the only way to that future and to its temporal anticipations here and now passes through barrenness and negativity. God can no more come to the divine tomorrow of consummation and fulfillment than we can to ours, without firs embracing suffering, defeat, and death. More specifically, our non-optimistic hopes of participating in history’s future of justice, peace, and freedom cannot be separated from the imperative upon us, as upon the God of history’s own self, to countenance the varieties and costs of surrender: the pain of giving away, of giving up, of letting go.” (Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 324)

The politics of Christian mission and eschatology cannot support any promises of peace and freedom outside of the openness to surrender, suffering, and cruciformity. Any rhetoric of hope and freedom that eschews the costliness of confession, the pain of discipleship must never be confused with the language of Jerusalem. For those of us that name the name of Christ there can be no rhetoric of resurrection that is not underwritten by the practice of the cross.

Mutual Inequality

Posted by on October 2, 2008 6 comments

In a previous post the issue of Jesus’ opposition to patriarchy and pyramidal hierarchies the issue was raised of how the order of the kingdom interrupts and overturns oppressive social conventions. Does the order proclaimed by Jesus and witnessed to in the church supplant hierarchical social orders of oppression with new social orders of egalitarian equality?

The answer to such a way of putting things must clearly be no. The apocalyptic nature of the order of the resurrection defies any such notions of social engineering being the substance of Jesus’ message. So, how then should we characterize the theopolitical message of Jesus as it regards social relations?

The fundamental character of Jesus’ theopolitics revolves around the way they shatter the polarities which define the normal oppositions within social relations. In other words, the order of the resurrection transfigures rather than merely inverts the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic binaries between oppressor and oppressed. That is why the order of the Triune God is apocalyptic, miraculous, a scandal. Alan Lewis got this dynamic exactly right in his book, Between Cross and Resurrection in a passage I have quoted before:

“What damage could be done to the mighty structures of the empire by one who gave Caesar his due, who scorned the bigotry which hated an infidel and punished the ungodly, and who pictured a kingdom of freedom, peace, and love in which the distinction between friend and foe would lose all meaning? Yet, with their unseeing eyes, the Romans had rightly perceived a radical and dangerous subversion — with clearer intuition, it seems, than those who still characterize the preaching of Jesus as spiritual and therefore not political. What, in fact, could be more ‘political,’ a more complete and basal challenge to the kingdoms of this world, to its generals and its lords, both to those who hold power and to those who would seize it, than one who says that his kingdom is not of this world, and yet prays that the kingdom of his Father will come and his will be done on earth. This is an aspiration for the world more revolutionary, a disturbance of the status quo more seismic, an allegiance more disloyal, a menace more intimidating, than any program which simply meets force with force and matches loveless injustice with loveless vengeance. Here is a whole new ordering of human life, as intolerable to insurrectionists as to oppressors. It promises that forgiveness, freedom, love, and self-negation, in all their feeble ineffectiveness, will prove more powerful and creative than every system and every countersystem which subdivides the human race into rich and poor, comrades and enemies, insiders and outsiders, allies and adversaries. What could an earthly power, so in love with power as to divinize it in the person of its emperor, do with such dangerous powerlessness but capture and destroy it? It could change everything were it not extinguished, and speedily.” (p. 49-50)

John Howard Yoder understood this in a radical way when he engaged the texts of the household codes in the New Testament and classified them as “revolutionary subordination.” The message of the gospel is not simply a message of equality, let alone the notions of liberal democratic, rights-based equality that inform our contemporary imagination. Rather the message of the gospel seizes both the oppressed and the superordinate, calling them both to the message of mutual subordination. The message of the gospel is, properly speaking, not an egalitarian proclamation of equality, but an apocalyptic interruption of mutual inequality.

Balthasar at the Center

Posted by on August 29, 2008 7 comments

Two of my favorite books, as I’ve mentioned many times are David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite and Alan Lewis’ Between Cross and Resurrection. And, in terms of theological conclusions, you would be hard-pressed to find two books that come to more radically different conclusions. Lewis’ study is a bold attempt to seriously think the reality of Holy Saturday, the day of Christ’s death and descent into hell. Lewis attempts to take the historical reality of Christ’s triduum with absolute seriousness for how we begin to think the being of the Triune God. Refusing to go behind the revelation of God in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, Lewis insists that the radical interval of suffering and death seen in Good Friday and Holy Saturday cannot be dismissed by the light of Easter Sunday. The light of the resurrection only lengthens the shadow of the cross for it establishes that the one who died, who experienced the ultimate terminus of descent into the fullness of death and godforsakeness was indeed God in the flesh. If this is so then notions of divine passibility, temporality, and grace must be radically re-thought without attempting to circumvent the radicality of the narrative on the basis of what we “know” is metaphysically fitting for God to be God.

Hart, by contrast paints his vision of God on the basis of God’s resplendent, infinite glory, as seen in the resurrection. It is the always-already complete reality of God’s fullness, his replete plentitude that enfolds and immediately consumes and destroys any finite interval that seeks to determine God’s life. The suffering and death of Christ, for Hart are not events which truly occur within the being of God, despite all appearances to the contrary in the economy of salvation. Rather these events are simply the event of creation being seized up into God’s Trinitarian beauty without introducing anything new into the being of God. Christ’s suffering and death are, for Hart, as for many of the patristic fathers, simply realities proper to his human nature. God as such, despite what we see in Christ, does not suffer, is not implicated in created history. Rather God enters into history out of needless, gratuitous grace, always enfolding any perceived interval of finitude, suffering, and death with his own unchanging always-already actualized life of joy, feasting, and peace.

Personally, I find both theologian’s cases beautifully compelling, both as pieces of theological writing and argument. I suppose I should come clean and admit that I find Lewis more persuasive, though I think that these two thinkers could be brought to a wonderfully illuminating meeting of the minds (were Lewis alive, that is).

However, the point I really want to introduce in describing these two thinkers has to do with their respective dependence on Hans Urs von Balthasar. One could, I contend, parse the difference between Hart and Lewis on the basis of how they differently appropriate and extend certain of Balthasar’s key theological trajectories. Lewis follows in Balthasar’s train, exploring to the furthest limits the trajectory of Balthasar’s theology of Holy Saturday as laid out in Mysterium Paschale and The Glory of the Lord (see especially volume 6). Hart however pursues the logic of Balthasar’s theology of the immanent Trinity, which for Balthasar is extrapolated from the economic Trinity and which is its metaphysical ground. The immanent Trinity is an infinite fullness of primal kenosis which grounds and enfolds the suffering and death of Christ.

The funny thing is that the most radically opposed claims made by both Hart and Lewis can be found in almost identical form being affirmed by Balthasar. For Balthasar, as for Lewis, the interval of Holy Saturday is a real interval in the life of the Trinity. The suffering and death of Christ are events in the very life of God. Conversely, for Balthasar as for Hart, God is always-already replete in God’s Trinitarian plenitude and kenosis which enfolds and grounds God’s economic activity in the world. The infinite distance and difference between the Triune persons is the holy distance into which the unholy distance of sin is transposed and apocalyptically consumed in the ardor of God’s holy fire, God’s inexhaustible life of Love. For Balthasar, God’s being does indeed include economic events, even events as radical as suffering, death, and godforsakenness. When Christ suffers and dies, we behold the true and real suffering and death of God. However God’s being is not overcome or determined by these events precisely because of the intensity of the eternal life of Trinitarian self-giving, God’s primal kenosis.  The Triune life of infinite distance and freedom is not delimited or determined by its free taking of sin and death into itself. The Triune God freely and openly allows the reality of sin, death, and nothingness a true and real interruption into the divine life, as witnessed on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and just so enfolds it, timefully into the replete, inexhaustible plenitude of God’s life. Here Balthasar is able, beautifully, to affirm the positive claims of Hart and Lewis without being sucked into affirming the oppositional logic that seems to separate their positions. As such, it seems that Balthasar represents a site where the radical and beautiful theologies represented by Hart and Lewis could come to an even more radical rapprochement.

The Powerlessness That Must be Silenced

Posted by on August 29, 2008 4 comments

Well, I should be reading some of the new and excellent books that I have sitting about my room right now such as J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account or Ted Smith’s The New Measures. Soon enough. For now I’m still re-reading some old favorites, namely Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite and Alan Lewis’ Between Cross and Resurrection and being seized again by the beauty of so many passages in both. Of the two though, I would have to pick Lewis hands down if I could only keep one. Here’s one of the many glorious passages in the book:

“What damage could be done to the mighty structures of the empire by one who gave Caesar his due, who scorned the bigotry which hated an infidel and punished the ungodly, and who pictured a kingdom of freedom, peace, and love in which the distinction between friend and foe would lose all meaning? Yet, with their unseeing eyes, the Romans had rightly perceived a radical and dangerous subversion — with clearer intuition, it seems, than those who still characterize the preaching of Jesus as spiritual and therefore not political. What, in fact, could be more ‘political,’ a more complete and basal challenge to the kingdoms of this world, to its generals and its lords, both to those who hold power and to those who would seize it, than one who says that his kingdom is not of this world, and yet prays that the kingdom of his Father will come and his will be done on earth. This is an aspiration for the world more revolutionary, a disturbance of the status quo more seismic, an allegiance more disloyal, a menace more intimidating, than any program which simply meets force with force and matches loveless injustice with loveless vengeance. Here is a whole new ordering of human life, as intolerable to insurrectionists as to oppressors. It promises that forgiveness, freedom, love, and self-negation, in all their feeble ineffectiveness, will prove more powerful and creative than every system and every countersystem which subdivides the human race into rich and poor, comrades and enemies, insiders and outsiders, allies and adversaries. What could an earthly power, so in love with power as to divinize it in the person of its emperor, do with such dangerous powerlessness but capture and destroy it? It could change everything were it not extinguished, and speedily.” (p. 49-50)

Of all the books I have read I have found few whose prose seize me with the certainty that the author thereof has stood in the very presence of God and discerned the heart of the gospel in a way I can only catch the fringes of. Alan Lewis is one of the foremost among those few. He truly understood the gospel of God’s revolution.

The Freedom that Can do no Other

Posted by on August 5, 2008 46 comments

Recently Paul Molnar and I debated a bit about the nature of divine freedom. I think Alan Lewis puts the issue perfectly in his amazing book, Between Cross and Resurrection:

“God is free, not as one who could do otherwise, but as the one above all who can do no other. Self-bound to one sole way of being, God is committed, necessarily but thus freely, to the cognate course of action. God’s lordship in bowing to the contradiction of the godless cross and godforsaken grace does not reside, as Barth occasionally and illogically asserts, in a prior self-sufficiency and secure immutability, but — as he more often understood and later followers more emphatically underscored — in the uncoerced impulse to self-consistency: love’s determination not to be deflected from its purposes but to flourish and perfect itself through willing self-surrender. What judges us as burdensome imperative illuminates God as free but binding indicative: the truth — for our Creator and therefore for ourselves — that only one who gives up life discovers and fulfills it. On such a basis alone can we understand how the cross and grave truly reveal God’s inmost triune life.” (p. 211-12)

God’s freedom consists not in an abyss of infinite potentiality, in an endless array of unconstrained options that are open to God. No, God’s freedom simply is what we behold in the event of Jesus’ apocalypse: his cross, burial, and resurrection. God is not free in that God could have done other than this. God is free in that God did in fact do this thing. The resurrection is God’s freedom. Any definition other than this must, inevitably find its source of theological knowledge somewhere other than in God in Christ.

The Best Theologian-Writer?

Posted by on April 25, 2008 53 comments

One of the wonderful things that is a sad rarity in reading theology is to find a theologian who is also an excellent writer.  Sadly the greatest of theologians are often some of the worst writers you’ll ever read.  I remember my glee in reading Alan Lewis’ wonderful book Between Cross and Resurrection because not only was it some of the best theology I had ever read, it was definitely the best theological writing I had yet encountered.  David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite was another such joyous experience of great theology being wed to beautiful writing. 

Other theologians I’d put in the good writers category would be Robert Jenson, Herbert McCabe, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.  Where else have people read theologians whom they consider to be good writers?  In what great theologians does true literary ability meet theological acumen?

Self-Abandonment, Prayer, and Power

Posted by on February 12, 2008 1 comment

“What is the point of praying to the God of the cross whose power and wisdom are only those of impotence and foolishness?  The answer, surely, as discomforting as it is hopeful, makes costly demands even as it liberates.  For if the surrender of power is the form, and the only form, that God’s power takes, and if vulnerable self-abandonment is itself the creative energy which is bringing history powerfully to its fulfillment, that places unbearable demands upon ourselves who in and through words and deeds of prayerful living would align and associate ourselves with the triune history of God, confessing and obeying Christ’s cruciform, grave-shaped lordship over all.   Such prayer must humanly enact the divine possibility of grace — that those and only those who lose themselves shall find themselves.  To pray to the crucified God is, therefore, to affirm and practice radical dependence and surrender to the point of death itself — which may be why so few of us truly know how to pray, or even wish to do so.”

–Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 303.

Between Cross & Resurrection: A Review

Posted by on April 5, 2007 Comments Off

This is a modifed version of a review that I wrote on Amazon some time ago. As we are now entering Holy Week, I thought it was a fitting time for such a post. Let me just lay my cards on the table and say up front that Between Cross and Resurrection, remains one of the most moving and powerful works in theology that I have ever read. Alan Lewis was a masterful writer and theologian whose character, passion and humility is apparent on every page of this wonderful book.

As the title suggests, this book seeks to unpack the relevance of Holy Saturday (the day Christ lay dead in the grave “between cross and resurrection’) for Christian theology and life. The fact is, there are few areas of Christian doctrine and practice this book does not touch on in some significant way. This book is a brilliant exercise in narrative theology, which situates a trinitarian doctrine of God within the thoroughly narrative framework of the Church’s three-day story of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Christ. The first section of the book essentially involves telling the three-day story that stands at the center of our salvation and then begins to unpack its implications for our understanding of the nature and power of God and for theological ethics.

The central thesis that Lewis advances throughout the book is that Jesus’ statement that ‘those who lose their lives will find them’ is not only true of us, but is antecendently true of God. The Triune God is the one who knows how to die and thereby enter into the fullness of resurrection life. The key theme that Lewis plays up here is not the suffering of the cross overwhelming the victory of resurrection, but rather how the resurrection forces us to think about radical nature of the suffering and death of God in Christ. Since the resurrection confirms that Christ was in fact God, when we reflect back on Holy Saturday we are left with the shocking reality that God is found and identified among the suffering and the dead. The way that the Triune God overcomes the powers of sin and death is not by matching them with brute power, but by surrendering to them and then abounding all the more in overflowing life. The key verse the Lewis often returns to is Paul’s statement “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more so that, as sin reigned in death, grace might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life in Jesus Christ, our Lord.” (Rom. 5:20-21). God’s way of dealing with sin and death is not to overthrow them through power, but to surrender to them and then abound still more with resurrection life that cannot be surpassed by sin and death. The second section involves more explicit theological unpacking of the three-day story.

In particular, Lewis focuses on the trinitarian context in which the theology of the cross, grave and resurrection must be understood. In one of the best chapters in the book, “From God’s Passion to God’s Death” Lewis brilliantly demolishes conventional conceptions of God’s omnipotence and other central elements of classical theism which derive from Greek and Modern thought rather than the narratives of the cross. Through an examination of Barth, Moltmann and Juengel, Lewis shows that God’s very nature and the very form of his power is seen through the suffering love and weakness of the cross and the grave through which the ever abundant life of resurrection breaks forth. I cannot begin to do justice to the ways that Lewis formulates all of this. The implications are staggering. If the very from of God’s power is seen in surrendering to the powers of sin and death through love and then faithfully awaiting a transcendent hope on the other side of negation and death, then our perspective on violence, oppression and injustice is radically transformed.

The final section of the book deals specifically with our practice of living in light of the three-day story. Lewis offers an amazing chapter on world history where he particularly discusses Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Chernobyl. He then moves on to articulate a theological politics that derives from the narrative of Holy Saturday. He follows this up with discussions of the the church’s mission to the wider culture as the cruciform and “grave-shaped” followers of Christ, setting out an excellent discussion of missional ethics and theology. Finally, he sets forth a vision for the church as the trinitarian community of mutual love, peace and self-donation.

Lewis was not only a brilliant theologian, but a brilliant writer whose theology of Holy Saturday was born out by his own Holy Saturday experience of terminal cancer. I have learned much from this amazing book, and I intend to return to it repeatedly in days to come. In particular I find myself coming back to it every Lent, as I prepare to teach on Holy Saturday as I do every year during Holy Week. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

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