Professing the Faith Cloth

This review appears 16 years (2009) after the book's publication in 1993. The second volume of a trilogy by the same author, this monograph deals with "the Christian doctrine of God" (part 1: 11 chapters), "Creaturely (sic) being" (part 2: 14 chapters), and "Jesus the Christ, Savior" (part 3: 11 chapters). Weighing 1 pound, 11.5 ounces (780 grams), the book's cruiser weight among paperback publications compares with an anticipated weekly mean-weight gain for a human infant, which happens to be exactly 27.5 ounces or 780 grams. What a difference in weight a week can make for an infant, and each gram of this book contributes weighted rhetoric to the author's goal of feeding "mainline Protestantism" sufficient contextual theological nutrients to extend "a prophetic sort of Christian witness" (Preface, ix) to the "dominant culture of this continent." His enterprise in this volume builds upon two assumptions. First, mainline North-American Protestant Christians must know who they are by Tradition(s). Second, they must commit themselves to who they are. "Who they are" introduces Hall's distinction between profession and confession, which runs the course of the entire book. Such knowing as Hall advances entails professing love shared among Christians because they have acknowledged "...the One by whom we are known" (Introduction, p. 3). Thus, Hall appropriates Kierkegaard's use of "Christendom" to differentiate right thinking about the facts of faith, from right practice of Christian faith. The North American situation for mainline Protestants unites former denominational and latent international opponents in discovering how they might profess Christian faith in practice without sacrificing a "genuine confession of Christ in the world" (p. 6). As Hall sees it, practice of faith counters the history of 20th-century isolation by North American theologians, who accomplished little more than affirming the 'status quo' of elitist dialectics. In part, a separation of affect and intellect had been transplanted by the Reformed tradition onto North American soil, and later ascribed Theology to scholars. Nevertheless, both affect and intellect engaged the concept of God, rather than the saving work of Christ (p. 113). He employs dialectical methods of mainline Protestant theology as it moves from center stage to the margins of society, yet makes a good case for dropping an hegemony of professional academic theology without also fueling anti-intellectual fires. However, neither pole of affect nor pole of intellect had been effective to curb missionary excesses across several centuries following the start of triumphal and often coercive conversions by western European settlers. Case in point that favors Hall's argument is that contact with gods and cosmologies that were foreign to the Reformed God, whom settlers imposed on native people, provided settlers no grist for inquiry about their own God. The gradient of power between settlers and native people remai