A REVIEW OF THE HOME OF GOD

The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything

By Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz

Brazos Press, 272 pp.

Every theology relies on some image to make sense of Christian life and doctrine. Whether it be law and Gospel, pilgrimage, covenant, or liberation, a central image helps illumine the scriptural witness which gives rise to Christian life and belief. The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything is less a new account of Christian theology and more a proposal of a new guiding image: home. The book’s promise is not in any innovative claims about theological doctrine or method, but in how the metaphor of home can help inform Christian preaching, teaching, and witness.

The Home of God is co-authored by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, both affiliated with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Volf serves as the center’s founder and director as well as the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. He is best known for his monumental work Exclusion and Embrace and for several books that have found wide readership outside of the academy such as Allah: A Christian Response. McAnnally-Linz is the center’s Associate Director and co-author—also with Volf—of Public Faith in Action. The Yale Center for Faith and Culture’s vision states “deep reflection on flourishing life” as central to its mission (https://faith.yale.edu/about). The Home of God falls squarely within this vision. The book’s main thesis is that “Christian faith . . . offers a vision of a form of the world toward which we can joyfully direct our hopes and strivings . . . creation comes fully to itself when, indwelled by God, it becomes God’s home and creatures’ home in one” (2). This is a theology of flourishing. Creation’s purpose is to serve as a home for God and creature alike. For creation to flourish is for it to more perfectly be the home it was intended to be.

The book shows how the Christian story is “best told” through the guiding metaphor of home (13). Most of the work is an interpretation of Exodus, John, and Revelation. The first two chapters focus on Exodus, showing how that Exodus narrative reveals God’s concern to deliver God’s people from slavery and to constitute them as a people in the wilderness. The God of Israel leads a people from exile home and dwells with them on this journey. Four chapters on John take up the bulk of the book. John’s Gospel reveals God’s intent to dwell with humanity in Christ, remove the forces of sin and death that separate humanity from God, and dwell within each person by the Spirit. If Exodus showed God’s delivering a people from homelessness, John shows God’s making home among God’s people by taking on flesh and pouring out God’s spirit. The final three chapters look to Revelation as a reflection on God’s intention for the world and the transition from the world as it is and as God intended it to be.

While the authors are clear that The Home of God is not a commentary, its close attention to scripture is a key virtue. Faithful reading of scripture is not only theology’s central task, but more practically, Volf and McAnnally-Linz’s attention to scripture allows the book to serve as a guide for preaching, teaching, and reading scripture. I can easily see this work being a helpful guide for preachers making their way through John’s Gospel, small group leaders preparing for a study of Exodus, or individual Christians making sense of Revelation. The work is pitched such that readers with differing levels of theological background will value from it. While not a primer or introduction to Christian faith, the book is by no means reserved for denizens of the academy. To give an example, while some readers may be wary of the the authors’ citation of Martin Luther (especially the Finnish school of Luther interpretation), Augustine, G.W.F Hegel, Kathryn Tanner, and Jürgen Moltmann as key conversation partners, the discussion of academic trends and theological discourses generally remains in the footnotes. This allows the work to serve a fairly broad range of readers with some theological background.

The Home of God makes a compelling argument for “home” as one helpful guiding metaphor for reading scripture, perhaps even a very important one. However, the question of whether home it the best way to tell the biblical story remains open. The authors outline three alternative visions near the beginning of the book: home versus temple, home versus kingdom, and home of God versus God as home (10-13). They claim that the image of home captures both the temple and kingdom images and are thus caught up under the broader image of home. However, a look at scripture beyond Exodus, John, and Revelation should give the reader pause about this claim.

Let me give one example. John 1, Revelation 21, and other key texts certainly privilege God’s dwelling among creation, as the authors rightly note. However, kingdom is essential to Jesus’s message and mission in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This image is not unique to the synoptics but also appears in John 18 when Jesus encounters Pilate and various other places across scripture. It is thus striking to read this claim: “‘kingdom’ is a political metaphor and is ill-suited to express a Christian vision of some important aspects of personal and social lives. That’s partly because not all of life is politics and partly because the politics evoked by the metaphor of kingdom runs counter to the politics of the New Jerusalem” (11). A claim like this needs more attention to Jesus’ use of kingdom as a guiding metaphor especially as Jesus’ usage and example contrasts with the sort of deployments of kingdom language of which Volf and McAnnally-Linz are wary. Closer attention to these alternative metaphors and why home is superior would greatly help the book, especially when it comes to metaphors as central to scripture as kingdom.

The Home of God offers presents a helpful guide for reading scripture. Home, as the authors show, is a metaphor that brings God’s desires for creation across scripture into view and which offers a pattern for Christian life. Volf and McAnnally-Linz’s attention to the theme across Exodus, John, and Revelation makes the work a helpful guide for Christians studying those texts. Though the authors certainly show the importance and fruitfulness of home in the texts they discuss, the question of whether home is the best way to tell the bible story remains. Thankfully, the work sits within a “systematically unsystematic” series called “Contributions to a Theology of Life,” in whose later volumes the category home will hopefully continue to be developed and borne out.