Review of Trevin Wax's HOLY SUBVERSION

Review of Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals by Trevin Wax (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2010)

Trevin Wax was written and outstanding primer to the Church’s task of bearing faithful and effective witness to the Lord Jesus Christ in North America. Lucid, brief, reflecting the best of contemporary scholarship, his book would be an excellent small group or study group resource. The issues he treats are precisely those we most need to face yet those that are among the difficult for us to face.

The root issue Wax is getting at is the Lordship of Jesus over all of life. He creatively gets our attention by eschewing the language of “Lordship,” an all too familiar piece of Christian lingo, and using the less but still accessible image of “Caesar” to make his point. Rooted in the first century world where Caesar was an omnipotent and omnipresent reality. Lordship is what Caesar is all about. We are rediscovering in our day that when Jesus is acclaimed as “Lord” this is a direct challenge to the pledge of allegiance of the Roman Empire, “Caesar is Lord.”
Thus the call to follow Jesus is a call to a subversive commitment and lifestyle.

Wax uses subversive to mean something that “undermines” (26) the existing structures rather than fomenting a revolution to overthrow them. Wax relentlessly and effectively presses home his key point: “true Christianity is not merely life-changing. It is world-changing” (24).

Wax makes it clear that following Jesus is much more than an inner life of the soul or heart (though it is that too). Rather, Jesus came to establish a group, a community, in the midst of the world who are distinguished from the surrounding world by observable behaviors – how and what they buy and sell, how they raise our children, ways they are involved in their neighborhoods and communities, who they invite home for meals and parties, how they handle our money, and so on. This visible, public community of faith is an evidence of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension to God. What is more, this community is an evidence of the credibility of the gospel itself! This is what makes books like Wax’s so important and helpful for us.

Seven Caesar’s receive their comeuppance at Wax’s hand. : self, success, money, leisure, sex, power, and evangelism. Each chapter provides a brief description and analysis of its particular Caesar followed by a set of practical and helpful reflections and practices designed to help the reader begin to engage that issue.
While the first six Caesar’s may be unsurprising, as they are perennial issues with which the Church is called to struggle, the seventh Caesar, evangelism, will likely be a surprise.

This is to me the best chapter in the book. Wax challenges cultural distorted practices of evangelism shaped by the prevailing orthodoxy of “tolerance” or the marketplace mentality of consumerism. The former warns against “imposing” one’s beliefs on anyone else and accepting the perspective of other’s as as valid as one’s own. The latter frames a gospel in terms of the benefits one can gain from following Christ while soft-pedaling or ignoring the cost entailed in such commitment.

Wax exhorts us to recover our proper theological nerve as prepare ourselves to proclaim Jesus as the Lord of all of life as well as the only source of salvation. Love, not tolerance, is what we owe others for Christ’s sake. And that means we find winsome and appropriate ways to share the truth of Christ, including the cost of commitment to him, with them. In conclusion, he again sounds the note of the necessity of a viable community of faith as a visible and tangible expression and evidence of the gospel being shared with them.

Inevitably, any reader will find something they wished the author would have discussed but didn’t. I would have liked Wax to offer his reflections on the value and witness of singleness in his chapter on sex. He rightly situates and praises sexual practice within the context of marriage. However, there is much ferment and thought be given now to the appropriateness and power of the witness of singleness to the gospel. In a sex-saturated world, folk who choose or learn to live peaceably and even joyfully without sexual expression are a quite subversive presence.

And a chapter on the Caesar of the Church would have been interesting, especially in day when we are recovering the stringent critique of religion delivered by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the last century. Some of this is implicit in what Wax writes but a more explicit treatment would have been helpful.

Nevertheless, I whole-heartedly commend Holy Subversion to all readers and give thanks to God for its author, Trevin Wax, and pray God’s blessing on him in all that he does.