Kyle R. Hughes

Another year over…and so much to be thankful for! I’m especially grateful that my family is settling well in Atlanta and that my teaching position allows me the time and flexibility to keep making progress on my PhD. In 2015, I was able to complete my prospectus and the first two chapters of my dissertation/book (appx. 110 pages, or 40% of the whole). Lord willing, I’ll be able to finish the entire book, tentatively titled The Trinitarian Testimony of the Spirit, by the end of 2016. My supervisors, Jan van der Watt (Nijmegen) and Chris de Wet (Unisa), have been enormously helpful in elevating the quality of my work, and I’m so grateful for their encouragement and advice.

In other news, my initial article exploring the nature of the Spirit’s prosopological speech has seen the light of day in the year’s final issue of Vigiliae Christianae, which you can read on this site. I presented on the Spirit and eschatology in the Epistle of Barnabas at SBL Atlanta, but that’s probably the end of the road for that project. Finally, I wrote an invited review for RBL of James McConnell’s The topos of Divine Testimony in Luke-Acts that should be out some time next year.

In all, then, it was a busy year academically beyond being a year of transition for our family, but above all as 2015 draws to a close I just wanted to be able to express my gratitude to all of you who have encouraged me in this journey and let you know what I’m up to. Happy 2016!

I’m excited to share that my second published article, three years in the making, has at last seen the light of day! Thanks to everyone who has helped and encouraged me in this project, which I am continuing to pursue as a full-length monograph (because, you know, the royalties will be out of this world). The article, Kyle R. Hughes, “The Spirit Speaks: Pneumatological Innovation in the Scriptural Exegesis of Justin and Tertullian,” Vigiliae Christianae 69.5 (2015): 463-483, has been posted on the “Academic Archive” tab.

It’s always nice to have SBL meet in your own backyard, and so I’m very excited that this year’s Annual Meeting is just a few miles down the highway from home. I’ll be presenting on the Epistle of Barnabas, a (more or less) early second-century Christian text that has long been a source of interest to me. If you’ll be at SBL and want to check it my presentation, I think there will be some good papers in this group:

Hope to see you in Atlanta!

Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014. Pp. 298 + xiv.

Andrew McGowan’s newest book is an exemplary guide to the ritual life of the earliest Christians. Indeed, insofar as the study of early Christianity tends to focus more on ideas than practices, this book is a particularly welcome contribution which might be profitably used in many a class on early church history.

McGowan begins with a helpful introduction which takes up the problems inherent in our understanding(s) of the term “worship.” In this book, “worship” refers not to an attitude of the heart or a particular set of music at the beginning of a church service, but rather “these practices that constitute Christian communal and ritual life, as reflected in the NT itself and thereafter” (7). As such, the book traces the development and significance of aspects of early Christian worship including obvious candidates such as the Eucharist and baptism as well as less obvious things like song and dance.

The book excels in presenting each aspect of ritual life in a clear and compelling manner. To take just one example, the chapter on “Meal: Banquet and Eucharist” does a very nice job of situating the Eucharist within the context of the Greco-Roman banquet, summarizing the key contributions of more scholarly works such as Dennis E. Smith’s From Symposium to Eucharist and Katherine M. D. Dunbabin’s The Roman Banquet. This ability to concisely pull together the main points of recent scholarship makes this book an ideal choice for introducing students to some of the key literature for each aspect of early Christian ritual. Returning to the focus of this chapter, McGowan deals with the well-known issues of reconciling the Last Supper traditions as found in the Markan and Pauline (1 Corinthians) texts, and traces the major lines of development between these early forms of the Eucharist (that is, within the context of a larger community meal) to its detached placement as a sacrament within a church service. Again, it is easy to imagine portions of the book to be used as required supplemental reading for any number of college or seminary courses.

All of this may of course be found in other treatments of the development of the Eucharist, but McGowan manages to surprise by looking at these subjects from new angles. Thus, for instance, he concludes the chapter on the Eucharist with a look at “kissing.” McGowan examines the “holy kiss,” the devotional kisses given to saints and martyrs, kisses in the context of baptism, and, finally, kissing at the Eucharist itself. By focusing on topics of this nature, McGowan helps us to see early Christian ritual as both more familiar and more strange than we originally anticipated.

In sum, at a time when some Christians are rediscovering the power of ritual (see, e.g., James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom on the importance of habit-forming practices as central to the Christian pedagogical task), McGowan’s book is an excellent introduction to the complexity and wonder of the communal life of the first centuries of Christians. Highly recommended.

Disclosure: I received this book free from Baker Academic for review purposes. The opinions I have expressed are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review.