Impersonal Rules, a Personal Gift
Brad East’s Letters to a Future Saint offers a different kind of introduction to Christianity: with less theological abstraction and more attention to the givenness of Christian worship and practice.
Review by Will Bryant
Brad East’s Letters to a Future Saint finds its home in a recent movement of the American church towards a more liturgical expression of Christianity. High-church Protestant denominations, though still vanishingly small in the national cross-section, have experienced significant growth in the past decade. Letters to a Future Saint is an alternative introduction to Christianity from a high-church perspective. East defends all the hallmarks of the high church—a high view of the Lord’s Supper, infant baptism, deference to church tradition, the veneration of saints and of Mary in particular—but he does so in a familiar American idiom of pastoral guidance. He takes time to anticipate and neutralize stumbling blocks for American readers unfamiliar with high-church tradition.
A focus on liturgy might seem odd for an introduction to Christianity. But if this is the case, it is only because the American allergy to tradition has become so ingrained in American evangelical circles that it no longer registers. Our common life no longer rests on shared tradition or a rich script for life. Instead, the basics of life in America are impersonal rules.
What do I mean by impersonal rules? In her book Natural Symbols, the anthropologist Mary Douglas investigates the religious beliefs of societies that lack the experience of living in “small, closed communities.” She shows that when “a man is expected to build his own career by transacting with all and sundry as widely as possible to the best of his ability, there is a very different view of human nature.” Rather than narrating life through ingroup/outgroup distinctions, these societies suppose that life is governed by a set of “impersonal rules” known to all, but difficult to follow. These rules mechanistically connect narrow behaviors or beliefs to social status.
Though Douglas finds evidence for these impersonal rules in the seafaring tribes of Melanesia, they are also applicable in American life, where we also “transact with all and sundry as widely as possible to the best of our ability.”
It is dangerously easy to let simplicity become impersonal.
In secular life, impersonal rules are everywhere, and they are easiest to see in American sports culture. The sky-high status of athletes in America relies on their demonstrated ability to master a simple set of rules. Sports are so compelling because they are theoretically democratic—anyone can understand the rules of the game—but they are technically difficult enough to produce lots of social stratification. Many other areas of American life have come to resemble sports as they have become dominated by impersonal rules. Success in higher education, for example, has been reduced to a few simple metrics: GPA, standardized test scores, impressive extracurriculars, and a good essay. The social game of college admissions has swallowed up local ties and personal preferences with a rigorous, narrow, and status-determining rubric.
Within the American church, the story is more complicated, but impersonal rules persist. The church has avoided the immediate reliance on rules so common in secular life. Christian warnings against legalism certainly provide a bulwark against secular rule-making. But American Christians have not escaped scot-free. Many influential evangelicals have tended to understand faith as adherence to a simple principle, idea, or concept that makes up the sum total of Christianity. There is a longstanding instinct in American evangelicalism—beginning in Charles Finney and most recently noticeable in Billy Graham—that collapses Christian life into a single moment of “decision for Christ.” The rule here is maximum individualism: to accept or reject Christ on a purely interior basis. Success is mechanistic—a simple “yes” rather than a “no”—and it determines whether someone has status in Christian community.
Impersonal rules are not limited to mainstream evangelicalism. Calvinists who reject the “decision for Christ” paradigm sometimes opt for the rule of belief in five points of TULIP. This rule is intellectually narrow, and it mechanistically determines membership in a particular Christian community. Even CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity, that sacred cow of the evangelical literati, suggests that Christianity is somehow reducible to something “mere,” personal, and mental; apart from any embodied expression of the faith. And liturgical communities easily make impersonal rules out of ritual. Some traditional Catholics define status based on the language of the Mass someone attends, or whether a woman wears a veil in church.
It is dangerously easy to let simplicity become impersonal. These simplifying tendencies—whether in sports, college admissions, or Calvinism—pluck individuals out of community and place them isolated before inflexible social rules. It is a truism that people are more than numbers. People are also more than their answer to a single question, or their adherence to a single point of doctrine. Letters from a Future Saint is a remarkable book because it offers a compelling alternative to this American paradigm. Rather than a checklist for status or salvation, East offers his readers a variegated introduction to Christianity that focuses on the many complicated and wonderful gifts that God has given to his people personally in Christ. For East, Christianity is fundamentally about gifts, not rules.
Baptism, communion, and the ritual life of the church are gifts to be received, not rules to be followed or dead scripts to be performed.
East takes seriously Jesus’s identity as Jew, and his relationship to God’s chosen people. There are no rules for the reader here, only wisdom in the recognition of God’s outlandish mercy and unshakeable commitment towards his people: Jews and Christians.
East also explores Jesus’s self-sacrificial death on the cross, and the grave call to martyrdom that Jesus places on every Christian. Again, no rules here, only the bone-chilling gift of present hope in suffering and future glory.
East describes the apocalyptic importance of Christ’s resurrection, which redeems not only individual sins, but reconciles all of creation—the natural world, the plants and the animals—back to God. The reader sees that life is not about checking boxes, but rather participating as adopted heirs in God’s redemption of the world.
With winsome gentleness, East describes the importance of the sacramental life of the church, which Christ instituted during his time on earth, and which sometimes goes forgotten in the American church. East also argues that church history and tradition are essential guides for Christians, because they allow us to understand who Christ is and how he has acted in his church across time and place. On these points, the skeptical reader may fear that impersonal rules for salvation have reentered through ritual and tradition. But East explains that Christians should not practice sacraments or rituals in and of themselves, but instead as loving gifts from Jesus. Baptism, communion, and the ritual life of the church are gifts to be received, not rules to be followed or dead scripts to be performed. They welcome Christians into the kinds of “small, closed communities” that Douglas shows are defined by personal filiality, not impersonal rules.
East attempts, in a phrase, to give Christ to his readers as a gift. By focusing on what God has already done for his people over the course of three thousand years, Letters to a Future Saint avoids the impersonal rulemaking. In academic and professional life—and often even within the church—humans are stripped from history and forced into a simple rubric of status. We know that this is reductionistic and harmful. East shows that Christ, through his church, offers his people a wonderful and complicated gift.
Will Bryant lives in Washington, DC, and works in clean energy policy. He graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Religion and Quantitative Social Science, in 2024.
Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry was published by Eerdmans on October 1, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
