| A Review of
A Dangerous Dozen: Reviewed by Seth Forwood |
The people we discuss, the stories we tell and the lives we admire will determine what we think is possible. I just heard a nine-year-old Christian boy saying that if he needed money he could just sue someone. What made this little boy’s joke (or hope) possible was the constant flow of news stories describing individuals making millions in settlements from massive corporations. To be a people formed by the story of God in Christ, rather than the stories of celebrities living the American Dream, we need to know and tell more of lives made truthful by the life of Christ. In light of this, I was eager to read C. K. Robertson’s A Dangerous Dozen, which states in the subtitle that it tells the stories of lives that “[teach] us to live like Jesus.”
Robertson’s book collects twelve succinct biographies of Christians who, as the other half of the subtitle describes, “Threatened the Status Quo.” He includes both the recognizable and the unexpected, so for most there will be some familiar faces and some brand new. His prose shines when he captures the people of his stories in their particularity. He portrays the twelfth-century nun, Hildegard of Bingen’s poetic visions vividly, “…Hildegard’s vision of paradise is shown to be lush and moist and green. The holy life is also considered to be green, a life of hope and intentional living for God.” (62) Or, as she pleads for the church to accept her writing, Robertson includes her poetic flourish as she asks “to make it green.” (63)
As Robertson narrates the Civil War era abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s life he inserts her wild forthright character as well as her wit. Whether it’s her last sojourn with refugees she calls “Exodusters” or her description of her first escape from slavery in her own words (“I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.”), he renders her life with her very own vivacity and humor. These unique turns of phrase and personal additions make each short biography colorful and easily accessible. Other highlights include Dorothy Day, Francis of Assisi, Janani Luwum and Oscar Romero.
Robertson also took special care to make his cast of characters diverse. In the epilogue he describes his intentional inclusion of different ethnicities, both male and female, Reformed and Catholic, ancient, contemporary, and some in between. In his desire to present a variety of contexts he communicates the message that all are welcome to join in God’s salvation within their particular time and place.
Yet, by the end of the book it is difficult to pick out a central theme across the continents, centuries and contexts which may help us to recognize those in whom God is at work. To read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s and K.H. Ting’s lives back to back, it is confusing how Christ’s life makes intelligible our subversion of or allegiance to a nation state. The lack of a cohesive, constructive theme, other than challenging the status quo, may be due to Robertson’s treatment of the life of Jesus in the preface. He writes,
Although they offer different reasons for the opposition Jesus faced, all four Gospels agree that he faced strong antagonism, that it came from the religious establishment, and that it resulted from the perception of Jesus as a threat to that establishment. Jesus was the prototypical ’sent one,’ but he seemed to be sent not to stabilize the religious system but to upset it. (xx)
Interpreting Jesus as one sent primarily to upset the religious authorities misconstrues and obscures his central role, to be the revelation of God as the one who not only raised Jesus from the dead, but also raised Israel out of Egypt (to paraphrase Robert Jenson). Robertson does not adequately place Jesus as a product of, as well as a threat to, his community. This results in stories that heavily emphasize individuals in conflict with community rather than God’s continued work in people through confrontation and participation with the church, which is mentioned only rarely and in passing.
Robertson writes, “all the members of this dangerous dozen were salt and light in their own time and their own context.”(164) My worry is that, without a robust christology, Christians may feel justified to simply create controversy, calling it salt and light. To cultivate Christians in the practice of challenging authority without a clear vision of Christ’s community is to form a church with a battle cry but not a story. The reason we retell the stories of holy people is so we can gain a fuller vision of the story God is telling through us and through the history of the family of God, that we work toward the day when God will complete the establishment of a kingdom in which the Slaughtered Lamb sits on the throne. Any telling that compromises this vision is something less than the story God tells us in Christ. And I argue that the emphasis on individuals threatening “the establishment” is to the detriment of this eschatalogical vision.
Despite what I believe is a fault in the framework, we can still learn much from Robertson’s book. He introduced me to several new Christian lives that will fill my imagination with possibilities of how Christ can be alive in our world, lives filled with boldness, compassion, and faith. Robertson finds unique moments of humor and grace in the lives of his holy ones and he engenders a vast and varied appreciation for the diversity church across the ages. It will do the church well to learn of Robertson’s dozen dangerous Christians and to weave them in as a part of the greater life of Christ through his church.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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