Review: Frank Viola’s From Eternity to Here

Today’s review of Frank Viola’s From Eternity to Here is a part of a blog tour with several great bloggers including my friend Chad Estes, with whom I go back a few years in the Vineyard Community of Churches. Be sure to check them out his Q & A with Frank as well.

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Frank Viola has been making some serious noise lately.

Early last year he crashed the proverbial party with Pagan Christianity. Co-authored with George Barna, this ruthless little book shredded the modern, Western institutional church for being, well…pagan. Frank followed that up a few months later with Reimagining Church, an attempt to offer a highly pragmatic framework for establishing churches in the West that are true to Christianity’s first-century roots.

In From Eternity to Here Frank expands his scope significantly. What he seeks to establish in his latest book is nothing short of a Trinitarian treatise of the missio dei. As he states in the preface,

“I had discovered the driving passion of God. And that passion gave birth to a divinely crafted purpose - a timeless purpose that had nothing to do with my individualistic efforts at being a good Christian or “going to heaven.”

This is big, bold stuff, and, make no mistake about it, Frank uses big, bold language to unpack his discovery. One of the things that is really effective about Frank’s writing is that he approaches his subject in narrative form, and in FETH he does so by outlining three biblically-inspired narratives.

The first is the narrative of a God who is an “ageless romantic,” dislodging Godself from the transcendent roost of eternity in order to pierce the veil of time and space just to be reconciled to His beloved. Frank does a masterful job of describing a God who is madly in love with the bride, and goes to great lengths not only to create her, but to redeem her from the muck and mire of sin in oder to place her beside Christ, the betrothed husband. This is part of God’s driving passion, a highly romantic passion for the Church. We are eternally tied to the passionate expression of the God who loves.

In the second narrative Frank shifts to the story of a “homeless” God. Again we find all the elements of a good drama; a sympathetic character on a quest through hardship and wilderness to finally find a home, a place to rest. That place is the church; the tabernacle, or house of God. We are the new temple made with living stones, in which God lives by His spirit. We are eternally tied to the vocation of the God who rests.

Finally, Frank tells the story of “a new species,” or a new family of God. God has entered into the realm of history in order to populate the earth with a brand new creation, and here Frank seeks to bring about a “titanic paradigm shift” in how we understand “church.” The church is not the institutional structure we often think of - ornate (or mundane!) buildings, professional clergy, rites of liturgy - rather, the Church is a new species of people - God’s physical body on earth. We are eternally tied to the manifestation of the God who incarnates.

There’s much about this book - and Frank’s writing in general - that I love. I agree completely with the spirit of each of these narratives, and am on very much the same journey of faith. In that way I’m drawn to Frank’s work.

However, I must admit, there’s much about this book that I struggled with. What’s interesting about Frank is that he tends to make his arguments from an absolute moral imperative. So, for example, in Reimagining Church, the reason we should be meeting in homes is not just because it’s the best practice for making disciples (as I would argue), but because, according to Frank, meeting in large corporate gatherings is flatly unbiblical. This lends tremendous rhetorical weight to his writing, but the the problem is that many of his claims (like the claim that the early church never met in large gatherings) are extra-biblical or simply false. In these instances Frank either hasn’t done his homework, or he’s simply ignoring the well-grounded scholarship that disagrees with him.

In FETH Frank’s tendency to boldly make extra-biblical claims goes to extremes. For example, early on Frank makes this foundational statement about Adam and Eve:

Now I would like to venture a question: From where did the woman acquire the capacity to passionately love? The answer: from Adam, for she came out of him. Did the woman force herself to love Adam?  Not at all, her passion was simply the natural response to Adam’s passion for her. In fact, it was his own passion returning back to him.

Perhaps, but, frankly this is all nothing more than incredible speculation that bleeds way outside the boundaries of the creation narrative. We have absolutely no indication anywhere in scripture that the creation of Eve should be interpreted this way. In fact, there’s really nothing in Genesis that I can find that has anything whatsoever to do with Eve’s romantic passion for Adam. It’s all just Frank’s assumption and speculation. However, in spite of that, this one observation is foundational to the claims Frank will go on to make about the nature of the relationship between God and the church.

There are other examples that are too numerous to recount. On page 33 Frank says, “Interestingly, an artist always makes his masterpiece last,” and uses this seemingly benign cultural observation to reinforce another foundational point, namely, that Eve - and by extension the Church - is God’s “Magnum Opus” of creation. The only problem is that his observation about a masterpiece isn’t true. Elsewhere Frank claims - based again on his idea of romantic love - that the entire motivation for creating humanity in the first place was that “God the Son was alone” and had no object for his own passion. This claim is a stretch, to say the least.

In fact, Frank’s theology in the entire first “narrative” of FETH is really far more influenced by romanticism than any careful exegesis of scripture. Frank has anachronistically read the plot of a thousand Hollywood romance films into the creation story, and he continues this pattern of making extra-biblical assumptions throughout the entire book constantly making untenable claims about God’s feelings along the way. Picking out the many fallacies became an incredible distraction to actually reading the book.

The problem is that I love and whole-heartedly agree with the basic points Frank is trying to make; God’s purpose for church is far more grand than to be the purveyor of individualistic religious goods and services. But in his fervor to write colorful narratives Frank fails to write good missiology, and I’m very sorry to say that was, for me, a disappointment.

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OTHER BLOGS PARTICIPATING IN THE “FROM ETERNITY TO HERE” BLOG CIRCUIT

Today (June 9th), the following blogs are discussing Frank Viola’s new bestselling book “From Eternity to Here” (David C. Cook, 2009). The book just hit the May CBA Bestseller List. Some are posting Q & A with Frank; others are posting full reviews of the book. To read more reviews and order a copy at a 33% discount, go to Amazon.com:

For more resources, such as downloadable audios, the free Discussion Guide, the Facebook Group page, etc. go to the official website:http://www.FromEternitytoHere.org

Enjoy the reviews and the Q and A:

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6 Responses to “Review: Frank Viola’s From Eternity to Here”

  • Mike Morrell Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 9:11 am

    You’re a good writer too!

    I hear you, re: the points of imagination, speculation, and hyperbole in Frank’s writings. And yet - I wonder if we need to get over the idea that theology is ‘realistic.’

    I’ll give you an example: I’m a comic book geek. In the 50s-80s, DC Comics (Publisher of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc…) occasionally published stories that took place outside of their established continuity; they were ‘parallel universe’ or ‘alternate reality’ tales of Superman marrying Lois Lane or Batman having a son with Catwoman. They were deemed ‘imaginary stories’ because they couldn’t or shouldn’t happen in the main universe.

    In 1985 virtuoso writer Alan Moore (From Hell, V for Vendetta, The Watchmen) poked fun as this nom de plume in his acclaimed two-issue Superman story ‘Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?’ about the death of Superman. This story took place outside of regular continuity (even though they were to ‘really’ kill Superman in the comics seven years later, in 1992…see, I told you I was a geek). In it, Moore quipped “Yes, this is an imaginary story…aren’t they all?”

    I’m not comparing theologizing to comic books. But I am saying that perhaps we need to lighten up. We need to realize that our Sacred Scripture was written by seers, poets, mystics, and visionaries - and fishermen, tentmakers, and kings. Play and divine imagination are a huge part of what’s in there, a major source of God’s communication with humanity. It might sound crass to say that Scripture’s writers were ‘making the stuff up,’ but different takes on various matters (look at the differences between Samuel/Kings and Chronicles, for instance) show that a great deal of imagination and interpretation were involved.

    So much the more for today’s preachers, teachers, and theologians. We engage in the world of Spirit - that is, of metaphor, image, and idea. There is a lot of leeway, and statements like those of Mr. Viola need not be taken literally in order to be ‘true.’

  • Rick Meigs Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 11:44 am

    Well written post and your points are well taken. I love Frank’s writings tend to agree with his basic points, but the tone and extremes are a disappointment and distract from the good.

  • Bill Kinnon Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 12:25 pm

    Jason,
    Great post - well written and well said.

    Perhaps, I would appreciate Frank’s writing a tad more if he wrote with much less certainty. It’s his “I’ve found THE answer” style of writing that has caused me to stop reading him. We are all broken people and see “as through a glass darkly.”

    Mike,
    Actually, you are comparing Scripture to Comic Books. How postmodern of you.

  • Grace Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 12:35 pm

    Very well-explained Jason. I also found the romanticizing of God’s love to be at best distracting and at times a cheapened description of the truth of His love. Which to me was disappointing because it was a distraction from many other solid and important points that the book made.

    I would disagree that this is theologically unimportant. I believe that distinguishing whether creation was the result of lack or an expression of abundance on the part of the Father, Son, and Spirit is an important facet of trinitarian theology.

  • Jason Coker Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

    I’m disturbed by the twinges of pleasure I receive when approving comments that agree with me. I’m sure that little AJAX effect has something to do with it…

    Mike -

    Wow, thanks for the compliment about my writing!

    You make a good point - and maybe I am being too hard on him - but I think context is a critical factor. Nobody takes comics literally (well, almost nobody), and I certainly don’t have a problem with narrative license. For example, I don’t even think the creation story IS literally true, but I do think it communicates a powerfully important theological truth and that theology really isn’t a matter of poetic license. Likewise, I don’t think Psalms, Proverbs, or Job should be used by themselves as the sole foundation for doctrinal statements because they are poetry, and as such are to be understood in a slightly different way than, say, apocalyptic literature or epistles. Still, there ARE reliable, well-grounded hermeneutical practices for properly interpreting their meaning within a proper context.

    All that to simply point out that 1) I’m no fundamentalist, and 2) Viola isn’t writing creative prose here. On the contrary, He’s attempting to write a sweeping missiological foundation for a new ecclesiology (a sorely needed task, IMHO), and he really does expect to be taken quite seriously. His statements about, say, the insufficiency of the Trinity to provide the Son with an adequate object of passion are not poetry, they are hard-core, far-reaching theological statements that he believes are true - and he wants us to believe it too. When I judge those statements to be biblically ungrounded I’m merely taking him as seriously as he demands to be taken and holding him to that standard.

    I judge Alan Moore’s writings by a very different standard, even though he’s made HIS theology quite clear as well, in his own way : )

    Rick, Bill, and Grace -

    Thanks for the comments guys. It’s good to know I’m not the only one feeling ambivalent about Viola’s stuff.

  • Aldaz Says:
    September 15th, 2009 at 8:19 pm

    Jason,
    Great post - well written and well said.

    Perhaps, I would appreciate Frank’s writing a tad more if he wrote with much less certainty. It’s his “I’ve found THE answer” style of writing that has caused me to stop reading him. We are all broken people and see “as through a glass darkly.”

    Mike,
    Actually, you are comparing Scripture to Comic Books. How postmodern of you….

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