It’s now over two years since I reviewed Anthony Bartlett’s Theology Beyond Metaphysics. Today I have the pleasure of reviewing its follow-up volume, published in 2022 and titled Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence.
Perhaps the easiest way to set the scene for Signs of Change is to quote from my review of Theology Beyond Metaphysics:
In his earlier work Virtually Christian, Bartlett explored how the Gospel has infiltrated culture in such a way as to influence and subvert human meaning, much as yeast spreads through a batch of dough and ends up decisively influencing the final form of the loaf. In this latest work, he follows the river of meaning upstream to its source and draws from a range of seminal thinkers to make a reasoned – and, crucially, non-metaphysical – case for precisely how the Gospel has achieved this feat of influencing and subverting meaning to radically reshape what it is to be a human being. If in Virtually Christian Bartlett took the finished loaf and broke it open to observe and describe how it had been affected by the yeast, in Theology Beyond Metaphysics he wants to go back to first principles and try to account for how the leaven of the Gospel got into the dough of human culture in the first place and by what mechanisms and processes it did – and continues to do – its subversive and formative work.
To summarise, in Theology Beyond Metaphysics Bartlett explored the semiological means by which the absolute non-violence of God infiltrated and subverted human culture. To quote again from my previous review, in the final chapter of that volume, the author offered
a refreshing and inspiring reading of the Gospel of John, highlighting and explaining how its author makes ingenious and creative use of signs to reveal, transform and reshape human meaning
That final chapter of Theology Beyond Metaphysics sets out a fresh perspective on John’s Gospel that is entirely congruent with Christian orthodoxy yet boldly innovative in its exploration of how the Gospel text creatively and subversively works to transform and reshape human meaning. The good news for those who enjoyed this exciting new take on a classic biblical text is that Signs of Change offers much more in the same vein, this time taking as its canvas not just one of the Gospels but the broad sweep of the biblical canon.
Today I have the honour of reviewing the recently published Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Metaphysics of René Girard by Anthony Bartlett.
