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.
Bartlett’s basic contention is that shifting human culture away from its violent roots and reorienting it towards a trajectory of non-violence required a deep and prolonged work of semiotic reprogramming, a reconfiguration of meaning at the most fundamental level of human existence and interaction. His thesis is that this, in essence, is what the Hebrew and Christian scriptures together achieve: a sustained semiotic shift that could not have been achieved in any other way. The attentive reader may note that the book’s subtitle speaks not of “the evolution of divine nonviolence in the Bible”, as might have been expected, but rather of “the Bible’s evolution of divine nonviolence”, illustrating Bartlett’s premise that it is the leavening effect of scripture itself that has infiltrated and saturated human culture to produce a deep and sustained change that is still ongoing.
To demonstrate how the Bible reorients human meaning and culture in this way, Bartlett starts with the seminal Exodus and Genesis narratives (in that order) and their profound challenge to prevailing cultures of violent rivalry and subjection. He then proceeds to explore key texts of the Hebrew scriptures: Job and its revolutionary defiance of expectations with regard to justice and retribution; the Servant motif of Second Isaiah and how it works to reorient violent judgement towards “an extraordinary gentleness and nonaggression in relation to what is broken and close to extinction” (p. 75); Ruth and its profound subversion of sociocultural codes; Daniel and its startling rejection and reversal of established codes in favour of divinely inspired and empowered non-violence, even to the point of martyrdom; and Jonah and its “dynamic sign of nonviolence […] which changed a people, and, in turn, this change in the people changed the meaning of God, completing the semiotic circle” (p. 134).
In the book’s penultimate chapter, Bartlett surveys the Gospels, showing how Jesus, in his life, death and resurrection, “announced the end of the Temple” and worked to “drain violence from human history” (p. 148). In the final chapter, he engages with Paul, creatively drawing on the work of Douglas Campbell (notably in his seminal work The Deliverance of God) and others to demonstrate how the Apostle deliberately and decisively rejects established conceptions of divine wrath and paints a daring new vision of what constitutes the true sacred, framed no longer in terms of exclusion, retribution and vengeance but of radical inclusion, forgiveness and restorative justice.
The book concludes with a “Brief Appendix on the Lamb” in which the author sketches out an approach to the notoriously difficult book of Revelation, reframing history as an “epoch-long semiotic battle” between the “Lamb-standing-as-having-been-slain” and the Beast – a battle the author characterises as “a battle for human meaning”, with “the end revealed in Revelation […] of the conclusive victory of the sign of the Lamb” (p. 213).
All in all, Signs of Change is a masterful survey of the biblical text that promises to open up exciting new vistas of interpretive possibility to even the most seasoned students of scripture. I should, perhaps, add the same note of caution that I did when reviewing Bartlett’s previous book: Signs of Change is by no means a light, breezy read. However, readers willing to furnish the required effort will be richly rewarded with a panoply of creative insight.
[Signs of Change was published in 2022 by Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock. I was kindly provided with a review copy by the author. I was not required to write a positive review.]
