Book Review: The Luminous Dusk

I am an obsessive reader and have decided to finally start writing reviews of some of the books I read. Today, we start with Dale C. Allison Jr.'s The Luminous Dusk.

The Luminous Dusk is, in many ways, a lament. Allison laments the modern way of living, along with Modernity as a whole. He points out how we have lost contact with our true nature, not just our spiritual nature but our human nature, which of course has a drastic effect on our spirituality. This book smells of great thinkers like Wendell Berry (getting away from technology and its grasp on our lives), Eugene Peterson (finding God in the everyday) and Richard Foster (in about every way possible). I see this book as divided into two halves, with the first half being more of a lament than the second, which brings up some ideas and thoughts to move us towards more holistic, healthy ways of living out faith. Although both sections contain both lament and remedy, Allison seems to move toward a more hopeful tone as the Dusk moves towards its conclusion..

The first two chapters, along with the introduction, are gems. I was pleasantly shocked to read a New Testament scholar who sounded more like a poet than a scholar. Allison decries our world and ways of living; our noisy world that leaves us out of touch with nature and ultimately with our true selves. As he writes, "Christians may claim that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. But the rest of us are not." We are, he claims, being changed to fit the environment that we have created for ourselves. We stay indoors more and more often, causing us to ask less cosmological questions (pondering the stars, nature, etc). We live in unnatural worlds full of artificial light and noise. In all of this, not surprisingly, our senses of awe and wonder are diminished, if not eliminated. Allison, again not surprisingly, suggests that we seek out silence, our natural rhythms, and even darkness. As he says it, "the way to achieve this, as we instinctively know, is to dampen the senses and quiet thoughts, treating everything as a diversion to be avoided." Although there was little that I would consider profoundly new in these three chapters, these were well-written, thought-provoking, soul-shaping chapters.

Chapter three, The Ascetic Imagination, is a fitting chapter for Allison to write, as it feels much like a defense of the early Christian mystics, especially the desert fathers. It is in many ways the centerpiece of Dusk. He argues that men like Origen, Anthony and Simeon "write a still-valid prescription for fortifying the imagination. It has" he goes on, "three parts: (1) extended reflection upon transcendent realities, (2) prolonged experience of the natural world, and (3) stillness without and within." Although we are not asked to follow these men literally, Allison is telling us to learn from these men (and women, I hope) and follow their wise guidance, which challenges our easy ways of living that leave us not needing God or even being in places where we may see or hear him. Their choice in living with ascetic imaginations caused them to grow closer to God and bring others into similar ways of living. They were strange to many, but we could also say that they were too good for this world. They chose to remake their environments and ways of life to bring themselves into deeper relationship with the Lord. He writes, "but if the desert Christians wisely remade their environments so as to free their internal senses, we seem foolishly to be doing just the opposite." We remake our environment as they did, only our remaking, though not intentional, is done to get us away from those things that would bring us closer to God.

Allison spends the last third of the book prescribing remedies to our Modernistic maladies. These come with further dissections of our modern world, but they are well spoken and too true for me to complain that he is being overly critical of Western culture. To begin to find wholeness we need to (besides finding quiet, darkness, and an ascetic imagination), rediscover reading, heroes and saints, and the transforming power of prayer.

Allison calls us back to the Bible, saying, "when I push its pages apart, I lay my finger on God's heart." He laments the way we have substituted reading with radio, TV and internet. He challenges us to find heroes to emulate rather than celebrities; to know more about Athanasius that Angelina Jolie (my example, not his). And he challenges us to pray in ways that are Biblical rather than treating God like Santa Claus. By imitating the heroes of the faith that have gone before us (think of Hebrews 11), both Biblical and beyond, by letting scripture speak into our lives and transform us, and by praying to YHWH in ways that really are saying "your will be done," we can begin to contend against the false gods and idols that Modernity has set us up to worship.

The Luminous Dusk is a great, thought-provoking read. There were times where Allison seemed to offer a lot of critique with little in the way of alternatives. And his complete lack of footnotes/citations was bothersome throughout. Nevertheless, I celebrate Allison's call for us to rediscover natural rhythms as well as nature in general. I love his challenge to our modern ways of living. He may be a voice calling in the wilderness, but, as we learn from the desert Christians, some, if not many, will come out to the desert when the hear that voice.