Lexham Press | 2023 | 136 pages (hardcover) | $18.99 | Translated by Jonathan Vaughan
If I had to pick a Scripture passage to epitomize the themes of Lydia Jaeger’s new book Ordinary Splendor, it would be Psalm 8:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
The Psalmist exults in the majesty of the Lord’s name, revealed in the wonders of his creation—especially his crowning act of forming human beings in his own image.
With similar doxological reveling and contemplative wonder, Jaeger offers a series of insightful meditations on key aspects of what it means to be image-bearing creatures of God who are situated within a purposeful order orchestrated by God. Employing her expertise in theology and philosophy, Jaeger carefully teases out implications of these creational realities in the realm of embodiment, sexuality, human limits, gratitude, rest, and more. Jaeger’s book is part of a growing body of work addressing the vital topic of what it means to be creatures of God in a society that has forgotten what it means to be human. So many of our current cultural challenges, both inside and outside the church, stem from anemic anthropology and atheistic or deistic cosmology. Jaeger doesn’t just say no to these failures; she shows where they crumble upon themselves and provides a better yes to the majesty of the human creature and the God who deigns to give himself to man.
This slim volume is another aesthetically pleasing offering from Lexham Press, with poetic passages and short excurses interspersed throughout the book. The book contains ten manageable chapters that explore the wide-ranging implications of Genesis’ opening two chapters, which as Jaeger puts it in the book’s epilogue, leads “us to examine some of the most diverse aspects of the human condition. From religion to work, from procreation to diet, from marriage to science—no aspect of what humanity is or does is unaffected by the worldview found in Scripture” (161). Jaeger admits this is a task of unending depth and complexity and leaves “for another day the joy of unearthing yet more hidden treasures from these ancient texts” (162). But what she does unearth along the way is worthy of further reflection.
Creation and Science
Jaeger avoids contemporary evolution debates and instead focuses on how the Genesis account invalidates both modern materialistic and ancient polytheistic origin stories. She writes, “the Bible’s first sentence constitutes a powerful rebuttal of any conception, be it ancient or modern, that fails to make a clear distinction between God and the world.” To the scientific materialists who argue science can answer all, she notes that “the world does not explain itself, but has its origins and foundation in God.” To those who divinize nature, she states “the notion of creation demythologizes the world in a way that is conducive to doing science.” This all means that God’s orderly creation provides a basis for scientific discovery, while at the same time limiting the scientific enterprise to questions of “what is,” not questions of what “should be” (8-9).
Body and Design
Jaeger spends most of her time unpacking the embodied human being: our sexed bodies, physical limitations, and exquisite design. She does so by considering what she calls the three aspects of creational blessing: procreation, work, and food (66-76). All three of these pre-Fall blessings relate to human physicality. Even something as mundane as eating becomes food for thought. Jaeger explores how eating reminds us that we are not God: we are not self-sufficient but need to rely on the frequent intake of food to nourish and sustain us. God could have designed this to be a bland or joyless process, but he didn’t: eating offers endless variety of flavor, color, and texture that reveals the goodness of God and his created order (76). Through this type of rich reflection Jaeger undermines the common misconception that the body is sinful and that it must be transcended to attain salvation, “which paradoxically amounts to the quest for a final condition where human beings would no longer be truly human.” She continues,
To attain salvation, human beings do not have to try and escape their own condition: there is no need to free the immortal soul from the material body. On the contrary, salvation, according to the Bible, is first and foremost the restoration of humans in all that we are, in accordance with God’s initial plan. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of the true Human. In him we recover our humanity. (52)
With echoes of Augustine’s famous prayer, Jaeger writes, humans “cannot fulfill their true nature and develop their full potential unless they live in communion with the One whose image they are” (56). Such a relational understanding of the imago Dei means that “man cannot be his own companion,” which has implications for our relationship to God and one another (114).
Male and Female
From this foundation Jaeger enters the contested territory of male and female distinctions, offering some profound reflections along the way. Being male and female is about much more than gender roles since “sexual differentiation structures the whole person.” This deeper view of masculinity and femininity rooted in the total structure of the holistic body prevents us from falling prey to two common traps: adopting rigid gender stereotypes based on what society says men or women should do, on the one hand, or rejecting the body’s inherent design and destiny on the other. She writes:
The order between man and woman does not harden into a hierarchy because it is not the last word about the sexes. It is based on the work of a transcendent Creator, from whom all things come and who assigns the role of each, in the harmonious totality of a creation that is united by its common origin….Far from giving men the right to exploit women, the creational order implies reciprocal duties and provides the context in which men and women can enjoy the harmonious collaboration that their difference makes possible when willingly accepted. (122-123)
This understanding of the body’s deep design has implications for where the act of sex fits within the human experience (male-female monogamy) and where it doesn’t fit (same-sex relationships, which Jaeger argues are a profound disordering of sexual desire and bodily design). Looking to Romans 1, she explains that “what homosexuality is in the interpersonal domain, idolatry is in the religious domain. Both amount to a denial of a fundamental otherness; on the one hand, between man and woman, on the other, between God and created things” (128). She is also careful to note the worthy place of singleness in the human experience. The “structural importance of sexual differentiation,” she explains, “plays out in the context of a common humanity: man and woman are first of all human beings.” This means that the contemporary sexualization of personal identity has gone too far: “the exercise of one’s sexuality is not essential for the fulfillment of the human vocation,” and a single’s “choice of sexual abstinence becomes a compelling testament to the fact that our relationship with the Creator has priority over all others” (141-142).
For Further Thought
Ordinary Splendor offers thought-provoking and accessible insights into theology, philosophy, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Though Jaeger admits that the book is far from exhaustive, there are a few areas that raised further questions for me and could use more elucidation and clarification, even in an introductory book like this.
In her exposition of Genesis 1-2, Jaeger periodically refers to two creation accounts. But what is the precise relation between these two accounts? While a detailed treatment is beyond the scope of Jaeger’s book, I was hoping that Jaeger would address questions that have emerged from this scholarly debate: Are the two accounts complementary or contradictory? Who wrote them? How did they end up in the Pentateuch?
Another question that surfaced while reading the book: To what extent does the Fall affect our native ability to interpret creation truthfully through science and reason? Jaeger suggests that “since human intelligence and nature are both created by God, there is a complicity between them which guarantees the adequacy of the human mind to understand the world we set out to explore” (40). Does adequacy mean actual ability? If so, is this too strong of a claim?
Lastly, I am unclear as to what she envisions when she refers to the ordered difference between male and female as applied to the ordered life of the church. She argues for the non-fungible nature of male and female—that they are complementary, not interchangeable. She refers supportively to Paul’s admonition that women “were not to claim for themselves positions of authority” (124). But in the preface she mentions that this book came about from a sermon series she preached (xvi-xvii). I’m struggling to see what Jaeger thinks Paul entails with his admonition, if not the preaching office. Believe me, I understand the dangers of taking gender roles too far, and have seen the damage caused by demeaning and domineering men, both in homes and in churches. I appreciate Jaeger’s careful approach to avoid flat egalitarianism on the one-side and distorted patriarchy on the other. But I would have loved for Jaeger to describe how she holds together her arguments with her practice.
Questions aside, Jaeger’s book deserves to be situated within the broader contemporary work being done on the theology of the body and the goodness of creation. These fields have exploded in recent years, and rightly so, considering the contemporary challenges in the realm of gender and sexuality, transhumanism and technology, and much more. Jaeger grounds our answers in the very structure of creation itself, the purpose and destiny stitched into our very bodies, and into the world around us. Jaeger reminds us that we are creatures, which means we are not our own. And that—when combined with the fact that we have been bought with a price by the one who transcended the Creator-creature divide—is truly good news.
