ROBERT DOUGLASS and WYNDY CORBIN REUSCHLING, eds., Celebrations and Convictions: Honoring the Life & Legacy of Dr. Luke L. Keefer, Jr. Mechanicsburg, PA: Brethren in Christ Historical Society, 2015. Pp. 269. $??.
“Chances are that if you are reading this book you already know something about Luke Keefer,” writes J. Robert Douglass, one of two editors of this essay collection. Since I first knew Luke as my seventh and eighth grade teacher at the Navajo Brethren in Christ Mission in New Mexico, Douglass’s observation was accurate for me. In review, however, this collection offers food for thought to a wider orbit than that of Keefer’s colleagues, family, friends, and former students.
Since the volume was published well after Keefer’s death in 2010, it serves both as a festschrift and an extended eulogy from colleagues and former students. Devin Manzullo-Thomas opens the collection with a biographical sketch of Keefer, from his childhood and youth in the Free Grace Brethren in Christ congregation in central Pennsylvania, through his mission and service years, his theological and graduate study, and his teaching career at Messiah College and Ashland Theological Seminary.
Keefer committed much of his scholarly life to teasing out the particularities of Brethren in Christ history and identity. His own inclinations were revealed in his choice of John Wesley as the subject of his doctoral dissertation, working with Franklin Littell, a scholar of sixteenth-century European Anabaptism. Keefer’s 1996 and 1998 article on the “three streams” which intertwined the Brethren in Christ theological heritage (Anabaptism, Pietism, and Wesleyanism) is included in the volume. Keefer’s uneasiness about the more recent “fourth stream”—Evangelicalism—may be the key to the personal and ecclesial care with which he wrote, taught, preached, and mentored others. Paul Chilcote offers a Wesleyan perspective on church history, underlining Keefer’s claim that John Wesley used his study of early Christian writings to navigate between the views of the magisterial and the radical reformers. Sider’s survey of Brethren in Christ history links the denomination’s engagement with Wesleyan theology to the denomination’s nineteenth-century participation in the Holiness movement. Wyndy Corbin Reuschling, the volume’s other editor, picks up Keefer’s insistence on the role of the Holy Spirit in shaping both holy living and holy leadership.
Keefer claimed that historically the Brethren in Christ blended “an Anabaptist understanding of the church and a Pietist understanding of salvation” (37). Essays in this volume draw readers’ attention to a particular of Anabaptist ecclesiology that was important to Keefer—the visible life and witness of the church. Elaine Heath remembers Keefer’s class on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as directing her spiritual formation journey from prayer to hospitality to work for justice. Grace Holland’s overview of churches in mission quotes Keefer: “The New Testament is largely a missionary document; and the church in any age which seeks to be obedient to the Spirit will be committed emphatically to evangelism and missions” (138). She also emphasizes that Keefer insisted on growth in discipleship as essential to ongoing mission. Looking back, Zach Spidel recognizes, as did Keefer, the unhealthy “church as cultural bunker” response to the world in which we live. Looking forward, he recommends an Anabaptist ecclesiology that lives “as an embassy of the kingdom of God on earth through a shared commitment to a visibly distinct corporate life centered on Jesus” (158). Concerned about the ongoing commitment within the Brethren in Christ to teaching on biblical peacemaking and nonviolence, Eric Seibert notes the importance of efforts such as the collection A Peace Reader(Sider and Keefer, 2002).
An outstanding feature of the collection is the repeated notice its writers give to Keefer’s irenic nature and voice. Perhaps most significant is Douglass’s reflection on the word “heresy,” and how Keefer responded both thoughtfully and peacefully when controversial theologian Clark Pinnock visited Ashland. Doris Barr recounts both internal and external questions as she recognized her ministering gifts and struggled to understand her call. She notes that Keefer’s “emphasis on ‘the rule of love’ has become a framework for my own journey in ministry” (159). John Yeatts notes Keefer’s “perhaps most controversial contribution” to Brethren in Christ biblical interpretation. Terms like “inerrancy and “infallibility” were for Keefer not necessary. Rather, he proposed, believers can allow “Scripture to define its own understanding of reliability.” (192-194)
Matthew Lewis’s moving account of Keefer’s mentoring made me long for the opportunity I now see that I missed to reopen conversation with Luke as an adult, a fellow graduate of Temple University’s religion department, and a sister historian who has also sought to mine the treasures of the early Christians. This collection opens a door to a bit of what we might have been able to share in person.
The volume is repetitive at points, and gives more space to survey material than some readers will need. Still, it is an excellent resource for people who care about the integrity of the church’s twenty-first century witness and need a modern picture of one man’s Christ-like embodiment of spiritual and intellectual leadership.