Robert Webber’s The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life is not for those looking for light devotional reading.

It is a serious look at the meaning of biblical spirituality and the various distortions of it and alternatives to it that have been practiced by those in pursuit of spirituality in Christendom and in the world through the centuries. The reader who is new to the field of theology may find some of the early going a bit slow, but those who stay with this book will be richly rewarded.

In his introduction the respected Professor Webber quickly sends the message that this will be no rerun of typical evangelical thinking. As he sees it there are five themes in the return to true spirituality: (1) God’s Story, (2) My Story, (3) His Life in Mine, (4) My Life in His, and (5) Life Together (meaning in the Body of Christ). The key to all this is what Webber calls God’s “incarnational embrace”—that is how God has reached out to embrace us in the incarnation, in his taking on our physical life in Jesus. So far this sounds fairly typical, but then Webber asks “How do we embrace God’s story? How do we enter God’s story?” His answer: “Acts 2:38-46 gives us insight into the oldest answer to this question. In this passage of Scripture, Peter tells his listeners to do three things: (1) repent, (2) be baptized for the forgiveness of sins, and (3) receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. In contemporary evangelicalism, too little is made of Peter’s instructions.” (p 25)

Whatever one may think of the rest of the book, it cannot be said that Webber makes too little of these key words. Again and again (no exaggeration) he makes statements such as this one: “So, how do you participate in God’s embrace for your life? The biblical key is baptism—immersion into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the pattern of spirituality—putting off the old person who has been buried with Christ in his death; putting on the new person raised in the new life of the Spirit.” (p 26)

Those of us who have emphasized baptism into Christ in the conversion process will not only find that we are affirmed by Webber’s study but made to think even more deeply about the meaning and consequences of baptism in Jesus’ name. For Webber a disciple is one who “lives the baptized life” and the theme of one entire chapter is “No life but the baptized life.” Baptism is not something you do and then leave behind; it is that which you live out every day of your life. Spirituality is a continual dying and rising with Christ. Baptism is not some physical act that has only a minor relationship to spirituality, but baptism, because of its physical nature, is the God-ordained way to enter and participate in the physical nature of the incarnation—where we experience God’s embrace of us.

Even with numerous reference to baptism, this is not a book on baptism. It is supremely a book on spirituality, and most all readers will be challenged to enlarge their thinking about this most crucial need. If we read this work carefully we will see some of our own tendencies to stray from biblical thinking even as we think we are focused on being spiritual. We may know little about dualism (and the way Gnosticism creeps in) but we will learn how it is still pulling people away from an incarnational and baptismal theology. Better yet we will learn how to stay on solid biblical ground.

This is an important book. It represents a fresh look from a different perspective at biblical concepts that many of us treasure. It will stretch your thinking and add depth to your understanding. It shows us that not every one is bound to a traditional path, and reminds us that there are those willing to compare Scripture to the normal ways of doing theology. If this work is an indication, there is fresh and exciting thinking going on. God’s Spirit is still at work in surprising ways. Robert Webber can help us see that and feel the reality of God’s embrace.

The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life by Robert Webber. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2006.

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