The Word made grotesque

In the interest of full disclosure, I should begin with a few confessions. One of my favorite hymns is “Fairest Lord Jesus.” For a spell, I included a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky in my email signature: “Beauty will save the world.” And I’ve long swooned over Eugene Peterson’s glorious rendition of John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.” Which is all to say that I’m a tough sell for Charles Campbell.

Campbell, professor emeritus of homiletics at Duke Divinity School, asks us to consider not a beautiful savior but a grotesque one. He wants us to resist redemption stories that are lovely but bring about little more than false hope. Rather than inviting us to imagine encountering Jesus on the next block over, Campbell translates John’s critical line in a significantly less charming manner: “The Word became grotesque and dwelt among us.” Still, despite my attachment to an aesthetically pleasing theological imagination, I find Campbell’s slender volume compelling—and even convincing.

The four chapters of The Scandal of the Gospel were originally delivered as the 2018 Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School, and the oral quality of the prose was wisely maintained. Campbell begins by rejecting the preacherly tendency to impose order on chaos. “We seek to discern a pattern, a narrative, a doctrine that will provide some clarity and structure,” he notes. The problem is that these patterns are often artificial; these narratives false. The grotesque, in contrast,