Fortress Press

In his latest book, the inestimable Rodney Clapp offers a great gift to the Christian community for this moment. With remarkable brevity, drawing on his wide-ranging and eclectic reading interests, and always deeply rooted in the biblical text, Clapp diagnoses a major current Christian problem--a desperate grasp for control--and offers a way to get us to a solution: learning to "live out of control." I learned a great deal from this book and commend it strongly to the global Christian community.

In a time when much about our lives seems out of control, Rodney Clapp deftly explains that this, in fact, is our Christian calling, personally and collectively. Far from a posture of resignation or a relinquishing of agency, living out of control, he insists, is about embodying a lively and lifegiving witness that is shrewd in its assessment of systems of domination. Drawing on important work in prefigurative politics and Christian anarchism, Clapp paints a compelling picture of living out of control for the sake of the gospel and its good news for the oppressed and the suffering.

In this thoughtful and wide-ranging book, Rodney Clapp challenges Christians to take seriously the reality that Christendom is on the wane--that Christians qua Christians are not, will not be, and should not want to be in control of the American polity. His accessible, provocative reflections should spur conversation within congregations seeking to discern the shape of faithfulness to the gospel and among friends--inside and outside the church--in search of political integrity in the absence of control.

Rodney Clapp has given us the book we all need at this moment. With vivid writing, theological depth, and an abundance of wisdom, Living Out of Control will help you make sense of this moment and hear again the call of Jesus Christ to follow within it. Timely and rich.

Christians in the US are severely tempted to bind themselves to political parties and politicians in hopes of exerting and even recovering a measure of power and control. Seeking control, Christians ironically find themselves under the control of forces and movements ultimately opposed to the goals of the gospel. Rodney Clapp's Living Out of Control is a bracing call to Christians in the US to repent of their desires to control and to devote themselves to resisting the powers that seek to control them. This book is filled with probing insights, wise counsel, and careful judgments. These work together to call Christians to the place where they are most secure because they are most out of control: the act of worshipping in word and sacrament.

Rodney Clapp's account of a "waning" Christendom--changed, not ended--provides a sobering yet insightful, and ultimately encouraging, agenda for a changed church in a difficult world. Clapp envisages a different Christian practice, setting aside both the paternalism of past social witness and the attendant objectification of creation itself, in favor of recovering a "resonance" fitting to the needs of the world and to the changed reality of a Christian faith that has to rethink itself amid the secular. This significant, even profound achievement is the sketch of a Christian ethic that remains engaged and relevant to contemporary social and political practice, while avoiding the compromises of Christian nationalism as well as the self-indulgence of some "post-Christian" postures.