Bartholomew’s book engages more comprehensively with what the Bible has to say about place. For that reason alone, it is likely to appeal to a broad swath of readers, including many evangelicals

A Review of Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today by Craig G. Bartholomew, Baker Academic, September 2011, 384 pp., $29.99

“Love in this world doesn’t come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.” So writes Wendell Berry in his breathtaking novel Hannah Coulter. If any four sentences can sum up the core thesis of Craig G. Bartholomew’s Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today (Baker Academic), then surely it is these.

Bartholomew, a professor of philosophy, religion, and theology at Redeemer University College in Ontario, has written what ought to become the introductory book for evangelicals interested in issues of place-making. While other evangelicals have written well on issues of land use and conservation—Lisa Graham McMinn and Megan Anna Neff’s Walking Gently on the Earth: Making Faithful Choices about Food, Energy, Shelter and More (2010) comes to mind—Bartholomew’s book engages more comprehensively with what the Bible has to say about place. For that reason alone, it is likely to appeal to a broad swath of readers, including many evangelicals.

American Christians often struggle to understand the role of place in Scripture. Like much of Western philosophy generally, many recent forms of American evangelicalism marginalize or ignore the particular settings within which divine and human dramas unfold. We assume that place is trivial, merely incidental to the Bible’s core message of salvation. And then, predictably enough, we read Scripture in such a way that our assumptions are confirmed. To such unwelcome habits, Bartholomew offers a bracing resistance.

The Geography of Redemption
Bartholomew attempts to define place in the book’s opening pages, but the concept tends to resist tidy definition. For most of us, the term conjures up highly evocative images, but we would struggle to give it a dictionary definition. Bartholomew offers a few principles to aid us: First, “[place] is a human concept,” and “to be human is to be placed.” Second, “place results from the dynamic interactions of humans and their particular location.” Third, “although space and place are inseparable, place must be distinguished from space.” These principles form the foundation of the book.

Bartholomew’s opening chapters show the centrality of place in the Old Testament. When God speaks to Cain, he tells him that “the voice of your brother is crying out to me from the ground.” The land itself tells of Abel’s murder. God calls Abraham to a particular place, Canaan, and makes his pleasure known to Israel through its eventual provision. And later, when God’s judgment falls upon his wayward people, his punishment of choice is exile from the Promised Land. To contemporary Westerners who view particular places as incidental to their lives, the centrality of place in the Old Testament can be quite jarring.

Yet it should not be surprising. From the very beginning, God’s plan for creation was mediated through the particulars of a specific place and specific people. Genesis 1 speaks in grandiose, universal terms of God’s plan for humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it” (1:28). It’s a noble, epic calling, but to individual human beings, it can seem too large to be believed, much less realized. Until we continue reading. In Genesis 2, we find God focusing—focusing, not narrowing—the scope of that work. He does not give the creation mandate to Adam. Rather, to “the man of the ground” (adama means “ground” in Hebrew) he gives a very specific task: stay in the garden, work it, keep it.

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