Holy Stride

Christopher R. J. Holmes’ 2021 book A Theology of the Christian Life: Imitating and Participating in God, is a golden book. Superficially, it has a golden cover. At the risk of overinterpreting the outside of the text, and of reading too much into the decisions of the design department at Baker Academic publishing house or overinterpreting the vagaries of the Alamy photo licensing corporation, let me point out the uncommon beauty of the cover image.

It is a 1914 drawing by Dutch artist Jan Toorop (1858-1928), portraying a devout pilgrim, perhaps a nun, eyes closed, one hand clutching a cross to their chest and one hand reaching out.

The golden-haired figure is thrusting leftward at a striking angle across the yellow picture plane, and the drawing’s title acknowledges the centrality of this angular momentum: it is called The Holy Stride.[1] Toorop was an unusual artist, accomplished in many subfields of art, and hard to classify or characterize. His output was equal parts reaction against academic classicism, a pointillist phase, followed by phases of art nouveau, symbolism, and neo-impressionism. This drawing is vintage late Toorop, immediately engaging and beguiling. Though its clear central image is almost too easy to take in at a single glance, in its outworking the piece contains evocative mysteries, nearly inexplicable individual choices and unpredictable strategies. A golden cover for a golden book.

And there are similarities between Toorop’s drawing and Holmes’ Theology of the Christian Life in other ways as well. Christopher Holmes is likewise hard to classify or characterize. An accomplished theologian who works comfortably in a variety of styles with obvious mastery, Holmes has sometimes seemed Barthian, sometimes classical theist in retrieval mode, a bit Reformed Thomist, great-church Anglican, practitioner of the theological interpretation of Scripture, or something else. But though his paths may sometimes be untraceable, Holmes does not meander. He never wanders. Rather his work always single-mindedly strides, moving directly to its goal with, in fact, a Holy Stride. And this book in particular is vintage, golden Holmes.

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[1] Het Heilige Schreed. The drawing is held in the city museum of Amsterdam: https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/collection/4467-jan-toorop-het-heilige-schreed