Exhortations to patience and hope
Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry by Brad East. Eerdmans, 2024. 220 pp., $24.99
Reading Brad East’s new book, Letters to a Future Saint, made me want to be a more thoughtful, more engaged, more grounded person of faith. East loves Jesus deeply. His passion for the story of God’s work on earth shows through a series of letters he addresses—as the title says—to a “future saint.” East’s longing for his readers to know Christ better is written into every epistle, and I finished East’s book with a renewed desire to follow Jesus’ teachings with a similar fervor.
I’m also definitely not the intended audience for East’s book.
I’m not a young person hoping to become a Christian; it’s been forty years since my baptism, and I have far fewer years to secure sainthood than the readers East hopes to address. As someone who grew up Mennonite and is now an elder in a Quaker church—both “low church” traditions—I also found some of East’s discourse alienating, especially around the sacraments and creeds. I wished his letters might acknowledge that some Christians have a different understanding of scripture, church practices, and how Jesus is made real to his followers.
So whom is East hoping to reach? In the very first letter, he describes his audience: “Raised in the orbit of church. Not unfamiliar with Jesus or Scripture. Not skeptical for them either. But untutored. And more than anything, hungry to learn more—to make the switch, in the Bible’s image, from milk to meat.” East defines his book as a kind of catechesis, intended to instruct his young audience “in what it means to be a Christian.” He writes to express Jesus’s love because “life is nothing apart from loving him.”
Setting out to understand Letters to a Young Saint through the lens of its intended readers, I thought about an idea John Steinbeck expressed in a 1969 Paris Review interview: “Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.” Following Steinbeck’s advice, I visualized one person to whom East wrote, and I could see this work for what it is: a compelling dialogue with a young person curious about the Christian life. That reader must also have the intellectual capacity to consider East’s use of philosophy, theology, history, and literature to invite his reader into knowing Christ—and Christ’s love—with the kind of intimacy the author himself enjoys.
In that sense, it is easy to imagine one of my university’s honors students reading these letters and cherishing East’s words. Or a young person seeking mentorship from an elder who understands faith on an emotional and an intellectual level. Or perhaps an inquisitive student in a catechism class, eager to know Jesus better and to understand the arc of church history.
Each epistle in the volume, addressed to a “Dear Future Saint,” is brief and framed around one topic or idea. The collection of letters is separated into twelve sections that East sees as the beats of the Christian story: tracing the formation of God’s work on earth, from creating and calling God’s people; the fall of humanity and the concept of original sin; the birth of Jesus and his ministry on earth; his death as atonement for sins; and the hope, made possible by Jesus’ resurrection, that life will overcome death.
While each letter is deeply grounded in scripture and theology, I was also impressed by East’s reliance on the humanities; his concepts come alive through the use of specific examples from literature or church history. When, for example, East writes to a young saint about turning and returning to Christ following every failure, he quotes the poem “Judas, Peter,” by Luci Shaw. Then he amplifies the theme of being (re)penitent by recalling the story of Kijichiro, a character in Shusako Endo’s novel Silence. Kijichiro embodies traits of both Judas and Peter in his flawed endeavors to love Christ. East’s conclusion—that young saints are all like Judas and also like Peter (and like Kijichiro)—will resonate with young readers longing to understand the concept of following Jesus despite their fallenness.
East is at his best when giving life to challenging theological concepts with powerful examples that make ideas like the atonement more real to his audience (though he only really amplifies and explains one theory of the atonement, while mentioning there are 30 different “understandings of how Jesus saves us”). He recognizes the temptation to become mired in theological abstraction, as well as the value of embodying each concept with examples his audience will understand.
In one letter, he acknowledges that the young saint would benefit from more specificity: “You ask for specifics. Always specifics! Here I am, preaching and philosophizing, and you want to know how to live.” Although somewhat tongue-in-cheek—he concludes the paragraph by saying “I would have thought the Ten Commandments is as practical as it gets!”—East recognizes the reader’s need for a roadmap to a life of faith. In the rest of this particular epistle, he addresses five specific teachings of Jesus that might serve as a guide.
While elsewhere in the book East describes writing letters to his children and godchildren, his direct address to a correspondent (“You ask for specifics”) makes me wonder how his book might have been different were readers to have access to letters from a future saint, alongside the letters to the saint. It might have been useful to know more about the questions to which East is responding.
The book ends where the church calendar begins, with hopeful waiting for Christ’s return. In this last series of letters, East exhorts the young future saint to practice the virtues of patience and of hope, and to choose the life and love Jesus offers. East’s final epistle is perhaps his strongest. There, he relates the story of twenty-one Libyan men (twenty of them Coptic Christians), martyred at the hands of ISIS in 2015 for refusing to renounce Christ. They were normal people, East writes, whose hope in the resurrection “showed the world the power of God,” and who “chose life by submitting to death.”
Although Jesus-followers are not all created to be martyrs—something East reminds his young saints in the earliest letters of the book—he asserts that his readers are called to the same kind of faithful witness, even in their ordinary lives. This is powerful encouragement for any reader who longs to serve Jesus, and not just the young future saints.
Melanie Springer Mock is Professor of English at George Fox University. Her books include Finding Our Way Forward: When the Children We Love Become Adults (2023), Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else (2018), and If Eve Only Knew: Freeing Yourself from Biblical Womanhood to Become Who God Expected You to Be (2015). Her essays have appeared in Christian Feminism Today, Literary Mama, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brain, Child, and Runner’s World, among other places. Much of her work focuses on her experiences parenting, feminism within Christian context, and social justice.