A beautiful monologue about what ‘Christianity feels like from the inside’: Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic

A humanist friend bought this book for me, which was a kind thing of him to do, as it’s blessed me. I haven’t read much in the field, but it’s the finest apology for Christianity I’ve encountered.

There are so few contemporary Christian writers whose prose is beautiful, but this book is beautiful in places, and full of the kind of insight into human experience one hopes to find in the best literary fiction, and rarely encounters in Christian nonfiction.

All this said, I’m hard pressed to sum up Spufford’s argument. It’s less an argument than a beautiful monologue about what ‘Christianity feels like from the inside’ – about how, apparently, it makes emotional sense.

Spufford states early on that he is a fairly orthodox Christian, but he writes as someone who carries little theological baggage, and perhaps that’s why he’s refreshing. He describes his inner life and how it resonates with his faith. He actually manages to cover all the key areas of the faith in this account, from his limited but important experience of God, to the message of Jesus and the significance of church.

It’s not a book which will sit easily with evangelicals; he likes to use f-word, and he claims that hell is not something many Christians believe in. For me, I’m so glad to find this  account of a fragile but very real faith that takes seriously the prospect of being wrong, the spectre of atheism and the reality that we often hear nothing back when we pray, and spins from these threads a compelling account of ‘why, despite everything’ Christianity might still be true.

We are your lunatics, we surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible: the nun in White Noise

It is a mixed blessing, how little I remember of novels; the fact I can return to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which meant a lot to me ten years ago, and be surprised by things within it I had completely forgotten.

Published in 1985, it is proof that today’s anxious consumer world of surfaces, freeways, supermarkets, advertisements has been with us three decades. It feels like a novel of the internet age, even though computers are barely mentioned and there was no web. But this is why DeLillo is one of America’s greatest novelists.

Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies, and his wife Babette are scared of death. The novel cuts between the domestic sphere and campus life, before a long middle chapter in which the whole town is evacuated due to a ‘toxic airborne event’. Without giving away the plot, in a climatic scene, Jack finds himself in hospital being tended by a nun-nurse. It is one of the few passages about religion in the novel; when he learns the nun is not a believer, he is curiously devastated, asking her if her dedication is a pretense. She responds:

“Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.” (319)

It is a deeply insightful speech. The New Atheists may wish religion away; yet for the uncommitted majority, ambivalent toward religion, holding a vague belief in God, perhaps the dedication of the ‘lunatics’ is a vicarious faith. For us who are the lunatics, perhaps in moments of doubt we feel the same exasperated anger of the nurse. As I read this scene, I felt the same terror Jack feels, imagining a world without believers. White Noise, as well as being a very funny book, is a bleak vision of the horror of a godless world.

C.S. Lewis on the need for a Christian point of view

As one perpetually caught between literature and theology, C.S. Lewis’s words here make me pay attention:

We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone far away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. Every newspaper, film, novel and text book undermines our work. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round… It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern [person] a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books… The first step to the reconversion of this country is a series, produced by Christians, which can beat the Penguins and the Thinkers’ Library on their own ground.

- “Christian Apologetics” in Timeless At Heart, p. 18

(To my mind, Tom Wright says it better and closer to my way of thinking when he imagines – in “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative” -  ‘a novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story can be my story.’ For Wright, the purpose isn’t simply conversion or even apologetics, although that is part of it. The purpose is to embody and redeem all elements of life and infuse them with a background story of the kingdom. A sign and foretaste of Jesus’ reign. Lewis would probably agree. But I’m not sure Wright would call for the ‘reconversion’ of Britain – that horse has bolted, surely? Do we want to go back to Constantinianism? Not us Anabaptists, anyway.)

Yet I was genuinely struck by this passage. I picture Lewis as a sharp, kindly great-uncle, and he’s dispensing some pointed advice to me when I read his books. (For this analogy to work, he’s a great uncle I avoided until recently, because all the other great-nephews and nieces kept saying how great he was.) There’s a generation gap, but also genuine wisdom to be found.

For me, I am drawn to in-house Christian writing and thinking because I see too much of the church in the grip of fundamentalism and other unhealthy forms of Christianity.

Lewis writes here specifically about the need for more science books written by Christians, but I’m sure he’d urge me to persist with novels too. He is one of the few to be a respected voice in both.

On coming late to The Great Divorce

I’ve just finished C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce for the first time. It is a strange genre of writing, certainly not a novel in a conventional sense. Somewhat like Pilgrim’s Progress, it has a series of encounters with representative people in heaven, hell and in-between, whose responses to their situations have much to teach and warn us about our lives today.

Despite its disclaimer (‘a dream’), the book must surely horrify many evangelicals with its set-up of the afterlife. People’s fates are not fixed; they have the opportunity of visiting heaven and even staying. Their entry seems to depend upon their letting go of the sins which they have become attached to.

Lewis performs a deft twist at the end to exculpate himself and maintain his orthodoxy; the encounters we have read of are perhaps ‘only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago’ or perhaps ‘anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things’ (107). Better to say neither, advises George MacDonald (C.S. Lewis’s literary hero and his guide in heaven) – ‘do not ask of a vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give.’ MacDonald, warns him to be sure to ‘give no poor fool a pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows’ (108).

It is one of those rare books which inspire me to be a better person. Actually, perhaps it scares me to be better as much as inspires me – it is frightening to see parts of myself in all these people who are shutting out heaven and holding onto sin. The worst sin in The Great Divorce seems to be joylessness – those who shut out joy will shut out God. This is hard for a gloomy person like me to hear. It’s not the sin Jesus spent the most time on, but I see much truth in Lewis’s depiction of a series of people who will not embrace joy and truth because they are holding onto resentments of various kinds:

…it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. (60)

Also frightening is Lewis’s depiction of a liberal bishop, who would rather return to the ambiguities of his theological reading group in the gloomy city (hell) than embrace the certainties of knowing God face to face. This is how he became what he is:

Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm. (28)

There should be more books like this. The Shack probably belongs in the same genre, but unfortunately not in the same league.

Religion as a life sentence

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which… is at home at the moment.
– Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

I’ve been listening to The Poisonwood Bible in the car. I didn’t read it when it came out; I was biased against it because it was a book club favourite. But two tapes in, I’m finding it an enthralling novel. A Southern Baptist family move to the Congo to live as missionaries there in the 1950s; Nathan Price, the father, is a harsh and stubborn man, not willing to learn from the Africans – or his wife, from whom this quote comes.

Jesus is tender sometimes, but is just as often harsh, especially with hypocrites. But still her quote resonates with me. Faith asks us to live out a particular way of life, at odds with the world. And we have do that without certainty. We shouldn’t think of salvation as ‘life insurance’ – yet often we do, and if it doesn’t pay out, then we have just been given a life sentence.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

There were so many books I had to read I stopped reading. Then I had a craving like one craves junk food sometimes. I wanted to read science fiction. It was all I read from age 14-17, then I stopped almost completely. I imagined a recent book, I imagined discovering new voices in science fiction from the time I had left it. But instead, I ended up rifling through a markdown bin at a secondhand bookshop and picking out two 1970s paperbacks, the precise era I spent obsessively reading in my teens.

Philip Jose Farmer’s first volume of Riverworld – To Your Scattered Bodies Go – has been something to restore my interest in reading this week. I haven’t finished yet, but it is interesting to think of it theologically.

Everyone who has ever lived awakes with a resurrected body in a world dominated by a long river. The people are resurrected at their peak, with the bodies of young adults. Or most of them are; those who died as children are resurrected as children.

Everyone is naked and hairless. The hair starts growing and people begin covering themselves up, but before these things even happen, violence breaks out. There was just a brief window of time where we might have hoped for a peaceful society, or at least a better one than the one one people remembered on Earth. But that was not a possibility. There was not even the restraints of culture, family, the law. Some are been murdered hours after being resurrected. Fighting erupts over territory, sex and food. It’s made worse by the realisation that if one dies, one will wake up in a ‘refreshed’ body the next day. There is less reason to hold back.

The inhabitants don’t know why they are in this land, or how. They don’t even speculate much. The religious among them acknowledge that it is not the afterlife they believed in. But, of course, they are closer to the mark than the materialists who thought there was no survival beyond the grave. In the absence of any answers, the needs of the body and the rhythms of the day take over.

For readers who cannot or will not believe in God, our world, perhaps, is little different from this. Our existence is either inexplicable or explained fully by blind, natural processes. And yet few live like this is true, few face this in all its brutalness.

I taste the inexplicable world sometimes. It’s when I let the silence in, and the what ifs of my atheist friends. ‘What if’ we have been brought into consciousness without hope of explanation? ‘What if’ there is nothing after death? The atheists, if they are right, they will not get to gloat. They need to win the debate now, because that is all they have. (If they are right, it is all Christians have, too.)

The novel gives me new respect for the conventions of society.  The impossibility of not spoiling the fresh creation. The chaos in the absence of restraint. I think he has it right; he is not being too pessimistic about humanity.

On another matter, we live in Christian hope expecting that in the new creation, all will be explained, all will be made clear. (We are meant to know enough here and now to keep us going. But I don’t often feel like that. Not enough certainity, for one thing.) But just consider another ‘what if’ for a moment: ‘what if’ we are resurrected, but only to a state without any answers? Of course, that is not the biblical picture at all, although I wonder if  a God who works so subtly in this Earth will reveal everything all at once?

Perhaps the ‘what ifs’ are unproductive. Perhaps all the science fiction of the world should be burned. Or perhaps the ‘what ifs’ at least keep us humble.

 

Tim Winton’s Christian Novel

I finished Tim Winton’s 1986 novel That Eye, The Sky this morning. Last year I noted that Tim Winton’s later novels (The Riders onwards) were not explicit enough in their treatment of faith to be the kind of ‘writing for the kingdom’ that Tom Wright proposes. I cautiously added that I hadn’t read his earlier work; That Eye, The Sky is precisely an attempt to ‘write for the kingdom’.

Told through the eyes of twelve year old Ort, it is the story of a family in a WA town living in the aftermath of an accident which leaves Ort’s father, Sam, unable to talk or communicate. A stranger, Henry, knocks on their door and offers to take care of Sam, bathing him. (Tim Winton has talked of a similar experience in his life, when his father had an accident and a Christian came each day to bathe him.) Henry also explains the gospel to the family and Ort and his mother accept the good news, are baptised in the dam and start eating the Lord’s Supper – sherry and bread – with each meal.

[Spoiler alert] I think any good novelist would have to be something of an outsider to the church, and this comes through in what happens subsequently. For Ort and his mother to become Christians, start going to their local Bible-believing church and live happily ever after, it would have to be one of those inspirational fictions published by Harvest House.

Instead, they visit the local fundamentalist church, an Australian flag on the wall, where all the women wear hats with fruit and the like on them. The preacher shouts at them from Revelation and Ort’s mother yells back that ‘We’re not animals!’ before running out. Later they try a Catholic church, but things don’t turn out perfectly there either.

The final disappointment with Christianity comes when Henry runs off with Ort’s teenage sister.

Alas, if anything, Winton’s novel proves to me how difficult it is to write about Christianity. I felt embarrassed, for some reason, reading the sections about faith. Maybe embarrassed for how good-naturedly Ort takes on faith, without any understanding of the obstacles and disappointments ahead of him.

Or maybe it’s that I felt myself squirming with Winton, knowing the impossible task he was undertaking – making the literary fiction reader feel superior enough to this ‘born again’ religion stuff, but trying to be faithful to evangelical Christianity at the same time – while knowing that evangelical Christianity wouldn’t embrace the book because it was too “weird”, or too highbrow or too rude.

Writing for the kingdom response

Jendi Reiter, a Christian writer in the USA, has written an interesting post responding to my paper on Writing novels for the kingdom. You can read it here.

Writing novels for the kingdom

Last night I presented a paper to the Newbigin Group on “Writing novels for the kingdom.” Below is the introduction; if you like the sound of it, you can download the PDF file.

It might be much more appropriate to go off and write a novel (and not a ‘Christian’ novel where half the characters are Christians and all the other half become Christians on the last page) but a novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story can be my story.
- N.T. Wright, “How can the Bible be authoritative?”

The kingdom novel is an elusive, mythical creature. We’re not even sure if we have any living specimens. We do have some prescriptions for what it should look like, and numerous rumours of sightings. At times, I’ve attempted to create one; in fact sometimes it’s what I’d like to do more than anything. But my story is just as much about my falling short of it, of stillbirths and my retreat from the attempt.

My paper has three sections – firstly, an overview of the idea of a Christian novel. Secondly, an account of my writing career from a faith perspective. Thirdly, an investigation of the framework of building for the kingdom suggested by Tom Wright in Surprised By Hope.

Download the whole paper: Writing novels for the kingdom

The general blessedness of his life

I want to live with the grace and thankfulness of the Reverend Boughton in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home:

The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular sorrow. (p. 3)

This quote doesn’t get close enough to what I mean. You have to read a couple of pages, so he can come alive. I’m only in the early pages of the book, but Boughton has an indefeatable thankfulness to his manner; he’s a beautiful character who fleshes out the forgiving father in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. We need more fiction like this.