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.

Reblogged from Meet Jesus at uni:

I can start by ruling out the obvious – God has not promised success or even happiness. God has not promised a long life, although I wish God had so I can have some certainty about how long I’m here for. God has not even promised to stop the pain when it comes; Jesus seemed to promise quite the opposite.

God has promised to set the world right. God has promised that Christ will return and God’s kingdom will come in all its fullness. God has promised the Holy Spirit to take us through to that day – but my experience is that we can’t always sense the Holy Spirit.

I went to a charismatic church for several years, and they talked a lot about God’s promises there; I always found that hard. I was never clear what the promises were. What did they mean? I know they meant more (or less) than I do. But maybe, when pushed on this, I’ll refocus on those promises I can affirm.

I’ve been glad in recent times to find a few things which have worked for me.

1. Take Our Moments and Our Days is an Anabaptist prayer book. It’s designed for use in corporate worship, but is of value to the individual to read to themselves. It’s a wonderful combination of liturgy and Anabaptist themes. Each liturgy has a call to praise, a call to discipleship, and a call to intercession. I don’t have a Kindle, but bought the Kindle edition and read it on the Kindle for PC program. Sometimes it feels too much to try to do in a morning devotion, but I have been blessed by it.

2. Thank you, Methodist Church in Britain, for ‘A Word in Time Bible Study‘ online resource. Each day brings a good portion of scripture to read, with commentary and some questions to ponder. (You can even answer the questions in the comments section, but that doesn’t often happen.) There is also a daily prayer on the site, which for me is a good prompt to prayer. (I wish there was a stronger Methodist presence in Australia. We would be the richer for a good dose of Wesleyanism; I’m not convinced the influence comes through the Uniting Church. It would make for a stronger advocacy of a more Arminian approach to theology, for one thing.)

3. I’ve just discovered the Ancient-Future Bible Study Series, which has actually been around a couple of years. It takes its name from the late Robert Webber’s ‘ancient-future’ approach to Christianity, drawing on the wisdom of the early church – in this case, a lectio-divina approach to reading the Bible. I’m only two chapters into the book on Abraham, but so far I have found it very spiritually enriching. It’s built on some well-handled commentary; I’m glad it combines a contextual reading of the Bible with a spiritual one. It is available as an ebook, but I wouldn’t recommend that, as writing down answers in the space under each question is surely central.

But when I went to read more of what he had said, I discovered the radio grab and the headlines are a reduction and distortion of the pope’s words. His comments were much more astute, a comparison to the time the apostles are in the boat with the Lord Jesus in stormy weather and the Lord sleeps on. The point was that God was present in the boat, even if he was asleep. The headlines miss the significance, the evocation of a profound story. It’s a far better picture, the Lord Jesus sleeping in the boat to our frustration and bewilderment as the storm rages, than a deistic picture of a God in the heavens asleep.

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.

The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age
Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson (Harvard University Press, 2011)

It would be easy to be misled by this book’s title. It could well be the latest combative tome by a conservative evangelical. Yet it’s published by Harvard University Press; the ‘anointed’ and the ‘evangelical truth’ have invisible scare quotes around them. It is a book which explores how evangelicals will follow the teachings of populist extremists like Ken Ham, David Barton, James Dobson and Tim LaHaye while paying less attention to more balanced, moderate and better-credentialed voices within evangelicalism like Francis Collins, Mark Noll, David Myers and Tom Wright in their respective fields.

As befits a book published by Harvard and aimed at a scholarly or educated general audience, the authors write as neutral, secular observers of the movement. Yet the back flap reveals that Stephens teaches history at the (evangelical) Eastern Nazarene College and Giberson used to teach physics there. (Stephens has since moved to Northumbria University.) They are actually insiders to the evangelical culture, writing as if outsiders. Perhaps the nature of the book required this pretense, but I think it would have been valuable to have an acknowledgement in the text itself of their own relationship to evangelicalism.

This criticism aside, their analysis is very good, offering a historical account of the rise of young earth creationism, the myth of Christian Founding Fathers of the USA, Focus on the Family and populist premillennial eschatology. In each case, ‘anointed’ men have popularised a fundamentalist message, claiming to have derived it straight from the Bible, unlike the liberal ‘experts’ whose education and research can be dismissed. A historical treatment is particularly valuable, placing these ideas within the context of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the cultural and sexual revolution of the 1960s and the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s.

Having been brought up to believe young earth creationism in Australia, I found it particularly fascinating to read about the key role Queenslander Ken Ham played in making young earth creationism far more popular than it had been in the USA since he moved there in the 1980s:

Before his arrival in 1987, ICR [Institute for Creation Research] representatives – with the exception of the superstars, Morris and Gish – spoke to crowds that sometimes measure only in the dozens, making dry technical presentations about problems with radioactive dating, transitional fossils… and so on. (42)

Ham’s genius was to have a ‘bottom up’ approach:

He would convince millions of ordinary people to reject evolution in the hopes that the grassroots groundswell would change society and work its way up, or at least marginalize the eggheads at the top. (43)

He achieved this with the glossy Creation magazine, books aimed at children and, more recently, the famous Creation Museum. In this account, he and the others have been brilliant populisers, speaking to the evangelical masses in ways they can understand and with personas they can trust.

The analysis of the four areas of Christian thought is entirely US-centred, and to a significant extent, this is a US phenomenon, with the final chapter offering an explanation in terms of US egalitarianism. Yet the anointed fundamentalists have a death grip on Australian evangelicalism too. The revisionist history is the least widespread phenomenon in Australia, but even this has its Australian equivalent, with popular writer Col Stringer insisting Australia is actually a Christian country, despite Tom Frame’s persuasive case otherwise. In the other three areas, Ham, Dobson and LaHaye are extremely influential. Why should this be? A lot of Australians dislike the Americanisation of their culture – yet in both Christian and secular culture, they are always taking it on. Australia has a similar disdain for experts; this is surely one factor.

The weakest chapter for me was the penultimate one, “A Carnival of Christians”, which tries to explain the phenomenon through the eyes of one particular subject, a young evangelical named Paul Miller in his twenties who has lived most of his life cloistered in this ‘parallel universe’ of evangelicalism, explaining how he could embrace it growing up and how it came into question when he was exposed to the wider world. It is an interesting attempt to humanize their argument, yet in this case the details of the particular dragged for me, rather than illuminating the whole.

Overall, I found the book compulsively readable and fair-minded in its attempts to understand the appeal of the anointed. I think there should be a unit in evangelicalism at theological colleges, and that this should be required reading, in the hope that the fish might come to recognise the water they are swimming in – and perhaps prospective pastors could find ways to steer their congregation toward the best thinking Christianity has to offer in each area of thought, rather than to the bestsellers.

The first man had been praying she would be healed, miraculously, and would not have to go through with the operation. But he had been embarrassed about this prayer; he’d felt a little foolish. This wasn’t an out loud prayer, it was a silent prayer early in the morning.

In the group, the second man prayed, “God this didn’t surprise you. You have already seen this and every step of the path she must now walk. So comfort her now.”

The third man prayed, “God you don’t want any of us to be sick. Sickness isn’t your will, but part of our fallen world. So be with her and give her peace at this time.”

And then someone else prayed for healing after the operation, that the sickness would not return. This was not what the first man had imagined as healing.

Lord, hear our prayer.

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.

Since I moved, I’ve been crossing the city on Sundays, albeit from inner suburb to inner suburb; it is remarkable how little time it takes me. I’m sure if it took the forty minutes it would take at peak hour instead of fifteen minutes, it would be a factor in me trying to find a new and local church. Alas, I’m also one of those misfits who would only feel at home in a small number of churches. I hold that in tension with a strong ideal for ‘relocalising’, especially in church.