- why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising
emotional sense
Francis Spufford
This is a great book! Based
on the premise that few people are convinced about faith, or anything else, by
rational argument, but by life events that shape their broader intuitions,
Spufford is clear that his book is not an apology for Christianity in either of
the usual senses. It is not ashamed of Christianity in spite of its many highly
vocal critics these days, and it is not an apologia in the classic sense of an intellectual defence of
Christian positions. And it is gloriously eloquent, so well expressed! Spufford
is in your face, no doubt about it, so of course there are places where I am
not in full agreement - so I'll get those out of the way first.
I am sure the swearing is necessary
in an attempt to look cool enough for contemporary readers but sadly some
people who would really benefit from this book just won't read it because of
those occasional f-words. They're also there because the book is in the style
of that most contemporary genre the rant, and some of the book displays
justifiable anger at the false and exploitative promises of secularist
materialism.
I am enough of a modernist to think
that reason and truth are connected and that intellectual arguments for
Christianity can and should be put forward. How many people in this age of
shallow, me-too atheism think that Christianity is no longer an option because
modernists like Dawkins, Hawking and the rest seem to have the stage left to
themselves and certainly shout the loudest? "I needn't bother considering
Christianity when Prof D says it's irrational and nobody contradicts him."
A lack of sturdy intellectual foundations also leaves the way open for
dangerous proselytising ideologies such as aggressive Islam. That's why I
myself am currently aspiring to write up an intellectual defence of Christianity.
But having said that, the project
of Unapologetic is still a vital and
necessary one which could not be accomplished if it tried also to be a
rationalist apologia – it would get too complicated by trying to do two things
at once. And both projects, rational sense and emotional sense, are worthwhile.
Surely we need both and can all agree that they complement each other rather
than cancel each other out. The making of emotional sense supports a rational
case, which of course needs to argue that a God who is our maker and knows us
intimately must also be the point of integration for our inner life.
And vice versa: rational grounds
for believing that this God who nourishes our inner life is actually there, in
existence, must support our inner life more powerfully once it has replied to the
underlying question whether it is all a mere chimera of wish-fulfilment. It is the
power Christianity gives us to see life whole that is I think one of its
strongest claims to truth and brings emotional and rational sense with it as
concomitants rather than combatants. Something like this – the drawing together
of intellectual and inner truth - is what people felt satisfied by in C S Lewis
and Spufford is unnecessarily disparaging of him.
Another gripe is about weighting. I
can't disagree that the track record of Christianity in matters such as the
Crusades, the Inquisition etc is inexcusable. As a complete betrayal of our
values as followers of Christ they are outrages, as indeed they would be
whoever perpetrated them. But he is surely not right to say so little on the
other side of the balance sheet, the side that is so studiously ignored by the
likes of Hitchens and Dawkins. Why in the West are all our ancient places of
learning called things like Trinity, Emmanuel, St John's, Christ's, even Jesus
College? Because the church cared about and promoted learning. This continued
through the Sunday school movement that was a church-led attempt to bring
education to the masses. The question isn't "Why do we have faith schools?"
but "how did we let education become so secularised?" There's the
same background to our ancient hospitals, St Thomas, St Bartholomew's – because
the church cared for the sick. All social security, until the Industrial
Revolution came along and invented the workhouse, was carried out by… the
parish. This was done because of the Christian commitment to help the poor.
Christians did act against slavery
when others did not and there is no need to downplay the magnificent
achievements of Wilberforce, Newton and others as Spufford seems to wish. These
have echoed down to our own times through the lives of Josephine Butler, the
Earl of Shaftesbury, Florence Nightingale, Dr Barnardo, Sister Dora, Martin
Luther King, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu and so many more. Secularism just does
not have this track record. Look at the amazing people Christianity has
produced and the incredible difference they have made to the well being of the
whole world and ask yourself, where are their secular counterparts?
I shouldn't get started on the competition
because it remains true that the negative side of our history is a source of
deep embarrassment and shame. But secular ideologies – nationalism, communism,
fascism, the French Revolution – have got an absolutely hideous record of
massacres and enslavements, and the more atheistic they are, the worse they
are: Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot…
My last niggle is that Spufford's
Christianity is a rather lonely affair. His default mode as a Christian is when
he is alone and silent in an ancient church building and finds that the
universe is whispering deep inside him. I'm all for that! I want more of it
myself! But it reminds me too much of Temple's mid 20th century
dictum, "Religion is what you do with your solitude." Your innermost
relationship with God is fundamental. But since the 1970s the church has been
trying to rediscover the corporate dimension of being a Christian: the body of
Christ… love one another… One in the Spirit… There are bits of this in
Spufford, for example pages 209-210, but they feel like adjuncts to the
emotional sense of Christianity rather than at the core of it, done because
we're commanded to not because we are intrinsically one body. There must be an
emotional sense to be made of this too.
And now for those glorious
positives!
I love Spufford's riposte to the
blandishments of secular materialism. He focuses this on the bus campaign of a
few years ago, when the Secular Society responded to adverts for the Alpha
Course on busses with some sloganeering of their own: There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. Personally
I loved the irony of this. The Christians were inviting us to use our minds and
be curious and inquiring – Explore the
meaning of life – while the so-called freethinkers were telling us what to
think! But Spufford's line is to rip apart the false premise of the campaign.
Do they really think that rejecting God will end anxiety, that a life on their
terms is one of unfettered enjoyment? The sad truth is that in our secularist
era huge numbers of people struggle with issues of image, self-worth, lack of
meaning and purpose. Suicide rates among young men are high. Family breakdown
is epidemic, with knock-on consequences for the happiness of our kids. Stress
based diseases and the use of anti-depressants are soaring. Spufford is
absolutely right to say, it's just not working.
Then there's his description of
sin, which he describes so powerfully as the human tendency to f*** things up –
ie the reason why it's just not working. Spot on. A brilliant restatement of
the classic doctrine of human fallenness. Spufford succeeds in making fluffy
humanist optimism look naïve and ridiculous. It's Christianity that requires
you to take a long hard look at yourself in the unflattering mirror of what the
God of love wants you to be, the unavoidable prelude surely to any kind of emotional
integrity.
Because He is a God of love and
Spufford is clear that it is Christianity he means, not religion or a divinity
in general. In fact it's one of the arguments against purely rational
apologetics that so often they end up with something more like Deism than the
Lord who took flesh in a smelly stable and died in agony on the cross – all
those Prime Movers and Supreme Beings and Conceptual Ultimates that emerge from
Thomistic proofs. Spufford is a Christian because of grace – he discovers first
in himself the HTTFTU, then he discovers that he is loved anyway, then he
discovers forgiveness.
Spufford's retelling of the amazing
story of Jesus (Yeshua) as the
centrepiece of his Christianity is contemporary and powerful and moving. He
asks is it true – and doesn't offer a rational defence beyond that of pointing
to its emotional integrity as a way of making sense of our beauty and
brokenness as human beings, that we have a God who would do something so
astoundingly beautiful for us. I think there is more to be said about its
historical truth - even the scholars are now slowly getting over the worst of their
18th century enlightenment assumptions – but that would be a
different book.
Fantastic book – can't wait to read
more by Spufford.
