The Shack William P Young

This is the kind of book you want to be good because the intentions are so brilliant. To set out complex theological concepts such as the Trinity and seek to make them relevant: to dig away at the issue of God and suffering, especially in our era where people no longer have any concept of the Cross: and to seek to expound Christianity as relationship rather than doctrine or hierarchy; these are noble ambitions. However the aims are let down by the execution.

There’s an absence of awe in the encounters with God which bothers me – there really aren’t many encounters with God in the Scriptures which lack this dimension. That includes encounters during and after the Incarnation, such as the awe at the Transfiguration or in Acts 2. I think William Young would say I have a problem with a distant Father here, but is that all there is to awe? C S Lewis, who one suspects is at least partly a model, does awe very well in the Narnia stories, including those where deeply personal inner stuff is being healed, such as when Eustace is undragonned.

There’s a Disneyfication of God’s stuff. For example when Mack first returns to the shack, then decides to leave again, Spring arrives, flowers burst open, chipmunks scamper across the forest trail, and even Bambi makes an appearance. I laughed out loud! I wish it were the only passage influenced by St Walt. Is there a disease of the North American psyche here? Probably not, it’s just this author. There are a couple of nods to the Matrix as well. I am sure the Afro-American God woman is really the Prophet from the Matrix. This may date!

Some really sad grammatical errors spoil things. For example in God is a verb expectation is treated as a hate word because it is a noun. Expectancy is far better – except, William, that expectancy is a noun as well...

Then there’s the folksiness. Again it’s probably the transatlantic gap at work.  But in spite of the desire to be at home with ordinary people, which I suppose is what the folksiness is trying to achieve, a lot of the dialogue is in fact a bit turgid. Some of it doesn’t make emotional sense either – Mack is poised on a precipice of heartbreak while they discuss the coinherence of the persons of the Trinity? Still, there is a very good pedigree for the dialogue form in the Dialogues of Plato...

One possible outcome if the portrayal of God as folksy psychotherapist really takes hold is a change of ethos. God becomes a secondary figure in the real drama of life, which is my personal inner fulfillment. I think this is a prevalent if unacknowledged view in Christianity today and I don’t know how long God will let us get away with it. Or maybe he isn’t letting us. Perhaps a lot of our spiritual shallowness and lukewarmness comes from the fact that our real God is our own emotions.

But I’m still glad this book was written and glad to have read it, and in spite of my nit-picking ways I was really moved by it in places. I was also challenged that my own walk with God is not nearly intimate enough. God may not drop by to bake me some chocolate brownies or dig my garden for me – but he created the chocolate and the gas and the heat and plants and the soil and the sunlight and I really could do with seeing him and interacting with him and enjoying and worshipping him in every daily thing.

Unapologetic

- 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 20^th 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 18^th century enlightenment assumptions – but that would be a different book.

Fantastic book – can't wait to read more by Spufford.