Review - SCM Studyguide: Christian Spirituality

SCM Studyguide: Christian Spirituality
Ross Thompson with Gareth Williams
SCM, 2008, £16.99
ISBN 978-0-334-04093-4

In many ways this is my sort of book: classifying, diagrams, spreadsheets, all you need to know about a mystic in 2 paragraphs. I can already see my PowerPoint presentation emerging. I suspect the book will annoy others for whom its schematizing and over-simplification is anathema. They might argue that it uses the very methods that are so antithetical to spiritual understanding to explore that same spiritual understanding. But then you have to remember Thompson's audience.

It is a very readable introduction for any thoughtful person, although it is obviously aimed at the undergraduate market and written to give a broad overview in just 250 pages. Also it is written with students who have no faith backgrounds in mind, sometimes stating the obvious for those of us who have grown up in confessional Christianity. The large type and classroom format help draw you through the schema of the book. The style is like a very long Grove booklet, but with a much more liberal groundswell.

Part One is a selective history of spirituality, running from the Old to the New Testament, through Patristics, the 'Dark Ages' and Medieval period, to Reformation and the post Enlightenment. It is inevitably patchy, and your particular gurus may not be selected. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), for instance, gets a bigger mention than Pentecostalism. It attempts an almost impossible task which Thompson admits emerges as something of a 'fireworks display', designed to introduce some of the main concepts and to give a sense of the shifting understanding of spirituality over the last three thousand years.

Part Two is more substantial and looks thematically at the intersection of spirituality with Experience, Science, Theology, the Body, the Psyche, Ethics and Difference (Postmodernity and Pluralism). This is more intellectually demanding and the language and quotations will sometimes be a challenge to readers. It is very much a teaching text, which in the hands of a good teacher will open up the subject. The bibliography is extensive and some more restricted suggestions for further reading and a feel for some of the key texts would have been useful. For the target audience a shorter, annotated bibliography would have avoided intimidation.

Thompson acknowledges that the book approaches the subject in a 'middle way' (which is well suited to Anglicans): 'self-implicating rather than confessional or detached'. In this sense it is a contemporary approach to spirituality, although there are times when the author's 'self-implication' inevitably skews the content. A look at his website (holydust.org) explains something of the direction permeating much of the work. However, this is a book I will keep and browse, and recommend to those wanting to learn more of Christian Spirituality.

Church Times