Review - Think, John Piper

Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

Author John Piper

IVP, £8.99

978-1-84474-488-6

This is more an insight into the American evangelical psyche than a book about thinking. There have been some notable other books addressing this topic over the past 50 years and indeed Piper helpfully lists some of the evangelical ones in contradistinction to his own. So his book is "less historical than Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, less punchy than Os Guinness's Fit Bodies Fat Minds, less philosophical than J P Moreland's Love Your God with All Your Mind, less vocational than James Sire's Habits of the Mind and less cultural than Gene Veith's Loving God with All Your Mind."

So what is Piper's book 'more of' than these or say Harry Blamire's classic The Christian Mind? Well, much more of Scripture. And much more of the 18th century theologian Jonathan Edwards with nothing of Hooker, Lewis or Pinker. It was a disappointing read for me, rehearsing old arguments that still seem to preoccupy much of North American evangelicalism. I liked Anna Moyle’s comment in her Amazon review; “Piper has a tendency throughout the book to get caught up in stale agendas and arguments… He thus devotes two entire chapters to the subject of relativism, which could have been better used to write positively about the rise of scholarship within the Christian community in the past few decades.”

There is a chapter on the meaning of ‘thinking’ where Piper explains that his main understanding of it is “working hard with our minds to figure out meaning from texts.” There are chapters on rationality and three chapters combatting anti-intellectualism. And he concludes by commending a humble attitude to Christian knowledge that will result in love of God and Man. It is a triumph of the cataphatic over the apophatic; of statements of faith and two sentence positions on abortion, divorce and homosexuality; with little of the struggle of faith seeking understanding, of acknowledging our limited rational powers before the Divine Mind. There is scant room for mystery or bewilderment and consequently not much engagement with how to work alongside other Christians who also ‘think’ but who come to very different conclusions about so many things.

Piper writes well and although I suppose he does set out with an admittedly limited agenda, this probably made better sermon material than a book. My guess is that the people who will benefit most from reading this book are not reading this review.

Published in the Church Times on 4th November 2011

Review - Two books on Preaching

Teaching Preaching as a Christian Practice: A new approach to homiletical pedagogy by Thomas G Long and Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, Westminster John Knox, 238pp, 2009, £19.99
Preacher Rehab: Restoring faith in the sermon by Ron Cassidy, AuthorHouse, 368pp, 2009, £14.99

I suspect that almost the only people who read books on preaching are those who teach homiletics and book reviewers. Many American preachers still regard preaching as a skill to be honed and worked on throughout ministry, but among Anglican clergy, preaching is often regarded as a chore that goes with the job; to be endured by both priest and people.

The College of Preachers and CODEC (based at St John’s College, Durham) have just completed a preliminary research project into how preaching is received in the pews and what congregations think its role should be. Two striking conclusions are: that people look forward to the sermon; that it makes little difference to their attitudes or behaviour. Both of these books try to address these issues of connecting with the congregation and aiming for a Christ-like transformation.

Long and Tisdale’s book is clearly aimed at the academy although its 14 contributors provide something for everyone, especially in the section on the Components of the Practice of Preaching. The burden of the book is a plea to take preaching seriously as an honourable practice which can be taught and learned in a similar way to law or medicine. The problem of course is that in the modern curriculum there is hardly any time devoted to homiletics and it is often regarded as something ‘you will pick up’. There is no bibliography but good endnotes after each of the 15 chapters, which cover topics from the Preaching Imagination, to a very rapid overview of Voice and Diction, to the more spiritual Marks of Faithful Preaching. It’s idiosyncratic, embedded in the USA and moderately useful.

Cassidy’s book is robustly British and, as the title suggests, is a cri de coeur for a renewed confidence in the power of preaching. The emphasis of this book is the ongoing journey of the preacher after the academy, learning ‘on the job’ and with the ever changing demography of the congregation. There are ten chapters: the Preacher’s Problems, Predecessors, Preparation, Privilege, Perseverance… almost a complete set of alliterative Sweet Ps. And it’s all good stuff, well illustrated with helpful overviews of recent homiletic thought and contemporary culture as well as historical insights. At the same time Cassidy’s 40 years in Anglican ministry means it is very realistic and earthed. So there are tips about using and choosing a PA system as well as a critique of Craddock (Fred, not Fanny) and tips on preaching on special occasions. I liked his exploration of John Wenham’s aim of a sermon: placere (to please), docere (to teach), and movere (to motivate). This is certainly a book for the preacher, but it should also be on the booklist of the academy. There is a good select bibliography and helpful endnotes. Neither books have an index which is unhelpful.

I wouldn’t spend £20 on the American book but I might spend £15 on Cassidy’s. So perhaps you should save your money and continue muddling through as dilettantes, but don’t use that word in a sermon and never use irony.

Church Times

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

Review - Christian Spirituality

Christian Spirituality
Karen E Smith
SCM, 2007, £19.99
ISBN 978-0-334-04042-2

Who would have thought in the 1960s that spirituality would become a buzzword of 21st century western culture? From school Ofsteds to dieting regimes, among celebrities, cabinet ministers and terrorists, spirituality is a sine qua non. Of course its context is usually set within another characteristic of our age and culture: individualism. Even in the church, spirituality is often pursued alongside personal fulfilment.

So what is most refreshing about Karen Smith’s treatment of the subject in this SCM Core Text is that the setting is the community. And not just the community as a place to develop my own spirituality, my own ministry; but a renewed community, a new humanity, a kingdom come. Individual spirituality is only truly Christian when it works towards a transformation of society in the light of the Gospel. Her last chapter encourages us to dream of God’s new order and to wait patiently and work fervently towards it.

The Introduction takes the form of a parable that highlights the difficulties confronting the spiritual searcher: there are so many, often competing, approaches to the subject. Smith maintains that these are characterised by the tension between interpreting spirituality through either doctrine or experience. The following six chapters are about the dialogue between these two.

This is not a ‘teach yourself how’ book (such as Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines) but rather it tries to follow threads in Christian spirituality: belief systems, searching, relationships, storytelling, pilgrimage, and of course, suffering. It is a deeply reflected and Christocentric study which is likely to be more resonant with those of us who have been around a while rather than teenagers. Some of the particular people Smith uses as examples (Dag Hammarskjöld for instance) raise interesting issues concerning the breadth of ‘Christian’ spirituality, and so-called, anonymous Christians.

It’s a comparatively short and expensive book and although aimed at second and third year undergraduate students of spirituality, it would prove a helpful workbook for leading a course exploring spiritualities in church. Each chapter ends with an invitation to reflect on various questions and a very good selection ‘for further reading’. There is a rather eclectic glossary of Christian writers, and subject and Scriptural indices are welcome. Preachers will be grateful for Smith’s many illustrative vignettes and quotations which can be plundered.

Church Times

Review - From the Abundance of the Heart

From the Abundance of the Heart: Catholic Evangelism for All Christians

Stephen Cottrell
DLT, 2006, £10.95
ISBN 0-232-52636-2

In some parts of the Church, evangelism has become the unmentionable poor cousin of Mission. It is for evangelicals, and involves things ‘we’ would not even do to our dog. Bishop Cottrell, from his long ministry in Anglo-catholic mission, rightly reminds us that it is a duty for ‘all Christians’, including those from the Catholic wing, and that we need a change of church culture if we are to grow. But he recognises at the outset that this is not just about techniques or courses or ‘fresh expressions’ – it is about attitude and our understanding of discipleship; it is about motivation; it is about longing for justice and a renewed society; it is about our love for Jesus and the riches of our spiritual life and worship in him – it is ‘from the abundance of the heart’.

Cottrell’s introduction is a very succinct essay drawing out the distinctions between mission, evangelism and discipleship, considering their reflection in the Anglican Consultative Council’s five marks of mission. The two main sections of the book then explore the theology of an evangelising church and the practice of evangelism. The real situations that he uses to illustrate his points add both colour to the book and raise expectations that this sort of evangelism could happen in our parish with our congregation – in our own lives. In the theology section he looks at ways in which authentic prayer helps to reshape our thinking and can provide a springboard for evangelism. He recognises that conversion and discipleship require a nurturing and outward looking church, and in the second part of the book he encourages us to imagine what an evangelistic catholic church might look like. His down-to-earth chapter on liturgy and worship suggest a number of simple modifications which evangelicals have long since realised help open a door to the nervous unchurched.

In many ways it is all reminiscent of the sense of excitement and passion for evangelism which was abroad in the late 60s and 70s after Vatican II, and although it is outside the scope of Cottrell’s brief work, it reminds all of us that the roots of 19th century Anglo-catholicism reach deep into the 18th century evangelical revival. There is a very helpful thematic bibliography and the endnotes demonstrate the breadth of contemporary and historic sources that the author has tapped. With sermons, and other interludes, including a meditation on Mary the Evangelist, this is a very accessible and readable book for priests and people alike, and I hope it will enable us all to share in building a mission shaped church, and indeed a Christ shaped church.

Church Times

Review - Saving Power

Saving Power: theories of atonement and forms of the church

Peter Schmiechen
Eerdmans, 2005, £19.99
ISBN 0-8028-2985-6

This is a solid and inspiring theological book opening up a doctrine which is at the heart of our faith and which provokes so many other questions concerning the goodness and justice of God. It is refreshing to have a book which gets away from the present obsessions with sexual ethics and ecclesial trivia and which brings us back to the amazing grace of God in the saving work of Christ. As Walter Brueggemann remarks ”[it is] an important resource for the church seeking to find its way back to the saving truth that is larger than all our pet projects.”

There have been a series of debates and conferences in the last year about various views of the atonement, and which is ‘right’. Schmiechen is not interested in defending any particular model, but tries to draw truth and inspiration from the ten theories he outlines: from Augustine, Calvin, Hodge and penal substitution, to Irenaeus, Gutiérrez and liberation theology. En route he engages with feminist, womanist and postcolonialist theologians. He does all of this with an attractive and engaging style, informed by an obviously broad and deep appreciation of the subject.

The sub-title, ‘theories of atonement and forms of the church’, indicates that this book is not only stimulating theology, but also committed to understanding the ecclesial implications of that theology. Schmiechen’s use of history demonstrates to us that understanding the atonement is not purely a matter of academic interest. Theology forms the church as much as the church formulates theology. He brings this out as he explores the cultural reasons that some theories have appealed to particular groups in particular ages, and he also examines some of the present divides between conservatives and liberals and how they might be healed by a better understanding of the limits of their respective interpretations.

Schmiechen does a brilliant summing up of the ten theories in the penultimate chapter (a good place to start!) that makes you want to go back to some of the sections you hurried over. He shows, for instance, the danger of theories that depend too much on either guiding principle: that of unconditional love or that of the demands of divine justice.

We are too often tempted to put theories of the atonement into the area of divine mystery, or on the other hand to be too dogmatic and prescriptive. But here is an account which nurtures and challenges our faith as it deepens our sense of love, worship and fealty.

Church Times

Review - 3 OT background books

Old Words New Life: Reflections on 40 Key Old Testament Words

By David Winter
BRF £6.99 (1-84101-391-9)

Connected Christianity: Discovering the riches of the Old Testament

By David Spriggs
BRF £8.99 (1-84101-420-6)

Standing Up to God

By Anthony Phillips
SPCK £9.99 (0-281-05699-4)

The Old Testament Lectionary readings often leave the congregation baffled at best, or convinced that God must have written it before he became a Christian! And preachers often, understandably, choose the Gospel or Epistle to expound. So it’s good to have these books, which are both accessible and readable for the intelligent layperson as well as providing pithy background for those preachers who dare to venture into the OT. David Winter’s list of 40 key words, from Atonement to Yahweh, can be used as a reference book or a source for daily meditation – each brief chapter ends with a reflection. Some words not listed in the 40 are touched on under other another label. So ‘Sin’ also contains a paragraph or two on ‘wrath’. There is a devotional undercurrent always in Winter’s writings and at times, the brevity may frustrate but will whet the appetite for some more serious study of the Hebrew Scriptures.
David Spriggs has provided just this with a thoughtful OT background, touching on much recent scholarship, but without a German word in sight! The book has questions for group study and a useful annotated yet brief bibliography. Spriggs gently opens up the contextual issues of Ancient Near Eastern history, cultic religion and textual genre, but without getting bogged down in them. The final chapters segue from monotheism, messiah and mission into the connection with the New Testament.
Yet still those puzzling Old Testament passages, like the testing of Abraham and of Job, the angel wrestling with Jacob, Isaiah’s suffering servant – point uncomfortably to the ‘shadow side of God’ as Anthony Phillips calls it. He engages with these texts, and others, drawing them into the mystery of Christ’s passion. There are certainly no trite answers here to the problem of theodicy, or to why bad things happen to good people. With integrity and some bold theological assertions (that God occasionally ‘loses the plot’), Phillips believes that through faith and love, the light of hope can eventually pierce the darkest shadows.

Church Times

Review - Liquid Church

Liquid Church

Pete Ward
Paternoster Press, 2002, £9.99
1-84227-161-X

Sometimes a book doesn’t live up to a good title, but Ward’s stimulating and occasionally annoying material swirls about in Liquid Church to produce a provocative and generally encouraging analysis. It was one of postmodernity’s great commentators, Zygmunt Bauman, who came up with Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2000) and this provided the metaphor to examine the postchurch realities of a Britain where 72% describe themselves as Christian, although only 5% regularly sit in the pews.

Ward recognises what others have called the McDonaldization of the church. It has become a spiritual commodity in the postmodern marketplace and some church growth ‘methods’ have capitalized on that. Many Christians not only shop for the style of church they like, but they also choose the time, place and degree of involvement that suits their fluid lifestyle. So some of these “72%” are part of a network of relationships rather than a gathered assembly on a Sunday morning. The commodification of spiritual resources becomes the means of sustaining the life of this decentred and unstructured Christian network. Liquid church ‘will need to develop commodities that can circulate through networks’ asserts Ward. (p.47)

Solid Church (some will be glad to hear) doesn’t disappear in Liquid Modernity, for there are still islands of Solid Modernity floating in the postmodern sea. Ward suggests that this solid church mutates into three different expressions of traditional congregational church: heritage site, refuge (and sometimes holiday resort), and nostalgic community. Most of us will recognise ourselves in these descriptions.

If all this is completely new to you, then the last chapter of ‘Dreams’ about Liquid Church is a fascinating insight into postmodern and premodern ways of being church and of worshipping God, with lots of actual examples.

The challenge is how we adapt church structures to service and in some ways guide this growing manifestation of ‘being church’, if indeed we accept it as genuinely ‘church’. A moot point, which although the book is not heavily theological, Ward does spend a couple of chapters discussing in the light of traditional ecclesiology.

Not all will agree with Ward that as part of the continual reformation of the church, there needs to be a conscious shift from solid church to liquid church. But we will all find food for thought and action and perhaps a melting of our too solid views.

Church Times

Review - Mary for Earth & Heaven

Mary for Earth and Heaven: Essays on Mary and Ecumenism

William McLoughlin & Jill Pinnock eds
Gracewing, £20 (0-85244-556-3)

Not everyone is into Mary. It’s a cultural thing. But there has been a growing recognition, even with some of the Free Churches, that Mary has been greatly neglected; that perhaps the reformation abhorrence of anything not Christocentric has sufficiently abated to allow a re-appraisal. And that perhaps some hot-prots can laugh at the old chestnut caricature of a Catholic sermon: “It’s Easter Day and quite naturally our thoughts turn to Our Lady...” rather than imagine it reflects a widespread Catholic position.

In this collection of essays published by the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary (following the earlier volume, Mary for Everyone) the search for a deeper unity and shared common ground are pursued by 29 contributors. They are mainly Roman Catholic and Anglican, but there are also Methodists, Church of Ireland, Orthodox and even URC.


Essays are loosely grouped together with the larger sections being ‘Mary in Systematic Theology’, ‘Mary and Spirituality’ and ‘Mary and Unity’. But there are also sections on Patristics, Justice and topics such as Mary’s relevance to Irish politics today. Attention is also devoted to the Malines Conversations (initiated by the Anglican, Lord Halifax) whose 40th anniversary celebration in 1967 led to the establishment of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (In Unity Week we light a candle before the Lord Halifax memorial here in St Mary’s where he was churchwarden.)

In general the articles are well written and researched, and even the four homilies included are scholarly in tone. There is a real desire to be both open-minded and yet respectful of tradition and of strongly held differences. For instance there is a very stimulating article by Edward Yarnold, SJ, of Oxford on ‘The ordination of women , gender symbolism and the BVM’, and in another article he arrives at the right conclusion concerning the controversial use of the title ‘Co-Redemptrix’ for Mary.

The Ecumenical Society of the BVM has proved a very stimulating forum for debate, and this book enables the reader to look in on the breadth and intensity of the discussion, while conveying an underlying irenic and optimistic attitude towards all our ecumenical endeavours.

Church Times

Review- Priestly Identity

Priestly Identity: A Study in the Theology of Priesthood

Thomas J McGovern
Four Courts Press, Dublin, £19.65 (1-85182-655-6)

This is a book that makes me glad I am an Anglican. McGovern is a priest of the Opus Dei prelature and a student chaplain in Dublin and this substantial book is a model of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. It acknowledges at the outset that there is a crisis at hand, especially in Europe and North America, where defections from the priesthood run alongside a dramatic decline in vocations. The well-known former parish priest of St Francis of Assisi in West London, Oliver McTernan, is one of the most recent losses, lamenting the suppression of the reforming spirit of Vatican II. Of course McGovern’s book is a thinly veiled attack on the direction of Vatican II, if not on the actually content - which necessarily is beyond criticism. He argues that Catholicism ‘from about the time of Vatican II’ (what a coincidence) had begun to slide towards Reformation theology, especially in embracing notions of the priesthood of all believers. This in turn led to a functionalist view of priests, no longer keepers of the cult, but preachers of the word. He maintains that secularisation and agenda-specific cultural forces have lured priests into becoming Christian social workers, promoting the latest cultural issue, whether feminism or ecology.

McGovern has been inspired by the teachings of the present Pope, John Paul II, and quotes from them extensively. He responds to the Holy Father’s 1985 analysis of the clerical crisis that sees the underlying problems as anaemic spirituality, theological dissent and deficient formation, by suggesting that priestly identity needs to be clarified in three overlapping areas: theological, spiritual and pastoral.

McGovern’s last major work was Priestly Celibacy Today (1998) so it is hardly surprising that he devotes one of the first 4 chapters, dealing with theological issues, to re-affirming the centrality of celibacy. He returns to this theme at other places in the book especially as he examines the need for a unity between the spiritual life of the priest and his ministry, a unity which would prevent the dysfunctionality which has surfaced in all the current sexual scandals. It is in the three chapters on the spiritual life and five on pastoral ministry that I found the most resonances and challenges. Although in the section on Mary the ‘Mother of priests’ I found the assertion that ‘in the Eucharist we receive not only the verum corpus natum ex Maria virgine but, in a very real sense, Mary’s own flesh and blood for our nourishment’ hard to swallow.

The book is written primarily for Roman priests but at a time when lay presidency at the Eucharist is being discussed within Anglicanism, this will fuel the conservative arguments.

Church Times

Review - Challenging Catholics

Challenging Catholics: A Catholic-Evangelical Dialogue

Dwight Longenecker & John Martin
Paternoster, 2001 £? (1-84227-096-6)

We don’t burn each other any more. We are terribly polite and try to respect one another’s positions. And it is very fashionable for evangelicals to have catholic spiritual directors. But we also rarely engaged in honest debate about the issues that divide. All the things you’d hope to be discussed are found here: the Bible, the Pope, Mary, transubstantiation, purgatory, praying to the saints and more.

It’s humorous, good natured and very informative, yet a debate between Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics would perhaps reveal some more telling theological differences which are already forcing their way on to the Christian agenda. Both these authors come from the zealous and largely traditional factions of their denominations which give them a great deal in common.

Church Times

Review - Learning to Dance

Learning to Dance

Michael Mayne
DLT £9.95 (0-232-52434-3)

It is Lent and so a confession is appropriate. I know a book reviewer who does not always read every word of the book he reviews. But I did read every word of this book. And kept thinking of people to whom I must give a copy. It is Mayne at his best, reflecting in retirement on life, science, literature, music, art, heaven and everything. His rich life as a priest, Head of BBC Radio’s Religious Broadcasting, Dean of Westminster, Vicar of Great St Mary’s Cambridge, all feed into a book that is both an apologetic for the reasonableness of Christianity, and an autobiography of the interior life.

The twelve chapters follow the months of the year and themes reflected in the medieval Books of Hours. So April moves from gardening to explore the vastness of the cosmos and is an excellent explanation of contemporary cosmology in ordinary language. (There are a couple of terminological and mathematical slips here to keep pedants on their toes.) June takes us romping through hay-making and thence through the startling wonders of DNA, including an investigation of ‘consciousness’.

“I wept when I was born, and every day shows why.” These words of George Herbert’s open August and from the Book of Hours’ depictions of ‘threshing’ we ‘dance in the dark’, contemplating the awful pain of our world and the problem of evil. September follows on with a movingly illustrated chapter on forgiveness, viewed both theologically and politically. The author has the ability to discuss these issues without sounding glib and yet making a real contribution to our understanding of the complexities and tensions of our faith.

Underlying everything is Mayne’s conviction of the worthwhileness of being human; his conviction that our universal sense of wonder points us relentlessly to God; his expectation that ‘the perpetual present tense of living’ (John Updike) will eventually embrace all that we have been and bring us to completion in eternity. Thus December leads us to Easter and to heaven and to the hope of the Gospel.


Of course not everybody likes Mayne’s style. He has an encyclopaedic mind and at times you feel you have wandered into a book of quotations, with gems like Derek Jarman’s “The Word made goose flesh” and Samuel Butler’s assertion that the true test of our imagination is the ability to name a cat. But I agree with Dame Cicely Saunders’ foreword: ‘This is an enchanted and enchanting book.’

Church Times

Review - Life's a Beach

Life’s a Beach

Mike Yaconelli
Messy Spirituality: Christianity for the rest of us
Hodder & Stoughton £6.99 (0-340-75635-7)

Here are 50 or more anecdotes loosely making the point that there are no slick formulae for guaranteed spiritual growth. “Spirituality is complex, complicated and perplexing - the disorderly, sloppy, chaotic look of authentic faith in the real world.” Mike Yaconelli is a popular speaker on the ‘postevangelical’ circuit and at UK events such as Greenbelt. He is an ageing, hippyish youth worker who pastors a little church in California which seems to attract the socially challenged like a gate with ‘Vicarage’ on it.
All these anecdotes are seasoned with biblical illustrations and in a very non-theological and accessible way he explores the spiritual concepts of openness, closure, rejection, via negativa, deficient discipleship and accidie - without mentioning any of them. With the great unchurched in his mind (and perhaps overchurched American evangelicals) he eschews both theological jargon and all the great historical spiritual writers. There are quotes and stories however from many of the gurus looked to by late 20th century ‘broad’ evangelicalism: Robert Capon, Jacques Ellul, Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen.
Yaconelli’s love of God and of people who feel rejected by more formal church structures is evident. “Spirituality is not about competency, it is about intimacy” he asserts. He has no time for those who mistake conformity to evangelical culture for the pursuit of God, and whatever your church style, he leaves you feeling slightly uncomfortable and wondering how inclusive many of our congregations really are.
This is a good book for those who have started well in the faith, but who are beginning to lose the plot and feel disheartened. I read it one morning on the beach in Gran Canaria and it made me feel better about having forgotten to take my Divine Office Book with me.

Church Times

Review - Thinks...

Thinks...

David Lodge
Secker & Warburg, 2001, 342pp, £16.99

It’s a campus novel and it’s a good read, as ever with David Lodge. His fluid and deft narrative style always makes me wonder whether I can bother to read on after the first few pages, and then you get drawn into the layers of the thing. Although this book starts with nine pages of self-conscious stream of consciousness - he’s full of self-parody - and then settles down to more recognizable Lodge. But here we have more than just a well-written campus novel.

Thinks... is also a very stimulating and informative postmodern encounter with the self, under the guise of an incidental exploration of cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI). If you let it, the book has you staring into a literary mirror wondering who the person staring back at you really is, and whether your thoughts are hard-wired into your brain. And whether God is a virus.

Yes, there’s a good story, with bitchy university dons, and love affairs and lotharios and pushy wives and clever talk from High Table polymaths. (Although this is set in the fictional University of Gloucester in 1997 where there is no High Table, but a lot of characters very like the media dons on Channel 4 and Radio 4 .) But this is more than a story and certainly not a parable or extended metaphor. The quirky title, Thinks..., gives you a hint of your final destination.

Lodge admits that it was an article in The Tablet (John Cornwell’s ‘From Soul to Software’, June 1994) that set him off down the now well-worn trail of human identity, consciousness, language and brainworks. The trail may be well-worn, but the territory is still mostly uncharted. So it’s science, it’s philosophy and of course it’s theology - often Roman Catholic theology - not Lodge’s theology, but that of his characters. His ‘Acknowledgements’, at the back of the book, forms a ready bibliography of major publications on the trail in the 1990s. (I happened to be reading Ian M. Banks Look to Windward, his latest Culture novel (Orbit, 2000), while I was reading Lodge. The Culture presents another challenge to much Christian thinking on the role of machines, AI, and the hybridization of computer software and humans. And I am also reading the final part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, (Scholastic, 2000) which is a darkly creative approach to the human soul in the machine. And while I’m at it, I suppose I should commend my current ‘heavy’ reading, Fergus Kerr’s Immortal Longings (SPCK, 1997) which represents a philosophy of religion approach from the angle of transcendence and ‘what is human?.)

This is an enjoyable novel, full of different styles: narrative, parody (including Irvine Welsh), diary, email exchanges... and will get you hooked after the first couple of chapters. It might also send you off to find out more about human consciousness and more about the nature of human identity and how that fits in with our theology of eternal life.

Third Way

Review - Solid Ground

Solid Ground: 25 Years of Evangelical Theology

Eds: Carl R Trueman, Tony J Gray, Craig L Blomberg
Contributors include: Packer, Goldingay, Marshall, Bauckham, Bray, Helm, Lyon, Drane
Apollos, 2000, 319pp, £14.99, hbk

I remember when the journal Themelios (Greek for ‘solid ground’) first came out in 1975. I had just started at Spurgeon’s College and evangelicalism was on an ‘up’ with a new confidence and a new generation of conservative theological gurus who had not had to live through the battles that scholars like Stott and Bruce had fought for academic respectability. Liberal theology was going out of fashion as fast as humanism. With Oxbridge Christian Unions bulging, there were few clouds on the horizon, save for loony charismatics. (Indeed, Trueman in his final essay sees too much ‘success’ as one of the present dangers for evangelical scholarship.)

This collection of essays reflects some of the issues that have exercised evangelical academics over the last quarter century, and also shows how they have had the luxury of engaging with contemporary culture and some ‘purely’ academic issues while the theological ‘opposition’ was in disarray. The journal is on the British side of ‘international’ (I notice that Volf’s planned contribution on Latin American Liberation Theology was omitted from the book), and there had to be some distancing of evangelicalism from US fundamentalism. The work includes David F Wright’s extended book review of James Barr’s 1977 broadside Fundamentalism (SCM).

The 16 reprinted essays cover most areas. Of course one of the major problems for a Bible based (rather than tradition based) movement over these past decades has been hermeneutical methodology (how we interpret the Bible), which in turn affects our application of scripture - an area in which evangelicals have always excelled.

This is an interesting collection, which will remind evangelicals of the groundwork that has been laid over the past 25 years and will help non-evangelicals to understand the hopes and fears of a movement that is still very, very big worldwide.

Church Times

Review - Virtual Morality

Virtual Morality: Christian ethics in the computer age

Graham Houston, Apollos, 1998, £?, pb, 224pp

I remember when I first visited a cybercity with a colleague (I think it was called Narnia) and ‘sat’ in a cybercafé where he met and counselled another cybernaut whose friend had just committed suicide. This café visitor was a lecturer on the West coast of the USA where it was 3am. Or was he? Was she in fact a housewife in Hull with a vivid imagination? The ethics of cyberspace are even more slippery than those of realspace. But the ethics of our imagination and of our every day doings are closely connected according to Houston. There is an obvious correlation with the teachings of Jesus about the imaginative realm of heart and mind as the dark source of malevolence, but there is a greyer area of creative imagination - and this is what is often at work in Virtual Reality (VR). I often adopt an alter ego in cyberchat. Must I declare that, or is it OK so long as I’m not causing harm to others or self? This is but the tip of the iceberg and Houston delves well below the water line into the murky depths of child abuse, violence and even the confusing abstraction of Baudrillard’s hyperreality.

Houston wants to establish that philosophy of technology is to Christian ethics (in the creative tension of postmodernity); what philosophy of science is to systematic theology (in late modernity). So he needs to explain his view of the philosophy of technology. It is an ambitious attempt, embracing en route the Ethics of Realism (following Oliver O’Donovan), the dangers of technicism (building on Jacques Ellul’s early insights) and the primacy of publicly shared truth in a pluralistic society (overtones of Lesslie Newbigin). By technicism he means technology for technology’s sake, or ‘belief’ in technology as the saviour of mankind. Science and technology were always going to save the universe in early Star Trek (3 hits in the index). In contrast, the latest Star Trek: Insurrection. sees the human spirit triumphing over technology. Houston makes obvious that technology is value-laden and thus Virtual Environments (VEs) are value-laden. Furthermore, technology is bound up with Homo Faber (Man the Maker) and therefore bound up with fallen humans capable of self-deception and a century of atrocious technological wars.

This is an interesting book which I read in no particular order. It’s a bit dense in places and set out like a scientific PhD, which is indeed what it is. A glance through the index shows us that Ellul, O’Donovan and Philip Wogaman get the highest number of hits for mortals (‘God’ wins outright) and their influence is seen clearly in the summarised conclusions. Cupitt and the Sea of Faith fall by the sword of MacIntyre and the necessary transcendent - no God, no agreed basis for morality. Secular futurologies are shown to be inadequate and unrealistic in the light of Christian eschatology and the theology of hope. This is a very good survey of ethics in general and a clear suggestion for a way forward not only for VR but plain old R as well. The form of the book will appeal to techies.

Church Times

Review - idoru - William Gibson

idoru
William Gibson, Viking, 1996

I like William Gibson’s books. I was bowled over by his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which won the Hugo, the Philip K. Dick Memorial, and the Nebula awards - in case you’re not into the genre of Science Fiction (SF), these are all very prestigious. He coined the term “cyberspace”, envisioning both the internet and virtual reality before most people had even heard of them, and Neuromancer was hailed as the “Christ-child of cyberpunk”, (a genre of SF which became self-conscious during the 80s, first characterized as Radical Hard SF, or Neuromantics, or the Mirrorshades group. At its best, it describes with all the linguistic style of the modern novel, a hi-tech future which is sometimes a drug-induced nightmare, sometimes a surrealistic New Age, always just beyond the cutting-edge of physics and metaphysics.) At 48, Gibson is an American draft-dodger who has been living in Canada since he was 19 and has picked up the best of both cultures. His subsequent novels are Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, the best-selling Virtual Light, and his short stories collected in Burning Chrome.

I surfed the net (653 matches to “idoru” found by my HotBot search engine) to give you a flavour of both the man and his writings: “Gibson's stuff is the reactor core steam of all tomorrow's parties breathing down your neck today. Not so much an imaginary future as a highly specific look at a present in midstage adrenaline OD.” (Spin) “Gibson brings to the surface the beast that lurks behind the dense surreal surface of pop culture, simultaneously as meaningful and empty as a video screen.” (The Nation) “Gibson distils a technopunk sensibility with the kick of white lightning and the clarity of white light.” (Village Voice)

So what of Idoru? I was disappointed. If you have never read any Gibson, then start with Neuromancer - and persevere beyond the baffling first pages.

Idoru (a Gibson neologism) is an advanced software program meaning idol-singer or idol-guru. The idoru is an ‘imaginary’ pop star, a cybernetic Madonna of the future - although the Japanese are already creating these as I write. The action is in a new millennium Tokyo, after The Quake, with new self-building buildings, a new mafia, smuggled nano-technology and a couple of innocents-abroad in a big bad technoworld. Colin Laney has a ‘gift’ due to early drug experiments, of fishing for patterns in the dense texture of computer web information. He sees ‘nodes’ and discovers narratives intuitively by accessing the net. For me this was the most interesting feature of the book, as it mirrors contemporary preoccupation with narratives and stories, and the ways that these can convey more than the sum of their parts. In this virtual, holographic future, Gibson is pushing the frontiers of the Flesh made Word which helped me to ponder the Mystery of the Word made Flesh.

The sub-plot concerns Chia Pet McKenzie who is active in the fan club for Lo/Rez, a superstar rock duo. She is bundled off to investigate some new rumours about the plans of Rez, one half of the band, to marry Rei Toei, an “idoru”. She is inadvertently used to smuggle illegal nanoware to the Russian criminal underground and gets caught up with a nice boy-next-door Japanese computer nerd who guides her round the Virtual Walled City and helps save the day. The Famous Five on Acid.

Third Way (not sure they ever published it!)