Books about Christianity for Non-believers

PART ONE: GUMBEL STOTT LEWIS ?

Some time ago, I picked up Nicky Gumbel’s introduction to the Christian faith– Alpha: Questions of Life (1991).

It was not half as bad as I expected.  Not half as bad, for example, as the kind of thing I can remember reading in my adolescence.  Just as well, I thought, as I’d left the book lying round the house in the hope it might attract some passing attention. 

Still, a good way off anything I would regard as an adequate presentation of the Christian faith.  Why?  Well, there was the author’s evident attachment to the doctrine of penal substitution, for a start – the idea, I mean, that, in dying, Christ ‘pays the penalty’ for our sins.  That, for me, would rule this one out from the start.  On the other hand, the way Gumbel describes the human sinful condition – his notion of a need for ultimate purpose, a ‘God-shaped’ hole in each of us …. that struck me as right on the mark – and a deal more persuasive than more traditional accounts of ‘sin’.

My encounter with Gumbel’s book has prompted me to reflect why I would or wouldn’t recommend certain other books when trying to explain my Christian faith to non-believers.  Here, then, is the result of this reflection – a kind of theological survey of introductory presentations of the Christian faith.

I’ll begin with two books, cited by Gumbel, that were very much the inspiration of popular presentations of the Christian faith when I was young:  John Stott, Basic Christianity (1958) and C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity? (1952).  

Next, I’ll review, from the same theological perspective, some well-known newcomers on the apologetic scene.  Foremost among them N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian (2011), a book that, already in its title, advertises the ambition to re-do Mere Christianity for the new generation.  I also include Francis Spufford’s recent volume, Unapologetic (2013), and Tim Keller’s The Reason for God (2008).  Keller’s book is the ‘go-to’ apologetic of smart evangelicals. We will be concerned exclusively with the latter half of this volume, which offers a straightforward presentation of the Christian faith.  (The first half rebuts common objections to Christian faith.)  Spufford’s book needs no such ‘apology’. The entirety of the volume is essentially apologetic, albeit in a novel style calculated to disarm the allergic response of contemporary British middle class to anything resembling evangelical culture.

Would I recommend any of these?  Let me present my conclusions without further ado. 

Lewis, Mere Christianity – yes, with the strict recommendation that the reader confine themselves to Part Four, and ignore the Parts One, Two, and Three.  Spufford, Unapologetic – yes, for a certain kind of enquirer, with certain reservations as to the rather subjective and partial nature of the author’s ‘take’ on the Christian faith.  Keller, The Reason for God – possibly, and in the expectation of further discussion on the point of ‘Why Jesus had to die’.  Stott, Gumbel, and Wright – no, no, no; in the first two cases – absolutely no; in the case of Wright – somewhat more regretfully, no.

Now let me tell you why!

Gumbel, Stott, Lewis

I begin with Gumbel and his antecedents (Stott and Lewis).

The spareness of Gumbel’s treatment of the essential issues has the advantage of laying bare the basic structure common to all the presentations discussed here.  First, an account of the human condition as essentially ‘needy’ from a spiritual perspective (i.e. ‘sin’); second, an account of how the message of Jesus/the Christian faith successfully responds to that state of need (i.e. ‘salvation’).  The second element is generally buttressed by arguments as to why the Christian solution to human spiritual need – that of Jesus – should be taken seriously.  It is here that the detail of Jesus’ person and mission tend to come in, along with any account of ‘how’ Christian salvation works. 

All the books considered here contain these essential elements.  In most, the characterization of human spiritual need involves a broader account of the human relationship to the divine, with discussion of the existence of God, and how that affects the human predicament. But I intend to stick to the essential elements.

I shall now say a little more about Gumbel’s treatment of them and now it differs or doesn’t differ from that of his predecessors. 

The human problem

As already noted, Gumbel’s statement of the ‘problem’ is principally in terms of what Simone Weil famously termed ‘the God-shaped hole’.  This is the idea of an essential human drive to find ultimate purpose and belonging in life – an instinct that leads either to the worship of the true God, or the divinization of things in the world to which we inevitably enslave ourselves. 

This characterization of sin as idolatry is supported by evidence from biblical exegesis and Christian sociological studies.  It is also persuasive, making good sense of our personal experience in terms that are philosophically defensible and surprisingly congenial to contemporary moral sensibilities.  A similar, but fuller and more cogent, version of this explanation of the human ‘problem’ appears in Keller (2008) (see below).

Regarding the ‘human problem’, Gumbel’s account represents a notable improvement on Stott and Lewis who define ‘sin’ as an inevitable human ‘falling short’ of a recognized moral standard.  The latter view prompts the obvious objection of moral relativism; namely, that moral standards vary from one culture to another.  Stott has little to say in response.  But Lewis, from the perspective of his wider acquaintance of human cultural difference, goes to considerable philosophical lengths in order to refute moral relativism, not only in the earlier chapters of Mere Christianity, but in The Abolition of Man, where he seeks to martial the ethnographic evidence.  This testifies, if nothing else, to Lewis’ sense of the importance of absolute and universal moral standards to the characterization of sin.   

But I have a more deep-seated unease about the Stott/Lewis approach, one based largely on personal experience – my own and other people’s.  This prompts me to view my individual commissions and omissions as chiefly the secondary effect of a fundamental mis-investment of spiritual energies.  Not to see this, I find, is to focus on symptoms rather than causes.

Moreover, the notion of sin as a succession of discrete errors (the ‘driving-test’ notion of sin) also has the disadvantage of conjuring up a notion of moral ‘perfection’ as conformity to some single fixed prescription.  This makes as little sense of my own moral experience as it does of my attempts to imagine what ‘perfection’ could mean in the case of Jesus Christ.  Life confronts us with multiple possibilities of action that are hard to graduate on grounds of their intrinsic moral value, but are more or less sinful in view of the motivation with which we undertake them. 

Finally, there is also a kind of individualism that inevitably goes along with the driving-test approach – though for some reason we find it also in Gumbel.  It tends to the characterization of the human moral predicament in terms of individual moral insufficiency.  Far less emphasis is placed on the systematic, as opposed to the individual, aspects of sin: the ‘broken’ nature of our common life, its exploitative institutions and impoverished ideologies.  This is a dimension more recent apologists have sought to evoke (or, at least, not to exclude) by the translation of ‘sin’ as ‘brokenness’.  Some of these have even gone so far as to locate moral agency at the institutional as well as the individual level. 

The Christian solution

An exclusively individualist perspective on the human problem has implications also for our understanding of the Christian solution.  Where the problem is seen as essentially one of personal moral insufficiency (i.e. ‘selfishness’), the benefits of the Christian life here and now tend to be characterized as personal ‘sanctification’ – a process which brings individual souls ever closer to the state of moral perfection that will be theirs in the afterlife.  A more collective conception of the human problem leads to a characterization of salvation in more collective and socio-political terms as the institution of the new community of love proclaimed by Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels – the coming of the Kingdom of God that is both now (in the Church) and in the future.

Needless to say, there is little recognition of such a dimension in any of the apologists so far considered – either in their exposition of the problem or of its solution.

The problem of ‘how it works’

However, the most serious weakness of all three presentations – Gumbel, Stott and Lewis – lies elsewhere.  Namely, in their failure to give a persuasive account of HOW the sacrifice of Jesus Christ brings about the resolution of the problem of our human spiritual need.  Without some sense of the means by which salvation is achieved, Christian apologetic will, I suspect, make very little impact on the sceptical enquirer. 

Broadly, there are two ways in which popular presentations of the faith have approached this task.  The first is the whole-hearted traditional explanation of Christian salvation as a process of penal substitution; the second, a step-back from this to a position that calls on a multiplicity of scriptural ‘metaphors’ in the face of a reality that cannot be wholly apprehended by any single explanation.  These approaches are exemplified by Stott and Lewis, respectively.  Neither is particularly convincing.  Gumbel tries to combine the two approaches, somehow failing to recognize their mutual incompatibility.

Both approaches presuppose that the Christian salvation-event is essentially about how humanity obtains forgiveness from a perfectly just God.  Let us begin with penal substitution.  The latter is the doctrine that, in order for us to be forgiven, the penalty for our sins must be paid by God himself acting in the person of the innocent Christ.  As an explanation of the Christian salvation-event this fails, above all, on grounds of logic.  After all, what conceivable sense can be made of the idea that one person should pay the penalty for the misdeeds of another?  It is in the nature of a penalty that it can only be borne by the one responsible for the offence – else it ceases to be a ‘penalty’.  This problem of moral logic (or rather illogic) is generally compounded by the entrenched individualism, on which we have already commented in relation to the human problem.  The traditional view, articulated by Stott, understands the ‘penalty’ in terms of ‘hell’, meaning eternal separation of the individual from God in the afterlife.  Without repudiating that idea, Gumbel expands the conception of punishment in the direction of a range of this-worldly ills (e.g. fear of death, guilt for our sin, anxiety about the future) from which Christ’s atoning death can liberate us.  Either way, there is almost exclusive emphasis on what the faith ‘has to offer’ the individual.  This presents salvation in terms likely to strike the more altruistic and socially/politically engaged non-believer of today as very self-focussed.

I have spoken of Stott and Gumbel.  Where, finally, does Lewis stand on penal substitution?  Lewis claims to find ‘even this theory less silly and immoral than I used to’.  Scarcely a ringing endorsement.  In practice, he goes down the other route taken by Christian apologists in declaring the mechanics of salvation to be ultimately unknowable and referring the enquirer to a number of ‘theories’, ‘models’ or ‘metaphors’: 

A good many different theories have been held as to how it (the Christian salvation event) works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work …  Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how important these theories are. 

Other presentations of the faith (e.g. Gumbel) have been more whole-hearted in their assessment of the need for – and importance – of ‘these theories’. They commonly concede some value even to penal substitution – albeit now demoted to the status of one explanation of the salvation-event amongst others.  Frankly, this works well as an ecumenical strategy for keeping died-in-the-wool penal substitutionists on board.  ‘Yes, we attribute some (considerable) value to penal substitution – but, please admit, there are other ways to think about the salvation event’.  However, where the presentation of our faith to non-believers is concerned, I seriously doubt its persuasive power.  It’s one thing to speak of the hermeneutic value of models & metaphors in contexts where the reality of the referent is undisputed – as, for example, in the much-cited instance of quantum physics.  In such cases, empirical experiment points to physical realities that have to be explained somehow or other.  But when it’s about explaining to non-believers a reality in which they are disinclined to believe, it won’t wash, of course.  Our insistence on the partial (or, at least, less than absolute) truth value of religious language will not impress them with the ineffable mysteries we fail to describe; it will simply cast further doubt on the actuality of that in which we claim to believe! 

Pragmatically, it would be better to stick to penal substitution!

PART TWO: WRIGHT, KELLER, SPUFFORD ?

PART THREE: CONCLUSIONS

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