PART ONE: STOTT, LEWIS, GUMBEL?
What would you, and what would you not, recommend as an introductory presentation of the Christian faith to a serious enquirer? This series of blogs offers an evaluation of popular books which Christians of my acquaintance would be most likely to name in response to such a question. I consider them both from the perspective of the acceptability of their theology – and from the more general one of their likely appeal for contemporary enquirers into the Christian faith.
In my previous blog I offered a verdict on Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha: Questions of Life (1991) and on two earlier books, cited by Gumbel, which 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).
Here, I propose to review, from the same 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. Also, Francis Spufford’s recent volume, Unapologetic (2013), and Tim Keller’s The Reason for God (2008). Only the second half of Keller’s book concerns us here, as the first half is taken up with offering a response to popular objections to the Christian faith rather than a straightforward presentation. I also return to C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, though confining myself to the fourth and final part (formerly published under its own cover): Beyond Personality.
As before, I will present my verdict without further ado.
Wright, Simply Christian – sadly (given all this admirer at least would have hoped from this distinguished scholar and hero of contemporary evangelicalism) no. Keller, The Reason for God – possibly, and in the expectation of further discussion on the point of ‘Why Jesus had to die’. 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. Lewis, Beyond Personality – yes, preferably, under its own cover, and in isolation from the rest of the material constituting parts 1-3 of Mere Christianity.
So much for my conclusions. Let me now explain how and why I have reached them.
Wright, Keller, Lewis (again), and Spufford
Much has to do with the same theological points that formed the basis of my critique of earlier presentations covered in my previous blog (Gumbel, Alpha; Stott, Basic Christianity; Lewis, Mere Christianity). So – for the benefit of readers who might not have read it – let me summarize those deficiencies.
First – and most importantly – the failure to offer an intellectually sustainable account of how salvation works.
Second, the failure (at least by Stott and Lewis) sufficiently to ground their account of human spiritual need in the biblical notion of idolatry, and the related failure (in the case of all three) to take full account of the collective and socio-political dimension of human sin. I will show in a moment how these two areas of failure (i.e. inattention to idolatry and excessive individualism) are linked.
Simply Christian
Tom Wright’s book (Simply Christian) sets out expressly to rectify the exclusive individualism of earlier evangelical presentations. There is a happy synergy here between this theological goal and Wright’s life-long dedication to Jesus scholarship. Wright’s more socio-political – less individualist – orientation leads to an understanding of Christian salvation as the coming of God’s Kingdom here on earth, rather than the retrieval of individual souls for the afterlife. And his background in NT scholarship equips him admirably for the task of demonstrating that this – i.e. the coming of God’s Kingdom – is indeed the message of the entire biblical narrative, culminating in Jesus and the New Testament. The ‘cross’ in this context matters, not so much as the locus of a divine:human transaction necessary for the forgiveness of sin (though, in deference to Isaiah 52-3 and, I suspect, entrenched evangelical opinion, Wright declines to exclude penal substitution), but rather because it marks God’s vindication of Jesus’s Messiahship (i.e. lordship of God’s Kingdom) through the resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
It is a notable feature of earlier presentations that what they have to say about Jesus’s mission and its place in biblical history is confined to assertions regarding the truth of certain claims that Jesus makes for himself – for example, to be ‘Son of God’. The life of Jesus is seen primarily as ‘evidence’ of the claims. By contrast, Wright’s portrayal of Jesus’ mission as the culmination of the scriptural narrative requires a much wider, and less narrowly, selective reading of biblical texts. The result is sufficiently compelling that it is hard not be won over by it. It constitutes practically an argument for Christianity in itself!
The difficulties of Wright’s presentation, however, lie in his more explicit efforts to demonstrate the relevance of the Gospel message. To this end, he begins, like everyone else, with an exposition of the human condition of spiritual need. As might be expected in view of his eventual focus on salvation as the coming of the Kingdom, ‘sin’ is no longer seen exclusively in terms of individual moral degradation. Rather, the attempt is made to depict aspects of contemporary life where a human aspiration – for justice, love, spirituality or beauty – seems condemned to frustration and disappointment in the face of our lived experience of injustice, relational breakdown, materialism and ugliness. The point of this sociological analysis is evidently to pave the way for the introduction of the biblical notion of the Kingdom as the natural object of such aspirations.
On an abstract level, this ought to work. In practice, I don’t find it very persuasive! The difficulty may lie in convincingly demonstrating the unique aptness of the solution to the problem. After all, Christianity is not the only religion claiming to be the key to every lock! Wright’s approach strikes me as just a little too reminiscent of that conversation we’ve all had with the Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness on the doorstep, in which we’re invited to commiserate on all that’s amiss in ‘today’s world’ only to be offered the ultimate solution to these problems in the shape of whatever religion is being purveyed!
The other major area of difficulty lies in the adequacy of Wright’s response to scriptural declension of salvation in the language of sacrifice. The importance and ubiquity of such language can hardly be denied. But, in responding to it, it is as though Wright speaks with two voices. On the one hand, his explanation of the Christ-event as, above all, a vindication of God’s Kingdom and God’s Messiah offers us a way of comprehending Christian salvation that can stand on its own, without recourse to sacrificial notions, as an entirely adequate and intelligible account of how Christian salvation works. On the other, Wright makes clear he views the sacrifice of Jesus as the fulfilment of the prophecy of the suffering servant of Isaiah 52-3, and interprets the prophetic text in terms of penal substitution. The two ‘tracks’ of his explanation run, as it were, independently and in parallel. Something we can see demonstrated both in subsequent versions of the Kingdom narrative by Chalke and McLaren who eagerly embrace it as an alternative to penal substitution – and in the reactions of those traditionalists who grasp at Wright’s concession to penal substitution, while treating the Kingdom narrative as theologically accessory.
The Reason for God
If I went to Simply Christian with the highest expectations only to be somewhat disappointed by the book itself, I had the almost the opposite experience with Keller, The Reason for God (2008). While I feel strongly aligned with Wright theologically, I am forced to admit it is Keller who has produced the more persuasive presentation of the Christian faith in the Part Two of this book.
Keller’s principal success lies in finally cracking the problem of how to characterize the human sinful condition in less exclusively individualistic terms, and then present the Christian claim as the answer to the human problem that he has characterized in this way. This success corresponds to the second major failing I identified above in the presentations of Stott, Lewis and Gumbel – their total individualism. Wright sets out to rectify this; but it is Keller, rather than Wright who succeeds in the attempt.
The secret of Keller’s success is that he grounds the notion of human sin in idolatry. This automatically introduces a new way of envisaging the relationship of the individual and the collectivity. Once we characterize the human person as essentially idolatrous – as having to ‘find’ an identity through investment in some ultimate ‘good’ – then the human person ceases to be a self-contained entity. He/she becomes a locus of potential attachments binding them into (often destructive) relationship with other beings in their spiritual and social environment, a node in a wider social net. ‘Who we are’ – a matter of where – and to whom/what – we belong. From this perspective, individual and collective/institutional agencies are mutually reinforcing; our identities are moulded by wider collective forces, which they help, in turn, to sustain.
To see personhood like this, is to reconceptualize sin as false – that is, idolatrous – religion. The Christian solution to this may involve forgiveness, but it doesn’t stop there. It also requires that false religion – the attachment to unworthy objects – be replaced by the true religion of attachment to an object worthy of devotion. Thus, Keller identifies the ultimate end of salvation, not with forgiveness per se, or with our admission to some post-mortem existence in heaven (as Gumbel, Stott, and Lewis), nor with the coming on earth of God’s ideal community (Wright), but with the glorification of God – an ongoing act of worship which Keller compares to a cosmic dance. A dance of mutual self-emptying or love, that begins between the persons of the Trinity, and expands through the work of the Son and Holy Spirit to include all who accept Jesus’s invitation.
Let us now return to the question of the how of salvation. Here Keller is more conservative. His later focus on the glorification of God as the object of human life would have given Keller, had he wanted it, the chance to present a compelling portrayal of Jesus and his mission as the ultimate realization of that cosmic act of worship, and the death of Jesus as the means of bringing about our participation in it. Others have laid the necessary theological foundations for that kind of presentation of the Christian faith.
Keller does neither, but, instead, reverts to an explanation of Jesus’ death exclusively in terms of its securing of God’s forgiveness. Whether this Keller’s explanation is properly speaking penal substitution is debatable. It could perhaps be considered a mitigated form of that doctrine. Keller defends the idea that all forgiveness is costly. Just as forgiveness is always costly in our human relationships with each other, so we would expect the same to be true the case in our relationship with God. Hence the agony of the cross makes a kind of psychological sense when seen as an earthly expression of divine forgiveness from God’s perspective; it is what one would expect such forgiveness to look like given the nature of human sinfulness.
I find myself broadly in agreement with Keller on this, though as an explanation of the ‘necessity’ of Jesus’ death, I don’t find it particularly compelling. A more serious problem, however, is a kind of dislocation between the exclusive focus on forgiveness in his chapter about Jesus and his broader concern with restoration and renewal (cosmic dance) when attention shifts to what Jesus means for ourselves as his followers in the final chapter. Why is salvation all about forgiveness in the former case, but about so much else in the latter? One would have expected the means of salvation to have had a much stronger relationship to its ultimate effects. Worse still, between the chapter on Jesus, and the chapter entitled ‘The Cosmic Dance’ Keller inserts another on the resurrection. Rather than explaining the meaning of resurrection in relation to what has preceded and comes after, this chapter is entirely devoted to the incidental question of its ‘proof’ as a historical event. It is hard to avoid the impression that Keller has allowed the execution of his grand design to be waylaid by traditional evangelical preoccupations.
Still, some sense of a grand design remains sufficiently discernible for the whole presentation to be relatively more persuasive than Wright’s.
Beyond Personality
I return now to Part Four of Mere Christianity. This I propose to evaluate taken in isolation from the rest of the volume in which it stands on the same basis as the books already discussed – that is, from the point of view of its effectiveness as a presentation of the Christian faith. In fact, it has, in the past, been published as an independent volume, and should, I believe, be so again.
In an important respect it hardly qualifies to be considered here. It does not itself contain any account of the human condition of spiritual need, and therefore does not conform to the same problem:solution structure of all the other works considered. From the perspective of its place in Mere Christianity or the Radio Talks on which that book is based, that task of delineating the human sinful condition has already been completed by the Part One and Part Two. However, as we shall see, the nature of salvation as outlined in Part Four, presupposes a rather different account of the problem than the one we find in those earlier parts of Mere Christianity. The author evidently sees Part Four as offering a theological supplement to the earlier account of Christian basics – and one that is theologically entirely consistent with it. But, of course, as readers, we are not obliged to share this view.
My reason for including it here is that, taken on its own terms, Part Four offers – in a way that none of the above presentations have done – an entirely valid and convincing account of the how of Christian salvation.
It does so through Lewis’ notion of the ‘good infection’. The incarnation is represented as bringing about a remarkable union, both physical and spiritual, of perfect God and sinful humanity – first at the sole point of the historical Jesus, but then, because of oneness of humanity, inevitably spreading, in ever-growing circles, through the mass of humankind, past and future, near and far. This reminds me of a youtube I once saw of Jesus healing a leper, which somehow by visual cues managed to capture the mystery of a divine touch capable of bringing (by a reversal of the second law of thermodynamics), not the corruption of purity by the impure, but the purification of impurity!
The emphasis of salvation shifts here from forgiveness to restoration. But the scriptural notion of sacrifice remains fully present in the idea of a divine emptying out (kenosis) whereby the God the Son becomes fully man to the point of accepting the utterly dehumanizing death meted out by demonic authority to its enemies. In other words, the ‘cross’ is not disregarded but taken up in the broader notion of an entire human life offered up to God in sacrifice.
This kind of presentation requires two things. First, a preliminary account of what it is theologically for Jesus to be ‘Son of God’ and what this implies both about Jesus’s relationship to God and our own – in effect, an explication of the kind of statements to be found in the Nicene creed. This Lewis very ably supplies in the early sections of Beyond Personality. Second, an understanding of humanity from the divine perspective: not, that is, as an aggregation of individuals, but as a kind of unified organism spread over the earth, and extending back into the loins of our earliest ancestors. Lewis does his best, here; but would probably have been assisted by the more ‘relational’ definition of the human person that I discussed earlier in relation to Keller’s treatment of sin as essentially idolatry. At all events, the argument of Part Four of Mere Christianity gestures in the direction of an anthropology that is a far cry from the one presupposed by the rather Kantian definition of sin offered by Part One.
The response to the incarnation that characterizes, for Lewis, the Christian believer is – hardly surprisingly given this incarnational bias – a sacramental one. As Christians, we get as close as we can in every way to the influence of the Holy Spirit, like people in a cold room clustering around a fire; we seek baptism, and eat the bread and drink the wine of the Eucharist.
Unapologetic
In Spufford’s book we find, once again, the problem:solution structure. The ground covered here is very much that of classic presentations. The novelty, as indicated by the full title, is that Spufford claims not to be aiming at clinching arguments for Christianity, but merely at demonstrating its ‘psychological’ good sense.
Accordingly, our human condition is characterized not by propositions but in terms of the author’s experience. The ‘Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up’ (HPtFtU) – and the blinkered pretension to any kind of moral optimism – is asserted through the author’s appeal to what we all of us, he says, really know to be case, and illustrated through very frank personal anecdote. Yet, Spufford also points to the paradoxical occurrence of moments of ‘grace’ where we somehow apprehend a reality whose generosity overwhelms our petty interests – something he describes as a universal backing to things’, an ultimate ‘solidity’, ‘which seems to shine with lightless light.’ Such moments bring the author a reassurance that reality is somehow larger than our HPtFtU, and that ‘more can be mended than we think’. Subsequently, Spufford retells the story of the Jesus of the Gospels, which he treats as an ultimate revelation of that light – an episode of history when reality turns like a Moebius strip to reveal its shiny backing to the world.
To make such claims is to set an extreme challenge – not only for the author’s own expository talents, but ultimately for the Gospel narratives themselves. Needless to say, it is a challenge the Gospels can meet, and, on the whole, Spufford’s repristinated version of their narrative does justice to the task. For Spufford (as for Wright) the solution to our HPtFtU is the constitution of The International League of the Guilty (a.k.a. the Church) – a failing but never quite failed attempt, by limited people to perpetuate the unlimited generosity of God in the world; …. a body which aspires to be, to carry on from, to keep alive and present and breathing, the literal corporeal body of Jesus.
This presentation of the faith avoids the pitfall of excessive individualism. Neither HPtFtU nor Christianity’s response in the shape The International League is exclusively individualist. On the other hand, there is little attempt at an anthropology that could in any way ‘explain’ or even properly ‘define’ HPtFtU (such, for example, as we find in Keller). Spufford’s ‘rhetoric’ in this book is ultimately novelistic. Such cogency as it has depends entirely on the degree of authenticity we attribute to its presentation of human experience.
Equally it avoids unsustainable accounts of the how of salvation. The Christian claim to offer an adequate response to HPtFtU relies ultimately on the reader being, as it were, knocked for six by an account of the Gospel narrative essentially faithful to the original, but ‘anachronised and estranged (i.e. defamiliarized) to try to peel away the lingering familiarity which might prevent you from hearing it afresh’. After those earlier presentations (Stott and Gumbel) that reduce the Gospel to a mere statement of Messianic claims, this readiness to let the narrative speak for itself is very refreshing. On the other hand, the complete absence from Spufford’s presentation of even NT attempts to make sense of the Gospel events leaves important things like the institution of the church devoid of any very compelling necessity. What weird reasoning, for example, would have led the band of Jesus’s admirers ‘to keep alive, present and breathing the literal corporeal presence of Jesus’? Weren’t they just imitating someone they admired?
The other problem with this kind of presentation is that it can’t easily be extracted from the book through which it is communicated. It wouldn’t, for example, be an easy matter to distil the message of Unapologetic in a sermon, or a conversation with a friend. This is because that message apparently comes indexed to a specific personal experience – or perhaps, the more sophisticated would say, to the text Spufford has composed. Such evangelism is deliberately low-key, and doesn’t claim to greater authority than normally attaches to personal narratives. Yet, that is perhaps its strength – at least, for a certain kind of reader. It doesn’t ‘convict’ anyone; but it might incline the more well-disposed reader to pop into an Anglican Sunday service one day … It is unlikely to have much influenced the sermon he/she hears while they are there.