Category Archives: book review

Better off (Eric Brende)

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This is a very intriguing, interesting and challenging book. Eric was a high-flying MIT post-grad who was becoming more and more disillusioned with the way in which human society had shifted to serving machines, rather than being served by them. So immediately after his honeymoon, he and his wife take the plunge and join an Amish community to see if they can survive without ‘labour-saving devices’. They don’t just survive, they thrive. A remarkably optimistic fable for anyone who is concerned about Peak Oil, and what the lack of available energy will mean. Human society can flourish with much less energy – indeed it will have many, many untellable blessings – but the problems will come from those who try to hang on to what God is taking away. They will experience the wrath.

Highly, highly recommended.

The Last Oil Shock (David Strahan)

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This was a rather good overview of the Peak Oil problem, from a British perspective, and despite being pretty well informed on the subject – or so I like to tell myself – there were a number of things I learnt, particularly with regard to details about Hubbert’s techniques of forecasting oil production and the influence of energy consumption on economic growth. Recommended, especially if you haven’t read anything else on the subject.

Strahan is a BBC journalist; his blog is here; a relevant Guardian article from yesterday is here.

The Rise of Evangelicalism (Mark Noll)

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Just finished this, which was a really good historical overview – just what I needed as I start to research evangelicalism more thoroughly for my autumn Learning Church series. I am now much clearer in my mind about what evangelicalism is, and what I like and don’t like about it. I’m most particularly intrigued by the influence that High-Church theology had on its beginnings, mainly via the Wesleys, as I suspect that there is the stream where I would locate myself, in what Noll calls ‘primitivism’: “the faith thought to have been practiced with great purity in the church’s very first centuries… imitation of the faith and life of early believers, ascetic practice for the self, godly discipline for society and regular participation in the church’s celebration of the Eucharist”.

I’m not going to say too much more in this review because so many issues were raised that I want to explore them in separate posts, but it’s probably worth sharing some longish quotations.

The four key ingredients [as defined by David Bebbington]:
– conversion, or ‘the belief that lives need to be changed’;
– the Bible, or ‘the belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages’;
– activism, or the dedication of all believers, including lay people, to lives of service for God, especially as manifested in evangelism (spreading the good news) and mission (taking the gospel to other societies); and
– crucicentrism, or the conviction that Christ’s death was the crucial matter in providing atonement for sin (ie providing reconciliation between a holy God and sinful humans).

If evangelicals were strong in personal reassurance before God, they were weak in the formation of worldviews. If they stripped away other considerations to focus on the need for a Saviour, they sometimes also stripped away the urgency to think generally about responsible Christian life in the world. The remarkable effects from concentrating on Christian experience as depicted in Scripture were often matched by the deliberate devaluation of intellectual tradition. At the end of the day, evangelical concern for society reflected the character of the movement as a whole. It was a pietistic movement that did much good in the world. But as a pietistic movement its focused attention on the spiritual tended to edge aside, rather than stimulate, self-conscious attention to the social.

At its worst, this new evangelicalism neglected, caricatured and distorted the inherited tradtions of Reformation Protestantism. Evangelical beliefs and practices could foster a self-centered, egotistic and narcissistic spirituality and also create new arenas for destructive spiritual competition. From in-group cliches, associations and institutions, evangelicals sometimes constructed new barriers to alienate humans from each other. They could turn so obsessively inward as to ignore the structures of social evil. Most important, evangelicals could trivialise the Christian gospel by treating it as a ballyhooed commodity to be hawked for its power to soothe a nervous, dislocated people in the opening cultural markets of the expanding British Empire.
But at its best evangelicalism provided needed revitalisation to English-speaking Protestant Christianity. It breathed vibrant religious life into stagnant or confused religious institutions. It created dynamic communities of self-giving love and international networks of supporting fellowship. It reached out to many at the margins of respectable society. From authentic personal experience it provided a dynamism for addressing corporate evils. Most important, it communicated the beauty and the power of the Christian gospel in a wide variety of settings and through that gospel provided a wider range of individuals with purpose before God and meaning for this life, and it did so for the long haul.

Great stuff.

The Forgotten Ways (Alan Hirsch)

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I found this to be a very good book, although it had one or two very irritating flaws, not the least of which was an astonishingly inane jacket-quote from someone called Leonard Sweet, which would have prevented me from buying the book if I had seen it beforehand.

But that’s a cavil. This is an excellent book about mission; one that I will almost certainly be sharing with the wider leadership team here. It’s had quite an impact on me, not least in providing ‘the fourth thing’… I’ve often thought that (following Eugene Peterson’s analysis) there were three things in my ministry that I felt called to concentrate on: celebrating communion; teaching and preaching; and spiritual direction. However, I’ve also felt that there was a ‘fourth thing’ that was in me and that didn’t quite fit with this – and I’ve variously called it management, or leadership, or even (before I came to Mersea and decided against doing a PhD) ‘the Civil Service element’ in my character. What this book has done for me – and for which I am profoundly grateful – is given me a different description of this element, and one, moreover, which gives me great peace. It is the apostolic element. Hirsch quotes Steve Addison saying:

“The apostolic role within established churches and denominations requires the reinterpreting of the denomination’s foundational values in the light of the demands of its mission today. The ultimate goal of these apostolic leaders is to call the denomination away from maintenance, back to mission. The apostolic denominational leader needs to be a visionary, who can outlast significant opposition from within the denominational structures and can build alliances with those who desire change. Furthermore, the strategy of the apostolic leader could involve casting vision and winning approval for a shift from maintenance to mission. In addition, the leader has to encourage signs of life within the existing structures and raise up a new generation of leaders and churches from the old. The apostolic denominational leader needs to ensure the new generation is not “frozen out” by those who resist change. Finally, such a leader must restructure the denomination’s institutions so that they serve mission purposes.”

In a week of great and diverse stresses it has been very healing and heartening to read that.

There were two other elements that really resonated with me: the first, that the apostolic call isn’t about pastoring as commonly understood: ‘in actual practice, a predominantly pastoral conception of the church and ministry now actually constitutes a major hindrance to the church reconceiving itself as a missional agency’. The second, that the apostle is first and foremost a working theologian, one who safeguards the ‘DNA’ of the Christian faith. That is precisely what I have seen as most essential in my ministry so far, and the source of all the positive things that have followed (such as there have been).

A final long quotation (from Karl Barth, which the book ends with):

It is certain that we all have reason to ask ourselves each of these questions and in every case quickly and clearly to give the answer:
No, the church’s existence does not always have to possess the same form in the future that it possessed in the past as though this were the only possible pattern;
No, the continuance and victory of the cause of God, which the Christian Church is to serve with her witness, is not unconditionally linked with the forms of existence which it has had until now;
No, the hour may strike, and perhaps already has struck, when God, to our discomfiture, but to his glory and for the salvation of mankind, will put an end to this mode of existence because it lacks integrity;
Yes, it could be our duty to free ourselves inwardly from our dependency on that mode of existence even while it still lasts. Indeed, on the assumption that it may one day entirely disappear, we definitely should look about us for new ventures in new directions.
Yes, as the Church of God we may depend on it that if only we are attentive, God will show us such new ways as we can hardly anticipate now. And as the people who are bound to God, we may even now claim unconquerable security for ourselves through him. For his name is above all names….

Amen. Praise the Lord!

Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)

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This was tremendously good – another one that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. I’m going to quote it in another post which I plan to write – at some point – but for now let me just say that I agree with all the positive reviews that have been written about it. Lovely, gracious book, deeply human.

An acceptable sacrifice

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I know it’s a cliche, but this really was a curate’s egg, in many ways. Variable quality of essays, by various different people, some of which appealed, some of which were worthy but dull. I was most struck by two essays – one on ‘intersex’, which has significant theological implications, and one on the pluriform and extensive way in which our sexuality is embedded within our wider life.

Recommended for being stimulating; I’m sure other people will like different things.

Promise and Presence (John Colwell)

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I had started reading this before heading off on holiday, but only managed to finish it when I was there. It is superb, an excellent exploration of sacramental theology with which I found myself in virtually 100% agreement – which, given that the author is a tutor at Spurgeon’s, might strike some as surprising! I’m going to use much of his material in my Learning Church sequence, so there will be more to come about him. I was particularly struck by the way that his sacramental understanding of the eucharist was enabled by his depression – that the reality of God’s activity doesn’t rest upon how we feel about it!! Quite so.

Very highly recommended.