the Reason for God

This book by Tim Keller is a reasonably accessibly-written but thoroughly intellectually-robust apologetic for the Christian faith. I recently read Francis Spufford's marvellous effort at proposing an entirely irrational apologetic, so I thought I'd balance it out with something that appeals more to the head than the gut - and this did not disappoint. I have read this book before, the summer before I started this blog, so retained a sense of its general gist, but it was truly a pleasure to revisit the concrete arguments.

   Keller splits the book into two sections of seven chapters each.* After a brief introduction exploring the helpfulness and limits of doubt in our contemporary skeptical culture, the first half digs into some of the biggest obstacles in the way of people coming into meaningful contact with the Christian faith, and for each shows how all of these hurdles are actually based on unprovable "faith" assumptions in themselves. These issues are:

1. the problem of Christianity's exclusivity when there are so many other competing religions
2. the problem of suffering, which exists despite God being supposedly purely good & all-powerful
3. the restrictive limitations following Christianity places upon a human life
4. the historical injustices & present hypocrisies of the Church
5. the thorny issue of Hell - surely a good God wouldn't be so extreme as to condemn people to an eternity of suffering?
6. the challenge supposedly posed by science, which many consider to have disproved religion for good
7. the logical and ethical snafus entailed in taking the Bible literally
   
   Having dealt with some of the strongest and commonest arguments against Christianity, we then have a short intermission chapter which considers the subjective nature of rationality itself. Then we head into the second set of seven chapters, which pose some of the strongest reasons for Christian belief.
   
   
8. the orderliness (and indeed existence) of the universe & meaningfulness
9. the innate sense of moral standards that seems essentially universal to humankind
10. the existential hole that sin leaves in the human heart, which we try to fill with idols but can only be satisfied by God
11. the radically distinctive nature of the Christian gospel as compared to other religions
12. the rationally revolting but emotionally intuitive core of Christianity - the incarnate God crucified for our sake
13. the resurrection of Jesus & the explosive emergence of the early Church being the simplest & best historical explanations for each other
14. God's Trinitarian nature providing a cogent & appealing explanation for the natures of creation & humankind

   Having dismantled some of the strongest arguments against and illumined some of the clearest arguments for Christianity, the concluding chapter is a gentle but confident prod for the reader of what to do if they feel themselves approaching a faith that they can truly call their own. After the philosophical and theological weight of the chief portion of the book this provides a comforting pastoral cool-down, though for non-Christian readers this may well be the most challenging part of the whole text.

   Overall I think this is a great book for making the case for Christianity in as best reasoned a way as possible. Keller never lands on absolute proof, but his earlier chapters show that nor do critiques of faith; and his points throughout cohere to short-circuit "absolute rationality" into a more pragmatic reasonability to which I think Christian belief is well-suited. A highly recommended book for Christians who want to supplement their own skillset in arguing for the Kingdom, and moreso a must-read for those whose curiosity about Christian faith is drowned out by overwhelming presumption that the case against it is too strong.

* Summarising the arguments Keller makes in each of these chapters is beyond the scope of this post, so you'll just have to take my word for it that his treatment of all matters discussed is intellectually humble but compellingly-put. And hey, I am a completely fallible blogger so if you don't want to take my word for it, you'll have to read the book and decide for yourself.

Unapologetic

This book by Francis Spufford is, despite his claims that it isn't an apologetic as it makes zero effort to engage with classic philosophical arguments for or against any particular theological claims, by far and away the best Christian apologetic I've ever read. I've literally just read the whole book in a single sitting* it's that good. The subtitle proclaims it as an exploration of "why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense" - and to say it achieves the goal of making a case for this with aplomb would be a grand disservice to the word aplomb. It runs its course over eight perfectly-structured chapters:

1. a general introduction; statement of intent for the book
2. the existential experience of sin, or as he translates it the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up
3. the frustrating ineffability of God in light of people's recurrent sense of needing, if not Him, then something to fill that gap
4. the confounding problem of suffering
5. the personality, teachings, mission and passion of one Yeshua from Nazareth
6. the historically improbable paradoxes surrounding the emergence of Christianity as a coherent religion
7. the complicated legacy and situational state of the Church
8. the subjective feeling entailed in having faith that one is forgiven, and the challenges and opportunity implied herein

   It's deeply insightfully clever without being scholarly**, bewilderingly matter-of-fact in what it says and completely down-to-earth in how it says it, balancing common-sense public presumption with personal but universally recognisable experiences and dazzlingly original points that lead him into compelling conclusions without ever making anything that so much as looks like a rational argument. Spufford not only doesn't avoid the prickly areas of conversation around Christianity in its contemporary context but actively leans into them and tries to give them as much benefit of the doubt as possible, and somehow still manages to wrangle cogent and meaningful ways of sidestepping or outright neutering them. He writes with a disarming simplicity and a refreshing honesty that if such style was wider emulated by Christian authors (and indeed everyday evangelising believers) I hazard to expect that we would see a great many more folks showing interest in the faith.

   Overall, this is a more-or-less perfect example of communicating Christianity effectively in a postmodern culture. If we are presumed by the world around us to be irrational, then give up on trying to convince people by reason - and talk about what it feels like to have one's messy spiritual life wrapped up in what never has been and never will be scientifically verifiable but is indisputably salient in its psychological cohesion to those who try to believe it. If you're a Christian, read this and be inspired to draw on your own emotional experience to communicate your own faith more fluidly, with less intellectual trumps and more confounding expressivity. If you're not a Christian - this book won't convince you to become one, but it may very well provoke you to give it a bloody good consideration.

* With minor breaks only to piss, smoke, and make more coffee.

** Spufford humbly boasts in a note at the end of the book that aside from checking to ensure the accuracy of certain factual claims and quotations used, he conducted exactly no research whatsoever throughout his writing process.

George Herbert - the Complete Works

This book is, as you probably inferred from the title, a complete collection of the works of the 17th-century poet George Herbert. I've been reading this very slowly for the past four years, having been gifted it by my second-eldest brother when he was very concerned about me (as I was having a psychotic episode at the time) and thought some archaic Christian poetry would break through to me, which it *kind of* did - I heavily annotated the first thirty or so pages of it in purple biro, emerged from the psychotic episode (after about a week) and then finished reading it bit by gratitude-debt bit in the time since then. It's a hard book to binge, being 17th-century poetry and so rather archaic and (sorry Josiah) stuffy in tone while also being deeply overtly deliberatively Christian in content, theme and message, which makes every poem, no matter how artful (and they are artful - the majority of the poems in this book are as technically well-constructed as their theology is orthodox-Anglican), feel somewhat like you're being sermonised at.

   The poetry is all lumped together in one big collection called The Church, with poems (mostly rather short, and often sonnets, which seem to be a particular specialty of Herbert's) unsurprisingly centring thematically around classic weighty Christian concepts, such as consciousness of one's own sin, prayer, confession, hope, grace, forgiveness, love, joy, peace, etc. This bulk of the book is prologued by a longer poem called The Church Porch which is much meatier in terms of a challenging mental/spiritual engagement as it explores the inner dynamics of a person weighing themselves up before entering a church (in both a day-to-day instance and in the lifelong sense), and epilogued by another longer poem called The Church Militant which is a triumphal hearty toot on the eschatological trumpet of what God's people look like from an eternal perspective.

   Alongside the poetry which forms the core backbone of the collected works, there is a 37 chapter prose piece called The Country Parson which is half essay, half sermon, half manual on how to be an effective parish priest (I will freely admit I somewhat skimmed this - it has a good deal of wisdom in it but nothing particularly groundbreaking), and a compiled list of 1,024 "Outlandish Proverbs", which initially I was rather excited by as I assumed George had come up with them all himself - however it seems more that he simply collected folksy wisdom from all over the place and put it all together in one big wodge (some of which is retained in proverb and idiom to this day, some of which is mere tautology or common-sensical to the point of banality, and some of which is downright impenetrable). Finally there is a small array of letters, lectures, translations, and his will, none of which I bothered to read at all.

   Christian readers who enjoy neatly-constructed if somewhat repetitive and decidedly unadventurous poetry will find a lot of edifying stuff in this book. Non-Christian poetry enjoyers will probably find it coming on far too strong a moralising and proselytising voice to read past. And non-Christian non-poetry enjoyers probably have no reason whatsoever to engage with the works of George Herbert unless it's part of your current academic syllabus to whatever extent. All that said, receiving this book four years ago was a significant moment in helping me claw me way back to sanity, so I will forever owe it that at least.

What Would Jesus Post?

This book by David Robertson takes that classic wristband acronym WWJD* and transplants it into the chaotic modern context of social media - hence the title. It's a good question. Were history's most famous Nazarene to have accounts on one of those half-dozen websites that constitute today's internet, what kind of content would he be putting out? Would he be a TikTok influencer? Instagram inspirer? YouTube video essayist? Twitter rage-debater? Reddit helper-outer of strangers lost in Google searches? Verbose blogger? Tumblr sharer of unprompted unhinged angles on stuff? Facebook shitposter? Some combination of any or all of the above? We simply don't know.**

   That doesn't mean we can't take the lessons learned from him and try our best to apply them to the communications landscape in which we find ourselves today, and I think Robertson has done a pretty solid job in this book of applying 2000ish-year-old meta-ethical precepts to Very New Paradigms of Possibility. It's far from a comprehensive*** manual, but as a starting point offers some healthy and biblical broad principles we can bear in mind as we engage with online communities as Christians. I think this is a very helpful and well thought-out book, and I would highly recommend it as a resource - most especially for older generations who have immigrated to the internet after an analogue life, and so aren't as adept as The Youth at navigating the psychosocial turbulence that all online society entails.

   Before concluding this post, I will give a special mention to the format of the chapters in this book, as they're all broken down into the same sections that help lend flow and intentionality to the reading process. We open with an introductory overview of "the way it is", before digging deeper into some relevant theological concepts, then having a "pause for thought" in which what's just been discussed is thrown over to us to particularly consider, after which in a "joining the dots" section we consider contextual or social elements that apply what we've just read to the realities of contemporary internet use, then "a way forward" points us toward particular behaviours or attitudes that help us maintain Christian consistency on these issues, a Bible verse or two with an explanation of how it helps us navigate this, "wisdom from the Psalms" as far as I can tell being simply a nice balm to the soul to concentrate on the spiritual side of life rather than being prompted to relate everything back to the online, and finally a few questions to prompt further thought. The length and order of these sections varies chapter to chapter but overall they are consistent throughout the book and make it a much more engaging discipleship experience as a reader.

* "What Would Jesus Do?" for you heathens unfamiliar.

** My money's split between Facebook shitposting and completely out-of-left-field Tumblr dumps, both of which would be essentially parables converted to fit the format. If ministry responsibilities left him with enough free time he'd probably have a YouTube channel with over 10,000,000 views but only 372 subscribers, on which the Tumblr parables are delivered vocally (as you'd expect, the comments sections are full of confusion, people who only watched the first ten seconds, and a minority of people saying "this changed my life"). He'd probably have Twitter, but unless he had something that absolutely HAD to be said there and then, he'd only use it for ironically retweeting Pharisees and Roman officials. If anyone in Jesus's orbit has a blog it's probably Matthew, and Peter and John would have competing Instagram and TikTok accounts documenting the day-to-day doings of the disciples.

*** There are chapters on: the internet as a public arena, prayer, porn, confession, sowing seeds, our digital tongue, dwelling in God's presence, wisdom and discernment, humility, hospitality and generosity, the Sabbath, spiritual gifts, spiritual fruit, gossip, persecution, the footprints we leave, and community. For a pretty short book it covers a lot of ground, but with Christianity and the internet both being as diversely complexly themselves as they are, one can easily imagine entire books being written about any of these chapters. Which is what I mean when I say this is more of an introductory provocation text.