FMB - Archive

From My Bookshelf

Archive

Philip Jenkins The Next Christendom. The Comings of Global Christianity, New York, Oxford University Press, Revised and Expanded Edititon, 2007.

978-0-19-518307-8.

So there really are books, the reading of which totally, radically, and permanently change the way you look at things. My understanding of Christianity’s origins, history, present reality – and certainly future – was completely changed by page 30; I still had 231 to go, and the revolution in my thinking was not over.

Christianity was perhaps never a European affair. It didn’t start here (I used to think Eastern-derived religions meant New Ageism), had far, far more missionary success – in early, and early modern, centuries – than is generally realised, and this was in such places as India, China, Japan, and Africa (Catholicism had been established in western Africa three generations before the Reformation – some of the first Africans taken to America as slaves would have been Roman Catholic). As for amazing statistics (the book is packed with them), we are reminded time and again that by far the vast majority of Christians live south of the equator, and as the populations of Europe and north America are shrinking – particularly the practising-Christian populations – the faith will soon be (what it first was, and perhaps always really was) a southern/eastern affair. The statistics on church growth are amazing, with millions of converts appearing in various southern/eastern countries; the overall number of Christians is beyond our conception; and from now, our conception should be a global, not a parochial (Western) one; remember to say, loudly , in your office: “most people go to church on Sunday”, to reveal (from their comments) the purely-European thinking of almost everyone around us. In global terms, it is only in the tiny, demographically-declining, secularised/materialist West that most people don’t.

Many things about the book are impressive. The range of facts – about all kinds of things – is enormous, and yet the author handles them with a lightness of touch, where others might have been swamped by them. What this book is not is the kind of pure “sociology of religion”, which used to be popular, involving a sort of “outsidist” view, where – from the outlook of a secular world-view – a writer might use figures and facts to plot trends; here, one is always conscious of a view from inside Christian faith. A lot of the book is devoted to non-Christian religions, and Christian relations with the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths, and people. Much attention is given to Christian relations with Islam, both in history, and in the present situations in the Global South and the West. Time and again, he illustrates the fact that our thinking about Christianity is based on nothing more than the accident of our placing in time and space, by means of comparing new churches (with all their local concerns, and individual cultural flavour) with the older, somewhat staid, entrenched Christianities – that is, early-medieval western European churches, with contemporary Byzantine/eastern Mediterranean churches. Europeans devised a purely-Western understanding of the Church, and sought to promulgate it across the globe, in modern times; but soon – indeed, already – it will be the Africans effecting the re-evangelism of the dried-out, decadent, Western husk – and they know that they must not make the same mistake as we did, of seeking to imprint their own culture on us in inappropriate ways, that their culture (like ours) is not the essence of Christianity; Christianity is always beyond, more than, the culture which it takes its temporary home within.

Of course, all these facts have a large bearing on that present most fraught of matters: the future of understandings of Christianity where the old, tired West seeks, by a kind of neo-imperialism, to impose its own mark – revisionism - upon the new churches of the Global South (or – depending on your viewpoint – Africa seeks to hold us Westerners back from moving on into our new “liberalising” understandings of truth and reality). Personally, I am on the side of the Africans - and so is every trend of future developments in as far as we can see them, both demographic, and concerning purely religious changes. If 95% of Christians are south of the equator (and they are almost all orthodox), then the percentage of revisionist, as opposed to orthodox, believers (many Westerners are orthodox also) is microscopic - and declining fast (if what we read about “liberal” North American congregations is true). Jenkins affirms the reality of this view – but cautions us not to assume that African/Asian/South American churches will always be “conservative”, since if they, and their societies, grow in their theological sophistication, and in their material wealth, perhaps in the future they will develop the kind of revisionist theology that America’s TEC has made us familiar with, and which the Church of England – to name but one ecclesiastical body – seems on course to adopt. Perhaps when a Christian community is young and fresh it can discover, and hold to, the truth as it should be; when it is old and worldly it thinks it knows too much ever to be content with the “truth once delivered to the saints”. Materialism – in all its forms - surely strangles a church, ends its ability to see beyond purely-human values; perhaps Christianity always will be, can only be, the possession of the poor. From now on, I’ll try to remember that the future of Christianity is African; the figures allow no other interpretation.

Christopher Jamison Finding Sanctuary. Monastic Steps for Everyday Life, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006.

"From the TV series The Monastery"

10-0-297-85132-2.

In May 2005, BBC Two broadcast a series of programmes in which five men from everyday life spent forty days and nights at Worth Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in southern England; the programmes were subsequently repeated, and had a tremendous impact upon viewers, some of whom had perhaps assumed that Worth's monks, holed up in their cloister, were totally out of touch with modern life, its pressures and its problems. In fact, the monks and their abbot not only related very strongly and positively to the men, but had a great impact on their lives, and those of the many viewers, such that Worth's retreat facilities were fully-booked for a long while, and a subsequent series was made, The Convent, which featured a group of young women staying at the Poor Clare monastery at Arundel, Sussex. Similar programmes have been made for American television.

In Finding Sanctuary, Worth's abbot, Christopher Jamison, sets out to provide seven steps by which insights from the Rule of Saint Benedict - which governs the life of Benedictine monks and their monastery - can be made to provide a place in ordinary peoples' busy lives, by which they can find "spiritual space" - peace, meaningfulness, purpose, and hope. The book does not lose sight of the programme, and its men, but moves beyond it, to reach out to everyman and woman. It is organised along the lines of a positively architectural image - the sanctuary is a place which must be built, and its structural elements have to be carefully chosen; its furnishings have to be appropriate and fitting. I have to confess, I did not see the programmes (but I did see The Convent, and was moved by the sanctity, and sense of purpose and relevance, which flowed from the Poor Clares, and all the advice and wisdom that they gave to their visitors*).

In this book, Jamison is able gently to recommend a set of concerns, principles, and procedures which, together, completely overturns the emptiness and purposelessness of modern values - and yet without any of the strident rejection and condemnation, which many other Christians and spiritual writers have been guilty of (a temptation, I know myself, it is so easy to respond to). Likewise, with his treatment of "spirituality" (Step 6), he is able to expose the wrong-headedness of so much of the modern New Age-derived fare, with only the gentlest persuasion that spirituality and religion are different things, and that the spiritual, as once understood, has become detached from religion (from reality), and can now become just another product on offer to consumerist society, offering its adherents excessive concern with themselves, enthroning self, rather than freeing people (as real religion must do) from "the constantly shifting sands of human desire" (p. 146). The "History of Spirituality" (pp. 139-142) portrays, in just a few pages, the steps by which we have got from the wholeness of what may be called "religious spirituality" to the divorced, disjointed self-help therapy of the "Spirituality Shopper" - with the unexpected appearance of 16th century Spanish (Christian) mystics as the first users of "spiritual" in the modern sense.

Also subtly "conservative" (appealing to older values, in a non-confrontational way) is the introduction of Virtue (what?) as the door into the sanctuary, and - in one of the author's constant surprises - his commendation of virtue and goodness springs not from ancient spiritual writers (though he constantly quotes these), but from the world of modern big business (pp. 26-7). Jamison appears to be effortlessly orthodox, conveying the unambiguous message of the truth and rightness only to be found in the Christian faith, while making much of Worth's harmonious relationship with a nearby Buddhist monastery - and soon we see that the origin of this approach (warmth towards religious others existing beside firm Christian self-belief) comes from none other than John Paul II, and his invitation to non-Christians to join him in prayers for peace (p. 168-9). Peace is another area where he immediately hits the target; so often pacifists and peace activists seem to writhe and struggle in a difficult moral world of compromise, where objectives seem to be blunted - what, I often find myself wondering - does this or this group understand by peace? Jamison has the (presumably official) definition of the Catholic Church to hand (" ... not simply the absence of war; it is the fruit of justice" (p. 167)). Another much attacked, ill-defended area is one that he simply and easily weighs into, with no hesitation: the moral effects of religion in our world. No mealy-mouthed apologetic, defensive stuff (which other Christians would timidly produce) here: "Religion Causes Peace" he says (pp. 164-7), and he cites research to prove it. If only other Christian defence (that is, attack), in this perilous, fraught, situation, was like this!

I'm not surprised people have been knocking on the doors of Worth Abbey; if only our world had more of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

www.worthabbey.net

*I know, from watching this series, that the visitors' stay was not always easy. In The Convent, one despondent young woman described the place, and the experience, as "A kind of Catholic boot camp."

Alister McGrath The Twilight of Atheism. The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, London, Rider (Random House), 2004, 2005. 9-781844-13155-6.

Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism is a largely historical account of the fortunes of a particular strand of human thought from the 18th century (in Europe) to the present day (in the west). The historical nature of this survey becomes increasingly apparent, for as the early chapters progress, one begins to notice that varieties of “atheist” thinking are simply outlined, they are not subject to the kind of critical examination, or analysis, that we might have wished for. Then McGrath reveals that this is in many ways a personal account – of a personal journey – since precisely there (within atheism, of some kind) did the author begin, and from there did he journey on to becoming the Professor of Historical Theology in the University of Oxford, and a Christian who might be said to be broadly within the Protestant/Evangelical camp; and the recalling and recounting of a journey of personal experience, and the changing of a person’s ideas and beliefs, is always fascinating. Above all, in telling of the rise and development of this thinking, one is struck again and again by the almost excessive respect (here, we learn of intellectual “giants” who were possessed of “great” ideas – oh really?), and normally one thinks of converts as being hyper-critical of their intellectual past. I would have liked to see rigorous analysis (is “deconstruction” today’s phrase?), and at least a mention of, say, Paul C. Vitz's The Psychology of Atheism. Peter Masters’ The Cruelties of Atheism (London, Sword & Trowel (Metropolitan Tabernacle), 1994, 1998) is perhaps a bit strident and rhetorical (Masters is after all, an Evangelical preacher) – but Masters’s thinking and theology would be perhaps be useful when discussing some of the (actually not) “giants” of modern atheist thought.

The book has fascinating by-ways, which opened up matters I had not known of: the theory that it was Protestantism that actually made atheism possible (though earlier, he has firmly located the origin of modern atheist thought in 18^th century France – hardly a milieu awash with Protestantism), and the strange story of Madalyn Murray O’Hare, and modern American atheism. Some accepted ideas he seems, to me, to turn on their heads: I had thought it was Protestantism in which a personal relationship with God was important, and with (Medieval) Catholicism it was the individual’s relationship with the Church that determined things – but McGrath seems to suggest that it was the other way around, at least until the Evangelical Revival came (Pietism onwards). He rightly makes much of the ongoing rise of Evangelical/charismatic Christianity all over the world, and its replacement of Western Liberal Christianity (which has committed “suicide”; he is very interesting, here; pp. 161-5) – but I fancy Pentecostalism (the label he constantly uses) is something of a shorthand, since there are surely many groups of Christians (from the vibrant congregations of China and south-East Asia, to the “Mega-Churches” of America - and Europe) who might not actually call themselves “Pentecostals” ("Born Again" Christians, "Bible Believing" Christians?). Early in the book, McGrath has suggested that it was inevitable that people would reject the tyrannous, immoral “gods”, in the Classical world – but later he mentions the great attraction ancient pagan ideas had for such as Shelley, without drawing any conclusions about this irony, as to the meaning and validity of modern atheism (he might have mentioned a point which his history brings out well - that when people reject God their first destination is usually Nature).

McGrath leaves me wondering exactly what this “atheism” is, that he is writing about. He makes it clear (when outlining 18^th and 19^th century developments) that so few of the great thinkers actually thought in terms of a world that created itself, and where chance and accident is all there is. Atheism, as in this book, is more anti-clerical, anti-Church, or anti-religion protest. Hence, in his final pages, the author talks about the “moral seriousness” of atheism: “It is impossible to do anything other than admire the criticisms and passionate demands for justice directed by atheists against the corruptions of …” (p. 273) (oh really?). Now, many writers in recent times (perhaps not all of them Christians?) have pointed out that if anyone believes that: the world/life emerged by chance/accident or undirected processes; there is no existence other than this life; there cannot be any ultimate consequence of human actions, reckoning, or destiny; humans are just a kind of animal – then any idea about ethics, morals, right, wrong – or “justice” – are absurd, impossible, and totally meaningless. But perhaps this thinking should actually be called materialism, and perhaps atheism (at lease as reviewed in this book) is really something else. Perhaps if we see it like this, and take this on board, then the thinking of such as Philip Pullman becomes vaguely understandable. It is ludicrously impossible to enter a “moral” “protest” – as C. S. Lewis pointed out as long ago as the 1940s - if one believes in … nothingness, meaninglessness, emptiness … As I have written elsewhere on this website, all one is left with, in these circumstances, is the amoralism experienced (or rather, not experienced) by my cat.

There are aspects of an atheist thought-scenario which one might have looked for discussion of, in this book. Several writers have pointed out that we now know (unlike a century ago) that moral behaviour can not exist on its own, once the objective reality of the source of ethical ideas has been jettisoned (the prominent atheist thinkers of previous centuries assumed it could) – as seen in the constant rise of criminal behaviour, or simply amoral assumptions, in our society (as shown by the B&Q Macclesfield example * ) (see also The Cause of Crime ). McGrath, as suggested, makes much of the “moral protest” of atheists – but surely more than a few, today, choose atheism (or at least a de facto atheism, the acting “as though God did not exist” which he twice refers to) because it assures them of insulation from any eventual consequences of their actions; the possibility of God threatens to unleash a spectre at the feast of present-day hedonism, a party which is far too enjoyable to be threatened by the awful possibility that the religious nutters might just be right …

McGrath points to the demise of traditional, (what we might call “philosophical” atheism) in the case of Madalyn Murray’s desperate descendants in modern-day America. But he says nothing about the constant, intense anti-religious, secular power-base building (which is threatening to make Christianity as difficult, in Western society, as it is in many Asian countries) – as seen in the activities of the inaptly-titled “American Civil Liberties Union” (a real enemy of liberty if ever there was one), and, in Britain, the constant barrage of secularist, anti-religious, or simply “naturalist” propaganda in the form of nightly television programmes, and the kind of adulation given, in our culture, to such as Philip Pullman. History seems to show that few things actually cease to exist – “atheism” is one of them – they just come back in a new form. McGrath shows (traditional) atheism as a necessary part of Modernism, one left high and dry by the ebbing of the Modernist tide, and the rise of Postmodernism. But now “Anti-Theism” (this concept is the key to understanding such as Dawkins, I would argue) is come upon us, and that particular tide is in full flood. The Christian Church now has a new enemy to resist, a further fight on its hands.

Also recommended: McGrath’s Dawkins' God. Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life, 2005;

see also: Quotes 60.

Author's site: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mcgrath/

* A while ago, B&Q (a large hardware/home improvement retail chain, in Britain) built one of their out-of-town superstores near Macclesfield, Cheshire, and staffed it only with people aged 55 and over. After a while, they compared performance there with that of their other stores, finding among other things (eg. the profits were higher) that the level of theft was considerably lower - indicating, surely, that the nearer peoples' upbringing was to a generation which believed in the objective source and reality of moral laws, the more honest they were.

Kenneth McAll, Healing the Family Tree, London, Sheldon Press, 1984, 1986. ISBN 0-85969-532-8. Still available on order.

The "blurb" at the back of this book, describing the contents for would-be readers, calls it "sensational" and "highly original"; such words are designed to sell, and rarely to be taken literally; this is not the case with this book, however. McAll (1910-2001) was a medical doctor, trained in Edinburgh, and from a Congregational missionary background. He returned to China as a Christian "missionary-surgeon", at a time when the Sino-Japanese war was already in progress. He was later interned by the Japanese, in World War II, along with his wife and child. Experiences in China convinced him of the reality of spiritual forces - evil and benign - and of the influence, on people living today, of unresolved badness, evil, or "unfinished spiritual business" in one's ancestry, that is, influence upon the living, of the acts and experiences of the dead. Such influences may be in the nature of suicide, unforgiven sin, occult practice, or dying from (or committing of) abortion, on the part of ancestors. Or, it may be that a person was simply not committed to God, on death, as in the case of suicides who had not received Christian burial and committal. Such events and occurrences in one's ancestry, he argues, may produce spiritual, or more often physical, effects on people, and normally despite their ignorance of such things (how many of us know details of the acts, beliefs, and practices, of our ancestors three generations back?).

McAll returned to England, became a psychiatrist, and began treating patients by medical, psychiatric, and also spiritual means, and this book details case after case where he was able to cure - often dramatically - the chronic physical symptoms of patients who had been referred to him by medical colleagues. His principal spiritual weapon, he repeatedly makes clear, was the celebration of the Eucharist (indeed, his sacramental emphasis is perhaps a surprising feature of one from a "Free Church" tradition). In many cases, McAll plotted the family tree of the patient (eg. p. 14) before isolating where exactly, in the patient's past, the source of the problem lay. Other people, the book makes clear, were enabled to study their own family history, and lay it, and their ancestors' situations, before God, resulting in peace and lasting cure. Often, treatment might reveal the presence of occult practice, abortion, or death of a sibling, which only one member of a family knew about, but the revelation, and its spiritual treatment by way of the Eucharist, was sufficient to bring lasting health and happiness to all. Not only was "treatment" effective when done in the presence of sufferers, but also when affected people were prayed about, without their knowledge, over great distances.

A notable feature of McAll's work was the reality and immediacy of his direct spiritual insight and experience, such that he recounts "seeing" spiritual entities (of all kinds) in a very matter-of-fact way; and such discernment, indeed, is the way with many people in the deliverance ministry. Also, some of his patients were also able to "see" former-relatives and spiritual beings - including Mary the mother of Jesus (p. 26), whose role, in this instance, should surprise many of traditional Protestant-Evangelical beliefs. The connection of this particular kind of deliverance, with "conventional" deliverance ministry, is shown by the way that the author devotes two chapters (6 and 7) to "normal" spiritual warfare; he constantly makes the point that spiritual healing is only a part of such work, as conventional medical methods will usually be necessary as well (one case he cites, for example, proved only to need normal surgical treatment (p. 83-4)).

The implications of this book, and its ideas, are far reaching. It means that no longer can we think that people are only affected by, or in some way accountable for, their own sin; sins are indeed visited upon us to the third and fourth generations. It also means that we are to concern ourselves with the dead up to the point of praying to God for their eternal peace and forgiveness (praying to the dead, or attempting to contact them, McAll reminds us, is strictly forbidden). For any from Protestant, Reformed, or Evangelical traditions, prayers for the dead will be a difficult concept, and the author, obviously aware of this, devotes Chapter 8 to showing how, from the very beginnings of Christianity, there was a strong practice of praying for dead relatives, and this was enshrined in the teaching of the apostles, and thence the Fathers of the Church; only after many centuries was this corrupted, into the late-Medieval practice of buying prayers for the departed, and indulgences.

If the Christian Church, in all its many forms, was to take McAll's ideas and practices seriously - as I think it should - the result would, indeed, be sensational - and renewing; and the Church surely needs renewal.

Kenneth McAll's work is continued by the Generational Healing Trust - www.healingtrust.info

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, London, Faber, 2005. ISBN 0-571-22411-3.

Years of youth, and growing up, in a rural English boarding school; the cliques, games, and playing fields; the muted talk in the dorm at night – all that we might expect is here. That this place, Hailsham, is not an ordinary school, we perhaps know from the outset (there seem to be no holidays, and no parents to go home to). The story is the memories of Kathy (it is the late 1990s, she is 31). Kathy is a “carer” (a geriatric nurse, perhaps?). As her story develops, from infants class to adolescence, we learn by degrees that these are no ordinary children, their destiny is something unusual. We learn what it is slowly, just as they themselves have been slowly initiated.

It is not possible to discuss this book without saying why they are different (if you want to keep a surprise in store, look away now). The children have been bred for organ donation, and there are several others of these establishments, in addition to Hailsham. Later, in adult life, they will enter a phase of being “carers”, who look after other former-school-students who are now undergoing “donation”; then, they will graduate to being donors themselves. After two, three, or even four “donations”, they will “complete” (die), perhaps on the operating table, where, it is hinted, “white coats” will remove the rest of their organs, before “switching them off”. The “students” have been produced from ordinary, living, people (the word “clone” is only used twice in the book).

There is great merit in treating the subject of organ donor production by cloning in this particular kind of novel, as opposed to the various other genres, where we might otherwise expect to find it. The monstrous inhumanity of the subject is consequently presented in a way that is calm and un-hysterical, and all the more devastating for this. The book does not read like a protest against the developing trend of justifying the dismantling of the valuing of human life, in the name of science or medicine; yet this, all the more strongly, perhaps, is its effect. It is quite a feat in itself for a writer to get so much inside the mind of a character that he is able to re-create it as someone who is real; but to do this of characters the like of which don’t actually exist, and still have us believe in them, and grieve for them, requires very special gifts; Ishiguro is surely one of the very best of writers on the British “literary scene”.

But what of the reality of organ-donor-by-cloning? Most surely it will come about, one day, so long as our western society stays on its present course, committed to its materialist world-view, by which this present life is considered all that there is, and that all life exists by accident, where any question of life’s “meaning” is … meaningless. The “benefits” of human “progress” – as has long been realised – will only ever be available to the few, and supplied by the many unfortunates; and the beneficiaries, being ethically emasculated by the relativism of our fast-becoming amoral world, will unthinkingly take all that they consider their due. Bringing people into the world for the benefits that their physical attributes will bestow – which has already happened in Britain – is assuredly the beginning of this process; motivations behind this, or any other present action, will soon be long forgotten by its irresistible logic. Before long the market, greed, and expediency, will determine things; and the future will smile wryly at “ethical committees” and the like.

In the last few chilling pages we learn that Hailsham (now gone) was the most humane of such institutions, and was run by people who had made feeble attempts at protest; and - we are told - the situation of current future-donor children is very different …

Louis Markos, Lewis Agonistes. How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle With the Modern and Postmodern World, Nashville, Tennessee, Broadman & Holman, 2003. ISBN 0-8054-2778-3. 174 pp. (Availability: unfortunately, I could only obtain a copy in the UK through Amazon.co.uk).

C. S. Lewis’s name is found in the title and subtitle of this important book. It is written by a Lewis scholar; but it is not a book about C. S. Lewis, it is a book about the age we live in, its prevailing world-view, the fundamental errors that lie at its heart, and the means by which we can fight against them, and find a way out of their consequences. The scheme of using the ideas and apologias found throughout Lewis’s very diverse oeuvre, to combat the “modernist paradigm” or the “materialist world-view”, is itself very original. “Lewis Agonistes” means Lewis’s struggle, or Lewis the wrestler (in Milton’s play, it is Samson agonistes, in Genesis, it is Jacob); and Lewis fought against the illusions and errors of supposing that all is the product of blind chance, and that we might try to make our own world, and our own purpose, independent of the God who made us, loves us, and will save us despite our efforts against him. Louis Markos identifies five areas of struggle: Wrestling with Science, with the New Age, with Evil and Suffering, with the Arts, and with Heaven and Hell; the book begins with a resumé of Lewis's life and thought.

Perhaps “Science” might have been better expressed as “Materialist Science” or “Scientific Materialism”, but it is right that this agon (struggle) comes first, since the “materialist paradigm” is the world-view or value-system by which our western world is governed, from the smallest detail of life to the most ubiquitous. Beneath the sceptre of this - from which all else flows - “religion” is often merely tolerated as a fringe activity for those (it is supposed) who feel the need for such things (this analysis, its causes and effects, is brilliantly presented in a book which might be read in parallel to Markos’s, Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth (see Quotes, 39, 40)).

Wrestling with the New Age (pp. 61-89) is brilliant in its analysis of New Agers as people sickened with the materialism of this world, but who will only find cure, and peace, in Christ. The Christian faith is their natural home, and has everything to supply their needs, because the faith of the Church, as Lewis tells us, should vibrate with the symbolism, mysticism and sacramentalism that the Mediaeval world-view bequeathed to us, if only we can put away the post-Enlightenment sterility that has in measure produced the Evangelical Protestant Christianity that so many of us are part of. Markos tells us that he is of this tradition, and Lewis, also, came originally from Northern Ireland Protestant stock. But C. S. Lewis was steeped in magic, myth and Mediaevalism from his earliest days, and Markos has done Evangelicalism a great service by arguing that in this direction - not in the rationalistic, post-Enlightenment-derived thought that produced, for example, biblical literalism – lies authentic Christianity; this is not a message that will be palatable to all, perhaps, but the sooner we learn it, the quicker we can throw off the modernist materialist world-view.

The chapter concerned with the arts (p. 112-144) develops further this plea for a return to the imaginative and mythopoeic in Christian art (and the ending, for example, of the "ghettoization" of Christian fiction, p. 139). Sadly, C. S. Lewis seems to have had that blindness, often found in literary people, to the visual and spatial arts (a story is told of how, after a typically-long walk in the English countryside, he came upon a lonely village church - but did not bother to go into it, where, very likely, he might have found a rich repository of the beautiful/truthful products of Christian culture). Perhaps we find a little of that here. Wrestling with the Arts tells us much about the modernist destruction of verbal meaning - upon which the Christian conception of rational truth, its defence, and communicability, ultimately rests; but equally destructive is the materialist savaging of aesthetic value: the relationship of truth and beauty (upon which Christian visual arts have depended) is as void, if a pile of excrement can be considered to have the same value as Michelangelo's Pieta, as when a shopping list can be claimed to have the same validity as the Bible. Here, in contrast with non-meaning and relativism, we find an exposition of the (true) artist as sub-creator, a concept Lewis derived from J. R. R. Tolkien (pp.133-5). The source of biblical literalism in post-Enlightenment rationalism is a theme Markos returns to in this chapter (p. 121), but - his book reveals (eg. p. 37) - it is not only Protestant Evangelicalism, but also other areas of Christianity, that were produced by it (one might add theological liberalism/modernism; maybe there could be "Wrestling with Modernist Post-Christianity"; Lewis surely had much to tell us about theological "radicalism").

"Wrestling with Evil and Suffering" (pp. 90-111) is, not surprisingly, a re-statement of the "free will defence", which is particularly powerful in Lewis's writings; Markos leads us from the rational analyses of The Problem of Pain to the hard experience of A Grief Observed. But the main cause of human grief is surely the sad delusions of the "optimistic" view of man, which "begins with Rousseau [and] leads to a long list of totalitarian, antihumanistic states that crush individuality and purge out all difference" (p. 92).

A great virtue of this book is the brilliance with which, time and again, Markos encapsulates, in a few sentences or pages, the whole of a complex framework of thought, making profound ideas - Christian, or anti-Christian - clearly intelligible (eg. the whole of the human condition, as seen by orthodox Christianity, pp. 90-98); if he has learned this from C. S. Lewis, as may be the case, he has learned it very well.

Finally, this book convinced me of something that had for some while been in the process of suggesting itself, and which now I am certain of: that Christian thought, and writing, can not move forward, or bear new fruit, until we have totally put behind us the post-Enlightenment "Modernist" world view, its assumptions and reasonings (which we can now see were not really Christian at all, but are perhaps what the New Testament writers meant by the "things of this world"). Once this is done, Christian thought will realise a new flowering. Louis Markos's book may well be seen to have stood at the boundary between that time and the flawed past.

Audeh and Patricia Rantisi, with Ralph K. Beebe, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 2nd Edition, Bath (England), Eagle Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-86347-581 7. 188 pp., £8-99. (Availability (UK): IVP Ltd, Norton Street Nottingham, NG7 3HR, distribution@ivpbooks.com).

Some years ago, on television, I saw an interview with a young Israeli. He was being questioned about his people's mistreatment of the indigenous Palestinian population. How could it possibly be - he asked - that a people who have been persecuted as much as mine, might have no right to do as they wish, to whom they please? When I once recounted this story, I was told that many Israelis do not think this way. No doubt this is true, and someone who would surely have agreed was Audeh Rantisi. This book is his story, and the story of his people, the Christians of Palestine; and it is a terrible one. Most of the book (chapters 1 - 10) are from his hand, with his voice speaking; chapters 11 and 12 have been added by his wife Patricia (the first edition was published in 1990).

Audeh Rantisi, from the town of Lydda, could trace his ancestry there back many centuries, probably to the Early Christian period (Acts 9, 32-35 refers to Christian believers in Lydda). In three days, in July 1948, 11-year-old Audeh, his family, and many of his community, were evicted from their homes by Israeli soldiers and forced to trek for many miles along rocky terrain, with no food or water. Some were shot by the soldiers, many others died on the way (two Jewish families took possession of the Rantisi home; Audeh's father, pathetically, kept the key to the house for many years). The horrors told in Chapter 1 of this book are hard to relay, and sadly there are many more. Eventually, the forced refugees made a home in Ramallah (ten miles from Jerusalem), where, over the later decades of the 20th century, the yoke of Israeli oppression became heavier and heavier.

Four years after the forced exile from Lydda, Audeh dedicated his life to the service of Jesus Christ, and in 1955, left Palestine for the Bible College of Wales, Swansea, where he met Patricia, daughter of an English clergyman. After a period in Africa (and, for Patricia, five years' missionary work in Peru), Audeh returned to Ramallah. They were married in 1965, and for many years ran an evangelical home for boys, a ministry to children in need, which continued until the 1990s. In the intervening decades, Audeh was much involved in local politics, attempting to exercise a measure of Palestinian self-determination which was later to be extinguished by the ruling Israelis; Conor Cruise O'Brien has apparently suggested that a people hates no one so much as those whom it has persecuted.

Chapter 2 and the appendixes give much historical/diplomatic background to the "Palestinian problem". They remind us that Zionism has its origins in the 19th century, not the first half or middle of the 20th, and was based on the untruth that here was a "land without people" ready and waiting for a "people without land". Many of us probably thought that Zionism was created by pious orthodox Jews, for whom the ancient promises of Yahweh readily translated into 20th century property rights - but Audeh tells us that most of them were secular, non-practising folk, who simply made political use of the ancient prophecy (p. 32).

Much of this book chronicles, almost en passant, the growing destruction of human rights by a rulership not in the least influenced by the civilised world's attempts to see democracy and justice established in a benighted region. The reader cannot but be appalled by the hideous mistreatment of the Palestinian people; this is a book that could create anger, but the anger was not Audeh's. Time and again (despite experience of pain that could never be healed), he expresses empathy for his oppressors, an understanding of their suffering and fruitless, tragic, search for security, and recounts the deep shame felt by many Jews the world over, concerning the ability of their people to inflict oppression on others. The capacity for understanding and forgiveness, shown throughout this book, comes only form one source.

As Blessed Are the Peacemakers makes clear, many efforts by the international community to prevent further destruction of human rights have been simply disregarded, and at times we read here of a state in the hands of virtual terrorists, people whose deeds equal many of the so-called "Axis of Evil" countries, put under severe military pressure by America and its allies. Shameful, also, is the attitude of Christians around the world to their Christian brothers and sisters in Israel (we hear plenty about persecution of Christians by Muslims, Hindus and militantly-atheist states - why not in this case?). Ironically, the final tragedy remains a Jewish one. The ultimate evil that can be done to a people (here, surely, to the most persecuted race in human history), the final depravity that suffering can inflict on them, is that they are brought to a state where they, or a few of them, can for a moment believe that they are right, and it is proper, appropriate, to behave the same to others, to do as it has been done to them. There are no greater depths to which anyone can fall.

John Blanchard, Does God Believe in Atheists?, Darlington (England), Evangelical Press, 2000. ISBN 0 85234 460 0. 655 pp.

This is a very large, almost encyclopaedic book. Its 655 pages treat all kinds of subjects and areas of thought; it mentions literally hundreds of authors, writers, thinkers, and their books; everyone from Anaximander to Jeremy Beadle ("a lightweight British television personality...", p. 593) is here, explained, and summarised - now I will know where to go to discover what Plotinus's philosophy was all about, or Immanuel Kant's. His information is very much up to the minute (Phillip Johnson, Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker are all here). The difficulty with producing such a vast book is controlling it, knowing, as you're writing what becomes page 490, what you wrote about a very similar subject on page 49. The index listing all these people and subjects is very inclusive, though the bibliographical references can be thin and inadequate at times - but good documentation would have filled about twenty more pages. Blanchard's use of sources can be worrying at times: too often we read a controversial view, look up its origin, only to find it quoted from a quotation in another book (and one which might have been sympathetic to Blanchard's kind of view, not the original author's); some of the materialist/atheist's pronouncements are very damning of them, and in this circumstance, cautious authors would have been very sure to check, and cite, the original source, preventing any possible charge of misrepresentation - but to do as I suggest might have added months more to a production which must have taken long enough. Twice we are told that Shakespeare opined that "life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". no, not Shakespeare, but Macbeth at a very crucial stage in his story (Hamlet, however, is credited with his own opinions). There are too few dates in the text, so that Socrates, Rousseau and Keith Ward may be mentioned in the same couple of paragraphs, with no warning that several centuries separate these people and their works - are we supposed to know about this?

Above all - since I seem to be registering complaints - there is the title, which will help some people to dismiss the book without opening it (materialists should read it, but they never will, the title, and the publisher's name, will see to that). So what is it really about? What should the explanatory subtitle (which I always recommend) be? Its subject is indeed atheism, and it is a powerful, wholly sucessful, attack on the whole credibility, reality, and even viability of atheism. Blanchard shows (though I don't remember him using the phrase) that atheists are "in denial", their atheism being a product of the will. While I know I am reading my own view into his text, this is the idea that comes across, time and again: that atheism is a deception which starts with willed self-deception, and moves outwards, like ripples in a pond. He reveals - again not explicitly - the centrality of evolutionism in any atheistic/materialist mindset. Many things I'd wondered about are here lucidly explained (not in a wordy way; it is not a big book due to prolixities): I'd long wondered why some of our political leaders profess Christianity, while being at the head of a state machine which prolongs or promotes quite un-Christian ideas/practices: Blanchard explains about the Post-Modern ("virtue") of a person's compartmentalising of their religion, morals, ethics, and political ideas (p. 201).

This is one of those books which so convinces its readers 40% of the way through the text (such an enormous one, in this case), that further reading might not be necessary - but here there comes something rather special: Does God Believe in Atheists? is quite a page-turner (at least, once those cold ancient Greeks are out of the way, p. 39), and at times I could not put it down. How many writers on beliefs/ideas have managed this? How many historians of philosophy/theology? I can't think of any at all, and I have read quite a few, and find long texts very hard going, as a rule. Part of this effect is created by dividing long chapters into manageable - titled - chunks (we live in the age of "sound bites"), but the main credit for this is the author's style and zest - not that there is any trivialising of these (in reality quite grave) subjects. John Blanchard has published a very great deal, apparently. I had not read any of this, but I will certainly look out for him; and if you come across this book, don't be put off by the title, or the size.

Rabindranath R. Maharaj with Dave Hunt, Death of a Guru, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1978, 1986. ISBN 0 340 38776 9. [This is the 1986 edition, which has an additional chapter.]

A long while ago, on British television, there was a short programme in which a solitary man or woman spoke of some extremely powerful event which had changed their lives. I fancy it was called The Light of Experience, and I still remember some of the events related. Nothing, but nothing, speaks more powerfully than actual first-hand experience; this is why Death of a Guru is such a powerful, important book. It relates the story of Rabi, a high-caste Hindu (Brahmin) born to a wealthy, religiously-very-influential family in Trinidad (by one of those strange racial-geographical stirrings-about - no doubt the work of British colonialism - Trinidad, in the West Indies, has or had a significant Indian Hindu (and also, it seems, Muslim) population). Rabi was born into a close-knit community of Brahmins who immediately made him aware that he was different, and very special. His father was a yogi who took a vow of silence and total inactivity, soon after his son's conception, and it was assumed (and Rabi himself accepted) that Rabi would before long take his place. From an early age he carried out an intense programme of spiritual exercises (meditation, scripture reading, ritual bathing, prayer, yoga, etc.); in fact, he did nothing else (since his family and community had only one task - to see to all of his personal and material needs). When only a teenager, he had had intense, personal experiences, through his religious practices and rituals, of the Hindu deities and passionately worshipped the sun and the cow; he quickly came to see that he was indeed god (or part of god). But increasingly, he had emptiness and anxiety within. Long periods of meditation could induce calm - but this was only very temporary, quickly removed by the tensions (particularly personal) of everyday life.

The process of his coming to Christ was a relatively quick one (after a few meetings with local Christians); but no sooner than he had become a Christian, he discovered virtually his whole family either following, or confessing to having just preceded, him. Before long - as the reader might expect - he was leading evangelistic campaigns in Europe and even Asia (where his family name immediately revealed his status and supposed religious identity). Curiously, his mother (who had left Trinidad soon after being widowed) became, not a Christian, but a leading member of a Hindu organisation in India.

Most significant for westerners (for whom "Eastern religions" are so attractive), and "liberal" Christians drifting into "multi-faithism", is Rabi's attitude to the Hindu gods he had spent his earlier life worshipping. His words are specific, and leave no room for re-interpretation: Christ had set him free from "the fears I had lived with all my life - fear of the spirits that haunted our family, fear of the evil forces exerting their influence in my life, fear of what Shiva and the other gods would do if I didn't constantly appease them." (p. 128). The "gods" were neither forces of good, nor symbols of natural forces of the cosmos, but instead, were Satan's angels, demons: "They were the real power behind the idols [which were housed in the family prayer room]. ... These were the beings I had met in Yogic trance and meditation ..." (p. 136). For long he had considered it unthinkable that he could ever become Christian - but once he had done so, he had none of the syncretistic delusions of the multi-faithists: "We knew that there was no compromise, no possible blending of Hinduism and true Christianity. They were diametrically opposite. One was darkness, the other light" (p. 134). Rabi and his brother took vast piles of idols, images and ritual objects from the prayer room, and burnt them: "The tiny figures we had once feared as gods were soon turning to ashes. The evil powers could terrorize us no longer. We rejoiced with one another and offered thanks to the Son of God who had died in order to set us free" (p. 134). Very soon, years of family bitterness and even hatred was turned to love, joy and forgiveness (apparently Hinduism, and the law of Karma, do not really recognise forgiveness).

While there are many in the Church who, I have suggested, are knowingly choosing, or moving into, a multi-faithist mindset, there are others for whom the "gods" of non-Christian religions are indeed emanations - however well masked - of the Satanic. The difficulty for the latter group is to explain how it might be, then, that there are clearly moral people within every religious tradition, whose goodness seems hard to account for, if their perpetual concern is actually the worship of demons; these religions and peoples produced much of inestimable worth, in terms of glorious religious buildings and art, in the East; but all beauty comes from God - demons, and a demonised society, can only produce ugliness. But the assumptions of the former group involve the (I think impossible) task of trying to show how the very different ultimate objectives, and world-views/value systems of these religions, can be made to fit one another. And the testimony of Rabi Maharaj cannot be set aside: he had more real knowledge and personal experience of Hinduism and its deities, by the age of ten, than our western multi-faithists will ever, can ever, have.

Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth. Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism. Downers Grove, Illinois, InterVarsity Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8308-2267-4. [Availability: I know of none other than this first US edition, but my own copy came via my local Christian Literature Crusade bookshop].

The anti-evolution world is a much more complex place than is generally acknowledged - and there is good reason for the seeming-simplification. Phillip Johnson is a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. His campaign against evolution and "naturalism" ("materialism" is a better word, in many ways) is well-known in America with his books Darwin on Trial and Defeating Darwinism (the second of these published in Britain as Testing Darwinism, 1997). He would consider that his place is in the "Intelligent Design" (ID) movement (along with Michael Behe and Michael Denton), which is very separate from that of Creationism (Johnson is a Christian, which some IDers are not). He thinks in terms of evolution (or rather evolutionism) as being like a great log which blocks our way; on one side, there is a steep cliff, on the other, a precipice. Only reason can act as the wedge which can split and remove this barrier - and hence the title. Reason, evidence, and the persuasive arguments of ID, quickly reveal the materialist camp as die-hard defenders of an orthodoxy which is pure ideology, not real science, people desperately clinging on to tired, 19th century arguments about variations in bird's beaks, rather than accepting the implications of the need to see the emergence of life in terms of the origination, and transmission, of information (Ch. 2). Evolutionism's critics have long ago made the distinction between microevolution (variations - sometimes temporary - within already-existing kinds of life) and macroevolution (the emergence of completely new kinds of life), and swept aside much of the so-called evidence as pointing only to the insignificant variations seen in the former. This book details the way in which - in America - the education-academic establishment has for long subverted the religious faith upon which the nation was built; education now forms a powerful tool in the hands of materialists, with which they are slowly edging religion out of national life, only to be tolerated as long as it is personal and private, and not influencing society (Chs. 1 & 3).

The materialist fight-back has all the viciousness of an elite whose sovereignty is threatened (it's now their world, we live in, didn't you know?) and their chief weapon appears to be caricature and distortion - thus IDers are portrayed as a kind of irrational Creationists, with much use being made of "straw man" arguing (parody your opponent as something weak and stupid which you can easily knock to the ground; then go ahead and do it) (Ch. 6). The Wedge of Truth discusses various issues in the materialism/theism debates, such as the implications of materialist values (eg. Steven Pinker's alleged seeming-advocacy of the justified destruction of unwanted babies; Ch. 5), and the attempted marginalisation of religion (eg. by Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria"; Ch. 4). The validity of "evolutionary theism/theistic evolution" is a question which seems to hover in the wings. Many shorter pieces by Johnson are available directly from his excellent website (http://www.arn.org/johnson/johome.htm); in all, he is one of the most refreshing and important writers on these subjects currently on the scene.

I wish Johnson and his writings very much success. I can't help, however, thinking that we must see his piece of timber in a somewhat different way, vertically not horizontally - evolutionism is not so much a roadblock as a great pier or pillar, in fact the one which alone holds up the great edifice of the materialist world-view which Western life is run by, dominating, as it does, government, law, Establishment, academia and the media. The vested interests within all of this are huge (far beyond mere science), and I can't actually see them allowing something as pathetically small as truth or reason come in and spoil the party. The pillar of evolution - despite whatever amount of crimes its influence can be found to originate (see "The blood-stained 'Century of Evolution'", http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3319.asp ) - will be shored-up and bolstered, whatever its cracks, until some even-better foundation for materialism comes along; then, evolution will probably be ditched.

Professor Johnson's speaking tour in Britain (Autumn 2004) was a great success. To receive news about related future events, see: http://www.darwinreconsidered.org/