Francis Spufford, UNAPOLOGETIC: WHY, DESPITE EVERYTHING, CHRISTIANITY CAN STILL MAKE SURPRISING EMOTIONAL SENSE. London: Faber & Faber; San Francisco: Harper One, 2012, xiii, 221 pp. $25.99. 

A Book Review by WRF Member This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. John Boyer Chair of Evangelism and Culture Westminster Theological Seminary

Yeshua looks around. He sees the doves in their wicker cages,

and the half-grown spring lambs in their straw, and the nervous cattle sidling, kept perpetually antsy by the smell of blood that drifts out of the temple doors. He sees the money-change stalls where, before you can even buy your animal for the sacrifice, you have to swap the emperor’s dirty coinage for the temple’s own clean currency, good nowhere else. He sees the whole apparatus for keeping this one little walled acre of ground separate from the compromised, colonized world outside. And he begins to shout. Do you call this pure? Do you think this keeps you clean? … Nothing is pure! This is the house of the loving father who welcomes home his lost children! … Do you think you can sell his forgiveness? … It cannot be sold! It can only be given! 

I have read hundreds, possibly thousands of books either about apologetics, or direct apologies for the Christian faith. This volume must qualify as one of the most unusual. Francis Spufford in this paragraph retells the occasion where Jesus cleanses the temple. The style is fresh, and his dramatic prose matches the scene’s commotion, even as it highlights the crucial theological issue at stake: being right with God is a free gift, not a bargain.

Spufford is a prolific public intellectual, having examined such diverse issues as the myth of communism (Red Plenty, on how the promise of prosperity within Khrushchev’s ascendency was at best a fairy tale), Arctic explorations (I May Be Some Time, on the brave, stoic British adventures to places such as Terra Nova, and what they reveal about the views of different cultures in the cold North). He also writes science fiction, for which he is a prize-winning author.

Spufford is a penitent atheist. His prose is directed primarily to “Godless Europeans,” whose church attendance rates are so remarkably low. This includes the popular “New Atheists,” whose agenda was recently expressed in the advertisement on London buses. He faults them not so much for logical errors as for… emotional blunders. To them, he says:

Take the well-known slogan on the atheist bus in London. I know, I know, that’s an utterance by the hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, but in this particular case they’re pretty much stating the ordinary wisdom of everyday disbelief. The atheist bus says: “There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.” All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it doesn’t even have time to wave goodbye? It isn’t “probably”. New Atheists aren’t claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn’t a God. In fact they aren’t claiming anything substantial at all, because, really, how would they know? It’s as much of a guess for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here is “enjoy”. I’m sorry – enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error. 

Such a paragraph reveals as much about Spufford’s writing style as it does his philosophy. Indeed, his style is either the favorite aspect or the most irritating for his readers. On of his detractors says, “[Unapologetic] is written so badly that one can barely read it. It took a great force of will (and a glass of Dow’s 1977 vintage port) for me to get through it. It could serve as an example of horrible popular writing, and I’m not sure why HarperCollins didn’t give Spufford a decent editor.” Others believe quite the opposite, that it is well written, and conveys the very best about the Christian message. “It’s the most recent version of [an appealing kind] of indirect, charming and in some ways conciliatory approach to apologetics, as opposed to the frontal assault,” said John Stackhouse Jr., a theology professor at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, author of Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (2006). When you garner such contradictory critiques, it means you are probably doing something right.

 A bit in the manner of Karl Barth, or even Abraham Kuyper, Spufford asserts his book is not an apologia, which for him is a defense of ideas (plus, he says, “because I am not sorry,” falling, no doubt tongue-in-cheek, into a basic etymological error). But then he goes right ahead and gives us an apologia for the Christian faith, based, as he claims, on its emotional payoff. Among the most valuable portions of this fascinating book is its treatment of sin. He dubs it HPtFtU, “The Human Propensity to Mess Things Up” (the F stands for the “F-bomb,” which may put some readers off, though it is a rather inventive way to put things!). Spufford compares the huge crimes of genocide or cruel torture to ordinary sins of omission and believes they are comparable. “Keep yourself busy with stuff. Don’t look inside. Shop. Rent a DVD. Kill zombies on your Xbox…” These distractions in God’s view are as big a sin as mass murder, because they deprive us of what He wants for us.

His critiques of unbelief are equally poignant. What is wrong with Darwinism? “The moral scandal of evolution is not that it contradicts some sweet old myth about God knitting the coats for the little lambkins: it’s that it works by, works through, would not work without, continuous suffering.” This kind of reasoning is bound to frustrate empiricists who want the facts, only the facts. But it has a way of cutting through to the heart of the matter, to the presuppositions which control the facts, whether we like it or not.

 Spufford also boldly demonstrates the incapacity different religions to be of any real help. Neither Islam nor Judaism are able to save us. The reason is that they make demands that are achievable. Their laws are a “wearable coat.” The Christian faith is altogether different. It makes impossible demands. Its principles are “lunatic”: give your possessions away, love strangers, etc. You even have to mean what you say and do! This is “thrillingly impractical.” Jesus is not a great moral teacher in the manner of Confucius or Socrates. Again, if he were a guide to the good life, he would be “catastrophically impractical.” But then we are offered forgiveness as a free gift. This is emotionally safe, because God is there beside us, and we don’t have to earn his presence. What I think is remarkable is Spufford’s essential orthodoxy (well, there are a few departures: Genesis chapter 2 is a Hebrew myth; judgments about sexual sins belong to law religions, not Christianity…). And throughout, he expresses the basics of the faith in such creative ways. His retelling of the Prodigal son is worth the price of the book.

The biggest payoff for Spufford is forgiveness. That is because he can feel the relief. 

It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me. No, I can’t prove it. I don’t know that any of it is true. I don’t know if there’s a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item.) But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I’d be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. 

Of course he believes in God. Only he wants that belief not to be reduced to a set of bare propositions. He somehow trusts his emotions to guide him into the truth. “Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. No dancing about; no moving target, I promise. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.” Understood generously, this is presuppositional apologetics.

In the manner of G. K. Chesterton, Spufford asserts that the Christian faith must be true because it is so implausible: “Claiming that a provincial rabbi somehow embodies the impulse behind billions of years of history and unthinkable expanses of space does not have much philosophical dignity to it as a position… It deliberately entangles unlikeliness.” Christianity is a tragedy. Christ’s death was “obscure,” and he is nothing like Oedipus or Prince Hamlet. Death by crucifixion is a fate so low, as Cicero puts it, that no decent person should ever mention it. One would have to turn the world upside down to do justice to God’s sense of the tragedy of it.  And that is what happened!

I am not sure what the future holds for such a book. But I hope it gets the attention it deserves. And I hope it will egg Christians on to try a little more imagination with our typically prosaic theology. That is how I feel about it!