On the Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer

This is one of the Penguin “Great Ideas” series – but it is one of the few within that collection where I have found the writer’s thought completely without merit. 

OK he is anti God and religion and therefore there would be little common ground between us in terms of conclusions, however often reading the writings of those that have come to other conclusions from yourself sharpens your thought and is an intellectually stimulating counter-point.  I found done of this with Schopenhauer, his arguments seemed to fail even on their own terms. 

I would also add that his Essay “On Women” would suggest that he wasn’t a feminist to put it mildly…

Inscribing the Text by Walter Brueggemann

This collection of sermons and prayer/poems is of astounding quality.  This comes as no surprise given Brueggemann is one of the greatest living theologians.

But what is perhaps most powerful is that this is a pastoral collection, sermons given at particular moments in particular places, and yet informed by the full extent of Brueggemann’s scholarship. What a delight it must be to find yourself in the pews as Brueggemann rises to speak of God. 

How many Sundays have been defined by the crushing mediocrity of a sermon? And yet somewhere out there such pearls as these were being offered. 

Many of the prayers are response to Psalms, many are, to use a term of Jim Cotter’s, “unfoldings” of a Psalm – not translation or paraphrase but a reimagining in our contemporary setting of what prompted the first Psalmist to write or craft the words. 

Much of the collection was written shortly after “9/11” - in a moment when Americans of all perspectives were taken off guard. Brueggemann would fit within what is loosely called “Liberal” America and if is interesting to see him trying to process the events of 9/11.  At moments the shock and grief of the event are at the fore, but at others he is taking on a bold prophetic voice – as the American Establishment lurched toward reactive and ultra-conservative responses, often buttressed by “Christian” rhetoric – he is calling out to a different understanding of the message of Christ.

This collection is a joy to read, but that does not mean it is an entirely comfortable read.  The intensity of Brueggemann’s faith and thought is a challenge – even on the page he demands our attention, and then directs that attention away to Christ.  Anyone would is genuinely attentive to Christ can not stay long unchanged. 

Men and women in marriage by Church of England's Faith and Order Commission

Many have stated that this document should receive the fate common to the vast majority of General Synod Miscellaneous paper, to be ignored and to sink without trace impacting neither the life of the Church and much less the life of wider society. 

However such is my disgust with its content that I feel at least some comment must be offered.

We begin with paragraph 13 (I am highlighting only the most extreme of the documents errors, please do not interpret my silence on other paragraphs as assent to them!).  There is a wilful misinterpretation of the quotation “The first blessing God gave to man was society” – it seems to me that in the context of the quote “society” is being used as a pseudonym for companionship and not as society as in for example “Big Society”.  Neither does it seem clear from the fact that the first expression of that blessing was marriage between Adam and Eve (a union with only limited coexistence with our current legalistic expression of marriage) which of the characteristics of Adam and Eve are  about any resulting patterning of “society” – perhaps we should only be allowed to marry people who have been cloned from one of our ribs?

On to paragraph 21 – which tells in the context of marriage sex between those for whom there is “no prospect of actually having children” is still somehow open to procreation.  This is bizarre, it is characteristic of the deployment of arguments to justify a predetermined conclusion without any critical evaluation of them.

In paragraph 23 we come to one of, in my view, the most offensive and pastorally damaging statements in the document.  It is a direct attack on single parents, which even the patronising language about their “heroic struggles” can not hide.  For many being an adoptive or single parent is not ultimately characterised by “struggle”.

In paragraph 41 the document seems to shoot itself in the foot, by stating that neither state nor Church are the arbiters of marriage, it is a matter of God’s providence at work in the couples themselves.  It is therefore left to a question of whether you believe God’s providence to be constrained and limited or bountiful and boundless.  Then in 42 it seeks to pretend that civil marriage within the UK has been defined within the bounds of the Church’s understanding, completely ignoring that the state took an approach to divorce at variance to the Church and only latterly has the Church come to realign its understanding of divorce towards that of the state.

My final complaint is about paragraph 45 which talks of “giving pastoral help to those who seek to engage with the challenges of life responsibly.” It is clear that the vast majority of those who would wish to have a same-sex marriage are doing exactly that, it is an act of responsibility.  However setting that aside even the most ill-informed Gospel reader must see that Jesus was often far more interested in those who, for what ever reason, were engaging with life irresponsibly – are we not now to give pastoral help to the prodigal?

Into Suez by Stevie Davies

Having sat on my wish list, after a review in Planet, for some time I read this book on the plane out to Canada back in May.  Your encounter with a novel is always, I think, more intense when you get the opportunity to spend 9 straight hours reading it.

This is a bitter sweet story, based are a kind of “who do you think you are?” journey.  It is full of all the richness that was so sadly lacking in Barry Unsworth’s Lands of Marvels, while both centre on the lives of a group of “white” British within a hinterland of an indigenous population, that unease about the characterisation that plagued Land of Marvels is thankfully absence here.  Perhaps it is because the key dynamic of this story is the class tensions between the “white” characters, it is a tale of the birth pangs of the social and sexual revolution that would come in the following decade (the 1960s). 

It is also a tale, fundamentally, of lives lived in regret.  Freedom was momentarily grasped and then through tragedy (in the dramatic sense) revoked. The lead character Nia discovers that the small and sheltered life of her Mother was the consequence of that tragedy, and perhaps the only route to survival after it.

This is one of those tales that is haunting, and it lingers (in the best possible way), despite being a fiction the pain is so vivid that it demands your continuing attention.

The Drama of Scripture by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen

This is the latest book to be handed out by the Bishop of Winchester, and is the homework before a Diocesan conference in September. 

The premise of the book is simple – that there is a single over arching [meta] narrative to the Bible.  It is not enough to read parts of the Bible in isolation without at least a sense of the context of the whole “story”.  This is hardly a radical idea, although (as with last year’s book by Tom Wright) the authors seem convinced that this will rock our world…

Having set out this approach the bulk of the book is a retelling of the Bible with a focus on its unifying story.  There is nothing wrong with this – there are one or two points when there is a particular theological interpretation I might question – but in general it is a solid account.  I think that this would be of value to those considering confirmation (or equivalent step) – that is someone who is not completely fresh to Christianity, someone looking to deepen and consolidate their understanding. 

However call me an evangelical if you must, but I do always have a nagging feeling that in the vast majority of cases people would still be better off reading the Bible rather than reading a book about the Bible.

What is the purpose of this book in the context of our Diocesan Conference?  I think it is to encourage a different approach to outreach – for must of the 20^th Century mission has been about imparting the truth of the Christian faith (the search for the Historical Jesus and all that).  However the 21^st Century “post-moderns” have only limited interest in hearing the “facts” about Christianity and an accumulation of facts win never add up to a decisive argument – what matters to them is whether the “story” make sense, and make sense of the world.  The book does make that point – however personally I didn’t need to read this book to arrive at that conviction!

Alongside this we were also given “Hope – the heartbeat of mission” which is a source book of ideas for mission.  It labours its own “radical” notion, that social action and mission are a single activity rather than mutually exclusive.  It identifies three steps, One – connecting with your community, Two – sharing the Gospel in words, Three – giving opportunities to respond.  This is all well and good, and it has lots of great ideas for steps One and Two.  However all it offers under step Three is running an Alpha course (ok that is unfair – it does suggest as an alternative if you want to do something “different” running a Christianity Explored course!).  Really? Is Alpha the only format they could think of for response – and what does it say that Alpha is the third and seemingly final step?

Rites surrounding Death: The Palermo Statement of the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation 2007 Edited by Trevor Lloyd

You might be able to guess from the title that this is a recent edition of  Joint Liturgical Studies! And as I have said before (and no doubt will say again) the value of these is that they place before you material that you would not otherwise encounter. 

The International Anglican Liturgical Consultation is one of a number of fora for the production of “normative statements”, either ecumenically or, as in this case, for a particular denomination.   Their relationship to the general thinking of the members of a denomination or the pronouncements of a denomination’s Synods (or equivalent bodies) is often loose or strained.  A clear example of this difficulty was the ARCIC report on the place of Virgin Mary which a large part of the Anglican Church denounced.

Here we have “The Palermo Statement; Rites surrounding Death” along side a commentary by Trevor Lloyd.  The commentary is mostly made up of examples from different Anglican Liturgies of the themes encountered in the Statement.

While of interest neither the Statement nor the commentary had anything particularly earth shattering to say. 

However as someone with no love for Common Worship I need raise an audible cheer when reading the Statement saying,

“We affirm that the liturgy is owned by the Christian community as well as by the minister or clergy leading the rites.  Where church members own a service book in their homes, and also a hymn book, they are more likely to feel they own the liturgy with the clergy.”

This is one of my key critiques of Common Worship – it has fundamentally removed the liturgy from the hands of the people.  The Prayer Book, and even the ASB, gave a sense of a liturgical whole while Common Worship allows only for the encounter of isolated liturgical events.  Also the people saw and knew the rubrics in both the Prayer Book and ASB - allowing at least some small insight into why things were happening – in Common Worship these are hidden from sight encouraging the people to be passive recipients of worship done by the clergy and other leaders.

On similar ground the Statement later says:

“No set of texts or rubrics, however comprehensive or permissive, can do all this without the mediation of pastorally sensitive, theologically astute and liturgically fluent clergy.”

From this I would read that the search for the perfect text (which the endless variation of Common Worship encourages) is flawed.  A decent text placed within an appropriate context of pastoral and liturgical action is powerful enough.  And the search for “pastorally sensitive, theologically astute and liturgically fluent clergy” is somewhat less fruitful than the search for hen’s teeth!

Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth

I read this on the plane home from Canada and maybe reading in the hours when by rights I should have been sleeping resulted in me missing some essential quality of the novel.

The cover proudly proclaims that Barry Unsworth is a Booker Prize winner and in is within the context of this claim that I found the novel lacking.  The story is fairly engaging and appealed to the bit of me that enjoys reading Agatha Christie but is that enough to place it in Booker Prize territory?

The cast of characters was made up of clichés, many of them paper thin clichés at that – there were few that were in anyway rounded and none that were insightful.  There was a worry that these stereotypes of the Western and the “Arab” were in fact supporting racist assumptions – you can give Agatha Christie some degree of flexibility as she was writing in different era, and so we can hold a critical distance to some of the less enlightened depictions of non-Western characters, but for Barry Unsworth, publishing in 2009, to be deploying the simpleton chai wallah as the basis of his non-Western characters is unsatisfactory.

 

If you have a few hours that need filling with light reading this book “would do” but to be honest my recommendation is to avoid it.