Abstract
Francis Spufford,
Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
, Faber and Faber: London, 2012; 224 pp.: 9780571225217, £12.99 (hbk)
Richard Dawkins et al. have prodded enough. There's a number of books now which offer philosophical, political, scientific and imaginative reasons for continuing to believe in God and go to church: a new wave of apologetics, particularly in Anglican theology. Despite its title, this is a work of apologetics, written for the man out there, commending Christianity for its emotional wisdom. The ‘man’ out there? Spufford wants to speak to the lads, to prove he's one of the lads; though his style settles down as he goes on. But it gives us a brilliant shorthand for sin, in its oh-so-human pettiness and cruelty, splitting and cracking everything (you'll have to read the book to learn what the shorthand is). Spufford isn't sorry to be a bloke and to talk about emotions, and he does it really well. He highlights the vacuity and lack of emotional knowledge in society today – we aren't innately good, living in a good universe; but nor is God safe and secure in his heaven. The world might be cruel, with suffering plain to see, but time has been interrupted, disrupted, abruptly altered from moment to moment by God's presence, a continual love song, a face in the crowd, a man under arrest, on his way to our common catastrophe.
So Spufford writes about Yeshua, the story of all stories, arguing with a great range of appropriate images and depth. He does achieve that most necessary move if good apologetics is going to work: imagining oneself into the mind and heart of the person who needs persuading. And so Spufford tackles the key questions. Why is God absent? Why does nothing happen when you pray? And then we read the most excellent passage of the whole book: the description of the author's experience of praying in a silent church. Larkin, R. S. Thomas – those who belong to that tradition of the empty church are here, as he writes. Then, how does one even begin to explain a cruel world? There's a good section on the different traditional theodicies, and then we are brought back to the contradiction to which Spufford says there is not resolution. All we can do is listen to the love song, and, ‘if we can, to go on loving’ (p. 105). And forgiving. Spufford talks about the Church; how it is not just another institution, but the place where ‘We eat the bread. We drink the wine. We feel ourselves forgiven. And, feeling that, we turn from the table to try to love the world, and ourselves, and each other’ (p. 202).
The book is a great read, and I hope that it reaches the places, the pubs, he wants. I suspect, though, that he’s up against it: the man in the street, if he happens to wander into the local bookshop, is unlikely to reach for this. More likely it will be the vicar, or blogging bishop. But that's okay: leaders in the Church need resources to engage with the secular and rationalist humanists around, and this would be a great book to recommend to someone who interested in exploring further.