Favourite Books of 2023

Theology and Culture

Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, by Christopher Watkin.

Watkin is a Yorkshireman who teaches French Literature in Australia. In this chunky book Watkin uses Augustine's City of God as a model of how to use the Bible in cultural engagement. I have found it bristling with insights and hope to go over it again to try to retain some of the stuff I have learned from it.

Unpacking Forgiveness: Biblical Answers for Complex Questions and Deep Wounds, by Chris Brauns. 

This is the one book (apart from the Bible) that I took into hospital with me in November. Chris is an American Presbyterian pastor with a lot of experience of helping people work through the pastoral issues related to forgiveness. He lands squarely on the need for repentance to precede forgiveness. Some people are horrified by such a stance, and many would be puzzled, but Brauns makes a solid case that, to me at least, is convincing. I am still working through issues in this area myself and this book has been a helpful guide.

Into His Presence: Praying with the Puritans, by Tim Chester.

Tim is an old friend of mine, and I have benefitted from so many of his books - he is a prolific writer. I am not normal big on written prayers, but having enjoyed The Valley of Vision a couple of years ago, thought I would give this a try. I was not disappointed. Gave copies to the family for Christmas.

What Makes Us Humans? And Other Questions about God, Jesus and Human Identity, by Mark Meynell.

Mark calls this a "short book about a big subject". There can be few subjects that are so important in our cultural moment. It is so vital we get a proper view of what it means to be human when all around us people are questioning reality and coming to grief. If you haven't read anything on this, please give this one a read. It is one of a series on hot topics by The Good Book Company called 'Questions Christians Ask'. They are bite size, biblical, and brilliant.

Reality and Other Stories: Exploring the Life We Long for through the Tales We Tell, by Matt Lillicrap and Peter Dray.

Stories are fundamental to what it means to be human (see above). Matt and Peter reflect on seven kinds of stories that we tell each other. This book started as a series of talks by Peter at Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union and then reworked with Matt, using the framework provided by Christopher Booker in his The Seven Basic Plots. It's brilliant.

Missiology

Motus Dei: The Movement of God to Disciple the Nations, edited by Warrick Farrah.

News from far-flung places suggests that great numbers of people around the world are turning to Christ. And we are told that a leading factor in this movement is a relatively new method of church planting or disciple making. Motus Dei (Latin for the 'Movement of God') is a multi-author work that reflects on this phenomenon in a number of contexts around the world. It's a mixed bag. I offered to review this book for the International Journal of Frontier Mission but the project snowballed and now a whole issue is to be given over to it with my review article being followed by responses by other writers. Spoiler alert: I am sympathetic but have serious misgivings.

Biography

A Camaraderie of Confidence: The Fruit of Unfailing Faith in the lives of Charles Spurgeon, George Müller and Hudson Taylor, by John Piper.

This is the fourth book that I have read in this series of potted biographies by Piper. They spring from papers that he has given at his annual pastors' conference at Bethlehem Baptist Church. They are always super-encouraging and challenging. Piper doesn't focus on critique or analysis, though he could, but he does think freshly on his subject. His concern is to bring the faith of these three great men into focus so that we would emulate that faith in our day. I gave copies to a bunch of pastors in my area, with whom I hope we too form a camaraderie of confidence in the Lord.

Fiction

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie.

I am not an aficionado of crime fiction as some of my friends are, but this has got to be one of the best. An excellent plot with a stunning plot twist. 

The Southgate Fellowship: The Antithesis

The TSF make much of the doctrine of the antithesis, the "radical distinction between the Christian and non-Christian religions."

I have already interacted with the following section:

84a) We affirm that theological teaching can legitimately adjust its teaching style, phraseology, selection of content, use of illustrations, and many other ways that prove significant in facilitating the communication and grasp of truth in the audience’s target language and culture.

But there is more:

84b) We deny that such adaptation may rightly interpret any culture, religion, faith, and practice apart from the comprehensive authority of Scripture concerning the radical distinction between the Christian and non-Christian religions, between believers and unbelievers, and between the moral and religious antithesis that exists between those in Adam and those in Christ Jesus.

As religion is undefined, it is really difficult to understand what exactly this is denying. It seems to be saying that the doctrine of the antithesis is so complete ‘non-Christian religions’ have nothing to admire, nothing to appreciate, nothing to celebrate. And yet, the importance of extending hospitality to strangers, the demand to respect the aged, the value of modesty, to name but three, are all features of many communities hardly touched by the Bible.

One might respond that these are merely cultural and not religious. But since the TSF have not adequately defined the difference between those two terms that recourse is not open to them.

And can it really be that only those in Christ are able to help in interpreting a ‘culture, religion, faith, and practice’? If this is so then there can be no point ever in asking those in Adam why they are doing anything. Why do you give flowers to your wife? Why do you applaud a great performance? Why do you play rugby? Why do you attend the funerals of your relatives? Why do you sing in the bath? All are pointless. 

An attempt is made to expand on the TSF definition of culture here:

87a) We affirm that the word ‘culture’ is used generally to describe the shared set of artefacts, characteristics, meanings and values that give shape to the total corporate life of a group of people.

87b) We affirm that culture is complex and multi-faceted and operates at many different levels—the external and observable artefacts of culture always expressing more deeply held beliefs and value systems.

But this creates even more problems: do external and observable artefacts of culture always express more deeply held beliefs and value systems? If this is so, then what would they make of the custom of having bridesmaids at a wedding, widely understood to have originated as decoys for the evil eye?

On this, J. H. Bavinck had a wise word to say:

Numerous customs and practices originally based on pagan ideas and conceptions are gradually secularized and have lost their original meaning. Certain forms of politeness originally expressed respect to the divine majesty of the ruler and were forms of religious adoration, but now they have become civil formalities, the meaning of which is scarcely understood by anyone. Other customs of dress were connected with magic and superstition, but now they have completely lost their original meaning. There are burial customs, even in Western countries, which originally arose from fear of the dead, but which now only bear the character of tradition. Thus, even though a national culture is basically an indivisible whole, so that the meaning of each component is determined by religion, nevertheless, in practice, many customs are detached from this coherence and lost their original character. In such cases it is foolish to go back to the original meaning of a custom, because it is now no longer experienced and felt as it had been originally. (An Introduction to the Science of Missions, 1960: 174)

The paradigm expressed in the TSF statement is cut loose from reality.

The Southgate Fellowship: Religion and Culture

The TSF statement is frequently muddled where it seeks to establish a position on religion and culture.

Throughout the TSF statement the following terms are employed: ‘faith’, ‘faith system’, ‘worldview’, ‘religion,’ and ‘spirituality.’ Yet none of these terms is defined or distinguished from one another. This would not be such a big problem if it was a piece of popular writing. But this is a statement which the group has been working on for four years.  

The result is that it leaves a large number of affirmations and denials ambiguous or even incomprehensible.

Perhaps we are to understand them to be synonyms. If so, then why, for instance, is faith distinguished from religion in the following?

4e) We deny that the Christian faith and religion are purely human constructs.

Despite this lack of definition, religion is supposed to be connected to culture. Hence:

90a) We affirm that culture and religion are interrelated, interdependent and inseparable, the latter informing the former.

But this is incoherent: how can two phenomena be interdependent with only one informing the other? 

Likewise, the following:

90d) We deny the existence of any human culture that functions disconnected from or uninfluenced by human religious thought and expression or by the spiritual forces of darkness.

However, if culture is the expression of religion the denial is meaningless: they are saying that ‘religion externalised’ (their definition of culture) cannot be disconnected from ‘religious expression’. 

Moreover, what are we to make of the following denial?

6f) We deny that non-Christian religions and worldviews also offer ways of salvation.

Is this a denial of the phenomenon (the offer) or a denial of the claim (salvation)? Many religious traditions offerways of salvation. This is surely undeniable. So maybe they mean that people cannot receive salvation by those ways. But they have already said that here:

6d) We deny that the adherents of any non-Christian religions and worldviews can receive salvation, except through faith in Christ alone.

If this is so, 6f is redundant.

But 6d is itself problematic: the way it reads, one might be forgiven for thinking that adherents of ‘non-Christian religions’ can receive salvation through faith in Christ alone, while they remain adherents.

Section 6 has, in fact, multiple intractable issues that arise because of a lack of precision in the language. 6a tells us that the ‘practice of false religions’ makes unbelievers ‘blind to saving knowledge’. 6b is in reference to someone who ‘holds a false … religion’. So, we have people adhering to, holding to, and practising false religions. But with no definition of religion, we are left wondering just what it is to which people are holding or adhering.

So, what is the way forward? Let us stop trying to divide the world into neatly distinct religious mega-communities. It is a figment of the imagination. It does not reflect the reality. 

Bernard Adeney puts it like this: “The very word religion is problematic, since it groups together the ways diverse cultures understand and interact with ‘the real’ as if such ways had certain common characteristics. In fact, different cultures construe what is real in radically different ways.” “The category of religion,” Adeney continues, “reflects the dichotomizing tendency of Western thought to separate the spiritual from the material world. ‘Facts’ and ‘values’ are considered unrelated” (Strange Virtues: Ethics in a Multicultural World, 1995: 173).

The problem throughout the TSF statement is that an Enlightenment, essentialist construction of world religions has been adopted uncritically. The simple fact is that the religions as they are experienced ‘on the ground’ (as opposed to the way they are described in theological statements) are not nearly so neat and tidy that one can demark true religion (Christianity) from false (everything else – all the other ‘isms’) as the TSF wants to do.

This is not the first time I have argued the inadequacy of this approach.

A Taxonomy of Church & Ethnic Engagement

As there is a fair pit of dialogue on twitter at the moment on multiculturalism in churches I thought I would post some material on the issue.

Some years ago in teaching on urban contextualization I came up with a taxonomy of how churches engage with the existential issue of living in a multi-cultural or multi-ethnic society (I use the terms synonymously). This is not to make a judgment on one approach or another but simply as an analytical tool. The taxonomy is based on two axes: the horizontal (x) axis on multiculturality and the vertical (y) axis on philosophy of engagement. This is what it looks like:

The table below shows how churches of the four types differ from each other.

	Pragmatic Monocultural	Pragmatic Multicultural	Idealistic  Multicultural	Idealistic  Monocultural
Affirmation of communal identity	û	ü	ü	ü
Communities meet separately in one local church	û	ü	ü	û
Communities gather in one congregation	û	û	ü	û
Translation in services	û	û	ü	û

Advantages of each type:

Pragmatic Monocultural	Pragmatic Multicultural	Idealistic  Multicultural	Idealistic  Monocultural
clear expectations of what is expected of everyone easy for majority community to accept outsiders from minority communities	all groups are encouraged to express themselves according to their cultural norms single local church expresses multicultural reality of universal church in relationships between congregations of one church	all groups are encouraged to express themselves according to their cultural norms single local church expresses multicultural reality of universal church in vivid public form	all groups are encouraged to express themselves according to their cultural norms relations between local churches expresses multicultural reality of universal church outsiders readily feel at home

Disadvantages of each type:

Pragmatic Monocultural	Pragmatic Multicultural	Idealistic  Multicultural	Idealistic  Monocultural
not easy for minority communities to adjust to culture of majority church for those from minority communities, bridges to unbelieving relatives and friends are broken, passively by neglect or actively by insistence on leaving former lifestyle	sense of unity of local church is threatened communication between congregations is complicated outsiders may still feel the congregation is not for them because the ownership of the wider group is multicultural, especially if the senior leaders are from the majority community	no community feels entirely at home in the congregation communication is complicated outsiders may still feel the meeting is not for them because the identity of the minority group is subsumed under that of the majority	image of unity of universal church is threatened postponement of ethical awareness communication between churches is complicated

Kraft, Hiebert, and Conn: A Comparison

I have found the work of Charles Kraft, Paul Hiebert and Harvie Conn very helpful as I have tried to get my head around the topics of religion, culture and worldview. But the three authors use the terms quite differently. Here is a comparison of their terms and below an attempt to diagram that and add my own proposal.

	Worldview	Religion	Culture
Kraft	“the culturally structured assumptions, values, and commitments/allegiances underlying a people’s perception of reality and their responses to those perceptions”[1]	“… a means of relating to and dealing with an important part of the nonhuman universe.”[2] “A religion, then, is a set of cultural forms in terms of which a faith is expressed.”[3]	“a society’s complex, integrated coping mechanism, consisting of learned, patterned concepts and behavior, plus their underlying perspectives (worldview) and resulting artifacts (material culture).”[4]
Hiebert	“A worldview provides people with their basic assumptions about reality.”[5] “the foundational cognitive, affective, and evaluative assumptions and frameworks a group of people makes about the nature of reality which they use to order their lives.”[6]	“Religion provides them with the specific content of this reality ….”[7] “Religion … is the model man uses to explain the reality of all things.”[8]	“the more or less integrated systems of ideas, feelings, and values and their associated patterns of behaviour and products shared by a group of people who organize and regulate what they think, feel, and do.”[9] “… the integrated system of learned patterns of behavior, ideas, and products characteristic of a society.”[10]
Conn	“…the prescientific factories and bank vaults of presuppositions…”[11]	“[Religion] is the core in the structuring of culture, the integrating and radical response of humanity to the revelation of God. Life is religion.”[12]	“[Cultures] are integrated, holistic patterns structured around the meeting of basic human needs.”[13]

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This is very tentative - an attempt to create a mediating space for worldview that acknowledges that there are some aspects of life, e.g. views of time and space, that are basic but nevertheless culturally relative. (The software sadly doesn't let me draw lines in all the right places.)

Kraft	Culture
	Worldview	Religion	Other aspects of culture
Hiebert	Culture
	Religion		Other aspects of culture
	Worldview	Religion expressed
Conn	Religion/Worldview		Culture
My Proposal		Cultures/Religions
		Worldview
	Religion

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[1] Charles, H. Kraft, Christianity with Power (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant, 1989), 20.

[2] Kraft, Anthropology for Christian Witness, 197.

[3] Charles, H. Kraft, “Is Christianity a Religion or a Faith?” in Appropriate Christianity (Charles H. Kraft, ed.; Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2005), 87 (original emphasis).

[4] Kraft, Anthropology for Christian Witness, 38.

[5] Paul G. Hiebert, Cultural Anthropology (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 371.

[6] Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 25-26.

[7] Hiebert, Cultural Anthropology, 371.

[8] Ibid., 356.

[9] Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological Insights for Missionaries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 30.

[10] Hiebert, Cultural Anthropology, 25.

[11] Conn, “Culture,” 254.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 253.