This is almost a very good book!
Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense by Francis Spufford is wonderfully written, amusing, humane and very original.
There are many books which seek to demonstrate that Christianity is objectively true and trustworthy. Spufford sets out to show that Christianity also makes sense of the emotional world in which we all live.
Using colourful (very colourful at times) and non-churchy language, the book explores the human capacity to make a mess of our own lives and the world around us (what the Bible calls sin and what Spufford refers to by an interesting acronym). He demonstrates the way in which most secular and atheist approaches to life gloss over this issue in one way or another. In an hilarious section, he refers to John Lennon’s Imagine as the ‘my Little Pony of philosophical statements’. History and experience show us that it is not normal for humans to live in peace and harmony with one another and with the world – it just doesn’t happen.
Having demonstrated that life is often a mess, he examines the life and death of Jesus against this background and shows how they can provide a solution to our most profound problem.
This is all done very clearly and accessibly and I wouldn’t hesitate to pass this book on to someone who is struggling with making sense of the Christian faith.
However, this book does suffer from a serious weakness, which is why I say that it is almost a very good book. Spufford develops his argument from within human experience, showing how the Christian faith relates to our experience. His description of sin and it’s capacity to mess up our lives and the lives of those around us is superb, but…
Unfortunately, when it comes to the message of Scripture, Spufford is on less sure ground. Though sin is horrible and it does mess things up, it is also an offence against God and this book more or less glosses over this issue; which means that, ultimately, it’s description of Christianity is rather wishy-washy.
I suspect that this book will be very popular (at least popular by religious publishing standards) and in many ways it deserves to be so. However, it could have been so much better if the author had taken the same care in unpacking the Biblical message as he does dealing with early 21st Century western culture.
Note: I read this in the Kindle version and was very disappointed with the way that the footnotes were handled. Faber and Faber need to remember that pagination changes on a Kindle and that one printed page can turn into three or four pages on an e-reader.