CHRISTIANITY

‘I myself am a Christian and not a Muslim or a Buddhist for a mixture of two different kinds of reasons; as an outcome of both kinds of process. On the passive side, Christianity was the religion of my childhood. It’s the ancient religion, for something like forty generations, of the place I come from. It’s the matrix of my culture. But it’s also something that I came back to, freely as an adult, after twenty-odd years of atheism, because piece by piece I have found that it answers my need, and corresponds to emotional reality for me. I also find that the elaborated structure of meaning it builds, the story it tells, explains that reality more justly, more profoundly, more scrupulously and plausibly than any of the alternatives. (Am I sure I’m right? Of course not. Don’t you get bored with asking that question?).’

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p.75.

THE CHURCH

‘So of all things Christianity isn’t supposed to be about gathering up the good people (shiny! happy! squeaky clean!) and excluding the bad people (frightening! alien! repulsive!) for the very simple reason that there aren’t any good people. Not that can securely be designated as such. It can’t be circling the wagons of virtue out in the suburbs and keeping the inner city at bay. This, I realise, goes flat contrary to the present predominant image of it as something existing in prissy, fastidious little enclaves, far from life’s messier zones and inclined to get all “judgemental” about them. Again, of course there are Christians like that: see under HPfFfU. The religion certainly can slip into being a club or a cosy affinity group or a wall against the world. But it isn’t supposed to be. What it’s supposed to be is a league of the guilty. Not all guilty of the same things, or in the same way, or to the same degree, but enough for us to recognize each other.’

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p.47.

CHRISTIANITY

‘Christianity...does something different. It makes frankly impossible demands. Instead of asking for specific actions, it offers general but lunatic principles. It thinks you should give your possession away, refuse to defend yourself, love strangers as much as your family, behave as if there’s no tomorrow. These principles do not amount to a sustainable programme. They deliberately ignore the question of how they could possibly be maintained. They ask you to manifest in your ordinary life a drastically uncalculating, unprotected generosity. And that’s not all. Christianity also makes what you mean all –important. You could pauperise yourself, get slapped silly without fighting back, care for lepers and laugh all day long in the face of the futures markets, and it still wouldn’t count, if you did it for the wrong reasons. Not only is Christianity insanely perfectionist in its few positive recommendations, it’s also insanely perfectionist about motive. It won’t accept generosity performed for the sake of self-interest as generosity. It says that unless altruism is altruism all the way down, it doesn’t count as altruism at all.

So far, thrillingly impractical. But now notice the consequence of having an ideal of behaviour not sized for human lives: everyone fails. Really everyone. No-one only means well, no one means well all of the time. Looked at from this perspective, human beings all exhibit different varieties of fuck–up. And suddenly in its utter lack of realism Christianity becomes very realistic indeed, intelligently resigned to our vast array of imperfections, and much more interested in what we can do to live with them than it laws designed to keep them segregated.’

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p.45.

SIN

‘Everybody knows, then, that “sin” basically means “indulgence” or “enjoyable naughtiness.” If you were worried, you’d use a different word or phrase. You’d talk about “eating disorders” or “addictions”; you’d go to another vocabulary cloud altogether. The result is that when you come across someone trying to use “sin” in its old sense, you may know perfectly well in theory that they must mean something which isn’t principally chocolately, and yet the modern mood music of the word is so insistent that it’s hard to hear anything else except an invocation of a trivially naughty pleasure. And if someone talks, gravely and earnestly, about what a sorrowful burden one of these is, the result will be to make that speaker seem swiftly much, much more alarming than the thing they’ve got worked up about. For which would seem to you to be the biggest problem, the biggest threat to human happiness: a plate or pralines, or a killjoy religious fanatic denouncing them?’

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, p.26.

GOD

‘”I think you look what a man I once knew called ‘a God-struggler.’ I can’t tell you why I think it, but I do, and what you say about getting your satisfaction out of wanting things made me sure of it. You see the only ‘thing’ that a human being can go on wanting all their life and be satisfied with just wanting, is God."

“I don’t like the idea of wanting God,” said Margaret decidedly.

Lady Challis laughed.

“My poor dear, that won’t help or make any difference. Have you read The Hound of Heaven?"

“Yes. To me it seems technically beautiful but emotionally it doesn’t mean a thing.”

“I wouldn’t let that worry you. There’s plenty of time.”’

Stella Gibbons, Westwood, p.446.

PERFECTIONISM

‘Most of Mr Challis’s troubles could have been traced to his thirst for perfection; he was no maker-do with what God provides; he must have perfection and here for once (he told himself with beating heart), perfection was.’
Stella Gibbons, Westwood, p.160.

EVANGELISM

‘Sharing the good news is not so much a matter of telling people what they have never heard as of persuading them that there are things they haven’t heard when they think they have.’
Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World, p.17.

THEOLOGY

‘...some matters are better dealt with through narrative and imagination than through attempts at systematizing; a conclusion that shouldn’t surprise any reader of Holy Scripture.’
Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World: Journey into the heart of Narnia, p.6.

CULTURE

'Every human culture is an extremely complex mixture of brilliant truth, marred half-truths, and overt resistance to the truth. Every culture will have some idolatrous discourse within it. And yet every culture will have some witness to God's truth in it. God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill completely without regard for merit. He casts them across a culture, like seed, in order to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world. Without this understanding of culture, Christians will tend to think they can live self-sufficiently, isolated from and unblessed by the contributions of those in the world. Without an appreciation for God's garcious display of his wisdom in the broader culture, Christains may struggle to understand why non-Christians often exceed Christians in moral practice, wisdom, and skill. The doctrine of sin means that as believers we are never as good as our right worldview should make us. At the same time our doctrine of our creation in the image of God, and an understanding of common grace, remind us that nonbelievers are never as flawed as their false worldview should make them.

This suggests that our stance toward every human culture should be one of critical enjoyment and an appropriate wariness.'

Timothy Keller, Center Church, p.109.

CONTEXTUALIZATION

'Contextualization is not - as is often argued - "giving people what they want to hear." Rather, it is giving people the Bible's answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even in they reject them.

Sound contextualisation means translating and adapting the communication and ministry of the gospel to a particular culture withour compromising  the essence and particularities of the gospel.'

Timothy Keller, Center Church, p.89.