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Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote his classic treatise On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers at the behest of his radically irreligious friends—emancipated thinkers who wanted to know how he could share so much of their intellectual world and yet be an ordained, believing Christian. The result was a novel, innovative phenomenology of religion that aimed at rendering religion intelligible to a large swath of modern, intellectual Europe, and which influenced liberal Christian theology for generations.

In many ways Francis Spufford’s unique, hilariously pugnacious, and vivaciously argued tour-de-force Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense could be considered a version of that same project. Only this time the book aims at “awkward” post-Christian Brits who have trouble making sense of why an emotionally competent adult would embrace belief in a sky-fairy and so forth.

Before you’re too put off, though, unlike Schleiermacher or Spong-style modern liberals, Spufford knows that big doctrines like the incarnation and the actual events of history (cross and resurrection) matter as issues of truth. He’s not offering some soggy song about the power of metaphors. The emotions must somehow connect to reality. Still, though he engages in some humorous polemics against Dawkins & Co., it’s not a traditional, philosophic apologetic for the truth-claims of the Christian faith—he doesn’t think that can really be done. Rather, it’s more of a Pascalian wager in the sense that, assuming we can’t know either way, there is real satisfaction and dignity in belief. It’s a brief, pop phenomenology of the Christian faith that tries to help the non-religious understand what it’s like from the inside.

Translation Issues

I’ll be clear up front: there are some translation issues. Knowing this problem, Spufford wrote a foreword to the American edition explaining some of the differences between the American and British scenes, including the latter’s preoccupation with having a “good sense of humor” and general apathetic confusion about religion in general.

Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense

Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense

HarperOne (2013). 240 pp.
HarperOne (2013). 240 pp.

In other words, the more “Christ-haunted” a locale you inhabit the less you’ll understand the problem Spufford is seeking to address. Readers in more religious areas shouldn’t sit too comfortably, though. Cultural shifts from city to country being what they are, and with younger generations growing up explicitly non-religious in greater numbers, this book will eventually be relevant to everyone. I remember my own struggles in college trying to explain what prayer felt like to a classmate of mine who’d never even tried it. This is the problem Spufford is getting at and must be remembered if you’re going to properly appreciate what he’s doing.

The other thing I ought to mention is the language. I’m not talking so much about the shift in vernacular from the UK to the American scene, although that’s an issue, but the fact that Spufford curses—a lot. I’ll just say this: though I wouldn’t use such language, much of it fits the subject matter. Also, if you can’t handle it in print, you may find yourself having issues with real conversations with real unbelievers.

Strengths

As a novelist and instructor of creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London, Spufford masterfully deploys language to make his argument; it’s dynamic, conversational, full of verve and life. (I’d offer some quotes, but with this book you start asking yourself, Why this fabulous passage and not that one?) This isn’t an exercise in mere linguistic acrobatics, though. The language is central to the task, as Spufford aims to make the familiar strange, or rather the strange familiar. So many religious terms still float about the cultural landscape—cut loose from their moorings in religious experience, robbed of their mystery, having ceased to form a part of their recognizable reality.

For instance, in a world where the word sin arouses resonances of red lingerie and chocolate, Spufford connects it to the real-life moments in every person’s life when the crushing epiphany that they’ve “[messed] up,” and have a tendency to do so, finally overwhelms them. In fact, he doesn’t really use the word sin but coins the memorably inappropriate “Human Propensity to [Mess] Things Up” to substitute. This gritty realism punctures a hole in some of the pseudo-intellectual, anti-religious pretenses of the day, especially its “my little pony” philosophy of human nature.

Or again, when he reaches the center of the argument, Spufford gives us a lengthy, emotionally compelling portrait of “Yeshua’s” life, ministry, and death aimed at conveying the “meaning rather than its naked events” in such a way as to “peel away the lingering familiarity which might prevent you from hearing it afresh.” As Wesley Hill recently put it, “Finishing the Yeshua chapter made me want to become a Christian all over again.”

Problems

Of course, there are problems—more problems than I can count really. At times I found myself clapping and cringing within the space of a paragraph. Where to start? Spufford falls into to anachronism fairly constantly, especially when it comes to other religions (especially in his characterizations of Judaism and Islam). His epistemology could use quite a bit of work, as it exhibits some common confusions regarding the possibility of knowing God’s existence versus proving his existence and so forth. (Might I recommend some Alvin Plantinga?) While Spufford understands that beliefs have to match up with the way things really are, he still says things like, “I believe because of the feelings, not the other way round.” Spufford’s biblical hermeneutics could stand for a tune-up as well. In the middle of reaching a Job-like conclusion to the problem of evil, he writes off Genesis 2–3 as a sad bit of failed theodicy.

As often happens in apologetic endeavors, in the process of cleaning up misconceptions about pricklier doctrines, Spufford ends up scrubbing a few out entirely. For instance, you’ll learn that “most Christians” have dispatched the doctrine of hell as a bit of outdated mythology (unless you’re some unenlightened American redneck, that is). Or, quite predictably, his perspective on sexual ethics is progressivish, taking his cue from “Jesus” who was remarkably unconcerned about that sort of thing. Right.

He writes at the end, “I don’t need to point out that I am not any kind of spokesman for the Church of England, do I?” (A row of surpliced bishops nod their heads vigorously.)

Read It Anyway

And yet, with all of these problems, I still heartily recommend Unapologetic to anyone even remotely interested in talking to their neighbors about Jesus (which should be most of you). If I had one apologetic piece to put in someone’s hands today, Tim Keller’s The Reason for God is still my go-to. That said, Unapologetic is a fabulous read and a marvelous resource for putting language to some of the most basic emotional postures (guilt, forgiveness, grace, worship) of the Christian life for which the unbelieving world has lost all sense.

And this is important. Over the last few decades we’ve been so focused on logos that we’ve sometimes forgotten the importance of pathos in the persuasive enterprise. Yet Christianity isn’t only an affair of the head, but the heart as well. It appeals not only to the intellect, but also to the affections, and it’s precisely here that Spufford’s work fills a glaring gap. While I would have preferred a book with a stronger grasp of doctrine and Scripture, believers can be genuinely grateful for Spufford’s robust, honest work.

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