Jesus, like Jeremy Paxman, asked a lot of questions. Although it’s possible to construe this as the sign of an enquiring or humble mind, it has rather more to do with capturing the agenda. Paxman asks a minister why she’s failing to deliver, Jesus asks the Pharisees whose image is on the coin, and the message is clear: we shall have this conversation on these terms.
The New Atheists tend not to ask so many questions, preferring instead to tell us about theology and science and ethics and history, but they have nonetheless successfully captured the God agenda. Thinking about this objectively, they said, freed from the instincts, emotions, hopes, and all the other subjective sentiments that cloud the light of reason, what evidence have you that God exists? Most of the anti-anti-God polemics that followed in their wake took the bait and found themselves dancing to tune they didn’t choose.
Francis Spufford’s short and witty book does not. Instead, it narrates Christianity from the inside, recognising that as humans are quite important to the religion, to discuss it without recourse to the human is silly. It is a mistake, he writes early on, “to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary.”
This is courageous for at least three reasons. It is open to misinterpretation – specifically that prioritising feelings is the same as abdicating reason. (It isn’t, as Spufford insists, but that is how it will undoubtedly be read by some.) It is highly personal – not only is Spufford opening himself up in public but he is also laying himself vulnerable to the accusation that his Christianity-from-the-inside is different from other people’s (something he would probably admit). And it pushes at the boundaries of what can be said, necessitating metaphors that strain and crack under the pressure of what they are charged with doing, or alternatively recourse to phrases like “something makes itself felt from beyond”, which are, of course, sitting ducks for the God-hunters.
None of this openness and courage should be taken to imply that Spufford is like some literary Christ, led meekly to Skull Hill without a word of protest. Billed as “unhampered by niceness”, Unapologetic successfully skewers various atheist holy cows, such as the embarrassingly anodyne, marketing-savvy advice offered by the atheist bus campaign, or John Lennon’s dreadful Imagine (“the My Little Pony of philosophical statement”).
The book is not, however, particularly interested in sniping (he is generally quite kind about Dawkins and Hitchens) and lacks the exuberant spite of the New Atheists. Rather, it is an attempt to communicate what Christianity is to a culture that is “smudged over with half-legible religious scribbling.” Spufford is insightful about that culture, now far more informed by goods than by God, where “each moment is supposed to be the solvent of the one before.” He is alert to the cultural accretions that render certain Christian words all but redundant in modern English, translating sin, for example, as the HPtFtU (read the book for an explanation).
He is painfully honest, not only about the suffering that litters history and the world, but also the final inadequacy of all attempts to reconcile it happily with the Christian God. He recognises that awe, so often the emotion of first and last resort when it comes to religiosity, actually plays a much less significant role than desperation. He is perceptive and pleasantly sarcastic about church history (“A message of personal forgiveness? What could possibly go wrong?). He readily admits that “the life of faith has just as many he-doesn’t-exist-the-bastard moments as the life of disbelief. Probably more.” And he understands that the Christian answer to this pain, both within the human heart and beyond it, must rest on the Christ and, in particular, his death.
Accordingly, the centrepiece of the book is a retelling of the life of “Yeshua” which is frankly superb. Lives of Jesus are notoriously difficult, plagued by the paradoxical problem that the story is both too familiar and too strange. It can be done. There were moments of Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ that conveyed Christ(‘s teaching) freshly. Spufford’s retelling is, remarkably, creative, orthodox and moving, managing to convey the terrifying appeal of both the man and his kingdom message.
Unapologetic is unlikely to persuade anyone who thought The God Delusion was a good book. The fact that Spufford gets in a thousand words of anti-Christian abuse within the first couple of pages suggests he knows this. But in a literary field that is fast becoming overpopulated, it is an intelligent, sophisticated and much welcome addition.
Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense is published by Faber and Faber at £12.99
