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1996 David Denby, Great Books

One of the great literary and cultural arguments for the last generation has been whether or not there is a Western Literary Canon. And if there is, is this a good thing? Isn’t it the case that those who say what the great books are, have the advantage of dictating literary and cultural values? Classics are attributed an authority that can be used as a way of silencing, marginalising, even rubbishing the voices that don’t fit the favoured elites and empowered cultural norms. After all why should George Eliot’s Middlemarch represent the great novelist’s literary benchmark, and Bridget Jones be dismissed as chick lit? Or why should Homer’s Odyssey be given canoncial status and placed on a different literary level from Lord of the Rings, arguably the greatest quest fantasy of the 20th century? And is Jane Austen the epitome of literary craft and human observation or at best a more or less boring, perhaps an occasionally amusing writer, who pales alongside today’s more emotionally outspoken and psychologically informed writers like Margaret Attwood, Anne Tyler or Penelope Lively?

I bought David Denby’s, Great Books, to commemorate my ordination in 1996, and to indulge my passion and interest in the influence of reading, and the role of books as great literature on the culture of the individual mind and of any given society. David Denby was in 1996 Film Critic for the New York Magazine (still is I think). In 1961 as a student he took the ‘Great Books’ course at Columbia University but didn’t take it all that seriously. So 30 years later he went back to take the course again, as an experienced, mature, hardened social and media critic, and to do so in a class, interacting with the students and ‘instructors’. The book is the account of that year – and it is wonderful reading, at times annoyingly clever, but mostly honest and wise. He describes lying on the sofa reading and trying to ‘get’ Kant, feeling the heart-rending tragedies of Sophocles, amazed at the subtly cynical but politically effective power plays of Machiavelli, bemused by Hegel, won over by Jane Austen, going with the flow (of consciousness) that is Virginia Woolf’s take on human experience….and so on throughout the whole academic year.

Denby summarises and criticises, respects but isn’t intimidated by this exploration of great literature; arguing with mostly everyone, just as often humbly listening to students half his age who are an entire culture removed from Denby’s generation, sometimes he is arrogantly declaring what this or that means, must mean, might mean – but through it all trying to hear what these great books say about what it means to be human, to live a human life, yes to LIVE a human life. I would have to say for myself I learned more about human existence and reflection in this book than in a dozen theology monographs. This is a modern encountering the post-modern in the classroom thirty years on.

Denby is passionate about what he writes here – this year back at Columbia clearly deepened the irrigation channels in his own spirit. Here is his own description of the ennui that drove him back to school, the creeping boredom that comes from being saturated by media images, the mind being deprived of reflective substance, the emotions depleted from overstimulation and moral muscle atrophied through lack of sufficient exercise:

By the early nineties I was beginning to be sick at heart, sick not of movies or movie criticism but of living my life inside…the society of the spectacle – that immense system of representation and simulacra, the thick atmosphere of information and imagery and attitudes that forms the mental condition and habits of almost any adult living in a media society. A member of the media, I was also tired of the media; I was more than uneasy in that vale of shadows, that frenetic but gloomy half-life filled with names, places, chatter, acts, cars racing, gunshots, expertstalking, daytime couples accusing one another of infidelity, the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom, the low hum of needs being satisfied.

That last italicised phrase is the clue to the book. Denby went looking for substance, not to have needs satisfied, but to understand the nature of human longing that gives rise to needs, to encounter the tragic and the comic, the romance and the quest, the philosophical search for enlightenment and the poet’s quest for meaning. And he went looking for all this in the great books of the Western Canon.

Here is Denby again

I know longer knew what I knew. I felt that what I had read or understood was slipping away. I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs. The foundations of the building were turning to sand while I sat in the upper balconies looking out at the sea. Feeling the wiggle, I knew I was in trouble. I sensed my identity had softened and merged into the atmosphere of representation, and I couldn’t quite see where it ended and I began. My own memories were lapsing out into the fog of media life, the unlived life as spectator.

As a Christian, a preacher, a pastor, and as a human being first of all, I found this book to be quietly but persistently an argument for recovering the power of literature to shape and enrich, to inform and nourish, to deepen and in the end to humanise, human life. I’ve read this book three times and expect to enjoy it again.

And it is ridiculously cheap on Amazon – which tends to suggest not everyone thinks it’s as wonderful as I do. Don’t care! Or as Catherine Tate might say, (and with due acknowledgement of the source!), in language unlikely to establish itself in the Western Canon, ‘Not bovvered’!

I hadn’t really intended to let a few reflections on previously bought books grow into a series – but I now find it personally intriguing trying to trace some of my footprints through books bought years ago because they were significant at the time – and now might not be, or might still be. Apologies for what is therefore becoming self-indulgence!

1994 Joel Green (ed) Jesus of Nazareth Lord and Christ.

This is the sixtieth birthday collection of essays in honour of Howard Marshall. Thirty essays, and only one by a woman – Ruth Edwards, herself a careful, unassuming but deeply learned New Testament scholar, and dedicated Episcopal priest. But there are some important essays here – some of them heavy going. Such essays date quite quickly, and some of them have already been overtaken by scholarship, sometimes by the essay writer’s own developing thought. But most of Howard’s main areas of biblical interest (which are remarkably wide) are represented. I value the book for reasons of personal friendship, and because I think Howard Marshall’s contribution to New Testament scholarship and to Evangelical credibility in the academy, is in the same tradition, and on the same scale, as his mentor F. F. Bruce.

1995 S. M. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel: You are My Witnesses.

My view of the world, of faith, and of how faith and tragedy combine in the deep moments of personal and moral life, is long indebted to these two Jewish thinkers. Heschel (is that not a wonderful face on the book cover?) was a remarkable thinker, whose work on the prophets and the pathos of God represents some of the most profound theology and humane reflection I have ever read. It deeply influenced Moltmann. Elie Wiesel (pictured below) is a holocaust survivor whose writing is dedicated to ensuring that the world never forgets the story of mechanised evil and genocidal hatred that befell central Europe. Wiesel’s two volume autobiorgaphy, All Rivers Run to the Sea, and The Sea is Never Full, I read while on holiday in Yorkshire – they are a remarkable account of a human life lived in the shadow of great evil, and refusing to allow his humanity to be eclipsed by the memories of such moral horror.

Friedman’s book examines the life values of these two Jewish thinkers, one a devout philosopher, the other an agnostic novelist, both of them men whose writing glows with morally generated power. Reading this I was conscious of two people, whose life experience and intellectual legacies require those of us who are Christians to read them humbly, and thank God for their capacity to construe and construct a worldview lacking in that embittered hostility that inevitably ignites enmity. They represent the ethical genius of Judaism. They are the obvious riposte to those who say religion per se is inevitably the source of violence, hatred and enmity. As a book to commemorate my ordination to Christian ministry, it compelled searching reflection then, as now, on the relationship between God’s ancient people, and the Church of Jesus Christ, within the family of faith that traces its genealogy to Abraham. Shalom.

1991 John Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel.

Along with the likes of C. H. Dodd, John Robinson, Stephen Smalley and Raymond Brown, this massive monograph by Ashton holds its own on my shelves as an elegant and encylopeadic account of how John’s Gospel has been understood , especially through the lens of Bultmann. Ashton brilliantly commented that Bultmann asks all the right questions and usually gets all the wrong answers. But another master of Johannine scholarship, B. F. Wescott famously said that he would give a First Class Honours to a student who could write a first class examination paper which asks the right questions. This was the summer read the year that my own book on Evangelical Spirituality was published. Ashton on John provided a different scholarly landscape (and refreshing relief) from the history of Evangelicalism, biography and desk-loads of primary Evangelical literary outpourings.

1992 David Bosch, Transforming Mission.

This is one of the great Christian books of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Along with Newbigin, Bosch put missiology right up the theological agenda for many of us. I read this book throughout Advent and preached on Christmas and Mission for four Sundays. I still have the sermons, and I can still remember the mind expanding scale of this marvellous book. The pencil marks and comments are like footprints of a long satisfying journey. As a minister, preacher and Christian trying to get a sense of the scale of the Gospel / culture / church equation, this book provided an utterly dependable orientation.

1993 Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology.

After I bought this I was sent a review copy! So a pal got a freebie. There’s nothing else like this volume. For Scottish Christians interested in our own wee (but rich and influential) cluster of Christian traditions, this volume is all but indispensable. Now out of print – a casualty of a great Scottish Publisher, T&T Clark, being absorbed and assimilated by the globalising BORG – it can only be bought second-hand usually requiring a mini-mortgage. There’s hardly a week goes by but I have this book open. There are some gaps, and some of the articles reflect the views, even prejudices of the writers, but it’s a five star book nevertheless.

The book I bought in 1990, to commemorate my ordination was, Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God. This wasn’t the first of Paul’s books I bought, (it was – and remains, the dearest!), and it persuaded me that there is theological congruence in the notion of a God who suffers creatively, freely and redemptively. Not the easiest book – but how could it be with a subject which pierces to the core realities and mysteries of tragic yet creative suffering, faces honestly the bliss and anguish of human existence and the divine-human relationship, and does so by sweeping critically and constrcutively across a broad range of Christian theological proposals.

Inside my copy is a letter from someone whose life partner had died, tragically young, and had left a family still with much of its growing up to do. It is a note of gratitude to me, but more significantly the words cannot obscure the questions, the anger, the existential resentment that for one bewildered family, the defining relationship of life was ended. This is a book of rigorous sytematic and philosophical theology, but written by a theologian alert to the pastoral relevance of our deepest thinking about God, and who refused then, as now, to minimise questions for the sake of convenient answers. One reviewer pointed out how unfortunate that there was a second D in the surname – Fides = faith, which is what Paul’s life has been about, to the great enrichment of all of us.

This book helped me in the privacy of the study, to pray to a God who freely chooses to suffer in the creative, redemptive love that is divine, who became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and whose Being is an eternal communion and interchange of Love, giving, creating, sharing the Divine life, in the great lived out narrative of God’s eternal purpose. And it did so by making me think – hard – honestly – deeply, about the God I believe in.

The book I’ve just finished reading, The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne, has an essay in it by Fiddes which continues his reflection on what it might mean for God to freely create those who, in order to grow into divinely intended freedom of love and fullness, chooses to forego absolute control over ultimate outcomes. The work of love is that the Triune God will eternally, persistently, patiently, redemptively work, with creative passion and vulnerable self-giving, till all creation sings, in a performance that will never end and therefore need no final encore!

1986  Adrian Hastings, History of English Christianity, 1920-1985. A terrific survey of English church history in the volatile and challenging 20th Century. Now revised and updated to 2000, but I haven’t bothered replacing my first edition.

1987  Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 Vols. The best history of the Victorian Church by the best church historian I’ve ever read. Owen Chadwick exemplifies careful, witty and weighty judgement. His comment on Spurgeon’s spiritual confidence, ‘He approached the burning bush with cheerful aplomb’. Superb!

1988  Philip Toynbee, End of a Journey. This was the second volume of Toynbee’s Journal. The first, Part of a Journey, I read while on a caravan holiday in 1977! This volume is movingly written against the backdrop of his final illness, and his late-in-life journey to God. He is a crabbit saint, at times moody, at other times surprisingly reconciled to his own mortality, and most of the time on speaking terms with God.

1989 Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688-1791. Vintage Rupp. He writes about the decades before the Evangelical Revival with far more historical reliability than a lot of stuff up till then. And his account of the Evangelical Revival itself is nuanced, fair and satisfying. This is one of those books that is also beautifully produced by Oxford – a bibliophile’s must have. And it aint cheap – but quality shows. You show me your BMW and I’ll show you my Rupp!

1985 – J A T Robinson, The Priority of John.

Bishop John Robinson was infamously famous for his book ‘Honest to God’. It was the book John MacQuarrie described as the result of taking three good German beers (Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Tillich) and creating a lot of froth! That wasn’t fair, and it probably wasn’t MacQuarrie’s finest scholarly hour, but it is a brilliant sideswipe. When a book of theology becomes a bestseller, though, academic theologians need to pay attention, listen, and hear the sound of people’s longing, rather than rush into print scoffing at those who have touched the nerve of a public MacQuarrie could never have hoped to reach with such effectiveness.

Anyway, The Priority of John represents John Robinson’s legacy – he died before it was published, and did the final writing while suffering at the later stages of cancer. They were to be the prestigious Bampton Lectures, but were never delivered. The book is way out on a limb, arguing not only for the substantial historicity of John, but that John was the Gospel written first. Now I wasn’t persuaded by his arguments, but I was tempted to be, by the sheer ingenuity, passionate exposition, and oh so obvious love for this wonderful Gospel story as told by John the Evangelist and interpreted by John (Robinson). The book is a gem. I bought it hardback – it cost £19.50 – (Amazon have it ranging from £40 to £151!!). I read it slowly through Lent 1986 and appreciated the reverent scholarship of one who spoke deeply about the Passion of Jesus. All the more poignant that some of this writing was done in the full knowledge of his own terminal illness.

Here’s a very small extract which shows why this Bishop was also a trusted pastor to many. Commenting on Matthew 26.53 where Jesus says he could appeal to the Father to send 12 legions of angels to rescue him, Robinson observes:   

"There is no suggestion he could lay them on because he was God. He is a man of power because he is a man of prayer. But because he is a man of prayer, he knows that it is not the Faither’s will to win that way."

A good book to commemorate the vocational centre of ministry, which is abour prayerful obedience rather than charismatic power.