Phill Sacre

Category: Reviews

Sometimes I’ll see a film or read a book or listen to a record. On very rare occasions I’ll choose to write about this. This is where this category comes in…

  • Review: Benefit of the Doubt

    Review: Benefit of the Doubt

    Is doubt a good thing when it comes to the Christian life? Doubt seems to be in vogue in certain circles these days – uncertainty about doctrine, uncertainty about the Bible, uncertainty about all sorts of things. It’s become deeply unfashionable to be certain about anything to do with the Christian faith (well, nearly anything … in my experience of such circles a belief such as the validity of women being priests/bishops/etc is often held with as much certainty as anything I’ve ever seen).

    Anyway, I’ve been wanting to blog about this subject for a while but just haven’t quite had the right opportunity. However, back in January, fellow blogger The Alethiophile asked “What to read in 2015?” and suggested a sort of exchange – if you suggested a book for him to read, he would suggest one for you to read. I suggested to him “Taking God at his Word” by Kevin DeYoung, and he suggested to me “Benefit of the Doubt” by Greg Boyd. Well, I’ve just finished reading it, and it provides the ideal opportunity to talk about doubt!

    The book is subtitled “Breaking the idol of certainty”, and – as you can imagine – his contention is that doubt is actually a good and healthy thing for the Christian. What I’m going to do in this post is to review the book itself, and then follow up in the near future with a blog post about faith and doubt. [I was going to do all of this in one post, but the review went on a bit. Sorry.]

    (more…)

  • Review: Wise Counsel

    I’ve just finished reading “Wise Counsel” – John Newton’s letters to John Ryland, Jr. And when I say John Newton, I do of course mean that John Newton – he of Amazing Grace fame, the former slave trader turned Church of England minister. Although Newton is probably best known today for Amazing Grace, at the time he was most famed as a letter writer – many of his letters were published, and he admitted himself that his letters were where God seemed to use him the most.

    And his letters are well worth reading: I started reading the book just before ordination, as I thought it might be beneficial to read as I started pastoral ministry. I was not disappointed.

    As I said, John Newton was a minister in the Church of England, and John Ryland Jr. was a Baptist minister. The two corresponded for many years, and it’s wonderful to see the growth of their friendship through these letters. Grant Gordon – editor of the book – has provided a very helpful biographical introduction, as well as notes at the end of each letter explaining the circumstances of the next one.

    For me, the real highlights of the book were:

    • Newton’s “wise counsel”. It is an appropriate title for the book – Newton was clearly someone who had a lot of Godly wisdom in various situations. Obviously the situations were specific to Ryland at the time, as was the counsel given, but it’s worth reading simply for Newton’s approach. In particular, Newton was someone for whom theology and the Scriptures were not just an academic thing: they applied in real situations. That is what was so helpful about the book for me – seeing how he took the theology he knew and applied it to the situations he was given. His letters are soaked in Scripture and Scriptural references.
    • Similarly, he was not someone who courted controversy. He was charitable in his dealings with those of different theological persuasions whilst at the same time knowing when to stand firm.
    • I would recommend the book to any Christian, nonetheless they were originally written to a pastor of a church, and as someone now in a similar situation I think the letters were especially relevant to someone in Christian ministry.
    • Finally, what I particularly enjoyed was seeing how many of the situations Newton and Ryland were facing that I could relate to: it’s surprising how little has changed in the last 200 years. It was actually encouraging to think about some of the issues that they were facing in the 18th Century, and how the church has survived those challenges – it gives me confidence that the church will survive today. God has kept the church through many changing times, and he continues to work today.

    All in all, this is a book I heartily recommend!

  • Review: Simply God

    As I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog, over the past academic year I’ve been studying a course on the Doctrine of God. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s one of the best courses I’ve done at college: the doctrine of God is fundamental to theology – it affects pretty much everything else (what else is theology if not about God, in order to relate us to him?). And it’s been a real privilege to look into how the great theologians of the past (such as Augustine and Aquinas) have understood the doctrine of God, and how they went about doing theology – their careful methodology is a real treat given much of what passes for theology on the internet these days.

    And it’s not just an intellectual thing – I’ve found my faith enlivened as we have considered together what it means for God to be God. My mind has been stretched as we’ve thought about God’s simplicity (theological term, not simplicity as you may know it… hence the title of the book), omniscience, omnipotence, eternality and so on. In short, I’ve discovered to be true what Spurgeon once said about God:

    Oh, there is, in contemplating Christ, a balm for every wound; in musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore. Would you lose your sorrow? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead.

    Given all that, I can warmly and heartily recommend “Simply God” to you: Peter Sanlon was until recently a tutor at college and taught the Doctrine of God course which I’ve been doing this year. As such, much of the contents of this book are similar to what I’ve been learning at college – if you wanted one book to read instead of doing the course, you couldn’t do much better than this one. Let me highlight a few aspects of the book I found particularly helpful. (more…)

  • The Trouble with Rev…

    I have mixed feelings about the third series of BBC Rev, which finished last night. On the one hand, it made great TV: it’s a good story, well written, genuine characters, some touching and funny moments, and generally very watchable. It also – as the previous series have done – brought to the small screen some important themes, such as forgiveness and even the cross.

    And yet, despite all that, I found this series even more difficult to watch than the previous two – and not just because it dealt with some pretty bleak themes. I concluded my review of series two by saying: “Adam Smallbone doesn’t have any good news.” I still think that, and even more so this series: Adam apparently has a very strong sense of vocation, of his calling to be a priest – but he doesn’t seem to have much else apart from that. He seems to have very little idea about what he is actually there to do apart from be a kind of social worker in a dog collar. His faith seems to make very little difference in his life – witness his outbursts that I wrote about last time, again in this series. The third episode (with the artist) I actually found painful to watch – Adam’s outburst at the end would probably have been grounds for instant dismissal in secular jobs. And the way Adam treats people – particularly the way he treats Nigel (the curate) towards the end – is also painful.

    I think the problems I have with the series can be summed up in two scenes:

    (more…)

  • Review: What’s Best Next

    What's Best NextI’ve just finished reading What’s Best Next by Matt Perman. It’s a book about productivity, and unlike many other productivity books it’s written from a specifically Christian perspective.

    I must confess to not really reading productivity books (there are so many of them, it’s difficult to know where to start) – but I’d heard good things about this one, so I decided to give it a go. It’s definitely worth the money.

    Here are a few things about the book I found helpful:

    • I really appreciated the focus the book had on the ‘big picture’. Although I haven’t read much in the way of productivity books, you see a lot of blog posts about this kind of thing around and most of them focus on how to improve your efficiency – how to do things more quickly, or get more done in a certain space of time. This is all good, but this book argues that efficiency is no use if you’re doing the wrong things to start with! So the first part of the book deals with how we assign our priorities and goals.
    • The focus on creating a schedule, rather than simply blocking in a list of things which need to get done. I hadn’t really thought about this aspect of productivity before, but it’s very helpful.
    • Only after discussing pretty much everything else does the book talk about efficiency and creating lists etc! This seems to me to be a workable and effective solution to a lot of problems around time management.
    • Finally, the ‘Christian’ focus of the book I found particularly helpful – i.e. orienting things from God’s perspective rather than just giving us licence to do whatever we want to do better.

    All in all, I think this will be a book I will come back to – there is a lot of wisdom here for organising your time. Don’t worry if you – like me – have never read a book on productivity before!

  • Brief Thoughts on Sherlock series 3

    The latest series of Sherlock aired its last episode on Sunday night. I really enjoyed the first two series (i.e. I think it’s one of the best things the BBC have done in the past few years, perfect cast and tone), so this was something I was eagerly anticipating. However… after a few days I’m still not sure what to make of it. I mean, let’s be clear, the series had some genius moments (loved meeting Sherlock’s parents in the first episode, or the game Mycroft and Sherlock are playing, for example). And it was all tremendously clever. But I feel that something fundamental had changed and just wasn’t there.

    This article on the Huffington Post goes some way to explaining the problems I have with the third series. I don’t agree with all of it, but I think Kate Rose pretty much hits the nail on the head when she talks about some of the fundamental changes which seem to have happened between series two and three.

    • One of the things people noted about S3 was it felt a bit like fan fiction. (Sherlock, if you didn’t know, has a massive fan fiction community). To me, I thought there were just a few too many nods to fan fiction – especially including a group of characters in the first episode who came up with theories about how Sherlock survived (I mean, is that meta or what?)
    • S3 seemed to focus more on Sherlock’s character and its development. In some ways this was a good thing, but in others I felt like they overplayed it to the detriment of Sherlock’s raison d’etre: Sherlock as the aloof, high-functioning sociopath who … detects things. I mean, what did Sherlock really do in this entire series which only he could do? The first episode, he was virtually irrelevant to the bomb plot. The second episode he did deduce more, but I still felt like it wasn’t the same as the previous two (although the episode itself was probably my favourite of the three, despite moving at a snail’s pace sometimes). The third episode… well, again, not much deducing going on.
    • This is the thing: the previous episodes have had some mystery which only Sherlock could solve as the primary driver behind the events in each episode – S3 seemed to go some way away from this. Each episode felt more fragmented and fractured, trying to tie all the pieces together.
    • There was no real overarching plot (well, villain), unless you count the very end of the first episode. That’s what I loved about the first two series – both of them built up to a finale. In S3, the finale seemed to be more of a whimper.

    It was still good TV, and I do appreciate that with the expectations riding on the series it was almost doomed not to live up to expectations. Still, these are just my feelings at the moment. I should probably go watch it again, just to make sure…

  • Review: Is God anti-gay?

    I’ve just finished reading “Is God anti-gay?” by Sam Allberry. It didn’t take very long – it’s less than 100 pages long! In the book, Allberry uses his experience as a pastor who experiences same-sex attraction (SSA for short) to write a sensitive and compelling piece about what the Bible says about sexuality.

    I’d recommend this book to anyone who wanted to understand more about what the Bible says about sexuality (Christian or not) – it may not change your mind but it will hopefully give a different perspective. Not all of the book will be relevant to everyone, I think Allberry tries to write to accommodate a wide range of potential readers, but that’s not to detract from the main message of the book.

    I’d suggest that this would be a good book to put at the back of churches for people to browse; this issue isn’t going to get any smaller in future years and having something to explain things in a concise yet accessible way will be a real plus.

  • Review: The Story of Christianity

    I’ve just finished reading “The Story of Christianity” by David Bentley Hart. He is, as you may recall, the author of “Atheist Delusions” – a book I highly recommend. Anyway, I came across the book recently, and as I’d enjoyed Atheist Delusions – and as the Kindle edition was 56p on Amazon (still is, at the time of writing!) then I decided to give it a go.

    Let me say this: the foundation degree at Oak Hill includes a two-year church history and doctrine course (which is what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years). This book basically goes through all that we’ve done on the “church history” part. In fact, if you wanted to do the course that we’ve been doing in book form, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

    Most of the major events and people are covered (some things in more depth than on our course), and the whole thing is written well and engagingly. To give you an idea – I’ve been able to follow it while at the same time suffering from sleep deprivation from a one month old baby. That speaks well of the book!

    There are a few areas where I’d disagree with Bentley Hart, mainly I think in theological emphasis or interpretation of particular events, but as a historian he does a great job. And although most of the events are covered, this isn’t the book to go to if you want to look at church history in great depth – it’s a popular-level overview.

    I would recommend this book to pretty much anyone who has an interest in Christianity and who – like me until a couple of years ago – is ignorant of much of church history. Let me give  you a few reasons why I think this book is worth reading:

    • You can’t understand the state of the church today without understanding where the church has come from;
    • I thought Bentley Hart’s presentation of the crusades – an area which people often talk about without actually having any historical facts to hand – was very helpful;
    • Similarly, his chapter on science and Christianity was very helpful (this is a topic he covers in more depth in Atheist Delusions);
    • Although the book is not in huge detail (by design), there are some book recommendations at the back and a general overview is often a good starting point for further reading. It will introduce you to many of the key players throughout the church’s history.

    Most importantly, many people have misgivings about the future of the church at the moment. This book will help to put things in perspective: the church has survived a tough 2,000 years. Christians have been persecuted in the past, and indeed today many endure persecution (apparently Christians are the most-persecuted world religion). And yet, Christianity is still growing fast in many places. This book certainly gave me a lot more confidence in the church’s future, which is surely worth it!

  • Freedom and Order: History, Politics and the English Bible

    I’ve just finished reading Freedom and Order by Nick Spencer, who is research director at Theos Think Tank. Some of their output recently on secularism has been excellent, and I also went to hear Nick Spencer do a talk about English politics and the Bible at Westminster Abbey a couple of years ago (about when the book was released – strangely enough I don’t think I blogged about it at the time).

    Anyway, I very much enjoyed reading the book. I’d simply never understood before just how big an influence Christianity and the Bible has had on English politics. In short: it’s massive. One story I liked was hearing about one MP who was told by one of his constituents that he wasn’t in parliament to preach – apparently this particular MP had been talking about the Bible too much! Another interesting fact – apparently William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury 1942-44) came up with the phrase ‘Welfare State’. The number of political groups who have not only been influenced by but explicitly grounded in the Christian message and scripture is staggering.

    As someone who isn’t very ‘political’, if that’s the right word, some of the book went into a bit more detail than I really cared for – it’s not a light bedtime read – although I’m sure if you’re into politics and history you would enjoy it much more. I would recommend the book to anyone who had an interest in English political history and religion, I think Nick Spencer has done an excellent job detailing just how British political life has been affected by it.

    We seem to be living in an age where people want to cast off the religious roots of the UK, and I believe books like this are important to help us understand why that would not be a good idea – or at least, to ensure that we do it with our eyes open. So much of what we take for granted today has been hard won and fought for by people in the past, often using explicitly Christian arguments.

    At the start of the book, Spencer quotes John Locke, which I think sums it up:

    He that travels the roads now, applauds his own strength and legs that have carried him so far in such a scantling of time; and ascribes all to his own vigour; little considering how much he owes to their pains, who cleared the woods, drained the bogs, built the bridges, and made the ways possible.

    – John Locke, “The Reasonableness of Christianity”

  • The Story of the Jews

    One of the things which interests me about modern-day Judaism is how different it is from my understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures (i.e. the Jewish Bible or the Christian Old Testament). Given that Christians and Jews have so much shared Scripture (most of the Bible – 75% or thereabouts – is the Hebrew Scriptures) – how have they ended up in such different places? In particular, modern-day Jews do not offer sacrifices and there seems to be no atonement for sin – the focus seems to be rather on the observance of the law. So I was interested to see that Simon Schama has created a new documentary called “The Story of the Jews” recently (Sunday evenings on BBC2 – at the time of writing there are another couple of episodes remaining in the series). Mrs Phil and I have been watching it, and it’s fascinating. What’s particularly interesting to me is how Judaism has changed and adapted over the years.

    It’s fascinating to see how Simon Schama – and others – interpret the parts of the Scriptures which I am familiar with, and yet put a slant on them which I would be quite unfamiliar with. Present-day Jews have much more history to look back on, and have much more to explain. In a particularly poignant moment at the end of the last programme, for example, Simon Schama talked about the building anti-Semitism in Europe at the end of the 19th century before finishing up at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. (more…)