My Take on Francis Spufford's "Unapologetic"

Unapologetic is Francis Spufford's apologetic for Christianity. Where it is good, it is very good. But I still can't recommend it.

Let's start where it is good: His description of what he calls the HPtFtU, the autobiography of his own encounter with God, and his defense of Jesus as God Incarnate.

I doubt many of us will adopt his acronym, HPtFtU, which stands for "the human propensity to f*ck things up." But his description of the propensity is a fresh take on 'sin'--before 'sinful' became merely a term to market ice cream. A sample:

Everybody knows...that 'sin' basically means 'indulgence' or 'enjoyable naughtiness'.... What I and most other believers understand by the word...has got very little to do with yummy transgression. For us, it refers to something much more like the human tendency, the human propensity, to f*ck up. Or let's add one more word: the human propensity to f*ck things up, because what we're talking about here is not just a tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident, our passive role as agents of entropy. It's our active inclination to break stuff, 'stuff' here including moods, promises, relationships we care about, and our own well-being and other people's, as well as material objects whose high gloss positively seems to imply a big fat scratch.

Second, props for his autobiography of his own encounter with God in the crisis of realizing his HPtFtU. Quite beautiful. It was, he wrote, "comforting, but not comfortable." And then there his presentation of Jesus as God Incarnate: "He is as human as we are, but if you meet him, you are also meeting the being responsible for the universe."

As I said, where it is good, the book is very good.

But the book is not in every subject good.

No, I'm not talking about his use of f-bombs and other four-letter words. (The asterisk in the word "f*ck" in this book review is my own editing.) The coarse language is off-putting to my sensibilities, and will probably limit the audience on this side of the Atlantic. But that's not the book's fatal flaw.

Neither is the fatal flaw found in his disappointing discussion of homosexuality. He trots out the tired argument that since Jesus never directly addressed homosexuality he must certainly have cared little about it. (For someone as skilled at logical and rhetoric as Spufford obviously is, that argument is surprisingly disingenuous.) Spufford is convinced that Christian opposition to homosexuality will eventually disappear and thus his readers should not see this as a stumbling block to their consideration of Christianity. Despite the fact that he throws biblically-convicted Christians under the bus on this point, that's still not the fatal flaw of the book.

What keeps me from recommending this book is Spufford's weak treatment of the cross. There's simply no clear explanation as to how the cross addressed our HPtFtU. Here's the best he can do:

[On the cross] he's turning his bruised face toward the whole human crowd, past and present and to come, and accepting everything we have to throw at him, everything we fear we deserve ourselves.

Notice that in this explanation, the only function of the cross is to absorb our anger, not God's. In this view Jesus is simply John Coffey from The Green Mile, taking back our ruin, absorbing it into himself. The biblical view is richer, where the cross is seen in relation to an offended God more than offensive humans.

I recall how my theology prof in seminary compared the biblical view of atonement with the view held by classic 19th century liberalism (revived in a growing number of contemporary writers like Spufford). He said if he were to stick his hand in a blazing fireplace, saying to me, "See how much I love you!" I would probably conclude he had a screw loose. But if I were trapped in a burning building and he entered to save me, knowing that he would die in the process but knowing that I would die if he did nothing, well then, I would hail him as a hero. In the biblical view of atonement, Jesus doesn't just demonstrate his identity with our suffering ("see how much I love you!") but he dies bearing the divine wrath we deserved.

It's important to get the cross right, because misunderstanding at this point ripples out into other subjects. Spufford has great skill at describing the HPtFtU and describing his encounter with God in Christ. But the book fails at his inability (or unwillingness) to see how the cross relates to God's offense at our HPtFtU.

 

Posted with Blogsy