I’ve been reading, which is almost always a worthwhile activity. Even bad books often give an insight into humanity in an accidental manner, but I have fortunately had the good pleasure of reading some good books and articles.

I’ve been reading:

• Death in the City by Francis Schaeffer (one of the great Christian thinkers of the twentieth century), which looks at how Christians should respond to the post-Christian world by looking at the books of Romans and Jeremiah
• Ecology and the Death of Man, also by Francis Schaeffer. One of the particular things that struck me was the view of creation we should have – we are both part of creation, of the natural world, and stweards of it
• The Christian and the Business World – a series of articles on the blog Cerulean Sanctum by Dan Edelen, which in their analysis of business and how Christians should relate to it display a wholeness of thinking that is just what the Church needs in the present day. Check the series out, they’re really good, and the blog is well worth reading on a regular basis.
• Living Proof by someone whose name I have forgotten, but is about evangelism as a lifestyle, and not just an activity (rather like Out of the Saltshaker by Rebecca Manley Pippert, which I’d also recommend).

One of the common themes that has emerged in my reading recently is the importance of a wholeness in our Christian lives, which all these tackle in some way or other. One of the problems with contemporary Western Christianity is a failure to work out the implications of the incredible, wonderful, revolutionary teachings of Jesus Christ on every area of life. Christianity should be a faith that refuses to be confined to a personal, private “spirituality”, and permeates every area of our lives. If the Bible is true, then it is true in every area.I’m not arguing for a literalistic viewpoint, by the way, which insists on the Bible being taken literally on every point. It is both a work of literature and a work of truth, and it’s important to be sensitive to the genre, style and intention of the Bible’s diverse parts. It contains many different things – teaching, history, poetry, prophecy, letters, legal documents, parables and so on, often communicating different kinds of truth in different ways. The Bible is also at the same time unified in its overall message of revealing the truth of God and his plan of redemption. It’s a wonderful, staggering, complicated, beautiful work. The Bible, if true, is historically true when it speak historically, poetically true when it speaks poetically, doctrinally true when it speaks doctrinally, and so on.

Stuart Olyott, preacher, teacher and pastor to pastors in Wales, spoke at my church’s prayer meeting on Tuesday on the state of the church in Wales (which deserves a blog entry of its own, so I won’t go into that now). What I found very helpful in the course of what he said was the way he identified the three components of the Christian life:

• The intellectual – Christianity involves certain beliefs, such as in the existence of the infinite-personal creator God, the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and so on. It also involves working out what the truth of the Gospel means intellectually in various fields.
• The practical – the Christian life must be lived, not just thought. “Faith without deeds is dead”. We need to follow Jesus in the way we act, in what we do, enacting the love that he taught us, and working out what it means to live as a Christian in all we do.
• The experiential – Christianity is above all a relationship. It is not primarily about following a code of conduct or adhering to a set of doctrines, though those come in to it, but is about following a person, Jesus Christ. We should be experiencing a relationship with the Living God, spending time with him, listening to him, talking to him, being in a state of constant communication and communion with him.

These three areas are closely interrelated and reinforce each other. It is hard to be strong in one while remaining weak in the others. Most churches, however, tend to focus on one or two and neglect the others. What’s lacking are balanced, complete Christian lives, teaching and evangelism, which should relate to all three areas. The implications of this are wide-ranging and will need a lot more thought and writing to work through…Well, that’s almost all I have time for before lunch. I’m writing this in the library and the librarian has just handed me True Spirituality and Genesis in space and time by Francis Schaeffer, which I saw on the library catalogue were in storage and so asked for them to be got out for me. More reading – excellent!