Why Christianity makes emotional sense

Review of Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense by Francis Spufford (HarperOne, 2013, $25.99, 240 pages)

There’s a long tradition of Christian literature called apologetics, which is an intellectual defense of Christianity, why it’s reasonable to believe it. British author Spufford in his witty, accessible and profane new book takes a different approach. His is a defense of Christian emotions, “their grown-up dignity.” He writes: “The book is called Unapologetic because it isn’t giving an ‘apologia,’ the technical term for a defense of the ideas. And also because I’m not sorry.”

Who will want to read this book? First, Christians will be drawn to it but will also find plenty they may disagree with. And his swearing will offend some.

Second, people who like to read good writing. Just take a few minutes to read his brief critique of the message New Atheists have put on British buses: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” His beef is with the phrase “enjoy your life.” What follows is prose that reads like a good novel.

Third, the curious. Whether or not you call yourself a Christian, take note of that word in the subtitle: “Surprising.” You will find something to surprise you, whether or not you agree with it.

While Spufford, who is an Anglican, claims not to be presenting an intellectual defense, he does make reasonable arguments in an attempt to clarify what Christianity is; he just tries to tie them to people’s experience. For example, he notes that people may view believers as “people touting a solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution.” Then he argues that “it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable.”

Another part of the subtitle he keeps to throughout is “Emotional Sense.” While many claim that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer, Spufford writes that “it is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.”

Spufford develops his own terms as alternatives to standard theological ones. For example, his second chapter is called “The Crack in Everything,” in which he presents a way of addressing “sin” without using that word, which tends to refer to “the pleasurable consumption of something,” especially sex. He goes on to create a term he uses throughout the book: HPtFtU, which stands for the human propensity to f--- things up.

In “Big Daddy,” he addresses the experience of God, which he describes thus: “I am being seen from inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of.” Then he goes into a long description of awareness in lovely prose. He notes that such an experience brings comfort but is not comfortable. “Starting to believe in God,” he writes, “is a lot like falling love, and there is certainly a biochemical basis for that.”

Spufford reiterates the emotional sense of faith: “I’m only ever going to get to faith by some process quite separate from proof and disproof; … I’m only going to arrive at it because in some way that it is not in the power of evidence to rebut, it feels right.” He concludes that God “is as common as the air. He is the ordinary ground. And yet a presence. And yet a person.”

In “Hello, Cruel World,” Spufford considers the problem of evil, which he describes thus: “What sort of loving deity could have the priorities that the cruel world reveals, if the cruel world is an accurate record of His intentions, once you look beyond reality’s little gated communities of niceness?” He then dismisses several theodicies, or arguments to solve this problem, before concluding that “all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us. We don’t have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story.”

This leads to his chapter on Jesus, which he calls “Yeshua,” where he retells the story of Jesus from the Gospels. Scholars will no doubt find it too cursory, but I found it well done and engaging.

Even though Spufford writes in his preface that he didn’t write the book to “engage in zero-sum competition with atheists,” he has those and other voices in mind at times as he confronts and names certain perspectives. In his chapter “Et Cetera,” he points out the view that somebody, “probably St. Paul, retrospectively glued Godhood onto poor Jesus,” who was really “a minor first-century religious reformer with a bit of a bee in his bonnet about gentleness. A well-intentioned and irrelevant person from the pre-Enlightenment ages of superstition.”

In “The International League of the Guilty, Part Two,” Spufford deals with the difficulty of balancing grace and justice. He writes, “We want God’s extra-niceness confined to deserving cases such as, for example, us, and a reliable process of judgment put in place which will ensure that the child-murderers are ripped apart with red-hot tongs.”

While parts of Unapologetic may tax one’s patience, most of it reads quickly. And while some of his points are hard-hitting, confronting Christians as much or more as others, the tone is mostly confessional. He’s giving us his experience, how he came to see how Christianity makes emotional sense.

This is likely a book I’ll return to more than once. And I imagine others will, too.

Hundreds of close calls we never knew about

Back in the late 1970s and ’80s, I was involved in the antinuclear weapons movement. We tried to warn people about the danger of so many nuclear weapons—more than 50,000. One was too many, many of us felt, but we also tried to argue with such logic as, Why do we need to be able to blow up the world 50 times over? We also warned people about the risk of accidents and an inadvertent error leading to a suicidal nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Little did we know that we were actually understating the danger. Little did we know how many times we came dangerously close to a nuclear war.

Now, with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control (Penguin, 2013), we know much more about that history.

Louis Menand reviews the book in the Sept. 30 issue of The New Yorker. He includes summaries of some of the stories Schlosser tells. For example, on Jan. 25, 1995, more than four years after the end of the Cold War, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin received news at 9:28 a.m. Moscow time that “a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow.” Yeltsin had the option of launching an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. He had 4,700 nuclear warheads ready to go.

It turned out the “missile” was a weather rocket launched from Norway to study the aurora borealis. “The Norwegians had, in fact, notified the Russians several weeks in advance of the launch,” Menand writes, but “whoever received the notice didn’t grasp the implications or simply forgot to forward it to military authorities.”

This was one of hundreds of incidents after 1945 when “accident, miscommunication, human error, mechanical malfunction or some combination of glitches nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons.”

Menand includes other stories. In 1958, “a B-47 bomber carrying a Mark 36 hydrogen bomb, one of the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal, caught fire while taxiing on a runway at an airbase in Morocco.” Fortunately, or luckily, and the word must be repeated many times, the explosives in the warhead did not detonate.

Only six weeks later, another Mark 6 landed in the back yard of a house in Mars Bluff, S.C. “It had fallen when a crewman had mistakenly grabbed the manual bomb-release lever.” Fortunately (there’s that word again), the nuclear core had not been inserted. The bomb left a 35-foot crater, killed a lot of chickens and sent family members (humans, that is) to the hospital.

One study discovered that “between 1950 and 1968 at least 1,200 nuclear weapons had been involved in ‘significant’ accidents.” Even the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was a mile off target (and killed 40,000 people).

Perhaps the most harrowing incident occurred in 1980 at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, when a worker dropped a socket into the silo and left a hole in the missile.

The explosive force of a Titan II was three times the force of all the bombs dropped in World War II, including the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If detonated, it would have wiped out most of the state of Arkansas.

Schlosser also discusses at length the insane strategy of the Cold War powers, which called for full-scale nuclear war in response to any attack. A general tells Schlosser that “we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” Indeed.

Today many smaller powers also have nuclear weapons, and the possibility of their use, by design or accident, is high.