Christian authors seem to always end up writing a book about how they came to believe what they believe, and in fact from when I was a youth (that is in my twenties) one of the things that the Bible teachers would always do would be to teach us to explain to people why we believe what we believe. They would refer to this as our testimony and it would generally, though not always, fall into a similar pattern – I was a really bad person, but I then had this divine revelation, and suddenly I am now a Christian. The problem with that is that many of us got stuck on the 'I was bad' part of the story and simply finished it off with a 'now I'm a Christian'. The truth is, though, explaining why one is a Christian as opposed to how one became a Christian is a very difficult task, especially since it involves a lot of thinking. To be honest there are actually quite a lot of Christians out there that if you were to ask them why they are a Christian then they wouldn't be able to give you an answer. While I could give you a tonne of examples of the testimony, a friend of mine wrote a very good example of what I will call an Apologia.

Orthodoxy is another really good example this form of literature (and yes, you will also find similar examples in the writings of Paul the Apostle, but for now I will stick to Chesterton). At the beginning of this book Chesterton explains that the reason that he wrote this book was because he spent all of his time in [book:Heretics] explaining why a number of the secular beliefs that were circulating at the time were not so much wrong, but unsatisfactory, and didn't provide any ideas of a way that was satisfactory. As such he writes this book, not so much as an objective argument as to why Christianity is superior to these other beliefs (because it is very difficult, if not impossible, for one to write an argument objectively as to why one's belief system is superior), but rather why he considers Christianity superior.

One of the interesting things that we are seeing in this book is the beginnings of the war between science and religion. It isn't as if Chesterton is saying that science is wrong, but rather he is suggesting that a world that exists within a closed system that is run purely by the laws of science does not actually provide a rational and satisfying answer to the basic question of life – why are we here? I have to admit that I agree with him, because to me a universe that functions purely on the rules of science is little more than a cold and unloving machine that offers no hope and no purpose. I guess this is one of the main reasons why people in the later part of the 20^th Century have began to seek out religious answers again because the harsh reality of the closed system in the end leaves us empty and alone.

One of the things that Chesterton focuses on is the idea of miracles, or I would prefer to suggest as the idea of magic – namely that there are aspects of this universe that completely baffle us and the more than we look into it them more confused that we become – how is it that light can behave as a particle and a wave, and in turn matter exist not only as a particle but have wave like properties about it. What is emotion, and what causes us to feel these emotions: joy, sadness, excitement, love? The problem is that we live in this scientific world that seeks answers to this questions in science – we have determined that emotions are caused by chemical reactions in the brain, and thus we create drugs to pump into people to try to cure them of depression, or to make them sit still in class (when in reality children don't want to be stuck in a class room that is a form of prison being taught using a system of education that belongs back in the industrial age).

Then there is the notion of sin – not big 'S' Adam ate the apple and got kicked out of the garden sin, but rather the fact that people can be really annoying at times. In fact there is a whole field of study called criminology that tries to explain why people do bad things. Well, I guess it happens to be because we really only care about one person - ourselves. Half the reason that charities survive is because you get tax deductions for giving money to them – I wonder how long a charity would last if it didn't have tax deductible status? Then again it is always the other person who is bad because we can never accept us as doing any bad things – yet our prisons are full of people who claim that they never did anything wrong (though I do have serious concerns with the way the criminal justice system operates).

One thing that Chesterton does is that he goes back to his childhood to look and remember the joys, and the magic, of growing up. How we would be marvelled by the animals that we would see at the zoo, or the trains that would go roaring past. In many ways that magical part of childhood is not so much lost, but forced out of us, as we grow up. We aren't supposed to have this magical fascination of trains any more because one is now an adult and one is supposed to do adult things – such as sitting in an office all day trying to be as productive, and as profitable, as possible, even if you aren't enriching yourself.

I want to finish off here by saying a few things about conservatism because while Chesterton may sound like your standard Christian conservative, in reality he isn't. In fact he considers conservatism to be a incredibly dangerous thing, namely because nothing stays the same forever. He uses the example of the white post – if one leaves the white post and doesn't do anything to it (thus attempting to maintain the status-quo) the the white post will sooner or later become a black post. For that white post to remain a white post one must paint it. The same is the case with conservatism – it is corrupting. If we maintain the status-quo then eventually the system will become corrupted, and eventually we will all lose out. We are seeing this happening today with the ever widening income gap, and the ravages of climate change. This is probably why democracy is a good thing because at least every few years we get to ditch the tired old party and bring in a new one – though the problem arises not so much with the parties, but with the system they represent – we may change the parties, and we may change the policies, but the system, in the end, remains the same. This is why Chesterton not so much supports progress, but rather progress in the form of a revolution, a revolution that seeks to move us out of the corrupted status quo and back to the edenic world of the past. There are many ideas as to how one can do this, but in Chesterton's mind this can only be done if we return to the original teachings of Jesus Christ.

You can read this book online here (and probably numerous other places as well).

Well, most authors that I know want as many people to read their book as possible, yet with this guy (whoever he was, though it is believed that he was a monk) opens, and closes, the book with who he doesn't want to read this book, which is basically anybody who does not have some intense spiritual epiphany. Okay, the version I read was a translation from the Middle English text, and I am told (in the introduction) that a lot of the beautiful and flowery language has been lost in the translation (not surprisingly) so I am unable to really comment on the poetic form. However, I must say that I am probably one of those people that he didn't really want reading this book because, well, I didn't think all that much of it.

In a way, I am not surprised that it was written by a monk because the entire book is an exposition on God (that is the Christian god) and seems to be stuck entirely in the esoteric world. Personally, I really do not find any benefit from reading such books that have no connection to the world in which we live, not to say that I do not like esoteric writings – some of them can be quite good – but this seems to be clearly written by somebody who had no understanding of what the world was like outside the walls of his monastery.

The reason that I rate the book so low is because I find good Christian writers are able to actively engage in the world around them, and while I do not necessarily agree with what a lot of them write, I do know that the good ones live in the world and interact with real people, as opposed to the monks of the medieval world who shut themselves away to spend their lives contemplating the nature of God. It reminds me of the story of this guy back in Roman times who built himself a column and sat on top of it so that he could escape sin, yet it did not matter how high the column was he could not escape the world.

It is not that I have a thing against the monks of the medieval world though because they were active in preserving many of the texts that have been passed down to us from the classical world of the Greeks and Romans. Without these monks we would not have Homer or Cicero nor would have we have, surprisingly, Aristophanes (though it was suggested that as they transcribed his plays they would make comments about how dirty some of them were). As for this book though, while it may be short, it is probably one to give a miss because, beyond giving us an idea of how some monks spent their life contemplating God, there is not really all that much that I got out of it.

This is sort of one of those books that if you have been a Christian for a while you have probably stumbled across or even read. Well, I'm actually not quite so sure about that now because the book was published over 35 years ago and as is typical for our modern Western culture, the older it is the less relevant it becomes. Personally, I really don't think that this book is necessarily all that irrelevant because the teachings that it proposes are pretty much as old as Christianity itself, though what Packer was trying to do was to bring the spiritual aspect of our relationship with God back into the modern world in which we live. In a way the things that he says in this book are probably more relevant now than they were back then.

However, there are a few things that I do need to discuss, and one of them is his chapter on idolatry. Okay, there have been numerous books written about the modern nature of idolatry, and he does explore it here, but one of the things that I do question is his reaction against religious art. He seems to think that religious art is a bad thing, however I am quite the opposite. I believe religious art has its place, and in the medieval world, where pretty much 90 percent of the population were illiterate, it was even more important. I believe religious art has its place, however, like all things, it needs to remain in this place. Packer's concern here is the act of using religious art in the act of worship rather than having it as simply an expression of our love for God. In a way, if we were to outright ban religious art, then we should also get rid of all of our hymns and songs because, in the same way, these songs are not of the Bible, and unless we only sing the Psalms, by singing a modern hymn we may be breaching the second commandment.

Packer explores almost all aspects of Christianity here, and in a way relates it to how we as modern middle class Christians respond to it. Mind you, here in Australia, as is probably the case in Europe and England, Christianity is simply something that middle class people (and not all of them by a long shot) simply do because that is what they have been doing all their lives. However, as he argues, if we are to be truly Christians, we should be doing a lot more. Many of us simply live what can be said to be 'safe' Christian lives, that is we go to church, and we hang around our Christian friends, and rarely, if ever, go out of our way to actually live our Christian lives. In fact, many of us hide behind the walls of the church and keep our contact with non-Christians to a minimum, and if we do interact with them, it is usually through either holier than thou type of talk, or fear-mongering fire and brimstone sermons. Rarely, if ever, do we actually try to get alongside them and actually work with them.

Packer's exposition of the patriarchs is quite interesting because he looks at each of them and shows us how God moulded them through their flaws. This leads to his conclusion in saying that the Christian life is not easy, and for those who go into it believing that it is are fooling themselves, and those preachers who preach a rosy painted version of Christianity are simply fulling a church of people who really don't understand what it means to follow Christ. Once again I am not talking about being a goody-too-shoes. God does not care if you are sleeping with your girlfriend/boyfreind, in a de-facto relationship. Marriage as become such a farce that as far as I am concerned, as long as everybody knows that you are living as if you were married (without the ceremony) then you are basically married. Mind you, even then the ceremony itself pretty much comes down to a form of crass ritualism that can be done without.

No, being a Christian is living a selfless life and willing to live with integrity, honesty, and a rejection of materalism. To stand up and fight for the weak and the oppressed, and be willing to spend your time to live with, befriend, and provide comfort to those society has rejected. Look at what Jesus says about those who show kindness to the weak, infirm, cripple, and imprisoned. Many of us wrap ourselves in our middle class cloaks, put our money in the plate, and then go home to our nice comfy beds, and in the morning go to work and proceed to rip off, abuse, and mock those that we have power over (and some of us even do that within the church congregation as well).

It is what he said about the patriarchs (though the chapter on Guidance was thought provoking as well, but I have written about that elsewhere, except to say that we in the Western world spend more time asking God if the decision we are going to make is the right one than rather making that decision and going and doing it, as they tend to do elsewhere in the world) is that each of them had flaws, and as we see through their lives, God works through them, through their struggles, and their challenges, to make them into the people that he wants them to be. I'll pick Joseph (the dude with the technicoloured dream coat) as an example, namely because some preacher said that nothing bad is said about Joseph in the Bible. That, my friend, is rubbish. He was a conceited little child that rubbed his brothers' faces in the fact that he was his dad's favourite, which is why he ended up as a slave (and later a prisoner) in Egypt. God had a plan for him (and we never know the result of this plan until after the fact, so don't try second guessing God, just go out and do it) and for this plan to work, God had to iron out the rough spots.

One thing, though, I will finish on, and that is something that I discussed with my friend tonight. We spoke a bit about the idea of guidance, and one thing that we know from the Bible is that none of the characters in the Bible ever forfeited their destiny because they made the wrong decision. The whole thing about us here in the Western World is that God has given us the freedom to make these decisions, so instead of uming and ahhing, and wasting your time asking God whether it is the right decision, simply make the choice because despite what choice you make, your destiny will not be forfeit.

Initially I though that this was a book that was written by Charles Spurgeon but since it was published in 2000 and no matter how hard I try I cannot find an original publication date I suspect that this is more a collection of his writings on the Holy Spirit than a particular book that he has written. To me this is not surprising because Spurgeon tends to waffle on a lot, and I felt that this book was little more than a very long waffle on the Holy Spirit.

I can't say that I was really all that encouraged by this particular book, I am sure others are or will be, but for me I wasn't, namely because Spurgeon's writing is not succinct nor does it actually move anywhere, and bringing a collection of his writings into a book helps even less because you cannot see where he is heading. Sometimes I even wonder whether Spurgeon actually studied theology, or whether he simply rambled on without even thinking about what he was saying.

Look, I'm not necessarily going to say that it is a bad thing, and Spurgeon did a lot with regards to helping the poor, but when the editor suggests that Spurgeon preached his first sermon at the age of 16 one wonders if there was any real experience behind that. Okay, there are probably a lot of 16 year olds out there that preach sermons, however they do tend to be young and they do tend to not have the understanding or the experience to really know what they are saying. In fact I suspect that most sixteen year olds that are preaching sermons to their friends are probably coming from a very fundamentalist background.

Spurgeon himself was a fundamentalist, though this was before the actual fundamentalist church came into existence (which was around the early 20th century after the publication of a book call, I believe, 'Christian Fundamentals'). However, from reading some of his writings in this book one can see that there is such a streak in him. For instance, in the chapter entitled 'Grieving the Holy Spirit' he talks about how you know that you have upset the Holy Spirit when you have trouble reading the Bible and that you have trouble understanding sermons. Me, that is a normal part of life, and Christians struggle through those periods quite a lot. To think that because you are dozing off in Church or not learning anything from the Bible, or finding it hard to participate in Bible study should not make you think that you have some unrepented sin in your life. We are all sinners, and we all have sins that we try to cover up, and if the Holy Spirit left us because of that then there would be no Christians. If you want to know what happens when the Holy Spirit leaves you, or what causes the Holy Spirit to leave you, then you can look no further than King Saul (and I wonder if Spurgeon properly exegeted his Bible before writing that).

Then there are his comments about the Anglo-Catholic church. Granted, there may problems with that particular denomination, but aren't there problems with all denominations. If you show me a church that has no problems then I will show you a fantasy. All churches have their problems, just like all humans have their problems. The question comes down to whether the church, just like the human, is trying to work those problems out of their system. The same goes with tradition and ritual – there is nothing wrong with tradition or ritual as long as it is used in its right context. If you believe that you get to heaven because of ritual and tradition, then you have another problem because the Bible is clear that there is nothing that you can do to get to heaven, it has more to do with what has already been done for you.

Well, first I should suggest that if you don't want to read me rambling on about nothing then you should skip this first paragraph, but then I am probably going to talk more about Barth and theological writing than this book because I read this book quite some time ago and not much of its content ended up sinking into my long term memory (or at least what I can withdrawal). However, it is ANZAC day today so I have the day off work (yay), and as well as writing a rather steamy chapter of my post-modern piece of rubbish, I thought I would also write a few more commentaries on Goodreads (if only to try a boost the number of reviews I have written since I am currently number 4 in Australia, and have dropped down somewhat from number 2).

Karl Barth was a Swiss theologian, a contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which meant that he was around during World War II when the German Church faced pressure from the Nazi Regime to conform to their doctrine. This lead to a break within the church and the creation of the Confessing Church which stood against the regime and its atrocities. Remember that many of the hierarchs of the regime were not Christian and were more interested in bringing back ancient German paganism.

Barth's major work is a 13 volume book called Church Dogmatics (which I am unlikely to read) however this work is more of a cut down version that uses the Apostles Creed as a springboard for his discussions. When I did read this book I found that Barth was a very inspiring writer and explore numerous areas of Christianity quite deeply, which is not surprising since he lived during one of the most violent periods of the 20th Century, having seen two world wars and two economic crises. What this period symbolised was a breakdown in the modernist and enlightened ideas of the 18th and 19th century which saw the idea that humanity no longer needed God and that they could create paradise on Earth develop.

This changed with World War I, and I still hold the position that World War I should not be viewed outside of World War II or the events that occurred inbetween, namely because, as I have once again suggested, we see the breakdown of humanistic philosophy. What we see with theologians like Barth, and later with philosophers like Lewis, is Christianity being brought into the modern world. Some suggest that Francis Schaffer is returning to the fundamentalist roots that we see struggling with our own post-modern world, but having read a number of his works, I see that he is also attempting to reconcile Christianity with modernism. Unfortunately, humanity tends to always move faster than Christianity which, while not being a backward looking religion, tends to be less progressive.

These days, within the churches that I attend (and I must admit that they also tend to move slowly, but this is not necessarily a bad thing because what slow movement means is that the congregation considers how they should progress, and simply rushing too fast into the progressive movement can undermine the authenticity of the church) are desires to try to meet the post-modern society where they are at, however they have still not understood the relative nature of post-modernism, in that they are still caught up in objective doctrine, and fail to see the nature of subjectivity and opinion. However, consider this, music in the church is still mostly pop-rock, and while the music may be moving into the style of the 90s, the electronica of the new century is still a long way off.

As for me, in some ways I have probably moved forward a little more than the others, but have no desire to drag or push them up to where I am because as I have suggested before blind progress can be quite destructive. For instance the issue of sex before marriage is something, that if not handled correctly, can be very destructive within the congregation, and as is clear within the Bible, the people are God are not meant to be descending into orgies or prostituting themselves to the world. To me, one should be able to move beyond this obsession that society has with pleasure to a more disciplined and enlightened understanding of the human-God relationship.