By Michael Green
IVP. 160 pages. £2.50
ISBN 0 8511 08830
I remember, when a young student only a few months old as a Christian, sitting down to read Michael Green's Runaway World and being amazed to discover that there were so many good reasons for believing!
It is fascinating, 25 years on, to read Critical Choices, the latest book from his prolific pen. It is written with today's person in mind, students certainly, but a far wider audience too, believer and particularly not-yet believer.
Certainly, this is a book for today. For all the overlaps with Runaway World, You Must Be Joking, etc., this captures a different mood and a different type of question. I doubt it will be widely read in 20 years' time; I doubt it was intended to be!
This is not a heavy academic treatise, but a more popular work, not a philosophical analysis of the modern western world, so much as a tuning in to its 'vibes'. It faces up to them and then faces them up to the Christian gospel and to the person of Jesus. In many ways, this is Michael Green at his best - fresh, intriguing, punchy, thoroughly readable yet with an acute mind offering penetrating insights.
It is written for a wary, suspicious and even ignorant generation in an understanding and warm, rather than hostile manner. Yet throughout there is a determination to face us with the truth about Jesus and not to let whatever hurts, hopes or abuses have shaped us, excuse us from that encounter. So Michael Green tackles issues as diverse as identity, aloneness (deliberately and shrewdly not loneliness - see p. 30), materialism, stress, freedom, love and he throws out comments on race, ecology, debt, gender, sex, with a good feel for people's longings and desires as well as their fears. There is a masterly passage on 'story' and a defence of the truth against relativism without resorting to cold rationalism (see pp. 44 and 47) and, more familiar, though still shrewdly-put arguments on the person of Jesus (pp. 68-69).
The range of quotations is impressive too. They are often good ones and certainly not just the old favourites, and I am unashamedly using them! Outside of biblical sources, he ranges from Tacitus to Dylan Thomas, Diognetus to Dudley Moore, Voltaire to Michael Jackson, Nietzsche to Eric Clapton, C.T. Studd to Sting.
I must confess that I read this with a conscious question mark, a fair one I believe when an author starts where people are and is still trying to tell the gospel faithfully. I wondered if the book would really do justice to the judgment of God. If every now and then a smug smile flitted across the face of my prejudice, every now and then it was firmly wiped off. 'Jesus allowed himself to suffer the alienation, the damnation if you like which our evil deeds deserved'... 'So it was perfectly plain to all and sundry that when Jesus was exposed to die on a cross he was suffering the curse, the righteous judgement of God.'
I am grateful for the book and I suspect that it does fill a gap in the overcrowded book market. It is different from Basic Christianity or Mere Christianity and it may speak where they will no longer be read. I would buy this to give away to today's generation, I would buy this to read myself, and catch something of the feel for today, and allow Michael Green's enthusiasm for Jesus to rub off on me and I would buy this as an unashamed 'magpie' to pick up for myself fresh lines and approaches.
