MUSTARD SEED SHAVINGS
Mountain-moving for beginners
By Steve Tilley. Bible Reading Fellowship. 135 pages. £6.99
ISBN 978 1 841 018 287
Steve Tilley is an experienced vicar with a deep desire to see new Christians grow in the practical outworking of their faith.
Ten chapters give wisdom, insight and opinion on applying the Ten Commandments today. Quotes from the Bible and a wide range of modern sources, from The Independent to Woody Allan, are used well to present the moral tensions of our times.
Steve Tilley’s dilemma, and ours also, is how to speak meaningfully with people soaked in the anti-religious propaganda, moral relativism and defended by knee jerk reactions and cliched arguments. He is to be applauded for his struggle and for pointing to the Ten Commandments, the missing link in much of modern evangelicalism. He is deeply concerned to be relevant and clears away as many religious obstacles as he can to communicating his ideas. Most readers of this paper would say he clears too many. As he says in the introductory section, Me and My Bible: ‘Those who find themselves in churches that take a conservative approach to the Bible will find me disappointing company’. Possibly true, but not because we do not struggle with the same obstacles.
When Moses received the law there was a sense of the glorious: the eternal speaking into the broken but magnificent ruin which is the human race. The law describes the way of freedom, of how things should be. For David it was better than gold. It takes his breath away. This book awakens no great sense of that glory. It does not awaken my moral imagination, make me hunger after goodness or bow before God. In its attempt to speak to the immanence of our secular age it loses sight of the transcendent. In its attempt to be inclusive, it relativises. In its desire to be kind and not offend, it appears (but I do not believe it to be true of the author) to be indifferent to the suffering sin causes and is in danger of trivialising the tragic. If ancient Israel is not going to be different, why leave Egypt?
This well-intentioned book gives away too much, but does not give enough.
Marsh Moyle,
Missionary-in-Residence at L’Abri in Greatham, Hampshire;
lived for many years in Central Europe
