WHAT ARE CHRISTIANS FOR?:
Life Together at the End of the World
By Jake Meader
IVP. 192 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978 0 830 847 365 (hardback)
‘A revived sense of ourselves as embodied creatures – bodies of particular times and places who are nevertheless like all other human bodies, made in God’s image and for a purpose – will help address nearly every crisis we face as a church and a civilization today.’ (Karen Swallow Prior in the Foreword)
A clear sense of our identity and purpose is vital if we are to flourish and be fruitful as human beings. Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy, an online magazine covering the Christian faith in the public sphere. What are Christians for? explores who we are as Christians and what our purpose is in the world.
Speaking to Jake, I asked about what stimulated his writing.
‘I try to read pretty broadly and keep a lot of voices in my head … Reading people that you disagree with and taking their words at face value. I imagine myself in conversation with the authors. This is helpful for having a bassline honesty with ideas.’
This ‘promiscuous reading’ leads to making connections that might not be otherwise so obvious. For an example of this generous engagement with a broad range of thinkers, there is the fascinating chapter on ‘place’. It is not every day that one reads the names Jonathan Edwards and Pope John Paul II in the same sentence! That, however, is what the author manages in talking about the concept of ‘Mother Earth’.
A contemporary Lewis
Meader’s writing sounds like a contemporary C.S. Lewis delivering the broadcast talks that became the book Mere Christianity. Like Lewis, Meader does not engage in much direct Biblical interaction, but Scripture is clearly the superstructure that undergirds all his writing. I asked about the reason for this approach. Meader explained that he is writing for a generation who have been raised Christian but are disillusioned by the faith and offended by being told that they don’t know what the Bible says.
‘I need to find ways of talking about these things that hit them at such an angle that it piques their interest and makes them say: “Huh, maybe I need to look at this again. I’ve never heard that before.” Find a way to break through that assumed familiarity that causes a lot of people to not pick up a book, or to put it down before they understand it.’
Light touch
The author manages to cover a lot of ground in this book; using a light touch he deals with a variety of challenging contemporary themes in an accessible way.
These issues of race, sex, technology, the family, the environment, politics, and institutions are of vital interest to contemporary society. Sadly, viewpoints concerning these issues can become deeply polarised. Meador skilfully finds common ground on which they can be discussed. Meador combines storytelling, careful cultural analysis, penetrating insights into how Western society got to be where it is now, and tentative suggestions concerning what we can do about it.
This book breathes an air of both urgency and hope. Meader said that it is an urgent message because: ‘During church history regional churches die. Regions that were Christian (like North Africa), but are no longer Christian.
‘Church history tells a story of boom and bust. The booms come after times of widely shared trauma or pain or difficulty. What is distressing to me is that I feel we are going through a moment like that right now, but the church is in so many places so ideological, so yoked to certain political programmes that it almost chokes the voice of the Spirit.’
The hope comes from the desire to promote the practice of virtuous agency in the immediate settings and contexts that God has placed us. When dealing with real things that concretely exist in front of us, we need to learn how to respond with imaginative faithfulness. Here is a book that can help us to do that.
