FIGHT VALIANTLY:
Contending for the faith against false teaching
in the church
By Lee Gatiss
Lost Coin Books. 288 pages. £10.00
ISBN 978 1 234 567 897
After a thoroughly helpful and absorbing read, Fight Valiantly now numbers alongside the much older The Cruelty of Heresy by C. FitzSimons Allison as forever-useful volumes.
The latter book showed demonstrably how all heresy entails far more than just wrong doctrine or wrong morality against the teaching of Scripture. Rather, Allison persuasively argued, all heresy is profoundly destructive and unloving, negating either the humanity of Christ, leading to mysticism; or the divinity of Christ, leading essentially to humanism. Either way, heresy disowns the authority of the Bible, and leads to licentiousness.
The new, expanded edition, therefore, of Lee Gatiss’s Fight Valiantly is hugely welcome, because it achieves exactly the same purpose, and more. Complementing The Cruelty of Heresy, it starts from the same viewpoint that doctrinal and moral heresy are, in our own time, comprehensively ruining the Church Visible, especially the Church of England, and the spiritual (and earthly) lives of its adherents.
But Fight Valiantly goes much further in issuing an impassioned plea to classically orthodox Christians to contend resolutely for Biblical truth, citing Jude 3 (‘Beloved, I urge you…’). For myself, its challenge to the laxity of my own fight for Scriptural doctrine and morality made for an uncomfortable read, but it was riveting and compelling, spurring me on to new resolves. It would be a hard-hearted reader who found the book otherwise, especially because throughout, the author turns us to Scripture, and its appeal to godly saints to join the battle.
In fact, to my mind Gatiss’s appeal to Scripture, and his use of Scripture, is far and away its strongest point. After a brief, passionate appeal to the reader to comprehend the urgency and necessity of the task of contending for God’s truth, Gatiss spends several chapters surveying the topic of fighting valiantly in the New Testament, with comprehensive treatment of a large variety of Bible texts. He is thorough, if not quite exhaustive, in his exegesis, and I found it difficult to fault his Biblical hermeneutics. No more than minor quibbles came to my mind. For instance, I would have liked to see him take note of the ‘beloved’ in Jude 3, pointing out that all contending for the faith, and urging for it, is an act of love towards both God and those we seek to persuade back to Scriptural truth. But such a minor quibble is just that, and not a criticism of this book.
Striking also is the note of humility throughout the book, acknowledging the weaknesses and sins of our own constituency, together with an insistence that all contending must be kind and compassionate. Another strength of Fight Valiantly is a series of 25 vignettes written by a plethora of guest authors, each a short, pithy, easy read, narrating how they or their church found themselves fighting various specific battles. At a number of points the author supplies a summary of key lessons learnt so far, and questions for reflection and Bible-study outlines.
This book is heavily weighted towards fighting within the Church of England. I can’t make this a criticism of the book, because it is issued from an orthodox Church of England stable, Church Society, and aims itself self-avowedly at that denomination. But surely the essential content of this book is needed in all ‘regiments’ of the church, to quote Gatiss himself. Please, may all members thereof feel that Fight Valiantly has much to offer all faithful Christians of any stripe. I wholeheartedly recommend it.
