IN THE SHADOW OF THE ROCK:
an autobiography.
By Geoff Thomas
Reformation Heritage Books.
384 pages. £29.99
ISBN 978 1 601 788 672
On the death of his father in 1977, Geoffrey Thomas, known to most for his long ministry in Aberystwyth, began a journal of ‘roughly 200 words about the events of most days’, which gives his book the immediacy of one who has lived through things at close quarters.
For the author this ‘autobiography’ may be a kind of capstone for one who tells us he is loosing himself from earthly ties.
He writes with a delightful gentleness and courtesy, perhaps especially when he records with sadness the decline of gospel preaching in the first half of the last century, and when he is speaking of those with whom he disagrees but has a personal regard. We meet a local Roman Catholic priest who ‘had a brilliant mind and was most engaging’, of whom others in the town ‘thought that he and I would be close, but neither of us felt that’, and a former deacon who had been opposed to his appointment as pastor: he left the church, later acknowledging that he was a Unitarian – ‘We got on well. I liked him’. Yet we are left in no doubt regarding ‘the killing fields of liberalism and modernism.’
There are unexpected moments, as when he tells us of Virginia Woolf writing to her sister of T.S. Eliot’s conversion, saying ‘He believes in God and immortality, and he goes to church … there is something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.’
He writes also with honesty – for example, over a period in his undergraduate university life, and on how he would have approached exposition rather differently in the opening months of his ministry. Then in his remark, ‘if you want to humble a minister, ask him about his prayer life.’ Yet ‘in all my spoonful of regrets, I have been given a vast and abundant reservoir of blessings.’
Much more than an autobiography, we have the long chapter on his time at Westminster Seminary, written around accounts of each of the faculty members, and a chapter on ‘key brothers’ – Dr Lloyd-Jones, Al Martin, Iain Murray, Joel Beeke, and his cousin, Bobi Jones, ‘the most prodigious Welsh scholar Wales has ever known.’ But he is no idolater, writing, for example, of ‘some little exasperations with the Doctor’. His brief remarks regarding the affairs, issues and themes of the life of the church in the UK in general, Wales in particular, and North America, are a delight.
Rather like watching the early episodes of The Crown, those whose memory stretches back to the 1960s will recognise and engage more closely with the early chapters. His book is like a box of Quality Street, much of it written in brief nuggets that can be read at the occasional moment without losing direction. Not everyone will recognise the many names that run through the pages, hence for some this remarkable personal record will prove the beginning of an exploration.
