Why I don't read much theology

“'Let's at least agree on one thing, God is a hypothesis.' That's what one of my professors used to say. 'Your hypothesis may be different from mine, but if you insist it is superior because you have a better line to God than me, it leads to nothing but bitterness, rancour and even war. The best course is mutual toleration - live and let live.' But then, Jonathan is an Anglican.”
(Will Hutton: The Observer 6 July 2008)

I’ve just read two books that would appear on the face of it to be coming from opposite directions, but actually have far more in common than either author would wish to have pointed out. Stephen Cottrell is the Anglican Bishop of Reading, one of the new breed of “Call me Steve” types, I guess (why are they always called Steve?). His book is “Do nothing to Change your Life”. The cover, the marketing, and the chapter headings seek to catch the zeitgeist of the slow movement, and books that I have mentioned on the blog before, such as Carl Honore and Tom Hodgkinson. “A joyous affirmation of life for anyone feeling exhausted” it says in the blurb on the front, and “Discovering what happens when you stop”. It opens with some unlikely premises that you are supposed to swallow, like a bishop who can decide to lay in bed until eleven in the morning, and perhaps encourage his clergy to do the same occasionally. “We need to stop imagining everything is so urgent. We need to nurture our inner slob”, it says in the blurb on the back. Do you believe that? I thought not.

“The Form of Things”, by AC Grayling, promises “Essays on Life Ideas and Liberty in the 21st century”. Indeed the first, third and fourth sections are exactly that; witty and perceptive, thought-provoking, gentle, generous. He writes on fashion, beauty, colour, dance. Towards the end he writes well on civil liberties, terrorism and human rights. So far, so good. But in the middle section called “Polemics”, rather sadly, we get a gloves-off attack on religion, in the manner of Dawkins and his disciples. Why? Why could Grayling not be generous here too, and at least accept that here we have two hypotheses on which we are not going to agree, alongside a great deal about which humanists, atheists, scientists and believers will want to agree wholeheartedly?

And it is here that we find the common ground between the two books, for Cottrell’s work is in fact, at heart, an evangelical tract, dressed up in modern clothes, just as Grayling is, at least in part, writing an atheist tract. The core of the book, in chapter five, is “the strange story of Jesus of Nazareth, and the incredible claims Christians make about him”. This is what Cottrell set out to deliver, and the rest of the book, before and after this story, is gift wrapping to help to get it off the shelves.

What a pity. Both books could have been so much better. I found neither book honest about its intentions, and therefore both books, while containing many good things, ultimately disappointing.