Short notices

Sean Gabb, Stories from the Life of Christ: A Latin Reader for Intermediate Students: Selected, with an Introduction, Notes and Comprehensive Vocabulary (Deal, Kent: Hampden Press, 2018); 106 pp.: 9781983188732, £10.99 (pbk)

Here is a novel way of brushing up your Latin. The enterprising author (who can be contacted at sean@seangabb.co.uk) writes:

The purpose of this book is to give a set of readings that are in genuine but fairly simple Latin, that are interesting in themselves, and that are accompanied by a Vocabulary in which nearly every word used in the text is fully explained. I hope it will be useful to intermediate students – that is, those who have made some progress in the language, but who still find the Roman Classics too difficult to read with any fluency. I think of A-Level students in England, or undergraduates anywhere in the English-speaking world who are beginning an accelerated course in Latin. I think also of students preparing for any other advanced examination at schools outside England, and of students in home education or those who are trying to learn Latin by themselves. I hope the book will be of general use.

Basically, he reproduces Jerome’s Latin translation (itself deliberately written in simplified Latin for a wider readership across the Roman Empire) of various well-known extracts from the four gospels. So anyone with basic Latin and familiarity with the English gospels should be able to read this fluently. What a brilliant idea!

Denis Alexander, Genes, Determinism and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); 385 pp.: 9781316506387, £26.99 (pbk)

This very important book (reviewed May 2018) is now available in paperback. It is an essential read for anyone tempted to say anything accurate about so-called genetic determinism and is based on Alexander’s remarkable Gifford lectures (see below).

Andrew B. Torrance, The Freedom to Become a Christian: A Kierkegaardian Account of Human Transformation in Relationship with God (London and New York, NY: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2018); 217 pp.: 9780567683540, $39.95 (pbk)

This book, too (reviewed in July 2017), is now out in paperback. The original review judged that it ‘promises to be a key text for future Kierkegaardian theology’.

Anthony Towey, An Introduction to Christian Theology , 2nd edition (London and New York, NY: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2018); 584 pp.: 9780567678195, £28.99 (pbk)

This second edition has a new chapter on spirituality and companion videos for each chapter. The first edition came out in 2013 (and was reviewed in November 2014) and was judged to be ‘wittily written’ and ‘a reliable guide’.

G. A. Studdert Kennedy, edited by Thomas O’Loughlin and Stuart Bell, The Hardest Part: A Centenary Critical Edition (London: SCM Press, 2018); 231 pp.: 9780334056560, £25 (hbk)

In the short notices in May, I reviewed Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne’s collection Life After Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War Evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy. This new critical edition of Studdert Kennedy’s passionate The Hardest Part, written in the trenches in 1918, adds significantly to our understanding of his life and work. It is a ‘critical’ edition mainly in the sense that it attempts to contextualize each chapter of Studdert Kennedy’s book with detailed footnotes and with the editors also adding helpful introductions and appendices. However, unlike the Brierley/Byrne collection, it is not ‘critical’ in the sense that it makes little mention of Studdert Kennedy’s paternalism and former jingoism. Reading The Hardest Part is quite painful. Studdert Kennedy’s emotions were often raw, especially in the wake of burying a young corporal, who uncharacteristically took Communion three days before he was killed, and then burying his own more conventionally pious orderly. At one point he exclaimed: ‘War is evil. It is a cruel and insane waste of energy and life. If God wills war, then I am morally mad and life has no meaning. I hate war, and if God wills it I hate God, and I am a better man for hating Him’ (p. 46). And he scorned a traumatized soldier who prayed aloud for deliverance and all those soldiers who believed that ‘religion is an insurance policy against accident’ (p. 97). Despite O’Loughlin and Bell’s best efforts, I found little here to compare with Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God (the cult book discussed by Collin Smith in September 2018).

V. A. Demant, edited by Ian S. Markham and Christine Faulstich, The Penumbra of Ethics: The Gifford Lectures of V. A. Demant with Critical Commentary and Assessment (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018); 348 pp.: 9781498297783, $41 (pbk)

This is another book from the past with a present-day critical commentary, although in this instance it is based on Gifford lectures that were delivered in 1957–58 but were never actually published by the author. Ian Markham offers an excellent and lengthy introduction to Demant, Christine Faulstich provides a complete text of Demant’s Gifford lectures (some of it based only on notes that he left), and together they add a brief final assessment and critique. Despite their hard work, the lectures themselves remain sadly pedestrian. Demant saw himself as a cultural historian, but frankly, compared with other Gifford lecturers (more recently Iris Murdoch and especially Charles Taylor), his insights are often vague and sometimes wrong (few economists, then or now, give any credence to his attachment to the theory of ‘social credit’). He held the Regius Chair of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford for 22 years – matched more recently by Oliver O’Donovan’s 24 years. From Markham’s interviews in the late 1980s with then elderly but now dead academics, it is evident that Demant was much liked by his Oxford colleagues. However, from his writings he seems to have lacked O’Donovan’s sharp, angular intelligence. Yet neither Demant’s nor, as it happens, O’Donovan’s Gifford lectures come anywhere near matching the abiding brilliance of those of, say, William James, A. E. Taylor or Reinhold Niebuhr.

Jonathan Dean, To Gain at Harvest: Portraits from the English Reformation (London: SCM Press, 2018); 201 pp.: 9780334056898, £19.99 (pbk)

Jonathan Dean is a Methodist tutor at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, and has a Cambridge doctorate in Reformation studies. His writing style is engaging and his theological sympathies are highly ecumenical. He offers an informed and accessible introductory ‘portrait’ of ten figures who were instrumental in the English Reformation – Anglican, Roman Catholic and Protestant. His approach is always eirenic, recognizing, for example, some of the deep cruelties of Thomas More and Queen Elizabeth I and the ambiguities of Thomas Cranmer, while setting each in their context and praising their significant religious achievements. He concludes with lyrical accounts of the poetic language and mystical touches of Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert and Thomas Traherne. This book is not for experts in this area but it is one to be enjoyed by the rest of us. A gentle and pleasant read.