Book Review: Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in our World

Greg Sheridan has been foreign editor of the quality Australian newspaper for more than two decades. And he is the author of seven other volumes including God is Good for You: A Defence of Christianity in Troubled Times, published in 2018. He declares his new book to be “about the compelling, dramatic, gripping characters you meet in the New Testament. Above all, it is the search for Jesus. It seeks to meet him directly, in the New Testament, and in history, and to meet him indirectly through his friends, both his first friends, and some of his friends today” (1).

The volume is arranged in two parts. Part One, “Jesus and His First Friends” begins with two chapters on the historical evidence for Jesus (Chapters One and Two). It then continues with chapters on what the New Testament says about Jesus and about Mary, a brief discussion of “Angels at my shoulder,” and concludes with a chapter on “Paul the apostle, Christ’s Lenin.” Some of this discussion of Christian sources covers what Stimulus readers will see as well-trodden ground but there is a freshness in Sheridan’s approach, and for two reasons. First, because he casts an inquisitive, perceptive, well-informed and even cynical reporter’s eye over the evidence for the historical foundations of the Faith. Second, because of the way in which he intersperses accounts of personal transformation of individuals as they pondered the gospels – most movingly by an interview with Kanishka Raffel (94-102) whose encounter with the Fourth Gospel as a Sri Lankan Buddhist (studying honours level English and Law at Sydney University) led to his conversion and eventually to his present ministry as the first non-Anglo Anglican Archbishop of Sydney.

The book’s second Part (“Christians and Their New Worlds”) is even more engaging. Its chapters explores the impact Christianity has had on the lives of people, past and present. Chapter Seven (‘Smuggling Christ into popular culture”) begins with films and some recent TV dramas before moving backwards to rich discussions of Tolkien, Graham Greene, Marilynne Robinson and others. The next chapter (“Christians who keep giving”) assumes a narrative tone as it recounts the stories of three energetic and remarkable lay women leaders – one of whom is a Kiwi: Jenny George from Brethren and “Navigators” circles in Christchurch and more recently Dean of the acclaimed Melbourne University Business School.

Chapter Nine introduces Australian political leaders for whom Christian faith has been important. Some fifteen pages are devoted to former Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Pentecostal inclinations; Morrison also speaks at length of his indebtedness to the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and of “tears over the moral gravity of the decisions he felt he had to make” as Prime Minister (253). The chapter also introduces former deputy PM John Anderson; former military chief and then Governor-General Peter Cosgrove; Labor (sic) politician and later Governor-General Bill Hayden who in later life abandoned a life-long atheism and embraced Catholic Christianity.

Chapter Ten offers a survey of Chinese Christianity and the following chapter expands that discussion into the life and faith of Singaporean political leader George Yeo. The final chapter, “New missions, new fire, Christian leaders,” sounds a hopeful note as Sheridan interviews a range of church leaders whom he admires: an Hispanic American Pentecostal leader (Samuel Rodriguez), UK Alpha leader Nicky Gumbel, Melbourne Catholic Archbishop Peter Comensoli and Lyn Edge, a Salvation Army officer sent to work in Paris. These narratives – not always uncritical in tone – add a distinctive and rather persuasive dimension to Sheridan’s apologia.

Sheridan wears his own rather generous Catholicism lightly, stating that “I have consciously taken a ‘mere’ Christianity’ approach, honouring every Christian tradition (and every Christian) that can recite the Apostles’ Creed and mean it” (315). He also makes clear – in an interview elsewhere – that Christians is not an “issues” book: “I tried very hard for it not to be a left versus right, culture wars book.” At times the tone is reproachful. He has little time for those who prefer a Christianity more accommodating of human weakness and more in tune with the spirit of the age. Nor does he give much attention to ecclesial scandals; these are examined in his God is Good for You. He worries that his fellow Australians face spiritual and behavioural poverty without a better understanding of the faith that has shaped the Western worldview: “The West is a culture willing itself into amnesia and ignorance, like a patient carefully requesting their medical records and then burning them, so they and their physicians will have no knowledge of what made them sick in the past, and what made them well. … [T]his is our society willfully depriving itself of the truth” (40).

One pleasing feature is the way in which the volume is firmly anchored in both the Australian and wider global context where the majority of Christians live. There is no equivalent to Christians in the Kiwi public square although Ron Hay’s Finding the Forgotten God (reviewed in Stimulus, 22.3; Nov 2015) has some of its positive qualities but without the narrative dynamic that drives Sheridan’s volume. A bibliography ranging from Brother Andrew, John Barton, Richard Bauckham, Benedict XVI and Peter Berger through to Rick Warren, Evelyn Waugh, A.N. Wilson and N.T. Wright gives an indication of the range of the resources deployed by Sheridan. As befits an experienced journalist, the volume is written in a pleasingly fluent style (and with numerous witty asides). The book’s positive reception in the Australian media is understandable given Sheridan’s journalist profile, albeit with a rich irony: agnostic and atheist reviewers have generally saluted its passionate style and persuasive argumentation; in progressive Christian circles the tone has tended to be patronising with reminders of the academics that Sheridan should have deferred to. The contrast is so striking that it might deserve its own Wirkungsgeschichte /reception-history and missional analysis!

Bob Robinson is a Research Fellow Emeritus of Laidlaw College.