Review
Pilgrim's Finale?
The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible
by A. N. Wilson
HarperCollins, 2016
(224 pages, $26.99, hardcover)
The eminent British novelist and man of letters A. N. Wilson was a foil in my Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2006). My book was an account of Victorians who had been Christians in their youth, later lost their faith and became polemical secularist leaders, but then returned to Christ, and in debates, lectures, and publications thereafter offered learned reasons for their mature Christian convictions. Crisis of Doubt ended by arguing that its evidence should serve "to reorientate us toward the intellectual strength of the Christian tradition."
Wilson, by contrast, had championed the view that the nineteenth century was when it became no longer possible for someone who was keeping up with his reading and facing facts to still believe the gospel. I observed that in his God's Funeral (1999) he had "denounced as dishonest seemingly every leading Victorian intellectual who maintained a commitment to orthodox Christianity." Wilson's anti-Christian views were most on display in the bluntly titled Against Religion (1991). It began: "It is said in the Bible that the love of money is the root of all evil. It might be truer to say that the love of God is the root of all evil." As a young man, he had studied theology with the hope of becoming an Anglican priest, but by midlife he had become a vocal and bitter critic. His book Jesus (1992), and the resulting TV program, Jesus Before Christ, had sought to show that the real, historical Jesus was neither God nor the Messiah.
Having the spiritual gift of self-promotion, I wrote to Wilson when my book appeared, warning that I criticized him, but brashly pleading that he review it nonetheless. I forthrightly observed that even being abused by a figure of his stature would be good for sales. For good measure, I added the pathetic point that, unlike someone of his cultural prominence, I was functioning in an academic world where books struggle to sell just a thousand copies. I was rewarded—not with a review (good or bad)—but with a charming letter that included an apposite and delightful biblical allusion: "I take your point about Saul has slain his thousands and David his ten thousands." I wondered if the wind that bloweth where it listeth was starting to move A. N. Wilson in another direction.
A little over two years later, Wilson announced his return to faith in an article in the New Statesman, "Why I Believe Again." Eerily, he was living out the very life pattern that I had presented in Crisis of Doubt. My eye for self-promotion not failing me yet, I wrote about Wilson's conversion in a piece published in the Wall Street Journal, "Look Who's a Believer Now." It ended:
As in the case of Mr. Wilson, intellectuals often pursue long, drawn-out love affairs with Christian thought. Next time you hear someone fume that God is the most contemptible being who never existed, keep in mind that you just might be watching the first act of a divine romantic comedy.
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Since then, I have been keenly waiting for Wilson to take the final step in my Victorian template and offer the world a thoughtful and learned defense of his rediscovered faith. He has now done so in The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible (2016). In the front matter, there is a list of a whopping 42 titles "also by A. N. Wilson," including even an early believing work, How Can We Know? (1985), but not Against Religion or Jesus, indicating that his anti-Christian period is now on his personal index of prohibited books.
Although Wilson might cringe at such a label, this latest book is—on one level—a work of Christian apologetics. In it, he laments that the Old and New Testaments are now widely dismissed as false and pernicious and that, therefore, they are no longer being read by most people in the West. He commends the Bible to its cultured despisers. It is actually "an incomparably rich collection of writings, brought together by Providence to form a single whole, which both reflects and enlightens each life that reads in it deeply."
He is apparently ignorant of Brevard Childs, but Wilson rejects the JEDP kind of biblical criticism as irrelevant "archaeology" and argues for the canonical approach (which he learned from the literary scholar Northrop Frye). Wilson has much to say on the compelling power of specific parts of the canon. The Psalms are "the poems of the inner life of humanity." Moreover, he practices what he preaches by including extended scriptural quotations throughout. The heart of The Book of the People is a series of reflections on how to read the Bible so as to not either get it wrong or dismiss it as wrong.
Wilsonic Singularities
Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. His most recent book is The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is a nondenominational, charismatic, evangelical Protestant and an elder in his local church, Life Church, Wheaton.
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