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
First, however, we must grapple with its peculiarities of presentation. The book documents Wilson's interactions over many years on the question of the nature of the Bible with a woman he calls "L." Wilson once wrote a biography of C. S. Lewis, and he refers to the Oxford apologist in this book. His approach reminds me of A Grief Observed, with its reflections on "H." L.—who we eventually learn is now dead—is heavily quoted, and vignettes of their meetings are sprinkled throughout. She had always said that she was writing a book on "How to Read the Bible" (Wilson's own subtitle), and therefore he claims that this is in a sense her book written for her.
On the one hand, Wilson warns us that he has "cast it in a semi-fictional form" and has "felt free, in these pages, to mythologize L., to put into her mind, or her letters, words which were in fact spoken by others, and to make her a 'composite' figure." On the other, he somehow cannot resist giving us as many factual details as possible so as to precisely locate what he is saying in the real world rather than a fictional one. All the other characters are anonymized as well, but nonetheless are typically made instantly identifiable. Thus, it is not even just "my daughter E.," but, you know, the one who teaches at U. Penn (Emily Wilson is not only named on her father's Wikipedia page, but also has one in her own right—so no need to hire a detective.)
Wilson's own "H." is not just a New Atheist leader who is described with multiple identifying details, but is even the one "now dead from throat cancer." (And one does not even need to guess that this is Christopher Hitchens, as Wilson told the same anecdote with his name included in the New Statesman article.) When Hitchens himself churns some gossip about "a famous right-wing journalist in the US," Wilson is so anxious that we get the reference to William F. Buckley, Jr., that he departs from his one-initial rule and calls him "William B."
Still, this whole book is a warning against taking the Bible too literally. At times, one wonders if Wilson is baiting his readers to go off on a futile, wild-goose chase in search of the historical L. Wilson repeatedly commends the patristic practice of allegorical interpretation. He offers a lovely meditation, for example, on reading Rebekah as a personification of Wisdom.
Seemingly irresistibly, one begins to try to apply the reading strategies he recommends to his own book. Notably, it has seven chapters, which he repeatedly refers to as stages on a sort of intellectual pilgrimage, thus making the book as a whole a "seven-part journey." In other words, Wilson seems to have deliberately given it a symbolic structure that reminds us of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, which in turn reminds us of Dante, which points ultimately to the biblical motif of pilgrimage and the tradition of symbolically interpreting the number seven in Scripture as signifying
completion.
L. writes to Wilson about "Jacob and his two wives" and, beautifully, Wilson closes the book with this scriptural quotation: "Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, 'Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!'" "My wife R." also appears throughout. In the real world, this is Ruth Guilding, but in the allegorical one, it began to feel to this reader as though Wilson were Jacob and L. and R. were Leah and Rachel. On the literal plane, he was not having an affair with L., but in the mythological world, she is a fertile wife generating numerous ideas in Wilson's life.
Avoidance of Extremes
Ultimately, what Wilson is attempting to offer is a classic Anglican via media. His book is not an easy one to summarize because he tends to let an argument run off in one direction, providing it with supporting evidence and champions, before winding around in the opposite direction to do the same. In the end, he is mapping out an approved middle way. As with all works of apologetics, readers will have to decide for themselves at what points they think he has given away too much in order to alleviate the concerns of his target audience.
He identifies various pairs of extremes to avoid, one being religious and secular fundamentalisms. Wilson insists that the New Atheists are also fundamentalists—and the worse kind of the two. When he himself was an anti-Christian polemicist, L. would remark: "You see, the reason I don't agree with you is that you, too, are being a kind of fundamentalist. . . . And also, the fundamentalists you so much dislike are right, and you are wrong." Recalling a Hitchens indoctrination session, Wilson wryly observes, "I felt like some teenager who'd accidentally joined the Moonies."
Another pair of extremes is made up of those who think that everything recorded in the Bible is historically accurate by the standards of the Enlightenment versus those who think that Jesus is fictitious. Wilson understands that the key question is: What think ye of Christ?
How Jesus Is Carried
His answer is to say, on the one hand, that the details of the Gospels cannot be pressed as historical facts. The portrait has been painted so as to convey symbolic meaning. It does not matter that the Last Supper was not literally on the Passover; the point is that the early Church could see profound theological connections. His foil on this point is Sir Colin Humphreys' painstaking and ingenious efforts to prove the literal accuracy of the Gospels regarding the date of the crucifixion: "It is done with the best intentions, of course, but is it not playing into the hands of materialism to make everything depend upon the plausibility of a theory put forward by one retired scientist about weather conditions and calendars in ancient Palestine?"
On the other hand, such observations do not evacuate the basic historicity of Jesus Christ. Wilson notes that, in the past, it was standard to graft rich material from pre-existing sources into biographies of great figures to draw out their deeper meaning, "but no one for that reason supposes that the Twelve Caesars or Charlemagne or Alfred the Great were just literary constructs, still less that they did not exist. It was because they did exist, and were considered important, that the authors chose to dignify them in this particular way of writing."
Moreover, Wilson argues that this is only done with respect to Christ himself, and thus, if one wants evidence of historicity—which, crucially, really is there in the Gospels—one should look at the minor figures: "Although . . . they write about Jesus in a way which makes it all but impossible to 'deconstruct' the Scriptural tropes, the symbolic language, they do not write in this way about the witnesses."
The historicity proof text he highlights is Mark 15:21: "They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus." It is clear, Wilson avers, that these two brothers were known members of the early Christian community who were being identified as living witnesses. He draws approvingly upon Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. He also reminds readers that, in terms of chronology, the epistles stand between the crucifixion and the Gospels, and they offer early testimony that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.
The title, The Book of the People, points to another argument, namely, that when the New Atheists claim that religion poisons everything, they are ignoring the tremendous good that has been and is being done when people rightly handle the Word of God. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, did not get bogged down in a wooden literalism, but drew out the spiritual meaning of the text to speak powerful words of life into an unjust and disturbed society. He "saw political events in the light of the Bible . . . [O]n fire with the prophetic spirit, Martin Luther King had changed the world. The Spirit giveth Life." I, for one, would be content to learn that this is the seventh stage, the stage of completion, on Wilson's own winding journey. •
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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