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A Faith to Live By - Studies in Christian Doctrine

A FAITH TO LIVE BY:
Studies in Christian Doctrine
By Donald Macleod
Mentor (Christian Focus). 309 pages. £15.99 (hardback)

One of the crying needs of our age is for thoughtful Christian people who can express and apply their faith intelligently and attractively where they work and where they live. All too often, our theology is locked away in the ghettos of our churches and colleges - and in a separate compartment of our own minds. This new book, by the Principal of the Free Church of Scotland's College, is a significant contribution towards addressing that need.
Originally delivered as lectures to audiences of ordinary Christians in Glasgow and Inverness, the 24 chapters cover the main doctrines of the evangelical faith, from the inspiration of Scripture through to the return of Christ. It is thus a handbook of theology - but with a number of features that place it out of the ordinary.

Impact

Firstly, it carries with it the immediacy of the spoken word. This is no dry, analytical textbook. While the author is not afraid to use technical terms, and assumes a fair knowledge and intelligence, the contents confront the reader as a message, directly delivered. This impact is heightened by his all-too-rare command of lucid and effective English.
Secondly, Macleod never loses sight of people as he discusses doctrine, and most chapters end with brief but pointed applications.
Another attractive feature is the non-polemical tone of Macleod's teaching. In rejecting certain aspects of modern charismatic theology, for instance, he does not scorn charismatics. He does not attack people, only particular beliefs. For this reviewer at least, that is attractively different from much of current 'Reformed' writing.

Intelligently Conservative

Throughout the lectures, the author is intelligently conservative. He stands firmly and completely within the theology of the Scottish Reformed and the Princeton schools. Yet he relates that theology to contemporary issues, interacting with liberation theology, Freudian psychology and the science of genetics. And there are flashes of challenging insight, as in listing 'concern for the poor' among the 'marks of the church' (p.228), and as in his insistence that the 'world (was) made BY Christ' and 'has impressed upon it all his characteristics: his wisdom, his truth and his love. We love it because he made it. But there is something even greater: the world made IN Christ. Creation is Christ-shaped That is why we can never despise the material and the tangible and why we can never despise or abuse the world in which we live, or be afraid to ask it questions.' (p.64f)
Sometimes, indeed, he challenges modern evangelicalism - as in the chapter on 'Creation' where he rejects evolutionism but also declines to endorse the '24-hour day' and 'flood geology' theories that some would turn into shibboleths of orthodoxy. But even here, Macleod can point to the writings of Warfield, Hodge, Chalmers and Hugh Miller and insist that Reformed theology has been more cautious and more broad than many fundamentalists.

Suffering

Perhaps the quality which most strikes the reader is Macleod's gift of relating theology to the reality of human experience - an experience sometimes joyous but persistently painful. In our comfortably secure Western world, we are prone to forget that we live on a cursed earth and that 'much tribulation' is the pathway to the kingdom. Few of our Christian forefathers could afford such a luxury. So Macleod's assumption that agonised emotions are not merely incidental, but should be close to central in our Christian thinking, is profoundly biblical. This emphasis comes through as he writes about the humanness of Scripture, about the nature of man and about the Incarnation. But, most of all, it sheds rich light on Gethsemane and Calvary.
Gethsemane, awesome though it was, was only a pale shadow of Calvary. On Calvary, Christ moved into unmitigated physical pain and into total social isolation. He experienced all that hell could do by way of darkness and onslaught and temptation. Above all, he experienced the agony of being forsaken by God his father and becoming, as the Bearer of the world's sin, the Great Outsider. There is a sense in which no being was less prepared and less apt for the dereliction than God's own Son. The very closeness and perfection of the bond between him and his Father made the desolation more excruciating. He had never known in the remotest degree what the loss of God was . . . (p.130).
Macleod is crystal-clear on the objective and substitutionary nature of Christ's atonement, but one glimpses in this stress on the reality of Christ's human suffering a point of contact with the unbeliever (and, of course, the struggling believer) which has not always received sufficient attention.

Not exhaustive

All books that cover the whole of Christian doctrine tend to prove frustrating when one looks in vain for an exhaustive treatment of a particular topic. Yet we need a way of introducing Christians to the broad and rich field of biblical truth, and of grasping the whole in order to keep the smaller details in correct perspective. For those purposes, this book is extremely valuable and well worth the price (though a second edition, in paperback, would surely make it more widely accessible!).

John Nicholls
London City Mission