May 2011 Book Reviews by Revd Canon John Thomson, Director of Ministry

David Bunch and Angus Ritchie, eds., Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech (London: DLT, 2009) & Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2007)

David Bunch and Angus Ritchie, eds., Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech (London: DLT, 2009)

Kenneth Leech has been one of Anglo Catholicism’s robust and challenging practitioners. An advocate of contextual theology, Leech has sought to discern the ways of Christ in the rough and tumble of urban ministry and presence rather than the more abstract academic contexts. As a result his work has a passion and force that impacts with particular force and this collection of his writings brings together many of the themes of his ministry, particularly the integration of prayer and prophecy or attention to the voice of God in order to reflect something of that voice back to the Church. His is not an establishment voice but rather a John the Baptist voice, crying out in the wilderness of both society and church convinced that following Christ is about becoming a distinctive community associated with those most marginalized by the powers that seek to rule. This society is necessarily engaged in the micro politics of ground level communities and is sacramentally orientated since it finds God’s activity in the material realities of such living. For Leech issues of inclusion and practical holiness figure large and worship is the critical lens through which the world is seen and the character of God discovered. Leech has some harsh words to speak to a Church which he believes has sold its soul for the pottage of Establishment and stands in the more radical Catholic rejection of this alliance. He wants transformation from below which is not about ‘posh’ clergy condescending to live amongst the poor or Christians in the suburbs rolling out their view of Church growth into contexts unknown to them from the inside. Instead, following the liberation theologians, Leech asks Christians to inhabit the undesirable places of our society in ways that seek to listen to and work with these communities and in this way to represent and share the Gospel. As someone not formed by the same tradition as Leech, I found his passion and challenge exhilarating and disturbing. I need to think more about it and I invite you to do the same.

Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2007)

For those who were able to attend Richard Burridge’s Shrove Tuesday lectures, this book will be a treat. It provides us with some of the spade work which contributed to those lectures and offers a distinctively Anglican way of approaching ethical questions in conversation with the New Testament. Burridge is concerned that sectional interests within the Church claim that their ethics are ‘biblical’ or ‘scriptural’ too swiftly, too self interestedly and in ways that are not faithful to the New Testament itself. He uses the example of the South African Dutch Reformed Church’s claim that apartheid was biblical to show how claims articulated by an isolated and sectional group can go seriously wrong. In contrast Burridge argues that to learn our ethics from Jesus we first need to clarify the genres of the Gospels. These are not primarily ethical works, like Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, but rather have affinities with Graeco-Roman Ancient Lives whose purpose was to offer a quasi biographical account of a hero’s words and deeds which disciples could imitate. Burridge then goes onto explore the way Jesus has been interpreted over the centuries and looks at Paul and the Gospels in greater depth. His conclusion is that Jesus taught a very rigorous ethic, albeit redacted by each writer in ways pertinent to their contexts, whilst embracing a very diverse and mixed community of followers. It seems that Jesus did not require his disciples to be pure in order to be part of his community, but rather invited them to explore what it meant to be faithful followers as they wrestled with his teaching together. The Gospels and Paul’s letters are examples of such improvisation and suggest that the appropriate way to engage with new ethical issues is to read the Bible together in an inclusive community of those who want to follow Jesus, which explicitly involves those directly affected by whatever is being discussed. In Zulu and Xhosa this is called Indaba.

Both books can be borrowed from the Resources Centre.