Category: Books

The Naked God

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I know Vincent Strudwick and have met him socially on numerous occasions and enjoyed his company. I have the greatest respect for him, and admiration for his learning and opinions, even though I haven’t had the opportunity to learn from him as much as I might wish. So reading this book has been a real treat.

The premise of The Naked God is that every age and generation clothes God in their own particular way, in doctrine, dogma, liturgy, religious institutions, and ethics. They do this in order to make the Mystery that is ‘God’ somehow comprehensible and accessible to themselves and their contemporaries. But of course, the clothes are not God, and when that generation passes (possibly even before that) these ‘clothes’ actually obscure the Mystery, rather than make it known. The underlying reality of God is still there, present and underneath the ‘clothes’ that have been laid upon it. Each new generation has the task of discovering that reality for itself. Ideally, I suppose, we might continue to know the naked reality. In fact, that is impossible for us, so we will always find our own way of clothing it, if we go about the business of God seriously.

In this book, the fruit of Vincent’s life of wrestling with God and seeking to understand how God should be known in the world of today, there are too many ideas to take in all at once. Although clearly stated, they are sketched in in broad outline. This is, after all, a book for the general reader, though it includes a useful bibliography and notes for further reading.

It has been a lifetime in which the institutional Church has pretty much lost the plot (cf. Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead’s book, That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England lost the English People – though it is a global, not just an English, phenomenon). This isn’t just the Church’s fault, because the last several decades have been a time of rapid and turbulent social, political, technological and cultural change. In times like this – there have been several during church history – the Church has usually at first resisted the changes, then floundered as it is widely seen as irrelevant, then succeeds in adapting to the new understandings and idioms, leading to a time of renewed growth in influence in society.

It is a hopeful, though urgent book, addressed to desperate times. But it also makes me think that much, if not most, of what I was doing during my ministry was contributing to that inward-looking irrelevance of the Church, rather than the new directions that Vincent calls for. The only times I was kind of on the right lines, with the good guys rather than the villains of the story, were being in support of women priests and bishops, and (alas, somewhat more slowly) of same-sex relationships and the full acceptance of LGBT people by the Church. I may have tried to keep up with some of the social trends, but a great deal of what I did in the church was keeping the show on the road, rather than making the church truly the embodiment of Christ serving the world.

I commend this book to lovely friends and colleagues who are still working – including the brilliant young clergy and ordinands I’ve had the privilege of knowing. Read it; and don’t weep, as I’ve felt like doing, but carry on the wrestling to find the ways of doing it.

The first book I bought

Tony1 Comment

Can you remember the first book you ever bought? I can. It's not a title or a choice I'm especially proud of, but it reminds me of the way things were and have been in my life.

When I was a child in the 1950s, ours was not a very bookish household. I remember one shelf of books in the dining room, and some other books on the top of the bureau. There were a couple of single-volume reference books, a large five-volume pictorial encyclopaedia called I See All,

some books which I think Mum had as a girl, including Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales. There were a few that Dad had won as Sunday School prizes: Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch by Talbot Baines Reed is the only one I can remember the title of. There was E. V. Rieu's Penguin Classics translation of The Iliad. From later years (probably), I remember Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa and Sir Richard Burton's translation of Kama Sutra, a bright yellow paperback. Both of these looked like books I wasn't supposed to read, so I naturally looked inside them and found them too boring to tolerate. What was the parents' interest in them?

But, books of my own? I really can't remember the first book I read or was given as a present. But The Book as a thing, an idea – it compelled me like nothing else. I longed to have, to own, to read.

I think I was 8 that year, when we went on our summer holiday to Greatstone in Kent. Mum and Dad gave me five shillings holiday pocket money, so naturally on the very first day I was in the small village shop, looking how to spend the money that was burning a hole in my pocket, looking at the books on the shelves. The selection was small in the extreme. The book I had to have cost, I think I remember, three shillings and fourpence. That was two-thirds of my allowance for the whole fortnight. My mother was horrified. That five shillings was supposed to buy me sweets, ice creams, buckets and spades, rides on dodgem cars, all the important things I was going to need while on holiday. And I had spent nearly all of it on a book!

And the book? It was, alas, The Boy Next Door, by Enid Blyton.

All I remember of it, the very first book I ever chose and bought with my own money, is that I had finished it by the end of that day. I learned something about disappointment that week, because I didn't read it again and again (it wasn't that good), and the village shop wasn't going to function like a lending library where I could trade in my finished book for another. I probably wouldn't have wanted to anyway: it was my book, my very own, my precious.

Since then I have bought, and owned, many books. Most of them I have wanted and loved more than that one. But, even though I can't remember an iota of the plot – even reading the summary on the Enid Blyton website stirs not the least memory – I will never forget that longing, that agony of choosing and sacrifice, that having and owning. That book.