470 - The Simple Gospel: Reflections on Christian Faith

The Simple Gospel: Reflections on Christian Faith

By Hugh T. Kerr

Louisville, Westminster/john Knox Press, 1991. 72 Pp. $7.95.

"Sometimes," Professor Kerr writes, "we need to be reminded of the basic and essential affirmations of the Christian faith, " and although nowhere does he choose to set down in so many words precisely what he considers those affirmations to be, in a series of eight brief, rather loosely related essays, he suggests various general ways of thinking about them. Perhaps, above all, the gospel reduced to its simplest form is a gospel of grace, he says in his concluding essay-the good news that we are loved by God unconditionally in ways that we can experience personally and can respond to with gratitude and thanksgiving. In another essay, "Angels Unawares," he makes what would seem the equally unassailable point that frequently we experience this grace through the medium of other people. He then cites episodes from his own life to illustrate it-the New Testament professor, a friend of his father, who rescued him when he was lost as a small child, and the Jungian analyst who, in the middle of Kerr's career, " changed the direction and quality of my life, both personally and professionally." He adds that there may be a correlation between the way we tend to minimize the importance of such benefactors and the way we are often blind to the workings of God among us and within us. Once again, it is hard to disagree with him.

"Not everything in the scriptures is worth carrying forward," he writes. To get down to the burning heart of the matter, the flame must be carried forward, to be sure, but the ashes allowed to be blown off by the wind, and he recalls for us how Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, deepens and enriches the time-honored strictures of the law with new insights. His point is that, like Jesus, we must reverence the wisdom of the religious past even as we attempt to simplify and encapsulate it. But our reverencing it truly should involve scrutinizing it critically as well as finding ways of relating it to the contemporary situation.

Perhaps the most engaging of the essays is the one entitled "My Kind of Theology," where the author allows himself to speak more personally than he does elsewhere about how his own faith has developed over the years. He speaks disarmingly about having undertaken "a redistribution of theological luggage in the interests of traveling light," and one wishes that he had told us more about it-what he chose to have stowed away in the hold and what he keeps by him in his stateroom where he can readily lay his hands on it whenever the need arises. He goes on to add that he has also shifted from a largely Christocentric position to one that is more Spirit-

472 - The Simple Gospel: Reflections on Christian Faith

centered, and his spelling out of some of the implications of that shift is too interesting not to quote in full:

For one thing, the Spirit is nameless and, for that reason, provides a breakthrough in our current gender dilemma over the name for deity. In the second place, emphasis on the Spirit could lift our often fuzzy and sentimental "Jesus-ology" to a higher level, where the cosmic Christ "sits at the right hand of God" but is made present in our midst and within us by the Spirit. And in the third place, discussions between Christians and Jews, and with persons practicing other religions as well as new forms of spirituality, might get beyond the usual temptation toward Christian triumphalism, in which traditional Christology frustrates sincere efforts at mutual understanding.

One hopes that Kerr may find time to pursue this most promising line of thought more fully in a future book. In the meantime, we can only be grateful to him for The Simple Gospel. There are not many surprises in it because, instead of breaking new ground, it contents itself with simply a searching reexamination of the ancient ground out of which contemporary Christian thought has grown. But it is an unpretentious, thoughtful, accessible statement for which we have good reason to be thankful.

FREDERICK BUECHNER

Pawlet, Vermont