This was one of the best books I read in 2017 and I recommended it to no fewer than 10 people in the first week after finishing it. We’d be in the middle of a conversation and something will come up that reminds me of the book and then bam—suddenly I’m a book purveyor for Mr. Sayers without ever being asked.
If you’ve looked around at the world lately and wondered what the hell is going on and been brave enough to also ask “What can I do to help?” this is a book you need to read.
Sayers doesn’t gloss over the complicated mess that is our current world. He digs into all of the complicated factors—of terrorism and technology and globalization and politics—and reminds us that the Bible is still relevant in this crazy world because it teaches us about human beings and how they have been from the beginning.
He paints a big picture to help put things in perspective. If you don’t like history or social science, it might be a long (but important!) trudge for you through the first two parts of the book. However, if you do and you’ve been waiting for just such a guide to help show you why we’re right here right now, these parts will answer questions you haven’t been able to articulate and help you zoom out from the daily he said, she said of the current media cycle to see the patterns behind history.
Whether you’re on the left or the right, it’s going to push some buttons. Sayers himself doesn’t fit neatly into either category, at least from what I can discern from his writing. He’s simply a realist that believes in the Bible and making the hard choices—the countercultural choices—that the world needs to see the church make.
His work makes you take a step back and demands we recognize each of the many groups and tribes vying for our allegiance are calling out to our flesh, demanding we give up our God-given right to live in the Spirit. He poetically remarks,
Our Babel-infused dreams of an enlightened, placeless utopia. our political programs both left and right, our individual seeking for satisfaction, all come to naught. Creation still groans. Self, blood soil, technology, ideology, religiosity cannot save us. The only hope is found in the Savior, who would come and die. Triumphing above all powers, the principalities, the elemental forces of the world, over you and me. The only truth, the only way, the only answer, found in the re-patterned life that emerges from God.
He doesn’t offer easy answers or compromise and settle for the world’s way of doing things. There’s a better way waiting if we let go of our allegiances to worldly powers and commit to being the Church.
For a Christian book making a Christian defense for life in the Spirit, you might be surprised by how few times Sayers directly quotes or references the Bible. I see this as a huge benefit because of how he uses biblical truth instead. He paints pictures—instead of giving rote quotations—like this one:
As the implications of Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection swirled in the social firmament, strange gatherings happened across the Roman world. Jews, Gentiles, slaves, free people, men, and women met together, laying down their statuses and identities and bowing knees—not before the emperor, but a Galilean Jew they claimed had risen from the grave. Off the radar, something radical, something momentous had occurred. The church had been born.
Particularly in this age in which the Church can feel institutionalized, politicized, and ostracized from the realities of the world, Sayers gives a vision of what was and what could be for God’s people—those who choose to live by this new world order—in this tumultuous world today.
Sayers isn’t offering a scriptural defense of the ideas you already hold. I found many of my liberal millennial ideas on the chopping block of Sayer’s criticism right along with just as many right-winged philosophies that he throws out as well. Especially today, as we curate the voices we hear on social media, we need books that won’t reinforce our present ideas and won’t salve our itching ears.
