Paul Burt, Making Sense of Things through the lens of Christian Belief, Amazon Fulfilment 2023, pp162
This is an intelligent book by a man who has been a school chaplain, a parish priest and a chaplain to seamen. The breadth of his pastoral experience is reflected in the range of his reading and its application to living the Christian life.
The book is structured around four fundamental aspects of the world, time, nature, language and personhood. They are also pillars of Christian theology and its attempt to express the nature of a God who invites human participation in his creative activity. Burt does not assess Christian theology from the outside; he places himself inside the theological tradition and looks through it as a lens on human experience and finds it true to its complexity. The lens that holds in coherent view scripture, doctrine and the living theological tradition, in short Catholic orthodoxy, thus makes sense of a God who creates, relates and participates in the full range of human experience.
The lens holds in focus scriptures that are historical and literary in character, rooted in several ancient cultures, requiring attentive and imaginative use of interpretative tools such as symbol and metaphor; doctrine that expresses for the praying community (the Church) the dynamic energy of God and the opportunities for human life in relation to him; and the myriad and continuing responses of human mind and spirit that is the living tradition of prayer and worship. The author is particularly sensitive to the power of music in expressing and elucidating divine transcendence.
Burt casts his lens across a coruscating range of movers and shakers: Plato, Hegel, Kant, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, C S Lewis, Polanyi among the philosophers; Mary Midgely as anthropologist and Iain McGilchrist as psychiatrist and neuroscientist; Augustine, Gregory Nazianzen, John of the Cross, John Henry Newman among the doctors of the Church; Milton, Coleridge, Kipling, Chesterton among the poets. Special attention is accorded St Irenaeus of Lyon, an icon of whom is printed at the front of book, who, in the words of the modern theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, apprehended “the scandal of the Incarnation”; and the English seventeenth-century poet George Herbert, who confides a crystalline personal relationship with Jesus invigorated by the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the central and ultimate focus of the lens.
The book is a treasury of quotations. It concludes with words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who calls us to live “unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith…” The book’s title might, indeed, have been better expressed in the phrase “through the lens of Christian faith”.
As a note of criticism, the book would have benefited from judicious application of the editor’s scalpel: the range of supportive referees and their comment is somewhat giddying and at times a quotation makes the point more opaque than clear, or labours it . Less is more. Nevertheless, this is a refreshingly affirmative book for the energetic enquirer into the possibilities of Christian orthodoxy as a realistic, exciting and sense-making framework for the good life.
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