ALL four books reviewed below underline the crucial importance of our understanding of revelation today.

Ray Billington, in his Religion without God

(Routledge, £ 12.99)

Challenges the theistic monopoly in religion. The transcendental' and the numinous cannot be known or named. He has no difficulty in pointing to some adherents of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Taoism as examples of sincerely religious people who do not believe in God and he recognises a profane religion" among some with no particular religious affiliation.

It is time to let 90 of God as nothing more than a human construct. Belief in God too often generates a narrowness and divisiveness, of spirit harmful to human co-operation.

Neither the acceptance of historical or quasi-historical figures as icons nor the elevation of certain texts as possessing absolute truth is any longer acceptable. Religion at its most sublime is substance and not form. It is absorption into the infinite or ground of being.

Post-modern, post-God religious people accept a dimension beyond the physical and are filled, with an invigorating sense of wonder but have no expectation of life-beyond death. They sound cosy and uninvolved, with little passion to struggle against injustice or remake the world but there is a case for the theist to answer here.

In contrast,

Edward Norman in Secularisation

(Continuum, £12.99)

Reasserts traditional Christian doctrine and attempts to account for a, perceived transformation in religious understanding today.

As he sees it, we allow secular Humanism, as an unconscious, orientation of life and thought, to infiltrate our perceptions of the Christian faith.

Christianity and Humanism are utterly opposed. The Gospel is about the sovereignty of God, the corruption of human beings and the forgiveness held out to those who repent.

Humanism proclaims the moral autonomy of human beings and their capacity for self-correction. The Church has allowed human welfare, rather than Christian virtue, to become its goal and Christianity has become inseparable from the prevalent Moral culture of the secular world.

We must reassert the authority of the Church's teaching, determined collectively by the people of God and conveyed through ecclesiastical authority.

One way to achieve this is to ensure that students in our theological colleges are trained not to think for themselves but to propagate approved interpretations of faith and morals! How this can be done when, as he recognises, there has always been diversity of thought within the Church from New Testament times onward, he does not explain.

Much here will feed the prejudices of many but he begs the huge questions. The nature of revelation is not discussed, neither is the credibility of traditional Christianity in a scientific or post-modern atmosphere addressed

A robust theology of redemption is proclaimed but not balanced by an adequate doctrine of creation.

For all its useful insights, this book does not begin to come to terms with the problems presented by our contemporary culture.

(SCM. Press, £13.95)

Contains his Gifford Lectures delivered in 2001. Hauerwas thinks that Lord Gifford's understanding of natural theology was one of the desperate attempts used by a dying Christendom to maintain its intelligibility and influence. It rests on the assumptions of modernity and attempts to secure the truth of Christian convictions in a manner, which makes their content secondary. Natural theology divorced from a full doctrine of God cannot help but distort the character of God and of the world.

Modern theology suffers, he thinks, from a false humility and he proceeds to tell the story of 20th century theology by looking at the work of William James, Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth.

James turned natural theology into religious psychology. Niebuhr, like James, assumed that Christianity must be tested by standards generally accepted by the intellectual elites of the day. Faith, he thought, is validated by experience. But in the process, he ended with a complex humanism, disguised by Christian language.

The hero of the story is, therefore, Karl Barth, who attacked the humanism generated by modernity. His work is a massive attempt to overturn the epistemological prejudices of modernity.

The question, "How do we know God is dependent on an answer. To the question, "Who is God", Barth begins not, with human experience but with talking about God, insisting that God is the proper subject of theology. The apologetic task is to witness to the reconciling and redeeming work of God in Jesus Christ.

A big, erudite and demanding book, it nevertheless leaves me unsatisfied. The point of contact, between God and human experience is missing and there remains a big question about whether modernity can be dismissed in this fashion.

Gavin Hyman offers a philosophical analysis of some of the tendencies here in The Predicament of Post-modern Theology

(Westminster John Knox Press £14.99).

He rejects the textual nihilism of Don Cupitt largely because it continues, however unconsciously, to operate within the framework of modernity. We have to recognise the shift from reason to vision, from system to narrative and from argument to persuasion, which has occurred in our thought.

Equally, the, radical orthodoxy of John Milbank, which Hauerwas embraces, is insufficiently post-modern because it insists upon the possibility of still treating Christianity as a meta-narrative, a master story which explains everything.

For Hyman the only possibility is a fictional nihilism that accepts the need for commitment to narratives to make sense of our lives ~ but also recognises their provisionality and the impossibility of absolute commitment' to them.

In this disposition, we are constantly on the move, haunted by a sense of the "other" which motivates the movement through such narratives.

Perhaps there is a measure of affinity with Billington here tempered by a more positive assessment of the particularities of religions. Commitment to some narrative is unavoidable but it is not clear on what criteria we should move from one to another.

By no means an easy read, it is valuable for its analyses but less useful in what it proposes.

These four book reviews by kind permission of the Methodist Recorder

Personal view from The Daily Telegraph 27 August 2002:

Africa's shady politicians are at root of continent's destitution

By George Ayittey

(George Ayittey is President of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington DC. This article is a precis of his contribution to Sustainable Development, a collection of essays published by Profile Books, £14.99 please note this is NOT available from Dovecote.)

Africa's potential is enormous, yet it is inexorably mired in steaming squalor, misery, deprivation, and chaos. Four out of ten Africans live in absolute poverty and recent evidence suggests that poverty is on the increase. Most Africans today are worse off than they were at independence.

Why is Africa in this state? "Externalists" ascribe Africa's woes to factors beyond its control: Western colonialism and imperialism, the slave trade, racist plots, avaricious multinationals, an unjust international economic system, inadequate flows of foreign aid and deteriorating terms of trade.

"Internalists" blame local systems of governance: excessive state intervention and corruption at all levels, from the police and judiciary to the highest branches of government.

Since independence in the 1960s, African leaders, with few exceptions, have attributed almost every malaise to external agents. But a new and angry generation of Africans has emerged.

As Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe says: "There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land, climate, water, air, or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which are the hallmarks of true leadership."

Many African countries are "vampire" states; their governments hijacked by gangsters who use the instruments of the state to enrich themselves and their cronies. In Africa, the richest people are heads of state and ministers.

They destroy wealth: rather than encourage investment, they encourage activities designed only to capture some of the President's largesse. The instinct of the ruling elite is to loot the national treasury and invest the booty in foreign banks.

The UN has estimated that in 1991 alone, the ruling elite siphoned more than $200 billion out of Africa, more than half the continent's foreign debt.

Since politics is the gateway to fabulous wealth, the competition for power is ferocious. Defeat can mean exile, jail, or starvation. Those who win power award key positions to fellow tribesmen, cronies, and supporters. Those exploited remove themselves from the formal economy, either leaving the country or turning to the black market.

This deprives the state of tax revenue and foreign exchange. The formal economy shrinks and the state finds it increasingly difficult to raise revenue. Then those excluded from the spoils rise up. It takes only a small band of determined malcontents to plunge the country into mayhem.

In 1981, Yoweri Museveni, now the President of Uganda, started with only 27 men in a guerrilla campaign against Milton Obote. Charles Taylor, now the President of Liberia, set out with 150 rebels; no post-colonial African government has been able to crush a rebel insurgency.

In destroying their economies, African tyrants received much help from the West - out of sheer naivety. Since the end of colonialism, Western governments, development agencies, and international financial institutions have provided generous assistance.

According to the OECD, the net disbursement of official development assistance, adjusted for inflation, between 1960 and 1997 was roughly $400 billion, equivalent to almost six Marshall Plans.

Somalia is probably the most execrable example. Huge amounts of economic and disaster relief aid was dumped there, but it was the massive inflow of food aid in the early 1980s that did much to shred the fabric of Somali society.

Droughts and famines are not new to Africa, and traditional societies developed methods of coping. Cheap food aid destroyed these methods and Somalia became dependent on food imports.

Africa's crises have little to do with artificial colonial borders, American imperialism, racism, or the alleged inferiority of the African people. They stem from bad leadership and the enabling role-played by the West. The centralisation of power and absence of mechanisms for its peaceful transfer lead to a struggle, which degenerates, into civil war.

Infrastructure is destroyed. Food production and delivery are disrupted. Thousands are dislocated and flee. Food supplies run out. The Western media bombards us with horrific pictures of famine victims. Unable to bear the horror, the conscience of the international community is stirred to mount 11th-hour humanitarian rescue missions.

Foreign relief workers parachute in dispensing high-protein biscuits, blankets, and portable toilets at hastily erected refugee camps. The same macabre ritual is repeated year after year.

Strict and Particular : English Strict

and Particular Baptists in the Nineteenth Century

by Kenneth Dix.

The Baptist Historical Society,

for The Strict Baptist Historical Society

£15(Paperback) ISBN 0-90316631

£20 (hardback) ISBN. 0-903166321

Kenneth Dix has given us the first comprehensive and reliable published history of the Strict Baptists, whose churches made up more than a quarter of the total of English Baptist Churches in 1900, and without whom the English Baptist story is incomplete.

Dr Dix introduces those who were leaders of the Strict Baptist movement as it arose and took shape in the nineteenth century, men like William Gadsby, minister in the early decades of the century of Manchester's then only Baptist church and advocate for the poor; J.C. Philpot, seceder from the Church of England and editor of the Gospel Standard magazine (Incomparable on his one theme' according to C. H. Spurgeon); George Wright of Beccles, the first secretary of the New (Strict Baptist) Suffolk and Norfolk Association; and James Wells a 'pulpit genius' whose Surrey Chapel in South London had to be enlarged, then rebuilt, to hold almost 2000 people. A number of illustrations of people and places help to give the 'flavour' of Strict Baptist life.

The author identifies the two main pillars of the Strict Baptist position. One was 'high' (some would say hyper) Calvinism, which led them to insist that only those who showed evidence of an initial experience of the grace of God could be invited to come to Christ. From this position they deplored the indiscriminate invitations and 'duty faith' of the moderate Calvinism revived by Andrew Fuller.

An experiential and introspective ethos came to dominate many of the churches, as people were directed to look within themselves for marks of the Spirit's work, as evidence that they were among the elect.

The other factor was the defence of a church order in which Robert Hall regarded baptism as a necessary prerequisite to church communion (membership and participation in the Lord's Supper), over against the spread of open communion as advocated.

A gazetteer of churches of 1900 is provided, showing which ones still exist, but the author does not set out to bring the story up to date. So it may be worth pointing out that the two groups he identifies as the, evangelical' and the 'experiential' are still discernible today.

Many of the former have replaced the word 'Strict' with 'Grace', reverted to moderate Calvinism, and would see their contemporary distinctive as a Reformed doctrine of salvation, a Baptist Church order, and a separation from liberal theology and ecumenism - a stance that has attracted some members and ministers from other Baptist churches in recent decades.

In many ways this book tells a cautionary tale, and the author, although writing as a Strict Baptist pastor, is willing to identify shortcomings.

Division and controversy multiplied within Strict Baptist ranks, the idiosyncrasies of dominant leaders were perpetuated, while their more endearing characteristics were not always reproduced, shibboleths accumulated and it became second nature to be averse to any kind of change.

Such regrettable traits of movements that set out to resist 'modern departures' and defend 'orthodoxy' are not confined to Strict Baptists or to the nineteenth century, of course. It is sad, however, that the narrow or eccentric characteristics of nineteenth century Strict Baptists almost overshadow their more positive features.

For if their deepest concerns were to glorify the grace of God, and to maintain a Baptist (and, indeed, catholic) church order, in which the significance of the New Testament connections between baptism, the Lord's Supper and the body of Christ are fully recognised, they could, through this book, present some healthy challenges to our present-day Baptist denomination as a whole.

The Revd Dr Michael Thomas pastored two Strict Baptist churches

prior to becoming minister

of Brighton Road Baptist Church, South Croydon.

This review by kind permission of the Baptist Times

Matthew for Everyone. Parts 1 and 2 by Tom Wright

SPCK, £8 99 (each)

ISBN. 0-281-05301-4 & 0-281-05487-8

When preparing a sermon I want two kinds of commentary; the academic to help me wrestle with what the text actually says, and what one might call 'the preachers commentary', to help stir the imagination and apply the text. I still turn to William Barclays' famous Daily Study Bible as one of the latter.

In 1957 he completed Matthew by publishing Volume 2, taking up the Gospel in chapter 11. His style was to print the text of the passage in his own translation and then to comment upon it in a way which did not require any specialist knowledge on the part of the reader.

What William Barclay did half a century ago Tom Wright is in the process of repeating now, and to superb effect. His Matthew is also in two volumes, split at chapter 15, and he follows the same pattern, but with significant improvements. As with Barclay, the translation is the author's own, and while it is not as colloquial as, say, Eugene Peterson's The Message, it flows with a winsome style.

The comments are always pertinent, and where Barclay steps straight in with comment upon the text, Wright gives an illustration. I am sure many of these chapters began life as sermons themselves. The background information is clear and there is a glossary of more technical terms at the back to help the reader unfamiliar with the New Testament (e.g. covenant, exile, kingdom, Mishna, Sadducees etc.).

While this whole series will be a welcome addition to the preachers tool kit from one of the outstanding New Testament scholars at work in Britain today, these books are genuinely for everyone, and their best use will be to help every Christian wanting to use this aid to daily Bible study.

In 15 minutes you can have engaged significantly with a Bible passage, understood it's meaning and applied it straightforwardly to your life. For the Christian wanting something deeper than, say, the Scripture Union Encounter series, this is a godsend and, like Encounter, will feed the soul better than some of the meagre fare offered up as daily Bible study aids these days. It would also be of use to those preparing bible study for small groups. Keep going, Canon Wright, and complete this wonderful series.

The Revd Paul Goodliff is Regional Minister/Team Leader

for the Central Baptist Association.

This review by kind permission of the Baptist Times

Rwanda the Land God Forgot?

by Meg Guillebaud

Monarch Books, £8.99

ISBN. 1-85424-576-7

Just eight years ago, Rwanda made headline news with the genocide in which 800,000 people were killed. Yet revivals had taken place in previous decades with 90 per cent of the population claiming to be Christians. How could all this happen? Meg Guillebaud helps us to unravel the strands in this fascinating book.

Her personal story offers remarkable insight into four generations of missionary service in Rwanda. Her grandfather, Harold, took years patiently translating the Scriptures into local language. The moment of completion was one of intense joy. 'It was a moment worth all that it has ever cost us to be here,' wrote Margaret, her grandmother. Within the deep sense of call, we glimpse the cost of overseas mission service whether it is the feeling from the children being educated thousands of miles away from parents, honesty over marriage struggles, or the risks to personal safety. The personal story here is woven around the revivals of the 1930s and the 1970s. At these times, there was a deep hunger for Bible teaching day and night, with the fruits of repentance evident as new converts repaid stolen goods. Walking in the light was a prominent feature where Christians would challenge each other in specific ways to live a Christ-like life. This included strong relationships across racial and tribal barriers, including the Hutu and Tutsi young people repenting and embracing each other. Such honesty also caused conflict especially when young Christians challenged senior Church Leaders over their shortcomings. Revival sought freedom for women in contributing publicly to church life. Prayer was a priority.

Testimonies are deep, frank, and moving. In 1964, Pastor Yona was a latter day Stephen, praying for his enemies and singing a hymn before he was shot. Helene, a young widow, was - in time - able to forgive the killer of her husband and later joined him in public worship to testify together to the transforming grace of God.

I valued particularly the final section, 'Afterthoughts', as the author begins to reflect, along with others, on the genocide and how it could have happened. Some lessons become apparent. Firstly, alongside the stress on personal salvation, Roger Bowen who was General Secretary of Mid-Africa Ministry in the 1990s states that there was a 'lack of engagement with the public life of the nation or critique of the socio-political context'. The structural evil was not recognised.

Secondly, following from this, the role of church leadership was crucial here. The author identifies that many leaders were not generally willing to exercise 'their prophetic role in challenging the previous government'. Many did not condemn the killing and some actually participated in it. Thirdly, while many became baptised Christians, there was not sufficient emphasis on 'growing in discipleship'.

Here, then, is a highly readable book which both inspires challenges. It certainly motivates intercessory prayer for Africa. Although we live in a different context, I believe there are lessons here for us in Britain. In our multicultural context, we need commitment to a Gospel, which transforms individuals, and the whole of society prophetic servant leadership is essential in undergirding this commitment to mission.

We, too, need a greater emphasis on growing, as disciples where we wrestle with the big issues of faith, witness, and public life, releasing lay ministries. Having just finished reading Nigel Wright's book New Baptists, New Agenda, I was amazed at the echo.

The Revd Ernie Whalley is a Regional Minister

in the Yorkshire Baptist Association.

This review by kind permission of the Baptist Times