As promised, here is a brief review. I've no doubt that it is not up to the standards of some of my more literary friends but if I persuade anyone to read it I shall be happy. Neil Martin should really start paying me a commission...
Keep Going is a two-parter. The first is a theology of doubting and struggling. With unmistakeable marks of personal experience, he sensitively yet ruthlessly pulls apart the reasons, good and bad, why Christians often doubt. In all this he works from a soundly biblical perspective and structures his argument in such a way that even the most philosophically-illiterate science student can understand exactly where he's going and how he's getting there. My experience as I read it was one of self-recognition at every paragraph, followed by the question "yes, but what about..." only to discover that the subsequent paragraph dealt with the arising question. Whether this reflects the fact that Neil Martin is my strange psychic twin or that my experience is more common than I had previously realised, I will leave for you to determine. More seriously, he helpfully navigates the tricky pastoral balance in affirming that doubt is often the product of sin, the world and the devil; that it is a common and in many respects normative experience; and yet that Christian faith can stand up to and indeed be enriched by the use of our God-given reasoning ability to assess the basis of our trust in Christ.
In the second part of the book he addresses some of the most common intellectual struggles that doubters face: the existence of God (helpfully for me, dealing well with the interaction between evolutionary biology and theology); the tension between God's sovereignty and human freedom/responsibility; the authenticity of the bible; and struggles with assurance. These questions are addressed within the framework established in the first part of the book, and as such provide excellent case studies of how to think biblically about difficult questions. Having said that, I think most doubters would feel that if they settled the existence of a sovereign, loving, and just God; the reliability of the biblical testimony; and were certain of a place kept for them with God for eternity and of their adoption as sons by the blood of Christ, they really wouldn't need to work out that many other doubts... I'm not saying Martin's book quite gets you there, but it's definitely a sizeable shove in the right direction.
Here seems as good a place as any to repeat the request for your help and input on this blog: Martin often led me to conviction of the sin of using half-thought-out objections as an excuse not to trust Christ. So as I write of some of my struggles, please flag up where they are poorly-thought-out, and send me packing back in the direction of the cross! One memorable passage from Keep Going has been this one:
With the bible too, research can only take us so far. It can help us reach the point where we're intrigued and persuaded by the bible's relevance - but it's only in actually doing what it says that our confidence will really be established. And this is just as well because if confidence really did depend on our grasp of the historical evidence for the New Testament - or any other form of external evidence for that matter - faith would be restricted to the educated. But as God has arranged things it's just one of the many means available to help get us to the start - and persist through the difficulties - of the Christian race. It can bring us to the point where we're ready to give Jesus a hearing, but it's what we do with this readiness that determines whether or not we'll grow in confidence that the bible is really a revelation from God. (p128)
