Writers to Read: A Short Demonstration of Christian Engagement with Culture

Writers to Read: A Short Demonstration of Christian Engagement with Culture August 18, 2015

Review of Writers to Read by Douglas Wilson

Douglas Wilson is, for the time being, for better or worse, one of the Reformed world’s leading public intellectuals. Arguably christened or “welcomed” to this stature by John Piper when he was invited to speak at the Desiring God conference in 2009, Wilson has gone on to become known as an edgy apologist (Collision), classical educator (Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning), and questionable historian (Southern Slavery, As It Was). Beyond this, however, Wilson is also known for being wordsmithy. Writers to Read is his second book on writing Writers to Read. In it Wilson explains what you should learn from nine authors that allegedly belong on your bookshelf.

Wilson is a delight to read. And in this book he continues to deliver. Like many books on writing style (think Clear and Simple as the Truth or On Writing Well), Wilson demonstrates the lessons in the way he writes the very text we read. Discussing Chestertonian paradox? Demonstrate the use of truth-revealing paradoxes into Christian theological paradoxes. What about Wodehouse’s famous metaphors? Wilson crafts his own striking and, since we’re talking Wodehouse here, hilarious word images for us to savor. Wilson’s prose is difficult to skim because it demands attention.

But Writers to Read has a number of objectives. It is meant “to help us all become better readers of some fine writers.” And better writers too, since “anyone who wants to write well should return to these authors again and again” (p. 12). Wilson succeeds to varying degrees — the variation changing chapter by chapter. Each chapter is dedicated to one author, nine in total: G. K. Chesterton, H. L. Mencken, P. G. Wodehouse, T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, R. F. Capon (not usually initialed, but for consistency sake), M. S. Robinson (same here for Marilyn), and N. D. Wilson (Douglas’s son).

Image Source: Crossway
Image Source: Crossway

Wilson does not successfully convince us that all these authors deserve to be on this list or will stand the test of time (a criterion that Wilson himself puts forward as a sign of true classics). Each chapter begins with a brief sketch of the author’s life, followed by a section “Digging Deeper” that tries to expose the mechanics behind their thought life and how it relates to the Christian faith, and concludes with helpful “If You Read Nothing Else” recommendations. The chapters on Chesterton, Mencken, and Wodehouse are gripping. Chesterton “bends what is bent so that we might see it straight” (p. 17). From Mencken we learn, “A ‘sense of poetry’ is at the bottom of all sound prose” (p. 33). On analyzing Wodehouse’s metaphors, Wilson writes, “Metaphor works for a reason. … The universe goes together in some very odd ways” (p. 53).

The last six chapters, unfortunately, never reach the stylistic and turn-of-phrase heights of the first three. The reader never really gets a sense of Eliot; his treatment of Tolkien and Lewis read more as a work of literary criticism; we finish Capon unconvinced that he is actually worth reading; and anyone who has actually read Robinson’s work will not learn anything substantively new. The chapter on N. D. Wilson feels the most shallow. The opening biographical snapshot reads more like an extended account with unnecessary details (how can a father resist?) and Wilson’s analysis grasps at low-hanging fruit. He identifies literary themes such as fatherless and courage, which unabashedly rest on the very surface of many young adult novels. The case for Nate Wilson’s proto-classic-status is wanting.

Wilson states that his mission in Writers to Read is to create better readers and better writers. A third, underlying, objective becomes clearer page by page. He is teaching Christians how to engage with culture, both by “digging deeper” into literary luminaries who shaped the twentieth-century mind and by explaining how these authors themselves interacted with (and critiqued) the zeitgeist of their time. Along the way, he not so subtly prunes the church’s intellectual hedges.

Ever the contrarian, Wilson warns that the popularity of worldview thinking should be tempered. “The problem is not with the word worldview. The problem is with what we naturally tend to think of as our eyes. … But the real organ that we must view the world with is the imagination” (p. 18). Moreover, “many modern Christians do all their worldview analysis through the simple process of counting [hells or damns in books]” (p. 48). He takes a swipe at N. T. Wright fan clubs as contrarians who may be as thought-less as the stampeders, chasing fads. A favorite Wilsonian word to describe Christian engagement with culture is “shrill.” Rightly, he argues that:

“The besetting sin of many cranky, conservative Christian types is their inability to make any good point whatever without sounding shrill. And the better the point, the shriller the making of it can be. The more serious the point, the shriller it gets. When it gets down to matters of life and death, we sound like so many teakettles on a full boil” (p. 55).

And,

“Our cultural criticism tends to be brittle and shrill rather than proceeding from faith. Living by faith includes our criticism, and, oddly enough, the Latin for “with faith” is con fides, that is, confidence” (p. 38).

And here comes the punchline: “Shrillness is therefore a lazy man’s indignation. Shrillness is cheap bluster” (p. 55). This is the negative. What does Wilson say positively about how Christians should do “cultural criticism” while leaving aside the shrillness?

Christian writers should “assume the center” (p. 38). They should, like Machen, have a brain and the courage of their convictions, and “use both of them in the battle” (p. 43). Christians should embrace metaphors because “the more we use them fittingly, the more we grasp what God is like [i.e., the Word made flesh]” (p. 53). In fact, “[t]he test of a theology is what kind of culture it builds” (p. 67). Christians should “affirm a fundamental loyalty to the world and constantly thwart the world’s desire to become disloyal to itself” (p. 25). Applying some Chestertonian paradox: “Worldliness is just a clever way of deserting the world. This is the explanation of why worldliness is so consistently wary of the world” (p. 25). And a word of encouragement: “The Christian faith is permanently sane and is therefore always a bit out of fashion” (p. 27).

With Writers to Read, Douglas Wilson has given us a book part literary guide, part style instructor, part cultural criticism. There is a lot packed into this relatively slim volume. And as with any book that tries to do so much, readers may leave dissatisfied. But if anything, it serves as an invitation to explore these nine authors as “a wonderful place to begin” (p. 151).

 


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