review: The Hopeful Skeptic

The Hopeful Skeptic: Revisiting Christianity from the Outside, Nick Fiedler

I haven't posted a book review in a long while. I have rather a big pile of half-read books waiting to be finished. The Hopeful Skeptic had to go to the top of the pile, for a few reasons, and is not a difficult read, so I actually have managed to get the end.

Oh dear, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement. Let's try again. Nick has written a light, chatty book which is thought-provoking and engaging. It's certainly not your average IVP book, as he discusses in the first few pages. The style draws you in, and it's full of tales, anecdotes, and analogies.

I first encountered Nick when I was beginning to explore the whole brave new world of emerging church - or whatever you want to call it - and found The Nick and Josh Podcast. Subsequently, as he was beginning his year-plus round-the-world adventure I drank Guinness with him in a bar in Sydney.

Packing up his appartment in advance of that trip provides the metaphor to hang the book on. What to retain, and what to leave behind? For someone wondering about all the Christian things he's held onto in the past, the same question arises. For Nick, the approach is summed up in his phrase hopeful skeptic.

He toys with the word agnostic, but decides it comes with too much baggage. I'd have to agree. So he prefers skeptic. But it seems to me that skepticism gets a bit of a bad press: perhaps it is too readily confused with cynicism. But even if not, Christians are often encouraged to be highly credulous, to ask questions in convenient places, to feel inadequate if they are not quite as confident as their peers. But a healthy skepticism is part of the path to wisdom; the foundation of scientific endeavour (perhaps even the whole academic venture). If you don't believe me, try convincing a room full of scientists that you have a new theory, a new approach better than their existing one: it quickly gets ugly.

But Fiedler's approach isn't purely skeptical - it is most definitely hopeful. In fact, the whole narrative is so suffused with hope that you can easily forget the subtitle about "revisiting Christianity from the outside", for these don't seem like the sentiments of someone outside the Christian community, just somone who has grown tired of the baggage that comes along with the term "Christian". The skepticisim is almost apologetic at times: much of the book seems addressed to an imagined individual who is fully immersed in the Evangelical world, and needs broadened horizons - but without wanting to give offence.

So some of the chapters address familiar topics of Christian formation: prayer, scripture, community, views of Jesus. But Mr Web 2.0 has to give us a chapter on "technianity", looking at how our emerging technologies can radically re-shape what we mean by church and faith.

Is it surprising and earth-shattering? That probably depends on where you're starting from. For me, no, I don't think there's too much which messed up my world view. Is it full of seminal theology? Er, no. Is it destructive or divisive? I wouldn't say so: I'm sure that's not the intention, anyway, and I can't really see it falling that way. Is it an honest and entertaining traveller's tale, a snapshot of what early 21st Century post-evangelicalism might look like? Absolutely.