McGrath’s Surprised by Meaning is a fairly accessible and slender volume that quickly immerses the reader into the ongoing conversation between radical atheism, science, and Christianity, centering on the latter’s ability to provide meaning to experience. As the title, an allusion to C.S. Lewis’ work, suggests, Surprised by Meaning falls into the tradition of intellectually robust and academically informed yet pietistic apologetics. It seeks to navigate and renegotiate this tradition through modern scientism and militant atheism. In the process, McGrath builds an irenic yet polemical argument that comes to crescendo in a more deeply appreciable presentation of the Gospel.

Alister McGrath, a North Irish theologian, is currently a faculty member of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is also an ordained Anglican priest. Prior to his work as a theologian and priest, McGrath pursued studies in biochemistry and molecular biology, earning a D. Phil in the latter. He has written a number of other books on the relationship between science and faith, the New Atheism, and historical theology. He has recently written a biography on C.S. Lewis (2013) and a book on Swiss theologian Emil Brunner. As a conservative and intellectually engaged Christian, McGrath’s work represents some of the best thought engaging influential currents in contemporary, Western society. However, for some American Evangelicals, McGrath would be considered somewhat liberal, as he endorses a type of theistic evolution and appropriates truth from literature and philosophy as well as the Scriptures.

Alister McGrath

Surprised moves slowly, especially through the first seven chapters. McGrath, accustomed to writing tomes, tends towards the same pace with this text. It is almost a quarter of the way through the book before he describes the thesis of the book by quoting Bernard Lonergan, “‘God is the unrestricted act of understanding, the eternal rapture glimpsed in every Archimedean cry of Eureka’” (29).

Several more pages later, the thesis is clearer:

The argument of this book is that Christianity offers an intellectual sun that illuminates an otherwise dark and enigmatic world: it gives a deeply satisfying “empirical fit” between theory and observation, which suggests that the map of reality that it offers is reliable and may be trusted (57).

Prior to this, McGrath traces his own turn from atheism to faith, the contours of the New Atheism and some of its fallacies, and the proper role, use, and definition of science. He writes: “[T]hings that are really worth believing in lie beyond proof. Our most important beliefs are the ones that simply cannot be proved” (19) and “Science is about warranted belief, not about rational belief. The history of science is about the recalibration of notions of ‘rationality’ in the light of what was actually discovered about the deeper structure of nature” (27). In more philosophical argot, McGrath seeks to provide the beginnings of a Christian epistemology. In another sense, the first half of the book feels more like a prolegomenon than the building of a sustained thesis. Nonetheless, many of the threads pulled out in the first seven chapters are interwoven in the final six.

The other half of Surprised seeks to display how the intellectual sun of Christianity illuminates the world. McGrath begins this endeavor by looking at cosmology. Although at times too dense for the non-specialist, his main point in this section unpacks the anthropic principle at a universal and biological level. In short, the universe is “fine tuned” for life (61, 66, 68). He then discusses the latest developments in regards to teleology and evolutionary theory. Here he argues that there seems to be purpose in the evolutionary process and this suggestively coheres with what could be called Providence.

Moving from developments in science and their illumination by the Christian sun, McGrath explores the meaning of history, culture and faith vis-à-vis an atheistic account. He charts his course by centering on the concepts of the image of God and the sinfulness of humanity (86). Keeping interpretations of history and humanity oscillating between these two poles provides a necessary realism, neither angel nor devil.

James Robinson, Divine Healing: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition Years, 1890-1906: Theological Transposition in the Transatlantic World (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 238 pages, ISBN 9781620324080.

James Robinson’s second volume in his Divine Healing series is a major contribution to the study of Pentecostal origins in the Anglo-American world. An interesting and highly researched work, Divine Healing: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition Years, includes enough anecdotes and testimonies from primary sources to engage the lay reader and a tempered, even-handed review of the secondary literature and historical critiques others have had concerning the divine healing movement of the late 19^th century and early 20^th.

The author, (PhD Queen’s University, Belfast, 2001), is a relative newcomer to the field, having retired from a lifelong vocation as a grammar school teacher in Northern Ireland prior to his contributions to Pentecostal studies. His volumes include forewords by such noted Pentecostal scholars as Candy Gunther Brown (Indiana University) and William K. Kay (University of Chester). As a Presbyterian elder with Pentecostal roots, Robinson is conservative in regards to his work on divine healing: “A more subliminal, and possibly ethereal, aspiration is that some within the church of our day will find something in the book pertinent to the safeguard and furtherance of the historic ministry of healing” (Robinson 2011: Kindle Location 145). This hopeful conservatism underwrites both volumes and shines brilliantly through Robinson’s careful attention to detail and objectivity.

Transition focuses on the years between 1890-1906. His prior volume covers 1830-1890, and a planned volume will investigate 1906-1930. However, these dates are not tight restrictions, but, rather, a permeable focus on people and highlights of the proto-Pentecostal era building up to Azusa.

Transition begins with a brief overview of the preceding volume and establishes the parameters of the rest of the work. In the introduction, Robinson outlines three distinctive features of the radical healing apologetic that underwrote the flowering of the movement. These features were: 1) Redemption extended to “both the spirit and the body.” 2) “As salvation is through faith, so is healing,” and 3) “Medical intervention was considered the sign of a deficient faith and brought less glory to God” (Kindle locations 214-224). These features resurface time and time again in Robinson’s narrative and analysis. The rest of the Introduction links the Holiness-Pentecostal transition to earlier historical precedents and highlights divine healing teaching and practice in a variety of contexts.

Chapter 1 looks closely at the Holiness-Pentecostal transition in America. This transition occurred in the post-Bellum era and primarily among splinter groups off of the Methodist church. These splinter groups comprised the Wesleyan Holiness counter movement from which and in which radical divine healing advocates flourished. Again, Robinson underscores the connection between Holiness teaching and divine healing rooted in the extent of redemption. Following the trajectory from Methodism, through the Wesleyan Holiness counter movement, the author finishes out the chapter with how the Holiness movement with its divine healing overtones were linked to early Pentecostal movements and leaders such as Frank Sandford, the Shiloh Movement, Daniel Warner, and Alma White. These links, as elsewhere in the volume, are developed through extensive biography and narrative along with contemporaneous accounts from those outside the movement.