Fight by Preston Sprinkle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 15

This is barely a blog post – just noting that, on an evening journey to visit a friend in Milton Keynes, I finished my audiobook of the moment: Fight: A Christian Case for Non-Violence (2014) by Preston Sprinkle.

Preston Sprinkle is my favourite Christian writer (theologian? I don’t know where the line is to become one) and I love his books on a wide range of topics – he also hosts an excellent and wide-ranging podcast called Theology in the Raw (so I guess he is a theologian). His books range from the very accessible to the quite academic, sometimes within the same chapter, and Fight is to the accessible side of things. I think the print version has a lot of supporting academic material in appendices.

Sprinkle’s thesis is basically that Christians are called to be non-violent – which I think is a more controversial claim in parts of right-wing America than it is here. And, as often with Sprinkle, it’s not a conclusion he comes to instinctively or even comfortably. He always looks to find his theology from the Bible, not from culture or history or assumption. He goes even further than most, and argues that Christians shouldn’t fight in the army, shouldn’t kill someone trying to attack them etc, and has beautiful, Christ-centred back-up.

I’ll be honest, this is perhaps the worst kind of theological reading – in that I’m reading something I know I’ll agree with. I’m instinctively a pacifist and find violence abhorrent in any form. So I’m glad to have scriptural back-up for it (though it also seems very self-evident of the Prince of Peace) – particularly for the trickier bits of the Old Testament or Revelation that people will wheel out in opposition to the idea, often without having actually read them.

So, when I say ‘worst kind’, I mean this book has not challenged my thinking at all – because it says what I want it to. And I know that’s kinda lazy… but also I’ll follow Preston Sprinkle anywhere he leads.