Reading between the lines
- deansimpson7
- Jun 23
- 4 min read
Captain Paul Farthing is the Corps Officer at Shellharbour in NSW. An avid reader, Salvos Online asked Paul three book-related questions:
Besides the gospels and Psalms, which is your favourite book in the Bible and why?
The book of Jude is not a comfortable read. Jude is brutal. Jude takes you by the shoulders and screams in your face. Jude is furious. Jude is out to get false teachers, those who try to sell us ideas that drag us away from the good news of Jesus Christ. He believes their teaching is empty; they are clouds with no rain; they are like the autumn tree; they bear no fruit. At this point, Jude gets really worked up; he says that not only do they not bear fruit, they have been pulled up by the root and are therefore “twice dead”. This is perhaps the sickest burn in the Bible.
It is likely that you have never read the book of Jude, you have probably never heard a sermon on the book of Jude, and this is understandable. Nobody wants to be told they are twice dead. But Jude is worthwhile. The trick is to accept the offence. Jude is kind of like Gordon Ramsay when he storms into a kitchen and criticises the soufflé, he is not gentle, but he knows what he is on about. A wise chef listens to Gordon even as he blusters at them – a wise Christian listens to Jude. I try to listen to Jude, he is brutal but helpful, and I really don’t want to end up twice dead.
Besides the Bible, what is a Christian book that has strongly influenced your faith?
The Booth family wrote a lot of books on a lot of topics. I have read a bunch of them, and my favourite is Evangeline Booth’s Toward a Better World. I think it is a collection of sermons, but they don’t read like sermons. These are lyrical things. Evangeline doesn’t just preach on a topic; she makes poetry of it. Take this opening sentence to her sermon on the nativity (read it slow): “Out of the deepening darkness of the firmament, over a chill Eastern night, brilliant stars of diamond-like sparkling shot their lustre as the two weary travellers waited at the door of a village khan for an answer to their humble request for a night's shelter.” Wonderful.
One does learn things when reading Evangeline’s sermons, but most of all you behold things. Her long and loping ponderings lull you into prayerful meditation, and within that meditation you meet Jesus. She puts him in front of you, 10,000 feet high, glorious and glittering.
She says that Christ “has forged an inseverable link between man and God”, she calls heaven “the bright land without a hearse”, she says that Jesus’ love will “banish from our faces the gloom that sin has cast”, and when Evangeline says something is so, you cannot help but believe her.
What is a secular book that has revealed to you a Christian message or theme?
Sally Rooney is a celebrated Irish novelist. At first, she wrote about love, but more recently, she has written about love and Jesus. My favourite was 2021’s Beautiful World Where Are? where two young women exchange letters on the two aforementioned topics. Neither identifies as Christian, but when Alice goes to mass – purely so she can spend time with her handsome love interest – she is struck by the depth and beauty of it all. She sees ordinary people lifting their hearts to the divine, she notices how Jesus is so unusually eager to forgive and wonders if she, too, could be forgiven. Later on, her friend Eileen says of Jesus, “I do love him, and I can’t even pretend that it’s only the same love I feel for Prince Myshkin, or for Charles Swann, or for Isabel Archer, (characters in her favourite novels). It is actually something different, a different feeling.” Rooney is often called “the voice of the millennials”, and here she depicts a generation who were raised outside the church but holds a yearning for what goes on within it. An article in The Critic notes that almost all reviewers ignored this part of Rooney’s writing, and the author wonders if the critics would rather pretend that the religious aspect of Rooney’s writing doesn’t exist.
We live in a world that tries to tell us nobody is interested in God anymore. But rest assured, dear Salvationist, people are more than interested in God. Beautiful World Where Are? tells us that we have a soul, and for him our soul yearns.
Some bonus Evangeline Booth ...
“My calendar tells me that Spring is now already well on the way, and although heavy snow still covers the ground, as I look through my window I catch something of a cunningness in the sunshine that does not belong to Winter, and observe a fascinating, gauzelike sheen veiling the nakedness of tree branches, great tears falling from suspended icicles as though Jack Frost himself were crying over his departure being delayed. And, if you will believe me, on the crest of a bank of snow there is a little robin carrying an infinitesimal wisp of straw, while from the eaves his mate chirps soft murmurings, looking down upon him with mysterious and wistful glance.”
