• More B&B owners in court
• The Commentary
  21st-century us?
• Southern Comfort
  Dr. Bruce Ware interviewed about the transformation at Southern Baptist Seminary
• Common myths about church planting
• Making strangers welcome
  How do you make newcomers to church feel at home?
• Updating origins
  Some recent scientific developments
• Pulpit pop culture?
• Monthly media and arts column
  Generation Wii
• Unapologetic Christianity
  God is dead (again)
• The Music Exchange
  Strictly no dancing?
• Robin Wells, 1935-2011
  Obituary
• The Third Degree
  Who is God?
• Randle Manwaring, 1912-2010
  Obituary
• Keith Mawdsley, 1931-2010
  Obituary

other articles

• Never let me go
• Plastic people - How Queer Theory is changing us
• Tangled
• The Bible in Voice and Verse
• The theology of B.B. Warfield - A systematic survey
• Beware of living too long!
• Jonah - Pride & Prejudice
• Silences and nonsenses - Collected poetry, doggerel and whimsy
• Anne Bradstreet - Pilgrim and poet
• Stronger than the sword
• The spirit level - Why more equal societies almost always do better
• Faith unfeigned
• Shadow gospel - Rowan Williams and the Anglican Communion crisis
• Generous justice - How God's grace makes us just
• Rich - The reality of encountering Jesus
• Problems - Solving them God's way

Civil war sentimentality?

STRONGER THAN THE SWORD
By Faith Cook
Evangelical Press. 190 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-0-85234-728-7

This short historical novel will interest all who want to feel what it might have been like to live in the past. It gives a flavour of living through the English Civil War and then, particularly, the Restoration period of Charles ll. It is a homely tale of parental love, of troubled teens growing into young adults and of redemption and God’s grace. So its appeal is truly broad.

The strength of the book is to clearly set out how a person’s doctrinal beliefs and knowledge of God can lead to painful decisions with harsh consequences if the government is opposed to such beliefs. And to experience this we do not go far in terms of geography or language but far in terms of time: back around 300 years. The people we read about are not only brothers and sisters in the faith, but, for most EN readers, great … great grandparents.

Here we are encouraged to persevere from the examples of saints who have gone before us. The plot gives us a feel for a period that shaped our present evangelical culture in the UK. It concerns what might be a ‘golden’ period for some readers, at least the period before the Restoration when Oliver Cromwell, a Bible-believing independent, ran the country as Protector.

It is a book for believers. There is no attempt to explain the faith that the heroes of the tale share, so a good level of understanding is required to follow the story as told. And the characters are too narrowly presented as minds struggling with doctrinal issues and matters of life and faith to capture the imagination of someone uninterested in and unable to empathise with such struggles.

It is sufficiently sympathetically presented to be a worthwhile read for anyone convinced of the biblical case for independent evangelical churches and the doctrines of grace who would like to gain a ‘lived experience’ of believing some 300 years ago.

Sue Halliday,
lecturer; deacon in Hope Church (A Passion for Life), Hampshire