God and Charles Dickens , livre ebook

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127 pages

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Charles Dickens's 200th birthday will be celebrated in 2012. Though his writings are now more than 100 years old, many remain in print and are avidly read and studied. Often overlooked--or unknown--are the considerable Christian convictions Dickens held and displayed in his work. This book fills that vacuum by examining Dickens the Christian and showing how Christian beliefs and practices permeate his work.This historical work is written for pastors, students, and laity alike. Chapters look at Dickens's life and work topically, arguing that Christian faith was front and center in some of what Dickens wrote (such as his children's work The Life of Our Lord) and saliently implicit throughout various other characters and plots. Since Dickens's Christian side is rarely considered, Gary Colledge illuminates a fresh angle of Dickens, and the 200th birthday makes it especially timely.

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Christianity

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 juin 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441237781
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0576€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2012 by Gary L. Colledge
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3778-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Scripture quotations labeled Phillips are from The New Testament in Modern English, revised edition J. B. Phillips, translator. © J. B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.
For Aurora, Collin, William, David, and Ethan
“I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.”
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop , chapter 1
May you each find joy, as did Dickens, in our Savior
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes and Abbreviations
1. Charles Dickens: That Great Christian Writer
2. Charles Dickens’s Jesus
3. Charles Dickens: Theologian?
4. Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist
5. Real Christianity
6. Dickens and the Church
7. Reading (and Hearing) Dickens
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Author Index
Subject Index
Back Cover
Acknowledgments
I would certainly be remiss if I failed to express my deepest appreciation and sincere thanks to the handful of family and friends who contributed to the writing of this book in ways that most of them are probably unaware.
Let me begin by thanking everyone at Brazos for their warm reception of the manuscript, their interest in the project, and their careful work on it at every stage of the process. It has been my privilege and a joy to work with such capable and friendly folks.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr. Bruce Longenecker (Baylor University), who was instrumental in providing opportunity for the work and research that would eventually produce this book. From the inception of the original project to its publication here, Bruce’s unobtrusive support and sincere interest has helped give it shape. Thanks, too, to my friend Craig Clapper, pastor of Trinity Evangelical Free Church (South Bend, Indiana), who queried with his characteristic frankness, “What does Dickens have to say to the church?” and who then invited me to share my answer with his congregation. The conversations I enjoyed with Craig on Dickens and the church provided the impetus for the rough outline of this work.
Don Alexander, my good friend and mentor, read and discussed chapters five and six with me and provided a careful critique in a very short time. Over the years, Don and I have had countless discussions concerning the church and I have benefitted greatly from his wisdom and insight. I thank him for his contribution to this volume.
My work colleagues and friends at Summa Western Reserve Hospital (Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio) have consistently expressed a genuine excitement for the project and regularly offered generous words of encouragement, for which I am grateful. I extend special thanks to Joe Spiros, my supervisor at work, for his accommodation of my writing schedule and his enthusiastic support for the project.
I could never have completed this project without the unwavering support of my family. While that may seem a tired and clichéd expression to some, anyone who has ever undertaken the sort of solitary and time-intensive project writing sometimes can be knows how true such an expression is. My children and my best friends Emily, Kristen, Jonathan, and Rachel, always exhibited an extraordinary excitement for anything and everything related to the writing process whether that was the turning of a phrase, the working out of an argument, the completion of a chapter, the finishing of the manuscript, or the final submission to the publisher. And they always made me feel like this would be the most important book the world would ever see. Saying a simple thank you to them seems quite inadequate.
My deepest gratitude goes to Marla, my wife. She endured endless conversations (and even more ramblings) about Dickens, about religion, about Dickens and religion, about all things Dickensian, and even about the writing process. She read, she thought, she formulated, she outlined with me. And she did it all with patience, grace, interest, and selfless love. Her influence is inscribed on every page of this book. A mere thank you is surely not enough. Nevertheless, I express that thanks, and while doing so I am reminded of how Dickens brings his David Copperfield to a close. As David reflects on the many “faces” in his memory, he is soon brought to reflect on the face of his wife, Agnes. “But one face,” David writes, “shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains. I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me. My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.” I know exactly what David is talking about.
Introduction
T his is a book not so much about Charles Dickens as it is a book of him. At least it tries to be. By that I mean, I have attempted in these pages to let Dickens speak through his fiction, through his letters, through his journalism, through his speeches with as little interference as possible but also without letting the book become simply a compendium of quotations. Specifically, I have attempted to let him speak so that we might hear Dickens the Christian. That voice, the Christian voice of Charles Dickens, for whatever reasons, is not often heard. Yet, Dickens’s Christian voice is conspicuous and pervasive in his work, even though that fact is not always recognized or acknowledged.
Michael Slater, in his definitive biography, Charles Dickens (2009), makes some significant gestures toward Dickens’s faith. First, in the several instances where Slater mentions the faith of Dickens, it seems clear that Dickens’s faith was no small matter in his life. Dickens’s faith, Slater implies, is part and parcel of who he was and is evident throughout his life. Second, Dickens’s faith, says Slater, finds expression in his work, whether in the deliberately spiritual The Life of Our Lord , his social journalism, or his fiction. Third, and not unexpectedly, Dickens’s faith sustained him in difficulty and tragedy, particularly as he grappled with the deaths of various friends and family members. Of course, Slater says little, if anything, substantial about the nature or the substance of Dickens’s faith. Given the intent and design of Charles Dickens , it would be a bit misinformed, not to mention unfair, to expect Slater to speak extensively to Dickens’s faith or to suppose that he should. That is the subject and the purpose of another book, a different book. The book you are reading is an attempt to be that other book.
As such, then, this book purposes to speak to the Christian faith of which Slater writes. It is a book that will attempt to lead you into Dickens’s Christian thought but to guide you only sparingly. Once you are acquainted with Dickens and introduced to his understanding of the life of faith, my hope is that you will examine him on your own and test my observations against yours. Certainly, I have made every effort to be honest and accurate in what is written here, and to the best of my knowledge, it is honest and accurate. Furthermore, I am hopeful that my treatment of Dickens will be adjudged to be reasoned and fair. And, of course, any errors in content or judgment are certainly my own and for which I accept full responsibility.
My study of Dickens has convinced me that he was a Christian and that he wrote unapologetically as a Christian. So, I write here not simply to prove that Dickens was a Christian but in order that the Christian voice of one of the great literary geniuses of all time might be heard; the voice of one who was neither theologian nor biblical scholar nor churchman but a layperson, one who thought seriously and deeply about the life of faith, following Jesus, and just what that should look like.
As Dickens was not a theologian, a biblical scholar, or a churchman, we should not expect to find anything approximating a systematic theology or even theological speculation. Even so, in his The Life of Our Lord , Dickens does come near to an explicit and deliberate expression of his faith and I would argue that The Life of Our Lord is, in fact, an explicit and deliberate expression of his faith, substantive and definitive. But Dickens’s Christian faith and his Christian worldview undergirded all that he wrote. As such, The Life of Our Lord is not an anomaly in the Dickens corpus. It is an inevitable and integral volume in it. In chapter 2, I will deal more extensively with The Life of Our Lord, and we will see how it becomes, in some instances, a valuable guide to help u