Under the Mercy

                                        Under The Mercy

Author SHELDON VANAUKEN

Publisher HODDER        

ISBN 0-340-38301-1

This author has something to say.  Something that is thought provoking, he wrote well and is thoroughly readable and rooted in an experience of God that deepened with the years and is settled in the essentials of the Christian faith.  We may not agree with all he says, but should respond to the candid unveiling of his testimony as he contemplates his pilgrimage with God under the mercy.’  This book is a sequel to his earlier better known one, A SEVERE MERCY.’  Here he takes us through his life in the sixties and seventies and into the eighties of the twentieth century.  Plenty of space is given to his commitment to the feminist movement in the sixties and also his involvement with the ferment of racial equality in the USA.  He then unfolds his changing view as to the former and he does so with much clarity of argument exposing the folly of much of the feminist agenda and detailing something of the inevitable muddle as to sexual identity that would result.  In this he is somewhat prophetic and those of us living today can see the rightness of his predictions.  The latter half of the book deals with his movement towards what he calls the Catholicchurch, by which he means the Roman.”  We can particularly sympathise with him as he writes about the body of belief called the magisteriumthat he regards as a bulwark against the tides of vague Bible interpretations and personality figures that have so dogged much of what is known as protestantism from time to time and led to such proliferation of denominations and even cults.  However, most of us would not be able to run with him all the way but perhaps should be chastened by his considerations.  Born in 1914 and passing away in 1996 this book was published in 1985 so these are not the words of a young novice but a man who had passed through the conversion from his early agnosticism and the what he calls the pagan love he enjoyed with his wife Davy, to the challenge of her coming to Christ and subsequent early death and his own conversion to Christ and defection during the sixties and return to the obedience of faith that characterised his later years.  As I have remarked, we will not agree with all he says, but the scarlet chord of faith and obedience to Christ is plain for every reader to see.  

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *