Testimony

Talking Ourselves into Being Christian

Book Details

Discerning Reader Editorial Review

Reviewed 02/18/2010 by Chad Vandervalk.

Recommended. A helpful and inspiring book on the spiritual discipline of "God talk."

Language has power; power to wound, but also to heal. Language has the ability to change the way we understand and interact with our world, for the worse and for the better. Thomas Long, in his book Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, explores speech and talking as a holy act. He exposes how our everyday talking, whether it be on our mobiles, or face to face with strangers, can be a mode of shaping and directing our lives to be more Christian.

This book is a part of the Practices of Faith Series published by Jossey-Bass, a series focused on bringing Christians disciplines into our everyday lives. Though I have not read any of the other books in the series, if they are like this one they deserve a look.

Long organizes his book into two parts. In the first part he exposes our longing for true authentic God talk. This is not primarily discussing how we address God in our Sunday activities, but rather how do we talk about God when we are not gathered with other believers for worship. Long does not, however, provide a set of techniques for personal evangelism, rather it is about simply telling the truth; the whole truth.

Christians believe that we cannot tell the truth, not the whole truth, without talking about God, and if we cannot tell the whole truth, we cannot be fully alive as human beings.

We learn how to be Christians by engaging with other Christians as they live out their faith in community. We learn to speak of God, by living with God and attempting to articulate what that life is like. We learn the language of God by gathering and worshiping with other Christians, as we have been doing for over two thousand years, but they we take that speech and use it in the rest of our lives.

The second part of Long's book walks us through the daily lives of a person from sunup to sundown and explores what authentic God-talk looks like as we move through our day. Long weaves examples of individuals trying to live out their faith with theological reflection on what they were doing. One of his examples was a friend who was driving through the congested streets of his city trying to get to work. As his frustration mounted he put in a tape that he had purchased while visiting a cathedral in Scotland:

The rich sound of the St. Giles choir singing a Good Friday hymn, Bach's arrangement of "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," began to fill his car as he negotiated his way through traffic. the words of that great hymn blended in with the honking horns and the hum of morning traffic...Suddenly, this hymn, so familiar from worship but now being heard in a different place--in a car, in rush hour traffic--started to heighten the man's awareness of the world around him. "Idling in rush hour traffic," he wrote, "the woman in the Infiniti next to me adjusted her rear view mirror for the morning ritual of lipstick. The soundtrack punched through my consciousness. 'Tis I deserve Thy place.' And yet Jesus died not just for me but also for her! somehow, if made her far less easy for me to dismiss there in the traffic."

Connecting our worship lives to our everyday lives through speech heightens our awareness of God and his action in our everyday lives. Though I felt that Long’s book dragged on in places, it is a good attempt at imagining how Christians talk in the world from sunup to sundown relating God to our experiences.