Richard Foster, ‘Life with God: A life-transforming new approach to Bible reading’, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008.

Richard Foster – a Quaker pastor and scholar – became a house-hold (or, rather, a church-wide) name in the late 1970s when his first major book, Celebration of Discipline, became a best-seller. In that work, he brilliantly summarized the Christian Church’s historical approach(es) to the ‘Spiritual Disciplines’.

Later, Richard’s major work, Streams of Living Water, offered a major synthesis of the six main answers Christians have given to the question ‘How should I relate to the living God?’ These have given rise to six traditions (Contemplative, Holiness, Charismatic, Social Justice, Evangelical and the Incarnational), each with their strengths and weaknesses.

Half a century earlier, two other Evangelical writers – one on each side of the Atlantic – had offered similar writings: W.E. Sangster in Britain, and A.W. Tozer in the U.S. (Interestingly, a few years ago in conversation with Richard, he confessed that was not aware of Sangster’s work, so I gave him that great Methodist’s magnum opus ‘The Pure in Heart’).

Now there’s a flood of books and seminars on this broad topic, and Protestants have (at last) become more open to learnings from the Roman Catholic and Eastern traditions.

‘Life with God’ is simply-written. It’s ‘evangelical’ (he uses the NIV translation; but he also warns against the common conservative diseases of bibliolatry and biblicism); ecumenical (citing stories about people as diverse as Bonhoeffer, Laubach, Kierkegaard, and Mother Teresa); and ‘hortatory’: Richard’s warm and gentle devotional approach leaves the reader wanting ‘more of God’ (he likes to call this ‘The Immanuel Principle’: the reality of a ‘life with God’ on earth, centred in the person of Jesus). The whole aim of the spiritual life is not ‘external conformity’, whether to doctrine or law, but the ‘re-formation of the inner self – of the spiritual core, the place of thought and feeling, of will and character.’

Here’s a sample of Richard’s warmth: ‘God comes to us not to overwelm and overpower us, but to interrupt us in the midst of our ordinary routines, on the ground of what is familiar to us – everyday life, the arena in which most of life with God takes place. He whispers rather than shouts, gently prompts rather than shoves, “I am with you – will you be with Me”?’ (p. 185).

A bibliography offers an excellent list for further reading.

An excellent idea: phone the nearest Catholic retreat-place, and take this book and a Bible with you on an eight-day personal retreat. Walk through it meditatively and slowly. You’ll be spiritually richer for such an experience!

Rowland Croucher

October 2008.

This book can be purchased from Ridley Melbourne Bookshop (http://bookshop.ridley.edu.au/ )