New year, new pile....

As promised, and carrying on the (recently established) tradition of detailing some of my reading for 2026 (who knows what tangents and byways await), here are some of my thoughts on the pile of books that has appeared, as if by magic, in my study. And yes, I know I’m repeating myself, but at the bottom (and serving as a foundation) is my Greek New Testament. I will spare you the details of what and why (mainly because I’ve mentioned them before). I see no need to be shy about my commitment to what God has said (though note that He says it just as clearly in English as in koine Greek) and to its being foundational. And to it providing the necessary framework for my other thinking. “How quaint” some might say. Or perhaps “how closed minded”. But we all think within a framework, and we all (to use a metaphor beloved of both Calvin and N.T. Wright) look at the world through spectacles. The spectacles themselves, because they are not usually observed but the means of observation, don’t often attract attention - until they do. At least I am explicit about my framework.

As in previous years I have a major theological reading project in mind for 2026 that is next up in the pile. I first encountered Herman Bavinck, Dutch reformed theologian, educator, politician and polymath, at the very outset of my MTh studies at Union. Bob Latham introduced us to Bavinck’s “organic” view of Scripture, and I plumped for the assessment essay comparing this view with Warfield’s view of Scripture. James Eglinton’s (excellent) biography of Bavinck had just appeared, so I obtained a copy to get a more rounded view of the man. Proved to be a good move on my part, and ever since, Bavinck has been on my radar. Last year I read his “Christianity and Science” and began obtaining the four volumes of “Reformed Dogmatics” from various second-hand sources. Volume 1 sounds dry (it’s his preamble discussing dogmatics and its history), but it has been (I'm 100+ in) an excellent historical introduction not just to dogmatics but also to theology, philosophy and various points in between. I’m looking forward to Bavinck’s company throughout 2026.

Last year much of my reading was related to the paper I was writing on neuroscience and theology. But that hadn't really been the topic at the front of my mind (until it was!). My MTh dissertation was about the Biblical basis of human friendships. The general topic of friendship is again being revisited from multiple perspectives partly because its retrieval is seen as vital in a culture now so marked by chronic loneliness and its deleterious consequences. The starting point for many are the ancient accounts of friendship to be found in Plato, but particularly Aristotle. Now Aristotle was a bright chap who said many interesting and helpful things, and who still exercises a profound influence over Western thought (and for all I know much more widely too). His thinking on friendship was mediated to the Roman/Latin world by Cicero, who in turn was a major influence on Augustine, who is one of the towering figures in Western theology. Long story short, if friendship is important for us, then we should  find a basis for it not so much in Aristotle but revealed in Scripture. Now, this might not seem like a bold claim. But there have been those who have suggested that there isn’t much in Scripture about friendship, and indeed that it might actually be in conflict with Christian teaching. So because friendship always has voluntary and exclusive aspects it conflicts with the commandment to love even my enemies (etc, etc). I won't reproduce my dissertation here (because you can actually find it here), but I aim is to edit it down and tart it up and submit it in article form somewhere or other. Hence the need to update and extend my reading on the topic and the books on the pile relating to friendship.

In addition to theological accounts (Summers and Bequette), I thought I’d dip into some of Robin Dunbar’s work. Our paths crossed briefly in the University of Liverpool, prior to his move to Oxford. His is a scientific, evolutionary account of human relationships. He is perhaps best known for coining “Dunbar’s number” – the expected average number of stable relationships a human being can maintain (with various caveats). My reason for wanting to read such an account is simple. If relationships (including friendship) are fundamental to our humanity, then a completely naturalistic account of them should be possible. Their qualities, the effects of their absence, what makes for their flourishing, what causes their breakdown and so on, all of these are observable, and I’m assuming have been observed. Among other things it will be interesting to see if Dunbar’s stance is that once a naturalistic account has been given, there is nothing more to say. But as ever the science (as opposed to the smuggled metaphysics) will be fascinating. Whether any of this will be relevant to what I eventually write, we will see.

Given my background, I need to continue my education in the humanities and there are lots of classics that I have never touched. I have read a bit of ethics in my time, although usually secondary accounts for apologetic purposes. So I decided to continue my education with Macintyre's “After Virtue”. It so happened that N.T. Wright, in discussing the importance of ethics in Paul’s theology (although Paul would not have thought about it in our siloed terms) quoted his own “Virtue Reborn”. I decided these would make a nice pair to read back-to-back. Whether they in any way complement each other again, we will see.

So far, so good. But I might need some light relief. I decided to turn to a comedian for it. Marcus Brigstocke is both funny and clever (the two often seem to go together). I admit I came across “God Collar” in a charity shop, but it wasn’t just the bargain price the attracted me to this particular read. I spend relatively little time among atheists, certainly less than I spend with their writings. But I could perhaps be accused of holding the views I hold because I know little of the alternatives and rarely expose what I hold dear to scrutiny, even ridicule. As it turns out, this would be unjust. I often find the opposite to be the case. Many who think they have rejected God have never actually seriously encountered Him or sought to. In part this is because people like me are rarely who or what we should be, given what we claim to believe; we are terrifically bad adverts for those beliefs. But fundamentally we are not (or should not be) recommending ourselves as paragons or examples. I see nothing that indicates that any group of other human beings or the institutions they have built are worthy of worship (although some may have other important reasons for their existence and uses). It is God Himself who is worth listening to. And fortunately for us, God thinks so too. It turns out that the speaking God speaks! The problem is that He is often not heard, or even when heard, heeded. Anyway, we’ll see if Marcus is alive to such distinctions.

But finally to more trusted friends and allies. I have encountered some of the earliest Christian writers (after the Apostles themselves) in the writings of others. But (just as with God Himself) I can hear from the “men” themselves (or at least a few of them). So I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of “Early Christian Writings” (including writings of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp). I have encountered Polycarp before thanks to reading Irenaeus’ “Against Heresies” (worth it for the riff on vegetables as names for the various Gnostic entities; 1:11:4). Context is everything though. So I decided I’d better read a bit about the context of the second century, hence Grant on the second century “apologists”.

This should be enough to get me going.

Friendship and its problems…

Arguably, like everyone else, I’ve been interested in friendship for as long as there has been a me. That’s why, at first blush, there’s not much of interest to be said about friendship. For most of us (there are exceptions, some of which are due to pathology) friendship just happens in childhood. We don’t particularly plan it or reflect on it, it’s just a part of life. But, as with much else, friendship soon becomes a bit more complicated. So complicated in fact that it has long been the subject of scholarly effort and debate, stretching all the way from Aristotle’s “Ethics”, to rather more recent brain scanning experiments. So on the one hand it would seem that friendship is a fairly basic and widespread aspect of human experience, but on the other that it’s more complicated than just a fact of our experience. And with complication comes a degree of controversy.

Writing in a column entitled “Why you don’t need friends” (Psychology Today, 2019), Daniel Marston argued that while “[S]ocial interactions are important” this was mainly so that we could meet our basic needs (by which he meant basic biological and practical needs). Beyond this is was “not essential that the social relationships move beyond that point” to what we might recognise as friendship. As it happens, Aristotle classified precisely this sort of utilitarian relationship as a form of friendship, although of a fairly inferior type. But Marston is not alone in thinking friendship might not be necessary, and even that it might not be helpful. It turns out that Christians, or at least the theologically minded among them, have historically had something of an ambivalent “relationship” with friendship. Strangely this is because of the importance of love.

Friendship in the ancient world, or at least the higher forms of friendship, always had an exclusive air. One could be real friends with only a relatively small and select (and ideally selected) group. There was considerable discussion of exactly how many friends it was wise to have. Aristotle thought that the highest form of friendship (the friendship of virtue) was very rare and would only be found a few times in one’s life. Actually, it was rarer than that because in Aristotle's world only educated (which meant rich), connected, virtuous men were capable of such friendships. Cicero (who mainly channelled Aristotle to the Roman world) agreed that real friends of the highest quality were rare. Plutarch, who wrote slightly later in time, noticed that in antiquity what stood out was friendship between pairs (of men) and that perhaps we should aim to have just one, true, friend (our “bestie” in modern parlance). More than this was likely to be tricky and would probably only serve to dilute the quality of friendship enjoyed. But all of this talk of exclusivity is in stark contrast (so it was argued) to the love for even enemies that was said to mark the Gospel. Hence the tension.

Much more recently Robin Dunbar argued that we can probably maintain some sort of friendly relationship with up to about 150 individuals. He arrived at this number just over 30 years ago while “pondering a graph of primate group sizes plotted against the size of their brains” and this has since become known as Dunbar’s Number. Again, how friendship is defined matters. Dunbar was talking about the number of individuals one might recognise well enough to pass 15 minutes with while sitting in a station waiting room. Within this larger number he reckoned that 3-5 was the number of close friendships that were maintainable. It turns out this does seem to be roughly how the numbers shake out in actual surveys. But what is really interesting is that Dunbar’s work implied that friendship was about more than culture or education. The patterns that he observed were argued to persist through time and across cultures. It’s was almost as though the need to have and the ability to form friendships was designed into to us.

Then again, I would argue that it is. More heat than light has been generated over the years over the meaning of the opening chapters of the Bible. My view (for what it’s worth) is that, as has long been taught, these chapters tell us in outline, and in the absence of the biological (or cosmological) nuts and bolts, how we came to be and what we are basically like. And interestingly we were created by a community, to be a community. We are created by an “us” to be a “them”. While it is true that such community is partly achieved by marriage and family (and beyond that clan, tribe and nation), we miss something if we don’t see friendship as playing a role in expressing this aspect of our constitution. A culture in which the importance of the individual is constantly elevated and stressed, and more collective expressions of our humanity are downplayed or even suppressed, is likely to be one in which cracks eventually appear.

Others have charted the rise of narcissistic individualism and diagnosed it as a current and acute problem (see Carl Truman's “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self”). But more recently A.N. Wilson lamented (in his column in the Times) the demise of male friendship in particular, and beyond that the absence of friendships from the lives of those who only really know relationship in the form of the nuclear family. Both the US and UK governments have expressed concern at the impact of loneliness on the health and flourishing of communities on their respective jurisdictions. And such concerns are manifest beyond the Anglo-Saxon sphere. Friendship is not the whole answer to the problems thus identified, but it is probably part of the answer. In general we need to reverse the remorseless focus on I and me, and rediscover we (in all its various forms), but particular in the form of friendships.

Perhaps the biggest problem we have with friendship is simply a lack of those we can truly call friends.