Alister E. McGrath, Mere Discipleship: Growing in Wisdom and Hope. Baker, 2019. 176 pages.
Christian discipleship today is often reduced to either a pseudo-spiritual self-help session over a macchiato or life-coach meetings for personal mentoring. It’s refreshing, then, to see a robustly evangelical Anglican like McGrath define it as “intergenerational transmission of wisdom” (65) and “reflective inhabitation of our faith” (31). McGrath’s aim in Mere Discipleship is to help churches develop “individuals who are both theologically informed and professionally competent, who can make connections between these two domains . . . [as] salt and light in the professional and academic world” (16). To that end, he seeks to apply a C. S. Lewis-esque approach to Christian discipling—particularly discipling of the mind. Don’t let the pulp paperback fool you. This book is thought-provoking stuff by a leading British evangelical, admittedly expressed in “somewhat opaque ways” (46).
McGrath serves in the academy, where misunderstandings of Christianity as anti-intellectual are legion. In the best sense of each word, his approach is intellectual (chapter 1), evangelistic, creedal (chapter 2), ecclesial (chapter 3), literary (chapter 4), and even doxological (44–46). McGrath’s book is also “philosophical” in that it both applies and proclaims Christianity as a
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