Seeing in the Dark – University Sermons
by Nicholas Lash
Darton Longman & Todd, London, 2005
pp 163, rrp $39.95.

Reviewed by Maggie Helass

This book of sermons from a Cambridge scholar
reflects on two decades when theology was well
and truly out in the cold as far as western society
was concerned.
The collection begins in 1969, during the Cold
War and when Existentialism was cool. “We are
lost, badly lost, in the fog,” remarked the young
Nicholas Lash.
He broaches ethical problems of the day,
such as President Reagan’s electoral appeal to
disenfranchised Christians, and proves himself to
be a prophet, ‘seeing in the dark’ on behalf of his
generation.
The appeal to nostalgia infl uences signifi cant
congregations of the church today.
By the 1980s – notorious in Australia as the
decade of greed – Lash is giving his university
audiences practical advice on Christian living.
“Hope is not a feeling, but a quality of action…
the achievement of what I have called the
integration of sensibility is a necessary condition of
hearing and responding to the prophetic message.”
Marx, so infl uential in the period, gets insightful
mention: “What Marx well understood…were the
terrifying costs of the processes whereby, under
capitalism’s Midas touch, the abundant richness
and vast diversity of things is drained away,
homogenised, as everything becomes transformed
into only one kind of thing: commodity.”
And laying bare the worm in global politics Lash
tells an Oxford congregation: “One fundamental
form of self-deception is self-interest disguised as
altruism. Egotism walking in its sleep. Thus, for
example, in East-West relations, we identify the
defence of the West with the defence of human
freedom, the freedom of all mankind.”
These sermons affi rm the preacher’s prophetic
ministry, but in their time they would have been
subversive, unafraid to discomfort the comfortable
in the congregations of academia.

At Edinburgh
University in 1982
he lambasted those
for whom every
point of view has
something to say
for it: “It is really
very difficult to
see why anyone
should sustain,
even with a
cup of water,
these apostles
of shapeless
benevolence.They will, it is true, escape crucifixion-why should anyone bother to kill those who have nothing disturbing to say?”

He describes the dark bewilderment – the
absence of criteria on the basis of which values
are to be chosen, goals selected, truth affi rmed
– which pervaded the times. Post-modernism,
nameless then, was already overturning religious
complacency.
“There is, in our culture, a deep-laid and most
unbiblical assumption that God’s Word is spoken
for comfort rather than for truth.”
We are, said the preacher in a 1978 address
to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, disturbingly aware,
perhaps more than any other generation in human
history, of our complicity in the world’s evil.
In the 1990s Lash turns to the costliness of
creation and redemption. “It may be out of nothing
that the world is made, but it does not follow that
its making is uncostly”.
In these sermons he is urging the re-embodiment
of the human narrative – a palpable response to the end of the reign of rationalism.

Lash’s acerbic orthodoxy is very refreshing. I
wish I had heard his sermons when he preached
them – they would have encouraged me in dark
and diffi cult times. Besides being a chronicle of
those times, this is a useful little book for devotional reading.