(£9.99, Gracewing, 2003 ) Reviewed by Martin Blake, March 2003

“Hope is that sweet unhappiness that drives us to seek more and more Christianity”

This is a book that should make a huge contribution to the ‘ecumenical movement’ of drawing Christians of various backgrounds into unity. The author is unusually qualified to speak to the various ‘traditions’, having come from an American ‘Bible Church’ to Catholicism via the Anglican Communion, and indeed ministry. He was much influenced by the books written by C.S.Lewis, and the title ‘More Christianity’ is of course a sort of pun on Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’. Few books had more impact on Christian Britain sixty years ago than ‘Mere Christianity’, which became one of the seminal texts for non-Catholic Christians.

Longenecker shows how this book, and others by Lewis, who died in 1963, are absolutely sound so far as they go. But as an Anglican Lewis carefully avoided such aspects of Christian teaching as the nature of the Church, the Eucharist, the Marian dogmas, the role of the Papacy, penance and the Communion of Saints. Thomas Howard says in his foreword that had Lewis found himself in conversation with Peter, Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Justin and a score of other early Fathers of the Church, he would have had to do some pretty heavy sledding! It is all these aspects of Catholic teaching that Longenecker develops and explains to show that ‘Mere Christianity’ is amplified and completed by ‘More Christianity’.

This then is the perfect book to explain the Church’s teaching to a keen Evangelical who has grasped the basics, so to speak, but is still perplexed by much that he thinks is Catholic accretion and even error.

Longenecker knows his Evangelical audience; he can and does quote from Scripture with the best of them. Indeed his forte is to show that in fact it is Catholics who are the Bible Christians par excellence. He points out that in the forty years since Lewis’s death England and its national established Church have changed beyond recognition, as indeed have the mainstream bodies in both England and the U.S.A. The fundamentals of the Faith which Lewis described have largely been abandoned due to the undermining influence of modernism. This has affected, but to a lesser degree, the Catholic Church too. Churches have emptied because people have been given what Lewis called “Christianity with water”. But the Catholic Church has also changed significantly for the better since Lewis’s day with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. “She has simplified her liturgy, opened the door to worship in everyday language, and reformed herself with out losing the historic Faith”.

Lewis perceived the various denominations as rooms opening off the central hall of ‘Mere Christianity’. Longenecker sees the Catholic Church more like a vast country house, which has a few side waiting rooms for other Christians, who are now invited to explore the rest of the house which contains treasures which they could hardly imagine. “In my Father’s house are many rooms.” (John. 14) Thus Evangelical or Bible Christians are invited to come “further up and further in” (The last Battle), and in the process the author manages to put over the fullness of the Faith in a simple and practical way.

The reader will get fresh insights into the roles of Our Lady and the Pope, as well as the centrality of the Sacraments and prayer, and he will find plenty of quotes from both Scripture and the C.C.C. With so many luke-warm and lapsed Catholics around this book is also for them. It is a worthy successor to the great C.S. Lewis books which are still popular.

Theotokos Catholic Books - Book Reviews Section - www.theotokos.org.uk