Underworld resurrected

One of the job hazards associated with working as an editor is that you sometimes have to read things faster than you would like to in order to make a quick and dirty assessment of it. Peter Bolt’s Living with the Underworld (Matthias Media, Sydney, 2007) suffered this treatment recently when, as a matter of conscience, I flicked through it at a great rate of knots to determine whether or not I could recommend it to people who asked about it.

In reality, the process of doing this is fairly painless: you skim past most of the introduction, stories, anecdotes and cute turns of phrase, and just leap straight to the bits where the Bible is explained. On the strength of this, it was fairly easy to work out that this is a worthwhile book, tackling the important issue of how Christians (and people generally) should think about the underworld of the occult, demons, evil spiritual forces, and the like. Peter makes the point that the Bible treats all of these things seriously, while in no way allowing them to occupy centre stage. That is reserved for Jesus Christ who by his resurrection, signalled and actually achieved complete victory over these spiritual forces—spiritual forces which are, after all, not so far from home. They are forces which are at work within the human heart, and which manifest themselves in all sorts of wicked and sinful behaviour. But Peter Bolt points back to the gospel itself to show how Jesus’ propitiatory death defeats the power of sin and brings forgiveness. The last pages of the book give good, practical advice on how Christians should live with the underworld (hence the book’s title). All this and more will be covered in greater detail when Michael Jensen’s review in The Briefing appears.

At any rate, when I no longer felt the pressure to see quickly what the book was about, I went back for a slower read and took in more carefully what I’d skimmed past. Here’s a sample, from page 107:

Resurrection isn’t natural. A long time ago now, I was a med student, attending an operation that started way too early in the morning, so early that the other med student didn’t make the beginning of the procedure and missed the anaesthetic process (“There’s an edge for me in the exams”, I thought). Sometimes patients receive general anaesthetic, but this time the guy was just knocked out from the waist down and somewhat sedated. My friend arrived and stood near the guy’s head. The operation went on, and on, and after some time, the patient opened his eyes, turned to my friend and said, “Are they finished yet?” From the way my friend fell backwards in a dead faint, I guessed that he wasn’t expecting this to happen.

What a great story! Peter goes on to talk about the defeat of death in the resurrection of Christ. It’s not that the book is packed with such stories, but it illustrates something of Peter’s tone—which is friendly, humourous, yet able to deal with serious subjects in a way that holds interest even for those who might not consider these things to be important.

The value of the second, slower reading was that it made me realize that the book was not only useful for Christians, it could also potentially be given away to non-Christian friends. The sort of person who might benefit is one who would have read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code a year or three ago, and has a general interest in spirituality and the ‘underworld’ of the book’s title. Sure, Dan Brown’s book is yesterday’s fad, consigned to the dustbin of silliness by the wig Tom Hanks wore for the movie adaptation. Yet it leaves in its wake the vague sense that perhaps there is some worldwide spiritual conspiracy—something ‘out there’ that is half-believed. The sort of person who read Dan Brown might also read and enjoy Living With the Underworld, and find himself or herself surprised to be confronted with the risen and living Lord Jesus.