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Elizabeth Agnew Cochran, Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics

foolish to claim that Jesus’ parables have a single, unambiguous message. And anyone with a knowledge of British politics since the Second World War will realize that most politicians know that the public is highly suspicious of any claims that they have privileged religious commitments. This is well-trodden territory and Nick Spencer negotiates it well in this lively and highly accessible book. But what is both new about this book and relevant to Theology readers? Nick Spencer has a particular interest in the religious backgrounds of politicians, but he has already covered this in his edited collection The Mighty and the Almighty (2017) and repeats some of it here. As he is aware, this is an elusive topic. American politics seems to encourage would-be presidents to claim that they are more religiously active than they actually are – famously Ronald Reagan was supported by many conservative evangelicals despite the fact that, unlike his opponent Jimmy Carter, he was only a very occasional churchgoer. In contrast, British politics (and French politics even more so) seems to encourage the opposite despite the fact that quite a number of post-war prime ministers have been assiduous churchgoers – notably Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Theresa May. But who really knows what effect such churchgoing (or its absence in the case of Churchill and Attlee) has had on their politics? Nick Spencer is just as much in the dark on this question as the rest of us. What is new is his use of Hansard to explore the different ways in which British politicians have used the Parable of the Good Samaritan. He has been able to uncover numerous and conflicting ways in which politicians of the left and the right have interpreted (‘hijacked’ is an obvious exaggeration) this particular parable. Sometimes they refer explicitly to the parable by name, but more often they use a phrase such as ‘pass by on the other side’. Only Margaret Thatcher gave the parable sustained attention with arguably a veryWesleyan slant (earn, save and then give). In contrast, Hilary Benn’s brief usage seemed to identify pre-emptive warfare as Good Samaritan action. For this chapter alone, this book is well worth buying. The parable is well chosen since it is better known than the equally challenging Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. And its political reception is deeply revealing. Here, Nick Spencer has succeeded in making a genuinely new and pertinent contribution to biblical reception history.