Page 4576 – Christianity Today (2024)

What makes for a satisfying detective story? In an often-reprinted essay from the May 1948 Harper’s, W. H. Auden answered this question by referring to “the Aristotelian description of tragedy” where “there is Concealment . . . and Manifestation. . . . There is also peripeteia, in this case not a reversal of fortune but a double reversal from apparent guilt to innocence and from apparent innocence to guilt.” Auden was characteristically perceptive, but most of us who share an addiction (Auden’s word) for the genre can put it in simpler terms–clever plot, a solid sense of place, interesting characters, and a compelling moral universe.

Two recent efforts–one by a veteran of the historical mystery and the other by a promising neophyte in her first shot at detection–offer a nice contrast in strengths and weaknesses. By so doing they clarify what it is that brings many of us back for more and more of the type.

Anne Perry’s Ashworth Hall is her seventeenth historical novel featuring Thomas Pitt, a member of London’s finest, and his well-born wife, Charlotte, who usually figures prominently in setting atmosphere and solving the crime. Perry has been widely praised for bringing Victorian England to life, and this latest effort shows why.

Ashworth Hall is set on the country estate of a rising member of Parliament who came into his land by marrying a widowed patrician. She happens to be Charlotte Pitt’s sister. The time is November 1890; the task at hand is a conference between Irish Catholic nationalists and leading figures of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy. The convener of the conference, Ainsley Greville, is a high-placed mover and shaker in the Foreign Office who hopes that face-to-face negotiating might solve “the Irish Problem.” Even as the suspicious antagonists gather for their face-to-face deliberations, the divorce trial of Katherine O’Shea, charged by her husband for adultery with Charles Parnell, parliamentary leader of the Irish nationalists, moves toward a verdict. At Ashworth Hall things turn nasty with the untimely murder of Ainsley Greville, whom Superintendent Pitt had been assigned to protect. Pitt’s efforts at unraveling the crime lead him to unpleasant discoveries about Greville’s sex life; to an attempt (by dynamite) on Pitt’s brother-in-law; and through a series of unexpected twists and turns to the resolution of the case.

Perry’s reputation for loving attention to the details of Victorian life should be preserved with this novel. To be sure, there is a problem with telephones, since she has her characters calling freely around London and from London to the countryside at a time (1890) when far less than 1 percent of British homes were equipped with these modern conveniences. By contrast, her touch is sure with household duties for parlor maid, scullery maid, cook, footmen, valet, and other servants; with the logistics of tending a dozen guests and several times that number of underlings at a weekend in the country; and with the varieties of Victorian class distinctions, class resentments, and class expectations. Expert handling of scenes makes this a welcome addition to the series.

Whether it also makes for a fully satisfying mystery is another question. For one thing, some of the novel’s hackneyed sentiments–as when Charlotte comments on the need of star-crossed lovers to find refuge in America, “It will be hard enough for them. They will leave everything they know behind them and take only their love, their courage and their guilt”–cannot be mistaken for anything but mind-numbing filler.

The sense conveyed of Irish problems also points to difficulties in the moral universe of the story. Too much of the time we are offered simplistic, black-and-white distinctions between a senseless thirst for vindication and reasonable moves toward peace; all it takes for Charlotte to puncture a legend that has loomed large in the plot is a quick dash to the British Museum; and the Catholic nationalists are as predictably romantic in their Celtic fascinations as the Anglo-Irish Protestants are sulfurous in their hard-bitten antipapalism. Of course, it could be suggested in Perry’s defense that the sad course of events in Ireland has fed on myths even more woodenly constructed and more militantly promoted than those portrayed in the book. And it certainly is a clever stroke to situate an imagined peace conference at the very moment of Charles Parnell’s fall. Nonetheless, the profusion of stereotypes for characters, motives, and myths means that the Irish bits of the plot function more as local color than as an integral contribution to the story.

Ashworth Hall should not disappoint Anne Perry’s numerous fans. But its strengths are skills in plotting and full knowledge of daily Victoriana much more than in depth of moral vision. The book moves right along, but it is not as fully formed as, for example, at least some of Peter Lovesey’s Victorian mysteries featuring Sergeant Cribb of Scotland Yard.

Betty Smartt Carter’s The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave is not as effective on the level of story as the first attempts by some of the masters of the mystery genre, whether Dorothy L. Sayers’s Whose Body? from 1923, Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance from 1934, or P. D. James’s Cover Her Face from 1966. Nor does Carter–whose first novel, I Read It in the Wordless Book, published last fall, was not a mystery–deploy the machinery of plotting and scene with the aplomb of Anne Perry. Yet with her protagonist, Virginia Falls, Carter has created a character whose debut is nearly as impressive as that of Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, Stout’s Nero Wolfe, or James’s Adam Dalgleish. If Carter’s protagonist lacks the flamboyant idiosyncrasies of the Golden Age detectives, she is nonetheless palpably present to the reader.

The setting of The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave is the campus of a midwestern evangelical college where Virginia Falls has stayed after graduation to work as a literary assistant for a renowned theologian, apologist Milton Katharde. The time is Christmas vacation in the indeterminate present. The plot features the kidnapping of the theology department’s secretary, whose divorced husband (formerly a member of the department) has recently returned from a long sojourn in Africa and immediately becomes the prime suspect. Virginia and her not-quite-boy-friend, Stephen Holc, are pulled into the investigation when the kidnapper (as they assume) roughs them up on the night of the crime. A great deal of huffing and puffing follows. Some of it is due to the strenuous efforts required for climbing four flights of stairs to the theology offices in McIlwain Hall, the ancient Old Main at the center of campus. But some is caused by the excessive complexity with which Carter has constructed both her central architectural prop (McIlwain is thick with stairwells, attics, tunnels, secret hiding places, and display cases of missionary memorabilia, not to speak of classrooms, storage closets, and the rest) and also her plot (which careens at a nonstop pace). In addition, many of the key characters are only partially realized, especially the members of the theology department. All of them sound like pious phonies, so when one turns out to be the hypocritical villain, it is hard to know why it should be that one and not one of the others.

What saves the book is the main character. Virginia, it turns out, has lost her faith, but she has done so in such a winsome, open, nonvindictive way that she is far more interesting than the book’s figures of cardboard piety. Moreover, while it would be tragic in real life, for the novel it is a virtue that Virginia remains in her newfound lack of faith straight to the end. The result is a story with a weightier moral universe than is to be found in Ashworth Hall, despite Anne Perry’s superior craft. Perry’s opinions on the wellsprings of Irish conflict are sound as far as they go–for example, “You can’t get freedom for people by murdering other people just because you think they stand in your way”–but they remain platitudes, merely a window dressing of moralism for the main business of the book.

The climax of Carter’s story contains far more. When Virginia finally discovers and confronts the kidnapper, he can use only well-worn theological jargon to justify himself and his deeds. Virginia, by contrast, insists on knowing what happened in plain words. Then, in an effort to keep the villain from doing himself in, she discovers fresh energy in the language of an evangelical piety in which she professes no longer to believe. It is a fine moment–and all the better for the story that she fails.

Few authors of detective fiction who introduce explicitly religious themes merit a second look. With the exception of some of the Father Brown stories by G. K. Chesterton; the parts of Ralph McInerny’s Father Dowling novels featuring the priest’s ruminations on sin and grace; and the Talmudic exercises of Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small, most such stories are good for a quick read and little more.

Betty Carter’s The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave cannot be classed with the best efforts of Chesterton, McInerney, and Kemelman. But the levels of religious meaning at work in this story suggest that such comparisons are not fanciful–especially if, in books to come, Carter adds lessons from Anne Perry on plot and setting to the complex moral vision she unquestionably possesses already.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 33

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“Any sufficiently advanced technology,” wrote Arthur C. Clarke, decades ago, “is indistinguishable from magic.” Thus was born the First Great Commandment of science fiction, a dictate so all-pervasive in the annals of SF that Clarke actually quotes himself in his latest novel, 3001: The Final Odyssey.

3001–the final installment in the series that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey–opens with the rescue of astronaut Frank Poole, last seen being shoved into space by the out-of-control computer Hal. Poole wakes up from a thousand-year sleep brought on by the coldness of space and discovers himself in the year 3001. The fourth millennium is, indeed, a world of wonders. Poole muses, eying the Braincap that all humans now wear: “Someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Will I meet magic in this new world–and be able to handle it?”

Poole’s Braincap does look like magic–it fits onto his skull and downloads the history and customs of humanity into his brain–but Clarke explains that the Braincap is actually “the end product of more than a thousand years of electro-optical technology.”

The Braincap rescues Poole from years of catch-up study, but it has a more important payoff: It has eliminated religion. When children are fitted for the Braincap, they are mentally “calibrated”–a process that serves as an early-warning system for psychosis. Any mental deviancies are treated immediately. As a result, no one in the fourth millennium starts wars, eats meat, or believes in God. (Marriages have also taken the eminently reasonable form of 15-year renewable contracts, but that’s another issue.) Anyone with strong religious beliefs is classed as either certifiably insane or mentally impaired due to childhood conditioning. As a matter of fact, the name of God is the only obscenity left in the 3001 vocabulary.

All this is a setup for Clarke’s explanation of the greatest magic of all: the development of intelligence from Earth’s primordial ooze. 3001 is less a novel than a wandering wrap-up of all the loose threads from the previous books in the series (2001, 2010, and 2061). And the wrap-up finally reveals the truth about humanity: We’re a crop sown by aliens.

Clarke is, apparently, serious. The genesis of human life may seem miraculous, but creation was actually a matter of extraterrestrial technology far, far beyond our ken. The Firstborn–alien intelligences that have long since conquered the limitations of flesh and blood, transferring their minds into the “structure of space itself” and becoming pure energy–wander through the universe, planting monoliths that accelerate and guide the process of evolution.

3001’s plot (such as it is) revolves around Poole’s attempts to save humanity from extinction. It seems that mankind has not quite measured up to the Firstborn’s standards. The aliens have slated the entire race for destruction, as a failed experiment, and have moved on to more fertile fields.

Eventually, Frank Poole saves humanity by launching a computer virus at the attacking Firstborn weapon, successfully disabling it. If this sounds familiar, you’re quite right; 3001 and Independence Day have the same ending. To forestall criticism, Clarke explains in his afterword that he thought of the virus before Independence Day was even released.

It doesn’t really matter; the rescue of Earth is completely incidental to 3001, which is primarily about the idiocy of faith. Every mystery is herein explained in technological terms. The intangible essence of man? No such thing; human personality is merely a matter of intelligence plus collected memories, a “straightforward job of nanoassembly.” Religious faith? Simply a “reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe.” Sin? Mental maladjustment, practically unknown by the year 3001. The reason for humanity’s existence? The Firstborn were lonely; they became creators because they sought “fellowship among the stars.” Mystery solved.

Well, not quite. Clarke doesn’t explain the Firstborn, and probably never will; he is 80 years old, living in Sri Lanka, and in poor health. But undoubtedly the Firstborn themselves arose from an odd wrinkle of the expanding universe and will disappear back into that wrinkle as the universe contracts. In the meantime, Clarke–the great-grandfather of science fiction–has no use for faith. He ends his afterword with barbed condescension:

Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy.

Faced with a mystery, the sane and happy man digs for the technology behind it. In Clarke’s fairy tales, the quest is always successful. And his sane and happy heroes don’t keep asking silly questions, like: What’s the point?

Not all science fiction is so overtly hostile to faith. The Rise of Endymion, the latest chapter in the Hyperion saga by sf veteran Dan Simmons, is positively enthralled by it. In the future as imagined by Simmons, faith is a genuine phenomenon, the portal to a whole new world, a realm that lies beyond the “scientific,” beyond what we can see and touch. Faith is necessary for survival. Indeed, by the end of the novel, everyone has faith.

But Simmons is still a science-fiction writer, and The Rise of Endymion illustrates sf’s Second Great Commandment, like unto the first: The supernatural is simply a manifestation of natural laws that are not yet understood.

The Rise of Endymion, like 3001, is a bad novel. Simmons is a better plotter than Clarke, but his characters deliver speeches in 15-page chunks, his exposition is incredibly clunky (“My friends, as good born-again Christians you undoubtedly know the procedure for the election of our next Pope. But let me refresh your memory”), and his sentences can be exquisitely awful (“During all the centuries of the Hegemony’s WorldWeb, the Three Sectors of Consciousness of the Core had not found a way to use the Void portal–that instantaneous interface that humans had known as farcasters–without leaving a record of modulated neutrinos in the fold matrix”).

But for all that, Simmons weaves a world that is fascinating in its very perversity. In The Rise of Endymion, the known universe is ruled by a corrupt Catholic church, which has purchased the technology of resurrection from a mysterious, technologically advanced entity known as the Core. The church rewards all its followers–“born-again Christians”–with a parasitic implant shaped like a cross, which records both personality and genetic makeup and allows physical resurrection in case of accident or disease.

Simmons’s hero, Raul Endymion, quite rightly rejects this resurrection; Christianity, he decides, is not supposed to be about life forever in the here-and-now. True Christianity holds the answers to those questions that standard science dismisses. True Christianity explains the intangibles: love, self-sacrifice, personality, the meaning of life. True Christianity, it turns out, has more to do with quantum physics than with the supernatural, and it happens to look a lot like Zen.

The Rise of Endymion chronicles Raul’s growing understanding of something called the Void Which Binds, a realm stitched of quantum stuff, woven with Planck space, Planck time, lying under and around space/time. . . . Neither mystical nor metaphysical, it flows from and responds to the physical laws of the universe. . . . The Void is structured from thought and feeling. It is an artifact of the universe’s consciousness of itself. . . . Its actual but inaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite-satisfying bullsh*t.

This is more than just another eye-popping Simmons-style paragraph; it is a credo, an avowal of faith in a realm that lies beyond the scope of traditional science. To access the Void, humanity must reject the cruciform and the church’s offer of physical resurrection and accept mortality. But that’s all right, because death isn’t really the end. If mortals can learn to enter the Void, they will live on as part of the universe, their emotions, experiences, and intelligences returning to the universe as water flows back into water.

This may sound supernatural, but don’t be fooled: It is still science. The Void is bound by physical laws, even if those laws are odd. The Void can be reached through Zen disciplines, but also through dna modification. As a matter of fact, Jesus discovered the Void Which Binds; he was able to move back and forth through Planck space, appearing to his disciples in the future as he still hung on the cross. And he tried to help them enter the Void as well, by putting blood in wine and skin scrapings in bread. He knew that anyone who drank his blood would “share his dna, and be able to perceive the power of the Void Which Binds the universe.”

But the disciples didn’t understand the Void. They “turned to dogma, reducing the inexpressible into rough words and turgid sermons, tight rules and fiery rhetoric. And the vision paled, then failed. The portal closed.”

The Rise of Endymion is about the reopening of that portal, the coming of a new messiah who opens the Void Which Binds to all humanity. She shares her blood with her followers and begins a revolution against the corrupt church. Her disciples move in together, share their belongings, devote themselves to the breaking of bread and the teachings of the enlightened.

It’s a much warmer universe than the fourth millennium of Arthur C. Clarke. Simmons–30 years younger than Clarke–has benefited from the popularization of the strange and wonderful world of quantum physics. Unlike Clarke, he can be a materialist without admitting that life ends at the grave. He can allow for strange, spiritual-seeming phenomena. He can wax ecstatic about the power of love and still call himself a writer of science fiction. He can even give Christianity and Buddhism passing nods of approval.

This isn’t progress; it is simply a rearranging of the boundaries of science so that the “spiritual” falls within them. But the urge to do away with the inexplicable–common to science-fiction writers since the days of Jules Verne–remains.

Both Clarke and Simmons are looking for a Grand Unifying Theory, an explanation that brings together the material and immaterial into a coherent whole. Clarke pitches the immaterial out; Simmons redraws the lines. Both remain hostile to Christ. And this hostility is ironic, since it is precisely in Christ–the one who sustains all things, both visible and invisible–that the laws of physics and the intangible yearnings of humanity come together “before the foundation of the world.”

Susan Wise Bauer writes for Charles Colson’s radio commentary, BreakPoint, and teaches literature at the College of William and Mary.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 34

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Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (A Man for Our Times)

By Yves Hamant

Translated by Fr. Steven Bigham

Oakwood Publications

231 pp.; $14.95

Christianity for the Twenty-First Century: The Prophetic Writings of Alexander Men

Edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman

Continuum

226 pp.; $19.95, paper

At 6:00 a.m. on September 9, 1990, a martyr was born. Fr. Alexander Men, a Jew by birth and probably the most powerful voice for Christ in Russia, had his skull laid open by an axe in the hand of a murderer. Did the kgb do it? Or one of the anti-Semites who wrote all those threatening letters? Or (probably) both in tandem? In Tengiz Abuladze’s 1986 film Repentance, which helped spark the religious revival in the dying Soviet Union, the closing scene had an old woman questioning what good is a road that doesn’t lead to a church. Men was assassinated while on his Sunday-morning way to catch a train to go to church to preach. The ultimate answer to what good this road was depends on how one views time and eternity. But there is no gainsaying the enormous loss to a Russia trying to get its post-Communist bearings–a classic case of what Solzhenitsyn calls “counterselection.”

Readers of Books & Culture know of Father Men from Larry Woiwode’s rendition [March/April 1996] and can know more of him from these two books: a passably written but miserably proofread biography, dotted with pictures of churches and priests, and the first translated fruits of a writer’s teeming mind. Hamant writes in the manner of hagiography, which need displease only cynics about saintliness. The women of Men’s family–grandmother, mother, aunt–shaped the spiritual life of their precocious boy, who absorbed Kant at 13, learned many languages both ancient and modern, and read very widely in the arts and sciences. Although he went on to write many books, none of which was published in Russia during his lifetime, and became friends with such worthies as Solzhenitsyn and Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Men always considered himself a preacher above all else. Amid a corrupt Russian Orthodox Church inclined toward passivity and ritualism, he manifested an evangelist’s missionary spirit and a teacher’s catechizing passion. His life and work were Christocentric; he spoke of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as freely as any evangelical Protestant. His influence continues through a Christian university in Moscow named after him, through the lives of his many spiritual children, and through his writings.

The 11 items gathered by Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman–academic essays, public lectures, interviews–enrich our understanding of the situation of Christians at the end of the Soviet parenthesis of Russian history. But Men is no museum piece. With orthodox heart, ecumenical spirit, and model Christian mind, this polymath offers superior instruction for Western Christian thinkers, as well. Eschewing the exclusivity common among the Russian Orthodox and warning against excessive asceticism, he brings fresh rhetoric and a distinctive angle of vision to bear on familiar Big Questions such as how Christians should interact with the surrounding atheist culture, how Eastern and Western Christians can be both ecumenical and faithful, and how Christianity can respect yet transcend other world religions. He is especially sophisticated on Christian philosophy of history, interacting with the likes of Karl Jaspers and Arnold Toynbee while drawing steadily from Vladimir Solovyev and Nikolai Berdyaev, also Christopher Dawson–but indebted even more to the Church Fathers and most of all to the Bible.

If, as between the two powerful monks in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the spirit of the rigid, judgmental Father Ferapont seems preponderant among Russian Orthodox clergy in our time, Men legitimately lays self-conscious claim to the sweet and world-affirming spirit of Father Zosima. As we await translation of more of his works, we can say Amen to A. Men.

–Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

The Moral Intelligence of Children: How to Raise a Moral Child

By Robert Coles

Random House

218 pp.; $21

For many years, Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles has delighted his readers with inspiring observations on the nature of children–delight, because his reports have been cheerier than we might have assumed. Some of Coles’s young reporters have taught us more about race relations than a dozen passionate prophetic tomes could ever hope to accomplish.

Coles’s new book, The Moral Intelligence of Children, informed me less about the moral ability (or disability) of children than the responsibility of adults in their moral formation. In conversations with educators and parents, Coles learns that, in late twentieth-century America, adults habitually turn to the mental health system for “solutions” when confronted by the moral failure of children. A particularly sad story is that of a nine-year-old cheater who was supported by the teacher, much to the despair of her little classmate who reported her. Elaine had been observed to “fudge a little” in sports, “occasionally exaggerate things,” and–because she hated to lose, ever–she “told little white lies.” Under the cloak of euphemisms, the significant adults in her life turned to psychology and its own weasel words to solve a moral sickness in the family.

It is a curious commentary on our times that it takes a psychiatrist to recognize that these are spiritual sicknesses, not mental diseases. Alas, our culture has substituted social workers for grandmothers, and psychotherapists for priests. In the process we have passed the cost for our shift in paradigm along to the health-care system and now groan under a heavy burden that breaks our national back.

Why does the author rely on what some may regard as legalism? Here Coles is simply echoing biblical wisdom. The law is indeed a schoolmaster, and its lessons point to the need for more than what is naturally within. Children are not “naturally good”; they need godly instruction. I’m reminded of the daughter of a simple Dutch watchmaker who, when faced with Jews on the run from the Nazis, remembered her father’s words. Corrie ten Boom was 45 years old when she told her first lie, and then agonized as she weighed the competing demands of mercy, grace, and love. Our world needs more such morally proficient sons and daughters.

–Diane Komp

Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Volume 1: 1926-1938

In The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson

Princeton University Press

836 pp.; $59.50.

Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor, is engaged in the titanic project of establishing a complete and reliable set of Auden’s works. The previous two volumes are devoted to Auden’s plays and opera libretti (most of which he wrote in collaboration with others). Two more volumes of prose will follow, and then the poems–which, because of Auden’s frequent revisions to already published poems, are a textual editor’s nightmare; one can see why Mendelson is saving them for last. This volume meets the high standards Mendelson set with the volumes of dramatic writings: the critical apparatus is full, detailed, one is tempted to say all-knowing; but unobtrusive. It is also a superbly produced book, with excellent paper and a fine flexible binding that makes it a delight to hold.

Readers interested in Auden’s intellectual development will find this volume fascinating, because throughout his life Auden tended to try out intellectual stances in his occasional prose. Especially in the 1930s, Auden’s poems were enormously difficult, at times even impenetrable. From the essays and reviews on poetry, one can garner a somewhat better understanding of what made Auden the poet tick at this time in his life; but much remains obscure. However, in the other occasional writings one can see more clearly Auden’s struggle to evaluate and make proper use of his greatest intellectual influences: Freud, D. H. Lawrence (his “think books,” as Auden called them, not his novels), English versions of Marxism. Christian theology seems to play a role nearly equal to that of the figures just mentioned; one of the potential surprises of this book for those who know that Auden re-entered the church in 1940 (for the first time since childhood) is how frequently Christianity comes up in the pieces collected here.

This is a useful collection, but Mendelson’s next installment, which will cover at least the years of World War II–when Auden was writing about and assimilating such figures as Charles Williams, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Kierkegaard–will be more important. Few of those writings are available between book covers, while many of the key pieces in this volume are already available in a collection titled The English Auden.

–Alan Jacobs

The Reformation in National Context

Edited by Bob Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikulcs Teich

Cambridge University Press

236 pp.; $54.95

Calvinism in Europe, 1540-1620

Edited by Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis

Cambridge University Press

283 pp.; $59.95

These two outstanding collections provide further examples of the currently dominant approach to the Reformation. They feature detailed research in long-neglected sources such as local church archives, business accounts, diplomatic correspondence, and the records of local governments. Theology and grand contests over church order, which dominated Reformation research for the 400 years before about 1960, are present, but only at the margins.

It would be possible to look on this sort of history as contributing to the process of secularization. It is also possible, however, to look upon it as opening the possibility for understanding Incarnation. Especially when modern students of the Reformation write without animus against traditional religious faith (as is the case with most of the authors represented in these two books and most of the rest of “the new Reformation history”), the opportunity exists to see what religion meant for ordinary people in ordinary circ*mstances. Even for those who remain mostly interested in theology, the results of this new history can be illuminating, for it brings faith out of the monastery or pulpit to the marketplaces, schoolrooms, courtrooms, and homes where most people lived–to, that is, the very places that the gospel was first proclaimed by Jesus himself.

Of special interest here is the skill with which several authors treat connections among religion, commerce, and government. The Calvinism book is especially germane in this regard, since those relationships eventually led, through several national channels, to the shaping of religious faith and practice throughout much of the United States and Canada. The most useful essays in the national context volume are those that describe reactions to Protestantism in often neglected parts of Europe like Bohemia, Hungary, or Poland, and those by editor Bob Scribner in weighing the varied mixture of political, urban, intellectual, cultural, and religious factors that help explain why Protestantism took root in some nations but not in others.

–Mark Noll

“We can understand, even applaud, normal human cravings for a secure place in some highly anthropomorphic heaven perceived as a structured and idealized version of man’s society on earth.” Indeed. And who are “we”? The writer, Lacey Baldwin Smith, a much-honored historian and professor emeritus at Northwestern University, doesn’t say; let us assume he means civilized, educated people–the kind who read the Times of a Sunday morning. Smith continues: “But peel back the carefully contrived veneer of sterotyped piety imposed by hagiographers, and we sense the existence of the dark abyss of psychosis: the agony, the courage, and the distorted logic of personalities that have long since passed spiritual hypochondria and are well on the road to madness.”

While Smith was writing Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World, Christians in China, the Sudan, and elsewhere were dying for their faith. Their stories, insofar as they are recoverable, offer little of interest to those who would probe “the dark abyss of psychosis.” They testify rather to the banality of evil and the tenacity of hope. And they point beyond themselves to the much larger number of Christians who, though not martyred, are suffering persecution at this moment.

Thanks in large part to the untiring efforts of the Hudson Institute’s Michael Horowitz, who has written that “the mounting persecution of Christians eerily parallels the persecution of Jews, my people, during much of Europe’s history,” the plight of these believers is at last beginning to receive sustained attention. Two new books–Their Blood Cries Out, by Paul Marshall with Lela Gilbert, and In the Lion’s Den, by Nina Shea–convey the scope of the problem with passion and a contagious sense of urgency. Every American Christian should read them.

Marshall, a widely published scholar who came to the subject via a philosophical interest in human rights, has produced the most comprehensive and coherent survey of the worldwide persecution of Christians, accompanied by extensive analysis of the apathetic American response to this crisis. Shea, a longtime human-rights activist and director of the Puebla Program division of Freedom House, covers much of the same ground in concise fashion, with a personal punch: her book includes many photos and brief profiles of victims of persecution.

Another book that belongs on the same shelf with these two is Susan Bergman’s Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith–a good antidote to Smith, whose last chapter is titled “The Twentieth-Century Martyr: An Endangered Species?” Bergman commissioned 19 poets, novelists, and essayists to tell the stories of modern martyrs. Not all of the subjects fit what I would call even a broad definition of martyrdom; I’m thinking, for example, of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the French philosopher Simone Weil: extraordinary writers of great moral courage, yes, but not martyrs. But these are exceptions. Archbishop Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Edith Stein: The lives and deaths of these exemplary figures and others, famous and obscure, are recounted without a trace of false piety, their stories framed by Bergman’s powerful introductory essay and a thoughtful afterword by the poet Dana Gioia. “‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed,'” Gioia reminds us, “but only the living can cultivate the fruit of their sacrifice.”

–JW

Diane Komp is professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine. Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

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Since the days of Genesis, human beings have struggled to understand the ways in which women and men differ and the ways in which they may legitimately be viewed as similar. Until the rise of modern secular individualism in the seventeenth century, the significance of sexual difference seemed all but self-evident to most peoples, who normally drew upon that difference in their social and symbolic organization of their world. Christians, drawing upon readings of Scripture and tradition, took the difference seriously, even as they recognized the equality of souls in the eyes of God. Secular individualism, by introducing the idea of worldly equality, opened the way for feminist claims that women should be viewed as the equals of men in the here and now, not just in the hereafter. And, in our time, postmodern feminism has pressed beyond those claims to insist that any notion of natural difference between the sexes invidiously disadvantages women and must be repudiated. But the notion of difference has refused to lie down and die, especially since even those who most protest its oppressive character still seek to justify their belief that women as a gender have been and continue to be oppressed.

Ten years ago, Nancy Goldberger, Jill Tarule, Blythe Clinchy, and Mary Belenky published Women’s Ways of Knowing, reissued now with a new introduction. To further mark the anniversary of that publication, they have edited a companion volume, Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by Women’s Ways of Knowing. Taken as a whole, the new volume, comprising 14 chapters, including one apiece by each of the original authors, implicitly marks an official canonization of their initial effort–one that is nonetheless self-congratulatory for the authors’ admirable willingness to include a smattering of criticism. If anything, the criticism, including a measure of self-criticism, merely underscores their deep satisfaction at the reception their work (in this volume now familiarly referred to as WWK) has received and their quiet confidence that it now occupies a secure position in both feminism and epistemology.

The initial impetus for Women’s Ways of Knowing derived from the authors’ interest in extending the insights of Carol Gilligan’s influential study of women’s distinct patterns of moral reasoning, In a Different Voice (1982), to the ways in which women know and learn. At the time, they believed, as they still do, that “gender is a major social, historical, and political category that affects the life choices of all women in all communities and cultures.” And this conviction led them to ask, “How were Western social constructions of gender and authority affecting women’s sense of self, voice, and mind?”

Focusing upon the specific role of family and school in communicating the meaning of womanhood to girls, they did not analyze their findings with respect to what is now known as “positionality” or “social location”–class, race, nationality, and so on–but rather focused upon listening to women’s own accounts of their experience as women. Their extensive interviews ultimately led them to identify five positions in relation to knowledge: (1) silence (not knowing and consequently feeling “voiceless, powerless, and mindless”); (2) received knowing (construing knowledge and authority as external to the self and expecting to learn from those who possess them); (3) subjective knowing (personal, private, and based on intuition or feeling rather than thought and evidence); (4) procedural knowing (developing and honoring “techniques and procedures for acquiring, validating, and evaluating knowledge claims”); and (5) constructed knowing (“the position at which truth is understood to be contextual; knowledge is recognized as tentative, not absolute; and it is understood that the knower is part of [constructs] the known”).

Not surprisingly, the authors regarded constructed knowing as superior to other forms. Their preference in this regard signaled their immersion in and commitment to postmodernism, notably the postmodern revolt against the authority of one body of knowledge over others. At that time, however, as they now acknowledge, it also testified to their commitment to an implicitly developmental scheme in which they focused, as Goldberger puts it, “more on the descriptions of persons whom we sorted into types of knowers than on types or ways of knowing that persons used for different purposes at different points in their lives.” The essays in Knowledge, Difference, and Power remain faithful to the centrality of constructed knowing, but many, including those by the original authors, attempt to refine the previous model and especially to substitute a systematic attention to positionality for their previous model’s developmental implications.

Notwithstanding different foci or purposes, the 14 essays collected in this volume converge in their insistence upon the vision of knowledge as simultaneously a repository of power and a formidable perpetuator of its inequitable distribution. In the concluding chapter, Sandra Harding, a feminist philosopher and critic of science, credits the authors of wwk with having from the start focused not merely upon the importance of women’s ways of knowing in relation to those of men but in relation to differences among women themselves and thereby having avoided the essentialist pitfall of regarding all women as fundamentally similar on account of their sex. Above all, the authors “kept in clear focus the links between power and knowledge and showed how less powerful positions nevertheless have distinctive epistemological resources.” In this respect, they “charted the surprising epistemological ‘powers of the weak.’ ” And they confirmed that, “in the case of gender relations, knowledge possibilities are shaped not only by the activities in which men and women characteristically engage, but by the positions they are assigned in power relations.”

Indeed, the authors represented in Knowledge, Difference, and Power rival one another–in good collaborative, sisterly fashion–in delineating the myriad ways in which women’s exclusion from power shapes the ways in which they learn and know. Thus, Elizabeth Debold, Deborah Tolman, and Lyn Mikel Brown (all collaborators in Carol Gilligan’s continuing project on adolescent girls) discuss the case of Lily, a sexually active teenager, to illustrate the ways in which the narratives of the powerful undermine the self-confidence and self-knowledge of the less powerful.1 Lily, they argue, “‘knows’ and understands her experience, shaped within cultural power relations, through the story told in her family’s culture and in dominant American culture that a woman’s happiness is dependent upon marriage, motherhood, and sex after marriage. The lessons Lily learns map perfectly with cultural practices, rooted in constructed norms of femininity, that deny young women sexual subjectivity.” Christians may note with interest the cavalier assumption that marriage, motherhood, and premarital chastity figure among the oppressive norms imposed upon the young, and that they invariably deny young women’s sexual subjectivity; but we will return to such considerations later.

Many of the essays emphasize the imperative of rescuing women’s subjectivity from the grasp of inherited narratives that exclude women from the company of those who construct valid knowledge. In general, however, most of the authors claim to have moved beyond a primary concern with subjectivity. Frances Maher and Mary Kay Tetreault argue that an excessive preoccupation with subjectivity has compromised cultural feminism, from which they and others in this volume seek to distance themselves. They credit the authors of wwk with having pointed out that “where ‘truth’ is based on personal experience, each person’s truth rests on an essentialized uniqueness and is unknowable to the other.”

Subjective knowing, Maher and Tetreault insist, “is also the quintessential epistemological stage of individualism, one of the most pervasive and mystifying ideologies in our culture because it suggests that we stand or fall, progress or not, only as individuals and not as occupants of societal positions of power and domination.” An emphasis on positionality, they hold, rescues theorists from this trap by suggesting that individuals are not composed of any “fixed ‘essence’ or individual identity” but rather “develop amid networks of relationships that themselves can be explored, analyzed, and changed, as long as people understand that they are not simply individuals, but differentially placed members of an unequal social order.”

Maher and Tetreault capture the sensibility and commitments of many of the authors through a discussion of the experience of “double consciousness” that affects women and nonwhite students who try to move from the identity politics of group consciousness to “outside knowledge” from cultural and historical experience. The prevailing disciplines offer them little help in this quest, since “the ‘political language’ of the mainstream culture offers a validation of oppression, but no means of communication for them within its terms.” Their double consciousness derives precisely from the chasm that separates “objective” knowledge and prevailing forms of “rationality” from their sense of self. This alienation leads them to attempt to formulate a new language that does not oppress them in the manner of the dominant discourse: “Ultimately, they want to construct their own theory–to ‘change the way things are,’ by transforming the meaning-making apparatus itself.”

The ambition to transform the world by transforming the “meaning-making apparatus” is one for which Maher and Tetreault, like the other authors, feel the utmost sympathy. Indeed, many, like Ann Stanton, see teaching as a “political activity” and their own work as teachers as the fulfillment of a moral responsibility. For Ann Stanton, WWK helps to sustain her vision of teaching’s moral imperative by helping her to “see beyond the technological rationalism that undergirds most of modern life.” The focus on epistemology it provides introduces a “strong subtext of an ethic of care. As the midwife/teacher image dramatically conveys, education is relational–a relationship that involves knowledge, attentiveness, and care; care directed not only at disciplinary material but to who students are and what they can become.”

Like most of the other chapters, Maher and Tetreault’s is primarily grounded in specific conversations or interviews with women of different ages and backgrounds. Throughout Knowledge, Difference, and Power, the liberal sprinkling of quotations from those with whom various authors have spoken reinforces the basic claim of WWK that women frequently do feel uneasy with much of the prevailing scholarly discourse and do often evaluate people, experience, and ideas by other criteria than scientific or academic “rationality.” More often than not, the voices of those who find the learned discourses alien and alienating ring true.

This pervasive uneasiness with purportedly “objective” knowledge helps to explain why so many found it plausible to read wwk as a defense of subjective knowledge against the claims of objectivity. In that volume, Goldberger, Tarule, Clinchy, and Belenky seemed to invite readers to see women as naturally inclined to reason out from their personal experience and the relations in which their lives are enmeshed.

Strongly endorsing the importance of personal experience, Michael Mahoney, a psychologist and the only male contributor to Knowledge, Difference, and Power, directly attacks the illusion of impersonal detachment fostered by the goal of arriving at objective knowledge: “This has perhaps been the most basic illusion of Western white male epistemology: that reality is a rational order revealed by reason and public sensibility.” In Mahoney’s view, that assumption still “lies at the heart of objectivism, a tradition that still dominates contemporary worldviews. Such a view essentially denies plurality, perspective, diversity, change, and the private realm–rendering meaningless any discussion of multiple personal or dynamic realities.” Mahoney’s facile assumption that rationality and “objectivism” reflect the biases and implicitly the interests of white Western males pervades the entire volume, although some of the contributors attempt to guard against associating themselves with the most simplistic aspects of that view. Time and again, however, they have difficulty avoiding the impression that women remain more closely tied to subjectivity than men.

(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

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(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 1)

Debold, Tolman, and Brown speculate that many women have difficulty in moving from subjective to constructed knowledge because of “the justifiable difficulty women have in explicating reason outside authorized rational discourse.” In their view, WWK did “not go far enough to negate the cultural equation of mind, authority, and masculinity.” Sara Ruddick, in her chapter entitled “Reason’s Femininity,” deplores the “impersonal procedural knowing, which continuously separates knower from known and the mind’s knowing from its emotional, bodily, and social life.” Arguing that both gender and knowing develop from and within relationships, she insists that “a person is the relationships that constitute and are constituted by her.” Similarly, the knowing that arises from practices–for example, farming, engineering, mothering, or psychotherapy–is gendered, for “to the extent that women and men engage more extensively and intensively in certain practices than others the thinking that arises from these practices will have a masculine or feminine aspect.”

In this respect, styles of thinking do not merely express attributes of gender but reinforce them. Thus, for example, the “epistemic” communities of defense analysts create a specific definition of masculinity that intensifies the devaluation of femininity. Within this community, masculinity “is expressed in–and requires–an ‘objective,’ abstract style of thinking so deeply rooted as to appear ‘natural.’ ” Ruddick applauds WWK and other initiatives for serving as “disruptive interventions in epistemic communities marked by insistently separate, impersonal procedural knowing that is labeled and legitimated as ‘masculine.’ “

Ruddick, who has written elsewhere of her deep hostility to militarism, believes that women’s experience endows them with special proclivities for attentive listening to and caring for others, notably children.2 Here, she explicitly states what the other authors imply, namely that “connected knowing will be judged by ethical as well as epistemological ideals.” And she insists that connected female knowers will be more likely than impersonal, objective male knowers to evaluate knowledge and ways of knowing in relation to “the good to which they lead and which they yield.” This connection “between epistemological ideal and moral result seems to me central to the feminist epistemological enterprise and to WWK.”

As the original authors of WWK and their current collaborators attempt to move beyond “essentialist” assumptions about natural differences between women and men, they run into escalating theoretical difficulties. For if men and women do not differ in their embodied natures, it becomes imperative to identify sufficiently binding ways in which they do differ to account for their proclivity for different ways of knowing. Similarly, as many of the authors attempt to move beyond the value of subjective knowing to an ideal of connected and constructed knowing, they must provide a necessary and sufficient explanation for why women are more prone than men to engage in the latter.

This dual quest leads them, as we have seen, to embrace all or aspects of the postmodernist emphasis upon positionality and standpoint theory. Human minds, hearts, and ways of knowing are shaped by a person’s location within the complex network of power that constitutes our world. In this perspective, knowledge itself ranks among the primary spoils of victory in the continuing struggle among differently empowered and enabled social groups. And the individuals who “know” the knowledge are reduced to little more than specific sites of knowing.

If the language in which these ideas find their expression seems opaque and forbidding, it may be because the ideas themselves remain fraught with confusions and complexities that deny clear, direct expression. Try as the reader may to appreciate the theoretical discussions of positionality, he or she will be hard pressed not to fall instinctively back into the intuitive assumption that, in some way, women and men do naturally differ. The authors, however, have been well schooled in the truth that any concession to such essentialism compromises both postmodern theory and the utopian political goal of drawing men into women’s ways of knowing. Difference must be affirmed, for without it the entire enterprise crumbles; essentialism must be denied, for the admission that, in however small measure it exists, would implicitly accede to the claims of authority, whether natural or divine.

As the attentive reader will by now have noticed, much of what the feminist epistemologists value in women’s ways of knowing bears a strong resemblance to Christianity. Jesus Christ did die for all of our sins–for each of us in particular–not for the sins of humanity in the abstract. He did enjoin us to love our neighbor as ourselves and, especially, he did insist that what we did for the least among us we did for him. The Gospels abound with his concern for connected knowing, and much of Christian theology has followed the path they charted. At the same time, the Gospels preach the reality of God’s power and the universal claims of his commandments. Again, much Christian theology has followed suit, combining particularism with rationalism. Even secular ethics has generally combined attention to binding, universal laws or rules with attention to the specificity of particular cases, including the situation of individuals. Against this background, it appears increasingly difficult to claim many of the virtues celebrated in WWK and Knowledge, Difference, and Power uniquely for women.

Christianity merits no entry in the index to Knowledge, Difference, and Power, religion only one, and that one is explicitly paired with “received knowing.” The section in which the mention of religion occurs is labeled “External Authority and Received Knowledge,” which accurately conveys the authors’ hostility to received knowledge.

In an exploration of cultural imperatives and diversity in ways of knowing, Nancy Rule Goldberger, the author of the chapter in which the reference to religion appears, interviewed African American women to understand the ways in which their perceptions of knowing and learning differ from those of white women. A number of those she interviewed referred to the centrality of God or the church in their lives, which might suggest that they also recognized the binding character of God’s authority. But by probing beneath this surface, Goldberger (one strongly suspects to her great relief) was able to understand that although African American women speak about their faith and their trust in the ultimate authority of God, there is a sense of God as someone who listens as well as directs and dictates, who frees as well as expects obedience. Furthermore, God is experienced as “in me” (not external); thus, the person’s voice can be God’s voice. The orientation to God as authority coexists with a strong sense of self, experienced as a distinct and particular person who can and should be known by God and by other people on her own terms.

How much Goldberger understood remains open to question. What she demonstrably does not grasp is Christianity, which her interlocutors clearly understand much better than she. Otherwise, how could she suggest that the idea that God listens and frees as well as directs, dictates, and demands obedience in some way qualifies or undercuts the totality of God’s authority? Indeed, until the claim that the person’s voice could be God’s voice–in all fairness, a confusion that too many have made–the African American women’s beliefs, as Goldberger describes them, may be read as entirely orthodox. But whether sadly or comically, Goldberger is incapable of recognizing them as such. For she, like the other authors in this volume, seems incapable of acknowledging the possibility that some authority may be legitimate and some traditions may be sustaining.

It remains beyond dispute that the West is indeed suffering an epistemological crisis of the first order, one that has been gaining momentum since Nietzsche, if not since Hegel. The postmodernist assault upon authority in all forms and the concomitant emphasis upon the situational or positional character of all claims to truth merely represent the culmination of a long development. Recognition of the historical antecedents of postmodernism may not make its doctrines any less dangerous, but it does help to recognize the feminist variant as an especially radical permutation of them rather than as something new under the sun.

Indeed, the cumulative logic of the articles in Knowledge, Difference, and Power ultimately points toward the eradication of the female subject qua distinct subject. For once we have toppled God and nature as authoritative sources of the difference between the sexes, we are indeed left with gender understood as a conventional or “relational” organization of the darkling plain of fluctuating relations among individuals, each of whom is jockeying for maximum power.

In this zero-sum game, it is hard not to accord a grudging admiration to feminist theorists who have the wit to saddle hapless men with the rationality that the larger epistemological crisis has already discredited. Unfortunately, their clever tactic leaves the women they seek to champion with no firm ground upon which to base their own claims. Worse, it leaves the rest of us with the formidable task of attempting to understand the ways in which women and men do genuinely differ, the ways in which they do not, and the bearing of both upon a renovated understanding of legitimate authority, on earth as in heaven.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese teaches history, literature, and women’s studies at Emory University. Her most recent book is “Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life”: How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women (Doubleday/Nan Talese).

1. For a critique of the spirit that informs the project, which has already yielded several books and many articles, see Christopher Lasch, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn (Norton, 1997), ch. 6, “Gilligan’s Island.”

2. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (Beacon Press, 1995).

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

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Historically, Christian attitudes toward fiction ranged from hostility to suspicion. Especially during the nineteenth century, fiction was shunned because it was, well, fictitious and therefore not true. It was also a waste of time. (Followers of Jesus did not waste time in that pre-home appliance age. There were always domestic chores to attend to when one wasn’t busy saving souls.)

Curiously, Christian fiction has now become a publishing phenomenon as today’s evangelical readers feel a need for leisure reading and see fiction as a vehicle for a sermon.

That is just the problem, says Ellen Vaughn, whose first solo novel, The Strand, was recently published by Word. “Some novels on the Christian market use the story as a vehicle for a point of view on particular issues,” she says. “Instead, The challenge for Christians writing fiction is to let the truth be subtle enough to woo the reader who is not coming from a religious background.”

“There is a temptation to use the fiction as a vehicle for a sermon,” says Ellen, whose first novel, Gideon’s Torch, was cowritten with Chuck Colson. Truth and emotion, she says, should not be explicitly told, but should “bubble up within the reader.”

What truth bubbles up in The Strand? Its “deeper theme,” says Ellen, “is choosing life, choosing to embrace life in all its richness and untidiness.” At the novel’s beginning, the main character is “frozen and unable to make the most banal choices”—such as which dessert to order. But by the end of the novel, she has become someone “who can embrace a variety of real life choices”—including the bitter messiness of poor people’s lives.

Yet another truth bubbles up in this book: the unpredictability of God’s intervention in our lives. You can classify The Strand as a mystery because it has murders and plot twists, but unlike most mysteries, it keeps going when the mystery is solved. “It doesn’t end there,” says Ellen, “because it is about something deeper. The murder mystery reflects a far deeper mystery: Often, through the most unlikely means, God intrudes in our lives. But I didn’t want the novel to end even after her spiritual epiphany. I wanted it to get a lot messier, because in life there is always a further challenge.”

As Christian fiction is getting (and deserving) increased attention, this issue of CT brings you a special section: Be sure to read “The Bible Study at the End of the World” (about apocalyptic fiction) and “Postmarked Mitford” (about the hometown appeal of author Jan Karon), as well as an original short story by James Schaap.

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Bill Bright as model* My heart jumped for joy when I saw Bill and Vonette Bright on the July 14 Christianity Today cover. My nine years on Campus Crusade staff (1969-78) laid the foundation for a lifetime of ministry, and I’ll be forever grateful to Campus Crusade and Bill Bright’s leadership, which have shaped my vision for ministry. I still strongly believe in the “Win, Build, Send” philosophy; now, after many years of pastoral ministry, I work with t-net International to help churches develop and strengthen this philosophy in their more complicated environment.

I only wish that Bill’s deep and devoted walk with his Savior had been underlined even more. Though he is a visionary and has a businesslike approach to organization, his whole drive is to please only the Lord he loves.

Dave HineMarlton, N.J.

The image of God* Karen Lee-Thorp’s insightful thoughts conveyed a timely and realistic challenge for today’s church [“Is Beauty the Beast?” July 14]. She offered the best foundation possible: the theological tenet of the image of God. With that construct in mind, it should come as no surprise that the “dualists” she cited serve as the primary opposition to her cause. For, as in the early church, contemporary believers must boldly confront all forms of Gnosticism and Doceticism—whether those heretical positions diminish the virtues of the Incarnation or a responsible look in the mirror.

Prof. Ronald T. HabermasJohn Brown UniversitySiloam Springs, Ark.

Indebted to Wimber* Evangelicalism owes John Wimber and the Vineyard movement a debt it may never be cognizant of [Conversations, July 14]. Wimber has simply applied the plain truth of Scripture to modern American Christianity and found that God truly is the same yesterday, today, and forever. As it stands now, the majority of the church has come to depend on force of personality rather than the power of God to proclaim the gospel. All the Vineyard has done is open the door to real New Testament Christianity.

Burritt HessMobile, Ala.

Seeking true relationships* I agree with Chris Rice on the dilemma of whites recognizing blacks in terms of achievement [“Why Tiger Makes Us Feel Good,” July 14]. The editorial, however, underlines the more serious problem that African Americans face in dealing with our white brothers and sisters. Using terminology such as Negro and black as monikers in 1997 shows a lack of understanding of the African-American community and the larger community of people of color. At the risk of sounding politically correct, there are very sound reasons for not using the terms black and Negro except in cases of historical documentation. W. E. B. DuBois is still right. The problem of the twentieth century, and perhaps the twenty-first as well, is the problem of the color line. Until white Americans, especially Christians, cross over the color line and begin to seek true relationships with people of color rather than frail associations at work or church, there will be no progress. If Christ, who is our peace, has broken down the walls between us, why is it that African Americans must always be the first to step over the line to embrace whites? I hope in my lifetime I will see it the other way around.

Anthea ButlerVanderbilt UniversityNashville, Tenn.

Slow down the translation process* I would agree with the title of your news article [“Bible Translators Deny Gender Agenda,” July 14] that, more than likely, the motives of the translators of the NIV are sincere and proper. The question that needs to be answered, though, is whether the “inclusive language” changes are warranted. Answering this question will not happen in news articles, which attempt to find notable people on each side of the issue and then hint at a conclusion. The Christian community needs to make a major effort to decide what is right. And to do this, it is time to slow the English translation process down and study this question with a broad group of scholars, pastors, and, perhaps, laymen. The need will be to avoid looking for the majority opinion, and to honestly seek what is right.

Paul FurnissUnadilla, N.Y.

* The statement by the “Conference on Gender-Related Language in Scripture” is revealing when it speaks of “the necessity within Bible publishing for greater accountability to the church.”

As Michael Maudlin wrote [Inside CT, June 16], evangelicalism now thoroughly distrusts its own scholars. Instead, somehow Bible publishing is more accountable to “the church” when James Dobson and his selected men are involved! Forgive me, but when did Focus on the Family gain greater credibility and authority to speak for “the church” than evangelical biblical scholars?

The great gulf between the academy and the church will not be bridged when evangelicals are fed misinformation and sensationalism, nor when popular evangelical leaders assert their authority in areas outside their greatest competence. The sad fact is that sometimes “the church” does not know what is best, at least without adequate information and explanation from her own scholars—whom she is unable to hear.

Daniel J. TreierGrand Rapids, Mich.

I am grieving. Others are outraged. So far, no one with whom I have spoken is happy with the way the body of Christ looks right now. To resort to name-calling (“Stealth Bible” [in World]) rather than conducting ourselves in a way worthy of the gospel gives more fuel to those who consider Christians just a quarrelsome, bigoted bunch. How I long to see the body “standing firm in one spirit with one mind.”

How can CBT members, who would give their lives before they would compromise Holy Scripture, and who have given prayerful consideration to any revisions, be treated thusly?

I do not think the “climate in the evangelical church” is represented by people who drill holes in Bibles. I am among the fortunate, having a godly father, a loving husband, parents who rightly divided the word of truth and made it clear to me that when Jesus became a man, he did so to identify with the details in the lives of being men and women. Unfortunately, vast numbers do not have the opportunity to learn that women are included in this matter of Christ identifying with humanity.

Does the new NIV make God female or androgynous? Does a reading of Philippians 2:8 as “And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself and became obedient to death” (new NIV) really make Christ other than a man? Christ is still a man. Note the two personal pronouns. Is this not a “foolish dispute”?

Pat ArgueCarol Stream, Ill.

* We talk about knocking down the walls in Christendom and we talk about racial reconciliation, but someday Christians will have to address the prejudices between the genders. We must accept our differences and let women be women and let men be men, but let’s not be afraid to see the equality of both.

It seems to me that we are being hypocritical in the Christian church when from the pulpit we give clarification to the word men in a particular passage as meaning all people but yet we are afraid to change it in a dynamic equivalent translation such as the NIV. Or, are we saying that the Bible is literally just for men? I really don’t think so, and neither do I think that Word Publishing Group or Zondervan Publishing House are trying to do away with female or male gender.

David J. McCullough, Associate PastorAgape Fellowship ChurchNashville, Tenn.

* If the folks at the International Bible Society and Zondervan truly believe, as they insist, that they were pursuing the gender-inclusive version in order to improve the accuracy of the NIV, why did they abandon the project so quickly? Genuine improvement in the accuracy of a Bible translation is a worthy and highly desirable goal that all evangelicals would welcome. No amount of hue and cry should deter such a noble endeavor, but notice how quickly they caved in.

Zondervan and IBS disavow the charge that they were pursuing a feminist agenda or were being influenced by the feminist movement. They say they were merely responding to changes in the culture and in language. But what do they think is driving these changes in culture and language except the feminist movement, which has been quite successful in implementing a clearly defined agenda?

CT Senior Editor Ed Dobson (quoted by Michael Maudlin in Inside CT, July 14) laments “the intensity of the fuss” over the NIV controversy. In doing so, he unwittingly brings to the surface a tendency that I deem to be a problem with the NIV “translation,” not just now but since its beginning. Ed Dobson says that “when I preach from the NIV and the text uses a male word that refers to all human beings, I always explain the use of that word” as having generic meaning. He goes on, “This is exegesis—interpreting the text for all to understand.” That is exactly what the preacher should be doing—exegeting the text. But then he indicates that exegesis is also what the NIV translators are doing by next saying, “To call this [using ‘brothers and sisters’ when the original has ‘brothers’] caving in to a feminist agenda … is … shocking.” I agree that making changes like that to the text is exegesis and not properly a translation. It is trying to interpret what the author meant by what he said rather than translating what he said. But NIV translators—not just now but from the beginning—have been going beyond legitimate translation into illegitimate (for a translator) exegesis.

Douglas B. OstienLakeville, Minn.

It appears that many people have forgotten that the Bible is the Word of God, and that God has made sure, in all translations, that the truth is still there.

Our church uses the God’s Word translation, but each member owns and uses different translations. The message is still there, at some times more obscured than others, but it is there.

Find a version that is comfortable for you to read, with wording that fits you, and the meaning will be there. The Bible is open for all, so allow all to read it in a form right for them.

Richard S. SwaineMorristown, Tenn.

It was with tremendous shock and grief that I read that Zondervan and the IBS had decided to abandon plans for a version of the NIV that speaks more clearly to women.

Zondervan and the IBS were not proposing an edition that excised all use of masculine pronouns. Of course God is called Father in the Bible, and Christ is unmistakably male. But women are directly affected by versions of the Bible that constantly use male pronouns when the intent of the text was to speak to all people or all believers.

The fact is that today’s women are very sensitive to language. And so, if a translator knows a Bible verse applies to all people, that translator has a moral obligation to look for language that will actively include women rather than passively allow them to look over male shoulders.

Men who are inclined to minimize this issue need to read Bible verses such as Matthew 16:24-26 and 2 Corinthians 5:16-17, substituting feminine for masculine terms and examine their feelings about them. If their Bibles were addressed to women in this way, would they feel comfortable reading through the feminine pronouns to try to get at the meaning for themselves?

Joan Lloyd GuestCarol Stream, Ill.

* I believe that much ado about nothing was what occurred concerning the NIV revision! I do believe that the IBS and Zondervan were unfairly condemned and attacked by World magazine, and many Christians have fallen into the worldly trap of finding the nearest tree to lynch the latest “subversion” of Christianity!

Although I would not personally choose to buy and use an inclusive language NIV translation, I recognize that there may be believers (and nonbelievers) who would be more comfortable (not with sin! or as in a tickling of the ears) with such a translation if only because a masculine slant to the Scriptures becomes a stumbling block for this day and this age. Our missionaries must often go into a foreign culture and adapt (methodologically) the gospel to that culture without compromising the message. So, too, we should be sensitive to our own subcultures in the West and adapt without compromise (and I believe an inclusive language translation as was proposed did so) to those cultures even if it means being able to give them the Scriptures in a form that allows them to see God and not the manmade elements.

When Mrs. Olasky criticizes [in her World article] the new NIV because they translate “Men of War” as “Warriors,” then we have become guilty of buying into the fictionalized conspiracy of the X-Files, and fallen into the real conspiracy of Satan’s efforts to divide Christendom over petty and insignificant issues.

Scot A. SchiefersteinWyoming, Mich.

You underestimate the intensity of feeling we have toward the NIV: it is the current standard for the church and we have been proving and defending its accuracy for years. Thousands of people are praying that this attack on biblical inerrancy would be defeated. The CBT should know better than to cave in to media-hyped demands of the feminists or to marketing pressures. I am thankful we are resisting the desires of the liberal social engineers to change the meaning of the Bible. Your article does not do criticism of the proposed “gender-inclusive” revision justice. Gender inclusivity involves interpretation of the meaning of the language beyond the bounds of acceptable dynamic equivalency: we should not establish doctrine based on a paraphrase cloaked as a translation. NIV revision could have been a “healthy debate” had those proposing the revisions done so openly and with listening hearts.

Pastor Rich ThorneBettles Bible ChurchBettles Field, Ark.

A “useless theory”Jerry L. Walls’s basic theory [“Can We Be Good Without Hell?” June 16] is rather useless since it is not applicable to anybody. It is not applicable to unbelievers because they cannot avoid hell by being moral. Only by accepting Jesus Christ and his atoning sacrifice can they do so. It is not applicable to believers because we have already been delivered from hell, and believers have other reasons to be moral. The doctrine of hell should motivate believers to proclaim Christ, and it should motivate unbelievers to accept him.

Don KopeckyRochester, Minn.

* Walls’s article sets up the logic of Islam, and the Taliban of Afghanistan would agree that the only way to improve society is to reestablish the fear of hell. Using the fear of hell to effect change is the root of all kinds of legalism. New Testament change is by the power of the Holy Spirit to perfect us in love.

Robert BrowBattersea, Ont., Canada

* I feel compelled to express my amazement that an author in Christianity Today could write an article of that length dealing with that kind of subject without once referring to the Bible in support of his thesis. Oh yes, there was one Scripture reference to Hebrews 5:7, but that passage really had nothing to do with the thrust of his argument. In an issue where Managing Editor Michael Maudlin eloquently proclaimed CT’s attitude toward Scripture in his Inside CT column with phrases like “We at CT revere God’s Word … we love our Bibles,” an occasional reference to the Scriptures in a theological piece would not just seem appropriate but absolutely indispensable.

James M. KutnowSpringfield, Pa.

* Alleluia, hell is back. I have missed it. I mourned that clear cause-and-effect ordering of my moral universe. During hell’s eclipse I read Dante’s Inferno, which made me not only nostalgic for hell, but for purgatory, limbo, and medieval Italy as well. Dante’s perfectly orthodox vision of hell is astonishingly applicable to my contemporary preferences and politics. It afforded me the comfort (and, I admit, the sport) of placing my neighbors and competitors in well-defined retributory arenas.

Carol DeChantChicago, Ill.

Has life lost all meaning?I found “Deadly Compassion” [June 16] interesting and troublesome. As a Christian, it is difficult for me to accept the fact that the world we live in today has so degenerated that life has lost all meaning. Abortion at one end of life and physican-assisted suicide (PAS) at the other end are telling signs of the moral decay that has overtaken our society.

Dr. Lynn’s comment that “my experience with churches has been fairly grim” highlights the role that the church has played in answering the needs of its people. In an era where the battle in the church has been between meeting the spiritual or physical needs of society, this article states clearly that we have done neither well. For society to have moved from the position of shock and dismay over PAS to one of complacency and a foregone conclusion—as Dr. Pellegrino states in his comments that he “expected that euthanasia will eventually be legalized”—demonstrates a clear message that the church has lost its ability to affect society.

It will take both the law of Scripture and the gospel of Christ for the church to undo its current position. We need a clear biblical understanding of our moral responsibilities and the grace of God to fulfill those responsibilities.

Stan GuyArnold, Mo.

* I believe there is a silent majority that is in favor of some sort of PAS, but reticent to give verbal expression to it because it “would not seem Christian.” But let’s face it, “It is appointed unto man once to die,” and one of the great questions that leaves us is “when and how.” My guess is that in 20 to 50 years we won’t be able to die—50 years ago we just died; today we face the matter of when to stop life support to the very ill. In 50 years we will be able to replace every single part of a human body, of that I have no doubt, and when we can do that the bar will be raised so high that it will be virtually impossible to die because the Christian community will expect us to use the newest technology to maintain life—what a dreadful prospect. What we need are some answers to managing this matter that rightly understand what human life is and when it needs to end, because if we get to where we are in the replacement business, we will have a problem so large that it will be beyond our grasp to solve.

Bob TurnerSimpsonville, S.C.

ClarificationInside CT for July 14 (“Accusing the Brothers (and Sisters),” p. 4) did not, and was not intended to, accuse all critics of the inclusive NIV of “fundamentalist political correctness,” but only those who resorted to attacking the translators’ motives and fostering guilt by association.

—Eds.

Brief letters are welcome. They may be edited for space and clarity and must include the writer’s name and address. Send to Eutychus, Christianity Today, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188; fax: 630/260-0114. E-mail: cteditor@christianitytoday.com. Letters preceded by ” * ” were received online.

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True or False? The Founding Fathers designed the First Amendment to the Constitution to protect religion from government interference and from the unfair advantages and inevitable oppression that come from conferring official status on any one religion. Well, it all depends which Founding Father you ask, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson.

In the August issue of Commentary, Richard A. Samuelson reports that Adams believed "the religious impulse was inherent in man"; despite the sordid history of religious wars, religion was the source of genuine piety and faith. Any attempt to uproot it would "wreck something with much potential good in it." Adams looked for the good in all religions and welcomed all to the public square. He expected disestablishment to bear good fruit in both piety and public policy.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, had quite different purposes. "Like many other Enlightenment thinkers," writes Samuelson, "Jefferson saw the sum total of man's religious past as one long line of crusades and persecutions piling abuse upon abuse and spewing rivers of blood." Jefferson had great hopes that once traditional religion was disestablished, and thus deprived of its political influence, the good religion of Reason would drive out the bad religion of revelation and tradition.

These Founding Fathers agreed on disestablishment, toleration, and on free exercise, but their vastly different goals are still with us over two centuries later. We now find the Supreme Court displaying a Jeffersonian disdain for the religion of ordinary Americans and defining religious liberty so narrowly that it puts the burden of proof not on the state, which proposes to interfere with religious practice, but on the believer, who wishes an exemption from some generally applicable regulation.

RFRA as so much riffraffThis summer, in the case of Boerne v. Flores, the Court engaged in a power struggle with Congress and set aside the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA; CT, Aug. 11, 1997, p. 48). In so doing, it also returned religious liberty to the perilous position it held following Justice Scalia's majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith (1990). In denying the right of two Native Americans to use peyote in their worship, Scalia wrote: "We cannot afford the luxury of deeming presumptively invalid, as applied to a religious objector, every regulation of conduct that does not protect an interest of the highest order." In that dense legalese, Scalia revealed that religious liberty, as the Court had previously defined it in 1963, was a "luxury." That prior definition, which Scalia disdained, required the government to prove (1) it had a compelling state interest that trumped religious motivations, and (2) it was trying to protect that interest in a way that least burdened religion. At that time we wrote: "Scalia displayed an illogic that if cited in future decisions could obliterate the entire force of our 'First Freedom.' " We were not far off the mark.

Although Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Boerne v. Flores was consumed with questions about the limits of congressional power, the decision plays into several prevalent but erroneous notions. The first is the secularist axiom that religion is inherently subversive to public order—that if you exempt religious behavior from generally applicable laws, there is no telling where it will stop short of anarchy.

But we must ask the opposite question: If you do not exempt religious behavior (as odd as it sometimes is) from generally applicable laws, where will we stop short of majoritarian oppression?

Governments rarely fear the religion of the majority, the bland cultural Protestantism of the American middle class, for example, or cozily co-opted Orthodoxy of the Soviet era. These can be tamed and domesticated. Such religions are usually manageable and can be turned into public relations tools for politicians and, worse, for the suppression of unpopular religions that encourage people to resist the assaults of hedonic society on the spirits of all and on the lives of the inconvenient frail and unborn.

Such a mindset continues to be revealed in Russia where the legislature recently passed laws severely restricting the activities of all religious groups that were not registered 15 years ago (CT, Aug. 11, 1997, p. 61). Although the Russian Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience, and Boris Yeltsin has now vetoed the legislation, the attempts to favor the religions that had been successfully co-opted during the Soviet era are not dead. Any other religion, Russian politicians know, is truly democratic and dangerous.

Deriding the "hobbyhorse"The second erroneous notion the Court has played into is the sense that religion has no special place or privilege, that it should be treated as if it were a hobby or personal preference (like golf or Barbie collecting). But religion is not a hobby—it is a source of a compelling vision that can provide passionate commitment to the fruitful ordering of society and a sharp critique when society goes astray. That is why White House counsel Joel Klein wrote in defense of RFRA, "the President recognizes that religion is not just another value or activity. He believes that religion has a unique role in American life, and that it deserves special protection that is consistent with the Constitution."

Note that Klein wrote "special protection," not "equal protection." When Americans forget the special place that religion holds in our history and should hold in our common life, then even equal protection is in danger. Constitutions, Russian or American, are no safeguard without the vigilance of the citizens. The Supreme Court has not directly threatened religious groups as the Russian legislature did, but it has blindly created the legal environment in which oppression can sprout and grow. The next move belongs to Congress: May it once again stand firm for what the Court's majority has forgotten.

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When former President Jimmy Carter recently addressed the Christian Booksellers Association meeting in Atlanta, he was asked how Christians should respond to the non-Christian culture in which we live today. The questioner seemed to suggest that, though America was once a Christian country, it has now become not only secular but is hostile toward Christian faith.

In response, Carter told a story from his tenure in the White House. Idi Amin, the tyrant then in power in Uganda, took 52 American missionaries hostage, threatening to kill them, one by one. With anguish, Carter appealed to other African leaders to lean on Amin in order to get the missionaries freed. The strategy worked: Amin backed down and released those American expatriates.

Carter then informed the missionaries that he would immediately send a plane to transport them to their homeland. But to Carter's surprise, everyone said, "We aren't leaving Uganda. Even though our lives have been threatened, this is where God has called us, these are the people we are to serve, and here is where we are staying."

Carter never did answer his CBA questioner directly. Perhaps he didn't agree with the interrogator's assumptions. Or he might have been trying to put the concern in a different perspective, just as Jesus did by telling parables. Was Carter saying that the opposition Christians experience in this country pales in relation to the persecution so many Christians face around the world? Or was he saying that we have to rethink our stance in relation to our cultural context, seeing ourselves as missionaries in service to it, rather than power brokers who try to control it?

A missionary strategyWhatever Carter was trying to convey, the person asking the question was right about the shift that has come about in the influence of Christianity on our culture. Truth telling, promise keeping, sexual purity, and marital fidelity were all assumed in the environment in which I was reared. Only "worldly" folk worked on Sundays. But there are few such enclaves anymore like the one in which I was reared. And we cannot look to the culture at large to support our values.

But should this shift away from an explicitly Christian environment be viewed purely as a threat? Or should it be seized as an opportunity to recover a New Testament sense of being a missionary community in a "foreign" world?

I sometimes wonder what we would come up with if the church would do something like "zero-based" missionary planning for American society—that is, drop all our assumptions and current strategies about how we live in and carry out the missionary mandate of the gospel. What if we were to assume that we were coming to this country for the first time? How then would we live? Proclaim the gospel?

For one thing, our stance in relation to our society should be one of compassion, like Jesus' when he wept over Jerusalem because it didn't know what made for peace. For another, it could mean recognizing we are in the peculiar position of being guests in a "host culture."

Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf recently shared that, after he became a naturalized American citizen, he received a note from his in-laws, including this quotation from the second-century Christian letter to Diognetus: "As citizens, Christians share all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. … "

Said Volf, "The words put in a memorable way the dialectic of distance and belonging, of strangeness and domesticity" that is characteristic of Christians living in this world. We find a home here, yet we are not totally at home here. This is the stance of the Christian people, whether we happen to live in the land of our birth or some other land.

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With this issue of CT we begin a new tradition: an annual section devoted to Christian fiction. By “Christian fiction” we mean fiction that is informed by a Christian world-view. That includes, but is not limited to, fiction that is issued by evangelical publishers and sold primarily in Christian bookstores. It includes writers as various as Georges Bernanos, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Madeleine L’Engle, C. S. Lewis, Janette Oke, Walker Percy, Brock and Bodie Thoene, and Walter Wangerin, Jr.

The territory is vast, and we should be suspicious of any sentence beginning “Christian fiction is … ,” whether the tone is boosterish or dismissive. We’re on safer ground simply noting how strange it is—from the commonsensical materialist’s point of view—that human beings invest so much energy and passion in creating alternative worlds. In doing so, J. R. R. Tolkien said, we are “sub-creators,” imitating the supreme imaginative act of the God in whose image we are made.

The geography of the Christian imagination encompasses the windswept plains of Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall (just reissued in a handsome paperback edition in Graywolf Press’s Rediscovery series) and the slightly rundown postwar English parishes of Barbara Pym. So in this issue we range from Jan Karon’s Mitford, a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone else’s business, to the apocalyptic visions of a trio of end-times novelists. And because part of our purpose is to encourage excellence in Christian fiction, we’re publishing a new short story by James Calvin Schaap.

Let us know what you think of this special section, and what you would like to see in the future. We look forward to hearing from you.

John Wilson, Book Review Editor

QuizListed below are the first sentences of ten novels, representative of the spectrum of Christian fiction. Name the author and title of each book.

1. It was a dark and stormy night.*

2. I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man.

3.“Love?”

4. Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young trees and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

5. Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.

6. A dozen students are present around the long white table, four men, eight women.

7. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

8. “Damaris!”

9. One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds.

10. A confused impression of English tourists shuffling round a church in Ravenna, peering at mosaics, came to Catherine Oliphant as she sat brooding over her pot of tea.

*No, not Bulwer-Lytton—or Snoopy.

All entries (one per person) must be clearly written or typed on a postcard and mailed to Christianity Today Fiction Quiz, 465 Gundersen Dr., Carol Stream, IL 60188, and must include complete return address. Entries must be received no later than September 15, 1997. Employees of CT and their families are not eligible to enter. The winning entry will be the first correct answer drawn at random. The winner will receive a box of books.

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.