Page 4683 – Christianity Today (2024)

Redemption is a hard thing to pull off, either in life or on the screen, but in “Dead Man Walking” the very deep mystery of a relentless Love assumes a palpable heft that rolls right over audiences, even secular ones.

Most stories are journeys of one sort or another, but very few take us to the place “Dead Man Walking” travels. The waters there are deep and troubled, made so by the confluence of many “rivers” of tears, as one character puts it. Topically, the film takes viewers into the tangled debate on capital punishment.

To his great credit, director Tim Robbins’s screenplay avoids Hollywood’s accustomed sanctimony and deck-stacking in treating “serious” moral or political issues. Refusing to mince the horrors of either the crime or the punishment, Robbins eschews formulas, staying close to the heart and bone of those who do murder and those who suffer its aftermath. Here are no last-minute escapes, revelations, reprieves, or pardons, not for anybody: victims, families, activists, murderers, or viewers.

“Dead Man Walking” is mostly about people who by different routes find themselves amid life’s worst tragedies and deepest griefs, a place where cliches–cinematic, political, or religious–simply don’t work very well. In particular, the film centers on the search by a nun and a convict for a Christian redemption of the old-style guilt-contrition-forgiveness sort. For this soul-shaking excursion, we must thank Robbins’s tough-minded screenplay and direction, riveting performances by Academy Award-winner Susan Sarandon (Best Actress) and Sean Penn (who was nominated for an Academy Award), and perhaps most of all, the candor, compassion, and courage of a real-life nun, Sister Helen Prejean, on whose book the story is based.

The result is an arresting, utterly credible, and profoundly moving exploration of Christianity’s capacity to console the earth’s most forlorn creatures. Surely, the film’s wrestling with capital punishment is passionate, smart, and honest, but it also argues that there are perhaps more vital concerns than by whose hands or what means we die, matters that involve the inmost transactions of the soul.

Sister Helen Prejean (Sarandon) teaches adult literacy in a Catholic mission house in a New Orleans ghetto. In the film as in the book, she seems devoid of pretension or self-righteousness, and her good works are merely a necessary something she does, like eating, laughing, washing her car, or praying. So when asked by a prison ministry leader to write an inmate, she matter-of-factly agrees, thinking little of the gesture. The prison’s old-school Catholic chaplain warns her that she has no idea what awaits her in trying to minister to inmates who are, he contends, a mean and despicable lot.

And he is right, of course, but also grievously wrong in his incomprehension of his theology and the men for whom it was meant. The prisoner Sister Helen writes and then visits is Matthew Poncelet (Penn), guilty of rape and murder in a lover’s lane double homicide, and he has only a few weeks to live. She soon finds herself getting Poncelet a new lawyer, protesting the death penalty, and serving as Poncelet’s spiritual adviser as execution approaches.

Lest this sound too contrived, rather like “The Flying Nun at Alcatraz,” the filmmakers go out of their way to imbed the story, like Prejean’s actual experience, in the stark horrors of the crime, the criminal, and the costs. Brief, hauntingly effective intercuts of the murders repeatedly remind viewers just how wanton, bestial, and vicious were Poncelet’s actions. And then appear the parents of the victims, whom Sister Helen meets at pardon board hearings and execution vigils. They accuse her of selective sympathy, lavishing her care on beasts rather than the suffering bystanders, and with the stunning power of white-hot rage, they set forth the unfathomable heinousness of the crimes against their children. A last dose of hard reality comes from the killer himself, who is, to say the least, uninviting, not at all the nice-guy-framed or the good-heart who falls afoul of circ*mstance.

Poncelet’s character conflates the histories and personalities of two different men for whom Prejean served as spiritual adviser, and very little happens in the film that did not occur in Prejean’s encounter with them. Most folks would say that Poncelet is just plain no good, with all the moral sense of a scavenger, taking what he can when he can. He is proud of his badness–indeed, full of swagger–except perhaps for the scavenger part, which he fully denies. Poncelet features himself a tough guy, autonomous and fierce, and he proclaims indebtedness to none. Even his looks suggest his effrontery: pompadour, sideburns, well-combed goatee, and a billboard’s worth of elaborate tattoos. At the trial, he had lipped off to the judge, smirked at the verdict, and taunted his victims’ parents. In death-house media interviews, he spews white supremacist bile. During Sister Helen’s first visits, he flirts, and she rebukes him for playing silly “macho games” with “death breathing down your neck.”

In his last days, he shows no remorse, insisting he is a victim of the state and the parents who want him to “fry.” He attributes his crime to bad influences, booze, drugs, and fatigue. As a number of critics have commented, Penn the actor utterly disappears into the chasm of this man’s psyche.

It is a lasting shock to Poncelet (and viewers) that Sister Helen is a very tough nun, who cares as much about saving his soul as saving his life. To this end, she abides none of his self-dodging, his elaborate gambits of evasion that fix blame on everyone but himself. When he claims that his belief in Jesus assures him of safe passage to heaven, Sister Helen quickly disabuses him of the notion that belief by itself is “a free-admission ticket.” Rather, she says, salvation entails the hard work of owning up and regretting.

In another ploy, Poncelet compares his own execution, which he deems unjust, to Jesus’ death, and to this Sister Helen firmly replies that the two are not at all similar because Poncelet raped and murdered while Jesus “changed the world with love.” And on goes their soul-wrestle, the question of the morality of execution largely fading into the background. Ultimately, the resolute caritas of Sister Helen combines with the terror of approaching death to jolt Poncelet’s soul to honesty and remorse. Then follows his brief but deeply glad recognition that in some strange way he must “die to find love.”

At the end, Poncelet knows the fullness of the truth that sets him free, as Sister Helen has oft insisted, and in his last moments, she pronounces him a “son of God,” able at last, even as he dies, to look upon a “face of love” simply because of the perduring reality that “Christ is here.” Here, made manifest, and with stunning clarity (as Neal Plantinga said in a talk alluding to the film), Love overcomes death.

It goes without saying that redemption is a hard thing to pull off, either in life or on the screen, but here the very deep mystery of a relentless Love assumes a palpable heft, a kind of clout, that rolls right over audiences, even notably secular ones. For a while at least, viewers embrace a psycho-spiritual logic that contends it is somehow terribly important that, before he dies, Poncelet reckon with his deeds and self-deceit. Forgiveness and reconciliation matter desperately, ultimately, and not all the accumulated psycho-reductionism of our time can diminish that implacable existential demand, even in the benighted Poncelet, for whom a thousand excuses might be found. Thus we are made.

And this happens in a region of human experience of such darkness and abandonment that no light whatever seems to reach it. This is the woebegotten place to which the film hauls viewers, a place of lostness like Golgotha, a thief on the cross, a murderer strapped to a gurney. Of course, against all odds, Light does come, and it bestows joy, reconciliation, peace. Robbins and his actors distill this peculiar turn into a few minutes of luminous filmmaking that permit audiences to walk with Prejean into Poncelet’s darkness and, having absorbed that, into the glad, but wholly credible surprise of breaking Light. Somehow with the necessity of reckoning comes the thirst for reconciliation.

“Dead Man Walking” does not answer its questions about capital punishment, and big-time critics disagree on where the film comes out, which is pretty much what Robbins intended. All must wonder and wrestle. By the last scenes, it has in effect turned its attention elsewhere.

The story does not end with an execution, which suggests this is finally about more than capital punishment. After Poncelet’s death by lethal injection (Prejean’s two friends died by electrocution) comes the funeral and Prejean’s encounter with a victim’s father (Raymond J. Barry), a man whose loss has devastated his life (his wife is divorcing him, having wearied of his grief). Although Poncelet has begged forgiveness and died for his crime, this man cannot find it in his heart to forgive. With a wordless, poignant beauty, the last scene commences for Prejean and the haunted father still another journey. It begins where Poncelet’s ended: with the ever-shattering recognition that Love beckons all to the hard, deep work of reconciliation.

From death row, then, a destination where life’s starkest realities are magnified, comes a story that illumines and freshens, even for lifelong virtuosos of the church, the ever-strange wellsprings of Christian belief. Not bad, for a movie.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS and CULTURE

“Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt” for environmental degredation. So argued historian Lynn White, Jr., in a much-reprinted article.(1) The debate has taken many turns since White’s article first appeared in the 1960s. Some have argued that an exploitative attitude toward nature is built into the biblical world-view, which must therefore be rejected. Others have suggested that the biblical notion of stewardship, properly understood, is compatible with contemporary environmentalist concerns. Still others have disputed the notion that Christianity is significantly responsible for environmental abuse in the first place. Moreover, there is no consensus about the severity of our ecological crisis, or what the response to it should to be. See, for example, the lively debate in “Creation at Risk? Religion, Science, and the Environment,” edited by Michael Cromartie (Eerdmans, 166 pp.; $15, paper).

Despite such disagreement, there has been a growing responsiveness to environmental issues among American Christians since the first Earth Day in 1970. Many mainline Protestants have wholeheartedly embraced the ecology movement, as Robert Booth Fowler has chronicled in “The Greening of Protestant Thought” (University of North Carolina Press, 252 pp.; $14.95, paper). Similarly, the bishops of the Catholic Church have forthrightly endorsed mainstream environmental causes. Finally, on the academic scene, ecological theology–much of it in tension with orthodoxy–is a flourishing enterprise. For a representative study, see “The Greening of Theology: The Ecological Models of Rosemary Radford Ruether,” Joseph Sittler, and Jurgen Moltmann, by Steven Bouma-Prediger (Scholars Press, 338 pp.; $23.95, paper).

Are evangelical Protestants left out? Many have argued that doctrinal distinctives have led Bible-believing Christians to slight the environment. Evangelical sociologist Tony Campolo, for example, has blamed premillennialism: If the world is bound to get worse, and Jesus is returning soon, why worry about ecology? Another frequently offered explanation is that evangelicals may have trouble identifying with environmentalism because of the New Age ties of some of the movement’s leaders.

But are these charges accurate? Until fairly recently, most such discussion was largely conjecture. Scholars had very little evidence about the link between religious influences on the one hand, and environmental attitudes on the other. In recent years, however, we have conducted several studies that address this connection: surveys of clergy, religious activists in politics, political party activists, and average citizens. What can we say on the basis of these studies? Do conservative Protestants conform to the portrait painted by their environmentalist critics?

First, a 1988-89 survey of Protestant clergy reveals some very clear differences between evangelical and mainline traditions. We asked pastors to list “the two or three most important problems confronting the country,” tell how often they addressed environmental issues, and report whether they favored stricter environmental controls even if the results were higher prices and fewer jobs. As the table shows, evangelicals are much less likely than mainline ministers to name the environment as a major issue, address it as a part of their ministry, or support stricter regulations (although half do).(2)

What causes these differences? Although specific denominational factors no doubt have an impact, the main influences are theological, especially eschatology and affiliation with conservative religious movements. As the table shows, premillennialists seldom perceive or address environmental problems and are also least in favor of more stringent regulation; nonpremillennialist clergy hold down the other end of the spectrum. Similarly, ministers who identify with the fundamentalist movement are much less likely than religious liberals to see the environment as an important problem, address it frequently, or advocate stricter regulations. These religious factors overlap, of course, but each makes its own contribution to environmental attitudes. Thus, the more dispensationalist in belief and the more fundamentalist in affiliation a minister, the less likely he is to see or address environmental problems or endorse policies to deal with them.

Are these results the artifact of the specific denominations we studied? Certainly not. The 1990-91 Wheaton Religious Activist Study surveyed almost 1,000 evangelical, mainline, and Catholic clergy and over 4,000 laity active in religiously related political interest groups, from a wide range of denominations. We found once again that evangelical clergy were least inclined to see the environment as a major problem, put a high priority on the environment, or favor strong environmental policies. And the table shows that the laity faithfully mirrored their pastors’ views, although laity in each tradition tend to be slightly less environmentalist than the clergy. Once again, basic religious measures of premillennial eschatology and fundamentalist movement identification are important correlates of less sympathetic attitudes toward the environment (data not shown).

It was deja vu all over again among contributors to various Democratic and Republican party causes in 1988-89, most of whom were not drawn to politics by explicitly religious concerns. Once more, evangelicals had the lowest probability of belonging to an environmental organization, favoring increased spending on environmental programs, or feeling affinity for the Sierra Club, a centerpiece of the mainstream environmental movement. Mainline Protestants and Catholics were more sympathetic to environmental groups and causes, but were far surpassed by secular activists–those without any religious attachments at all. Again, adherence to biblical literalism, attachment to fundamentalist or Pentecostal movements, and frequency of church attendance all produced less support for the environment among party activists (data not shown).

What about the folks in the pew? In the 1994 edition of the University of Michigan’s biennial National Election Study, we find that regular churchgoers in each tradition differ from each other and from secular voters. As the table shows, those who attend evangelical churches are least likely to favor increased environmental spending or feel close to environmentalists; secular voters again prove most sympathetic to ecological concerns. (Interestingly, all groups are less environmentalist than they were in 1992.) Similarly, voters who held most strongly to biblical inerrancy, identified with fundamentalism or Pentecostalism, and attended church most frequently were least environmentalist, while those with less orthodox perspectives were friendlier to environmental concerns (data not shown).(3)

What are we to make of all this? It is clear that certain themes present in evangelical Christianity have contributed, as critics have charged, to a diminution of environmental concern. Premillennial eschatology, in particular, is strongly associated with suspicion of environmental causes, as is identification with fundamentalism. Perhaps it is understandable that the movement which so carefully guarded Christian orthodoxy early in this century is suspicious of social movements with spiritual credentials anything but orthodox. Still, we think that a more careful reading of the Scriptures can produce a faithful Christian theology of care for the natural world.

1. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” “Science,” Vol. 155, March 10, 1967, pp. 1203-7.

2. The evangelical denominations in our 1988-89 surveys include the Assemblies of God, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Evangelical Covenant Church (surveyed in 1992), and the Christian Reformed Church. Mainline churches were the Reformed Church in America, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The proportion of ministers who addressed environmental issues varied considerably: the Assemblies of God (25 percent), the Southern Baptist Convention (26 percent), the Evangelical Covenant Church (34 percent), the Christian Reformed Church (51 percent), the Reformed Church in America (54 percent), the United Methodist Church (67 percent), the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (62 percent), and the Disciples of Christ (64 percent). A similar pattern appeared when we asked these same pastors whether they perceive the environment as one of the nation’s two or three most important problems: only 6 percent of Assemblies pastors and 20 percent of Southern Baptists said yes, compared to 31 percent of the Presbyterian pastors surveyed and 30 percent of the Disciples of Christ.

3. For further information on the studies summarized here, see James L. Guth, Lyman A. Kellstedt, Corwin E. Smidt, and John C. Green, “Theological Perspectives and Environmentalism Among Religious Activists,” “Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion,” Vol. 32, No. 4 (December 1993), pp. 373-82; and “Faith and the Environment: Religious Beliefs and Attitudes on Environmental Policy,” “American Journal of Political Science,” Vol. 39, No. 2 (May 1995), pp. 364-81.

FAITH AND ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDES

1988-89 Clergy Studies

RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Evangelical:

Most Important 17%

Address Often 34%

Strict Laws 53%

Mainline:

Most Important 25%

Address Often 62%

Strict Laws 88%

THEOLOGY

Premillennialist:

Most Important 11%

Address Often 27%

Strict Laws 50%

Nonpremillennialist:

Most Important 18%

Address Often 62%

Strict Laws 90%

RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT

Fundamentalist:

Most Important 6%

Address Often 28%

Strict Laws 45%

Liberal:

Most Important 32%

Address Often 72%

Strict Laws 94%

1990-91 Religious Activist Study

CLERGY RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Evangelical:

Important Problem 15%

Top Priority 21%

Strict Laws 54%

Mainline:

Important Problem 36%

Top Priority 58%

Strict Laws 88%

Catholic:

Important Problem 23%

Top Priority 61%

Strict Laws 91%

LAITY RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Evangelical:

Important Problem 13%

Top Priority 20%

Strict Laws 46%

Mainline:

Important Problem 28%

Top Priority 49%

Strict Laws 74%

Catholic:

Important Problem 31%

Top Priority 52%

Strict Laws 82%

1988-89 Democratic and Republican Political Activist Study

RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Evangelical:

Member Group 20%

Spend More 30%

Close to Sierra Club 22%

Mainline:

Member Group 33%

Spend More 34%

Close to Sierra Club 30%

Catholic:

Member Group 28%

Spend More 53%

Close to Sierra Club 44%

Secular:

Member Group 56%

Spend More 67%

Close to Sierra Club 61%

National Election Study, 1994: Churchgoing & Secular Voters

RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Evangelical:

Increase Spending 20%

Close to Environmentalists 40%

Mainline:

Increase Spending 26%

Close to Environmentalists 48%

Catholic:

Increase Spending 33%

Close to Environmentalists 48%

Secular:

Increase Spending 42%

Close to Environmentalists 62%

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS and CULTURE

“Integrity”

By Stephen L. Carter

BasicBooks

277 pp.; $24

In his new book “Integrity,” Stephen Carter sounds despairing at times when he considers the level of public discourse in the 1990s–“what appears to be an increasingly bitter and even mean political era.” Carter’s own career, however, suggests that his assessment may be too pessimistic.

Stephen Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has been on the faculty since 1982, first gained a wide audience with his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” (1991). Even more influential was “The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion” (1993; an updated paperback edition with a new foreword appeared in 1994). “Contemporary American politics faces few greater dilemmas than deciding how to deal with the resurgence of religious belief,” Carter wrote. From his perspective as a Christian and a political liberal, he proceeded to chastise those (including many of his academic peers) who are openly contemptuous of religion and religious believers, particularly when they also happen to be politically conservative.

“Integrity” is the first of three books that Carter plans to write on what he calls ” ‘pre-political’ virtues–that is, elements of good character that cross the political spectrum and, indeed, without which other political views and values are useless.” (The next book in the series, Carter says, will be on civility.) Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., talked recently with Carter about his new book.

WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS BOOK, AND WHY DID YOU WRITE IT NOW?

We live in a time when people are giving attention, finally, to the spiritual dimensions of public life. Our democratic institutions are at risk precisely because politics has become so relentlessly materialistic, across the political spectrum. As a result, people are feeling increasingly alienated from public life. It strikes me that when you talk about the values that are missing, the virtues we want in our leaders and our institutions, integrity has to rank first. If you lack integrity, nothing else that you say you believe matters, because people have no reason to believe you when you tell them, This is what I stand for.

WHEN WE SAY A MAN OR A WOMAN IS A PERSON OF INTEGRITY, WHAT ARE WE SAYING ABOUT THEM?

People use the word integrity in a lot of different ways. If you look at the philosophical literature, it tends to define it in a very unsatisfactory way. The literature suggests that integrity means living life according to a consistent set of principles. I don’t like that, because what if the principles are bad? Could Hitler have integrity? The philosophical literature says, “Sure he could, as long as he was being consistent.” I think consistency is the wrong criterion. While it’s important that you live a life along a set of principles, it matters where they come from. What seems to me most important is that all of us be willing to take the time and the energy to be deeply discerning and to try to be sure that we’re right. So to me integrity is living your life according to a deeply discerned set of principles.

Integrity ends up having three steps. The first step to a life of integrity is to spend the time, to make the effort to discern what is right and wrong. The second is to struggle to live according to that sense of right and wrong. And the third, the step I think we tend to overlook, is to be willing to be open and emphatic about the rules that we’re living by: to say why we’re doing the things that we’re doing.

Chuck Colson wrote a piece in the “Wall Street Journal” recently where he mentioned that a warden said to him, “Ten years ago I could talk to these kids about right and wrong. Now they don’t know what I’m talking about.”

While I’m not a sixties basher, one of the bad things we did in the sixties was to say that all the problems in American society can be traced to repressive traditions. Some people took that as a license to overturn all values in society. So nowadays you have a culture in which, if you simply talk about right and wrong, many people will say that you’re being oppressive.

William Bennett says the reason that so many Americans don’t like to talk about religion is that religions tend to have rules to which you’re held accountable. That’s true. They do, and that’s good. It seems to me that one of the most important things about living a life of integrity is to be willing to say, “I am governed in my conduct by something other than my own immediate desires.” That’s just fundamental.

The popular injunction, “Don’t impose your morality on me,” is a non sequitur, because all laws impose someone’s morality on somebody else. Law has only two functions. Law says that you must do what you don’t want to do, or that you cannot do what you do want to do. Every law falls into one of those two categories. So when people say, “Don’t impose any morality on me,” they really mean, don’t impose that particular rule. Well that’s a fair proposition. We can then debate that. We can discuss whether this is a good or bad thing for law to do. But we have to be able to have those discussions. We have to be able to say some things are right and some things are wrong.

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTEGRITY AND TOLERANCE?

If you look at the history of Western thought, tolerance developed as a solution to religious warfare. It’s very important to understand that. The idea of tolerance was “We all worship the same God, we can find a way to live together. You can worship God in your way over in your village, I can worship God my way over in my village, and we can rely on what we share and try to live together.” That’s very different from the fashionable notion of tolerance as suspending moral judgment. Whenever you decide to suspend moral judgment, I think you move away from the path of civilization. You don’t just move away from integrity, you move toward a world in which people lack a set of common values.

ON THE SUBJECT OF ABORTION, YOU MAKE THIS COMMENT: “ABORTION IS ONE OF THE FEW MORAL ISSUES IN AMERICAN HISTORY ABOUT WHICH IT IS POSSIBLE TO SAY, WITH NO SENSE OF IRONY, THAT BOTH SIDES ARE RIGHT.”

That’s a little jarring, I realize. When I said, “both sides are right,” what I really meant was, both sides have a point. Saying “right” is a little too strong, and I’m sorry that I wrote it that way.

Both the pro-choice and the pro-life arguments have at their core sensible, humanitarian, and eminently reasonable ideas. They’re very different ideas. But because they’re both reasonable, it strikes me that this can’t possibly be an arena in which the Constitution commands one answer or the other. This is an arena in which culture or politics is going to determine the answer, just as it happens on so many other questions where both sides’ views are reasonable.

It is perfectly reasonable, it seems to me, to say that it is vitally important as a matter of either privacy or equality for women to be able to make this choice without being interfered with. It is also perfectly reasonable to say that this is human life, or so close to human life that we cannot allow its casual destruction. Those are both reasonable and thoughtful positions; they are not morally monstrous. But they are entirely inconsistent. When you have an inconsistency between reasonable views, you resolve it through dialogue and politics. You don’t usually resolve it by saying that one side wins and the other side loses as a matter of constitutional law.

EXCEPT TO SAY THAT POLITICS MAY LEAD TO THE CHANGING OF THE LAW.

That’s true, politics may lead to a changing of the law. My concern about Roe v. Wade is that it changed what was a vibrant and thoughtful moral, cultural, and political debate into a legal debate. We do that all too often, and it’s unfortunate. It allows one side to say, “I don’t have to listen to you because I have a constitutional right.” While that’s sort of technically true, you can’t really have a discussion in that atmosphere.

YOU SAY, “WE HAVE TO STOP ALLOWING SO MUCH OF POLITICS AND PRINCIPLE TO BE DICTATED BY THE NATION’S MORAL DIVISIONS OVER ABORTION . . . IF OUR POLITICS IS TO BECOME A POLITICS OF INTEGRITY, WE MUST NOT ALLOW ONE ISSUE TO GENERATE SO MANY OF THE RULES AND RHETORIC, FROM EITHER LEFT OR RIGHT.” BUT WOULDN’T YOU REJECT THAT LINE OF ARGUMENT IF THE ISSUE WERE SLAVERY? SOME PEOPLE SEE PARALLELS HERE.

I don’t deny those parallels, and I don’t deny that many people see this issue as crucial. At the same time, I’m concerned about the view, especially in the news media, that this is the only issue that matters.

You would also grant that in the sixties there were some who said, “I wish these people would stop talking about race so much. It’s not the only issue that matters.”

Yes, I do grant that. But there’s an important distinction. In the sixties, yes, race was a central issue. But there was an enormous difference between the politics of that time and the politics of today. In the sixties we had a political dialogue that enabled us to talk about big issues. We talked–we argued–about race. We talked about war and peace. We talked about ending poverty. Issues that are central to perennial human concerns were at the top of the national agenda. Today we have vehement arguments over the proper rate at which to tax capital gains.

You see, it’s not that abortion is an unimportant issue. The problem is we’re talking about it in a political era in which we seem unable to conduct productive public discussion of important issues. We talk about abortion, but we don’t talk about it, really. We yell. We scream. We sneer. And the media portray the abortion issue in a way that encourages us to think that everybody yells and screams about it.

But, in fact, the public shouting match isn’t an accurate reflection of what Americans think about abortion. The survey results have been pretty consistent for a long time. There is a set of restrictions on abortion that a majority of Americans favor very strongly; at the same time, a majority of Americans are rather uneasy about banning the practice entirely.

CAN YOU THINK OF TIMES IN YOUR PAST WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN LISTENING IN AN OPEN-MINDED FASHION AND SOMEONE HAS PERSUADED YOU OR AT LEAST FURTHER NUANCED SOMETHING YOU HELD STRONGLY SO THAT NOW YOU SEE IT DIFFERENTLY?

I could name quite a number of examples of that. Maybe I should mention one or two. In “The Culture of Disbelief,” I talk about people who want to ban the teaching of evolution. That is a subject on which I used to be very close-minded. I used to teach a course on law and science. When I taught the cases about trying to ban the teaching of evolution, or demanding equal time for evolution and creation, I presented the issue as a matter of narrow-minded sectarians trying to take over the apparatus of the schools. Then one of my students brought me up short. My student said you have to look at this from the point of view of the parents. All they want is what’s best for their children. They are deeply concerned about their children losing what’s good in their family’s religious tradition because of the way that the alternatives are presented. That really set me to thinking. I don’t believe I could have written “The Culture of Disbelief without that conversation.”

YOU’VE OBSERVED THAT MANY RELIGIOUS PEOPLE ARE CARICATURED BY THEIR OPPONENTS–AND BY JOURNALISTS.

It’s sad, but it’s true. I don’t want to sweep too broadly, but all too often the vision of religion and religious people that you get in the media is so one-sided, such a caricature. Abortion is an excellent example of this, where you get one story about the opposition to abortion. It’s basically Pat Robertson if you read the papers, or if you watch television especially.

OR A STORY ABOUT SOMEONE WHO’S BLOWN UP AN ABORTION CLINIC.

Yes, all the complexity of the situation is ironed out. Daniel Berrigan, the same Daniel Berrigan who crusaded against the Vietnam War, now crusades against abortion. But I have seen maybe one story about that in the last decade. It doesn’t fit the standard scenario.

OR NAT HENTOFF.

Or Nat Hentoff, an atheist who is against abortion. But my two biggest bugaboos are the caricatures of evangelicals and of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. There was that notorious story in the “Washington Post” which said that religious conservatives are “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” And the next day a retraction was issued that, instead of apologizing, just said there’s no data to support this characterization.

I’ve met moderates and even political liberals who are involved in the Christian Coalition. At a speaking engagement, I met two young women who call themselves political liberals and were involved on the fringe of the Christian Coalition. I asked them why, and they said something very interesting. They were evangelicals and political liberals, and they had tried to get involved in a variety of liberal organizations but had always found that their religion made them objects of suspicion. In the end, they were forced to choose between a place that appreciated their politics and not their faith, and a place that appreciated their faith and not their politics. They chose to go to the place that appreciated their faith and not their politics.

YOU SPEAK OF THE ANTIRELIGIOUS BIAS OF LIBERAL INTELLECTUALS. IS THAT CHANGING?

I don’t mean to say that all liberal intellectuals are antireligion, but there is, in much liberal intellectual thought, a tendency to treat religion as an object of suspicion. This goes at least back to John Dewey, who quite clearly in his writing on public education means to stamp out what he viewed as immigrant superstitions, by which he meant religions different from a kind of mainline American Protestantism. Judaism and Catholicism were somehow distortions in the mind, and when parents tried to raise their children in this kind of religious faith, you had to coax the children out of that because otherwise they couldn’t be good, upstanding citizens.

I think that such attitudes are a very serious problem. These are the intellectual currents that dominate our universities, and so our best and brightest kids are often learning from people who view religion with condescension, at best, if not outright hostility. I only wish that we would find a way in our thinking, writing, and talking to treat antireligious bias the same way we treat bias about race or sex. It’s just as much of a problem.

I also wish that academics would spend more time with religious people before concluding that there is this kind of close-mindedness that occurs simply because you are a person of deep religious faith who consults his or her religious convictions in deciding moral and political questions.

YOU WRITE, “THE GREATEST ERROR OF ALL IN CONSIDERING HOW TO BUILD AN INTEGRAL POLITICS IS TO JUDGE THE INTEGRITY OF OUR POLITICS BY THE INTEGRITY OF OUR POLITICIANS.” HAVE WE BEEN FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE INTEGRITY OF OUR POLITICIANS?

The integrity of our leaders is not unimportant; in fact, it’s crucial. But we are the voters. It’s the integrity of the voters that’s going to matter most. Are we willing to vote for what we say we are going to vote for? When we choose political leaders, do we demand of them the things we say we are going to demand of them, or do we allow them to break their promises, to do as they please, and then vote for them again?

CAN INTEGRITY BE LEGISLATED?

Yes and no. When you use something else as a proxy for integrity, sometimes you can legislate it. For example, if you want to legislate honesty in the securities markets, if you want to have some disclosure rules, you can do it; you’re being a technician, in effect. But when you’re trying to get directly to people’s behavior, it gets a lot harder.

In the book I give a couple of examples. A lot of people want to legislate rules for advertising in election campaigns. You just can’t do it. We can complain about advertising, but the notion of having rules strikes me as a bad idea. It leads to crazy cases like the one the Supreme Court decided 15 years ago that involved a politician in Kentucky. When he ran for office, he said, “If I’m elected, I’m not going to take my salary. I’m going to redirect my salary to the treasury.” He won, and he was brought up on charges in the state on the ground that this was like a bribe to the voters. That’s the craziness you get when you try to enforce rules about what you can and can’t promise in election campaigns. So while we should have very strong societal norms about what we do and don’t want politicians to do, we as voters should be willing to enforce those norms. The proposal to have a government agency regulating truth and falsity in advertising in election campaigns strikes me as a terrible idea.

You can’t legislate integrity in government. You can either elect good leaders or not elect good leaders. We can’t regulate integrity the same way that we regulate clean air. But what we forget is that politics is regulatory in its own way. It’s very clear that the Framers had a view that if people were corrupt in office, you would give the voters a chance to vote them out.

SO IN A SENSE, INTEGRITY IS LEGISLATED BY THE PEOPLE.

In politics that’s exactly right. In politics the level of integrity you get is the level of integrity people want to demand with their votes. You make tradeoffs. You say, well, this politician seems honest about X, dishonest about Y, but I like his view on Z. If the balance comes out, I prefer his view on Z, then he stays in office. If the balance comes out, his integrity is too low even though I like his views on these other issues, then he’s voted out of office. Those are political judgments, not legal judgments. Politics has to resolve it, not special prosecutors.

IN THE LAST CHAPTER OF INTEGRITY YOU WRESTLE WITH THE REALITY OF EVIL IN THE WORLD. YOU WRITE, “EVIL IS NOT SIMPLY THE RESULT OF A DECISION TO DO A BAD THING; IT IS THE RESULT OF REFUSING TO MAKE A DECISION TO DO A GOOD THING.”

When Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, that’s what she was really getting at when she talked about the “banality of evil.” What she was trying to say was that you don’t need moral monsters to create morally monstrous results. You need people who simply don’t think about what they are doing, or look the other way once or twice. In premedieval theology–in Augustine, for instance–that was the very definition of sin: it was the refusal to do God’s will, turning your face away from God. It seems to me that that is exactly right. Whether you want to talk about evil as not doing God’s will, or in strictly secular terms, evil is not doing the good; the point is, when you know what’s right, you’ve got to do it.

Integrity is not integrity unless it forces you at times to stand up against what everybody else is saying. If you always end up, just by coincidence, doing the popular thing, that’s a pretty clear sign that you lack integrity. Integrity requires you to risk something. You have to have something at stake, something you can lose. You can’t live a life of integrity unless you sometimes are willing to stand up and say, “I know all of my friends believe this,” or, “My society believes this. But I believe something entirely different, and here it is. Take your best shot.” It’s so much easier to sit back. It’s exhausting to stand up when people criticize you and when you are viewed as odd. But that’s precisely when integrity is tested.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 14

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“I believe in justice,” Camus said in 1957, amid the Algerian crisis, “but I will defend my mother before justice.” His words enraged the French intelligentsia, and they still have the power to discomfit absolutists of every stripe. In the novel left unfinished at his death and published now for the first time, he answered his critics.

“The First Man”

By Albert Camus

Alfred A. Knopf

336 pp.; $23

When I think of Albert Camus, two photographic images come to mind. The first is of that face, both thoughtful and tough, a cigarette drooping from the lips, the collar of a trench coat showing. The second is of the crushed automobile in which he died early in January 1960. These images are not important just to me; they may be said to define the dominant impression many readers had (and perhaps still have) of Camus. If Hollywood had invented an existentialist writer, the homely, scholarly Jean-Paul Sartre, with his squat body and thick spectacles, would not have made the cut. No, it would be Camus: he looked like Humphrey Bogart and died like James Dean.

What is ironic about all this is the simple fact that Camus came closest to existentialism at the beginning of his career in his first published novel, “The Stranger,” and in his first book of philosophy, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” both of which were published in 1942–and Camus even claimed that the latter book was written as a conscious repudiation of existentialism. By the end of his life he had become completely alienated not just from existentialism as a philosophy but also from the whole French intellectual culture within which existentialism was then the dominant force. Perhaps if Camus had remained in lockstep with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir he would be more popular today. Instead, he remains perhaps the most neglected major author of the second half of this century–one of the few, along with W. H. Auden, Czeslaw Milosz, and a handful of others, who represent the nearly forgotten virtues of wisdom and courage.

Whatever we Christians aver about God’s sovereignty over our allotted span, like everyone else we regret it when it seems to us that lives are cut short, and we imagine what their possessors might have done with a few more years in which to work. It is impossible not to speculate about what Keats might have achieved had he been given more than a decade in which to write; it is hard to believe that Mozart would not have profited by living at least into his forties, or the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brezska by surviving the Great War and making it at least to 30.

Camus died at 46, and the recent publication of “The First Man,” the novel he was working on when he died, suggests that he would have made very good use of another five years. “The First Man,” as we have it, is but a draft fragment, a direct and unedited transcription from Camus’s final notebook–a notebook found, inside a briefcase, in the car in which he died. In the new Knopf edition it comes to over three hundred pages (albeit rather small ones), but the appended notes and outlines make it clear that this constitutes perhaps only a third of the book as Camus planned it. Beyond question, it would have been the most ambitious project of Camus’s life. One could even say that it would have been the first product of his full maturity as a writer and thinker, for, though he had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957 (when he was only 43), his political, philosophical, and literary vision was just beginning to achieve something like coherence. It is impossible for anyone who appreciates Camus’s work to read “The First Man” without a sharp pang of regret at what never came to be.

Though Sartre and Camus are often linked in the public mind, they are dramatically different figures. There was a brief period when they seemed on the verge of forming a real friendship: each had reviewed the other’s work positively, and when they met (in 1943), they discovered a mutual interest in the theater. Indeed, Sartre asked Camus to direct and act in a play he had just written, one that would prove to be his most famous: “No Exit.” Throughout the war, the two writers found themselves involved in the common cause of the Resistance. But their temperamental differences made a lasting friendship impossible. Sartre distrusted, and perhaps envied, Camus’s toughness and flamboyance, what one might call his Bogartisme; Camus distrusted, and perhaps envied, Sartre’s analytical and philosophical mind.

The breaking point in their tenuous relationship occurred in 1952, after “Les Temps Modernes,” the intellectual journal largely run by Sartre, published a hostile review by Francis Jeanson of Camus’s recent meditation on political philosophy, “The Rebel.” Camus directed his reply to Sartre (who he thought should at least have done the criticism himself): “I’m getting tired of seeing myself, and particularly seeing old militants who have known all the fights of their times, endlessly chastised by censors who have always tackled history from their armchairs.” Sartre retorted by saying that Camus was arrogant–“Tell me, Camus, what is the mystery that prevents people from discussing your books without robbing mankind of its reasons to live?”–and philosophically incompetent: “But I don’t dare advise you to consult Being and Nothingness. Reading it would seem needlessly arduous to you: you detest the difficulties of thought.”

Annie Cohen-Salal, Sartre’s biographer, is right to see ideological differences at the roots of this dispute: Sartre’s attempt to soft-pedal or even evade recognizing the evils of the Stalinist Soviet Union in hopes of sustaining the socialist vision, against Camus’s belief that Soviet Communism and fascism were morally equivalent. On this view, Sartre’s philosophical condemnation of The Rebel masks his anger at Camus’s total repudiation of violence as a means to achieve any political cause, however noble. As Cohen-Salal admits, Sartre’s tendency was to be “pragmatic” on such issues.

Pragmatic about means, perhaps, but absolutist about causes. Sartre believed, for instance, that the French in Algeria should all get out; if they did not, Algerian terrorists were justified in killing them. It was this issue–not the disagreement over Stalinism, about which Sartre eventually admitted he had been wrong (in 1956, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary) –that ensured lasting enmity between Sartre and Camus. And it is this issue that proves central to Camus’s plans for “The First Man.”

Politically speaking, one could say that Sartre never overcame the Manichaean dichotomies that were arguably appropriate during the war against the Nazis. That the Soviets had stood against fascism placed them firmly on the side of the angels. (Best not to reflect, at least publicly, on the uncomfortable fact that Stalin had signed the Pact of Steel with Hitler, and that Hitler was the one who broke it.) For this reason, Sartre could forgive, or at least avert his eyes from, the purges of the 1930s and the continuing hell of the gulag.

In Sartre’s political world there were only oppressors and oppressed: fascism stood for the former, communism for the latter. Likewise, in Algeria, since the native Algerians were by definition the oppressed, they were incapable of sin; conversely, the pieds noirs, the French colonists, were reprobate and irredeemable. Thus Sartre endorsed the decision of the Algerian FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale) to kill any and all French men, women, and children in Algeria whenever possible, a position he was still taking in 1961 when he wrote a famous and lengthy introduction to “The Wretched of the Earth,” the major work by one of this century’s greatest theorists of terrorism, Franz Fanon.

Camus, on the other hand, was himself a pied noir; his family’s roots in Algeria went back a century and a half. Members of his family, including his mother, still lived in Algeria and were endangered daily by the FLN’s random shootings and bombings. Yet Camus was not, nor had he ever been, indifferent to the abuses the French had inflicted on the Arabs of Algeria. Indeed, in the 1930s, at the beginning of his career as a writer, Camus had striven ceaselessly to call attention to these abuses, but he was generally ignored–by the French Left no less than the Right.

So he was not pleased to have a difficult and morally complex political situation reduced to an opportunity for French intellectuals to strike noble poses: to those who would “point to the French in Algeria as scapegoats (‘Go ahead and die; that’s what we deserve!’),” Camus retorted, “it seems to me revolting to beat one’s mea culpa, as our judge-penitents do, on someone else’s breast.” Those who are really so guilt-stricken at the French presence in Algeria should “offer up themselves in expiation.”

Camus boldly affirmed that his family, “being poor and free of hatred”–and Camus really was raised in abject poverty–“never exploited or oppressed anyone. But three quarters of the French in Algeria resemble them and, if only they are provided reasons rather than insults, will be ready to admit the necessity of a juster and freer order.” It should, then, be possible to give the proper rights and freedoms to Algerian Arabs without condemning and destroying the pieds noirs indiscriminately, or forcing them out of the only country they had ever known.

But such subtleties were lost on almost everyone involved in this conflict. When Camus received the Nobel Prize in 1957 and gave a press conference in Stockholm, he was bitterly condemned by an Arab student for failing to endorse the FLN. His reply was simple, direct, and forceful: “I have always condemned the use of terror. I must also condemn a terror which is practiced blindly on the Algiers streets and which may any day strike down my mother or my family. I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice.”

Michael Walzer is almost unique among Camus’s commentators in seeing the significance of this stand: he identifies Camus as an example of the “connected social critic,” that is, the critic who does not stand above the political fray and judge with Olympian disinterest, objectivity, and abstraction. That was the way of Sartre: absolutist, universalizing, committed to a single overriding binary opposition, that between the oppressors and the oppressed. But for Camus, the universal could not so easily displace the local; commitment to “Justice” in the abstract could not simply trump his love for and responsibility to his family. “I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice.”

Walzer points out, with regret, that Camus ceased to write about Algeria after 1958: “the silence of the connected social critic is a grim sign–a sign of defeat, a sign of endings. Though he may not be wrong to be silent, we long to hear his voice.” But the draft of “The First Man” suggests that Camus was not prepared to remain silent; instead, he was seeking a new way to speak about a complex social reality with which the common political discourse of the French intelligentsia could not cope. A fragmentary note makes this clear:

“The two Algerian nationalisms. Algeria 39 and 54 (rebellion). What becomes of French values in an Algerian sensibility, that of the first man. The account of the two generations explains the present tragedy.”

Jacques Cormery, Camus’s alter ego, is “the first man,” a kind of Adam in that he represents a new breed of human being: a pied noir, yes, a person of “French values in an Algerian sensibility,” but one who has been forced to acknowledge the claims of the native Algerians to equality as persons and under the law. In this sense he must support the nationalism of the 1930s, which sought just that, equality; but what can he say to the later nationalism of Ahmed Ben Bella, a leader of the FLN, whose slogan was “Algeria for the Algerians” and who was ready to kill any pied noir, however supportive of Algerian independence, who would not leave the country? And what can he say to Francois Mitterand, then France’s Interior Minister, who in 1954 said that with the Algerian rebels “the only possible negotiation is war”? Ben Bella and Mitterand, for all their mutual hatred, share a conception of the political sphere that cannot comprehend the moral imperative to love and defend one’s mother.

When Camus died, Sartre responded with a handsome eulogy, which reveals that, despite all their enmity, he understood the fundamental character of Camus’s work: “Camus represented in this century, and against History, the present heir of that long line of moralists whose works perhaps constitute what is most original in French letters. His stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged a dubious battle against events of these times. . . . He reaffirmed the existence of moral fact . . . against the Machiavellians.”

I cannot allow that last comment to pass without noting that Sartre was one of the Machiavellians against whom Camus contended. But it is indeed the moralistic tradition, the tradition of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, to which Camus belonged, and it is worth noting that this tradition has always had an ambivalent relationship to Christianity.

In a lecture called “The Unbeliever and Christians,” which Camus gave in 1948 at a Dominican monastery in France, he spoke in terms that eerily prefigure the Algerian crisis of the next decade: “Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun. . . . The program for the future is either a permanent dialogue or the solemn and significant putting to death of any who have experienced dialogue.” (The primary targets of FLN terrorism, at least at first, were neither pieds noirs nor French soldiers but rather Arab and Muslim moderates, that is, would-be compromisers and dialoguers.)

And the question that Camus puts to his Christian audience is, Which side will you be on? He is not sure of the answer; he fears that the Roman Catholic Church in particular will choose terror, if only terror by means of the papal encyclical, and argues that if that happens, “Christians will live and Christianity will die.”

In Camus’s first two novels, moral questions occupy the foreground, while Christianity occasionally flickers at the margins of the reader’s attention. In “The Stranger,” Camus’s first and most popular novel, the protagonist, Meursault, seems to be everything an existentialist antihero should be. He is alienated and confused. He commits a murder that appears to illustrate the existentialist theme of the acte gratuit, the gratuitous or utterly unconditioned act that is supposed to indicate the terrible freedom with which we humans are burdened. He is amoral, in the sense of being unable even to understand what others, especially the priest who visits his prison cell, call morality. Camus’s later (“admittedly paradoxical”) comments on Meursault did not help those who would like to know how we should evaluate this young man. What did Camus mean when he said that Meursault was condemned because he would not lie, would not “play the game”? Still more puzzling was his claim that Meursault is “the only Christ we deserve.” And when he suggested that those unfamiliar with the Algerian culture in which the book is set were likely to misunderstand Meursault, he was simply ignored.

Rieux, the protagonist of “The Plague,” Camus’s allegory of fascism and the resistance to it, is a clearly and profoundly moral man–perhaps because (not in spite) of his inability to explain and unwillingness even to think about the sources of his morality. Here religious questions are rigorously suppressed by Rieux’s own character, since he is the narrator of the story, though this is not revealed until the end of the book.

The narrator and protagonist of Camus’s last completed novel, “The Fall,” is almost as enigmatic as Meursault. But far from being amoral or unreflective about morality, the ex-lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence tells a story that concerns little other than his forced confrontation with his own moral failings. Camus’s lifelong interest in and reflection upon Christianity seems here on the verge of becoming something more serious: Clamence’s “confession” follows traditionally Christian patterns of penitence. One sees this even in the setting of the book, since Clamence, a man who always loved and craved the heights, has exiled himself to the low-lying city of Amsterdam–a city whose concentric circles of canals he compares to the circles of Dante’s Hell. Indeed, he describes himself as no longer a legal advocate but a “judge-penitent,” who confesses his sins to those whom he thinks might profit by his tale of woe. (As noted above, Camus used the phrase “judge-penitent” in reference to the critics of “The Rebel;” but their penitence was on behalf of others rather than themselves).

Christian readers, therefore, might be forgiven for hoping that “The First Man” would mark yet further development of Camus’s interest in Christianity. But such hopes, it appears, are misplaced. The moral and spiritual introspection, the penitential self-awareness, of Clamence are absent here–or rather, transposed into the key of filial affection, the relationship between a son and his mother. And it is the juxtaposition of this familial theme with the historical crises of modern Algeria that make “The First Man” a distinctive and potentially powerful work.

This is the most historically and culturally rich of all Camus’s books. Unlike his earlier protagonists, Jacques Cormery is fully situated in a social, and more particularly a familial, world. The news of Meursault’s mother’s death comes in the first line of “The Stranger;” in “The Plague,” Rieux is separated from his wife by a quarantine, and eventually he hears of her death in a sanitorium; the judge-penitent Clamence never married and lives alone in his exile. In some respects, Cormery is like these men: the ordinary social world seems absurd to him, his friendships are few and awkward, and he constantly seeks a self-understanding that he vaguely feels has been denied him by his father’s death when he was only an infant. But it is quite clear that his story is ultimately one of connectedness, emplacement, rootedness.

In the main text, one sees this in the lush romanticism of Camus’s descriptions of Cormery’s childhood: his play with friends, especially on the football field, his life with his family, his experiences at school where instruction and religion are mixed, and so on. This romantic language, whose long sentences seem to derive from Camus’s late-blooming fascination with Faulkner, contrasts rather dramatically with Camus’s typical narrative austerity. “The First Man” is so autobiographical that Camus sometimes forgets the fictional names he has assigned the characters and uses the real names of his family members. Moreover, in the notes for uncompleted sections of the book we see emerging with striking clarity a plan to depict not only Cormery’s relationship to his mother but his increasing awareness of the centrality of that relationship in his life and of the dignity and strength of his mother’s existence. One sees this plan with particular force and eloquence in this passage from the notes:

“I want to write the story of a pair joined by the same blood and every kind of difference. She is similar to the best the world has, and he quietly abominable. He thrown into all the follies of our time; she passing through the same history as if it were that of any time. She silent most of the time, with only a few words at her disposal to express herself; he constantly talking and unable to find in thousands of words what she could say with a single one of her silences . . . Mother and son.”

But the apparently timeless intensity of this bond between mother and son is always placed within the context of Algerian history. It appears that Cormery’s recognition of the depth of his love for his mother was to emerge in large part from her constant endangerment by the bombs of terrorists, whose beliefs and purposes she never understands, occupied as she is by the difficulties of living with scarce resources in a harsh world. And this attempt to live in peace and with dignity in the midst of violence dominates her experience long before the rebellion of the fifties, since it was in the Great War that she had lost her husband: “A chapter on the war of 14. Incubator of our era. As seen by the mother? Who knows neither France, nor Europe, nor the world. Who thinks shells explode of their own volition, etc.”

Thus it seems clear that the lyrical nostalgia of the drafts–their Edenic character, evident in the book’s title, and so reminiscent of the work of Dylan Thomas–was to be contextualized, though not, I think, discredited or ironized, by an ever-deeper immersion in the violent world of modern history. Or so Jacques Cormery, with his education and his experience of Europe in the second of its great wars, might characterize the narrative movement. Camus’s greatest narrative challenge, it appears, would have been to allow his mother’s experience its full scope: “Alternate chapters would give the mother’s voice. Commenting on the same events but with her vocabulary of 400 words.” Some people, it seems, are in history, however unwittingly or unwillingly; but only Cormery and Camus and readers like us are, strictly speaking, of it. But how can this be portrayed in art?

The late literary critic Northrop Frye once reflected on the curious fact that the nineteenth century found it obvious that “Hamlet” was Shakespeare’s greatest play, while the twentieth century has, for the most part, bestowed that honor on “King Lear.” For our predecessors, the problems of Hamlet, which revolve around the nature and stature of the individual human person, were paramount; in our century, we have come to contemplate Lear’s dilemma, which is to find the line (if it exists) that separates the tragic from the absurd. What, Frye mused, will be the essential Shakespearean play of the next century? His admittedly speculative answer was Antony and Cleopatra, because that play represents a situation that more and more people in our world will face: the confrontation of deeply personal desires with world-historical events, or, in other words, the potentially tragic consequences of the creation of a global village.

To get Frye’s point, we need only recall the now-general agreement, which has arisen among warring parties in this century, to disregard old distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, to eliminate the concept of “civilian.” But these movements are economic as well as military: I think of a Guatemalan farmer whom my wife once met: he could not get his crops to market because, suddenly, he could no longer afford the necessary gasoline, gasoline that had risen in price because of the Gulf War. So a man who had never heard of George Bush or Saddam Hussein was in danger, because of their actions, of losing the ability to feed his family. That people may find themselves implicated against their will in historical events is nothing new; but the reach of historical (political, economic) movements has gotten so long so quickly that the connections have become strange, and hard for most of us to accept.

It is precisely this bizarre juxtaposition of the personal and the historical, or this erasure of the line between the two, that Camus was seeking to elaborate in “The First Man.” This was to have been his answer to his critics, to those who failed to comprehend, or who found inexcusable, his decision to defend his mother before some abstract notion of justice. In recent years, similar concerns have emerged in the fiction of V. S. Naipaul, especially “A Bend in the River,” and in a very different way in the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz. But I think Camus was the first to see the full implications of this massive change in the nature of historical experience.

Camus never wrote a great book, though each of the three novels he published in his lifetime is nearly perfect. His plays, stories, and essays reveal a similarly high level of technical accomplishment and thematic depth. But clearly he had not found the subject that would enable him to fulfill his promise and exercise his abilities to their full–until, perhaps, “The First Man.” Though it would not have been the novel that Christian readers of “The Fall” might have wished for, it could well have been Camus’s most impressive work. Having had his (fictional) say about Algeria, having explored and portrayed the cultural complexities that the French intelligentsia refused to acknowledge, having paid a proper tribute to the dignity and value of his mother’s life, would he have returned to the spiritual quest that so dominated “The Fall?” That, alas, we cannot know. But now, at least, we have stronger testimony to Camus’s moral integrity, if not to a movement toward Christian faith.

Edward Said has called Camus “the archetypal trimmer,” implying that he altered his opinions to gain the approval of others. If this were true, then no one could ever have trimmed more ineptly, since Camus’s simultaneous insistence upon the validity of Algerian complaints and upon the innocence of his family (and others like them) earned him nothing but contempt from both sides. In fact, Said’s statement is a monstrous calumny. Camus was a sinner, like all of us, and can be faulted for many things. But in two ways he is, I think, an exemplary figure. He had the wisdom to see that political justice is never simple and cannot be reduced to simplistic binary oppositions between the oppressors and the oppressed; and he had the courage, in the most stressful of circ*mstances and in the face of the bitterest opposition, to repudiate the cheap virtue that such oppositions always represent.

Perhaps this is a naive idealization, but I think that Camus’s face, in those later photographs, reveals something of his character: stubborn, as Sartre said, but upright, and willing to acknowledge just how hard it is to know what Truth or Justice is in any given case. After all, when he died he was very near the age at which, as George Orwell said, every man has the face he deserves.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 19

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“Hope: The Heart’s Great Quest”

By David Aikman

Servant

220 pp.; $9.99, paper

About 500 pages into “The True and Only Heaven,” his expansive book about the life and death of optimism, Christopher Lasch wondered about the possibility for a rebirth, not of optimism, but of hope. Optimism’s confidence in unending and universal progress, he had observed, lived on evidence that things were going well and were likely to go on getting better. With such a flimsy basis, optimism could not survive the persistent experience of tragedies that have so cruelly walloped the human family. Now the question is, can we find a hope to replace our lost optimism? What we need, Lasch mused, is “a more vigorous form of hope which trusts life without denying its tragic character.” Is there such a hope?

Though he does not include Lasch’s book in his impressive list of sources, David Aikman has written his own answer to Lasch’s question. There is indeed the sort of vigorous hope that Lasch looked for. There is a hope that is based in God’s promise rather than evidence of human progress. The promise is a new creation rather than gradual improvement on the old one. Thus, Christian faith offers a life beyond the “tragic character” of this world to hope for and Someone above our tragedy-prone existence to trust our hope in. It is, therefore, a hope that will survive adversity and tragedy. And, since our spirits need hope as much as our lungs need oxygen, I can only applaud Aikman’s passion to show that Christian hope is the one and only true hope.

To support his purpose, Aikman, for many years a foreign correspondent for “Time” magazine, succinctly surveys the faith of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam in 21 pages and then–in 47 fast-turning pages–neatly reviews the major thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment to the New Age to show that other religious faiths offer no hope at all and that any hope that secular thought offers is a false one. This done, he reviews what the Bible along with selected theologians teach us about Christian hope. All this is done with the sprightly style and easy-to-open packaging that we would expect from a seasoned reporter.

Aikman shows quite splendidly that what Christians are given to hope for is a life of bodiless blessedness after we die and a good world for us all to live in later on. But just as important as what we may hope for is who we put our hope in–not ourselves nor signs of progress, but the Maker of the universe who is now Christ the Lord.

But granted the greater importance of what we hope for and in, it is also interesting to think about the sort of experience that hope is. Aikman tries out a few definitions and quickly rejects them; hope, he cautions, is not a desire or a wish. Nor is it a disposition. It is, as the Bible suggests, more like an eager expectation–which is close enough, I suppose–except that eagerness is, after all, a lively desire, and we often expect things we certainly do not hope for (“Expect the worst and hope for the best.”).

But not to quibble about definitions of so slippery a thing as what actual hoping is. Aikman senses the difficulty, so he offers a few vivid metaphors, like this one: “Hope is like the lion in the forest, triumphant over all the animals, patient, never hurried, always king of his domain.” Taste in metaphors, as in all else, is indisputable, so enjoy this one if it illumines what you do when you hope.

What motivates Aikman, in any case, is the effect of Christian hoping on daily living. Christian hope provides its own evidence in the miraculous manifestations of its power in the life of people who have it. It is fitting, then, that Aikman should save to the last chapter a review of how Christian hope for the next world “revolutionizes” the “way ordinary people live their lives” in the present one.

It is probably true that most Christian people do not spend much time “eagerly expecting” life in heaven or in the new earth. What most of us consciously worry about and hope for is fixed on the same worldly things that everybody else hopes for. We hope for the good things we eagerly desire for our families and friends and for ourselves, things we believe are possible, things none of us can be sure of. We hope for our children’s safety, happiness, and success. We hope for our own comfortable retirements. We hope for the healing of our spouses’ diseases. And the like. (Saint Paul says that we are most miserable if we have hope only for this life, but it is equally true that we are also pretty miserable if we have no hope for this life.)

So it seems natural that we should want to know how our Christian hoping for life in God’s future affects our chances of getting what we most hope for in our present. Is there any connection? Aikman is eager to prove there is. And, as a triumphant climax to his objective research, he offers us several personal examples of “The Fruits of Hope.” The fruits are harvested from some ordinary people’s extraordinary experiences of the power of hope. He tells their stories, quickly, without commentary, on the run, like those nifty little paragraphs at the front of “Time” that tell us what we really need to know about the week that was.

A man on his way to a golf game gets a message that his daughter was seriously hurt in a car crash. He bolts for the hospital. On his way, he prays with just “a flicker of hope that someone was listening.” There was. The man’s daughter survived and is, besides, now happily married.

A woman whose marriage is on the skids is sailing off Hawaii and sees a double rainbow over the island and reads it as a sign of hope.

A young lady plagued by an ugly skin disease goes to a Billy Graham rally with hope for a cure. She got what she hoped for and is now a professional model, high on the power of high hopes.

Aikman’s own marriage had broken down before he got it into his head to write a book about hope. While he researched and thought about hope, he and his wife were reconciled and now have a new hope for their family.

These are the sort of “fruits” that Aikman offers to show how Christian hope affects–in a “revolutionary” way–how “ordinary people live their lives.”

What can I say? Aikman’s “fruits” baffle me. Does he mean to say that putting our hope in Jesus Christ for the other world gives our hopes for life in this world a better chance of coming true? But where is the connection? Maybe he means that God rewards us for hoping for eternal life by giving us what we hope for in this one. Or maybe he means that Christian hoping emits such a potent psychosomatic energy into our lives that we make our own hopes come true. Then again, it may be that Aikman has no idea of how hope does it and wants only to celebrate the fact that it does.

Geriatric hopers like me will permit themselves some skepticism. We just have too many crushed hopes under our belts to be easily persuaded that our Christian hoping improves–in any predictable sense–the odds that our human hopes will come true. Our hunch is that Aikman’s zeal for a nifty evangelical finish ran ahead of the sounder journalistic instincts he demonstrated along the way.

And yet, I do not wish to discount Aikman’s message. Certainly, when we keep hope alive for a victorious ending to a long struggle, we are encouraged to fight on and on until justice wins. Martin Luther King taught us that. And certainly a vivid hope for God’s kingdom rooted in Christ’s resurrection keeps the hope for victory alive. Bishop Tutu gives a resounding witness.

Certainly there is a therapeutic link between hopefulness and healing–both physical and psychological. It is being celebrated in the best of medical circles these days. And Victor Frankl has moved many of us to awe with his story of how the power of hope for what was obviously impossible–escape from the death camp–made the doomed life of prisoners who hoped to escape it infinitely richer than those who gave up hope.

It must be wonderfully true that nothing is ever accomplished, no poem written, no painting painted, no wall constructed, no enterprise begun, no family kept together, and no life reborn unless somebody hoped it could be done. But these are different sorts of links between hope and life than Aikman hints at with his amazing fruits. And besides, as Rabbi Maurice Lamm’s lovely book “The Power of Hope” (1995) assumes, the energy that links hoping to the getting of what we hope for is as powerful in the lives of people in general who have a hopeful disposition about this present life as it is in the lives of Christians in particular who hope for the promises about life to come. And besides, is there not a wee irony in celebrating the possibility that Christian hope of going to heaven improves our chances of putting off the trip? (“Everybody,” I have heard, “wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”)

I wonder whether the author’s fantastic “fruits of hope” would have persuaded Christopher Lasch that he had found the “more vigorous form of hope which trusts life without denying its tragic character.” I fear not. They seem instead to hint that Christian hope offers an escape from tragedy. And to that extent, it denies that life need have a tragic character. Perhaps Aikman’s evangelical enthusiasm for immediate and transparent results may have obscured his apologetic purpose. But I do not want to carp. He set out to demonstrate that the gospel offers a well-founded hope for a happy ending to our tragic history, and he succeeded, for which he deserves a good deal of praise for a lot of work well done. His book, in spite of my cautions about the ending, will give any reader a fine overview of all that has been thought and said about the gift of hope, for which nothing is more essential to the life of the human spirit.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 23

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“Christianity and Democracy: A Theology for a Just World Order”

By John W. de Gruchy

Cambridge University Press

307 pp.; $59.95, hardcover; $17.95, paper

“Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy”

By Robert H. Wiebe

University of Chicago Press

321 pp.; $25.95

Come November, millions of American citizens will file dutifully into polling places located in schools, churches, and other spaces set apart for performing the civic ritual of voting. The outcomes we suppose will have significant consequences, from the local school board all the way to the White House. We call this democracy, and we celebrate it.

Still, a sense of foreboding hangs heavy in the democratic air. We are daily informed that the American people are frustrated, angry, alienated, cut off from their government. In a sentiment widely shared by political scientists and journalists, Lance Bennett in his text “Governing Crisis” writes of how “most Americans today experience elections as empty rituals that offer little hope for political dialogue, genuine glimpses of candidate character, or the emergence of a binding consensus on where the nation is going and how it ought to get there.”

As we approach our appointed task and duty, what is the Christian to make of the state of democracy? If it is gut-check time for the Christian citizen, where can she go for enlightenment? If she takes her cues from the two books here under discussion, I would not be surprised should she express some confusion. While both John de Gruchy (professor of Christian studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa) and Robert Wiebe (professor of history at Northwestern University) tell the democratic story, their accounts vary widely.

The Theologian situates the American moment in the broader context of the general democratization of the world, most vividly captured in our day by the fall of the wall in Berlin and of apartheid in South Africa. The American Christian trying to sort through her own situation will find scant material here for practical guidance for November, but plenty of reason for comfort and consolation with respect to the big picture. “Christianity and Democracy” is full of hope, redemption, and the possibility of the democratic transformation of the world, with churches playing a critical part in the process. It is perhaps fitting that the Theologian should be the dispenser of such hope.

But such is not the message of the Historian. Wiebe’s book tells a local story. He writes of democracy, American style, defined as the practice of popular self-government with individual self-determination: its origins, its spread, and its uncertain prospects. Eschewing the kind of globalist reach undertaken by the Theologian, the Historian characterizes his own work as carried out in “the spirit of an interpretive essay, not the comprehensive synthesis.” Unfortunately for our troubled citizen pondering the November event, Wiebe’s interpretation of what has transpired since democracy’s full establishment in America in the 1820s can be read as a lament for the passing away of a grand experiment in which politics and self-rule were carried out by the people, only to be eclipsed and ultimately replaced by the individual and the state.

What passes for democracy in our day is a thin and watery relic of a more robust and healthy democratic way of life. This is not a happy story. It is agonistic, full of conflict; the outcome is in doubt. In fact, the sober Historian concludes, “No general renewal of democracy will occur, the record indicates, without a breakdown of the structure.” It is not hope the Historian offers but a gamble, and a dangerous one at that.

I have stylized the authors as the Theologian and the Historian because I sense that there is something in the very disciplines from which they write that inclines them to tell the story as they do. De Gruchy’s theology is all of a package. The reader cannot fail to recognize how a transformationist Reformed theological perspective drives his interpretation of the biblical and historical materials, setting the agenda for his political prescriptions. Meanwhile, Wiebe adopts the attitude of the sober, cautious, and indeed skeptical style of history writing as it has been practiced from the time of Thucydides. Where modern theologians aspire to the seamless narrative, to holism, to continuities and stories well ended, historians revel in the messiness of counterexamples, of the unlooked-for and the unexpected, of historical projects derailed, or, as Wiebe and pragmatist philosophers like Richard Rorty prefer to say, the contingent. Just how can our troubled Christian make sense from the different reads of democracy given by the Theologian and the Historian?

In his wide-ranging analysis, de Gruchy argues that what Christians require at the present moment is a proper understanding of the relationship between Christianity and democracy. To this end he makes a distinction between the democratic system of government and what he calls the democratic vision.

By system, he refers to the practical institutions and processes that democratic regimes throughout history have instituted. He sums these as including universal adult suffrage, free and fair elections, majority rule with minority rights, the separation of church and state, and so on. Ancient Athens stands as “the symbolic birthplace of the democratic system.”

But the Theologian wants to focus instead on the democratic vision. This he defines as that hope for a society in which all people are truly equal and yet where difference is respected; a society in which all people are truly free, yet where social responsibility rather than individual self-interest prevails; and a society that is truly just, and therefore one in which the vast gulf between rich and poor has been overcome.

Such a vision is not to be located in pagan Athens. Rather, the democratic vision has emerged historically from out of “the message of the ancient prophets of Israel, and especially in their messianic hope for a society in which the reign of God’s shalom would become a reality.” Christianity has been the historical carrier of the democratic vision, though modern versions of it have become much more secularized and even revolutionary.

In order to establish this connection, de Gruchy has to deal with the messiness of Christian history. As he readily concedes, compatibility between the faith and democracy has not always been self-evident. Following the work of Walter Brueggemann, de Gruchy points to two different political trajectories that exist within the Hebrew Old Testament: the prophetic (beginning with Moses) and the royal (beginning with David). These traditions exist “in critical tension with each other.”

Following a particular line of New Testament scholarship, de Gruchy positions what some scholars call “the Jesus movement” clearly in line with the prophetic tradition and its emphasis upon the shalom of God, the full healing and wholeness of the human and cosmological condition. The gospel message possesses rich political implications–good news indeed for the poor and oppressed. It extols “the emancipatory values of truth, freedom and justice.”

Unfortunately, with the conversion of Constantine, this emancipatory message was forced underground or to the margins of Christian political consciousness. Parallel to the Old Testament critical tension between the prophetic and royal tradition, there emerged in Christian practice and thought a tension between the democratic vision of the gospel (i.e., the prophetic) and an imperial political theology fitted for the now-Christian imperial state.

In a long and complex chapter, de Gruchy attempts to show how these two political trajectories within Christian thought have contributed to the paradoxical situation in which Christianity has been claimed by some to be antithetical to democracy but by others to be essential to democracy’s full flowering.

De Gruchy’s historical claim is quite clear, however. The time is at hand, the paradox now resolved. For Christian political commitment, this century’s experience of national socialism and Stalinist totalitarianism has driven home the lesson: “Christianity . . . now appears to be irrevocably committed to the retrieval of democracy as essential to its vision of a just world order.”

At the end of his historical sketch, the author reaffirms that the contemporary ecumenical church “regards the democratic vision as consonant with, even if not identical to, that of the prophets of ancient Israel and its own vision of a just world order, [and] that the democratic system provides the best available way for embodying that vision within political structures amidst historical realities.” We are all democrats now. But democrats to what end?

De Gruchy’s historical retrieval of the democratic vision serves as a warm-up to his call for political action. Since the political vision of Christianity is the democratic vision, and, since the world is undergoing a global democratic transformation, Christians (through their churches and in their public activities) should be making the world safe for democracy. And, according to de Gruchy, this is just what they have been doing.

Showing how churches have been at the forefront of recent democratic movements around the world, he traces this theme across his account of the civil-rights movement in the American South, the struggle for liberation in Nicaragua, and the postcolonial struggle for democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. In the final chapter of this section, he analyzes the role of the churches in the Berlin and South African moments of liberation.

But it is not yet time to sing “the strife is o’er, the battle won.” For the churches, having delivered the nations from the kingdom of darkness, now face a new and daunting responsibility: “The struggle is no longer to be understood primarily in terms of resistance and liberation, but in terms of reconstruction and transformation.” Required for this new task of empire building is what de Gruchy seeks to provide in his last chapter, “a theology for a just democratic world order.” In this emerging new world, Christian churches should think of themselves as “instruments enabling the process to take place, and as nurturers of a culture of democratic moral value.”

A theological reorientation is needed for such a task, and now more than ever. As de Gruchy puts it, “If [the church] is to participate in critical solidarity in the process of global democratization, it is unsatisfactory, even dangerous, for the church to become involved unless it understands why, and in what way, this is consonant with its faith and integral to its mission in the world.”

Key to such a theological reorientation is the recovery of the original self-understanding of the primitive ecclesia.

“Those early Christians were a small minority, often situated on the periphery of public life, but they did not regard their mission as a private affair–it had to do with the transformation of the world. . . . From the beginning of Christianity, then, a connection was made between the life and the structure of the church, and God’s will and purpose for the world.”

Such a retrieval of the “concrete utopia” of primitive Christianity places the Christian at the vanguard of the new world, making her a vital contributor to redemptive history. In a statement certain to brighten the countenance of our bewildered and beleaguered Christian citizen as she ponders November, de Gruchy claims that “it is impossible to conceive of the mission of the church apart from the struggle for a just world order, or to consider the role of the church except in relation to the needs and concerns for humanity and creation as a whole. This is, indeed, the vision of the prophets and the hope of the world.” Come November, then, our troubled voter can take comfort: she is a world democrat.

But from the Historian comes a different take on the matter. Wiebe identifies his work as a response to more than 60 studies of democracy that have emerged in the past quarter-century, from philosophers, social scientists, and political journalists. At the outset, Wiebe locates himself as joining “a gathering of people who in recent years have been separating democracy out for rigorous examination in its own right.”

This “gathering” is truly impressive. His appended list of “special debts and suggested readings” includes nearly every major work in the fields of scholarly and journalistic endeavor. However, in his conclusion, Wiebe gently chides this body of work: “What this impressive analysis lacks . . . is historical awareness, a sense of the particular experiences that particular people have had during a particular span of time.” The author makes up for this lack with his own impressive account of American democracy’s establishment and subsequent transformation.

While the relationship between American democracy and American Christianity does not serve as the object of his focus (for such, one should consult Nathan Hatch’s “The Democratization of American Christianity”), Wiebe’s treatment of how “new relations between work and authority have framed the major changes in American democracy” provides a cautionary tale for all would-be democratic reformers in our day. He demonstrates how an increasingly complex late-nineteenth-century political economy frustrated and redirected the original democratic dynamic–“lodge democracy,” as Wiebe calls it.

Early-nineteenth-century democracy, Wiebe reminds us, was rooted in local communities. Democratic energies were developed by the rise of innumerable small, voluntary, civic, fraternal groups, whereby the free white man, cut adrift from the traditional moorings of family and place, was transformed from isolated individual to member, brother, and friend. Such democracy was local, face-to-face, and personalistic.

Wiebe acknowledges how exclusive this “lodge democracy” was–especially in terms of gender and race–but he insists that it rested on the key democratic principles of individual self-determination and egalitarian self-government. Thus, while read one way, lodge democracy represented all that was worst in early to midnineteenth-century America, “viewed another way, it formed widening circles of connection that linked citizens over vast distances, invited collaboration across class and ethnic divides, and served as a beacon of self-respect for millions here and abroad.”

But then the nature of work changed, and so the egalitarian structure of American political society became increasingly vulnerable. Thus, by the 1920s, following a shift that began in the 1890s, America’s modern three-class system was in place. Even as democracy spread out to include the older disenfranchised groups, new hierarchies were arising that would frustrate the democratic promise of individual self-mastery and egalitarian self-rule.

Wiebe’s seventh chapter, “Dissolving the People,” chronicles the deformation of American democracy by the rise of major corporations and the modern bureaucratic state. Tracing the systemic problems of American democracy back prior to those objects of complaints common among conservatives (who blame America’s ills on FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society programs, or both) and liberals (who fault Richard Nixon, Reaganomics, the rise of the Christian Right, or all of the above), Wiebe identifies two great constraints on modern democracy: centralization and hierarchy.

In the final section of “Self-Rule,” Wiebe provides what he calls “the democrat’s brief,” combining a critique of contemporary American democracy with a call for particular kinds of political action. Wiebe’s democrat practices “guerrilla politics,” an agenda of “pulling down and pulling apart,” repositioning power and decision making to levels closer at hand to the everyday life of citizens. The object of political action is thus the “large structures” where public and private (economic) power is concentrated: “The democrat pulls down the large structures so that ordinary citizens can move in and participate. The historical record and contemporary experience alike are eloquent in expressing how closely a rise in participatory energy correlates with a faith in local self-rule.”

All politics is local. Small is beautiful. Thus, should she follow the Historian, our November citizen will still think of herself as a democrat, but now a guerrilla democrat.

So we slouch toward November. Democracy is what we think we are all about. The Theologian bids us come and be a part of global democratic transformation. The Historian warns us of the pathologies that afflict modern democracies. Who are we to be, world democrats or guerrilla democrats? I must confess that my own reading of history, theology, and the politics of the present moment inclines me to prefer the way of the guerrilla. Democratic Constantinianism is Constantinianism nonetheless, and what we set out to police has a nasty way of policing us. Small is beautiful.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 24

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“The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336”

By Caroline Walker Bynum

Columbia University Press

368 pp.; $29.95, hardcover;

$17.50, paper

I have awaited publication of this volume for some time. Caroline Walker Bynum has for 15 years written about medieval texts–often the same texts that I had just begun to struggle with. Each time, upon the appearance of her book or article, I found she had written about them with compelling insight and fetching good humor. As a result, I have come to think of reading her work as an eerie but pleasant process by which I discover what is in my own mind (at least were it as fecund and acute as hers).

Great expectations, however, can impose a heavy burden upon any human artifact. It was perhaps inevitable that the “Christmas” of finally examining this volume should fall short of the wild imaginings of an “Advent” spent contemplating its promising wrapping. I admit having had such moments of Yuletide ennui, but they were mercifully few. Indeed, on the whole, my reading was dominated by long stretches of delightful discovery.

Bynum proposes to examine several moments in the Christian community’s ongoing reflection upon embodiment, moments in which embodiment had become the subject of debate, of disagreement, and of change (AD. 200, 400, 1100, 1200, 1270, and 1330). The doctrinal issue that served to inspire reflection upon, disagreement about, and change in the West’s experience of embodiment was the central Christian confession of bodily resurrection. Potential readers should be aware that the doctrine of bodily resurrection and what might be termed its pendant theological themes (eschatology, soul, heaven, hell, purgatory, millenarianism, mysticism, time, and self) are treated not so much for their own sake as for what they can tell us about the experience of body and the transformations such experience has undergone through time.

Bynum’s study, then, fits into a new effort being championed by some of North America and Europe’s most creative historians to write a “history of the body.” What Bynum brings to the endeavor is a different and fruitful focus. Other historians tend to underline our experience of body in its sexuality. Bynum, on the other hand, argues “that for most of Western history body was understood primarily as a locus of biological process.”

In other words, “the ‘other’ encountered in body by preachers and theologians, storytellers, philosophers and artists, was not finally the ‘other’ of sex and gender, social position or ethnic group, belief or culture; it was death.” How could it be otherwise in a culture that owed so much to the death-defying work of Christ narrated in the Gospels and given explicit theological thematization by Paul? As obvious as such a point seems once Bynum articulates it, it is a point of view difficult to square with the cultural expectations of a post-Freudian age.

Bynum begins each division of her book with what philosophers and theologians say about bodily resurrection. She labels her commitment to start there as “rather old-fashioned intellectual history.” She moves beyond traditional concern with ideas and the arguments used to justify them, however, to consider the limiting cases, the examples and metaphors used to illustrate and confirm doctrine. It is her view that these materials lead the investigator in two very valuable directions.

In the first place, they often point to problems that philosophers and theologians are incapable of solving (social and psychological as well as intellectual). Second, they point to the social and religious context of intellectual discussion.

Bynum’s aim in following these two leads is to incarnate the doctrine of bodily resurrection, so to speak, by placing its intellectual discussions within the pulsing tissue of the Christian faithful’s lived experience. Bynum sums up her methodological orientation this way: “If I move to a consideration of gender or power, birth or burial, money or food in an effort to situate the debates I study, I do so because the authors I am reading slip into analogies drawn from these aspects of human experience and slip into such images especially at points of tension, confusion, fallacy, self-contradiction or absurdity.”

Of course, the Christian notion of bodily resurrection presumes that the dead shall rise with bodies that are “the same” as those that underwent death. Bynum distinguishes two senses to this term “the same.” There is “the identical,” which denotes numerical sameness (i.e., spatio-temporal continuity). There is also “the similar,” which denotes perceptual sameness (i.e., the same material bits arranged in the same way).

Bynum sees Christians generating two sets of images used to illustrate and confirm bodily resurrection, sets that correspond roughly to these two senses of “the same.” There is, first and foremost, the central biblical metaphor of seed articulated in 1 Corinthians 15. While this image maintains its canonical status throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, it comes, rather quickly, to be placed alongside, to be overshadowed by, and to be understood in terms of a large number of subsequent images–for example, “the flowering of a dry tree after winter, the donning of new clothes, the rebuilding of a temple, the hatching of an egg, the smelting out of ore from clay, the reforging of a statue that has been melted down, the growth of a fetus from a drop of sem*n, the return of the phoenix from its own ashes, the reassembling of broken potsherds, the vomiting up of bits of shipwrecked bodies by fishes that have consumed them.” These were the metaphors that dominated patristic and medieval speculation on the resurrection of the body.

Bynum points out that these are complex images, which can serve different philosophical and theological understandings. Thus, for example, “The growth of seed or sem*n or an egg implies numerical identity through spatio-temporal continuity but not necessarily material continuity. The reforging of a statue seems to imply continuity of material but may only mean that exactly the same shape (i.e., continuity of form) accounts for identity. The image of smelted ore suggests that continuity of self is explained by continuation of the same material bits at the level of atoms or particles, whether or not what is reforged has the same form.”

Bynum’s researches lead her to a single, descriptive conclusion: “that a concern for material and structural continuity showed remarkable persistence even where it seemed almost to require philosophical incoherence, theological equivocation, or aesthetic offensiveness. This concern responded to and was reflected in pious practices of great oddness; without it, such late medieval curiosities as entrail caskets, finger reliquaries, and miracles of incorrupt cadavers are inexplicable.” Her interpretation of this state of affairs is put with equal starkness: “But the ultimate context for the tradition I study is not a particular historical moment but a longue duree of terror. Whatever ultimate glory medieval thinkers hoped for, however much they came to understand physicality and individuality as necessary components of self, they did so at the expense of freezing much of biological process and sublimating much of sensual desire.”

In working toward and interpreting her conclusions, Bynum leads her reader on a merry chase through thickets of philosophical and theological argument, medical and other scientific theory, through the maze of contemporary social and political structure and instinct, through remote outcroppings of folklore and iconography, indeed, through an ethnographer’s heaven of odd practices and beliefs. She moves on many fronts simultaneously (seemingly at home with the parochial concerns and methods of many disciplines) and toward a characteristically multitextured narrative that both establishes her conclusions and argues powerfully for her interpretation of them.

This is vintage Bynum, a book that begs to be read more than once. One feels the privilege of being present at the unveiling of some of Christianity’s most arcane secrets and of discovering that they, in turn, shed light on some of the most poignant dilemmas of the human condition.

Bynum does miss one or two opportunities. For example, she does not seem to catch some of the implications of what she has uncovered. The swift association of the biblical term “dust” (as in “from dust to dust”) with units of matter suggests connections up and down the history of philosophy. Christian “dust” seems to be a worthy analogue to Democritean, Epicurean, even of modern atoms. It also lines up with Stoicism’s seminal reasons and Leibnitz’s monads. Indeed, what is common to all of these conceptual developments is the desire to allow for a truly scientific (i.e., epistemically defensible or justifiable) analysis of matter, material reality, and its correlate, individuality. Material realities, these conceptions seem to be designed to affirm, are only apparently labile and friable (Bynum’s terms). These admittedly fluctuating entities are divisible, to be sure, but ultimately into equal units that possess identical properties. As a consequence, material entities can be understood as constellations of such equal units (i.e., as regular patterns of unit density that result from the response of such units to immaterial dynamics, whether such dynamics are conceived as anterior and interior to matter itself) or coeval with and exterior to, though constitutive of, the actuality of matter (e.g., form).

This philosophical context for Christian theological treatment of “dust” can add depth to Bynum’s understanding of the persistence of Christian insistence on the material continuity of resurrection bodies. For, if Christian thinkers are about the business of understanding the faith, and if the faith involves an orientation to materiality, embodiment, and salvation, then a precondition for understanding this orientation is the intelligibility of matter and body, even in the face of a long and powerful philosophical bias against such a possibility. In other words, Christian thinkers of antiquity and the Middle Ages were aware that matter and material realities cannot be thought (be intelligible) in abstraction from quantity (i.e., divisibility). But the history of philosophy suggests that divisibility has a logical conclusion–equal units possessing identical properties. Thus, if the nexus between matter, body, person, and salvation is to be thought at all, material continuity intelligible in terms of an understanding of “dust” as equal units of matter possessing identical properties would seem to belong to an understanding of the salvation of persons who are truly psychosomatic. The contradictions Bynum sees in theologians such as Thomas Aquinas may thus be more apparent than real. Bynum, then, has missed an important factor in the persistence of theories and images of bodily resurrection that assert material continuity. I would love to have seen what she would have done had these philosophical connections occurred to her.

In the end, however, all quibbles pale. In this volume, one learns much about the Christian tradition. In the process, one travels to many of its stranger corners and learns to accept that Christian imagination and practice are far more diffuse than we Christians are wont to recognize.

But the rewards of such travel and acceptance are great. One learns to see in the doctrine of bodily resurrection “a concept of sublime courage and optimism.” One comes to realize again that Christianity truly “locates redemption there where ultimate horror also resides–in pain, mutilation, death, and decay”; that it “face[s] without flinching the most negative of all the consequences of embodiment: the fragmentation, slime, and stench of the grave”; indeed, that it is “this stench and fragmentation” which it sees “lifted to glory in resurrection.”

Let us follow Bynum to her own moving conclusion: “To make body crucial to personhood is to court the possibility that (to misquote Paul) victory is swallowed up in death. But if there is resurrection, then what is redeemed includes the fragments that concerned Tertullian and Athenagoras as well as the love for which Dante and Mechtild strove. We may not find their solutions plausible, but it is hard to feel that they got the problem wrong.”

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 26

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One wouldn’t expect a play about an aging Anglican clergyman to pack such a punch as to sweep all four Best Play awards on the London stage. Yet such was the acclaim that greeted David Hare’s “Racing Demon” when first produced at the Royal National Theatre in 1990. Why it took so long to get to America is anyone’s guess.

“Racing Demon” is one of a trilogy of plays (along with “Murmuring Judges” and “The Absence of War”) in which Hare examines Britain’s tottering institutions. It sets before us a story embodying a debate about divine compassion and human care, as well as a slew of issues concerning faith, revelation, hom*osexuality and ministry, prayer, pastoral care of the poor, and the role of the church in society.

As I settled into the plush seats of the inviting arena of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, I wondered if this play would offer more of the same sort of unfair stereotyping we have seen so often in portrayals of clergy, who are generally depicted as bumbling, hyperpious, sterile, forgetful, wheedling, and whining–that is, when they are not homicidal maniacs who quote Scripture while dispatching their victims. But Hare gives us a plausible picture of four Anglican priests who operate a social service in an impoverished area of London.

All action takes place in an austere raised space shaped like a cross. The spare, abstemious staging and artistic direction of Richard Eyre make the spectator feel like a participant-observer in a musty church or around its seamy edges. Eyre and company have re-created their London visual setting for this New York performance and populated it with an excellent set of experienced American actors: Josef Sommer (as the elderly liberal clergyman, Lionel Espy), Michael Cumpsty (as his young evangelical assistant, Tony Ferris), Kathryn Meisle (as Tony’s girlfriend, Frances Parnell), Kathleen Chalfant (as the head parson’s passive-aggressive wife).

Liberal and evangelical clerical prototypes provide the central conflict for the play. The liberal is Lionel, a confused, discouraged, spiritually fatigued clergyman, an Anglican elitist from a family with “a great clerical name,” now penitently working as a social caregiver and depressed permissivist. Tony, his energetic, new assistant, is a spirited evangelical from a working-class background, now upwardly mobile and ready to rise into church leadership.

The title of the play refers metaphorically to the demonic impulses pervading and threatening to take over every level of church life–laity and clergy, liberal and conservative, liturgy and relief work, theology and practice. It is the demonic against which all the ministers are racing in various ways, and whose effects they wish to mend in order to nurture the people of God.

The play opens with the battered balding priest Lionel praying, “God, where are you? I wish you would talk to me. It isn’t just me. There’s a general feeling. This is what people are saying in the parish. They want to know where you are. The joke wears thin. . . . But the people also think, I didn’t realize when he said nothing, he really did mean absolutely nothing at all.”

Lionel’s wily bishop (played by George N. Martin) is from the outset warning him of discontent among his parishioners: “They have come to doubt you. Maybe question the power of your convictions.” The bishop, cynical about seeking unity in teaching, advises Lionel to put on a better liturgical performance. “Only one thing unites us. The administration of the sacrament. Finally that’s what you’re there for.”

Evangelicals will find most interesting the character of Tony Ferris, the lively young curate just out of seminary and so the least experienced member of the team, who criticizes the banality of the team’s ministry and asks for more direct testimony to the saving power of Christ.

The play hinges on a series of soliloquies in the form of prayers, which provide a window into each key character. In Tony’s soliloquy, he says to God: “Christ didn’t come to sit on a committee. He didn’t come to do social work. He came to preach repentance. And to offer everyone the chance of redemption. In their innermost being. God, please help Lionel to see this. . . . Can you tell me, is anything right with the Church? I mean, is the big joke that having lived and died on the cross, Jesus would bequeath us–what?–total confusion, a host of good intentions, and an endlessly revolving cyclostyle [duplicating] machine?”

The only case study in pastoral care occurs with Stella, a distressed black woman whose husband does not want any more children; she has just had an abortion. “They knock you out. Then they wake you up and it’s over. ‘Cept for me it wa’n’t.” She comes to Lionel asking what the church teaches about abortion. After reluctantly admitting that “abortion is wrong,” all Lionel can do is offer her Kleenex and a “very low-key” prayer. Lionel’s pastoral theory is “Let them come to you,” “don’t judge,” and never mention the Bible.

When Tony asks: “Isn’t this the perfect moment to tell her about Christ?”, Lionel answers: “I don’t approve of cashing in on people’s unhappiness.” The churches are empty, says Tony. When presented with a problem, we send the needy away with a half-hearted prayer. Tony suspects these two facts are linked: low parish responsiveness and inarticulate witness to Christ. “The statistics are appalling. We feel we’ve had a good Sunday if between us we attract one percent.”

Tony wants to energize the congregation with evangelical preaching as the ground of serious social service. Lionel wants to listen to the congregation and serve them in their pain, to learn from them and to empathize deeply with them without requiring any response. Meanwhile, the church is becoming ever more inconsequential within an increasingly demoralized society.

The catalyst in the briskly developing story is the bishop’s decision to expel Lionel from his parish for being unable to make the sacramental life come alive and for being uncertain about the essential teachings of the church. Such an expulsion may seem improbable; anyone who knows the Anglican ethos has a hard time imagining a bishop so concerned about “putting on a show” sacramentally that he makes a cause celebre out of a mild-mannered clergyman who seems only to have empathy for the poor. In dramatic terms, however, the premise is effective, highlighting the contrast between Lionel and Tony.

Hare deals evenhandedly with the two pastors who represent sharply defined alternatives for the church: the tired and waning liberal ministries of compassion versus the emergent and exuberant ministries of evangelical proclamation. Neither prototype comes even close to being flawless, and yet neither is clearly evil. Meanwhile, the demonic is racing throughout the church and chalking up victories across the theological/political spectrum.

Lionel’s way of compassionately ministering seems to be stagnating in hopelessness. Tony’s way of spirited proclamation seems to be ready to steamroller over human needs and vulnerabilities. Lionel has a miserable relationship with his miserable wife. Tony has not yet entered into the real task of mating and parenting but appears overconfident in his ability to put all things in good order under the commandment of God. “I have accepted a supernatural religion. Since I did that, everything has changed.”

But Hare is far too cunning a playwright to present a static opposition between these contrasting types. Indeed, in the course of the play all the characters–not only Lionel and Tony–undergo a transformation of some kind. The bishop, Charlie, for example, changes from one interested mainly in peacemaking in his diocese–maintaining the status quo–to one who stands up for feeding the sheep. “You parade your so-called humility until it becomes a disgusting kind of pride,” he says to Lionel. “Yes, we can all be right if we never actually do anything. In any other job you’d have been fired years ago.” The bishop is making an example of Lionel, he tells him, because “you are the reason why the whole church is dying. Immobile. Wracked. Burned inward. Caught in a cycle of decline. Your personal integrity your only concern. Incapable of reaching out. A great vacillating pea-green half-set jelly.”

That denunciation carries considerable persuasive force. And yet Lionel is portrayed more positively as the action progresses. At the beginning of the play, he seems to be merely wishy-washy, comically incapable of providing any plausible rationale for his ministry. But as the play develops, his weaknesses seem to turn into strengths. Faced with the bishop’s charges, he shows himself capable of at least modest resistance. By the end, Lionel appears as a martyr to church politics, admirable not only in his identification with the suffering of his parishioners but even in his uncertainty.

It is in contrast to Tony, perhaps, more than in any action of his own, that Lionel appears to grow in stature. From the perspective of the audience, it is almost as if the playwright himself undergoes a change of viewpoint between the two acts. At first he presents the young evangelical so sympathetically as to appear to endorse his critique of the latitudinarianism of Lionel’s meandering social ministry. By the end of the play, however, Tony is portrayed as so rigid, so ecstatic, so fixated, so alienating, that it is hard to identify with him at all.

Tony’s flaws are revealed with particular clarity in his relationship with his girlfriend, Frances, the agnostic, disillusioned daughter of a distinguished missionary family, with whom he breaks up in the course of the play. In their first scene he is already talking about ending their relationship. They have just made love. He has done so, he says, in the religious context of their implicit long-term commitment and is uneasy about their continuing in premarital infidelity, for fear that it will dissipate his energies for ministry. He “feels rotten”–“worried about how it may look to the rest of the world.” In response, Frances notes, “For the record–I didn’t make love in any ‘context.’ Whatever that may mean. I made love because I wanted you. Is that really such a terrible idea?”

She feels disvalued and ignored, convinced that all Tony wants to do is to carry the cross, which she’s had enough of from her missionary background. And yet it is he, the presumed caregiver, who has depended on her for caregiving, for she has repeatedly gotten him through his major crises: the death of his parents and his ordination, with all its accompanying feelings of unworthiness. For his part, Tony is now feeling ready to “clear out of the way” the ambivalence of his private life, the ambivalence between being thrilled and made anxious by their trysts. Ironically, Frances is willing to articulate the one word her priest-lover is most frightened to use: “The word is sin. Why don’t you use it? You’ve been sinning.” It’s in keeping with Hare’s deliberately unsettling use of shifting perspectives that, as the action progresses, Frances changes from a skeptic to one who talks with God and who finally ends in going out to do relief work in some distant place of service analogous to a mission field where God’s name is not known, where God–as distorted by the visible church–does not exist.

Tony’s lack of empathy and simple human feeling–in marked contrast to Lionel–is also apparent in his sanctimonious fixation on viewing suffering as divine punishment. When Lionel’s wife has a stroke, Tony sees it as a providential sign that Lionel should change his life and redefine his staggering ministry. Tony sees the death of his parents as a shock that set him on his path to his present ministry. “Through suffering we learn.” Finally, he complacently concludes that his real conversion occurred at the point of his giving up Frances. And so in his last scene the goal-oriented Tony is preparing a huge billboard for evangelism, remarking: “It’ll be like saying Christ really belongs. Not just in church. But in the high street.” He boasts: “We’ve doubled our numbers each week.”

Some people coming out of the theater thought they had clearly identified the “demon” in the title: Tony. I think rather that the demonic is saturating the whole church ethos, and all principal characters.

Tony is right about his critique of the church and its need to proclaim Christ. He is wrong when he assumes that the success of evangelism can be counted in numbers, and in his excessive subjectivism, which turns toward an oversimplified theodicy that leaves no mystery in the purpose of God in relation to evil and suffering.

Those who see the parson’s world as intrinsically boring and narrow will encounter in this play characters with whom anyone could meaningfully identify and converse. Those who share the suffering that is occurring within the body of Christ will find in it an accurate mirror of much that characterizes the church today, not only Anglican but the whole church. I strongly encourage community theaters and church drama groups to consider producing “Racing Demon.” It offers a compelling, provocative statement of alternative views of the church and a variety of interpretations of the readiness of clergy for ministry.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 28

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“The Battle of Beginnings: Why Neither Side Is Winning the Creation-Evolution Debate”

By Del Ratzsch

InterVarsity

248 pp.; $14.99, paper

Del Ratzsch, professor of philosophy of science at Calvin College, has written a flawed but thoughtful book that encourages me to hope that, despite some unfortunate resentments and misunderstandings, the Christian intellectual response to evolutionary naturalism may be converging on a common set of principles. I am afraid that many readers may miss Ratzsch’s most significant points, however, because they are presented in a context that tends to conceal their importance.

It appears that Ratzsch started out to write a critical analysis of the conflict between neo-Darwinism and creation-science–as exemplified on the one hand by the British zoologist and fervent atheist Richard Dawkins, and on the other hand by the young-earth fundamentalist Henry Morris and his creation-science movement. Ratzsch’s original aim seems to have been to show that some bad arguments have been made by both sides in this polarized conflict. That does not sound very new or exciting, but somewhere along the way Ratzsch seems to have recognized that the old creation-evolution debate is getting redefined, and he makes some constructive points to help that process along.

Ratzsch’s subtitle says that “neither side is winning” the battle of beginnings. I cannot imagine what gives him that impression, since the Darwinian position dominates not only science, but government, the universities, the public schools, and the media. Most people I meet in the secular university world have gained what little information they have about creationism from the writings of its principal enemies, such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and the late Isaac Asimov. They take for granted that evolutionary science has explained or soon will have explained the entire history of life on naturalistic principles.

Given this state of affairs, it is difficult to see what Ratzsch could expect to accomplish by his concluding recommendation that “maybe the various sides should talk. Not debate–talk. It is just possible, neither side being omniscient, that both sides could gain something from serious contact with competent practitioners on the other.”

If Ratzsch is proposing a serious, mutually respectful conversation between the neo-Darwinists and the biblical creationists, he is in need of a reality check. The position of just about everyone with any influence in evolutionary science is that creationism is not science, and its practitioners by definition cannot be competent. This is the case not only because creationists are deemed to be prejudiced by their belief that the Bible has authority over scientific questions, but even more fundamentally because they reject naturalism, which is the philosophical basis of contemporary science.

Theistic evolutionists fare little better. Most theistic evolutionists do not challenge either the conclusions of evolutionary biology or its naturalistic methodology, but argue merely that evolution by natural processes is compatible with theistic religion. To the extent that they go further and postulate a supernatural directing force in evolution, they violate the rules of methodological naturalism and are no more welcome in scientific discussions than outright creationists. In either case, what scientific topic is there to talk about?

For a productive scientific conversation to be even conceivable there would have to be a new force in the picture, one that is capable of entering the debate with arguments the naturalists cannot easily refuse to take seriously. Almost halfway through his book Ratzsch discloses that a potential force of that kind has, in fact, emerged, a new phenomenon that he mysteriously refers to as an “upper tier” of creationists. He explains that this group consists of persons with doctorates from first-class universities who are performing serious scientific and philosophical work to advance concepts like “intelligent design” and “irreducible complexity” as legitimate descriptions of biological reality. Although Ratzsch does not name any of the members of this “upper tier” in his text (a few references are provided in the notes) or discuss their work in any detail, he apparently sympathizes with their objectives and endorses some important principles that are essential to gain them a fair hearing.

In particular, Ratzsch rejects the argument that science is defined by its adherence to naturalism, pointing out that such a dogmatic standard potentially conflicts with the principle that science should be a “no holds barred” search for truth. Unless we have a prior knowledge that naturalism is true, then we cannot rule out the possibility that supernatural action may have affected the history of life, and that evidence of that action may exist. Ratzsch similarly rejects Dawkins’s argument that reference to a creator in science as the source of biological complexity is logically pernicious because it leaves the creator unexplained. Every explanation has an unexplained starting point. A theistic science starts with an uncreated creator; a naturalistic science starts with something like particles and natural laws and goes on from there.

On similar grounds, Ratzsch rejects the argument, frequently made by theistic evolutionists, that to posit action by a creator anywhere in the history of life is to invoke a futile “god of the gaps,” who will inevitably be expelled from reality as science advances to fill the gaps with naturalistic explanations. Ratzsch sensibly retorts that “If there are no gaps in the fabric of natural causation, then obviously appeal to divine activity will get us off track. On the other hand, if there are such gaps, refusing in principle to recognize them within science will equally get us off track.” That is particularly cogent reasoning if the so-called gaps involve not minor details but such fundamental problems as accounting for the existence of irreducibly complex genetic information.

In all these instances, Ratzsch insists upon a principle I heartily endorse; he will not permit either side to win its case by controlling the definition of terms. Either organisms show evidence of design or they do not; either mindless processes like mutation and selection can make complex biological organisms or they cannot. The determination should be made by a fair assessment of the evidence and not by defining “science” as an enterprise that inherently assumes the one possibility and excludes the other.

This endorsem*nt of a level playing field is more radical than readers may suppose. The view that science and methodological naturalism are inseparable is widespread among many scientists and philosophers, including theistic evolutionists, and makes it impossible for them to take seriously the possibility that the creation of genetic information might require intelligence. Show them a computer program and they will never question the need for a programmer. Show them a much more impressive example of design in nature, and they will never doubt that unintelligent material processes must have been responsible for the appearance of design. Even if they give lip service to the possibility that a designer might exist, they will insist on standards of evaluation that ensure a putative example of design can never be more than a problem that naturalistic science has not yet solved.

Ratzsch is aware that the appeal of evolutionary naturalism owes as much to moral and spiritual factors as to scientific evidence. He says in his preface that he was raised a Christian fundamentalist and taught to respect science but to distrust Darwinism. At first, he wanted to reconcile Genesis, religion, and evolution,

“but at some point along the way I think I ceased to want them to be reconcilable. Evolution, along with the new cosmologies and backed by the undentable prestige of science, became part of a gratifying sophisticated excuse for unbelief–a ticket out of an oppressive universe with a God who set boundaries and made demands, into one where we set the rules and the cosmos itself was the only limit. (It was this personal experience as much as anything that has convinced me that creation-evolution issues frequently run much deeper than mere scientific theory.)”

I was raised as a nominal Christian, not a fundamentalist, but otherwise my story would be similar. My own realization that there is a profound relationship between naturalistic philosophy and Darwinian science led to my writing two books and many articles on this subject. It also led to my forming a rewarding colleagueship with a group of scholars and scientists whom I judge capable of holding their own in a serious conversation with the scientific naturalists. This group is the “upper tier” of professors and researchers whose existence Ratzsch so tentatively acknowledges as the new factor in the debate.

My colleagues and I speak of “theistic realism”–or sometimes, “mere creation”–as the defining concept of our movement. This means that we affirm that God is objectively real as Creator and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology. We avoid the tangled arguments about how or whether to reconcile the biblical account with the present state of scientific knowledge because we think these issues can be much more constructively engaged when we have a scientific picture that is not distorted by naturalistic prejudice. If life is not simply matter evolving by natural selection but is something that had to be designed by a creator, then the nature of that creator, and the possibility of revelation, will become a matter of widespread interest among thoughtful people who are currently being taught that evolutionary science has shown God to be a product of the human imagination.

Our movement is something of a scandal in some sections of the Christian academic world for the same reason that it is exciting: we propose actually to engage in a serious conversation with the mainstream scientific culture on fundamental principles, rather than submit to its demand that naturalism be conceded as the basis for all scientific discussion. That raises the alarming possibility, as one of Ratzsch’s colleagues put it in criticizing me, that “the gulf between the academy and the sanctuary will only grow wider.” The bitter feeling that has been spawned in some quarters by that possibility may explain why Ratzsch discusses our group so tentatively; but no matter. What matters for the present is to open up the discussion, and to that end, Del Ratzsch has made a positive contribution.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 30

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“A Challenge to C. S. Lewis”

By Peter Milward

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

138 pp.; $29.50

Lewis once wrote to a Roman Catholic critic of his, “One of the most important differences between us is our estimate of the importance of the differences.” He might have said the same thing had he read Peter Milward’s new book, which argues that Lewis’s Irish Protestant sensibility distorted his work as a cultural historian and literary critic. Milward presents his critique in 15 brief, alphabetically ordered essays with broad headings such as Allegory, Historicism, The Reformation, Shakespeare, and Words.

Partly because of the book’s curious organization, its central thesis emerges only gradually and is not fully articulated until the final chapter. There Milward argues that Lewis’s recurring insistence that literary texts be studied primarily as literature–not as philosophy, biography, or history–is a distortion of vision resulting from Lewis’s Irish Protestant background. Milward charges that Lewis’s academic work is tainted throughout by his Reformation allegiances, as shown by his neglecting the importance of Mary in the medieval world-picture and his downplaying the cultural disruptions in England caused by the break with Rome. Milward also claims Lewis’s concern about critics’ reading too much philosophy into literature reveals a distrust of secular culture inherited from Luther and Calvin.

Milward’s critique is thoughtful, but too cursory and impressionistic. Lewis’s adult faith was far removed from what he called the “dry husks of religion” of his Ulster boyhood. And the targets of Lewis’s literary barbs were not fellow Christians of any denomination, but rather secular intellectuals seeking to establish a Religion of Culture. Sometimes Milward simply misreads Lewis, as when he speaks of his “horror of Darwinian evolution,” comparing Lewis to Samuel Wilberforce debating Thomas Huxley. Other times Milward extrapolates Lewis’s whole view on a subject from a sentence or two, apparently unaware of more ample discussions elsewhere in the Lewis canon. In places, what Milward calls disagreement seems more like disappointment, a frustration that Lewis did not share his own opinions, such as an aversion to eating meat or an enthusiasm for Teilhard de Chardin.

Milward met Lewis when he was a student at Oxford in the early 1950s, and the two exchanged letters for some time thereafter. This may account for the uneven tone of the book, from a preface that all but apologizes for finding fault with Lewis to passages on the Reformation where diagnosis gives way to diatribe.

Lewis was famous for his commitment, however imperfect, to be a “mere Christian.” Would that his critics had succeeded so well.

–David C. Downing

“Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress”

By Kathryn Lindskoog

Cornerstone Press

165 pp.; $9.95, paper

“Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy”

By David C. Downing

University of Massachusetts Press

186 pp.; $13.95, paper

It has become increasingly difficult to say anything fresh about C. S. Lewis. Thirty-odd years after his death, there is no shortage of published paraphrases, recollections, handbooks, and indices to Lewis’s theological and personal legacy. Nevertheless, it is relatively rare to encounter works that skillfully elucidate Lewis’s fiction and apologetics in the wider context of his life and times. Thankfully, the two books reviewed here–along with Doris T. Myers’s recent work, “C. S. Lewis in Context”–prove the exception, weaving together incisive literary explications of major Lewis volumes with uncommon biocritical insight.

Kathryn Lindskoog has written a perspicacious and winsome guide to one of Lewis’s most underappreciated works, the quasi-autobiographical “Pilgrim’s Regress.” Lewis’s first postconversion theological work, it tracks, a la John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the protagonist’s journey in search of the Landlord, that is, God, whom he has both longed for and feared in ignorance for most of his life. Lewis decorated his allegorical terrain with clever, sometimes esoteric allusions and references to contemporaries and prevailing philosophies, some of which are likely to stump even his most well-read admirers. Finding the Landlord is a welcome companion volume, helping casual readers and serious scholars alike rediscover and understand more fully this early Lewis work–both in its own milieu and in the light of his more mature, later explorations of joy in “Surprised by Joy” and “Till We Have Faces.” Lindskoog also includes three useful appendices, the most impressive of which is her sprightly annotated bibliography of other Lewis works and selected secondary sources that explore further the biographical and theological contours of “Regress.”

David Downing’s “Planets in Peril” is a singular work that sets a high standard for Lewis scholars wishing to illuminate rather than obscure or trivialize their subject. With an economy and precision of words atypical in scholarly publishing, Downing patiently sets forth compelling expositions of each volume of Lewis’s space trilogy, providing needed perspective on their composition history and formative influences, their critical reception, and their ongoing popularity. Of considerable value is Downing’s sensible treatment of issues raised by recent critics of the trilogy regarding Lewis’s use of violence, his antagonism toward science, and, most significantly, his alleged sexism. In each case, Downing frankly addresses the textual evidence without diminishing Lewis’s achievement or explaining away weaknesses in his line of sight.

–Bruce L. Edwards

“Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism”

Edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jensen

Eerdmans

125 pp.; $10, paper

This brief but important volume consists of seven addresses given at a 1993 conference held by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology in Northfield, Minnesota. Its title, taken from the conference theme, borrows from an early work of Soren Kierkegaard, whose prophetic critique of the European church evermore suggests itself to American Protestants.

The editors–cofounders of the center and coeditors of the thoughtful theological journal “Pro Ecclesia”–are forthright in stating the trajectory of the addresses. Unashamedly partisan, they acknowledge the deadly cultural context in which evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians are to contend. At stake in this conflict are the triune identity of God, the exclusiveness of the Christian faith, the unity of the holy apostolic church, the nature of the church’s ministry, and the great commission of our Lord to disciple the nations. Where these marks of historic Christianity have not been outrightly denied, they are increasingly diluted by the plethora of cultural “isms”–the spirits of the age–that inhabit American society. It is against these various betrayals that the addresses are directed.

Undergirding contemporary religious expression is what cultural critic Harold Bloom has described as the gnostic core of American religiosity. The hallmark of this new gnosticism, in the view of the editors, is religious experience that is divorced from dogma–indeed, from truth itself. This obsessive and radically individualized notion of spiritual freedom stands as a blatant contradiction to historic Christian orthodoxy. In response, each of the essays represents an attempt to counter the gnostic or neopagan cultural Zeitgeist in a fresh and penetrating way, examining the foundational premises of competing world-views and theological pluralism while considering the ethical fallout of pluralism’s ascendance. They scrutinize the corrosive tentativeness of false religious tolerance coupled with the church’s therapeutic captivity. And they chart the moral markers necessary for civil society.

Although the religious context being addressed in this volume is mainline Protestantism, there is much that commends itself to Christian churches of all types. Protestant evangelicalism, for example, has shown itself prone toward two tendencies. On the one hand, evangelical pietism that divorces itself from the catholic element of the Christian tradition breaks up under the weight of cultural metamorphosis. On the other hand, a Christian apologetic that, in Carl Braaten’s words, seeks to accommodate and console every new form of cultural apostasy mirrors a church that has lost its identity–and its relevance.

The church, if it is to be faithful, cannot be all things to all people, as James Crumley concludes. Rather, the church is incarnational, a grace-filled gift–it is no less than the embodiment of Christ on earth. For that reason, the church by its very constitution is the instrument whereby that which is finite offers to culture that which is infinite. Only in this way can the church recapture the eschatological power of the gospel–a gospel that our culture so desperately needs.

–J. Daryl Charles

“The Content of America’s Character: Recovering Civic Virtue”

Edited by Don E. Eberly

Madison Books

368 pp.; $24.95

Character is back. After decades of toxic television, family breakdown, and values clarification in our schools, politicians, parents, and even intellectuals have finally begun to recognize that we can no longer take character for granted in America. Judging from the recent establishment of groups like the Character Education Partnership and the success of Bill Bennett’s “Book of Virtues,” a groundswell of interest in character development and moral education is sweeping the country.

“The Content of America’s Character” offers a good overview of the roots of the crisis as well as a helpful sampling of the theoretical and practical issues involved in cultivating character. This volume makes clear–particularly in excellent contributions by Christina Hoff Sommers and James Q. Wilson–that the origins of our current crisis in character may be found, partially, in a turn toward self-expression in the 1960s and 1970s. As higher rates of secondary education encouraged an attitude of skepticism toward authority, and as affluence enabled a hedonistic adolescent culture, Wilson argues, people felt free to “do their own thing.” At about the same time, according to Sommers, schools jettisoned moral education in favor of a “values clarification” approach that reduced moral authority to a matter of personal preference. The result, as Don Eberly notes: the virtues binding people to family, community, and God withered.

What is the remedy? With the exception of one essay, this volume suggests that society as a whole and schools in particular should encourage those values that all Americans agree upon–values such as honesty, commitment, and compassion. The contributors rightly argue that these values will be internalized in schools, homes, and playing fields that combine concern for others with a healthy degree of discipline. (Randolph Feezell, in particular, offers some excellent ruminations on the possible but not necessary connections between sports and character development.) Many contributors also emphasize that storytelling is vital to moral education, spurring the will to embrace the good via the imagination.

A half-century ago, with the Protestant capital of the nation not yet spent, one could issue an appeal for nonsectarian moral education by invoking common virtues of fidelity, responsibility, and respect and by telling fables and fairy tales. But this is an age when, for instance, almost half of all marriages end in divorce. Words like fidelity have lost their power. Only a drama greater than the American dream will draw Americans from their televisions, careers, and suburban security to the hard work of self-denial that character and the common good depend upon. Regrettably, one won’t find much about the drama that began at Pentecost in this book.

–W. Bradford Wilcox

“The Christian Philosopher”

By Cotton Mather

Edited by Winton U. Solberg

University of Illinois Press

488 pp.; $49.95

In 1721, Cotton Mather, the last of the great New England Puritans, published “The Christian Philosopher”–one of the most ambitious works of a fanatically productive lifetime. (Mather probably published more individual books than all of New England’s ministers before him. His output totaled 388 separate titles, and at his death in 1728 he left several gargantuan and many small manuscripts unpublished.) The reissue of this book with the careful editing of Winton Solberg, emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois, is a boon to scholars, but its appearance is unexpectedly timely as well.

Mather’s purpose in “The Christian Philosopher” was to range widely through the phenomena of nature in order to demonstrate the goodness, power, and wisdom of God. His opinions are firmly fixed in the conventions of the pre-Darwinian era of natural theology, when great exertions were undertaken to demonstrate–against unbelief and as a support for belief–that the natural world pointed to the all-powerful Creator of the Bible. Mather’s effort is of special importance because it was by far the most ambitious work of its kind produced to that time in America; because it illustrates how thoroughly thinking in North America was tied to the deliberations of Europe (much of Mather’s work is extracts and commentary from European sources); and because it laid the groundwork for later American labors in natural theology–especially from Jonathan Edwards, who succeeded in drawing closer links between his basic theological convictions and his attitudes toward nature than did Mather.

The book’s modern relevance is to show both possibilities and limits for this kind of natural theology. What is more obvious now than when Mather wrote is that the data of science do not explain themselves. Mather’s efforts to tease out the mysteries of nature illustrate both reasoning that endures over time and reasoning that has become embarrassingly trivial. For such historical and contemporary insights, readers owe a great debt to Solberg, whose introductions, notes, and explanations wonderfully illuminate the parts of Mather’s text that would otherwise be a puzzlement to modern readers.

–Mark Noll

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 34

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