Page 4226 – Christianity Today (2024)

“I can’t be your pastor anymore. I’m sorry.” My tiny congregationstared back in shock.

In 1985, I’d moved to this promising community to start a church.I’d expected forty people at the inaugural worship service —fourteen showed up. Not until I decided to leave did our churchaverage forty in attendance.

The low figure wasn’t for lack of hard work. I didn’t know asmuch as I’d thought I did, and ministry was much harder than Ihad anticipated. So I quit.

Since then, I’ve learned some powerful lessons — ones I wish I’dknown before I quit.

I WISH I’D KNOWN HOW MUCH PEOPLE LOVED ME

I’d believed the primary reason for anyone to love me was forproducing results as a leader. The day I resigned I began tolearn how much people loved me for who I WAS, not what I DID.

I WISH I’D KNOWN HOW MUCH I LOVED THEM

After my resignation, the congregation met in our home to decidehow it would carry on. That night, I couldn’t believe how much Iloved these people. The same folks I’d been frustrated with —and blamed for my lack of success — were ones I now grieved overlosing. The bonds of affection had been there all along; Idetected them only when I tried to break freefrom them.

I WISH I’D KNOWN HOW MUCH GOOD WAS HAPPENING

The week before I quit, I told my dad about my decision. He said,“Pay attention to what happens. I think you’ll notice much moregood is going on in your church than you would have imagined.”

Those were prophetic words. People stepped up to ministry as soonas I got out of their way. Folks came into a relationship withGod because of seeds planted during my ministry. People calledand wrote letters expressing how much they had benefited from myministry.

I half-expected the church to fold. It didn’t. Instead itcontinued to slowly grow. I wish I’d seen that my people werebeyond where I thought they were.

I WISH I’D KNOWN THERE WERE ALTERNATIVES TO QUITTING

I shared my decision with three men in my church a week before Iquit. What I didn’t do was listen to them. They brought up threealternatives I should have considered:

1. Take a leave of absence. Most churches really do love theirpastors, and would much prefer to work out a time of absence forhealing, rather than go through the divorce-and-remarriageprocess.
2. Talk with other pastors. They would have loved to help me. Ididn’t ask.
3. Work maintenance into the weekly routine. Failure is inevitablein ministry, and dealing with failure demands not only aspiritual strategy, but a physical one as well.

I WISH I’D KNOWN THE IMPORTANCE OF KEEPING SHARP

For years, I thought I couldn’t afford conferences and books. Inow know I can’t afford to go without them.

I WISH I’D KNOWN HOW MUCH INAPPROPRIATE PRIDE WAS INVOLVED

Pride prevented me from talking to others, from consideringoptions, or from taking time off. Pride kept me from saying, “Idon’t know what to do,” as opposed to saying, “I’m going to quit — end of discussion!”

I no longer ask if my resignation was a mistake. Instead I ask:Have I learned from that experience? When tempted to move, I ask:Am I committed to learn and grow, and not quit if at allpossible? These lessons have been used by Christ to create atighter bond to the ministry I now serve.

Anthony Laird is pastor of East Tucson (Arizona) Baptist Church. To reply, write: Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net

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Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

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During the past decade or so I have occasionally played around with a rather perverse theological fantasy. I have thought of announcing the formation of yet another "neo" movement within evangelicalism—this one I would label "neo-fundamentalism." I hasten to repeat: It is a mere fantasy, and admittedly a perverse one. But there is nonetheless a germ of seriousness for me in the idea.

The thoughts that sparked the fantasy came shortly after current Notre Dame professor George Marsden published his much-acclaimed history of Fuller Seminary titled Reforming Fundamentalism. A person who was quite fond of Fuller told me he liked the Marsden book very much but found the title "embarrassing." This wasn't a word I would have thought to use, so I pressed him for clarification. He explained that he had rejected his fundamentalist upbringing and now looked to Fuller for "a more sophisticated evangelicalism." But to make a big thing about Fuller's connection to a fundamentalist past, he said—well, it was for him "embarrassing." Much better, as he viewed things, to reject fundamentalism altogether than to be associated with any effort to "reform" it.

Prior to this conversation, I hadn't thought much about the Marsden title. But now I began to muse about what it means to "reform" something. It would be very strange, for example, to give the title Reforming Roman Catholicism to a book about the Protestant Reformation. When the sixteenth-century Reformers set out to change things, they broke completely with the Roman church. They were re-forming (re-making, re-establishing) the church as such-a church that, as they saw things, had gotten completely messed up in Catholic hands. When a group within a particular political party, on the other hand, announces that it is working for the reform of their party, they are not trying to create a brand-new entity but rather to renew the existing party from within. They are working on something they see as seriously damaged—but they are also convinced it is worth fixing.

The person who expressed annoyance with Professor Marsden's book title would have been happy, I'm sure, with Reforming Evangelicalism as an alternative. This person saw fundamentalism as a distorted version of the evangelical movement. To attempt a repair job on fundamentalism was, for him, a waste of time. He saw Fuller Seminary as embodying a new kind of evangelicalism—one purged of fundamentalist distortions.

My own criticisms of fundamentalism are probably quite similar to his. But I do have a difficult time seeing the fundamentalists as nothing more than the villains in the story of evangelical reform.

Survival and beyondI must confess that in my own support for the "neo-evangelical" cause I have often engaged in a bit of fundamentalist-bashing. This is why it was good for my soul to read Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of AmericanFundamentalism, a compelling account and an honest assessment of what happened to American fundamentalism from 1930 to 1950. Professor Carpenter's book picks up the story where George Marsden left off in his much-discussed 1980 book titled Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925. Together these two books provide an excellent and authoritative history of the fundamentalist movement.

As the conventional wisdom had it at the time, Protestant fundamentalism was all but dead by the end of the 1920s. The fundamentalists had struggled for several decades against "modernizing" tendencies in old-line Protestantism, and now they had, to all appearances, lost the battle. Their efforts to gain control of denominational seminaries and missionary agencies had failed, and one of their most visible champions, William Jennings Bryan, had suffered a humiliating defeat in the infamous J. T. Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925.

Twenty-five years later, however, the fundamentalist cause was very much alive and well. What happened between 1930 and 1950 to bring about a reversal in fundamentalism's fortunes? This is the story Joel Carpenter tells so well. Like Professor Marsden, he sees fundamentalism as a movement full of "paradoxical tensions." Not the least of these has to do with the fundamentalists' basic understanding of their place in North American culture. The Puritan notion of America as having a special divine appointment among the nations is deeply embedded in the fundamentalists' collective psyche. But the nineteenth-century Darwinian crisis and (not unrelated) the increasing influence of secularism in American public life brought about a strong sense of cultural transition that, as Marsden argued, was not unlike an immigrant experience. In this case the migration was not one of literal geography, but as evangelical Protestants moved into the twentieth century they felt like they 'Were somehow being transported into a strange new land. They were moving from the New Israel to the New Babylon.

The battles against theological modernism during the first thirty years of the twentieth century only served to reinforce this mood of cultural pessimism. Having lost the struggle for control of the old-line denominations, the fundamentalists came to see their role in the larger culture in "remnant" terms: They were the faithful cognitive minority who possessed inside "prophetic" information about the world's inevitable decline toward doom. The only hope for the future was the ushering in of a supernaturally initiated millennial kingdom. In the meantime, the faithful remnant must concentrate on the work of spiritual rescue by means of evangelizing the lost and providing spiritual nurture for the remnant. And that is precisely what the fundamentalists worked at for two decades. And in doing so—as it- turns out-they guaranteed their survival. Indeed, they did more than survive. They prepared the way for a vital evangelicalism that would come to function in recent decades as an influential movement in the Christian world in particular and in the larger American cultural scene in general.

Correcting an overreactionWhat does all of this have to do with my perverse theological fantasy about a "neo-fundamentalist" movement? At the heart of this fantasy is the growing recognition that in all of my efforts to prove I have long ago abandoned fundamentalist traits and convictions, I have failed to acknowledge my indebtedness to—and my continuities with—the fundamentalism that nurtured me in my early years.

Joel Carpenter hits home with the criticisms he makes of folks like me. Take the case of Edward John Carnell. As a college student I took glee over the way Dr. Carnell attacked the fundamentalists in his The Case for Orthodox Theology. Characterizing fundamentalism as "orthodoxy gone cultic," he chided the movement for the pettiness of many of its attitudes and legalisms.

There is a certain measure of naivete embodied in these criticisms of fundamentalism, argues Professor Carpenter. All religious movements that are trying to accomplish something important are necessarily "cultic." A movement needs to forge an identity, which means establishing behavioral and cognitive boundaries. This is turn means devising, as Carpenter puts it, "mores and symbols" to live by, and these, by their very nature as human fabrications, reflect the circ*mstances of their makers." Furthermore, says Carpenter, Carnell and his colleagues failed to acknowledge that in their efforts to improve on what the fundamentalists had done, they were making use of the very subculture they were attempting to alter. While the fundamentalists could certainly be "intellectually lame, provincial, petty, mean-spirited, stultifying and manipulative" they also managed to produce a new generation-people like Carnell—who were not at all attracted to liberalism but who were restless to bring new intellectual and evangelistic energy to the larger vision they had received from their fundamentalist forebears.

Carpenter rightly reminds us that those "who chide a prior generation for not seeing its own foibles and limitations should know that some day their descendents will say the same of them." But he is not content simply to have us tolerate the fundamentalists' shortcomings; he wants us to see their very real strengths: "They were able to create close-knit and supportive fellowships. They had plenty of outlets for inventiveness and entrepreneurial expansion, and they enjoyed life-changing religious experiences that came to them in forms and language they had fashioned." In a day when "fundamentalist" has become a label that gets thrown around with much abandon by the folks who take delight in disparaging strong religious convictions, many of us can be grateful that the fundamentalists taught us some important lessons about what it means to be caught up in passionate witness.

Organizational savvyJoel Carpenter also points us to the organizational savvy of fundamentalism. Much of his narrative focuses on the intricate subculture the fundamentalists constructed to implement their mission. While the secularizing elites took it for granted that "the old-time religion" was a thing of the past, the fundamentalists were building a complex system of independent organizations-youth ministries, evangelistic teams, Bible institutes, seminaries, missionary agencies, summer Bible conferences, Bible distribution societies, and so on. These organizations were somewhat eclectic theologically; advocates of the "Old Princeton" brand of Presbyterian Calvinism managed to cooperate in various settings with both the more "Bible prophecy" oriented dispensational theologians and the relatively atheological "get the message out" pragmatists. The fundamentalist subculture was surprisingly transdenominational, with participants representing the newer independent "Bible churches" as well as pockets of conservatism within the more established denominational bodies.

During the period when the fundamentalists were building this organizational infrastructure, the old-line Protestant bodies seemed content to maintain the more traditional denominational patterns. Their efforts at creating new interdenominational networks focused primarily on leadership-oriented "council of churches" entities, in contrast to the fundamentalists' less "official" grassroots networks.

In all of this, the liberals were oblivious to the fact that they were being outflanked by the theological opponents they thought they had defeated in earlier battles. Although the process was not very visible for several decades, the fundamentalists were, as Joel Carpenter puts it, helping to affect "a major shift among the basic institutional carriers of American religious life." The results are quite obvious today. Many commentators even insist we are in a "postdenominational" era. While this may be overstated, there can be no doubt that, as Carpenter observes, the old-line "denominations have been losing members, income, and influence while special-purpose, non-denominational religious agencies have grown, multiplied, and taken on increasing importance in shaping and carrying people's religious identity. Carpenter underscores the irony in this situation. Having been forced by the Protestant denominational establishment to move to the margins in order to survive, the fundamentalists promoted ways for Christians to associate with each other that went beyond the denominational structures. In doing so, they guaranteed their own survival by initiating "a trend that has led to the weakening of the most central and powerful corporate expressions of American religion."

Some very healthy evangelical organizations today—many colleges and seminaries, mission and relief agencies, evangelistic associations, youth ministries, radio and television programs—owe their contemporary vitality to the organizational savvy of the earlier fundamentalist movement. This is certainly true of Fuller Seminary, the school over which Edward John Carnell had presided during the time be was formulating the basics of his attack on fundamentalism. The seminary had been founded in 1947 by Charles E. Fuller, an important pioneer in the field of religious broadcasting. While one of the gentler fundamentalist leaders, Dr. Fuller's successes in his international radio ministry—and in the founding of his seminary—are unthinkable apart from the vast organizational infrastructure fundamentalism had created.

A healthy rememberingSigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was fond of telling the story of a pastor who was summoned to the bedside of a dying insurance agent. The man was a professed atheist, but his family was hopeful that he might be open to the Christian message as he faced his own demise. The family members waited outside the room as the pastor and the insurance agent talked together. The conversation went on for a long time, and the family began to nurture the hope that a religious conversion was in process. When the door finally opened and the pastor emerged, however, they discovered that the dying insurance agent had remained in his unconverted state-but the pastor had been sold a new insurance policy!

Freud's primary intention in telling this story was to warn psychoanalysts not to compromise their principles. But it can also be used to illustrate some important questions about the present condition of evangelicalism. In rejecting the very real defects of fundamentalism during the past few decades, evangelicals have begun to take very seriously their responsibilities to the larger culture and with some obvious signs of success. The questions we must face honestly are these: Have we sold a new policy to the culture or has the culture sold us a policy!

There is no ignoring the fact that we are in a different cultural position from the days when our spiritual forebears spread sawdust on the ground in their revival tents. We certainly have a much friendlier relationship with our surroundings. Some commentators say we have actually become the "mainline" of Protestantism. Evangelicals can be found in positions of leadership in politics, the universities, the entertainment business, and the marketplace. Pentecostal and Holiness congregations, which once stood on the wrong side of the tracks, are now often-flourishing ecclesiastical enterprises occupying the best real estate in town. Yet the question must be asked: Have we lost some important spiritual sensitivities while all of this has been happening?

There is an interesting parallel between the social pilgrimage of evangelicals and that of Roman Catholics in this century. In the course of only one or two generations, American Catholics have gone from being a marginal immigrant community to a significant cultural presence in the United States. A number of commentators have observed that these changes have not been accompanied by a comparable shift in theological self-understanding. Many Catholic laypeople, for example, occupy significant leadership roles in American culture, but they were educated in a religious system that presupposed the need to "keep the faith" as immigrant communities rather than to take up the challenge of exercising power in the structures of the larger culture.

Similar things, I am convinced, can be said about evangelicals—and not only about our upwardly mobile laity but about our upwardly mobile clergy leaders as well. In the past we evangelical Protestants became accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a beleaguered remnant. We devoted much energy to preserving the integrity of our faith in what we saw as a hostile environment. And the kind of theology we heard in sermons and read in magazines was designed to reinforce this sense that we are destined to be a people who are on the margins of cultural life. We don't really belong in this world, we told ourselves. We are on our way to heaven's glory. The most important thing is to make it through by being faithful to the gospel and—as much as possible—without getting contaminated by our sinful surroundings.

We don't usually hear the case being made in such stark terms these days. We have a lot less to feel alienated about than we did in the past. Let me make it clear that I do not think this is necessarily a bad thing. I have expended considerable energy joining my voice with those who have called for an evangelical witness that speaks more credibly to the larger culture without losing the movement's distinctive strengths, and I do not think this effort has been misguided. Indeed, I occasionally complain that some of the defects that led to the marginalized mentality in the past still linger on in the evangelical community.

Unlike those evangelical thinkers who worry that our successes have inevitably weakened us spiritually and theologically, my own inclination is to see the social gains of contemporary evangelicalism as presenting us with new opportunities for faithfulness. And I see many evangelicals responding creatively to these challenges. I talk with seminary students on a daily basis who care deeply about the cause of the gospel. I often hear "megachurch" pastors boldly proclaiming the themes of sin, guilt, and redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ. So, I am not discouraged about the evangelical movement. But I do want us to think carefully about who we are and what God calls us to be.

I am especially impressed these days with the importance of historical mindfulness. The call issued by sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues in Habits of the Heart—that churches and synagogues must work hard at being "communities of memory" in a culture fast losing its awareness of the past—is a poignant one for evangelicals.

Indeed, memory loss was one of fundamentalism's biggest defects. The fundamentalist movement often seemed to think that the history of the "real" church jumped from the early church to a quick stop at Martin Luther and then on to the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early twentieth century. The Pentecostal and Holiness movements had their own versions of that kind of abbreviated narrative of the Spirit's dealings with the church. Traces of this kind of spiritual and theological amnesia can still be detected in the evangelical movement.

A few years ago I met with a group of pastors from very large "charismatic" churches. Each of their congregations numbered in the thousands—many were conducting four and five services each weekend. I tried to impress on them the importance of theological education for pastors. Several of them made it clear they found what I was saying quite unconvincing. "We're in the business of getting people to come to church," they said; "seminaries are no help at all in telling us how to do that." I responded by admitting that while seminaries could do a better job in helping to promote this cause, we also are concerned about what people learn when we get them into a church. And for this we need pastors who are firmly grounded in biblical teaching, theological reflection, and a clear understanding of the history of God's dealings with the church. None of this seemed very attractive to this group of pastors. One of them did say, however, that there probably is some value in studying the history of past revivals in the Christian community.

The study of the history of revivals is, of course, a worthy project. But I'm also interested in looking at the forces that were at work to make revivals necessary. One obvious factor in bringing about spiritual decline is bad theology. If we fail to engage in the careful study of ideas in Christian history—worthy and unworthy ideas about God and his relationship to human beings—we run the real risk of constantly recycling old heresies.

A Pentecostal friend of mine once shared an interesting account of the ways in which the Assemblies of God have had to deal with various heretical views about faith healing during the twentieth century. A key biblical text for Pentecostalism's understanding of this topic has been Isaiah 53:5 (King James Version): "with his stripes we are healed." The standard Pentecostal interpretation of this verse has been that physical healing is included in the atoning work of Jesus Christ, so that we can expect on occasion miraculous displays of God's healing power in our bodies. This interpretation was an important corrective emphasis for the whole evangelical movement. But at times in the Assemblies of God certain people have taught that physical healing is guaranteed by the atonement, so that Christians can expect miraculous hearings as a normal course of events in their lives. The denomination has regularly warned against this teaching. At other times, though, an even more radical notion has surfaced, namely, that Physical healing is accomplished by the atoning work of Christ, so that if a person thinks she has a cold she is being deceived by Satan—with Chris's stripes she is healed! This teaching has also been rejected as heretical.

This history shows us that there resides in the Assemblies of God a collective wisdom about faith healing; contemporary Pentecostals and charismatics ignore this wisdom at their peril. And these are only a few of the lessons that the study of the Christian history can teach us. If we fail to be historically mindful, we run the risk of constantly recycling old heresies.

I find it necessary for my own spiritual well-being to remember the history of the fundamentalist movement in particular. I was surrounded in my youth by people for whom painful memories of spiritual and theological battles were still very vivid. Many of them had left denominations and had been evicted from church buildings where they had served faithfully. They had seen schools and agencies they loved come under the influence of strange theological teachings. They had experienced the loss of "goods and kindred" because they refused to compromise their convictions.

I certainly entertain no illusion that the stories of their struggles were inerrant in all details. Nor do I deem it healthy to nurture past hurts in such a way that I insist on waging battles that no longer need to be fought. David Hubbard, the late president of Fuller Seminary, had a nice way of making this point. He said we evangelicals should look at the battles fought by previous generations in much the same way that American citizens honor the memories of those who fought in the Revolutionary War. "I can go to Bunker Hill," he said, "and feel patriotic, even though I have no animosity toward the present-day British."

Dr. Hubbard's image is an instructive one. Clearly it is important to remember our spiritual ancestors and to learn from their strengths and their weaknesses. But we do remember them as ancestors, as people who attempted to be faithful under conditions very different from our own context. We contemporary evangelicals must continue to visit our Bunker Hills. But the point of those visits is not to live in the past but to find new ways of engaging the present, knowing that to do so will require us to work together with—and learn important lessons from—Christian fellow travelers who regularly take their own detours, visiting very different shrines.

Excerpted from The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage, by Richard J. Mouw.

Copyright © 2000 Richard J. Mouw. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

Related Elsewhere

Be sure to read today's related article, "The New Scarlet Letter" by Wheaton College theology professor Vincent Bacote.

The Smell of Sawdust can be purchased through Amazon.com and other book retailers, as can Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again and George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture.

“I shall make them conform or I shall harry them out of the land, or else do worse.”—James I of England

King James had been harassing the Puritans. One group, called Separatists, left the church of England entirely fleeing to Holland in 1607, where they lived in Leyden for 12 years. A leader among them, William Brewster, was to write, “They knew they were pilgrims,” and the name stuck.

In time, these supposed deviants would celebrate a kind of harvest home thanksgiving for God’s goodness in watching over them as they crossed the Atlantic to Plymouth, and in bringing them through that first harsh winter to the abundance of autumn, 1621.

About 40 of the Leyden congregation had gone to England with Brewster and William Bradford in order to set out for the colonies in 1620. Accompanying the 40 pilgrims were 62 other colonists, whom they called “strangers” an assortment of people aiming to make their fortunes in the new world.

AS they prepared to leave England, they received a pastoral letter from John Robinson, the minister they had left in Leyden to look after the larger group. He was concerned about their relationships as they were jammed aboard ship for a long voyage, and as they faced the stress of life in the “hideous and desolate wilderness” of northeast North America.

The encouragement and warning set forth in Robinson’s letter (here paraphrased and condensed) are as relevant and insightful for us today as they were for the Pilgrims in the summer of 1620.

Leyden, Holland

July 27, 1620

Loving Christian friends,

I heartily salute you in the Lord. I am present with you in my heartfelt desire, though I am constrained for a while to be absent in body … Though I do not doubt your godly wisdom, I have thought it my duty to add some further stimulus, not because you need it, but because I owe it in love and duty.

Self-examinationWe know that we are daily to renew our repentance before God, especially for the sins that we know and generally for the trespasses that are unknown to us.

But beyond that, and at this time of such difficulty and danger, the Lord calls you specially to a thorough search and careful reformation of your ways. Otherwise he might call to mind sins we have forgotten or had not repented of. Then in judgment he might leave us to be swallowed up in one danger or another. But consider the case where a person’s sin is taken away by his earnest repentance and by the Lord’s pardon, and the result is sealed to his conscience by the Spirit. Then great shall be his security and peace in all dangers, pleasant his comfort in all distresses, with happy deliverance from all evil, whether in life or death.

Giving offenseNext in importance to peace with god and our own consciences, we should carefully provide for peace with all people, so far as we are able. This applies especially in relations with our associates. We must be watchful so that we neither give nor easily take offense.

Considering the malice of Satan, and man’s corruption, it is inevitable that offenses come. Yet woe to the man or woman by whom they come. The apostle Paul teaches that, more than death itself, we are to fear giving offense by our inappropriate use of things that in themselves are neutral (1 Cor. 9:15). How much more should we fear those offenses arising from things simply evil, in which we do not attach enough importance either to the honor of God or to the love of man.

Taking offenseNor is it sufficient that we keep ourselves, by the grace of God, from giving offense. In addition we need to armed against taking offense at others. For, as the Scriptures point out, how imperfect and lame is the work of grace in a person who lacks the love to cover a multitude of offenses.

We can see several reasons for such forbearance. (Let us set aside for the moment arguments based on your own special circ*mstances.) Any Christian should be able to see that those who are ready to take offense lack either love to cover offenses, or wisdom to understand human frailty. Or else they are hypocrites, as Christ our Lord teaches (Matt. 7:1-3). Indeed, there are perhaps as many who easily take offense as there are those who give it. Those who have nourished this touchy attitude have not proved sound and profitable members of societies.

There is a variety of motives to stimulate you of all people to great care and conscience in this. For many of you are strangers to one another’s weaknesses. As a result, you need to be more watchful lest, when such unsuspected thins appear in men and women, you should be inordinately affected by them. Much wisdom and love are demanded, if you are to control and even eliminate these incidental offenses.

Further, your plans to live closely together for mutual protection in the New World mean that the likelihood for offense will be greater, Your circ*mstances will fuel that fire unless you diligently quench it with brotherly forbearance.

If all this is true, how much more must we be careful not to take offense at God himself—something we do as often as we grumble at his providence or bear impatiently the afflictions he sends us. Therefore, store up patience against the evil day; without this we take offense at the Lord himself and his just works.

Seeking the general goodYou should see to it that you add to your mutual activities a mutual desire for the common good. Avoid, as a deadly plague on both group and private well-being, any secret scheming or self-absorbed way of doing things. How should you deal with self-seeking actions designed only for a person’s private benefit? Every man should suppress in himself these acts of rebellion. And the whole body should aid each person in this.

Men are careful not to have a new house shaken with any violence before it is well settled and its parts firmly knit. I beseech you bretheren, be much more careful that the house of God—which you are, and are to be—will not be shaken by unnecessary fads or other threats in its early stages of settling.

Yielding to civil authoritiesYou are forming a political body, with civil government. But there are among you no people who, because of their special eminence are obvious choices for various offices. Use your wisdom and godliness to select those who entirely love the common good and will promote it. But let wisdom also guide you to yield to them all due honor and obedience as they do their lawful jobs.

Do not see in them the mere ordinariness of their persons, but rather recognize that God institutes government for your good. Do not be like the foolish crowd who honor the brightly colored coat more than either the virtuous mind of the man of the glorious teaching s of the Lord. You know a better way: the image of the Lord’s power and authority, which the magistrate bears is honorable, regardless of how common he may be in ability.

I earnestly commend these matters to your conscience. I am praying incessantly for you to the Lord who has made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all the rivers. His providence is over all his works, and especially over all his dear children for good. I pray that he will guide and guard you inwardly by his Spirit and outwardly by his hand of power. Then we will have cause to praise his name all our days. Farewell in the Lord in whom you trust, and in whom I rest.

A well-wisher of your success in this hopeful voyage,

John Robinson

The hopeful voyage was interrupted when the Pilgrim’s first ship, the Speedwell, began to leak like a sieve, forcing them to go back to port. Later, in the Mayflower, the Pilgrims made the voyage in 65 fierce days.

By spring, half had died of scurvy or “general debility.” But then a busy period of planting, hunting, fishing, and trading passed, and fall came. Bradford wrote “Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling so we might in a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four in one day killed as much fowl as … served the company almost a week.”

About 90 Indians came that Thanksgiving, and provided venison. During the days of the celebration they played games and enjoyed such fare as roast turkey, duck, and goose, plus eels and clams, as well as leeks “and other salad herbs,” and wild plums and dried berries. Pumpkin? Possibly. Cranberries? No.

Bradford tells us the spiritual basis of the Pilgrim’s celebration. Writing of their landing at Plymouth, he saw a parallel to Israel: “But may not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say—Our Fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice and looked on their adversities.”

Related Elsewhere

Don’t miss previous CT Classics on Thanksgiving like “Two Kinds of Thanks” and yesterday’s “Giving Thanks in Plague Times.”

Christianity Today.com’s Thanksgiving area includes articles from Christian History magazine about the Puritans, and stories, poems, and articles about giving thanks.

If you’re interested in the history of Thanksgiving, be sure to check out www.plimoth.org. It has pages upon pages of fascinating Thanksgiving facts and essays, including why we associate the day with 1621 Pilgrims, historical Thanksgiving proclamations, and notes on preparing the foods from that October day.

The Jews. For Christians, the name of no other people on the face of the earth carries the resonance that this one does. Due to a fateful history together that resonance is charged, in both positive and negative polarities. Toward the Jews, the church has never been neutral.

A spate of recent books as well as a pregnant historical moment give us occasion to rethink all things Jewish. None of the works to be reviewed in this essay offers such a rethinking from a Christian perspective. That is precisely why these books are valuable for Christians to consider. For the entirety of Christian history we have viewed the Jewish people from within a theological perspective that makes it nearly impossible for us to enter into their self-understanding as a people; or for that matter, simply to read their history and understand their politics in a way like unto how we would consider the history and politics of any other people.

For Christians, the Jews are the chosen people of God, born out of the call of God to Abraham, distinct from the nations and unlike any other people on earth. In the mystery of biblical inspiration, they are both the authors and the subjects of the Holy Bible—all of the first two-thirds we Christians call the Old Testament and almost all of the New Testament. Jesus, the One we adore as Son of God and Savior of the world, was Jewish. All of his original apostles were Jewish. The most important of the first-century converts to Christianity, Saul of Tarsus, was a “Hebrew of the Hebrews.” Christianity began as a Messianic splinter movement within Judaism, and its convictions are impossible to understand apart from these origins. As well, most Christian eschatologies hold out a significant role for the Jewish people as a way of tying up the most unsettling loose end in the Christian schema of salvation history.

How that loose end, that “Jewish question,” has bedeviled Christian thought and besmirched Christian behavior for these 2000 years! God took human form in Jesus, we believe. But “He came to his own, and his own received him not.” Jewish religious leaders, our four Gospels seem to tell us, were among the least responsive of all flesh to the coming of the Incarnate One. The Passion narratives depict them as at least complicit in his death. The Book of Acts generally portrays them as foes of the apostolic evangelistic mission. Yet as the New Testament era closes, the Gospel is progressing, despite the efforts of its most committed opponents in Jerusalem, or for that matter, in Rome.

Synagogue and church, portrayed as estranged in the New Testament, have remained estranged for most of these two millennia.1 And in these two millennia the church has wrestled with its ultimate theological loose end both through an array of frequently spiteful theological writings and through the incarnation of Christian frustration in a shameful variety of forms: suppression of Jewish religion and practice, coerced Christianity and conversion at pain of death, discrimination and ghettoization, forced emigration and deportation, pogroms, Crusades and massacres. This horrible history culminated in the twentieth century with the mass murder of the European Jews, at the hands of baptized Christians, in the heart of formerly Christian Europe, serving an anti-Christian idolatry called Nazism.

The Holocaust, once its horror was fully recognized, seemed to break the power of Christian anti-Semitism. Much of the Western Christian world, recoiling at the shock of what had occurred in its midst, eventually sought means of atonement. Politically, that atonement primarily took the form of the Western powers permitting and to a certain extent enabling the birth of the nation of Israel in 1948—an in dependent Jewish homeland for the first time since the Maccabean era. Theologically, the Holocaust led some Christians to undertake theological reflections with the aim of removing the cancer of anti-Semitism.

The recent emergence of this bookshelf’s worth of volumes on Jewish life and identity is significant. These works indicate both by their existence and in their content that the early stages of shock, anger, and grief about the Holocaust are now behind the Jewish people. It has been just over one hundred years since the inception of the modern Zionist movement, over 50 years since the end of the Holocaust and World War II and, soon after, the shocking birth of the modern state of Israel. A time of reassessment and evaluation seems to be upon both the Jewish people and scholars of Jewish history. Two of these works offer searching reflections on Jewish thought, faith, and tradition. The other five reflect on the history of the geographic region some still call Palestine, on Jewish nationalism, and on the actions and character of the modern state of Israel.

The Gifts of the Jews, by Thomas Cahill, is an effort to assess the contribution of Jewish thought to Western (and by now, world) civilization. Cahill, former director of religious publishing at Doubleday in New York, is currently engaged in a broad publishing project he calls “the hinges of history.” The purpose of the seven-volume series: “to re tell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West.” This is history as good news, or better, history as cultural retrieval in an era of historical amnesia and cultural rootlessness.

In the first volume of this series, Cahill claimed that “the Irish saved civilization.” In this work, he argues that the Jews invented it. His story opens with a gripping depiction of primeval human religious consciousness. He takes the reader to the top of a Sumerian ziggurat and narrates for us a moonlit cult prostitution ritual both alien and titillating. His goal, not only in this imaginative reconstruction but throughout the opening chapter of the work, is to demonstrate how fundamentally different was the primitive religious consciousness from that introduced by the Jews beginning with the call of Abram.

Thereafter Cahill simply tells the story of the Jewish pilgrimage through biblical history, beginning with Abram. He revisits in a most engaging manner all major elements of the biblical narrative of the Jewish people: the call of Abram (the patriarchal narratives), Egypt (slavery, Moses, and Exodus), Sinai (the Law), Canaan (Conquest, David, and kingship), and Babylon (kingly corruption, the prophets, and the later writings). The book is comprehensive enough to serve as supplementary reading for an Old Testament survey class.

Not that Cahill’s ambitions are trained on the classroom: on the contrary! He has written a book that people will read of their own free will, not be cause it is assigned. He wants to retell the story of the Hebrew Bible in a way that can win the hearts of the jaded post-Christian or post-Jew or, for that matter, one with no exposure to this literature whatsoever. His goal is not conversion or orthodox religious faith but simply appreciation, in at least two senses. First, he wants his readers to appreciate the beauty and depth of the writings found in the Hebrew Bible. More important, he wants to make the historical/intellectual argument that Western civilization is inconceivable apart from the Jewish contribution to it.

Cahill claims that the Jews “invented” all of the following: real history with real historical personages, a linear rather than cyclical understanding of time, goal-directed action and choice-making, a sense of purpose and the freedom to affect the direction of events, the concept of a personal relationship with God, the notion of an individual self and the value of such selves, the collapse of the concepts of sacred and profane into a unified whole under a sovereign God, a sense of moral responsibility and moral obligation, fully reciprocal romantic/sexual relationships, the concept of justice and especially its application to the vulnerable and powerless, and the dream of a utopian future in which all wrongs are made right. His climactic claim is that “the Jews gave us … our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning … without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes.”

Frankly celebratory, at times indulging in flights of hyperbole, Cahill’s book is badly in need of a critical edge. So intent is he on lauding a cultural patrimony that he fails to wrestle with the troubling aspects of the Hebrew Bible, such as the annihilationist motif in the Joshua narratives and the marginal role generally given to women.

Nor does Cahill emphasize strongly enough that the linear, goal-oriented, utopian strand of Jewish thought has dangerous possibilities when untethered from the high moral demands of the God of the Bible. Both of the past century’s most hateful ideologies—fascism and Communism—were utopian schemes rooted in a linear view of history and the role of decisive action to make that history come out right. Ca hill calls capitalism and Communism “bastard children” of the Bible’s “processive faith,” but doesn’t mention Nazism or any number of dangerous Christian or cult-type variations of the same basic problem. A careful consideration of the evils done by men and women seeking to bring in their utopia almost makes one long at times for the passive, complacent, cyclical view of history that the Jewish perspective displaced.

Where Cahill looks back to biblical history for an appreciative rendering, Arthur Hertzberg (together with his collaborator Aron Hirt-Manheimer) offers his own summing up of “all things Jewish” in a book bluntly titled Jews. The purpose of this book is to “define the lasting Jewish character.” Hertzberg, one of the lions of contemporary American Jewish life, remarks that for a Jew to even undertake such a task is “scandalous” and decidedly not “politically correct.” For centuries, the Jewish people have been labeled and caricatured, and the last thing a Jewish leader normally has wanted to do is to offer any ammunition for further labeling and caricature. Thus the tendency in the Jewish establishment has been to resist any effort to describe a distinctive Jewish character. Just call us human beings like all other human beings, and leave it at that.

But Hertzberg (and his co-author, whose own voice, they tell us, is subsumed by Hertzberg’s here) won’t leave it at that, and the very fact that he won’t is a remarkable sign of a new Jewish confidence. The existence of this work signals the easing of that dread of the non-Jew that has characterized the Jewish people for two millennia. Howard Thurman, the great mid-twentieth century black theologian, in his work Jesus and the Disinherited, powerfully articulated the distorting effect of oppression on the self-presentation and thus the inner lives of all members of oppressed groups. Living in fear, the oppressed present whatever face to the world that they think is most likely to get them through another day in one piece. They learn the art of deception. But the internal price of doing so is grievous.

For centuries, Jews in the Diaspora had to do the same thing. They quite realistically feared the wrath of their gentile/Christian neighbors. But now, with the Jewish state strong and relatively secure, and Jews in most lands also secure and at peace with their neighbors, authenticity and honest speech can be attempted. That’s progress.

Hertzberg’s 17-chapter discussion of “the essence and character” of the Jewish people hits the mark most of the time—that is to say, on the basis of my own limited experience I find his description to be recognizable and defensible. Among the key defining characteristics of the Jewish people, for Hertzberg, are a (religious or secular) sense of chosenness, a tendency toward division and factionalism, a mix of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and nomadism, and a defiant and stubborn “wild streak” that has ex pressed itself, among other things, in rebellion and martyrdom. Generally implicit in Hertzberg’s discussion, and well worthy of making explicit, are such characteristics as the distinctive Jewish commitment to study and scholarship, a pattern of hard work and considerable drive, intellectual independence, and great intelligence and accomplishment.

From the title and early chapters of the book, one expects Hertzberg to spend the entire volume thematically exploring these and other elements of “the” Jewish character. But he surprises us early into the work by instead moving into a chapter-by-chapter summary of the high and low points of Jewish history, from Abraham to the present moment. Nothing in the title or introduction prepares the reader for this shift from a thematic to a historical account, and perhaps Hertzberg and Hirt-Manheimer can be faulted for that. But maybe the very lack of comment reveals a key assumption on their part: if you want to understand the Jewish people, you must understand our history.

The “essence and character” of the Jewish people are both revealed in, and worked out through, their melancholy pilgrimage through history. Most Christian readers know little or nothing about the rich history and the great figures described in these chapters. Our knowledge of Jewish history ends with the vision of that history offered in the New Testament, with a renewed spike of interest in the Holocaust and the modern state of Israel. Thus Bar Kochba and Rabbi Akiva, Yehuda Halevi and Maimonides, Shabbetai Zvi and the Baal Shem Tov, Baruch Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, Disraeli and Herzl, Kafka and Heine, Rosenzweig and Buber, are all strangers to us. We may have heard of Hasidism and the Kabbalah, or of Judaism’s own “denominationalism”—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist—but nothing of the essence of these particular movements.

As a minority in a hostile culture, Jews have needed to know what is going on in the gentile world; but, Hertzberg argues, Jews have had no real theological reason to deal with Christianity. “There is absolutely nothing in Judaism, in its own terms, that requires it to have an opinion or a theology of Jesus.”2 Meanwhile, in a fascinating and fateful reversal, the Christian majority has not needed to know Jewish history or thought but has found it impossible to offer a coherent theology that does not deal with Jews and Judaism. Indeed, Hertzberg contends, “there is a fundamental lack of symmetry between Judaism and Christianity. Christianity is inconceivable without its relationship to Judaism”—but Judaism is not inconceivable without its relationship to Christianity, be cause Judaism was here first. And Christians have in many times and places hated Jews for that inescapable fact.

The culmination of Jew-hatred in the Holocaust receives just nine pages in this important book. That fact in itself is a sign of the subtle receding of the Holocaust into a place in the broader history of the Jewish people. Increasingly, Jewish leaders and thinkers are unwilling to allow the Holocaust to dominate the landscape of Jewish thought. And yet these nine pages are heartbreaking, stunning. Hertzberg barely mentions in passing that he lost his grandfather and all of his mother’s brothers and sisters and their children in concentration camps. He tells of a Polish rabbi he knew who lost every single member of his family and re fused to speak of it or to participate in any public ritual in their memory. The man’s grief was beyond words and signs. Every Jew knows that but for an accident of geography, time, or circ*mstance he or she would have died at Hitler’s hands. And even now there are men and women walking among us who still carry the personal marks of suffering under Hitler. The Holocaust is living memory, not ancient history. But it is “only” one part of the entire living memory of a 4000-year-old people, whose full history all Christians should be required to consider.

The 50-year anniversary of the birth of Israel in 1948 occasioned a burst of new books attempting to take stock of this unique modern-yet-ancient nation. Here we consider several of these in tandem.

Perhaps the first overall impression one gains from reading these works is that nothing has come easily for the modern state of Israel. It was born in blood and conflict in 1948, after some 50 years of strenuous Zionist effort. Its enemies sought to strangle it in the proverbial delivery room and nearly succeeded. For 30 years it fought major wars against the several Arab states that opposed its very existence. For 20 years, having proven indefatigable in large-scale conflict, Israel has slowly made a cool peace with two of its four bordering enemies—Egypt and Jordan—and a partial peace with its Palestinian neighbors, a people that has never given up on its own national dreams. Throughout this process, and even today, Israel has faced periodic terrorist at tacks on its civilian population that have claimed thousands of lives and remain a daily possibility.

Thomas Idinopulos’s Weathered by Miracles offers an excellent background account of what might be called the prehistory of modern Israel. He picks up his story with the invasion of Palestine by Napoleon in 1798. At the time of Napoleon’s at tack, Palestine was a “wasted” land, Idinopulos argues, suffering under the exploitative and neglectful rule of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Though Napoleon himself was repulsed by an Anglo-Turkish force, over the next 150 years Europeans in general rediscovered what even then was called the “Holy Land.” This was the colonial era, after all, and nearly every major European power sought influence or control of a swath of land that was both strategically and theologically precious: Prussia, France, Russia, Austria, and England all got in the game, with England finally prevailing after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The period of British rule lasted from 1917 until May 14, 1948. The structure under which Britain officially ruled Palestine was the “mandate,” agreed to at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The “mandate” concept authorized powers such as Britain and France to rule as benign trustees over former Ottoman territories until such time as the peoples of these lands were politically prepared for self-rule. Mandatory government was intended to be an in-between step bridging European colonialism and national self-determination.

Idinopulos, in a generally quite re strained account, offers considerable critique of these crucial 30 years of British rule. His thesis is that Britain was far more interested in Palestine’s strategic significance and the colonial gains it could offer than it was in providing a disinterested trusteeship. He documents the twists and turns in British policy toward Palestine, beginning with the crucial Balfour Declaration of 1917, which declared Great Britain’s support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. These shifts in policy, this tacking between Arab and Jewish interests and demands, exacerbated the political tensions that ultimately tore the land apart. Yet it could also be argued, as most of the works considered here do argue, that a bitter clash between Jews and Arabs was a nearly inevitable outcome of the historical forces converging in Palestine.

Some key numbers in Weathered by Miracles help tell the story. In 1800, there were approximately 300,000 people in Palestine, more than 90 percent of them Muslim Arabs, most of the rest Christian Arabs, and only 5,000 Jewish. By 1900 the number of Jews in Palestine had risen to 50,000, with the population 85 percent Muslim, 11 percent Christian, and 4 percent Jewish. In 1914, on the eve of World War I, there were roughly 700,000 inhabitants, with the Jews numbering 80,000 to 90,000 or 11-14 percent. Finally, in 1948, when a Jewish state was declared, there were 1.5 million inhabitants of this contested land, with fully 600,000, or 40 percent, Jewish.

The settlement of the land by Jews from all over the world had changed the “facts on the ground” in Palestine. What prior to 1850 had been only a trickle of devout traditionalist Jews be came in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century a determined flood of Jews fleeing the persecutions of Russia, Poland, and elsewhere and/or acting on the basis of Zionist ideology. They came and came and kept coming, whether legally or illegally, buying Arab-owned lands (usually at inflated prices), establishing agricultural settlements, all along slowly but surely establishing a tentative foothold in their ancient homeland. The flow of Jews into Palestine then spiked again in the 1930s and 1940s as Jews sought to flee Nazism and later the Holocaust, or came as displaced persons after the six million were murdered during World War II. Well be fore the Holocaust, Jews had come to Palestine in the conviction that Jewish survival ultimately required emigration from hostile European lands. This was the central belief of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist vision. Horribly, history proved this belief to be exceedingly well-founded.

As Benny Morris documents in Righteous Victims, the Arab peoples of Palestine and surrounding regions were not unaware of the steady flow of Jews into what Arabs had considered their land for many centuries, a land which contained several key Muslim holy sites, especially in the highly contested city of Jerusalem. With special intensity beginning in the years immediately after the Balfour Declaration, Arab leaders expressed alarm at the growing Jewish presence in Palestine. They were (quite reasonably) concerned that the Zionists intended to take Palestine away from them, and that Great Britain and other world powers were going to help sponsor the take over. Anti-Zionism, some of it religiously tinged, became a source of badly needed Arab unity. A new Palestinian nationalism arose as a response to Zionist/Jewish nationalism, but it was ineffective and disorganized.

The anti-Zionist movement turned increasingly violent, instigating many bloody attacks both on the British and on Jews. A 1936-1939 revolt against the British, as Morris puts it, “unsuccessfully and prematurely expend[ed] what little resources, energy, and unity they had.” Violence begot violence, as increasingly well-armed and effective Jewish paramilitary forces and even terrorist groups also swung into action. This period also helped intensify Zionist preparations for full-blown military action when the time came, as it soon did.

In the midst of the deteriorating situation, as Idinopulos documents, several promising Arab-Jewish and multilateral diplomatic efforts were contemplated in the hope of finding a political arrangement in which Jews and Palestinian Arabs could share the land. All failed, including the last best hope, the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The fighting began in late 1947 as a local Jewish-Palestinian conflict that emerged against the backdrop of Great Britain’s announcement of its departure from Palestine in May 1948. It became an international conflict when the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq joined the Palestinian side the day after Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion declared Israel a state: May 14, 1948.

To the surprise of a great many observers, the Israelis prevailed, in what they proudly call their War of Independence—and Palestinians call al-naqba, the Catastrophe. The war produced a massive Palestinian refugee crisis. Morris claims that some 700,000 Palestinians “fled or were ejected from the areas that became the Jewish state,” and documents with searing honesty the sporadic massacres and expulsionist tactics sometimes used by the Israeli army. This refugee crisis has yet to be re solved and has been a major source of grievance and tension in the region for 50 years. Meanwhile, some 350,000 Jews (according to Idinopulous) left Arab lands and fled to Israel within two years of the war. These two population shifts decisively reshaped the land’s demographic mix. And the groundwork was laid for the next 50 years of struggle, pitting the fledgling Jewish state against its en raged, aggrieved, but increasingly ineffectual Palestinian and Arab neighbors.

The vigilance and seemingly permanent adrenaline rush that characterize Israelis is certainly attributable, at least in part, to this immense, century-long, nation-building effort, this extraordinary struggle for ethnic survival and then for acceptance in a hostile neighborhood. But whatever its source, as several of these works document, Israel is well de scribed as a “quarrelsome” democracy, to quote the journalist John Hohenberg’s not very impressive work, Israel at 50. Hertzberg describes this argumentativeness, or quarrelsomeness, as a part of the broader Jewish character. Hohenberg, on the other hand, is impressed with the structural difficulties built into Israel’s fragmented multi-party parliamentary system, in which most Israeli governments have had to cobble together fragile and tenuous majorities.

But as Hertzberg, Hohenberg, Alan Dowty, and Zeev Sternhell also note, there is more than quarrelsomeness or political structure problems at work in Israel. The assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli extremist in November 1995 was a disastrous moment in Israel’s history. It revealed that internal social, religious, and political divisions may pose a greater threat to Israel in the next 50 years than her external enemies do. Starkly differing visions of what it means to be Jewish and to live in a modern Jewish democratic state roil Israeli culture and politics. Inflaming these issues is the omnipresent question of how, or whether, to make a final peace with the Palestinians (not to mention the Syrians) whose land has been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 war.

Sternhell’s provocative scholarly treatise, The Founding Myths of Israel, reminds us that questions concerning the nature and character of the Jewish state have actually been in play ever since the emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth century. Sternhell, a leading “revisionist” Israeli historian, argues that Israel’s founders actually offered an organic nationalist ideology of “blood and soil”—he dares to say “blood and soil,” a key Nazi phrase—drawn from the same ideological cauldron as other late 19th century “volkisch” European nationalisms. His primary thesis is that although Israel’s pre-state and then national leaders all claimed to offer a socialist vision, that vision has always been more nationalist than socialist, with traditional religiosity (among many Jews, anyway) a component of that nationalism.

This has been a poor foundation either for genuine democracy or for a broad-minded concern for Israel’s people, whether Jew or Arab. Hence, Sternhell argues, Israel has never developed many of the institutions of the liberal state, such as separation of religion and state, a written constitution, and an emphasis on individual and minority rights. And hence also it has proven very difficult for Israel to let loose of territories it conquered during the Six-Day War of 1967, the third of Israel’s four wars with its Arab neighbors.

Indeed, Israel has not been at all sure it wanted to resist the temptation of holding onto land that, the international community agrees, does not be long to it. This has been the case, so Sternhell argues, because nationalist ideologies tend toward imperialism, expansion, and a celebration of raw power. Add that to a religious understanding of Israel’s divine right to the whole of historic Eretz Israel and one has a recipe for intransigence. That is Sternhell’s striking interpretation of why Israel did not rapidly move to disgorge itself of occupied territory but instead took steps to incorporate the West Bank and Golan Heights into a Greater Israel—at least until the hotly contested Oslo agreements of 1995.

Sternhell is a committed secularist, and his perspective is clear as he weighs in on the religious/secularist schism that is the most fundamental social division in Israeli society. His own conviction is that “a liberal state can only be a secular state … a state cannot be liberal as long as religion plays a major role in governing society and politics.” The enormous role of religious parties in Israel, as well as religious Jews in general, in his view undermines the very possibility of a successful liberal democracy that can live at peace with its own Arab minority or other Arab peoples and states.

For Sternhell, Israel must look forward rather than back, not defining its identity by biblical understandings of the divinely ordained territory of Israel but instead by a pragmatic, democratic, and just consideration of the rights and needs of all affected parties. Sternhell believes that the tension between these two different visions of Israeli identity—the pragmatic/liberal and the nationalist/religious—by now is nearly unbearable. It cost the life of Rabin and may make peace with the Arabs impossible.

Sternhell’s critique of extreme religio-nationalism hits the mark. Yet one sees here no mention of the positive moral possibilities available in the best of the Jewish religious tradition. It is possible to “look back” at religious sources in a way that brings life rather than death. Religion does not always equal religio-nationalism. Secularists rarely acknowledge this.

For a fairer, less ideological, and somewhat more optimistic interpretation of the same history, a better source is Alan Dowty’s The Jewish State Dowty’s intention is to consider the extent to which the modern state of Israel functions as a Jewish democracy. Both terms are important. To what extent and in what ways is Israel both Jewish and democratic? Sternhell doubts whether it is possible to synthesize the two, and opts for a purely secular vision of Israel’s future. Dowty’s analysis of the evidence leads him to conclude that a genuine synthesis is possible and, indeed, is in process even now.

Dowty argues that four threads together constitute the forces that have shaped the modern Jewish experiment with democracy: Jewish traditions, secular ideologies, objective conditions in Palestine/Israel, and more recently the force of modernization. He traces Jewish traditions of self-government back to the experience of Jewish ke-hillot (organs of Jewish self-government) in Eastern Europe prior to the destruction of that civilization in the twentieth century. Jews were forcibly cut off from the dominant Christian culture, but were permitted, most of the time, a large measure of autonomy to govern their own internal affairs. This was not Western liberal democracy, but it did include the development of many skills of democratic life and a way of running a democratic polity that have clearly been important in post-1948 Israel.

Like Sternhell, Dowty acknowledges that both nationalism and socialism were at work in the ideological development of Zionism. But his depiction of these strands also indicates nuances within the Zionist camp; exclusive or atavistic nationalism, according to Dowty, was only one strand of Zionist thought and not the dominant one. As well, most early Zionists were secularists, and most religious Jews were not Zionist. Meanwhile, he notes that immigrants to Israel from western Europe and the US brought the influence of the western liberal tradition, and that this tradition—together with 30 years of British rule—did leave a mark on Israeli democracy.

Dowty claims that the early twentieth-century Zionist pioneers were unique in their aggressive rejection of Diaspora-style Jewish existence and their desire to create a new secular nationalist Jewish “self.” It might be said that like Communism, an ideology emerging at roughly the same time, this strand of Zionism dreamed not just of political goals but of remaking Jewish peoplehood—the dream of a new Communist “man” is something of a parallel. Later immigrants to Israel, including many from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, have been more comfortable in their Jewish and religious “skin” and have not shared the original Zionist vision at this point. Any fair-minded observer of Israel must take into account this very real diversity of Jewish identities.

These different kinds of Jews, while being melded uneasily and under extreme crisis into a new Jewish state, were also faced with the reality of an Arab minority already present. Dowty is clear, though in a restrained fashion, in arguing that the “acid test” of Israeli democracy is how it treats its Arab minority. He fully acknowledges, like Sternhell and Morris, that Israel has generally failed that test so far. But he is more sympathetic in noting a lack of any preparation in history or tradition for managing a rather large (19 percent!) ethnic minority under Jewish sovereignty. He is hopeful that an easing of Israeli-Arab tensions generally, as is already beginning to take place, will make possible the normalization of relations between predominantly Jewish Israel and its permanent ethnic Arab minority. Part of making this happen is the negotiation of a permanent peace with the Palestinians and a withdrawal from/ partition of the West Bank, which Dowty clearly considers both morally and politically imperative.

Dowty is especially persuasive about the force of modernization. Traditional, religious, and communitarian/ethnic Israel is a part of the population and is here to stay. Unlike Sternhell, Dowty does not see that part of the Israeli population as a problem per se, though its extremist fringe is certainly problematic. But a more modern and secular type of Israeli, resembling the population of most of the developed world, is also growing in influence. Israel’s future, according to Dowty, will require a balance of Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism, both of which can fairly be retrieved from the rich and broad moral tradition of the Jewish people: “When tradition offers contradictory messages, why choose limited visions of the past rather than the timeless truths of the Hebrew prophets?” Israel can be both Jewish and democratic; it need not abandon one to achieve the other.

Thoughtful and fair-minded reevaluation of Israel’s history is a process Christians should applaud. We do our unique friend no favor when we offer uncritical support. Unquestioning advocacy of whatever Israel is doing at any given time does not actually advance its true interests. Any Christian with a lively doctrine of sin ought to assent readily to this proposition, which applies equally well to any nation or context. Precisely because we “pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” we ought to be free to engage critically with its policies.

But we can only do so if, as Christians, we are able to hold in tension the Israel of our theological consciousness and the Israel of contemporary history. The dilemma which Sternhell raises as an Israeli/Jewish problem is also a Christian problem—in particular, an evangelical problem. For we too tend to interpret modern Israel and its claims on the basis of our theological categories, including a variety of dubious eschatological frameworks, and have done so for centuries. This distorts our political thinking and public witness.

Contemporary Jews often find themselves bemused by the enthusiastic support Israel receives from its evangelical Christian friends. They’re certainly glad for the help, especially the exertion of our influence in our own politically strategic nation, but they find the theological underpinnings of that support nearly incomprehensible. In any case, it is not at all clear that this theologically driven pro-Israelism really does twenty-first-century Israel much of a service. It helped motivate British pro-Zionism, helped the state of Israel get up and running, helped it gain an extra measure of US support when that was badly needed—but it cannot help Israel mature into the kind of humane liberal-while-Jewish democracy it must be to flourish over the long term.

Christians must acknowledge that modern Israel, and modern Jews in general, cannot neatly be identified with the “Israel” of our theological categories or even of our Western religious and cultural heritage. We do well to acknowledge a level of mystery here. We do not know for certain what plans God has for wrapping up the threads of human history and what role the extra ordinary Jewish people or the Jewish state will play in those culminating events of this aeon. For now, while we pray and ponder such mysteries, we should urge our government to relate to the modern state of Israel in essentially the same way we relate to other valued national friends and allies. Meanwhile, as Christians, we must continue to participate in a repentant and respectful dialogue with our much-abused Elder Brother in the family of biblical faith.

David P. Gushee is Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: A Christian Interpretation (Fortress Press).

Footnotes

1. Recently a number of scholars have begun to suggest that in the first centuries after Christ—the formative period of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism alike—the lines between church and synagogue were not so clearly drawn as both Christians and Jews have tended to suppose, and that the mutual influence between the two remained strong even as late as the seventh century. See for example Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), and Lee Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (Yale Univ. Press, 2000).

2. Hertzberg’s view that Judaism has no reason theologically, “in its own terms,” to reckon with Christianity perhaps still represents the majority of contemporary Jewish thinkers, but there are significant dissenting voices. See for example “Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity,” which appeared in the New York Times (September 10, 2000), and a collection of essays edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Westview Press, 2000).

Books Considered in this essay

Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews (Doubleday, 1998). 291 pp.; $14, paper.

Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheimer, Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998). 294 pp.; $16, paper.

John Hohenberg, Israel at 50 (Syracuse Univ. Press, 1998). 356 pp.; $29.95, paper.

Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). 419 pp; $18.95, paper.

Thomas A. Idinopulos, Weathered by Miracles (Ivan R. Dee, 1998). 283 pp; $16.95, paper.

Alan Dowty, The Jewish State (Univ. of California Press, 1998). 337 pp; $35.

Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). 751 pp; $40.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

T. S. Eliot has probably been given as much media attention in the past five years as he was given in his entire lifetime. But fame, as we all know, is not necessarily a good thing. For admirers of Eliot, the most recent wave has been decidedly bittersweet. His prestige is still apparent, most prominently in his selection by Time magazine as “the poet of the century.” But a dark cloud has settled firmly over his reputation. Though Eliot has no apparent skeleton in his closet—such as the pro-Nazi articles which the late “Father of Deconstructionism,” Paul de Man, wrote as a young Belgian journalist during World War II—he does have a motley pile of bones, which several recent critics have attempted to reconstruct into various forms.

Unlike de Man, Eliot has long been a thorn in the side of the liberal intellectual establishment. That Eliot was a conservative in almost every aspect of life he himself admitted in the famous preface to his 1928 book of essays For Lancelot Andrewes: “Meanwhile, I have made bold to unite these occasional essays merely as an indication of what may be expected, and to refute any accusation of playing ‘possum. The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” Such an agenda, dismissed by many of Eliot’s contemporaries as merely anachronistic, is taken by our own contemporaries as utterly damning.

Among the most provocative and widely discussed indictments of Eliot is Anthony Julius’s book T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. In an irony that Eliot perhaps would have appreciated, it was a trick of pop culture that brought Julius’s dissertation work, published by Cambridge in 1995, into prominence. In his day-job, Julius was the attorney who represented Princess Diana in her divorce suit with Prince Charles. If the massive settlement he effected for Diana is any indication, he is a good lawyer (and perhaps the wealthiest literature Ph.D. in the world!). If the case he has constructed regarding Eliot is any indication, the lawyer’s craft does not always translate well into that of the literary critic.

What one first intuits from Julius’s tone is that the conversation regarding Eliot is already closed. Not only does he posit anti-Semitism as a strong theme in Eliot’s work; he further sees this bias as the trope that dominates all of Eliot’s thought. Now, it is undeniable that several of Eliot’s early poems (all dating from around 1920) have anti-Semitic references, most notably “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”; an excised portion of The Waste Land entitled “Dirge”; and the opening of “Gerontion,” where “the Jew squats on the window sill.”

Equally undeniable, and more troubling, is the fact that, well after his 1927 baptism into the Anglican Church, Eliot remarked in a lecture at the University of Virginia in the spring of 1933 (in ill-timed correlation with Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial powers in Germany), that “reasons of race and religion make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” in a Christian culture. The poetic glosses seem to be the product of the ill-conceived period bias that often beset Eliot as a young poet. The lecture remark, reprinted in the volume After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, seems a painful theoretical expression of the logical ends of Eliot’s nascent cultural theory.

But from such problematic moments it is a long stretch indeed to Julius’s portrait of Eliot as an obsessive anti-Semite—and to the astonishing “judgments” of Eliot that were pronounced in passing, almost casually, in reviews of Julius’s book. So, for example, Frederic Raphael in The Weekly Standard: “What we shall never know, luckily for us and, I suspect, for his reputation, is what posture Eliot would have struck in a London as providentially subject to the Nazis as occupied France was.”

Julius himself never goes that far, but his own faulty reasoning certainly invites such conjecture. He attempts to use The Criterion, the quarterly review which Eliot edited from 1922-1939, in order to prove that Eliot’s enmity to ward the Jews bordered on complicity with the Nazis. He cites a harsh review that appeared in The Criterion in 1936, demeaning the account, in the book The Yellow Spot, of atrocities against Jews in German concentration camps. Julius now admits to having been mistaken in assuming Eliot’s authorship of the review (Eliot’s widow came forward recently to identify the author as Montgomery Belgion). However, he still claims a deep culpability for the editor:

Drawn elsewhere to examples of martyrdom—Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, Celia in The co*cktail Party—Eliot’s willingness to publish this ugly review suggests that he was blind to the martyrdom of German Jewry. Certainly, in the whole period from the Nazi seizure of power to the closure of the Criterion, he did not publish a single article or review correcting the false impression given by Belgion of life (and death) for Jews under Nazism.

In his sweeping indictment, and the further implication of complicity in the Nazi mistreatment of Jews, Julius goes awry. The actual testament of The Criterion in the thirties is decidedly anti-Nazi. Probably Eliot’s most direct criticism of Nazism was in regard to its dangerous assault on the place of the Christian Church in the social order (an issue increasingly central to his thought), and one finds an unexpected hero in The Criterion reviews of the mid-thirties in the figure of the great Protestant dissident Karl Barth. Through Julius’s obsession with the crassness of the review of The Yellow Spot, he misses the whole direction of Eliot’s practical socio-political concerns.

Kenneth Asher comes closer to pinning down these socio-political concerns in his book T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Asher sees Eliot’s early attraction to the proto-Fascist ideas of Charles Maurras and his organization L’Action Francaise, as the enduring and dominant feature in Eliot’s development, spiritual and otherwise. Indeed, it is no accident that Eliot’s famous pronouncement in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes is an echo of an early manifesto from the newspaper of L’Action Francaise, published around the turn of the century (a formula that included the necessity of anti-Semitism in the mix). Eliot had also made a very public defense of Maurras, in the pages of The Criterion, when the Frenchman was condemned by the Vatican in 1926 for espousing and promulgating a form of Catholicism which valued the Church’s political function while denying Christ. Eliot’s odd rejoinder to the Catholic apologist Leo Ward was to proclaim:

I may say also that I felt a reluctance to meddle with a matter that concerns another nation than mine. What decided me was Mr. Ward’s suggestion that the influence of Maurras, indeed the intention of Maurras, is to pervert his disciples and students away from Christianity. I have been a reader of the work of Maurras for eighteen years; upon me he has had exactly the opposite effect. This is only the evidence of one; but if one can speak, is it not his duty to testify?

Asher makes a very shrewd observation regarding Eliot’s resolution of these difficulties:

But Eliot, again showing his genius for assimilation, has quietly adopted the essence of the Catholic case against Maurras: politics (and art), properly understood, must be ultimately in the service of Christianity. The religiously based communitarianism that Eliot evolves in the thirties and forties represents his at tempt to relocate Maurras’s conservative revolution on this firmer ground.

This is tightly argued, but I would venture to alter just a few of Asher’s terms, in light of my own understanding of the profundity of Eliot’s turn to Christianity. What Asher calls “assimilation” I would term “winnowing,” because I see the process more as a sifting out of those notions, in all his influences, which Eliot deemed useful in developing what would become his neo-medieval social vision. This, of course, assumes that heterodoxy would be left as chaff. To ex tend the metaphor, I see The Criterion as the threshing-floor whereupon this process was exercised.

The second term I would alter is represents. The idea would be more accurately expressed by includes, since Asher’s fundamental problem is one of priority. He wants the Maurras connection to be at the heart of Eliot’s post-conversion project, in a way much clearer, though still analogous, to Julius’s desire that Eliot’s “exclusionary biases” be seen at the heart of his Christian ideology. But Eliot’s “religiously based communitarianism” owes much more to the primitivist economics of A.J. Penty, the medieval-centric notion of European history offered by Christopher Dawson (both contemporaries whom Eliot featured in The Criterion of the thirties), and the social vision of Dante than it does to Maurras.

This problem of priority comes out most clearly when Asher is being most careful about his emphases, in the conclusion to his book:

I am not labeling Eliot an ideologue because I happen to dislike the particular triumvirate of institutions he em braces, nor because I consider him deluded and somehow primitively pre-Nietzschean for entertaining the possibility that his values may be true ones. Where a critical note occurs in these pages, it is provoked instead by his tendency to displace and even camouflage the true locus of his concerns in the name of the higher goods he espouses. In this regard, his essay in praise of Machiavelli is instructive. To be fair, perhaps we, with a longer experience of the abuses of social and cultural engineering, are more understandably suspicious of such strategies. Yet surely Eliot, who devoted so much thought to social cohesion, might have seen—as Orwell did—that the Platonic lie, even in the relatively rare instances when it is noble, erodes the very fabric it would preserve.

Asher, despite his care to objectify his concerns, seems to fundamentally misunderstand what Christian redemption does to one’s vision of this world. Nietzsche’s criticism of Christians as always having one foot in the next world has a flip side to it, a positive and conciliatory possibility, the very possibility which Eliot locked onto in his neo-medieval vision of cultural transformation. In other words, there is a sense in which the “Platonic lie,” the Myth of Er which Socrates proposes at the end of The Republic, has been transmuted into the realm of reality by the redemption of Christ. Eliot’s priority, then, becomes the promulgation of such a vision, using whatever intellectual corollaries will fit, and exhibiting, far from any Machiavellian root, a thorough-going vulnerability to the Realpolitik of this world.

It is, after all, in the struggle with the consequences of both doubt and faith that Eliot’s poetic voice seems to resonate most clearly and deeply. Perhaps that is why Martha Cooley’s novel The Archivist is more satisfying, in its assessment of Eliot’s impact and influence, than the indictments drawn up by Julius and Asher. Because it assumes from the very start that Eliot is a flawed and haunted figure in our literature, the novel allows him to function in the role for which his poetry is tremendously adequate: as patron saint of all the flawed and haunted seekers of modernity.

Cooley has woven Eliot deep into the fabric of the work, both explicitly and implicitly. The archive of her title is none other than Eliot’s mysterious correspondence with Emily Hale, the American woman with whom he had initiated some intimacy as far back as his college days, and who was his correspondent and confidante until the late forties. Eliot’s wife Vivienne, institutionalized for over a decade at Eliot’s behest, died in a fire in 1948, clearing the way, it seemed, for Eliot to marry Hale. But, at the crucial moment, Eliot chose to cut her off, and burned all of her letters to him, begging Hale to do the same with his letters. Her decision, perhaps more an act of vengeance than of literary stewardship, was to donate the letters to an academic collection in 1957, with the caveat that they not be opened for 50 years. And thus the situation now stands, with both the fans and foes of Eliot eagerly awaiting the distant revelation.

Cooley’s ingenious twist is to make the fictitious librarian in charge of the Hale letters an analogue to Eliot himself, part of a triangular relationship which mirrors Eliot’s own. The archivist and narrator, Matthias Lane, is an aging, reticent man, confronted by a female graduate student half his age, who insists that she must see the Hale letters in order to understand Eliot’s relationships with Vivienne and Emily.

What strikes the reader about this graduate student, Roberta, is that she seems earnestly to desire the humanity of the letters, the pitch of emotion and suppression which they promise; there is nothing of the purely antiquarian in her. Such a longing illuminates a rarely expressed but important reason why Eliot’s poetry is still compelling: even in our confessional age, the emotional nakedness of this legislator of impersonality is shockingly powerful.

As the narrative unfolds, shifting restlessly between present and past, Matthias’s late wife Judith appears as perhaps the central character of the novel. Judith is many things in the complex analogy which Cooley creates: foremost, she is Vivienne to Matthias’s Eliot. Like Vivienne, she becomes increasingly mentally unstable, is institutionalized, becomes by turns vindictive and imploring with her husband, and dies in the asylum. But Judith is also a Jew, haunted by the death of her parents in a pogrom in Russia, haunted by the inexplicable Holocaust, haunted by the inescapable terrors which Matthias, a goy, cannot feel. This fictional Jew finds in Eliot’s Christian poetry, in Four Quartets, shards of hope and healing in the midst of a desert of pain. In fact, the Quartets play a major role in the novel, bringing Matthias and Judith together through their mutual fascination with Eliot’s voice.

Judith’s death, by suicide, in the first days of 1965 (Eliot himself died on January 4, 1965), inclined Matthias not toward emancipation but toward reclusion. But Roberta reawakens him to the use of poetry and to the resonance which one poet’s life can offer, one interpreter of life’s traumas and failures. As for Matthias’s way of repaying Roberta, well, I cannot in good conscience give the ending away. It takes the weight of the whole narrative to make that ending coalesce.

We are left finally with a sense of Eliot’s importance, not as a model political theorist nor humanitarian nor chaste and ethereal thinker nor even congenial neighbor; he seems to have been flawed in every category. But his flaws, or rather his recognition and expression of the flaws of human existence, made for beautiful and meaningful poetry.

When I teach Eliot to my students, I like to finish by mulling over a line from the final section of “Little Gidding,” the last of the Quartets and practically the final lyric poetry of his career: “Every poem is an epitaph.” Usually the students get it: for the artist, the art is the intended legacy, the definitive statement to the world. If this is so, then Eliot deserves to be remembered not for what he may have hidden and obscured, but rather for what he certainly gave and revealed.

Michael R. Stevens is assistant professor of English at Cornerstone University.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The brochure from our local museum had described its new exhibit as an “installation,” a term that, in our town, we usually apply to dishwashers, church officers, or, more recently, computer software. My husband declined the invitation to the opening, preferring to spend the afternoon laying bricks for a new patio, so I went alone the following Saturday to “The Waiting Room,” a multimedia production by San Francisco artist Richard Kamler.

“What was it like?” my husband asked when I got home, looking up from a patch of sand he was leveling.

“Big,” I said. “It took up two rooms.”

In the main gallery, ten gray posters, each about 12 feet long, hung from the ceiling. They outlined an area, a placard explained, the size of the room where lawyers, spiritual advisors, and family members wait to visit inmates at California’s San Quentin prison. Inside this space, two rows of empty chairs faced each other. Stenciled on the posters were instructions taken from the prison’s handbook for visitors. One poster warned, for example, that visitors’ hands must be visible at all times, another that bras containing wires would set off the metal detector.

Beyond this space, along one wall of the gallery, were mounted cafeteria trays, the kind with partitions. Most of the trays were empty, inscribed with the names of executed prisoners, the dates of their death, and the words, “Declined last meal.” A few trays held renditions of some portion of a requested last meal—an ear of corn, a banana, a hamburger. Against the opposite wall, four video monitors played tape loops of interviews with relatives of condemned prisoners or their victims’ families. Speakers concealed around the room emitted two other persistent sounds, a ticking clock and a beating heart. Every once in a while the heartbeat would speed up briefly, then stop.

“So what did you think of it?” my husband asked when I’d finished this description.

“Interesting,” I shrugged, “but is it art?”

My offhand gibe concealed the bothersome questions that had beset me all the way home. These questions weren’t about the aesthetic merits of the show. True, I found somewhat overblown the artist’s description of his work as “very dense.” (For real density, you need to visit the Texas Prison Museum in the old drugstore on the town square where you can see not only Old Sparky, the retired electric chair, but such objets d’art as photographs of Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-riddled bodies, crude weapons fashioned by ingenious prisoners from toothbrushes and spoons, and the changing fashion in convict clothing.) As for the question of artistic genre, it hardly behooved someone attending her first “installation” to challenge the typology.

Nor was I troubled by the moral issues the exhibit raised. If you live in Huntsville, a town routinely and accurately labeled by the press “the execution capital of the nation,” you’ve already heard and wrestled with every legal, sociological, and theological argument both for and against the death penalty. That—and our profound uneasiness with our town’s media persona—probably explained why so few of the hundred or so people filling the auditorium that afternoon were residents of Huntsville.

It was what had gone on in the second room of the exhibit that remained a disconcerting enigma. In the museum’s auditorium the artist had designed what he described as a “social sculpture.” The printed program had listed it as “A Community Conversation.” Why “community?” That was where, I dis covered, the whole experience began unraveling for me.

How and under what conditions does an aggregate of individuals merit the name community? What has the word come to stand for in our collective imagination? Clearly, in any number of contexts, community has taken on a certain coloration that distinguishes it from its dark doppelganger, society, which in recent decades has come to mean some distant and impersonal power, one that exerts an almost exclusively negative influence on our lives. Society now serves as a convenient catchall culprit for our every affliction. Membership in society, like affiliation with a political party, we somehow assume to be optional for human beings.

Community, on the other hand, is essential. We decry society’s “demands,” but we seek the “support” community offers. Society is impersonal, cold, and oppressive; community is redolent of maternal snugness, warmth, and goodwill. If one is “in community,” one floats in the warm, amniotic fluid of caring and sharing. Conversely, belonging to no community strikes us as about the most miserable fate that can befall a person.

This shift in vocabulary has had, in fact, some beneficial practical effects. For one thing, it re focuses our attention closer to home, puts our imaginations to work on local problems like neighborhood crime and school bond elections. But semantic shifts can also disguise intractable problems, allowing us to pretend we have dealt with a difficulty when in reality we have merely renamed it. Whatever the brochure had called it, I was certain that what happened in the museum auditorium that afternoon had not been a conversation, nor did its participants constitute a community.

The Cast

What took place in the museum under the banner of conversation might more accurately have been called a drama. Visualize, if you will, the stars of the cast: four panelists who sit on a low stage up front. They are assisted, in classical fashion, by the chorus, made up largely of two groups wearing T-shirts, one group in purple, the other in black. The shirts are emblazoned with the names of two separate coalitions against the death penalty. From time to time, lone speakers will emerge from the audience in the not-so-classical tradition of guerrilla theater.

But this opening act belongs to the panelists. The first, a white-haired woman who served in the Texas legislature for five years and once ran for governor, tells us she came to be an death-penalty abolitionist by education and family tradition. Still, she says, “I continue to test this position against every horrendous murder that takes place in this state, including most recently the despicable dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper last year.” But not even James Byrd’s murderers should be executed for their crime, she concludes, because “the ability to be transformed is the ultimate identifying mark of humanity,” and execution forecloses the possibility of such transformation. Clearly resonating with these sentiments, the audience hums like a well-tempered tuning fork.

The next panelist, Huntsville’s district attorney, provides the first complication for the dramatic action. A handsome man with dark longish hair and a beard, he is the panel’s sole proponent of the death penalty. He too mentions his early education and family tradition. Surprisingly, he was schooled in the pacifism of the Church of the Brethren. That he felt compelled to break so decisively with such a background suggests, he says, how deeply his personal experiences at the bar have affected his beliefs.

At this, the audience stirs restlessly. As if to mitigate their distrust, the attorney adds that he still keeps up a personal correspondence with one of the men he sent to Death Row 14 years ago. The audience, unimpressed, maintains a stony silence.

Moving forward a couple inches in his chair, the lawyer recalls his last capital murder case, prosecuted two years earlier. A 23-year-old mother had been raped and killed, her 16-month-old baby buried alive beside her. “A little baby,” he repeats, “still running on its tiptoes. A child that couldn’t have given evidence and was no threat at all to him.” There are some acts, he concludes, so monstrous, their violence so gratuitous, that they put their perpetrators “beyond the pale of human society.”

The sea of silence stirs uneasily but does not warm.

Sensing that, at this point, he may as well go for broke, the attorney continues. “As for whether the death penalty deters criminals, I believe it does.” As proof, he cites a leader of the infamous Texas Syndicate, a powerful narcotics ring, who recently offered to plea-bargain rather than face execution. “He told me he could face a lifetime in prison but not the death penalty. But you see? Without the threat of that sentence, I’d have had nothing to bargain with.” The D.A. closes by affirming that individuals are ultimately responsible for their own actions and that society has a right to protect itself.

Murmurs of dismay ripple through the audience. Maybe he should have said “community” instead of “society.” At any rate, a steady stream of people, led by black and purple T-shirts, begins to eddy from the auditorium in protest.

Suddenly, down near the front, a large woman in a gauze dress, her black topknot slipping askew, charges forward and splashes something liquid onto the dais.

The people in the doorway freeze, the audience gasps. “What’s that?” someone shouts.

“That, sir,” the woman cries, her voice trembling with rage, “is your blood.”

I am still puzzling over this—shouldn’t it be a prisoner’s blood?—when the artist, trying not to sound like a scolding schoolmarm, stands up to ask that we all “try to sit still and listen.” Obviously, his “social sculpture,” Pygmalion-like, is getting out of hand.

The next panelist quickly regains our attention, binding us in her oratorical spell. Casting an appraising sidelong glance at the district attorney, she begins by echoing the previous two speakers’ theme of personal experience. And her experience upstages theirs, for she has, she tells us, coming down hard on each syllable, spent “nine years, five months, and 24 days in a Texas prison for a murder I did not commit.” (Through out her remarks, whenever she refers to her sentence, she always spells out its exact length, driving home rhetoric like ten-penny nails.)

“And if,” she adds, “the charge had been capital murder, I would have been sent to Death Row and possibly be pushing up daisies by now. Fortunately,” she fixes the district attorney with another baleful look, “I survived to help the prosecutors discover the real culprit.”

Here she takes us on an instructive tour of the appeals process wherein we learn that an appellate court is not allowed to consider the plaintiff’s guilt or innocence, only whether there has been an infraction of correct judicial procedure. “Guilt or innocence is irrelevant,” she says, pronouncing each Latinate syllable of the final word separately and distinctly. “And as for the death penalty preventing crime, if I had been executed, the real murderer would never have been found. I was the one, who, from a jail cell, discovered the suppressed evidence that had been sitting in the D.A.’s desk drawer for the past nine years!”

The audience cheers, claps, whistles. Even the district attorney shakes his head as if to commiserate with her long pursuit of justice.

Given her passion and eloquence, the woman is a tough act to follow, but the last panelist, despite his unfamiliar New Hampshire accent and subdued demeanor, soon has us in the palm of his hand. Stationed at the end of the table, he turns slightly so as to put himself at right angles and a little removed from his fellow panelists.

His voice is low and consciously controlled. “I too am part of a community,” he begins, “one defined by experience—the experience of having a family member murdered.”

He recounts his story thus: One June day in 1988 he was called to the hospital emergency room in his small town. There he found his father on a gurney, his chest “blown to hamburger” by an intruder’s shotgun. A few minutes later, the body was sent to the morgue, “no longer my father, but just a piece of evidence.” After he had called his six siblings with the news, “I was left alone to wonder how I was going to get the blood washed off my mother’s walls at home.”

His story stills the audience the way arctic cold slows the movement of air. We hold our breath for the denouement.

“I don’t oppose the death penalty because I care about murderers, but because I care about their victims, including the families they leave be hind,” he tells us. “If I could trade the life of my father for the life of his murderer, I’d do it in a minute.” He reckons a life for a life to be true justice, and a trade he would gladly make if he only knew how. “But I will never get my father back by killing his murderer. I don’t need vengeance,” he says, “I need healing.”

The audience, silent and wary till that final phrase, now murmurs its sympathetic approval.

But the man quickly continues, as if fearing that we mistake his meaning. “The isolation imposed on victims’ families hinders that healing. Neither side in the death penalty debate wants to talk to us. Advocates of the death penalty want to exploit our grief as an argument for execution. They don’t understand that killing the murderer compounds the pain; it only creates another grieving family.”

A smattering of applause ripples through the audience.

But abolitionists, he adds, too often find victims’ families an embarrassment to their cause. “It’s as if there’s only so much sympathy to go around. Any compassion for us means less for people on Death Row.” Abolitionists, he says, also resent those family members who support execution. “They think these people are only out for revenge. But most of them are motivated by deep moral convictions. They’re not hate-mongers, not for the most part. They just want to spare others the pain they’re living with; they want to make sure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to someone else.”

He rolls a pencil between his fingers for a long moment, then rakes his gaze across the audience. “I don’t know that I can ever forgive my father’s murderer, but I do know if the state were to take his life, that would forever preclude that possibility.”

Intermission

As we trickle into the foyer for the scheduled break, each of us scans the crowd for someone we know, eager to discharge the static electricity we’ve accumulated during the past hour. The black and purple T-shirts clump together, making the rest of us seem aimless and unconnected.

Before I return to the auditorium, I take another turn through the posters and cafeteria trays in the main gallery, recalling a conversation I had with the artist a couple of weeks ago while he was installing his show. We sat in the museum foyer, empty then, across from a display of quilts made by local women.

Richard Kamler is a slight man with a shining bald head, his white chin whiskers divided symmetrically into two points, giving him the air of a 60-year-old elf. I asked if this were his first trip to Huntsville.

“Oh no,” he shook his head, “I’ve been here several times during the past couple of years while I was working on this piece, interviewing different people.”

He mentioned the man who manages the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, as well as the warden at the Walls, the original state prison that houses the execution chamber, only a few blocks away from where we sit. “And professors in the Criminal Justice Department at the university,” he added.

“Was everyone cooperative?”

“Yes. Very helpful. Well,” he paused, “almost all. I wanted to film inside the former residence of the prison director, that big brick mansion across from the Walls, but they didn’t encourage that.”

“What about prisoners?”

“Yes. Of course, they wouldn’t let me take a videocam in there, but I got audio tapes.”

“What about guards?”

“Guards?” He peered at me over his reading glasses. “No. I’m afraid I don’t have any contacts among the guards.”

Act Two

Back in the auditorium now, “Community Conversation: Part II” is cranking up, and I hurry back to my seat. As disjunctive as the panelists’ presentations have been, they all gave me something to ponder, and I’m eager to hear what will doubtless be the Q&A part of the program. The moderator, a professor from Michigan, asks for input from the audience. And this is when the already precarious coherence of the artist’s carefully contrived “social sculpture” really begins to crumble.

No sooner does the moderator pause for breath than the woman who earlier threw make-believe blood onto the platform jumps to her feet. “I am a doctor,” she announces, “and I have spent my life working among the poor in Mexico.” The death penalty, she tells us, is part of a conspiracy by the state of Texas to subjugate and colonize Central America. Her outline of this plot is interspersed with tidbits of her family history: her daughter is also a doctor, as is her father—who, however, was abusive and patriarchal.

The moderator, rattling his notes, gets to his feet.

“You people are wrong,” she cries to the audience. “You need to do more than just abolish the death penalty. You should shut down all the prisons!”

People stir in their seats. The moderator nods uncomfortably in her direction. An invisible isolation booth seems to form around her, sealing her in a kind of unspoken solitary confinement. A number of people are waving hands while others, not waiting to be recognized, shout demands that the district attorney explain how he can justify serving a justice system that favors the rich and powerful.

The attorney glances accusingly at the moderator. “I think most people prefer an imperfect system to none at all,” he says.

Another woman gets to her feet. “What we need is more economic development, more education. That’s the only way to get rid of violence.”

“Only poor people go to jail,” someone near her adds. “The rich get off.”

“All depends on who you are whether you go to jail or not,” yet another voice calls out.

“And who you kill,” someone else chimes in.

The moderator from Michigan rocks forward on his toes, appearing stunned. Fortunately, one of the panelists, the woman who spent time in prison, grabs the reins of this runaway fracas. “What it really depends on is your county’s district attorney,” she says with the authority of one who knows, turning toward the lawyer on her left.

The D.A. takes the ball and runs with it. “Absolutely,” he agrees, leaning his elbows on the table and hunching to ward the audience. “This office has a great deal of power. It’s the district attorney who decides whether to bring charges and what those charges will be.” He sits back. “But you know who determines what constitutes a capital crime? The state legislature. It’s your representatives who decide if Texas even has a death penalty.” He aims a finger at the audience. “So it’s the voters who really have the power. And the responsibility.”

His challenge is ignored. Instead, someone shouts, “How come Houston has four times as many inmates on death row as Dallas?”

A woman gets to her feet. “As a lawyer from that city, I can tell you in one word. Economics. The county figured it was just too expensive to prosecute capital cases. It costs three times as much to prosecute and execute a criminal as it does to keep him in prison for 40 years.”

To judge by the exclamations of surprise, this information comes as news to most of the audience, but before the issue can be pursued further, a thin man with a moustache near the back of the auditorium stands up.

“I’m here today,” the man says a bit nervously, “both because my sister was murdered and because the state executed the woman who killed her.”

A murmur rustles through the audience. This is Ron Carlson, someone whispers, whose sister was killed by Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas for a hundred years. “I have two other people here with me,” he says, gesturing toward a middle-aged couple next to him. “Their son is scheduled for execution next week.” The pair look down at their laps.

“Six months after my sister was murdered,” he continues, “my father suffered the same fate. Yet his murderer escaped the death penalty by plea-bargaining. Where’s the fairness in that?”

His voice shatters, and for a moment silence falls over this conglomeration of people hemmed up together in the auditorium. But whether they are pondering the inequities of the criminal justice system or gauging the extraordinary odds of having two family members murdered in the same year, I can’t tell. I’m not even sure which has caught my attention.

In any case, the silence lasts no more than a moment. Then a woman wearing a purple turban to match her T-shirt stands and delivers a well-scripted speech about the Thirteenth Amendment. It did not, she claims, as we all probably believe, abolish slavery. “Oh yes, we still have slavery in this country. And why? Because the Thirteenth Amendment exempted prisoners from the provisions against forced labor. It was planned that way—to fill the labor demands of giant corporations!”

A hubbub, part protest, part confusion, follows this speech. The scene in the auditorium is beginning to resemble a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, macabre and self-devouring.

The panelist from New Hampshire tries to swing our attention back to Ron Carlson and the plight of victim families. “We rely on victims to justify the death penalty,” he says. “We tell the families ‘Look what we’re doing for you! Killing the murderer to make you feel better.’ But the death penalty is a cheap substitute for what victims’ families need. It allows us to abandon them and their pain.”

I want to hear him say more about this, but his point fails to grab the crowd’s roving attention. Instead, their focus swings to a thin man with a two-foot-long gray ponytail, just getting to his feet. “I once came within 72 hours of execution,” he says in a gravelly voice. He pauses briefly for the crowd to take this in. “So you can understand when I say I’m not exactly comfortable in this town.” The crowd murmurs its comradely comprehension. “In fact,” he chuckles confidentially, “I had to have a few drinks just to get here.”

“We’re with you, brother,” someone calls out.

The man sticks his fingertips in his jeans’ pockets. “I just want to say, you know, this room is full of family.” He takes his hands from his pockets and hugs his elbows, as if not knowing how to go on. He frowns, concentrating. “And also that voting is the answer. Thank you. Thank you very much.” And, sinking into his seat, he waves to us all as people break into applause.

The void is immediately filled by a tall African American woman. She’s not a Texan, she tells us, but came here 20 years ago as a student from Chicago to interview 300 prisoners as part of her graduate research. “I now work in the Restorative Justice Program, and this is the part you’re going to find hard to believe. My boss is the man you all have been dumping on.” She points to the district attorney. “He knows my position on capital punishment, and though we don’t agree on that point, he always listens to me with respect. We should be glad to have him serving in the office he holds.”

Suddenly, the woman who doesn’t believe in prisons jumps up and shouts at her, “Shame on you! You’re a Judas. Shame on you!”

There is a collective gasp from the audience, followed by a fretful stirring. Our concentration is shredded by the constant volleys of stories, accusations, pleas—none of which we have time to absorb.

The Michigan moderator, intuiting that everyone has had enough, stands, thanks us all for coming, announces there are refreshments laid out now in the foyer, and dismisses us with the relief of a harried schoolteacher at the end of a particularly rowdy day in the classroom.

Out in the foyer, I glance at the delicacies and drink set up on a long table. Rarely has food seemed so unappealing. I head for the parking lot instead, feeling the way Alice must have, exiting the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

Many of the stories told here had come from the deepest levels of human experiences. Yet none had been honored as they deserved. What, I wondered, had caused roughly a hundred people, most of whom obviously shared the same opinions about capital punishment, to pay so little attention to these stories?

Why do people with the best intentions often have the worst manners and show the least interest in what others have to say? Why does the language of advocacy so often polarize rather than clarify?

Eventually, all these questions, like moons around a more massive planet, settled into orbits around a core enigma—one that, I have come to believe, pertains to community. A cause, we think, unites people. Common goals create community. But under certain conditions (the event at the museum being a case in point), a cause—whether the right to bear arms or defeat of the death penalty—becomes instead a device for defining personal identity. Carving out one’s position, claiming moral territory, takes precedence over making your cause common. Like James and John, those sons of thunder who wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village, we are often more interested in destroying our enemies than in consolidating friendly forces.

This is not to say that town meetings and city councils, even church boards, are not frequently cantankerous and divisive. So are families, for that matter. But it takes more than similar views on issues to make a community. Some glue that makes us stick together even when we differ. Ties of place or blood or work, for example. Everyone in the auditorium came and went away free of such ties, thanking our lucky stars we’d never have to meet again. Such haphazard and transient couplings don’t produce a community.

Perhaps in the artist’s mind, shutting people up in a large room for a couple of hours with a volatile topic was a form of art, “subversive,” defiantly unscripted: a “happening.” Nevertheless, that afternoon’s “Community Conversation” had not been artful. No care had been taken to fit the pieces together. Indeed, the “conversation” was profoundly careless. Even worse, it was unholy. Real suffering, both present and represented there, had been trivialized and desecrated by our casual and shifting attention. The result was an anti-conversation carried on by an anti-community.

Epilogue

The same week Richard Kamler’s installation opened at the museum, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice began transferring the 461 prisoners on Death Row to a unit in another county. The citizens of Huntsville weren’t sorry to see them go; in fact, they would just as soon the executions took place in the neighboring county as well, instead of the condemned prisoner being brought back to the Walls to receive the lethal injection. Not all of our citizens would admit they’re ashamed of our town’s reputation; they’d merely say they don’t like the worldwide publicity the executions focus on us. Either way, it comes to the same thing: we care what other people say or think about Huntsville, the same way families feel responsible for, proud of, or shamed by their members. This is another necessary aspect of community.

I said that no one in Huntsville protested transferring Death Row to another county, but there was one telling exception: the community of execution itself, which included both the Death Row inmates and the 70 men who guarded them. Cloistered together for years, preparing for death, prisoners and guards had annealed in a furnace of waiting.

In the new prison, Death Row cells are equipped not with bars but with solid steel doors, leaving their occupants in virtual solitary confinement. Their new jailers have had no training in dealing with condemned men, a situation that puts both prisoners and guards at risk.

As time for the move approached, the old Death Row guards became distraught about their charges’ uncertain future. In response, the spiritual adviser to this strange monastery, a chaplain who has served on Death Row for many years, reserved the local theater. He invited the 70 veteran guards to a showing of The Green Mile, the movie in which Tom Hanks plays the superintendent of a Depression-era Death Row. Afterwards, they ate dinner together and talked it over. And that, I’ll bet, was a real community conversation.

Virginia Stem Owens is a novelist, essayist, and poet.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“What makes real people?”

Before I was seven years old I asked my father that question.

“What’s the matter with you?” my dad asked in response. “What kind of notion is that—real people?”

“People that live in houses,” I tried to explain. “People that stay together in towns.”

I was expressing in a child’s blunt language the basic questions of theology, philosophy, and psychology. What is human? How do people become what they are? And the original questions of sociology. Questions of social organization and disorganization. How and why do people form groups? How and why do they get disconnected? How can they get together?

Before the term became fashionable, my family was “homeless,” as many migrant workers still are today. We traveled in a battered car throughout the western half of the United States, harvesting fruits and vegetables and peddling novelties from door to door. Most of my life we had a Model A Ford. The men in a camp would help each other cut down the chassis. Then they built a frame from rough lumber and covered it with canvas painted with oil for waterproofing. It was the original RV. I was born in the hop yards of Oregon, and with the seasons and years we followed the crops over routes later known as “migrant streams.” We slept in the car, or a tent. Sometimes there were rows of one-room shacks provided by the growers, and sometimes strictly supervised government camps.

I pulled long bags of cotton down the thorny rows, carried boxes or “lugs” of fruit, climbed trees, and dug into the black earth with my hands. I stood in the rain to hold a piece of tin over the fire while Dad cooked mush and Mom cared for the little ones in the crowded tent. As the eldest child, I knew the most intimate details of family life and economy. I watched the children being born, usually attended only by Dad and me. My mother had eight besides me, and two of them died before my eyes. I saw my mother stand at the edge of a field with a dead baby in her arms. Someone reported us to the sheriff. He said he would try to get a federal agent to help us. He couldn’t give permission to bury the baby in his county because we were nonresidents.

I knew there was a depression going on, and every town was trying to keep the bums out. I heard my dad say the government is full of graft, that rich people work the poor to death and then kick them in the teeth; and a poor man’s got no chance. Sometimes he said he was just fed up with doing the rich man’s dirty work, so we made willow baskets and paper flowers to sell. My earliest memory, in fact, is of selling baskets and flowers. Dad told me to go up one side of a street and back down the other throughout the neighborhoods, knocking at each house and entering each place of business, saying, “Would you like to buy a basket? They are 25 cents apiece.”

Up one side of the street and down the other I went, praying the next house would have a doorbell because knocking could hurt, especially if the paint were old and cracked; hating screened porches through which no one could hear a knock; anxiously watching for dogs; and dreading to meet children. The town children looked different from the camp children—I called it a “clean and smooth” look. My hair was not washed nor combed. Often I wore the same clothes in which I had slept. I never had socks. My shoes were canvas. We bought them for 50 cents at the dime store, and wore them working in the fields, so they were tattered and ugly. I think children have a thing for shoes. Today they have a fabulous assortment. The “real people shoes” I remember were leather ox fords and shiny black slippers with buckles. I was so ashamed of my shoes.

Up one side of a street and down the other. Going systematically through the towns I learned about urban patterns. Before scholars brought it to attention in the first sociology textbook, I discovered the concentric circles model. Large buildings and stores in the middle, then houses, factories, and maybe a railroad, stockyards, and a city dump on the far edge.

Gradually I learned that the buildings that were not houses and stores might be called public buildings. I was fascinated by the schools, libraries, and churches, and began to understand that these were shared and often provided through community cooperation and taxation. So basket peddling gave me opportunities to observe life in a settled community, and become aware of the contrast between this and my own lifestyle, dress, language, and total condition. I heard people call us gypsies, tramps, migrants, bums, farm labor, transients, and okies. The designations so obviously set us apart that I began to conceive of the townsfolk as real people. I asked, “What makes real people?” because I had sensed the vital concepts of being and belonging. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to belong?

People have asked these questions in the contexts of religion and philosophy for as long as we have records of human thought. When we began to use scientific methods to ask the questions, psychology was born. At about the time I was asking them, the same questions were being examined from a another viewpoint, far more sophisticated, but remarkably like my own. It was the viewpoint, growing out of the relatively new academic field of sociology, that persons are to a great measure shaped by their society. And people who are placed on the outside of social life be cause of circ*mstances or factors such as race or gender are likely to be acutely aware of social patterns that people in side the society take for granted.

At the University of Chicago, where American sociology became involved more with people than with methodology, Robert Ezra Park, who had studied with early theorists such as Ferdinand Toennies and Georg Simmel in Germany, developed the idea of a marginal personality.

Drawing from the work of these theorists, and others, such as William Graham Sumner, Park postulated that the loyalties that bind persons together in primitive societies are in direct proportion to the intensity of the fears and hatreds with which they view other societies. This concept is developed in theories of ethnocentrism and in-group/out-group propensities. Group solidarity correlates to a great extent with animosity toward an out-group.

With expansion of communication and transportation came the transformation of primitive societies into a wider and more rational social order, what we call “civilization.” Movements and migrations that accompany this process bring about a mixture of peoples and fusion of cultures, with the result that some persons find themselves in ambiguous positions, caught between, not belonging solidly to an in-group, and therefore confused as to relationship with an out-group.

Park quoted Simmel’s description of the stranger as a personality type: “a person who lives in intimate association with the world about him but never so completely identifies with it that he is unable to look at it with a certain critical detachment.” He then added his own theory of what he called the marginal man, described as one who lives at once within two or more different and often somewhat antagonistic cultures.

To Park the marginal person is evidence that an individual’s personality achieves its final form through the concept of himself or herself in relation to social factors. The marginal personality type arises at a time and place where there is a significant merging of cultures and people. Such persons find themselves always on the margins, rather than comfortably integrated. They can feel like strangers everywhere. The positive aspect, Park noted, is that marginal persons are by definition the more civilized human beings. They can observe their own and other groups with considerable objectivity. Because of personal detachment, they can learn to accept differences, develop wide appreciations, and make mature adjustments.

Of civilization and maturity I will not boast, but I know my life as a migrant caused me to develop a marginal personality, and in Christian ministry today marginality is an asset. My experience may have a special meaning in these days when all boundaries seem indistinct, and when—perhaps more frequently than at any time in history—people live in and on the margins.

My training as a basket peddler gave me distinctive advantages. I was compelled to talk to strangers and walk into strange buildings. I knew I was different and did not belong in the way of real people. Yet I had a kind of claim, as the homeless do, to the streets and public areas. I examined buildings and school grounds, tried out the swings, peeked into the windows. I was more curious than afraid. The paradox was that while I did not belong, I was in a better position than most children to understand the concept of community.

“What’s that?” I asked a kind lady who bought a basket, as I pointed to a brick building across the street from her house. “A library,” she answered. She told me it was filled with books, which the people of the town kept there for all to use. I could hardly imagine it. They kept books there for all to use together. I had overheard conversations in the towns. “Dirty gypsies out in the camps, probably steal and have lice. Low class people like that. Not a thing you can do. Never appreciate anything. Give ’em something and they’ll tear it up.” But the lady said I could go into the library. It was public and free.

I remember walking into the big room with all the shelves of books. No one was there except the lady at a desk. I stood frozen. “Did you want something, little girl?” she asked.

“I want to see the books.” She al lowed me to walk around, looking at the shelved books. Then she let me sit at a table that was clean and smooth, and look at the pictures in a magazine.

Of course I became an ardent fan of the free public library. I decided to find out what else was “free.” I went into other public buildings, such as court houses, touched marble and brass, walked up and down the stairs, and looked at paintings. I examined open churches.

Then I discovered Sunday school. There was practically no social experience in these early ventures. I would peek into a room until someone offered me a chair. Usually the teacher would ask my name, but little else. The situation was structured and the time was short, so a child could be allowed to participate quietly in some of the activities without getting really involved.

Nothing that has happened to me since has impressed me more than Sunday school. I liked to sit in a chair, especially a red one. I liked to hear how Jesus walked around from place to place with a lamb in his arms and no house to live in. It was in Sunday school that I had my first brush with the notion of identity, self-concept, in the teacher’s guileless direct answer to the question, “Who am I?”

“You are children of God,” she said. Children of God. Could I be a child of God?

And then there was school. I ducked into stairwells and doorways to avoid a direct meeting with groups of “school kids.” I learned to walk far around little stores where they gathered, sucking on lollipops and jawbreakers and stringing out bubble gum in that smart-alecky way. Naturally I felt angry, frustrated, and bitter. No doubt I could have been led into violent and destructive action if a leader had appeared. Occasionally I threw rocks at school kids, and once I tore the lace off the beautiful dress of a girl who called me a dirty gypsy peddler. But greater than anger and bitterness was the desire to be like the others. Part of me wanted to fight them. More of me wanted to join them.

Schools, I learned were public and free, like the library. And every child was supposed to go. I remember telling my little sister, “You go to school to learn to read, so you can get a town job and live in a house. There is a law that all kids must go to school, so we will go someday.” Often, when I had sold my baskets I would find a school building. If there were no children to see me I would walk about the grounds, pretending I was a school kid, pretending I belonged to that other world through which I moved as a stranger. Sometimes I would get my sister to walk with me and share the secret game.

Of course the idea of school was not so inviting to Dad. It meant staying a while in one place. So for two years after I was old enough to begin school I was not allowed to go. I peeked into windows, and several times I slipped furtively inside the building for a fleeting glimpse of a classroom and some books. I touched a desk wonderingly with my fingertips, and stared fascinated at a blackboard.

The big day came in that unexpected, unplanned manner that rules the destiny of vagabonds. We were camped on the grounds of an old fort where there was to be a pioneer celebration. Some of the campers were carnival people, and, instead of heading south for the cotton my dad decided we would make paper flowers and willow novelties for carnival booths.

“We’ll be here for several weeks,” I heard a woman say. “Why not send the kids to the consolidated school in town? A bus will come by here.”

“Oh yes! Oh yes!” I screamed, jumping around, almost upsetting the kettle of mush on the campfire. “Please let us go to school!”

Somehow like a miracle it was decided. Dad made us a lunch pail from an old lard bucket, into which Mom put some thick pancake-like items we called doughgods, and my sister and I stood waiting for the school bus, swinging the pail between us, whispering ecstatically to each other. “We’re going to school. Like people who live in houses. We’re going to be school kids for truly.”

Soon I had a room and a teacher. And most wonderful of all, I had a desk. A certain special place which was mine among the other desks, just like each other desk. When I sat there I belonged with other persons. I was equal to anyone else. I had the same materials and the same opportunities here, right now. Outside they could jeer at my clothes and laugh because I lived in a tent, but when I sat at my desk, money and clothes and houses did not count. So long as I did well right here, I could be free of the sickening inferiority that accepted with morbid understanding the slights and cruelties of others. I could be, yes, even superior. Some of the clean smooth children did not do so well as I in school. Next time they called me a dirty gypsy I could say to myself, “Who do they think they are? What’s so grand about leather shoes?”

Ironically, after I started school I became even more alienated. Now I was a kind of traitor to my own people. My parents, threatened in their position as I made ideals of the teachers, scoffed and ridiculed and even punished me. I was scolded for saying “thank you” in that highfalutin way, trying to act like those nasty nice school teachers. I was slapped for saying “ain’t” was a wrong word, and sent to bed for putting ideas into the heads of the little ones. The migrant kids called me smarty and stuck-up be cause I liked school and would not join in picking up cigarette butts.

At school I was a curiosity. Older than my classmates and accomplished in some areas beyond any of them, I was behind where it counted most. I had to guess at the material they had covered before I arrived. They told in oral reports of music and dancing lessons. They baked cookies, competed in talent shows, drew pictures, and knew the names of movie stars.

No expert in “cognitive measurement” knows better than I the wishful thinking inherent in the concept of culture-free testing. I have sat with cold, damp hands, holding my breath, hoping the teacher would not call on me. The assignment was an English lesson in how to explain a process. The list of processes from which we were to choose did not contain one that I knew anything about. They were such items as pressing a garment, washing the china, setting up a croquet game. I did not have the courage to choose a different item. I might tell how to build a fire in the rain, with only one match. I was afraid they would laugh.

In my early years I knew nothing of life in a house. Constantly I stumbled over such terms in lessons and tests as: windowsill, curtain rod, cabinets, highboy, lavatory, drawer pull, mantle, casters, ladle, light switch. We had no electric lights except in government camps, where they were turned on and off from a main switch. We never had a telephone, vacuum sweeper, washer, toaster, refrigerator, radio, or floor lamp. We never had a private bathroom, or a kitchen sink, or an oven. I never owned a tricycle, bicycle, or pets. We did not go on vacations, have company, take lessons, or pack luggage. We had no front yard, back yard, next door, or neighborhood. We did not sweep or shovel walks. We had no shelves, attic, cellar, or basem*nt. For years I owned no hairbrush, toothbrush, nail file, or pajamas. I could go on. In short, the middle-class world was strange to me and its terms could frighten me.

Sometimes I rejected opportunities to learn because I was ashamed to admit that I did not know. When I entered a new environment where all those present seemed to be participating in an activity, I had no way to judge the level of accomplishment of the others. They seemed to know everything and I alone was ignorant.

One of my most painful experiences in this regard was my failure to understand musical notes. It was customary in many schools to teach the names of the notes: do, re, mi, and so on. The children sang the note names instead of the words in the music book and tapped with their fingers the number of beats each note was to receive. None of this made any sense to me. I never understood statements about the sharps and flats and the last one to the right called do. Why was it called do at some times and not at others? A word like cat was the same wherever you saw it. Why did notes keep changing names? I could not ask the meaning of these things when all about me the children tapped competently. The music teacher hurried in and out. It seemed she frowned at me. I tried to tap and move my lips at the same intervals as did the child beside me.

There were similar problems in math, when teachers tried to make the examples practical. (Practical for kids who lived in houses, belonged to Scout troops, baked cookies, and owned bags of marbles.) I could subtract two from twenty-four. But when it came to telling how many cookies would be left if mother baked two sheets of a dozen each and Bobby ate one off each sheet, then I was intimidated into saying I did not know.

I never knew how to act in class. If I were quiet, I was dull. If I talked, I was pushy and awkward. Sometimes I became so eager to show that I did know something that I would burst into the conversation. It sounded loud and rude. It seemed to me that the others could shout each other down and no one minded, but when I tried to say something they stopped talking and stared.

In the upper grades obstacles came with current events and literature and music appreciation assignments requiring the use of mass media. How could I admit I had no radio? I had to decide whether to be absent, pretend I had forgotten the assignment, or try to glean enough information from the others to fake a report. I might find the newspaper in a library, steal or beg one, or look over someone’s shoulder. It was never as simple as the teacher made it sound.

Since I tended not to be rebellious and I liked most of the school work, I was seldom a discipline problem. My only troubles in this area resulted from my curiosity concerning the ways of real people. Once I was punished for stealing from lunch boxes. Actually, I had no intention of stealing. I stayed in the building at recess time, which was against the rule, because I did not want to face the kids. The lunch boxes in the cloak room where I hid were attractive and interesting. I decided to look into one. It contained a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, carrot sticks, and a little jar of dessert. It was neat. I closed the box carefully and opened another. Soon I was carried away and bent on examining every lunch before the bell rang. A teacher caught me and sent me to the principal. It was hardly stealing. I put everything back meticulously—except one irresistible cupcake.

One trip to the office did not deter me forever. I examined lunch boxes several times after that. Also, I tried on coats, gloves, and galoshes. For some forgotten reason I was left alone one day in an office and got into trouble for trying to make a telephone call. Someone came in before I could get the operator, but probably I would not have spoken to her if she had answered. I knew no one to call. I just wanted to say I had used a phone.

At about the time I was trying to find myself between the migrant camp and the town, one of Park’s students, Everett Stonequist, heard a lecture at the Geneva School of International Studies, describing the effects of European ideas and practices on life in Africa. He recognized parallels that launched him on a study of the interaction between personality and culture. This culminated in his 1937 book, The Marginal Man—A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict. He described the marginal man as “one who is poised in psychological uncertainty between two or more social worlds; reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds.” Stonequist’s study examines representative types of marginal persons. Among his references are autobiographical writings, such as The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, and My Life as German and Jew, by Jakob Wassermann. From the literature and extensive investigations of factors of race and social conditions that contribute to the condition, he generates a kind of marginal personality profile. When I first read the book I recognized myself.

Using the expression double consciousness, borrowed from Du Bois, and the notion of the looking-glass self from Charles Cooley, Stonequist characterizes marginal persons as painfully self-conscious, excessively sensitive to others’ opinions and actions, and “ambivalent in attitude and sentiment.” Feelings of inferiority arise out of social situations where they are stigmatized as inferior or made to feel unacceptable. They look for ways of proving themselves, constantly striving to find situations in which they might excel.

Stonequist did not emphasize personality traits as problems. His main point was to show how marginality, like migration and fusion of cultures, can affect social experience in periods of rapid culture change. “Population intrusion,” he says, “sets in motion a process of culture change that breaks down old cultural forms, releases individuals from their domination, and so gives rise to periods of creative activity and advance.” Persons who learn to adjust themselves, Stonequist concludes, can contribute to the solution of the conflict of races and cultures.

I paraphrase here from closing chapters of his book: Marginal persons may become pioneers and creative agents in a new social order that seems to evolve as narrower group interests give way to larger human values. The marginal man is the key personality in the contacts of cultures. It is in his mind that the cultures come together, conflict, and eventually work out some kind of mutual adjustment. He is the crucible of cultural fusion. Thus the practical efforts of the marginal person to solve his own problem lead him consciously or unconsciously to change the situation. His interest may shift from himself to the objective social conditions and launch him upon the career of conciliator, interpreter, reformer or teacher. It is in the mind of the marginal person that the inner significance and driving motives of culture change are most luminously revealed.

The Marginal Man was written in 1937. In 1992, the philosopher Charles Taylor published his book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Taylor sees in the United States today unprecedented powers of creation (and destruction) at the disposal of increasingly interdependent societies with diverse cultures. He says the pivotal question is whether the democratic ideal may be served by providing each separate group with identity for its members, or connecting the democratic value of diversity to the value of expanding the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual horizons of all, enriching our world by exposing us to differing cultural and intellectual perspectives.

Since ethnic groups became more interested in social and political recognition, the term marginality has been used in a negative sense not intended by the early sociologists. Rejection of the melting pot metaphor and fear of assimilation have resulted in emphasis on recognition of ethnic units. Recently, however, new terms are being used for the concept of being able to merge cultures without negative consequences for either group distinctiveness or individual identity and self esteem. These include Du Bois’ double consciousness, Thurgood Marshall’s double vision, and David Hollinger’s postethnic perspective. Representatives of Native American, African American, Hispanic, and Asian American cultures have all suggested that the future of American democracy depends on respect for identity in the context of a common culture.

In a psychology course I teach at a theological seminary, I have several students who plan to work in other cultures. I assign them a reading authored by a former missionary.1 He proposes an “incarnational model for personal relationships” that is based on Christ’s incarnation, arguing that the psychological adjustment necessary for optimum multicultural relations is to yield part of one’s birth culture to merge with an other. Jesus became the 200 percent person, fully God and fully man. Jesus developed from infancy to belong in the earthly context. All human beings have some of this experience, in the initial socialization process. They make adjustments to become fully developed personalities within a social context.

We cannot be 200 percent persons, but the successful missionary declares we must not cling exclusively to our ethnicity. We must set aside some of our social identity and way of life: “If we are to follow the example of Christ, we must aim at the incarnation!” They call their model the 150 percent person. The person who is more than whole.

When I graduated from high school I still lived with my family in a migrant shack without a telephone or plumbing. I had learned to live in two worlds, supporting migrant causes yet feeling like a real person as I gave a speech at commencement. I could move from one role to another with considerable skill, and feel a certain pleasure from the experience. I was coming to realize that not belonging exclusively to one group has a positive side. I didn’t need to fight anyone in order to assert myself. I was developing the wide range of sympathies and appreciations I needed to become a bridge for my people.

Now I have worked as an educator with migrant populations in the United States, and with peoples of several ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions in Europe and Latin America. My studies in psychology and sociology have given me essential information and tools. My experience as a marginal person has given me that feeling of extra percentage. Today the whole world is experiencing culture conflicts and diffusion. If we are to understand the people of our time and make effective use of our fields of education, sociology, and psychology, we must move knowledgeably in the margins. I began my quest for personal identity with the desire to be a real person. Now I believe the complexities of our multicultural society involve us all in a more ambitious quest. Our challenge is to go for the 150 percent. To be a little bit more than real.

Billie Davis is Education Consultant for the Christian Education Counselor. She is professor emeritus at Evangel University and has been an ordained minister with the Assemblies of God for 50 years.

Footnotes

1. Malcolm McFee, “The 150% Man: A Product of Blackfeet Acculturation.” American Anthropologist, Vol. 70, pp. 1096-1107.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

• INTELLECTUM VERO VALDE AMA •Greatly love the intellect

—Augustine

I was born in 1948, a few days after the founding of the State of Israel, and like many evangelical Christians of my generation I grew up amid speculation about what that might mean eschatologically. Many preachers were sure what it meant: We had entered the End Times. My mother and grandmother were not quite so dogmatic, but they were nevertheless convinced that the return of the Jews to Palestine was an event of immense spiritual significance. God’s covenant with the Jews was still in force, and they had a prominent role yet to play in salvation history.

In any case, I was raised to be philo-Semitic. But I didn’t know anyone Jewish, not even casually, and my ignorance of Jewish life and history was almost complete.

In September of 1962, having graduated that June from a small Lutheran school that ended with eighth grade, I began ninth grade at a large public school, John Marshall Junior High, in Pomona, California. The school was already showing signs of the changes that the sixties would bring, but there were also touches that appear in retrospect as incongruous vestiges of an earlier era.

One such vestige was “The Ambassadors,” a group of students selected to “represent” the school. We were told: “You are the cream of the crop.” We were given blue sweaters to wear, like lettermen, and we met at the beginning of each day as a class (our “home room”).

A newcomer seeking friends, I quickly fell in with a group of three other “Ambassadors”: Richard (known as Dick), another Richard, and George. We ate lunch together, we talked, we watched girls, we loaned one another books.

Then one day, still fairly early in the schoolyear, when the four of us were walking along, I heard someone say, “Here come the Jews.” That was all. The tone was unmistakably unfriendly, but there was no name-calling, nothing in the least dramatic.

Ridiculous and improbable as it may seem, I didn’t know until that moment that my new friends were Jewish. And I realized at the same time that in the minds of some people at the school, I was Jewish too—a judgment later confirmed in several instances.

Our friendship continued. We all joined the debate team. We spent a little time at one another’s houses—the first Jewish homes I had visited—and I learned a bit about the range of Jewish convictions (or lack of same) represented by their families, but somehow that setting was very different, awkward. I tried to convert one of my friends, the one I was closest to (he had introduced me to Leon Uris), and that put a distance between us that was never reduced.

The following year my family moved, and many years passed before I again entered a Jewish home. Book-learning slowly reduced my ignorance: Isaac Bashevis Singer was my first guide, and I happened to be carrying one of his novels the next time I was taken for Jewish.

By then I was married, the father of a seven-year-old daughter, and my wife, Wendy, was pregnant with our second child. We were living in Pasadena, and I was teaching part-time at California State University, Los Angeles, from which I returned one spring day, walking from the bus stop with an armload of books. (Soon a backpack would change my life.)

Our neighbor across the street was a violent, unpredictable man who claimed to have played with Coltrane years earlier. Some said he was addled by drugs. If so, his speech centers were unaffected, and he could summon eloquence for charm or denunciation. The neighborhood was never dull.

Since he and his family—which grew to fourteen children over the years—had moved in six months before, we had not fallen afoul of his rage. Not an angry word had been exchanged between us, and he had even offered to teach me how to drive, appalled that a man would not possess this skill. (I politely declined, explaining that my brain wasn’t wired for driving.)

But on this day, as he saw me walking toward our house, he burst into a torrent of abuse. “I know you Jews! You and your books!” He pronounced that last word with infinite disgust. I stood dumbstruck as the diatribe continued, and Wendy came out, drawn by the commotion. She was quickly included: “Your dirty kike of a wife.” And so on, for many minutes even after we had gone inside. I never knew what triggered this.

Mistaken for Jewish? The air of absurdity, confusion, and miscommunication that hangs about these incidents, with a faint undercurrent of menace, seems to me entirely characteristic of evangelical relations with Jews. Hence the two articles that begin this issue, by David Gushee and Lauren Winner (the latter opening a five-part series, “Jews, Christians, and God“). Don’t miss them.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I gave this day to God when I got up, and look,look what it birthed! There up the hill was

the apple tree, bronze leaves, its fallen applesspilling richly down the slope, the way God spilled

his seed into Mary, into us. In her the holy promisecame to rest in generous soil after a long

fall. How often it ends in gravel, or dry dust.Blackberry patches thorny with distraction. Oh,

I pray my soul will welcome always that smallseed. That I will hail it when it enters me.

I don’t mind being grit, soil, dirt, mud-brown,laced with the rot of old leaves, if only the seed

can find me, find a home and bear a fruitsweet, flushed, full-fleshed—a glory apple.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment

edited by Carl R. Trueman and R. S. ClarkPaternoster Press, 1999344 pp.; $35

The Identity of Geneva: The Christian Commonwealth, 1564-1864

edited by John B. Roney and Martin I. KlauberGreenwood Press, 1998228 pp.; $59.95

Thomas Boston as Preacher of the Fourfold State

by Philip Graham RykenPaternoster Press, 1998357 pp.; $40, paper

If Protestants in general must sometimes plead guilty to forgetting the centuries of Christian history between the Apostle Paul and the start of the Reformation, evangelical Protestants must make the same plea for the period between Luther and Calvin and the outbreak of revival under Wesley, White field, and Edwards. Sheer ignorance is the most important reason for neglecting the nearly two hundred years of history between 1550 and 1730. But to ignorance is often added a negative stereotype. Wasn’t this the period of that notorious “Protestant scholasticism,” when churches and leaders turned their back on the vital faith, urgent exegesis, and courageous faithfulness of the first Protestants in order to fill up on arid philosophy, sterile disputes over theological arcana, and ego-driven quarrels about recondite church practices? The worst feature commonly thought to characterize the age of Protestant scholasticism was its propensity to substitute fascination about the secret will of God for Scripture’s clear teaching about the work of Christ.

As with most stereotypes, the commonly held views on Protestant scholasticism are not completely fallacious. Yet as these three books, and a modest tide of other similarly well-researched, volumes have recently shown, there is a whole lot more to the subject. Of these books, the symposium edited by Carl Trueman and Scott Clark is most ambitious in correcting misconceptions and arguing new theses. Among its most successful contributions are arguments by David Bagchi (for Luther) and David Steinmetz (for Calvin) pointing out how aspects of medieval scholastic theology survived in the first generation of the Reformation. Other important chapters include Richard Muller’s convincing argument that Calvin’s successor in Geneva, the oft-maligned Theodore Beza, taught a theology far closer to Calvin’s than prevailing views often admit, and Paul Shaefer’s depiction of the late-sixteenth-century English Puritan, William Perkins, as a preacher who featured Christ’s saving offer of mercy much more prominently than the Puritans are sometimes supposed to have done.

Similar illumination for a more limited topic is provided by the essays in John Roney’s and Martin Klauber’s book, which traces the progress of Geneva from its theological heyday under John Calvin to its much more modern (and modernist) theological existence in the nineteenth century. This book too overturns ill-grounded stereotypes, especially when it shows how much the quintessential scholastic Francis Turretin (1623-1687) relied on intuitive realities of faithful Christian practice in constructing an ideal picture of Christian truth. Yet the book’s prime contribution is to demonstrate that the theological transit from Calvin to nineteenth-century intellectual pluralism was a product of multiplied contingency: rather than responding to long-enduring tendencies built into this theology or that, Geneva’s religious history was shaped by a multitude of particular decisions related to a wide variety of political, economic, and social—as well as theological—developments.

Philip Ryken’s theological portrait of Thomas Boston, who ministered in Ettrick, Scotland, from 1707 to his death in 1732, also punctures stereotypes. Boston was known in his lifetime as defending views of salvation in which Christ’s grace was offered to all. His renown long survived his death through a book of sermons entitled Human Nature in its Four-fold State. By carefully reconstructing Boston’s theological sources (which included a lot of Luther as well as Calvinists from all over Europe) and by carefully exegeting Boston’s account of the Innocent State, the Natural State, the Gracious State, and the Eternal State (in heaven or hell), Ryken shows how pastorally sensitive, Christ-centered, and broadly evangelical one of the old preachers of the late-Scholastic period could be. Even as he remained in touch with the main emphases of what Ryken calls “international Calvinism,” Boston was a preacher whom all sorts of leading evangelicals recommended for a very long time. With his more particular subject, Ryken does what the other two books also accomplish for their broader topics—which is to unmask the deficiencies of stereotypes while opening up the era of Protestant scholasticism for its complex, and often edifying, realities.

Mark Noll

Atlas of the Year 1000

by John ManHarvard Univ. Press, 1999144 pp.; $2

Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901-2000

by J. M. RobertsViking/Penguin, 1999906 pp.; $18, paper

Twentieth Century America: A Brief History

by Thomas C. ReevesOxford Univ. Press, 2000314 pp.; $21.95, paper

John Man’s Atlas of the Year 1000 is a richly illustrated, somewhat understated account of what the whole world, and not just the European part, looked like one thousand years ago. Along with solid treatment of Europe in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, Man presents accessible essays on the Americas, Africa, the world of Islam, Asia, and Oceania—all places where, since it was not by local reckoning the year 1000, there was not even an echo of Europe’s relatively mild concern for the flipping of the calendar. The most helpful contribution of the book, apart from the unusually clear maps, is the awareness communicated of how big the world, and how extensive the human family, were even one thousand years ago, when total world population was still less than 300 million (or close to the number of people living in the United States in the year 2000).

J. M. Roberts, who earlier had published a notable one-person history of Europe from prehistory to the present, is also successful in his single-volume twentieth-century world history. Religion does not feature large in these pages—only brief comments on Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, nothing on Billy Graham, John Stott, or other notable world Christians of the century. But on questions of economic development, world wars, colonial expansion and decline, world ideologies, and similar subjects the presentation is about as good as one can expect from a single volume.

Thomas Reeves’s Twentieth Century America is, if anything, even more successful than Roberts’s global history in providing learned, accessible, succinct accounts of important people, complex events, and momentous long-term changes. The book moves through its 15 compact chapters with a sure touch; it breaks up chronological surveys with focused discussions of, for example, “Postwar Challenges” and “Nixon’s America.” As befits a responsible history of twentieth-century America, Reeves integrates religious matters quite capably into his general account. Thus, William Jennings Bryan’s religious convictions, the visibility of Bishop Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham in the post–World War II golden era for institutional churches, the confusion among traditional churches brought on by the challenges of the 1960s and 1970s—these and other similar subjects receive fair, if brief, treatment. Reeves, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and who has made no secret in other books of his own sincere Christian convictions, is not writing a morality tale; nonetheless, a sharp moral vision is at work throughout these pages in a non-obtrusive fashion. With the volumes by Man and Roberts, Reeves’s book can be recommended wholeheartedly, not as another frivolous wave at a passing chronological moment, but as exactly the sort of serious popular history necessary for genuine perspective on the state of the moment and the future ahead.

Mark Noll teaches at Wheaton College. His new book, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction, will be published in December by Blackwell.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.