The Living Bible’S Modern Hero
My Life: A Guided Tour,by Ken Taylor with Virginia Muir (Tyndale, 401 pp.; $16.95, hardcover; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.
Evangelical heroes are in short supply these days. Televangelists offer a daily crop of epic deeds, but their struggles and triumphs seem strangely unreal, like track records set at high altitude. Ken Taylor’s memoirs are a happy reminder of another kind of Christian mind, and of another era of evangelicalism.
A Chronicle Of Mistakes
Never, perhaps, has an autobiography been written with less intention to impress an audience. As translator of The Living Bible and founder of Tyndale House Publishers, Taylor has plenty to crow about, but that seems to be the furthest thing from his mind. His son Mark, now president of Tyndale, says in an interview that the greatest difficulty in editing his father’s memoirs was to rein him in from telling in detail every mistake he ever made.
One can almost see Taylor’s brow furrow as he spells out his failings and doubts in the practice of his faith, in his marriage and family, in his work. “As I look back on it, I am astounded at my thoughtlessness,” he says of a time when he left his bedridden pregnant wife to go to Mexico on a missions trip.
“I know now that it has often been a problem for me through the years to make good judgments about priorities.” Or again, “I realize now that on the whole we did not talk things over enough. We should have done so more often, because her judgment is frequently better than mine.” Or, “I find it painful now to look back and remember how I would sulk in moody silence, sometimes for many hours.”
Taylor is equally vulnerable when discussing his many business failings, which almost bankrupted his publishing company. (He persistently attributes this to his own greed and lust for success.) He writes openly and very simply about his struggles with faith, explaining, for example, how he has always found prayer and Bible reading peculiarly difficult. These very ordinary struggles are treated with the gravity and almost naïve simplicity a conscientious child might give them. They don’t read as long-ago troubles that can now be hung on the wall as trophies; these enemies are apparently still alive and dangerous.
Excited By God
Difficulties, though, are not the whole story. With Taylor’s honesty goes an old, powerful evangelical virtue: an almost childlike excitement in what God is doing. That he does not understand God’s ways, Taylor makes very clear; he puzzles out loud over matters that others have shrugged off since Sunday school, such as the slaughter of the Canaanites in the Book of Judges. But Taylor seems profoundly, fundamentally committed to following God and astonished by the privilege of it. So, from this book of memories, a wonderful sense of God’s greatness arises.
In following God, Taylor has been extraordinarily poor—but he makes nothing of it. He has been astonishingly successful—The Living Bible, which he published himself because no other publisher was interested, has sold 40 million copies. He makes nothing of that, either, except to communicate his amazement. “I am troubled that often I get the credit while others do the hard work,” he writes; and remarkably, by the time we reach that statement in the middle of the book, we know he is telling the truth—he is genuinely troubled.
His is a gentle, ordinary life in most ways. We observe him as often perplexed, frequently worried, seeing few miracles. Yet the virtues of humility and generosity, of stubborn perseverance in prayer, of hope (though never certainty) of participating in God’s work, of faith: these add up. We see that God has done wonderful things through Taylor, but more than that, we rekindle a gratefulness that there are men like Ken Taylor. Heroes inspire hope that we can be better people than we are. Taylor, then, must be a hero.
The Nature-Nurture Wars
In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought,by Carl N. Degler (Oxford University Press, 400 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Merrill Matthews, Jr., who teaches philosophy at Collin County Community College in Dallas, Texas, and is a political analyst for USA Radio Network.
Most Christians are aware of the role the theory of evolution has played in Western thought. Beginning with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, and heightened by the publication of Descent of Man in 1871, in which Darwin included humankind in the process of evolution, there has been a constant struggle between the creationists and evolutionists. That struggle has been portrayed primarily as a battle over human origins, debating God’s role as Creator and the accuracy of the Bible. But Darwin and his thought had a much more pervasive effect on Western intellectuals as they pondered not human origins, but human nature.
While ministers were proclaiming it was our sinful nature that motivated our actions, a number of American scholars in the fields of biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines had rejected entirely the “sin” theory of human nature. Instead, these scholars looked to science and evolution to explain why we do the things we do. What is of interest to Christians is how influential these secular scholars have been in shaping our culture’s views of psychology, education, public policy—in fact, almost all areas of American social thought—in ways that contrast sharply with the Christian world view.
Who Is Our Master?
In Search of Human Nature chronicles the secular quest for human nature in America from the middle of the last century to the present. Noted historian Carl N. Degler has sought to answer some of the “why” questions about this development. His findings confirm what many critics of the social sciences have said all along: Their findings are often ideology presented with a pretense of impartiality. But he goes beyond the usual criticism of how biological theories have been misapplied: “Much less widely acknowledged is the view that ideology also underpinned the repudiation of biology in social science and encourages the present widespread acceptance of culture as the alternative explanation of the behavior of human beings,” Degler writes.
The story of this debate involves the giants of American intellectual thought: Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, John Watson, B. F. Skinner, and many more. Their quest was to explain human actions, and even motivations, in scientific terms. A controversy arose, however, between those who believed our actions are determined by our genetic make-up and those who thought our environment was the determiner of our actions.
I do not use the term determined lightly, because several of the major figures in the controversy, as Degler shows, contended that all of our thoughts and actions are determined—the debate was over causation, whether genetic or environmental. Yet these deterministic approaches have created a problem for American moral thought, because they tend to undermine the notion of individual responsibility and accountability. For instance, it is widely accepted that alcoholics are not responsible for their actions because either their genes or their environment has removed “choice” from the individual.
Degler reveals just how far-reaching the implications of the nature-nurture controversy have been. Proponents of the nature argument, which was strongest from the late 1800s to the 1930s, saw human motivation and action as largely a product of the genetic code. This led some scholars and researchers to advocate forced castration of those considered genetically (and sometimes racially) inferior, such as certain criminals and the “feeble-minded.” Laws permitting castration were passed by some states.
However, the genetic theory of human nature began to decline by the early 1930s as the behavioral psychology of John B. Watson and later B. F. Skinner became more widely accepted, in part because it seemed more democratic, more American. As Watson once pointed out, behaviorism stresses the natural equality of every individual. And once again, education, government, and public policy were altered to conform with this new view of human nature. Under behavioral psychology, people are not good or evil. It is society, the environment, that causes people to do evil things. And if we want to diminish evil in the world, society must be changed. Thus, the emphasis for programs became education and creating the right environment. Behavioral psychology provided an intellectual basis for the liberal political agenda.
The nurture argument has begun to fade, however, as genetics once again is being seen as the primary force behind human action. Indeed, genetic research is almost approaching messiah status, as some scientists and scholars seem to imply that all of our problems will be solved if we can understand and control the genetic code.
While it is safe to say both our genetic make-up and our environment play an important role in shaping us physically and mentally, the concern for Christians comes when either the nature or nurture argument is portrayed as the primary or only determining factor. Such views can lead to questionable laws and policies that threaten our liberties or the sanctity of life. Many eugenicists were among the last to condemn Hitler and his human experimentations, because they thought Hitler’s efforts on what were considered less valuable lives could be rationalized as beneficial for the “superior” races.
In other words, total acceptance of either the nature or nurture argument could lead to a Nazi world of human experimentation or a socialized world where the government must control all of our environment. Behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner’s novel Walden II carries precisely that stigma.
Furthermore, the Christian call for individual and personal accountability virtually precludes the Christian identifying totally with either side of the argument.
Carl Degler’s book is a scholarly and detailed look from a secular perspective at how American scholars have grasped for any theory of human nature besides the biblical theory. And his book highlights what has resulted from those nonbiblical views. It is an eyeopening work, and one that Christians should carefully consider.
