Chapter1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

The day Ernetta met Stannie, she realized she’d spent the last 30 years praying for a day like that without even knowing it. All her silent prayers for forgiveness, for assurance that her sufferings would come to right (not be for nothing), and that every stain left on her from Arvin’s cruelty might be washed over and healed—those prayers had all been answered free of charge.

Not many people would have looked at Stannie Colfax that afternoon in his ballcap and baggy shirt and found him beautiful. But Ernetta did. The beauty of that human being sitting in front of her in a living room in Florida knocked her down like a great, sparkling wave. It was a true miracle, him sitting there with her—no less than having an angel appear at the foot of your bed in the middle of the night or seeing somebody raised from the dead, not on TV but in a live church service. To find her son this way was as if she went out to the garden one day in February to look at how the gardenia bushes had held up in the frost and found bright red strawberries bursting from new vines on the fence, already grown up sweet and delicious.

After a few days, the fruit of her search had soured a little. Kind-hearted as she was, she felt Stannie’s cruelty. It wasn’t outright, blunt cruelty like Arvin’s, but it was politeness with a sharp edge. Stannie’s sharpness could go right to your heart. The last two days, whenever he came to check on her at the motel—and he’d come three times and just stayed by the door, smoking—she’d felt him growing sharper, as if he were splintering up the middle. She’d begun to feel afraid of him: her words to him came out in shorter and shorter bursts, like the last drips of ink in a ball-point. She noticed he didn’t want to hear about her life, or about his birth, or about how she came to find him. He didn’t want her asking questions about him, either. If she started onto any of that, he’d turn and walk out, just like Arvin used to do. And what else was there to talk about but him and her?

On Friday afternoon he showed up at the motel looking ragged and sleepy. He needed to do something about her, he said. He was flying back to Washington the next day. She said she didn’t want to be a burden any more, she could even hitchhike back home if she needed to. He looked furious when she said that. He stood for a long time just staring at her like it was the first time he’d ever really seen her. Finally he broke off staring and laughed. He said he’d been thinking about taking her with him to the Academy Awards.

“What would you want to take me for?” she asked him.

“Wouldn’t you like to meet movie stars?”

She shook her head, not even half-understanding him. “I met you now, Stanley. That’s all I care about.”

When she said that, he turned and walked out. But he called later to say he’d decided not to fly back to Washington. He’d hang on to his rental car and drive her home to Alabama on his way up North. She mentioned she had a truck up there; it’d probably been towed. He said he’d take care of it one way or the other. This was the best thing to do.

So here they were Saturday morning stuck for several hours alone in his car on the way up to LeCrane, and she had no idea what to say to him. She’d meant him to come to LeCrane, but not this way, without them getting close first. The inside of his car was black and hot. It smelled like a vaccum cleaner bag after it’d been run for an hour. The light beat down on her face through the sunroof; she didn;t want to complain, but she was sweating. She licked a salty trickle from her upper lip and felt another trickle run into her eye.

“Ernetta,” Stannie said dully. His voice sounded stuffy, like he’d been smoking all night. “I’ll buy you lunch. Where would you like to eat?”

She looked out the windows and saw signs for Panama City Beach. The road was flat and sparkling: there were palm trees everywhere, sprouting like giant pineapples on poles.

“Any place be fine,” she said.

“Arby’s?”

“Oh, Arby’s is too high.”

“High? Define ‘high.'”

“I don’t want you to spend all your money on me, Stannie.”

His sunglasses looked like insect eyes. “We’re stopping at Arby’s. What do you want to eat?”

She thought for a moment. “I reckon I’ll just have a piece of bread and butter.”

They pulled into the Arby’s drive-thru and he ordered her a chicken sandwich, curly fries, and a chocolate shake that had a delicious malt taste to it. She’d never tasted anything as good as that food. She ate it all daintily and self-consciously, with a napkin carefully unfolded on her lap. Meanwhile he pulled out on the highway again and drove along down the road with his face half-buried in a silver food wrapper. He sounded like a hog, chewing. She wondered if he was trying to hide from her in that wrapper. Sometimes he stopped eating to cough or clear his throat, and she couldn’t help but look over at him.

“You need to see a doctor about that congestion,” she said gently.

“What?” He put the wrapper down and she saw that had mayonnaise on his chin; the stubble of his beard poked through the white film.

“You got a terrible cough. You should see a doctor about it.”

“I have allergies,” he said. “That’s why I cough.”

“Why do you smoke, Stannie? I worry about you.”

“Don’t bother.”

She wished she could see his eyes. “A lot of people in my family has died of lung cancer,” she said. The words hung in the air for a while. He didn’t answer.

She put her head back and closed her eyes. When she found she couldn’t sleep, she sat up and watched from the window, noticing the slight rise of the land, the deeper green of the trees and crops as they came closer to home. She began to see familiar spots along the highway: the American Indian Museum where her father used to take her as a little girl; the roadside antique stores where she drove out with her cousin to look for bargains; the cement plant where Arvin worked for two months once. Almost into LeCrane they passed the Catholic church where Arvin got mad and cussed a priest. Then the LeCrane sign and the grocery store and the Dairy Kreem (where she used to scoop ice cream) and then her own church and the very parking lot where Grace Hodge had talked about seeing her picture in the magazine at the doctor’s office. Not so long ago, neither. They passed the gravel road where she and Arvin put a trailer after they got married and tried to settle into normal life as if nothing unusual had happened.

Her time with Stannie was almost at an end now and she was on her own territory, her home ground. She felt afraid, still, but how could she help but talk? There were so many things she’d stored up to say. And what if the chance never came again? She began to talk in a breathy voice about all sorts of things, mostly about Arvin.

She told first about how they got married and he tried to work, but never did any one thing for long. He got jobs as an auto mechanic and then an electrician, till the city told him he couldn’t wire things without a license. Then he got mad and cussed the government and thought about running for office. Arvin could have been the mayor or governor, she said, if he’d wanted to, if he’d really wanted to. He was smarter than any schoolteacher you’d ever meet. He was always inventing things before they came out in the stores—like a record player you could carry around on your back while you listened to headphones and a timer to make the lights to come on in your house if it was dark and you was out.

“Tell me where to turn,” said Stannie’s voice, smoky and cold, from far away.

Ernetta kept her eyes straight ahead and went on talking. That first year after the baby came and went, Arvin was so good to her, it seemed like he just forgot what he done to her before. Such kindness all the sudden—he fixed her breakfast some days; he treated her like a bride, like he wanted to make up for the bad they both had done. At first she couldn’t believe it, and then sometimes at night she started feeling warm all over because of the change in him, and she wondered what another baby might do for them. She hoped she’d get pregnant again.

One day when she was lying in bed and Arvin was gone, she picked up his Bible and started reading where his bookmark was, in the book of Hosea. And it was about this whore named Gomer, which made her laugh at first, because she thought about Gomer Pyle. Then she realized it was like she was reading her own story from Arvin’s point of view. What will I give? God asked Hosea after he made him marry a whore. Wombs that miscarry and breasts that are dry. Suddenly it came back to her: the feel of Arvin’s warm breath on her cheek as he leaned over her on his green chenille bedspread, jerking the ropes tight on her wrists: “You’re an evil slut to want to kill your baby, and God hates you.”

And after the baby came, when she was swollen with milk and there weren’t no little one to drink it, Arvin put his hands right on her breasts and the beautiful milk spurted down his big, stony fingers. Something about seeing her own baby’s milk—a fountain, so white and pure and yet sad as tears—made Arvin’s hands look like great, big, ugly claws. It was the only time she ever hated him, before or since. “Tell me where to turn,” said the voice again from far away.

She went on, telling about how she decided not to have another baby. She didn’t let on to Arvin about the pills Dr. Spears gave her, and before long Arvin didn’t seem interested in being a husband to her, anyway. He applied himself to other things, such as dragging her along on marches. They became professional marchers for a few years, showing up everywhere there was a picket or a clinic sit-in or anything that had to do with abortion. She went to jail twice. She also got to see lots of the country, which she liked, but she wasn’t sure how her and Arvin kept eating without neither of them working a regular job. Arvin took care of everything, though.

To this day she didn’t know how he’d managed their finances, but there wasn’t one thing, not one thing, about which she could honestly say, “No, Arvin couldn’t do that.” Arvin could and would do anything. He’d even worked in Korea for the CIA as a paid assassin. So maybe that was it. Maybe even back in the marching days Arvin killed people on the side for money, just to keep him and her driving around the country in their truck that said “Stop Abortion Now” and had a pair of sleeping bags under the shell in the back along with plenty of towelettes for sanitary purposes and a pile of signs tied up in the corner.

Within a few more years, Arvin started killing people on a regular basis, but by then he’d left her behind. She flat out told him one day she wouldn’t do anything that hurt nobody.

“I know what you’re doing,” she said. “I’m against abortion, but I don’t think God wants us going around lighting fires and setting off bombs.”

“I knew you’d say that,” he told her in a voice like rocks being rubbed together. “I never forgot what you tried to do before. You haven’t changed a bit. You’re still just a slut.”

And that was it, he was gone. At first she waited, expecting he’d come back and she’d have to get used to him again. And then she found herself getting her courage back, peeking up out of her old life like a bulb that’s been lying buried all winter, and when the cold is gone, it slowly sneaks up, it lifts up little buds and it starts to grow toward the light. That’s just how it was for her, just how it was.

She’d been talking and crying, almost forgetting that she was talking to somebody. She wiped her face and looked over at Stannie. He looked gloomy, all hunched down near the wheel. His shirt was crumpled up around the back of his neck.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Where are we?” he asked, in a voice that sounded more like Arvin’s than ever. “Where’s your frigging house?”

“We’ve gone way past my street.”

“How far past?”

“About six or seven miles. Turn around.”

It was a five-lane highway. He swerved left and made a quick u-turn. Another car blew its horn as they jerked out of its way.

“Shit,” he said. “All right, where is it?”

She pointed ahead, trembling. “Just keep going, Stanley. I’ll show you this time.”

Except to give directions, she didn’t talk again until they were in her own driveway, parked in the shade of a blossoming orange tree. A white flower drifted down and settled on the sunroof. She wondered if he’d come in or just drop her off, here. She wondered if she’d ever see him again.

“I don’t have no groceries,” she said softly, “but I could give you a glass of ice water.”

He opened his door and the car made a little ringing noise until he’d got out and shut it again. She got out after him and rushed ahead to open the door. The house smelled so musty.

“Just a minute,” she said. She drew back the front curtains, opened a window, turned on a fan. “I wished I’d knowed you was coming. I’d have cleaned up.”

He looked so uncomfortable. She felt sorry for him. She wished she could change all this! There was no prayer in the world to convince God to take you back in time and do it all over different. Stannie came into her living room and his eyes darted around, like he was looking for something.

“Did you want to see a picture of him?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Your father.”

His forehead wrinkled up for a second, and then he laughed.”

“No.”

“He said you had a right to be born. He said you might grow up to be somebody and it weren’t our right to stand in your way.” She paused. “Would you like some ice water?”

“No.” He suddenly looked up. “Do you have money for groceries, Ernetta? What do you live on, anyway?”

“Oh, I got plenty.”

He raised a dark eyebrow but didn’t say anything. He jingled his keys.

“Stannie,” she said, “will you call me? I don’t have no right to ask, but I’d like to hear from you now and again. And what I asked you about—”

He shook his head. “Can’t find a terrorist for you.”

“What if he kills somebody else?”

“Call the FBI. Or maybe the CIA. Maybe he’s still working for them.”

“I wish you could do it. But if you can’t—”

“No,” he said slowly, and then took in a breath through his nostrils. “Well, Ernetta, it’s been—”

“Goodbye, Stanley,” she said. “I’m real glad I got a chance to see you once.”

“Take care of yourself.” He coughed and turned slowly to the door, then went back out to his car. She could hear his footsteps on the porch outside. Then the engine of his car. This was why, she thought. This was maybe why people had abortions in the first place. Because whether you wanted to or not, you put your heart into a child. You had no choice about it; it was just instinct. And if things didn’t work out—if that child turned its back on you or maybe even if you turned your back on the child, then your heart went with it, and you were a hollow person after. Love was a killing thing: it was no wonder people wanted to end it sometimes before it even got started.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Dear Tom,

I’ll not respond to the ad hominems, thinly disguised under the rubric of “social location,” in your piece, “Answering Critics of ‘An Evangelical Celebration.'” I’d not respond to the rest of it, either, except for its misrepresentations of my statements, biblical statements, your own earlier statements, “Celebration,” and other confessional statements. Let me put my response to these misrepresentations in the form of questions addressed to you.

Why do you now appeal to the statement in “Celebration,” “Doctrinal disagreements call for debate,” after complaining initially, “We [you and your fellow drafters of ‘Celebration’] had hoped that we might be spared this sort of public squabble”? Wasn’t it I, not you, who twice appealed to the statement in “Celebration”?

How can you claim, “[W]e have not yet heard from our critics clear affirmations on the nine–tenths or whatever, which would be welcome [to the critics], but only displeasure on the one–tenth or so about which they strongly disagree,” when in the very first paragraph of my initial offering I stated, “‘Celebration’ … contains much that I affirm; and it seems to me that much of what ‘Celebration’ contains needs reaffirmation in view of currently noticeable tendencies to water down, if not wash down the drain, certain features of the evangelical tradition that are rooted in Scripture”?

Why do you speak of critics’ “duty to recognize the irenic and limited purpose” of “Celebration” as though I hadn’t written, “I accept Oden’s statement that ‘the drafters of “Celebration” sought to be as inclusive as possible of major evangelical voices'”?

How can you downgrade the dominance of imputation in “Celebration” when “Celebration” itself refers to its “extended analysis of justification by faith alone through Christ alone,” and then yourself turn around to describe “The Salvific Significance of Jesus’ Sinless Life” for justificatory imputation as “The Key Issue”?

Why do you say, “He [Gundry] argues that no New Testament author ever speaks of any ‘righteousness of Christ,'” despite my pointing out the reference to “the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ” in 2 Peter 1:1 (though with no connection to imputation)?

In view of my repeatedly declaring, “Certainly evangelicals affirm that Jesus had to live a life of perfect righteousness if he was to qualify as the bearer of our sins,” why do you keep saying that “despite ambiguous disclaimers” I regard the life of Christ as “irrelevant” to his sin–bearing death? What is ambiguous about my declaration?

Why, even though in my last offering I pointed out the following misquotation, do you persist in misquoting Romans 5:18 as though it says, “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all,” when in fact “man’s” is missing and the verse refers to “one trespass” and to “one act of righteousness“? In view of your desire to include the whole life of Christ in Paul’s statement, does this persistence in misquotation arise out of discomfort with the singularity of Christ’s act of righteousness?

When after the foregoing misquotation you do come around to note Christ’s “one act of righteousness,” you violate the contextual indications that I earlier underlined and define it as “his entire life” as well as “his death” and note the antithetic parallel with “Adam’s trespass.” That trespass is usually understood as Adam’s original sin in the Garden of Eden, yet you immediately go on to reference Adam’s “behavioral actions.” To help your inclusion of Christ’s whole life in his one act of righteousness, does the plural of your phrase, “behavioral actions,” imply that Adam’s trespass includes his whole life of sinning, all of it being “accredited to others’ condemnation”? If so, do you regard that holistic interpretation of Adam’s one trespass as an item of “evangelical consensus”?

To solve the problem for your view that God’s righteousness but not Christ’s is associated with justification, you argue, “Triune teaching prevents us from saying that the New Testament speaks exclusively of ‘God’s righteousness, not his Son’s.'” Would then you also want to say, “Triune teaching prevents us from saying that the New Testament speaks exclusively of Christ’s obedience, not of the Father’s, too”? Would you really want to say that everything true of one member of the Trinity is always true also of its other members? If not, what happens to your argument from the Trinity?

How can you quote for support the creedal statements of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the National Association of Evangelicals, Gordon–Conwell Theological Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary, and the Amsterdam 2000 Declaration, when not a single one of your quotations so much as mentions an imputation of Christ’s righteousness, much less an inclusion of the whole life of Christ in his imputed righteousness? Don’t you understand that without reservation I could sign each of those statements?

Hoping my questions will disperse some of the fog that obscures our disagreements,

Bob Gundry

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Practicing Faith in the Inner City

Thanks for the interesting May/June issue. While I found Mark R. Gornik’s “Practicing Faith in the Inner City” informative, his distinctly left–of–center political perspective compels me to offer comment based on an alternative view.

Gornik reveals his bias in several ways: criticizing our “winner–take–all” economy and an excessively “individualistic framework” in diagnosing the ills of urban poverty; praising egalitarianism, equality, and “jubilee justice”; blaming urban decay primarily on “structural injustice” rather than personal moral failure; and claiming all Christians should feel “indignation” at the gap between rich and poor. Although he acknowledges the need to preserve the spiritual message and relational core of ministry to the poor (government programs must always fail on both counts), he nevertheless calls for more government involvement, seemingly unaware of the sadly consistent results of such intervention: the breeding of corruption in government, while discouraging virtue and encouraging vice in citizens.

I appreciate Gornik’s recognition (rare on the Left) of what Robert L. Woodson, Sr., terms “Pharaohs,” those who have a vested interest in keeping the poor down, and of the tough fight that will be necessary to dislodge them in getting voluntary help to those who need it. Gornik cites the Hebrew prophets, who, when discussing the plight of the poor, focused on the behavior of the privileged and powerful rather than of the poor. But this obscures the clear biblical emphasis that ALL bear responsibility for sin and must repent and change. “The cross deconstructs moral superiority,” he says, apparently failing to see that the cross leaves intact (and fulfills) the eternal formula of justice that virtue will/must be rewarded and vice punished (here and hereafter).

Gornik says more than once that the gospel is good news for the poor. It is, in fact, good news for everyone, rich and poor, strong and weak, powerful and powerless. Like some early converts, who tried to coopt Jesus in their project to overthrow Roman oppression, latter–day social gospelers try to coopt Him in their push for their version of “social justice.” Gornik claims “for Christians, social and economic inequality is a distinct gospel challenge. It must be if divine reconciliation makes all things new.” But equality of outcomes is not (and never has been) a properly Christian goal. Rather, it is a utopian vision based on fantasy and is the underlying reason for untold worldwide suffering during the twentieth century, as forced leveling schemes have imposed misery on trapped populations, all in the name of equality, egalitarianism, and fairness.

Gornik flatly states that “voluntary compassion will not transform the fallen systems and structures of the inner city.” This questionable axiom, for him and others on the Left, somehow morally justifies the employment of government force to resolve this issue. This puts them in the awkward moral position of Robin Hood: advocating immoralities (coercion, theft) in support of (dubious) morality.

In summary, I applaud churches and others who voluntarily offer assistance to those in need. Indeed, this is a fundamental responsibility for Christians. But when they demand access to the public trough to finance these activities through coercive taxation, they’ve left the realm of biblical principle behind and are venturing into a set of ideas and practices of very different origin. The fruits of Christianity (in theory and in history) are individualism, liberty, the rule of law, progress, voluntarism, community, and justice in an atmosphere of limited government, while those of paganism are collectivism; total regulation; the rule of man; fear; repressed civil society; centralized, top–down power; and eventually total oppression in the absence of Christian mercy and restraint.

Steven P. Sawyer

Fountain Hills, Ariz.

The Roots of Hitler’s Evil

Both my husband and I are historians who have spent our careers enjoying teaching university students, not least in discussing with them the still very engrossing and taxing questions raised by the Nazi years. It was then especially interesting to read Richard Weikart’s analysis of Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship and Ian Kershaw’s two–volume biography of Hitler [“The Roots of Hitler’s Evil, March/April 2001].

May I comment on two aspects? First, Weikart warns us not to quarantine the years of Hitler’s rule: “not to make the mistake of treating the Nazi era as the expression of an anomalous, incomprehensible evil.” He concludes that, by “doing so, we keep the Nazi experience at a safe distance from our own historical moment.” This seems to me—and many of the students I talk with—to be a central message for anyone studying the erosion of values that Nazism involved.

Second, Weikart later says: “If Hitler had died in 1938, Kershaw claims, he would probably have gone down in history as a great German leader. No moral opprobrium would be attached to his name. Germans might have regarded him as another Bismarck.” Kershaw is not alone in such a view. I first read it in a (still remarkable) book a generation ago: The Tragedy of Nazi Germany (Praeger/Pegasus, U.S.; Routledge, U.K.; 1968). There, on p. 77, the author argues: “Had he [Hitler] died early in 1939, or the autumn of 1940 [after the Fall of France], he would have been acclaimed by most Germans—and many historians inside and outside Germany—as one of his country’s greatest statesmen fit to stand beside Bismarck.” This is only one singular view in what remains in many ways a singular book. The author, a trained historian, wrote to provide an explanation of Nazi “evil” and to help him come to terms with his own imprisonment by the Nazis in both POW and concentration camps, so the book is partly autobiographical. (The title of the last chapter—indeed, the entire book—bears on one of your reviewer’s concerns; it is called “There but for the Grace of God . …”). The author is Peter Phillips, my husband. But the views speak for themselves.

Janet Phillips

Senior Lecturer

Department of History

Flinders University,

Adelaide, South Australia

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Chapter1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

While Stannie slept off his Friday-morning hangover in Florida, Rose woke up before dawn in a bedroom at the Westford farmhouse. It had been a child’s room once, whether long ago or recently, she couldn’t tell. A nightlight shaped like a bear glowed near the door; a stuffed rabbit sprawled on a rocking chair by the window.

Rose got out of bed and looked into the navy sky over the treetops. You could actually see a few stars out here in the country. She’d spent too much time in Washington lately and too little on the road. She hadn’t planned to stay more than the afternoon at Sibyl’s, hadn’t even brought a toothbrush. Then, Jim Westford mentioned at yesterday’s reception that most of the real League business would happen the next morning, after a prayer service in the chapel.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, looking at him over the rim of a plastic punch glass. She’d just found out that he specialized in medical malpractice. “I’m going back to Washington tonight.”

“Well, don’t go if you don’t want to. Sibyl wouldn’t mind one more for the night—would she, Jenny?”

Jenny Lemke came over, smiling vaguely. “Huh?”

“Sibyl could find Rose here a room tonight, couldn’t she? Rose needs to come to our meeting tomorrow.”

“Sibyl would do anything you told her to.”

So Rose agreed to stay, though she was pretty sure Jim had to twist his sister’s arm over it—maybe other arms, too. At the picnic supper in the evening, she felt people looking at her more suspiciously than earlier in the day. The priest and the hippies and the others all smiled but kept the conversation shallow, even when she set up a lawn chair near the priest and said, “Hope you don’t mind me plunking down here—I’m a friend of Jenny’s.”

“Jenny’s a very fine person,” he said, “but I don’t know anything about her private life.” He sank down in his chair with his head near his plate. His long face looked like it might slide right into the potato salad. Rose almost laughed out loud.

After eating just half a hot dog and none of her sauerkraut she got up and folded her chair against an oak tree nearby, then started across the broad lawn toward some women with children. She hoped they’d be more talkative, but as she came closer, the women pulled their children away and spread out slowly in a wide semi-circle over the light green grass. In fact, the nearer she got to them, the further out the semi-circle moved. She felt like the wrong side of a magnet, pushing these people away. (Or was she just imagining that they moved away from her? Maybe she was hanging back, herself—you could fool yourself that way; like taking your foot off the brake at a red light and thinking other cars were creeping backward.)

She went back and found an empty table set up under a tent that had “Parker’s Funeral Home” emblazoned on each side. This seemed like a good place to roost, alone: she slid onto a bench and took a few pictures of the children with her telephoto lens, then looked around and studied the faces closer to her. There were plenty of people whose types she didn’t recognize—women with long dresses and bows in their hair, a man in knickers, a teenage girl wearing a sari. Almost everyone was a little—how could you say it?— off, but nobody looked like a terrorist. Suddenly she realized she hadn’t seen Jenny in a while; she scanned the crowd, but couldn’t pick her out anywhere. It was starting to get dark. She put the lens cap back on her camera and went inside to examine Sibyl’s house, unchaperoned.

She was standing in a long, carpeted hallway, squinting at old family photographs of the Westfords, when someone walked up quietly behind her. “Recognize me in any of those?”

She turned, startled, and found herself facing Jim Westford. He was tall like his sister, with the same earnest expression. She had decided by now that she found him more interesting-looking than handsome: pale but dark-haired, with bright blue eyes and a high, straight nose that gave him a brainy look.

“Big family,” she said. “Which of these kids is you?”

He smiled and pointed to a black-and-white photo of a small boy with a cocker spaniel. “I’m number six, the youngest. But I came long after everybody else, so I get my own picture. How come you’re not outside with the folks?”

“Nobody seems to want to talk to me. I think they’ve been warned off.”

“They probably have. We don’t trust anyone we haven’t known for years.”

“Me neither.”

He looked at her for a moment, cocking his head to the side, clearly considering something. “Want to come in my office, drink a cup of tea or coffee or something? Actually, I have a very nice bottle of wine I’ve been saving for a special occasion. If you don’t object.”

“No, I’d love a drink.”

They went to a small library in a corner of the house and she sat down across from him at a heavy wooden table. The sky had deepened to grey outside: the shadows in the room were heavy. There were already candles burning. He switched on a dim lamp. While he opened and poured the wine, she scanned the bookshelves that circled the room and climbed all the way to the high ceiling. The volumes on the shelf behind her chair were all law and theology. Even the spines looked dull.

“I bet you haven’t really read any of these,” she said. “You just keep them around to intimidate people.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“Your gang of dead white males.”

He laughed. “That’s what they are. They back me up when I’m in trouble.”

“In your line of work, you must stay in trouble.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

He had a way of putting you at ease—exactly what Stannie didn’t have: he didn’t mind not talking at all. She finished her first glass of wine and held her second glass up to the candle burning beside her. The light seemed to glow from inside: thin red shadows waved across her palm. She felt sleepy, and also guilty for relaxing when she was supposed to be thinking of weasely questions to ask Jim Westford about the FRL. She knew he probably had terrible politics, but at the moment she didn’t care.

“So what do you think?” he asked, as if reading her thoughts.

“About what?”

“About us. The League.”

“I think I’m being lazy and getting slightly tipsy. At least let me get out my camera and take your picture.”

“I wouldn’t stop you.”

She took a photograph of him sitting in front of his books with his arms crossed, sipping his wine. It was quiet in his office: she heard a clock ticking in the hall, a whippoorwill calling outside.

“So why in the world do you want a picture of me?”

“Oh, don’t underestimate yourself. I’ve never heard of a lawyer-pastor, before. I like contradictions.”

“I get tired of them.”

“You probably see more of them than I do.”

“What’s this book about, anyway? Sibyl thinks you’re a spy from NARAL.”

Rose laughed warmly, and held up the camera again. “No, I’m just a friendly researcher. I want to show people who you guys really are and what you do. Not just what you do politically. The day-to-day stuff.”

“Well, you know what I do. I’m a lawyer most of the time and I preach to a very small congregation on Sundays, and you think that’s a contradiction.”

“It is.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you a fundamentalist?”

“What does that mean?”

“Do you take the Bible literally?”

He smiled. “Do you really want to discuss theology?”

“What kind of cases do you take? You said malpractice, but I can’t imagine you going around suing doctors. You don’t seem like the type.”

He squinted. “The type that’s in it for money?”

“You’re too honest. It’s obvious.”

“Everybody has to make a living.”

“Come on. You people are idealists around here.”

He nodded. “Yes, we are.”

“So tell me what you do.”

“I think you’ll get a better sense of all that tomorrow.”

“When? At the meeting?”

“Yes.”

“Is your work primarily related to abortion?”

“Sort of.”

“Can’t you be more specific? I told you I’m not a spy.”

He cleared his throat. “Why don’t you get up and take an early hike with me, before the meeting?”

She hesitated.

“What’s the matter? “Are you a late sleeper?”

“No. A walk would be nice.”

“Good. Really early. Five-thirty.”

“Whoa!”

“You are a late sleeper, then. I was testing you.”

She smiled. “I’m just a sane human being.

* * *

Now, standing in her t-shirt and underwear in this child’s room, she was sorry she’d agreed. She felt groggy and slightly sick. She took a quick shower in the adjoining bathroom and then put back on her clothes from yesterday. There were clowns and alligators in the bathroom wallpaper, floating together in tiny toy boats. Another odd combination. She imagined the alligators tearing off white fingers, big shoes, round noses.

She went downstairs and stood by herself on the front porch until Jim appeared from the chapel next door in khaki pants and hiking boots. He had slept over in the chapel, he said, because it wasn’t worth driving an hour back to his own house.

“I assumed you lived with your sister.”

“No.” He laughed quietly, and she wondered why.

“Where do you live, then?”

“I have a house in Washington, and I come up here on the weekends. But my home—I hate to say it, but it’s probably in a suitcase.”

“I know what you mean!”

The sky had lightened, but it was still dim. They left through the backyard, crossing a thin patch of woods to a dirt road that went on and on through unplowed pasture. The air smelled thick and wet. They passed an old barn and a row of apple trees, just in bloom. Rose reached up to touch a flower and it fell away, spiraling to the ground like a tiny pink bird. Horses grazed on either side of them. She could hear them snorting and chewing in the early quiet.

“Does your family own this land?”

Jim nodded. “Sibyl’s in charge of everything. It used to be a dairy; now she just boards horses for a riding school, and gives lessons.”

“Does she make a profit?”

“Not much of one. And it’s a lot of work, even for her.”

“Why ‘even for her?’ “

“She has more energy than I do. Hang around, you’ll find out.”

“I guess I’ve already seen it. She looks old-fashioned but she’s pretty fierce. More of a true believer than Jenny, isn’t she?”

He squinted. “Less of a diplomat, obviously. I don’t know. I’d rather not try to analyze Sibyl. We’re all very different, but we agree on the main things.”

The road was weedy and cracked down the middle, with water puddled in the low places. Rose tried to step on the grassy spots and avoid the puddles, but her shoes got wet and gathered mud as she walked. She felt like a Clydesdale trudging along. At the bottom of a hill, they sloshed into a wide, shallow swamp. Bright blades of grass prickled up from the brown water. Their feet made sucking noises with each step. She looked over at him and laughed suddenly.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing. I could just … I don’t know you at all. I can’t tell what you’re thinking right now.”

“You really can’t?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’m thinking we ought to start growing rice on this farm. I’m so sorry. I had no idea it would be this wet.”

“Well, I’m not thinking about that,” she said.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about what I was asking you last night.”

“About what I do.”

“Yes.”

He looked over at her, half-frowning. “All right. Have you ever heard of abortion survivors?”

“Women who’ve had complications?”

“No. Not women. I represent children that survive botched abortions. There aren’t many around obviously, since the whole point is to kill them.”

She waited, not sure what to say. She felt herself stiffen inside.

He went on. “You might have seen one of the talk shows recently with an eight-year-old girl from Maine—”

“I don’t watch TV.”

“Her mother was pregnant with twins. She had a saline abortion in the seventh month, but the younger one was born alive.” Rose sighed. “I represented the family,” he said, “but they settled out of court. I have two other clients who are suing clinics and chances are they’ll settle, too. But when the right case comes along, it could be big. In fact, we may have it now. I have an adult woman who’s willing to take this all the way. She doesn’t care about money.”

“Do you expect her to win?”

“I expect her to get a lot of public sympathy.” She felt him smiling at her, but she didn’t look up. “We have a chance,” he said. “The argument is a lot more convincing when you have a real person there who nearly died because there was no law to protect her.”

“So that means—” She hesitated. “Who are you suing? The government?”

“Yes.”

“On what basis?”

“Can’t tell you that. But you might talk to my client. She’s a nun.”

“You’re kidding.”

“She’s a junior sister, but I told her to take orders in a hurry. She works in a school for handicapped children.”

Rose imagined herself in a chilly room with a nun and a tape recorder, her fingers curled up in a microphone cord. She didn’t really want to meet the woman, but the story demanded it.

“Where would I have to go?”

“Pensacola, Florida.”

She frowned, thinking about Stannie. “I have to warn you, I can’t promise what I’d think or write. I want to be objective.”

“Oh, I hope you will be objective. And then I hope you’ll decide that a crime has been committed. I’d feel a little better about my ability to convince a jury.”

She hesitated. “Let me ask you something, though. Suppose you win this case, or another. Surely you wouldn’t feel better as a minister … that is, if abortion did eventually become criminal, and someday you had to perform a funeral for a girl who died after a really bad illegal abortion?”

“I hope that never happens.”

“But women will die, if you people ever get things your way. They used to die all the time.”

He winced. “Yeah.”

“So you’re willing to live with that?”

“It’s the hardest question to answer. As a lawyer I can argue the pro-life position pretty coldly, but I’d rather answer you as a Christian.”

“I’m asking the Christian, not the lawyer.”

He nodded slowly. She tapped his arm. “I’ll let you off the hook for now,” she said. “You think about it and get back to me.”

“Thank you. And I will.”

They walked on silently for the next half-mile. She felt tired out again, mentally. What was it about being at this place, thinking about these things? She found herself wishing that she and Jim Westford could sit in his office the way they had the evening before, just sipping wine. He seemed more like a stranger this morning: a study in contrasts, very wrong on some things and very right on others. He was fine to know casually, but she wondered whether she could really be close to a man like that.

They circled around and walked back over a long, yellow-green field, up hill and down hill. The ground was drier here. The air had already turned a little warmer; it was sweet with the smell of spring grass and horse manure. The sun rose waist-high and glimmered through the trees.

Suddenly he asked, “Do you see somebody, Rose?”

She looked up. “Where?”

“No, I mean do you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes!” She laughed. “I thought you meant—”

“Just a pastorly question. Are you serious about him?”

“I used to live with him. A few years ago. And then I found what a jerk he could be and I moved out.”

“But you still see him?”

“Yes. And it works for the most part, you know? As long as there’s a distance.”

“He doesn’t sound good for you.”

Rose smiled. “Nobody’s good for anybody.”

“Do you love him?”

“I don’t know. It’s a very convenient relationship. Hard to imagine giving him up completely.”

“You know, speaking of the sanctity of life, if that’s what we were speaking about a few minutes ago, I don’t think you value your own life enough. Maybe you should try being alone for a while.”

“Maybe so.” They had just passed through the woods and into Sibyl’s backyard.

“Rose,” Jim said quietly, “there’s something I want to show you, or more I can tell you, later this morning. It has to be off the record. Not for the book. Just for yourself.”

“Sure. What is it?”

He started to answer but then looked up because Jenny Lemke had just opened the back door of the house and waved at them.

“Jim!” she called.

“Yes?”

She had a phone in her hand. “There’s a call from Florida. It’s an emergency.”

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

We have received many letters in response to the exchange between Robert Gundry and Thomas Oden on “The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration.” That exchange began with a critique by Gundry in the January/February issue, continued with an exchange between Oden and Gundry in the March/April issue, and concluded with Oden’s response to critics of “Celebration” in the May/June issue (a longer version of which is available here on our Web site). Following is a representative selection of responses from our readers. Many thanks to all who have taken the time to think through these matters and write.

My first reading of the Gundry response to “Celebration” and his articulation of what I considered to be several significant and well–considered questions left me with a strong appetite for the inevitable response which would follow. Desperate for well–articulated debate I thought here for once was an opportunity for the evangelical community to engage in a rigorous examination of fundamental concepts.

Count me in the utterly disappointed category having read Thomas Oden’s “Calm Response,” which I found completely lacking in both calm and response. According to whose set of rules does a questioner get labeled as a critic? Did not Gundry demonstrate his own fundamental allegiance with the broad intention of the document? Did he not verbalize his own concern about the possible interpretation that he was being overly “picky” in raising some of his concerns? For this he gets marginalized for daring to examine rigorously the perhaps unintended consequences and possible errors of the document.

Quite apart form the tone, Oden did not even offer up an exegetical response to Gundry on the key question of Righteousness. Instead he tries to fend off Gundry with a list of the signers, as if their assent to the document determines its truth. At the same time, he deflects the question with his interpretation of how Calvin and Arminius are actually aligned on the issue, such that Wesley himself attests to the core elements of what “Celebration” proposes.

My response to Thomas Oden would be threefold. First, he demonstrates once again that we are not yet ready to engage in real debate on core questions. This is tragic. Second, he trivializes the concept of sola scriptura by offering up Calvin and Wesley rather than addressing and perhaps even demonstrating where Gundry may be in error. Finally, through his dependence on the cloud of witnesses who support “Celebration,” he leads me to conclude that truth can be reduced to a numbers game or perhaps the academic equivalent of “my dad’s bigger than your dad.”

In the end I am still waiting for a response to Gundry. If Oden can’t or won’t answer the question, hand the pen to someone who will. If the question does indeed call us to look again at the evidence and affirm or revise our theology, so be it. Waiting for a real response.

J. Roger Laing

Aberdeen, Scotland

Robert Gundry is either being disingenuous or very naive when he writes, “does Oden not allow that contemporary exegesis may correct an aspect of classic Protestant teaching on justification just as that teaching corrected an aspect of classic Roman Catholic teaching on justification?” For the sake of remaining charitable, I have to assume that it is the latter that is the case. Certainly, it is more than naive to suggest that a positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness constituted only an aspect of the classic Protestant teaching on justification. It was the insistence on the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness which made Protestantism to be a revolution against the Catholic doctrine (and not merely a correction of an aspect of it).

Admittedly, this understanding did not emerge overnight. It required the Osiandrian controversy in the early 1550s to bring final clarity into the confessional position on justification affirmed by Protestantism. But once that clarity was achieved (through sweat, blood and tears), it remained the defining doctrine which gave to the Protestant Reformation its character as Protestant. Reading Gundry, it becomes quite understandable why so many Protestants today have become Catholic in their understanding of justification. For all too many, this entire sixteenth–century debate was about nothing more than a modest correction of an aspect of Catholic teaching. If that were true, there would be no reason not to return to Rome. Robert Gundry has already taken the most decisive step.

Bruce L. McCormack

Weyerhaeuser Professor of Systematic Theology

Princeton Theological Seminary

Princeton, N.J.

Congratulations to B&C for the courage of faith to publish the spirited exchange between Robert Gundry and Thomas Oden. For this ordinary reader, patient perusal of its unplain scholar talk was worth it. I take as their agreed objective, not to split hairs over the gospel. They are evidently not convinced, however, of each other’s desire not to split its heirs. At points their debate was almost palpably frosty. Nevertheless, it succeeded, prompting me to download “The Gospel of Jesus Christ” for myself and my family. I offer these comments on the trigger of this apologetic cold snap, Christ’s righteousness.

First, that believers possess Christ’s righteousness can be stated by the simple gospel logic: the justified have God’s righteousness; Christ is God; therefore the justified have Christ’s righteousness. Argument about whose righteousness the justified have, Christ’s or God’s, is pointless, unless one intends to qualify or take issue with the central statement, Christ is God. Christ himself credited his works and words to the Father. He did not distinguish his righteousness from his Father’s. They were one in word and deed and essence.

Then, the compartmentalization of Christ’s life and death into active and passive obedience, respectively, misconceives the unbroken continuum of his subservient will. Thomas à; Kempis said Christ’s entire life was a cross. And in a sense the cross was his entire life. His obedience knew no distinct phases corresponding to active and passive. Believers must be heir to all his righteousness in life and death or none of it, because it canot be divided without harm. There’s something redolent of wise King Solomon and a certain baby in this.

Finally, the mystical transformation at salvation that positions Christians in Christ and he in them, declares him more than a removed third–party payer or surrogate sufferer. We have become his earthly body and temple and he our resident high priest. Can it be he is present in us without his righteousness imputed to us? How odd and contradictory that would seem. It would be as if a rich suitor, having sacrificed all he possessed to win his beloved, refused her his good, hard–earned name. Astonishingly, our relationship with Christ is likened to a husband and wife, a metaphor that seems designed both to communicate the New Covenant and to provide a tool, an “intimacy factor,” for its exegesis.

Dr. Bruce Jespersen

Calgary, Alberta

Canada

All the exegetical debate on this exchange about whether Christ’s righteous life is savingly imputed to his people has centered on the New Testament epistles. I think two episodes from the synoptic gospels can shed light on this matter.

The first is Christ’s baptism where his public ministry began by his being baptized for the repentance of sin. Since the New Testament is uniform in its insistence that Jesus was sinless and John the Baptist is shown to sense this in his reluctance to baptize Jesus, then how can Jesus be baptized for sin he never committed? The answer, of course, is that Jesus was not being baptized for his own sins but ours. He began his public ministry by radically identifying himself with sinners stating his intention to become one with us so that he might covenantally represent us before God for our salvation. His baptism is then a foreshadowing of the cross, where his determination to become one with sinners reaches its zenith in his being crucified for our sins. Jesus himself confirms this exegesis by later asking his disciples if they can “be baptized with the baptism he is baptized with,” referring to his impending death. The shadow of the cross fell across Jesus from the moment he began his ministry.

But what happens immediately after his baptism, where he radically identifies himself with sinners? Does he go to the cross? No, he goes out into the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil for 40 days. Many have pointed out the parallels with Israel’s 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. But whereas Israel failed the test and succumbed to the devil’s temptations, Jesus triumphs over Satan fending off the devil’s attacks with Scriptures used to describe Israel’s wilderness experience in the book of Deuteronomy. Many have concluded that Jesus is declaring himself to the new Israel, a son of God that will be covenantally faithful to his Father.

My point is this: when Jesus declares his intention to radically identify himself with sinners, he does not immediately go to the cross but replicates in his life events in the typological life of Israel which at this point represents all sinners in their failures to keep God’s covenant law. But by contrast, where Israel broke the covenant, Jesus perfectly kept it. Are not the gospel writers trying to teach us that part of Jesus’ radical identification with sinners involves his living the righteous life for us that we have failed to live? He established a saving covenant with God for us sinners that does not only include his atoning death for our sins but also his righteous life as a covenant keeper. Our sins are forgiven by his blood poured out upon the cross and our lives are eternally hidden within the righteousness of his perfect covenant–keeping.

Professor Gundry stated that his objection to the imputed righteousness of Christ as a means of our salvation had to do with his disagreement with the doctrine that Christ had to fulfill the Old Testament covenants for us. Regardless of how the word “imputation” is used in the epistles, I believe the gospels uniformly testify that that is exactly what Christ had to do for us in order for us to be saved. All the Old Testament covenants are taken up into his life, but whereas we as a race failed to keep those covenants, he fulfilled them all perfectly that our sinful lives may be hidden in his righteous one as he represents us before God the Father.

Curt Gardner

Berea, Ky.

I was most disheartened by Thomas Oden’s “Calm Answer” to Robert Gundry’s critique of “An Evangelical Celebration.” Oden dismissed Gundry’s exegetical argument against Christ’s imputed righteousness like an old schoolmaster scolding an errant student who had the importunity to dare ask “why?” The response was not a well–reasoned argument which dealt with the Scriptures, but instead a mere, “Tut–tut, my boy, we can’t have you asking questions like that! Such impertinence! You’ll upset the Traditions our Grand Institution!”

Oden substituted bluster for reason, which is always an indication there is something to hide. The circled wagons of Protestant thought are a chief sign that the tradition is losing its vitality. We need nothing less than a new Reformation. Protestants do not have the luxury of appealing to a magisterium, the Tradition, or a pope. It is against our ecclesiology to do what Oden has done. We have but one recourse—the Word of God. Gundry’s challenge is to examine what we have accepted according to the light of that Word, but Oden prefers to cling to familiar traditions like old wineskins, cherishing the memory’s savor, not realizing the present contents have soured to vinegar with age.

Jefferis Kent Peterson

www.scholarscorner.com

Thomas Oden’s remarks on the “social location” of the critics of “An Evangelical Celebration” are quite amusing. He has constructed a neat dilemma for his opponents: If they maintain their criticisms, they are succumbing to the pressures of the liberal academy, whereas if they agree with him in supporting “Celebration” they are showing commendable courage. Oden himself has indeed shown magnificent defiance in repudiating the liberalism of his own tradition and becoming uncompromisingly orthodox. But his own social location, in a very liberal seminary of a liberal denomination, is far from that of most evangelicals. And he consistently underestimates the enormous pressures for conformity, and against criticism, in many evengelical circles.

In such circles, what takes courage is to resist being intimidated by the parade of names Oden marshalls in order to silence the critics! But some critics are pretty much immune from any kind of intimidation. Anyone who knows Nicholas Wolterstorff will find laughable Oden’s implied characterization of him as a conformist, meekly surrendering to the demands of his colleagues at Yale Divinity School! Oden needs to repent his attribution of unworthy motives to his opponents, and conduct the debate on its merits.

William Hasker

Huntington College

Huntington, Ind.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.