Smart Cards, Silly People

Recently, I have spent an irrational amount of time trying to calculate the intrinsic value of a thinner wallet and a lighter purse (my wife’s purse, that is). This bothersome question arose as I followed the progress of New Jersey’s plans to implement the nation’s first government-issued smart card. The governor’s spirited initiative is entitled Access NJ, and it would establish a precedent-setting program that begins with a digitized driver’s license. Initially, a motorist’s picture, driving record, signature, and fingerprint would be stored on his or her individual card, and in subsequent stages, insurance, credit, bank records, medical information, and other personal data would be added. All of the specific-use plastic and paper cards we carry and the services they represent would be combined into one convenient—and very smart—personal identification card.

I work for a New Jersey legislator, so I was not unaware of the program that narrowly failed in June when controversy prevented the bill from being posted for a floor vote in either the senate or the assembly. The barrage of voices that rose from an unusual coalition of religious conservatives, free thinkers, and civil libertarians caused enough hesitancy in the legislature to put the program on hold.

Commercial smart cards are becoming more prevalent here and abroad, but they have been issued by private industry, predominantly banks or short-term authorities (like the one used by patrons at the Atlanta Olympics). To date, no state in the Union has produced a smart card.

When the smart-card headlines succumbed to fresher topics, I was left alone with my query concerning my wallet. I was trying to figure out exactly when our walk through the technology bazaar became a forced march. And I wondered how many questions we consider appropriate to raise before we make peace with the latest marvels.

Technology stop or yield signs are hard to define and defend, and we have yet to set the limits that would at least frame a thorough debate on things like smart cards. Invasion of privacy is certainly a valid argument, but it needs some persuasive allies in order to insert a persuasive wedge. A good starting point is the incongruity of a government producing a smart card.

The commercial interest in smart cards is clear enough; it has been reported that they reduce per-transaction costs from a quarter to a penny. Government enthusiasm is more difficult to understand. Indeed, the leaner, meaner efficiency such cards so proudly offer is noticeably incompatible with the bureaucracy that proposes to issue them.

We Americans are a diverse and cluttered people. The venerated wisdom arising from the colonies was decidedly in favor of inefficiency, even the sloppy, wasteful kind that prefers motion without effect to hasty accomplishments. The bicameral legislature and separation of powers conceptualized and created by this nation’s founders were not intended to be compact and always practical, and they are anything but efficient.

Obviously, they were designed to fracture governmental potency into less threatening pieces dependent on the intangibles of cooperation, and waiting. Our forefathers knew that budgets would be delayed, projects suspended, and energy wasted, and they understood the virtue of mandating such unbecoming safeguards.

The smart-card mentality doesn’t like such hindrances. It would argue for a single branch of government, a streamlined command unencumbered by prudence, protest, or delay. Separation of powers makes us clumsy; why not instead one orderly whole? Perhaps a single building could handle all of the affairs of government; though that may seem alarming, it really is not, and the savings are too great to ignore. We will be fine. Such consolidations are expressly prohibited by the Constitution, but a tidy restructuring is sure to simplify our lives, and we can rest assured that our technological prowess will provide a continuation of the independence we all expect. OK?

Debate on the smart cards will soon resume here and in other states close behind. In the meantime, I have promised myself that I will regularly extract a dollar bill from the limited assets within my impractical billfold and stare at it. I will contemplate anew the unique, stirring remainders of the beautiful inefficiencies of our freedom, and I will trust in God. I may count the numerous cards within and be grateful for little checks, little balances. I will let myself be inspired by remembering that a cluttered wallet is an ideology to be preserved and defended, and that one made thinner by being relieved of the bulkiness of liberty is none the better.

William Crew is director of communications for Assemblyman Jack Gibson (N.J.).

Dogma

“I sit there every Sunday and I feel nothing,” says Bethany. “I can remember sitting in church when I was a kid and being moved—like everything meant something, like I was important. And the stories of all these holy people were so inspiring. Now I sit there and think about my checking, and what I’m going to wear to work the next day.”

It sounds like something straight out of a Bill Hybels book. But it’s not. It’s from the script for Dogma, a forthcoming film by Kevin Smith, one of Hollywood’s coarsest—and most popular—directors. Smith’s previous film, Chasing Amy, centered on a young man’s love for a lesbian. Now he has turned his sights on the ills of religion—specifically, Catholicism.

Here’s the basic plotline: Once upon a time, the Angel of Death, at another angel’s prodding, decided to become a conscientious objector. For their insolence, God banished them to Wisconsin for the rest of history. But the angels (played by Hollywood darlings Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) find a “loophole” that may allow them to return to heaven. In an effort to get more people into church, one Catholic parish has reinstituted plenary indulgences, but only as a special, one-time offer. Those attending the church for the rededication ceremony will receive a clean slate morally, and all their previous sins will be forgiven. So the angels set out to enter the church.

There’s only one problem: God doesn’t allow loopholes. If the angels manage to finagle their way back into heaven, negating their banishment, all of God’s other decrees will be up for grabs as well, from “Let there be light” on down. Existence will be canceled. So the forces of God enlist humans to stop the angels.

First on their list is Bethany, a counselor at an abortion clinic (and a descendant of Joseph and Mary). She meets up with Silent Bob and Jay—lovable dope-dealing characters from the director’s past three movies—and Rufus, the thirteenth apostle (left out of gospel accounts because he was black). I won’t spoil more of the plot; those who want to read a version of the script can do so at the semiofficial Web site (http://www.newsaskew.com).

Thus far Dogma may sound like just another antireligion flick created by a pagan filmmaker. But there’s a wrinkle. The script is often critical of Christian (especially Catholic) practices, but not so much of Catholic doctrines. It has a deeply “inside” feel to it—as if it were written by an editor of the Door, if he were Catholic and potty-mouthed.

As Ben Affleck told the online entertainment magazine Mr. Showbiz, “Smith is a devoutly religious Catholic. This is a criticism of the Catholic Church by someone who was raised in it … and grew up within it. He’s a firm believer in Christianity and God and a believer in the Catholic doctrine.”

But Smith doesn’t make movies to preach. Instead, he makes them to deal with his own life. If he satirizes others, he satirizes himself even more. The inspiration for Chasing Amy, Smith has said, was his own struggle in dating a woman far more sexually experienced than he.

Likewise, in Dogma it’s clear that Smith is working through questions about his own faith. Unfortunately, while he regards the church with vigilant skepticism, he swallows Hollywood’s favorite religious dogmas without blinking.

“So if we’re so wrong, then what’s the right religion?” asks Bethany.

“When are you people going to learn?” comes the answer. “It’s not about right or wrong—it’s a question of faith. It doesn’t matter what you believe in—just that you believe.”

In Smith’s porno world, the church’s role is simply to inspire, and faith is simply a good, even necessary, thing to have, like a balanced diet, an exercise schedule, and the Star Wars movies on video.

And God? He hardly makes an appearance in the film, either in depiction or discussion. All we know is that he/she really likes to play Skee-Ball on the weekends (and he looks a lot like Alanis Morisette—don’t ask). Smith’s faith isn’t even based on belief. As Rufus (played by Chris Rock) puts it, God prefers ideas to beliefs:

I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should be malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can’t generate.

What Smith is left with is a religion without claims to being right, one that changes its definition of sin with the times, one that is itself always changing, run by a God who’s absent because he/she’s off playing Skee-Ball.

In that case, I’ll be the one rooting for the Angel of Death.

Ted Olsen is assistant editor of Christian History.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

Earlier this year the American Film Institute made headlines with a list of the 100 best American films. We asked regular reviewers Roy Anker and Peter Chattaway to give us a modest counterpart: their 10 favorite films. Herewith their lists:

Roy Anker

Favorite doesn’t necessarily mean best (though most here are), for these choices depend as much on personal history as cinematic merit. Kafka wrote that art is the “ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us,” and so all these, showing both dark and bright, shook this soul.

1. The Godfather Saga (dir. Francis Coppola, 1972-90). This wrenching fugue on moral decay has the “blackness of darkness” (Melville on Hawthorne, with whom Coppola belongs). At once inescapable and self-chosen, an appalling evil devours mob son Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). By part 3, aging and soul sick, Michael reaches for Christian redemption but chooses ill yet again, arriving at a final unfathomable devastation.
2. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). Again gorgeous, grim stuff, a blanched noir tale of a jaded streetwise PI (Jack Nicholson) who runs into moral horror beyond imagining, and that in the best of places. And surprise! cruelest malice wears a smiling face.
3. Superman (Richard Donner, 1978). Well, why not, at least the first half: superhero as seriocomic Christ (Christopher Reeve) tells more about the glad core of the Incarnation than whole theologies. Indeed, the film tutors the heart, especially with the help of John Williams’s exultant score.
4. Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980). With painterly precision, Redford explores the “mess” tragedy brings to a well-to-do Chicago family. The wonder is that any recover enough to find relish in living, which is also grace. The movie made Pachelbel famous for the good reason that in context the Canon in D wonderfully suggests the exquisite splendor of being alive.
5. American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980). A stark Calvinist parable about the nature of evil and the persistence of grace, even for upscale gigolos (Richard Gere). Best of all is the film’s moving portrait of the central human yearning for intimacy and “home.”
6. Tender Mercies (Bruce Beresford, 1983). Writer Horton Foote’s story of a derelict country singer (Robert Duvall) whose self-destruction is redeemed by the “tender mercies” of a West Texas Baptist widow (Tess Harper). Through people and places, grace comes to the inscrutable emptiness of the Texas plains.
7. The Mission (Roland Joffe, 1986). Eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Central America. The first half of Robert Bolt’s screenplay depicts the conversion (unexpected and wild, it is the best ever put on screen) of a slave-trading murderer (Robert De Niro), and the second unflichingly explores the fate of Christ amid the demonic tangles of geopolitics. Joffe’s rapturous direction is complemented by stunning cinematography (Chris Menges) and one of the best film scores ever (Ennio Morricone).
8. Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987). Long ago in a tiny Danish fishing village, two maiden daughters of a pietist preacher take in a homeless French cook who years later repays their kindness with a sumptuous French dinner. That becomes the Love Feast, precisely because of its splendidly loving carnality. Wondrous-strange Light here transmutes the lasting sadness of darkness and loss.
9. Grand Canyon (Lawrence Kasdan, 1991). Amid the horrors of contemporary L.A., a motley bunch of unsuspecting pilgrims stumble upon signs of a Providence that shoves their lives toward one another, meaning, and joy. Kasdan’s inventive cinema makes all these tales plausible and conveys well the “feel” of What visits these disparate folks.
10. Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993). In this virtually silent film, a young French woman (Juliette Binoche) seeks numbness after a car wreck kills her daughter and composer husband. Slowly but inexorably, the haunting coda of an unfinished symphony, which sounds Love itself, carries her back into living and loving.

Consider as well Places in the Heart, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dead Man Walking, The Doctor, The Deer Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and, yes, Citizen Kane.

Peter T. Chattaway

They asked for “favorite” films, not the “best” movies ever produced, so I will not pretend that this list is definitive for anyone other than myself. And even then—well, let’s just say the top five or so are pretty much set in stone, but the rest remain more tentative.

1. Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean, 1962). A grand, visual spectacle backed by Maurice Jarre’s majestic music and supported by perhaps the greatest international cast ever assembled, yes, but also a thoughtful, incisive look at the tensions that exist between nationality and personality, power and identity, destiny and free will.
2. The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985). A “minor character” steps off a movie screen and into Depression-era New Jersey, stranding his fellow characters while offering perfect, but imaginary, love to an abused housewife. A delightfully comic exploration of the difference between movie fantasy and harsh reality, but also a remarkably canny parable about a created world that is deemed good yet loses its sense of purpose once its inhabitants “chuck out the plot.”
3. The Family Way (Roy Boulting, 1966). A poignant, funny, bittersweet look at newlywed woes in working-class England that touches gently on a few hot buttons, notably impotence. John Mills delivers a superb, many-layered performance as real-life daughter Hayley’s father-in-law, and Paul McCartney—in the first solo Beatle project—provides the tender, melancholy, and hauntingly perfect score.
4. Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983). No script, no actors, no plot—just pure cinema, set to Philip Glass’s mesmerizing music. The title is Hopi for “life out of balance,” and Reggio employs a grab bag of camera tricks to convey the idea that modern technology—including moviemaking!—has thrown the created order out of whack. A dazzling film that seems to recreate itself with every viewing.
5. The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980). Not your typical sequel. George Lucas took a lot of risks with the middle chapter in his space opera and created a more successfully convincing parallel universe than Star Wars ever hinted at. The confrontation between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker is striking for its moral complexity, and it ultimately opens the door to Vader’s redemption. Who could have predicted that?
6. When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989). Forget Seinfeld. Reiner, Nora Ephron, Billy Crystal, and Meg Ryan scooped that so-so series with this surprisingly perceptive and frequently amusing dissection of modern relationships—platonic and otherwise—between the sexes. A treat for cynics and romantics alike.
7. The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz & William Keighley, 1938). Swordfights, romance, swashbuckling derring-do, and a subversively patriotic idealism—what more could one want? Still the best film of its kind, even if Basil Rathbone is less menacing here than he is in The Court Jester (Melvin Frank & Norman Panama, 1956), Danny Kaye’s witty, affectionate send-up of the genre.
8. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979). Not as irreverent as some might think, this intelligent, albeit raunchy, satire of big-budget Bible epics is, if anything, sympathetic toward Jesus. It taps into a subversive critique of shallow faith, personal ingratitude, and misplaced political zeal that is as old as the Gospels themselves.
9. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988). Morris’s dreamlike documentary is much more than a stylish, neonoir, real-life account of an innocent man convicted and almost executed for a murder he did not commit. It’s a remarkable piece of investigative journalism and a probing study of the construction—and deconstruction—of memory.
10. Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989). A sometimes gentle, sometimes biting, allegorical tour-de-force about the postmodern quest for meaning and the tensions between integrity and compromise that plague both art and religion. Tight, complex, and richly conceived, every scene seems to be pregnant with multiple meanings.

Honorable mention goes to the animated shorts of Chuck Jones, especially Rabbit Seasoning (1952), One Froggy Evening (1955), and What’s Opera, Doc? (1957). Jones is a master of restraint; his characters can speak volumes with little more than an arched eyebrow or a blank stare. Would that writers could do the same.

Roy Anker and Peter T. Chattaway spend much of their time in darkened theaters, emerging every once in a while to experience what others call real life.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

We moderns like our heroes cut down to size. Especially we demand that Christian faith, which is nothing if not the heroic writ large, must be portrayed warts and all. Robert Duvall did just that in The Apostle. The extremely favorable reception of Duvall’s extraordinary film tells me that something is afoot in our culture. Christian themes can actually be portrayed in a way that is neither saccharine nor demeaning—and audiences will applaud. In case you’ve been asleep during the twentieth century, this is big news.

All of which brings us to Central Station, a striking film by Brazilian director Walter Salles that took top honors at the Berlin Film Festival and won Sundance’s Cinema 100 award for its screenplay. The story focuses on two people: Josue, an orphan of nine, and Dora, a nastily cynical and bitter woman of 67—going on 167. (When in one scene on a bus her shrewish squawking prompts a wakened passenger to denounce her as a hag, I thought, “Ah, yes, that’s the word I was looking for.”)

The movie’s quirkily filmed opening is a happy presentiment of things to come. We see closeups of various people “talking” to the camera—to us—pouring out their hearts, as to a mirror, or to God. Because of the heartbreaking earnestness of their words, even the least attractive of them has a radiant inner beauty. We soon realize these people are dictating letters as they speak—to Dora, who works in the main room of Rio de Janeiro’s eponymous Central Station as a surrogate “letter writer.”

One of the people who visits Dora is Josue’s mother, whose letter is addressed to her runaway husband. She implores him to return so he can see his son. Josue squirms nervously by her side, correctly sizing up the old woman as untrustworthy. But when they finish and leave to go home, tragedy strikes: a speeding bus hits and kills Josue’s mother. The authorities spirit her away in an ambulance, and Josue is somehow left behind. The brave boy wanders the station for several days, waiting for her to return, but of course she never does.

In the meantime, we learn something ugly about Dora. It seems she doesn’t mail many of the letters she’s supposed to. She takes them home and after mockingly reading them with her neighbor, imperiously decides which ones merit mailing, tossing the others in the trash. There is something inescapably evil about this act, especially when one considers the hopeful and kind faces of those illiterates who entrusted her with their deepest thoughts and concerns, not to mention money for postage and handling.

Because Dora’s own father, an alcoholic, treated her and her mother poorly, Dora has it in for all fathers. When she reads the letter Josue’s mother dictated she is especially derisive. She assumes Josue’s father will never respond to it, and she moves to discard it. Her neighbor protests, and Dora finally consigns the letter to the cramped limbo of her “maybe” drawer, clearly never intending to mail it.

But because she alone knows the details of Josue’s circumstances, Dora begins to feel somehow responsible for him as she watches him wandering about the station, futilely waiting for the return of his mother. When a policeman moves to take Josue away from the station, Dora surprises herself and us by telling the policeman she knows the boy. More suprising still, she takes him home.

The two of them bicker immediately, though, and after a few days Dora returns to her less magnanimous ways, selling the boy to a shady adoption agency for a tidy sum. Her neighbor berates her, and Dora finally relents, returning to the agency to rescue Josue. She does so, but without refunding the money. Predictably, the authorities give chase, making it impossible to return to her apartment.

At this turning point in the story, Dora vows to reunite Josue with his father, who lives in the rural northwest of Brazil. The two get on a bus and begin their long, strange journey, a kind of Heart of Darkness in reverse—a diesel-powered flight from Mr. Kurtz’s dense cinder of horror into the free and expansive light of God’s redemption. That this journey will mark Dora’s pilgrimage home to her own heavenly Father is neither obvious nor cloying.

During their journey they argue again, and the bus leaves them behind, sans cash. But God appoints an evangelical truck driver named Cesar to give them a lift. His truck has decals that say, in Portuguese: “God is coming / Prepare yourself” and “With God I follow my destiny.” Cesar is an odd but generally likable fellow. (Think Soupy Sales meets John the Baptist.) When they stop in a restaurant for a bite to eat, Dora, whose heart is now lurching toward life, takes a shine to him. She offers him some of her beer. He initially refuses, saying he cannot, that he’s an evangelist, but suddenly he relents and gulps it down greedily. It is a measure of the film’s extraordinary maturity in dealing with faith that we don’t see this as mere hypocrisy but rather as an honest picture of a man struggling with temptation.

Now Dora’s slowly thawing heart melts into overdrive: suddenly aware of her decades-suppressed desire for love, she awkwardly puts her hand on Cesar’s and gazes at him longingly. She then excuses herself and shuttles to the bathroom to apply some lipstick. When she does this it is as though she is smearing life itself onto her face. A decade or two seem to vanish—poof!—and mirabile dictu, the old bird suddenly looks attractive again. But her newfound radiance is too late to capture Cesar, who is spooked by her clumsy grasping as much as by his own inability to resist temptation. When she returns, he has slipped into his rig and is hauling his assets toward the horizon.

Visually, parts of Central Station are beautiful. Sometimes it resembles the later films of Jacques Tati, who, three decades before Imax, filled every inch of his frame with action, nearly overwhelming the viewer. Other shots, such as the ones of swarming commuters, bring to mind the peopled segments of the Phillip Glass-scored Koyaanisqatsi. And yet, somehow Salles has managed to choose the ugliest earth tones imaginable for his pallette. Think of it as the chromatic opposite of The Truman Show or anything by Merchant-Ivory.

When Dora and Josue finally near their destination, without money or any resources, things take an almost hallucinatory turn. They stumble onto a vast Catholic revival meeting, where pilgrims are singing hymns and praying. When Josue and Dora argue yet again, he runs away through the suppliant throng and she follows him, eventually ending up in a strange tent filled with candles and loudly praying faithful. The confusing din undoes her, and she collapses, but when Josue and she are reunited it’s clear they have come through a crucial pass, geographically and spiritually.

I won’t spoil the ending, but there is one more precious scene involving letter writing, this time to various saints, that tops the first one and forms a touching counterpoint to it. Either of these alone is worth the price of admission. And of course, this batch of letters is mailed.

Eric Metaxas is associate editor of Chuck Colson’s BreakPoint radio program. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and Regeneration Quarterly. His most recent book for children is The Bible ABC (Tommy Nelson).

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

Any parent of a newborn will tell you that an unbroken night is God’s most underappreciated gift. Seven hours of uninterrupted sleep is far more precious than guaranteed college tuition. On this much, agreement is unanimous. But the debate about how to achieve this nirvana before the baby goes off to school is fragmented beyond repair.

Gary Ezzo, author of the much-loved and much-vilified parenting guides Babywise and Preparation for Parenting, suggests that babies can learn to sleep through the night by nine weeks; sociologist Amy Scott calls Ezzo’s plan “misinformation, denial, and disguised child-hate.” Sleep is always an emotional topic, especially for the deprived, but passionate discussions over infant training reach far beyond the crib. Ezzo suggests that toddlers can be trained to eat neatly; pediatric guru T. Berry Brazelton counters that a child must be allowed complete control of her food, even if this involves “tossing it to the dog. … We fed one of ours in the bathtub so she could play with her food, drop it and smear it at will!”

“Raising good children,” says Gary Ezzo, “is not a matter of chance.” Carol Rubenstein, Ph.D., writes, “A child’s personality and temperament has little to do with his mother or her sacrifices, and a great deal to do with what she has passed on to him genetically.” And the 1998 annual convention of the American Psychological Association was all abuzz over the contrarian theory of outsider-scholar Judith Rich Harris (The Nurture Assumption), who believes that peers are far more influential than parents in shaping a child’s personality.

There is little prospect of peace talks between these warring child-care generals; but what do those of us in the trenches do? Enter Julia Grant with a different approach: the metadiscourse of parenthood. Grant’s Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers doesn’t offer any new answers to the perennial questions of parenthood, but instead tackles the assumptions that allow the debate to exist. Metadiscourse—the study of the rules and conditions of communication—never provides content to an ongoing discussion; Grant doesn’t care whether or not you let your baby cry it out at night, but she is interested in why you think an expert’s book (as opposed to your mother, or your church, or your own common sense) might give you a trustworthy answer.

Metadiscourse, like most academic pursuits, turns deadly in a hurry. If you’re fighting with your spouse over whether or not to spank a rebellious toddler, you want an answer, not someone who’s going to inform you that your argument takes the form D(p)M1: M(p). But good work in metadiscourse can allow the combatants to step back, view the debate in a new light, and reopen discussion in a way that might possibly lead to compromise (or conversion).

Contemporary evangelicalism suffers from a number of stalemated debates that could benefit from some good, accessible theory of metadiscourse: gender roles, translation issues, birth control. And, of course, parenting. Daycare or family care? Working or stay-at-home moms? Demand feeding or parent-directed feeding? How exactly do you get that baby to sleep through the night?

Raising Baby by the Book, like most examples of metadiscourse, isn’t scintillating reading. But Julia Grant asks some new and fruitful questions about the ongoing relationship between parents, parenting books, and the experts who write them. Why do parents feel a need for expert reassurance? How does this expert advice interact with the common-sense insights provided by daily parenting? And what do you do when the experts disagree?

Grant’s survey of parenting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests that parents began to feel inadequate largely because of a change in family makeup. Big extended families, living close together, gave way to small, isolated family units of mother, father, and two children; parents were deprived of the experienced help previously provided by older family members. This increased isolation of parents coincided with the growing availability of jobs that removed fathers from the home all day, and with a widespread social perception of women as less rational, less capable, and thus less competent than men. Mothers, left alone with children all day long without fathers or extended family to make up for their female shortcomings, became the target of child-study groups sponsored by such organizations as the Baby Hygiene Association of Boston, the U.S. Children’s Bureau, and the Child Study Association of America. The “traditional kinship networks that supplied child-rearing knowledge,” Grant suggests, were “no longer fully functional.”

Within this framework, Grant surveys the major schools of parenting expertise: the behaviorism of the thirties, the democratic child-raising practices of the forties, the psychoanalytical fifties, and the Spock years. Although the rise and fall of these schools is presented in stultifying detail, the complex history of expert advice is worth plowing through.

For one thing, Grant’s survey of the past reveals that many of the shibboleths we hear mouthed today are merely repetitions of past slogans. “The proper care and training of children,” announced pediatrician Edith Jackson in a 1944 radio broadcast, “is as essential to true and final victory as the warfare on our fighting fronts”—a declaration that bears an eerie resemblance to evangelical rhetoric about building Christ’s kingdom through the work of mothers at home.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, in A Mother’s Place: Taking the Debate About Working Mothers Beyond Guilt and Blame (1997), Susan Chira writes that a mother can “enrich her children” by pursuing her own dreams (even if this involves a full-time nanny and a 60-hour work week). Grant finds this same rhetoric in the Freudian-focused groups of the past, which assumed that “the better we understand ourselves, the better we understand our children.”

Grant doesn’t bring her study up to the present, ending her survey sometime around 1978. And she ignores the most authoritative book of all. “In general,” she says, in the only paragraph devoted to biblical standards for parenting, “people with a strong religious affiliation will develop child-rearing values that at least partially derive from their communities of belief.”

In part, Grant’s neglect of biblical influences seems to stem from Scripture’s unsatisfactory character as a nuts-and-bolts parenting handbook. The Bible offers a few general instructions for parenting (“Fathers, do not exasperate your children”) and plenty of ideals for adults, but specific prescriptions for the everyday raising of children are few and far between (which is why evangelicals can battle to the point of excommunication over the Ezzo method of sleep-training).

The most frequently quoted biblical text on parenting is Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” In some Christian circles, this declaration is read as a guarantee that children who are raised properly will “turn out” perfectly. Grant’s history of parenting advice reveals this interpretation as an echo of behaviorism: supply the correct stimuli, and the desired response will mechanically follow. Yet behaviorism is in tension both with life as we know it (well-raised children do sometimes rebel) and with the God-created complexity and originality of each person.

At the other extreme, this affirmation of the wonderful individuality of each child has been corrupted into the shrug-of-the-shoulders philosophy that “nothing you really do changes the child anyway.” Carol Rubenstein’s recent dreadful book, The Sacrificial Mother, assures us that parents’ actions “play little, if any, part in [their] children’s overall development. It’s much more likely that the genes a child is born with will have the greatest influence over his future personality.”

This notion that character is biologically predetermined, popularized in recent years under the label “evolutionary psychology,” makes odd bedfellows. Rubenstein uses it to encourage something she calls “selfism,” putting parental wishes far ahead of childish needs, but Grant points out that a similar notion lies at the root of child-centered training methods: demand feeding, originally promoted by Arnold Gesell in the 1940s, grew out of the theory that “children’s psychosocial development was guided by inherent biological mechanisms that were impervious to parental training.”

Gesell’s methods currently rule much of the secular parenting literature (think “meals in a bathtub”). A recent issue of Salon, the online magazine, contained a scathing article by Katie Allison Granju about the Ezzo methods. Most of Granju’s righteous indignation seems centered on the chutzpah the Ezzos display in proposing an “ideal” pattern for training children. Granju objects to the Ezzos’ “authoritative tone,” to their nerve in “boldly” informing parents of their method, and to their goal of producing “obedient, respectful children.” She writes, “Although the books do sprinkle warnings against ‘legalism’ and in favor of ‘context’ throughout their pages, the overall message remains one of rigid, uncompromising parental authoritarianism.” Given a plethora of such Ezzo statements as “Flexibility is basic to your success,” and “Neither of you should be enslaved to routine,” Granju’s assessment displays an almost pathological fear of any parental standards “imposed” on children (such as “Do not toss your dinner to the dog”).

Once more, Raising Baby by the Book provides useful perspective. This complete rejection of any parental training, Julia Grant suggests, followed World War II; Gesell himself went so far as to suggest that “the seeds of fascism” were embedded in the very notion of parental training! In the immediate postwar years, popular child-rearing manuals “challenged parents to adopt democratic child-rearing strategies, using powerful political terminology . …Social scientists speculated on the authoritarian child-rearing patterns that had engendered a German populace susceptible to the temptations of fascism.”

In the same way, Salon’s Granju calls the Ezzo methods “rigid,” “harsh,” and unlikely to “produce emotionally healthy adults”; she labels the child-centered parenting she prefers as “hands-on, relaxed,” and “increasingly popular.”

Grant’s work suggests that the reaction to Babywise (Granju is typical) has less to do with the Ezzos than with a general hatred of absolute moral declarations, (Indeed Salon tips its hand with the article’s teaser: “Do parents who buy the controversial baby-care book know about its conservative Christian agenda?”) Raising Baby by the Book also confirms that parents, even those who feel inadequate, tend to react strongly to expert advice. “White folks,” comments one African American mother in 1933, “just naturally can’t tell you nothing about raising children.” “It may be that I am having interesting experiences with children,” snaps another mother, fed up with cheerful experts who want to improve her parenting technique, “but I cannot tell you what they are. I do not see them.”

Most parents are in this same boat. Perhaps the best thing the church can offer them is not yet another list of books by parenting experts but rather (in Grant’s words) a network of child-rearing knowledge. “We learn to care for children,” Grant concludes, “in the context of the families and the communities in which we live.”

These communities—known as “interpretive communities” in the jargon of metadiscourse—help to interpret the dictates of the experts for individual parents and children. An interpretive community dedicated to discovering the wisdom of God can make sense of Babywise. Without an interpretive community, the conflicting dictates of the experts might never make sense. Get ready to face 18 years of broken sleep, and a whole lot of meals served in the bathtub.

Susan Wise Bauer is a novelist who successfully used the Ezzo method, modified by advice from other mothers (including her own), to teach her three boys to sleep through the night.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

When I was 12 and what happens to boys hadn’t happened to me yet, I loved to walk alone. I would walk five miles down a railroad track to my grandparents’ place or walk seven miles in the opposite direction to a lake I liked to look at, after I had walked to the far corners of our town a half-dozen times that day. It wasn’t beyond me to walk 20 miles without even stopping to think about it, as I haven’t, really, until now.

The places I most liked to walk were outside any sign of habitation—in the carved gap of a railroad line or along a dirt road that led through pastures or corn fields to a woods. When I walked I thought of others who had walked this way before, and the only ones I had heard of who had walked as much as I seemed to walk were the apostles of Jesus Christ (along with Jesus, of course), and a U.S. president who once lived in the area of Illinois where my family was living—Abraham Lincoln.

The place I liked above all to walk was to a woods halfway between my grandparents and the lake I liked, the straight north of those two points, or so it seemed to me then, though its actual direction was west. I strolled toward it along the edge of a road that was such pure sand it was as hard to walk as the sand of an unpacked beach. All along the route hedge apples lay in the sand like limes so bloated that the pebbling of their peels resembled worms locked in molten swirls. You didn’t want to think what the thing was up to. The hedge apples struck the sand like shot puts, and if I kicked one it was almost as heavy and left a gooey sap on my bare toes. Hedgerows crowded the road, growing wild in this place as deserted and hot as the Sahara—the perimeter of a state forest I was headed toward.

Once I had sized up my route for the next mile or so, or to the next hill or curve, I never looked ahead of my feet as I walked. I don’t know why. What flowed past or flew in from the side or swung up to encounter me was more of a surprise that way, I suspect. I partly wanted to be surprised, or safely scared, as boys that age do—a natural scare that never approached the terror I lived with. My mother was dead and had died away from home of a disease I had never been able to fathom or my father had never been able to explain, so I had come to feel that my worst thoughts about her had caused her death.

The latticework of shadow from the hedge-apple rows thickened to trunks and overarching shadows of trees—tall elms still free from the Dutch elm blight—maples, burr oaks all gnarled, horse chestnut, and a dozen other varieties our science teacher had pointed out on a field trip when I was so overwhelmed by the trees themselves I couldn’t take in their names.

But I knew them as well as aunts and uncles from my weekly walks through this state forest that was also becoming a wildlife sanctuary. I felt so much at home I sang as I sang nowhere else, sometimes mere notes that I felt began to reach the tones and patterns of plainsong—this I loved, mixed with incense, as much as anything about the church I attended each week.

“Oh, beautiful trees!” I sang. “Oh, sky above me! Oh, earth beneath my feet!” It was really a shout, blasts of assurance, the same song I sang each time I walked, as if to announce my presence to the elements I addressed—the sky and earth that had seemed to govern my life from its beginning. Then these trees.

I was never afraid or lost my way no matter how many and how varied the routes I took (besides not looking ahead), and I never felt the sense of the absence of my mother that I felt everywhere else. She was born on the plains, far from actual woods, where an individual tree offered shade but too many got in your way and were a bother or threat. I had walked with her in the spaces of the plains and at the edges of woods, the blue-green conifers of Minnesota mostly, and the movement and placement of her limbs as she walked communicated to me a sense of this. But people were made to talk, unlike the spaces of earth (both empty and filled-up) that seemed to want so much to talk they trembled with an omniscience that caused me to listen as I never did with people, not even her.

Now as I sang and walked, matching the words to my right-left pace, I saw rough trunks crowd close, their shadows lying on leaves and needles they had shed, all of this closeness intertwining in a way that caused the light I saw striking my feet to take on substance. The chill of a presence slid over me as if I were shedding leaves myself, and I stopped and looked up.

The patterns of the scribbled multitude of twigs and the matching gaps of designated light matching the movement of the limbs were as much a song or shout as what I sang. This was the earth, these its trees in their multitude of beauty, twigs to branches to trunks, the sky and space brimming with angels and voices that would soon break into appearance or speech. I felt no terror, gripped by a presence of greater substance than my mother’s hand, and tears of laughter leaped out like the appearances and voices that seemed so imminent.

One presence was here, I saw, as I turned with my face raised, in the trees and sky and the earth that supported me as I turned. This presence had put all this in place to teach me about myself and its own qualities and makeup: God. I had been instructed to love Him, but the words of English I knew couldn’t approach the language pouring from everything around with a familiarity that aroused in me a wordless love that for the life of me I couldn’t define. I was given a glimpse of it when I came to read, The Heavens declare the glory of God. … Day unto day utters speech. … There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. … For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. … For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

Here were two languages put partly into English, and what they stated in the language I partly knew was so unimaginable—especially that last phrase—that I’m jolted from the trees and left flat-footed in the present. As I studied the statement, I found it has been so seldom touched upon by any portion of official Christendom you would think it doesn’t exist. And the more I studied it and turned it every which way, it still persisted in saying, in Him all things consist. How could I reconcile this with my present-day understanding of nature, pragmatic and tone-deaf—my hard-heartedness toward grass and trees and birds and fish and beasts and bracken and oceans and the stormy wind that He says fulfills His word? Lopped off from that boy who hadn’t learned to reason and didn’t pay any more attention to his body and its developments (or so far, anyway) than the developed creation around him, I seem farther from the truth of the actual words of that statement than those who worshiped trees and imaginary or real spirits trapped inside them.

And those who practiced that missed the truth that this statement, and all the others before it, also teach: it’s more than trees or the spirits trapped in them, when you understand that they are communications of Christ.

Carefully and with the greatest accuracy I may write a description of my favorite six-foot patch of nature or, if my spirit is feeling expansive, my favorite ten acres, and if anyone who reads it afterward doesn’t sense in the description some hidden attributes of God that we are told exist but try to deny because they do not fit with the rationalism that enlightened thinking (rather than the language of God) has brought to us, then our description is a failure in His face.

Language was given to return to Him the sort of language He proclaims to us, when we normally hear only if we’re surrounded by stereo equipment.

On some days, if I lie for hours on the ground or crawl on my belly through grass or weeds or walk into a forest where I might get lost and lie down and take a nap and then wake—on those days I sense voices clamoring from all sides as they did when I went walking in the woods. Do you ever roll in new-mown grass and feel the reek of its greenness fill your nostrils until it seems your nose will bleed and then realize that the reeking is the blood of grass, or something more astonishing than your grip on language has been able to grasp?

There are times when, with a warning in my legs of a spongy weakness, the earth is revealed as molecular—able to give way at any second—and every gesture and word formed and even every thought is being weighed and measured (right foot, left foot) on shifting scales that are accurate to every millimeter of infinity. The giving earth itself is His handiwork, and my treading on it is communicated through a network so complex that even our mightiest computers can’t begin to estimate its effect. I sense this and tend to rest on its evidence even when it’s unseen.

This is faith. In whom do I have faith? In God. Where is God? Everywhere.

That’s what I learned in the English language.

Then why don’t I bump into Him or step on Him?

I do, in a sense, but wouldn’t know it if He appeared in front of me, since I so seldom acknowledge that.

If God is everywhere, it’s as Spirit that He is. This is the age of the Spirit He has given the World through His Son, and even though the world came into being for that purpose, the world does not know Him or recognize Him or receive Him or the message that the handiwork of His world continues to communicate in every detail we take in.

A glimpse of this was given to a poet who had suffered the rigors of the Gulag and was trying to read an anthology of modern English poetry with his faulty command of the language. He says,

I remember sitting there in the small wooden shack, peering through the square, porthole-size window at the wet, muddy, dirt road with a few stray chickens on it, half believing what I’d just read, half wondering whether my grasp of English wasn’t playing tricks on me. I had there a veritable boulder of an English-Russian dictionary, and I went through its pages time and again, checking every word, every allusion, hoping that they might spare me the meaning that stared at me from the page. I guess I was simply refusing to believe that way back in 1939 an English poet had said, “Time … worships language,” and yet the world around was still what it was.

This is Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate, and he wanted to make clear the effect on him of that distilled statement from W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”—time worships language. Brodsky abhorred artifice and sham and was so attuned to language, and especially the language of the Bible, that he saw Auden’s statement as so revolutionary it should have altered the known world. Time is the lesser compatriot to language and so time, whom many of us personify and revere as a god, bows to language. With language people build adornments that will last while time merely passes away—just as God, through a poured-out language, the breath of His mouth, He says, formed worlds that endure and will last for eternity. A Russian poet grasped this on first sight under straitened conditions, but it flies past most of us—with the thrumming beat and glide of a flicker, I hope; the bird, I mean, with its yellow-gold ribs and that flash of red you can’t miss.

When I remember how I drew in as if in gulps the words of Brodsky as he explained the struggle he underwent toward his transformation, I can see my feet moving through the woods and hear the words of the song I shout. The words were given to me, and just as Brodsky, arriving by the labored steps of an unfamiliar language to the understanding that transformed him, could not believe the world had remained the same, so I once suffered in a smaller sense. When I set down “I feel a pressure behind and turn and there are the cottonwoods and willows at the far end of the street, along the edge of the lake, flying the maidenhair faces of their leaves into the wind, and beyond their crowns of trembling insubstantiality, across the lake dotted with cottonwood pollen, the blue and azure plain abuts against the horizon at infinity”—when I set that down, as it arrived on its own, I knew I would never be the same. It was a period when the balancing scales beneath me were jiggling so much I was sure they would give way, and my search became a desire to rest, as if on a tree, on Him.

But I forget and become deadened, as I think I’ve said, and walk around whispering, Sure, God’s everywhere, that’s why my life’s so wonderful—this in a detached and abstract cynicism so bitter it could burn holes in the air. When I reached a moment like that once again, a year ago, my wife said, “Will you pray, please?” Sure, I thought, sure, I’ll pray, and lit into a prayer with such anger a hole indeed appeared to burn open to the presence I’d forgotten or abandoned, and I felt the ladder that Jacob had dreamed, with angels ascending and descending on it, appear. The pure power of the Spirit poured down on me with such force that prayers for my wife and children, who had gathered, were pressed from me as prayer had never been pressed before in 50 years, and when I looked up I felt I was seeing each of my family for the first time, transformed.

They were clearly in Him, as I was, or more than I. They had waited for this confirmation, it seemed, and I had been too cautious and rational and bitter (if I could have explained my state in words) to give in to that presence mightier than Time.

I went to bed. It was all I could do. But in bed I couldn’t sleep. The pressure that had once caused me to turn in recognition of a horizon exerted a fraction of its real weight, as I sensed, and I couldn’t move. I lay underneath it—a molecular current containing, yet revivifying me—and every petty act of mine was an electron above an abyss in the magnificence of the current that kept flowing through and out of me.

I couldn’t move for hours. Everyone I had hated or could not forgive appeared over the night, not so I could see them, but I sensed the presence of each one and knew who it was and was astonished and grieved at the smallness of my hate in the weighty glory of the forgiveness I was receiving. Tears sprang from my eyes as they had in the woods and I was lodged so close to joy I felt that if this was the end, so be it. And it was the end in one way, perhaps (you will find me as unforgiving and petty as always, I suspect, the next time we meet), because I understood I was being called to rise up and walk.

I couldn’t move but had to, and once I was out of bed and made it from the room, barely (never waking my wife; she never woke this whole night), I slowly ground around the perimeter of two small rooms and a hall, my pacing grounds, and was given a partial sense of bearing in a body the weight of glory for those steps, all I could bear. I realized I had been prepared for this by that sense of pressure, the turn to a new horizon, but even more by those walks in the woods where I watched my feet lit by the sun as I listened to a language leaping past time and entering me in a beginning I couldn’t begin to explain, or wouldn’t have been able to, until I sat down and re-entered that fifty-year-old walk.

Larry Woiwode is a founder of the Beth-El Institute for Arts and Sciences in Carson, North Dakota, where he currently teaches. This article appears in slightly different form in Things in Heaven and Earth, edited by Harold Fickett. Copyright 1998 by Paraclete Press. Used by permission of Paraclete Press, P.O. Box 1568, Orleans, MA 02653.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

“Tragically timely” is the only way to describe Bruce Hoffman’s Inside Terrorism. Hoffman has been working at this subject for 20 years, first at the RAND Corporation in California, then for the last several years as director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. Hoffman finished the book in January 1998. During the weeks before the book’s official publication date of September 17, the daily press became a series of case studies on the themes of Hoffman’s lifework:

• August 7: Bombs explode at two United States embassies in Africa, killing 10 at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and 253 at Nairobi in Kenya, with thousands more injured.
• August 15: A car bomb detonates in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, killing 28 civilians, the majority of whom are women and children, including several from the Irish Republic.
• August 20: U.S. Cruise missiles take out the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, and slam into suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan as reprisals against the organization of Osama bin Laden, a multimillionaire exiled from Saudi Arabia and suspected of masterminding the African attacks.
• September 3: President Clinton visits Omagh on his way back to the United States from a summit in Moscow and solemnly offers his thanks to the survivors of the blast for “restating your determination to walk the road of peace.” On the same day Louis Freeh, Director of the fbi, tells the Senate Judiciary Committee that while the number of terrorist incidents around the world is declining, the casualties from such attacks are rising dramatically.
• The first week of September: The Irish and British parliaments both race to pass legislation aimed at “the Real ira” and other paramilitary splinter groups resisting the peace accord signed last Easter week by the main political factions in Northern Ireland.

If ever there was a time for a book providing informed perspective on the origins, development, goals, characteristics, stratagems, and mentalites of international terrorism, now is that time.

Inside Terrorism should not, however, be confused with what can be found in a weekly newsmagazine. Osama bin Laden and the Real IRA, for example, do not show up in its pages. Nor does it offer the detailed treatment of current incidents and terrorist groups found in official government publications.1 But what the book does treat it treats very well.

Hoffman plunges into the complexities of his topic with a nuanced history of the word itself. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was the first modern use of the term, but as employed in France in the 1790s, terror was a means for the new regime to establish order. During the next century and more, terror was a self-conscious tool put to use by Russian constitutionalists challenging the rule of the Tsars, anarchists from several European nations lashing out at governmental oppression, militant Armenians struggling for independence from Turkey, and (with horrifying consequences in World War I) Serbian nationalists fighting the Austro-Hungarian empire. These groups used terror as outsiders wanting to bring down the system.

In the 1930s, terror took on another meaning in Germany, Italy, and Russia as Fascists and Stalinists sought to intimidate their own citizens. Western democracies quite rightly protested, although some of them (like the United States) had not too many years before countenanced analogous acts for analogous purposes of intimidation against enslaved and indigenous populations.

After World War II, terrorism swung back to a strategy of the “outs” versus the “ins.” Two clusters of events from the war years were particularly significant for inspiring the ethno-nationalist aspirations that have been so important over the last half-century. First, when the British were defeated at Singapore in February 1942 and the Americans surrendered at Corregidor in May 1942, the myth of Western invincibility was shattered. Second, the Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941, turned out to have ironic effects. The charter’s lofty statements defending principles of local self-determination imposed conditions on the West that, for the most part, Western nations did not intend to fulfill. In turn, that failure fueled an explosion of ethnic, nationalist, and religious anger at Western states, businesses, and institutions.

Hoffman’s consideration of terrorism over the last decades leads him to a careful definition: “the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change.” A chapter on public opinion lets him show how the modern media—especially the competitive necessity for highlighting drama and blood—have become ideal vehicles for promoting terrorist political goals. His account of the PLO, however, adds an ironic twist. Once the world’s main educator of terrorists, as well as itself a major perpetrator of terrorism, the PLO has been changed by financial success, which has given it a stake in the system that moderates at least some of its violence.

In many ways, the heart of the book is Hoffman’s full-scale picture of religiously inspired terrorism. The increasing proportion of terrorist groups inspired wholly or primarily by religion is sober in the extreme—including the Japanese followers of Shoko Asahara in the Aum Shinrikyo sect (poison gas in Tokyo subways, March 1995), American Christian Patriots (implicated in the Oklahoma City murders by Timothy McVeigh), Jewish followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane (Baruch Goldstein’s murder of 29 worshiping Muslims on February 25, 1994; Yigal Amir’s assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995), and militants in both Shi’a and Sunni branches of Islam (the World Trade Center blast of 1993, Hamas suicide bombings in Israel that killed 60 in February and March 1996, massacres of tourists in Egypt in April 1996 and November 1997, and the deaths of perhaps 75,000 in Algeria since 1992).

Hoffman shows that religious-inspired terrorism goes way back. The very words zealot, thug, and assassin derive from religious terrorism in, respectively, first-century Judaism, medieval India, and premodern Islamic movements opposing the Christian crusaders. Hoffman also highlights the difference religion makes in the nature of terrorist action. Where most traditional terrorism is motivated by political, social, or economic goals, religious terrorism seeks transcendent justification. The traditional political terrorist wants more people to watch than to be killed. The religious terrorist wants to eliminate the infidels. In the utterly chilling words of Robert Mathews, deceased leader of “The Order” (a splinter from the Aryan Nation/Christian Patriotism/Identity nexus), Jews, blacks, Hispanics, other “mud people,” along with white “race traitors,” must be exterminated in “a racial and religious Armageddon.”

Especially distressing to those who look upon organized religion as a force for good in the world is Hoffman’s documentation of the blessing that virtually all recent acts of religious terrorism have received from ministers, rabbis, or imams. Hoffman wonders if the year 2000 will incite aggrieved true believers to millennial acts of terror that could trivialize the difficulties anticipated from computer foul-ups.

Inside Terrorism is an extraordinarily insightful book. But of course it cannot be the last word on its subject. Hoffman mentions the pressures of late twentieth-century demography in sustaining terrorism, but even more could be said. The Brazilian Sem Terra (without land) movement is only one of the groups that promotes local violence to protest the systemic poverty so deeply entrenched and so rapidly spreading in so many parts of the world.

Nor does Hoffman address what might be called the philosophical paradoxes of terror. The African National Congress (including eventually Nelson Mandela) sanctioned terrorism and now, to worldwide acclaim, rules South Africa. Terrorist activity played a part in the creation of modern Israel, Algeria, and Cyprus. As discussed in a recent issue of Books & Culture, John Brown was a terrorist whom many northern abolitionists lionized.

For all who consider what exceptions to the rule of law are justified, for all who worship the Prince of Peace, for all who believe in the power of general revelation to inspire people of goodwill everywhere—and for many more—Hoffman’s thoroughly sobering book offers much to grasp, and also much to ponder.

Mark A. Noll teaches history at Wheaton College. He wishes to acknowledge a long friendship with James Ohlson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as essential background for this article.

1. For example, Terrorism in the United States (1996), from the Counterterroism Threat Assessment and Warning Unit of the National Security Division of the FBI, or Patterns of Global Terrorism (1997), from the U.S. Department of State.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

Starting with its first issue, Wired magazine has featured an unusual item on its masthead. Along with the customary job titles, there is a listing that reads: “Patron Saint: Marshall McLuhan.” If Books & Culture were to follow suit, we’d have to list a number of names, not just one, but among them for certain would be Stanley Hauerwas.

Hauerwas is professor of theological ethics at Duke University’s Divinity School. He is the author of many books, including A Community of Character, In Good Company: The Church as Polis, and, with Charles Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (all three of which are published by the University of Notre Dame Press).

A Methodist who draws on diverse sources—especially Roman Catholic and Anabaptist—Hauerwas is a profane, pugnacious pacifist. His understanding of the church was well summarized by Rodney Clapp more than a decade ago in Christianity Today (Sept. 5, 1986): “Worshiping together and supporting one another in community, Christians are a sign to the world. Sustained by the miracle of the Holy Spirit, the church is a palpable presence proving, by its existence and unique character, that the way of the world is not the only way—and certainly not the true way—to live.”

Clapp talked with Hauerwas in Durham, North Carolina, this summer. Expletives mostly deleted.

What’s the biggest challenge facing the North American church today?

It’s very simple: survival. And surviving is a big thing. By survival I mean sustaining the everyday practices that make Christians Christian. Robert Wilken, in The Christians As the Romans Saw Them, explains that the Romans didn’t notice the Christians for a long time because they just weren’t that significant. Pliny, when he finally noticed the Christians, said, “I can’t figure out who these people are. I think they’re a burial society because they go out to the cemeteries.”

That’s a pretty good description of Christians. We’re a burial society. We know how to bury people in a way that shows they are part of our community and our community’s ongoing memory. That’s a lot, to be a burial society in the kind of world in which we live. My own view is that within a hundred years, Christians may be known as those odd people who don’t kill their children or their elderly. That’s a lot, too. And that’s what I mean by survival: maintaining everyday small lines of resistance to a world gone mad seeking perfection.

Right now we’re imperiled both within and without. We have lost confidence in our common actions—our basic convictions and practices—and because of that we have become shrill. People get concerned about making our common actions meaningful, and you get bizarre things like the church-growth movement, which is surely a sign of unbelievable desperation. Or, to take another example, Methodism looks like it may well come apart on the gay issue, which is a very strange thing to have happen. And so we’re threatened from within, having lost a sense of internal discipline that makes any sense of our lives as Christians.

That in turn means that we’re threatened from without, because the people outside can’t tell that there’s any difference between being Christian and anything else. So they wonder, what’s the point? The North American church is in a very awkward time.

But Christians are obligated to be hopeful, and I’m hopeful because this is about God, after all. It’s not about the survival of the North American church. On the whole, Christianity is over in the West. And there’s not any great tragedy in that—it won’t be long before the churches of Africa and Asia are sending missionaries here. That’s okay. Christianity is never dependent on numbers. And I think what has primarily killed us, by the way, in spite of all my criticisms of liberalism, is wealth. It’s very hard to be Christian and wealthy.

Is that a recent conclusion of yours—that wealth is more fundamentally destructive of the church and its mission than is liberalism?>

No. They go hand in hand. The production of wealth has always been what liberalism has been about, and liberalism understood economically is capitalism. We have arrived at a condition in which it’s just inconceivable for us to think of ourselves as Christian and poor. Therefore our great social vision is knowing how to make the poor not so poor, as part of what it means to be Christian. And I think that what God is doing is teaching us that Christianity is very much about knowing how to go on in the face of being poor. I don’t want at all to romanticize poverty, but the poor are forced into forms of cooperation that provide resources that we affluent Christians do not have. It takes a lot of money to avoid cooperating with other people. Affluent Western Christians have that kind of money.

We’re clearly under the power of greed and we don’t even know it. I take it that part of the agony of child-rearing today comes from the fact that any no that you give a child appears arbitrary. “No, you cannot have another Beanie Baby because you’ve got too many Beanie Babies.” And the child says, “How would I know that I have too many Beanie Babies? My best friend has more than I do.”

I grew up in a low-middle-class home. I never knew I should, for example, expect my parents to provide me a college education. It never crossed my mind. I didn’t know I was poor, as a matter of fact, until I went to college. There I discovered that a lot of people had a lot more stuff. But when I was growing up my parents didn’t have to say no because certain things were just out of reach. And now, for many, there seems to be nothing out of reach. So if a parent says no, children can only suspect they’re being mistreated. Greed isn’t even located.

Now, I say all this as someone who has for many years lived with the benefits that come with academic success. I get paid well. I’m still not sure what to do with my money, but I like being rich. I mean, it’s a good thing to be able not to have to worry about whether or not I can really afford to buy books or pieces of art, and so on. It’s just very hard to discover appropriate limits in this society.

I hope I’m not being judgmental when I’m saying this, because I assume that we’re all captured by it in various ways. But we’re captive to a power. That’s the way I want us to think about sin: not as something so much that I do as something that I’m captured by and that I don’t even recognize as captivity.

And isn’t this inability to locate limits related to a widespread feeling of lostness and nihilism? If there’s nothing we really can’t have or do or must protect, then is anything really rare or precious?

That’s why I say the yuppies are the great monastics of modernity. The yuppies are often criticized for not having children because allegedly that’s their hedonism—they’ll buy a boat rather than rear a child. But I think yuppies don’t have children because they see no reason why they should pass on to future generations the meaninglessness of their own lives. That refusal is a kind of ascetic discipline. Why have children in this culture? You’re going to have children for them to grow up to consume at a higher level than you? Rather than go to Wheaton, they can go to Harvard? Why are you doing this? I think children catch on. “Why am I here? What am I to do? No sacrifices are asked of me.”

It’s very hard to live in a world without a sense that your life is part of an adventure that you yourself didn’t make up. There are some deep problems with growing up in middle-class America. But that’s exactly what’s so frustrating about liberalism. It’s so flaccid, it never seems to be offering much threat.

It rarely dresses in jackboots and wears a swastika.

Right. I sometimes wonder if I don’t overdramatize the threats of liberalism as a way to render intelligible theological speech. I hope I haven’t done that. But the flaccidity of liberalism makes it very hard to locate why it is such a threat. After all, liberals are so nice, and we’re all really liberals. So it’s very hard to discern where the cracks appear, when and where we must as Christians say no. It takes great theological insight.

Is this absence of limits, this sense of infinite choice, also related to the breakdown of church discipline?

The moment a church tries to discipline any member, that person can just take off and go down the street to another church. Put very simply, what’s killing Christianity is democracy. It is a degraded form of democracy, whose habits we bring into the church and then assume that we don’t need to be under orders. “Who’s the minister to tell us what to think? We get to make this stuff up.” Democracy is killing us because the American church has no appropriate sense of authority. We think every authority is authoritarian.

I don’t think we’ll recover proper church authority by focusing on authority itself. You’ve got to be the kind of community that has good things to do and be. If you have good things to do, then no one will question the authority necessary to doing it. My father was a bricklayer. When you learn to lay brick you can go out and your dad can show you, “Hold the trowel this way.” And you think, no, I’m going to hold it another way. Dad will let you do that for a day or so until your wrist wears out. Then you’ve learned to listen when he says, “Spread your mud this way along the course.” If you’re bricking a building, you learn pretty quickly that there are some people that know better than other people about how to do it. That’s how authority works.

Unfortunately, under the sway of liberalism, where it is assumed that a society consists of antithetical individual wills that somehow must be forced to cooperate, authority cannot help but appear as arbitrary and authoritarian.

So much professional theology has been and continues to look to the academy for its standards and its self-esteem. Do you think there’s a future for theology primarily in service to the church rather than the academy?

I can’t imagine any other future. When theologians write primarily for other theologians, then you know you’re in trouble. You can’t sustain the theological past that way. University culture itself is not healthy. One of the things that you see among a very talented group of people is the agony of influence. So you write another brilliant article or book on Milton. Whose life are you making better?

And so academic publishing becomes one-upmanship.

That could happen to theology—it probably already has, in a lot of ways. But what’s wonderful about being a theologian is that there’s no way in the modern university that the theologian can be seen as a legitimate academic. So we can have a hell of a lot of fun, make hay while the sun shines. Because theologians do have an audience. We still have Christians in the world that think what we do should be taken seriously as part and parcel of their lives.

Of course, there is a difficulty. There’s a deep alienation between theologians and people who have no theological training. That’s why, from the very beginning of my work, I’ve written not just technical but also more accessible material. I’ve taken some academic hits for that, but the mixed genre of my work has always been intentional. I’m eternally grateful to Will Willimon for helping me write Resident Aliens. I could never have done that on my own. And I really like that little book that he and I did on the Lord’s Prayer, Lord Teach Us. I want to write Sunday- school literature.

Yet you also continue serious intellectual engagement.

Theologians need to do that on behalf of the church. And I also understand that I have a responsibility to acquire secular power. I train Ph.D. students. They’ll need jobs. So I have to work in a way that commands the respect of people not only in academic theology but also elsewhere in the university.

But part of what is quite wonderful about being a theologian in the world in which we live is that now Christians are in a position of disempowerment. We have to know what our critics think, but they don’t have to know about us. I have to read Richard Rorty. I have to read John Rawls. They don’t have to read me or other theologians. So there’s a certain sense in which being in the position we’re in creates necessities that are good for us.

It ends up being a very good time for theology—a horrible time for the church, but a wonderful time for theology. Professional or academic theologians are free. When you’re no longer in power, you’re no longer beholden to reinforcing the reigning intellectual formations. The intellectual formations are always, it seems to me, about the reification of the world in a way that will convince people that the way things are is the way things have to be. So universities are gigantic theodical projects to educate students into thinking, “Yes, I guess it’s right that politics is distinguishable from economics.” But now theology no longer has a stake in those theodical projects. We can think freely about politics or economics in a way that God matters, because we don’t have anything to lose. And I think God did that to us. God wanted to make us free, and he’s done it. It’s a wonderful time, and I hope people feel the genuine joy that comes through my work.

I work very hard, but it’s a joy that I get to think the way I get to think.

You often speak with a great deal of appreciation for Roman Catholicism—enough so that I’ve got to ask: Why isn’t Stanley Hauerwas a Roman Catholic?

The first answer I always give is that my wife’s a priest, ordained in the Methodist Church. And of course she cannot be a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. I take it the rightness of women in leadership is one of the hard-won discoveries that came largely through the Enlightenment—a development out of the Enlightenment that is correct. And we have to wait in patience and pain for the Roman Catholics to discover that. They may discover it through us. These things take centuries. Also, I couldn’t become a Roman Catholic and continue to teach at Duke. It wouldn’t be a matter of integrity. I would have to become a Catholic moral theologian. But I am a committed Methodist, as silly as that is. I mean, Methodism is a movement that by accident became a church. In any event, as a Methodist theologian, I teach Methodists what I take to be a Methodist position.

Of course, Catholicism and Methodism aren’t your only influences. Your work is also marked by Anabaptism. How can a theologian consistently have his thought shaped by both Saint Augustine and Mennonites?

[Baptist theologian] Jim McClendon has told me, “You’ve got to remember that if Augustine were alive today he’d kill you and me.” And that’s probably right. He might have thought of us as proto-Donatists. But my attention to different theological sources has to do with my belief that part of the theologian’s task is to constantly hold himself accountable to past voices in the Christian tradition, and—even in disagreement—to honor those voices in a manner that we can make the most constructive use possible of them.

My attention to Augustine has partly aimed to suggest that we Anabaptists are not fleeing from what good rule means. Remember that for Augustine what’s crucial in good government is the true worship of God. Without the true worship of God, justice is not possible. And without justice you don’t have true government. On Augustinian grounds, Christians serve the wider social order by providing exemplification of truthful and thus just worship of God. I read Aquinas similarly. And Aquinas, next to Barth, is the theologian that I go back to time and time again for instruction and help.

What about subcultural Protestant evangelicalism? What does that movement have to offer the rest of the church?

Energy. The evangelicals have great energy and I have a great respect for energy. I think, for example, of the work that InterVarsity Fellowship does on campuses. These are people who ask other people not just to come to church but to be Christians. That’s absolutely wonderful, because most Christians don’t know how to ask other people to be Christians anymore. The problem with IVCF and other evangelical movements is that they’ve got the New Testament now. There’s not enough appreciation of the Christian tradition in between the New Testament and today to give evangelicals the resources either to diagnose the enemies within or to know how to resist. The evangelical movement generally tends to be too pietistic for me.

How would you define “pietistic”?

Pietism confuses personal experience with ecclesial formation.

On some level or another, it appears that many evangelicals may be yearning for richer ecclesial formation. As you may know, students at a number of evangelical Protestant schools have over the past couple of decades gotten increasingly interested in Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, and more recently in Eastern Orthodoxy. But these developments have dismayed a number of evangelical theologians and other leaders. How much do you think evangelicals should care if their children embrace Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy?

I think they ought to rejoice. Then their children have the best possible of all worlds and the parents did good. Look, there’s no way that evangelical life is sustainable within a liberal economy. And so their children are just figuring out now where you have to go to survive. Evangelical parents ought to be happy about that.

Why is evangelical life not sustainable in a liberal economy?

There’s no way it will be able to resist, for example, the church-growth movement. Churches in the church-growth movement may last ten years, but I don’t think they’ll last a century. Evangelicalism cannot help but be susceptible to a market economy to try to attract people on the grounds that “we have what you’ve been looking for.” Traditional Christianity says, “Outside Christ and the church, you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re looking for. That’s why you need us to reshape you and your desires.” It’s not by accident that the most effective church-growth movements have come out of evangelicalism. It’s not by accident either that Amway is a movement of Calvinist evangelicialism. Amway is Calvinistic revivalism put to use to sell soap, and it works very well in the short run. But it will be very hard for evangelicals to last beyond two or three generations of their original formations.

We’ve been talking about what I’ve called “subcultural evangelicalism”—North American conservative Protestants very concerned to use the term evangelical to identify themselves. But Robert Jenson, Carl Braaten, and others—including yourself—talk about catholic evangelicals and are concerned that the Reformation churches, at least originally, wanted to reform Catholic Christianity rather than to permanently break away from it or create an ongoing alternative to it. Do you think there’s hope for recovering a vital, institutionally embodied catholic evangelicalism or evangelical catholicism?

I’d stake my life on it.

What would be your short dictionary definition of evangelical catholicism?

It’s sacramental Christianity committed to witness to the world for the conversion of others who do not share that worship.

Okay, here’s a scenario. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Christians decide Hauerwas has it right. Puffs of white smoke escape from the top of Duke Chapel and Stanley Hauerwas is named pope. Then the people say, “Tell us how to be and do church in this time and place.” What would Pope Stanley’s first encyclical say?

I don’t know how to answer, but let me say that it is an extraordinarily important question. Because I realized some years ago, and it was a realization I did not want, that it is not enough simply to try to do theology. You must also try to help the church imagine what it would be like if your theology is true.

One of the first things we would need is a damn good prayer book.

We have to start giving examples of the kinds of ways we have to learn to pray as Christians today, where it doesn’t appear that our praying is something we stop life to do, and then we go ahead and do what we were going to do anyway. How our lives become prayer is absolutely crucial for institutionalizing this kind of Christianity. What our church government would look like would be another important matter.

What I don’t want to do is encourage any notion that we have to think it up on our own. I think we’ve got most of what we need. We just have to know how to manage that which already lies like gold before us, but that we can’t see it at the moment.

You can see that I have difficulty answering your question, but the question is just right. One commentator has articulated my objectives better than I could:

I want the Catholics to be more Anabaptist, the Anabaptists to be more Catholic, and the Protestants to be both.

Rodney Clapp is the author of A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (InterVarsity).

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

In 1941, a Philadelphia Presbyterian minister named C. E. Macartney conducted a poll to see whom his local fellow Christians thought to be “the ten greatest men in the Bible.” Isaiah came eighth on this list—not, presumably, on account of any record of his life (there is none), but on the strength alone of the book that bears his name. The opinion of prewar Philadelphia Presbyterians, it turns out, was remarkably consonant with the opinion of earlier ages. Moreover, it tallies with that of the postwar generation in every Christian denomination from Catholics to the Salvation Army. But the Isaiah who loomed in the imagination of the Presbyterians, suggests John F. A. Sawyer, may bear surprisingly little relationship to the Isaiah cherished by either medieval or postmodern theologians. The “fifth Gospel,” it appears, has been an unusually protean text, warm wax in the hands of many a maker of images.

Though Sawyer does not stress it, there is nonetheless a strong thread that binds most of the diversity together: messianism. Divergence among interpreters through the centuries is usually about what messianic deliverance might mean.

A quick overview helps establish the point. For Saint Jerome (A.D.. 342-420), Isaiah “should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet because he describes all the mysteries of Christ and the Church so clearly that you would think he is composing a history of what has already happened rather than prophesying about what is to come.” Saint Ambrose and his star pupil, Saint Augustine (a.d. 354-430), echo this view, emphasizing additionally Isaiah’s role in “the calling of the Gentiles.” The Wycliffe Bible Prologue follows suit (“not only a profete but more, a Gospellere”), and so, with varying emphasis, do the Reformation writers Luther and Calvin, for whom, above all, “the word of God abides forever.”

Jewish traditions also feature Isaiah centrally, not only in lectionaries—in which, at least, since the Middle Ages, about half of all haftaroth (weekly readings from the prophets) come from this book—but particularly in Zionist writings since the nineteenth century and visibly on Holocaust memorials such as the magnificently somber Yad v’shem in Jerusalem (cf. Isa. 56:5), where the emphasis is on the restoration of Israel. And for quite other purposes Isaiah is a staple of Catholic liberation theologians and “swords into plowshares” revolutionaries such as Daniel and Philip Berrigan, as well as of feminist theologians like Susanne Heine, Phyllis Trible, Rosemary Radford Reuther, and Dorothee Soelle.

Of the two works reviewed here, Sawyer’s is the book most useful for reflection on these hermeneutical questions, simply because it is a history of Isaiah interpretation in Christianity. Sawyer believes that the myriad formal commentaries on Isaiah in our own time are often barren with respect to the affective power of this richly poetic part of Scripture; obsession with “the original meaning of the original text” has blinded the commentators to the value of a rich interpretative tradition found not only in earlier formal commentaries but in preaching down the centuries, in hymns and other music, and in art and literature. What Sawyer offers as antidote is a lively and cross-disciplinary Rezeptionsgeschichte, a review of how Isaiah has been understood and, especially, used by its Christian readers. As a variant on reader-response criticism, the primary source material for a contextualizing of Isaiah’s text is these past readings “in preference to archaeology and ancient near-eastern parallels.” The result is an impressive scholarly resource, sobering in its implications for exegetes, and at the same time an entertaining and culturally enriching survoler of the development of certain aspects of Christian theology.

Sawyer is less interested in theory than in what he calls the “empirical dimension” of textual interpretation. Consistently, he has attempted a descriptive (if selective) rather than evaluative study. While it is clear that he himself has been involved in feminist and interfaith appropriations of Isaiah, for the most part he steers commendably close to his stated attempt of an “objective” reporting. Sawyer’s guiding conviction, however—that we ought to be free to select from the full range of interpretation history a “meaning” for the text “more effective in its context, or more beautiful, or more historically significant, or indeed more ethically acceptable than the original” (here he cites Elizabeth SchŸssler Fiorenza)—need not be shared in order for the reader to appreciate the value of his comparatist approach.

To wit: the early church, patristic writers, medieval church, and Reformation writers saw each, in their turn, elements in Isaiah’s prophetic witness that to some degree were not noticed as forcefully by the others. We, in our turn, now have available to us a compendium of insight—a fuller, richer, and more complete appreciation of a text too polysemous to yield itself completely to any singular reading.

The earliest Christian interpreters used Isaiah primarily to authorize their mission to the Gentiles. This is already evident in Romans 14-15, where Saint Paul cites the “root of Jesse” image from Isaiah 11:10 (rather than Isa. 11:1), presumably because in the context he is less concerned with the human ancestry of Jesus than he is with pointing to him “who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope” (Rom. 15:13). And such promises persist: Paul’s evangelical emphasis returns in a refractory fashion in the nineteenth century, when a reference to the “land of Sinim” (Isa. 49:12) provided missionaries to China with a motto, and mission hymnody could refer to the overcoming of pagan bondage with Isaiah 45:2, 14, 23, “Lift up your heads, ye gates of brass,” and “To Christ shall every nation bow.”

Patristic writers emphasize (as later, for other reasons, did Northrop Frye) the counterintuitive literary unity of Isaiah, a unity grounded less in overt design than in an astonishingly accurate spiritual prefigurement of salvation history. Sawyer himself gives two pages of running excerpts from Isaiah that so perfectly outline the gospel narrative as to arrest the most jaded reader. He does not take up a related issue—the manner of the book’s division into chapters in the thirteenth century. I have myself often wondered whether the chapter divisions introduced by Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton (d. 1228) were not calculated in such a fashion as to express this unity. Do Isaiah’s 66 chapters, in a synechdoche of the 66 canonical books of the Bible, prefigure, in their central division, the two testaments—the first part ending on a dour note at the end of chapter 39 (with Hezekiah’s witless invitation to Israel’s destruction) and chapter 40 commencing the 27-chapter announcement of the Good News of consolation, restoration, and reconciliation? For a book that comprises so many genres and layers, Isaiah has, on so many counts, an astonishing capacity to project the unity of the larger biblical anthology.

The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity
by John F. A. Sawyer
Cambridge Univ. Press
281 pp.; $54.95, hardcover;
$17.95, paper

The fathers, however, had no chapter divisions. Typology was their preoccupation. Exegetes such as Augustine and Jerome emphasized reference to the Virgin Birth (Isa. 7:14), the Sanctus (6:3), the Suffering Servant (52:13, chap. 53) or “Man of Sorrows” of later medieval art, certain elements of medieval angelology, such as the six-winged seraph (Isa. 6), and the messianic prophecies they found echoed in Virgil’s Eclogue IV. They were the first to see the ox and the ass at the manger (Isa. 1:3) as prophetic of Jesus’ birth—and to thus instaurate an iconographic tradition familiar to every Christian.

Later on, Isaiah also played a key role in the establishment and development of the cult of Mary. In late medieval and Renaissance Annunciation paintings, Mary is typically found reading Isaiah 7:14 (in Latin) at the moment Gabriel arrives to announce the Messiah’s conception; it is not unusual, as in the Isenheim altarpiece of Matthias GrŸnewald, to show Isaiah hovering in the background (here he holds his text in the “original Hebrew” for comparison), and Isaiah often appears alongside Mary in early Christian art. In the Bible moralise (thirteenth century), Isaiah points to the Virgin Mary in a rocky wilderness holding a lamb in her arms (Isa. 51:1); the motif may have been adapted by Leonardo da Vinci in his Madonna of the Rocks in the Louvre. Much later, Isaiah 61:10 was prescribed as the introitus to the mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, instituted by Pope Pius IX in 1854. More problematically, Isaiah has been employed in the promotion of anti-Semitism.

Sawyer is properly concerned with the history of anti-Semitic Isaiah interpretation not only in the Middle Ages (e.g., Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century De Fide Catholica ex Veteri et Novo Testamento contra Judaeos) but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well. While the “ox knows his owner, the ass his master’s crib” invites a charming Christmas typology, the prophet’s next line has been wielded in such a way as to undo the charm: “Israel, my people, knows nothing” (Isa. 1:3). Suddenly the image, like the veiled Synagoga that appears opposite Ecclesia in medieval church portals, can seem to have become polemical.

Luther best illustrates the special interest of the Reformation in Isaiah, not in any abandonment of anti-Semitism, but in his choosing three new emphases. These are: (1) “the Word of God abides forever” (Isa. 40:6-8), which for Luther (though not Calvin) means narrowly the text of Scripture ipsum; (2) a declamation against idolatry (Isa. 41:7; 44:9-10), here focusing especially on biblical art, especially art representing the Virgin Mary; and (3) the importance of education: “all thy children will be taught of the Lord (54:13).” The Reformer thus, like Jerome, sees Isaiah as privileged among the prophets, but for quite different reasons. Isaiah is no longer primarily the prophet of the nativity or of the Virgin Mary or of the Suffering Messiah, but preeminently the champion of truth in an unjust society. The principal text is 40:8; Luther encouraged his followers to embroider it upon their sleeves (cf. Deut. 6:8). Sawyer sees a clear link between Luther’s emphasis and that of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum, Nov. 18, 1965), though he notes that verses 6-8 are still omitted from the prescribed Catholic readings for the second Sunday in Advent, as well as from related Catholic hymns (not to mention all other modern lectionaries).

Isaiah: Spirit of Courage, Gift of Tears
by Daniel Berrigan
Fortress Press
156 pp.; $17

Evangelicals should find it a matter for careful reflection that Luther is inspirational for the kind of unranked interpretative pluralism Sawyer champions. The starting place is Scripture, but the platform is really one’s own interpretation:

When one considers that for Luther “the word of God stands forever,” one cannot help comparing this constant recourse to Isaiah 40:8 with his most famous axiom “Here I stand . …” 40:8 expresses his passionate belief that God has revealed to him the true meaning of the Bible.

Accordingly, Sawyer suggests, evangelicals have been idiosyncratic in their more individualistic use of Isaiah. John Wesley uses it hardly at all, while the great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon makes a wide and imaginative use of Isaiah throughout his sermons. On the other hand, there are predictable hallmark affections: Isaiah figures as prominently in The Song Book of the Salvation Army (1986) as in the rhetoric of the liberation theologians.

Perhaps the most interesting cultural appropriations of Isaiah occur in art and literature, which get rather skimpy treatment here, despite Sawyer’s proper insistence on their importance. Part of the value of this perspective, it seems to me, is revealed in the way art and literature in the modern period tend to highlight popular abuse of Scripture. One thinks, for example, of Melville’s White Jacket, where midnineteenth-century Americans might too readily confirm a triumphalist (and secularizing) prejudice that Isaiah himself would most obviously have deplored:

[W]e Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. … The political Messiah has come. But he had come in us. … [Our] national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world.

Yet on such points Sawyer is less steady than he might be. He thinks, for example, that Isaiah might have scrupled to find distorting the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s removal of “justice” from Isaiah 45:8, substituting for it “quietness”:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of thy peace.

In fact, prophet and poet are both misrepresented in this instance. Neither the Hebrew text (tsedeq) nor the KJV translation used by Whittier (“righteousness”) uses the word justice at all (nor do RSV, JPS, etc.). More pertinently, there is no plausible evocation of Isaiah anywhere in Whittier’s lovely hymn: Whittier’s work is a prayer for God’s peace such as settled in the hearts of those who heard Jesus teach “beside the Syrian sea”; his line “Drop thy still dews of quietness” (not, as in Isaiah, “Drop down, ye heavens”) invokes, in fact, a host of Old Testament references to the salubrious teaching of God (Deut. 32:2; 33:28), by whose knowledge “the clouds drop down the dew” (Prov. 3:20) and whose very presence with his people shall in the time of their return to him descend upon them in blessing “as the dew” (Hos. 14:5).

Such a double misrepresentation is not a good way for Sawyer to make his point about the value of literary interpretation of Isaiah, or to raise the query, valid in itself, that follows immediately upon this unfortunate example. What he wants to ask is: Are we entitled to pray for peace while we evade the question of justice? Undeniably this is a question with which the book of Isaiah is directly concerned from the very beginning (e.g., 1:1-20).

It is also the question that prompts Daniel Berrigan in Isaiah: Spirit of Courage, Gift of Tears, and to it his answer is uncompromisingly negative. Berrigan’s is not in the least an academic book. It is rather an extended sermon, and inasmuch as Isaiah provides his text, it is by way of highly idiosyncratic selection, editing, and imaginative translating (excerpts from the New Jerusalem Bible with alterations heavily subtended by Phyllis Trible). Berrigan chooses from amongst the prophet’s concerns one above all to feature. He got his own “prophetic” start as a Jesuit antiwar protester. Unlike many activists from the Vietnam War era, he has (along with his brother Philip) stayed the course; his Plowshares community in the inner city of New York is characterized by social action against the “military industrial complex” in matters both of practical compassion and public disturbance. (No quietist he.) Berrigan’s key text is that which also captivates liberation theologians of the ilk of Miranda, Gutierrez, and Lohfink: “They will beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning knives. Nevermore war—never again!” (cf. 2:4).

Berrigan’s Isaiah ranks much more highly than eighth among great personalities of the Bible. He is a kind of superhero—almost himself messianic—a visionary who “refused to separate public responsibility from the voice of God within.” No mere na-vi-‘, simply a mouthpiece for the word of the Lord, he “becomes the measure of our own possibility of seeing, hearing, understanding with the heart, of being healed.” For Berrigan, “the ‘holy’ lives in Isaiah and in those who, like him, take the word of God seriously.”

In Berrigan’s case, taking the word of God seriously means taking your own appropriation of it seriously enough to attack military hardware with hammers and, further, rejecting the Catholic church’s ecclesiastical authority in the constraint of such actions. His troubled reflections on the theological and ethical complexity of such appropriations of authority may, however, seem eerily familiar to students of Reformation history (cf. Roland Bainton’s biography of Luther). Berrigan muses about the consequences of going perhaps too far: “[A]n anathema is inevitable. You presume for yourself the word of God, immemorially entrusted to priesthood and temple. Dare you thus blaspheme?”

Well, for better or worse, he dares. “Do not imagine that some magic or other will beat the world’s swords into plowshares,” he writes. “You yourselves must act.” He reviles the “just-war nonsense” of past and present moral theologians, and the dispiriting evasions of “preachers of an American pseudo-gospel and the tempests of secular culture, by turns enticing and brutal, [which] all but swamp us.” In Berrigan’s U.S.A.,

Sometime shortly after the Civil War, the strange gods of empire entered the land with a rush. It was the beginning of an apocalypse of power and dominion—and ruin. We have never succeeded in casting off that foreign spirit that holds us in tight bondage.

In consequence, America is for him no new Israel but “a Babylon become our native land,” a society governed by “megamachinery of untruth”:

In an election year the airwaves and video waves heat up. Promises, promises pollute the air; glib henchmen utter their foolishness, the media echo like a cave of bats—mewings, strokings, choler, anger, vituperation, verbal abuse and scufflings, much dust flung about, no clarity. Bread and circuses are expended broadside, money seduces and unsettles and buys and sells opinions and promises that are of absolutely no sense or worth.

Berrigan writes well, and much of his eloquent diatribe (more reminiscent of Amos or Jeremiah) is close enough on the mark to make an honest reader squirm. Surely our culture is indeed naked before the just judgment of God, and surely, as he says, “the nations will one day see” that “God is not the God of the big achievers and half-believers, but of the helpless, the needy, the victimized, the distressed” (24:4-5). Berrigan’s experience in San Salvador lends pith to his passion. For him America is a land in which “Christians consider themselves justified by keeping the law”—the law, which exists, he believes, primarily to advantage the holding of property and the amassing of wealth: “Sanctity, righteousness … are spurious. ‘Under God,’ as they say. Under God, and unjust.”

It is easy to imagine how many have taken offense at Berrigan’s accusations. He is no patriot, either, and that to some will be his least forgivable offense. On other grounds, his reflexive embrace of Trible’s “Herself” renditions of the Servant Songs of Isaiah seems a defiance of orthodoxy more for the sake of defiance itself than out of concern for any kind of accountability to his text. Moreover, the targets of his own prophetic invective may seem a good deal more selective than the Book of Isaiah warrants. I for one do not see how any principled critique of violence in American culture can withhold criticism of television, cinema, and the pornographic Internet. And if one is to prophesy credibly against “the American culture of death” and be consistent with Isaiah, then abortion and euthanasia call for more than a phrase en passant. But all these reservations aside, I think contemporary Christians still need to reckon with Berrigan’s criticism of the “faithful,” in some of which, it seems to me, he is most faithful to Isaiah:

There flourishes at large a hyper-spiritualized version of salvation. It is intensely concerned with self, with “rapture” (and the devil take the hindmost). Such salvation ferments, to all appearances, in the head only, a kind of pseudo-ecstasy, without cost or empathy or a sense of the suffering of the innocent. It is little concerned with our culture of death, or a critique of same, and much concerned with something known as the “afterlife.”

So understood, salvation also welcomes, without critique or second thought, assimilation into mainstream America (a polluted stream, if ever one flowed), into cultural attitudes toward women, money, success, ego, and, perhaps above all, violence . …

Implied in this view is a quite clear conviction, a cultural one to be sure, that there is nothing seriously wrong with America. Quite the contrary, America is God’s finest triumph.

America is for Berrigan no new Israel but “a Babylon become our native land,” a society governed by “megamachinery of untruth.”

Sawyer’s book lacks the passion of Berrigan’s, even as it has over it a decisive advantage as scholarship. For all that, these books sit fairly comfortably side by side on the shelf. Both teach us important things about the witness of Scripture within and without the church; each is limited by a curiously common failure to see that, for all of the partiality in interpretation in every place and time, the common threads that run through the fabric of our historic understanding are not only many, but most are persistently visible and anchoring.

I think of the converted slave trader John Newton, for example, author of the now universal hymn “Amazing Grace.” In a series of 38 sermons (1785-86) Newton took up, Sunday by Sunday, the texts featured in the libretto to Handel’s Messiah (then enjoying a successful rerun at Westminster). Many of Handel’s texts, of course, are from Isaiah, and in his treatment of them, Newton hits on almost all of the emphases that Sawyer places, reasonably, along a historical line of development. It is true that Newton does not anticipate the “immanentizing of God” so prominent among some of the liberation theologians (he would have regarded this as a hideous, blasphemous self-arrogation), but long before contemporary feminists, he corrects a mistranslation of Isaiah 40:9 to note that “the publisher of these good tidings is written with a feminine construction,” and that it was customary in Israel “for the woman to publish and celebrate good news with songs and instruments,” instancing Miriam’s song, the women announcing David’s victory, and Deborah’s song of victory. “In my text,” Newton writes, the prophet speaks proleptically the “Good News, glad tidings indeed! … The women are, therefore, called upon to proclaim his approach, on the tops of the hills and mountains, from whence they may be seen and heard to the greatest advantage, for the spreading of the tidings throughout the whole country” (Works 4.68-69).

I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Newton qualifies in Trible’s sense (or Sawyer’s or Berrigan’s) as a feminist. He has a very different order of relationship to the authority of Scripture as revelation, for one thing. But his application of the text makes use of a legitimate textual meaning, even if inferential, to extend the good news without distorting it, and his sense of the social meaning of Isaiah for us all will bear firm company with Berrigan’s. All of which suggests that there is more consistency in the church’s interpretation of Isaiah through the ages than has met the eye of either of our contemporary commentators. Just for the sake of perspective, let me give the old evangelical the last word—the conclusion to one of his sermons on Isaiah:

We call ourselves the followers and servant of him who was despised of men, and encompassed with sorrows. And shall we then “seek great things for ourselves,” as if we belonged to the present world, and expected no portion beyond it? Or shall we be tremblingly [sensitive] to the opinion of our fellow-creatures and think it a great hardship if it be our lot to suffer shame for his sake, who endured the cross, and despised the same for us?

(Newton, Works 4.208)

Well, these are after all the questions any honest reading of the gospel—including Isaiah’s “gospel”—will have to conjure with, and to answer. They persist as Scripture persists, from age to age, our own preoccupations notwithstanding.

America is for Berrigan no new Israel but “a Babylon become our native land,” a society governed by “megamachinery of untruth.”

David Lyle Jeffrey is professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author most recently of People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

Christians exhibit a peculiar double-mindedness on the subject of worship. Nothing is as likely to stir passions in local congregations as a proposal to change the form of worship. Even modest modifications—the introduction of a hymn in a church that sings all praise songs, for example—can lead to bitter divisions. And yet at the same time, there is abundant evidence that the church regards worship as a matter of secondary importance. The typical survey of the history of Christianity can go on for several hundred pages with only a passing reference to the worship practices of earlier Christians. Many works in systematic theology probe the implications of a given doctrine for personal and social ethics while entirely neglecting its implications for worship. Many Christian artists, musicians, and architects save their best work for contexts outside the worshiping assembly. And worship courses often function as the plankton on the seminary curricular food chain.

These new works by Bernhard Lang, Frank Senn, Geoffrey Wainwright, and James White move in a decidedly different direction. As Lang notes, this is a topic “too intriguing, too puzzling, and too beautiful to be passed over in silence.”

1.The first contribution of these four books is their impressive survey of the dazzling variety of Christian worship practices. Many of Christianity’s most poignant and colorful moments have happened when believers have gathered for worship.

Imagine being served daily doses of Origen’s allegorizing exegesis in the schoollike daily worship services in third-century Caesarea. Origen, Lang teaches us, was a pioneer of exegetical preaching, working through the entire Old Testament every three years. (Wouldn’t Zwingli have been pleased?)

Imagine the terror of standing alongside the self-assured Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing, whose destructive axe undid centuries’ worth of painstaking artistic craftsmanship in a fortnight. At least, White reminds us, Dowsing appreciated the intrinsic power of artistic works to shape the piety of a community, in contrast to many today who view liturgical art as nothing more than innocuous decoration.

Imagine being overcome by the effervescent energy of Shaker prophetess Ann Lee, whose “whirling” followers made liturgical dance a community event. As Lang remarks, worship in North America can be as ecstatic as any the world has seen.

Imagine the joy and fervor of Roman Catholic worshipers in Zaire who, following the reforms of Vatican II, have developed a vernacular, indigenous Missal for the Dioceses of Zairethat unites the solemn recitation of the ancient Eucharistic prayer with exuberant congregational dance and vivid African poetic images. The result, Wainwright observes, is a “splendidly Nicene affirmation … in African terms.”

No other religion in recorded history features such a dazzling variety of ritual practices: everything from elaborate Byzantine vigils to exuberant Methodist frontier camp meetings; from the Dionysian ecstasy of the Toronto Laughter to the Apollonian reserve of a Presbyterian sermon. Everything from the trancelike seizures of Maria Woodworth-Etter to the precise rhetorical patterns of the Book of Common Prayer; from the brilliance of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to the kitsch of burlap banners. Everything from the serene beauty of a Palestrina motet to the rugged earthiness of an Appalachian gospel quartet; from the sophisticated majesty of Chartres to the folk art that adorns a thatched-roof sanctuary; from the enforced silence of Quaker corporate mysticism to the sustained exuberance of an African American ring shout sermon.

These four books feature a common desire to look at this landscape with a wide-angle lens. After a whirlwind tour that crosses continents and centuries, the thoughtful reader will come away with a deepened sense of the variety and complexity of Christian worship.

This acknowledgment of diversity is a sign of the maturing of the academic discipline of liturgical studies. These works demonstrate that the academic study of Christian worship need not be limited to critical editions of medieval missals. The discipline of liturgical studies is large enough to encompass sociologists who compare patterns of liturgical leadership in Africa and Southeast Asia, intellectual historians who study the philosophical underpinnings of the rise of baroque architecture or music, social historians working on the cultural and economic dimensions of Methodist quarterly meetings or Pentecostal revivals, and theologians working on the liturgical implications of the doctrine of the Trinity.

This broad view also provides a sturdy basis from which to examine the complexities of the present period of liturgical change. With the possible exception of the first centuries after Christ, never before has the church been reforming its liturgy in so many directions at once. Some churches have rediscovered historic patterns of worship; many others have intentionally developed styles labeled “contemporary” or “alternative.” While some churches are busy buying brand-new hymnals, others are discarding theirs, not to be replaced.

Whether a church is urban or rural, large or small, endowed with many musical and financial resources or few, whether it is Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Reformed, Roman Catholic, independent, or just about anything else, it is probably dealing with the pressure of change. Some of these changes are so significant that major national media, including ABCNews, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, and Newsweek, have devoted significant energies to analyzing them.1 Some churches are approaching such changes eagerly and expectantly; others are embroiled in “worship wars.”2

2. Negotiating these currents of change requires the kind of discernment and perception that can only be sharpened by careful consideration of how generations of past Christians have rendered faithful worship in countless cultural settings. Fortunately, in the hands of these skilled interpreters, liturgical history becomes not only instructive but also engaging. The lessons they teach are crucial for understanding the meaning and significance of Christian worship. Consider two of them.

First, they teach us that liturgy is a universal phenomenon. Despite the protest of Puritan divine John Cotton (“ceremonies wee use none”), even the most stubbornly iconoclastic, antiliturgical community soon falls into a regular rhythm in times and modes of corporate prayer. Even the most spontaneous service often follows a predictable, if not prescribed, structure. Saint Peter’s Basilica has its liturgy, but so does Willow Creek Community Church—and so did Azusa Street. See any Christian assembly through the eyes of a cultural anthropologist and you will notice deep patterns of actions and community relationships that are routine, even if not explicitly prescribed. An underlying assumption of all four of these books might be stated this way: Every community develops deep patterns for corporate worship. The question every community needs to ask is whether its patterns of prayer make luminous the full gospel of Christ and enable a broad range of people to respond with heart, soul, and voice.

Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship
by Bernhard Lang
Yale Univ. Press
527 pp.; $40

Second, they teach us that it is remarkably hard for Christian worshipers to live without a language that is, in some sense, sacramental. Worshipers in nearly every Christian tradition experience some of what happens in worship as divine encounter. Differences in Christian worship arise not so much from whether or not God is understood to be present, but rather in what sense.

Those who mock supposedly simplistic theories of sacramental realism at the Lord’s Supper wind up preserving sacramental language for preaching or for music. Speaking only somewhat simplistically: the Roman Catholics reserve their sacramental language for the Eucharist, Presbyterians reserve theirs for preaching, and the charismatics save theirs for music. In a recent pastors’ conference, one evangelical pastor solicited applications for a music director/worship leader position by calling for someone who could “make God present through music.” No medieval sacramental theologian could have said it more strongly. Dare we call this “musical transubstantiation”?

Only the Enlightenment stands as a counterexample to this thesis. All four of these books disparage the Enlightenment, suggesting that it robbed the church of the sense that God acts in and through the public assembly of Christian people for worship. As White notes, Enlightenment Christians viewed the sacraments as mere “infrequent pious memory exercises.” For Enlightenment Christians, a worship service was successful if you left it with one good new thought.

In contrast, postmodern liturgical reform is assiduously focused on the experience of God’s presence. Might this be the unifying theme in such seemingly heterogeneous forms of worship as the richly symbolic Orthodox liturgies, the demonstrative physicality of Pentecostal worship, the shock tactics of high-tech multimedia presentations, and the mantralike refrains of Taize?

3.Three of these works come from familiar sources. Geoffrey Wainwright is a British Methodist by birth who has taught theology on four continents and is currently professor of theology at Duke University Divinity School. He writes as a seasoned theologian and ecumenist, self-described as an “evangelical, orthodox, and catholic” Christian. Worship with One Accord is a collection of essays that reflects Wainwright’s explorations since the publication of his magisterial systematic theology, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life. These essays investigate such diverse topics as Irish penitential rites, liturgical reforms in Australia, the work of French patristic and liturgical scholar Jean Danielou, Trinitarian liturgical theology, Wesleyan sacramental theology, liturgical inculturation, and the relationship between worship and ethics. Wainwright’s overarching argument is that liturgical renewal is a necessary ingredient in the quest for Christian unity. His goal is to promote what Rome’s Edward Cardinal Cassidy calls “the cause of reunion in historic Christianity.”

James F. White is a Methodist elder who teaches liturgy at the University of Notre Dame. Christian Worshipis a collection of essays chosen from among his 120 or so published essays from the past 35 years. As with his earlier volumes—Protestant Worship, Roman Catholic Worship, A Brief History of Christian Worship, and Introduction to Christian Worship—White is at his best when summarizing complex movements and figures into memorable, popular accounts that are accurate as well as accessible. Add to this White’s gift, rarely evidenced in liturgical historiography, for remaining hospitable when writing about movements and traditions other than his own and it is no wonder that his works are ubiquitous on syllabi in seminary worship courses.

White’s work also reflects a lifelong interest and expertise in liturgical art and architecture. After reading White, the observant reader becomes something of an amateur architectural connoisseur, noting such delicious historical ironies in Anytown, USA, as the presence of a Georgian Roman Catholic church alongside a Baptist church in Gothic style.

Frank Senn is a Notre Dame graduate and Lutheran pastor from Evanston, Illinois. His Christian Liturgyis a chronological liturgical history of encyclopedic dimensions. With its introductory chapters on ritual theory, its comprehensive view of liturgical history from Acts 2 to Vatican II, Senn’s work might be thought of as a one-volume summary of a Notre Dame Ph.D. in liturgical studies.

Senn clearly sees the world through Lutheran spectacles (five of six chapters on the Reformation period deal primarily with Lutheran churches), and in contrast to White’s neutrality, Senn inserts more critical commentary and prescriptive directives in his narrative. He promotes robust symbolic movement, gesture, and action, as well as the traditional structure or ordoof Western liturgy. Correspondingly, he critiques North American revivalism in all its forms from Whitefield to Finney to Willow Creek. The result is always thought-provoking, though the book does feature occasional oddities, such as placing an analysis of Gothic architecture in a chapter with the loaded title “Medieval Liturgical Deteriorization.”

Taken together, these three volumes represent what has come to be called the Liturgical Movement among Protestants.3Senn, White, and Wainwright are all active participants in ongoing conversations about liturgical reform among Protestants that have issued from these ecumenical conversations.

The volcanic energy that led up to the enormous changes in Roman Catholic worship promulgated at Vatican II also sent aftershocks throughout the Protestant world. As White observes, Vatican II not only led to Protestantlike reforms in the Roman Catholic church but also provided a catholic agenda for Protestant liturgical renewal. As Wainwright describes it, this movement is “a common return to a shared tradition” (note again his emphasis on ecumenicity).

Symbols of this movement abound: the historical and ecumenical influence on the new worship books of the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the ecumenical acceptance of the Revised Common Lectionary (and the subsequent boom in the publication of lectionary-based sermon helps and worship resources), the genesis and growth of the North American Academy of Liturgy, and the growth of academic programs in the study of worship at the University of Notre Dame, Drew University, and Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.4

The achievements of the Liturgical movement are impressive: mainline preachers concerned about Scripture, Catholics concerned about preaching, Protestants concerned about sacraments, and evangelicals concerned about the early church. The movement has also generated some rich historical ironies. Consider the growth of the number of Mennonites, Brethren, and Nazarenes meeting in lectionary study groups, lighting Advent candles, or holding Ash Wednesday services. And consider the recent spate of works by Roman Catholic liturgists and theologians that argue for baptism by immersion.5So strong is this liturgical convergence in some congregations that the only observable difference, White quips, is that “Catholics use real wine, while Protestants use real bread.”

In sum, these three works represent the maturing fruit of the Liturgical Movement among Protestants.

4. These works are joined by a bold and vast work by the German scholar Bernhard Lang. Not a household name in North American circles, Lang brings to the conversation new interpretive categories and a wealth of rarely discussed historical examples.

Sacred Games is a phenomenological study of the “ritual idiom of Christianity.” Lang organizes the book as a series of “six interpretive essays” based on a “typology of ritual acts” that identifies six paradigmatic, widely observable actions, six “sacred games”: praise, prayer, sermon, sacrifice, sacrament, and spiritual ecstasy. Unlike the typical chronological approach to liturgical history, Lang’s book is topically organized, with a dizzying array of historical vignettes illustrating each of his six categories. This structure frees Lang from the need to write a comprehensive chronological history (like Senn’s). Lang complements this structure with a cool, dispassionate style that is neither impressed nor depressed by the peaks and valleys of liturgical history.

The virtues of the analysis are many. For one, Lang laudably treats biblical descriptions of liturgical events as part of Christian liturgical history, refusing to drive a wedge between the work of biblical and patristic scholars. For another, Lang works with an exemplary awareness of the whole sweep of the history of Christianity. He surveys a history that spans from ancient Greek and Hebrew culture down to our own day (where else could you find well-documented analysis of both Augustine and the Assemblies of God in the same volume?). Sacred Games is a synthetic work of breathtaking scope. It succeeds in demonstrating how large and complex the study of liturgy is.

These strengths are diluted by some uneven treatments of historical data. Lang perpetuates the odd tendency of some Jesus Seminar scholars to speculate about the ritual life of Jesus. (Why would a scholar who approaches the history of Origen or Luther or Plato or Finney with a conservative minimalist treatment of historical data become so speculative when treating the history of Jesus?) Lang suggests, for example, that the Lord’s Prayer would make more sense if attributed to John the Baptist. He softens such claims with caveats about their speculative nature, but hardly answers why such speculation might be necessary in the first place.

Christian Worship in
North America:
A Retrospective, 1955-1995
by James F. White
Liturgical Press
336 pp.; $29.95, paper

Worship with One Accord:
Where Liturgy and
Ecumenism Embrace
by Geoffrey Wainwright
Oxford Univ. Press
276 pp.; $39.95

Christian Liturgy:
Catholic and Evangelical
by Frank C. Senn
Fortress Press
747 pp.; $39.95

Alongside Lang’s historical, comparative analysis runs a deeply theological concern. In the all-too-brief conclusion of the work, he surmises that “two fundamental attitudes govern behavior in Christian worship.” According to one view, God appears as the distant, majestic Father who must be approached with solemnity, ceremony, and awe. According to the other, God appears as a benign, understanding, friendly spirit with whom people can establish a close relationship.

• Like a game—or a good novel—worship enfolds us for a time into a way of seeing the world. It is the one hour in the week when an entire community acknowledges a world where God rules, where evil is named, where hope abounds, where the Spirit is on the move.
• Like a game, worship can only be learned by doing. A long afternoon of reading the baseball rulebook will not help you execute a well-placed bunt. So too, hours of catechetical instruction can not fully prepare you for the joy and mystery of participation at the Lord’s Table.
• Finally, like a good game, worship is joyful business. As Romano Guardini has observed, worship at its best features “a sublime mingling of profound earnestness and divine joyfulness.”

Here then are four books that depict worship as playful but not trifling.

John D. Witvlietdirects the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College.

1. See, for example, Gustav Niebuhr and Paul Goldberger, “Megachurches,” a four-part series in the New York Times, April 16, 18, 20, and 29, 1995; Charles Truehart, “Welcome to the Next Church,” Atlantic Monthly (August 1996), pp. 37-57; and Mary Rourke, “Redefining Religion in America,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1998.

2. This was the title of a theme issue of Dialog, Vol. 33 (Summer 1994).

3.For a description of this as a distinct movement, see John Fenwick and Bryan Spinks, Worship in Transition: The Liturgical Movement in the Twentieth Century (Continuum, 1995), and Kathleen Hughes, How Firm a Foundation: Voices of the Early Liturgical Movement (Liturgy Training Publications, 1990).

4. See Book of Common Worship (Westminster John Knox Press, 1993) and The United Methodist Book of Worship (United Methodist Publishing House, 1992), For more on the graduate program at Notre Dame, see James F. White, “Thirty Years of the Doctoral Program in Liturgical Studies at the University of Notre Dame, 1965-1995,” in Nathan Mitchell and John F. Baldovin, eds., Rule of Prayer, Rule of Faith: Essays in Honor of Aidan Kavanagh, O.S.B. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

5.See, for example, Regina Kuehn, A Place for Baptism (Liturgy Training Publications, 1992), and S. Anita Stauffer, Re-examining Baptismal Fonts:
Baptismal Space for the Contemporary Church (Liturgical Press, 1991).

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & CultureMagazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

In the fall of 1949, a revival campaign was going on in downtown Los Angeles, and there was excitement in the air—perhaps too much excitement. The young evangelist leading the crusade, Billy Graham, was worried. Some famous people had just been converted—a wiretapper for the mob, an Olympic medalist and war hero, and a cowboy musician—and now every night the big tent was swarming with reporters and photographers. Graham feared the carnival atmosphere would drive off the Holy Spirit. So he went to a car in the back corner of the lot for a private conversation with a trusted adviser. There he met J. Edwin Orr, an Irish-born roving revivalist. Orr had a large book with him, ready to point the younger preacher to some wisdom. It was not a Bible, however, but Orr’s doctoral dissertation. Billy Graham was getting a lesson in revival history. Orr quoted a chronicler of the “Prayer Meeting Revival” of 1857-58, who said that the press was “taken possession by the Spirit, willing or unwilling, to proclaim His wonders.” So Orr advised Graham not to fear the news media, for “the Lord may make the American Press act as His publicity agent for nothing.” Graham went forward with renewed confidence.

The wonders of grace, proclaimed by the secular press: that was part of the enduring charm of the Revival of 1857-58. According to its main chroniclers, the Revival started in the fall of 1857, at a prayer meeting in a Dutch Reformed Church in the heart of New York City’s financial district, just as a financial panic began to paralyze the city. Businessmen packed that prayer meeting and others, as they appeared in New York and other cities. Revivals broke out at the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia that winter, while lay teams of evangelists, led by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Methodists, swept through cities. The church periodicals reported revivals in the hinterlands. Then, beginning in late February 1858, two major daily newspapers, the New York Heraldand the New York Tribune, made the Revival continual front-page news. The media publicity convinced many that a great awakening was afoot and encouraged widespread copying of the activities in New York. Then, nearly as suddenly as it had begun, the Revival was over. That summer the ordinary rhythms of church life reappeared, and while some revival activities restarted the following fall and winter, they were largely a diminished afterglow.

The Revival brought some lasting results. In 1858, the Protestant churches recorded their greatest accession ever, of nearly 500,000 new members. The Methodists alone gained 130,000. The newly emerging YMCAwas a chief agent of the Revival and became a leading ministry thereafter. A “revival generation” of religious activists became the nation’s postwar evangelical leaders: Dwight L. Moody, urban mass evangelist; John Wanamaker, exemplary Christian businessman; George H. Stuart, organizer of the United States Christian Commission (a “y”-related ministry to the Union soldiers); holiness advocate Hannah Whitall Smith; Annie Wittenmyer, organizer of the Women’s Temperance Crusade; and Lottie Moon, the legendary Southern Baptist missionary to China.

Ever since, suggests Kathryn T. Long, the author of The Revival of 1857-58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening, this revival has fascinated American evangelicals. Its initial setting was urban, commercial, and middle class, and it emphasized ministry to men. For generations thereafter, the Revival’s mythic memory as God’s invasion of modern, urban America framed evangelicals’ expectations for the next awakening. When Billy Graham preached in Times Square, on Wall Street, in Madison Square Garden, at Yankee Stadium, and in Central Park in 1957, with meetings broadcast on network television, evangelical leaders heard echoes from a century before. Graham had learned his revival history well.

The Revival of 1857-58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening
by Kathryn Teresa Long
Oxford Univ. Press
256 pp.; $TK

Professor Long, who teaches history at Wheaton College, became interested in the Revival because of the contrast between evangelicals’ fascination with the event and historians’ relative lack of interest in it. She discovered that the Revival was indeed a formative historical moment, but that its legacy is not nearly so admirable as evangelical memory would have it.

The midcentury awakening, Long contends, hastened the emergence of a transdenominational evangelical Protestant “establishment,” with a new view about the nature of revivals. The Puritan-derived vision of the righteous republic, in which social reform was the fruit of revival, was being superseded by a more socially conservative ideal, first promoted by the Old School Presbyterians but increasingly adopted by the Baptists and Methodists too: revivals were now “vehicles for evangelization and for middle-class spiritual refreshment rather than agents of cultural transformation.” It was revivalism without social reform.

Long’s thesis challenges the late evangelical historian Timothy L. Smith’s classic work, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (1957). Smith argued that revivalism, augmented by the zeal for moral perfection that revivals ignited and the drive to reform society that moral perfectionism propelled, was a progressive and pervasive cultural force from Charles G. Finney’s revivals in the mid-1830s through to the Civil War.

Smith saw the Revival of 1857-58 as the culmination of this progression. His Revivalism and Social Reformis an eloquent, finely crafted work, which has inspired a generation of reform-minded evangelicals. There was a day, Smith argued, when evangelicals were on the cutting edge for progressive social change in America, from the rights of women to the liberation of the slaves. His pioneering work challenged the established academic view that religion ceased to matter long ago in America, and that its demise was welcome, because it was a retrograde social force. Revivalism and Social Reform, then, is one of the last books that an evangelical historian would set out to devalue, and Professor Long had no such intention. Nevertheless, she demonstrates that the Revival of 1857-58 simply will not bear the interpretive freight that Timothy Smith laid on it. Indeed, she insists, it marked a shift toward a more conservative evangelicalism.

Long’s case runs like this: far from bolstering the reformist side of evangelicalism, the leaders of the Revival excluded it from the main arenas of the awakening. The downtown prayer meetings ruled out any discussion or prayers concerning “controverted points” such as slavery or the public ministry of women. While women were converted at about an even rate with men during the Revival, prayer meeting leaders at its downtown New York epicenter expressed a “desire … that the ladies would keep away.” Downtown meetings in other cities followed suit. Business districts were no place for respectable women, and revival leaders worried about defeating the revival’s effect on businessmen by upsetting the masculine tenor of the meetings. When Harriet Olney, a Methodist exhorter, testified at the YMCAmeeting in New York’s Barton Theater, she was told not to come back. Phoebe Palmer, the Methodist holiness advocate who collaborated with her husband in a number of revivals in Ontario and upstate New York, wrote a defense of women’s right to preach and testify, The Promise of the Father (1857). But she kept her distance from the downtown meetings.

Evangelical reformers of the day noted the conservative turn of the Revival, Long insists, and they protested bitterly. George Cheever, the evangelical antislavery pastor of the Congregational Church of the Puritans in New York, labored long and hard for the Revival, but he was distressed to see this “season of refreshing” running parallel to a “revival of evil,” the tacit Northern acceptance of slavery. Cheever insisted that a “revived and true Christianity” should reawaken an “abhorrence against this infinite abomination.” Smith’s Revivalismalso saw a progression toward the later Social Gospel movement in evangelicals’ efforts to bring salvation and social betterment to the urban poor during the 1840s and 1850s. Long acknowledges that these efforts continued during and after the Revival year, but she also notes elements of change within them. One of Smith’s key cases was Phoebe Palmer’s founding of the Five Points Mission in 1850 on behalf of New York’s poor. According to Long, both Palmer’s mission and several others were shifting their emphasis from conversion-resistant adults toward children by the late 1850s. Evangelical social workers were making their welfare work subservient to evangelism.

This tendency permeated the work of the YMCAand the U.S. Christian Commission as well, Long argues, citing the USCC’s stated mission: to work for “the spiritual good of the soldiers … and incidentally their intellectual improvement and social and physical comfort” (emphasis Long’s). Long asserts that on the eve of the Civil War evangelicals were drawing back from the destitute, the oppressed, and the outcast. Increasingly they concentrated on people more like themselves, such as the young adults served by the ys. And while Long cautiously reminds the reader that some evangelicals persisted with urban ministries, she finds no evidence for increased commitment to such ministries as a result of the Revival.

The new evangelicalism marked a definite departure from the evangelical united front of the 1830s, which had linked voluntary societies for evangelism and social reform. What was behind this conservative turn? First, many evangelicals sensed that revival-fired reform had failed. In 1835, Charles Finney told a New York audience that if Christians did their duty, the millennium could come in three years. By the 1850s it was clear that revivalism had not brought social reform. Now, with their nation in crisis, Northern moderates and conservatives feared that further zealotry would break it apart.

The second factor was an adjustment, more implicit than conscious, to the realities of an urbanizing America. North and South were more interdependent than ever before, and this fact was most evident to the merchants and bankers of New York City, whose welfare depended upon the Southern economy. Antebellum cities now were increasingly multicultural, and the new immigrants were both resistant to evangelization and apparently a threat to urban law and order. The idea, born in Puritan villages, that a revival would bring reform to an entire community, fell hard against the realities of New York City. Even Finney himself eventually made accommodations to the city. His Chatham Street Chapel (founded in 1832) was part of a revival-fired “free church” movement to save New York’s tough neighborhoods. Yet it suffered from continual strife over racial issues and from the decreasing participation of middle-class families. Four years after its founding, the congregation moved to a more middle-class site. By the 1840s, the whole “free church” movement in New York was disintegrating. The evangelical ideal of communitywide awakening, with reforms following, was in decline as well.

On the eve of the Civil War evangelicals were drawing back from the destitute, the oppressed, and the outcast

So what could evangelicals hope for? The conservative view of awakenings, held by Old School Presbyterians and the Dutch Reformed, seemed to fit the situation much better. It emphasized that revival was for the spiritual rejuvenation of churches, and for a fresh harvest of converts. God had his own purposes for society, which he would effect in his own time. Social betterment was an indirect product of a revival, by means of the sober, pious, honest, and decent citizens it created. As their adherents became more middle class, Baptists and Methodists also began to lean toward the conservative outlook on revival. Their earlier emphases on revival-fired emotional excitement, personal liberation, and empowerment for the poor were set aside, along with the New School Calvinists’ expectations of sweeping social reform. A new evangelical consensus began to emerge.

This new evangelicalism had some additional features, Long explains, that were less an adjustment to the new social realities than a heedless embrace of them. One of the most striking was the focus on masculine piety and the ethos of the business world. The most exciting and newsworthy feature of the Revival was that it brought prayer to the financial district. Contemporary observers enthused that this exceedingly worldly sector was being made sacred, but Long argues that, in fact, the values, methods, and outlook of business were invading religion. “The noon meetings were … an appointment with God,” she observes, “scheduled to fit into the rhythm of the business day and reflected the intense time consciousness of Victorian men.” Prayer, too, translated into a “productive activity,” and the publicity for prayer meetings mingled with advertisements for consumer products and worldly entertainment. Ever sensitive to the mood, needs, and tastes of its audience, evangelical Christianity was once again accommodating itself to the popular culture.

The leading organizational beneficiaries of the revival, the YMCAand the USCC, celebrated manly vigor, patriotism, and the compatibility of religion and business. Both were lay led, male oriented, and organized outside of the churches. The USCC sought volunteers who had “knowledge of the world, experience in business, and ability in affairs.” In other words, parlor-sitting ministers need not apply. These new ministries marked the beginning of a turn toward the parachurch agency as a major source of religious activity. When businessmen like D. L. Moody and John Wanamaker got religion, their ambition turned toward doing some great work for God. Rather than submitting to the constraints on lay leadership within churches, these entrepreneurs created new religious agencies. In this growing “parachurch” realm, a “masculine sphere” for religious enterprise arose to challenge the Victorian feminization of religion.

Still, Long does us a service by pointing out the ways in which evangelical Christians were too readily making peace with their new surroundings. For the gospel is not only about Christ making himself at home in our culture; there is a pilgrim principle to it as well, which prompts the children of God never to feel perfectly at home again, to know that faithfulness to Jesus Christ will put them out of step with their society. How much did that restlessness pervade the Revival of 1857-58? Not very much, seems to be the verdict of Professor Long. How much does it mark conservative evangelicalism today? We can hope that books like hers will provoke some healthy self-criticism.

Joel A. Carpenteris provost of Calvin College.

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