“The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov,” edited by Dmitri Nabokov. Alfred A. Knopf, 640 pp.; $35

“Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years,” by Brian Boyd. Princeton University Press, 619 pp.; $15.95, paper

“Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years,” by Brian Boyd. Princeton University Press, 790 pp.; $16.95, paper

Vladimir Nabokov (or gnaw-BOAK-uff, as he pronounced it) is perhaps best remembered by those who never read him as that nasty old man who wrote the dirty book Lolita. Rather than attempt to polish Nabokov’s image for the Christian reader, as certain aficionados of Saint Augustine try to shine him up for the secular public by emphasizing his attraction to heresy and whores, it seems best to quote from a letter Nabokov wrote to his mother as a young man, in an effort to console her in her continuing decline after her husband had been killed:

Three years have gone–and every trifle relating to father is still as alive as ever inside me. I am so certain, my love, that we will see him again, in an unexpected but completely natural heaven, in a realm where all is radiance and delight. He will come towards us in our common bright eternity, slightly raising his shoulders as he used to do, and we will kiss the birthmark on his hand without surprise. You must live in expectation of that tender hour, my love, and never give in to the temptation of despair. Everything will return.

This was written in Russian in 1925 and still conveys, even in translation, not only the scent of another century but the affectionate familial warmth of an earlier Russia, before its language, even, suffered the warp necessary to serve the pragmatics of “dialectical materialism.” The extract is taken from the exhaustively detailed (over 1,400 pages) and truly exceptional biography by Brian Boyd, published by Princeton University Press in two volumes in 1990 and 1991, and now available in paperback–the proper place to begin for anybody who wants to know about the real Nabokov. The year Nabokov wrote that letter he was living in Berlin, an exile, and his mother was trying to scrape together an existence in Czechoslovakia.

Nabokov’s family was of the landed gentry of nineteenth-century Russia and had been forced to flee after the unruly rise of Bolshevism. The Rukavishnikovs on his mother’s side were among the largest landowners in Russia, and many magnificent estates (including one bequeathed to Nabokov when he was 21) were left behind–razed or used as quarters for the Red Army. His father, V.D. Nabokov, a lawyer and professor and athlete and editor of a progressive newspaper, was a liberal who was convinced change was overdue in Russia, but he eventually came to abhor and then oppose the bloody revolutionary chaos that arrived. Elected to the first provisional parliament ever formed in Russia, he was a courageous man, a hero to some. When he leaped up to shield a political enemy who was speaking at a rally in Berlin, he was shot to death by a pair of assassins. Their intended victim walked away unharmed.

This stuff of myth made up the boyhood and early life of Vladimir Nabokov. He was born in Saint Petersburg in 1899, and when he attended private school, in what was then the capital city of Russia, he was driven there each day in a touring car by a liveried chauffeur. Echoes of this mythical past resound throughout his impressive oeuvre of at least 30 books, depending on how you count. The difficulty of tabulation lies in the remarkable, almost unbelievable, nature of that body of work. Nearly half of it was composed in Russian, and the other half in English, with essays and some short stories in yet another language, French. Then, toward the end of his career, Nabokov translated the Russian half into English and the English half into Russian. No such feat has been performed by another writer–and certainly not with the artistic elan and accomplishment of a Nabokov–in any major literature in any century.

Until he was almost 40, Nabokov wrote exclusively in his mother tongue, under the pen name of Sirin. But during the years when he was growing up in Saint Petersburg and on his family’s country estate, his father, an Anglophile, read Dickens aloud to the family, and a governess from England drilled English into all the children. There were five; Vladimir was the oldest and most loved by both parents. When he was ready for university study, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and completed a dual major in French and Russian literature–conducted at the apogee of proper English, of course.

So when–living and writing in emigre poverty in Berlin–he saw how awful was the translation of one of his early novels from Russian into English, he decided to translate the next one, “Despair,” himself. At about this time, further upheavals in Europe–at least partly related to the communism now installed in Russia–caused another flight. Nabokov left Berlin with its brownshirts and Hitlerian brass because of his inherited abhorrence of tyranny, yes, but also for an even more visceral reason. His wife, the dear and cherished Vera, to whom he would remain married until death and to whom he would dedicate every book he wrote, was a Jew.

They hurried first to Paris, where, in December of 1938, Nabokov began his first novel written in English, “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.” With war imminent, he desperately tried to find a teaching position in England, to no avail. Finally, in 1940, at the last minute, an emigre group in New York, acting out of gratitude for the efforts of Nabokov’s father, reserved for Vladimir and Vera first-class passage on one of the last liners leaving France for America–torpedoed on its next voyage. They left Paris just before the German invaders took the city. Penniless and bedraggled but secure in the sumptuous cabin, Nabokov and his wife turned to the prize they’d brought on board, their son, Dmitri, just turned six, who the day before had been running such a high fever they had thought they wouldn’t be able to leave for America.

In the further working of circumstance, it was this son, their only offspring, who translated or cotranslated with his father much of Nabokov’s early work and who now serves as editor of the most recent addition to the Nabokov canon: “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.”

Over 600 pages of stories, 65 in all, are collected here, including 13 stories not previously published in English in book form. At least one story has been unearthed by Nabokov’s son since his death, the lovely “Sounds,” which contains autobiographical material too telling to permit it to be printed when it was written, including details later recapitulated in “The Circle,” a story detached from Nabokov’s indisputable masterpiece in Russian, “The Gift.” (Another novel from his Russian canon I would nominate to take its place beside “The Gift” is “The Defense,” and the title character of the story “Bachmann” is clearly a precursor to the absently bedazzled chess grandmaster of The Defense.)

The mythical stuff of which Nabokov’s life consisted can be followed through these collected stories like the thread of life leading to Rahab’s family. But the reader should be cautioned not to expect too many autobiographical snippets. It is the shape and exhilaration and the poetic power of the stories that convey not only Nabokov’s mythical past but the repercussions of his loss of it.

In an early story, “Beneficence,” a young artist, a sculptor (his methods and studio are scrupulously described), is waiting near the Brandenburg Gate for a last meeting with a woman he loves, even though he is convinced she will never appear. He begins to notice a stout street person, similar to some of our present-day homeless, trying to sell tattered post cards from her seat on the sidewalk, to no avail. A soldier in the guardhouse at the gate offers her a cup of coffee, and as the narrator watches her consume it with relish in the cold fall air, a change comes over him:

Here I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I had sought in you [the woman he hoped to meet] was not only secreted in you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated.

The young sculptor, stunned by the gift of life itself, is conducted by it to the other side of loss and appreciates the unappreciated gift. In the beauty of creation, the lovely complexity of the natural world, Nabokov, who was also a lepidopterist of renown (he worked at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology), was able to pass beyond the material manifestations of his near-fictional past and delight in the unfolding life around him. Few Christian writers have conveyed creation’s breathtaking beauty with such precision and delight.

The short story may not be the most difficult form to work within (though it gets my vote), but it is without a doubt the genre in which it is least easy to hide yourself and your dirty socks, as it were. You must enter a story with the straightforward momentum of a poet going headlong after the rhythms of a poem, yet shape every sentence with such careful prose that the reader is able to follow each word without the least slip to what seems an inevitable end, the last sentence. After a few dozen of these, no matter how studiously you may have tried to avoid the pitfalls of your personality, or slunk toward the trapdoors you use to conceal yourself, you stand exposed.

It is relevant that Nabokov began with poetry, then moved to the short story, then the novel. He never played up (or down) to an audience, and his observations and conclusions still enable us to see ourselves and the world in astonishing new ways. As here, in “La Veneziana,” an early story of family deceptions and the transmutations even a forged masterpiece can bring about: “How radiantly the world’s monotony is interrupted now and then by the book of a genius, a comet, a crime, or even simply a single sleepless night. Our laws, though–our pulse, our digestion are firmly linked to the harmonious motion of the stars, and any attempt to disturb this regularity is punished, at worst by beheading, at best by a headache. Then again, the world was unquestionably created with good intentions.”

Or this stunning description of the city where an emigre now lives, written to a young woman he once loved and had to leave behind in Saint Petersburg:

A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow passes under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted–except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she passes under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply.

The perhaps too easy pathos of this story’s title, “A Letter That Never Reached Russia,” looms over its unfolding, but its author was only 25, as he was when he wrote that letter of comfort, one of many, to his mother, and the final sentence discloses Nabokov’s characteristic stance: “The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”

Only a year later, the young Nabokov began to form his mature aesthetic. In a series of nearly postmodern vignettes entitled “A Guide to Berlin,” the narrator steps forward and states,

I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.

How then did this gentle aristocrat come to write the lurid “Lolita?” Part of the answer, of course, is that she and Humbert and Quilty are dressed in their dowdy sinfulness for a masquerade that doesn’t yield its full meaning on a first or even a second reading. It was a practice of Nabokov the writer to invert his personality, or dramatize the opposite of what he felt and believed, or to oppose aspects of himself, as Shakespeare did in Iago and Othello, in order to gather readers to the side of sanity.

It has been remarked by many who knew Nabokov as a father that his affection for Dmitri was extraordinary, even excessive, and perhaps he sensed this and employed the person of a prepubescent girl to communicate something of his overzealousness, hedged with caution (think of nambla), in this disturbing novel that ultimately conveys a moral tone. In a larger sense, I believe that Nabokov, who traveled America more widely than many natives, from coast to coast and north to south–often in search of a specific species of butterfly–came to care for his adopted country so completely that he wrote a horribly graphic and macabre parable of how its youth was being stained by the polymorphous sins of the decaying old world, Europe. It was in Europe that Nabokov had lived through what must have felt akin to the apocalypse, twice.

It is finally surprising to realize from Nabokov’s own end notes to this volume (taken from previous collections) that he wrote only nine stories in English, not counting “First Love,” which became an early chapter in his autobiography, “Speak, Memory.” Short stories are indeed that difficult, and although Nabokov brought to every piece of prose a chiseled precision that heirs as diverse as John Updike and Thomas Pynchon continue to emulate, he never quite mastered the comfortable yet compressed music in English that a story demands, as he had orchestrated it so well in Russian–more a project anyway for the stout nerves of one-minded youth. In 1951, he hung up his harp on that resistant form and settled into novels, after the nightmarish experience he underwent to complete his last story, “Lance.”

During the work on “Lance,” sentences and phrases washed through Nabokov with such immediacy he couldn’t sleep for days; he stalked from place to place dazed and shaking. (Later he came to realize that the story was an attempt to assuage his fears about Dmitri, who had taken to mountaineering on some of America’s most precipitous slopes.) It’s a curious story, to say the least. On its surface it seems to be about space travel, but it’s also about mountaineering and an arresting climb toward death:

The classical ex-mortal leans on his elbow from a flowered ledge to contemplate the earth, this toy, this teetotum gyrating on slow display in its model firmament, every feature so gay and clear–the painted oceans, and the praying woman of the Baltic, and a still of the elegant Americas caught in their trapeze act, and Australia like a baby Africa lying on its side. There may be people among my coevals who half expect their spirits to look down from Heaven with a shudder and a sigh at their native planet and see it girdled with latitudes, stayed with meridians, and marked, perhaps, with the fat, black, diabolically curving arrows of global wars.

But the narrator understands that his “young descendant on his first night out, in the imagined silence of an unimaginable world, would have to view the surface features of our globe through the depths of its atmosphere”–this long before photos were beamed back from outer space–which “would mean dust, scattered reflections, haze, and all kinds of optical pitfalls, so that continents, if they appeared at all through the varying clouds, would slip by in queer disguises, with inexplicable gleams of color and unrecognizable outlines.

“But this is a minor point. The problem is: Will the mind of the explorer survive the shock?” What Nabokov was actually broaching here, as he did over and over in his fiction, is the possibility of existence after death. More than any writer of the twentieth century, perhaps, Nabokov reached for and brought back glimpses, intimations of a spiritual world coexisting with the everyday one we take for granted. He believed in that world with a sturdy aloofness that put people off, as many would be put off by his mere mention of heaven.

From the time of the letter to his mother, he looked forward to that world, sometimes with trepidation, but mostly with the arch and tender verve he communicated in his prose. In “Pale Fire,” which even his most entrenched detractors acknowledge as at least a minor masterpiece, Nabokov puts into the mouth of one of his most untrustworthy narrators, the unseemly Kinbote, a portion of the credo he kept scattering through interviews toward the end of his life:

As St. Augustine said, “One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is.” I think I know what he is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one’s rattling throat, not the black hum in one’s ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the name of God has priority.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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When I was down to the Big City not long ago, my youthful friend Rod took me to his favorite bookstore-cafe. We sat on high stools at a small, sticky square of yellow wood, buffeted by alternative rock flowing from the excellent sound system. I chose, at Rod’s suggestion, a designer beer that the menu described as “fruity and complex.” Nearby, patrons lingered at blond-wood book racks, perusing the handsome volumes with impressive nonchalance. Diversity spread her amiable wings: Elbowpatch-and-beret types mingled easily with Birkenstocker-backpackers en tout noir.

So when Rod came up to Baltimore I took him to my favorite book source, across the street from the Friend General Store and Love Nest Package Liquors. The bulky one-story building fills nearly a city block; it is painted rosy beige with deeper brown trim and topped with romantic crenelations. The orange metal sign bolted to the wall reads “Baltimore Department of Finance, Bureau of Purchases, Warehouse #9.” But those familiar with its charms eschew the formal title; we call it the Baltimore Book Dump.

I don’t recall what was displayed in the window of Rod’s book boutique. The items in the Book Dump window appear not so much displayed as huddling in refuge. Prominent is a large cartoon cutout of a figure in a hardhat, hand-decorated with a smiley face and an unintentionally threatening note of good cheer: “Think safety beyond this point. It helps!” Next to it is a small framed print of two ice skaters, bearing another ambivalent message: “Time with a friend is like no time at all.”

There’s a quart of Duralene oil, a brown metal trash can, a defunct computer monitor, a Singer sewing machine, a few jumbled and overturned chairs. Just visible is an oversized, crudely painted metal globe, emblazoned with a strip of masking tape marked: “Don’t Ask.” This could be another gem of cryptic wisdom. A square of brown cardboard is taped to the window, on which someone has written in bold, black marker: “Great Northern Beans, 25 lbs, $4 per bag. Worcestershire sauce, $1 per gallon.” Yes, this is the place.

I steer Rod inside, where we stand in the central of three large rooms; altogether, the Book Dump offers nearly 70,000 square feet of varied treasure. The pre-dominant color plan is gray, as in concrete–floor, walls, and ceiling. High overhead, grimy skylights wink at the Baltimore noon; a few ancient fans turn, and a few don’t. The architectural effect at floor level is enlivened by ramps and steel tracks; this building was originally a terminus of the streetcar line.

Yes, there are books at the Book Dump, but I aim to tantalize my guest first. We step over a large tire with a Chevy hubcap and admire a flock of old microfilm viewers, plastic house shutters still in their cardboard boxes, and a veritable History of Typewriters Museum (one specimen of which has a carriage over two feet long). There is an early computer with slots for giant floppy disks. An antique Mobile Maid top-loading dishwasher. A bowling ball. A new plastic sink and an old, rusty medicine cabinet. An industrial-strength record player, circa 1960, with a pop-up for playing 45s; “Sch # 55” is scratched into the arm. A metal desk tray with the handwritten label, “Problem’s.” Yes, if you don’t really want it, you can find it here at the Baltimore Book Dump.

“We recycle from all the city agencies,” Mr. J. D. Zissimos, city property disposal supervisor, had told me. Though there are other warehouses, this is the only one that offers items for sale. How much staff does it take to run an operation like this? “There are five employees, including the repair guy. Did you see the one-armed, one-legged man? He takes the furniture apart and fixes it.”

I asked about the trolley tracks in the floor. “They give us a fit,” Mr. Zissimos said.

We pass the Great Northern Beans and Worcestershire sauce, which are in padlocked metal-screen cabinets. Other cabinets hold workshirts, ashtrays, and piles of clipboards; these are similarly locked. But toward the back of the room, furniture runs wild and free. We wind our way past motley squadrons of school desks and chairs (a very small one, with worn green paint and a hand-hole through its back, begs to go home with me) and into a second room, where coiled fire hoses are stacked in dusty towers eight high. Standing out among more mundane discards are various unidentifiable objects–a pink three-sided construction, for instance, four feet high, with mirrors inside–that are at least reassuringly stationary.

At last we reverse our tracks and enter the final room. Rod stops abruptly and stares. “My heavens!” he exclaims. “Where do you begin?”

Spread before us is the equivalent of an Olympic swimming pool full of books. In giant, cardboard barrels, in refrigerator-sized boxes, in canvas rolling bins, books are jumbled in hundreds of containers and strewn unheeding on the floor. Along the wall, books stand two and three deep on black metal shelves. It is the fabled book burial ground.

“Can you give me an estimate of how many books you have?” I had asked Mr. Zissimos. “No,” he said.

A sign at the forward edge of this tide reads, “FREE! BOOKS Schoolbooks, Textbooks, Workbooks FREE!” I had asked Mr. Zissimos about that, too. “We used to sell them for a nominal amount or send them to be recycled for paper. Then, in 1988, when Mayor Schmoke named Baltimore ‘The City That Reads,’ we thought it would be in keeping with that to give them away.”

They come from public schools, libraries, offices–everywhere. “Does the amount of books going out keep pace with the amount coming in?” I asked. “Well,” he hedged, “we have an awful lot coming in.”

Rod is already hitting the first box. There are a number of Andrew Greeley titles and a Jane Smiley. Then he finds a 1964 Reader’s Digest and is enraptured by the ads. “Speedy Petits Fours” from a can of date-nut bread particularly inspires him: “Can’t you just see an astronaut’s wife at Cape Canaveral preparing this for her husband!”

Next he seizes a copy of Harold Brodkey’s fat “The Runaway Soul.” It’s hard not to have a sense of memento mori in this place. “This was eagerly anticipated for so long, at the highest literary levels in New York,” Rod says in wonder. “Brodkey worked at it for years, surfacing every so often to tell the world how it was going. Now look, here it is at the Book Dump.” He surveys the cavernous room, shaking his head at the sight. “How much work went into each of these books, and the day the book was published might well have been the happiest day in the writer’s life,” he says. “Now the books are discarded, and most of the writers are utterly forgotten.” Rod and I, two writers, are about to enter the Royal Bummer Zone. “You could really get lost thinking about that,” says Rod.

Something about this place makes linear thought difficult; we hop through dusty tomes, scanning the century at a glance. Here is a photo of Walt Disney standing before a nifty laser-light background and smiling hopefully over a model of the New York World’s Fair. “Think how amazing it must have been to actually believe in progress,” Rod says. From the same era, Telstar: Communications Breakthrough! includes a shot of LBJ on the phone, with the caption, “‘You’re coming in nicely,’ President Johnson said.”

A textbook, “The Changing Family,” catches Rod’s eye. The title appears in yellow letters on a sickly green cover, over a curiously dispiriting shot of a girl drawing on a sidewalk with chalk. “Everything about this–the fonts, the colors–is just like the elementary-school textbooks I had in the seventies,” Rod says. “It’s so depressing. It reminds me of the time this local education specialist, Beryl Gene Daniel Field Lott, brought her audiovisual show to our fifth-grade class. There was this song– ‘I like chocolate, you like vanilla, we all get along’–a kind of Sesame Street multiculturalism. She was so desperate to make us love one another, so much earnestness, and here she was on her third marriage. We were in these horrible orange chairs,” he muses.

Rod appears to be veering close to the state that neurologist Oliver Sacks calls “incontinent nostalgia.” I suggest that we could get a handle on the Book Dump experience by taking an archaeological sample of a single container. I kneel on the floor by a low box (when I rise, it will look like my shins were rubbed with charcoal), and together we begin lifting off the layers. Some books get discarded quickly: Norah Lofts paperbacks, “Your Ulcer” (1954), “We Elect a President” (1962), a heap of Robert Ludlum, “Dawn over the Amazon” (1943), “Life and Love: The Commandments for Teenagers” (1964), and a “Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature” (Nov. 7-25, 1987). We linger longer over a 1927 Norse-English dictionary, Rex Reed’s forgotten “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” and a 1977 U.S. Labor Department handbook, “The Dictionary of Occupational Titles.” “You gotta take a look at it! It’s breathtakingly stupid!” Rod exclaims. “Imagine the bureaucrats in their wide ties, sitting around writing descriptions of the jobs people do!”

We spend a minute in stupefied admiration of a hip ‘n’ hideous 1974 children’s book with balloony Yellow Submarine letters on the cover. They spell out contents that would beguile any curious grammar-schooler: “Real People at Work: Office Worker.” The Office Worker is pictured on the front, fortyish, with heavy black-framed glasses, in a doubleknit dress with lapels like seagull wings. It’s a jazzy shot from below, and she’s grinning self-consciously, outlined in a Peter Maxx aura of yellow and orange. “Probably she worked on the Dictionary of Occupational Titles,” Rod says.

Then we come across “Being Well-Born,” a 1916 tome with a worn, red cover, promoting the eugenic dream in terms that seem eerily familiar. Chapter subheadings tell the story: “World population growth and food supply,” “General increase in world population undesirable,” “School instruction in sex hygiene,” leading naturally to “Urgency of eliminating unfit,” “Corrective mating,” and “Sterilization.”

Next Rod lights on “The Galactic Troubadours,” a 1965 space adventure about teenage folksingers who save the universe. He is enchanted. He reads selected morsels aloud, from the knowing nudge of the opening sentence (“Parents are probably the same all over the Galaxy”) through subtle messages (“Most of us in my age group were bored to death with everything that came ready made”) and high drama (“`You are a disgrace to the planet! You’ve dragged our reputation in the dust!'”). At the end, “the whole planet had turned out” for the Troubadours’ victory concert. They sang “in perfect six-part harmony”: “I’m just a-goin’ into orbit / I’m blasting off for deepest space / I’m going where the stars are burning / And where uncharted planets race!”

Meanwhile, I have discovered a small, yellow paperback that announces, in heavy black capitals, “Nymph In Need.” Published by Kozy Books in 1962, this little volume has lost all its covers, which accurately foreshadows what is going to happen to the nymph. It’s fairly tame for hot stuff, which lends a certain charm. The prose is editor-proof (“Patti Markey had watched the game, the last half, that is, with bated breath”), and the overeager descriptions of female anatomy suggest less than full working familiarity with the apparatus (“Her breasts were like electrodes”; “Her breasts bored holes in his chest”). There are baffling accounts of action that, no matter how many times you reread them, never make sense: “She gave her body to his clutching arm. He broke contact and held her close for a minute.” “Nymph In Need” went into our carry-away stack.

Because, unfortunately, it was getting to be time to decide what we’d carry away. The last time I was here, with my friend Connie, she filled five boxes with books and had to use a dolly to get it all to the car (“Don’t tell my husband about this place!” she warned). But today we just filled the length of Rod’s arms. I took a photo of him standing outside the Book Dump door, next to the cartoon cutout of the hardhat safety guy, smiling on the sidewalk with his cap turned around backwards.

Had I done enough as a hostess? I wondered. The Book Dump doesn’t have a snazzy cafe, but we could go back in and haul down a school desk and a couple of battered chairs. I would spring for a bottle of Worcestershire sauce–anything to impress my city-wise friend–and we could munch on handfuls of Great Northern Beans. It would be the complete Book Dump experience. But no, I thought, let’s not do it all this one trip. We take our reluctant leave, just a-going into orbit, blasting off for deepest space.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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“Another Turn of the Crank”

By Wendell Berry

Counterpoint

122 pp.; $18

The publication of a new series of essays by Wendell Berry is always good news. In this slim, well-titled volume, Berry returns to the theme that has gained him a growing audience: the goodness of the small agricultural way of life and the destruction of it caused by America’s commitment to large-scale political economy. Throughout these essays, Berry writes as a self-confessed Luddite, one who favors community health over technological innovation. This presumption informs his thoughts on how best to conserve farming, communities, forests, nature and human life, and health. He writes burdened by “that difficult hope” that there still exists in the scattered rural communities of America a different way of understanding life than the standard account served up by our major institutions. Berry points to this other way of life as possessing “better economy, better faith, better knowledge and affection.” He even sees signs that a “party of local community” might be forming to challenge “the party of the global economy.” These essays reflect a vast knowledge not only of the literary traditions of the West but of contemporary ecological issues as well. “To save the land and the people,” a phrase he uses in several essays, nicely captures the goal of his life’s work.

Reading Berry is both tonic and challenge. This collection may be too brief to count as his best; for the faithful, however, this turn of the crank is another gift of good sense, a cup of cold water in the dry and barren land of contemporary American cultural life.

–Ashley Woodiwiss

“Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel”

By Lee Palmer Wandel

Cambridge University Press

205 pp.; $39.95

“Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525-1556”

By Carl R. Trueman

Oxford University Press

306 pp.; $55

“The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalisation of Reform”

Edited by Ole Peter Grell

Cambridge University Press

218 pp.; $54.95

Studies of the Protestant Reformation have moved rapidly in the last two decades as the pendulum in historical scholarship has shifted massively away from theology and toward the study of local situations, practical problems, life on the ground, and the dense interconnections between spiritual and other aspects of life. (Notable practitioners of the new social and cultural history include Bob Scribner, Euan Cameron, and William Bouwsma.) Once it was assumed that the Protestant protagonists of the period provided the most reliable account of why a Reformation was needed, but more recently a strong revisionist school has arisen to challenge the charge that late-medieval Catholicism was hopelessly corrupt. (Major advocates of such revisions include Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy.)

The trio of books noticed here takes advantage of these new emphases, but also shows that the older focus on theological and ecclesiastical affairs can still yield sound as well as innovative results. Lee Wandel, who teaches at Yale University, writes learnedly on how the iconoclasts (those who destroyed images, stained glass, and statues) were moving concepts of God and Christian holiness beyond original Protestant formulations in Luther and Calvin toward a more spiritual, less bodily, ideal of the Christian life. Carl Trueman, who lectures in historical theology at the University of Nottingham, offers a particularly sensitive study of the older theological type where the writings of five early English Protestants are probed for their commonality (the longing for a God-centered faith leading to a life of piety) as well as their serious differences (on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper and of predestination).

The solid essays collected in “The Scandinavian Reformation” show how the northern countries that would become the most solidly Lutheran of any in Europe transformed the Reformation faith from a loosely organized movement of evangelical preaching into a state-run enterprise of church and social reform. The book provides full coverage for events in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, as well as topical coverage of subjects like the lingering influence of the Catholic church, the varied regional responses to witchcraft, and religious and political influences from outside the region.

–Mark Noll

“The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict”

By Russell Kirk

Eerdmans

497 pp.; $34.99

Russell Kirk finished these memoirs shortly before he died at age 75. The publication of this volume, a festschrift, and a tribute issue of “Intercollegiate Review,” along with a conference in his honor, properly caps one of the truly influential lives of our time. It is remarkable that this influence emanated from a tiny backwoods Michigan village.

The premier disciple of Edmund Burke, Kirk helped establish modern American conservatism with “The Conservative Mind” in 1953, and he lived to see its current flourishing. His vast erudition yielded many books, as well as articles in prominent journals and declasse conservative periodicals, two of which, “Modern Age” and “University Bookman,” he founded. Friend of presidents (Nixon, Reagan) and authors (T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Roy Campbell, Malcolm Muggeridge), Kirk spent much time in the company of the young, who trooped to his ancestral home in Mecosta for seminars, and he remains the intellectual godfather to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative campus organization. Eking out a meager subsistence as a man of letters, he and his family took in waifs and rejects, from a robber of church poorboxes to Ethiopian refugees and scholars fleeing communist homelands. Reared in a Swedenborgian/ Spiritualist household, he became an adult convert to Roman Catholicism.

This telling of the outer, rather than the inner, life is a curious mixture of reticence and self-revelation, and the self-styled “lone wolf” is alternately gentle and contentious. The highly mannered prose is, for those who know their Kirk, virtually a personal signature. The third-person narrative, designed to convey an air of objectivity, fails, happily, to camouflage a man of wholesome prejudices and deep sentiment.

–Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

“X Y: On Masculine Identity”

By Elisabeth Badinter

Columbia University Press

274 pp.; $24.95

This translation of a best-selling 1992 book by a French philosopher and historian reflects the more relational style of European, as opposed to mainstream American, feminism: a concern for gender justice within an analysis of gender differences, rather than a concentration on abstract, androgynous ideals and rights. In a thoughtful and nonpatronizing attempt to understand the male experience, Badinter explores the possible psychological significance of the fact that males depend on women for birth and (in most cases) for their primary nurturance. She argues that this, plus the fact that girls have a natural entry into womanhood in the coming of menstruation, for which there is no strict male analogue, results in a more fragile and defensive male gender identity that is traditionally shored up by demanding tests and/or rites of passage. Thus masculine identity–to a much greater extent than feminine–must be socially constructed and constantly reproven, resulting in an intergenerational cycle of males fearing, fleeing, or oppressing women, a cycle whose interruption depends in large part on the more equal involvement of both parents in child rearing.

In this analysis, Badinter shares the theoretical stance of American feminist object-relations theorists, but she also does an excellent job of covering the best of the accumulating men’s studies literature, with its examination of changing models of masculinity and its concern to affirm the legitimacy of male vulnerability without losing the best aspects of traditional male virtues and positive (i.e., nonmisogynist, nonauthoritarian) male bonding activities. The argument is thoughtfully nuanced and thoroughly interdisciplinary, and the translation is elegantly readable.

–Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

“Narrative and the Natural Law: An Interpretation of Thomistic Ethics”

By Pamela M. Hall

University of Notre Dame Press

192 pp.; $25.95

In evangelical circles, the Bible is often referred to as “God’s owner’s manual” for living life to its fullest. Thomistic ethics, as Pamela Hall develops it, is a detailed and dialectical exposition of the implications of this metaphor. In so interpreting Thomistic ethics, Hall addresses two standard academic criticisms of natural law. First, Aquinas’s understanding of natural law is anything but natural since it ultimately presupposes supernatural revelation if it is to be understood. Second, the exceptionless dictates of natural law falsify the “tangled” nature of the competing claims of this world. Both these criticisms, according to Hall, stem from reading Aquinas’s ethics in isolation from the whole of the Summa theologiae.

By wisely reflecting on the narrative of history and individual lives, one comes to see that the real point and function of the prohibitions of natural law–don’t murder, steal, lie, and so on–is to help secure the goods of human life by properly ordering the conflicting wants and desires with which humans are born. Thus, natural law is not so much a deduction from Scripture as it is a reflection upon our own and others’ desires and choices and the corresponding mistakes and successes to which they have led. With sufficient practical wisdom, Aquinas believed, all humans are capable of coming to understand natural law thus far. Yet, for Aquinas, as for Saint Paul, the moral law also serves a pedagogical function, leading individuals to Christ by making clear to them their sin and their need for a savior.

As Hall makes clear, the gospel is not a new “list of precepts and prohibitions” but rather “the gift of right desire.” The goal of the New Law is the peaceful unity of human communities brought about through the transformation of lives, not by the legislation of deeds. And while philosophers like Martha Nussbaum argue that the world is too tangled with competing claims for such peace ever to be realized, on Hall’s reading it is not the world but “our desires and loves which can become tangled and at war with one another in sin. The world itself embodies a natural hierarchy of goods which should be, for Aquinas, mirrored in our desires.”

–Ric Machuga

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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Bob Dylan told us that you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. These days you don’t have to be a biblical scholar to know that the historical Jesus enterprise is prospering. Cover stories in “Time” and “Newsweek,” articles in local newspapers, and a flood of hot-selling books tell us “He’s ba-a-a-ack.” Not Freddie Krueger and not the Jesus worshiped and adored by the church, but the scholars’ Jesus, the Jesus who is reconstructed by New Testament experts and ancient historians. These scholars claim their Jesus is the historical Jesus, the real Jesus, to be distinguished from the Jesus of myth or dogma who is the product of the church.

This is the third such “quest for the historical Jesus” in the span of roughly 150 years. The nineteenth century gave us the original quest, a project widely believed today to tell us more about the questers than about the actual Jesus. This original quest was finished off at the turn of the century by Albert Schweitzer’s devastating “The Quest of the Historical Jesus,” which argued that the actual Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who was utterly different from the ethical teacher beloved by liberal theology.

For several decades, the project of reconstructing the “historical Jesus” lay dormant as a result of a strange alliance of liberals and some conservatives, who agreed on the necessity for a distinction between “the Christ of faith” and the “Jesus of history.” These conservatives thought it was the church’s task to proclaim the former; the work of Bultmann had shown liberals that the latter was beyond recovery.

However, it is hardly surprising that work on the historical Jesus eventually resumed as the “new quest” among Bultmann’s former students and others. After all, the Christ of faith the church proclaims was a historical figure who “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” And skepticism about the possibility of knowing the historical Jesus could hardly endure among scholars trained to investigate such things; otherwise, what would such people do?

As far as I can tell, this second quest for the historical Jesus–unlike the first quest–came to no dramatic conclusion. Rather, like so many academic debates, it just petered out, suffering from the law of diminishing returns. Once more the ugly face of skepticism and potential unemployment loomed, since one only needs a certain number of scholars to point out that knowledge of a particular kind cannot be had.

At some point, a third quest for the historical Jesus was inevitable. What is surprising about the newest quest is partly the sheer number of publications it has generated; a project that not many years ago seemed moribund is suddenly pulsing with life. Even more surprising is the public character of the new enterprise. The pilgrims on this new journey are not solitary travelers, nor are they content to form modest little groups who recite tales to one another. Rather, they seem determined to drag a large section of the population with them.

THE JESUS SEMINAR

The Jesus Seminar clearly has played a central role in taking this display of scholarly energy into the public arena. In 1985, a group of around 30 scholars formed this group “to renew the quest of the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to more than a handful of biblical scholars.” The last clause seems a masterpiece of understatement. Now numbering around 200 members, the Jesus Seminar has been spectacularly successful in hitting the front pages of newspapers and the covers of magazines with its unorthodox conclusions–not to mention the provocatively titled best-seller “The Five Gospels,” where the seminar’s methods and results are presented in detail.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of content, how did the seminar arrive at its picture of Jesus? In true democratic fashion, the members of the seminar voted, determining the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus by dropping colored beads in a box. (Though the seminar is now working on events in Jesus’ life, the original work dealt only with the alleged sayings of Jesus.) Different colors of beads represented various grades of authenticity, ranging from red (“Jesus said this or something very like it”) to black (“This saying was created by later tradition”).

Such a procedure was bound to generate media coverage, and this result seems to have been foreseen and intended by the seminar. However, the more fundamental question concerns the basis for the voting. How did the members of the seminar determine the authenticity of various sayings?

A quick answer seems to be “skeptically.” Only about 18 percent of the sayings traditionally attributed to Jesus were accepted by the seminar as authentic. The seminar came down on the skeptical end of the teeter-totter because its members adopted the judicial assumption of “guilty until proven innocent.” (The scholars assumed the Gospels “to be narratives in which the memory of Jesus is embellished by mythic elements that express the church’s faith in him, and by plausible fictions that enhance the telling of the gospel story for first-century listeners who knew about divine men and miracle workers firsthand.” This procedure partly reflects a widespread–though, in my view, mistaken–idea that such a skeptical view of sources is a necessary characteristic of a tough-minded, critical historian. However, it also reflects a suspicious view of the communities that created the writings we know as the New Testament.

These communities, as well as the writers of the four canonical Gospels, are seen as having no qualms about attributing common lore to Jesus or even about putting their own words into the lips of Jesus. Seminar leaders contend that even when authentic historical materials are present, they are often “Christianized” to such a degree that they require wholesale recasting in order to restore them to their “original” form.

It seems likely that the seminar put a fair amount of weight on what is called the “criterion of dissimilarity,” though it is hard to know this without the ability to read the minds of the “voters.” Since the policy was to accept as authentic only what can be proven to stem from Jesus, sayings of Jesus that could have been created by the early church or that could be general rabbinic teachings of the time must be rejected. The idea is that we can only be sure of those sayings of Jesus that fit with neither the early church nor first-century Judaism. (By the same reasoning, future historians would judge as authentic words of Newt Gingrich only those statements that are dissimilar from those of other Republicans.)

The members of the seminar relied on other “criteria of authenticity” as well. Some, such as the principle of regarding material that is attested by multiple sources as more likely to be authentic, seem close to common sense (though the question of what counts as an independent source is rather controversial). Others, such as the principle that more complex versions of stories are later than simpler versions, depend upon debatable theories about how oral and literary traditions are transmitted.

The methodology of the Jesus Seminar described thus far does not seem too far out of line with the working assumptions of most New Testament scholars. It is true that many scholars take a less skeptical attitude toward the texts, and a great many have pointed out the limitations of the criterion of dissimilarity, which would at best appear to capture what might be called the idiosyncratic elements of Jesus–those elements that fit with neither his predecessors nor his followers. What seems most unusual about the Jesus Seminar is the high reliance its members place on extra-canonical gospels, especially the Gospel of Thomas.

Thomas, discovered among other documents at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, is a gospel that consists largely of “sayings.” Though the actual document dates from several centuries after the time of Jesus and is a Coptic translation of the original, some scholars theorize that Thomas is a very early source composed independently of the synoptic Gospels. Its existence gave added importance to a document called Q, never actually found, that had already been theoretically postulated to help explain similarities between Matthew and Luke that could not be traced to dependence on Mark. Q, like Thomas, is presumed to be largely a collection of sayings of Jesus. Since Q is supposed to be a source for Matthew and Luke, it is regarded as a document significantly older than those Gospels, and perhaps older than Mark. Thomas, Q, and noncanonical writings of a similar character suddenly took on new significance as scholars pondered the purposes of such collections. Since these “sayings” gospels contained no accounts of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, could it be that there were early communities of “Jesus-followers” for whom these events were unimportant?

Some of the more prominent members of the seminar think this speculative question can be confidently answered. Burton Mack, in his work “The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins,” writes with breezy chutzpah about the hypothetical community that employed the hypothetical book Q. According to Mack, these people were not Christians; they were “Jesus-people” who cannot be seen as the early foundation of what later became known as the church. “The people of Q did not think of Jesus as a messiah, did not recognize a special group of trained disciples as their leaders, … did not regard his death as an unusual divine event, and did not follow his teachings in order to be ‘saved’ or transformed people.” (Interestingly, the Resurrection is not important enough to Mack for him to include it in this list as an item to be denied!)

What, then, was Jesus like, and why did such people follow him? The suggestion is that Jesus was a Jewish–though not-so-very Jewish–version of a wandering Cynic philosopher, a sage whose wisdom was presented in an aphoristic, unconventional style and whose content challenged the prevailing cultural and social assumptions. A portrait somewhat like Mack’s is presented in John Dominic Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant,” though Crossan does not go so far as Mack in seeing discontinuity between the early followers of Jesus and the church. Crossan’s picture of Jesus puts special emphasis on table fellowship–Jesus’ practice of eating with people of dubious moral and social standing. This “open commensality” was a proclamation of an “unbrokered kingdom of God,” a new social order that meant an end to mediators and hierarchies.

OTHER THIRD QUESTERS

This Jesus who is a Cynic sage–a “talking head,” as one waggish critic has put it–is by no means the whole story of the third quest. Many members of the Jesus Seminar reject the idea that Jesus was a kind of wandering Greek philosopher. And many other scholars, including liberal ones, take very different views from those of the Jesus Seminar.

For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other discoveries have shed new light on first-century Judaism, and such scholars as E. P. Sanders have taken the quest down a completely different path. On this view, the key to an accurate reconstruction of the historical Jesus lies in highlighting the Jewishness of Jesus, rather than understanding him in the supposedly Hellenistic environment of Galilee. Though such an approach can be used to drive a wedge between the historical Jesus and the church, it does not have to do so, as is shown by N. T. Wright’s significant work, “The New Testament and the People of God.” Wright argues that there was a spirited debate among first-century Jews as to how to tell the story of Israel as the people of God. In particular, how is the story to be completed? As Wright sees it, the early Christians told the story as culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus, which constituted the “great divine act for which Israel had been waiting.” Such a view makes sense of both the Jewishness of the early church and its eventual distinctiveness as a rift with other versions as the Jewish story developed.

A number of important Roman Catholic scholars have joined in this third quest. Many of them, while professing allegiance to the same critical-historical method practiced by the members of the Jesus Seminar, come up with results which, though far from pleasing to naive fundamentalists, are much more congruent with the Jesus of Christian theology. Raymond Brown, for example, in “The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels,” sees the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trials and executions as containing much that may reasonably be taken as historically authentic, a far cry from Burton Mack’s sweeping dismissal of Mark’s gospel as “a fiction.”

The work of John P. Meier is particularly interesting as a test case of how critical-historical studies comport with orthodoxy. In his massive study, “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus” (two volumes have been published, and a concluding volume is promised), Meier illustrates his commitment to such a method with an imaginary description of an “unpapal conclave.” The scholarly reconstruction of the historical Jesus should proceed, Meier suggests, as if it were conducted by a committee consisting of a Christian, a Jew, and an agnostic who are locked in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School Library and fed bread and water until they produce a consensus document. On Meier’s view, such a method cannot possibly arrive at many of the conclusions the Christian will want to affirm about Jesus by faith. It cannot, for example, assert that Jesus actually performed miracles (nor deny that he did). However, Meier himself thinks such an objective historical study will overlap with the church’s teachings to a great extent; for example, though a good number of the miracle stories are judged to be later creations, in some cases we have good historical grounds for saying that in Jesus’ own day he was believed to have performed miracles, whether or not he actually did.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN FOR THE LAYPERSON?

The works mentioned above constitute only a small sampling of the newest quest for the historical Jesus. My purpose, however, is not to give a comprehensive scholarly overview but rather to ask, What does it all mean to me? What stance should the intelligent layperson take toward this quest? As a Christian believer, who holds that salvation depends on the life, death, and resurrection in the history of Jesus, I can hardly suspend judgment about such issues. We have here what William James called a “momentous option.” My very life is at stake, and practically I cannot suspend judgment, since I must continue to live either as one who believes in this Jesus or as one who does not.

Should I simply ignore the whole business? Given the very public nature of the enterprise, this may not be possible. I recently had a conversation with a pastor planting a church in a suburban community. He told me that when he talks with his new parishioners, many of whom are previously unchurched professionals, they often inquire about such issues. They seem surprised that these scholarly claims have not been discussed in church, and they tend to think that the pastor is probably ignorant of such matters. A debate that is carried out in magazines and newspapers is no longer restricted to the ivory tower.

In any case, to ignore such intellectual challenges would appear to be a dishonest attempt to evade genuine intellectual problems. But there is a still better reason for avoiding ostrichlike maneuvers, and that is the possibility that historical-critical studies of the Bible might have genuine value for the Christian church. If the Incarnation really did take place in history, then it stands to reason that an understanding of the nitty-gritty world of first-century Palestine might indeed deepen the Christian’s insight into Jesus of Nazareth.

The predicament of the layperson here is not unique. There are other cases where academic experts pronounce on issues about which laypeople must make up their own minds–in part, because the experts disagree among themselves. Experts may disagree on whether the world is in danger of global warming and on how to avoid it, but laypeople must vote for legislators committed to carrying out preventive and palliative actions. Economists may disagree on the impact of tax cuts, but I must decide for myself how to vote. So, too, with the quest for the historical Jesus.

IS HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP THE BEST WAY OF COMING TO KNOW THE HISTORICAL JESUS?

In the process of arriving at an independent judgment where experts disagree, it is often useful to try to isolate the assumptions that lie behind the experts’ opinions–including the assumptions that almost all the experts take for granted as well as the ones that may underlie the disagreements. One crucial assumption that a great many biblical scholars seem to take for granted is that the historical-critical method is the best means of arriving at the truth about the historical Jesus.

It is easy to see why such a belief should be assumed by historical scholars; after all, the historical-critical method was devised precisely as a way to transcend the biases and limitations of traditions and communities so as to discover historical truth. Why should it not be the best way to understand the life of Jesus?

Nevertheless, a little reflection shows that this principle is far from obviously correct. After all, the Christian believes that eternal life can be found in a relationship to Jesus of Nazareth, and that the path to such a relationship requires knowing about this Jesus. It is hard to believe that God could have acted in Jesus to make salvation possible for the human race and at the same time believe that knowledge of the story is possible only for those who have the intelligence and leisure to fight their way through the thicket of historical Jesus research. Surely, if knowledge of Jesus is as vital as Christians believe it to be, God would have made it possible for ordinary people to gain this knowledge without learning Aramaic or receiving Ph.D.’s in historical-critical biblical studies.

The church has always maintained that it is possible for ordinary people to gain the knowledge they need about the Jesus they meet in the gospel narratives. I think there are two primary accounts as to how this is supposed to happen, though these stories are by no means mutually exclusive, rival accounts. Both may be true and, in fact, can be seen as complementary.

One story, traditionally emphasized by the Roman Catholic church, though in principle open to Protestants, stresses that the knowledge the ordinary person needs to have about Jesus is grounded in the testimony of the church. On this account, the witness of the church with respect to the life and teachings of Jesus is a trustworthy guide to the truth; ordinary people who rely on that authority are reasonable to do so. Historical scholars can hardly object to this by claiming that relying on authority is, in principle, unreasonable for the overwhelming majority of what all historical-critical scholars believe is based on their acceptance of the testimony of others.

The other story, which one might call the Reformed story because of its prominence in John Calvin (though it clearly is present in other Protestants as well as Catholics), lays great stress on what is termed “the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit.” Calvin regarded the Bible as containing a divinely inspired account of what people need to know for salvation, and he argued that the truth of the biblical account can be grasped by ordinary people on the basis of the witness of the Spirit of God.

Calvin’s story is sometimes disparaged as an appeal to an unverifiable subjective experience, but it does not have to be construed in such a manner. In talking about the “witness of the Spirit,” Calvin is giving a theological account of how people actually arrive at a conviction that Jesus is the divine savior. Suppose I begin to read the New Testament and, in some sense, I hear God speak to me through its pages: through the person of Jesus I hear God question me, make promises to me, give commands to me. As I think through those questions, promises, and commands, they begin to make sense of my life in a way I have never known. I gain a sense of who I am and who I should become, and I find myself gripped by a conviction that the story of Jesus I have encountered is true.

Such an account of faith does not necessarily divorce faith from knowledge. Some contemporary philosophers have theorized that knowledge is best understood as a true belief that is produced in a reliable manner. Thus I now know there is a computer screen in front of me, not because I can give a philosophical proof of this that would satisfy a skeptic, but because the belief is true, and it is produced in a reliable manner, employing my sensory faculties. If the story of Jesus is true, and if the work of the Holy Spirit is similarly reliable, it would appear that the outcome is also knowledge. (On this point, see my book “The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History,” forthcoming from Oxford University Press.)

One can see, therefore, that the assumption that the historical-critical method provides the best way of getting at the historical truth about Jesus of Nazareth is open to question. What I have called the Catholic and Reformed stories may be false, but their truth or falsity cannot be established by historical scholarship alone; it requires theological and philosophical argument.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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HOW OBJECTIVE ARE HISTORICAL BIBLICAL SCHOLARS?

Some of the more orthodox biblical scholars recognize the above point. Catholics such as John Meier, for example, stress that faith convictions are not limited to the conclusions of historical scholarship. However, the way Meier makes this point highlights another pervasive, yet dubious, assumption on the part of many New Testament scholars. This is the idea that historical scholars, in contrast to members of religious communities rooted in faith, are committed to an ideal of objectivity. This is nicely symbolized by Meier’s idea of the “unpapal conclave” and expressed in E. P. Sanders’s portrayal of the biblical scholar who roots his conclusions in “evidence on which everyone can agree.”

A dilemma arises at this point for someone like Meier who wishes to separate the conclusions of historical inquiry from the convictions of faith. Are the convictions of faith reliable or not? If they are, why should not the historian who is interested in truth employ them? If they are not, then why should the believer who cares about truth rely on faith?

The way out of this dilemma lies in questioning the dubious picture of the completely objective historian that lies behind it. The critical historian is not, after all, a person devoid of faith. Historical critics understand that their scholarly activity came into being at a particular time and place and therefore presupposes a cultural framework. Jon Levenson, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible who is himself a historical critic, has argued that even while recognizing this cultural framework, the members of this community, like every other, have tended to absolutize their cultural assumptions, their “faith.” In practice, this has often meant that, among historical critics, the assumptions of the Enlightenment provide the lens for looking at the world.

It would be arrogant and foolish for the layperson to ignore or dismiss the work of the historical scholar. However, it is by no means too much for the layperson to ask the historical scholar, who is so keen on understanding human life in its cultural context, to have a sense of the relativity of historical scholarship itself. Once the “relativizer has been relativized,” it will no longer be possible for the tribe of historical scholars to take a superior and arrogant attitude toward the members of religious communities, as if such communities were the only ones with biases.

There are good reasons why Christian scholars may wish to participate in academic “games” where the rules prevent them from appealing to some of what they know as Christians. Apologetic argument may require that one employ only assumptions that the intended audience will accept, and it is certainly interesting to see what may be known about Jesus without the testimony of the church or the saving work of the Spirit. Christian scholars must not, however, allow themselves to be hoodwinked into believing that this type of conversation is the only avenue to the truth, or that the results of such a game are the only convictions that deserve the honorific title “knowledge.”

WHERE DO THE SCHOLARS DISAGREE?

What I am calling the relativity of historical criticism can be clearly seen when one examines the assumptions that are disputed among the scholars themselves. It hardly seems an accident that the conclusions of biblical scholars who are fairly orthodox in their theology tend to be historically conservative-to-moderate in tone. (I have in mind here scholars such as Howard Marshall, F. F. Bruce, Robert Stein, James D. G. Dunn, N. T. Wright, and Catholics such as Raymond Brown and John Meier.) Scholars who are less committed to orthodoxy or positively opposed to historic Christian faith, such as Mack and Crossan, often produce portraits of Jesus that are quite remote from church teachings. The latter type of scholar often speaks disparagingly of the former, implying that the more traditional scholar is less than fully committed to “calling them as they see them” and “letting the chips fall where they may.” From my layperson’s perspective, it seems evident that the prior commitments of people like Mack may be pervasive in shaping the way they interpret the evidence.

That Mack does have an ideological ax to grind becomes evident in “The Lost Gospel.” He there explains that it is crucial to cultural progress to undermine the historical claims of traditional Christian faith: “The Christian gospel, focusing as it does on crucifixion as the guarantee for apocalyptic salvation, has somehow given its blessing to patterns of personal and political behavior that often have had disastrous consequences.” Christianity is at least partly responsible for such evils as colonial imperialism, the slave trade, and the Indian wars. It is only when we recognize that the founding Christian narrative is a mythical creation that we will be free to criticize it and perhaps to devise better, more socially progressive myths. There is much that could be said about Mack’s claims; my point here is that he should not pretend that he and other members of the Jesus Seminar approach the historical evidence with no ideological commitments.

Significantly, disagreement seems to be the rule among scholars engaged in the third quest, and the disagreements cut across theological lines. For example, some see Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher; others see Jesus as a proclaimer of “realized eschatology,” stressing the current reality of the kingdom of God. Some hold that the teachings of Jesus cannot be reconstructed, but that his actions can be known with some accuracy; others say the teachings of Jesus are all that can be known. Jesus is seen as essentially apolitical; Jesus is seen as consciously challenging the oppression of the poor in the Roman empire. The Gospel of John is historically worthless; John’s gospel is in many ways more historically informative than the Synoptics.

Such disagreements not only reveal differing assumptions, they demonstrate the highly uncertain character of most critical biblical scholarship. This can be nicely illustrated by examining two scholars who are perhaps equally unorthodox in their theological convictions, Michael Goulder and Burton Mack. We have already seen how Mack, relying on Q, produces a picture of Jesus as a wandering Cynic sage. Goulder, in his recent work “St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions,” reads the New Testament as containing the records of a war between the Petrine and Pauline missions in the early church. These two camps warred long and hard over the proper attitude of a follower of Jesus toward the Jewish law, with the looser Pauline camp eventually winning and freeing Christians from circumcision and Jewish dietary laws. From Goulder’s point of view, the Petrine camp was certainly closer to the perspective of the historical Jesus.

Now in the Gospels Jesus is represented as saying rather different things about the Law. Sometimes, as in Matthew 5, he appears to stress the validity of the Law: “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law, until all is accomplished.” At other times, Jesus seems to take a looser line on such issues as Sabbath keeping and food regulations, claiming “the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath” and that it is not the food that comes into a person that makes him impure but the words that come out of his mouth (Mark 2:27; 7:15).

How do Goulder and Mack treat such passages? Both are committed to “historical-critical” investigation; both are determined to throw off the “shackles of church dogma.” Nevertheless, they reach completely contradictory judgments in this case. For Mack, passages that manifest a cavalier attitude to the Law probably stem from that wandering Cynic sage who loved to thumb his nose at convention. Passages that represent Jesus as affirming the Law are a creation of the later church, intent on domesticating the hippielike free spirit of Jesus. For Goulder, the Matthean passage where Jesus upholds the Law certainly represents the kind of attitude a pious Jew such as Jesus would have held. The Markan passages where Jesus takes a freer line are the creations of a Pauline partisan anxious to justify a laxer attitude. Whatever else one may want to say about this dispute, it seems apparent that neither party can argue that the historical-critical approach has led to objective certainty about the matter.

Although critical scholars often stress the uncertain character of historical scholarship, I do not think it is easy for the unwary reader to keep in mind how uncertain and speculative their conclusions often are. Burton Mack again provides an excellent example. His claim that the most reliable historical portrait of Jesus comes from the hypothetical document Q depends on the following chain of probabilities (and doubtless more than these):

– The probability that Mark was the first of the synoptic Gospels. If those who argue for the primacy of Matthew are correct, then there is no need to postulate Q at all.

– The probability that Matthew and Luke both drew on a common written source. Even if Matthew and Luke drew on Mark and other sources, it is possible the other sources were oral traditions.

– The probability that this written source can be accurately reconstructed. Since we know Q only from what Luke and Matthew supposedly took from it, it is difficult to know what the actual document, if it existed, contained.

– The probability that this source was an important document for a community. Even if Q existed and can be reconstructed, it is not certain that this document actually functioned as a gospel for a religious community.

– The probability that this hypothetical community, if it existed, regarded Q as containing all that is religiously important about Jesus. The claim that Q does not contain any information about the death and resurrection of Jesus, even if true, does not imply that the community may not have known about and valued this knowledge.

Such probabilities as the above are “chained” or “linked” probabilities. The final probability of the whole is obtained by multiplying the probability of each link in the chain, each of which obviously must be less than 1.0 (following the usual convention of assigning probabilities on a scale from 0 to 1). Multiplied fractions get small very quickly; for example, .7 times .7 times .7 is only .343. My mathematical skills are not formidable, but it is clear that even if the probability of each link in the chain is estimated to be relatively high (and in some cases, such an estimate can only be described as dubious), the probability of the whole theory is low indeed.

In fact, Mack’s theory is even more improbable than the above implies. For when one examines Q, one finds Jesus to be an apocalyptic preacher quite unlike a Cynic sage. What is one to do? Mack’s solution is to postulate different “levels” of tradition in Q and consign the apocalyptic pronouncements to a later stage, created by the community. But there is no independent evidence for the existence of early and late versions of Q, nor any objective basis for recognizing some parts as earlier than others.

It would be interesting to take some actual contemporary documents that have undergone multiple revisions, perhaps involving multiple authors with different viewpoints, to see if it would be possible for a reader with no external knowledge about the process to determine the “layers” of the composition. As someone who has been part of such a process, I think that this would be practically impossible, even for a reader who had detailed knowledge about the authors involved. It is hard to see how this could be done at all for an ancient document where the supposed authors and communities are known only from the text being studied. When Mack begins to postulate these layers of composition in order to save his theory, it should be painfully obvious that Q is no longer functioning as evidence for his portrait of Jesus, but rather is itself being interpreted in light of the portrait.

What do these disagreements and the resulting uncertainties imply? They do not imply that the scholars involved in the disputes are never justified in holding their views. Indeed, if we reject Enlightenment epistemologies, some of the disputed views may even amount to knowledge. My own discipline of philosophy provides a close analogy. Disagreements in philosophy are pervasive, but this does not imply that no philosopher has good grounds for philosophical beliefs or ever knows any philosophical claim to be true.

What is implied by the disagreements in both cases is that the views of scholars on disputed questions cannot provide a strong basis for laypeople to form beliefs. Anyone acquainted with the history of philosophy knows that little rational weight adheres to the fact that a large number of philosophers at a particular time hold a certain view. In the fifties, the majority of philosophers in England and America probably thought some positivist form of the verifiability theory of meaning was correct, but today such a view is almost abandoned. Similarly, it seems to me that the views of a group of New Testament scholars, even if they constitute a majority, carry little authority for outsiders if respected scholars equally conversant with the facts continue to disagree with that majority.

If the layperson had to rely solely on historical scholarship as the means of forming historical beliefs about Jesus, then agnosticism might be the most reasonable policy, at least with respect to some important issues. However, I have already argued that the Christian should not accept the idea that historical scholarship is the only source of knowledge about Jesus. Christian believers take themselves to have good grounds for their beliefs about Jesus. Although historical evidence will almost certainly be a part of these grounds, the total story will also include either the testimony of the church or the testimony of the Spirit (or both). One might say that the ultimate ground of faith in Jesus for an individual is the total circumstances of his or her life in which the truth of the gospel has become evident.

Thankfully, the work of the Jesus Seminar has stimulated a flurry of orthodox, critical responses, including such works as “Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus,” edited by Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland; “The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth,” by Ben Witherington III; and “Cynic Sage or Son of God? Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of Revisionist Replies,” by Gregory A. Boyd. Such contributions clearly reveal the dubious assumptions and shaky reasoning behind much of the current quest. As a layperson, it is vital for me to know that scholars conversant with ancient languages and texts see the historical evidence as consistent with historic Christian faith.

However, it is equally vital to realize that Christ’s church does not stand or fall with the changing fashions of a contemporary academic field. My Christian beliefs are not primarily grounded in historical scholarship but in the testimony of Christ’s church and the work of Christ’s Spirit, as they witness to the truth of God’s revelation. Do my convictions continue to be reasonable when challenged by historical scholarship? In this situation, the uncertainties of critical historical scholarship undermine any pretension that the field has a sure authority for the layperson. They leave the original ground for Christian belief undefeated.

Christians can certainly learn from this quest, and they can be grateful for the believing scholars among the questers. Christians should not, however, think that their own pilgrimage from death to life requires a detour down this particular scholarly trail.

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Raymond Brown, “The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels” (Doubleday, 2 vols., 1,608 pp.; $75, 1994).

Gregory A. Boyd, “Cynic Sage or Son of God? Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of Revisionist Replies” (BridgePoint/Victor, 416 pp.; $15.99, paper, 1995).

John Dominic Crossan, “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” (HarperSanFrancisco, 544 pp.; $16, paper, 1993 [first published 1991]).

Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, “The Five Gospels” (Macmillan, 553 pp.; $30, 1993).

Michael Goulder, “St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions” (Westminster John Knox, 196 pp.; $15.99, paper, 1995).

Jon D. Levenson, “The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies” (Westminster John Knox, 258 pp.; $14.99, paper, 1993).

Burton L. Mack, “The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins” (HarperSanFrancisco, 228 pp.; $12, paper, 1994 [first published 1993]).

John P. Meier, “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus” (Doubleday, 2 vols.: Vol. 1, 484 pp., $28, 1991; vol. 2, 1,118 pp., $35, 1994).

E. P. Sanders, “Jesus and Judaism” (Fortress, 448 pp.; $20, paper, 1985).

Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland, editors, “Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus” (Zondervan, 243 pp.; $16.99, 1995).

Ben Witherington III, “The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth” (InterVarsity, 250 pp.; $18.99, 1995).

N. T. Wright, “The New Testament and the People of God” (Fortress, 535 pp.; $17, paper, 1992).

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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In a memorable segment of the public television series based on his book “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” Randall Balmer, as if addressing a delegation of curious Martians, described what he called “the evangelical subculture.” He seemed to be talking about a group like the Amish–a larger group, of course, and not quite so distinctive in their folkways. Still, it would be interesting to visit an evangelical village.

Talk about culture and cultures is ubiquitous in America today. We are said by many to be in the midst of a “culture war.” In response to the advocates of multiculturalism, many universities have added to their curriculum a “cultural diversity” requirement. We’ve had Oscar Lewis on the culture of poverty, Christopher Lasch on the culture of narcissism, Robert Hughes on the culture of complaint, and Stephen Carter on the culture of disbelief. In a recently published book, “The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation,” Tom Engelhardt offers “an autopsy of a once vital American myth: the cherished belief that triumph over a less-than-human enemy was in the American grain, a birthright and a national destiny.” And in an interview in this issue of, yes, BOOKS & CULTURE, Dinesh D’Souza argues that African Americans must overcome “cultural pathologies” that arose as adaptations to oppression but that are now dysfunctional.

What all these invocations of culture share is a common origin in anthropology, in the once-dominant paradigm of “culture,” founded on the study of small, discrete, and largely preliterate societies. This is a rather static view of culture: each society has its own, and the job of anthropologists is to travel around doing fieldwork and comparing their findings, creating a kind of grand taxonomy of human living arrangements and customs and world-views. It was a tidy model, best expressed in kinship diagrams. Now the tribe is likely to be gathered around Baywatch.

Does it matter where current talk about culture is distantly rooted? Yes, because much of that talk reflects the same static notion of culture that once prevailed in anthropology. This shows up with great clarity in talk about cultural purity, whether from Afrocentrists or from those who fear that “our” pure American culture will be diluted or polluted by immigrants. The reality is much different. Culturally we are all mulattos.

What this means for B&C is suggested in part by two forthcoming essay-reviews. Franklin Ng will write about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in the larger context of the Japanese American experience, while Timothy Tseng will consider the Chinese American struggle against exclusion laws and other discriminatory legislation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the light of current immigration debates. Both pieces will treat Asian American subjects not as exotica, nor with multicultural drums beating, but as part of our common history.

At B&C we won’t be dodging the contentious issues of our time–as a look at this issue will attest–but our notion of culture isn’t dictated by the agenda of the culture warriors. Thus we’ll continue to run pieces like last issue’s profiles of Annie Dillard and John Gardner alongside articles such as Robert Wuthnow’s “Can Christians Be Trusted?” (in the current issue). We hope to surprise and delight you with every issue.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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In late August 1994, Sinn Fein, the political party that speaks for the clandestine Irish Republican Army, announced that the IRA’s campaign of terrorist violence against British rule in Northern Ireland would be suspended. Soon thereafter, the major terrorist organizations that presume to act on behalf of Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority reciprocated with word that they, too, would honor this cease-fire. Negotiations toward a long-term solution of the Troubles–which, since 1970, had been marked by a sickening cycle of terrorist action followed by terrorist retaliation as well as massive public displays of force by the British military–immediately intensified. Those negotiations have to date involved the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, leaders of the local police force (the Royal Ulster Constabulary), delegates from the Irish Republic, and representatives of the province’s political parties. Prime Minister John Major’s unwillingness to let Sinn Fein and the tiny parties speaking for the Protestant terrorists participate in the negotiations until these militants begin turning in their arms and explosives has bogged down the peace process. But every month that the cease-fire continues, hope–for so long the rarest of commodities in Northern Ireland–has managed to survive. Could it be that peace is about to break out in this troubled corner of the world?

1. Events in Northern Ireland during the first half of July, ten months after the cease-fire began, suggest that the situation, though now genuinely hopeful, remains also explosively complex.

Most notable on the positive side of the ledger this past summer was the nearly universal tribute marking the passing of an ordinary Irishman whose self-consciously Christian response to terrorism made an extraordinary impression. On Veterans’ Day, November 11, 1987 (which the British style Remembrance or Poppy Day), the IRA exploded a bomb in Enniskillen, a country town 70 miles west of Belfast, amid a group of Protestants who had gathered to commemorate the war dead. This craven act of barbarism killed 11 people and wounded 63 others. It would have been soon forgotten as merely another in an endless string of atrocities, however, had it not been for the response of one of the wounded. Gordon Wilson, a Methodist born in the Irish Republic who had moved to Northern Ireland and established himself in a drapery business, was attending the ceremony with his 20-year-old daughter, Marie. They were caught in the blast. Marie Wilson died soon after the explosion while, under the rubble, she was clutching her father’s hand.

That night, from his hospital bed, Gordon Wilson told a reporter, “I have lost my daughter, but I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Talk of that kind is not going to bring her back to life.” In that same interview, he also said he would pray for those who had murdered his daughter.

As soon as he was released from the hospital, Gordon Wilson began a personal campaign for Protestant-Catholic reconciliation. Later it came out that Protestant paramilitaries were dissuaded from avenging the Enniskillen bombing because Wilson’s public statements made it politically unwise for them to act in reprisal. Wilson wrote a book called “Marie,” spoke at every opportunity about his hope that the violence could end, and constantly reiterated, “Love is the bottom line.”

His campaign for peace was passionate, indiscriminate, and nonpartisan. In 1992 he arranged a secret meeting with members of the IRA where he personally forgave them and urged them to lay down their arms. When they refused, Wilson came out boldly for interning terrorists (that is, imprisonment without normal judicial safeguards). Later, he met with Sinn Fein representatives, served on several peace commissions in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and endured harsh criticism from Protestant sectarians who felt he was selling out their side. In a magnanimous gesture that gave Wilson’s cause even more visibility, the taoiseach (or prime minister) of the Republic of Ireland, Albert Reynolds, in February 1993 made Wilson a member of the Irish Senate.

When Gordon Wilson died at the end of June, tributes poured in from all over, many from ordinary people who had been encouraged in their own peacemaking by Wilson’s example. Praise came also from representatives of Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as from Irish republicans, nationalists in Northern Ireland, and unionists in Northern Ireland. Extremists who felt that Wilson had nothing to offer them were conspicuous by their silence.

The heartfelt commendations for such a man on such a mission spoke volumes about the deep longings for peace shared by so many in Ireland. If much that was said in Wilson’s memory was sentimental–if, that is, tributes were short on specifics for how to achieve his goal of ending the political stalemate–still it was noteworthy that such broad-based sentiment supported the effort to walk that path.

Realistically considered, Northern Ireland’s political problem remains intractable. So far, no one has come even close to a solution to its dilemma–how to please both a Protestant majority (about 60 percent) that overwhelmingly wants to keep its place in the United Kingdom, and a Catholic minority (about 40 percent) that repudiates the legitimacy of British rule, probably just as overwhelmingly, while seeking its heart’s home in the Irish Republic.

Historical, ideological, and political complexities notwithstanding, responses to Gordon Wilson’s death in the press, radio, and television conveyed an almost palpable longing that, whatever it took, the peace must hold. And yet, what followed almost immediately was a return to the precipice.

2. News reports in the United States and Canada were quick to spotlight these new outbursts–tense nights of rioting concentrated in Catholic areas followed by tense days of confrontation featuring angry Protestants. The stories behind those outbursts demand serious attention, but not such complete attention as to overwhelm signs of hope that, less obviously, were there to be seen.

The months of uneasy peace since September 1994 have, in fact, witnessed major changes in simple details of everyday life. Before the cease-fire, Belfast, Londonderry, and other cities resembled armed camps. The military presence–made up of both the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and soldiers of the British army–was heavy, touchy, and everywhere. Bunches of soldiers patrolled on foot in urban areas, sauntering out in tight formation with rifles pointed skyward. Squat, steel-shrouded armored cars with a vigilant soldier peering out of the turret, semiautomatic at the ready, passed regularly through the busier streets.

Only a year ago, no one could drive anywhere near the legal-commercial-retail center of Belfast without being subjected to scrutiny at a military checkpoint. If the heavily armed officers in the middle of the street (who were always covered by at least two heavily armed officers poised alertly at the roadside) wanted to check your identity or inquire about your business, they did so. Once past the checkpoints, you could not drive into the central district itself, for, as a prophylactic against car bombs, it was kept vehicle-free. If, after parking on the fringe of Belfast’s business district, you wanted to enter the Castle Court shopping complex, you passed further guards who inspected what you were carrying and might give you a quick frisk.

A year ago, moving between Northern Ireland and the Republic resembled something out of a World War II movie. You drove up very slowly to the checkpoint; if it was night, you dimmed your headlights; you proceeded one vehicle at a time past the guards (again, never less than two, and armed to the teeth); you were aware of high, well-fortified towers in the near distance from which heavy weapons were trained on the crossing point to protect the guards and to do unto the paramilitaries before they could do unto the soldiers. Even if you were with someone who had made the crossing many times, and who assured you that these checks were routine, there was a grip in the gut.

A year ago, police stations in the major cities and many in the smaller towns were shielded day and night by armed officers positioned 50 to 100 yards down every road that could lead past the station. The stations themselves were heavily fortified castles of concrete, steel, and barbed wire.

Changes in the wake of the cease-fire are dramatic. Soldiers from the British regular army are now almost never seen, and the presence of the RUC is much reduced. Crossing the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic is now an exercise of vehicular dexterity rather than an experience of armed intimidation. At the height of the tension, border guards had constructed small-scale mazes in order to force vehicles to travel slowly and thus to increase their visibility. These mazes remain to confuse drivers new to the island’s roads, but fortifications at the crossing points are dismantled, and, if there are any guards present, they remain out of sight in the towers. Access to city centers, shopping plazas, and other congregating points is much less encumbered. Downtown Belfast now sports traffic patterns resembling those in many American cities–where pedestrian malls respond to the dictates of commercial rather than military captains. Given the occurrences of early July, it turns out to be a good thing that police stations are still well fortified, but gone are the foot patrols that once guarded them. The cease-fire, in other words, has made a real difference in what residents experience day by day.

Even more encouraging from a Christian perspective is growing evidence of spiritual exertions toward peace. The number of Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, and other church officials who speak out boldly is still limited, for partisans remain intensely alert to words that could be construed as betrayal. Yet enough do speak out so that all of the major religious bodies in Northern Ireland–Catholics, Presbyterians, Church of Ireland (that is, Anglicans), and many of the smaller Protestant bodies (most of which are evangelical)–can hear from leaders within their own circles of biblical and theological reasons for peace. Behind the scenes, even more efforts are apparently under way–both within the various religious fellowships and across denominational boundaries–toward moderating entrenched antagonisms, toward applying scriptural and theological resources to the situation, and toward ensuring that differences within and between groups are expressed charitably.

The cease-fire has also encouraged significant economic development. To be sure, unemployment remains considerably higher in Northern Ireland than in the rest of Great Britain, and it is a particularly persistent condition precisely in the areas that sustain the harshest sectarian suspicions. Yet construction seems to be going on everywhere in Belfast, including the building of a major new concert hall. Belfast’s Opera House, which was regularly bombed during the Troubles, has been resplendently refurbished. In the same week during which observers wondered if the province was careening back into its violent past, the British government announced a major new defense contract for a large, local manufacturer. This was only the latest in a string of new contracts that have been secured since peace emerged as a possibility. One does not need to be a materialist to realize that such development is crucial for a better future, since without work and reasonable economic expansion, the explosive combination of unemployment, youthful alienation, and ideologies of grievance will be much more difficult to defuse.

Peace has also opened up Northern Ireland’s underutilized potential for tourism. The province is, in fact, a beautiful region in a beautiful island. But for more than a quarter of a century, the threat of violence has kept tourists away in droves. Since the cease-fire, tourism has grown rapidly. In fact, it seemed about to boom–with more to be gained economically than lost environmentally–until the explosions of early July jolted the industry into a tailspin.

3. Those explosions were both metaphorical and literal. Even as peace struggled to be born, the guardians of sectarian suspicion hovered close at hand to snatch the newborn infant away. Instances were distressingly frequent:

– Even though Sinn Fein’s past record of condoning terrorism has been repudiated by spokesmen at all levels of the Catholic church, Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, still resorts regularly to public threats of demonstrations, and more, if his demands are not allowed to dominate the negotiating process.

– Twice during the first week of July, Ian Paisley, Jr., who now works with his father to support the hardest-nosed Protestant unionism, exercised his family’s genius for public provocation. Graduation ceremonies at Northern Ireland’s leading university, the Queen’s University, Belfast, are spread out over an entire week at the end of the academic year. At Queen’s and elsewhere in the province, the issue of music at public gatherings has produced bitter debate. For years the British national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” had been part of the music at Queen’s commencements. After repeated protests from nationalists, and after the university’s search for a universally acceptable alternative failed, it was decided this year to omit the anthem. That decision was a great offense to the most ardent unionists, who regarded it as a cowardly cave-in to republican pressure. To put the situation right, Ian Paisley, Jr., twice in commencement week provided his own tape-recorded renderings of the national anthem, once from a loudspeaker mounted on a car, which university authorities succeeded in keeping mostly out of earshot, and the second time at his own graduation ceremony (where he received a master of arts in political science) when, in the commencement hall, he stood to attention at the strains of the anthem coming from a tape recorder held in his own hand.

– Persistent difficulties remain in evening out cross-community inequities. Queen’s, for example, has been perceived as Protestant, not so much because of legal standing as because of its Protestant past and because its faculty (though now quite secular) includes few Catholics. Recently the university has aggressively recruited Catholic students–too aggressively for some Protestants, not aggressively enough for some Catholics. The university has also acted affirmatively by hiring more Catholics as administrators, faculty, and staff. These moves engender all of the suspicion, mistrust, and aggrievement that the United States has experienced in similar efforts at racial affirmative action.

– On the religious front, the growing willingness of church leaders to speak out for peace is not always matched by corresponding sentiments in the ranks. At least one Presbyterian minister, for example, was spending part of his summer preparing his defense against a charge raised in the presbytery that he had violated ministerial vows by taking part in nonsectarian Bible studies with a Catholic priest.

In short, the months of peace have witnessed the beginnings of hope, but hardly the end of sectarian realities.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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4. The major problems of the past summer, however, went well beyond ideological theater and persistent long-term difficulties in promoting equality between the two religious communities. On Monday, July 3, the British government announced the release from prison of Pvt. Lee Clegg, who had finished serving nearly four years of a sentence for murder. That night in Catholic areas of Belfast, Londonderry, and a few other towns, all hell broke loose. On the night of the third, 160 vehicles (cars, buses, trucks) were commandeered–usually by roving posses of masked men–and then torched. The same night, police stations reported being assaulted by 236 petrol bombs (milk bottles filled with gasoline, lit, then tossed). The next night, 12 more vehicles went up in flames, and 469 more petrol bombs were thrown at RUC fortifications. Numerous private properties were torched, including that of a major automobile dealer in Catholic West Belfast.

In a brief but telling commentary on the event, Belfast’s Green Gate Dairy announced that it was expecting only a 60 percent return of its glass milk bottles (the rate is usually well above 90 percent). From previous experience, the dairy knew that some would be stolen for use as gasoline bombs and some pitched to keep them from being stolen for that purpose. With the flames by night came also a blitz of sloganeering by day. Clegg Out, All Out was the graffito that appeared like a weed in many Catholic communities.

Miraculously, this spasm of violence resulted in no fatalities and only minor injuries to police, bystanders, and perpetrators. Why did it occur?

Lee Clegg was a private in the British army serving time for the murder in 1991 of a Catholic teenager, Karen Reilly. No one disputed the facts of his case, only what they meant. Clegg had been on patrol at night when a speeding car approached his position and failed to heed warnings to stop. Following stipulated procedure, Clegg opened fire on the approaching vehicle. When it had passed his position, Clegg, now violating his orders, fired once more at the retreating car. This last shot killed Karen Reilly, a back-seat passenger in what turned out to be a stolen car being taken for a joy ride. Although Clegg’s murder conviction had been upheld by several review panels, intense pressure for his release had come from Northern Ireland’s unionists as well as from right-wing members of John Major’s Conservative party.

In Clegg’s defense, it has been calculated that he had, at most, two seconds to decide whether to fire the last, fatal shot. To understand the outrage at his release, however, it is also necessary to recall that, at present, over 900 veterans of Northern Irish terrorism (including both Protestants and Catholics) are currently serving time for crimes that extremists in the sectarian communities consider political acts. No terrorist convicted of a capital offense has ever been paroled before serving at least ten years in prison. One of the items that has stalled peace negotiations is the insistence, by both extremes, that the men they term “political prisoners” be released as a precondition for serious talks.

The timing of Clegg’s release struck many observers as, at best, curious. The announcement came on the eve of the vote by Conservative party members of Parliament as to whether Major should continue to serve as their head. The dozen or so Ulster Unionist and Democratic Unionist MPS in the British Parliament constitute a minuscule bloc by themselves, but, as allies of the Conservatives, they provide John Major with a small cushion over and above the razor-thin majority sustained by the Conservatives. Though Tories denied absolutely the assertion, many observers saw Clegg’s release as a sop from Major to the right wing of his party.

For Ireland, the timing of Clegg’s release was potentially disastrous. July in Northern Ireland is the marching season. Annually on July 12, the Loyal Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal society pledged to perpetuate the Bible, Reformation Christianity, and allegiance to Great Britain, stages elaborate parades throughout the North. Less elaborate celebrations also take place in regions of the Ulster diaspora, including Scotland, Canada, adjacent counties in the Irish Republic, and improbable Commonwealth countries such as Ghana. The Twelfth and the Thirteenth (the latter as a day to recuperate from Orange parades and for smaller Protestant fraternal organizations to march) are full holidays in Northern Ireland. The Twelfth is particularly Protestant because it commemorates the victory on July 12, 1690, of William of Orange over James II, the Catholic claimant to the throne, at the Battle of the Boyne, near Drogheda in the present Irish Republic. This was the battle that decisively sealed the political triumph of Protestantism in Great Britain.

During the province’s marching season, there are each year about 2,500 local parades, the vast majority of them Protestant and unionist. While July 12 is the main day for parades, Orange Order celebrations, as well as parades by groups similar in purpose to the Orange Order, also occur in considerable numbers on the days before and after the Twelfth. The parading ritual is a manifestly public affair, with huge drums, well-schooled corps of fifers, and marchers dressed in black formal attire with colorful orange sashes and furled umbrellas to lend a little class to the array.

The marching season has always magnified Catholic-Protestant differences, but the July 1995 parades in Northern Ireland were especially fraught with potential for sectarian conflict. The 1995 parades marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Orange Order, which came into existence in 1795 after a decade of Protestant-Catholic tension climaxed in a bloody battle in County Armagh, leaving some 30 Catholics dead–a fact remembered by both sides to this day.

5. The way that Northern Ireland’s unionists responded to nationalist rioting at the freeing of Private Clegg was as predictable as it was pure Irish. As had happened often before–and not only in Northern Ireland–parading was transformed into an overtly political statement. The only thing different about this summer’s provocations was the fear that, in conjunction with nationalist rioting, they might scuttle the hard-won prospects of peace.

Even before the fires set by the nationalist rioters had died down, the Orangemen were at work. In Belfast, leaders of the city’s ten Orange Order districts proposed almost immediately that parade routes for the Twelfth be altered so that the city’s various marches could flow together into the Lower Ormeau Road. The Lower Ormeau Road is a Catholic district whose community leaders had earlier asked city officials and Orange leaders to have parades bypass their area as a way of keeping the peace. The Orange determination to show that unionism could not be cowed, however, was a much stronger force than clear-headed prudence. Catholics in the Lower Ormeau region were especially appalled by the parades this year, since all possible routes took Orangemen past the bookmaking shop of Sean Graham, where loyalist terrorists had once shot five Catholics dead.

Orange-inspired tension came to a head on Monday, July 10. Before the violence inspired by Clegg’s release, the various Orange lodges in Portadown had arranged a pre-Twelfth rally and parade for the nearby village of Drumcree, about 30 miles southwest of Belfast, a site significant in this anniversary year because of its proximity to where the Orange Order had been founded.

The spark that flared into confrontation was the decision by the Orangeman to route their pre-Twelfth parade through the Garvaghy Road, a heavily Catholic residential area in Drumcree. The plan was to carry out a proper parade on the weekend before the Twelfth–banners floating, bass drums booming, fifes piping, bands playing, the works.

But the Catholic residents resisted. Aroused by the banging of lids from garbage cans, they assembled in the middle of their road and sat down. As at all major parades, a few members of the RUC were present. As soon as they saw what was happening, they called for reinforcements. The fat was in the fire. The hair trigger with which Northern Ireland lives was no better illustrated than by the rapid escalation of events in Drumcree. The minor struggle of the weekend immediately flared into a major confrontation. On Sunday, July 9, and Monday, July 10, Orangemen and a motley crowd of unionist toughs streamed into Drumcree. RUC reinforcements also poured in to bulk up the human shield that had been hastily built to separate the rallying unionists from the Catholic residents of the Garvaghy Road.

The crisis climaxed on the night of Monday, July 10. At 8:00 p.m., a gigantic rally convened in a vacant field adjacent to the Church of Ireland in Drumcree. Among others exhorting the crowd was the Reverend Ian Paisley, a member of both the British and European Parliaments, as well as minister of the Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast and head of his own Free Presbyterian denomination. According to several published reports, Paisley told the crowd, “If we don’t win this battle, all is lost. It is a matter of life or death. It is a matter of Ulster or the Republic of Ireland.” No full text of Paisley’s speech was available, but reports suggested that he was using this apocalyptic language to demand the right of Orange unionists to march along the Garvaghy Road.

Within the hour, unruly elements from the unionist crowd started to pelt the RUC with rocks and bottles. At 9:00 p.m., the RUC began to fire plastic bullets at those who were hurling the missiles. When the official rally ended at 9:30, fife and drum bands led squads of Orangemen in marching up and down the police lines, while less disciplined parts of the crowd spread out in an effort to flank the RUC. Clashes escalated up, down, and beyond the police lines until about 10:30, when negotiations involving the RUC, heads of the local lodges, Ian Paisley, and Ian Paisley, Jr., were announced to the crowds, which then quieted.

Negotiations continued through the night, during which time Garvaghy Road residents again sat down in the middle of their road, and free-floating contingents from the unionist side probed the RUC lines. By 9:30 on the morning of July 11, a compromise had been reached: the Orangemen would be allowed to march along the Garvaghy Road, but only without music, only if they left their bands behind.

The protest at Drumcree was not the only Orange show of strength. Orangemen from lodges throughout Northern Ireland also assembled in and around the coastal town of Larne where they proceeded to disrupt highway traffic as well as access to the ferry that links Northern Ireland to the port of Stranraer in Scotland. Logic was askew here, for many of those stranded high and dry after disembarking from the ferry at Larne were members of Scottish Orange orders on their way to take part in the festivities of the Twelfth in Northern Ireland.

But logic was not the point. Power was. And the ability to disrupt traffic throughout a wide circle around Larne seemed to show at least some Orangemen who had the power.

For those, on the other hand, who were holding their breath over the fate of the cease-fire, it was a great relief that the parades of the Twelfth passed with only a few minor incidents. Tensions remained high along the Ormeau Road in Belfast, but a full contingent of the RUC–reassembling with the assistance of British army units the show of massive force that had been standard before the cease-fire–succeeded, despite a few tense moments, in maintaining order.

6. To an outsider, the period from Clegg’s release through the marches of the Twelfth shed a surreal glow over this potentially lovely corner of the world.

By July 7, three days after the rioting over Private Clegg’s release had ceased, most of the detritus from the riots had been cleared away. But not all of it. To visitors, the really odd thing about response to that violence was how swiftly “normal life” seemed to reassert itself, even in the hardest-hit areas. Along the Andersontown Road in West Belfast, for example, two burnt-out buses remained on the streets. To American visitors, these were sobering relics–the windows were all blown out, the interiors were filled with charred debris (including remnants of parcels that had been left on board), and the frames squatted on metal rims over asphalt recongealed where it had been melted down. Yet even more striking was the way that children scampered, shoppers milled, cars negotiated, and the elderly loitered in thick profusion around the bus shells as if they were no more unusual than a long unnoticed urban monument of innocuous origin.

Oddly, the most enduring images of Northern Ireland in July 1995 were the pictures of RUC personnel and armed vehicles supplied by press and television. There they were in reports of the fourth and fifth, often photographed against blazing skylines, putting their lives on the line to restore a semblance of order in Catholic areas of Belfast and Londonderry. There they were in reports of the tenth and eleventh, often photographed as a backdrop to mobs of unionist thugs hurling rocks and bricks with all possible malevolence, putting their lives on the line to restore a semblance of order on the outskirts of Protestant Drumcree. Go figure.

In 1983, David Hempton, a Christian historian who lives in Belfast, wrote poignantly about possible responses to the situation in his own province:

Any rational evaluation of Ulster’s problems is bound to be pessimistic, due to the irreconcilable objectives of its citizens, the historical weight of generations of conflict, the polarization that violence always brings, a crumbling economy, and the apparent inability of churches to offer any real hope. … To be thought of as realistic in Ulster political life it is apparently necessary to manifest hopelessness and despair, yet the Christian ought to be familiar with another kind of vocabulary, with words like hope, salvation, redemption, love and grace. This tension between external pessimism and internal hope is the most profound difficulty facing Christians in Northern Ireland and relates closely to the sufferings of Christ, particularly on the cross, where a similar tension between love and despair resulted in the one truly hopeful event in the world’s history.

A dozen years later, the situation is somewhat more hopeful than when Hempton described it. Yet the events of July also suggest how thin is the crust of healing that covers Northern Ireland’s poisoned past.

What can be made of extremists claiming to speak for Catholics who say they want to be part of a democratic peace process, but who hold the threat of wanton violence in full display as a potential response to public decisions that do not go their way?

What can be made of extremists claiming to speak for Protestants who flaunt age-old antagonisms like the words of petulant children on a playground, but who do not seem to mind if these words take those who hear them to the brink of conflagration?

What, in particular, can be said of the ones who do these things, at least partly in the name of their religions, while priests and bishops take to the airwaves and the streets appealing for people to return to their homes, and when the moderator of Ireland’s Presbyterian Church calls on those assembled at Drumcree to disperse?

Thankfully, the most important thing to say about the unrest in early July is that it did not permanently derail the peace process. Vividly and dramatically, however, it illustrated the depth of Northern Ireland’s difficulty. In the second part of this report, we will examine a few of the many good books published in recent years that help explain how things have come to be as they are. That examination will show how deeply the actions of Christians, sometimes acting out of profound religious concern, have contributed their full and bloody share to the past that so many throughout the world now pray can be overcome.

This is the first of two articles.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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