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When our faculty book group began reading James K. A. Smith’s new book Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (hereafter ITK), one of us was suffering from “benign positional vertigo”—a mild wooziness punctuated by dizzy spells. This condition meant experiencing something like waking up in an unfamiliar environment, with the disorientation that remains until one’s senses and thoughts collaborate to make sense of that strange context. Such sensations of being off-center, of the brain’s interface with the surrounding world being disjointed, brought poignancy to our reading of Smith’s argument. Smith claims that our cognitions presuppose a corporeal understanding of the world around us—”visceral plausibility structure[s]”—constructed by the narratives of our lives. We find Smith’s argument largely persuasive and helpful. His claims, however, also prompt questions about the accuracy of his anthropology, the nature of “worship” (as broadly defined by Smith), the relationship between the Church and Christian colleges, and implications for such educational communities.

Is Smith’s Anthropology Correct?

Smith published Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (DTK) in 2009. In February of this year, he followed up with ITK, the second volume of the planned trilogy Cultural Liturgies. Together, these volumes pursue the ambitious goal of renewing “Christian practice,” by which Smith means mainly what happens in Christian churches and colleges. The core claim is that effective worship and education must be based on correct anthropology, on a clear understanding of how human beings really act, know, and learn. Much is at stake in our account of human nature and of the relation of human beings to God. If the anthropology is right, then our ecclesial and pedagogical practices have at least a chance of being effective. But if the anthropology is wrong (i.e., if we have missed what drives human beings as human), then our policies and plans will be wrongly oriented. At best, our efforts may be effective only by a fluke; at worst, they will be effective in precisely the wrong ways, and our attempts to nurture and improve Christian worship and education will be misguided.

Part 1 of ITK is devoted to Smith’s channeling of “two key theorists of embodied intentionality,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu. Merleau-Ponty describes human being-in-the-world (including knowing, intending, and acting) as irreducibly embodied. To be a Christian, for example, is not simply to apprehend certain doctrines intellectually but also for one’s imagination—what Smith calls praktognosia or practical knowledge (a bodily, non-discursive, pre-reflective orientation)—to be shaped and active in certain ways. Bourdieu focuses on communal practices (non-propositional, socialized actions, rituals, and inclinations)—instantiations of what Smith calls habitus—which determine more deeply and consistently than any theoretical cognition how human beings relate, decide, desire, and worship. Learning, then, is more fundamentally a matter of becoming proficient in such practices than it is becoming conscious of concepts and propositions.

Smith’s extended homage to these French theorists—somewhat repetitious, but written accessibly and with verve—serves his exposition of the anthropological “inner logic” of Christian churches’ and schools’ formation of believers. Christian formation is missional; its end is for Christians to be sent into the world. Smith therefore claims to be opposed to a hierarchical dualism of mind and body that prioritizes intellectual, reflective, discursive cognition over practical, affective, aesthetic involvement. For this very reason it is odd to see repeatedly this very dualism, inverted but reinstated: e.g., the “intentionality that precedes knowledge and whose locus is the body”; the bodily “exercises in constitution that did not engage my ratiocinative capacities for a second”; and the assertion that “our bodies make and respond to the world … in ways that are independent of representations or deliberative processing.”

There are two puzzles in such patterns. One concerns the confidence with which Smith can insist that the affective, embodied aspect of human life is prior to, and independent of, the cognitive and deliberative. Are the dimensions of human thought and action really so neatly distinguished and ordered? The other puzzle (highlighted by our colleague David A. Vander Laan) has to do with Smith’s reluctance to acknowledge the embodied nature of the intellect itself. Deliberation, reflection, and consciousness—the stuff of which propositions, cognition, and worldviews are made—do not appear in a disembodied domain of abstraction. They happen in (even if they cannot be simply reduced to!) neurons and nerves, gyri and sulci, surrounded and supplied by glia, blood, and bone. Reading, writing, and arguing are communal, material practices. Rationality, too, is inescapably and irreducibly embodied and social. We agree that non-conscious perceptions and dispositions are deeply embedded in the texture of human being-in-the-world. But a simplistic reversal of the Cartesian mind-over-matter hierarchy is at cross-purposes with the careful anthropology and the pedagogical and liturgical seriousness for which Smith rightly calls.

Part 2 of ITK describes what liturgy “does”: it immerses us in a communal narrative, “not only inform[ing] the intellect but reform[ing] the very praktognosia by which we ‘feel’ our way around the world.” Liturgy gives substance and direction to our embodied desires, affections, and loves. Importantly, Christian worship is not the only practice that fits this description. Indeed, Smith makes a major point of construing many constellations of practices and dispositions—many liturgies—as doing the same work of formation, in competition with Christian faith. Individualistic, consumeristic, nationalistic, and other ways of being-in-the-world shape us (and our congregants and students) against the gospel and the kingdom. Smith’s urgent recommendation to pastors, teachers, and worship leaders is to realize that this competition is being fought at levels and in modes hardly limited to conscious, reflective thought. On the whole, we agree. Yet it would be easy to get the impression from Smith that the solution is simply to expose people, consistently and intensively, to the right liturgy: that Christian worship by itself—if practiced often enough to “seep into the bones”—forms a deeply Christian person (indeed a deeply Christian community).[1] But Christian experience is surely more complex than this. We may show up in the pews week after week, participate in fellowship, listen to the Word, feed on the body and blood of Jesus as we receive his promises—and still be capable of remarkable feats of compartmentalization. We can do all of the above, passionately and gratefully, every Sunday for decades, and just as routinely pick up our ways of unbelief, despair, and alienation again on Monday. A Christian liturgical anthropology cannot ignore the infuriating, confusing, corrosive dynamics of sin and brokenness, dynamics that regularly frustrate and demoralize the most dedicated Christian pastors and educators.

Who’s in Charge of Worship?

Attention to sin and to fallen creatures’ need for the Holy Spirit is understated in ITK‘s exploration of worship. Instead, Smith focuses on humans’ formation via the liturgies of our daily lives; he emphasizes habituation rather than the unplanned gifts and interventions of the Spirit. (Reviewers of Smith’s DTK have also flagged neglect of the Spirit’s role and related overstatement of human agency in overpowering sin.) While Smith alerts us to the important role that liturgies (whether sacred or secular) play in identity formation and even worldview, he could offer a clearer picture of what worship itself is or does.

The book as a whole purports to show “how worship works,” yet readers may leave wondering which view of worship Smith is describing and/or espousing. In his more optimistic moments, Smith lauds the possibilities of worship: e.g., he equates the “end of worship” with the “end of Christian education”—i.e., a sending out for action, a vocational call and response. “We are (re)made to be makers,” he claims, and he later reiterates that “the end of worship is mission … we gather to be sent.” Yet Smith seems haunted by the “paralyzing” realities of 21st-century practices such as the habitual use of social media, both enabling and encouraging self-display. Since he defines humans as “creatures who can’t not worship,” he stresses that we are shaped by cultural liturgies of many kinds, some far from holy. Perhaps because Smith’s view of liturgy includes a wide variety of practices (from tweeting to hymn singing), his definition of worship seems torn between the actual and the ideal.

What is clear about Smith’s view of worship is that it relies heavily on imagination—hence, the book’s title and theme. He describes imagination as “a kind of faculty by which we navigate and make sense of our world”—imagination serves as both pilot and interpreter. In developing his liturgical anthropology, Smith invokes Augustine, Aristotle, and others to argue for the role of the senses in “knowing” the world via experience and image. He builds a case for the centrality of story in Christian life and influence, titling his final chapter “Restor(y)ing the World: Christian Formation for Mission.” Readers may be reminded of debates on the scope and application of “worldview”; indeed, in one of Smith’s attempts to “picture” his argument throughout the book with asides boxed in gray, he invites readers to pray a worldview in order to absorb its story “in [the] bones.”

Smith hints that imagination may offer a “third way” between cognition and affect (hence avoiding dualistic reduction in his anthropology). However, Smith might profit from Aristotle’s concept of mythos (i.e., plot or narrative) as he helps readers navigate this potential “third way.” Via mythos as well as the better-known appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos, the Aristotelian tradition has navigated divides between thinking and feeling. The opportunity for Smith would be to interpret story (roughly equivalent to mythos) as a kind of rationale, even hypothesis, for how life or “worship” works. In Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, Jeffrey Walker traces a progression in classical thought from mythos to hypothesis: “A mythos … is a kind of ‘case’ that demonstrates the way things are, or could be… . Aristotle’s term mythos was … replaced by the term hypothesis.” Via Aristotle and his inheritors, we can understand story as explanatory, a kind of rationale for how life works. Smith comes close to this insight when characterizing cognitive narratology as “interested in the unique ‘logic’ of story and the imagination, the sort of visceral induction that characterizes our narrative sense.” But he soon retreats again to binaries: “Stories have reasons of which Reason knows nothing, but about which our bodies know almost everything.”

(How) Can We Love God with our Minds?

In ITK (as in its prequel), Smith provokes readers to question the habits of the Christian university, particularly as a part of the larger body of Christ. He insists that the telos of Christian worship and Christian education is the same: being “caught up” in the sending mission of God. Moreover, Smith argues that both must recalibrate to account for humans’ embodied, pre-cognitive, habitus-grounded nature. What, then, does this shift mean for the Christian university? Can its focus on worship and the formation of Christian affections be distinguished from that of the Church as a whole?

Smith’s ambiguity about worship proves significant here. It is not always clear when he intends “worship” to describe the totality of Christians’ lives (culture-making, etc.) and when he denotes the more narrow corporate worship of particular churches (think Sunday morning). ITK at times suggests the latter, focusing on worship liturgies shared across denominational lines and calling universities to incorporate these practices. Yet Smith’s Calvinistic and indeed Kuyperian call to extend Christ’s lordship over all of creation suggests that education itself should not be excluded from the category of “worship.” What does this ambiguity mean for educational institutions? On the one hand, it might suggest that the university be brought into closer relationship with churches, highlighting the continuity between its educational mission and ecclesial life and worship. At the extreme, this ambiguity might eliminate the institution of the Christian university as we now know it, replacing it with enhanced, church-based programming. On the other hand, if education is itself a form of worship when it fulfills its reflective mission, then the university might deliberately avoid mirroring the forms of worship used by the Church assembled. But Smith does not move powerfully in either of these directions—i.e., either to collapse or to define the distinctions between Church and college.

To the extent that Smith stands by his “education as habitus” argument—that learning is practice—there is little room to distinguish the university as uniquely focused on the life of the mind. In his construction, our minds emerge out of a process of embodied shaping and acquisition, making bodily practice consistently primary. When he tilts toward this dualism, Smith might formulate it thus: loving God with the mind must attend first to the body. Giving this sort of priority to the body certainly comports with the priority of churches in Smith’s account of worship-as-activity, but leaves little room (or at least a teleological question mark) for any distinctive role for the Christian university apart from the worship practices of the Church.

More encouragingly, Smith also shows some signs of a less dualistic, more dialectical approach. Just as body shapes mind, so reflection is brought into dialogue with environment, experience, and practice to recalibrate and shape these. Smith describes his own work in ITK in just such terms: “my hope is to foster intentional reflection on practice in order to encourage reflective immersion in practice.” To the extent that reflection informs practice, the Christian university has a critical role to play in refining worshipful liturgies, and indeed is a set of its own liturgies of reflection-as-worship. In other words, the Church needs the university to reflect on its practices even as the university arises as part of the Church. Once again, readers can infer a possible—if underdeveloped—”third way” in Smith’s argument.

This dialectical approach suggests that “worship” in the context of the university might not incorporate the liturgies of ecclesial worship any more (or any less) than would the liturgies of other institutions of faithful human culture. One might ask instead about the sorts of liturgies appropriate to an institution focused on loving God with the mind. In DTK‘s terms, what sorts of “shadow eucharists” (and other liturgies) apply across the range of redeemed human activities—and in particular to the intellectual endeavor? Here, Christian universities might deliberately seek to avoid what Smith calls “the heresy of paraphrase”—perhaps better termed here “the heresy of parachurch”—by not offering chapel-based similitudes of corporate worship that supplant the Church without replacing it. They would do well to explore uniquely academic liturgies such as reading, writing, analysis, memorization, performance, and advising. Furthermore, the dialectic relationship between worship and reflection suggests the import of elaborating the distinctive institutional emphases of churches and universities, and of exploring the variety of possible configurations for their relation. Indeed, a robustly corporate understanding of the church may create more space for differentiated institutional foci, as each part fulfills a particular role and as individuals participate across multiple institutions. The differentiable institutional telos of “loving God with the mind” would of course still encourage close attention to the liturgical, narrative, and embodied aspects of education—but with an eye to what is suited to education-as-worship. In Kuyperian terms, Smith might better account for what worship might look like in the academic “sphere.”

One of the ironies of this volume is that it is less affective than DTK: i.e., ITK is somewhat less adroit at engaging the affections of the reader. Bourdieu’s habitus and Merleau-Ponty’s praktognosia lack something of the storied qualities so artfully communicated in tales of shopping-mall cathedrals, Starbucks “sacraments,” Victoria’s Secret branding, and the shadow-eucharistic evenings of wine and cheese with friends. This trend is indeed an irony, as the content of this more cognitive volume (ITK) places greater emphasis on humans’ embodiment, practices, and pre-cognitive ways of being in the world. There is a further irony as well: this more academically pitched work may communicate its argument less effectively as a result. ITK‘s tonal limits actually support the fundamental merit of Smith’s overall project: cognition cannot be unhinged from the affections. This conclusion has implications for the university: an institution uniquely focused on loving God with the mind may require special attention to the body, precognitions, habits, and affections in order to faithfully fulfill is intellectually oriented mission. It may well be that these are complements to theory and reflection rather than simply their precedents.

How Then Shall We Live?

Smith argues that the metaphors, stories and liturgies we live by shape our desires more than our beliefs. Given Smith’s claims (without critique), what are the implications for college faculty and staff? Smith’s assertion that we are embodied social beings embedded in our culture has very practical implications for all college personnel. What assumptions of the good life and way of navigating through the educational system are being promoted? What kinds of backdrops (wallpaper, as he calls it) set the tone for student experiences? Looking at these subtle and embedded institutional practices and messages might be the first task of faculty and staff alike.

Similarly, if communal liturgies are especially formative, what are the common liturgies that populate our campuses? Analyzing the underlying messages inherent in these practices might be worthwhile. (Smith calls such analysis an “audit.”) Finding ways to eliminate the negative practices can then be addressed. The transient nature of the student population makes it possible for institutional practices and stories to be changed over time with intentional efforts at doing so. In addition to college-wide practices, faculty might examine how their own teaching and mentoring practices reveal assumptions of the truth or “good life” and ask the question, “What does each practice do for those enacting it?” Smith argues that routine practices shape us; therefore, we might eliminate practices that foster attitudes that conflict with the kingdom of God, and encourage those that resonate with it. Also, we could make explicit the vision underlying some of our positive practices that are not clearly articulated, understood, or embraced.

One important implication from ITK is that students may not have as much free choice in their actions as we assume—instead, they are embedded in a larger, fallen culture as well as their own long-term practices. These habits may operate on a non-conscious level and become highly resistant to change. College faculty inherit students from other educational institutions (as well as families) that have shaped students’ habits and attitudes. How do faculty change these liturgies and mindsets? How much time does it take to offset an early lifetime of training? Indeed, replacing old habits of mind and practice is difficult work. Smith envisions Christian education as “the acquisition of a Christian habitus,” and his account of Bourdieu suggests that it is “a slow process of co-option, initiation, and incorporation”—perhaps taking longer than the four years students spend at college. College, therefore, may provide the initiation of new ways of being and imagining. Old patterns, mindsets, and stories, especially worldly ones that are constantly reinforced in the larger culture (and sometimes in the church and the family), may be difficult to break or replace.

Still, the acquisition of practices, metaphors, and habitus will be enhanced when students are immersed in a new, supportive environment. Therefore, residential living-and-learning environments provide a better context for counter-cultural formation than do commuter colleges or distance education. Moving to a college campus takes students out of their old environments with established cues for behavior. Students at residential colleges are in a rich environment to establish new routines among others who can encourage and reinforce Godly practices and affections. Smith makes the claim that Christian faith is more than a set of beliefs; it extends to the imaginations, affections, practices, temperament, and “stories we live by.” In order for Christian colleges to effectively engage in Christian formation, they need an environment in which “the Story of the gospel is imaginatively woven into the entire ethos of the institution … it requires incorporating intentional historic practices of Christian worship.” We agree that the gospel should be woven into all aspects of the Christian college: residence life, student life, and faculty activity. No small task.

We want to emphasize the essential work of the Holy Spirit in bringing about transformed hearts and lives that are united with God. Still, we take Smith’s claims in ITK seriously in informing our “work” in partnering with God in kingdom work. We are called to be faithful stewards—cultivating good soil receptive to the work of the Holy Spirit. Smith reminds us how to cultivate good soil, but ultimately, it is the Holy Spirit who infuses and changes lives.

Jesse Covington (associate professor, political science), Maurice Lee (assistant professor, religious studies), Sarah Skripsky (assistant professor, English), and Lesa Stern (associate professor, communication studies) teach at Westmont College.

1. In conversation at a recent seminar at our institution, Smith moderated his position by saying that he does not hold to a liturgical determinism whereby practices automatically produce desired results.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If the standard accounts are correct, the 20th-century neo-evangelical movement was born on April 7, 1942 in St. Louis, Missouri. Meeting at the Hotel Coronado, the National Conference on United Action Among Evangelicals was the first organized expression of the “new evangelicalism.” Bringing together Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and Wesleyans, it represented a wide swath of conservative Protestantism. Lamenting the “disintegration of Christianity,” its leaders called for a united evangelical front. The result was the National Association of Evangelicals.[1]

Despite the best efforts of the NAE, this dream has never been fully realized. Far from unified, evangelicalism remains divided by theology, politics, and culture. Internally pluralistic and religiously diverse, evangelicalism has been called a mosaic, a kaleidoscope, and a “twelve-ring circus.”[2]

How do you study a twelve-ring circus? Focusing on the entire movement, some have explored the boundaries of the evangelical tent. Emphasizing common themes, they have stressed evangelicalism’s commitment to biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism. Utilizing the tools of survey research, they have mapped the doctrinal and organizational markers of evangelical identity.[3] Taking a different approach, others have emphasized the divisions within evangelicalism, identifying as many as 14 branches to the evangelical family tree. Faced with such diversity, some have concluded that “there is no such thing as evangelicalism.”[4]

In Apostles of Reason, historian Molly Worthen combines these approaches, analyzing the “shifting and conflicting authorities” behind the “evangelical imagination.” In place of shared doctrines, she highlights a “common set of questions,” focusing on faith and reason, emotion and intellect, and religion and public life. While continuing to speak of evangelicalism, Worthen refuses to reify its contents.

More than an exercise in classification, Apostles of Reason turns intellectual history into page-turning drama, highlighting the flesh-and-blood personalities behind academic debates. Drawing on extensive archival research, it lets both the protagonists and antagonists speak. Focusing on the cracks in the evangelical kaleidoscope, Worthen describes the battles between center and periphery, mainstream and fringe. The result is the most exciting history of evangelical intellectual life to appear in decades.

To be sure, Worthen does not neglect the evangelical establishment. Beginning her account with Christianity Today‘s founding editor Carl F. H. Henry, she describes his awkward encounter with the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. “His hair grimly pomaded across his skull,” Henry asked Barth about the historicity of the resurrection. Responding to Henry’s question, Barth joked, “Did you say Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday?” Raising his voice, the American replied with, “Yesterday, Today, and forever.” An architect of postwar evangelical theology, Henry worked diligently to distinguish evangelicalism from fundamentalism and neo-orthodoxy. Channeling the Presbyterian theology of old Princeton, he argued that God revealed himself in rational propositions. Not everyone agreed.

Moving from the center to the periphery, Worthen shows how evangelical outsiders articulated their own views of biblical authority. Bringing to light a 1955 letter from John Howard Yoder to Carl Henry, she reveals the tensions between Mennonite and Reformed approaches to Scripture. Criticizing Henry for subordinating theology to philosophical rationalism, Yoder championed the Anabaptist hermeneutic of his mentor Harold S. Bender. An intellectual descendant of Karl Barth (Yoder’s teacher at Basel) and J. Gresham Machen (Bender’s teacher at Princeton), Yoder embodied the contradictions in Mennonite identity. Worried that American Mennonites might succumb to Francis Schaeffer’s influence, he urged his co-religionists to produce a film illustrating the Anabaptist point of view. Such tensions have not gone away. In today’s Mennonite bookstores, works of Anabaptist theology compete for shelf space with Rick Warren and Joel Osteen. Despite the popularity of Amish romance novels, evangelicalism is still awaiting its Mennonite Schaeffer.

More influenced by John Wesley than Menno Simons, Holiness and Pentecostal scholars have articulated their own version of evangelical theology. Like Donald Dayton and Timothy L. Smith before her, Worthen restores the Wesleyan-Pentecostal tradition to its rightful place in evangelical intellectual history. Recounting the liminal status of Pentecostalism, she notes an Assemblies of God minister’s blunt response to a Presbyterian’s critique of “extreme” evangelicals: “He means us.” Profiling the globetrotting career of the Nazarene educator Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, Worthen recalls Wynkoop’s anxiety about the influence of “Calvinistic evangelicalism.” Inspiring the “back to Wesley” movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Wynkoop is the one of the few female theologians to be honored with her own bobblehead. Worthen tells us why. Rejecting Reformed formulations of inerrancy, Wynkoop’s colleagues warned against exalting “the intellect to the detriment of the affections and the will.” While recognizing the authority of Scripture, they emphasized the “intersection of text, tradition, experience, and human reason.” Dubbed the Wesleyan quadrilateral by Albert Outler, this four-legged stool can be found throughout Worthen’s chronicle of 20th-century evangelicalism.[5]

Not simply an account of warring theological families, Apostles of Reason traces the interactions of evangelical scholars with their colleagues in the neighboring pew. If evangelicalism is a multi-generational argument, much of its energy comes from the conflict between generations. Writing from within the citadel of evangelical orthodoxy, Wheaton College professor Clyde S. Kilby introduced low-church Protestants to the sacramental imaginations of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Celebrated in Thomas Howard’s memoir Christ the Tiger (1967), Kilby makes a cameo appearance in Apostles of Reason. Noting that he “had known Carl Henry since he was a freshman,” Worthen highlights Kilby’s dissent from the claim that “truth, including Biblical truth, is only reached through propositions.” Countering Henry’s rationalism with poetry, he asked, “How can the Psalms be propositional?” Seeking poetry over prose, Howard’s generation rediscovered the liturgical traditions of the past, turning their eyes toward Canterbury, Rome, and Constantinople. Around the same time, the Evangelicals for McGovern became the first major evangelical group to endorse an American presidential candidate. Part of an emerging evangelical Left, such groups were soon overshadowed by the Religious Right.

One look at Worthen’s bibliography suggests she has accumulated an impressive amount of frequent-flyer miles. In between trips to Wheaton College, the Chicago native explored the archives of the Assemblies of God, Biola University, the Church of the Nazarene, the Mennonite Church USA, and the Southern Baptist Convention. While this itinerary yielded a rich and sprawling narrative, one wishes she had visited Grand Rapids, Michigan. Home to several evangelical publishing houses, it was the epicenter of a lively Dutch Calvinist subculture that helped revitalize evangelical intellectual life in the postwar era. Through the Christian Reformed Church, Calvin College, the Reformed Journal, and the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, the Grand Rapids intellectuals played an outsized role in strengthening conservative Protestant thought.[6]

Had Worthen spent some time in Western Michigan, she might have developed a deeper appreciation for Abraham Kuyper. Anticipating the postmodern critique by several decades, the Dutch Calvinist statesman argued that “all knowledge proceeds from faith of whatever kind,” noting “The person who does not believe does not exist.” Although she acknowledges the contributions of Reformed philosophers Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga, Worthen devotes more space to the trickle-down Kuyperianism of Francis Schaeffer and the Religious Right. But while flood geologists and amateur historians use the trope of the “Christian worldview” to commit intellectual misconduct, as Worthen charges, not all Kuyperians engage in the “presuppositionalists’ artful dodge.” Celebrating the neo-Calvinist doctrine of common grace, the Christian Reformed philosopher Richard Mouw argues that believers should appreciate the truth and beauty that come from outside the household of faith. According to Mouw, “We must be diligent in our efforts to discover, honor, and appreciate any of God’s gifts that might be at work in the larger human community.”[7]

According to Worthen, evangelicalism’s epistemological pluralism constitutes a “crisis of authority.” As she notes in the final chapter, the problem with evangelical intellectual life is that “evangelicals attempt to obey multiple authorities at the same time.” Other scholars have come to similar conclusions. While sociologist Christian Smith highlights the “pervasive interpretive pluralism” of evangelical biblical interpretation, historian Nathan Hatch laments the “absence of a compelling theological vision.”[8]

A careful reading of Worthen’s book suggests that such epistemological conflicts are nothing new. Locating evangelicals “at the intersection of premodern dogma, personal religious experience, and modern anxieties,” she calls them the orphaned children of Pietism and the Enlightenment.

Far from constituting a “crisis,” as Worthen would have it, strongly contested appeals to Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience are consistent with evangelicalism’s contentious past. Unable to agree on free will and predestination, John Wesley and George Whitefield recognized that some questions cannot be resolved in this lifetime. As Wesley noted in a sermon commemorating Whitefield’s life, “There are many doctrines of a less essential nature, with regard to which, even the sincere children of God (such is the present weakness of human understanding!) are and have been divided for many ages. In these we may think and let think; we may ‘agree to disagree.’ “9 By agreeing to disagree, conservative Protestants have remained faithful to evangelicalism’s deepest commitments.

John Schmalzbauer teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Missouri State University, where he holds the Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies. He is the author of People of Faith: Religious Conviction in American Journalism and Higher Education (Cornell Univ. Press).

1. See Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (Oxford Univ. Press, 1997). The quotation from Harold John Ockenga appears on page 147.

2. On the lack of evangelical unity, see Donald Dayton and Robert Johnston, eds., The Variety of American Evangelicalism (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1991). The mosaic and kaleidoscope metaphors are from Timothy L. Smith in “The Evangelical Kaleidoscope and the Call to Christian Unity,” Christian Scholar’s Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1986), p. 128. The “twelve-ring circus” metaphor is from Cullen Murphy, “Protestantism and the Evangelicals,” Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 1981, pp. 105-116.

3. The so-called Bebbington quadrilateral appears in David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 2-14. See also Lyman Kellstedt, John Green, James Guth, and Corwin Smidt, “Evangelicalism,” in William H. Swatos, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 175-178.

4. The 14 branches are enumerated in Robert Webber, Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity (Zondervan, 1978), p. 32. The second quotation is from Nathan Hatch, “Response to Carl F. H. Henry,” in Kenneth S. Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry, eds., Evangelical Affirmations (Academie, 1990), pp. 97-98.

5. Albert Outler, “The Wesleyan Quadrilateral in Wesley,” Wesleyan Theological Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1985), pp. 7-18.

6. See James D. Bratt and Ronald Wells, eds., The Best of the Reformed Journal (Eerdmans, 2011).

7. Kuyper is quoted in James Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Eerdmans, 2013), p. 207. On the popularity of scientific creationist Ken Ham and amateur historian David Barton, see Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Harvard Univ. Press, 2011). The last quotation is from Richard Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Eerdmans, 2002), p. 28.

8. Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Baker Books, 2012); Nathan Hatch, “Evangelical Colleges and the Challenge of Christian Thinking,” in Joel A. Carpenter and Kenneth W. Shipps, eds., Making Higher Education Christian: The History and Mission of Evangelical Colleges in America (Eerdmans, 1987), p. 166. Hatch also warns of a “crisis of authority.”

9. John Wesley, On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, sermon preached on November 18, 1770 (London: J. and W. Oliver, 1770), p. 23.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Political scientist Thomas U. Berger declares at the outset of this exceptionally thoughtful and useful book on war and guilt in postwar Europe that “We live in an age of apology and recrimination.” He could not be more right. Guilt is everywhere around us, and its potential sources have only just begun to be plumbed, as our understanding of the buried past widens and deepens. Questions of guilt and innocence and absolution and expiation and atonement may have been largely banished from our intramural discussions of private morality, on grounds of their being “too judgmental,” but they proliferate everywhere else, even as the public authority of traditional religious institutions has declined. Nowhere else is one more likely to find such concerns expressed than in matters relating to foreign affairs and international relations, particularly in the settlement of wars.

The assignment of responsibility for causing a war, the designation of war guilt, the assessing of punishments and reparations, the identification and prosecution of war crimes, the compensation of victims, and so on—all of these are thought to be an essential part of settling a war’s effects justly, and are part and parcel of the moral economy of guilt as it now operates on the national and international level. But the standards have been steadily raised, and the demands of justice are at once very demanding, even insistent, and ever more difficult to satisfy.

Berger’s book engages precisely these issues by examining how governments in post-1945 Austria, Germany, and Japan have dealt with the aftermath of World War II. How can such states come to terms in an honest way with their pasts, and achieve some appropriate measure of postwar justice without crippling themselves and remaining mired either in the past or in utter denial? Or, by the same token, how can such states achieve internal and external reconciliation without choosing to forgive the unforgivable, and thereby betray the call of justice for those who suffered from historical wrongs? How does one strike the proper balance between justice and reconciliation, not only as a moral question, but also as a political question? Berger finds that the empirical record of these three countries suggests that this is, in fact, a very difficult balance to achieve, justice not always being attainable without incurring costs that most societies are, as a practical matter, unable to pay.

As Berger’s opening chapter suggests, the heightened moral awareness that we now bring to international affairs is something new in human history, stemming from the growing social and political pluralism of Western democracies and from the unprecedented influence of universalized norms of human rights and justice, supported and buttressed by a robust array of international institutions and nongovernmental organizations, ranging from the International Criminal Courts to Amnesty International.

In addition, as Berger argues, the larger narratives through which nations organize and relate their history, and through which they constitute their collective memory, are increasingly subject to monitoring and careful scrutiny by their constituent ethnic, linguistic, cultural and other subgroups, and are responsive to demands that those histories reflect the nation’s past misdeeds and express contrition for them. Here too he seems spot on. Never has there been a keener and more widespread sense of particularized grievances at work throughout the world, and never have such grievances been able to count on receiving such a thorough and generally sympathetic public hearing.

There is no disputing the fact, then, that history itself, particularly in the form of “coming to terms with” the wrongs of the past, and the search for historical justice, is becoming an ever more salient element in national and international politics. We see it in the concern for past abuses of indigenous peoples, colonized peoples, subordinated races and classes, and the like, and we see it in the ways that nations relate their stories of war. Far from being buried, the past is alive with moral contestation.

All of this might seem to represent a form of moral progress, just as certain in its trajectory as the scientific and technological progress of modernity. Perhaps the most impressive example of sustained collective penitence in human history has come from the government and people of Germany, who have done so much to atone for the sins of Nazism. But how much penitence is enough? How long? When can we say that the German people—who are, after all, an almost entirely different cast of characters from those who lived under the Nazis—are free and clear, and have “paid their debt” to the world and to the past? Who could possibly make that judgment? And will there come a day—indeed, has it already arrived?—when the Germans will have had enough of the Sisyphean guilt which, it seems to many of them, they have been forced to bear, and will begin to seek their redemption by other means?

This points to another problem for postwar settlement, analogous to the ironic way that scientific and technological progress may be bringing us rising levels of guilt along with rising levels of human empowerment. And that problem is that our age’s heightened universal moral standards apply universally, which is to say that they are like weapons on a pivot, which tomorrow may be whirled around and trained to devastating effect upon the very ones who are wielding them today. Those who stand in judgment can, and should, be held to the same standards they impose. The mirror of guilt points back at them too.

Who, after all, is pure and wise enough to administer such postwar justice with impartiality and detachment, and impeccable moral credibility? What nation or entity is sufficiently without sin to cast the decisive stone? The Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials were landmarks in the establishment of institutional entities administering and enforcing international law. But as Berger points out, they also were of questionable legality, reflecting the imposition of ad hoc, ex post facto laws, administered by victors whose own hands were far from being entirely clean (consider the irony of Soviet judges sitting in judgment of crimes their own regime committed with impunity), indeed, who might well have been made to stand trial themselves, had the tables been turned, for the firebombing of Dresden, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or dozens of other acts.

Or consider an example from an earlier time, a moment that Berger does not discuss, but that might be the locus classicus of the problem. One can reasonably consider whether the infamous Article 231 in the Treaty of Versailles, assigning “guilt” to Germany for World War I, was not, in the very attempt to impose the victor’s just punishment on a defeated foe, itself committing an act of grave injustice, the indignity of which surely helped to bring on the catastrophes that would follow it. Certainly the unintended consequences of that treaty are illustrative, like none other, of the high stakes involved in the work of postwar settlement, and the need to bring to it a special kind of prudential wisdom. And perhaps one of the lessons it teaches, which is one of the lessons of Berger’s book, is that the assignment of guilt, especially exclusive guilt, to one party or another may satisfy the most urgent claims of justice, or the desire for retribution, but may fail utterly the needs of reconciliation and reconstruction. As Elazar Barkan bluntly argued in his book The Guilt of Nations, “In forcing an admission of war guilt at Versailles, rather than healing, the victors instigated resentment that contributed to the rise of Fascism.” The work of healing has a claim all its own, one that is not always compatible with the utmost pursuit of justice (although it probably cannot succeed in the complete absence of such a pursuit). Nor does such an effort to isolate and assign exclusive guilt meet the needs of a more capacious historical understanding, one that understands, as Herbert Butterfield wrote, that history is “a clash of wills out of which there emerges something that no man ever willed.”

The deeply inscribed algebra of sin demands some kind of atonement, but for some aspects of the past, there is no imaginable way of making that transaction without creating sins of equivalent dimension. What possible atonement can there be for, say, the institution of slavery? It is no wonder that the issue of reparations for slavery surfaces periodically, and probably always will, and yet it is simply beyond the power of the present or the future to atone for the past in any effective way. Those of us who teach history, and take seriously the moral formation of our students, have to consider what the takeaway from this is likely to be. Do we really want to rest easy with the idea that a proper moral education demands an acute awareness of our extensive individual and collective guilt—a guilt for which there is no imaginable atonement? That this is not a satisfactory state of affairs would seem obvious; what to do about it, particularly in a strictly secular context, is another matter.

As Berger’s account suggests, therefore, there may be an intrinsic conflict in postwar settlements between the quest for justice and the path to reconciliation and healing. Sometimes the latter course may result in opportunistic decisions that come to seem genuinely shameful in retrospect. David W. Blight’s magisterial book Race and Reunion dealt with just such a conflict, in the wake of the American Civil War, arguing that the sectional reconciliation of North and South, though miraculous after such a bloody conflict, was achieved at the expense of the freed slaves, whose rightful demands for simple justice and dignity would have to wait a century before being fulfilled.

Berger sees repeated examples of what he calls “the tragedy of transitional justice,” a pattern of accommodation and half-measures that he finds to have been acted out to a greater or lesser extent in the Austrian, German, and Japanese responses to their respective postwar rehabilitations. It would be wrong to say that Berger looks upon such responses approvingly; he calls them “tragic.” But he insists upon realism in appraising the facts, and finds that in all such instances, the requirements of large-scale social change simply proved too daunting. The purging from power of old élites, for example, proved impractical in situations where their expertise and experience was indispensable for the rebuilding of shattered economies. And national narratives might be allowed to fudge the truth for the sake of national self-respect, as in postwar Austria, which long described itself as Hitler’s first victim, a half-truth at best, rather than his ardent accomplice. (This state of affairs changed dramatically with the revelations about former UN Secretary-General and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim’s possible involvement in Nazi war crimes.) It seems that the passage of a certain amount of time is required for societies to have the ability to engage fully with the moral implications of their own past, without being overwhelmed by guilt or succumbing to the grip of a “fight or flight” mechanism of self-protection. In the meantime, “transitional justice” is the best that can be reasonably expected, however morally unsatisfactory it may seem by universalistic standards.

But it is never reasonable to expect reasonableness. One should expect instead that the act of repressing our awareness of those universalistic standards, and of our moral accountability to them, for the sake of a fragile “transitional justice” will not be easy to sustain. “Sooner or later,” says Berger, who has a kind of dry gallows humor, “we are all going to be sorry.” He is right about that too.

The interesting question one is left with by this fascinating book is whether and how much all of this has to do with our living in a world that has increasingly been run according to secular premises, using a secular vocabulary operating within an “immanent frame,” a mode of operation that requires us to repress the very religious frameworks and vocabularies within which the dynamics of sin and guilt and atonement have hitherto been rendered intelligible. I use the term “repression” here for a reason. In his Civilization and Its Discontents, the grand master of repression, Sigmund Freud, identified the tenacious sense of guilt as “the most important problem in the development of civilization.” In fact, he argued that it seems that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.” This process does not depend, even for the irreligious Freud, on the “liberation” of the human race from its religious illusions. Indeed, it could well be the case, and paradoxically so, that just at the moment when we have become more keenly aware than ever of the wages of sin in the world, and more keenly anxious to address those sins, we find ourselves least able to describe them in their proper terms, let alone find moral release from their weight.

Wilfred M. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. This essay draws upon his work in a larger project funded by the Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs Program of the Historical Society.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When you are dead, asked Salvian from his pulpit above Marseilles’s teeming harbor, to whom will you leave your earthly possessions? It was not an idle question. Those were dire days for the Empire—around AD 430—and ripe for such otherworldly solutions. Barbarian hordes haunted the uneasy sleep of Salvian’s flock. Someplace sure and incorruptible was needed for their treasures: place them in heaven, urged their monk-bishop. Write Christ directly into your will. There was only one hitch: Roman law did not recognize Christ as a legal beneficiary.

Money mysteries such as this one dominate the era, which is precisely why Peter Brown, whose long and laureled career has homed in on such dissonance with nothing short of prodigious insight, focuses on the subject in his latest (and perhaps greatest) work, Through the Eye of the Needle. The allusion, of course, is to the disappointing story of the rich young ruler, who sulked off after Jesus asked him to give away his wealth to gain heaven. He became the foil par excellence for an era of heroic renunciation, where a very few of “the richest private landowners of all time” gave it all up for Jesus. But alongside such giants as Paulinus of Nola stand countless small-scale donors whose plunking solidi and plinking sesterci raised churches, monuments, shrines, and monasteries throughout the Roman world.

Many others such as the retired general Sevso, whose unearthed silver platter—19 pounds’ worth!—sports a token Christogram, seemed otherwise to live in “an imaginative universe in which Christianity was almost totally absent.” The fact that most Christians never fully unburdened their camels has tended to fertilize a jejune morality tale, where a kind of institutionalized hypocrisy and otherworldly doublespeak gutted the virile civic life of Rome to fill church treasuries. That’s the tale spread by Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which looms over the era like some great triumphal arch, through which all must pass to visit this undiscovered country. Long discredited by scholarship, the rhetorical power of Gibbon’s lament continues a covert life among Christianity’s historical apologists, and now more than ever in our own ceaseless chatter about the so-called perils of the Constantinian church. In Brown’s treatment, refreshingly, that tiny needle’s eye opens instead upon a vast and poorly understood landscape, where even our best evidence is but “a frail bridge to the past.” But it is a landscape put into relief by riches. Brown uses “the theme of wealth itself as a doctor uses a stethoscope,” for it “enables us to enter into the very heart of Roman society.”

While popular opinion about the era, Christians’ included, still fixates on a cerebral clash of civilizations, researchers have quietly made giant steps in uncovering—quite literally—the vast middle ground where most Christians actually lived. Inscriptions, buried mosaics, and sarcophagi give us a glimpse into the otherwise silent world of the unlettered. It’s not a detour from the real story but a necessary plunge into the dirt: for “we do not meet the average Christian in the pages of books or in the texts of the sermons of Christian bishops. We meet such persons, rather, on their tombstones.” Brown gives us a distantly familiar story with an entirely new cast: the Harvester of Mactar; Donatist bishop Optatus; Clamosus the schoolteacher. These souls, silenced but for a chunk of chiseled rock or the salvaged corner of a floor mosaic, speak out for vast swaths of the unremembered from Timgad to Trier—their quest for honors, their mundane tragedies, but mostly their place in the church, which along with the synagogues of the epoch “provided a space where the moderately rich could shine” through small and durable gifts. “It is late Roman society with a gentler face.”

If the siroccos of Tunisia have taken the flinty edge off a certain Geistesgeschichte, Brown’s subtle touch does not glory in the rubble but uses it to build up lost dimensions to certain set pieces, long buried in deep ideological ruts. The spat between Ambrose and Symmachus over the Altar of Victory—that dernier cri of a moribund paganism—gets interesting when we learn that the bishop of Milan came from new money. Wealth leavens the historical lump. Among Rome’s élite, who in 384 remained resolutely pagan, the vestal virgins guaranteed the harvest upon which the Empire rose and fell. What the Prefect of Rome called “a mean-minded budget cut,” Ambrose skillfully recast as a monumental waste of resources—which should have gone to the “poor.” He “secularized” the discourse by “subtly … turning what many thinking persons considered a religious crisis into a crisis of social relations.”

The well-trod Pelagian controversy, turbid from centuries of philosophical churnings, is recast by Brown in terms that practically all of us can understand. We forget that the precipitating event was the sack of Rome, which sent the rich flying to African shores, theological tutors in tow. The star financial moralists of the 4th century, Jerome and Pelagius, played guru to these extremely wealthy ladies, peddling an ascetic extremism mined from their dabblings amongst the monks of mysterious “East” but tempered for the comforts of villa life. Their conscience-panged pupils gazed benevolently toward distant horizons full of do-gooding potential. These super-rich, with their old and timeless money, were used to spreading it as they pleased. And if their high-minded life-coaches assured them that God demanded every last solidus for their salvation, well, why shouldn’t they slough off wealth with aristocratic ease?

So when some mediocre African bishop started pushing back at the likes of Melania the Younger (one of those richest landowners of all time), insisting that getting rid of sin was not so easy, and that wealth had its good uses—alms for the poor, for example—it was every bit as much a class conflict as it was about the human capacity to will the good. Our own self-help literature, inane as much of it is, is geared to the same sort of audience as Pelagius addressed, who had gazed upon the world from a distance and could envision the higher ground of moral simplicity. The notion of insurmountable sin is anathema to this imagined option of personal social mobility.

Augustine, who had made his way within sight of the very top of Roman society on the shoulders of just such a crowd, knew precisely whence they came. But his years as a pastor and patron to a thick slice of Roman Africa had pushed him to adopt a starker “doctrine for the long haul.” Practically alone among the Western fathers, the bishop of Hippo earned his living from church offerings. He was well aware that wealth and its compromises made for dirty business, even more so in an empire whose financial motors ran quite explicitly on state-sponsored extortion, delegated at spear point to tens of thousands of local curiales, little Zacchaeuses all. Spectacular renunciation was for spectacular people. Regular sin (for who could avoid it?), on the other hand, required regular amends. Alms clinking into the church coffers to be distributed among “the poor” was as good a way as any to forgive the substantial debts accrued during this new age of gold.

The explicit amalgam of financial and theological language common to late antiquity has “caused exquisite embarrassment to modern scholars,” living as we do in the shadow of Luther and his indulgences, not to mention Marx and his opiates. But, Brown insists, we must beware our anachronistic scruples: “if we wish to understand the economic upsurge of the Christian churches at this time, it is important that we overcome a prudery no late Roman Christian would have shared.” The very fluidity of monetary wealth made it an apposite image for the accessibility of salvation. And besides, we overestimate our own innocence. We may meticulously guard God from filthy lucre; but just ask a pastor what percentage of the congregation’s resources is destined for the physical plant. Or ask the same of America’s one thousand Christian colleges, each raising money for sports centers from rich alums by appealing to a higher cause. In Roman Africa, the Middle Ages, or today, “Earth and heaven [are] brought together by the Christian gift.”

Brown’s is a timely work. It’s been almost thirty years since The Body and Society wove from similar sources a riotous tapestry of evolving Christian attitudes toward sex and its renunciation. Those were the heady days of Foucault and Derrida—and the birth of the moral majority. But these are our obsessions, and sex-talk is usually about others, whereas money tends to implicate us all. Now, as our own Christian communities tear themselves apart managing sexual desire in lieu of waning of social limits, I have a sneaking suspicion, as did Christians of late antiquity, that the real game is elsewhere, playing itself out in the balance sheets and building projects of Christians around the planet. While we’ve gotten all hot and bothered over Augustine the killjoy, we turn a blind eye to the truly great social scandal of his age: voluntary poverty. Greed was the truly mortal sin for the ambitious ascetic, not lust. John Cassian’s Institutes, the veritable font of Western monasticism, treats sexual temptations and wet dreams without embarrassment. But the desire to possess, to hoard food and small coins, these were “so humiliating that … [he] thought that it was better that laypersons not read his chapters on avarice.”

In the parched Sahara of today’s academic prose, The Eye of the Needle is a life-saving oasis. In the course of its pages we cower in anxiety with “recently ennobled families whose offspring trembled on the edge of downward mobility”; we suffer the “rancors of freelance polymaths”; and we plunge into the muck of church discipline with realism all too familiar: “it was an autocracy frankly tempered by character assassination.” American evangelicals, who habitually slip toward repristinationism, will empathize with Salvian, for whom “the vibrant image of the Primitive Church hovered above his age as a permanent rebuke—a historical superego.” Brown stands in the tradition of Gibbon as one of the great stylists of the historian’s art.

Perhaps the greatest success of the book is not the ease with which it transports us to a bygone world, but how often it brings us back to our own. Throughout the reading I was reminded of my own hometown of Yakima, Washington. Middling in nearly every way, it was ruled by an élite of mysteriously wealthy small businessmen, doctors, and lawyers, ambitious for themselves and for their carefully reared offspring, eager to display their wealth from lofty Scenic Drive. Below them lay the engineers, teachers, managers, administrators, and even smaller businessmen who filled the respectable pews of First Presbyterian Church and mingled during coffee hour. Our pastors, with their Princeton and Cambridge pedigrees, offered us a glimpse into a distant and superior world where Einstein wandered absent-minded and divines undid cosmic mysteries over lunch. As it had been for the Christianized Romans, surrounded by a still vital pagan culture, the rest of our world remained resolutely secular: clergy were waived the fee at the country club and honeymooned in Hawaii. We are far from any theoretical ecclesiology. I imagine myself as a future archaeologist, puzzling over my Yakima church’s neo-Florentine ruins, then leafing through the directory (perfectly preserved by the desert climate) and concluding: “It was late American society with a gentler face.”

Sober thoughts for a sober time. For some reason, perhaps a vestigial royalism, we are tempted to link the tectonic shift in the classical world to the conversion of Constantine. The real change, cautions Brown, came several decades later, when treasures started pouring into heaven from all quarters. The unforeseen culture that arose as the “poor” in Christ became immensely rich from these gifts—well, let’s call it Christendom. And if we’re now on its tail end, we’d better have a wise and knowledgeable guide to tell us what exactly it was, and how it came about.

This book is it.

Andrew L. Wilson is a historian living in Strasbourg, France. He is currently writing a travelogue of his pilgrimage to Rome in the steps of Martin Luther.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

We are beggars. That is truth.” With his final words, Martin Luther returned to the fundamentally receptive, even needy, condition of humanity. Oliver O’Donovan commences the first volume of his Ethics as Theology similarly, echoing Paul’s confession that “we are debtors” (Rom. 8:12). From the moment we awake to our moral experience, we find ourselves already caught up in a swirl of obligation and responsibility, having been given, and just so claimed by, ourselves, our world, and our time. Our moral awareness of this very givenness begins our ethical reflection, and it remains our ethical task, so that “wakefulness” names the carriage of those with eyes to see the world around them and their place in time.

We engage in moral reasoning long before it occurs to us that we are doing so, and so ethics needs no introduction. Instead, O’Donovan offers an induction, in hopes of clarifying what it is we are up to when we “think about” and “think toward” a fitting action. This strategy of induction is meant, in part, to pay due respect to the variety and vagaries of practical reasoning. By starting on the ground, and employing common-sense accounts of our moral engagement with the world, he exposes the conceptual poverty of premature abstraction.

Good ethical thinking triangulates, considering who we are as agents given time to act in this world. In his seminal Resurrection and Moral Order, O’Donovan made much of the im plications of the resurrection for the world, insisting that evangelical ethics requires attention to the restoration of the created order as it is and will be in Christ. He worried about the thinness of a Christocentric ethics, which “put Christ at the center without putting him at the center of the created world.” In Self, World, and Time, O’Donovan reckons with the genuine newness of the resurrection and all it promises, focusing on the Pentecostal renewal of human agency. Consider this ethics as life in the Spirit.

But life in the Spirit hardly suggests an ethics of immediacy or spontaneity, despite the resilience of false dichotomies pitting moments of divine guidance versus processes of human deliberation. After all, this genuinely new agency into which the Spirit frees us remains a restored agency; it is a divine fulfillment of rather than a frustrated second try at human agency. We are still us in our renewed agency, people who reason, deliberate, discuss, decide, reflect, and revisit. The Spirit liberates us into these processes, all of which invite and require faithful attendance to the world God has made and the time he has given us in which to partner with him in its cultivation.

Consider two critiques, of moral intuitionism and divine command ethics. The problem with intuitionism is its confidence in the self-evidence of the good, and the very lack of such evidence is “why morality cannot depend on intuition, but always involves thinking.” To move from “is” to “ought” requires deliberation. Practical reason “cannot pocket its ball in one shot” but must “negotiate a way between the two poles of description and resolution, the one determinate and the other indeterminate.” Without discounting moral epiphanies, O’Donovan insists that “these moments are the beginning, not the end, of a train of moral questioning.”

O’Donovan also takes issue with the divine command ethic found in Barth, who aban doned the theological virtues of faith, love, and hope, leaving them “like unemployed pilots sitting with their legs dangling over the harbor wall and gazing out to sea, when they might have been guiding shipping through the straits of moral reason.” (If only more theologians wrote this way!) Noble though his motives might have been, in seeking to keep theology unstained by worldly philosophical ethics, Barth ended up with a “persistently punctiform” description of responsibility leading to a “collapse of the discursive character of moral reason.”

A narrative approach to ethics might seem a natural ally, but O’Donovan demurs. Appeals to narrative have failed to guard themselves against the temptation to justify itself in bad faith (stories wickedly lending credibility and coherence to what is really moral disorder) as well as the temptation to sloth, “to despair of responsibility, to wear one’s story as it were a mourning garment for one’s life, as a way of avoiding living.” Both imprison the self in the past, rather than goad one to future action. History is less a “narrative of origin” than of vocation, bidding us “grasp our freedom.”

The discursive character of moral reason can also be seen in the move from the Bible to ethics. For ethics to be theology, it must be “nourished” on Scripture—all of Scripture, and the reality to which it witnesses, not just the ostensibly ethical parts. And again, such spiritual nourishment does not short-circuit moral reasoning:

There is a necessary indeterminacy in the obedient action required by the faithful reading of the text … . If Scripture totally determined our actions, there would be no obedience, for there would be no deliberation. Deliberation does not simply repeat what it has heard; it pursues the goal of faithful and obedient action by searching out actions, possible within the material conditions that prevail, which will accord with the content of the testimony of Scripture.

Deliberation is present even in spontaneous responses to Scripture, such as Francis’ re sponse to Matthew’s gospel or Augustine’s to Paul’s letter to the Romans, the spontaneity of which belies the lengthy process of moral and spiritual reasoning that bookended these moments. (Recall Augustine’s prayer for chastity—”but not yet.”)

This is why, if ethics is “a pastoral discipline,” it is “a maieutic rather than a prescriptive one.” Even in the Sermon on the Mount, we do not encounter advice, which could be quickly followed, but moral teaching aiming at the formation of a community of disciples in the way of Jesus. The one who has called them to discipleship orients them rightly to and in the world in light of the coming kingdom. They are oriented together to the kingdom, and at the heart of the Lord’s moral teaching comes his prayer, a prayer that forms this people together as they learn and speak the truth of the world and call for the divine resources to act “this day” as moral agents.

In the concluding chapter, O’Donovan sketches faith, love, and hope, which structure a properly theological account of ethics as a “recovered and converted” sense of self, world, and time. Having been established as renewed moral agents by faith—in which we become aware of God having made us “competent moral agents” who are “fit for world and time”—we are given the world to love as God loves, in the hope of the return of Christ. Without this promised hope “we could not deliberate, for nothing could assure us that an exertion of our own could constitute a ‘work’ that might count for good in eternity.” The kingdom of God thus “underwrites the intelligibility of our purposes.”

All that said, perhaps my opening parallel of Luther and O’Donovan could use some work. Luther is hardly known for his ethical cast of mind—he of the “sin boldly” and the doctrine of justification by faith alone apart from works, the article on which the church stands or falls. The man who identified Aristotle’s account of the acquisition of virtue as the antithesis of Paul’s account of our being declared righteous by faith—well, he doesn’t seem a likely confrere to an ethicist intent on making much of our moral agency.

Luther found external constraints in ethics to be superfluous at best, suspect at worst. Put differently, he trusted the sufficiency of the internal witness and guidance of the Spirit in moving believers spontaneously to trust God and love neighbor. He celebrated the gift of new life, of the freedom in which to act as responsible moral agents—precisely because God has taken responsibility for our agency in Christ. Where a dose of O’Donovan might check the twinned tendencies of later Lutherans to veer towards antinomianism or collapse into legalism is in the insistence that the Spirit who dwells in and amongst us leads us to love by leading us through discursive processes of moral reasoning. To acknowledge this is not to immanentize or bureaucratize ethics, but instead to signal the fundamentally Pentecostal shape of theological ethics.

Matt Jenson is a theologian teaching great books in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University and a licensed minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I’m very glad I read The Bible and Asia once, but I doubt I’ll read it again. Make no mistake, R .S. Sugirtharajah’s new book is an unambiguously impressive survey of contrarian hermeneutics in an Asian context. Here Sugirtharajah has assembled a motley choir of Asian authors who find themselves singing from multiple scripts: the text of the Bible itself, the holy texts of other Asian faiths, the scripts imposed by various foreign and local colonial powers, and of course the scripts of their home cultures.

Postmodern biblical hermeneutics in this hypertextual environment yields (predictably) a cacophony: a result neither melodious nor harmonious but certainly instructive. Sugirtharajah himself is unapologetic about his agenda; he intends to assess the progress of self-consciously Asian hermeneutics so far, suggesting a path forward that increasingly values local contexts over and above any allegiance to the Bible itself and that simultaneously asserts itself as distinct yet fully equal to dominant Western modes of thinking and interpretation.

All this is a lot too much for a slim volume to bear and The Bible and Asia shows the strain at times. With the constraints of a 100-level introductory course in mind, Sugirtharajah has had to pick his Asian voices carefully. Aware he has no hope of covering the field adequately, he has nevertheless done his best to squeeze as many voices as possible into his book. The result is rather like browsing through a series of heavily filtered selfies on Instagram: one gets a blurred and tinted sense of a particular face and place before being rushed off to consider the next contrarian voice in Asian hermeneutics.

Helpfully, these voices are at least structured around chapter themes: Paul in Asia, the Bible in Asian fiction, traces of Asia in the Bible itself, and several chapters covering the hermeneutical projects of colonial administrators and the contrarian voices of colonized Asians. Grouping voices this way undoubtedly makes for easier reading, but it also allows Sugirtharajah to impose his own structure and perspective on the subject as a whole. In each chapter we are treated to a comparison of authors normally not considered together and of course to Sugirtharajah’s own perspective on the issue at hand.

All this makes entertaining reading for hermeneutics nerds to be sure, but whether Sugirtharajah’s effort succeeds in constructing a coherent and well-supported thesis is another matter. Quite frankly, Sugirtharajah’s own animosity toward what he calls the “innate colonial impulses” of the Bible make reading the book itself a bit tedious. More seriously, his antagonism toward the Bible itself more or less requires him to ignore Asian authors who don’t view the Bible his way and further tints the voices he selects for his book.

One of the voices chosen for inclusion in the chapter on Asian fiction is Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic author known for his spare historical novels that strain to welcome Catholic faith and teachings into Japanese and Asian contexts. Endo’s characters are complex and angstridden, and his corpus cannot be easily and comfortably filed away as either orthodox or heretical.

Regardless of space constraints, I was quite surprised to find Sugirtharajah summarizing Endo on the Bible in one paragraph. After a single anecdotal reference from Yellowman, Sugirtharajah feels free to conclude that Endo saw the Bible as a “mean and merciless book” that “communicates God’s displeasure and judgment.” But Endo’s characters (much less his own attitude) cannot be pigeonholed so easily; in the end, Sugirtharajah’s cherry-picking approach colors over the complexity of Endo’s work and leads me to question the legitimacy of other authorial portraits featured in the book. Given the prominence of Sugirtharajah’s own agenda throughout, how often are we meeting the authors he selects under false pretenses?

With its heavy-duty title, I kept hoping that The Bible and Asia would feature not only heterodox stories but orthodox ones too. I wanted to hear from missionaries like Francis Xavier or from Bible translators ancient and modern or read about the experience of the Karelan church and their special relationship to the Apostle Thomas. More than that, I wanted to be introduced to a wider selection of Asian pastoral voices; besides the usual suspects like Watchman Nee or Jayakumar Christian, who else has written on the challenges of the ministry of the Word in Asia?

Unfortunately, Sugirtharajah’s self-consciously postmodern and anti-Western agenda seems to have kept him from including any of these voices directly. In The Bible and Asia, missionaries are mentioned only obliquely as opponents; they are portrayed as powerful and cunning adversaries who use all the tools at their disposal to subjugate the Asians around them. Given such a hostile perception of the missionary project, it’s understandable that Sugirtharajah completely ignores missionaries and their Asian pastoral successors, instead privileging only those voices who seem suitably focused on resisting the colonizer.

This is a pity, because Asia’s pastors are by no means so in thrall to Western modes of thinking that they cannot articulate their own perspective on the ministry of the Word in the Asian church. Works like Waterbuffalo Theology by Kosuke Koyama and God of the Empty-Handed by Jayakumar Christian offer glimpses of the role of the Word in Asia that are simultaneously compelling and deeply discomforting; they articulate a deeply orthodox biblical hermeneutic that is not afraid to be severely critical of Western theology and hermeneutics where necessary. Sugirtharajah does his readers a disservice by overlooking these voices in favor of exclusively contrarian hermeneutical interpretations.

Beyond authorial selections and interpretations, I found myself disagreeing with Sugirtharajah over a more fundamental question: is the Bible an Asian book or not? In his introduction, Sugirtharajah suggests that precolonial Christian history in Asia was dominated by a “gentler and less triumphalist” Christianity that came complete with its own set of Scriptures: the Jesus Sutras, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Acts of Thomas.

Sugirtharajah sees these texts and their associated precolonial faith erased with the advent of colonialism and the modern Bible, which he sees as “a very European book” that has “lost all its oriental traits.” For Sugirtharajah, the codification of the Bible itself is a significant problem, since it prioritizes certain voices over other allegedly more Asian perspectives.

In his first chapter he sets out to right this wrong by recovering Asian perspectives and influences on the biblical text itself. Unfortunately, Sugirtharajah is so eager to “shatter the West’s pervasive presence” in biblical studies that he is quite willing to support a violent hermeneutic that rips the biblical text apart if the result is a reading that is somehow more Asian.

One example will suffice: Sugirtharajah enlists Rudolf Otto, a 19th-century German comparative theologian, to make his point that certain core theological ideas about Jesus may be essentially Asian (and specifically Aryan). Sugirtharajah repeats Otto’s assertions that the linkage between “Son of God” and “Son of Man” has no Old Testament antecedent whatsoever and should therefore be regarded as an idea with “no Jewish equivalent” that is therefore ripe for categorization as an Asian borrowing. Ignoring the amply supported Jewish Messianic context of both terms, Sugirtharajah credits Otto’s theory that the terms are essentially about a mysterious, semi-divine figure of “Aryan” origin. Unfortunately, Sugirtharajah supplies no other evidence for this re-reading of the term and is content to make the point and move on to a discussion of Pauline resurrection and its supposed origins in the Kausitaki Upanishad.

It’s a shame the book includes hit-and-run hermeneutics like this. The Bible and Asia is already chock-full of Asian voices, nearly all of whom are suitably critical of all things Western and to all appearances fully aligned with Sugirtharajah’s anti-colonial thesis. Given the impressive hermeneutical choir he’s assembled, it’s not clear why Sugirtharajah feels obligated to go further and surface a seemingly random collection of voices convinced about the Asian origin of one idea or another in the Bible. Even in a brief survey, this sort of cavalier treatment of the biblical text seems crude; Sugirtharajah has plenty of voices who can make his broader point without resorting to ripping apart biblical texts themselves in search of some sort of ill-defined distinctively “Asian” influence on the Bible.

And yet, despite all this, The Bible and Asia is well worth a read. Here Sugirtharajah and I are in lockstep: the near total dominance of Western thinking in biblical hermeneutics means any new voices, however heterodox or seemingly cacophonous, are welcome onstage. Whether we agree with them or not, hearing the voices collected here by Sugirtharajah can make us better and more attentive readers of our Bibles, softening our inevitable and often unconscious Western biases and opening our ears to the perspective of other Bible readers around the globe.

Perhaps in reading books like The Bible and Asia, warts and all, we westerners can be reminded of the value of listening to others first and talking second, particularly since after two millennia we still sit at the head of the common Christian table. In this context, I am reminded of Jesus himself leaving his place and washing his disciples’ feet one by one. In the same way, westerners might draw closer to the Savior by spending time away from our own place at the table so that we might honor those in less powerful positions. Though he might take issue with the metaphor, surely R. S. Sugirtharajah himself would appreciate the value of such a project!

Nate Jones was born and raised in Indonesia and the Philippines and reads Asian theology around the edges of a career as an internet marketer and entrepreneur.He lives in Seattle with his wife, Charity.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In recent years, Europe has been in the news more often than it would have liked. The Euro crisis has ensured regular, painful headlines about debt, bail-outs, demonstrations, and maddening summits. Europe’s N-word is back as some raise the specter of German continental domination. Only the ignorant would suggest that the crisis will end any time soon.

One minor consolation for Europeans is that headlines from the United States have been depressingly similar. There too, the story has been one of financial crisis exacerbated by political jams. A major difference between Europe and America, however, is that no one has questioned whether the American union will stick together. In Europe, by contrast, the neologism Grexit, which raises the possibility of the departure of Greece from the European Union, is merely one sign of how worried some have become about that body’s future. Watching Greek street demonstrations and wincing at Italian debt, it is easy to think that the Union’s days must be numbered.

Luuk van Middelaar’s book explains why this almost certainly isn’t so. Van Middelaar is a Dutch political philosopher who now writes speeches for Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council. His book is an attempt to explain how the politics of the European Union (EU) works. Anyone familiar with the EU will know that he therefore deserves the utmost respect. Few outside the world of European politics would want to be asked many questions on the subject; it would be torture at the village quiz night. The European Union makes the American federal system look like something for second graders.

A historian by training, Van Middelaar is interested less in theory than in what can be learned from the experience of politics. He wants to do for the European Union what Tocqueville did for America: explain its politics through its life. Van Middelaar brings the key issues alive by introducing the dramatis personae and describing the crucial meetings. He also explores popular attitudes toward the EU, which have seldom been terribly warm. In the process, he succeeds in explaining why a tertium quid that is neither a federation nor merely a conglomeration of competing states has stayed together for so long. Middelaar wrote the book before Europe’s recent travails, but his analysis, unchanged for the English translation, has weathered the crisis well.

The story begins in the ruins of World War II. France, largely abandoned by Britain and the United States after World War I, needed to contain German strength. West Germany wanted relief from its postwar pariah status through a return to the international stage. America wanted a strong, united Western Europe to counterbalance Soviet power in the East. These were the key ingredients to the deal that saw France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg establish a new supranational authority to control the strategic coal and steel industries in 1950. Eight years later, these six set their sights on a full customs union and became the European Economic Community. The name has changed over the years, but the club’s success is manifest in its expansion, both in size (it now has 28 states) and in further integration in areas such as trade, law, and finance. Europe has also been more peaceful and more wealthy than ever.

So how does it work? The tension at the heart of the EU and at the heart of van Middelaar’s book is that between the still-independent nation states of Europe and the supranational authority they created. At the outset, some dreamed of a united states of Europe, to use the phrase coined by Victor Hugo, in which national allegiances would be subsumed into a higher, European allegiance. Jean Monnet, one of the founders, said he would burn his French passport. But after a century in which many European governments had worked very hard to instill nationalism in their people, such a sharp turn proved impossible.

The tension works on two levels. One is governmental: when the leaders of the member states gather round the table, they stand for the interests of the European community and those of their countries. Those interests do not always align. Charles de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher are only the most obvious examples of national leaders who saw in the union threats to their countries’ wellbeing. The second is the popular level: most Europeans show greater allegiance to their country than they do to the supranational authority. As Middelaar points out, when people in, say, Portugal disagree with their government, they will talk about “our lousy government.” But when they are dissatisfied with decisions made in Brussels, they will complain about what “they” have done to “us.”

As national leaders asserted their authority, they tamed the proponents of supranationalism. Ultimate authority came to rest in a council made up of the European heads of state, not the officials in Brussels. But what to do about the disagreements between countries that play out in that council? The critical move was to majority voting. What might sound like recipe for disaster became the backbone of the union. For the result was that member states came to the table willing to do a deal, needing to figure out how they could best defend their own interests through negotiation with others. If Britain (a frequent culprit) huffed and puffed too much, the deal would still be done, but it would be a worse one for them. States can secede at any time, but the enormous economic benefits of the single market focus governments on making the project work. This is the regenerative political core of the European Union, however much it may be obscured by the posturing of the day. And it is why the eu has stayed together in the midst of the harsh economic storms of the past four years.

Popular grumbling against Brussels bureaucrats has proved more intractable. The EU is a gift for the majority of humanity who like to complain about their leaders: Europeans can grouse about their politicians without the burden of feeling that they were responsible for choosing them. Yes, there are elections to the European parliament, but many do not vote and there is the sometimes justified suspicion that the permanent staff of the union have more power. One can always blame Brussels.

Middelaar devotes a third of his book to attempts to create Europeans, citizens who feel they belong to the European Union just as they feel they belong to their nations. He divides these attempts into three categories: the German approach, which harks back to the early German nationalists who emphasized a shared cultural and historical identity; the Roman approach, which stresses the benefits derived from membership, just as Roman citizenship was grounded in the benefits of being able to say civis Romanum sum; and the Greek, which encourages Europeans to see European politics as their concern comparable to the way the citizens of Athens would have seen the affairs of their polis.

The chapter on the German strategy contains some comical episodes. It was all well and good to desire to foster a sense of Europeanness, but the detail was excruciating. One early failure was a history textbook co-authored by representatives of twelve nationalities: the Germans wanted to change the French chapter’s “barbarian invasions” to “Germanic invasions,” while the British told the Spanish that Sir Francis Drake was not a pirate. One success was the European flag, which has gained much greater visibility over the last twenty years. It is easy to imagine the discussions over who and what should go on the bills and coins for the euro: there weren’t enough different denominations for every country to be represented—and even if there had been, wouldn’t it have been a snub to be on the five euro bill rather than the five hundred? The generic designs that emerged, with dull architectural motifs on the bills, hardly inspired enthusiasm. Europeans see themselves as European, but tying that sentiment to the EU has proved very difficult.

The Roman strategy fared no better. That the union has delivered benefits—employment, security, and rights chief among them—is beyond question. But helping people connect these to Brussels is hard. For one, they take them for granted. No one worries about a Franco-German war anymore. Sometimes European benefits are measly compared to national ones, for example in welfare provision. There are also occasions when the benefits cause animosity toward the EU—for example, when migrant workers are protected by its labor laws. One positive has been infrastructure. The EU has invested heavily in roads and other projects in poorer regions, with signage making it very clear that this is union money at work. Middelaar sees this as a successful public relations exercise.

The intent of the Greek strategy was to get the people of the member states to see themselves as part of the EU to such a degree that they would see its affairs as their own concern. Again, the results have been mixed. The EU parliament struggles for legitimacy when few vote (fewer still know the names of their representatives) and when it is the meetings of the heads of state that really matter. The union introduced the idea of citizenship to foster a sense of belonging, but success was minimal. The EU Constitution had the same end, but once the people of the Netherlands had said “Nee” and the French “Non” it was dead. Middelaar argues that there is nothing impossible about the idea of an active European citizenship, and astutely notes that after the drama of 1914-45 the dullness of the politics of European integration was a virtue. But he is clear that a shared sense of European citizenship is vital: “Only when members of the chorus, rather than just the actors, individually inhabit their dual role [as members of their nations and of a united Europe] will it be possible to complete the passage to Europe.”

Rarely has such a book with so many sterling qualities been such a slog. Middelaar’s political nous, historical grasp, and abilities as a writer are first class. But writing about the politics of the EU is the intellectual equivalent of climbing the north face of the Eiger. Middelaar does a masterful job of explaining the politics of Europe’s integration, but the sheer difficulty of the endeavor means that it can’t always be pretty. Readers might be advised to read sections 2 and 3, on the history of the EU and the struggle to win over the people, before embarking on section 1, which tells the complex story of the development of majority rule among the member states. Anyone wanting to understand the union and by extension modern Europe and its doleful headlines should, however, read every page.

Alister Chapman, associate professor of history at Westmont College, is the author of Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Writers of speculative fiction are forever getting called out for their failures. The most typical complaint goes something like this: “in the interest of developing her critique of _____ (fill in with any specific social ill), the writer forgets that a novel is composed of compelling characters and an interesting story. This book gives us neither.”

This complaint was often made about Oryx and Crake, the first novel in Margaret Atwood’s now-completed trilogy. Sven Birkets, though he enjoyed the novel, complained in The New York Times Book Review that “we can take in only so many confected scenarios of future life before we crave a complexity of character commensurate with the intelligence of the plot or the confident excellence of the writing.” For my part, I thought these readings were unfair because Atwood succeeded in something arguably more difficult to achieve, namely, dramatic social satire. In satire, the believability of the characters and the story itself are necessarily subservient to the scenario. What the writer wants the reader to see is the world itself, what it is, what it has become, and, in the case of dystopic satires, what it will become if we are not careful.

Sometimes it does not do to listen to one’s critics. With MaddAddam (as with the second novel in the trilogy, The Year of the Flood), Atwood might have overcorrected. In her efforts to give us new characters and more stories about the plague’s survivors, Atwood forfeits the satirical edginess of Oryx and Crake. In that novel she powerfully revealed how our present, grotesque choices are building a near future in which someone like Crake could move and work and dream dreams of perfection. It told the truth via exaggeration: one man’s ideal perfection is another man’s actual destruction. When MaddAddam returns to Crake’s story and the forces that created him, the novel shines. The rest of it is simply a romp—albeit a really fun romp.

Atwood has always had a gift for moving seamlessly back and forth through time. The bulk of this novel follows the character Toby, who is one of the few human survivors of the “Waterless Flood,” the plague that Crake had released into the world’s population in order to “reboot” with a new breed of semi-humans, the Crakers. Through Toby’s memories we learn more about a religious organization called “God’s Gardeners,” who had anticipated such an event. Readers go back in time with her to the years just before the flood, in which the Gardeners saved her from a Painballer predator and taught her their earth-loving ways. We learn all about the organization, including the fact that Adam one (the first leader) had been involved with Crake in his early efforts to thwart the conglomerate of Bio Corporations who spread diseases through vitamins they sold in order to later sell their cure. Oddly, though the Gardeners are central to the last two novels, Atwood does not give them much of a pulse. We cannot love them because their religion is little more than banal nature worship. We cannot mock them because they, at least, have the tools necessary to survive the Flood. We cannot even blame them for the end of the world because they didn’t really cause it. In short, Atwood seems to be ambivalent about the Gardeners, and satire does not work well with ambivalence.

Though the Gardeners storyline is a bit dull, we do, at least, learn a little bit more about Crake. Zeb, one of the Gardeners who infiltrated the HethWyzer compound, knew Crake as a child, when he was still called Glenn. Through Zeb we learn that Glenn’s parents had little time to spend with him, and that “nobody ever touched Glenn. He somehow arranged it that way: he’d erected an invisible no-fly zone around himself.” Glenn’s parents leave him to his own experiments, which he conducts with no moral guidance. The scenes here are chilling. Glenn tells Zeb about his father’s research on a tick whose bite causes a strong allergic reaction to red meat. Their exchange is vintage Atwood:

“So,” said Zeb, “a tick drools into you and then you can’t have steak any more without bursting out in hives and suffocating to death?”

“Bright side,” said Glenn. He was going through a phase: he’d say “bright side,” and then add some gruesome sidebar. “Bright side, if they could spread it through the population—those tick saliva proteins embedded in, say, the common aspirin—then everyone would be allergic to red meat, which has a huge carbon footprint and causes the depletion of forests, because they’re cleared for cattle grazing; and then … “

“Not my idea of a bright side,” said Zeb.

Zeb deflates Glenn’s—that is, Crake’s—hubris a bit here by arguing that the human species has evolved to eat meat, which is why the allergy is so rare to begin with. Crake grants the point to Zeb, but the reader knows that the larger moral issue goes untouched, namely, why Crake thinks he has the right to unilaterally decide how to name and solve our ecological problems. And this is, of course, exactly how he decides to obliterate people and replace them with his new, supposedly superior species.

What was so brilliant in Oryx and Crake was Atwood’s revelation of a world—which turns out to be our world—that could create someone like Crake in the first place. We saw his childhood spent online, where he switched back and forth between watching live executions and kiddie porn without a single scruple. We saw him shuttled into the highly celebrated and heavily funded Watson-Crick Institute, where no research dollars are wasted on the humanities, like they do in the shabby Martha Graham Academy. The story was as much about the disintegration of the Western world’s moral core through the disintegration of the arts as it was about anything. MaddAddam, though it does begin and end with a tribute to the power of storytelling, has little of this critique. Neither does it have any evidence of the Gardeners either challenging Crake’s views or actually turning out to be responsible for them. Instead, the Gardeners seem to have had little impact on Crake for good or ill, and in the end we have no details about why or how Crake betrayed the organization by making them help him arrange for world obliteration.

In spite of these shortcomings, Atwood fans should rejoice that much of the imaginative fun of the first two novels continues here. The novel is bright, colorfully off-color, and funny. The world of biotech is, after all, an ever-evolving grotesque menagerie, and Atwood never lets us forget it. We see sheep called Mo’Hairs, bioengineered to grow human hair; large pigs (Pigoons) designed to grow human organs; and creatures designed to show that we could engineer a new Eden, the Liobams. A lot of the humor rises up when we get to know the Crakers, who are just coming into their own as a species, complete with all the foibles of the innocent. The novel also contains some interesting reflections on the inevitability of writing and storytelling among human (or nearly human) creatures. Although Crake had tried to engineer any need for the arts out of them, they are fundamentally myth-making beings who require explanatory stories. Toby teaches Blackbeard, one of the Crakers, how to write, and it is his voice we hear at the end of the novel. Through their need to process the events of their own creation, we become aware of the power of the storyteller, of the one who selects and arranges the material that will be handed down to the next generation. Toby’s voice starts the novel: “In the beginning, you lived inside the Egg. That is where Crake made you.” And Blackbeard’s voice ends it. Although he isn’t sure how Toby died, he tells us that the story he likes best is that she took the form of a bear in order to join Zeb: “That is the best answer, because it is the happiest; and I have written it down. I have written down the other answers too. But I made them in smaller writing.”

Atwood has always been fascinated by the myth-making power of the human imagination. Fiction does not create the world, but it does create and re-create how we inhabit it. Even if most of what we recognize were lost, humankind would continue as homo symbolicus, transforming mysteries into things we can understand. If we destroy most people in the world because of a failure of our imagination, the human imagination, at least, will remain to rebuild us. As Atwood explained in her volume on sci-fi, In Other Worlds, “if you are a question-asking being—which Homo sapiens is—then sooner or later the creative part of the brain is going to come up with a point of origin and an ultimate destination, even if it’s the cyclic destruction and re-creation of the universe.”

Christina Bieber Lake is Clyde S. Kilby professor of English at Wheaton College and author of Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood, just published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Several decades before the Civil War, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz asserted, in his influential treatise On War, that “war is merely politics continued by other means.” In 1832, Clausewitz’s dictum was meant to clarify the political purpose of war as an expression of national will, but latent within it is a biting implication regarding the military effects of political disunity. In To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave, Faith Barrett’s book on American poetry and the Civil War, Clausewitz’s famous formula could easily be adapted to read, “poetry is merely politics continued by other means,” with commensurate impact on the aesthetic effects of poems created in its chaotic ferment. Such a substitution of terms drives home two points, neither apparent to contemporary readers accustomed to viewing poetry as either a quaint or obscurantist occupation engaged in by disaffected iconoclasts and marginalized, self-appointed prophets. First, poetry in the 19th century was experienced by most readers as a unifying and universal language of the human spirit, with aesthetic techniques and forms appropriate to its broad cultural appeal; and second, advances in publishing and disseminating poetry in the mid-19th century radically democratized and atomized poetry’s universal claims and audiences. Poetry and the moral insight and aesthetic relief it offers to the public sphere haven’t been the same since.

The conflation of civil war and poetry in Barrett’s nuanced and rewarding To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave reveals how the practices of both strain toward politically unifying ends even as they fracture along isolating and individualized responses to grief and violence. That the Civil War inspired partisan and heartfelt poetry from a broad spectrum of society North and South is not news, but Barrett—taking a fresh look at poems and songs previously discounted for their conventional forms and sentiments—elucidates the ambivalence and emotional complexity of poets grappling with the difficult task of reconciling their personal experiences and beliefs about war with the more polarized and standardized positions available to them as they strove to speak for and to a national audience.

Literary historians have long recognized the Civil War as a dividing line in the public role of American poetry. Among its many effects, the Civil War shattered the presumed consensus of emotional and philosophical responsiveness that underwrote poetry’s ability to crystallize and harmonize experiences and beliefs common to its readers. Poets were less able to confidently address audiences like sages, crafting a consensus through accessible narratives, lyrics, and ballads. The immediate postbellum period in poetry, so frequently denigrated in criticism with the epithet of “genteel,” maintained this older version of poetry’s social function and its elevated, universalizing diction. However, emerging poets like Stephen Crane and Edward Arlington Robinson began to find audiences by adopting a more alienated posture in their poetry. The long slide toward modernist dissolution through realist and naturalist despair drove poets towards aesthetic forms that had no pretensions of gathering a popular audience, much less unifying it. When T. S. Eliot has his speaker in The Waste Land declare, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” he was less a herald of a new reality in poetry than he was capitalizing on a psychological and aesthetic sensibility that had been emerging for decades.

Barrett’s examination of Civil War poems and songs captures the dynamism of poetry’s movement from a means of consensus in the antebellum period to a conduit of dissensus in the modernist era. At the same time, she charts the narrowing of American poetics from a variety of narrative, ballad, and elegiac forms into the more isolating stance of lyricism, that unsurpassed mode of individual and prophetic speech. Barrett engages criticism of Civil War poetry, notably leveled by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore, as sentimental, simplistic, and reductively nationalistic. She does so by discovering in poems and songs by Julia Ward Howe, Sarah Piatt, George Moses Horton, Henry Timrod, Frances Harper, and a host of other less known literary and soldier-writers “the origins of the modernist poets’ commitment to skepticism, irony, and fragmentation.”

To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave includes extended discussions of wartime verse by Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, writers who have long been admired as modernist precursors. The analyses of Dickinson’s poems are particularly valuable, as Dickinson’s oblique emotional response to the Civil War is only recently gaining the critical attention it deserves. However, the depth and care Barrett gives to soldier-poets like Obadiah Ethelbert Baker, George Washington Hall, and Lyman Holford, as well as the attention she pays to other southern and female writers, make up the book’s most distinctive contribution. Barrett co-edited “Words for the Hour”: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (2005), a teachable collection where all of the poems discussed in this more recent book can be found. Readers of the anthology have long anticipated To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave as a critical companion piece.

Barrett focuses on three traits that establish the aesthetic merits of Civil War poetry when weighed upon a modernist scale of accomplishment. First, she carefully accounts for the slippage between individual and collective pronouns in a number of popular poems in order to suggest the uneasy ways that poetic speakers attempted to convey personal experience while still speaking for and with a larger community. Second, she documents the easy commerce between verse and song in the era, a circumstance that exemplifies the way singular and collective stances can collapse together in the bodies of singing soldiers and civilians at rallies and along the road. Finally, she focuses on the “voice effects” of speaking from multiple narrative vantage points within a single poem, a strategy that Sarah Piatt, for example, uses to devastating ironic effect in her poem “Hearing the Battle.”

Barrett’s commitment to justifying Civil War poetry within an anachronistic aesthetic system causes her to perceive ambiguity and irony at times when amateurism or earnestness are more likely. Even so, she is well aware of the limitations in proto-Modernist definitions of poetry, such as John Stuart Mill’s “feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude.” She is remarkably attuned to nuance and interpretive possibility, a stance that is richly rewarded in the chapters that discuss Dickinson’s use of landscape imagery to make nature scenes as horrific as battlefields and in describing the tensions within Howe’s famous “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as it modulates from a woman’s experience of walking among the troops to a triumphant nationalist “we” who “fight to make men free.” However, she seems to reach for these effects in her analysis of uncelebrated poets, like the soldiers Obadiah Ethelbert Baker and Jasper Jay Stone. Consider, for example, this assessment of Baker’s “After the Battle”: “While the awkward rhyme scheme and the ungainly inversion … may reflect the limits of Baker’s abilities as a poet, these verbal stumbles also suggest that he feels some discomfort with this ideal of forgiveness.” Still, speculative as this and other passages like it are, this weakness is characteristic of ambitious modes of literary criticism and isn’t a specific failing of Barrett’s.

Barrett’s incorporation of plebeian and popular poets along with canonized figures makes the book particularly rich reading for those interested in learning how an individual poet’s experience of war can speak to a national audience. The nation, after all, is responsible for initiating and sustaining the organized and dehumanizing violence that marks modern war, of which America’s Civil War was arguably the first example. The political and social distance of those most affected by today’s wars from the majority of Americans whose political choices or disaffection determine national policy stands in stark contrast to the broad impact, influence, and interconnections of Civil War casualties and survivors. Barrett’s book is both an elegy for a lost period of social and literary grappling with the effects of war and an enticement to seek out the poetry that will, in years to come, be written by the veterans, civilian survivors, and bereaved of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Liam Corley is associate professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. His essays on war and poetry can be found in College English and War, Literature, & the Arts.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Very unfortunately, Samuel Tadros has been blessed in the timing of his excellent survey of the past and present state of Egypt’s Coptic Christians. Just as the book was appearing last summer, that community suddenly found itself facing pogroms and mob attacks resulting from the military overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood regime. Anxious to find current information about the Copts, the media often turned to Tadros, giving him ample opportunities to develop his argument. I’m sure he wishes that his topic could have remained in decent obscurity much longer than it has.

Egypt’s Copts rightly claim descent from the land’s earliest inhabitants, the Egyptoi, whose language was that of the Pharaohs, and which still survives in Christian liturgies. They also occupy a unique position in Christian history. I sometimes fantasize about writing a History of Christianity from the Egyptian perspective. Without Egypt, we miss so many critical turning points in the making of the Christian faith. Ideas and language derived from Hellenistic Egypt are strongly marked in several early Christian writings, including the Gospel of John, and in texts like the Epistle of Barnabas. The 3rd century was the era of Origen, certainly a candidate for the title of the most brilliant and daring scholar in Christian history. Egypt was the main home of the monastic movement, which would transform the faith worldwide, and lay the foundation for the making of European civilization.

Modern Copts bear the burden of a history that is almost unimaginably rich.

In the 4th and 5th centuries, the patriarchs—popes—of Alexandria were pivotal to the church debates that established Christian orthodoxy for centuries to come. This was the era of Athanasius and Cyril, who were so crucial to the events at Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. Finally, Egyptian Christians of this era contributed powerfully to creating the Christian visual imagination, as they developed the tradition of icon painting. In the 6th century, Severus of Antioch complained that “Alexandrians think the sun rises just for them.” But why shouldn’t they? Egyptians had already done so much to establish Christian culture, art, and intellectual life. They made the faith we know.

In the 7th century, Egypt fell under Islamic rule, and at that point this ancient Christian tradition suddenly vanishes from most Western histories of Christianity. Yet Christians did not evaporate overnight, nor did they convert in significant numbers. If we read the great 10th-century History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, we find a picture of bishops and monks continuing to do much what they had always done, in a largely Christian countryside. In fact, they sound very much like their contemporaries in “Christian” Western Europe.

Yes, Christians sometimes faced persecution, but it was not a simple story. Some Muslim rulers were wise and benevolent, others were ruthless thugs. It sounds very much like the secular regimes that saints were confronting in contemporary Christian Europe, although the Muslim rulers were marginally less nervous about committing sacrilegious acts that could draw down divine anger. Often, when the History of the Patriarchs describes a brutal tyrant, it mentions that he was a terror to all the subjects, Muslim as well as Christian. Often, not always, this was equal-opportunity tyranny.

Oddly too, this church historian regards even the worst atrocities visited on Christians by Muslims as fairly minor compared to those inflicted by other Christians in past times. From the 5th through the 7th centuries, Egypt had usually been under the rule of Orthodox Chalcedonian Roman regimes, who were determined to enforce their will on the overwhelmingly Miaphysite Coptic Christians. Large sections of the History are devoted to the tortures, martyrdoms, and persecutions involved in that process, after which Muslim rule came almost as a relief.

What makes the History of the Patriarchs so striking is its combination of worlds that we often think of as radically separate, the medieval Christian and the “Oriental” Muslim. This is nowhere brought home more effectively than in the name of the work’s 10th-century compiler, the Bishop Severus, known as Severus ibn al-Muqaffa or (from his diocese) Severus of El Ashmunein. El Ashmunein is the name given to the ancient Egyptian and Hellenistic city otherwise known as Khmun, and later as Hermopolis Magna. Roman, Greek, and Arabic names merge together, very much as the cultures did in the Egypt of his time.

Severus certainly saw signs of trouble in his day, when the Coptic language was fading before the spread of Arabic. He made grudging concessions to this process, publishing works in Arabic himself. But even three centuries after the coming of Islam, he gives little impression of serving a church in danger of vanishing.

Not until the 14th century did persecution and discrimination really become intense. So appalling was this maltreatment that we can legitimately draw parallels between the lot of Egypt’s Copts and the fate of Jews in contemporary Western Europe. In both cases, communities might thrive and prosper for centuries, but they would become targets for extreme violence during eras of social and economic crisis. Copts and Jews were ideal scapegoats. And like Europe’s Jews, the Copts endured. In the early 20th century, native Christians still made up at least 15 percent of Egyptians, and some scholars think that is a serious underestimate. Even today, the figure is around 10 percent.

Modern Copts, therefore, bear the burden of a history that is almost unimaginably rich. Like Jews, they feel immense pride in their contributions to the wider world, together with amazed gratitude for their continued survival. At the same time, they wrestle to explain their repeated sufferings, often at the hands of countrymen to whom they have given so much. Copts struggle to explain the pogroms and atrocities of 1321, and now the horrors of 2013. They combine a fascination with ancient lineage and rootedness with an alarming sense of the transience of eras of peace and prosperity. They are the most devoted patriots of a nation that so often spurns them, rooted in the soil and the Nile mud yet repeatedly suspected as traitors.

Seeking to cope with these paradoxes, Coptic writers through the years have developed a number of mythological schemes for interpreting history, myths that Tadros ably describes—and does his best to avoid. For some thinkers, the Copts have since early Christian times been a martyr nation, stubbornly resisting ruthless assaults by the Roman Empire, and then by Muslims. Others, though, see Copts and Muslims as the two essential building blocks of Egypt past and present, two communities married in a common patriotic endeavor. As I have suggested, both narratives contain a great deal of truth, but both depend on highly selective historical memories.

Samuel Tadros, then, faces the very difficult task of trying to present a highly complex history in a very short space. He succeeds so well because he never forgets the central theme of the encounter with modernity. He avoids the temptation to explore early and medieval times in too great depth, and some three quarters of his text concerns the period since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt in 1798, the key date in modern Middle Eastern history.

For Copts, like Muslims, the European encounter was a revolutionary event, which demanded that Egypt adapt itself to a suddenly threatening modern world. But what exactly was that modernity? Could new attitudes to science and technology be imported without full-scale Westernization, with all that implied for political and social life? Modernity was a particularly sensitive issue for Middle Eastern Christians, who at all costs had to avoid giving any impression of representing a foreign fifth column, of being spies and agents working on behalf of European colonialism.

Like Christians elsewhere in the region, many Copts resolved this dilemma by becoming vocal and visible advocates of Egyptian nationalism and anti-imperialism, but of a particular kind. In order to escape Muslim hegemony, they favored a strong national state pledged to secularism. They would prove their national credentials by being super-patriots, by being more devoutly Egyptian than the most fervent Muslim. Often, that prescription would work, and for long decades. But on occasion it collapsed, and rarely so badly as it has in the past year. At such times, the old stereotypes emerge yet again: the Copts as plotters against the people; the Copts as secessionists; the Copts as tools of Israel and the West; the Copts as enemies of Egypt. Yes, the Copts, the people whose very name and entire cultural identity are taken from that same Egypt.

By no means does Tadros offer a solely political account. He pays due attention to the modern Coptic cultural revival and sketches the genuinely exciting spiritual rebirth of modern times, a phenomenon that clamors to be better known among Western Christians. Regrettably, though, most of his readers will be searching for clues to what looks like the early stages of a potentially catastrophic national and religious conflict.

In his last chapter, Tadros ominously draws attention to the swelling Coptic diaspora outside Egypt. He addresses “the bitterness of leaving, the peril of staying.” As he notes, “At a moment in the not so distant future, the center of gravity of the Coptic church will no longer be inside Egypt’s borders.” After two thousand years, it seems, that most ancient Christian community will have to learn to sing the Lord’s song in many strange countries—in new Egypts across the seas.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. His book The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade is coming this Spring from HarperOne.

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