Page 2210 – Christianity Today (2024)

It would be difficult to find a more examined religious movement than evangelicalism. Every couple of months a new book appears seeking to define and describe it. Historian Randall Balmer contributed his take on the movement some time ago in Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, an engaging historical and sociological look at evangelical variety that PBS made into a documentary, and he has returned to the subject over the years.

Now Balmer offers a crisp overview, attempting to bring some order out of the chaos that surrounds evangelical definition. Few are better qualified for this task than Balmer, who grew up in an Evangelical Free Church pastor’s home. (Although we did not meet each other as children, our fathers were evangelical pastors in the same midwestern city at the same time, and surely they met at least once.)

The Making of Evangelicalism is Balmer’s interpretation of evangelical history; it does not pretend to be a mere presentation of facts, although it contains many facts. Rather, it’s a hybrid of historiography and homiletics. By the end, the reader knows that Balmer has a passion for evangelicalism and wants to set it straight where it has gone astray. His disdain for the so-called Religious Right is palpable.

Balmer tells evangelicalism’s story through four turning points: “the transition from Calvinist to Arminian theology in the embrace of revivalism,” “the shift from postmillennialism to premillennialism,” “the retreat into a subculture,” and “the rise of the Religious Right.” Every student of evangelicalism will recognize this story; it has been told numerous times in slightly altered form by historians such as George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Joel Carpenter. Balmer puts his unique spin on it in ways that make it both spell-binding and troubling.

According to Balmer, modern evangelicalism was born out of the Great Awakenings of the early 18th and 19th centuries. The First Great Awakening, led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, “introduced to American society a peculiar strain of evangelicalism that remains America’s folk religion to this day.” It was theologically Calvinistic but at the same time emotional. The Calvinism appeared in its assumption that revival is entirely and exclusively a work of God that humans cannot cause or control.

The Second Great Awakening changed the course of evangelicalism in an Arminian direction, especially under the influence of revivalist Charles Finney. Balmer’s explanation of Finney’s impact on American evangelicalism is incisive but mistaken insofar as he associates it with Arminianism. As I have shown in Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (2006), classical Arminian theology affirms total depravity, the necessity of supernatural, prevenient grace for saving faith, and justification by grace through faith alone. In other words, it is a Reformation theology.

Finney’s theology was thoroughly semi-Pelagian in that it denied total depravity and the necessity of transforming grace for saving faith. Whereas classical Arminian theology has always affirmed the divine initiative in salvation, Finney denied it and placed the initiative in revivals and salvation on the human side. Finney’s doctrine of justification was ambiguous and implied a positive role for sanctification in justification.

The canard that Finney is the epitome of Arminianism has been spread by certain anti-Arminian Calvinists for almost two centuries, but anyone who reads Arminius or Wesley or later Arminian theologians such as Richard Watson, William Burton Pope, John Miley, H. Orton Wiley, and Thomas Oden (especially The Transforming Power of Grace) and compares their theologies with Finney’s (e.g., in Lectures in Systematic Theology) will immediately see the difference. For Finney, truth presented clearly and powerfully is all a sinner needs to convert; for all true Arminians, every sinner needs a special work of grace to exercise faith in Jesus Christ even in the face of the most powerful presentation of the gospel.

I do not think Balmer is guilty of that canard because I am persuaded his description of Finney as an Arminian is innocent; he is simply assuming the truth of what others have said. But some of the “others” were not so innocent: they clearly had read Arminius and Wesley and the leading 19th-century Arminian theologians.

Balmer’s second turning point involved another evangelist, D. L. Moody, who was instrumental in the wholesale adoption of premillennial eschatology to replace the prevailing postmillennialism of earlier evangelicals, including Edwards and Finney. As a result of this shift, Balmer argues, evangelicals gradually gave up on social transformation in favor of a purely individualistic “life boat” gospel. This is the story told earlier by evangelical historians Timothy Smith and Donald Dayton (e.g., in Dayton’s Discovering an Evangelical Heritage) and repeated by many others.

The problem is that Balmer identifies all premillennialism as dispensational, other-worldly, and caught up in rapture fever. He does not seem to know that it was not John Nelson Darby, the founder of dispensationalism, who introduced premillennialism into the stream of Christianity. The early church fathers before Constantine were almost all premillennialists. That’s “historic premillennialism,” and it has never disappeared entirely, especially from radical Christianity (many Anabaptists, for example, have been premillennial but not dispensational).

Again, I recognize that Balmer’s telling of the story of evangelicalism is a historian’s and not a theologian’s, and it is of necessity somewhat over-simplified. But at times it is a bit of a caricature as well. Not all premillennialists have been against social transformation; and postmillennialist optimism, for all the good it led to, had problems of its own, including especially its lack of biblical support.

The third turning point in Balmer’s account—closely connected with the second, as suggested above—was evangelicalism’s inward turn and its departure from the public square into its own ghettoized subculture. Having grown up in that world, I am painfully aware of what Balmer is talking about. Especially after the 1925 Scopes Trial debacle, conservative Protestantism in America tended to wipe the dust of secular and liberal culture off its feet and stay within its own institutions. From roughly 1925 until the 1970s, American evangelicalism had little interest in dialogue or cooperation with the wider world of politics and religion and scholarship.

Here, however, Balmer makes an important exception by noting that throughout this time evangelicals were in the forefront of using communication technology to get their message across. Although he only mentions her in passing, Pentecostal revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson was the first woman and one of the first Christian ministers to establish her own radio station. At the time of her death, in the 1940s, she was in the process of applying for an experimental television license to spread her Foursquare gospel. Other Pentecostals and fundamentalists were equally adept at adopting cutting-edge means of spreading the gospel.

One notable evangelical Balmer ignores is Mark Hatfield. After two terms as Oregon’s governor, Hatfield served in the U.S. Senate from 1967 to 1997. Why does the omission of Hatfield matter? It’s significant because Balmer traces the evangelical turn toward politics and social transformation to the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter and then the rise of the Religious Right. For Balmer, this fourth turning point was almost entirely negative for both politics and evangelicalism. His chapter on “The Rise of the Religious Right” is a jeremiad about evangelical capitulation to power politics. But before the advent of the Religious Right, Hatfield was combining evangelical faith and political involvement at the highest levels—in his case with a decidedly liberal bent (as a Republican!).

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Balmer’s book is his claim that the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s involved deceit. Publicly the political activism that began to flourish under that banner was proclaimed to be a reaction to abortion and hom*osexual rights, but in fact, Balmer says, it originated as an attempt to protect evangelical institutions from government intrusion, spurred in particular by outrage over the irs’s 1976 revocation of Bob Jones University’s tax exemption due to racial segregation. After the fact, Balmer contends, the evangelical founders of the Religious Right masked their true motives.

What starts out as a relatively calm and insightful story of the rise and evolution of evangelicalism in America ends with an assault on evangelicalism’s contemporary condition. As much as I regret many evangelicals’ dubious alliances with political movements, I do not think evangelicalism as a whole deserves to be tarred with that brush. The media has done that to us, and apparently Balmer has largely adopted that view. Many evangelicals never bought into the Religious Right and have been critical of it. I wish Balmer and others who write about evangelicalism would acknowledge that fact more forcefully.

Roger E. Olson is professor of theology at George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University. He is the author of The Westminster Handbook to Evangelical Theology (WJK).

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1892, the widowed, middle-aged Scottish twins Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, ne Smith, discovered at St. Catherine’s monastery, Mount Sinai, an ancient version of the four canonical gospels, known today as Codex Syriacus Sinaiticus. It was one of the greatest biblical manuscript finds of the 19th century. This codex offered valuable clues on matters of textual criticism: as Luke’s gospel follows in the same column immediately after Mark 16:8, the witness of Syriacus Sinaiticus against the longer ending of Mark was particularly strong. Besides suggestive omissions, it also sheds light on the New Testament in numerous other ways. As Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic—Jesus’ native language—some scholars have even argued that it conveys certain details more accurately than the Greek.

The improbable story of the “heavenly twins” has recently been explored in an admirable scholarly collection edited by David Cornick and Clyde Binfield and then popularized in Janet Soskice’s well-researched and lively Sisters of Sinai. Staunch Presbyterians, Agnes and Margaret could discern in retrospect how the Almighty had providentially been preparing them throughout their entire lives to receive the gospel on Mount Sinai.

A remote branch of the twins’ family had been populated by entrepreneurial, miserly bachelors. As they died off each in turn, the fortunes compounded. When the last one passed, the resulting inheritance taxes were the largest sum ever paid by a Scottish estate. The chief individual beneficiary was the twins’ widowed father, John Smith. When Agnes and Margaret were 23 years old he died, leaving a bountiful fortune to them on the condition that they always live together. This they did. They even conveniently took turns being married, with Agnes being sister-in-law-in-residence until Margaret’s husband died and then the other way around, these non-overlapping marriages equably lasting three years apiece.

Both twins were very bright, but Agnes was the one with the steam-powered drive for accomplishments. Scottish Reformed values ruled out a frivolous life of pleasure and, for both of them, the duties of a wife came late and left early. Agnes searched hard for a suitable vocation. In his account, Cornick tracks these efforts dispassionately. Agnes, Cornick writes, initially pursued poetry, “producing an interminable verse life of Margaret of Scotland,” but met with more success with three published novels, although “only the most determined literary archaeologists would turn to them to-day.”

From childhood the twins had always been enthusiastic about foreign tongues and travels. Every time they learned a new language their father would reward them with a trip to the country where it was spoken. After he died, the first great plan of these twentysomething heiresses was a trip to Egypt. Eschewing the convention of a male escort, soon they were sailing down the Nile—just the twins, a former teacher they had asked to be their female companion as an act of kindness, and sixteen hired men. They had also thought to bring manifold things that might come in handy, ranging from side saddles to guide books (Herodotus’ Histories, of course). Despite a series of unfortunate events, a good time seems to have been had by all. Even their prime schoolmarm got to smoke a cigarette in a harem. They returned a year later, and Agnes turned her observations into a travel narrative that does not wither under Cornick’s critical gaze, Eastern Pilgrims (1870).

Then Margaret wed James Gibson, a man of independent means who had spent several years as a Presbyterian pastor before his perfectionist and depressive tendencies made his ministerial duties completely unbearable. James and Margaret announced their marriage with a photograph showing them competing against one another at chess. Agnes was determined to go to Cyprus—which no modern female traveler had yet done, and very few of her countrymen had written about—and planned to visit St. Catherine’s monastery on the way. Only a few years earlier, a Cambridge professor of Arabic had been kidnapped and murdered in the Sinai peninsula, and James insisted that his sister-in-law must abandon that part of her scheme.

After James’ death, the sisters relocated to Cambridge, a move inspired by an article about the town in the Presbyterian Churchman. The twins visited the library of Corpus Christi College, where Agnes quickly got into a protracted argument with the Fellow librarian, Samuel Lewis, about the correct pronunciation of classical Greek. It was love at first fight. In an all-male university world, Samuel was the kind of rare, progressive soul who used a bit of his free time to teach Latin to bookish women. He even went so far as to pour the tea himself.

When Samuel died after three happy years of matrimony, there was no one left to tell the widows that they could not go to St. Catherine’s. No copy of Aristides’ Apology was thought to have survived until the scholar Rendel Harris had found a Syriac version there three years earlier. The monastery’s library had never been catalogued, and there had not been a monk who could read Syriac there for centuries, so even the keepers of this collection did not know exactly what they had.

Harris was convinced there were more scholarly treasures to be found. Agnes set herself the task of learning Syriac, coolly observing that it was not that hard for someone like herself who had already mastered Hebrew and Arabic, especially when she had the aid of a Syriac grammar textbook (in German). Harris also insisted that the sisters learn the art of photography.

The monks were sometimes suspicious of European scholars, and many thought that the twins’ gender was sufficient reason to doubt that they would even gain admittance. But the sisters came armed with a range of credentials, including an ostentatiously official letter from the vice chancellor of Cambridge University. In Cairo they gained the crucial permission of Archbishop Porphyrios, who, according to Soskice, “formed the impression that the twins were on a mission to convert the whole of England to the correct pronunciation of Greek.” The trip to the monastery included a nine-day trek across the desert. Agnes was disappointed to discover that the camel ride was not sufficiently smooth to allow her to read her Hebrew Psalter. In good Reformed fashion, the sisters insisted that the Sabbath be strictly kept, even by their cook. Did not the Almighty command it from this very mountain?

The twins received an enthusiastic welcome at St. Catherine’s. With the politeness of new guests, they accepted an invitation to join the monks for their afternoon prayers. Two full hours later, the sisters quietly decided that they were from an active rather than a contemplative order and would henceforth spend their days accordingly. Extraordinarily, these Calvinist Scots got along with Greek Orthodox monks with remarkable ease. When pressed on some point of difference between Reformed and Orthodox theology, Agnes learned how to set everything right by dropping casually into the conversation how it had recently occurred to her that the pope must be the antichrist.

The twins asked to see the volumes in an obscure closet that Harris had learned of too late in his stay to investigate, and made their momentous discovery straightaway. It was a 358-page manuscript that, although she had never seen one before, Agnes immediately recognized to be a palimpsest, that is, a parchment that had been reused. It had become a Syriac collection of hagiographies, but—it did not take her long to discern—underneath this were the gospels. No one had looked at it for generations, and the pages were stuck together. The sisters enterprisingly separated them with steam from their camp kettle. They then set about systematically photographing the pages.

On their return home, the twins tried to get Professor Bensly, Britain’s leading Syriac authority, and Francis Burkitt, a rising young scholar, to examine their find. These two professional men were not anxious to waste an evening viewing the holiday snaps of two wandering widows. Eventually the twins managed to trap Burkitt at a dinner party. He and Bensly were soon in a giddy euphoria about a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

It was hardly possible to transcribe an ancient text-beneath-a-text from Victorian-era photographs. The only thing was to go to Mount Sinai as soon as possible. The party was made up of Bensly and Burkitt and their wives, Rendel Harris, and the twins. Alas, the collaboration was fated to be filled with jealousies and misunderstandings. Cambridge did not allow women to even receive a bachelor’s degree (which neither twin had), and everyone but Harris was determined to think of the sisters as travel guides rather than scholars. Mrs. Bensly resented the way that the twins were disordering her complacent assumptions about gender roles. She knew her place and occupied her time profitably by endeavoring to teach the Bedouin to knit. Margaret, by contrast, busied herself systematically cataloguing the Arabic volumes in the library. (Burkitt and Bensly, however, insisted that they must inspect first each new pile of manuscripts the monks brought her, lest another Presbyterian church lady might be able to claim that she had been the discoverer of something of scholarly significance!)

On the other hand, through a series of suspicious circ*mstances for which Soskice absolves the twins of all blame, the world learned about this biblical breakthrough through newspaper accounts that did not even mention Bensly and Burkitt, who had just employed their preeminent linguistic knowledge by spending forty days painstakingly transcribing in the desert. Soskice can see Bensly’s point of view: “It was a hard thing, having climbed the greasy pole of academic renown with painful slowness over many years, to find oneself joined at the top by a fifty-year-old Scottish widow, who had vaulted to this height almost by accident in a matter of months.”

The aging professor then promptly died, and his embittered widow wrote a book in which she pretended that Agnes had no idea what she had found but had just handed over a few queer pictures to her husband, who had himself discovered that they were Syriac gospels. As Burkitt was also ruffled, Agnes decided that there was nothing for it but to become a leading Syriac expert herself. Having found their vocation half a century into their lives, both sisters then produced more serious, meticulous, academic volumes than most university professors ever manage in the course of an entire career. In addition to various single-authored works, the twins edited two formidable series for Cambridge University Press, Studia Sinaitica and Horae Semiticae.

It is only fitting that the twins should have made two great discoveries. In 1896, they bought a variety of ancient manuscripts from private dealers in Cairo. One of these turned out to be a portion of the original Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus, something so lost that some scholars had even argued that it had not been written in Hebrew. They showed it to the Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter, who immediately boasted to his wife: “As long as the Bible lives, my name shall not die.”

The academy eventually recognized the sisters as true scholars. The universities of Halle-Wittenberg and St. Andrews conferred honorary doctorates on them. Not to be outdone, Heidelberg awarded them the first DDs ever given to women. Cambridge, however, decided it would be ridiculous to give honorary doctorates to women when it would not allow them even to earn a bachelor’s degree; its idea of a sly nod to the sisters’ achievement was to honor Archbishop Porphyrios! With no hard feelings, the sisters endowed a Cambridge professorship in modern Greek and even founded a new Cambridge college to serve Presbyterians, Westminster College.

One of the highlights of From Cambridge to Sinai is a chapter by the late, distinguished biblical scholar John O’Neill, examining the most suggestive variants in Syriacus Sinaiticus and what Agnes made of them. O’Neill’s conclusion is that “she had great shrewdness and good judgment.”

Wealthy eccentrics, their greatest find became something of a monomania for Margaret and Agnes. They visited what is today Syria and berated the Christians there for allowing Arabisms into their language, “the mother-tongue of our Saviour.” More than one guest preacher at their local Presbyterian church was disconcerted to have his sermon found wanting for failing to take into account a salient Syriac variant. From Cambridge to Sinai also contains translations from her native German of the hilarious diary entries and recollections of Edith Klipstein, whom the twins had commissioned to paint their portraits. Living with the twins for a time while at work on the commission, Edith found that she was occasionally sent to her room under orders to memorize Syriac vocabulary lists. (“I was just young enough to put up with this madness.”)

The sisters were perhaps no odder than most financially secure scholars. (Rendel Harris seemed to have gravitated toward them because of a quirky scholarly obsession he had with twins, including an involved and portentous theory about there being more than one set among the apostles.) And calling them eccentric must not become a way to dismiss them. In conclusion, therefore, it is worth allowing Agnes to have the last, thoughtful word, as she reflected on the spiritual significance of her scholarly work on the Bible:

[God] makes even our mistakes, and those of our fellow-men, to praise Him, for the very variants which frighten the weak-minded amongst us act as a stimulant to others, inciting them to search the Scriptures more diligently, to eliminate the mistakes of the mere copyists, and to ascertain what it was that the Evangelists actually wrote.

Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, is the author of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford Univ. Press). His new book, about the Bible in the 19th century, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When a marriage ends, it is hard not to wonder who changed. Was it the husband? The wife? Both? Reading Jenny Sanford’s account of her marriage to, and separation from, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, it is clear that she thinks he changed. The rambling June 2009 press conference he gave—admitting that he was not “hiking the Appalachian trail” (as his staff originally claimed), but meeting his Argentinian lover—was not what she had expected from the man she married two decades earlier.

While no one knows what really happens inside a marriage, it is safe to say that Mark Sanford did not behave well. The title of his wife’s book, Staying True, refers to her. She stayed true to herself, her marriage, her family, and her ideals. He did not. But when a marriage ends, it is also hard not to wonder whether there were early signs that it would not turn out well. And every one of the mostly female readers of Staying True will have a moment when she thinks, That’s when I would have dropped him like a hot potato. For me the moment came on page 25, when I learned that during their engagement, Mr. Sanford asked Mrs. Sanford to meet him at a restaurant for dinner “and bring a list of … lifetime goals for us to discuss.” He came with several pages of notes, with priorities including making a lot of money, bicycling across America, beating his brother at tennis, and becoming a senator.

What? He didn’t want to be a fireman too?

The other list Mr. Sanford brought with him that evening was one of “spiritual goals,” referencing specific Bible verses that he aspired to live by. According to Mrs. Sanford, they included Galatians 5:22-23: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” And Matthew 5:16: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and praise your Father in heaven.” And Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth ….” (Well, maybe not.)

Mrs. Sanford herself never had to memorize any Bible verses as a child growing up in the Catholic Church, and she was duly impressed with her future husband’s knowledge. Despite his strange, and now well-publicized, request that he not be required to pledge faithfulness to her in their wedding vows (another aha moment), Jenny Sanford took the plunge.

To hear her tell it now, the marriage required a lot of sacrifice on her part. “I suppose you could say that women are built for sacrifice,” she writes early in the book. But there’s sacrifice and then there’s sacrifice. Mark Sanford hounded his wife about every penny she spent. Yes, many other men do the same, but Mr. Sanford’s skinflint ways put him in a class of his own. When they were first married, he bought her a $25 bicycle: half of it was a birthday present and half was for Christmas. Years later, he bought her a diamond necklace, but later decided it was too expensive and returned it. (Are the bells going off yet, Jenny?) Mr. Sanford seems like an insensitive lout in other instances as well. He refused to attend Jenny’s grandfather’s funeral. And while she concluded it had something to do with their different understandings of funeral services, one can’t help but suspect he was too cheap to cover the plane ticket.

Jenny Sanford has become something of a cultural icon in the months since her husband’s breakdown. On the fast track at the investment bank Lazard in New York, she gave up her career to follow Mr. Sanford to his home in South Carolina. She had four sons, and ran most of her husband’s political campaigns. But when the moment of truth came, she did not turn into a shrinking violet. Neither Silda Spitzer nor Hilary Clinton, Jenny refused to stand by her man while he humiliated himself and his family.

Mrs. Sanford’s balancing act between career and family was not something she planned. She seemed to want to stay at home and raise a big family. But in the hospital after the birth of their first child, Mr. Sanford announced his candidacy for Congress, telling his wife that she must be his campaign manager. “You can do this with the babies at home,” he explained, “and we can just put a phone line in the kitchen. The only way this will even possibly work is if we keep our expenses incredibly low and that’s why I really need you. You are free.”

Amazingly, this sweet talk worked. And Jenny Sanford, who (by her own account) wanted nothing more throughout their marriage than to be with her friends and family, to devote herself to raising her sons, couldn’t seem to catch her breath. So determined was she to help her husband fulfill his political ambitions, to calm the “restlessness” he was always displaying, that she kept saying yes. When Mr. Sanford won his first election, she told the local paper that she wanted to spend a night at home alone with her family. “After that, she wants to see her friends, read something beside political treatises, and play some tennis or golf.”

When did she think the unrelenting demands were going to end?

However blind Mrs. Sanford may have been to Mr. Sanford’s faults, she was immediately attuned to the differences in their religious practices. She was a Catholic from a large family in the Midwest. “Faith in our family wasn’t just something you had, it was something you did. I saw my dad pray nightly on his knees before his cross. Though he rarely preached to us, when I saw my father, such a huge figure to me, praying in this humble position, I felt the serenity of knowing that someone was always watching from above.”

She recalls going to Mass every Sunday as a child; her parents would go almost every day. Interestingly, she never describes going to church with her husband or children. There is no evidence, in this book anyway, of a pastor or a priest, of a church community, of any kind of group worship.

Instead there is Mark Sanford, quoting Bible verses and even writing what he called the “Sanford Family Constitution.” While Mrs. Sanford found herself “nodding in agreement” as he read it to the family over dinner one night, an outsider might have found the existence of such a document a bit odd. The family’s “mission,” he announced, “is to be a nurturing, loving and fun safe harbor and home place—where each member is loved unconditionally for who they are, where values are instilled and where each person is encouraged to develop their talents, find their passion and pursue it with excellence to indeed glorify God and make the world a better place.” (Christian College presidents may want to see if Mr. Sanford has cribbed from their websites.)

It was shortly after the mission statement dinner that Jenny discovered her husband’s lustful emails to his mistress. Confronted with the evidence, his reaction was nonchalant to say the least. And he later admitted to her that there were other dalliances over the years as well.

By the end of Staying True, Mark Sanford is begging his wife to allow him to see his mistress again because he wants to “find the key to his heart.” It is hard not to imagine him as the leader of a religious cult of his own making, spouting sermons to everyone, all the while living by his own rules. And finally Jenny has her aha moment. “He seemed to be traveling a path of his own making, seeking his own comfort, no longer guided by a power above. I began to see him as lost, disconnected from his basic values.”

Despite what readers might see as early warning signs of Mark Sanford’s failings, Staying True is not the story of a naïve woman suddenly finding out the truth. Whatever her husband was up to, she seemed to have her eye on the ball. How could she be there for her kids? How could she ensure they would be raised well? How could she keep her own faith? How could she plan for their life after politics?

There is surprisingly little second-guessing or handwringing in the book. Mrs. Sanford seems confident (despite the way the rug was pulled from under her) that her fate is in God’s hands. She is like many women of strong faith I have interviewed, better able to navigate the push and pull of modern motherhood and womanhood because of their trust in God’s will. The key to her heart was never lost.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is an affilate scholar at the Institute for American values. She is working on a book about interfaith marriage.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Like many good books, this is an act of faith. It has faith that secular liberals will listen to a religious voice, hear its consonances with theirs, and be open to learning from its wisdom. And yet it keeps faith with Christian audiences who think (rightly) of Augustine as more than just a resource for contemporary political thought. The Augustine who emerges is both astutely political and unapologetically theological. If non-religious political theorists have one chance to hear an Augustinian voice, it should be Eric Gregory’s. This is a major contribution to contemporary discussions in religion and politics. While I disagree with some of the project’s fundamental strategic choices, that disagreement is precisely the sort of productive dispute that contemporary political theology ought to be exploring these days.

Before I go on, a caveat lector is in order. Eric Gregory and I are good friends. We both teach religious ethics and theology. We email regularly. We go to the same conferences, and talk excitedly between sessions like teenagers at a rock concert. I’ve invited him to UVA, where I teach, and he’s invited me to Princeton, where he teaches. In 2007, I published a book arguing for a reappropriation of Augustine’s insights for politics. In 2008, he published a book arguing for a reappropriation of Augustine’s insights for politics. I even blurbed his book. Now I’m supposed to review it? Talk about over-determination.

In truth, though, our books are quite different. Mine is primarily theological, detailing how Christians should understand their civic obligations from a faithful perspective. Gregory’s is primarily political, detailing how Augustine and his heirs may help all citizens, religious and non-religious alike, to understand the distinctive political challenges and opportunities inherent in a liberal democracy. It is fundamentally a contribution to discussions of political philosophy—though Christian readers will find hearty theological nourishment, as well as an exceptionally powerful set of arguments to direct to their non-Christian friends, neighbors, and political allies.

Gregory offers a “rational reconstruction of Augustinian liberalism,” defending it both against liberals who think they ought to hate Augustine and against followers of Augustine who think they ought to hate liberalism. He wants to use “Augustine’s grammar of love and sin to open up more conceptual space within liberal politics,” hoping to develop a more mature and sophisticated appreciation of the challenges and opportunities that liberal societies—and liberal theory—afford us today.

Gregory worries that a pseudo-Augustinian pessimism could become an “entrenched cultural mood” among Christians—which would be bad for both the culture and the faithful. Yes, he allows, the regnant academic liberalism too often sacrifices intellectual capaciousness and moral wisdom for a sheen of dryly scholastic “rigor” (better described as rigor mortis); and yes, liberal societies do challenge traditional religious believers in distinctive ways. But this is our context, and we must confront it.

Doing so with an open mind, he says, we will see that many of the worries about liberalism are shared by thinkers with superficially quite divergent views. In one of the first of several attempts to gain allies in surprising places—Gregory is gifted with a canny irenic streak—he notes that some Augustinians and some feminists share a critique of mainstream liberal theory’s “individualistic conceptions of self-mastery” as deeply flawed, and both promote instead an “ethics of care.” If their concerns are similar, and their solutions align, perhaps there’s more shared than the two parties have yet realized. Perhaps an Augustinian-feminist political ethics of care can be developed.

Yet such critiques, genuinely pursued, take us only so far. The broader tradition of liberalism has insights beyond the ken of contemporary academic “political liberalism.” And the critics turn out, upon reflection, to be offering modifications of liberalism, not wholesale rejections of it. One critical modification may be developed through Augustine, who can help us not only to plumb the depths of liberalism’s limitations but also to scale the heights of its ambitions. For liberalism, Gregory argues, contains within itself more than just restraint; real community, real communion—in a word, love—is the aspirations of the liberal project, which has within itself the possibility of real if imperfect justice, not mere toleration. Little wonder that the United States—still the most “liberal” political entity in the world—is perpetually accused of both individualism and communal messianism; and these temptations reveal the reach of liberalism more searchingly than does contemporary academia’s hegemonic liberalism.

While earlier versions of liberalism recognized this, “much of [recent] liberal theorizing fails to give an account of this desire.” Augustine can, because he “affirms the desire but qualifies its possibilities for fulfillment in this life.” This lets him offer “a more coherent and complex ethics of liberal citizenship that does not abandon justice but also does not privatize love.” Love has a prophetic role to play; and here Gregory audaciously suggests that a stream of “prophetic Augustinianism” surges through 20th-century liberationist movements—particularly in the work of Gustavo Gutierrez and Martin Luther King, Jr. Here we see a liberalism acutely aware of the human capacity for justice and propensity for injustice, institutionally designed to encourage the former while discouraging the latter.

In all this Gregory exemplifies a new generation of religious thinkers on liberalism. Those of us who are under forty were raised on a steady diet featuring thinkers like Hauerwas and MacIntyre and thinkers driven crazy by them; the schizophrenia entailed by such an education has stymied many of my peers. Gregory is not among the vexed. He sees the wisdom and flaws on both sides, and he wants to transcend these debates. Yes, political liberalism has many vices, but we ought to allow ourselves a “critical admiration of liberalism’s virtues.” As “Augustinian pilgrims still on the way”—that is, on the way “to enjoying the politics of an infinite God”—we ought, in proper Augustinian fashion, to use the liberal societies that we inhabit as best we can, aware of their strengths and weaknesses. We ought to get on with the task of non-utopian thinking, asking questions about how we are to live here and now, instead of indulging in fantasized visions of the future (inevitably imagined in reactionary terms, experientially if not politically).

This means that the cultural criticism Gregory offers has a clear-eyed sobriety lacking in the eyes-scrunched-shut fury of the jeremiadist. It is not just an anti-but a counter-escapist form of critique. As he says, “the task for Christian social ethics today is to critically engage this reality with something like the Augustinian humanism of an Erasmus rather than a new Augustinianism assailing the ‘pagans.’ ” He’s got plenty of concerns about contemporary culture; he plausibly complains that “the myths, symbols, and practices that govern liberal society are either dangerously anemic or excessively prideful,” and that liberal society “paradoxically displays, at the same time, apathetic resignation and polarizing mobilization of group interests.” But by the time he makes these complaints—they come at the book’s end—he has earned the right to them, and they serve more to focus our critical attention than as a elixir to enchant his readers that they are justified in not caring about their society.

This new Augustinian liberalism is the central contribution of Gregory’s work. But it is not the only one, for Augustine geeks like me. He also draws on new scholarship on Augustine’s political thought to explain how carefully we must apply our procrustean political categories to the good bishop. Notoriously, like the Bible, Augustine is too often the victim of partial readings and prooftexting. You can find an existentialist, a crusading theocrat, a pietist, a bourgeois—just about anything you want. He wrote so much that survives (and more continues to be discovered—six likely sermons were found in Erfurt, Germany, just in April 2008) that it is hard to come to grips with his thought in any scholarly responsible manner. But insofar as that is doable, Gregory has done it. He sees that the core of Augustine’s theology is its theological-moral psychology, anchored in Christologically formed love; love is “the overarching grammar of his entire thought.” Gregory cites Jean Bethke Elshtain, for whom Augustine’s agent is “someone caught up in a love affair with the world.” Against charges that he was, in Annette Baier’s phrase, a “misamorist,” urging us to hate all worldly things, Gregory shows that in the context of his engagement with ancient philosophy (especially Stoicism), Augustine was quite affirming of the value of the emotions, precisely because Christ sanctified them as part of our eschatological destiny. And this account of love is unintelligible without reference to Christ. Augustine’s Christology has not received a great deal of attention, mostly because it is so boringly orthodox; but recent scholarship, most notably by Lewis Ayres and Robert Dodaro (whose Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine has now replaced R. A. Markus’ Saeculum as the gold standard for historical study on Augustine’s political thought), highlights the centrality of Christ for Augustine’s overall theology. Gregory uses their work to help articulate Augustine’s Christoform account of love as a virtue; this in turn lets him fashion an ethics of liberal citizenship as a “school of virtue.”

The training in patient, humble, virtuous love that we receive through our political tutelage can help us endure liberalism—to strengthen its frailties and build on its blessings—making us not only good citizens but also better Christians. So long as one keeps in mind the “[d]ynamic relation between love and sin,” love can be a functional analytic category, neither evaporating into a cloud of good intentions (as in political romanticism) nor ossifying into a mallet used to hammer down dissent (as in illiberal paternalism). Just as individual citizens can understand their political actions as motivated by love, so can the political authorities. Gregory shows this by developing Paul Ramsey’s Augustinian theory of just war into a general vision of a politics based on love that avoids paternalism by genuinely constraining the shape of legitimate political action through the regulative norm “of love for God within the Augustinian ethics of love itself”; this “both democratizes and publicizes love through a theological (and so political) populism.” Both from above and below, then, a politics based on love can genuinely work in liberal societies.

This proposal has implications beyond “the future of Augustinian liberalism,” as Gregory notes; many of the world’s deepest conflicts exist where traditional moral and religious communities encounter liberal societies, and the health of the next century “may turn on whether or not we human beings can learn to desire more than ourselves without killing each other or simply forgetting about the shared goods of political life in pursuit of private perfection, aesthetic delight, entertaining distractions, economic security, and even spiritual freedom.” In short, Gregory’s book is a major contribution. Anyone teaching an advanced undergraduate or graduate course on Christianity and politics ought to assign this book, and anyone interested in Christian theology’s engagement with public life ought to read it.

Of course, no book of over three hundred pages can do everything perfectly. Sometimes it’s overstuffed; there’s too much signposting throughout, and overly long, not fully digested discussions of other thinkers. And sometimes it’s under-argued. Gregory could have more deeply explored the broader liberal tradition he wants to advance; for example, had he explored the resonances and dissonances between Augustine and Mill on individualism, and between Augustine and Tocqueville on human community, it could have paid rich dividends. Furthermore, the tantalizing claim that Gutierrez and King are Augustinians is frustratingly undeveloped, more a gesture than a weight-bearing piece of argument. And so on.

These are very minor faults of execution, and in a book of such ambition, they neither detract from its value nor undermine my admiration for it. But admiration and affirmation are distinct things. And it’s only fair to say that I disagree with some of the fundamental assumptions driving the book. It is not primarily addressed to Christians but to secular liberal political thinkers, in the hope that they will find it, read it, and absorb its lessons. Will it move this audience? I have my doubts. Should it be oriented this way? On that I have my doubts as well.

I won’t spend time debating whether this audience will heed it. I wish it would, but I bet it won’t. (Watch the next decade of mainstream political theory to see if the book has much impact.) Still, it is worth the try, and I applaud Gregory for the effort.

But I do think that this effort slightly warps Gregory’s argument. Despite his disclaimers that he’s “not making Augustine safe for democracy,” I worry that he inadvertently does just that. I worry that the book’s interest in convincing liberal theorists leads it to downplay those dimensions of Augustine’s thought that are most unpalatable to those theorists, most especially the extremity of Augustine, emphasizing instead his sensible moderation. Gregory spends very little time exploring the first ten books of the City of God, those books in which Augustine takes a chain-saw to late antique Roman laissez-faire ideology, the closest thing in his world to our “liberalism.” And I suspect that those first ten books are more expressive of Augustine’s vision of worldly life than Gregory allows. It seems to me that Gregory underemphasizes the eschatological dialectic at the heart of Augustine’s thought—Augustine’s insistence that whatever order we enjoy here is borrowed, terrifyingly, from the coming reign of God, and is radically accountable to that reign. Political order is, then, a deeply unstable reality—always susceptible to revolution and always volubly (for Augustine) and radically dependent on God, in ways that may make secular liberal theorists uneasy.

From where I sit, Gregory misses the absolutist, fulminatory Augustine, the vehement Augustine, the axe-wielding John-Brownish Augustine—the more excitedly dialectical Lutheran Augustine—in favor of the calmer, Thomist Augustine. I’m not saying that this Lutheran Augustine is more authentic than the Thomist Augustine Gregory develops; but I am saying he is equally authentic.

Yes, liberalism can be construed, as Gregory says, as a series of “footnotes to Augustine.” But much of anti-liberalism can be construed that way as well. Gregory’s salutary wish to avoid theological grumpiness means he downplays these anti-liberal suspicions. And yet accommodating these anti-liberal suspicions is crucial to understanding Augustine.

It’s crucial to developing the right kind of liberalism, too. That is to say, Gregory’s selection of liberal theorists leaves him with a too-narrow understanding of liberalism. There is a strand of liberalism—the stream running from Montesquieu through Tocqueville and Mill to Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor, and Bill Galston in our own day—that gives voice to some of the most deep and troubling challenges to the liberal imagination. But Gregory’s is the Rawlsian strand of liberalism—a liberalism that can grudgingly be made to appreciate chastening, but that cannot countenance ambivalence.

If Augustine is a liberal, he is not one simply because he is “chastened.” (We should probably retire “chastened.” It’s one of those words that, when used, typically signify the opposite of what they mean—like “gentlemen’s clubs,” or a faculty member who wants to make “a few comments.”) If Augustine is a liberal, he is one because he is deeply, profoundly, dialectically ambivalent about the goods that liberalism propagates. Gregory tries to get at this with his attention to Augustine’s perfectionism, but—for me—those moments are not sufficiently worked into his account. And since it is precisely liberalism’s ambivalence about itself that I value most, I find myself not able to assent fully to Gregory’s proposal.

This is a real difference, but it is the sort of difference that theological and philosophical learning can build upon. In the end, I can’t say whether this book’s act of faith will be proven true. I’m confident, though, that Gregory’s book is more than just an act of faith: In the rumination and reflection it entailed, the re-reading and re-writing it demanded, the continual insistence that one’s patience with oneself must be taxed even further in the quest for just the right balance between affirmation and critique, endorsem*nt and distance—in all these ways this work is not simply an excellent scholarly work but, as Augustine would put it, and more properly, a act of love.

Charles Mathewes is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author most recently of The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts in Dark Times (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

At my 25th college reunion, a gentleman (attending his fiftieth) challenged one of the more progressive faculty members about our school’s complete lack of a curriculum: I hope, he said, we can at least agree that our graduates should share the Enlightenment values of self-criticism, dialogue, and openness to contrary opinions. Oh, sure, said the progressive, effectively shutting the old man up. The next year this professor, along with 15 other faculty members, protested the very presence of Justice Antonin Scalia on campus, refusing even to listen to him speak. Mr. Enlightenment, let me introduce you to Professor Postmodern.

When I witnessed the exchange at reunion, it struck me as poignant and a little pathetic. The older alum had studied under a curriculum, distinguished in its day, that was birthed during the last efflorescence of an Enlightenment humanism that had survived World War II. By that point the college, like so many in the United States, had cast overboard the cargo of its religious heritage, freeing the modern ocean liner of higher education of so many antiquated sails and weather glasses and rituals of a bygone era. For these children of the Enlightenment, education was the crucial element in making us decent and humane citizens, capable of preserving liberty while expanding equality. Their chief historical enemy was to become Joseph McCarthy, and the civil rights movement would shortly embody their noblest ideal.

While the older alumnus still thrills to the voyage he embarked on in mid-century, however, higher education has moved on to a postmodern ethic that embraces the power to stifle dialogue. Adorno and Horkheimer had it right, in this view, when they identified the roots of 20th-century totalitarianism in the Enlightenment’s wish to limit truth to a rationally conceived, mathematized world. Their broadside crippled the Enlightenment heritage far more effectively than 19th-century Romanticism had done. Michel Foucault would shortly sink it.

So what was the Enlightenment, as it was experienced and has come down to us? The literature is vast, but two very different books on this 17th- and 18th-century movement, one by Louis Dupré and the other by Gertrude Himmelfarb, together offer a useful introduction. Himmelfarb gives substantial treatment to America but hardly notices science. Dupré has hardly a word for America while the implications of science are apparent throughout. This contrast suggests larger differences between the books. Himmelfarb’s volume is a readable, strongly focused book on politics that explains three different approaches to the social significance of the Enlightenment—British, American, and French. The American Enlightenment, she argues, was preoccupied with the shape of political liberty, the British explored the basis for social virtue, and the French sought a completely new approach to reason. Her sharp focus causes Himmelfarb to exclude (from Britain) the significance of the scientific revolution associated with Sir Isaac Newton. Here, Dupré is the better guide. Despite Newton’s own wishes, Newtonianism became the basis for a materialistic worldview that treated the universe like a clock, society like an automatic system, and man like a machine. It wasn’t until the rise of 20th-century physics that key philosophical and theological issues could be put back on the table—freedom and indeterminacy, the relationship of observer to the observed, and the hospitality of the universe to creation. The challenge in reading Dupré, a distinguished Catholic philosopher of religion from Yale, is that he’s written an encyclopedic approach to the period. A much longer book than Himmelfarb’s (the respective pagecounts are misleading), The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture conveys a lifetime of learning—or rather, only a part of Dupré’s formidable learning—at the cost of a clear narrative thread.

Robespierre is a harbinger for postmodernism’s attraction to power, spectacle, and enforced virtue.

Gertrude Himmelfarb is one of those rare writers who are always worth reading. In a career that has spanned more than fifty years, she has brought deep historical insight and a clear style to timely issues, from political leadership to marriage and poverty. In Roads to Modernity, she explores the modern sources for a free, stable, and virtuous polity. Why have these 18th-century sources in Britain and America proven largely successful? Why did they fail in the French Revolution?

In recent years “the Enlightenment project” has fallen on hard times, sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. To pick up the college reunion story, Enlightenment humanism failed to recognize its own rootedness in particular historical traditions. At its best, this humanism could aspire to the level of Mark Van Doren’s course in Shakespeare, which Thomas Merton took at Columbia in 1936: “A course in literature should never be a course in economics or philosophy or sociology or psychology,” he writes in The Seven Storey Mountain. “Nevertheless, the material of literature and especially of drama is chiefly human acts—that is, free acts, moral acts. And, as a matter of fact, literature, drama, poetry, make certain statements about these acts that can be made in no other way.” However loving his description of Van Doren’s teaching, Merton is uncompromising in his analysis of “the sweet and nasty disease of the soul that seemed to be rotting the whole of Europe, in high places above all,” which had converted charity into gentlemanly behavior and enlightenment into chic Freudian or Communist leanings. Well, there are no Van Dorens or Mertons now. Instead, we have postmodern intellectuals who cannot distinguish between a legitimate social theory and a fraud, as Alan Sokal notoriously demonstrated when his 1996 hoax found publication in a leading journal. We have academic leaders at Columbia, Duke, and elsewhere who employ their energies to defend campus appearances by apologists for terrorism.

So maybe there was something to be said for the Enlightenment after all? Himmelfarb thinks so, and her book seeks to reclaim it by re-charting its boundaries in Britain, America, and France. Well over half of her book—its most original portion, in my view—treats Britain. She goes beyond John Locke, whose undeniable influence on political theory has caused us to overlook thinkers who provided a broader basis for the modern social and economic life we enjoy. Against Locke’s unyielding critique of innate ideas, for instance, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury argued for an embedded moral sense of right and wrong. Far from being a tabula rasa, the human mind is predisposed to recognize good and evil. And far from Hobbes’s anti-social view of human nature, Shaftesbury builds the social virtues upon a foundation of natural sympathy and compassion, without the self-interest and optimism that compromise Rousseau’s writings on these subjects.

Adam Smith, whom Himmelfarb explains with equal skill, takes the moral sense further. Restoring Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) to its central place in his thought, she counters the notion (unfortunately repeated by Dupré) that Smith believed self-interest alone could result in social harmony. “‘[T]o feel much for others and little for ourselves,'” she quotes Smith as writing, and “‘to restrain our selfish and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.’ ” Tocqueville would later highlight the need for Americans to preserve their mores, especially through religious institutions and non-political associations, in order to combat individualism and nurture the benevolence, compassion, and sympathy essential to democratic society. Contemporary with Adam Smith, Edmund Burke also emphasized the crucial role played by these social affections, and the ease with which they had been destroyed in the French Revolution. Burke saw them as the legitimate descendants of medieval chivalry, and incorporating them into the modern age was the work of the “moral imagination,” as he put it. The revolutionaries spurned this task: “Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this [revolutionary] mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression in persons so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place.”

In the American tradition, the religious basis for these social affections may be found in the sermons of the Calvinists, Deists, Congregationalists, and Baptists who shaped the nation. Their meditations on virtue and republican government lie outside the scope of Himmelfarb’s book, but here is a representative sample from the Calvinist preacher David Tappan:

[The Christian revelation] superadds a new scheme of truth, suited to the lapsed state of mankind, which at once encourages, directs, assists and constrains to universal goodness; it presents the Deity, in the full orbed luster of his perfections; it displays the matchless philanthropy, the generous expiation and intercession of his Son; it offers and conveys the needed succours of his spirit …. Must not these discoveries [tend to] produce, to ennoble, and improve every branch of a virtuous character?[1]

I’ve said that Dupré’s book lacks clarity, but it is not without a thesis. In the Enlightenment, he explains, reason is viewed as a construction of the mind. While the Greeks had viewed reason as an ordering principle, inherent in reality, Enlightenment thinkers began to see the mind itself as the source of meaning and of truth. Often, however, Dupré’s thesis is submerged in various excurses on 18th-century figures and movements. His book is marked by brilliant flashes of insight alternating with a disappointing failure to advance his thesis, as in this explanation of a passage from d’Holbach:

The distinction which has been so often made between the physical and the moral man is evidently an abuse of terms. Man is a being purely physical. [d’Holbach’s] System admits as truth only what is accessible to the methods of the positive sciences. The objectivism heralded by d’Holbach came to play a major part in the scientific philosophy of the nineteenth century. Those who have read Edward Wilson’s Consilience would hesitate to declare it extinct today …. [d’Holbach’s] atheism differs from today’s secularism, which is less concerned with opposing religion than with filling the cultural vacuum left by its disappearance …. Today modes of “low” transcendence are often filling the place previously occupied by the high transcendence of God. Primary among them may well be the aesthetic experience. Like religion, that experience integrates the various aspects of our world within a single coherent vision that radiates with a glow of transcendence.

I know a lot more about d’Holbach after reading Dupré’s treatment, but I’m still unclear whether he represents the central strand of the Enlightenment or a particularly extreme wing of it. And I could do with a sentence that firmly traces the genealogy of Wilson’s Consilience. Dupré’s splendid discrimination of today’s secularism from Enlightenment atheism, however, shows the book at its best. Similar insights abound: Deism was only interested in God as a support for its physics and morality; social contract theory is really an ideology for change rather than a science of politics; secular theories of progress assume that truth, happiness, and freedom are to be realized only at the end of history; by abandoning theology as a merely rationalist enterprise, pietism widened the gap between culture and faith.

I’m afraid, though, the book is written at such a high intellectual level that non-specialists will find it forbidding. Dupré expects you to know what the “Catonic obsession” was (to obliterate Carthage), and the phrases from French and Latin are sometimes translated, sometimes not. The book evidently overtaxed Dupré’s editors at times, for they failed to catch obvious errors about Pascal’s “waiver” and the misspelling of the poet Ben Jonson’s name. An encyclopedic work like this will invite more important errors as well. Dupré mistakenly identifies Jonathan Swift with the misanthropic ravings of his literary creation, Lemuel Gulliver, and what little he says about Samuel Johnson could have remained unsaid. Still, the book is an invaluable resource on the religion and philosophy of the 18th century, and it accounts for dozens of the figures and movements of the era, Fnelon as well as Descartes, Swedenborg as well as Kant.

After reading these books, one is struck again that so wordy an event as the French Revolution left so little political philosophy worth reading. Condorcet, predicting the perfection of humanity up to his very death in a prison cell, would be a caricature of revolutionary optimism if he were a fictional character. The most effective of the revolutionary writers, Sieyés, was a propagandist, not an original thinker. The figure who has been overlooked, in my view, is Robespierre. We make ourselves into the “dupe of words,” he declared in his great speech on terror, if we listen to those who call for dialogue and moderation. He grew suspicious of words and declared that the true reign of justice was engraved upon the heart. What need, then, to listen to the Brissotins or the Hérbertists—or the Scalias? Robespierre truly saw that the French Enlightenment had issued in aridity of thought and poverty of soul. He is a harbinger for postmodernism’s attraction to power, spectacle, and enforced virtue. Fortunately, these books demonstrate that there were many Enlightenments. Himmelfarb and Dupré will help us craft many responses to their legacy.

1. See Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, Vol. 2 (Liberty Fund, 1998).

Daniel Ritchie is professor of English and founding director of the Humanities Program at Bethel University. He is the author most recently of The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer, just published by Baylor University Press.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki is the oldest Sanskrit epic. Over seven books and some 50,000 lines, the poem celebrates the life of Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, founder of the Golden Age, peerless warrior, master of scripture, obedient son and exemplary brother, dedicated lover and husband of Sita, daughter of the Earth.

Vālmīki composed his holy story of Rama and Sita sometime between the 7th and 4th centuries before the Common Era. That makes his poem younger than Hesiod’s Theogony and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but roughly contemporaneous with writings of the Hebrew Prophets, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, Herodotus, Aeschylus, and Plato.

Nothing is hidden. Sacred legend, the struggle between good and evil, divine intention and human ambition, the cross-currents of personal obligation and right conduct, and the possibility of happiness, all unfurl in a work meant to be both read and performed. The Rāmāyaṇa informs, enlightens, and entrances, even in translation.

Bālakānda, or Boyhood, Book 1 of the epic’s seven books, tells the story of the Rāmāyaṇa’s own conception in its first four cantos. It also tells the history of Rama at least two ways, before the actual events unfold. Throughout, Vālmīki ‘s poem vibrates between heightened self-awareness and rapture.

Canto 1 opens with Vālmīki asking the sage Narada: “Is there a man in the world today who is truly virtuous?”

The sage responds that there lives a man named Rama. He then relates what might be called Rama’s official history, from princely birth to exile and martial triumphs, ending with the Golden Age.

After he hears Rama’s story, Vālmīki goes down to the riverbank to bathe. There, he sees a Nisháda hunter kill the male of a pair of krauñcha birds. Filled with grief at this injustice, the ascetic says: “Since, Nisháda, you killed one of this pair of krauñchas, distracted at the height of passion, you shall not live for very long.” But even as he speaks, the compassionate sage wonders what this is which he has uttered. Upon reflection, Vālmīki decides that his utterance, its elaborately patterned syllables “produced in this access of shoka, grief, shall be called shloka, poetry, and nothing else.”

Next, Brahma, the maker of worlds, visits Vālmīki , and informs him that it was by the god’s will alone that the poet produced his shloka, his elegant speech. Brahma then commands Vālmīki to compose the entire history of Rama as he heard it from Naráda, “the full story, public and private …. For all that befell … will be revealed to you, even those events of which you are ignorant. No utterance of yours in this poem shall be false.”

In the days after Rama regained his kingdom, the seer Vālmīki composed the whole Rāmāyaṇa. Its episodes, as rehearsed in Canto 3, include the future and final events which had not yet befallen Rama on earth.

But who would perform this story of Sita and the slaying of Ravana, which is “sweet both when recited and when sung …, eminently suitable for the accompaniment of both stringed and percussion instruments”?

In Canto 4, the youths Kusha and Lava become Vālmīki ‘s students, learning the entire Rāmāyaṇa by heart. Gifted musicians, they sing the poem with such single-minded concentration before assemblies of seers, brahmans, and good men, that its events seem to be happening before their eyes.

Vālmīki ‘s two disciples are brothers, princes, Rama’s sons by Sita. They do not know their father. Rama, in turn, is unaware of their existence. Yet the fame of their performance reaches royal Rama’s household. So the king brings the singers to his home and, turning to his own brothers Lakshmana, Shatrughna, and Bharata, says: “Let us listen to this tale, whose words and meaning alike are wonderful …. Moreover, it is said that this profound tale they tell is highly beneficial, even for me. Listen to it.” Kusha and Lava begin “to sing in the full perfection of the marga mode. And right there in the assembly, even Rama, in his desire to experience it fully, gradually permitted his mind to become enthralled.”(1.4.25-29)

Whatever its historical date of composition, the Rāmāyaṇa was written in the early days of Rama’s regained kingdom, which places Vālmīki ‘s discovery of poetry at the end of Yuddhakāṇḍa, Book 6 in the epic chronology.

Yuddhakāṇḍa, the sixth of seven planned volumes from the Rāmāyaṇa Translation Project, has just been published by Princeton University Press. Yuddhakāṇḍa sings the war of annihilation between the forces of good and evil. Led by Rama and his brother Lakshmana, the massed armies of the monkey King Sugriva and the hero Hanuman cross the ocean from the mainland to Lanka, capital of the ten-headed rakshasa (demon) king, Ravana. They destroy the evil demon’s kingdom and reunite the abducted Sita with Rama. Rama returns home after his 14-year exile, reclaims his throne, and ushers in the Golden Age.

The longest book in Vālmīki ‘s epic, Yuddhakāṇḍa unfolds over 116 sargas, or cantos. They fill 376 pages in translators Robert Goldman, Sally Sutherland Goldman, and Barend van Nooten’s stanza-spaced, numbered prose verses. The Englished shlokas, with their carefully pointed, romanized Sanskrit words where English will not serve, look like a kind of poetry which disregards the customary rules yet summons the need to understand rather than the impulse to correct. An 118-page scholarly introduction and 1,161 octavo pages of back-matter annotations, bibliography, glossary, and index support, but don’t intrude upon, the body of the text. The introduction takes up matters of meaning, theme and character, style and structure, commentary and translation. There’s even a discussion of Yuddhakāṇḍa‘s cinematic qualities. The extensive annotation considers variant passages. It clarifies such details as the identity of beings, weapons, and creatures that retain their Sanskrit names in the translation. For example, the hamsa is a bar-headed goose, Mute swan, or Whooper swan; and the sarasa is the Indian sarus crane.

The first five volumes of this translation of the Rāmāyaṇa are also available from the Clay Sanskrit Library. Easier to come by than the Princeton versions, the Clay editions are bilingual, a Sanskrit counterpart to the Loeb Classical Library. Addressed to Sanskrit students, these sextodecimo books eschew big scholarly apparatus. A brief introduction and guides to pronunciation and punctuation precede the romanized, transliterated Sanskrit verse with facing translation. Unlike the scholarly edition, the Clay Library sets its English text as prose. Marginal numbers synchronize the paragraphs with the corresponding Sanskrit shlokas. Each volume ends with a glossary and index.

Without the formality of verse blocks, the same translation reads like a narrative. There are other differences. The Clay volumes go by plain English or simplified rather than full Sanskrit titles. (The forthcoming Princeton University Press edition of the seventh volume, Uttarakanda, will appear in the bilingual Clay Sanskrit Library edition as The Final Chapter.) Also, the orthographic rigors of the Princeton edition are dropped.

The pleasures of Sanskrit-verse-in-English take some getting used to. Elegantly mannered and rhetorically extravagant, it possesses gravity, expressive breadth, and profound credibility. Profusion of detail and address informs every line like a creative principle, a force of nature.

The Yuddhakāṇḍa opens with Rama prey to the despondence he’s felt since the day back in Book 3, The Forest, when Ravana abducted Sita from their ashram in exile. Now, in the second sarga of Book 6, Rama’s ally, Sugriva the monkey king, asks: “Why do you grieve, hero, like some other, ordinary man? Don’t be like that! Abandon your grief, as an ingrate does friendship.”

Despite Sugriva’s urgings that he recall himself and lead Hanuman and the vast monkey army across the ocean to Lanka where Sita’s held captive, Rama laments to his brother, Lakshmana:

“They say that grief diminishes with the passage of time. But bereft as I am of the sight of my beloved, mine only increases day by day.

“I do not suffer because my beloved is so far away, nor even because she has been abducted. This alone is the source of all my grief: her youth is slipping away.

“Blow, breeze, where my beloved stays. Touch her and then touch me. For the touching of our limbs now depends on you, as on the moon depends the meeting of our glances.” (6:5:4-6)

The greater part of Yuddhakāṇḍa consists of battle scenes of a visual and auditory intensity very different in kind from the earth-bound pitched battles in the Iliad, or Herodotus’ descriptions of Xerxes’ armies. Consider the crescendo-decrescendo and hot-to-cold flashing of this confrontation, with its shifting perspective:

Then, in that terrible darkness, the frenzied rakshasas attacked Rama with hails of arrows.

And the uproar that they made as they rushed upon him, roaring in fury, was like the sound of the upheaval of the seven seas at the time of universal destruction ….

Pierced in every vital point by Rama with his hail of arrows, they crawled away from the battle, barely clinging to life.

Then mighty Rama illuminated all directions with his arrows which, with their shafts adorned with gold, resembled flames of fire.

As for the remaining rakshasa heroes who stood their ground before Rama, they, too, were destroyed, like moths entering a flame.

With thousands of arrows flying, their feathers fletched with gold, the night was as lovely as an autumnal evening sparkling with fireflies. (6.34.16-23)

This poetry of elaboration and profusion turns the common ancestry of bow and stringed instruments into a mortal concert, marrying aesthetic splendor to horror and pathos: “With the twanging of bowstrings in place of the sweet sound of the lute, the gasps of the dying for the beating of time, and the faint cries of the wounded in place of singing, the battle resembled a musical recital.” (6.42.23)

Typically, the Rāmāyaṇa describes the troops waging this war between the monkeys and the rakshasa hosts in millions and billions. In time the large numbers, like the chilly distances of astronomy or the vaporous magnitudes of plutocrats and economists, beggar understanding and numb pity. Homer particularized his warriors, granting even walk-on combatants a unique history, distinction, and anatomically explicit death. Or he imagined sublime unequal single combat, like Achilles fighting with the river Skamander outside the walls of Troy. Vālmīki celebrates the battle for Lanka as a conflict of race against race, so vast it needs four shlokas to anatomize the undifferentiated legions who feed the maw:

Indeed, the battleground resembled a river. Masses of slain heroes formed its banks, and shattered weapons, its great trees. Torrents of blood made up its broad waters, and the ocean to which it flowed was Yama. Livers and spleens made up its deep mud, scattered entrails its waterweeds. Severed heads and trunks made up its fish, pieces of limbs, its grass. It was crowded with vultures in place of flocks of hamsas, and it was swarming with adjutant storks instead of sarasa cranes. It was covered with fat in place of foam, and the cries of the wounded took the place of its gurgling. It was not to be forded by the faint of heart. Truly, it resembled a river at the end of the rains, swarming with hamsas and sarasa cranes. (6.46.25-28)

The hyperbolic sublime also has its droll moments. In Sarga 48, Ravana sends an army to awaken the enormous rakshasa Kumbhakarna, who is addicted to sleep. Over forty shlokas, the hard-put delegates of the ten-necked demon king try to arouse the sleeper first with piles of meat, then with pots of blood and strong drink. They smear him with sandalpaste, utter praises and roaring. They blow conches, clap their arms, belabor the giant with bludgeons and cudgels and maces, but they cannot withstand the wind from his snoring. They beat drums, they drive horses, camels, donkeys and elephants over him:

[F]inally, when they made a thousand elephants trample across his body, Kumbhakarna, aware of a slight sensation, at last awoke.

Ignoring the tremendous blows of mountaintops and trees that were being hurled down upon him, he suddenly leapt up at the violent interruption of his sleep, yawning and oppressed by fear and hunger.

Stretching wide his arms, which were as strong as mountain peaks and resembled two mountain peaks or great serpents, that night-roaming rakshasa yawned grotesquely, opening his mouth, which was like a gaping mare’s head fire that lies beneath the sea.

And as he yawned prodigiously, his mouth, as wide as the underworld Patala, resembled the sun, maker of day, risen over the summit of Mount Meru.

Yawning, the enormously powerful night-roaming rakshasa was at last fully awake. His breath was like a gale from the mountains. (6:48:47-51)

Having slain Ravana, granted him a funeral, and consecrated the demon’s brother Vibhisana as the new king of Lanka, Rama dispatches Hanuman to Ravana’s palace with a message for Sita. “Inform her,” Rama commands, “that Sugriva, Lakshmana and I are well, and that I have slain Ravana …. Please take a message from her and return.”

To this embassy Sita responds, “Foremost of monkeys, I wish to see my husband.”

Her reply plunges Rama into gloom. Staring at the ground, he orders that Sita be washed and adorned and brought before him, although she would have preferred to appear before him as the rescued captive. Instead, surrounded by hosts of his friends, Rama receives his wife:

“So here you are, my good woman. I have won you back after conquering my enemy in battle. Whatever there was to be done through manly valor, I have now accomplished ….

“I have wiped clean the affront, and so my wrath is appeased. For I have eliminated both the insult and my enemy at the same time.

“Today … I am once more master of myself.”

As Rama was saying these words in that fashion, Sita, wide-eyed like a doe, was overcome with tears.

But as Rama gazed upon her, his anger flared up once more, like the raging flame of a fire drenched with melted butter ….

“In wiping away this affront, Sita, I have accomplished all that a man could do ….

“Bless you, but it was not on your account that I undertook this war ….

“Instead, I did all this in order to protect my reputation ….

“Since, however, your virtue is now in doubt, your presence has become as profoundly disagreeable to me as is a bright lamp to a man afflicted with a disease of the eye.

“Go, therefore, as you please, daughter of Janaka. You have my permission. Here are the ten directions. I have no further use for you, my good woman.

“For what powerful man born in a respectable family—his heart tinged with affection—would take back a woman who had lived in the house of another man?”

Sita bids Lakshmana to build a pyre. She circles Rama, bows to the gods and brahmans, declares her purity, and “As Sita entered the fire, a deafening and prodigious cry of ‘Alas! Alas!’ arose from the rakshasas and monkeys.”

The gods fly to Lanka in their chariots, and Brahma asks Rama, “How can you, the creator of the entire universe, the most ancient one, and foremost among those possessing supreme knowledge, stand by and watch as Sita falls into the fire, eater of oblations? How can you not realize that you are foremost among the hosts of the gods?”

To which Rama replies, “I think of myself only as a man, Rama, the son of Dasaratha. May the Blessed Lord please tell me who I really am, to whom I belong, and why I am here?”

For all the monkeys, vultures, divine beings, demons, and gods swirling through the Rāmāyaṇa, only Rama and Sita count as avatars of true feeling. Married, peerless, loving, and devoted to the practice of righteousness, power, and pleasure, neither will ever know another partner. Separated twice—once by Ravana to incite a holy war, and once by Rama’s decision to embrace the burden of sovereignty, as will be recounted in Book 7—the monogamous pair make a strong case for mortal unhappiness.

The Rāmāyaṇa has generated literary spin-offs and reimaginings for 1,500 years at least. In the 4th century CE, the poet Bhatti wrote The Death of Ravana, a retelling of Rama’s story that teaches classical Sanskrit grammar without a textbook. Rama’s Last Act, an early 8th-century ce Sanskrit play by Bhava·bhuti, dramatizes the events of Uttarakanda. Murari’s play Rama Beyond Price is a seven-act remake of Vālmīki ‘s poem that closes with the triumphs of Yuddhakāṇḍa minus the trial by fire, and with a happy ending. All three works are available in the Clay Sanskrit series.

An illustrated Rāmāyaṇa commissioned by the 17th-century Rajasthani ruler Jagat Singh has been reproduced by the British Library, with 128 color plates. The manuscript makes a pictorial narrative of Vālmīki ‘s poem. There’s a book-by-book plot summary, and running captions identify the episodes depicted. Of course, visual imagination stands in the stead of poetry.

In Vālmīki ‘s world, poetry is the highest form of discourse: a measured utterance capable of simultaneous ecstasy and cognition. Poetry is “replete with all the poetic sentiments: the humorous, the erotic, the piteous, the wrathful, the heroic, the terrifying, the loathsome and the rest.” How else could it speak truly of the human? How else to come to terms with this world?

Books Also mentioned in this essay:

The Clay Sanskrit Library Ramayana of ValmikiBook 1: Boyhood / BalakandaTranslated by Robert Goldman, NYU Press, 2005

Book 2: AyodhyakandaTranslated by Sheldon I. Pollock, NYU Press, 2005

Book 3: The Forest / AranyakandaTranslated by Sheldon I. Pollock, NYU Press, 2005

Book 4: KishkindhakandaTranslated by Rosalind Lefeber, NYU Press, 2005

Book 5: SundarakandaTranslated by Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman, NYU Press

The Ramayana: Love and Valour in India’s Great EpicEdited by J. P. Losty, British Library, 2008

Bhatti’s Poem: The Death of RavanaTranslated by Oliver Fallon, Clay Sanskrit Library/ NYU Press, 2009

Rama’s Last ActBhava·bhutiTranslated by Sheldon Pollock, Clay Sanskrit Library/ NYU Press, 2007

Rama Beyond PriceMurariTranslated by Judit Törzsök, Clay Sanskrit Library/ NYU Press, 2007

Laurance Wieder is a poet living in Charlottesville, Virginia. His books include The Last Century: Selected Poems (Picador Australia) and Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms (Eerdmans). He can be found regularly at PoemSite, a monthly broadside in the landscape (free subscription available from poemsite@gmail.com).

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

At a graduate writers’ workshop I attended in Missoula, Montana, in the 1970s, our resident fiction instructor held up a copy of Raymond Carver’s first book of short stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and proclaimed, “This is going to knock you out.”

And so it did. Carver’s spare and powerful stories revealed in swift strokes the bruised lives, failed marriages, and assorted psychological wreckage in anonymous towns and working-class hamlets along the Pacific Coast. We were bowled over by his small, charged scenes. Innocuous incidents exposed hidden desires and muted despair, then snapped shut like nutshells. The dialogue was terse, oblique, the characters nondescript yet fully menacing. Reading Carver was like eavesdropping on trapped ghosts who don’t know they’re dead until they accidentally cross before a mirror. A Carver story was the record of what they saw. A friend described Carver characters as “those people in Edward Hopper paintings—together with their drinks but alone with their secrets.” Critics dubbed the stories “minimalist”—short, bleak, profound stabs of realism. It was not long before the terms “minimalist” and “Carveresque” were interchangeable.

In a professional career that lasted less than two decades, Raymond Carver wrote five collections of stories and several volumes of poetry. His big break came in 1971, with the publication of his story “Neighbors” in Esquire magazine. Esquire‘s fiction editor, Gordon Lish, edited many of Carver’s early magazine stories as well as his first book, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, published in 1976. Lish also edited Carver’s third book, What We Talk about When We Talk About Love (1981), the book that confirmed Carver’s reputation as a minimalist. It was a label Carver both regretted and resented.

At their most minimal, Carver’s stories were like glancing blows, shorn of literary prose and even the exigencies of plot. Some critics thought his X-rays too bleak and unforgiving, the characters too thin, the nakedness too naked. He added heft in subsequent books. The writing filled out and filled in with more description and texture. He began to write between the lines and flesh out the characters. He wanted to make them more Chekhovian, he said. He revised, rewrote, and republished many of his earlier stories, often to restore what had been cut by Lish.

The dramatic—some would say draconian—extent of Lish’s edits of What We Talk about When We Talk About Love became widely known only recently, first in a December 2007 New Yorker article and then with the British publication of the original manuscript, titled Beginners, by Carver’s second wife, the poet Tess Gallagher. This publication, Gallagher said, restored the intent and depth of the stories as Carver had originally written them. Both versions—the original manuscript and the published book as edited by Lish—are reprinted in Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, issued as volume 195 in the Library of America series. It is a testament to the editors of Collected Stories, two devoted Carver scholars, that the labyrinthine history of individual story publication—and republication—is included here, along with extensive notes on the individual books and a detailed chronology of Carver’s life.

Born in 1938 to a working-class family, Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington, in a house that had no indoor toilet. He married at 19, his wife Maryann already pregnant. He took the jobs he could get and so did she. They worked nights (janitor, waitress) while trying to finish their college degrees and raise two children. Their financial struggles were constant—so was their drinking. Carver wrote when he could, snatching only enough time, as he later said, to compose short stories and poems that he could draft in one sitting. The luxury of long fiction was beyond his means and finally his dreams. Of that time he wrote, “[My wife and I] thought we could bow our heads, work very hard, and do all that we had set our hearts to do. But we were mistaken.”

By 1977, Carver’s alcoholism had become acute. He had been hospitalized several times. In June of that year he quit drinking. After four harrowing days he emerged “shaky but sober,” the editors of Collected Stories report, “and he never drank again.” Divorce, sobriety, his newfound intimacy with Tess Gallagher—a strong relationship that would last the rest of his life—and his growing reputation would give Carver the security and time to take his stories in different directions. To open them up and, as he said, to explore the nuances of his characters and their fates. With the publication of his fourth collection of stories, Cathedral, in 1983, Carver was in full control of the editing of his work.

Though Carver had always cautioned himself with a mantra borrowed from the writer Geoffrey Wolff, “No tricks,” he made full use of literary effects. There is symbolism and irony. There are Hitchco*ckian moments of conversations seen but not heard, observations through windows and across streets, encounters witnessed but left mysteriously unexplained. A Carver story tended to end in midair, yet with a finality, as if landing in purgatory. Its locomotion hinged on the telling detail, the blunt assertion, the little syncopated shock:

He tried to think how much he loved her or if he loved her.”
—The Ducks”

He had to square his shoulders every few minutes. It was like he was very tired of carrying them around.
—”Vitamins”

“You think you’re God or somebody? You’re not fit to lick God’s boots, or anybody else’s for that matter.”
—”Intimacy”

[D]uring this time his wife took it into her head to go down the road with another drunk, a friend of theirs.
—”Kindling”

What happens in a Carver story takes place between men and women, in their words and behind their doors. He once said the most important influence in his life was his children, an influence he called “heavy and often baleful.” But it was marriage and its vicissitudes that were Carver’s great subject. No one dissected the married state, no other writer captured the sad halo of a marriage in its death throes, like Raymond Carver did. He got into its sinews, exposed its tortures, confusions, despairs. He followed it all the way to resignation and forgiveness and memory, and he recorded all its words, the lethal and the tender. When Gordon Lish extracted a line from the story “Beginners” and retitled that story and the entire third book of stories What We Talk about When We Talk About Love, it was a brilliant stroke, and it was prescient. Carver was still autopsying marriage a decade after his own had ended. One of the truths he seems to have discovered is that love fails; after that, it just endures.

Carver’s life was hard and fascinating. He was unlucky, and then lucky. He all but failed, then he succeeded. By 1987, Esquire magazine had placed him at the “red-hot center” of the literary universe. He would die of lung cancer the following year, at the age of fifty.

“It would take a Tolstoy to tell it and tell it right,” says one Edgar Morgan in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” a fine example of early Carver, with its contrapuntal marriages, its suppressed anger, and its little ironic click. Raising the specter of Tolstoy was a clever joke at Carver’s own expense—there would be no long, sweeping novel from his pen. Yet minimal is not the same as shallow, and Carver’s best stories are taut and sure no matter their length. By the time of his death, he had given them larger structures, and these too he controlled masterfully. “Intimacy,” “Kindling,” and “Blackbird Pie” are three of his best stories, and they show his range as well as his economy. The tension of the early work had now been finessed with a simple grace. Yet these are Carver stories. They are sly and move inevitably with great power. They have a keen compass for loss, and they zero in on this loss with precision and affection.

Do they surpass those early stories with the hard recoil that gave us small gasps, stories like “The Father,” or “Collectors,” or “The Idea”? I’d say no. There was nothing cheap about these, and they retain their power. Re-reading them thirty years later, I marveled at their muscle. From his first stories to his last, Ray Carver proved he didn’t need a lot of words to go deep, where the pain is. He just needed the right ones, and these he found.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Back in 1997, Books & Culture published the first book review/essay I ever wrote. It was a piece about Stephen King’s horror novels and redemption, and Books & Culture was the only magazine I’d ever seen that was interested in both. When my copy arrived I discovered that Jean Bethke Elshtain, Mark Noll, David Lyle Jeffrey, Larry Woiwode, and Philip Yancey (among others) were occupying the pages with me, doing the same thing I was doing: thinking about our faith and its relationship to everything. I’d found good company.

That was over a decade ago, and Books & Culture has been introducing Christian thinkers to each other ever since. Now you’re part of our company, so give us a hand. If you can send a check of support, please do. But don’t leave it at that. Give a subscription to your doctor, dentist, and orthodontist. (How delighted I’d have been, back in 1997, to discover Books & Culture instead of Car & Driver in my doctor’s waiting room!) Give a subscription to your local library. Buy two subscriptions for yourself; leave the extra copies on park benches and in hotel rooms. Help us find a few more kindred spirits; we can’t wait to meet them.

—Susan Wise Bauer is the author most recently of The Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (Norton), the second installment of a projected four-volume history of the world.

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Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“Influence” is a rather vulgar notion, widely invoked and largely unexamined. It has been on my mind lately because I have been reading James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, just published by Oxford University Press and reviewed in this issue by Andy Crouch. Hunter’s book—likely to be one of the two or three most discussed of the year in Books & Culture circles—skewers what he regards as naïve and misguided accounts of how Christians should exercise cultural influence and offers an alternative, which he terms “faithful presence.”

While I was reading Hunter, the theme of “influence” surfaced from another direction. On the Marginal Revolution blogsite, the polymathic economist Tyler Cowen responded to a reader’s query asking for a list of “the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world.” Tyler’s response (prefaced by the important qualifier that “books are by no means the only source of influence”) inspired many others to follow suit, and it provoked me to think about the question as well.

I’m not sure if we are well equipped to assess what all has influenced our view of the world. When I was about 15, I read Len Deighton’s novel The IPCRESS File (the movie, memorably starring Michael Caine, came a couple of years later). I found the book absolutely intoxicating, and a lot of that exhilarating effect—though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time—had to do with the way the sentences worked, and the spaces that Deighton left in the narrative for the reader fill in (or not: when I first read the book, I didn’t get everything).

Around that time, though I didn’t mention it to anyone else, even in our very close family (my mother, my grandmother, my younger brother, and myself), I resolved that I was going to be a spy, an ambition (if it merits that label) I carried into college. The Deighton book wasn’t the only spy novel I read as a kid, nor was it a reading of this particular book that suddenly put the idea of becoming a spy into my head, but it and its companion, Funeral in Berlin, made the most intense impression.

Why? In part, as I have already suggested, it was Deighton’s elliptical style. And of course I loved the insolent attitude of the unnamed narrator and protagonist. But also there was something deeper in the book that rang true, beneath the fantasy: a sense of the twistiness of our lives and an acute awareness of absurdity. (In this it was akin to Notes from the Underground, which I’d read shortly before, where sin and the burden—and gift—of consciousness are inextricably intertwined.)

People often talk about the influence of books on minds as if describing a chemical reaction with predictable results. Such is not my experience. Without any false piety, I can say the Bible has influenced my view of the world more than any other book. From the Bible comes my understanding of who we are, what ails us, and what hope we might share. But apart from what matters most—first and last things—reading and listening to this mighty book of books turned out to prepare me for a lifetime of reading. (If you turn the page, you’ll find Mark Noll reviewing a book by Robert Alter about the influence of the King James Version on the prose of six American writers.) It was far and away my most formative job training.

Reading the Bible taught me to hold two truths in tension. On the one hand, there was the conviction—imparted to me by my mother and grandmother, by pastors and teachers, by a community of believers—that the pieces of this complex, many-sided Text, like the great big world itself, fit together. I could place my unwavering trust in that. On the other hand—and this I had to learn for myself—the Text was often enigmatic, and I must not do violence to it simply for the sake of reducing my anxiety, my uncertainly, or conforming to someone’s pronouncement. There would always be more than I could understand, more than I could grasp.

Elsewhere in this issue, Roger Olson reviews Randall Balmer’s book The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond. In the book, Randy speaks of growing up in an evangelical subculture almost hermetically sealed from outside influences. Roger says that this resonates with his own experience. But this account of evangelicals in the mid-20th century differs strongly from my own experience, and I would love to know to what extent it really was representative, or if instead it was merely one point across a broad range.

I grew up in an evangelical household where we frequently hosted missionaries. After her graduation from Moody Bible Institute, my grandmother had been a city missionary in Aurora, Illinois, and then a missionary in China (where my mom lived until she was ten years old). I can see Grandma’s heavily worn Scofield Reference Bible in my mind’s eye. She listened regularly to The Old-Fashioned Revival Hour and similar radio programs. We attended conservative evangelical churches, mostly but not exclusively Baptist (and during many Sunday meals, Mom and Grandma would critique the sermon we’d just heard). And so on. By any measure, we were evangelical.

But in no way were we hermetically sealed off from the “culture” at large, whose “influences” we absorbed in countless ways, for good and ill, not least via books and magazines and television and music. I don’t say this because I think it was extraordinary in any way—on the contrary, I suspect it was quite common. In being “influenced” by comic books, National Geographic (especially the stacks of back issues from the ’30s and ’40s), the noirish movies my brother and I watched on TV, the Kingston Trio, Chopin, Segovia, Muddy Waters, The Saturday Evening Post, The Mickey Mouse Club, those many volumes of condensed books published by Reader’s Digest (where for instance I first encountered the man in the gray flannel suit), the cheap volumes of classic American lit on my mom’s bookshelves cheek-by-jowl with Charlie Chan and Perry Mason and Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart (where I first read Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe), the Dodgers on the radio, and much much more, I think we had a lot of company among fellow evangelicals.

I can imagine certain tone-deaf readers citing this as yet another example of evangelicals’ pitiful lusting after acceptance. (“We watched The Mickey Mouse Club, just like all the neighbor kids. We were normal!”) No, the point is to suggest that most of us, evangelical or something entirely different, have emerged from a hodgepodge of circ*mstances, that reality is typically much messier than standard narratives about “influence” imply.

Which reminds me that I have only managed to come up with two entries for the required list of ten: The IPCRESS File and the Bible. Following Tyler Cowen’s example (I’ll go with the “gut list,” rather than the “I’ve thought about this for a long time” list), here are eight more entries, roughly in the order in which I encountered them: 3. Ross Macdonald, the Lew Archer series. 4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (and many other books and essays and reviews and columns by Kenner, and countless books his books sent me to). 5. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (now In the First Circle); Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned (and the poetry and prose of Osip Mandelstam); and Andre Sinyavsky, A Voice from the Chorus. 6. Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle. 7. Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets, Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly (my introduction to Tranströmer); and Czeslaw Milosz (whom I discovered around the same time): everything he wrote. 8. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori. 9. Philip K. Dick: everything except the awful books at the end (Valis, etc.). 10. Raymond J. Nogar, OP: The Lord of the Absurd. With the exception of the Bible and the final entry, I first met all of these between my mid-teens and my early thirties. I have returned to them all over the years since. Send me your own lists.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Providentialist History

Thanks for Mark Noll’s review of Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty [“Jefferson’s America?”, January/February]. Noll gave due credit to Wood’s brilliance at analyzing republicanism while questioning how this political ideology could drive all features of life, even religious ones, in the early Republic, and how Wood can call Jefferson “the supreme spokesman for the nation’s noblest ideas.”

Noll is modest in not saying right out loud that Wood’s view downplays the many contributions made in the past 30 years by historians of American religion, especially evangelical ones, notably Noll himself. In fact, Empire of Liberty reveals that evangelical historians need to write grand interpretations of American history as well as writing monographs. We can’t be content just to make bricks if the architects and builders misuse them.

Empire of Liberty has pushed me over the edge, toward writing a providentialist history of the United States (the colonial period, too) to continue my earlier work for InterVarsity Press, This Rebellious House and God’s Judgments. At least I’ve begun the project. Who knows if anyone can finish it.

Wood’s casting of Jefferson and Madison as our Romulus and Remus, originating our national life, is a bit idolatrous by implication. Wood points to their imperfections and indiscretions, but the Romans and Greeks allowed their gods some faults. The key issue is, who did the originating?

After the debunking of the Founders in the 1960s, we now see a bidding war between the political Right and Left to see who can be more patriotic in praising them. The result borders on filiopietistic history—and Wood’s book comes close. If we’re going to be pietistic, why not pick the right Person and outline how Providence acted skillfully in the Founding, using the “Founders” as his tools? (More emphasis on the colonial period helps to show that Jefferson was no Romulus.)

A thoughtful providentialist approach can help citizens question Obama-articulated liberal utopianism, so like Jefferson’s utopianism in its zeal to hold out a democratic, peace-pursuing America as a beacon to the world. People are not in charge of events to achieve such visions.

If “God” is just a word in our religious discourse, then people will use their own hermeneutics to spin it however they wish. Providentialism holds God to be a real Actor in our history, who has blessed this “Capernaum nation” and holds it accountable for what it does with those blessings.

Steven J. KeillorAdjunct Assistant Professor of HistoryBethel UniversitySt. Paul, Minn.

Should Christians Be Physicalists?

C. Stephen Evans thinks it strange that I don’t represent and engage more knowledgeably philosophers and philosophical theologians and so put dualism in a better light [“Should Christians Be Physicalists?“, March/April]. This is because Evans has fundamentally misrepresented the content and aim of my book, Body, Soul, and Human Life. He apparently reads it as a monograph-length attack on dualism—a strange characterization of a book that includes two (of five) chapters where the word “dualism” does not even occur. At its most basic, Evans’ review comprises a demand for a different sort of book than the one he has reviewed. This was not a philosophical treatise or systematic theology but, as the subtitle indicates, a study of The Nature of Humanity in the Bible. Accordingly, I am not surprised (for example) that Evans finds that my discussion of “what happens when we die” provides no single, coherent view; after all, my aim was not to resolve into a single portrait the various views on eschatological details we find in the New Testament.

Less polemical readers will find—indeed, have already found—that the book is simply what it claims to be. This is an examination of biblical materials related to the nature of the human person in the context of claims from the natural sciences, and particularly the neurosciences. I am concerned about longstanding misreadings of the “imago Dei” language in Genesis 1 and of the language of the “soul” in Scripture. And I concern myself with the coherence of our understanding of the human person in relation to how we think about human freedom and responsibility, conversion, and the afterlife. My basic claim, then, is that a genuinely biblical faith ought not be surprised by 350 years of evidence, from the birth of neuroscience to recent innovations in the field, pointing to the indivisibility of embodied human life.

In the end, the basic chasm that separates Evans’ interests in this review from the content of my book is that I am writing here as a biblical scholar engaged in work at the interface of biblical studies and the neurosciences, and not as an analytical philosopher. Evans might reply that my claims have ramifications that ought to be considered philosophically. Were he to have said so, I would only agree, while pointing out that this would be project of a different sort than the one I have undertaken here. I am disappointed, then, that my book was not reviewed on its own terms.

Joel B. GreenProfessor of New Testament Interpretation &Associate Dean for the Center for Advanced Theological StudiesFuller Theological SeminaryPasadena, Calif.

C. Stephen Evans replies:

I did not expect Joel Green, a respected biblical scholar, to write as “an analytical philosopher.” However, his book certainly does contain an extended polemic against a view he calls “dualism.” Green’s book contains a lot more, including discussions of such philosophical issues as freedom and responsibility, but not everything can be discussed in a brief review. It seems highly disingenuous for Green to claim he is only providing an “examination of biblical materials related to the human person” and not doing systematic theology or philosophy, when the nature of the human person is one of the standard topics of systematic theology and cannot be discussed without touching on many philosophical issues. Rather than retreat into a disciplinary enclave, I invite him to be part of a conversation about these matters with Christian philosophers and theologians, as well as other biblical scholars. Surely what we both want is to know is how Christians should think about such matters as these: Am I identical to my body? What happens after I die? These are not “eschatological details.” We need answers we could provide to our children or at a funeral, and I am convinced that some of the answers Green provides are highly problematic. I commended Green for his willingness to engage with contemporary science and take the risk of discussing questions that cross disciplinary boundaries. However, when important questions are raised about his philosophical and theological claims, it will not do to claim that he is just doing biblical scholarship.

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