Articles – Page 179 – Religion Online

Miracle, Mystery and Authority: Recalling Jonestown

When the news first reached us in Ukiah, California. on November 19, 1978, no one really grasped the magnitude of the Jonestown tragedy. At the time no one could believe it. Congressman Leo Ryan and his aide had been shot down on an airstrip at Port Kaituma, Guyana. A number of people who had accompanied Ryan -- some of them media representatives, some of them relatives who had hoped to make contact with members of the agricultural project set up by Jim Jones and Peoples Temple in the jungles of Guyana -- lay dead or wounded. No one really knew what else had happened.

Gradually the horror began to dawn. Before it was over, the body count reached 912, but even then no one was sure whether the count was accurate. In a bizarre communal act of murder and suicide, the end came for Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. The community in Ukiah was devastated. As the names began to be released, we discovered that they included some of our co-workers from the Department of Social Services, the Juvenile Hall, the Public Health Department, the offices of county government. We saw the names of some who had been students at the local high schools and community college; we saw the names of friends with whom we had grown up, members of our track teams and little league; some of us saw the names of family members.

It was a Saturday when we realized what happened in Jonestown. On the following morning, Jerry Fox of Ukiah’s First United Methodist Church was, according to all reports, the first member of the clergy to speak to our collective grief. He chose as his text two passages from Revelation 13, on the theme of "discernment between the Word of God operating in the world, and the word of death."

Total self-giving is precisely what the New Testament church asked of its members, as in Acts 4:32-33. In the case of Peoples Temple, the total self-giving masked the enslavement to death, the "beasts" mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

Peoples Temple presents a mirror image of the gospel. The life-giving forces of the gospel are reflected darkly in the life-taking forces of Peoples Temple. Both demand total, unconditional participation in their kingdom. The problem for people of faith, then, becomes one of discernment.

Ten years later, the need for discernment seems no less great, for in every generation the story of Peoples Temple seems to be repeated in some way, leaving in its wake a grieving and confused community of families, friends and loved ones.

Probably the question most frequently asked about members of Jonestown is, How, did they ever become involved? There is no simple answer. Followers of Jim Jones included people like Maria Katsaris, youngest daughter in a family of Greek Orthodox believers. Maria’s father, Steve, at one time a priest, was the motivating force in the founding of a group called Concerned Relatives, which fought a long and losing battle to get members of their families out of Guyana.

Jones’s followers also included people like Philip Addison, a disabled man whose family had been among the first 150 or so people to follow Jones when he moved Peoples Temple from Indianapolis to Ukiah. Addison was later to renounce Peoples Temple after being forbidden to see his mother during a long illness that eventually claimed her life. Addison’s brother died in Jonestown.

Finally, there were those like Tim Stoen, a graduate of Wheaton College and Stanford University Law School. No stranger to Christianity, Stoen was seeking the fulfillment of a kind of utopian dream. Breaking a ten-year silence about his own experience, Stoen stated last July that "what made Jim Jones a historical figure was his genius in giving the utopian dreams of idealistic people a tangible structure for expression." He went on to say:

Each idealist in Peoples Temple was being carried by the driving force of his own personal utopian dream, which developed the momentum of a locomotive, and all Jim Jones had to do was switch the track toward the abyss [quoted in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, July 24].

For Stoen the abyss was deep. Peoples Temple cost him his only child, six-year-old John Victor, who was probably being cared for by Maria Katsaris when Jonestown turned suicidal.

If there was a common theme drawing the diverse followers together, it was indeed the one Fox identified: Peoples Temple presented a mirror image of the gospel, demanding total self-giving in exchange for the vision of a social order transformed by biblically sound values. Ross Case, Jones’s pastoral associate who was perhaps most directly responsible for bringing Jones to northern California, completely repudiated both him and Peoples Temple on the grounds of heretical divergence from the proclamation of Jesus Christ as Savior, and Lord. In a letter to a close clergy friend, Case wrote in 1965:

I want to make it clear that I am not a follower of James Jones, but of Jesus Christ. . . . Love for and trust in Jesus appears to be fading, while love for and trust in James Jones is growing. I am quite disturbed about this. Friends whom I had known as Christians are not concerned with the question, "What think ye of Christ?" but rather with the question, "What think ye of James Jones?" Jesus is no longer the issue to them; James is! [June 6, 1965, unpublished correspondence].

What was clear to Case very early in the history of Peoples Temple did not become clear to many others until the jungles of Guyana closed behind them -- and then it was too late.

Concerning authority, Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor speaks of the complete control over people’s activities that is required to keep them captive to the convoluted, mirror-imaged gospel: "And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children -- according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient -- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully." Astonished at the scenario presented by the Inquisitor, one of the characters cries out, "Your Inquisitor does not believe in God, that’s his secret." And he is told: "At last you have guessed it."

Dostoevsky created the Grand Inquisitor to represent what he believed to be the state of the Russian Orthodox Church in his own time. But the parallels to the method and ministry of Peoples Temple are remarkable. While journalists and critics disagree on the meaning of Jonestown, there is no disagreement on the fact that Jim Jones traded the name of Jesus using the coin of miracle, mystery and authority.

Whether Jones was in fact ever a Christian in the sense commonly understood among American evangelicals is a matter of some dispute. Certainly the terrible endgame in Guyana, during which Jones was by all accounts heavily drugged and perhaps close to psychosis, suggests an individual far from Christian ministry. But was it ever otherwise? Were there clues early in his ministry to alert potential followers of what was to come? Even now no simple answer can be given, for Jones’s ministry appeared to many to be spiritually empowered, and at least during the early years he himself claimed that power to be of Christ.

Affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) , Jones had a ministry in Indianapolis that was praised as a model of interracial service to the poor. His followers could not be characterized merely as neurotics or fools. They were, in fact, rather like us all. And for all of us, the power of miracle, mystery and authority is sometimes sufficient to cloud our vision of Jesus Christ.

When Jones arrived with his small band of followers in Mendocino County in 1964, he quickly established himself as a charismatic figure who claimed powers to heal both spiritually and physically. It was through one of the healing services at the Twelfth District Fairgrounds that Maria Katsaris was attracted to Jones’s ministry. The presentations were powerfully staged, and, though often completely fraudulent, they had a tremendous impact. Speaking of the experience of these services, Stoen recalled that it was "rapturous":

You’d be sitting there and some black woman is singing a beautiful black spiritual, and you’re holding hands with an ex-con on your left and a cultured lady who teaches French on your right. . . . Some lady is in pain up there and Jones is working on her, and he says hold hands and sense love, and you’d feel that vibration going through you. Suddenly that lady says, "It’s gone, the pains gone." and the music is swelling. I tell you, next to the birth of my son. I’ve never had rapture like that.

And what would one give for the assurance of a miraculous deliverance from the pain of cancer? Or for the rapture of healing, even if the healings were not always authentic? Would freedom be too high a price?

A second element of Jones’s ministry was the mystery of his prophetic proclamations concerning members of the congregation. Allegedly some of his proclamations, made in the middle of a long service of preaching and healing, were based on intelligence gathered from medicine containers in the bathrooms of parishioners or records on file in some public agency or doctor’s office. But when Jones declared that "Sister Sally is having trouble with her arthritis again," the utterance was viewed as a visitation of mystery. Occasionally, the prophetic statements would have a dark resonance to them. Debbie Harpe recalls a time when Jones looked her mother in the eye in the middle of a service and pointed his finger at her. "That bitch is going to die!" he screamed. About two weeks later Debbie, then seven years old, discovered her mother’s body hanged in the family garage, an apparent suicide.

In his sermons Jones was known to dishonor both the Bible and the power of God. Tim Reiterman, whose book (with John Jacobs) on Jones and Peoples Temple is generally considered to be the most definitive, quotes a sermon by Jones:

"If you don’t need a God, fine. But if you need a God, I’m going to nose out that God. He’s a false God. I’ll put the right concept in your life. . . . You understand the mystery? If you don’t have a God and you’re already believing that you have to build a society to eliminate poverty, racism, and injustice and war, I will not bother you. But if you’re holding onto that sky God, I’ll nose him out, ten lengths every time. . . . What’s your sky God ever done? . . . The only happiness you’ve found is when you’ve come to this earth God!" [The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People (Dutton, 1982) , p. 148].

Then there was the discipline, regimentation and the demand for total personal submission to Jones’s authority. It was that authority that finally turned Stoen away from Peoples Temple and set him on a course out of Jonestown at the end of 1977. "Why is it you won’t yield yourself to me?" Stoen quoted Jones as demanding of him. At that point, Stoen knew he had to escape Guyana.

When Maria Katsaris’s father is asked about the cost of Peoples Temple to him personally, he replies that it goes beyond losing a daughter and having a son nearly killed on the airstrip at Port Kaituma. "They took a part of my soul, and it can never be replaced," says this man of peace and nonviolence whose life has been devoted to the children and staff of a school for emotionally disturbed youngsters. For years, until the marriage of both his elder daughter, Elaine, and his son, Anthony, Katsaris continued to urge further action on the part of the Congress. During this time he was threatened repeatedly, to the point that he felt compelled to receive training in the use of weapons. He also kept a guard dog by his side for almost a decade. But at the urging of his children, Katsaris gradually stopped fighting. He confesses to feeling that, since 1984, by no longer talking about what happened in a distant jungle, he has broken faith with his promise to the memory of Maria.

The story of Jim Jones is the story of a man who by miracle, mystery and authority affected an entire valley in northern California -- and an entire world. For the people of the Ukiah Valley, Jones’s story is, in part, a personal story, for in some way our humanity was on trial there in Guyana and hung precariously in the balance -- and then for an instant in the middle of a distant jungle seemed to slip away. We will never forget the lesson of Jonestown.

Drug Abuse and the Church: Are the Blind Leading the Blind?

This Sunday, when ministers survey their I flocks, they will be looking at congregations consisting mostly of people who have been or are being drastically harmed by alcoholism or drug abuse. Most will not even be able to hear the gospel message, much less respond to it. This fact will probably be lost on the preachers, however, because in most cases they also will have come from a dysfunctional family -- one in which expression of emotions is discouraged or repressed, usually through compulsive substance abuse. It will be a case of the blind leading the blind.

If these statements sound inflammatory, consider the following:

• One of eight adults in America is suffering from some form of chemical dependency. One dependent person has a harmful impact on five to eight other people, including all family members.

• About 17 million people suffer from alcoholism; 25 percent of these are teenagers.

• Nearly half (47 percent, or 81 million) of the adults in the United States have at some point, to some degree, suffered physical, psychological or social harm as a result of someone else’s drinking; 21 million say they have suffered greatly.

• One in three children coming to school for the first time is crucially impaired by someone’s alcoholism or drug abuse. The same can be said of children attending church school.

These data mean that many church members are so sick from chemical dependency -- their own or that of a friend or relative -- that they are incapable of helping themselves. They don’t even realize how much they have been hurt.

The number of ministers scarred by substance abuse who are seeking to help parishioners who bear the same scars is alarming. In regional training seminars I’ve conducted for denominational clergy and lay leaders, a show of hands has indicated that 80 percent of clergy present have come from families debilitated by substance abuse, and they were aware that it had drastically harmed them. For many this history was a determining factor in the decision to enter the ministry -- "hope of the Lord’s salvation," as it were.

A show of hands among the lay leaders has revealed a similar percentage. These lay leaders said they looked to their churches and clergy for help, support and God’s affirming love. Ironically, in so doing they often put their trust in dysfunctional people and places. Still another disturbing fact, well known among chemical dependency counselors, is that people who grew up in dysfunctional families attract and are drawn to others who grew up in such families. Therefore, impaired pastors often collect impaired parishioners. No wonder that the church at large, and the clergy in particular, have difficulty recognizing and dealing with today’s epidemic affliction of addiction. The church and its leaders are clearly among the afflicted, if not the addicted. A minister recently wrote the editors of Changes, a magazine for adult children of alcoholics, to confess, "I have realized that throughout my ministry I have accepted calls to congregations that replicate the dynamics of the alcoholic family in which I was raised. This insight . . . has helped me discover why my career has been so chaotic" (January-February 1988, p. 78)

Because dysfunction begets dysfunction, denial is a primary symptom. In fact, society still considers substance abuse a laughing matter. For example, large audiences are enjoying the Walt Disney movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which at one point Roger gets super strength from a shot of booze -- giving viewers, particularly children, the message that alcohol can give one power. Even though alcoholism ranks as one of the country’s three major health problems, along with cancer and heart disease; even though it accounts for approximately 98,000 deaths every year; even though it is the root cause of most pastoral-care crises (suicides, auto fatalities, child abuse, divorces, hospital admissions, accidental deaths and home violence) ; even though it costs the nation $120 billion annually in terms of lost work time, health and welfare benefits, property damage, medical expenses, insurance and lost wages; and even though its effects impair the educational process of every child in every classroom, still the church acts as though alcoholism does not exist. With some exceptions, such as the Lutheran and Presbyterian churches, both of which have developed chemical-dependency health programs and educational materials, most denominations do almost nothing in response to alcohol and drug abuse. Except for an independent organization called the National Episcopal Coalition on Alcoholism and Drugs, a handful of diocesan, councils that promote conferences on alcohol and drugs, and approximately a dozen concerned and courageous bishops who require clergy training in the subjects, the Episcopal Church, in which I am a priest, would have no focused program on chemical dependency at all, save one day a year called Alcohol Awareness Sunday. Many congregations do not observe that one consciousness-raising Sunday. often because their priests deny the need. In those churches that do promote it, many of the members who have been affected by some substance abuse are not able to understand the one-shot message, much less discern how to help themselves. The cycle of denial continued uninterrupted.

What lawmakers don’t acknowledge in these approaches is that chemical dependency is a medical illness, as the American Medical Association defined it in a 1956 statement. It is a biochemical, genetic disease with identifiable and progressive symptoms. Like Tay-Sachs disease, sickle-cell anemia and diabetes, it is passed from one generation to another. In the case of chemical dependency, it comes in the form of addiction-prone body chemistry and dysfunctional and aberrant behavior patterns. It also renders its victims incapable of knowing they are sick. If untreated it leads to mental and emotional damage, physical deterioration, spiritual bankruptcy and in many cases early death. The medical definition of chemical dependency describes it as a primary disease with its own symptomatology; it is not a symptom of some other serious problem. It is a progressive disease in that the physical, spiritual and emotional symptoms become worse. The victim must abstain from mood-altering chemicals in order to maintain recovery. (Consequently, abstainers are always "recovering" but never "recovered.") It is a chronic disease, for which there is no known cure. The victim is always vulnerable to pathological chemical use. Chemical dependency is also a fatal disease -- it is terminal unless the chemical use is permanently stopped.

While the government argues over law enforcement versus prevention education and spends $8 billion a year on its futile but politically rewarding programs and arrests, and while politicians, scholars, jurists, police officers and doctors argue over prohibition versus decriminalization, the church continues to argue over whether alcohol and drug abuse is a sin or a sickness, and over how the sin -- if it is seen as a sin -- relates to the sickness. In the April 1988 issue of Alcoholism and Addiction magazine, Billy Graham questions the concept of alcoholism as disease and suggests it is more a matter of disgrace. "Man’s heart without God is like a vacuum," he says. "In our self-sufficiency we try to make it alone. When we refuse to turn to God, who has promised to be a ‘present help in trouble,’ we resort to all sorts of things -- pleasure, lust, drunkenness, revelings, and Wantonness. And drunkenness, as far as Graham is concerned, "is one of the oldest sins."

Underlying Graham’s. moralistic judgment is the mistaken assumption that drunkenness is a matter of choice. Graham’s naïveté is reminiscent of the government’s "Just say No!" campaign. Both invoke the gospel of abstinence in an attempt to save those who do not need saving. Neither Graham nor the government’s program helps the high-risk population: those millions whose body chemistry makes them addicted to any central nervous system depressant or stimulant. Clearly, drinking alcohol can lead to alcoholism, but it is also clear that most alcoholics have this predisposition from birth, waiting for the first dropper of alcohol-based cough syrup or spoonful of narcotic croup remedy. The alcoholic tendency is often activated by a caring parent or physician well before the high-risk child can "just say No!" If any sin or immorality is rampant in the realm of substance use and abuse, it is the willful disregard of those who need care by those who are committed to caring.

The Supreme Court added to public misunderstanding of the disease of alcoholism in its April finding in Traynor v. Turnage and McKelvey v. Turnage. By a narrow 4 to 3 vote it decided that the Veterans Administration could deny benefits to two alcoholic veterans. Giving a broad interpretation to a Prohibition-era regulation that calls alcoholism the result of "willful misconduct," it ruled that the VA was within its rights to refuse the plaintiffs an extension of their educational benefits.

Confusion over the court’s decision was as epidemic as chemical dependency; many people concluded that the court had defined the cause of alcoholism. In fact, the court did not rule on whether alcoholism is a disease or willful misconduct. It based its finding on whether the plaintiffs were eligible for benefits on an interpretation of the federal Rehabilitation Act, which does not deal with the etiology of the illness. However, the court’s majority opinion fueled public perception that medical evidence does not conclusively establish that alcoholism is a disease -- even though the medical community and the entire health profession at large overwhelmingly agree that it is.

The first identifiable role is that of the Enabler, who is usually a spouse, the one most responsible for picking up the pieces for the deteriorating alcoholic. By protecting the chemically dependent person from the consequences of his or her behavior, the Enabler actually helps the illness progress. The other roles are usually filled by the children and usually cast according to birth order. The Hero, most often the firstborn, strives to hold things together and mediate the family chaos, filling in for the absence of appropriate parenting. This child is forced into adulthood before she or he is mature enough for it. The Scapegoat, usually the second child, gains identity by misbehaving in ways that will attract attention. His or her role is to draw the focus away from the alcoholic. The cost to the Scapegoat, however, is the pain of living life as the family lightning rod, absorbing tension for everyone. The third youngster often becomes a Lost Child. While others act and react to the alcoholic, this youngster seeks to stay out of harm’s way by hiding, isolating herself, and fading into the woodwork. This results in abject loneliness and lack of loving consideration. Finally, there’s the Mascot, the family pet, the comic relief. This member’s role is to relieve the intense pressure of this sick household by acting like a clown. This person has a deep hunger for affirmation and appreciation that is never satisfied.

Playing roles does not allow children to grow and develop. They never get the modeling and freedom needed to function in a healthy way. Many of these people grow up to be church leaders. Changes’ letter-writer notes that "almost without exception, members of congregations who are prone to controlling and manipulating are ACOAs [adult children of alcoholics]." In my seminars I’ve learned that most clergy and lay leaders are Hero types, oriented more toward task and achievement than toward care and compassion. Whatever the role, however, all members of a substance-abusing household lose their potential, free will and choices.

Some churches are beginning to recognize the destructive effects of chemical abuse on the clergy and on congregations. They are coming to understand the spiritual dimensions of chemical dependency, co-dependency, treatment and recovery, and are offering training workshops, educational seminars and prevention programs. But considering the vast number of churches that do not acknowledge the problem, it seems that most denominational bodies and local congregations are in denial -- the primary symptom of a dysfunctional person, organization or system -- even though one substance-abusing minister can sicken, dishearten and dispirit an entire church just as one alcoholic can infect an entire household. What can -- and ought -- the church do?

Impetus to confront addiction in the parish must come from those who are healthy enough to insist on confrontation. My seminars have indicated to me that the religious organizations that address the issue of alcohol and drug abuse usually are prodded to do so by one person who is convinced of the need and will not take No for an answer. More often than not such people start small -- for example, they call the Educational Materials Department of the Hazelden Foundation (800-238-9000) ; a reputable treatment center, and order its catalog, which includes excellent materials for churches. Another helpful organization is the Johnson Institute (800-231-5165) , which specializes in training seminars. Health Communications, Inc. (800-851-9100) , carries a full line of material on dysfunctional families, co-dependents, adult children of alcoholics, spirituality, treatment and recovery. A church can start facing the issue by gathering and displaying educational materials, by asking the preacher to address it in a sermon, or by organizing workshops, seminars, retreats, or perhaps even a national meeting. My book Alcohol and Substance Abuse: A Clergy Handbook (Morehouse-Barlow, 1985) includes a detailed appendix listing resource material and organizations, and sample sermon outlines, giving churches specific suggestions on how to start addressing the problem. Concerned churchgoers should begin however they can, despite the ignorance, denial, resistance or refusal the congregation might express.

If the church is in the business of redeeming lives, it must minister to, and not shun or accuse, alcoholics and drug abusers. A disturbing number of members of the two fastest growing self-help groups in America, Alcoholics Anonymous and Adult Children of Alcoholics, describe having been ignored, disregarded and discarded by their minister and congregation. They feel they have been treated as lepers and expunged. Even after they have begun to recover, they find that they are not welcomed back into their church -- some even say their minister and congregation have actively sought to keep them out of church.

This explains why so many people seek spiritual nurture from AA’s Twelve-Step recovery programs rather than the church, and why these programs are the fastest growing "religion" of the day. While a person often is expected to exhibit certain virtues in order to be welcomed in many congregations, in the fellowships of AA and related groups such as Al-Anon, Ala-Teen and Narcotics Anonymous, participants are accepted and loved as they are. AA suggests a program of 12 steps that include elements found in the spiritual teachings of many faiths. These 12 steps focus not on pathology but rather on achieving sobriety and maintaining serenity.

This is not to say that the church does not have something unique to offer. The church is the only care-giving, helping institution that has access to half of all American families each weekend. Gallup polls taken from 1976 to 1983 revealed that Americans rank the clergy highest in terms of honesty and observing ethical standards. This puts the church on the forefront of being able to address the problems of alcohol and drug abuse and puts the clergy in a position to lead the way.

When ministering to addicts and co-dependents, pastors should see themselves as shepherds, not veterinarians. They are not trained to deal with the care and counseling of alcohol and drug addicts. They can be most effective as problem-solving therapists and referral agents. Ministers’ close contact with parish families each week affords them the opportunity to observe chemical dependency’s destruction of individuals and families. The pastor is in the unique position to help not by counseling but by assessing the extent of the chemical dependency and co-dependency and then becoming a resource for referral.

Pastors can also set up and promote chemical health education programs. They can invite AA and related groups to use their meeting rooms. They can educate themselves by taking advantage of the vast number of training programs available. In all, the clergy’s role is to create an environment of hope and redemption.

The church should be a community in which people can learn not only to trust in God but to dare to trust one another. The success of the church should be gauged not by the number in attendance, but by the lives redeemed. When we accept our members in their weakness, illness and dysfunction, and offer them strength and the opportunity for health and hope, we proclaim our faith in God’s redeeming power and establish a basis for faith in each other. Then, even where wounded parishioners listen to a wounded pastor, the light of God’s love and grace will not be dimmed.

Liberalism and Lost Days: A Re-evaluation of Fosdick

Greatness, by definition, is not typical or cheap. We expect to pay a price. We sense the need for a degree of imperfection in every great art form, some "redeeming defect." We expect great persons to have dark secrets. Every greatness, we suspect, has its grave. We expect greatness to be impure, and come in messy, mixed-up packages. As Edith Sitwell said of the poet William Blake, "Of course he was cracked, but that is where the light shone through!" According to Robert Moats Miller, all this is wrong when it comes to Harry Emerson Fosdick, a goliath among lesser liberal 20th-century giants. Miller lays his cards down in the third line of his biography: "I believe . . . he was a great human being." And a great human being need not, it seems, be a flawed human being.

Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (Oxford University Press, 608 pp., $38.50) is the story of a "protean man" whose public talents needed no advertisement or apology and whose private life resembled "the rose without the thorn." Fosdick had "not a milligram of self-pity in his make-up," "bare no grudges." was "always loyal," possessed a "modesty [that] was legendary," enjoyed a storybook marriage, was "unscarred by any serious imperfection of character," never went on a truant outing in his life, and "never gave less than his best in his entire life." Miller disproves Oscar Wilde’s dictum that it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

With two biographies of liberal church leaders under his belt (see his earlier work on Ernest Fremont Tittle [1971]). and with a third now under way (on G. Bromley Oxnam), Miller bids fair to become America’s foremost biographer of liberalism, and a major force in the rescue and revitalization of the genre of scholarly biography, which sadly has been out of favor in recent years. If Harry Emerson Fosdick broke the rules of greatness, Harry Emerson Fosdick breaks the rules of modern historical writing:

It abounds in anecdote, revels in rich characterization, maintains a strong chronological narrative, and soars at times in lyrical quality. Albert C. Outler once called the story of Fosdick’s life the biopsy of an epoch, and in Miller’s skillful hands Fosdick is allowed to give personality to an era. The book is wealthy in new insights, revisionist interpretations, and excavated conclusions about Protestantism’s response to all the great political, social, cultural and religious developments of the first two-thirds of the 20th century. But it is most riveting as a look at the lost days of liberalism, and why they are gone forever.

These were the days when Christians literally beat down the doors to get into church. "Crowds Smash Door: Near Riot to Hear Fosdick" ran the headlines of a 1924 newspaper. It was not uncommon for people to wait in front of the church for more than two hours in what they called the "bread line" so that they could be fed at Fosdick’s table. Church members were ticketed to ensure seating, but others had to find fragments of nourishment where they could, with some sneaking into already packed balconies through fire escapes and other evasive subterfuges, and with Fosdick’s own seat filled by a standee as soon as he entered the pulpit. The carnationed, gray-gloved ushers, or what Fosdick termed his "Guard of Honor," were really the city’s best-dressed bouncers and bodyguards. "We had a hectic time yesterday in the ushering business," one memorandum from a head usher reported. "One lady fainted. Two ladies crawled under the ropes on the pleas of wanting to go away and then beat down the center aisle. Mr. Lawton held them up. The crowd in the south gallery was dense and passing the plate was difficult and lengthy, as every one wanted to chip in -- bless their hearts. This explains why the other chap and I had to sprint down the aisles to catch up with the procession." Liberal causes found patrons in wealthy benefactors like John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who was ubiquitous in Fosdick’s career, and prominent public-relations experts like Ivy Lee, who retailed Fosdick like breakfast cereal through market analysis, mass distribution and image-building.

Some of the book’s most inspiriting reading and special satisfactions for pastors can be derived from the sections on how Fosdick conceptualized, prepared and presented sermons. Fosdick has been portrayed as the perfect model for the widely touted preacher’s formula: one hour of study for every hour in the pulpit. But Miller demonstrates that Fosdick’s success at preaching was a function of both time and technique -- time spent in roaming across a vast range of literature, and technique in collecting and organizing insights and illustrations from the resources read. In a marvelous metaphor, Miller compares opening up one of Fosdick’s preaching notebooks to "looking into a magician’s bag of tricks after marveling at his acts." It would take weeks, months, sometimes years of notebook preparation for a sermon to be born. "It’s like going to an apple tree," Fosdick explained. "and saying, ‘this one is ripe now."’ Miller also clears up much confusion by showing that for Fosdick the "project method" and the "expository method" of preaching were not mutually exclusive.

A preacher may be moving and still not be persuasive. Fosdick was both. The book works hard to portray Fosdick as the remarkably inventive and productive preacher he was, to explain how he could sustain such a level of excellence week after week, and to give a sense of why more than one preacher visiting Riverside staggered out of the worship service sighing, "I can never preach again!" It tells us where to go to find the best introduction to Fosdick’s preaching, his best books, his most powerful sermons. But the book also reveals why seminarians today have trouble picking Fosdick up, and why liberal church leaders will not find in Fosdick clues to revitalizing today’s "oldline" (mainline) churches.

Miller astutely positions Fosdick within the evangelical tradition and repeatedly calls him an "evangelical liberal," but the concept is never precisely defined. The book is somewhat shy about defining terms -- all the more to be regretted because Miller at times seems to be tottering on the brink of gifting us with creative focus and form in an area that is confusing for the exercise of critical judgment. If only he had probed more systematically Fosdick’s own self-description -- "I may be a liberal, but I’m evangelical, too!" -- we would have been treated to a tracing of the contours of "evangelical liberalism’s" placement within liberalism, an account of the evolution of Fosdick’s modernism from 19th-century evangelicalism, and an assessment of whether Fosdick belongs in the evangelical wing of the social gospel movement along with his hero, Walter Rauschenbusch. One comes away unclear as to how much Fosdick saw himself either as heir of his own past or as harbinger of a fresh religious movement.

For another, while Miller demonstrates that Fosdick’s theology was no lightheaded liberalism, he also sees him as a power-of-positive-thinking pioneer and somewhat of a "mystic" (Fosdick repeatedly called himself a Quaker at heart). But Miller also makes it clear why the conservatives were right in detecting modernist murmurings throughout Fosdick’s theology. Many of them professed to love and respect him, but did so as fox hunters are said to love the fox. Few preachers have so rubbed the liberal world the right way, or demonstrated so graphically that conservatives did not have a corner on the Bible, Miller’s account of Fosdick’s 1922 sermon titled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" is superb in assessing the furor it created among Presbyterian fundamentalists and the reasons why they moved against him.

Even when Miller goes through the accustomed hoops, his skills are impressive. The geography of Fosdick’s life, including his let-downs, put-downs and come-downs, is explored with great sensitivity, insight and attentiveness to the personal and domestic spheres. Miller has many perceptive comments about Fosdick’s initial casting of his theological weight behind interventionism, and then shifting it toward pacifism. There is an excellent chapter on the building of Riverside, and Fosdick’s insistence that the architecture accommodate his two wishes for "beauty" and "a warm church to preach in." The relationship of Fosdick to Rockefeller is illuminated as it never has been before. When Fosdick informed Rockefeller that he did not want to be known as pastor to the richest man in the country, he found his comeuppance in Rockefeller’s retort: "Do you think that more people will criticize you on account of my wealth than will criticize me on account of your theology?"

At many points Miller could have mounted a platform and warbled knowingly about Fosdick’s failed vision and cultural captivity. Fosdick’s relationship with America’s Jewish community was anything but easy, but Miller’s analysis of Fosdick’s support for a binational state and the Jewish reaction to what was perceived as his pro-Arab bias is a model of a scholarly tightrope performance. The same can be said for Miller’s treatment of Fosdick’s stance on issues relating to women and racial justice, the latter subject having an entire chapter devoted to it (chapter 24).

Miller comes the closest to being critical of Fosdick in regard to (1) his method of sermon preparation. (2) his almost haughty neglect of ecclesiology, and (3) his inordinate image consciousness.

Ironically, Miller can be most impatient with Fosdick for what he did best -- prepare and preach sermons. While scrupulous about checking and rechecking his quotations, Fosdick sometimes quoted original sources from secondary reading, thereby sending out misleading signals about the expanse of his reading. Fosdick’s repeated self-borrowings bother Miller no end, as does the manner in which Fosdick "achieved transparency, often, at the expense of accuracy." Miller registers "two major reservations" about the reading habits of this man who consumed staggering numbers of books: ‘Fosdick read too lightly in twentieth-century imaginative literature, and too frequently he rifled meretricious stuff for homiletical purposes.

Miller presents the picture of a liberalism void of a doctrine of the church. Fosdick’s professed loyalty was to Jesus Christ, not to the church. One wishes that Miller had inquired into Fosdick’s astonishing revelation that he had once considered leaving "the historic Christian organizations" and starting his own "independent movement." At Riverside, Fosdick was interested not in building a community of Christians so much as in carrying out a ministry to individuals. "I would rather help individuals," Fosdick said, "than preach sermons." Fosdick imagined his parishioners marching to heaven single file, not side by side. Fosdick offered no "sustained articulation of his understanding of corporate worship." Children were not welcome, or even safe, in worship. And one of the greatest preachers America has produced pooh-poohed the traditional role of preaching, redefining it in more acceptable therapeutic terms as "personal counseling on a group scale."

Through his books and writings, Fosdick may have been pastor to other pastors and laity throughout the nation, but he can scarcely be called pastor to his parishioners at Riverside. Armor-plated with a glass screen that kept people from getting too close without feeling shut out, Fosdick maintained a physical (though not always emotional) distance from his congregation. A leading apologist for the clinical pastoral education movement in America, Fosdick nevertheless scheduled counseling appointments for only 15 minutes each. He never made pastoral calls, and few members of the church spent even as much as an hour in his company their entire lives. The book’s most poignant passage tells of a woman parishioner who lived near the church writing Fosdick in his retirement, begging him and his wife to come over for a cup of tea:

A minister has never said a prayer in my home. I have an old-fashioned notion that a house is never a home until the minister has been there and blessed it. Dr. McCracken with his family problems is far too busy to do this as are all of the ministers at the church. So are you, I know, but maybe sometime you will need a cup of tea badly enough to come. I just want you to know that you would be welcome and that I would be highly honored. If you do come, I hope that you are not afraid of small, timid lame cats, because I have one. Thank you for being such a wonderful man and for giving people like me a faith to live by.

Fosdick may not have known the people with whom he worshiped, but neither did he know the city in which he lived. His relationship with New York City was curiously uninvolving. This was partly because though at home in theological modernism, he was ill at ease around cultural modernism -- a man of pastoral, not urban, sensibilities. Self-possessed, reserved, impassive and calculating, Fosdick did not know how to live adventurously, spontaneously or, at times, even casually. To a person who could never let himself go, even for a moment, the city was a whirlpool of danger. Pastor of the church that faced the city, he himself turned his back on the city, embarrassed by its glitz, glitter and garbage, proud of his ignorance of its restaurants, nightlife, and social and cultural offerings.

Miller mounts a defense of his failure to provide a critical bibliography on the basis of quantity of material ("over one thousand items") and complications of multiple publications, which only further reinforces the absolute necessity of its presence. Nobody does their homework better or researches more meticulously, than Miller. In "sparing" us footnotes and bibliography, Miller has deprived scholars and others of a rich deposit of soil in which to plant and to putter. No historian is likely to pass this way again for some time, which makes our loss even greater. What Miller terms his first "foolish thought of presenting here a critical annotated bibliography’’ should not have been dismissed so cavalierly.

Second, Fosdick is known for exercising an almost immoral influence over his readers. A common way to introduce Fosdick was, "I give you Dr. Fosdick, whose sermons you have heard and preached." Fosdick is the preacher whose sermons we would have written if we had been the preacher he was. Some preachers still find it necessary to ration strictly their reading of Fosdick for fear of unconscious plagiarism or incomplete weaning. At times one wonders whether Miller has entirely escaped the Fosdick sorcery himself, and whether he has not written the kind of biography Fosdick would have written. It would be untrue to say that Fosdick now has a scholarly autobiography, but it is fair to say that Miller is at his best when he is least under the Fosdick spell.

This solicitous attitude is no more apparent than in his treatment of Fosdick’s famous nervous breakdown, which Miller diagnoses as "a severe neurotic reactive depression." The story of Fosdick’s "terrifying suicidal smashup" while a student at Union Theological Seminary in 1902 is unfolded with great care and sensitivity, and the account of how Fosdick turned tragedy into literature is profoundly moving. But Fosdick’s journey into the land of shadows remains an enigma that will not crack. Chastened by the criticism accorded the author’s earlier biography of Tittle, Miller is at great pains to avoid unwarranted psychologizing. He even refrains from the scholarly sport of speculating about what Fosdick described as "the most perilous temptation that I ever faced in my young manhood." Miller shows little kindness toward Lytton Strachey’s belief that discretion is not the better part of biography.

No one will ever write a biography that is beyond criticism. However, this book is so good it makes one feel frustrated that it is not better. Indeed, it is only the need to chip away more mass and marble that prevents this erudite and indispensable volume from being truly magisterial.

Not All Cats Are Gray: Beyond Liberalism’s Uncertain Faith

The German poet Heinrich Heine stood with a friend before the cathedral of Amiens in France.

"Tell me, Heinrich,” said his friend, “why can’t people build piles like this any more?”

Replied Heine: “My dear friend, in those days people had convictions. We moderns have opinions. And it takes more than opinions to build a Gothic cathedral.”

I thought of this exchange while reading in the New York Times (December 13, 1981) the impression of the faith journey of Americans that Hans Küng gained during a ten-week stay here. “Most people are looking for constants, for beliefs they can rely upon in the midst of life’s flux,” he said. What Küng has observed firsthand is a validation of what sociologists and pollsters have been telling us for years: masses of Americans are having difficulty coping with the loss of certainty that is perhaps the most telling feature of postmodern culture. As economics, family relationships and political structures move toward greater and greater complexity and inconstancy, religious institutions, swept up by the same forces as everyone else, are failing to provide steady coordinates that orient and order life.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of Dean M. Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, which argued in part that people are dazed by modernity’s mazes of complexity, ambiguity and sheer madness, and are desperate for direction. That observation is even more compelling today than it was ten years ago.

The modern age, born of assurance in the transcendental reach of science and reason, has now crumbled into a heap of blasted hopes, eroded confidences and not-so-self-evident truths. The modernizing forces of technology, bureaucracy, urbanization and communication appear more and more to be the problems rather than, as they once did, the panaceas to the dislocations of our complex culture.

The Age of Uncertainty is how John Kenneth Galbraith characterized the current state of economic thought. Modern art has been vacated by The Lost Center, according to the analysis of Hans Sedlmayr. Philosophy, which was invented (as Horace Kallen pointed out many years ago) because humans wanted the security and constancy of an unshakable corpus of thought, now rises in the name of pragmatic relativism to slay the very needs that gave it life. Ironclad certainties are deemed philosophically obsolete. “We have lost our center,” writes philosopher Jeffrey Stout on the first page of his recent book The Flight from Authority.

And ever since the discoveries of undecidability, even the seemingly unassailable certainty privileged to mathematics has dissolved. The truth of mathematical systems has become a function of consistency, not correspondence. Mathematicians now settle into one of the four rival hammocks set up by formalists, intuitionists, logicists and pure set theoreticians and, once in, find it very difficult to get out. Mary Hesse in Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science argues that in some form relativism is an inescapable conclusion of modern science. History documents how yesterday’s certainties quickly become tomorrow’s curiosities.

Scholars and scientists widely read and respected by the public have popularized this refrain. Niels Bohr notified his students, “Every sentence that I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question.” Max Born, the Nobel Prizewinning West German physicist, agreed: “I am convinced that ideas such as absolute certainties, absolute precision, final truth, etc., are phantoms which should be excluded from science.” Stated British mathematician Jacob Bronowski in his influential Ascent of Man: “There is no absolute knowledge.

All information is imperfect.” Even Karl Marx, according to Marshall Berman’s puzzlingly rhapsodic celebration of life in modernism’s “maelstrom,” confessed that modern experiences are characterized by “everlasting uncertainty”: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity).

Among many of the scientific intelligentsia, the profession of atheism has become almost as academically unfashionable as the profession of religious belief. Anything other than agnosticism postulates an arrogant certainty, whether negative or positive. Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” would be a fitting epitaph for the spirit of this postmodern era that has made a principle out of its uncertainty.

At least in part because of what historian William R. Hutchison has identified as the “adaptionist” impulse within the American liberal tradition, mainline religion has partaken heavily of the diminished certitudes of modern existence. In the punctuations of faith, the exclamation mark of an absolute, the colon of a secure conviction, the dash of a dependable axiom, the period of a “center that holds” have been shoved aside by the supremacy of the question mark, which has come to occupy an almost iconic place in the contemporary liberal mind.

The Bible is not to be read as a book in which answers to life’s vexing questions can be found. Liberals cringe when they hear remarks such as the one by an executive of a major conservative publishing house, explaining the durability of his firm’s Bible sales: “Our product has the answers.” To the liberal, the Bible is neither a product nor an answer book. It is rather a “question book” (Cohn Morris), where we go not to find the right answers but to find the right questions -- questions we evade at our peril. The Holy Spirit then works, according to Paul Tillich and others, to help us ask these right questions and to find answers which will be both personal and provisional.

Where once children in Sunday schools were expected to answer questions, they are now taught to ask them. The battle of the bumper stickers between conservatives and liberals in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s predictably was fought from such Sunday school formations; evangelicals, fundamentalists and charismatics fired volleys of “Christ is the Answer!,” and liberals responded with smug salvos of “What is the Question?” One of the favorite liberal expressions to come Out of the 1970s was inspired by a misreading of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice in his Letters to a Young Poet, “Do not now seek the answers, . . live the questions now”; it was rendered, “The point is not to find answers, but to live questions.” Robert A. Raines’s title Living the Questions summarized the means for survival on life’s seas after all the anchors have snapped.

There is much to be said for the way in which liberalism feeds on ambiguities and complexities yet chokes on absolutes. No respecter of received opinion, liberalism refuses to submit to the authority of doctrines inaccessible to reason, properly perceiving that irrationalism underlies many slick “certainties” peddled by fat and thriving gurus. In liberalism the questions of the time are taken seriously; there is no attempt to answer unasked or improvident questions, and all speaking is in the accents of the age. A keen reading of history demonstrates that, as Robert Farrar Capon has written, “Most of the mischief in Christian theology is caused not by answers but by questions.”

Because liberalism takes account of the fact that we human beings cannot rise above the fallibility of our nature and the finiteness of our perceptions -- which is why Tillich’s “Protestant Principle” is so terribly important -- liberalism rejects a narrow-minded, merciless certitude and instead speaks in a conversational tone. Ear from being its death rattle, as some would claim, this accent on openness and humility represents a healthy hearing of other traditions as well as a guard against salvationist imperialism and “inappropriate closure” (John B. Cobb, Jr.).

Since no one can exist without hard ground on which to stand, liberals have fashioned the functional equivalents of absolutes, variously styled “values,” “goals,” “priorities” or “agendas,” which have the great assets of being contextual, relational and mobile. Without irreverence or irresponsibility, liberals are also able to retain their sense of humor, even about these “values/goals/priorities/agendas” concerning which they can be so serious and intense.

In short, the mainline religions, with varying degrees of effectiveness, have helped their members to risk experiencing the ambiguities and complexities of modern life, steering people away from bleached-out faiths where truth is never gray, and enabling them to live with and even embrace uncertainty. Lamb’s-Book-of-Life certainty on most issues is antihistorical, credulous and unscriptural. The movement of the Spirit toward the Kingdom is profoundly historical, and therefore relative. We live and die in the context of imperfections and in the confidence of relative judgments. The Bible teaches that the just shall live by faith, not certainty.

Despite all that liberalism has going for it, the liberal church approaches the threshold of a new century with haggard spirits and empty pews. Not since the 1920s have liberals so taken it on the chin. Some contend that liberalism, beaten down and knocked out too many times, is suffering from brain death. Its heart of compassion is still strong and beating, and there is life in its outer extremities, since it responds reflexively to social stimuli. Indeed, there have been some -- especially those motivated by wishful thinking -- who profess that they have already performed liberalism’s autopsy and signed the death certificate. Cause of death: an uncertain faith. This pronouncement of death is premature, but the diagnosis of the ailment is sound. Everyone knows that liberals feel, but there is much confusion about what liberals believe.

Certainty holds too many terrors for liberalism, and uncertainty too few. In the interests of intellectual exactness, social relevance and ecumenical dialogue, liberalism has frequently settled for unresolved tensions, stretchy ambiguities and impenetrable mysteries when dealing with “the truth question.” Alternating between a belief that absolutism lurks just behind absolutes and a suspicion that truth is a human construct, liberals are accustomed to offering opinions instead of truth. At their best, they have demonstrated that the love of humanity sometimes takes precedence over the love of truth. At less than their best, however, liberals have been too certain of uncertainty. Liberalism has exhibited a lazy satisfaction with proclaiming cross-eyed paradoxes and crossroads ambiguities, large questions and tiny truths, as if this is the best we can hope for.

It is little wonder, then, that liberalism has been accused of being fundamentally elitist, a religion for the Ph.D. crowd. Liberals have walled themselves off into elitist colonies: each preoccupied with some unique speculation, all absorbed in playing with ideas, and with openness often meaning uncommittedness. When spirituality becomes a daring high-wire venture without reassuring safety nets and stakes driven deep into solid belief, the admission requirements are quite restrictive.

Theodore Roszak claims in an article in the Nation that “by indiscriminately denying the validity of all the absolutes to which spiritual need would offer its allegiance, secular skepticism leaves the field open to quacks and rascals.” Since the majority of people “cannot diet on the disinfectants of critical intellect,” they “continue to nurse transcendent longings, for this is, at last, a deep natural need of our kind.” Longings after transcendence are not slaked by search, however, but by discovery:

Often the first thing that comes along to offer ungrudging hospitality to their capacity for wonder and their need for metaphysical anchorage captures their complete allegiance. Perhaps it will be something wise and gentle; too frequently it is a commercial gimmick; in a few unhappy cases, it is vicious nonsense. But no amount of mocking and scolding will stop people from taking the gamble.

Life without a centered faith suffers extreme spiritual discomfort. The idea that God has not given us some answers to our questions is intolerable to the human spirit, driving us to the very edge of fatalism on one hand, or fanaticism on the other. Questions provoke only deeper yearnings for answers.

In the words of Martin Luther, “The Holy Spirit is no skeptic.” The primary work of the Spirit is to bring us assurance, not puzzlement; confidence, not conundrums; to bring us to faith, not doubt. Doubt is important to faith, but primarily as a means of keeping faith alive and animated. The Holy Spirit brings us to only a relative knowledge of truth, but the word “relative” accents the “knowledge,” not the “truth.”

Anthropologists tell us of the cultural importance of the ritualistic fixing of centers -- in space, in time, in thinking -- from which humans get their bearings. A prime function of religion throughout history has been to help people move from centers to suburbs without alienation or anomie. Thus, a serene indifference to the human need for fixed spiritual maps by which we can navigate through life, no matter how variable the weather, betrays an ignorance of the major meaning of religion for human existence.

“Unless there is truth that is changeless,” William Ernest Hocking has written in a brilliant essay on the mystical spirit in Protestantism, “religion becomes a branch of anthropology, chiefly of historical interest.”

The world does not want to know Christians’ speculations; it wants to know our affirmations and certainties. The popularity of the expression “the bottom line” reveals a larger story than merely the triumph of economic modes of thinking in the modern mind. The hunger is real and legitimate for a “still point to a turning world,” for a solid bottom, for groundedness and rootedness. for certainties which we can lay our hands on and say: “That may be, and so may this, and that may be too. But this is it!” We have been too inclined to see “This-is-it!” certainties as faith’s crutch. We would be better off to see them as the crux of a transforming ministry. If the modern condition, as D. H. Lawrence once described it, is “a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air,” only big affirmations can replant us in the universe.

When affirmations are negations, declarations are doubts, and answers are questions, “truth” is dressed in ill-fitting clothes that are inadequate to protect people from the cold and rain. Mystery, complexity, contingency and pluralism -- all have stood at the heart of recent liberal affirmations. And all are essentially negative and centrifugal. It is difficult to minister to the need for affirmations with “truth is relative,” especially when relativism becomes one of those analytic monsters like absolutism. Once relativism is out of the study and into the living quarters, few can ever again evict it, and it proceeds to eat us out of house and mind.

Pluralism does not affirmation make, for it is very difficult to construct a theology out of openness to many theologies, or to none. When living in ambiguity is mistaken as a positive program, it becomes especially difficult to elevate social justice as a positive, since one loses the moral capacity to shape action and spur motivation. Despite their historic and current concern about the moral malignancies of our day, mainline churches have not been able to build an affirmative identity on their commitment to social justice, and for more reason than an absence of enough of such commitment. It is difficult to speak with authority on issues of social justice when there is not enough confidence to speak with authority on issues of faith.

Or, to put it another way, can we expect our attempts to incarnate truth in social policy during the week to be taken seriously when we are tentative and modest about these truths on Sunday? This condition is one factor behind the steady decay of purpose and the decline in identity among mainline denominations: The second volume of the United Methodist Church’s “Into Our Third Century” series argues that the denomination’s most pressing need as it approaches its bicentennial in 1984 is “to develop a clear sense of purpose and identity for its life and work.” The need for a clear vision of itself is not peculiar to one mainline denomination.

Ever since Schleiermacher’s classic On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers was written in 1799, the essence of liberalism has been its attempt to confront culture on its own terms. This means that, without acculturation, the Christian message cannot become incarnate in the world. This was the case with Jesus, and it will be the case with us. But the very thing that gives liberalism its distinctive strength can, when undisciplined and uncentered, prove to be its greatest snare. Christ accommodated himself to the culture of his day to minister, not to follow. When religion loses itself in culture, it becomes lost to culture -- and loses in strength, m identity, in spirituality. We cannot follow Christ’s steps and track the meandering course of culture at the same time.

What Wittgenstein once said of philosophy (in a lecture) is equally applicable to theology: “Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the commonsense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.” The strength of liberalism is that it shuns resting in the center and is bold enough to travel into and beyond the “common sense.” Wittgenstein continues: “The commonsense answer in itself is no solution; everyone knows-it. One must not in philosophy attempt to short-circuit problems.”

In theology, one must be careful not to overload belief with problems, either. From the purely pragmatic standpoint of human need, there is as much to be feared from the equivocations and fussiness of right thinking as from the certainties of half-baked thinking. No matter how incomplete, how partial our vision, we must be willing to move from the second stage of hard questions to the third stage of commonplace answers; from questions we cannot answer to answers we cannot evade. The mark of mature spirituality is certitude amid uncertainty: “Here I stand. I can do no other, God help me!”

Yet ultimately the issue is not that liberalism has lacked certainties but that liberals have been too inhibited about proclaiming with passion, constancy and especially self-consciousness the certainties that have been there all along. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong has vigorously declaimed in The Christian Century about the “dishonesty” of any evangelistic pretensions to “certainty” or “unchanging truths” (“Evangelism When Certainty Is an Illusion,” January 6-13). Is “honesty” the abandonment of certainty’s halo around the kerygma, as Spong would have it, or is “honesty,” in the memorable words of Margaret Lewis Furse, “the constant hallowing of the truth in the situation of some doubt about the truth as a whole” (Nothing But the Truth? What It Takes to Be Honest)?

As Spong eloquently affirms, “When we say that we do not have the whole truth of God, that must not be taken to mean that we have no truth of God. St. Paul said, ‘I see through a glass darkly,’ but he did see. And so do we.” That and Spong’s moving testimony -- “The only reward Christ offers, I believe, is the Christian life of openness, vulnerability, expansion, risk, wholeness, love” -- scarcely bespeak an uncertain, “dishonest” faith. Just the opposite; these are Spong’s certainties -- the “truth of God” that he “sees” -- and they are worthy of proud placement in all liberal centers. Any preaching deserving of the name brings just such truths of God to bear on the lives of people. We cannot give with certainty what is the whole of God, but we can give with certainty some of God’s truths.

I shall never forget the impact on my ministry when I sat down a few years ago and jotted on paper “the great rocky facts of being” (Augustus Hopkins Strong): some elementary but elemental truths I felt certain of, with certainty defined as “no doubt about it” but as “convictions by and for which one lives and dies.” I now call them the gospel’s “Twelve Truths.”

1. God loves me.

2. God is not mocked.

3. God had the first word. God had the second Word. God will have the last word.

4. God speaks to us through a trinity of voices: silence, monologue, dialogue.

5. In Jesus Christ “God has visited his people” (Zacharias).

6. The Christian community exists to give witness to the central fact of history -- the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

7. The purpose of life is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever” -- to grow in our love for God and in our love for each other.

8. No matter what happens to us, God can wrench good out of it.

9. Nothing can separate us from the love of God -- not our sinning, our suffering, or our dying; not a cross or mushroom cloud.

10. We can not outlove the Lord.

11. God has no hands but our hands.

12. We hold all truth in earthen vessels.

I found that if ministry were to have power, it needed to be conducted from an uncompromising position, from the vantage point of a “center that holds.” Flexibility over means to the truth is one thing; flexibility about the truth itself is an entirely different matter.

Liberals need to transcend faith’s uncertain-ties and stand up and make simple, strong declarative sentences about what they believe and know. That was done at Harvard’s founding in 1636: a profession “to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning,” and New England sat up and took notice. The effects are the same today. We must not retreat by giving up our questions; we must advance by “living into the answers” (the proper reading of Rilke’s words).

These lived answers need to be based on experiences that arise from within faith and from within community. Because truth is organic and social, it is the experience and work arising from within faith and community that bring conviction. So long as liberals attempt to go it alone, or display a readiness to pass resolutions voicing concern and decrying injustice but lack resolve to work out of their faith, an ineffectual witness is guaranteed. Until we can roll up our sleeves and lock arms, we can never be certain in our faith. Certainty is not a goal in life; it is an offshoot of a faith that lives and works.

The preacher Casey in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath says at one point, “One person, with their minds made up, can shove a lot of folks around.” At a time when liberalism needs to throw its weight around with a unified moral answer to the three big questions of our time -- peace, poverty and plenty -- there is evidence that the deep, deep sleep of liberal spirituality, from which there seems to be a reluctance to rouse, is coming to an end. For example, there is a growing awareness that if the claim is correct that some political values are universally right, then why should liberals be hesitant to declare that some spiritual values are universally true?

There is also great promise in the philosophical trail being blazed between rationality and truth by Harvard philosopher and mathematician Hilary Putnam, and the liberal way out of the jungle of relativism may well be guided by his skillful hacking away at all that divides Reason, Truth and History. Alisdair Maclntyre’s justly acclaimed After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory reclaims ethics from the anything goes” morality too often legitimated by pluralism and relativism.

Most important, the impression that liberals have given up the search for answers is beginning to disappear. If the liberal religious tradition is to regain its place as a vital force in modem culture, the two tendencies of the postmodernist temper, which Nathan A. Scott, Jr., has isolated as “negative capability” (a “disinclination to try to subdue or resolve what is recalcitrantly indeterminate and ambiguous”) and the “self reflexive” (a “retreat from the public world”), must be overcome. There are hopeful signs that the latter, at least, is taking place.

A few years ago, while visiting Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, I learned that spelunkers, before exploring unknown caverns, tie one end of a rope to an object outside. As they grope their way through the maze of passageways, they unwind the rope. Christians similarly need to be tied to some answers, some certainties on which they stake their lives. In a review of J. A. T. Robinson’s The Roots of a Radical, Don Cupitt beautifully summarizes Robinson’s spirituality: “One should be firmly rooted in a few central values, commitments, and doctrinal themes, while being open and exploratory at the edges.” I can think of no more needed definition of liberal spirituality.

The difference between conservatives and liberals is not that one group is certain and the other is not; rather, it is that conservatives are certain of too much. Liberals do not have all the answers, but they do have some. Or to borrow from Harry Emerson Fosdick a more poetic expression to describe the liberal temperament, “Astronomies change but the stars abide.”

From Catacomb to Basilica: The Dilemma of Oldline Protestantism

In the film made to celebrate its 125th anniversary, the International Red Cross officially designated itself a "movement," and incorporated that identity into its title. Not wanting to be known as an "organization" or "association," the world’s largest humanitarian society prefers to call itself the International Movement of the Red Cross. If oldline Protestant churches are to become anything more than dead bodies for anthropologists to study, a decision similar to that of the Red Cross, backed by real resolve, could be the most important action the churches could take.

There have been many moments in the history of my denomination -- United Methodist -- when its members could have responded to questions about church affiliation with "I don’t belong to a denomination, I belong to a movement." No more. Just as a college, founded by a denomination, reaches for respectability, severs its church ties and becomes a secular university, and just as a colony, settled by citizens of a motherland, rebels and becomes a nation, so a dynamic spiritual movement tends to become one more institution, one more system, one more bureaucracy. Methodism arose first in England to renew the Anglican establishment, which had become an end in itself rather than a means of drawing people into the worship and adoration of God. It then was transplanted to America with the ambition "to reform this continent and spread scriptural holiness throughout the land." But now it has itself become another establishment, or what the Bible calls "temple religion."

Of course, there is no such thing as templeless religion. In the words of the Psalmist, "God settleth the solitary in families" (68:61) God sets the individual in community. Freedom needs form; spirit needs structure. A structure provides the base which enables creativity and freedom. In the words of John Bowker, structure and system permit us "powerful and creative explorations of the implications of the system in art, music, iconography, architecture, self-sacrificing lives and the like" (Licensed Insanities, p. 137) But when structures stop moving, they become self-absorbed, oppressive and conformist. Without the heartbeat of a movement, structures are rendered lifeless -- with rigid metabolic rates, frigid body temperatures and low blood pressure.

Granted, there have always been establishments in the sense that establishment power pilots a movement. But there is a difference between establishment power within a movement and an established institution. Once a movement becomes an establishment institution, it is problematic whether it can ever be transformed into a movement again. Sociologists insist that once a denomination, always a denomination. Maybe; maybe not. But an establishment can surely be renewed by a movement. In fact, John Wesley believed that a denominational identity was prerequisite to church revitalization. That is why he remained within the Church of England all of his life. One of the greatest needs of oldline churches today is for faithful movements of the Spirit that can breathe new life into the dry bones of the denominational establishments.

How did oldline Protestantism become an assortment of establishment "temple religions"? After a heart attack nearly carried him off the entertainment circuit permanently, comedian George Carlin returned to his routine with these words: "God gave me a good heart -- but my arteries suck." Similarly, God has preserved a good heart for our churches, but our arteries have been ruined by a cholesterol-rich diet of Christendom. James 1:8 reads: "He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways." The word for "double-minded" appears only twice in the New Testament. It literally means "two-souled": a bigamist, a person with two loves, a person serving two masters, loving spiritual and worldly things at the same time. The results of "doublemindedness" are collapse of the interior, a crumbling from within, a severe values implosion and identity confusion.

To affirm one’s faith as a Christian is to accept a minority identity as part of a counterculture and counterchurch. We don’t live in a secular society; we live in a pagan society that is resistant to the gospel, a gospel which calls the church to perpetual criticism of the social and political order. Or as Yahweh told Pharaoh: "I will make a distinction between my people and your people" (Exod. 8:23) Oldline Protestants are now taught to be proud of their skill in "plundering the Egyptians." But God warned the Israelites not to engage in such activity because to do so could compromise their integrity and identity as Yahweh’s people. Sure enough, when the Hebrews did plunder the Egyptians, they did more than evangelize behind enemy lines or trespass on alien turf. They went out too far. They got in too deep. They poached. Before they knew it, they had created a golden calf.

In our reach for cultural respectability and power, we oldline Protestants have acquiesced in the golden-calf vision of Christendom, becoming warp and woof of the reigning political and social fabric rather than becoming weavers of a new kingdom community. We have abandoned our identity as a counterculture/counterchurch movement with a dissident piety and distinctive style of life. We have accommodated the church to what Isaiah says the people always want of their prophets: "Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things" (Isa. 30:10) We have, in short, forgotten how hard it is to do God’s work without God.

"The Only Remedy for Declining Membership" is the title of an editorial that appeared in the February 15, 1900, issue of the Christian Advocate. The 3-million-member Methodist Episcopal Church had just gone through a year (1899) which added fewer than 7,000 new members to the church roster. Church officials were startled and alarmed by this portentous "membership decline" -- a problem which "has not been frequent in our history." But Advocate editor James Buckley contended that the worst thing Methodists could do would be to engage in "misdirected inquiry into the cause" when "the simplicity of the problem" was so obvious. In words that are even more true today than when they were written 88 years ago, the editor declared that "it is not primarily members of the visible Church that are to be sought, but true disciples of CHRIST and servants of the most high God."

People take part in temple religion because it is encouraged by, and is a constituent part of, their realm religion. But people become disciples of Jesus Christ because their world has been turned upside down by the winds of a loving God who "puts a new spirit within us," which can resist those spirits blowing about us, spirits which must blow away without us. Or, in a phrase of Flannery O’Connor’s sharp enough to cut ice: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd."

How many of us are swimming with the tide of our time rather than taking the much harder route of bucking against the currents and false directions of modernity? As T. S. Eliot put it in The Family Reunion, "In a world of fugitives the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away. If the truth has made us "odd," if we have not accommodated ourselves out of all recognition, then it will appear to some people that we’re running away, that we’re living an escapist existence, that we’re outsiders, even outlaws -- whereas the truth is that we’re the insiders, because we’re bearing God’s reality, not the world’s. We are the true establishment, because we are building and inhabiting God’s basilica, the commonwealth of eternity, not earth.

To take but one example: Where does it say in the Bible that majority rules? The nation governs its life in this way, and it should. But just because the state so governs, should the church also? Where in the Bible did God ever need a majority for anything? In one circumstance, majority ruled and got Barabbas.

A bureaucratized church structure rewards leaders who display the courage of its conventions rather than the courage of their convictions. Like all highly organized systems, ecclesiocracies are more concerned about whether their leaders are operating within a programmed, "professional" context than about whether their leaders’ God-given gifts are allowed to flourish and make their special contributions to the body of Christ. Dag Hammarskjold was an exception that proves the rule -- one of the few model bureaucrats who refused to be ensnared by organizational sharks and imprisoned in official channels. The "professional" model of ministry reflects the ladder-to-the-skies syndrome of the rest of the culture. The ministry as a "profession" rather than a calling has encouraged the rush toward ecclesiastical preferment, with clergy jostling one another like bumper cars in order to secure the most prestigious placements.

In terms of lay leadership, the picture is even grimmer. In a recent joint episcopal address titled "The Church at Worship, the Church at Work," the United Methodist bishops of the Northeast Jurisdiction comment on the "debilitating syndrome" whereby "far too many congregations are damaged by lay apathy and clergy domination." Ministry belongs to people in the pew, not to people in the pulpit. In fact, "clergy" and "lay" are fundamentally an establishment’s division of labor, not a movement’s preoccupation. Establishment ecclesiocracies have not proved themselves adequate to the task of finding either fulfilling or full-time work for laymen and laywomen other than that of the maintenance of its structure. Lay education is time-warped in its covered-wagon, Sunday-school days. with "serious readers" of biblical studies, church history and theology embarrassingly absent. No wonder religious alternatives that many find more attractive than denominations -- New Age, for example -- are appearing on the horizon. And no wonder almost 15 percent of all Protestant giving goes to parachurch agencies.

United Methodist historian Franklin H. Littell reminds us that the great heresies of the early church came from the churches that were the most established, most complacent and most static, not from the church’s growing edges where believers were busy evangelizing, organizing and building new disciple communities. The very terms "liberal" and "conservative" are less an index of theology than of theology’s cultural involvement and captivity. The left/right typology would be less problematic if it were triangular rather than flat and linear -- right, left and apex rather than right, left and center. "Left" and "right" are the stationary, sedentary categories of an establishment that is at tug-of-war with itself and going nowhere. The only categories of a movement that matter are not "Are you on the right?" or Are you on the left?" but "Are you at the front?" or "Are you at the rear?" And if one is at the front in ministry, if one is on the frontiers of mission, then different accusations will be heard than those of "liberal" or "conservative." "Oh you man without a handle," Henry James, Sr., once complained to movement leader Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Oh you man who fits no formula," the establishment complained to another movement leader -- Jesus Christ.

If "Christendom" is the most damming and damning force in American religious life today, "outsiderhood" is the most creative and dynamic force in American religious history. So argues Cornell historian R. Laurence Moore in his recent Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. What makes American religion so vigorous and "normal" is not establishment denominations but movements within America’s denominations. The American religious system may be said to be "working" only "when it is creating cracks within denominations, when it is producing novelty, even when it is fueling antagonisms." Management theorist and corporate guru Tom Peters, in the well-titled book Thriving on Chaos, argues that leaders who do not engage in daily public acts of "bureaucracy bashing" are neither doing their job nor displaying loyalty to the corporation. Can oldline Protestant churches be as unabashedly self-critical and daring about institutional failings as Mikhail Gorbachev is in his Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World?

The greatest challenge facing oldline Protestantism today is whether within our life and thought we will welcome movements that buck the currents of establishmentarianism, Christendom and modernity and that call the church to speak once again the "language of dissent" to a culture and church of compliance and consumption. It will not be easy to stop accommodating Christendom and start accommodating both bothersome faith movements -- which are the enemy of complacency -- and nettlesome, nonconformist leaders who pursue vision quests and new religious practices with passionate intensity. An establishment’s most important values are stability and security, rules and regulations. The most important values of a movement, however, are change and innovation, and its most important contribution is that it keep on moving. What organization is to an establishment, mobilization is to a movement. And mobilization threatens establishments.

Will we nurture movements that are neither a division of nor a diversion from the denomination? Will we support a movement’s unity, which is different from the unity of an establishment? Will we find a home in our midst for leaders of faith movements -- the Peter Cartwrights and Frances Willards of the 21st century -- who inspire us by living out the two greatest moral lessons of life: "to hear" (which can produce "martyrs") and "to dare" (which can produce "heroes") ? Will we tolerate servant leaders who are image-breakers as well as image-makers, ridding our denominational system of images that are coarsening and corrupting the church’s soul? Will we encourage leaders who build congregational life around the discernment-of-spirits model of decision-making instead of the majority-rules model, who move forward by engaging in prophecy instead of strategic planning, who embrace the Order of St. Paul and the Order of St. Luke more than the Order of St. Robert?

A vitalized denomination is a church emboldened and empowered by a movement mentality and spirituality. We have come a long way from the catacombs to the basilicas, from the brush arbors to the cathedrals. It is time to explore the catacombs and brush arbors once again, and be gripped by, and restored to, the spirit of high adventure in the Christian life.

God as Santa

Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, "Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from hurt and harm!" And God granted what he asked. (1 Chron. 4:10, NRSV)

Bruce Wilkinson’s The Prayer of Jabez rode the top of Publishers Weekly and the New York Times bestseller lists for many months after its 2000 publication. This little book, easily read within an hour, centers on two short and obscure verses in I Chronicles. In marketing and sales terms, it has been a huge success. The book has not only sold millions but has spun off ancillary markets, including Jabez bracelets, posters, videos and shirts, and who knows how many other commodified talismans. It is safe to assume that hundreds of millions of dollars have been made. Bless me, indeed.

But Christian commercialization is an easy target. Besides, Wilkinson has pumped copious funds into the admirable Bible study program he founded and leads, Walk Thru the Bible Ministries. The back cover of Wilkinson’s book describes Walk Thru the Bible as "an international organization dedicated to providing the finest biblical teaching."

It is on the basis of "biblical teaching" that we would challenge The Prayer of Jabez, for it seriously distorts that teaching. One of the most striking features of Wilkinson’s book is the way the focus on Jabez’s prayer displaces the Lord’s Prayer. Wilkinson rightly mentions the Lord’s Prayer as "the model prayer" for Christians, but mention it is all he does, and only once. Otherwise, those for whom Wilkinson’s book is their first encounter with the Christian faith can only assume that Jabez’s petition is the central or exemplary Christian prayer.

We are told in the preface that this is "a daring prayer that God always answers" and "the key to a life of extraordinary favor with God." We are soon also informed that Jabez’s prayer has "revolutionized [Wilkinson’s] life and ministry the most" and that "the Jabez prayer distills God’s powerful will for your future." By the end of the book we are exhorted to intone the Jabez prayer every morning, to tape a copy of the prayer on our Bible, day-timer or bathroom mirror, and to pray the prayer for our "family, friends, and local church." The Jabez prayer emerges not only as a "key" distillation of God’s will but on the level of practical piety it shoves aside the Lord’s Prayer.

Do we read the Jabez prayer through the Lord’s Prayer, or the Lord’s Prayer through the Jabez prayer! Since the Lord’s Prayer was given as the exemplary pattern of Christian prayer, all other prayer should he shaped by it, not vice versa. Here we will simply note the two different trajectories of the Lord’s Prayer and the Jabez prayer as Wilkinson presents it.

First, the Lord’s Prayer is a corporate prayer. It is prayed in the first-person plural ("Our Father . . . Give us each day our daily bread . . ."). We pray primarily as members of the community of Christ’s followers, where our individual identity, purpose and welfare are nested. Indeed, the scope of the Lord’s Prayer is (most clearly in Matthew’s version) cosmic: the plea is that God’s kingdom come. God’s will be done, "on earth as in heaven." There can be no spiritual cocooning. There is no escaping politics, economics, conflict and other messiness of history.

The Jabez prayer, as set forth by Wilkinson, is markedly individualistic and insulating. The genealogical context in which the prayer appears emphasizes that Jabez is part of a people (Israel) and a particular, complicated history. But Wilkinson lifts Jabez out of that context and presents his words as "principles" and "steps" the 21st-century individual can directly claim and practice. The "you" addressed throughout the book is singular and coached to center the Jabez prayer on individual circumstances: "Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory . . ."

In fairness, Wilkinson discourages using the Jabez prayer for self-aggrandizement, and he defines enlargement of territory in terms of ministerial opportunities -- expanded occasions for evangelism and godly influence. But the individual is put front and center, and in Wilkinson’s examples the individual is always (if incidentally) made more prosperous or comfortable. Individuals should pray for the growth of their stock portfolios and businesses (pp. 31, 46). If the individual prays the Jabez prayer for 30 years, like Wilkinson, he may find himself evangelizing in agreeable circumstances such as cruise ships (pp. 36-39) and cross-country train trips (p. 42). His teenaged children may be protected from bad company (pp. 45-46). He may pray, when a plane is late, that a connecting flight be delayed; and then, perhaps partly to redeem any hardship caused to other fliers, he might witness to a woman traveling to divorce her husband -- a woman who, faced with the unfailing and relentless power of the Jabez prayer, will of course convert and decide to save her marriage (pp. 79-82).

Readers of The Prayer of Jabez may come to imagine God as a cosmic Santa Claus, merrily doling out gifts to any individual who asks. And asks. And asks. Indeed, one illustrative "fable" explicitly puts it in just those terms. A certain Mr. Jones dies and goes to heaven. He finds St. Peter outside an enormous warehouse sheltering the only secrets in heaven -- contained within row after row of "white boxes tied in red ribbons." Just like a child on Christmas morning, Mr. Jones tears open his package, and there he finds "all the blessings that God wanted to give him while he was on earth. . . . But Mr. Jones had never asked."

This Santa-fication of God points to the second difference between the Lord’s Prayer and the Jabez prayer. The Lord’s Prayer, especially with its settings in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, posits a God alien to human, individualistic whims, predilections and comforts. To be sure, this God is expected to give petitioners daily bread, forgiveness from sin and protection from temptation; but this God is not a vague and benignly amorphous dispenser of "blessings" defined on the petitioner’s terms. The God of the Lord’s Prayer is the Father of Jesus Christ, whose "name" or identity is to be honored and who sets the terms of any encounter or graceful engagement. Indeed, meeting and praying to this God will not change God, but will conform those who meet and pray to God’s ways; they will not only be forgiven their own debts, but begin to become people who forgive others who are debtors to them.

The God of Wilkinson’s Jabez prayer never lets a petitioner "come in second"; the God of the Lord’s Prayer knows there are "losers" and never forgets them -- those without wealth, or health or power. Jabez finished his life pleasantly (or, as we will suggest, fat and happy), while he who taught the Lord’s Prayer died on a cross.

Let’s look at the text of the Jabez prayer itself. The ironic playfulness of the text is impossible to preserve smoothly in English translation. Awkwardly but accurately, however, 1 Chronicles 4:9-10 might be rendered as follows:

And it came about that Jabez was more honored/heavier than his brothers. And his mother called his name "Jabez," or "Ouch!," saying, "Because I bore him in pain." Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, "Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from hurt and pain."

That is it for Jabez in the Bible (except for a mention in 1 Chronicles 2:55 of a village called Jabez, where lived the "Kenites who came from Hammath, father of the house of Rechab"). Given this paucity of information, the Jabez prayer truly is obscure. It is hard to say much about it without moving into speculative territory. Freely admitting its opacity, we turn to a close reading of the text.

The Jabez prayer crops up in a lengthy section of rough genealogy. Rather suddenly, at 4:9, the genealogy pauses and Jabez receives attention inordinate to any of the names preceding his. Jabez shows up within the specific genealogy of Judah, the royal house of Israel (1 Chronicles 2:3-4:23). Yet even if we find him within the family line, we should be careful not to make him too important. He does not lie directly and clearly in the royal line. He appears after the main line of the descendants is listed in a continuous family tree branching far into the family of David (2:3-55). Jabez and the rest of the names given in 4:1-23 are not directly linked to the family of David. They are long-lost relatives, belatedly remembered and included in the genealogy, distantly and unclearly related to David within the larger family of Judah. So they are subordinates within the messianic family. They are among the ranks that "serve the king," bit players assigned parts to make the star (David) shine even brighter.

The text also provides Jabez no father, which, within a patrilineal and patriarchal society, allows no shift of focus from the son to the father. Jabez’s brothers and mother are mentioned but not named. In show-business parlance, when it does mention him the text clearly spotlights Jabez. But why?

The only clue to Jabez’s significance within the text itself is the ambiguity of the verb in v. 9 (nkbd) and the pun volleyed between the name "Jabez" (y’b) and "pain" (‘b). The Hebrew root, kbd, can mean either "was honored" or "was heavier" -- or both. The text gives inordinate attention to Jabez, so we will grant that he was honored. It also tells us that Jabez’s birth was especially painful to his mother -- she called him Jabez (y’b –or, in the modern English colloquialism, "Ouch!") to remind her of her pain (‘b), presumably caused by bearing a son heavier than his brothers. To put it bluntly, Jabez was a fat baby.

The double entendre continues in Jabez’s prayer as an adult, "Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from hurt and harm" (‘ b, "my affliction," "my ouch," that is, his obesity). On this reading, Jabez’s corpulent affliction continues into adulthood, meaning lie needs increased amounts of food (and so more arable property) to sustain his girth and, in his anxious and hungry eyes, his very life.

The multivalence of the text may invite us to recall the village or family of Jabez mentioned in 2:55. Perhaps the Judean village of Jabez had an enlarged estimate of itself, gobbling up the surrounding countryside from other villages or families for its own hearty appetite. If so, the text gently mocks the Jabez family’s insatiable hunger while acknowledging, nonetheless, that God heard amid responded for its provision.

With this reading, 1 Chronicles 4:9-10 is something of a comic aside, a brief respite from the genealogies Wilkinson labels "boring!" There is a satirical edge to it. But its punning need not be read as hateful mockery or dismissal. Jabez, as man and as village, may be allowed some real respect (kbd/honor), yet also come in for some affectionate yet revealing ribbing.

Given this interpretation, the Jabez prayer (the Ouch! prayer) may then be taken as an indication that Cod can sometimes bless God’s servants with prosperity. Yet the text simultaneously distances itself from any easy or absolute identification of blessing with earthly wealth and human striving for self-worth and power. Jabez is honorable, to a degree and in a way; we may even take him as a kind of hero. But if he is a hero, he is really a comic hero -- he and his "blessing" of prosperity are not to be taken with final or ultimate seriousness. Were The Prayer of]abez made into a movie, big, adorable funny men (modeled after John Candy or Jackie Gleason) might be perfect for the part. Jabez is certainly likable, but to be admired only with ironic qualification.

Admittedly, this is not a terribly pious reading -- but then the Bible itself is often not too pious. Solely on textual terms, it is hard to make much more of Jabez and his prayer. It is more edifying to read the Ouch! prayer as a wry leavening of scripture than as a motivational mantra or a magical success formula. Besides, the church already has a model prayer.

The Problem with "Under God"

The Supreme Court’s June ruling on whether "under God" should be part of the Pledge of Allegiance passed with relatively little notice, since the case was rejected on procedural grounds. For those who paid attention to the arguments, however, it conclusively exposed the incompatibility of American civil religion with any kind of robust Christianity. If one considers Elk Grove Unified School v. Newdow theologically, with the conviction that God ultimately refers to the Creator-Redeemer met in Israel and Jesus Christ, then the "God" Americans are to pledge their nation to be "under" is at worst an idol and at best the true God’s name taken in vain.

California atheist Michael Newdow originally went to court arguing that the daily recitation of the pledge in his daughter’s public elementary school was an unconstitutional establishment of religion. In 2002, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and found the pledge’s inclusion of the God-phrase unconstitutional. The controversial ruling was appealed and accepted for review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court might then have faced head-on Newdow’s argument that "under God" in the regular recitation of the pledge constituted an endorsement and establishment of religion. But a technical issue arose. Newdow and the girl’s mother, Sandra Banning, had never married and are separated. Banning legally retains primary custody over their daughter, including the final say on her education. On that basis the court ruled that Newdow did not have legal status to bring the case on his daughter’s behalf.

Why should Christians consider the case more closely? First, because the solicitor general who argued the case on behalf of the U.S. government, Theodore Olson, mounted a vigorous case for retaining the God-phrase. This was predictable, since Olson is an appointee of George W. Bush. Besides his awareness of the president’s own personal and political support of "God" in the pledge, Olson could not have been insensitive to the overwhelming support for the phrase among conservative evangelicals, one of Bush’s most powerful and intensely supportive constituencies. We can rest assured, then, that Olson put forth as strong and "Christian-friendly" a case as possible. Its theological assertions and implications are consequently quite significant.

The second reason Newdow deserves close attention is that, although the court did not officially rule on the pledge’s inclusion of the God-phrase, some justices took it upon themselves to argue in favor of it anyway. Their opinions on the case reveal how, in the contemporary U.S., one might legally argue for some reference to "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Like Olson, the justices had to make their arguments in light of U.S. legal history, past and present religious pluralism, and variegated religio-political support of the God-phrase in the pledge. Accordingly, though they set no official precedents on the matter, their reasonings in response to Newdow are theologically telling.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s opinion summarizes the basic attitude underlying the theologically germane aspects of the government’s argument and the court’s response. Mindful of legal and constitutional precedents, Rehnquist knew that the God-phrase must be stripped of theological content to qualify as an admissible declaration in a government-sanctioned pledge. He asserts bluntly that the pledge, with the God-phrase, is not a "religious exercise." The pledge instead "is a declaration of belief in allegiance and loyalty to the United States flag and the Republic that it represents." As a "commendable patriotic exercise," the object of the pledge is to unify and otherwise promote the good of the nation.

It is not just that the pledge as a whole is something other than a "religious exercise" -- no part of it, including the God-phrase, can be a religious exercise. Rehnquist writes, "The phrase ‘under God’ is in no sense a prayer, nor an endorsement of any religion. . ." In reciting the pledge, "participants promise fidelity to our flag and our Nation, not to any particular God, faith, or church."

However the chief justice’s reasoning stands up legally, it is incoherent as a theological statement. Along with the other monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam, albeit in its unique way, Christianity professes that there is only one true and real God. To cite or refer to a "God" who is not the subject or object of "any religion," who is not the "particular God" of any given faith or church, is to introduce a "God" additional to and apart from the "particular" living God of the Christian church. This puts Christians (and other monotheists) in an awkward position, since we worship and acknowledge the existence of one God and one God only.

A related aspect of Rehnquist’s opinion is more coherent but hardly theologically satisfying. He declares that the God-phrase in the pledge is a recognition of America’s history, a history that demonstrably includes, time and again, reference to "God" (Christian or otherwise). As he parses it, "under God" is not in any sense a current, efficacious act of religious devotion; it is rather a historically "descriptive phrase," taking account of the attitudes and beliefs of our ancestors.

Olson, in the government brief, takes a similar tack. He argues that "under God" has no faith or religious content. He is explicit that it does not even affirm "monotheism" but declares only a "belief in allegiance and loyalty to the United States flag and the Republic that it represents." As such it serves – "clearly" and "solely" -- a "secular purpose." Citing former Supreme Court opinions, Olson declares that the reference to the deity "may merely recognize the historical fact [that the U.S.] was believed to have been founded ‘under God."’

In short, the God-phrase in the pledge is not a matter of theology but of historical sociology. It makes no reference to the true or any actual God, but only to the deity (or deities?) Americans once believed in.

Furthermore, the brief makes it clear that the God-phrase does not intend or attempt "communication with . . . the Divine. . . .The phrase is not addressed to God or a call for His presence, guidance, or intervention." In other words if this "God" who is met in no monotheistic faith, who serves a "solely . . . secular purpose" and is located only in the past should somehow attempt to be present, to guide or to intervene in the affairs of those reciting the pledge, that "God" (who sounds rather like the God of the Bible and Christianity) would be distinctly unwelcome.

Note that this is the case put forward by the representative of a strongly "conservative" administration, one deeply sympathetic with American evangelicalism and at least some form of Christian orthodoxy. It is not the argument of an administration indifferent or inimical to traditional faith. Yet the best case it can make for keeping "under God" in the pledge clearly empties the phrase of any substantive theological content. It makes "God" a museum object confined to the dead past and effectively (if inadvertently) posits polytheism in place of monotheism. Not only that, it makes clear that the deity cited in the pledge is appealed to instrumentally, in service of the flag, and has no presence and may offer no guidance. God is put at the service of the flag, not the flag at the service of a real, present and intervening God.

In her opinion Justice Sandra Day O’Connor underscores how the deity is emptied and instrumentalized in and for the pledge. She says the phrase is a "simple reference to a generic ‘God,"’ and is "inconsequential" in any religious weight or effect. Citing formerly wrought judicial language, she calls the reference "ceremonial deism" and pointedly insists that it does not intend to place the speaker or listener in "a penitent state of mind," create "spiritual communion" or invoke "divine aid." The speakers of the pledge refer to a "generic deity" without any expectation or concern that it or any other deity will actually interfere with their own purposes.

Like Rehnquist, Olson and O’Connor would retain the God-phrase in the pledge. But they can do so only by expressly denying that the God here referred to is the God of Israel, met in Jesus Christ. And they can do so only by admitting outright that for such a pledge they want an amorphous "God" who is always and only on the side of the flag and the Republic for which it stands. They frankly argue not for a Christian (or Jewish or Islamic) monotheism, but for what H. Richard Niebuhr called henotheism, that is, loyalty to the "god of my country over all others."

Henotheism in premodern times, according to Niebuhr, centered on clan or tribe. Its pervasive form in the modern world is nationalism. "Nationalism shows its character as a faith whenever national welfare or survival is regarded as the supreme end of life; whenever right and wrong are made dependent on the sovereign will of the nation, however determined; whenever religion and science, education and art, are valued by the measure of their contribution to national existence."

Henotheism is not the theism of any stripe of serious, intentional Christianity -- especially not after the German church’s experience under Nazism. What Olson and O’Connor propose at worst is idolatry -- if they mean to posit a henotheistic and false "God" of the American flag in addition to the one and true living God. At best, if they mean merely to allow or encourage professed Christians to confuse the Living God with the "generic God" propping up the pledge’s "ceremonial deism," they propose a taking of the Lord’s name in vain. Either way lies serious theological error and offense.

Newdow definitively exposes the theological incoherence and dubiousness of "ceremonial deism" in its many forms. American civil religion, and its construction of "God," has necessarily always been a vague, makeshift affair. Though many early Americans surely heard patriotic and public references to "God" as a reference to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of classical Christianity, it is clear that Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin intended the word less specifically, regarding "God" as a more removed, impersonal and deistic entity. The unfolding, increasing pluralism of the U.S. population has meant that national, official references to "God" have had to become more and more plastic and elusive. In today’s America, the word must be stretched to include not only Protestants, Catholics and Jews, but significant numbers of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other citizens representing various world religions. If that is not enough, more than 10 percent of American citizens declare themselves atheistic or otherwise nonreligious. Official references to "God" must be capacious -- or insignificant -- enough not to disenfranchise these citizens.

Short of hanging on to the muddy, vacillating devices of ceremonial deism, Christians appear to face one of two choices. One is the open, deliberate restoration of Christian theocracy. Then the referent of "God" in the pledge would be clear and honest. Some evangelicals and conservative Catholics lean in this direction, but gingerly and equivocatingly, if not disingenuously, because of the sheer in-feasibility of theocracy in a pluralistic America. With most contemporary Christians, I would argue that theocracy is not only politically dangerous but theologically disastrous.

We are on much more solid theological ground if we turn to the other choice. That choice is to recognize what the Bible and such exemplars of the Christian tradition as Augustine have taught us: to see and trust that the church and not any nation-state is preeminently the social agent through which God works God’s will in history. The church catholic stretches throughout the world and is its own "public," crossing the comparatively sectarian boundaries of nation-states. Knowing themselves first of all as "citizens with the saints," Christians may then, like the Babylon-dwelling Israelites counseled by Jeremiah, work and pray for the welfare of the cities (and nations) in which they now dwell, but never confuse those cities with the kingdom for which the church stands.

This means and entails many things. In the case of the pledge it means that atheists should not be alone in hoping to see this "God" dropped from it. Faithful and thoughtful Christians should also want the pledge to be returned to its pre-1954form, and thereby end any pretense of embracing a henotheistic God or cheapening their own faith language.

At the Divine Banquet

According to the claims of classical Christianity, there can be no salvation except through Christ. So what of those who reject or apparently never receive an invitation to join the party? Does God’s generosity, and the generosity of classic Christian spirituality, extend only so far? If spurned, does God turn to spite and everlasting punishment?

Clearly the language of scripture and the tradition can be dramatic and severe on this point. There is in both no little talk of hellfire and God’s implacable wrath. Heard from some distance, such talk often terminates any consideration of God or Christian spirituality as loving, generous and compassionate. But it is such distance -- as well as the church’s own clumsiness and sometime vindictiveness – that is the problem. When we draw a little closer to the tradition, we may see that the (inescapable and significant) doctrines of judgment have a place but can take on a light different from the red glow of hate.

It is affirmed in most if not every quarter of orthodox Christianity that God desires the salvation -- the willing and celebratory personal communion -- of all. This entails the preservation of human freedom. God will never give up on any community or person, but God will not override the rejection of God by any community or person. In the kingdom of God, as in any party, the more the merrier. But full and ultimate salvation really is this personal communion, this divine party. Those who reject the invitation made in Israel and Christ cannot, by the nature of the case, enjoy the party. Thus the call or invitation to the party is enthusiastic and even urgent.

The Christian conviction on this count is like the modern rhetoric about diet and physical exercise. Exactly because our doctors believe we will be better and happier human beings for it, they and others often speak quite urgently and drastically about proper exercise and dieting. They tell us we must mount the exercise bikes and cut out the fatty foods, or die. Of course, we will not die immediately or lose any hope of happiness if we persist with couch vigils and pizzas. But we could have so much more -- fit, energetic bodies and alert minds -- that the couch and pizzas are death by comparison.

On a much greater scale, the invitation to salvation is similar life now and everlastingly in personal communion with the triune God is true and full life. Anything short of it can only be death by comparison. The prophets and apostles speak urgently for a reason.

Drawing closer to the tradition of classical Christian spirituality, we can see that much of the talk of judgment is directed first and foremost at those who have met God in Jesus Christ. In the Old and New Testament alike, the strongest condemnatory language is addressed to other members in the nation of Israel and in the church. Judgment begins "with the household of God" (1 Pet. 4:17). The apostle Paul declares, "What have I to do with judging those outside [the church]? Is it not those inside who you are trying to judge?" (1 Cor. 5:12-13).

Jesus says that the only unforgivable sin is rejection of the Holy Spirit, which the tradition has interpreted to apply to someone who has clearly and explicitly known the fruits and gifts of the Spirit, through Christ, but then perversely -- willfully and deliberately -- denounced and rejected that Spirit (Matt. 12:31).

Salvation in Christ is mediated, through scripture, church and sacraments. We know, to our sorrow, that not all mediations of Christ present him truly and winsomely. European Jews in the mid-20th century saw their parents or children hanged by Christian Nazis. African-American slaves were whipped by Christian masters. Muslims now encounter supposedly Christian attitudes at the point of a gun barrel or through mass media entertainment that seems grossly hedonistic, violent and greedy.

Less dramatically, there are many just across the street from Western churches who often see the Bible wielded against them, as a club to beat them over the head. How fully and accurately have these people encountered Christ? Many are rejecting not so much the real and true Christ as ugly and distorted representations of him -- the Savior of the world obscured in a Frankenstein or Mengelian mask.

Traditional Christian spirituality has accounted or allowed for the possibility of these distortions. So the Bible speaks of God’s patience in delaying the end and day of judgment (2 Pet. 3:8-9). The tradition -- never denying that Christ is the only true light -- has conjectured that the light may get through to many people in some form (such as general revelation) without their knowing exactly how to name or identify it. (Imagine that you had never encountered the electric lamp. Then you do. Its light shines objectively, illuminating you and your surroundings, even as you know nothing about electricity and may name it nothing more accurate than "a really bright torch.")

Yet other orthodox Christians, looking to such texts as 1 Peter 3:18-20, have wondered if there may be a postmortem evangelization or after-death revelation of Christ, with the dead meeting Christ perhaps for the first time and in any event more clearly and truly than during their earthly sojourn, and with the chance to choose for or against communion with him.

Again, these are not newfangled or modern ideas: they arise from deep within the tradition and its commitment to a gracious God and, secondarily, to human freedom. As theologian George Lindbeck recently observed, Christians in the first centuries appear to have had an extraordinary combination of relaxation and urgency in their attitude toward those outside the church. On the one hand, they do not appear to have worried about the ultimate fate of the vast majority of the non-Christians among whom they lived. We hear of no crises of conscience resulting from the necessity they were often under to conceal the fact that they were believers even from close friends or kindred. The ordinary Christian, at any rate, does not seem to have viewed himself as a watchman who would be held guilty of the blood of those he failed to warn (Ezek. 3:18).

Yet, on the other hand, missionary proclamation was urgent and faith and baptism were to them life from death, the passage from the old age to the new, So it is at least plausible to suppose that early Christians had certain unrecorded convictions about how God saves unbelievers and how this is related to belief in Christ and membership in the community of faith.

Theologians speculate that such "unrecorded convictions" may include the sort I have just mentioned, general revelation and postmortem evangelization. In any event, we may rest assured that the early Christians looked first to the love and grace of God and to God’s creation and sustenance of human freedom. Unlike some later Christians, they were not ready to assume they knew all the details of salvation and its extent. It is clear that in terms of assuming God’s judgment on anyone, they worried first and foremost about their own shortcomings.

Nor does classical Christian spirituality assume that there are for the dead only two options: heaven and eternal bliss or a hell of great agony and pain. The doctrine of purgatory demonstrates as much. Dante’s rendering of purgatory is especially instructive, allowing as it does a place for the pagan Virgil. Not only does Virgil fail to suffer great punishment, but he reliably guides the (Christian) pilgrim Dante on his spiritual path, leading him to the threshold of paradise.

More recently the Anglican C. S. Lewis, who like Dante drank deeply at the well of Christian orthodoxy, rendered hell not as an undifferentiated expanse of fiery torture but at least in its outer environs as a lonely place for those who want nothing to do with God or others. Lewis’s picture retains both the love and mercy of a gracious God and the enduring reality of human freedom. Those who insist on separating themselves from God live in isolation. It is hell, but hell as freely chosen isolation rather than hell as torture chamber.

This is not to say that such pictures as Dante’s and Lewis’s rule out a hell of active agony. The residents of Dante’s lowest circles of hell, or of Lewis’s farthest distance from heaven, are those who deliberately habituated themselves to unmitigated evil. They have so distorted their humanity that, inescapably faced with final reality, they can only suffer horribly. To again use the metaphor of light, it is as if they have intentionally and so thoroughly accustomed themselves to darkness that even the faintest and most distant glow of truth burns their eyes.

Dante’s Virgil suggests yet another possibility, quite compatible with orthodoxy, for followers of the great spiritual traditions other than Christianity. (Here I can barely sketch a picture more compellingly presented in S. Mark Heim’s extraordinary book The Depth of the Riches.) As I mentioned, Virgil’s wisdom and goodness are not entirely denied. Virgil has something to teach the Christian pilgrim in the afterlife, even if Virgil himself does not attain the fullness of paradise. Similarly, we need not pretend that the Buddhist or Hindu or holy person of another faith is necessarily stripped of all real wisdom and goodness after death. In earthly life the Hindu, for example, may through grace and discipline come to know something of the reality of God in Christ. She may finally reach an end that is not salvation -- personal communion with the triune God -- but is an-other religious end.

For the orthodox Christian, this end can be seen only as a lesser end or goal than salvation, just as the Hindu would see the Christian’s personal communion as a less mature and full spiritual goal than a monistic unity with the cosmic principle Brahman. But the traditional Christian can affirm real wisdom and insight in the devoted Hindu’s intense awareness and pursuit of impersonal union with the cosmic principle underlying and sustaining reality. After all, Christians understand God not simply as personal and transcendent but also as immanent in creation, undergirding and upholding it by "natural law" or other impersonal means. From the Christian vantage point it is better, of course, to know God more fully and triunely, yet the Hindu may -- in this world and in the coming new world -- have something to teach the Christian about meditation or about God’s willingness to empty God’s self (Phil. 2:5-8).

Far from simply being generous, this view strikes me as an occasion for Christian sobriety and humility. A Gandhi or a Dalai Lama might travel farther and more faithfully on their paths than many Christians have on the way toward Christ. Inasmuch as they have been drawn to a true vision of an aspect of the true God, they can be the Christian’s worthy -- if not final or only -- teachers.

So classical Christian spirituality is and can be generous without relinquishing its convictions and worshipful practices centered on Christ as the unique, only and final Savior of the world. It is the Creator-Redeemer God who sustains the cosmos, whether or not every person in the world consciously knows this. The rain falls and the sun shines "on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matt. 5:45). Christ’s death and resurrection saved and will save the world from self-destruction. At history’s end, the Christian faith and hope could be proven wrong (just as other faiths and philosophies will be proven wrong if creation is consummated in the kingdom of God). Of course, orthodox Christian conviction and practice is not regarded by those committed to it as wrong or false. Classical Christian spirituality is grounded in what its adherents take as objective reality -- objective in the sense of being true whether or not any given person thinks or feels it to be true.

Imagine children raised in a cave, never allowed outside. Unless told, they would know nothing of the sun. Yet the sun would remain an objective reality -- indeed, a very important one -- of their world. The cave-reared children would be aware only of the light and heat of a wood-burning fire, yet it would remain true that the heat of the sun affects the cavern’s temperature. The light and heat of the sun enables the production of earthly oxygen, breathed by and sustaining the children despite their cavernous ignorance.

Likewise, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ have in fact changed the direction of the world, knocking it out of an orbit of perdition into the orbit of life. All, whether they know it or not, are affected by this changed reality. And all who are saved are saved through Christ and Christ’s work. Furthermore, Christians trust that the God met in Jesus Christ is gracious and desires reciprocal love, which means that God honors human freedom (and which in turn means, among other things, that there is a hell). Finally, Christians believe that God alone is judge of any and all -- the eternal destiny of persons is not in human hands. For orthodox Christian spirituality, that much is clear. What exactly happens after death to those who never hear the name of Christ, or those who hear it in a distorted fashion and reject it, is not so clear. I have suggested some possibilities, each deeply rooted in the tradition, so that each honors all the basic, clear truths just mentioned.

I realize some Christians will be made nervous by anything short of a stark assertion that those who accept Christ as Lord and Savior in this life will go to eternal life with God, while those who do not explicitly affirm Christ here and now will go to a hell of strict torment. Among other things, they will worry that any complication of the severely binary picture of human destiny may lessen Christian enthusiasm for evangelism and missions.

I would answer that salvation is much more than a matter of what happens to the individual, disembodied soul after death. Classical Christian spirituality is bodily as well as soulful, social no less than individual, and arrives at eternity not by skipping history and time but by passing through them. If trusting in and following Christ is participation in the healing of the cosmos ("physical" and "spiritual") of a divided world, and of the whole person (body as well as soul), there is every reason to proclaim it immediately and enthusiastically and to invite others to ultimate life and health sooner rather than later.

Imagine this scenario. Fishing in a river, I am drawn into a current and hit my head against a rock. I fall unconscious and am drowning. A woman passing in a canoe sees me go under and rescues me. She saves my life, though I am unaware of this event because I am unconscious. Then I am ashore and breathing and will live another day even though I do not know it at the moment. Now suppose that for one reason or another my rescuer cannot wait until I regain consciousness and must hurry away. When I rouse, I am alive and well, albeit with a knot on my head. This will remain a fact whether or not I ever learn the identity of my rescuer. My very life proves that I have been rescued. Footprints and mud flattened by a dragged body (as well as the knot on my head) prove that the accident and the rescue were no dream. Someone saved me. But who? Profoundly, I will want to thank my rescuer. It will only enhance my joy to see and know her. Here ignorance is not bliss -- my gratitude will only be enlarged and completed if I know my rescuer. On this count I would rather not remain agnostic.

To get closer to the Christian understanding of salvation, we need to enrich the picture. Suppose that I come from a race of folk who dwell on an island. Suppose I and my people have known only this island. We have feared leaving it because the river surrounding it is huge, and we have thought that the whole world consisted of our island and the river. In our fear and fragmentary knowledge we have never learned how to swim or how to build canoes. There are vague rumors about sightings of canoeists, who my people have seen as creatures with a single long, flat wooden leg gliding across the river’s surface. Some dismiss these as delusional myths or hallucinations, while others wonder if the wooden-legged gliders are gods from another world.

Like a Hollywood screenwriter, let us add another twist or complication to the plot. Not only have my people believed that our island is all of the world. Not only have we failed to learn how to swim or build canoes. In addition, the river is rising and our island is flooding. Some have responded to the river’s rising with fervent supplication to our gods. Others, the more fatalistic among us, simply try to live for today and today only. What is unknown to us is that there is, just beyond eyesight, not simply another island but an entire continent, and that there are dwellers on other (unknown) islands who have discovered the continent and have learned how to swim, how to build canoes, and much else.

If all this is the case, knowing my rescuer is all the more urgent and worthwhile. Not only can I thank her and live in a manner worthy of her efforts, but she can teach me (and my people) how to swim, how to build canoes, how to navigate the river. She can even, from her people’s advanced explorations, tell us of the teeming continent, an "island" bigger than our river, a whole other world. In our fears and limitations, it will be a while before we can visit the continent. But following and learning from the rescuer, some of us, bold and most learned in canoe building and handling, occasionally catch glimpses of it -- and of its stupendous promises and joys.

Christ and his salvation are somewhat like this analogy. Our world (our island) is sinking. Our rescuer enables all of us to escape to another island and live now. Our rescuer not only saves us to breathe another day but deepens and extends that salvation by teaching us how to swim and catch glimpses of another and greater world. Christ’s salvation is eternal life ultimately for a renewed, perfected heaven and earth -- a bounteous continent at which we may someday arrive. But it is also incipient eternal life now, in this day and age. Learning how to swim and build canoes will fit us for life on the continent and indeed enable us to arrive there. But it will also serve well and profoundly now, on the island of our limitations.

Venturing to other islands before we arrive at the continent, the new and mended world, we meet others who can teach us a thing or two. Our community of life will grow and deepen and take on unanticipated shades of beauty. We will hope the best for all we meet, even if they do not join our community now. Above all, we will rejoice that we have been saved, body and soul. The birds fly in a bigger sky. The dappled fish drift in a river lapping on its other side against the banks of a renewed and undying world.

All this, because the Word became flesh and tented among us.

The Appeal of the Da Vinci Code

The word truthiness was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society. It was also recognized by the New York Times as one of nine words defining the spirit of the age.

But in fact (Is there still such a thing as "fact"? Do we care?), truthiness has been around since the 19th century. It was not, as some might think, invented last year by television comedian Stephen Colbert. Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. did re-coin the term to spoof the way politicians and TV pundits insist that what they feel and want to be true must be treated as true, all contrary evidence be damned.

It is the zeitgeist of truthiness that best accounts for the extraordinary success of The Da Vinci Code. Many clever thrillers are best sellers, but the success of Dan Brown’s novel -- a 43-million-copy best seller about to debut as a motion picture -- is so phenomenal that it bears some reflection.

In a culture supersaturated with information, overwrought with shrill grabs at our attention, overstimulated by media of many kinds, none of us is immune to the allure of truthiness. Besides receiving the usual torrent of books, movies, radio voices, television shows, magazines and newspapers, modern searchers for truth must now take into account the World Wide Web, 24/7 news shows, 200-channel cable TV systems, videogaming, DVDs and iPods. It’s tiring to keep up with even a few of these media. Our attention is stretched thin and largely confined to the surface. As we shoot the thundering, ever-rolling tube of hypermedia, we are often forced back on our intuition, on some reflexive sense of what "feels true."

Enter Brown’s novel in March 2003. With the benefit of hindsight we can say that The Da Vinci Code got noticed not only because of able marketing by the publisher, Doubleday, but because the book profoundly played into the manic milieu of truthiness.

Two of Brown’s previous best sellers were technothrillers that also delved into arcane worlds -- computer encryption in one instance, space science in the other. The books were praised for Brown’s apparently thorough research into realms that very few readers knew but that were of some importance to their everyday lives. All laptop-using readers of Digital Fortress could relate to concerns about the security of computer transmissions. And readers of Deception Point had seen televised NASA rocket launches and knew about the search for life on other planets. Whether or not the books were accurate, they seemed plausible and "truthy" to nonexperts.

If science gave Brown’s books a reader-magnetizing air of real-world gravity, he soon discovered that religion would serve that end even more dramatically. Built into the plot of The Da Vinci Code is the thesis that the founder of the world’s most populous and arguably most powerful religion did not actually die on a cross, but survived, married Mary Magdalene and sired children. Controversy was guaranteed.

The book was assured more attention amid the ambiance of a fresh round in the culture wars. In the oversimplified binaries of that confrontation, some conservative Christians felt that their country had been taken away from them and that their faith was under attack, while some secularists felt under their feet the rumble of Inquisitorial dungeons and feared full-blown theocracy whenever Christianity assumed a public presence or influence. The anxiety and urgency of a post-9/ll world made it all the easier to tap into the desperate fears and hopes of these warring parties. Nerves were kept frayed with the conoversy over Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, released in Lent a year after The Da Vinci Code hit bookshelves.

Pastors say that the parishioners most drawn to The Da Vinci Code tend to be ex-Catholics or people who otherwise think they have reason to be suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church. As a Connecticut pastor put it, Brown’s depiction of conniving bishops and assassin monks rings true to those who "always knew the church was lying to us." A pastor in Ohio commented that the novel appeals to those "who feel the Catholic Church harbors something shady in its depths."

A scan of the 3,068 (!) customer reviews of the novel at Amazon.com substantiates this impression. Perhaps most poignantly, one reader who read the book in light of the pedophilia scandals and the church’s early secrecy about them says, tentatively but tellingly: "With all that is going on in the Catholic Church today, it makes you wonder if some of the fiction is actually true."

Of course it is a real leap from sex scandals and bureaucratic mismanagement to the argument that the Catholic Church will go to murderous lengths to stifle evidence that contradicts its teaching, and that the church’s highest officials do this cynically, knowing that the faith is a fraud. (In the end, the novel cops out on this point anyway. The scholar-detective hero. Robert Langdon, never locates the proof that is dangled like a carrot throughout the book.)

But in a culture of truthiness, actual evidence or contrary details are readily ignored. And for most readers, the world of faith and the academic study of Christianity is as exotic as that of South Sea Islanders. They aren’t struck by the fact that Harvard employs no "symbologists" like Langdon and that no such discipline exists. Readers may well be impressed by Brown’s claim that he relied on 39 books. His research is hardly adequate by academic standards, but repeatedly readers and reviewers have commented on Brown’s thorough research.

The Da Vinci Code covers a lot of ground, not only in theology and Christian history but in the specialized worlds of art history, cryptography, architecture and police procedure. For many readers, it is sufficient that it covers this ground engagingly, and in a manner that seems plausible. "Remember that novels are supposed to tell stories that just might be true, not stories that are 100 percent certainly true," exhorts one Amazon customer reviewer. ‘Whether the description of the art in this book is accurate . . . does not matter, avers another. "What matters is that Brown managed to take something that coulda, mighta, maybe happened, and made sense." A third exults, "I loved this book because it makes history (false or not) very VERY interesting. . . . It’s about history and the church, but it’s actually interesting." (Who would have imagined it -- the church, actually interesting?)

Many readers of the novel have noted how much it seems made for the movies. Truthiness, as already observed, dwells on the surface of things, and film does so as well, often marvelously and enrichingly. The Da Vinci Code is highly cinematic and suited to surfaces in a number of ways. It is plot-driven, propelled by external events and visible action. The entire hyperventilating story occurs within the span of a single day. This compressed time span lends an air of great urgency, as in television shows such as 24.

Other than exercising memory, which is displayed in the highly cinematic form of flashbacks, the novel’s characters exhibit practically no interior dimensions. In addition, the chapters are exceedingly short -- often three pages or fewer. They resemble the rapid. short scenes and cuts popularized by MTV and prevalent in many Hollywood movies. The chapters, like the old movie serials, almost always end with cliffhangers. propelling the reader forward -- especially when each chapter is so brief. You may be busy, but it’ll only take a few minutes to read to the next revelation.

There’s also a tourism angle. The action occurs in photogenic locations such as Paris, and the plot hinges on visual clues to be ferreted out of famous paintings and statues. Readers now carry the book along on their visits to the Louvre and Westminster Abbey. A special edition of the novel with color art and photography has been produced. Those who spend much more time with film and television than with books have found The Da Vinci Code exceedingly congenial.

To introduce a final cinematic aspect of the novel, consider this observation by film critic David Thomson: "If books are about the possibility or potential of meaning, films are about disclosure, revelation, appearance." Film "is a medium most acute when fixed on what happens next; whereas literature, sooner or later, is about the meaning behind events."

What is key here is not just Thomson’s note that the cinematic fixes on "what happens next," but his emphasis that its attraction abides in disclosure, on revelation of what was secret and hidden. In its parts and as awhole, The Da Vinci Code is all about the striptease of truthiness, the seductive (apparent) solving of puzzles in a world that otherwise is frustratingly obscure and opaque. In this regard, the novel resembles another literary phenomenon of our times, the Left Behind series, which rests on the thrill of decoding the Bible by way of dispensational theology.

Dan Brown’s novel has played perfectly into a culture that stays close to the surface, to the cinematic, to the allure of truthiness. However much it consumes our attention at the moment, The Da Vinci Code is a sand castle on the beach, one that will soon erode and melt from view, subjected to the waves of information and stimulation that ceaselessly beat the shores of our hypermediated culture. The far more pressing challenge, and the one that will not soon go away, is how the church can faithfully serve its mission of witnessing to enduring truth in a world more and more susceptible to truthiness.

Catholics, Anabaptists and the Bomb

The bomb paradoxically represents both humanity’s limitless ingenuity and its all too-limited ability to protect itself from the effects of that ingenuity. Perhaps this accounts for the strange things that many people do and say regarding nuclear weapons. It is strange that military strategists try to be sane and sober about the business of building and maintaining a defense strategy that they self-consciously label MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) It is strange that Americans profess a compassion for Russians deprived of human rights and then claim to promote the same Russians’ human rights by aiming missiles at them. And it is truly strange that, in face of the nuclear peril, some Roman Catholics are beginning to sound like Anabaptists.

The evidence for the latter is a recent book, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism (Oxford University Press) , co-authored by John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, Jr., and Germain Grisez, three Catholic thinkers. Finnis summarizes the argument of the book in a recent essay in the New Oxford Review, "Nuclear Deterrence, Christian Conscience, and the End of Christendom." Reduced to its essence in this essay, the argument is strikingly similar to the position of Mennonite John Howard Yoder, today’s leading proponent of Anabaptist thought.

Finnis begins his New Oxford Review essay by quoting Jacques Maritain on the "normal" hope of Christians for a new Christendom. For Maritain, the temporal mission of the church has as "its most comprehensive aim the ideal of building either a better or a new Christian civilization." But Finnis disputes this mission. He considers it a "philosophical and theological mistake," at least for our place and time. "The facts" convince him that at present a new Christendom, even in highly religious America, "is firmly blocked."

Later Finnis clarifies what he sees as the necessary as well as viable mission of contemporary Christians. "Society and polity are never identical with the church," he explains. In fact, "only the church has a comprehensive goal -- the kingdom of God, which is not of this world, though it is in this world such that its materials are assembled and the divine construction of it mysteriously begins." Thus Christians cannot depend on a general human ethics, or any ethics surreptitiously promoting the "future of whichever worldly society or state one happens to be concerned for." Instead, "there is a specifically Christian ethics because there is a specifically Christian horizon -- the kingdom and its building up by choices to follow in the way of the Lord Jesus."

Finnis’s basic orientation, then, leads him to shift the locus of Christian mission from society as a whole to the church. Like Yoder, he focuses on the church because he sees the church as the unique witness to God’s kingdom. In The Christian Witness to the State Yoder calls it idolatrous to think that a "given civilization or nation is the bearer of the meaning of history." Rather the church, "as aftertaste of God’s loving triumph on the cross and foretaste of His ultimate loving triumph in His kingdom," has been given that task. Moreover, as Yoder puts it in The Politics of Jesus, the church "is the primary social structure through which the gospel works to change other structures."

Accordingly, Yoder agrees with Finnis that "there is a specifically Christian ethics." For Yoder, Jesus is "normative for a contemporary Christian social ethic." As a faithful Catholic, Finnis has probably not given up on any and all formulations of natural law. But he concurs with Yoder in that he affirms a uniquely Christian ethics based on the revelation "consummated in Christ."

Consequently Finnis can view nuclear deterrence with little sympathy. For one thing, Christians have a specific end to their ethics -- witnessing to the kingdom of God, never absolutizing a nation or national principles. For another, certain intentions are true to that end, while others are not. Much of Finnis’s essay is devoted to a demonstration that intentions matter and that intentions in the case of nuclear deterrence are thoroughly non-Christian.

Finnis asserts that it is impossible to plan to light even a limited nuclear war "without threatening one’s adversaries with indiscriminate mass slaughter should they overstep the limits." He cites annual reports made to Congress by the secretary of defense to show this is the case and he recounts a statement by President Reagan on behalf of the Strategic Defense Initiative, confirming that at present "our only real defense" remains "a policy of mutual destruction and slaughter of civilians." (Senator William L. Armstrong [R., Colo.], speaking for SDI to a gathering of evangelicals in 1983, also boldly declared, "Every possible Christian value that bears on this subject seems to me violated by reliance on our current strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction.")

Finnis recognizes that some Christians attempt to make nuclear deterrence palatable by arguing that it is only a bluff, a "threat that is not backed up by any corresponding intention, choice, or willingness." He is signally unimpressed by this claim. "Few, save Christians, ever seriously advance this notion." Even granting that a particular president is personally bluffing and would never press the nuclear button, those who design, build and sit ready to deploy nuclear weapons are not bluffing. Engineers have not, after all, intentionally designed bombs that would never actually detonate and technicians have not placed dummy warheads in missiles. These people and others, as links in the nuclear chain, can choose "only to do now, or not to do now, their bit for the effecting of the proposal, the maintenance of the system, the performance of the vast and ongoing public act."

Finnis’s response is multipronged and again mirrors Yoder’s position. First, Finnis asserts that some means are simply beyond the pale of Christian conduct. Christians are always to consider how their choices bear on the national commonweal, "knowing that they can make no choice which participates in or itself supports a policy which, though indispensable for securing that common good against terrible disruption and damage by foreign, unjust, and anti-Christian forces, is simply excluded from Christian life because murderous." Similarly, Yoder believes the church’s witness to its faith will be visible in, among other ways, "her refusal to use means unfitting to her ends." For Yoder, "unfitting" includes any exercise of violence, let alone nuclear warfare.

Finnis next argues that consequences and their concomitant goods and evils are notoriously difficult to compare. "The attempts of philosophers to assess objectively the goods and bads involved in the alternative options -- maintaining the deterrent at the risk of nuclear holocaust, or renouncing it with the probability of unjust subjugation -- have made it plain that there is no balance, no metric, to give rational form to the hazy metaphor of balancing human goods and harms of such radically disparate kinds." Furthermore, sophisticated moderns too easily forget how little control human beings actually have over consequences. Finnis reminds his readers that consequentialist ethics originated in the "hubris of the Enlightenment," when "men began to forget that providence is God’s," and he suggests that "consequentialist methods of Christian moral judgment confuse human responsibility with God’s."

Likewise, one of Yoder’s most prominent themes is the illusion of human control over the course of history. Christian faithfulness, "guided by the kind of man Jesus was, . . . must cease to be guided by the quest to have dominion over the course of events. We cannot sight down the line of our obedience to the attainment of the ends we seek." Indeed, "the Christian community is the only community whose social hope is that we need not rule because Christ is Lord."

For Finnis and Yoder, it is imperative that Christians not simply assess and calculate the results of actions but recognize that intentions and actions affect the kind of people they are and will become. Finnis writes, "Our choices do not merely shape states of affairs in the world but also shape and constitute our character." And Yoder concurs: "We are marching to Zion because, when God lets down from heaven the new Jerusalem prepared for us, we want to be the kind of persons and the kind of community that will not feel strange there."

Finnis and Yoder do not possess unanimity on every point concerning nuclear deterrence. Finnis, a just-war theorist, thinks a "mere accident of technology" has put the church at such stark odds with the surrounding society; the pacifist Yoder considers the church mistaken to have ever thought it was not radically at odds with the ways of the world.

Either way, it is remarkable that the vicissitudes of history have brought proponents of two such contradistinctive Christian traditions into concordance about the church’s mission in the latter days of the second millennium.

In The Priestly Kingdom Yoder writes, "We call a nonviolent man ‘Lord’ and in his name rekindle the arms race. We call a poor man ‘Lord’ and with his name on our lips deepen the ditch between rich and poor. We call ‘Lord’ a man who told us to love our enemies and we polarize the globe in the name of Christian values, approving of ‘moderate repression’ as long as it is done by our friends. The challenge of civil religion is not a fact, to which we could choose whether to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’; it is an agenda. Is God, above all, our help? or are we God’s servants?"

In equally bracing words, Finnis concludes his essay with a quotation from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. "It is time that the Christian reacquire the consciousness of belonging to a minority and of often being in opposition to what is obvious, plausible and natural for that mentality which the New Testament calls. . . the ‘spirit of the world.’ It is time to find again the courage of nonconformism, the capacity to oppose many of the trends of the surrounding culture.

Finnis’s argument is not taking the Roman Catholic Church by storm. Most Catholics will find its corollary -- unilateral disarmament -- unpalatable, to say the least. Yet neither Finnis nor his Nuclear Deterrence coauthors Boyle and Grisez are extremists. All three are orthodox Catholics; Grisez has established a solid reputation as a careful ethicist and Finnis serves on the Pontifical Theological Commission convened by the Vatican. Though it is too early to predict the ramifications of their argument, it remains significant that mainstream Catholic thinkers are making an argument with unmistakable Anabaptist echoes.