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Plato was Wrong (Jn. 1-1-9, 10-18)

Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that "Plato was a bore," but this snooty remark merely confirms the madman’s madness.’ Alfred North Whitehead concluded, boring or not, that "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

In the voice of his master Socrates, Plato bestowed upon his intellectual descendants the branches of speculative philosophy. In the Phaedo, his great discourse on the immortality of the soul, Socrates asserts (while slowly dying of poison), "I cannot imagine anything more self-evident than the fact that absolute beauty and goodness and all the rest . . . exist in the fullest possible sense." Ever since, Westerners have pondered whether these absolute things do exist -- and what that could possibly mean. In the same dialogue, Socrates wonders, "Is there any certainty in human sight and hearing, or is it true, as the poets are always dinning into our ears, that we neither hear nor see anything accurately?" Philosophers have argued ever after whether sensory input aids or arrests the quest for knowledge.

Socrates has no doubts about what puts the distance between him and the pure knowledge of pure being for which he longs. It’s his body. His soul is always being led astray in its search for truth, because his body attracts distractions. Socrates lists them: "diseases which attack and hinder us in our quest for reality. . . . The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense. . . . Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires."

The prospect of gaining anything like true knowledge of absolute things is pretty meager. Reflection, the pure thought of the soul, might get us there. But it means that "we must get rid of the body." Such an effort in this life will be partial at best, as long as we are "contaminated with this imperfection." Whether we like it or not, "the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead." This is the optimistic view, by the way -- that the soul released upon death will be able to acquire knowledge -- because the alternative is that we’ll never know anything really real at all.

Meanwhile, we should "avoid . . . all contact and association with the body, except when they are absolutely necessary, and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it until God gives us deliverance." Purity of life secures access to purity of truth. Socrates insists: there is no other way.

Enter John the evangelist. He is trying to describe an event, an advent, an epiphany without parallel in the history of the cosmos. A being of absolute beauty and goodness has been made manifest upon the earth. He could be seen -- heard -- touched. He spoke directly of the singular truth. He was indeed pure: a spotless lamb. How to describe such a being? To call him simply a man is to fail to recognize him for who he truly is. There’s no other word for it: he is the Logos.

As any philosophically educated Greek of the time knew, "Logos" doesn’t just mean "word" in a literal or even in a lively metaphorical sense. It’s more along the lines of "the rational principle of the universe." It’s the underlying pattern of the cosmic fabric, the warp and weft by which all things hang together. It’s why things make sense -- the reason cause follows effect -- the law of noncontradiction -- the creative mind that accounts for why there is something rather than nothing. Because the Logos is, everything else is too. Above change, beyond time, outside of space: prepositions break down in the face of the Logos. It’s the first and final cause of the whole created world.

Now John describes this unique person of his as the Logos. More specifically, he claims that "the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us." If anyone ever wanted to dream up something that would be foolishness to the Greeks, John has outdone him. What he is saying is preposterous. It’s like saying "the circle became square" or "infinity became zero." It can’t become the latter while still remaining the former. More to the point, it’s like saying, "Purity became filth and dwelt among us." It’s not only absurd; it’s offensive. The Logos would never, ever saddle itself with a distracting, misleading body. That would defeat the whole purpose of being the Logos, and would permanently destroy any chance at true knowledge. By Plato’s standards, John couldn’t possibly be right.

Of course, John isn’t the only one to disagree with Plato. A certain student by the name of Aristotle did too. Lacking his master’s certainty in absolute forms without any substance, delighted with all the things he could discover by his senses, Aristotle became the first empiricist, by an large indifferent to anything he couldn’t hear, smell or feet The body is the real house of the soul, he insisted, an nothing gets to the soul -- not pure knowledge and not any thing else -- without the vital mediation of the flesh. If you can’t see it, how do you know it’s really there?

Proposing a solution that neither Plato nor Aristotle could have foreseen, John the evangelist agreed with the both. Knowing requires seeing (and the disciple Thomas in John’s Gospel knew that better than anyone else). The knowledge of absolute beauty, goodness and truth -- in other words, knowledge of the person of God -- is difficult because "no one has ever seen God." So how do we know God’s out there? Because the Logos became flesh. "It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known." Now we’ve seen him; now we know.

A Pro-Lifer’s Critique of Bush

When my son David was born in 1967, fathers were not allowed in the delivery room. So I posted myself outside the delivery-room door and prayed. My wife, Dot, had had German measles (rubella) in the early months of her pregnancy. She was a pediatrics nurse, so she and I were aware of the damage that German measles could cause to the developing fetus. When the pediatrician came out, he told me that David had heart problems and solid cataracts in both eyes. Later we learned he had brain damage.

That was six years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion and, in turn, triggered the modern pro-life movement. For our part, Dot and I all along had a sense of the value of the child that she was carrying. And we had hope that we could cope.

We got amazing help from so many people! The doctor and nurses who did the surgery when David’s heart failed at the age of one month. A church member who located a coworker at the American Printing House for the Blind to teach us how to raise a blind son. The outstanding teachers at Perkins School for the Blind (where Helen Keller’s teacher was trained) who gave David (and us) special schooling for three years while I was at Harvard. The teachers of United Cerebral Palsy School of the Bluegrass who provided two more years of special schooling while Dot and I were teaching at Berea College. David’s teachers in elementary school who gave up their break times each day to give him special instruction. The many teachers at Kentucky School for the Blind. The members of Crescent Hill Baptist who gave a handicapped boy a lot of hugs.

David now has a BA. and MA. in German and a certificate from the University of Mainz. He translates theological articles and books from German to English for graduate students and professors (he is visually handicapped, but he can read, and he’s gifted in language).

Dot went to work as a nurse in a high school for pregnant teenagers. The school offered child care, medical care, training in nutrition and child care, and the help of social workers -- all so that the girls’ pregnancies would not stand in the way of staying in school and developing careers.

My pro-life commitments are deep. But so is my awareness that parents need help in raising children.

Indeed, abortion rates are influenced by economic and social conditions. Two-thirds of women who abort say they cannot afford a child.

During the 1990s, as unemployment steadily decreased and average real income rose, the annual number of abortions in the U.S. actually decreased by 300,000 -- from 1,610,000 to 1,310,000 per year. But in 2002, the first full year of the Bush presidency, abortions increased in the 16 states for which I could find data by a total of 5,855. If the data from the rest of the nation fit that pattern, abortions increased nationwide in 2002 by about 24,000 a year, reversing the dramatic decreases of the 1990s.

Surely that increase reflects economic and social conditions. During the past three years, unemployment rates increased half again, average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation.

Over 80 percent of women who abort are unmarried. Increased unemployment means fewer marriages, since men who are jobless usually do not marry; in the 16 states whose data I surveyed, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before.

Women who become pregnant worry about having health care for themselves and their children. There are 5.2 million more people today who have no health insurance than there were in 2000 -- and women of childbearing age are over represented in that group.

Poor and low-income women account for the majority of abortions. Their economic status is a major contributor to the abortion rate. Black and Latina women tend to be poorer and are more often unemployed, and their abortion rates are two to three times higher than those for white women. The 30-year trend shows abortion rates moving roughly in tandem with women’s unemployment rates.

The abortion rate reported by the Centers for Disease Control stayed steady at 24 or 23 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age from 1978 through 1992 (the last year of Bush the elder’s administration), but then dropped dramatically to 17 per 1,000 by 1998 (the fifth year of the Clinton administration), as the unemployment rate also dropped dramatically. But in 1996 Clinton signed the bill phasing out welfare to families with dependent children. The U.S. Catholic bishops warned that a decrease in support for families would undermine efforts to prevent abortions, and indeed the abortion rate did not decrease again until 2000, when it dropped to 16. (CDC Web-posted data does not go beyond 2001.)

So is the recent increase in the abortion rate Bush’s fault? His supporters might point out that the 9/11 attacks hurt the economy; that the recession that hit in March of 2001, his first year, probably really began earlier; and that the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against terrorism have further weakened the economy.

True, perhaps. But throughout his election campaign of 2000 Bush proposed policies that would give permanent tax breaks mostly to the wealthy, leading the nation into a deeper deficit than in the Reagan-Bush years. (The 12 years of Reagan-Bush quadrupled the national debt of $1 trillion to $4 trillion. Now after just four years of the second Bush, Congress has had to increase the debt ceiling to $8 trillion.) This threat of exploding deficits was unsettling for the value of the dollar, and for investors, months before the recession in March 2001.

Again and again the Bible teaches that God’s judgment falls on nations that do injustice to the poor. Speaking judgment is not always welcomed, as the prophets experienced, but we need to face the truth. When the national income is shifted from the broad consumer base to the very wealthy, the broad consumer base has less to spend, so the economy lags.

During the Reagan presidency, taxes were cut drastically on the very wealthy, the minimum wage was not raised to keep up with inflation, job-training programs and supports for the working poor were cut, and real wages for all people decreased. The economy slowed to an average of only 3.1 percent growth during the Reagan presidency and 1.4 percent during the first Bush presidency. During the Clinton presidency the minimum wage was finally raised and the tax rate for high incomes was raised a little so the national debt could start being paid back. The economy grew an average of 4.3 percent per year. A scripturally shaped economics should celebrate that the poor had a little more to spend on necessities.

But during the first four George W Bush years the economy grew only by about 1 percent. The lag was not caused by 9/11. The recession preceded 9/11, and after 9/11 we had a recovery for six months, but then the economy sank back again to almost recession levels (0.6 percent). Economic policy in the slow-growth years of Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 was trickle-down: income was shifted dramatically to the very wealthy, while the real wages of the broad consumer base dropped. Consumers are two-thirds of the economy: they had less to spend, poverty increased dramatically -- and abortions increased.

Ron Sider wrote of George W. Bush’s second tax cut: "The overall impact is so obviously slanted toward the rich that the House had to abandon the bipartisan approach . . . and use the tiny Republican majority. . . to pass the bill by a mere two votes. Democrats, rightly, were furious. One would think that the huge Bush tax cut passed this spring and strongly skewed to helping the richest would have been enough unfairness for one year. But apparently not." This is not just an economic issue; it is an issue of moral fairness.

The National Institutes of Health recently reported the shocking news that the infant mortality rate increased in 2002. Never in the past 60 years has the infant mortality rate increased. This is another sign of the eroding support for prospective mothers and their babies.

Belgium and Holland have the lowest abortion rates in the world (6.8 and 6.5 per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 1996, compared with 22.9 in the US). This is because, though abortion is legal, those countries provide strong support for mothers and babies. By contrast, countries in Latin America, where abortion is illegal but mothers are not well supported, have among the highest abortion rates. (These Guttmacher Institute data for the U.S. are three points higher than the CDC data because of different methods of collection.)

During the campaign I sought to persuade John Kerry to adopt a more pro-life position on abortion. I still want to persuade Democrats to advocate policies that make abortions as rare as possible. I have also sought and am still seeking to persuade President Bush to shift his policies to support mothers and thereby reverse the increase in abortions.

There is much common ground that both camps can occupy on abortion. Surely both parties want to decrease the number of abortions dramatically -- if they care about justice, about parents, about babies, about life.

The pro-life position needs to be accompanied by a "motherhood mandate": economic support for mothers, parents and babies; help with better schools, including schools for pregnant teenagers like the one where Dot taught; health insurance for all mothers and babies; a minimum wage indexed for inflation and tax credits for the working poor so that those who work full time are not still living in poverty; and partially paid leave from work for one parent during a baby’s first year, when healthy attachment to a parent is so important for lifelong psychological health. Every European nation that I know of gives new mothers paid leave, and their abortion rates are far lower than ours. We are so much richer. We can afford it -- if we know what biblical justice really means.

Behind Pinochet’s Reign of Terror

Book Review:

The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. By John Dinges. New Press, 288 pp.

The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. Edited by Peter Kornbluh. New Press, 528 pp.

 

Visiting Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile, left me with much the same chill I felt at Dachau, the former Nazi concentration camp outside Munich. Under dictator General Augusto Pinochet the Chilean military tortured some 4,500 people at Villa Grimaldi. A guide shows visitors the spot where military vehicles drove over the legs of prisoners. Mock-ups of wooden boxes that held as many as six prisoners each, the swimming pool into which detainees were dunked, and a replica of the tower used as a torture chamber and extermination center are all on display. The Muro de los Nombres lists the names of the 226 people killed or "disappeared" by the military at the villa.

In the late 1990s the Chilean government, once again a democracy, responded to the demands of human rights activists by allowing the villa to be restored and converted into a peace park for quiet reflection on the horrors of authoritarianism. But 15 years after Pinochet’s exit from power the campaign for human rights is anything but quiet. The publication of these two books on his regime and other new information emerging from the U.S. and Chile have reignited the debate over Pinochet’s role in the abuses, reopened old wounds, and revealed a repressive system far more extensive than anyone had previously estimated.

John Dinges puts the Pinochet regime into an international perspective and signals again the need for atonement for the many versions of Villa Grimaldi that the U.S. quietly ignored during the highly repressive Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s. Dinges argues that the United States had detailed information about terrorist assassination plots on its own soil and elsewhere in the Americas but did nothing to stop them. Instead of saving lives, it preferred to coddle Pinochet and other dictators because they were allies in the fight against world communism. The Condor Years is a cautionary tale that urges us to think more carefully about the current battle against terrorism.

Dinges refers to the crusade of Pinochet and other Latin American dictators against revolutionary guerrillas as "the first war on terrorism." In Chile it began on September 11, 1973, with Pinochet’s overthrow of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. As Dinges states, the Chilean and Argentine military leaders who leveled a dirty war against their own people, killing and disappearing thousands, received technical assistance and "strategic leadership" from the U.S. Worse yet, U.S. officials had intimate political and operational relationships with the people involved in the atrocities. Though this revelation is not new, Dinges’s careful documentation demonstrates more convincingly than ever that the U.S. government could have intervened to stop right-wing terrorism.

Dinges’s book is not an ideological attack on Pinochet but a fair, balanced, painstakingly researched piece of historical journalism. He accepts the conclusion of an official government report that the U.S. "worked to undermine Allende’s democratically elected government . . . but had no direct role in the military coup itself." He points to the courageous attempts of some U.S. government officials to warn their superiors about the atrocities of Operation Condor, the dictators’ politically most explosive antisubversive organization. He recognizes that the U.S did not have the power to halt the slaughter completely. Dinges also offers a rare and detailed portrait of the violent left’s attempt to unite forces from various countries into a Revolutionary Coordinating Junta, an ambitious but flawed initiative to spread guerrilla warfare throughout the region. The junta served as a major pretext for Condor and for U.S. tolerance of atrocities.

Dinges’s main achievement is to deconstruct what has amounted to a 30-year cover-up of U.S. involvement with Chile and Operation Condor. He reconstructs Condor’s history by mining previously secret documents from both the U.S. and South America, as well as interview data from more than 200 people, including Colonel Manuel Contreras, head of Chile’s brutal spy agency, DINA.

Led by Contreras in Chile and backed by Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia and, to a lesser extent, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru, Condor began with the blessing of the U.S. It conducted cross-border kidnappings of alleged subversives and carried out assassination attempts against both the violent and nonviolent opponents of the dictatorships. Condor’s activities stretched across South America and into Europe and the U.S. Right-wing Cuban exiles and Italian terrorists joined the organization. DINA and Condor men killed Pinochet opponent General Carlos Frats and his wife, tortured and murdered scores of top guerrilla leaders from several countries, and gunned down Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton in the streets of Rome, leaving him seriously wounded and his wife crippled. Condor also considered murdering U.S. Congressman Edward Koch (later mayor of New York) because of his opposition to U.S. military aid to the Uruguayan dictatorship.

In the most notorious attack, former Allende cabinet member Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, were killed in a September 1976 car bomb explosion in Washington, D.C -- in Dinges’s words, "the most egregious act of foreign-inspired terrorism ever committed in the U.S. capital" prior to 9/11. Condor accounted for only a tiny percentage of the atrocities committed in dictatorial Latin America, but it represented ‘the final, worst departure from the rules of law and civilized society. States at their highest level of authority entered into an agreement to cooperate in the enterprise of state terrorism."

The Condor nations looked to the U.S. for leadership. Colonel Contreras met with CIA deputy director Vernon Walters in Washington and was put on the agency’s payroll. DINA received CIA training and material support. Dinges deftly portrays the contradictory signals on human rights sent by the U.S -- a willful obfuscation that allowed Pinochet and other dictators to continue the repression. In June 1976 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly criticized the Chilean government for its poor human rights record but privately reassured Pinochet that the U.S. understood his fight against communism.

Soon thereafter, the U.S. government received strong evidence that Condor was about to launch violent attacks. Kissinger ordered his ambassadors to warn the Latin Americans against Condor assassination plots, but they did not comply. Kissinger’s subordinates feared being criticized for their support of human rights, and they wondered what ulterior motives the CIA, which had its own secret strategy for Latin America, might have in maintaining Condor.

U.S. officials were also concerned about offending Pinochet. In a cable to Kissinger, David Popper, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, stated that Pinochet might "take as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination plots." The government, however, had failed to inform Popper about the latest intelligence on Condor. In a few weeks Letelier was dead. Contreras and others later asserted that Pinochet gave the order.

Kissinger’s advice to Argentina’s dictators to "get the terrorist problem under control as quickly as possible" left them "euphoric," Dinges states. He describes the Kissinger policy on human rights as a "two-track moral message ‘that the dictators conveniently interpreted as an endorsement of their brutal tactics. This kind of ambiguity must be avoided in the current war on terrorism, Dinges asserts. Condor provides a "template of pitfalls and tragedies" that the U.S. needs to examine as it builds new alliances in the antiterror campaign -- including ties to countries that run torture centers.

Appropriately, Dinges’s final chapter discusses the U.S. failure to assume responsibility for its involvement with Condor. Condor has taken on added significance in recent years as victims of the dictatorships, their families and foreign governments seek to bring torturers and killers to justice, beginning with Pinochet’s 1998 temporary detention in England on a Spanish warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity.

By 2003, hundreds of additional legal actions had been filed against the agents of repression in Europe and South America. Latin American countries ranging from Guatemala to Argentina had established truth commissions to investigate atrocities, discover the whereabouts of disappeared individuals, and ensure that the crimes be remembered. In Argentina members of the dictatorial junta served jail terms. But in the U.S., Condor has been shrouded by silence, secrecy and deception. The U.S. has in effect granted itself amnesty for the human rights atrocities committed in Latin America, Dinges writes.

Kissinger’s two-track morality reflects a flaw in American democracy. While cultivating freedom at home, during most of the 20th century the U.S. tolerated, assisted and instigated dictatorial regimes in Latin America and elsewhere. Americans remain largely oblivious of our government’s activities abroad. If more people knew about the history of Condor and other atrocities in Latin America, we might tread more prudently in the world. But neither our leaders nor the press furnish us with a greater awareness of the consequences of our policies.

America, too, needs a truth commission to give the populace a full accounting of our interventions in Latin America and elsewhere. But seeking the truth exacts a price, as Kenneth Maxwell, the Latin America specialist at the Council of Foreign Relations for the past 15 years, recently discovered in a dispute that caused a stir at the highest levels of academia and the policymaking elite.

Maxwell resigned his post after Kissinger allegedly intervened to shut down a debate over Condor and Chile in the pages of the council’s publication, Foreign Affairs. Maxwell’s review of The Pinochet File, edited by Peter Kornbluh, had sparked a heated exchange with William Rogers, Kissinger’s secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1974 to 1976 and today the vice chair of Kissinger Associates. Kornbluh, a top researcher at George Washington University’s National Security Archive, provides new documentation of the U.S. attempt to destabilize the Allende government. During the debate Maxwell called for a truth commission on U.S. involvement in Chile.

The many new revelations about Chile’s dictatorial era came as Pinochet’s personal image as an austere and incorruptible man disintegrated in the face of a U.S. Senate port affirming that he had accumulated millions of dollars in hidden wealth. New reports in December showed that the governments of the United States and other countries paid Pinochet millions for unknown services performed.

But the most important developments are taking place not in U.S. halls of power or in the pages of U.S. publications but on the ground in Chile. In October 2003 Chile became the first Latin American nation to establish a second truth commission, The first, the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (also known as the Rettig Commission), investigated the cases of’ the dead and disappeared, which numbered almost 4,000, and provided compensation for their families, Now the Commission on Torture and Political Prisoners has heard for the first time from the survivors of Pinochet’s repression, estimated at some 35,000 people. The commission presented its report to President Ricardo Lagos on November 10. He declared that Chile "should be proud" of the important step the report represents.

After my visit to Villa Grimaldi I interviewed one of the commission’s members, Elizabeth Lira, in her office at the Alberto Hurtado University, a Jesuit institution in Santiago. In the 1970s Lira, a psychologist, assisted victims of the repression. She also worked ten years for an ecumenical foundation with the same goal. Like many Chileans under Pinochet, she lost her job, a professorship at Santiago’s main Catholic university. President Lagos appointed her to the Commission on Torture and Political Prisoners, which is headed by Sergio Valech, a retired bishop and the last director of the Vicariate of Solidarity, the Catholic Church’s human rights agency, founded during the darkest years of the Pinochet era. Over the past year Lira, Valech and six other commission members coordinated a team of 60 people working to amass and catalog as much information as possible about the country’s political prisoners. The commission traveled to most of Chile’s districts to gather documentation and testimony from former prisoners.

One of the commission’s most shocking findings was the discovery of a veritable archipelago of variations on Villa Grimaldi. Human rights organizations assumed that Pinochet’s security forces had set up 350 such centers -- jails, stadiums, concentration camps and other places separate from the regular police system. The commission’s final report listed at least 1,300. One dramatic revelation came during a meeting with former prisoners in a local government building: a man nervously told the commission that the military had held him in that very room and had interrogated people there. Lira says the new number proves the intent and high level of organization behind Pinochet’s repressive network.

"The story they tell that it was just a captain or a lieutenant who got angry and wanted to do his job well offends our intelligence. These are things that you cannot improvise. You cannot have 1,300 centers throughout a country like this one if there is no coordination, if there is no financing," Lira notes, adding that to date no one has studied the costs of Pinochet’s system. Intelligence-gathering on thousands of people and the movement of prisoners around the country required extensive resources and personnel, including specialists in repression, many of whom studied at the U.S-run School of the Americas, she says.

The commission’s most important task was to determine the number of political prisoners and to document their cases. These people have received no official recognition. Lira believes the figure could be as high as 50,000, although the exact number will never be known. They ranged from college professors to high school students, from the wealthy to union members. Many of them were tortured or jailed as part of the regime’s attempt to use psychological warfare to undermine the followers of Allende and to destroy the numerous grass-roots political organizations that flourished during his rule. The commission did not look into the estimated several hundred thousand other people arrested temporarily in sweeps against mass demonstrations.

Prolonged detention affected people’s lives forever, Lira explains. "Some people were ferociously tortured. Others were, let us say, less tortured, but they were always expecting to be treated ferociously," she says, adding that most prisoners lost their jobs, often because employers used their absence from work as a pretext for firing them. Imprisonment especially affected the poor, who could not fall back on a profession, as could doctors and others who went into exile and resumed their work with the help of foreign colleagues.

"In many cases people had to abandon their villages" Lira says. "In the case of the peasants, they were left out of the agrarian reform. They had to leave the countryside and migrate to the cities as poor people. And in many cases the people had to leave the country. So the experience of being in prison is not only the experience of the prison. It is fear, it is torture, it is the impact on the family, it is the loss of work and income, it is the tragedy that affects children when they see the violence used in taking their father away and demolishing him as a person, it is the amazing deterioration of life’s possibilities, it is losing one’s dreams to become a professional and independent person or becoming someone who could participate more actively in democracy."

The commission did not have prosecutorial powers, but it proposed compensation to former prisoners in the form of what President Lagos has called "austere and symbolic" pensions, in contrast with the $2 million compensation that the Allende family received for his death, Lira says. On November 28 Lagos announced that he would seek congressional approval for $190 monthly pensions. In Lira’s view, "A torture victim should receive at least $1 million, but this is utterly impossible" in a small country such as Chile. Families of the dead and disappeared are receiving about $300 per month -- twice the average Chilean pension. But no amount of money can compensate for brutalities for which there is no psychological or physical repair. "The consequences of the illnesses that people have had are so serious as to be infinite," she says.

Chile will attempt to meet the basic needs of the former prisoners. The majority of those interviewed by the commission are between 60 and 80 years old. They want help mainly to educate their children and grandchildren and for health care "in order to live a dignified old age," Lira says.

The commission also aims to strengthen democracy in Chile. Chile specialists in the U.S. disagree on the health of Chile’s democratic institutions and on the degree to which the armed forces have receded from power. As Lira points out, the creation of the commission became possible because of Pinochet’s detention in England, the subsequent stripping of his immunity in Chile, and the formal dialogue opened up in Chile between the military and civil society. While a ruling of incompetence allowed Pinochet to avoid prosecution as long as he remained silent, the dialogue led some members of the armed forces to divulge such secrets of the repressive era as the dropping of prisoners into the sea or the clandestine removal of buried bodies. Furthermore, on December 13 a Chilean judge determined that Pinochet is indeed competent and must now stand trial on murder and kidnapping charges stemming from Operation Condor. An appeals court agreed, but Pinochet’s lawyer will take the case to the supreme court. Meanwhile, on December 18 Pinochet was hospitalized after a stroke that his opponents labeled a ploy to escape the charges.

More than anything else, the commission wanted to provide former political prisoners and victims of torture with moral compensation. It has aimed to produce a Chilean version of atonement by making the repression something for which Chilean society as a whole takes responsibility. One of the commission’s biggest challenges has been refuting the commonly held belief that the repression was a communist-inspired myth. Pinochet’s conservative allies have withheld comment on the commission’s controversial work in the hope that people will not notice that work.

Lira is now playing a key role as the commission’s final report is revealed to the nation. She seeks to transmit its findings in a convincing manner. The goal, she says, will not necessarily be to have people read the report, but to become familiar with its basic conclusions and to accept them as part of Chilean history.

The Power of the Bible in the Global South

Gatherings of the worldwide Anglican Communion have been contentious events in recent years. On one occasion, two bishops were participating in a Bible study, one from Africa, the other from the U.S. As the hours went by, tempers frayed as the African expressed his confidence in the clear words of scripture, while the American stressed the need to interpret the Bible in the light of modern scholarship and contemporary mores. Eventually, the African bishop asked in exasperation, "If you don’t believe the scripture, why did you bring it to us in the first place?"

Fifty years ago, Americans might have dismissed the conservatism of Christians in the global South as arising from a lack of theological sophistication, and in any case regarded these views as strictly marginal to the concerns of the Christian heartlands of North America and Western Europe. Put crudely, why would the "Christian world" have cared what Africans thought? Yet today, as the center of gravity of the Christian world moves ever southward, the conservative traditions prevailing in the global South matter ever more. To adapt a phrase from missions scholar Lamin Sanneh: Whose reading -- whose Christianity -- is normal now? And whose will be in 50 years?

Of course, Christian doctrine has never been decided by majority vote, and neither has the prevailing interpretation of the Bible. Numbers are not everything. But overwhelming numerical majorities surely carry some weight. Let us imagine a (probable) near-future world in which Christian numbers are strongly concentrated in the global South, where the clergy and scholars of the world’s most populous churches accept interpretations of the Bible more conservative than those normally prevailing in American mainline denominations. In such a world, surely, southern traditions of Bible reading must be seen as the Christian norm. The culture-specific interpretations of North Americans and Europeans will no longer be regarded as ‘real theology" while the rest of the world produces its curious provincial variants -- "African theology," "Asian theology" and so on. We will know that the transition is under way when publishers start offering studies of "North American theologies."

The move of Christianity to the global South might suggest a decisive move toward literal and even fundamentalist readings of the Bible. Traditionalist themes are important for African and Asian Christians. These include a much greater respect for the authority of scripture, especially in matters of morality; a willingness to accept the Bible as an inspired text and a tendency to literalistic readings; a special interest in supernatural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions and healings; a belief in the continuing power of prophecy; and a veneration for the Old Testament, which is often considered as authoritative as the New. Biblical traditionalism and literalism are even more marked in the independent churches and in denominations rooted in the Pentecostal tradition, and similar currents are also found among Roman Catholics.

Several factors contribute to a more literal interpretation of scripture in the global South. For one thing, the Bible has found a congenial home among communities that identify with the social and economic realities the Bible portrays. To quote Kenyan feminist theologian Musimbi Kanyoro, "Those cultures which are far removed from biblical culture risk reading the Bible as fiction," Conversely, societies that identify with the biblical world feel at home in the text.

The average Christian in the world today is a poor person, very poor indeed by the standards of the white worlds of North America and Western Europe. Also different is the social and political status of African and Asian Christians, who are often minorities in countries dominated by other religions or secular ideologies. This historic social change cannot fail to affect attitudes toward the Bible. For many Americans and Europeans, not only are the societies in the Bible -- in both testaments -- distant in terms of time and place, but their everyday assumptions are all but incomprehensible. Yet exactly the issues that make the Bible a distant historical record for many Americans and Europeans keep it a living text in the churches of the global South.

For many such readers, the Bible is congenial because the world it describes is marked by such familiar pressing problems as famine and plague, poverty and exile, clientelism and corruption. A largely poor readership can readily identify with the New Testament society of peasants and small craftspeople dominated by powerful landlords and imperial forces, by networks of debt and credit. In such a context, the excruciating poverty of a Lazarus eating the crumbs beneath the rich man’s table is not just an archaeological curiosity.

This sense of recognition is quite clear for modern dwellers in villages or small towns, but it also extends to urban populations, who are often close to their rural roots. And this identification extends to the Old Testament no less than the New. Madipoane Masenya, a shrewd feminist thinker from South Africa, comments, "If present day Africans still find it difficult to be at home with the Old Testament, they might need to watch out to see if they have not lost their Africanness.in one way or the other." Could an equivalent remark conceivably be made of contemporary Europeans or North Americans?

While some resemblances between the biblical world and the world of African Christians might be superficial, their accumulated weight adds greatly to the credibility of the text. The Bible provides immediate and often material answers to life’s problems. It teaches ways to cope and survive in a hostile environment, and at the same time holds out the hope of prosperity. For the growing churches of the South, the Bible speaks to everyday issues of poverty and debt, famine and urban crisis, racial and gender oppression, state brutality and persecution. The omnipresence of poverty promotes awareness of the transience of life, the dependence of individuals and nations on God, and distrust of the secular order.

In consequence, the "southern" Bible carries a freshness and authenticity that adds vastly to its credibility as an authoritative source and a guide. In this context, it is difficult to make the familiar Euro-American argument that the Bible was clearly written for a totally alien society with which modems could scarcely identify, and so its detailed moral laws cannot be applied in the contemporary world. Cultures that readily identify with biblical worldviews find it easier to read the Bible (including the laws of Leviticus) not just as historical fact but as relevant instruction for daily conduct. This fact helps us understand the horror of quite moderate African Christians when Euro-American churches dismiss biblical strictures against homosexuality as rooted in the Old Testament, and therefore outmoded.

Before northern liberals despair at the future, some qualifications are in order. I have written here of religious and scriptural conservatism, but that term need not carry its customary political implications. Though most African and Asian churches have a high view of biblical origins and authority, this does not prevent a creative and even radical application of biblical texts to contemporary debates and dilemmas. Such applications cause real difficulties for any attempt to apply northern concepts of liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, fundamentalist and literalist.

According to popular assumptions, liberal approaches to the Bible emphasize messages of social action and downplay supernatural intervention, while conservative or traditionalist views accept the miraculous and advocate quietist or reactionary politics. The two mind-sets thus place their main emphases in different realms, human or supernatural.

Even in the U.S. that distinction is by no means reliable. There are plenty of left-wing evangelicals, deeply committed to social and environmental justice. In churches of the global South, the division makes even less sense. For example, deliverance in the charismatic sense of deliverance from demons can easily be linked to political or social liberation, and the two words are of course close cognates in some languages. The biblical enthusiasm so often encountered in the global South is often embraced by exactly those groups ordinarily portrayed as the victims of reactionary religion, particularly women.

In his magnificent book Transfigured Night, a study of the Zimbabwean night-vigil movement, the pungwe, Titus Presler reports: "Charismatic renewal, conflict with demons, and the liberation of women are other fruits bearing directly on the churches’ mission in Zimbabwe." How often do American Christians place women’s social emancipation in the context of spiritual warfare and exorcism? But in African churches both are manifestations of "loosing," of liberation, of deliverance.

At one of these vigils, a woman preacher drew extraordinary lessons from an unpromising text, the story of Jesus ordering his disciples to untie a donkey for his entry into Jerusalem. She applied the passage directly to the experience of African women: "I have seen that we are that donkey spoken of by the Lord. .. . Let us give thanks for this time we were given, the time in which we were blessed.

We were objects . . . We were not human beings . . . Some were even sold. To be married to a man -- to be sold! . . . But with the coming of Jesus, we were set free . . . We were made righteous by Jesus, mothers."

Women play a central role in southern churches, whether or not they are formally ordained. They commonly constitute the most important converts and the critical forces making for the conversion of family or of significant others. Women’s organizations and fellowships, such as the Mothers’ Unions, represent critical structures for lay participation within the churches and allow women’s voices to be heard in the wider society. So do prayer fellowships and cells, which can be so independent as to unnerve church hierarchies. Female believers look to the churches for an affirmation of their roles and their interests, and they naturally seek justification in the scriptures, which provide a vocabulary for public debate.

Some texts -- like the story of the donkey -- have to be tortured in order to yield the desired meaning, though given the pervasive interest in deliverance, any passage that can be linked, however tenuously, to "loosing" is too good to be ignored. With other texts, however, liberating interpretations are readily found. Throughout this process, literalist readings that may appear conservative in terms of their approach to scriptural authority have practical consequences that are socially progressive, if not revolutionary. Reading the Bible teaches individual worth and human rights, and it encourages mutual obligation within marriage, promoting the Christian "reformation of machismo" described by scholar Elizabeth Brusco. Leaving women to pursue domestic piety through Bible reading is like forbidding a restive population to carry weapons while giving them unrestricted access to gasoline and matches.

Think of the implications of Bible reading for widows, who in many traditional communities are excluded and despised, and who are tied to their husbands’ clans even after the husbands die. The New Testament notion of "till death do us part" is burningly relevant. So is this claim by Paul in Romans: "If the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband." In the West, Romans 7:2 is scarcely a well-known scriptural text, certainly not a reference that enthusiastic evangelists wave on placards at sports stadiums. Yet in a global context, this verse may be a truly revolutionary warrant for change.

Reading as such also carries great weight. In a neoliterate community, access to the Bible betokens power and status, and there is no reason why this gift should be confined to traditional elites. Women -- and young people of both sexes -- have most to gain by achieving literacy. The more conspicuous one’s knowledge of the scriptures, the greater one’s claim to spiritual status.

But beyond any single text, the Bible as a whole offers ample ammunition for the cause of outsiders, to the dismay of the established and comfortable. People read of the excluded who become central to the story, of the trampled and oppressed who become divine vehicles -- and of how God spurns traditional societies, hierarchies and ritual rules. As David Martin famously wrote in his account of global South churches, Pentecostalism gives the right and duty to speak to those always previously deemed unworthy on grounds of class, race and gender. In the new dispensation, outsiders receive tongues of fire. The same observation can be applied across denominational frontiers.

Only when we see global South Christianity on its own terms -- as opposed to asking how it can contribute to our own debates -- can we see how the emerging churches are formulating their own responses to social and religious questions, and how these issues are often viewed through a biblical lens. And often these responses do not fit well into our conventional ideological packages.

The socially liberating effects of evangelical religion should come as no surprise to anyone who has traced the enormous influence of biblically based religion throughout African-American history. Black American politics is still largely inspired by religion and often led by clergy, usually of charismatic and evangelical bent; black political rhetoric cannot be understood except in the context of biblical thought and imagery. African-American religious leaders are generally well to the left on economic issues, as are many evangelicals in Latin America, and also independent and Protestant denominations across Africa. All find scriptural warrant for progressive views, most commonly in prophetic and apocalyptic texts.

When viewed on a global scale, African-American religious styles. long regarded as marginal to mainstream American Christianity, seem absolutely standard. Conversely, the worship of mainline white American denominations looks increasingly exceptional, as do these groups’ customary approaches to biblical authority. Looking at this reversal, we are reminded of a familiar text: the stone that was rejected has become the cornerstone.

For a North American Christian, it can be a surprising and humbling experience to try to understand how parts of the Bible might be read elsewhere in the world. To do so, we need to think communally rather than individually. We must also abandon familiar distinctions between secular and supernatural dimensions. And often we must adjust our attitudes to the relationship between Old and New Testaments.

Any number of texts offer surprises. Read Ruth, for instance, and imagine what it has to say in a hungry society threatened by war and social disruption. Understand the exultant release that awaits a reader in a society weighed down by ideas of ancestral curses or hereditary taint, a reader who discovers the liberating texts about individual responsibility in Ezekiel 18. Or read Psalm 23 as a political tract, a rejection of unjust secular authority. For Africans and Asians, the psalm offers a stark rebuttal to claims by unjust states that they care lovingly for their subjects -- while they exalt themselves to the heavens. Christians reply simply, "The Lord is my shepherd -- you aren’t!" Adding to the power of the psalm, the evils that it condemns are at once political and spiritual, forces of tyranny and of the devil. Besides its political role, Psalm 23 is much used in services of healing, exorcism and deliverance.

Imagine a society terrorized by a dictatorial regime dedicated to suppressing the church, and read Revelation -- and understand the core message that whatever evils the world may produce, God will triumph. Or read Revelation with the eyes of rural believers in a rapidly modernizing society, trying to comprehend the inchoate brutality of the megalopolis. Read Hebrews and think of its doctrines of priesthood and atonement as they might be understood in a country with a living tradition of animal sacrifice. On these grounds, a Ghanaian theologian has described Hebrews as our epistle -- that is, Africa’s. Apply the Bible’s many passages about the suffering of children to the real-world horrors facing the youth of the Congo, Uganda, Brazil or other countries that before too long will be among the world’s largest Christian countries.

Read in this way, the letter of James is particularly eye-opening. James is one of the most popular sermon texts in Africa. Imagine reading this letter in a world in which your life is so short and perilous that it truly seems like a passing mist. What implications does that transience hold for everyday behavior? The letter is a manual for a society in which Christianity is new and people are seeking practical rules for Christian living. The references to widows appear not as the history of an ancient social welfare system but as a radical response to present-day problems affecting millions of women.

As a particularly difficult test for northern-world Christians, try reading two almost adjacent passages in chapter five of James-one condemning the rich, the other prescribing anointing and prayer for healing. Both texts, "radical" and "charismatic," are integral portions of a common liberating message.

Think of the numerous forms of captivity entrapping a poor inhabitant of a Third World nation -- economic, social, environmental, spiritual and appreciate the promise of liberation and loosing presented in Jesus’ inaugural sermon in the Nazareth synagogue. Understand the appeal of this message in a society in which -- to quote a recent journalistic study of poverty in Lagos -- "the frustration of being alive. . . is excruciating."

When reading almost any part of the Gospels, think how Jesus’ actions might strike a community that cares deeply about caste and ritual purity, and where violating such laws might cost you your life -- as in India. Read the accounts of Jesus interacting so warmly with the multiply rejected. In many societies worldwide, the story of the Samaritan woman at the well can still startle. He talked to her? And debated?

Or use the eighth chapter of Luke as a template for Christian healing and a reaffirmation of the power of good over evil. Or take one verse, John 10:10, in which Jesus promises abundant life, and think of its bewildering implications in a desperately poor society obviously lacking in any prospect of abundance, or indeed, of any certainty of life. This one verse may be the most quoted text in African Christianity, the "life verse" of an entire continent.

Now recognize that these kinds of readings, adapted to local circumstances, are quite characteristic for millions of Christians around the world. Arguably, in terms of raw numbers, such readings represent the normal way for Christians to read the Bible in the early 21st century.

After I wrote The Next Christendom in 2002, I had a bizarre encounter with an elderly and rather aristocratic Episcopal woman, who praised me for how effectively I had delineated the growth of new kinds of Christianity in the global South, with its passion and enthusiasm, its primitive or apostolic quality, its openness to the supernatural. She then asked my opinion: As Americans, as Christians, as Episcopalians -- what can we do to stop this?

I understand her fear, and see why some northern-world Christians might have concerns about the emerging patterns of global South Christianity, with its charismatic and traditional quality. But the prognosis is nowhere near as bad as she imagined. As so often in the past, Christianity must be seen as a force for radical change rather than obscurantism, for unsettling hierarchies rather than preserving them. On second thought, perhaps she was exactly right to be alarmed.

The Antimuseum

The new National Museum of the American Indian has become one of Washington, DC’s major tourist attractions. According to its own statements, the museum is "breathtaking . . a truly Native place."

Yet not all observers are impressed. In a devastating review, Edward Rothstein of the New York Times describes the museum’s approach as gratuitous and self-indulgent, presenting "comforting homilies behind every façade": it "has packaged a self-celebratory romance. Slate’s Timothy Noah describes the museum’s opening last September as "the museum world’s gaudiest belly flop" in 40 years, and called for the immediate resignation of the institution’s director and administration. The Washington Post called it "an exercise in intellectual timidity."

In order to understand the mixed but powerful emotions stirred by the museum, one needs to realize that the Indian Museum, alone among the various Smithsonian institutions, self-consciously denies any claim to be a museum, or to record a history. It is almost an antimuseum recounting an antihistory This radical stance tells us as much about contemporary views of remembering and representing the past as it does about the Indian cultures that are meant to be the museum’s theme.

A hundred years ago, most Americans thought that Native peoples were a fact of the past, and that any surviving Indians must be part of what journalist Julian Ralph called "a dead but unburied race." Visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 could visit a living museum of primitive" cultures from around the world, and pity those fading races in their final decades of existence. As recently as 15 years ago, tourists could visit archaeological sites in which the skeletal remains of Native Americans were displayed in their excavated graves, to the delight and horror of visiting (white) children. While stringent federal laws have now ended the vulgar bone shows, many Native activists see the same dehumanizing principles still at work in the conventional museum treatment of Indian cultures. From this perspective, Indians are treated as museum exhibits rather than as living beings: they have a past, hut little present and, assuredly, no future.

It is to counteract this approach that after years of struggle the nation now possesses its spectacular new Indian Museum. Throughout, the museum asserts that Native peoples wish to be seen as a vibrant living tradition, who have the ability to tell their own story in their own voices, who wish above all to celebrate their "survivance" through a half-millennium of encounters with European civilization.

The core of the collection is the vast assemblage of artifacts collected through the early 20th century by the New York City banker George Gustave Heye. The museum itself was slow to emerge. Its appearance partly reflects the change in attitudes toward Native peoples that arose in the 1960s, which was accompanied by a powerful sense of collective guilt for the nation’s numerous acts of violence and confiscation.

Also, changing attitudes toward religion and spirituality meant that Indians, once viewed as benighted savages or devil worshipers, were increasingly seen as custodians of an ancient earth-centered faith that was at least equal to the Abrahamic creeds.

By the end of the century, the stereotype of the Indian as natural mystic and sage could be found in such mainstream culture productions as the films Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas. Public sympathy for Indians justified some sweepingly generous federal measures, including the Indian Self-determination Act of 1975, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act 1990. This last measure, NAGPRA, revolutionized the whole structure of operating museums and presenting history in the U.S.. giving Native peoples a dominant voice in deciding what remains could and could not be exhibited, and (in practice) how they should be interpreted.

Also critical to the new era was the federal legalization of casino gambling in 1988, which created what some have termed the new buffalo economy. Today, Indian "gaming" (the favored euphemism) is a $15 billion a year industry, and the tribes are hugely important political players, especially in California. Despite continuing poverty and deprivation on many reservations, many people feel that these are good times to be Indian, and the U.S. census indicates a population explosion in self-defined American Indians. The Native population grew from 524,000 in 1960 to 2.5 million by 2000.

The movement to create the National Museum originated in the late 1980s, at just the time of those other strikingly pro-Indian measures, NAGPBA and casino legalization. In fact, tens of millions of casino dollars went to fund the new museum. Against this background, we can understand why the museum’s authorities have the particular concerns and enthusiasms they do -- namely a categorical insistence on Indian authenticity, on the predominance of Indian voices, and on the rejection of academic or anthropological perspectives.

From the first glimpse, the visitor can see that the National Museum is not seeking to blend in with its environment. Instead of a white classical building designed to harmonize with the National Mall, the museum uses curved walls and sandstone textures to suggest a western or southwestern intrusion into federal order and tradition. The location alone, cheekily close to the Capitol, proclaims the message: despite all the damage the U.S. has done to us -- often in the name of benevolence -- we are still here.

The museum has a different way of presenting objects. Instead of being used to represent particular cultures, eras or events, the objects are shown in their own right, as art rather than anthropology or history. Throughout, the interpretation overtly recognizes the relativistic nature of any process of sorting or presenting: labels simply declare that the presentation offered is only one of the possible interpretations, which visitors are encouraged to mull over in order to produce their own understandings. History is not "a single definitive immutable work but . . . a collection of subjective tellings by different authors with different points of view." No account is authoritative.

The museum represents a bold and perhaps foolhardy approach to historical memory. While giving every single piece a historical context would suggest that the Indian creators are as dead as passenger pigeons, the museum goes to the other extreme in giving hardly any guideposts or markers, chronological or geographical. This is most evident in the display "Our Peoples," "where evidence that has been buried, ignored and denied is finally brought to light.

Each gallery was developed by Native community members and presents history from their perspectives."

But how do these aspirations work in practice? Entering the display, we first see an exhibit titled "1491," which is composed of a wall of faces, perhaps 200 small carved and cast busts and masks from a variety of Native cultures, from North and South America. The aim is to show the diversity and complexity of Indian cultures on the eve of contact with Europeans, but the effect is thoroughly bewildering. None of the objects is explained or contextualized. A given mask might be a Maya object from 800 AD or a Peruvian figure from 1700, and who but an expert is to say?

Throughout the museum, objects are juxtaposed with little sense of chronological connection. The materials that make up the 1491 exhibit are dazzling in their profusion and, who knows, their historical importance, but they are given no more significance than a papier-mach6 mask from a contemporary school project.

Equally unsorted are the (literally) hundreds of gold objects assembled nearby in a wheel pattern to illustrate "The Prize," the material treasures that drew conquistadors to the Americas. Just as deracinated and unexplained are the 80 or so "coiled dragons," the guns presented as "instruments of dispossession and resistance," which range from flintlocks to modern machine pistols and assault rifles. While no individual weapon is labeled, scattered texts provide snippets about "Apache rifles" or the use of firearms against Indian peasants in modern Latin American political conflicts.

As in the 1491 exhibit, or anything else in "Our Peoples," this material is of immense value to the visitor with a solid knowledge of Native history in both North and South America -- someone who thoroughly understands the cultures, eras or events, the objects are shown in their own right, as art rather than anthropology or history. Throughout, the interpretation overtly recognizes the relativistic nature of any process of sorting or presenting: labels simply declare that the presentation offered is only one of the possible interpretations, which visitors are encouraged to mull over in order to produce their own understandings. History is not "a single definitive immutable work but . . . a collection of subjective tellings by different authors with different points of view." No account is authoritative.

The museum represents a bold and perhaps foolhardy approach to historical memory. While giving every single piece a historical context would suggest that the Indian creators are as dead as passenger pigeons, the museum goes to the other extreme in giving hardly any guideposts or markers, chronological or geographical. This is most evident in the display "Our Peoples," "where evidence that has been buried, ignored and denied is finally brought to light. . . . Each gallery was developed by Native community members and presents history from their perspectives."

Throughout the museum, objects are juxtaposed with little sense of chronological connection. The materials that make up the 1491 exhibit are dazzling in their profusion and, who knows, their historical importance, but they are given no more significance than a papier-mach6 mask from a contemporary school project.

Equally unsorted are the (literally) hundreds of gold objects assembled nearby in a wheel pattern to illustrate ‘The Prize," the material treasures that drew conquistadors to the Americas. Just as deracinated and unexplained are the 80 or so "coiled dragons," the guns presented as "instruments of dispossession and resistance," which range from flintlocks to modern machine pistols and assault rifles. While no individual weapon is labeled, scattered texts provide snippets about "Apache rifles" or the use of firearms against Indian peasants in modern Latin American political conflicts.

As in the 1491 exhibit, or anything else in "Our Peoples," this material is of immense value to the visitor with a solid knowledge of Native history in both North and South America -- someone who thoroughly understands the chronology, and can provide his or her own context to the story. The vast majority of visitors, meanwhile, are consigned to a journey without maps.

In trying to eliminate white-imposed labels, museum authorities end up imposing other equally artificial and academic categories, especially by ignoring the differences between Native societies in various times and places. While Native and Indian communities are obviously not seen as totally homogeneous throughout the Americas, amazingly little attention is paid to the vast cultural distinctions that assuredly do exist -- just look at the very diverse Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo in the contemporary Southwest. For the National Museum, the message is one of simplistic cultural and political unity: we Native peoples are one, we must unite to assert our rights.

This optimistic theme is evident in the large exhibit "Our Universes," which presents the worldviews and spiritualities of a dozen different tribes and peoples. The deities and mythologies are different, but ultimately the core messages emerge as amazingly akin: "Everything is connected, interrelated, and dependent in order to exist"; "To be Anishaabe is to understand your place in all creation"; "Our elders have created for us a sacred way of being in the universe -- it is our responsibility to pass on this understanding to the next generation." Indian is Indian, Native is Native, quis separabit?

The failure to provide a narrative and a chronology is in itself a powerful statement about both narrative and chronology, since the implication is that Native peoples have changed little over time and remain rooted to the lands where, it is implied, they originated.

To study Indian history is to study one’s ancestors, who are ultimately one with the land. In fact, any acquaintance with Native American history shows population groups emerging and disappearing over time, merging with more powerful groups, and often moving far from their original homes. Nor, of course, do we hear any reference to anthropological theories that Native peoples originated elsewhere, that they came from Asia, or even (the latest heresy) that the Americas were first populated by European hunters skirting the Atlantic ice sheets in their skin boats.

For the National Museum, all interpretations are equally subjective. Anthropologists tell their stories, the tribes tell theirs. Beliefs are beliefs, not facts. In its passionate desire to avoid imposing a Western framework upon the material, Museum authorities themselves exemplify a profoundly Western theory of the past, namely a postmodernism that rejects all master narratives, In trying to avoid the academic Euro-American mold, the museum proclaims itself absolutely a product of American academic theory, as much a child of its time as the great world’s expositions were in their day.

Not surprisingly, Christianity fares poorly in this postcolonial context. One component of "Our Peoples" focuses on "Cod’s Work," and explores "churches as instruments of dispossession and resistance" (the relevant cases are immediately adjacent to the display describing how guns filled exactly the same historical roles). We see a hundred Bibles in 70 or so Native tongues -- none, of course, explained or labeled -- and are told, accurately enough, how Indian conversions were "a story not only of choice but also of adaptation, destruction, resistance and survivance," The exhibit sympathetically depicts a few of the syncretistic Native movements that drew on Christianity, including the Ghost Dance and the Indian Shakers, stressing prophetic, apocalyptic and messianic themes, What is missing, though, is the innovative and creative process of cultural adaptation that has so often marked the Native response to European Christianity, and which has so many parallels to the remaking of the religion in contemporary Africa and Asia. From the museum account, we would never guess that across both North and South America today, Pentecostalism challenges older established churches for the souls of tens of millions of Native people.

Just to take one individual example: think of the Lakota Black Elk, widely regarded as one of the great visionaries and spiritual leaders of North America. the classic book Black Elk Speaks brought his visions to a global audience, yet most of his readers are still unfamiliar with the profoundly Christian and Catholic cast of his later career, or his daring attempt to integrate traditional spiritual symbols into his church’s seven sacraments. That story is not presented in the National Museum. Nor are most of the obvious heroes and heroines of Native history; nor indeed is most of that history.

One can certainly understand why the National Museum reFramsists portraying the Native experience as solely historical or anthropological; but in the process, it leaves out a very large part of an often heroic story.

Idol Behavior (Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22)

Paul is making an unexpected visit to Athens. His proclamation of Christ crucified had angered the Jews at Thessalonica so much that they had followed him to Beroea to incite riots in the crowds there. Rather than risk Paul’s safety, the Beroean believers had sent him off to Athens. There, while he waits for his colleagues to join him, Paul takes in the sights, tours the city and tries to learn something about its people. When he finds city shrines and altars dedicated to a variety of idols, he debates their existence wherever and with whomever he can: in the synagogue with the Jews, in the marketplace with the buyers and sellers, in the town center with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers.

In this last location, the Areopagus, Paul gives his only speech in Acts to an entirely pagan audience. There he appeals to their religiosity and then tells them that their worship of graven images is a misguided search for the divine.

The Athenians, whose altar is dedicated "to an unknown god," are trying to cover all the bases. If the gods of their other altars or shrines fail them, perhaps an "as-yet-unnamed" deity will look favorably upon them. Though this sounds like an ancient problem, I’ve seen a similar sight in southern California. There you can get into a car that has a rabbit’s foot sitting in the cup holder, a sacred heart air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror, a bobblehead Buddha sitting on the dashboard and a Darwin "fish with feet" emblem on the trunk.

People are reaching for an experience of the divine. Some express their search in their automobile shrines, while others kneel at the altar of Superlative Experience: they’re seeking the highest high, the biggest vehicle, the most extreme sport, the most sordid confession on a reality show. Many in our culture are indulging in this cult of experience, which is actually a misguided groping for God.

The "experience" idol doesn’t stay out of our churches; in fact the importance of "a personal experience" often rides into the sanctuary and takes on a religious overtone. Christians grope for God by cultivating mountaintop emotions in worship and prayer time. I have heard church members remark that if the sermon makes them laugh or cry, they feel as if they have worshiped. Perhaps the idol of entertainment is at work here too, an idol that Neil Postman describes in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Athenian philosophers bowed -- not to a god of personal experience, but to the god of sharp intellect. What is curious about Paul’s speech in Athens is the mild response it draws. The apostle’s preaching generally leads either to great disturbances or to large numbers of converts, but in Athens the reaction of the listeners is lukewarm. Some scoff; others are willing to hear Paul speak again; a few convert. Why such a minimal reaction? Perhaps it is because the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers wanted to engage God only as a concept, and not as the God-man who lays a claim upon our lives.

Will Willimon tells the story of an undergraduate who complained about her college’s religion department, which included four professors who taught courses in everything from Hindu beliefs to Christian history. "They know a great deal about a great many things in religion," she said, "but none of them in the department are practitioners of any particular faith. I find that strange. They know everything about God except God!"

To search for the divine as only an intellectual matter is another form of misguided groping for God. The danger is twofold. First, we treat God as a topic to be conquered. If only I take another Bible study, if only I could get my questions answered, then I will know God. The second danger is using God as an endorsement for commitments we already have or projects we’d like to see carried out.

Both idols -- the idol of experience and the idol of intellectualization -- create distance from God. If we believe that a strong emotion or the right theory helps us worship God, we end up worshiping the emotion or the theory. And worship of anything but God separates us from God.

Furthermore, there is division between those who choose one type of idol over another. Those who place primary importance on a personal experience of God are skeptical of too much "book learning," while people who relentlessly search the limits of the knowable are skeptical of too much emotion. When people of both stripes are sitting in the sanctuary, what are we to do?

First, we are to heed Paul’s call to repentance, realizing that none of us has a corner on understanding God or living as Christ’s disciple. And since repentance involves concrete acts of turning away from the old and toward the new, we are to behave like family, the family that God created through baptism. We are made in the image and likeness of God, not in the image of the idols who tempt us. We are obligated to listen to one another, and to discuss our differences across denominational lines, theological persuasions -- and even across the center aisle of the sanctuary (where one side of the church prefers Paul Tillich, the other side, Left Behind).

And all of us need to stop reaching so far in our search for God. God is, after all, "not far from each one of us." Our groping can end at the communion table, where we dine together as a family, where God is placed into our hands, and where we are reminded that God has come and will come again in Jesus the Christ.

Not About Me: Prayer is the Work of a Lifetime

Our neighbors were visiting a cathedral in Italy with their three-year-old son. He saw a woman kneeling in one of the pews and asked what she was doing. "She’s praying," he was told. "She’s asking God for things." A few minutes later his parents found him kneeling in one of the pews. In response to their query, he replied that he was asking God for – gelato!

There’s something right about that prayer. After all, Jesus teaches us to pray for our daily bread, if not exactly for gelato. But it is the prayer of a three-year-old, a beginner in the school of prayer who is not yet ready even for kindergarten. I remember reading a list of the five elements of prayer: praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition (for self) and intercession (for others). It triggered a shocking recognition: the most important part of prayer is the most difficult. I feel reasonably at home with the last four items on the list. But praise? It is the one item in the list not concerned with benefits for me or those I care about. Here we have that disinterested delight (to cite Evelyn Underhill) in the bare goodness of God (to cite Luther) that escapes the self’s preoccupation with itself.

Praise presupposes, I believe, a prior kenotic gesture, an inner posture from which all five elements of prayer most properly emerge. It is the willing decentering of the self. Ironically enough, it is utterly fundamental to what is increasingly called centering prayer. For centering prayer is anything but positing the self as its own center; it is rather a movement from oneself toward God both at and as the center of one’s being.

Three specific prayers might teach us this gesture. Let us begin with the prayer of Samuel in 1 Samuel 3. Putting together his responses to Eli and then to the Lord, we get our first prayer: "Here am I, for you called me. Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening." While this speech act is an expression of Samuel’s freedom, there is more heteronomy than autonomy in it. He does not originate the conversation but is called, called forth, even called into being by a voice not his own. The meaning of the situation in which he finds himself is not determined by his horizons of expectation, which are simultaneously surprised and shattered. Nor is it just his situation that is changed; his very identity is changed as he becomes no longer merely Hannah’s son or Eli’s helper, but the one who stands coram deo, in God’s presence.

This challenge to our autonomy has the form of authoritative asymmetry. In response to the voice, Samuel identifies himself as the servant (ehbed, bond-servant) of the Lord, anticipating the many New Testament epistles that begin with the author identifying himself as a slave (doulos) of God and of Jesus Christ, and the Pauline identification of the self-emptying (kenosis) of Christ as "taking the form of a slave" (Phil. 2:7). Thus "Here am I" signifies not merely presence but putting oneself at the disposal of another, an act confirmed and specified in Samuel’s "Speak, for your servant is listening."

We can learn three things about prayer from Samuel. First, we learn that prayer is the task of a lifetime, so that even those who have been praying all their lives may not have gotten much farther than kindergarten. For Samuel’s prayer is the presentation of himself to God as a listener -- and that is easier said than done. It is an act that can scarcely be said to be performed more than to a certain degree. We know from merely human conversations how enormously difficult it is really to listen, to be fully present to our interlocutors. So we only kid ourselves, like the tyro who reports that he learned to play golf yesterday, if we think we have finished learning how to listen to God as God deserves to be heard. The praying soul seeks to be fully present to God, but that is the always unfulfilled task of a lifetime.

Second, we learn why silence is such an important part of prayer. It is those who seem to know the most about prayer who emphasize this most strongly, and now we can see why. We cannot listen very well to the voice of God if we are chattering ourselves, or even if we merely keep ourselves surrounded by noise, almost as a barrier to protect us from hearing the voice of any other. As the 14th-century mystic Johannes Tauler puts it, "And therefore you should observe silence! In that manner the Word can be uttered and heard within. For surely, if you choose to speak, God must fall silent. There is no better way of serving the Word than by silence and by listening." Prayer needs silence, not only external but also internal silence; for our minds and hearts can be, and usually are, very noisy places even when we emit no audible sound.

Finally, we learn why scripture and prayer are so integrally intertwined, why prayer can never be separated from some form of lectio divina. God speaks in and even as silence, to be sure, but prayer cannot grow in a purely apophatic soil, if for no other reason than that in such a context no God personal enough to speak is to be found. If we are engaged in prayer rather than yogic meditation, it is the God who speaks in scripture to whom we listen. The very call to which we may respond, "Here am I," can come as a mysterious voice in the night, but it typically comes through the words of scripture, either directly or indirectly in preaching, hymnody, liturgy and so forth. Before prayer becomes a fivefold speech act on our part, it is listening to the word of God as found in scripture.

Very closely related to Samuel’s prayer is Mary’s prayer at the annunciation. This is the prayer that precedes the canticle we know as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), and we can hear this earlier prayer as the prior condition of the possibility of that overflowing outburst of praise and thanksgiving. We might say that in the earlier prayer Mary assumes the posture from which her praise proceeds. The Magnificat is so heavily dependent on the song of Samuel’s mother, Hannah (1 Sam. 2:1-10), that we can only assume that Mary also knows the story of Samuel and of his prayer. In response to the angel Gabriel’s stunning and scary news about what is soon to happen, she replies, simply, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." (Lukel:38). She speaks these words immediately to Gabriel, but she understands him to be a messenger from God. Ultimately she is responding to God; her words are a prayer.

In this prayer we find Mary’s theology and ethics in a nutshell. The theology revolves around the notion of God as one who speaks, or better, as the One who speaks. God is not so much First Cause as First Speaker, the One whose word is always the beginning. Before I speak or act or even am, God has always already spoken.

Mary’s ethics is one of holy receptivity: Let it be, If we see this not merely as resignation before the inevitable or submission before the superior but as welcoming the will of another, we are again reminded of how prayer is the decentering task of a lifetime. We might call this an adverbial ethics. It is about Mary’s basic posture or fundamental project. It signifies the "how" rather than the "what" of her life, though it is not without a "what."

In looking at Samuel’s "Here am I," our focus was on the phrase "for you called." Mary’s "Here am I" gives us the opportunity to look more closely at the act itself. It is an act of self-presentation to the God who is already present. There is no attempt, because there is no need, to find God. Having spoken, God is already present. Mary would easily understand Augustine’s notion that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves (interior intimo meo) and his bittersweet confession, "Late it was that I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late I loved you! And, look, you were within me and I was outside . . . You were with me, and I was not with you." She understands that God is here, unusually so in the present instance, and the only question is whether I am willing and able to be here too. No doubt part of the problem is that while the messenger may be quite visible (we don’t know the form of her visitation), God is not. As Jean-Louis Crétien puts it, "The first function speech performs in prayer is therefore a self-manifestation before the invisible other."

Mary also understands that to be present to God she must turn away from the world in which she has been immersed. Not that there is something evil about the world, into which, in fact, God will send her back with a task. It is rather that apart from that turning the world is defined by her agenda or the world’s, however innocent, and not God’s. As Thomas Merton puts it so beautifully, "Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between ‘things’ and ‘God’. . , as if His creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God."

Mary’s prayer is echoed in two prayers of her son. The first is the prayer he taught his disciples to pray. To get a feeling for its force, let us listen to the way it can all too easily be intended:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be my name,

my kingdom come,

my will be done on earth as yours is in heaven.

Even to the most cynical secularist, this is bound to sound like sacrilege. The crassness of this formulation is barely mitigated if we substitute "our" name, kingdom and will for "my." We hear the decentering force of the prayer in its actual wording: your name, your kingdom, your will (Matt. 6:9-10). Here is a triple threat against all aspiration to autonomy, a triple abandonment of my preoccupation with myself. After, but only after, I have made this move, I am in a position rightly to pray for material and spiritual blessings, daily bread and forgiveness, for myself and for "us." And no sooner have I done so than the doxology, which is sometimes included in the prayer and sometimes serves as its liturgical trailer, reminds me of what I can so quickly forget: "for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever." The Amen (so be it) that concludes this prayer, echoes the "Let it be" of Mary’s prayer, just as the "your name, "your kingdom" and "your will" echo her "your word." To feel the full force of the self-transformation called for by this self-transcendence is to understand how learning to pray is the task of a lifetime.

The second prayer in which Mary’s is echoed by her son comes to us from Gethsemane. Anticipating the violent death that is about to strike, Jesus offers perhaps the most basic prayer of petition, which we might call the foxhole prayer: Lord, spare my life. "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me." But he prays this prayer from the posture that is its precondition in the sense that in a different posture it would be a different prayer altogether. The posture is that of being at God’s disposal: "yet not what I want but what you want" (Matt. 26:39). Here Jesus remembers the "your name . . . your kingdom . . . your will" that he taught his disciples to pray; here he echoes his mother’s "let it be with me according to your word," of which he may or may not have known anything; and here he enacts the kenosis celebrated in the early Christian hymn in praise of him who

emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave.

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death –

even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:7-8)

Whether we kneel, sit or stand to pray, the inner posture or basic attitude we find in these prayers is presupposed by all five dimensions of prayer mentioned above. A couple of examples: The self still centered on itself might consider confession as a useful means to an assuaged conscience, to divine blessings here, and to heavenly reward hereafter. The decentered self need not deny these considerations, but it takes a different posture. This is beautifully expressed in a prayer found in the Book of Common Prayer and the Lutheran Book of Worship, where confession of sins is followed by a request for forgiveness. To what end?

that we may delight in your will,

and walk in your ways,

to the glory of your holy name. Amen (emphasis added)

The self that has begun the kenotic journey prays for forgiveness in order, above all, to be more deeply decentered.

The other example is from a prayer of thanksgiving found in the Book of Common Prayer. At about the midpoint, thanksgiving turns into petition, asking that God will

give us such an awareness of your mercies,

that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise,

not only with our lips, but in our lives,

by giving up our selves to your service,

and by walking before you

in holiness and righteousness all our days.

This is not writing a thank-you note to Aunt Susie after Christmas so she will be well disposed toward me when my birthday comes around in February. The telos of thanksgiving is that through an awareness of "your mercies" our lives may be more completely given over to "your praise" and "your service."

Another prayer for our consideration is a line from a song by Elvis: "I want you, I need you, I love you with all my heart." I know that it wasn’t a prayer as sung by Elvis. It is addressed to the latest hormonal heartthrob, and the reference to the heart seems to be a euphemism for another seat of desire. But let us imagine that these words are addressed by the believing soul to God. They exhibit the fundamental trope of Hebrew poetry, parallelism, in which the same thing is said a second and even a third time in a slightly different way. In Elvis’s version, "I love you" adds nothing new to "I want you" and "I need you." And therein lies the problem. Even when we convert the earthly eros into the heavenly by addressing these words to God, it’s all about what I want, what I need and what I, in those senses, love. The prospects for deepening our understanding prayer as a deeply decentering posture do not seem very great.

If it’s always darkest just before the dawn, we might find our way forward by seeing the problem in its starkest form. When I want to introduce my students to the difference between eros and agape, need love and gift love, where sexual desire is only a single instance of a more general structure, I say, "I love cheese omelet. Would you like me to love you too?" This is a perfectly legitimate use of the word "love" in English. And its meaning here is clear. What I love is what I devour, what I assimilate to myself, what I make into a means to my ends. I give to it a double career: in part it becomes what satisfies and strengthens me, and in part it becomes what I flush away as worse than useless.

Now comes our first glimmer of hope. Even before we convert these words to a prayer, this alimentary attitude begins to unravel as I am deconstructed by my own desire. I want you, I need you, I love you. I can say these words in such a way as to make a sex object of the addressee. They can mean "I want you to belong to me so that you are my (play)thing; I will dispose of you as I want." This project can be frighteningly successful. All too often it is possible to dominate another who, in such a setting, becomes codependent on my addiction to myself.

But my own word, "you," undermines and rebukes such a speech act. I contradict myself when I say "you" in order to reduce someone to an it. It’s still about what I want, but to paraphrase Martin Buber, the I that relates to a you is a different I from the I that relates to an it. I am still the one speaking, not the one spoken to, but a certain decentering has begun, whether I like it or even notice it. It cannot address me, but you can. To desire you is to desire vulnerability to another.

Now let us return to the supposition that the you to whom I address these words is God. I could hardly mean, or at least could hardly admit to myself that I mean, "I want you to belong to me so that you are my thing; I will dispose of you as I want." That is as hopelessly crass as the my name, my kingdom, my will" version of the Lord’s Prayer. But I might mean by "I love you" simply that I want and need your help, your blessings, the benefits of having you on my side. Here, once again, decentering seems to get derailed by my preoccupation with myself.

But now suppose that what I mean is really "I want you," you yourself, not your gifts.

As a deer longs for flowing streams,

so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God,

for the living God. (Ps. 42:102)

O God, you are my God, I seek you,

my soul thirsts for you;

my flesh faints for you,

as in a dry and weary land

where there is no water.

(Ps. 63:1)

What has changed here is more fundamental than the replacement of a hunger metaphor with a thirst metaphor, and even more fundamental than a replacement of an it with a you. This is not just any old you, though what is true in this case may well be true in a measure in relation to human yous as well. But if we ask how it might be possible to "have" or to "possess" God, to drink of the living water (John 4:7-14, 7:37-39), we will realize that the "you belong to me" path leads away from our goal, and only the "I belong to you -- I am at your disposal" path leads to it. God cannot be "had" in any other way. God is always at our disposal, always giving Godself to those who are willing to take. But the only way to take this gilt is to place ourselves at God’s disposal, to give not this or that but our very selves to God. The hymn writer gets it right when describing the love between Christ and the believer:

His forever, only His; Who the Lord and me shall part?

Ah, with what a rest of bliss Christ can fill the loving

heart!

Heav’n and earth may fade and flee, Firstborn light in

gloom decline;

But while God and I shall be, I am His, and He is mine.

Only after I am his can it be that he is mine. Rightly to address God as "you" is to present oneself to God as "yours."

When we learn to speak in this way, a certain transubstantiation takes place and water is changed into wine. What I mean is simply this: eros is not merely reconciled with agape, it becomes agape. Need love and gift love, desire and disposability become two sides of the same corn. Johannes Tauler expresses this nicely when he says that true prayer is a "loving ascent to God, in profound longing and humble surrender."

But perhaps we shouldn’t get too carried away, as if we occupy such a space very fully or for very long. All too often we experience the two sides of this coin as distinct, and all too easily we fall back into an eros that is not (yet) agape. Prayer is the task of a lifetime.

Second Chance for Thomas

Book Review:

The Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow. University of Notre Dame Press, 472 pp.’ $37.50.

Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas. By Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt. Brazos, 352 pp., $27.99 paperbavk.



One of the fascinating aspects of the events surrounding the passing of Pope John Paul II was the almost universal outpouring of grief. The "people’s pope" was also claimed by millions of Protestants, many of whom stayed up through the night to watch his funeral and took his loss as that of one of their own.

From a historical perspective, this phenomenon was at once heartwarming and curious. After all, the pope has not been revered in official Protestant doctrine. He has been tolerated, at best, and more often than not he has been vilified. Protestants have been taught to reject the teachings of the Catholic Church, from its doctrine of grace to its conception of the priesthood and the sacraments, almost as fervently as they have been taught to reject non-Christian religions. Has something changed? Have Protestants discovered new connections with Catholicism, or come to appreciate the existing commonalities more deeply?

Two new books give readers the opportunity to explore these questions in unexpected ways by revisiting the thought and doctrine of that most Catholic of thinkers, Thomas Aquinas The Theology of Thomas Aquinas is an anthology of 18 essays by a distinguished group of contemporary scholars. Holy Teaching is an in-depth commentary on selective portions of Aquinas’s greatest work.

Aquinas has always been held at arm’s length by Protestants. While Augustine -- with his past of sexual excess and his conversion in the garden -- has been adopted warmly, if somewhat uncritically, by evangelicals, Aquinas has remained quintessentially Catholic.

Such a fate seems fitting. Horn in an Italian papal state in 1225, Aquinas was shipped off by his family to a nearby monastery when he was only five years of age. In a sense, he never left that monastery. Aquinas trained for the priesthood, became a Dominican friar, and filled his adult days attending church councils and writing legendarily dense theological tomes for his Catholic audience. Aquinas is credited with strengthening the Catholic understanding of infant baptism and crystallizing the Catholic ban on birth control. He’s also remembered as one who not only posed obscure questions but dared to offer the answers. (To the question of whether the dead will be raised with hair and fingernails, Aquinas replied with a confident yes.)

When Pope Leo XIII in 1879 instructed bishops and priests to "restore the golden wisdom of Thomas and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith," he was at once proclaiming Thomism the official doctrine of the Catholic Church and solidifying the divide between Catholics and Protestants. What could Protestants possibly have in common with someone with Aquinas’s hyper-Catholic resume?

A recurring theme of these two books is that there may be less of a divide between Aquinas and Protestantism than has been thought.

Eugene Rogers takes on this topic most explicitly in one of the essays in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas. It is true, he agrees, that Protestants from Martin Luther to Karl Barth have written derisively of Aquinas. "Protestant skepticism about the theology of Thomas Aquinas focuses on his doctrine of grace. Protestants worry that Aquinas has too high a view of human nature. . . . Proof of the Pelagian defect is supposed to be Aquinas’ reliance on Aristotle, the natural philosopher par excellence."

By stressing the divine inheritance in each person, including human reason and intellect, Aquinas allegedly idolizes humanity and leaves little room for the loving acts of an all-powerful God. Like a latter-day member of the Pelagians, the fifth-century Christian sect which insisted that a truly just God must give each of us the ability to save ourselves via our own free will, Aquinas creates a theory of salvation that rests too squarely on the shoulders of humanity, the argument goes.

Rogers debunks this view and shows -- quite convincingly -- that Aquinas relies on grace every bit as much as his Protestant critics do.

In Holy Teaching, Frederick Bauerschmidt, professor at Loyola College in Maryland, underscores a similar point. Countering common portrayals of Aquinas as a slave to reason, an Enlightenment humanist before his time, Bauerschmidt concentrates on some of Aquinas’s less-read writings, including those on the topic of grace. Bauerschmidt’s presentation takes some getting used to. For the sections of the Summa Theologiae that he covers, he translates the original text and includes it in its entirety. His points are completely contained in extensive, small-type footnotes which, at times, exceed in length Aquinas’s own words.

To the persistent reader with 20/20 vision, the reward is a lucid commentary. Bauerschmidt concludes with regard to Aquinas’s view of salvation, "If preparation for grace involves a ‘movement,’ then, like all movement, it cannot be done independently of God’s grace." Indeed, even the preparation for God’s grace "cannot be done apart from God’s gracious action."

Both volumes are correctives of sorts. While Catholics and Protestants alike typically read Aquinas first for his natural law doctrine and next for his proofs of God’s existence, topics which seem to stress the human capability of discovering God’s truth, these volumes portray an Aquinas far more focused on the mystery of God. In addition to extensive treatments of grace, both books have sections on Aquinas’s views on faith, the Trinity, the sacraments, the suffering of Christ, original sin, and soteriology. Both downplay Aquinas as natural-law thinker and rationalist.

The resulting Aquinas is one who is closer to Augustine and, yes, closer to Protestantism than is the know-it-all, answer-man who is sometimes conjured by Catholic supporters and derided by Protestant detractors. The insight offered by these two new volumes is that there is much in the real Aquinas to please even his fiercest theological foes. As Rogers observes, "Luther might have turned Aquinas to his own purposes had he known Aquinas better."

One reason Aquinas has so often been mistakenly portrayed by Protestants is that he is just so difficult to read. One estimate has his Summa Theologica topping 2 million words. Few professional theologians have waded through the whole work. Fewer still have made sense of it all. Bauerschmidt’s line-by-line commentary is called for precisely because these writings, filled as they are with obscure references to medieval Christian theology, Muslim philosophy and Greek thought, quite plainly demand it.

Will The Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Holy Teaching help the lay reader make sense of Aquinas’s thought? Perhaps. The former volume promises to "be of considerable service . . . to newcomers to Aquinas," but it is at times as dense as Aquinas himself, and the authors too often rely on untranslated phrases of Latin. Holy Teaching requires the reader to bounce back and forth between Aquinas’s original words and literally thousands of footnotes which explain the thoughts. In other words, both texts require the reader to work hard.

That is only fitting. Aquinas has always demanded as much. Thomists should take heart, though. If people are willing to stay up until 3;00 am, to say goodbye to a pope, perhaps they are willing to spend a few late nights reading two challenging works which explore the theology behind the church that the pope led.

Crusader Zeal: Holy Wars, Then and Now

Book Review

The First Crusade: A New History. By Thomas Asbridge. Oxford University Press, 416 pp.

The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. By Jonathan Phillips. Viking. 400 pp.

 

The leader of the Western world stands before his compatriots and outlines a list of atrocities allegedly committed by a demonic and militaristic Muslim power. He warns that even more horrendous crimes are imminent, perhaps this time to be committed on home soil. Sketching the conflict as a battle of good against evil, he calls for a preemptive strike against the foe. As public passions mount, more than 100,000 soldiers embark for the Middle East, confident of a swift and easy victory. But the enemy is persistent and fierce, the war bogs down and longstanding Western alliances are strained to the breaking point. Eventually the leader’s original accusations are revealed to be false -- even fabricated -- conjured to rally support for a war that, critics suggest, was motivated by politics and economics more than by a concern for security and justice.

Although this scenario might sound painfully familiar, the year in question is 1095, not 2004; the leader is Pope Urban II, not President George W. Hush; and the call to arms initiates not a war in Iraq but the long and bloody conflict between Islam and the West know as the Crusades.

Most contemporary pundits reject comparisons between the war in Iraq and the Crusades. Granted, President Bush did make a public relations misstep in the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks when he called the coming U.S-led war against global terrorism a "crusade" and promised that terrorists would face the "full wrath" of the U.S. "A lot of people think that America is out to get Islam, anyway," Joshua Salaam, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, warned at the time. "We’ve got to be very careful of the words we use."

The president immediately heeded such warnings. Within days he was visiting mosques and calling for religious unity, and had permanently retired the word "crusade" from his public addresses. The war on terrorism is a war against al-Qaeda, not Islam, he says, and the reason for the war is our foes’ clear aggression against innocent people, not their religious convictions. "Islam is a peaceful religion," the president said. The 9/11 attackers had "hijacked" the faith.

The message seemed clear, and the media nodded in agreement while the Crusades were a Christian holy war against Islam, the war on terrorism is a secular campaign in defense of justice. The two have nothing to do with each other.

But readers of Thomas Asbridge’s and Jonathan Phillips’s substantive, accessible and surprisingly timely new books on the history of the Crusades will wonder whether this widely held conclusion has been drawn too hastily.

When Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in a speech before a French crowd at Clermont, he demanded that Christians reestablish their claim to the Holy Land and to the most sacred sites of the religion -- Bethlehem, Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre. These sites had been under Islamic control for more than 400 years, and Urban chastised his audience for allowing this religious injustice to continue for so long. Asbridge notes that the pope’s call to arms was founded on just-war arguments. Urban suggested that war must be initiated to protect the innocents of Jerusalem -- to end "the appalling violation of women" and to bring to justice enemies who "cut open the navels of those whom they choose to torment with loathsome death, tear out their most vital organs, and tie them to a stake." The fact that these accusations were pure fabrications did not diminish their appeal. Urban knew that Christians would rally behind a moral cause.

No recent atrocities inspired this call to arms, Asbridge and Phillips agree; the threat Islam posed to the West was nebulous at best. Islamic forces had poured into Spain in the early eighth century and had been repelled at the French border by the army of Charlemagne’s grandfather, Charles the Hammer. But centuries had passed by the time of Urban’s charge. Muslims had integrated peacefully into Spanish society, and Islamic Iberia had blossomed into one of the world’s most sublime civilizations. Christians were far better tolerated in most Muslim-ruled countries than Muslims were in Christian-controlled territories.

The power of Muslim Turks in Asia Minor was indeed a growing concern for the Eastern Church. (Urban is speculated to have thought that a Western-led crusade against Islam might help to mend the schism which had split the Eastern and Western churches just a few years before, in 1054.) Hut while they shared a common religion, Muslims in Turkey, Spain, Syria and Palestine were not united in politics or purpose. By the 11th century, Muslims were far more likely to pursue jihad against their fellow Muslims than against Christendom.

Ironically, it was the brutality of the crusading expeditions that unified Islam. Jerusalem was taken by Christian forces at the end of the First Crusade in 1099, but Western control of the city was short-lived -- lasting only about 90 years -- and Muslims consistently routed the crusaders in the decades and centuries to follow. Phillips reports that ‘during the 1170s Saladin emerged as the leader of the Muslims, and he gathered forces of Egypt, Syria, and the Jazira (northern Iraq)" to defeat the crusaders, thus creating the biggest Muslim threat that Christianity had ever faced. The crusaders’ attack on Islam provided Muslims with a unity of purpose which had evaded them since the death of Muhammad in the seventh century.

In retrospect, the failure of the Crusades seems almost inevitable. Urban faced serious challenges of "coalition building" from the start. He was not able to convince a single Latin monarch to participate in the First Crusade. This was at least in part because, despite his moral arguments, his call to arms was seen as specious and politically motivated. For years, Urban had struggled to stabilize his power base in Italy and to reassert papal authority in France, his homeland. The call to crusade was seen as a transparent attempt to promote these dual goals.

While kings and knights largely remained deaf to his plea, the lower orders did not. Inspired by a mix of spiritual fervor and hatred for an allegedly demonic enemy, startlingly large numbers of average folks took up arms. The numbers surprised Urban himself. This was a mixed blessing. The response was a public testimony to the continuing power of the papacy, but "tapping into this innate well-pool of discrimination and prejudice was akin to opening a Pandora’s Box," Asbridge writes. Thousands of peasants set Out for Jerusalem on foot, with few provisions, no training and little supervision. They were soon committing the very atrocities of which Muslims had been (falsely) accused.

While passing through Germany crusaders spontaneously slaughtered thousands of Jews, nearly wiping out the Jewish population of the city of Worms. According to one 1096 eyewitness account, "They put a rope around [a Jewish man’s] neck and dragged him throughout the entire city. . . . They said to him, ‘You may still be saved. Do you wish to convert?’ He signaled [no] . . . and they severed his neck." When Jerusalem was at last sacked in 1099, the peasants, now joined by many knights, were even more brutal. The crusader Raymond of Aquilers recounts: "Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others tortured for a long time [or] burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and the streets."

While there is no indication that Urban directly advocated such acts of barbarism (any more than President Bush advocated the atrocities committed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq), the acts can be traced to passions he had set in motion. When one’s enemies are repeatedly depicted as animalistic and demonic, one can hardly be surprised when they are treated accordingly. The barbarism confirmed the Muslims’ worst fears about their Christian foes and convinced them that they must strengthen their resistance.

Saladin and other Muslim warlords unabashedly seized upon the crimes of the First Crusade as a motivational tool. "Demanding revenge, they re-ignited the fires of jihad, and under the cover of this ideal set out to unify Islam under their despotic rule," Phillips writes. Osama bin Laden tried a similar tactic when he attempted to rally Muslim unity upon the initiation of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan in 2001. "This war is similar to the previous crusades, led by Richard the Lionheart, Barbarossa, and Louis of France. In the present age they [the crusaders] rally behind Bush" bin Laden declared.

Crusaders through the centuries repeatedly found out the difference between subduing a territory through military force and controlling it over the long haul. Clearly, the group of knights and peasants who sacked Muslim-controlled Jerusalem at the end of the First Crusade was better equipped to fight than to rule. Urban had no real "plan for the peace" (to borrow the contemporary phrase). With the sacking of the city, the crusaders considered their job done. Many immediately headed back to Europe. There was no true program for the continued rule and protection of the city. (As was the case in Iraq in 2003, many of Jerusalem’s priceless antiquities were lost in the chaos that followed victory.)

What is striking is how consistently difficult it was for subsequent generations of crusaders and popes to rule their conquered territories. Pope Innocent found it so difficult to maintain an adequate number of troops in Jerusalem that he actually issued a "crusade bull" in December 1198, imposing an annual tax to provide a fund for crusaders who vowed that they would "remain to defend the eastern half for a year or more."

The Fourth Crusade provides an even more prophetic example of the challenges of ruling a conquered people. Initially intended to target the Muslim military stronghold of Cairo and then to retake Jerusalem, the crusade -- through a series of bizarre twists carefully detailed by Phillips -- ended up targeting the Christian city of Constantinople. Perhaps schooled by previous conquests, these crusaders brought with them their own candidate for imperial ruler, Prince Alexius, an exiled Byzantine. When one reads Phillips’s description of the crusaders’ arrival at their destination 800 years ago, it’s impossible not to think of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s 2003 predictions that the American forces would be greeted by Iraqis as liberators. "When they arrived at Constantinople in 1203, the crusaders expressed genuine surprise at the hostile reception. . . . It was anticipated that a wave of popular support would sweep [Prince Alexius] back into power without the need for military action."

In response to the hostile reception in Constantinople, the crusaders set siege to the city, and in April 1204 they plundered it. Again, they had won a military victory, but not control. "In the eleven months between June 1203 and April 1204 no fewer than six men . . . held the imperial title: indication enough of rampant and chronic instability."

What, then, do we see in the Crusades? Fabricated accusations about a demonized enemy; failures of coalition building; acts of torture and barbarism performed by the alleged defenders of justice; misplaced expectations of popular support from a conquered people; an enemy unified by the very attacks intended to divide it; inadequate planning for postconquest rule; and rampant and chronic instability after victory has been won.

Asbridge and Phillips do not explicitly critique the Iraqi situation and the war on terror. Both are careful historians who refrain from such conceptual leaps -- and the historical tales each tells are gripping in their own right. Each book has much to commend it. Asbridge’s work is the more general and accessible; for readers unfamiliar with the Crusades, it is the place to start. Phillips’s book fills a gap in the current literature, covering in detail an episode not well known even to scholars of the period; for readers with a general knowledge about the Crusades, his will supply fresh and entertaining elements.

But history at its best -- and these books clearly represent good history -- not only entertains, it informs. As we grapple with a new war fought against a Muslim threat and new efforts, to control and transform a conquered people, history can provide insights not only into where we have been, but into where we may be going. Our leaders tell us that the Crusades were a Christian holy war against Islam, whereas the war in Iraq is a just war against terror. But these books vividly demonstrate that the gap between then and now may be smaller than some would like us to believe. They suggest that the holy wars of the past were as much a product of politics and secular desires as any war today and that the war in Iraq may be neither holy nor just, but merely business as usual.

What About Zebedee? (Mt. 4:12-23)

When fairy tales begin with the familiar phrase "Once upon a time," they signal a mythical point of departure: the beginning of a great adventure. If Matthew had known this phrase, he might have employed it to introduce the calling of the first disciples, since his version of this story begins with the breathless anticipation of a fairy tale.

Each day Andrew and Simon, James and John wake before dawn, walk down to the sea, unroll their fishing nets and try their luck. This was their routine. Yet when Jesus calls, their lives are changed in an instant. ‘Follow me," Jesus says, "and I will make you fishers of people." With a few words they are his. Then Jesus sets his sights on James and John, and they leave their boat, and everything that goes with it, behind them. In the blink of an eye, they are by Jesus’ side, wide-eyed and dripping wet from the Sea of Galilee. G. K. Chesterton may have had such moments in mind when he wrote, "An adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose." Perhaps this is why everything happens so fast in this passage. No one can wait for the adventure to begin.

Well . . . almost no one. Every time I read this story, I find myself’ drawn to its only minor character. He appears just before the curtain falls. Informing us that James and John were

fishing that day with their father, Zebedee, Matthew leaves us with one final backward glance: "Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed [Jesus]." Though I know it is not what this passage is supposed to be about, I can’t help wondering why Zebedee didn’t come along. Was it simply because he wasn’t invited? Maybe. But I am enough of a Wesleyan to believe that everyone is invited. Each of us has the opportunity to respond to God’s grace in his or her own way. If that is tine, Zebedee stands out in this passage as the one who does not respond. While four spring to their feet, one hesitates. Four drop their nets. One isn’t quite ready to let go.

I am not saying this to beat up on poor old Zebedee. It’s not about trying to make him look bad next to his sons -- those two poster boys of Christian enthusiasm. I find myself wondering about Zebedee because out of all the characters in this story, he is the one I most relate to. I too have been known to sit in the boat awhile and mull things over. It took me two and a half years of college to declare a major, four years of dating to ask my wife to marry me. As Zebedee reminds me, most days our lives just don’t measure up to the phrase, "Once upon a time." Some days we’re just bored commuters stalled in traffic or distracted shoppers going in circles at the mall. We’re not always ready for adventure. Perhaps, at those times, we’re still following Jesus, but we are also dragging our feet. In this sense, Zebedee is for me a cautionary figure -- a reminder that I can’t stay in the boat my whole life and still find myself in the place where Jesus is going. I must follow.

When Christ calls, he offers abundant life. If we are to accept his offer, we must also accept some measure of risk. James Baldwin wrote, "Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it. . . the end of safety." Spiritual growth implies change. And change suggests risk. Yet, for folks like me, change is hard, We cling to the familiar. We clutch those behaviors and beliefs that make us feel safe. Christian spirituality calls this "attachment." The word comes from old European roots meaning "staked" or "nailed to." It implies that what makes us feel safe may also place us spiritually in peril. Our souls remain tethered to something other than the love of God. We hold ourselves back from what we were meant to become. We choose to stay in the boat, attached to all that is familiar and secure, even when the Son of God appears on the shore.

Of course, we don’t know what happened to Zebedee -- how he may have responded the next time Jesus called. We do know that despite their initial enthusiasm Peter, James and John were far from perfect followers. When the chips were down, Peter denied Christ, James and John missed the point of Jesus’ teaching, longing for the security of their own advancement. Christ calls countless times during our lives. Sometimes we are up to the task; other times we’re not. However we have responded in the past, the adventure is never complete.

In his novel Empire Falls, Richard Russo speculates that Jesus’ disciples must have experienced some ambivalence after his death. "They never wanted him crucified of course but what a relief it must have been when the stone was rolled across the entrance of the tomb, sealing everything shut so they could go back to being fishermen which they knew how to do rather than fishers of men which they didn’t." The resurrection was yet another disruption, yet another invitation.

When Christ calls, he beckons us beyond the point of familiarity, asking us to risk doing something we don’t know how to do, to become someone we’re not yet sure we know how to be. It’s not just that we are taking a risk on Christ. Each and every time he calls, he is taking a risk on us,