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I have lived with Martin Luther for 76 years, since I was christened with the reformer’s name. My father was a Lutheran teacher and organist. Lutheran chorales have provided the cantus firmus for my life. But in only in the past few years, as I worked on a short biography of Luther, did the reformer become a constant companion.

When I told people what I was working on, they invariably expressed curiosity but also strong opinions, often drawing on modern stereotypes of Luther. Their reactions were useful, since they taught me some of the ways Luther is viewed these days. I had to decide which of the different accounts of Luther I was going to focus on, and which Luther I would have as my primary companion.

Many people know of Luther as a violently anti-Jewish (especially anti-rabbi) writer. I didn’t want to let this Luther in my study but I couldn’t keep him out. He rants loudly, especially in his later years when he was an equal-opportunity denouncer of Jew papists, Turks, Anabaptists and even Wittenbergers. He was slightly worse on this score than most humanists of his day. His anti-Judaism was not racial; he welcomed Jewish converts to Christianity. It was religious, which may be worse. Luther thought the world was ending soon, and Jews were rejecting the gospel. As much as I might not have wanted to hear him, I had to let this Luther speak.

A second well-known Luther also got his foot in the door, though I wanted to hold him back. This is the Luther who was more fearful of anarchy than of authoritarianism, despite his own rejection of authoritarianism. Luther saw anarchy in the uprising of peasants, who had thought Luther would take their side in the Peasants’ War. He called on princes to smite and stab the peasants. The princes didn’t need much encouragement. Later he asked for restraint and penitence from the murderous princes – but that was too little and too late. In his Table Talk he showed massive insensitivity when crediting his preaching as being the instrument that put the peasants down. Up to 100,000 lost their lives. When East Germany marked Luther’s 500th birthday in 1983, officials played up Luther as a man of the people. In this case, hardly.

A third modern complaint about Luther is that he was a misogynist. It’s true that he was not a modern feminist. But then there weren’t many modern feminists until a half-century ago. Luther is an important partner to our conversations on sexuality and gender. He rejected clerical celibacy as the only model for the religious life, he married a former nun and enjoyed an affectionate marriage, and he stood in awe of his wife Katherine’s abilities. He included girls in both Christian and practical education. These are signs of a Luther who, while a man of his times, moved beyond their boundaries.

Another common view of Luther is influenced by Erik Erikson’s best-selling 1958 psychobiography Young Man Luther. Erikson portrays the reformer as shaped by his abusive father and his own gastrointestinal troubles, and he ascribes Luther’s "discovery" of the gospel to a session in cloaca -- in the toilet room. Scholars who know more about the language than I claim that Luther’s abbreviation "in el" more likely refers to nothing more than the cloister. Erikson remains worth reading, but his post-Freudian account of Luther was long ago demolished by historians who found his reading of sources to be biased. As the reputation of psychobiography has declined, so has the reputation of Erikson’s book. I waved this semifictional Luther along toward the clinic or bathroom and allowed the real one to stay. Still, any reader of Luther can’t help doing some psychological probing given Luther’s references to depression.

I have always told students that when they pronounce judgment on historical figures, they should do so in the light of possibilities in that person’s circumstances. Otherwise the judgment is based on nothing more than their having been born later than the person they are studying.

So who is "my" Luther? I decided there is no point in conversing with and writing about Luther unless one deals with his profound religious experience. He makes most sense to me as a wrestler with God -- indeed, as a God-obsessed seeker of certainty and assurance in a time of social trauma and of personal anxiety, beginning with his own. However you choose to explain his life, it makes sense chiefly as one rooted in and focused by an obsession with God: God present and God absent, God too near and God too far; the God of wrath and the God of love, God weak and God almighty, God real and God as illusion, God hidden and God revealed.

Luther was often paralyzed by what he called Anfechtungen, an untranslatable word that I would define this way: the spiritual assaults that keep people from finding certainty in a loving God -- attacks of doubt and near-despair sent not from the devil but; quite possibly, from God himself.

The God-centered Luther might be a hard sell these days, when people are more comfortable speaking of "spirituality" than of God. But the more I read of the Luther who sought assurance (he abhorred spiritual "security") and looked around at the victims of a world marked by insecurity, the more this theme made sense. And I think it is a theme that makes sense to non-Christians and nonreligous people too, who struggle with their own despair, and their own passionate search for meaning and security in an insecure world.

"My" Luther was like Luther’s Jacob, who is portrayed in Genesis as wrestling with God. (The word for Jacob’s wresting partner, ish, could mean man, or God, or the evil part of Jacob himself.) Late in his life Luther preached and wrote on Jacob, and offered this advice: "So you should reflect: ‘I am not alone in being tempted concerning the wrath of God, predestination, and unbelief" All the saints experienced that. Luther pointed out a line in the Jacob story I had never noticed: "In this passage it is expressly stated. ‘You have prevailed with God,’ not only ‘you have striven with God’ but you have also conquered."’ This is a God who "has surrendered and is bound to and by the divine promise."

From that shocking conviction of faith, Luther was able to go forth teaching, preaching, raising a family, running from authorities, sulking in protective custody in two castles, translating the Bible, writing hymns, eating and drinking with students and colleagues, maladministering the new congregations of evangelicals, struggling for freedom, devising pragmatic polities for the churches, becoming a public and political figure, defying pope and emperor and developing a Christ-centered theology. All the while, he was never an isolated individual but a catholic Christian, devoted to the sacraments, surrounded and supported by other Christians. On the day before he died in apparent peace, he called himself a "beggar" before God.

In my Luther the familiar theological topics make an appearance: justification by grace through faith (which is linked with one of his favorite images, that of a "joyful exchange" of identities with Christ); the forgiveness of sins; the authority of the Word; the human as "sinner and at the same time justified." But all these formulations derive from a God-preoccupied rhetorician.

The Luther I lived with always took chances. He seemed to raise the temperature in the room. Often I wished that my companion had a bit more of Erasmus in him. He could have been more civil, less sure of himself, less explosive in his vocabulary of denunciation. He could have been more conciliatory as he dealt with others in the church catholic, more moderate when compromise might have helped hold things together.

But had he been mild and concessive, he would not have been able to speak of his inner wrestling in away that helped others. He would not have manifested such courage in his struggles for freedom and in his readiness to see the foundations of Christendom crack for the sake of human freedom before God.

Luther had influence in politics, education, economics and the arts. But if one falls to see that his impact was rooted in his fundamental dealings with God, then one misses the whole point.

PRIMORDIUM. It's time to get used to the term. Next to it one might mentally store such words as "primitivism" and "restorationism," terms that will come in handy for interpreting America's past. Paradoxically, though they refer to various sorts of pasts, they are also convenient tools for understanding how many Americans are interpreting the present and envisioning the future -- though they may not know they are primitives or restorationists or that they believe in and measure life from a primordium.

Among these are members of the Churches of Christ and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), two of the fastest growing bodies in the U.S. and wherever they send missionaries.

"Primordium" is the most obscure and thus the easiest to define of the three words. University of Iowa professor Theodore Dwight Bozeman in his sound and exciting new book To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension of Puritanism relates it to Mircea

Eliade's concepts. Eliade spoke of an "originative, repeatable primordium, " a sacred, mythic "Great Time," which invited mortals to a consoling "nostalgia for the perfection of beginnings" and which helped them explain the world, even as it became "the exemplary model for all significant human activities." But for Eliade as for Bozeman and other historians, the Puritan primordium. differed from others in that the Great Time occurred not in prehistory but within human history.

Specifically, the Puritan and Christian American primordium -- not the only primordium available on the current market -- refers to a sort of mythic time. In essence this was "the primal (or "primitive" or "first") time in which Christianity was given and unfolded in fullness. " The time of Jesus, the apostles and the earliest Christian community was "the normative time to which men and women of the present must, in imagination, 'return' for saving guidance and empowerment."

There were some early warning signals that the community of scholars and citizens would some day have to attend to this subject. Bozeman connects the restoration of primordial concepts to Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, which Arthur 0. Lovejoy and George Boas published in 1935. Eliade's concepts were translated in 1960 and 1963. Those of us who sat at the feet of Sidney E. Mead, as I did at the University of Chicago and as Bozeman, Hughes and Allen did at Iowa, heard him saying what he wrote in 1956 about "the tendency chronic in Christendom, but perhaps more acute among Englishmen, to support every contemporary innovation by an appeal to 'primitive Christianity.' " On the frontier, leaders insisted "that there was really nothing new but only the repristination of the apostolic and hence normative ways. " In 1968 I signed off as adviser on a thesis by Marvin S. Hill, "The Role of Christian Primitivism in the Origin and Development of the Mormon Kingdom, 1830-44. " So those who studied Great Times with Eliade or who had great times with Mead were long being pushed to clarify the concept.

With the publication of The American Quest for the Primitive Church, edited by Richard T. Hughes, and Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875, by Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, primitivism is becoming a key interpretive category the way "millennium" once did. Of course, the "millennium" had always been a theme in doctrinal works (with which American Catholics, Lutherans, secularists and others did not much bother). But it was inert until books like Ernest Lee Tuveson's Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (1968) appeared. Today knowing the difference between pre- and postmillennialism is important for interpreting the interpreters of both Middle East and domestic politics When former President Ronald Reagan told a group that he had been reading "'your" theologians, he was referring to Armageddonned millennial tracts.

The new category is "primitivism." Historians will argue endlessly, but not fruitlessly, about definitions of the term, but their colleagues and the public will not wait for a neat definition. The book that Hughes edited contains an exchange between a Churches of Christ scholar, Thomas Olbricht, and evangelical Mark Noll. Noll is puzzled: how can Olbricht include as primitive the impulse of New Englanders to collect European books, to write 6,000 pages of manuscript as Cotton Mather did, to study German as Moses Stuart did, or to undertake perilous voyages to the Old World to hear complex lectures on early Christianity? "All of these seem like traditionalism instead of primitivism," Noll observes. Precisely. But, imprecisely, Noll will lose his effort to narrow definitions. Paradoxically, Olbricht and Noll agree that the sophisticated early Unitarians were the true biblical primitives of early America, since they "rested their case with the. primitive Christian documents. " Again: precisely.

Which suggests that it always took sophistication, even on the frontier where books were few, to work one's way across history, to forget what today we call hermeneutics and to claim to be replicating, restoring, repristinating, the pure norms of early Christianity. Some of the pioneers called themselves Disciples of Christ or members of the Churches of Christ, and others called themselves Latter-day Saints. Methodists and Baptists also found complex ways to say that they were following simple, unsophisticated ways. But Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith, the grand gurus of Great Time thought and action, were anything but intellectually primitive.

Let me illustrate how primitivism surfaces. I recall visiting the World's Fair in New York in the mid-'60s. A religious pavilion featured a large display by the Churches of Christ. The showpiece was a primitive but to us, then, awesome computer, surrounded by beautiful young women and dashing young men as acolytes. The banner of the display said something to the effect that here were first-century answers for 21st-century life. Passersby could ask the computer any of 300 questions. The prepacked answer, a kind of Chinese-fortune-cookie type message, came inside a capsule. In each case, the answer was simply a Bible verse. I tried out the question about the proper age, mode and purpose of baptizing and got back a very non-Catholic/Anglican/ Lutheran/Orthodox answer. We were back to the beginnings, as the boothkeepers saw them.

The incident seems trivial, but I suggest that the popularity of that crowded display at the fair points to a deep need among moderns. It was satisfying to know that in the midst of technology and pluralism one could rely on the simple message of early Christianity. All through American history, especially Protestant history, the winners of disputes seem to be those who have best made the case that they represent the authority and purity of the simple Bible and the primitive Christian generation.

Letters to the editor in Baptist, Methodist and many other kinds of denominational magazines reveal how simple and primitive the concept of a primordium, a Golden Age of beginnings, remains. The writers want all arguments settled on the basis of the simple gospel of the first generation of the church. Intervening history not only does not matter; it corrupts.

Simplicity is hard to come by. Think of how complex it is to live with wood-burning stoves, to find or grow organic food, or to replicate the little white church and little red schoolhouse world in metropolitan and pluralistic America. One recalls the observation made years ago when, to compete, Detroit automakers built economy cars with expensive gadgets: "This proves that Americans want economy, and they will pay any price to get it." Americans want simplicity, purity, beginnings, and they will go through tortured, compromising and historically "fallen" routes to convince themselves that they have found them.

While the heirs of the sophisticated primitives live on, the land is full of primitive sophisticates. The Puritans and Campbell and their kinds, and even Smith in his own way, had to retrace all Christian history and doctrine to posit or find the restorable early Christian primordium. Today one finds everywhere analogues to that primordium. The market is full of products gobbled up by hungry consumers who are unaware of how much work it takes to be simple. Consumers confront on every corner someone who reduces complexity to a single key, be it New Age, macrobiotics, holistic health care, the latest variation on Zen or "the simple Jesus." But the impulse that unites sophisticated primitives and primitive sophisticates is the search for purity, simplicity and wholeness.

The drive toward primitivism has four aspects. Psychologically, modernity fragments life and lives. It generates what Peter Gay called a "hunger for wholeness, " which William James claimed impels a restitutio ad integrum. The term is an analogue to our subject: there is to be a restitution to wholeness, integrity, a presumed earlier condition of simplicity and health.

Ideologically, there is a strong drive to follow the simplifiers. Gay, writing of the hunger for wholeness in the Weimar Republic, sees that drive leading to an acceptance of Nazism's totalitarian simplicities. In America the search for the simple, whether at Walden Pond for Henry David Thoreau, Yosemite Falls for John Muir, or in the pure gospel for the millions, usually comes down to the notion that with a few clear absolutes in mind, life will hold together and we can outargue other sects and outlast the ayatollahs.

Politically, there is constant appeal to the purity of the founders, beginning with George Washington and the Constitutionalists. One does not go far in politics without, as the media say today, "dumbing it down" or following the injunction KISS, "keep it simple, stupid. " "Simple" does not just mean linguistically or conceptually so, but also substantially. Politicians and economists like to suggest that we as a nation "fell," first into the clutches of robber barons or, later, into the hands of Keynesians and socialists and bureaucrats. Purity calls us to reduce and simplify government and restore primitive individualism of the sort our grandparents exemplified. Frederick Jackson Turner's influential frontier thesis in historical studies was but one evidence of this drive. David Noble in Historians Against History anticipated the current interest in primitivism by showing how the semisecular historical tradition uttered constant jeremiads against an America falling into complexity.

Ecclesiastically, in a nation in which churches have mattered much, everyone from fundamentalists through ecumenists argues for the "one" church that he or she represents. The liberal ecumenists spoke of the "reunion" of Christendom, even though most scholars say earliest Christianity was itself divided and complex, an intricate web whose essences and outlines cannot be retrieved.

The past in "simple" Christian history is not Eden but early Christianity; in the Republican version, not current times but antiquity or the age of the national founders. One cannot test whether advocates of such purity are right in contending for their particular versions of it against myriad competitors. The past is irretrievable; one can argue only about the traces, which look simple to primitivists and complex to others.

The primitive cannot be clearly assessed in the present, either. All who advocate simplicity, whether they are the Milton Friedmans in economics, the "Small Is Beautiful" E. F. Schumachers or the holistic therapists, make the rules of the game too tough for verification . When the economy goes wrong, the environment gets polluted, or the cancerous cells multiply, we are told that it was not the simple prescriptions that were at fault, but that the public simply did not trust these enough.

And, of course, one cannot accurately predict the future of a primitivist movement. Historians do not have to be cynics but only historians, however, to show that all past envisionings of millennium, utopia, or primordium-projected-forward have been complex and have failed. Campbell produced a scheme for a single, pure, primitive church, and he was opposed to denominationalism and even the term denomination (and Churches of Christ still resist the inevitable designation). But he succeeded only in adding one more denomination- -no, many more, for there were schisms -- to the Yearbook of American Churches. When the future becomes present, the simplicity disappears. This means that one takes the future on faith -- which in no way diminishes simplicity's imaginative and summoning power.

Primitivism and restoration are always under threat. In psychology, schizophrenia at worst and distraction at least complicate efforts at restitutio ad integrum. In philosophy, relativists are always at hand to threaten absolutist simplicities. In politics, there is always the danger of anarchy and the confusions of the other party. In church life, schismatics and dissenters haunt the structure. Meanwhile, scholars jumble things by pointing to the falleness of even the pure in history, the diversities and divisions of earliest Christianity and the difficulties of remaining historyless while moving through history.

Once one puts on restorationist spectacles, it gets ever easier to see the primitivist impulse in American history. What Tuveson accomplished with a few colonial millennialists, extending their vision into the whole mission of America, all kinds of Americans are doing with the primordium.

Catholics have not used the language of primordiurn much because they see biblical history within the tradition and the tradition within history, but the conservatives are often primitive in their views about origins of episcopacy and papacy, and contemporary moderates often try to settle things by going back to biblical accounts of early ministry and communal life. Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx both have acquired American followings for arguing thus.

As for the Puritans, Bozeman has elaborated on their sophisticated primitivism in detail and with stunning impact. If he is right, they were much more primordial than they were progressivist millennial. thinkers. If he is but slightly right, one would still be ill-advised to talk about Puritanism without at least accounting for his evidence. As for the extension of Puritanism to the frontier, where Disciples of Christ, Mormons and Churches of Christ made and lived the case, Hughes and Allen and their companions are making that case forcefully. And utopian communities, Shakers, Oneidans, Owenites and all the rest, also sophisticatedly worked for primitive restoration.

One should not close the book on these signals by restricting them to formal religion from Native American through present-day Churches of Christ. From at least Daniel Boorstin and Sidney E. Mead on, scholars have seen the leaders of the American Enlightenment -- the religion of the republic that animates present-day civil or public religion- -as being advocates of some sort of primitivism. Hughes and Allen devote only five pages to this subject, since it falls beyond their "Protestant" scope, but they are clear: "the quest for the primordium persisted; the rationalists simply substituted one book -- the book of Nature -- for another and exchanged the primordium of the early church for the primordium of Eden. The basic theological question continued to be What is truth?"

The authors cite Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson as what I call sophisticated primitives. In a deliciously perverse last chapter they see the attraction of elites to Allan Bloom's absolutist simplicities in The Closing of the American Mind as an example of what I am calling primitive sophistication. That is, the Thomases knew what they were doing and argued strenuously; Bloom, in their reading, does not seem to know what he is doing, and is apodictic rather than argumentative in his historyless presuppositions and statements. Bloom's book was "fundamentally a restorationist treatise, tapping deeply into the bountiful. wellspring of American restorationist ideology."

So the primitive sophisticates live on, advocating a return to a Native America that never was, an Enlightenment that never could be simple, a Socratean set of absolutes, an Africa untainted by Western corruption, the timeless, historyless religion of the East. The back-to-the-basics Christian fundamentalists, the Nature Religionists and the New Agers complexly live their dream of remembered and mythic simplicity, recalled from the primordium. Where such a pursuit is part of a worldview and not just the latest marketed fashion, it is impossible to argue someone out of it.

Hughes and Allen and Bozeman and their colleagues serve the primitivist tradition well, if ambiguously. They cherish its impulses and artifacts, they devour its documents, mostly they adhere to its heritage. But they pick up enemies by showing that historylessness has a history, absolutists get relativized by everyone else, purist dreams become inevitably compromised, and one should never simply trust the advertisements of the simplifiers. They recognize the power in myth and the mythic power of this set of "illusions of innocence." People acting on illusions can produce realities of power, as Americans have proved in politics these past eight years.

Through it all one sees ironies. That is what the realization of "illusions" is all about. Because all historical intentions turn out somewhat differently than intended, it would be easy for condescending and cynical historians to say simply, "What fools these mortals are," or "Hindsight tells us how stupid our ancestors were," or "It does not pay to try anything." But to do so would be a failure of Christian and other humane ironic visions, which intend only to bring perspective. They remind us that humans are not God, that God is beyond human intention and aspiration and advertisement and yet that God holds humans responsible and encourages and, yes, expects and blesses action. So the ancestors were not, or at least not simply, foolish; no more foolish than we are. They were wise and ambitious in their own ways.

Some of the tests one can put to them are pragmatic. If their outlook produces better relations between whites and Native Americans, leads people to care more for the environment, promotes good health or encourages political reform and Christian unity, it is hard to wish away the primitivist impulse even while relativizing it with historical perspectives.

Maybe the impulse one needs in the face of the lures of primitivism, restoration and the search for a primordium is best stated in Alfred North Whitehead's words to natural scientists: "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

"It is one of the striking facts of American history that the American Revolution was led by men who were not very religious," wrote Gordon Wood in New York History. "At the best the Founding Fathers only passively believed in organized Christianity and at worst they scorned and ridiculed it." When asked why the Constitution did not mention God, Alexander Hamilton is said to have answered, "We forgot."

As a major interpreter of our country's founding, Wood reflects the influence of his teacher Bernard Bailyn, who in two important new volumes provides the best general access to the period in which the Founding Fathers -- yes, they were all men -- debated their Constitution of 1787 and sold themselves, each other and the public on its ratification. This generous sampling of the argument helps contemporary readers assess the religious and metaphysical foundations and contentions of their thought.

Northwestern University law professor Stephen Presser has said that "at first blush, it would appear that none but the truly weird would find these two new volumes ... compulsive late-night page-turners." But I joined him in the company of the weird by marking all the references that could be construed as religious. I began at the outer limits with what I call the "sacral penumbra" of nondescript and rather noncommittal incidental references. (These do not include the more frequent and clear references in the sustained arguments discussed later in this essay.) My marker found three favorites: at least 30 "Heavens," as in "merciful Heaven," and 15 or 20 "blessings of heaven"; there were 15 usually casual "sacreds," as in "sacred liberties." God comes up often, but almost never in biblical terms; "God," we remember, was generic for deists and theists, philosophers and believers alike. In one instance in this collection, one John Smilie quotes the Declaration of Independence on the Creator. Beyond that, in these two lengthy volumes there are about 20 references to God, while the Almighty and the Creator make single cameo appearances. We read at least seven times of Providence; the Supremes are here four times, as in Supreme Being and Supreme Ruler of the Universe; Lord, as in "O Lord!" or "the Year of Our Lord," turns up six times, and there is a Sovereign Ruler of Events, one Grace, two Governors (of the World and the Universe),two Nature's Gods, and, for good measure, one Goddess of Liberty. Whether the general absence of the biblical God is intentional or reflects the habits of the Enlightenment, it is significant.

On one occasion, vox populi is identified with vox dei, a questionable theological concept, to be sure. Once, people are called "the sole governours (under God)," and I spotted another "under God" in connection with George Washington. Writers also refer to "the immutable laws of God and " reason," and "the laws of nature and nature's God." The citation of the Bible as authority is extremely rare. Once Benjamin Rush deals abstractly with "reason and revelation," and John Dickinson cites Holy Scriptures on perfect liberty and speaks of "the inspired Apostle Saint Paul." The latter is one of the most charged references in the two volumes; Dickinson uses I Corinthians 12 on the body of Christ as an analogy for "the benefits of union" in the republic. As for human nature, only once do. I recall spotting the word "sin." Calvin's God was far back in the wings in this Enlightenment-era discourse.

For a people putatively schooled in scripture, these arguers use relatively few biblical allusions. I counted three references to Moses. In Noah Webster's citation, Moses gets paired with Fohi and Confucius, Zamolxis and Odin and other "fabled demi-gods of antiquty" In another citation Moses joins Montesquieu as a representative genius. There are other casual allusions to the Bible, but they are slight and quickly dropped.

Terribly slim pickings, these. While practical politics was the preoccupation of these debaters, they were debating what was deepest in the people's minds and hearts. Consequently, it seems strange that I found only one reference to Christology or Christian salvation: the "blood of the Redeemer." "John Humble," speaking for "the low born," at one point makes fun of "the perfection of this evangelical constitution" and its claimed place "in the salvation of America," but that language does not advance the case for seeing America as a Christian country. One would hardly know from these collected documents that Americans were churchgoers; I caught them at church in only one casual allusion. Denominations are rarely mentioned, though Quakers are visible, chiefly as pacifists. Pelatiah Webster of Philadelphia defends "Quakers, Mennonists, Moravians, and several other sects scrupulous against war" from charges that they are "enemies to liberty and the rights of mankind.

"The clergy are almost invisible; once there is a minister of the gospel; once, some are "reverend"; and clergy march in place in a Maryland ratification parade. Did I overlook more than the one reference I found to "pastor," and the one to "theologian," as in "the close reasoning of the theologian," in lawyer Simeon Baldwin's speech?

Are the American people chosen? James Winthrop thought so, but that is about it (1:764). Unless my snooping eye missed some references, Americans were Christians. only once in 2,387 pages -- in Baldwin's oration at New Haven on July 4, where hearers were asked "to discharge our duty to our God, our country and ourselves, like true patriots and benevolent Christians." Historian David Ramsay wrote to South Carolinians to "consider the-people of all the thirteen states, as a band of brethren, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, inhabiting one undivided country, and designed by heaven to be one people," but the religion is unspecified. As for devotion, there is a reference to one's "prayer to God," but we 20th-century folk hear more such talk in a single presidential inaugural address.

The established religion of England gets mentioned ten or 20 times, in every case negatively, though George Mason once neutrally quotes the Book of Common Prayer. The founders allude to creeds once or twice but do not quote them from church history; Athanasius appears once, and we read of heretics. There is little anti-Catholicism in these almost entirely non-Catholic writings. Remember, these folks are arguing for ratification and are not eager to make religious enemies.

The founders were aware of what James Madison called "various and irreconcilable . : . doctrines of Religion" (1:746), and they were occasionally alert to world religions. This was especially true of Noah Webster, who states that the Alcoran of the Muslims is not likely to become the American "rule of faith and practice." There is an awareness of old Roman augury and priesthood, back when legislators "derived much of their power from the influence,of religion, or from that implicit belief which an ignorant and,superstitious people entertain of the gods, and their interposition in every transaction of life." But in modern North America such behavior would be incredible and impossible (1:154-56).

One of the most serious issues in constitutional discourse was the virtue of the people, since constitutional law would be effective only if citizens respected it. Pelatiah Webster of Philadelphia was the most explicit concerning people's response to the divine when he wrote about congressmen

: Another mighty influence to the noblest principle of action will be the fear of God before their eyes; for while they sit in the place of God, to give law, justice, and right to the States, they must be monsters indeed if they do not regard his law and imitate his character.

James Madison, however, balances Webster in a letter to Thomas Jefferson about possible restraints of majorities who might persecute minorities:

The most sustained religious discussion in these huge volumes has to do with the line in Article VI of the Constitution that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." Luther Martin, a fierce opponent of ratification, reported that the "no religious test" clause easily had passed at Philadelphia, but went on sarcastically:

The most notable New England Baptist, Isaac Backus, opposed such a test, stating that "no man or men can impose any religious test, without invading the essential prerogatives of our Lord Jesus Christ." William Williams, a Connecticut signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in the American Mercury that he wished the clause could have been omitted, and even would have liked to have voted for its reverse, "to require an explicit acknowledgment of the being of a God, his perfections and his providence," and an italicized affirmation of God in the preamble to the Constitution. Williams says he knows that such a phrase would have produced hypocrites and have provided no security, but he wished it were there simply as a public testimony.

On the other hand, Oliver Ellsworth takes three pages to defend the Article VI clause as not being "unfavourable to religion." It was designed "to exclude persecution" and to secure "the important right of religious liberty." English law and practice show the evils that would threaten were the clause not here. "A test in favour of any one denomination of Christians would be to the last degree absurd in the United States." Even a test-act that required officeholders to declare "their belief in the being of a God, and in the divine authority of the scriptures," would not have satisfied, since it is easy to dissemble. "If we mean to have those appointed to public offices who are sincere friends to religion; we the people who appoint them, must take care to choose such characters; and not rely upon such cob-web barriers as test-laws are.

"Henry Abbott and James Iredell returned to the issue in a report from the North Carolina Convention. Abbott stated that some feared that without religious tests, "Pagans, Deists, and Mahometans might obtain offices among us," and that legislators might some day "all be Pagans." Without religious texts, would oaths of office be taken "by Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Proserpine or Pluto"? Iredell responded, referring to the "dreadful mischiefs" and "utmost cruelties" that had occurred "under the colour of religious texts" throughout history. America had already chosen a more modest, reasonable and tolerant course. Iredell asks, "How is it possible to exclude any set of men, without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for?" But he concludes, "It is never to be supposed that the people of America will trust their dearest rights to persons who have no religion at all, or a religion materially different from their own." Let religion be permitted to take its own course; "the divine author of our religion never wished for its support by worldly authority.

After the "religious tests" debates, the most significant treatment of religion occurred in debates having to do with pluralism, "the multiplicity of sects," republicanism and religious freedom. Most of the suspicious antifederalists were pushing for a Bill of Rights, while the federalists, feeling that rights had been assured in the unamended Constitution, opposed it.

In Virginia, where Patrick Henry favored what is now called nonpreferential support, a quasi-establishment, James Madison, his opponent, argued that a Bill of Rights "declaring that religion should be secure" was unnecessary. Because of the presence of what Madison called a "multiplicity of sects" Americans had freedom of religion, and that was "the best and only security for religious liberty in any society.

"Z," replying to Benjamin Franklin in Boston, did argue that there had to be an express reservation of "inherent unalienable rights," for example, "in case the government should have in their heads a predilection for any one sect in religion? ... [and for] erecting a national system of religion?" (1:7). Tench Coxe in Philadelphia enumerated all the sects that had come to America for the sake of freedom of religion, and noted that they brought with them dispositions to other freedorns in matters of government. The anonymous "Federal Farmer" in letters to "The Republican" joined in: "It is true, we are not disposed to differ much, at present, about religion; but when we are making a constitution, it is to be hoped, for ages and millions yet unborn, why not establish the free exercise of religion, as a part of the national compact."

The "multiplicity of sects" theme came to prominence in Madison's Federalist Papers X and LI. These are more a celebration of religious diversity than of religion, since Madison seems nervous about religion's power to tyrannize. Still arguing for a large federal republic, Madison returned to the theme in Federalist LI,.where wariness about religious power is checked by celebration of diversity:

In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other, in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government.

In the event, the United States in 1789 added a Bill of Rights including the religion clause to the Constitution, and the nation became the large republic with many sects that Madison foresaw and wanted. The philosophy behind the religion clause derived from the Madisonian-Jeffersonian Virginian resolution, copied also by North Carolina:

I will not have discharged my self-chosen duties successfully without referring to two passages by notable founders that throw special if idiosyncratic light on religion. One is by the renowned Philadelphia physician and constitutionalist Benjamin Rush. In a 1787 speech at the Pennsylvania Convention reported on in the Pennsylvania Herald two days later, he awakened furies by arguing that ratification was divinely mandated. The other offbeat entry is Benjamin Franklin's speech at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787, the document which opens Bailyn's two-volume collection and frames some of what follows. He did not entirely approve of the Constitution, he said, and pleaded for modesty. The aged sage still had wit:

After antifederalist riots at Carlisle, Franklin returned to the scene with a satire against the rioters, comparing them to the ancient Jews who rejected a constitution handed down by God and "recorded in the most faithful of all Histories, the Holy Bible." There followed four pages of reference to biblical history (Exodus and Numbers), after which Franklin concluded that he did not want to be thought of as arguing that the General Convention was similarly divinely inspired:

One could never be too sure from Franklin's language where he stood, .and the same is the case with other major figures like Jefferson or Madison. It was Madison who reflected most on ambiguity, obscurity, cornplexity, the equivocal, and the noncopiousness of language. He also cast the problem against a transcendent backdrop: ' "When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated." .

My reading of 2,387 pages of "cloudy medium" may have clouded things more. It's clear, at any rate, that religious references in these primal republican political debates were rare and vague. In addition, almost no one found it easy to speak of a Christian republic or to offer a consistent theological rationale of constitutionalism. The few sustained debates about "religious tests" and "religious freedom" treated the potential for religious monopolies, hegemonies or majorities-and even religion itself-as a problem. Finally, the Madisonian devotion to pluralism won out over attempts to legislate metaphysical or theological solutions or to privilege particular traditions.

The two volumes confirm the idea that the founders' practical politics displaced and left little room for sustained discussion of the metaphysical, metaethical and theological backdrop to constitutionalism. The debates occurred at a time when there was enough Enlightenment talk about "Nature's God" to compromise evangelical talk about the God of the Bible in the affairs of the United States. When one contrasts outcomes in the United States with those in Europe, one is tempted to conclude that the "godless" Constitution and the reticent constitutionalists helped make possible a "godly" people.

The evangelicalization of American culture, then, did not derive from the constitutional period but from the times that followed, times of revivalism and immigration. It was not 1776 or 1787-89 but the period that followed which led Jon Butler to see Americans Awash in a Sea of Faith, Nathan Hatch to write of The Democratization of American Religion, me to write of the Protestant experience as an advocacy of a Righteous Empire , Robert Handy to describe A Christian America and Mark A. Noll, Nathan 0. Hatch and George M. Marsden to observe and criticize The Search for Christian America.

The language of the constitutional debates was, like that of the Almighty, in Madison's view, "rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated." Bailyn's triumph of editing and publishing The Debate on the Constitution communicates that aspect of language brightly and without doubt.

The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336.. By Caroline Walker Bynum. Columbia University Press, 368 pp., $29.95.

Caroline Walker Bynum concludes The Resurrection of the Body with this judgment on a millennium of Christian theologians: "We may not find their solutions plausible, but it is hard to. feel that they got the problem wrong." In this remarkable study, Bynum explores literary images, artistic depictions, doctrines and social contexts in which Christians affirmed bodily resurrection. She focuses on the period from 200 to 1336, the year Pope Benedict XII declared that souls experience beatific vision with the resurrection yet to come.

Bynum, who teaches at Columbia University, conducts her detailed, sympathetic treatment of patristic and medieval understandings according to the most honorable canons of historical research. But her interest is also personal. She dedicates this book to her father and daughter "because my love. for them lies at the heart of my confidence that there is, in some sense, survival and even resurrection." Bynum does not claim to know exactly what earlier understandings of bodily resurrection say to us, but she intuits that they tell us something if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

Part of Bynum's aim, then, is to reawaken our senses. Current notions resurrection are maddeningly insubstantial affirmations proffered with"acute embarrassment":

Thoughts of "life after death" still conjure up for most people some notion of a disembodied soul flying, rather forlornly through pearly gates and golden streets. Preachers and theologians (especially Protestants) pride themselves on avoiding body-soul dualism, but pious talk at funerals is usually of the departed person surviving as a vague, benign spirit or as a thought in the memories of others.

The conventional wisdom about the early church is that it was dualistic, that it denied, even hated, the body. Why then, Bynum asks, did the early church -- and not we who supposedly have discovered the significance of the body and renounced all dualism -- reflect so intently on the resurrection of the body? Her conclusion is refreshing and painstakingly demonstrated: "Despite its suspicion of flesh and lust, Western Christianity did not hate or discount the body. Indeed, person was not person without the body." In addition, we, more than the early church, regard the body as significant primarily as a "locus of sexuality," whereas "for most of Western history the body was understood primarily as the locus of biological process."

What was it about "biological process" that stimulated concern for the resurrected body? Change. By the end of the second century, particularly in the context of martyrdom, the issue of resurrection centered on the question of the identity of the earthly body and the resurrected body to come. In what way were these the same body?

The problem was particularly pressing because the earthly body was subject to decay -- indeed it was decay. The decaying corpse was the paradigmatic biological process and the telos of all change. Christian thinkers of the late second century followed in the path of those ancient philosophers for whom "change was the ontological scandal." Their concern was to assure the identity of the resurrected and the earthly body so as to overcome the body's mutability. Resurrection's victory over death had to be a triumph over putrefaction, the scattering of the martyred body, consumption of the dead body by other animals, and even the dread of cannibalism. By the end of the second century, the resurrection of the body meant the resurrection of the flesh.

"Body" and "flesh" are not necessarily the same. Focus on the body's material identity highlights two themes. First, the interest in bodily resurrection demonstrates that Christians understood the person as composed of soul and body, not primarily as soul. If the personality were located in the soul the wasting body would present no special problem; one could even view bodily degeneration as the condition for the soul's freedom. Bynum contends that this was never the position of Western catholic or Eastern patristic theology.

During this millennium the fundamental significance of the body remains constant. Resurrection is never reduced to a question of the soul. Bynum maintains that even the beatific vision of the soul (separated from the body), affirmed by Benedict, occurs only after the soul is endowed with the specificity and particularity that had previously been associated with body. It is possible to think about the beatified soul partly because (especially in the work of women mystics and Bonaventure, and in light of the practice of dismemberment of the saints for dispersion into reliquaries) "a new use of synecdoche throbs with enthusiasm for body and for all that to which body gives us access. Bodily part becomes body; body and soul become each other; body manifests self." The moment of apparent triumph for the disembodied soul is almost the reverse: the soul becomes bodylike.

Second, the emphasis on identity tends to conflict with the original Christian expression of resurrection in 1 Corinthians: Paul's image of the earthly body as the seed of the heavenly body. This image does not emphasize identity or the continuity or sameness of the fleshy material. Although, or even because, the natural body decays, the "spiritual" body, which is not "flesh and blood," rises "in incorruption." Change is not excluded but presupposed. The Pauline image stresses the transformation of a living, changing organism. By the late second century, a mounting fear of deteriorative change and a corresponding stress on material continuity led the church to mute Paul's language. The transformative possibilities of Paul's imagery are canceled in favor of images of the resurrected body as a mended pot, a rebuilt temple or clothing donned anew. Fear of organic process produces preference for inorganic pictures of the resurrected body which are grafted uneasily onto Paul's organic imagery. This conflict between organic and inorganic resurrection plays through the next millennium. Bynum allows us to see that doctrinal confusions, indecisions and oppositions are grounded in a clash of images.

In the patristic and medieval churches generally, restorative inorganic versions of resurrection consistently win out over transformational, organic ones. By the early fifth century, resurrection is understood in increasingly literal ways. By the 12th century, Bynum maintains, Western thought reached its materialistic and literalistic apogee. Pauline language about what was sown in corruption being raised incorruptible is generally understood to mean that the material bits of this body are replaced and rendered incorruptible in the resurrected body.

Eucharistic theology provides part of the support for this position as early as the late second century, and continues to do so through the 12th century. Eucharistic eating reverses the usual process of nutrition. Normally, digestion transforms consumed food into the property and being of the consumer; in contrast, the body of Christ begins to change its consumer into Christ's incorruption.

Images of transformation do not disappear. Although the dominant mode of conception of the resurrection body is in terms of material continuity and reassembly, differing views abound. Bynum does not impose uniformity where she does not find it, and generally she does not find it. Bynum refuses to lead us on a unilinear path toward a conclusion that we can either laud or decry. Instead, she presents a tangle of positions, hesitations and inconsistencies that helps us feel the darkness through which theology, art and society found uneven, uncertain paths.

Thinkers not only disagreed with one another but apparently were unable to make up their own minds about the resurrected body. In their desire to remain faithful to all facets of the problem and to scriptural and traditional texts, theologians from Tertullian to Lombard sought to incorporate images of transformation even as they struggled to show that the earthly body and the resurrected body were in some sense the same. Moreover, although it is true that materialistic representations dominated the theological and artistic landscape, some theologians attempted to keep transformative conceptions at the forefront of Christian thought by emphasizing the continuing potentiality of the body. Origen, for example, prefers seed imagery to the common metaphor of the statue; Dante and Aquinas stress growth and development of body and soul. Tradition spoke with many voices.

Advocates of the reassembly of particles spoke forcefully, though their assertions took many forms, ranging from claims that bits of matter are replaced precisely as they were in life, to Augustine's hypothesis that although matter need not serve the same function or be placed identically in the resurrected body, the matter itself is nonetheless identical. Concern with material continuity also fed theological and artistic speculation about the fate of cut fingernails and hair, the condition and presence of genitals, the age and stature of the resurrected body, the bodies of the saints, the fate of relics, whether bodies in hell are reassembled as completely as those given eternal life and how and whether digested body parts are regurgitated at the resurrection.

Attention to such matters strikes the modem reader as bizarre. Yet Bynum adeptly draws us into the universe of early and medieval thought so that by the end of her book we question less why earlier figures considered these issues seriously than why we do not. She makes the problem of bodily resurrection increasingly vital --emotionally, cognitively and ethically.

Our emotional attachment to this flesh is easy to understand. Whatever pains, agonies and violations we experience, however our bodies betray us, our bodies are still the ones we love and which we hope can be perfected despite decay and infidelity. Our bodies and the bodies of others are, after all, the only bodies we know.

Theologically, the demise of the body poses a basic challenge to God's omnipotence. If God cannot redeem the body that is so central to personal integrity, then God's victory over death is partial and relatively feeble. Resurrection and divine power are indissolubly linked. God must vanquish not only death but the ontological structures of change and time that make death inevitable. For Augustine, for example, spiritual rebirth is possible here and now -- one does not need resurrection for that. One does need resurrection to overcome the ontology of destruction that is so obviously presented in the body. We can conceive of moral and spiritual improvement throughout our lietime, but after a point we cannot rationally believe that our bodies will improve. God saves bodily rebirth for the end of time, as the final triumphal stake through death's heart. It was early Christians' refusal of dualism, their demand that God redeem the whole person, that forced on them the question of bodily resurrection.

Ethically, because the body was the center of personal particularity and difference, it was vital for early Christians that this flesh, which bears the marks of persecution, suffering, sainthood and merit in general, be preserved and perfected in the resurrection. Bynum claims not only that the church was not dualistic about body and soul, but that it stressed the importance of human difference and particularity. Far from being an "otherworldly" concern, concentration on the resurrected body insisted that what mattered on earth mattered in heaven, that "a rose cannot be a lily even in paradise." The beauty of earthly merit was preserved eternally. Heaven and earth kissed.

Indeed, the suspicion that less material imagery could not guarantee the exhibition of this merit throughout eternity helped generate opposition to transformative, organic conceptions. William of La Mare and others objected to Aquinas's approach largely because of "a suspicion that his view of the soul as a single, substantial, intellective form limits soul's ability to know, and to suffer, and to contain (so to speak) our individuality." Throughout the period Bynum considers, greater stress on materiality brought attention to difference in its wake.

Of course, making eternal differences correspond to earthly ones has its drawbacks, and Bynum is not blind to them. Although she does not argue that all thought is but clever ideological cover for oppressing one or another social group, she is aware that the belief that earthly hierarchical differences are perpetuated in eternity legitimizes those earthly distinctions, both just and unjust. But there is reason to be meek in our criticism of the early and medieval worlds. They too sought to avoid dualism; they too appreciated difference. Even our treasured understanding of the "individual as unique -- valued yet opaque and unknowable because (in the currently fashionable term) 'other'. . . is informed by hundreds of years of puzzlement over embodiment."

Nevertheless, the world Bynum so lovingly presents is, for the most part, lost to us. We cannot adopt patristic and medieval solutions as they stand. The contemporary inclination to do away with all differences in eternity in favor of egalitarian conceptions of external life (an outcome of 16th-century Protestant understandings of the spiritual body) has encouraged us to abandon serious reflection on the notion of bodily resurrection. Most important, we no longer view change as the ontological scandal. Change is now presumed to be good until proven otherwise. Stasis, tradition and the past now need defense. Our paradigm of human change is not the decaying corpse but the vital, growing, beautiful, perfect televised body.

Yet in our most private recesses, and despite our culture's efforts to deny it, we know that decay, death and putrefaction await our bodies and the bodies of all those we love. The benefits of change cannot obscure this elementary fact. Thus, the question of resurrection has not disappeared entirely. Films such as Ghost and Dead Again are efforts to remove the sting from even the most violent terminations of the body, assuring us that we shall be again what we once were. Like medieval representations, these images are materialistic, literalistic promises of perfection. In both films, moreover, evil's fate is exactly what it was in medieval art -- dismemberment of the body.

The themes that Bynum identifies continue to shape not only the conceptions of resurrection but our own broader religious and cultural life. Bynum points to at least two continuing difficulties in our culture. First, we have dissociated our earthly lives from our final destinies. The close marriage of heaven and earth that Bynum describes meant that religion was as much a matter of earthly life as heavenly joy. For good or ill, what one did and experienced would be preserved in the resurrected body. We, however, often view religion as helpful only in answering (often quite arbitrarily) questions of how we can reach eternal blessedness, not how we might live better while we are here. What the patristic and medieval worlds joined, we have torn asunder.

On the other hand, we unite what they did not. Difference is significant to us as it was for earlier Christians; but unlike them, we try to yoke difference with egalitarian conceptions of heaven and earth. It is worth asking whether our contemporary social egalitarianism is derived from the Protestant denial of differences in the intensity of the eternal vision of God. In any event, we have departed from medievals, but only partway. This half-leave has put us in a peculiar position; in our political and social life we seem to swing wildly between desires for full egalitarianism and rigidly hierarchical authority. Moreover, we tend to spiritualize both hierarchy and egalitarianism. We fail to connect these concepts to bodies wounded by hierarchy, or to the material differences between people regarded formally as equals. Whether our quandary is soluble remains to be seen. For their part, the patristics and medievals, justly and unjustly, and despite their juggling of other contradictions, resolutely refused to detach questions of difference, hierarchy, destiny and change from the body. They got the problem, right.

Resurrection of the Body is a jewel among current intellectual endeavors. Bynum takes the histories of thought and society (and their relation) seriously and on their own terms. In addition, she asks us if we have the courage to face this strangest of all Christian doctrines. We have hardly begun to make sense of it. To begin, we will have to think seriously about the value of change, the nature of the body and the significance of difference.

Bynum has provided indispensable aid to any investigation of bodily resurrection, whether historical or theological. She has made the task both easier and more difficult. If the luminaries of the past are not sufficient for us, if they too are internally inconsistent and perplexed, we must still use their lights to make our way. At the same time, Bynum has opened our ears to tones of beauty long unheard, opened our eyes to a more expansive and lovely vision of the body, and opened our hearts to the desire for body and the hope that the body -- despite decay and death-might remain integral to the beauty of the person.