Page 4173 – Christianity Today (2024)

Rembrandt’s Eyes, by Simon Schama, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, 701 pp.; $50

In the film The Madness of King George, the Puritan pastor charged with monitoring and rectifying the conduct of the crazed George III says to him firmly, ominously, “I have you in my eye, Sir. I shall keep you in my eye.” This minatory Puritan takes on a role most Protestants reserve for themselves: keeping an eye on the self. In fact, such self-gazing represents a somewhat paradoxical Reformed obsession.

Reformed theology mandated a focus on the divine, not on the human subject. Yet the need for keeping a constant watch over the potentially vagrant self, fashioned of fallen nature, led many Reformed believers to concentrate increasingly on policing their own inner states: precisely because the self is sinful and wants too much attention, one must gaze vigilantly inward in order to keep the self down and out of trouble. This incessant tracking of possible shortcomings and pitfalls could blur the necessary focus on divine grace.

The distinctively Protestant focus on the self exercised enormous influence in Europe and North America, and not only among Protestants. It was certainly one of the formative influences on the vibrant Dutch culture of the seventeeth century and on the greatest artist that age of great art produced: the painter Rembrandt, the subject of a massively ambitious, richly textured study by the historian Simon Schama. With The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Schama established him self as an expert on early modern Dutch culture. In subsequent works he challenged the conventions of academic history, essaying novelistic speculation. Here, he extends his metier to that of art critic.[1]

“Rembrandt,” Schama tells us, “was one of nature’s ecumenicals. His mother’s family had been Catholic; his father’s desultorily Calvinist.” Rembrandt himself showed no inclination to pledge confessional allegiance—”which is not to say,” Schama adds, “that Rembrandt did not feel his faith as intensely as Rubens did his.”

But while Schama is careful not to call Rembrandt a Protestant, he acknowledges the impact of Reformed thought on Rembrandt’s painterly scheme. Although all painters of the time, Catholics as well as Protestants, explicated biblical themes, Rembrandt’s works in this genre tend to display an especially Pauline influence, an influence most closely associated with the emergence of Protestant theology. His 1638 The Fall of Man shows Adam and Eve in an amalgam of prelapsarian heedlessness and postlapsarian consciousness, demonstrating original sin and the depravity of the human will. Almost bestial in representation, both Adam and Eve show the marks of shame. The painting Susanna and the Elders as well as the etching Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife are very graphic in sexual depiction, drawing the viewer in as voyeur, heightening that prototypically Protestant sense of the lure of sin.

Rembrandt’s preoccupation with self has a special energy in that he is fascinated by themes of blindness, sightedness, insight, scrutiny, and revelation. A profoundly self-absorbed individual, Rembrandt nonetheless had the capacity to become absorbed in the costuming of the subjectivity of others, especially as it revealed the tension between public self-presentation and private self. Schama reads Rembrandt’s masterly Portrait of Jan Six (1654) as displaying just such a tension. In a stunning analysis, Schama concentrates on Six’s gloved left hand. While viewers tend to assume that Six is pulling his glove on, preparatory to going out, Schama reads the fine detail and finds that the thumbnail is depicted as tightly pressed against the chamois so that, in fact, Six’s hand must already be firmly in the glove, and he is removing it, prior to resuming his inner, and indoors, persona. This interplay of inner and outer reveals a complexity of self-presentation that a less sensitive observer would have missed and is also consonant with the Protestant discomfort with disjunction between appearance and being.[2]

The Reformed emphasis on the preeminence of God’s Word inspired and challenged Rembrandt as well: here the energizing tension is between word and image. The Calvinist pastor in the Portrait of Johannes Cornelisz Sylvius (1646), for example, protrudes over the edge of the frame sketched around his image, as though to show the power of his expository word—reflection of divine Verbum—to cross boundaries and make contact. The image becomes a motor, a dynamism for the display of verbal potency rather than figurative exactitude. Drawn to the Mennonite sect by his own religious inclinations, Rembrandt’s sensitive Portrait of Cornelis Claesz. Anslo and His Wife, Aeltje Gerritsdr. Schouten (1641) confers gravity and dignity on the couple, while animating as if by divine breath the pages of the Bible they consult. The real energy here, Rembrandt seems to say, is verbal and is generated by the self dwelling on the Word. Schama concludes that “Rembrandt … could make the things of this world hymn the sanctity of the world to come, yet manage, somehow, not to trespass impiously across its borders. He had created what the preachers had said was impossible: Protestant icons.”

The spotlight on the self, and its good or bad choices, is reinforced by Rembrandt’s emphasis on subjectivity. Schama excels in progressively displaying a veritable portrait gallery of Rembrandt’s self-depictions, examining their evolution over time and what they have to say about the painter’s character and position in the world. He notes, for in stance, in The Artist in His Studio (1629) that the artist’s eyes are deeply shadowed, almost blacked out, as though he were wearing a mask. Rembrandt, on the threshold of his career, has not yet devised his own identity: hence, the eyes reveal an emptiness to be filled. But this vacuity is not negative; rather, Schama sees the painter posing as the very emblem of imagination or ingenuity, as Painting’s own copious powers of invention, yet to be unfurled. Schama observes that Rembrandt’s focus on eyes in all the portraits is a brilliantly simple rehearsal of draftsman techniques: “when the student, child or adult, was given an exercise in drawing a specific feature of the physiognomy, first and always came the eye.”

The material quality of Rembrandt’s settings and backgrounds—so vividly evoked by Schama’s lustrous verbal images—may also have a Protestant derivation. In Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor compellingly argued that one reason for the strength of Reformed faith was its willingness to explain Scripture using events drawn from quotidian existence, to elevate the ordinary occupations exercised by believers in the world to the status of a spiritual vocation. The world here-and-now possesses dignity. The Calvinist revolution in Holland, Schama observes, brought about the “replacement of a flamboyantly poetic manner with an unapologetically prosaic one; a coming down to earth.”

Just so, Rembrandt’s elaborate canvases, embroidered with detail like genre paintings run amok, offer a visually dazzling cornucopia of stuffs and substances, textures, implements, exotica, gadgets—compasses, astrolabes, butter churns, document boxes—some with symbolic valence or allegorical intent, but most present simply to authenticate lived experience and to enhance the pictorial illusion.

Schama details at great length the contents of Rembrandt’s Wunderkammer, a large room filled with curiosities, a mammoth collector’s cabinet jammed with unusual oddments, monstrosities, fragments of strange and wonderful objects. (In his book La Tulipe et la licorne, Antoine Schnapper has contended that the construction of Wunderkammerer was practiced chiefly, although not exclusively, by members of the Reformed faith.)

Paintings by Rembrandt displaying patriarchal roles or familial hierarchies often deal directly with a capstone of Protestant theology: the companionate marriage, both partners scripturally literate (or becoming so, as in An Old Woman Reading, 1631, almost certainly a representation of a pious Protestant) with the father as biblical exhorter and teacher of the wife and children. Relationships are developed through a textual filter: through proximity to the Bible, through discussion of Scripture, rather than through personal interaction per se. In Two Old Men Disputing (1628), the focal point of the microdrama is the text designated by the patriarch’s finger. Light falls on several Bibles arrayed about the room, making the drama one of scriptural utterance rather than of character development. In addition, paintings like David at Prayer (1652) show the Protestant shift to a domestic interior as the space for piety, as opposed to the Catholic tendency to display acts of worship in a church or other designated “sacred” space.

In other ways, too, Rembrandt’s canvases demonstrate a shift from Catholic to Protestant piety. Discussing the Portrait of Maerten Soolmans (1634), Schama digresses to tell us that in paired portraits of spouses, “often, the man … may hold a pair of gloves, the emblem of the dextrarum iunctio, of the nuptial joining of right hands, a detail which, in Catholic culture, had originally signified the sacramental nature of marriage, but which had survived into seventeenth-century Protestantism as a symbol of the marital bond.” Where as visual props had been used symbolically, or allegorically—a tendency more often associated with Catholic schemas—Rembrandt uses them as indicators of relationships and of nuanced subjectivities.

Finally, there’s a degree of irony in considering the Reformed influence on Rembrandt’s prodigious artistic output. Calvinists notoriously had a problem with the notion of creativity. God the Creator had created once and for all, and all further expression should be a mere gloss on his perfect order. For this reason, for example, both Calvin and Beza decried the writing of fiction as a hubristic attempt to supplant God by inventing one’s own universe; after all, the Latin root of fiction, fingere, meant lying.

Rembrandt, as creator of his canvases, is drawn to heroicized characters in strong, authorial roles, yet also shows some ambivalence toward these postures. In The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632), he depicts the sage surgeon designating with his scalpel the flayed musculature of a corpse’s arm and making a pedantic oval with his first finger and thumb to underscore the point of his lecture. A sort of “moral drama,” rather than simple anatomy illustration, emerges from Rembrandt’s rendering, since the corpse, rather than receding into the shadows, has half light on his face, forcing us as viewers to deal with the body as still a person—and requiring us to acknowledge our own mortality. Dr. Tulp’s surgical wisdom, perhaps paraded a trifle arrogantly, yields to the recognition of a supreme Creator behind the dissecting theater. That is a lesson of which Calvin himself presumably would have approved.

Catharine Randall is professor of French and chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Fordham University. Her most recent book is Building Codes: The Calvinist Aesthetics of Early Modern Europe (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press).

Footnotes:

1. The historian’s novelistic bent is indulged in Rembrandt’s Eyes as well. What Schama himself calls “a conjectural biography” is both winsome and vexing. The overlay of “must have,” “perhaps,” and “suppose” grows too thick at times and seems distorting. The correlate of this device is a sometimes too obvious ploy to insert the reader: “How would you have felt?” Schama asks, apparently imploring acquiescence rather than hoping for intellectual assent to irrefutable logic.

2. Since Schama makes so much of notions of selfhood, he might well have begun with how identity was understood in the seventeenth century—certainly quite differently from our fractured, postmodern self-conceptions. Because he does not, some degree of his own projection is inevitable; more than a hint of Freudian psychoanalytical vocabulary shades Schama’s perspective.

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Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art, by John B. Ravenal, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/University of Washington Press, 68 pp.; $18.95, paper

Most historical narratives of twentieth century art have, in various ways, accepted as a truism some version of the secularization theory advanced by sociologists, which regards modernity as incompatible with religious belief or spirituality. If, as Ezra Pound insisted, artists are “the antennae of the race,” it follows that this incompatibility will be expressed with particular clarity in modern art—and so the common wisdom assures us.[1] Whether or not this perspective is an accurate portrait of modernity (and the recent retreat from secularization theory by some of its principal advocates raises that question pretty forcefully), there is no doubt that spirituality and religious belief are alive and well in our “postmodern” culture—and so also in the contemporary artworld. But while contemporary artists have been exploring spirituality and religious belief aesthetically, art historians, art critics, and curators have paid little attention, so one must look a bit closer to find the evidence.

One place to look is a modest exhibition catalogue that accompanied an exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Entitled Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art, this exhibition was on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from April 4-June 28, 2000 and featured the work of 14 artists. Far from being reactionary or rear-guard figures working on the margins, these are some of the most important con temporary artists, including Christian Boltanski, Robert Gober, the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anish Kapoor, Zoe Leonard, and Gabriel Orozco.

The exhibition’s curator and author of the catalogue essay, John B. Ravenal, ex presses his own surprise at the intensity with which many contemporary artists are pursuing spiritual issues in their art. Ravenal quotes Robert Gober, who in a recent interview asserted that he is concerned to make a religious art or art that “is made with God in mind—like an at tempt to understand the mysteries of faith.” Al though the pieces gathered for this exhibition are not explicitly “religious art,” Vanitas explores the artist’s recognition of art’s capacity to communicate the spiritual dimension of life and death.

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” So reads the epigraph of the catalogue essay, and the wisdom of Ecclesiastes remains an important subtext for the exhibition, even while Ravenal steers the art away from the context of divine revelation. For the author/ curator, the vanitas tradition focuses on one of life’s fundamental tensions, between the enjoyment of earthly pleasures and accomplishments and awareness of inevitable loss. Although it is found in various manifestations through out the history of Christian art in Western Europe since the fourteenth century, the vanitas or memento mori theme inspired virtually a distinct genre in seventeenth century Dutch still-life painting, which played an important role in the visual culture of Northern European Calvinism. Ravenal finds this traditional artistic theme in unexpected places in the contemporary artworld: plastic bottles filled with water dyed red and hanging from a suspended rope, a pair of ice skates, a pair of synchronized wall clocks, silicone rubber, sewn dried orange and banana peels, and a decorated skull.

Ravenal is a bit too quick to attribute contemporary artists’ profound interest in exploring life and death in their art to pressing global issues and “conflict and crisis [which] are hallmarks of contemporary life.” At what time in human history has such reflection been irrelevant? And indeed, his catalogue essay attempts to find continuities between and among some of the most challenging contemporary artworks and the more traditional art of the past. The exhibition, which focuses on sculpture and installation art, differs from the more traditional manifestations of the vanitas theme, Ravenal suggests, insofar as these works of art “physically embody their themes in their materials, process, and forms in contrast to the pictorial representation of ideas in painting or photography.”

Consider, for example, one of the most explicit references to the vanitas tradition: the 1997 work Black Kites, by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962), an artist known for his subtle compositions, whether installations, photographs, or sculptures, and his use of ordinary materials, whether a garden hose or a partially deflated soccer ball filled with water. Lent to the exhibition from the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Black Kites is a human skull covered in graphite patterns of diamond-shaped kite forms.

The skull is the classic symbol in the Western tradition of the transience of life. Instead of representing a skull, Orozco draws directly onto an actual human skull, decorating it with patterns that allude both to the Harlequin costume and the chessboard, evoking the game of life and its rules. Orozco downplays the potential morbidity of an actual human skull serving as a drawing surface through his sensitive application of the diamond shapes, which suggests an intimate—even meditative—tactile experience of and relationship to this human skull, as an aesthetic manifestation of the artist’s reflection on life and death.

The massive media coverage devoted to certain recent “sensational” exhibitions has reinforced in the public mind the already well-established image of a viciously anti-spiritual and anti-religious contemporary artworld. The reality is much more complex. Spiritual and religious issues re main important for a vast number of contemporary artists. This modest project demonstrates that contemporary artists, like their predecessors, “address some of the basic conflicts of human existence, between presence and absence, pleasure and fear, love and loss, power and instability, beauty and death.” Vanitas also shows that, contrary to its dismissive critics, contemporary art is not devoid of beauty—with the understanding that beauty is ephemeral. “Vanity of vanities . …”

Daniel A. Siedell is curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden at the University of Nebraska.

Footnote:

1. There have been notable exceptions to this consensus; see, for example, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, by Maurice Tuchman et al. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Abbeville Press, 1986).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following product, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:• Vanitas, John B. Ravenal

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 300 pp.; $54.95

Isms multiply when ideologies collide. Strange though it may seem at “the end of history,” words we smile or scoff at were once casus belli, fought over like territory, flung about like grenades. Nineteenth-century English first felt the impact of “evangelicalism” (1831), “socialism” (1837), “secularism” and “vegetarianism” (1851), “altruism” (1853), “positivism” (1854), “sacerdotalism” (1861), “agnosticism” (1869), “imperialism” (1870), and “pragmatism” (1898). Other isms, like ensigns, heralded the followers of great men: “Owenism” (1833), “New man ism” (1838), “Malthusianism” (1848), “Moody-and-Sankeyism” (1875), “Spencerism” (1880), and “Marxism” (1897). Coined in innocence or forged in anger, words like these became “calls to battle,” not only in politics and religion, but—Ludwig Fleck reminds us—in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. When their “logical meaning” was spent, they still retained a “magical power” to provoke or persuade “simply by being used.”

The most durable of Victorian scientific isms is “Darwinism.” It entered the ideological fray in 1856 when a clergyman damned the soft-p*rn poet Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. Four years later, Darwinism began to acquire its modern sense, referring to views ex pressed in the Origin of Species (1859). This was thanks to a rising sea-squirt specialist, Thomas Huxley, who in the same breath puffed an arms magnate by dubbing the Origin “a Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.” Huxley went on to target popular audiences with the ultimatum “it is either Darwinism or nothing,” by which he promoted evolutionary naturalism with an anti-creationist edge. But his rhetoric proved divisive and made more enemies than friends. Too often, it seemed, Darwinism was used or abused by partisans rather than treated for what he believed it to be, bona fide science.

So Huxley back-pedaled, claiming to be agnostic about “lunar politics,” and then Darwin himself stepped in. Under his auspices (with a little help from the Catholic anatomist St. George Mivart) Darwinism was born again in the 1870s as the theory of evolution by natural selection tout court, without metaphysical or ideological entailments. Huxley continued to shun the D-word (nor did he ever endorse natural selection) and lived to see the “want of unanimity among Darwinians in matters of Sociology and Politics” cited as happy proof that “the principles of the Master are perfectly neutral on such questions.” By 1900 pundits were labeling the partisan use or abuse of Darwin’s science “Social Darwinism.”

All of which suggests that Darwinism has a history like that of other isms. No philosophical fancy footwork, no political jiggery-pokery can avoid this. Raymond Williams once remarked on “the isolation of isms” during the nineteenth century and their “transfer from theological to political controversy.” He failed to see that science was just as involved. Here too isms multiplied as dogmas clashed, denominations splintered, and excommunications took place; here too were ideologues, guerrilla groups, and palace coups. At stake was the nature of science itself and its bearing on human progress. And at the center of conflict stood Darwinism, repeatedly defused and rearmed, its charge diluted but finally distilled as the “universal acid” with which to day Dan Dennett and others would dissolve all fundamentalisms except their own.

How then may Darwinism be most aptly studied? As military history, it would seem, and we still hear of Darwin’s inflaming “the warfare of science with theology” or, more often, fomenting “the Darwinian revolution.” Indeed, judging from historical literature, Darwinism has generated all sorts of excitement. It may “come to” a place like America and there have “impacts” as people “react” or “respond” to it. It may have “implications” independent of context, for “it”—Darwinism—is conceived as an essence hovering above (or seeping through) history’s accidents, an idea or set of ideas that, like a chart-busting pop group, creates consternation wherever it goes. But pop artists are real, earthy; no one thinks the tried-and-tired methods of intellectual history are up to understanding them. The same cannot be said of Darwinism. Its historians have yet to discover the rich resources of media studies, material cultural studies, and ethnomethodology, now routinely exploited by interpreters of other protean subjects, like Madonna Ciccone.

Even so, Disseminating Darwinism marks a new departure. Here Darwinism is scrutinized, not science-by-science, country-by-country, or thinker-by-thinker, but according to an original set of canons—place, race, and gender—as well as the old-time favorite, religion. The editors have hit on a fresh guiding concept to boot. Not content with a static structuralist “introduction” (as in Yvette Conry’s L’introduction du darwinisme en France au XIX siècle) or a threadbare “reception” (as in Thomas Glick’s The Comparative Reception of Darwinism), Numbers and Stenhouse trot out a dynamic “disseminating.” Whatever can it mean? A biological —indeed, seminal—metaphor seems peculiarly apt, but this one has deeper roots than Darwinism, harking most memorably (as the editors well know) to the Synoptic Gospels.

“Behold,” Matthew 13 records,

a sower went forth to sow. And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up. Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deep ness of earth. And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them. But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

In this parable, Jesus draws attention to the conditions under which his message—”the word of the kingdom”—may spread. He offers in fact a rudimentary sociology of knowledge. “Place” is paramount, as the text goes on to explain: first, the “way side” where one “heareth the word … and understandeth it not”; second, the “stony” ground where one “heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it,” but “hath … not root in himself” and so “dureth for a time”; third, the plot of “thorns” where one “heareth the word” but it is choked and “becometh unfruitful”; and finally the “good ground” where one “heareth the word, and understandeth it,” and “beareth fruit.” In the three abortive cases, place is crucial but not the only factor. “Fowls” descend where there is no understanding—the word vanishes. The “sun” scorches where understanding is shallow—the word perishes under duress. “Thorns” choke where understanding is impeded—the word suffers from competition. Only where the word is both heard and understood does it catch on; only in prepared sites, with the right contingencies, will the seminal message spread.

How far then does Disseminating Darwinism live up to the promise of its title? How have “place” and other contingencies—race, gender, and religion—shaped the history of Darwinism? What indeed was reaped, and what sown?

The first five of the ten chapters focus on local, regional, and national terrains. David Livingstone’s study of Presbyterian towns shows that Princeton and Edinburgh were full of nutrients, offering Darwinism rich theological soil, but in Belfast the muck was thrown instead as stern preachers defended their turf against fellow-Orangeman John Tyndall. The aftermath of Tyndall’s “materialistic” Belfast address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 suggests that, for Protestants and Catholics alike, Darwinism’s manner of sowing could be more critical than its substance, and that the seed sown was not necessarily what flowered or even sprouted. Thanks to Livingstone, these phenomena may now be sought in places for which other contributors offer different insights.

Terra Australis is surveyed by Barry Butcher, a continent where, one might suppose, the fortunes of Darwinism were as distinctive as the flora and fauna. But no. The “tyranny of distance” failed to impose a significant “time lag” on de bates a world away; a “culturally connected” intelligentsia—church leaders, colonial governors, men of science—aired the same range of views on the same set of issues at roughly the same intervals as their British counterparts. And by the 1890s biology was bowing to Huxley-trained “new men” as much in Australia as at home. Butcher only hints at local conditions—gold fever, exotic wildlife, stone-age aboriginal cultures—that helped or hindered theories of progressive development, and he might have added the “convict stain” and republicanism among immigrant Celts and Catholics. Surely such factors affected the planting of Darwinism in the antipodes more than he allows.

New Zealand, analyzed admirably by John Stenhouse, is a case in point. The youngest of Britain’s “white settler colonies,” it had yet to come of age when the Origin of Species was published. Most of the immigrants were English, literate, and from “lower-middle-class or respectable working-class backgrounds.” Their Christianty was moderate or nominal; no denomination had a majority and there was no state church. Nor was there a “pre-Darwinian scientific establishment” to overcome. Old World conditions for ideological conflict were absent in New Zealand. When controversy over evolution did break out, it was in the “far south,” where Scots Free Churchmen predominated, and the main casualty was the Dunedin YMCA. For their part, men of science “favored Darwin from beginning to end,” yet without ostracizing his sole opponent, a Catholic entomologist. Even freethinkers “got tolerated to death,” Stenhouse claims, which is more than can be said for the Maori. The “most sustained period of racial warfare” in the colony’s history began in 1860. Darwinism breathed new life into Pakeha (white) racism even as it augured the extermination of native tribes. Slogans like “the European rat … displaced the Maori rat” became knock-down arguments for humans’ behaving like rats with a vengeance.

A similar Darwinian motif prevailed in Canada, where the “irresistible force of agricultural expansion” from a “vulnerable and relatively unstable” immigrant culture met the “immovable object” of the Precambrian Shield. “Darwin,” says Susan Zeller, “offered a scientific framework within which to comprehend this predicament” and “strengthened the resolve” to defeat it. Evolutionary biogeography flourished on the arctic tundra according to the same principles of competition and dominance invoked by romantic nationalists to justify the spread of civilization at the expense of indigenes in the same regions. By the twentieth century, Canada’s history itself was seen as a “progressive development” of the “best northern races” as they struggled to occupy their appointed environment. It took a die-hard creationist, McGill’s geologist-principal J.W. Dawson, to see this expansionism as “the enemy of wild nature,” the march of empire as “the westward march of exhaustion,” both of land and resources. Zeller’s essay, though largely descriptive, stands out for its fertile suggestions about the actual geological and geographical terrain on which Darwinism took root.

Ron Numbers and Lester Stephens’s “Darwinism in the American South” is probably the most thorough piecemeal vindication of the region’s hospitality to evolution ever published. Their case is weakened by its limitation to the “educated classes” and “scientific circles,” and the essay all but ignores the aspects of “place” featured by Zeller and Stenhouse. In a land steeped in slavery and torn by sectionalism, it seems inconceivable that controversies over a theory that both unified mankind and united man kind with beasts were not, at some level, rooted in “racial concerns,” even if the authors found this “difficult to document.” After all, they show that James Woodrow fell from grace over man’s bodily evolution, and Alexander Winchell over the descent of whites from pre-Adamic blacks. Both professors’ monogenism, like Darwin’s, threatened havoc by bestializing the cottonocracy, sanctioning miscegenation, and making mankind one. Is it any wonder then that in the “racially sensitive South” the “most ardent scientific opponent of Darwinism” (and perhaps many pundits on all sides) had been taught by Harvard’s great anti-Darwinian polygenist, Louis Agassiz?

The latter chapters of Disseminating Darwinism remain focused on American soil, assessing how religion, race, and gender affected the planting and the harvest. To recover the “motivations” of Protestant clergymen and theologians, Jon Roberts shows himself an even more out-and-out empiricist than Numbers and Stephens. He sidelines “denomination” and “geography” as explanatory “variables” because they cannot “predict” responses to “the theory of organic evolution” (help fully quantified as 35 percent pro, 25 percent con, 40 percent “progressive creationist”), although he allows that historians might find significant “correlations” by using “the sophisticated instruments of statistical analysis.” He then—predictably enough—rejects “social interest” explanations for being “largely driven by dogma rather than evidence” (thus as signing historians’ motives while muddling ideology with intentionality). Explanations based on “cultural-psychological strain” are similarly found wanting be fore Roberts expounds his own “hypothesis.” Taking the “theological stakes” identified by contemporaries as the key to their motivations, he boils the Darwinian debates down to one compelling issue: the relative authorities of Scripture and scientific expertise. “Thinkers” motivated by belief in “biblical literal ism” (or “in fallibility”) rejected evolution; others compromised that belief by adopting a miracle-studded “progressive creation ism”; the rest—”Protestant evolutionists”—acknowledged a fallible Scripture while ceding authority in science to professionals.

This seems a little too familiar for comfort. Motives are not like billiard balls, banging men into action—so far Roberts and I agree. He clinches the point usefully by allowing for “layers of motivation.” But “it makes sense,” he adds, to understand the theological stratum first, “before burrowing deeper.” After “six decades” of scholarship at this level, I wonder why. Why assume that nineteenth-century religious thinkers were the best judges of their motives? Why should we believe them anyway? Why not start at a more basic level (short of Jacques Barzun’s jocular “nuclear biography”) and ask where belief in the sacred authority of texts came from? Why was this particular doctrine thought to be at stake? Do the politics of hermeneutics shed light, now we understand (from today’s neo-creationists) the ideological value of the early chapters of Genesis? What indeed was the non-cognitive function of Baconian do-it-yourself exegesis in a enlarging, diversifying, pluralistic republic?

My point is that just as the imputation of motives by historians is to be understood by reference to their communal concerns and modes of practice—mine in Britain, Roberts’s in the United States—so the self-imputation of motives by historical actors must be considered in relation to the communal concerns and practices in the contexts where the utterances were made. (I owe this point to C. Wright Mills via Steve Shapin and Barry Barnes.) What holds for Protestants will apply to other believers in sacred texts—say, Mormons, Millerites, and Muslims. In each case, historians need to understand the actors’ communal world—their “social interests,” so to speak—to make sense of their declared motives in reckoning with science. Such declarations however do not open a window on anyone’s soul.

Sociological insight of this sort distinguishes Scott Appleby’s subtle analysis of the Roman Catholic church. With the clergy divided into ultramontane, neoscholastic conservatives and “Americanist” progressives, Appleby might have, Roberts-like, made beliefs about “Catholic tradition rather than biblical literalism” the crux of “responses to evolution.” But instead he digs deeper, viewing the church’s “internal politics” in cultural context, alongside the “external politics” of social reform as it affected the needs of a “polyglot, urbanizing, immigrant … community.”

The issue has, to my mind, never been put so suggestively. Of all denominations, Catholics were overwhelmingly on the sharp end of what American intellectuals in 1897 first called “Social Darwinism.” Those tired, hungry, genuflecting masses from southern and eastern Europe—petit*-bourgeois, wage-slaves, syndicalists, anarchists, and all—became the “feeble” and “unfit” on whom Protestant xenophobes sought to impose Darwinian discipline. Big families in good stocks—well and good; Catholics endorsed the aims of positive eugenics. But birth control, sterilization, and other negations preached at them in Darwin’s name were anathema, even apart from Natural Law. Theological gymnastics over evolution, Appleby argues, were “actually an occasion for American Catholics to work out a number of identity-defining issues facing the immigrant community.” Neither Scripture nor tradition was finally at stake, but the church’s place in the modern world.

Marc Swetlitz, in the book’s longest and most original essay, reaches analogous conclusions about American Jews. Their immigrant community too was divided, struggling to accommodate an alien culture without losing its identity. Of Germanic origin mainly (Swetlitz leaves the East European and Russian diasporas for future research), with few scholars trained in science, the traditionalist and Reform parties had “long engaged in polemics regarding the proper direction of American Judaism.” Matters came to a head in the 1870s and ’80s just as Darwin was becoming a cultural force, and evolution entered the controversy, mobilized and bad-mouthed by both sides, as rabbis invoked it to sanction religious “progress” or spurned it as an ideology of assimilation. At root, Swetlitz shows, the evolution debate was “about the nature of Judaism”; and with communal life at stake, Scripture remained a vital but subordinate issue. I find his argument convincing with one reservation. If evolution became a “resource” for securing the “future of American Jewry,” was it not also the stuff of pogroms? Didn’t Jews eventually suffer with Catholics and other immigrants under the heel of nativism dressed up as Darwinism? As this story belongs to his future research, I trust Swetlitz will tell it in the same compelling detail.

Another fraught topic, “Black Responses to Darwinism,” is covered in a ground-breaking chapter by Eric Anderson. The problem he confronts is the one Swetlitz puts on ice: Where was the cry of the oppressed? For there was “no strong, sustained black reaction either for or against Darwin and his theories.” Even black religious leaders “seldom directly attacked Darwinism or competing theories of evolution.” Responses ranging from “vague appropriation” and “sublime neglect” to “peremptory rejection” were “remarkably muted if Darwin’s ideas were central to American racist thought”; and Anderson concludes that we may be wrong to expect that blacks should have “responded more strongly to Darwinism.”

Indeed, it is difficult to see how the suggestion ever got started. Leaving aside whether Anderson’s clutch of spokesmen, from Frederick Douglass in the 1850s to Francis Grimké in the 1920s, expressed typical African American views, it seems perfectly obvious why “what did not happen” happened. Ignorance, illiteracy, in articulacy, failure of nerve, and sheer canniness are each reason enough why any “poorly educated, largely rural” people would hesitate to sound off about science. Even their leaders would, no doubt, seldom invoke great names or discuss complex theories (let alone endorse them), though they might well express commonplace concepts in vivid glozing language. Anderson complains that “black Americans … used Darwinian terms and metaphors … casually, almost offhandedly—a fact that complicates the task of assessing the impact of Darwinism on this community.” What? Would it be easier if language had not been used? Or should the language of African Americans at this period be judged by standards appropriate to philosophers and scientists? Who, for that matter, in any race or profession at any time has used “Darwinian” language so circ*mspectly that “assessing the impact of Darwinism” on their community is uncomplicated? Did Darwin himself?

Anderson is on firmer ground when explaining that blacks neglected Darwin because “polygenist theory” was their real enemy, because urgent practical concerns detained them (fighting racism on the ground, “like firemen in an arson-mad neighborhood”), and because “Darwin’s ideas were not the primary impetus be hind racist thought.” As for “measuring ‘the impact of Darwinism,'” which Anderson finds a “difficulty,” I hereby declare it (pace Roberts) a waste of time. Even if the results of data-crunching could be made plausible, historians don’t have to quantify the “silence” of racism’s victims to realize that “certain convenient, time-honored generalizations about evolution, race, and society” have to be overhauled. They have, for instance, Stenhouse, Zeller, and Swetlitz to remind them.

The last chapter of Disseminating Darwinism, on “women’s responses to evolutionary ideology,” is in respects the most salutary. Drawing widely on relevant literature, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Mark Jorgensen canvass the well-known views of Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman without overlooking remarks by Eliza Burt Gamble, Olive Schreiner, Louisa MacDonald, George Eliot, and Kate Chopin. The centrality of female experience, women’s wariness in debate, their empirical one-upsmanship and efforts to co-opt Darwin are all suitably addressed.

The problem with the essay lies elsewhere. It is one that afflicts every chapter more or less, and Kohlstedt and Jorgensen are to be credited for acknowledging it. From their opening alert—”there was no simple, singular Darwinism”—to their parting advice—”there never was a simple or static Darwin”—they struggle to pin down the subject whose dissemination the editors expect them to treat. With less than 10,000 words to work in, they take the time-honored way out. As Darwinian terms are “used so variably,” they say, and historical actors tended to “gloss over their distinction,” the essay follows suit. It uses language “in a fairly general way that finds considerable continuities and similarities in argument among the scientists and their popularizers despite the sometimes heated debates among them.”

Which is an understatement. Besides “Darwinism,” Kohlsted and Jorgensen refer to their subject as “Darwinian science,” “Darwinian theories,” “Darwinian ideas,” “Darwinian thinking,” “Darwinian interpretations,” “formulations,” “explications,” and “discourse.” Sometimes “Darwin’s own ideas,” “arguments,” and “descriptions” are in view, sometimes “Darwin’s theory,” “over all theory,” or “theories on sexual difference.” Occasionally the authors use “the evolutionary model,” “the evolutionary framework,” or just “this new scientific theory,” and the farrago goes on. Other chapters refer aimlessly to “Darwin’s hypothesis,” “Darwinian approaches,” and “Darwin’s work,” as well as to the old standbys “transmutation,” “evolution,” and “natural selection.” One chapter with Darwinism in the title even admits that “virtually all” of its scientists “preferred non-Darwinian modes of evolutionary development”—which might lead one to wonder what was being disseminated.

This simply will not do. Language means nothing if so many terms can be used interchangeably. Most of them would not be in use anyway unless someone, somewhere, at some time thought the distinctions they represent worth making; so why do historians ignore the rich history of semantics? For instance, Darwin had myriad “ideas” on myriad subjects. His “science” took in earthworms, his “theories” included pangenesis, his “arguments” involved metaphysics, natural theology, and ethics. To speak in a few breaths of Darwin’s ideas, science, theories, and arguments, throwing in for good measure Darwinian “interpretations,” “formulations,” “explications,” and “discourse,” without uttering distinctions and qualifications, as if everyone agreed in each case about what was being discussed, is to impoverish understanding. And it is no use pleading, with Kohlstedt and Jorgensen, that historical actors themselves used language loosely. We aren’t writing for them, arguing with them.

Not that I think actors should be expected to make the distinctions historians do. Jon Roberts is right and my former self was wrong: it is “unnecessary and even misleading” to classify Victorians by their adherence to natural selection, hypothetico-deductively conceived, particularly since Ernst Mayr had not yet been born and Darwin hedged about the subject. “Darwinism” is not to be formally defined in this or any other ahistorical way and then traced through the past as a distinct idea or argument. What historians have to tackle instead is usage, the incidence and semantics of Darwinian language in various theaters of power—classrooms, laboratories, churches, hustings, the mass media. If actors lumped meanings that we split, fine; if they split what we lump, fine too. If words became weapons—yes, there were theaters of war—we need to find out why, who got caught in the crossfire, and, as Disseminating Darwinism amply suggests, where. Was it not, for instance, removal from Belfast to the New World, according to Livingstone, that enabled the moderates James McCosh and George Macloskie to achieve a “rhetorical liberation,” one that “allowed them to express their reservations about Darwinism in a muted way, and to find evolution theologically congenial”?

Numbers and Stenhouse have edited a stimulating book, one that sets new horizons for researching Darwinian history. It is uneven, disjointed and undisciplined in places, with a glaring but entirely predictable blindspot: social class. (Six of the ten chapters are about the United States; two-thirds of the authors are based there. Stenhouse and Appleby alone broach the subject.) Here the only relevant study published by an American is Mark Pittenger’s American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920 (1993). Other wise scholars may consult works by Ted Royle and Bernie Lightman while looking forward to theses by their students, Suzanne Paylor and Erin McLaughlin-Jenkins, at Britain’s and Canada’s York Universities respectively.

As for sowing and reaping, the world is about to be electrified by Jim Secord’s long-awaited Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (University of Chicago Press). With unexampled rigor, analyzing publishers, audiences, rhetorics, reviewers, markets, and epistemic geographies, Secord nails down a point that, mutatis mutandis, Numbers and Stenhouse’s title only touches on. For what Darwin really scattered abroad, on stony, thorny, and fertile ground, was not ideas and arguments but books. “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

James Moore is Reader in History of Science and Technology at the Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. With Adrian Desmond he is the author of Darwin (Norton).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following product, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:• Disseminating Darwinism, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Jews, Christians, and God

I would just say that Jews and Christians hold each other’s keys. The Christians need the Jews to understand the church in Acts, and the Jews need Jesus to fill a gaping hole in their history, which, as the people of history, cannot be left empty.

Gary CummingsAustin, Tex.

The Romance of the Cloister

This Catholic theologian has been enjoying your publication for several years, and I hereby renew my subscription. The recent issue was particularly good except for Mark Galli’s trek [“The Romance of the Cloister,” January/February]. I know Protestantism abandoned monasticism, but there are no Christian imperatives that no Christian should pray any more than any other. Monks who cultivate tomatoes in between their prayers have no more “left the world” than Galli has. They do not refuse “to enter into life’s evils and sufferings, to subject [themselves] to the vicissitudes of life” any more than his home bound wife does by cleaning diapers, dishes, clothes, and bathrooms when she is not at prayer. They are no more impractical, out of the world, uninvolved, socially negative than she is.

Galli came at the subject with the prevailing attitude of the dying NCC that only social work or political activism expresses Christian faith, opposing “a community divorced from the world [the monastery] to a community engaged with it.” That’s a high schooler’s rhetoric. He questions whether monks “have a great deal to teach us about experiencing the uniquely Christian God.” I doubt if anyone could be accepted into a monastery who said his goal was to “experience God.” Roman Catholics, monks or not, are not about “experiencing God,” but as many of the monks quoted in the article tried to say, they are seeking closer union with God. While personal union with God in what ever degree oftentimes brings (never unambiguous) spiritual effects that can be experienced, if I sought sex with my wife only for my pleasure, she would be inaccessible, and rightly so.

Galli’s own categories blinded him somewhat. He acknowledges the monks’ “insistence upon the primacy [growth] of union with God” but then notes the extent to which they speak in terms of personal growth and development, in which he sees narcissism. Narcissism is always a danger for any Christian seeking growth in any area, but it’s not inevitable, much less in seeking growth in a personal relationship with God. Further more, he completely ignores the content of 95 percent of their prayer life, the divine Office, and the books they read.

I don’t recognize his “inner person” or his “inner workings of the soul.” He falsely opposes reference to “spiritual battles, dark nights, struggles with God” and psychological descriptions of personal growth. The therapy one monk sought and obtained was obviously, as the monk described it, theological and spiritual as well as psychological.

The last subhead of Galli’s article, “A Strange God,” is sad. Obviously God does not call most of us to become monks or nuns. But he calls none of us to seek either experience (or feelings) of God, or the complete absence of feelings and emotions about everything else.

Richard J. RolwingReynoldsburg, Ohio

Mark Galli replies:

I believe Mr. Rolwing and I agree more than he suspects. For example, he writes: “Monks … have no more ‘left the world’ than Galli has.” Agreed. To be sure, it is commonly assumed—and even suggested by the language of the monks themselves—that, as Thomas Merton put it, monks become “strangers to the world.” But upon closer examination of these Northern California monks, I concluded they are very much a part of this world.

No, I didn’t begin writing with the attitude that “only social work or political activism expresses Christian faith,” mainly because I don’t believe it; never have. In fact, I noted how this type of pragmatism is something monastic prayer rightly challenges. I’m sorry Mr. Rolwing missed that paragraph, because it seems we agree again.

He further suggests that I assume a dichotomy between the psychological and the spiritual, as if one can grow psychologically but not spiritually, and vice versa. I’m sorry to disappoint, but I don’t assume such: it’s always a both/and in this world. Talk of “closer union with God” is mere abstraction if there is not some experiential evidence of it (one of the tasks of spiritual direction is to help one discern the activity of God in one’s life). But for these Northern California monks, psychological language often preempts biblical and theological language; so I’m often left confused as to what is distinctively Christian about their personal/spiritual/psychological growth.

Rolwing says I presume the monks’ pursuit of peace “seeks the suppression … of all emotion.” No, I really don’t. But the way they talk about peace did suggest a suppression of some emotions (like anger, e.g.) that I’m not convinced should always be suppressed. Perhaps the con fusion arises from an assumption of Mr. Rolwing: that I am trying to describe and analyze Roman Catholic spirituality as a whole. If I left that impression in the article, I regret it, because I have nothing but profound respect for that tradition. Rather, I was trying to critique a romantic view of monastic spirituality—held by many spirituality-seeking evangelicals like myself—by looking at the actual spirituality of one Northern California Trappist monastery, as unveiled by one author’s interviews with the monks there. The book doesn’t tell us everything about monastic spirituality, but it does tell us something worth pondering.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

• INTELLECTUM VERO VALDE AMA •Greatly love the intellect

—Augustine

“Centrism” doesn’t appear in James Moore’s roll call of nineteenth-century isms (see “Darwinism Gone to Seed,”), nor did the word appear in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. There was an entry for “Centrist,” defined as “a member of the Centre Party (France),” though the first usage citation, from the Daily News in 1872, suggests a broader application: “That weak-kneed congregation who sit in the middle of the House and call themselves ‘Centrists.'” Books & Culture, alas, doesn’t possess the up-to-date digital version of the OED (philanthropic readers, please take note: if given this resource, we would use it), but my now superseded first volume of the supplement, from the 1970s, does include an entry for “centrism,” defined as “a middle position between extreme views,” with first usage in 1935.

Centrism is a peculiarism, then, with a fluid identity. In politics, it often takes the form of handwringing over partisanship, as Ashley Woodiwiss shows in “Democracy Agonistes“. Whereas James Q. Wilson and Edward Banfield began their classic study, City Politics (1966), with the frank acknowledgment that “politics arises out of conflicts, and it consists of the activities—for example, reasonable discussion, impassioned oratory, balloting, and street fighting—by which conflict is carried on,” centrists claim to transcend partisanship, all the while painting their opponents as “extremists.”

The battle over who gets to define the theological center is even more intense. As Michael Horton observes (“Who’s Got the Center?“), “the ‘center’ is not innocent. It is a real place on the map, which demands that all ‘others’ be related to it as margins to the mainstream.” One such attempt at defining the center—of evangelicalism—was “The Gospel Statement” first published in the June 14, 1999 issue of Christianity Today magazine, the subject of the exchange in this issue of B&C between Thomas Oden, one of the drafters of the statement, and Robert Gundry. Yet another perspective on this “remarkable show of unity” can be found in my article, “Whose Gospel Statement? The High-minded Highjacking of Evangelicalism,” written last July for the online site, Beliefnet.

By contrast, evangelicals are excluded from the center in Ellen Charry’s editorial for the January 2001 issue of Theology Today, “Will There Be a Protestant Center?” Here is how Charry begins:

The jury is still out on whether mainline Protestantism can be saved, but two forms of evangelism have geared up to give it the ol’ college try. The two constitute a new twist on the culture war for the heart and soul of Protestant denominationalism. Although they may see each other as deadly enemies, they share some important ground. Each has picked its target population very carefully, attends acutely to contemporary culture, is postdenominational, and works from the same basic principle of social work: “Begin where the client is.”

The “two forms of evangelism” Charry has in mind? The first is “the evangelical option,” with the focus on parachurch youth ministries; the second is “the progressive option,” which “tailors the peace and justice agenda to the tastes of the professional managerial class.” In her analysis, Charry thus adopts one of the favorite rhetorical strategies of centrists: claiming that one’s ideological “others,” who appear to be polar opposites, are in fact fatally flawed in the same way—which can only be perceived, of course, from the vantage point of the center. So Charry explains that both the evangelical option and the progressive option “[cash] in on American individualism, consumerism, and pragmatism.”

To be told that the local college chapter of InterVarsity, say, and the Boston-based Center for Progressive Christianity, “inspired by retired Episcopal bishop Jack Spong’s attack on Christian theology,” are despite their apparent “differences” closely akin because “both fit well with American consumerism and demand little” strikes me chiefly as evidence of how “consumerism” has become a cant word that attests the user’s fine (anti-consumer) sensibilities, an ism someone else is guilty of.

But Charry’s editorial doesn’t conclude on a smug centrist note. “Has denominationalism exhausted itself,” she asks,

as both sides seem to suggest? Will anything be lost if evangelical individualism and the post-Christian church prove to be the main “Protestant” options in the long run? Perhaps we are living through a seismic shift in Christian history. If so, we may do well to keep a period of holy silence in order to discern God’s will.

Too much holy silence would put journals like Theology Today and Books & Culture out of business. But there’s a provocative humility to Charry’s conclusion that speaks to all parties across the theological spectrum.

“Why do we need a center at all?” Michael Horton asks. “Such ‘golden mean’ thinking seems somewhat naïve, especially since we all seem to grant to ourselves the self-portrait of moderation and middle ground.” He has a point.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

There were words fit for love—love’s words:shy commoners to bow abashed,sly courtiers and favored fools,tongue’s pets indulged for prettiness,blood princes, dukes, to stand on rank,and kings—yes, even monarch speechcommanding heart’s obediencein beauty’s due and measured state.

It was in spring, the lilac blown,the Judas thorn, that I went mad.Our civil kingdom’s come undone.Buttocks, bellies, breasts, eyes.Speechless tongues and mouths turned down.Beneath the apple dress I sawwet petals white on nameless thighs,the wanton swell, disorder’s rage—

Was this when words began to fail?Noon trulls, slick merds, the cancered dogs,the rags, the clotted graves: our speechis shoddy-stuffed with winding sheets.Vows penny-dozen, nothing down.Mud streets of jabber, sudden, cheap.The dull pretenders tramping south.The mute insurgents coiling hate.

It was in fall I saw her faceabove the hedge. An order rose.We walked among the clean-swept courts,the crowns of marigold, the rue,the blush and spark of words made new.Love is lust to meaning wed.I saw the apple trees grow redwith fruit and gardens bright with leaves.

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor at

The Weekly Standard.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism 1900 to the Present, edited by Douglas Jacobsen and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Eerdmans, 1998, 492 pp.; $28, paper

“If you label me, you negate me.” I’m not certain who said this first, but I’m quite sure it was someone raised in California during the seventies. Nevertheless, there is a rising tide of far more nuanced reaction against modernity’s rigid and simplistic categories. Individuals and movements, perhaps partly due to hubris and partly due to legitimate distinctives, wish to have their unique positions entered into the public record, defying neat and hom*ogeneous taxonomies. To engage in a bald example of such type-casting, it is a case of the social historians taking revenge on their elders, the intellectual historians. It is time to abandon the one-dimensional mapping and acknowledge the diverse topography of the American Protestant landscape.

In his 1970 work, Righteous Empire, veteran American religious historian Martin Marty articulated what has come to be called the “two-party” thesis. According to that scheme, as Douglas Jacobsen and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., summarize it,

since the late nineteenth century two Protestant parties (the “private” party and the “public” party) have dominated the American religious landscape in much the same way as the Republicans and Democrats have dominated the American political scene.

Among others, George Marsden, especially in his Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980), strengthened this two-party reading of American religious history. But it was especially James Davison Hunter’s binary opposition of “orthodox” and “progressive” types in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991) that fortified this thesis with alarmist rhetoric. It is this thesis, so dominant in the popular imagination, which the editors and authors of Re-Forming the Center wish to call into question.

The book grew out of an effort to move “beyond the two-party system of American Protestantism” and was the result of national conferences held in the summer of 1994-96. The editors note in their acknowledgments that while “one of us is currently a member of the United Church of Christ and the other is now a member of General Conference Mennonite Church,” nevertheless

neither of us has ever been particularly beholden to any one denomination. … We also both tend to be more pietistic and ethical in our faith than doctrinal. This disposition has, no doubt, encouraged us down the road we have taken in this project.

Two agendas seem to guide this work: in addition to the historiographical, the theological. We may explore this collection of essays with that in mind.

The Historiographical

The collection of 23 essays begins with general analysis and critique of the two-party thesis, moving to case studies which provide obvious examples of how the traditional typology fails to do justice to the pluralism of the American religious landscape. It is not simply a question of applying nuance to basically reliable though general categories, but of missing the trees for the forest. David Sikkink draws on recent studies to demonstrate the relative insignificance of the conservative/ liberal divide for the average American, including Christians. “Religious identities articulated in the language of expressive individualism,” Sikkink suggests, “may tend to displace a concern for doctrine and truth, and to increase a concern for civility to ward and tolerance of other religious and secular groups.” Shrugging off the distinctions which may have mattered to their grandparents with the expression, “I just say I’m a Christian,” there is little that unifies the thought or identity of such people, but they represent a fairly sizable percentage.

Fred Kniss argues for a modified two-dimensional map in which morality is the chief criterion: moral authority and the definition of that which constitutes the moral project. So, for instance, the new poles are (under moral authority) modernism and traditionalism and (under the moral project) libertarianism and communalism. And Martin Marty himself argues for a chastened two-party model. There are still two parties, Marty insists. Public stereotypes and academic convention render this the case, despite criticism: “The ‘vision’ of history that needs ‘revision’ is more often closer to reality than are many revisionist substitutes.” As for his own commitments, Marty describes himself as a “James Madison type, finding freedom and security neither in ‘unum’ nor ‘bipartisan’ or ‘bipolar’ life but in pluralist existence.”

William Weston and D. G. Hart offer case studies of the Presbyterian controversy as counter-evidence to the two-party thesis. According to Weston, both the progressives and conservatives in the Presbyterian Church failed to win the support of the loyalist center. Many who might have been theologically sympathetic to the conservative cause were put off by what they perceived as disloyalties to denominational polity and process. Thus, the war was lost not over doctrinal differences alone, but because of tactical failures and a missed opportunity to attract the support of the loyalists. Hart demonstrates how J. Gresham Machen, the Princeton professor who led the conservative Presbyterian cause and eventually founded Westminster Seminary, defies easy categorization: “I never call myself a ‘Fundamentalist,'” Machen said in 1927, although—if the alternative is modernism, he would gladly defend that cause. “But after all, what I prefer to call myself is not a ‘Fundamentalist’ but a ‘Calvinist’—that is, an adherent to the Reformed Faith.”

A two-party thesis envisions a church made up of liberals and conservatives, but these examples demonstrate the failure to account for the majority (loyalists) and for the distinctions which must be drawn between Reformed confessionalists like Machen and fundamentalists like Carl McIntyre or Bob Jones. If the two-party thesis doesn’t work here—in the fundamentalist/modernist controversy—it probably doesn’t work anywhere.

Several of the pieces enter their unique traditions as exhibits for the prosecution against the two-party thesis. Reformed and Lutheran confessional churches, the African American church, various Hispanic church traditions, as well as the Disciples of Christ, simply cannot be categorized by the left-right typology. For many of these churches, the fundamentalist-modernist fight was remote. Even in the mainstream “fundamentalist” movement, there were exceptions to the two-party system. The Winona Lake Bible Conferences (1895-1968), the now defunct Biblical Seminary in New York, and the missionary enterprise (including groups such as Youth for Christ and Young Life), were far more mainstream than the imposition of polar extremes would allow. They incorporated a wide cross-section of Protestant America, from the roster of speakers to denominational and institutional representation on their boards.

Taken as a whole, these examples represent the majority of American Protestants over the last century. Hardly marginal groups (as the two-party system appears to assume), their distinctive contributions can be omitted only at a price of misunderstanding American religious history.

The Theological

This book is not about theology, but its subject matter requires the authors to make some theological moves. As the quote cited above from the acknowledgments makes explicit, the editors are motivated by a certain preference for pietism over ecclesiastical or confessional commitments. This is perfectly consistent with the ethos of American evangelicalism, a network of parachurch agencies and movements which continues to defy a monolithic description. The editors have made this prejudice explicit, a refreshing alternative to the assumption of some two-party theorists that they are simply “doing history,” even as their “mar gins” and “mainstream” often look curiously like “them” and “us,” respectively.

With the editors’ preference comes a certain notion of the “center.” And, as with most of the “centrist” thinking I have encountered, it just so happens that their position is that via media. So the undogmatic pietism which they announced as important for this project becomes the golden mean between two extremes. But doesn’t the very notion of a “center” rest on the assumption of the two-party system’s validity? Such deference to “centrist” thinking is no less aloof from dogmatic positions than a commitment to liberal or conservative points of view. The “center” is truly in the eye of the beholder.

This is the place where the theologian rants about the boars in the Lord’s vineyard, and I should be remiss if I missed the opportunity. While this volume offers a successful defense of pluralism over two-party reductionism in the study of American religious history, one is reminded that even among evangelical historians and sociologists, theology is often given short shrift. While such writers might justly complain that religion is treated epiphenomenally in secular scholarship, theology is often treated as such, even by Christians, in the study of religious history.

Many of the contributions borrow schematizations from sociology. Again, this is a welcome antidote in some respects to proponents of intellectual history who fail to recognize the role of embodied life (viz., economics, politics, institutional structures) in shaping the times. Nevertheless, when James Davison Hunter (not a contributor) applies the categories of “progressive” and “orthodox” across the religious confessions, one is left with the impression that socio-political elements are more determinative than theological ones.

In the process, the enormous power of religious convictions may be unwittingly reduced to effects of one’s socialization. A term generally associated with theological discourse such as “orthodox” now be comes an indicator of one’s political position in the culture wars. The writers criticize the polarities of the two-party system such as Hunter’s, but on the whole the volume continues to underplay the significance of the actual religious or theological distinctives of various groups.

The centrist agenda of the editors and of many of the writers may explain why theological distinctives are less important. But is it not the case in actual fact that what a group believes is more determinative than how firmly or idiosyncratically those views are held, or how they forge ostensibly more important effects, such as political and economic ones?

So once more we are reminded of the persistence of the two-party system even in this largely helpful critique. Mark Ellingsen, for instance, refers to the division “between moderates and fundamentalists … in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.” But, as Mark Granquist’s piece on American Lutheranism points out, Lutherans (like confessional Reformed churches) cannot be categorized in these terms. It is not only imprecise, but erroneous, to refer to those confessional Protestants who are simply affirming their traditional dogmatics as “fundamentalists.” Similarly, for those like Hodge, Warfield, and even Machen, the Old School/New School divisions went to the heart of what it meant to be a confessional Presbyterian in a way that the fundamentalist/modernist polarity failed to do, despite its much wider currency. In pitting “fundamentalists” against “moderates” in the LCMS, Ellingsen boldly suggests by his very typology that the correct position (i.e., the “center”) is represented by those who left the denomination because they had accepted many of the conclusions of higher criticism. They are not “liberals,” nor are they “non-confessional.” Rather, they are “moderates.”

What is even more intriguing in Ellingsen’s piece is his thesis that narrative theology (specifically, the “Yale school” variety), represents “the pre-Enlightenment ethos of the American Protestant center.” These postliberal theologians propose a recovery of confidence in the biblical narrative, reading it the way Luther and Calvin read it, rather than the way Tillich and Henry supposedly read it. So far, the movement of a certain segment of the academy to the center. But evangelicals are now more prepared to meet postliberals in that center, “as a result of the ‘liberalization’ of the evangelical movement,” involving a greater friendliness to Neo-Orthodox positions. To reach this “middle ground,” evangelicals surrender their commitment to inerrancy and the mainline theologians surrender their obsession with (though not necessarily the conclusions of) higher criticism.

Indeed, Ellingsen appears to go beyond the mild pragmatism of George Lindbeck’s theological method. Sounding a bit like Richard Rorty, Ellingsen says that “Christians on grounds of their theological model properly assume the truth of the biblical accounts until they no longer help them cope with ordinary reality.” I would submit that this is not only beyond anything that most evangelicals would accept, but that it is beyond anything in the work of Frei, Lindbeck, Kelsey, or other Yale representatives.

The identity of the losers in Ellingsen’s plea for a new “center” sympathetic to Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine (1984) is quite clear: “the Puritan/Reformed tradition that introduces into the conversation a preoccupation with biblical infallibility.” Still under the spell of a two-party thesis which presses particulars into general types even if the former do not fit, Ellingsen writes that evangelical critics of Yale postliberalism

have been enticed by the continental Enlightenment tradition to adopt an objectivist approach to the biblical text. This disposition has been heightened by the impact of The Westminster Confession of Faith, whose use of the language of inerrancy either encourages the endorsem*nt of the concept or its militant repudiation, on the theological perspectives of many American Protestants.

Aside from the fact that the Westminster Confession and Catechisms nowhere mention the term “inerrancy,” connecting that Confession (1647) to the Enlightenment is a popular but sloppy account. Even if certain figures identified as “Enlightenment thinkers” were working during this period, the content of the Westminster Confession is virtually indistinguishable from the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth century. An interest in doctrinal precision bears greater resemblance to ancient and medieval texts than to the accommodating apologetics of the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment, after all, that found in pietism an ally in the preference for morality over doctrine.

Undoubtedly many evangelicals will find Ellingsen’s analysis attractive, but the result is to marginalize the tradition that provided early American Protestantism with much of its content and form. Hence what Re-Forming the Center dismantles in the historiography it occasionally reinstates, with the call for a “center” that is neither conservative nor liberal. But haven’t we always had a word for that: namely, “moderate”? And aren’t “moderates,” despite all of the characteristics with which their temperament favors us, often reticent to take unpopular stands? Is there not a history of moderate indecisiveness and unreflective accommodation to the spirit of the age? The “center” is not innocent. It is a real place on the map, which demands that all “others” be related to it as margins to the mainstream.

Why do we need a center at all? Perhaps it is the case that various communions will go on with their somewhat different “centers,” determined by confessional commitments as to what the Scriptures teach, instead of negotiating a broad settlement. Is it not possible that the search for the “center” is itself reflective of modernity’s passion for the one over the many, hom*ogeneity, a stable option to which we ought to assent if we wish to avoid the pitfalls of dogmatism on either side? Such “golden mean” thinking seems somewhat naïve, especially since we all seem to grant to ourselves the self-portrait of moderation and middle ground.

In terms of historiography, Re-Forming the Center is a terrific set of case studies against the two-party model. Besides that, it offers fascinating tours of specific movements and communities that have been marginalized in scholarship. In terms of theology, the book warrants a more mixed review. Here, the ambiguous relationship of many evangelical historians to theology is all too apparent. As such, Re-Forming the Center affords a good opportunity to reflect thoughtfully not only on how to understand the American Protestant past but also on how to envision its future.

Michael S. Horton is associate professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in California. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including most recently A Confessing Theology for Postmodern Times (Crossway).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following product, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:• Re-Forming the Center, edited by Douglas Jacobsen and William Vance Trollinger, Jr.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Methodist theologian Thomas Oden, a contributing editor of Books & Culture, was asked by some of his fellow drafters of “The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration” to respond to Robert Gundry’s critique, which appeared in the previous issue of B&C (“Why I Didn’t Endorse,” January/February, 2001). Below is Oden’s response and a reply from Gundry. While Oden expresses disappointment at the prospect of a public debate over “Celebration” (“we had hoped that we might be spared this sort of public squabble,” he writes, speaking for the drafters of the statement), we at B&C think evangelicals can only gain from a forthright airing of concerns, in the spirit suggested by the statement itself. In fact, one of the reasons B&C was created was precisely to serve as a forum for such dialogue.

It is to Robert H. Gundry’s credit that he intends to seek precision in speaking of the relation of justification teaching to the life of Jesus prior to his death. Whether that intention is rightly and sufficiently fulfilled remains at issue.

But let us first clarify points upon which “Celebration” and its critic, I think, agree:

Both the critique and “Celebration” seek unity in evangelical testimony without a sacrifice of intellect.

Both agree that “Jesus had to live a life of perfect righteousness if he was to qualify as the bearer of our sins” (Gundry).

Both agree that evangelicals “look toward their risen Lord in repentance and hope for empowering through the Holy Spirit.”

Apparently, the critic’s desire is to defend Arminians from overweening Calvinists, but in doing so the critique presents arguments that neither Arminians or Calvinists would find acceptable, based on their classical confessions.

Since the drafters of “Celebration” sought to be as inclusive as possible of major evangelical voices, including those our critic thinks have been neglected, we had hoped that we might be spared this sort of public squabble. But the critique makes it evident that the issues are such that they must be answered in a timely way, on behalf of the many who have conscientiously signed it.

The purpose of “Celebration” is to define those points of common understanding upon which diverse evangelicals agree. If this is not a decent goal, I would hope our critics would state their reasons why it is not, rather than attacking the irenic effort at its edges. It is not intended to inquire exhaustively into all points of ambiguity and difference between evangelicals. “Celebration” states what differing evangelicals hold in common while still being true to their distinctive traditions, historical memories, and exegetical convictions.

Whether the Advocate of Arminianism Has Understood Arminianism

Most classical Wesleyan, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Pentecostal teachings have basically agreed that Jesus’ active and passive obedience are both indispensable to the justifying verdict on the cross in which the believers’ sins are accounted as sharing in Christ’s righteousness. This is a standard pan-Protestant consensus that has stood the test of four hundred years. Yet the critique argues that this view represents a highly partisan “Reformed stamp that many evangelicals cannot knowingly endorse.” But who among evangelicals could not endorse the complementarity of the active and passive obedience of Christ? Certainly not classic Wesleyans who have read Wesley’s sermons on “Justification by Faith” and “The Lord Our Righteousness” or his “Doctrinal Minutes on Justification” or the Edwardian homilies on salvation.

Wesley indeed thought that the doctrine of accredited or imputed righteousness, while itself being thoroughly biblical and Pauline, could by misinterpretation become exaggerated toward antinomianism. But if you read his caveats in “Thoughts on the Imputed Righteousness of Christ” and his Letter to James Hervey of Oct. 15, 1756, you will see that there is no attempt to disavow what he has previously said so clearly in his standard sermons on justification, but rather only to resist its misinterpretation. Some highly defensive and proactive self-avowed “Arminians” have themselves at times so exaggerated their differences with Calvinism in a counter-ecumenical polemical effort so as to stress repudiations which cannot be found in the Wesley texts. The best account of active and passive obedience vis-à-vis Calvin and Wesley is found in John Deschner’s work on Wesley’s Christology.

There is nothing whatever in “Celebration” that “rules out the Arminian doctrine of faith as an exercise of free will.” The free will that is enabled by grace is strongly affirmed in “Celebration” in a way that is totally accept able to patristic and Reformation teaching. The statement “our faith itself is the fruit of God’s grace” is not only unobjectionable to Wesleyans and Arminians, but moreso it is thoroughly in accord with patristic teachers such as Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen and Augustine, and with Luther, Calvin, and their Anglican and Methodist followers.

A great deal is at stake in the question of the extent to which the children of Dort and the children of Arminius are able to come in good conscience to consensus in a way no longer dominated by outmoded defensiveness and bitterness. “Celebration” found agreement in language that satisfied both parties’ concerns by showing that they have more in common than previously realized. Why would not our critic wish to see such an irenic effort succeed where three hundred years of polemics have despoiled and embittered the Protestant consensus fidelium?

Careful students of Jacob Arminius are not satisfied with nineteenth-century stereotypes and have shown Arminius’s theology to be understood as a type of Calvinism and not rightly viewed as in opposition to Calvinism (although he was resistant to specific points of the Counter-Remonstrance, which represents another type of Calvinism). Only a few defensive Wesleyans and self-declared Arminians still insist on pitting Arminian exegesis strictly against Calvin and Calvinism. As Dort is a type of Calvinism, so is Arminianism.

It is an exaggerated and defensive and tendentious reading of “Celebration” that leads the critic to conclude that “such evangelicals” as Arminians are being “kept outside the fold.” No such intent is present or even implied in the confession. Prominent Wesleyans and Pentecostals and Charismatics have not felt such an exclusion. They have indeed voluntarily signed the document in good conscience. The critic feels that Arminians cannot “knowingly endorse” “Celebration.” Why then did so many do so? Does the critic think that they did not read it, or that he knows better how to read it for them than they do themselves? Does he question their integrity? Are the very people he is trying to defend uninformed about their true beliefs? Hardly.

The critic dislikes repetition in “Celebration.” There may indeed be some repetition in the document, but any document that goes through a multi-layered review and editorial process is likely to wind up with some repetition. It should be pointed out to one who dislikes repetition that he himself has repeated the phrase numerous times that this is a “strongly Reformed” document with a tone and stamp that “rules out” Arminian believers. But there is in fact no “denial of evangelical citizenship to freewillers” in “Celebration.”

Whether the Pauline Language of Accrediting Is Rightly Viewed

Apparently the critic is in categorical disagreement with the essential distinction upon which both Calvin and Wesley thoroughly agreed (along with patristic exegetes): that through his active life Christ fulfilled the divine requirement, and by his suffering death he paid the penalty for others’ sin. By his life-long active obedience he provided a completely adequate fulfillment of the law (Calvin, Inst. 2.16.5; Wesley, “The Lord Our Righteousness”). And by his passive obedience in death he transferred penalties to himself. “Thus he honors obedience by his action, and proves it experimentally by his Passion” (Gregory Nazianzen, Orations 30.6).

Hence when the emphasis of the critique says, “What a pity that in its insistence on an imputation of Christ’s righteousness as a pivot of justification by faith, ‘Celebration’ is deeply flawed at its self-proclaimed core!” there apparently is some attempt here to defend Arminians in a way that is counter-Arminian and counter-Wesleyan. Neither Arminius nor Wesley nor Calvin nor Whitefield nor Torrey nor Gordon would disagree with the “insistence on an imputation of Christ’s righteousness as a pivot of justification by faith.” To argue that Paul does not use the language of crediting or imputation or the accounting metaphor at all (!) is to argue against, not for, Torrey and Gordon. What the critique calls “the usual suspects” are selected New Testament passages that assert the accounting metaphor as applied to justification, which he one by one attempts to refute, unavailingly in my view.

Justification occurs by accounting (or imputing or crediting—all derived from the same Pauline metaphor) to the believer by God himself the perfect righteousness of God’s own representative and guarantee: God the Son, Jesus Christ (Rom. 10:3-9). Justification is not the cheap forgiveness of a man without righteousness, but the costly pardon provided by God the Son. It is a declaration by which the sinner now possesses a righteousness which perfectly and for ever satisfies the law, namely God the Son’s own righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 4:6-8). It does a disservice to both Calvin and Wesley to imagine that either of them disavowed this.

The idea that one’s sins are unconditionally covered by another’s righteousness may, indeed, if misunderstood, tend toward license. It is indeed through faith that Christ’s righteousness is accounted to us (Rom. 3:24-25), but it is misleading to conclude from this that personal qualities of Christ’s actual obedience are being directly or immediately imparted (given) or infused (poured in) to the believer without faith that freely becomes active in love. The faith that saves is faith that trusts in Christ so as to work in love (Calvin, Inst. 3.16-18; Wesley, Minutes 1747, June 17). If one appears to have trusted in Christ but does not show forth a good faith response of seeking to be ac countable to God’s justifying action on our behalf, then that apparent trust is not and never was saving faith.

The Westminster Larger Catechism asks the person whose baptism is being confirmed: “Q.70. What is justification? A. Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sin, accepts and accounts their persons righteous in his sight, not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.” It is amid this metaphorical theater that the biblical terms are understood: dikaiosis (a judicial decision or sentence of acquittal), dikaios (righteous), dikaioma (judgment), dikaioo (to declare righteous, to justify), logizomai (to reckon or credit the account of), and dikaiosyne (righteousness) all derive from the same judicial metaphorical premise.

Such terms are not applied flatly or literally or univocally, but analogically as an attempt of limited human speech to do approximate justice to God’s declarative action of pardon that actually occurred on the cross. Analogies express intuitive similarities amid objective differences. Such analogies are not equations or mathematical correlations or statements of fact. Rather they represent through human language a divine verdict that actually occurred in a particular historical event, the Cross. The law is not being thereby circumvented but fulfilled through a substitute punishment. The law itself is vindicated, reestablished, and magnified both through Christ’s life and death.

Abraham became for Christians the decisive type of faith: “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going” (Heb. 11:8). His faith “was credited [accounted] to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:3; Calvin, Inst. 3.11).

Where is there an evangelical who does not affirm that “Him who did not know sin he made sin for us in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21)? But does this rule out the contribution of Christ’s active obedience to our salvation? On what basis? The Lord actively obeyed through his becoming obedient to his parents, and to the law, by being circumcised, by proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and confirming it through miracles. Did he not “learn obedience through what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8) both in life and death? It is a classic heresy to assert that Christ’s life had no salvific reference to his death.

The critic thinks “Celebration” is too dependent upon Pauline language of “accrediting” (the Latin verb of which is imputare, translating the Greek logizomai, to reckon or credit the account of). He holds fast to a highly idiosyncratic view of Paul’s crediting or accounting metaphor, yet he thinks of his own view as standard for recent evangelical exegesis. Yet many highly qualified New Testament exegetes signed “Celebration” in good conscience. It seems evident that there remain various debatable opinions about what Paul meant by the metaphor of accounting. We can leave it to the exegetical conscience of evangelical readers to assess the merits of linguistic and philological arguments. “Celebration” does not attempt to argue in detail a particular view of the language of the crediting of sin and righteousness or to read out of evangelical citizenship those who have other views. “Celebration” attempts to state where the most general convergence lies in evangelical teaching. If such a convergence is intrinsically a dilution, then we have a right to hear arguments as to why it is thought to be, but these have not been put forth.

Whether the Classic Protestant Teaching of Justification Is Sustained

The Westminster Confession (1646) is arguably the most widely received and authoritative Reformed confession in the English and American traditions. Its eleventh article, Of Justification, contains three negations each with corresponding affirmations: “Those whom God effectually calls, He also freely justifies; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on Him and His righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.” Wesley carefully examined the articles of Westminster but did not disagree substantively with this portion of them.

The critic apparently is unawed, even bored, by these hard-won and long-standing achievements of Protestant exegesis. Apparently he prefers to deal only with recent exegesis, as if these crucial exegetical points had no relevant history of interpretation. Why does he not understand that his ancestors were willing to bleed and die for these precise definitions? Why is he so cavalier about the blood-stained work of the Holy Spirit in the history of the church amid its struggle for doctrinal clarity, balance, and rigor? He forgets that church history is essentially the history of exegesis. How then can contemporary exegesis divorce itself from the layers of history of interpretation of the text?

Is a disproportional amount of attention paid to justification, as opposed to the larger theological issues facing evangelicals? Remember that the purpose of “Celebration” is to seek convergence on the gospel. Justification teaching is central to the gospel. “Celebration” is not trying to define evangelicalism but to clarify what evangelicals share concerning the heart and essence of the gospel, despite continuing legitimate disagreements on subsidiary points.

Whether the Active and Passive Obedience of Christ Is Rightly Understood

Does the active obedience of Christ prior to his death form any part of the righteousness of Christ? The critic appears to answer no. But consider the alternative: Suppose Jesus is a bum, a philanderer, a punk. Would he be qualified to become our Mediator? This is an easy question for all evangelicals I know. It is not simply and exclusively his death, as if separable from his life, but his life as well that has salvific significance for us, as Luther and Calvin and Wesley all taught. “Celebration” rightly demands “the contribution of Jesus’ life as well as death to Christian believers’ reconciliation by God.” The consensus of classic evangelical confessional teaching holds that the premise that both Christ’s life and death, both his active and passive obedience, enable our salvation to be not only unobjectionable but necessary. To deny this would be to deny a premise strongly shared by Lutheran, Calvinist, and Wesleyan teaching of justification. “Celebration” is attentive to Reformed teaching, but not in such a way as to exclude those of the Wesleyan and Arminian and Pentecostal traditions.

He argues that Gal. 3:13 says nothing about Christ’s life, but only his death. Yet simply to hang on a tree would have no salvific effect were it not preceded by a life of righteousness. Matthew 3:15 says that he came “to fulfill all righteousness.” Christ fulfilled the law for us through the work he came to do as prophet, priest, and king. His prophetic office was fulfilled through his words (Matt.7:28-29), deeds (John 10:25), and the example of his life (1 Pet. 2:21-23). Though more than a prophet, Christ fulfilled the prophetic office by his proclamation and teaching, so as not to abolish but fulfill the law by proclaiming the good news of God’s coming kingdom. His manner of life was congruent with his identity and mission and ministry and miracles. Is it a “common inaccuracy of biblical interpretation,” as the critic proposes, to affirm that both his life and his death, both his active and passive obedience, enable our salvation? To answer yes is to disagree with both Calvin and Wesley.

In Rom. 5:19 Paul writes: “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were constituted (katestathesan, or “has binding results for”) sinners, so also through the obedience of the One the many shall be reckoned or constituted (katastathesontai) righteousness.” This text does not specify whether the obedience of this One is through his life or death or both. Our critic argues for “his death alone,” apart from his proclamation, suffering, miracles, and obedience to the law. We, along with classic Protestant doctrine, argue for the complementarity of the active and passive obedience of Christ. Our critic thinks that katastathesontai does not imply any accrediting metaphor whatever. We think the contrary case can be argued exegetically.

Does “Celebration” indeed say, as charged, that the perfect life of Christ is unilaterally imputed to the actual behavior of believers? That would be to aggressively overread the actual text, which states in a more balanced and typically Protestant way: “We affirm that Christ’s saving work included both his life and his death on our behalf (Gal. 3:13). We declare that faith in the perfect obedience of Christ by which he fulfilled all the demands of the Law of God in our behalf is essential to the Gospel. We deny that our salvation was achieved merely or exclusively by the death of Christ without reference to his life of perfect righteousness.”

Whether Universalism and Annihilationism Are Allowable

Is “Celebration” soft or ambiguous in fostering a tendency toward “universal salvation,” as our critic suggests, or edging toward universalism? Clearly no. “We deny that the doctrines of the Gospel can be rejected without harm. Denial of the Gospel brings spiritual ruin and exposes us to God’s judgment.” Also: “We learn from the Gospel that, as all have sinned, so all who do not receive Christ will be judged according to their just deserts as measured by God’s holy law and face eternal retributive punishment.” Also: “we cannot embrace any form of doctrinal indifferentism, or relativism, or pluralism by which God’s truth is sacrificed for a false peace.” These statements could not be made by anyone seriously arguing for the doctrine of universal salvation.

Evangelicals agree that “no one comes to the Father except through the Son.” “Celebration” clearly rejects universal salvation, and it seems unexplainable how anyone might draw the conclusion that this point is “ambiguous” or “uncertain.” Yet even though he himself remains “uncertain” about whether “Celebration” affirms universal salvation and annihilationism, the critic does not risk offering his own constructive view in relation to the language of the document, except to criticize what he perceives as its ambiguity. This begs for some constructive response, so that he might help clarify what he regards as ambiguous.

Is “Celebration” soft or ambiguous concerning annihilationism? Although this is not the central issue of “Celebration,” it is evident that annihilationism cannot by any means come under its definition that “We learn from the Gospel that, as all have sinned, so all who do not receive Christ will be judged according to their just deserts as measured by God’s holy law, and face eternal retributive punishment.”

Remaining Questions

It can remain a debatable point as to whether the “empowerment for Christian life and witness requires a work of the Holy Spirit above and beyond justification by faith” and as to whether “all Christians have experienced this further work.” This is not a question that “Celebration” at tempts to answer in detail, but I have my self attempted to answer it in detail in my book The Transforming Power of Grace in a way that mediates between Dort and Arminius and between Whitefield and Wesley, and between the hyper-Augustinians and the semi-Augustinians. Wesley defended a constrained doctrine of free will under grace, but rejected semi-Pelagianism (“Predestination Calmly Considered,” sections 43-49).

It can also remain debatable among evangelicals the extent to which empowerment by the Holy Spirit is an accomplished fact the moment one receives justifying grace by faith or a gradual process to be prayed through looking toward full sanctification. Wesley himself made it clear that both instantaneous and gradual metaphors apply to the complex work of grace working preveniently, to elicit responses to God’s cooperating grace, that enables the faith that responds positively to God’s justifying grace, and in some way (however debatable) looks toward fulfillment in glory, whether in this life or in the celestial city. “Celebration” does not attempt to “rule out” particular views such as those of A.J. Gordon and R.A. Torrey on these issues that continue to be argued exegetically without “denial of evangelical citizenship.”

The critic attempts an unusually sharp bifurcation between the righteousness of God and the righteousness of Christ, arguing that Paul never speaks of the latter. But if Christ is God (as John 1 states), then is not this distinction dubious? Does Paul assert a righteousness of God with no relation whatever to the righteousness of Christ? How could that be argued in the light of Phil. 2? When Paul says: “So one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men” (Rom 5:18), is this “one man” not Jesus Christ? And is his one act inclusive of both his life and his death? Could his death be bifurcated from his life?

Finally, is “Celebration” anti-Catholic? If so, why then would those who have been most intimately connected with the efforts to reconcile Catholics and Protestants be included as drafters and signers—J. I. Packer, Timothy George, John Woodbridge, Charles Colson (as well as those who have publicly opposed some efforts at rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics)? “Celebration” is not anti-Roman but does clearly distinguish the differences between the infusion metaphor and the accounting metaphor in the reception of grace, which traditionally has stood as a difference between Protestants and Catholics.

Thomas C. Oden is Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at the Theological School of Drew University. He is the author of many books and the general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, published by InterVarsity Press.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

My thanks to Books & Culture for inviting me to respond to Thomas C. Oden’s “Calm Answer” to my critique of “The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration,” and to Oden for trying to answer the critique calmly. Naturally, third parties will judge for themselves whether or not there is enough calmness in his answer to make a true contrast with agitation in the critique.

Oden writes that he and his fellow drafters of “Celebration” had hoped to be spared “this sort of public squabble.” What then of their statements in “Celebration” that “doctrinal disagreements call for debate” and that “useful dialogue … requires not only charity in our attitudes, but also clarity in our utterances”? On what grounds has Oden classified the present debate as a “public squabble” rather than as a “useful dialogue”? And since my discussion of imputation, which captures more space by far than lesser topics, deals with the self-proclaimed center of “Celebration,” how can he rightly accuse me of an attack on the “edges”?

I accept Oden’s statement that “the drafters of ‘Celebration’ sought to be as inclusive as possible of major evangelical voices”; but as explicitly stated in the critique, my concern has been that whatever the drafters’ intention, at points the wording of “Celebration” excludes, or at least can easily and naturally be read as excluding, such voices. Oden’s suggestion to the contrary notwithstanding, nowhere have I said or hinted, nor have I entertained the thought, that it “is not a decent goal” for “‘Celebration’ … to define those points of common understanding upon which diverse evangelicals agree.” My criticisms do not imply an assault against that worthy goal. By and large they have rather aimed to help achieve it by insuring that the wording of “Celebration” not exclude certain evangelicals. It is therefore out of bounds for Oden to ask, “Why would not our critic wish to see such an irenic effort succeed … ?”

“It is an exaggerated and defensive and tendentious reading of ‘Celebration’ that leads the critic to conclude that ‘such evangelicals’ as Arminians are being ‘kept outside the fold.'” So writes Oden. But this statement of his is itself exaggerated, defensive, and tendentious. For I asked a question which he has now transmuted into a conclusion. Then, after applying to Arminians a phrase of mine that has nothing to do with them as such—rather with all those, whether Arminian or not, who think that Jesus’ “one act of righteousness” refers solely to his propitiatory death on the cross—Oden asks whether I think the “prominent Wesleyans and Pentecostals and Charismatics” who endorsed “Celebration” did not read it, did not know how to read it correctly, did not endorse it with integrity, or do not know their own true beliefs.

Well, I said that I was “surprised and puzzled to see … the names of drafters and endorsers … recognizable as Arminian, Holiness, Pentecostal, and otherwise charismatic,” and that “their subscription to ‘Celebration’ deserves respect.” I even asked myself “whether I am being too picky.” Do those statements and this question sound like an arrogating to myself of superior intelligence or a discrediting of others’ integrity?

Oden does not help me out of my puzzlement over the reason or reasons why Arminians, Holiness people, Pentecostalists, and other charismatics have not seen in “Celebration” some wording that negates their beliefs in free will, a second work of grace, and an empowering baptism in the Holy Spirit unentailed in justification. For with one exception, Oden’s assertions to the contrary do not constitute an exegesis of “Celebration” that would indicate how its wording might be construed at points as compatible with those views. I did engage in an exegesis of “Celebration,” one that raised doubts deserving, I think, a more exegetical than assertive comeback.

According to Oden, my critique contains an advocacy of Arminianism, and I “apparently” want “to defend Arminians from overweening Calvinists.” But I stated outright that I am not Arminian, so that the critique hardly advocates Arminianism. And by making my defense of Arminians against overweening Calvinists cover the issue of justification by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, Oden neglects the limitation of that defense to the matters of free will and, for many but not all Arminians, a second work of grace or an empowering baptism in the Holy Spirit usually subsequent to conversion. Therefore his citing agreements between Arminians and Calvinists on justification is beside the point of my objecting to seemingly anti-Arminian statements on the other matters.

Oden says that “Celebration” does not attempt to answer “in detail” the questions whether “empowerment for Christian life and witness requires a work of the Holy Spirit above and beyond justification by faith” and whether “all Christians have experienced this further work.” Not in detail, to be sure; but the statement that “the Gospel assures us that all who have entrusted their lives to Jesus Christ are born again … [and] empowered … by the Holy Spirit” does not seem to lack clarity. As one who in the past seriously considered the Holiness-Pentecostal view (if for the moment I may merge the two similar views into one), read widely in literature and listened to many sermons advocating it, and held that view for a while, I can say that if I did still hold it this statement in “Celebration” would wave a red flag in my face. Oden’s attempt to soften the statement by reading into it a question of “the extent” to which the Holy Spirit’s empowerment takes place at conversion founders on the parallel drawn by “Celebration” between that empowerment and being born again. For surely he and his fellow drafters do not read a question of extent into rebirth by the Spirit. But I am glad to learn that regardless of wording, there is no intention to deny evangelical citizenship to those who disagree with an immediate empowerment of all Christians. For in other quarters I have heard just such a denial.

Though doubting its contextual support, I myself noted a way in which free-willers might accept the statement that “our faith itself is the fruit of God’s grace.” But Oden’s claim, “The free will that is enabled by grace is strongly affirmed in Celebration,” spurs me to ask, Where? As to the observation that “Arminius’s theology is to be understood as a type of Calvinism,” I said almost as much in my own observation that “Arminians as well as Calvinists trace their roots back to the Protestant Reformation and can speak of faith as the fruit or gift of God’s grace in the sense that he gives human beings opportunity to believe and by his Spirit prompts them to do so by an act of their own free will.”

“The critic dislikes repetition in ‘Celebration.'” Where do I say so? I only point out that the repetitiveness with which justification by an imputation of Christ’s righteousness is put forward makes for a huge, advertised emphasis. My concentration on this point of doctrine simply reflects that emphasis in “Celebration.” It does not represent inconsistency with a dislike of repetition qua repetition.

To the means of justification, then. Something seems to have gone wrong in Oden’s statement that “believers’ sins are accounted as sharing in Christ’s righteousness.” I suspect he means that believers’ sins are accounted to Christ in order that believers themselves may share in his righteousness. Oden then asks “who among evangelicals … could not endorse the complementarity of the active and passive obedience of Christ,” which he defines, respectively, as Christ’s active fulfillment of God’s law prior to the crucifixion and Christ’s passive submission to a vicariously sacrificial death in the crucifixion.

Though Oden speaks of my “apparently … categorical disagreement,” asks whether Jesus “would … be qualified to become our Mediator” if he were “a bum, a philanderer, a punk,” and warningly says “it is a classic heresy to assert that Christ’s life had no salvific reference to his death,” I affirmed that complementarity in my statement, “Certainly evangelicals affirm that Jesus had to live a life of perfect righteousness if he was to qualify as the bearer of our sins.” I likewise affirmed justification as a forensic declaration of believing sinners to be righteous and, no fewer than six times, the imputation of our sins to Christ and the counting of faith as righteousness: (1) “Here Paul does use the language of imputation, but only in the negative, ‘not counting,’ and only in connection with the world’s ‘transgressions'”; (2) “Gal. 3:6 contains the language of imputation but similarly connects righteousness with faith”; (3) “In Rom. 4 we finally come to statements which say that righteousness is imputed”; (4) “But these statements are bounded and interspersed with others that say faith is counted as righteousness (just as in Galatians)”; (5) “Since faith as distinct from works is credited as righteousness, the righteousness of faith is a righteousness that by God’s reckoning consists of faith even though faith is not itself a work”; (6) “We do read of imputation, but in regard to counting faith as righteousness so as not to take account of sin, not in regard to counting Christ’s righteousness as belonging to sinners who believe in him.” How astonishing and false, then, for Oden to make me “argue that Paul does not use the language of crediting or imputation or the accounting metaphor at all (!)” (italics and exclamation mark original).

What is at issue is whether a righteousness of Christ is correspondingly put to the account of believing sinners and, if so, whether that righteousness includes his fulfillment of God’s law prior to the Crucifixion in addition to his submission to a vicariously sacrificial death. Many evangelicals who affirm an imputation of Christ’s righteousness deny an inclusion of more than his submission to death. Who are they? Generally speaking, they are the Baptists, nondenominationalists, and dispensationalists among whom I did most of my growing up (with frequent excursions into Holiness and Pentecostal circles), who have played a major, perhaps dominant, role in American evangelicalism, but who apart from borrowed references to A. J. Gordon and R. A. Torrey are conspicuously missing from Oden’s account, limited as it is to evangelicals in the Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, and non-Pentecostal charismatic traditions. I can still remember my teacher of systematic theology—a Plymouth Brother and no stranger to the classical Reformed tradition, for he took his education at Princeton Theological Seminary under the tutelage of A. A. Hodge, G. Vos, J. G. Machen, O. T. Allis, and R. D. Wilson—expositing the disagreement between Reformed and non-Reformed evangelicals on the question whether an imputed righteousness of Christ includes more than his submission to the cross. Because non-Reformed evangelicals see a stronger distinction between the church and Israel than Reformed evangelicals do, the non-Reformed ones feel less or no need to have Christ fulfill Israel’s law on their behalf and have that fulfillment imputed to them.

But I join the growing number of biblical theologians, evangelical and nonevangelical alike, who deny that Paul or any other New Testament author speaks of a righteousness of Christ (whatever it might include or exclude) that is imputed to believing sinners, and find instead a doctrine of God’s righteousness as “his salvific activity in a covenantal framework, not in terms of an imputation of Christ’s righteousness in a bookkeeping framework” (so my critique). Oden calls this view “highly idiosyncratic.” The description is dead wrong, as my citation of Mark Seifrid, Tom Wright, James Dunn, Chris Beker, and John Reumann showed. Other recognized scholars could easily be added to the list, so many in fact that it would not exaggerate to speak of a developing standard in biblical theological circles. Oden appeals on the contrary to “many highly qualified New Testament exegetes” who “signed ‘Celebration’ in good conscience.” I count only five known to me as fitting his description. Be that as it may, however, inasmuch as my own “conversion” on this matter occurred only recently through a serious study of the topic, I shall not fault those signatories but only issue them a friendly challenge to provide a convincing exegetical basis for the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.

In a patch of purple prose, on the other hand, Oden describes me as “unawed, even bored,” by the “hard-won and long-standing achievements of Protestant exegesis” in regard to an imputation of Christ’s righteousness, as preferring “to deal only with recent exegesis, as if these crucial exegetical points had no relevant history of interpretation,” as not understanding that my ancestors “were willing to bleed and die for these precise definitions,” as “cavalier about the blood-stained work of the Holy Spirit in the history of the church amid its struggle for doctrinal clarity, balance, and rigor” (as though I am not engaged in that struggle right here and now), as forgetful “that church history is essentially the history of exegesis” (as though I am not participating in that history), and as unmindful that “contemporary exegesis” cannot “divorce itself from the layers of history of interpretation of the text.” But does not Oden allow that contemporary exegesis may correct an aspect of classic Protestant teaching on justification just as that teaching corrected an aspect of classic Roman Catholic teaching on justification? Or does he think that corrective exegesis stopped with the Protestant Reformation? Presumably not, but then he needs to withdraw his argument from Protestant exegetical history.

Let us take up Oden’s exegetical arguments. Of me he writes, “The critic at tempts an unusually sharp bifurcation between the righteousness of God and the righteousness of Christ, arguing that Paul never speaks of the latter.” But there is no attempt and no argument, only a factual observation. Since Paul never speaks of Christ’s righteousness, a distinction between Christ’s righteousness and that of God does not even exist in Paul’s soteriology.

“But if Christ is God (as John 1 states),” asks Oden, “then is not this distinction dubious?” No, because Paul repeatedly mentions the righteousness of God in passages where he distinguishes between God and Christ (though without denying Christ’s deity), gives himself plenty of opportunity to mention a righteousness of Christ, but never does.

Oden then appeals to Phil. 2. But that passage does not talk about Christ’s righteousness, rather about his obedience, relates it to his death on a cross, not to his preceding lifetime, and uses no language of imputation. (By the way, “taking the form of a slave” should also be related to the cross inasmuch as crucifixion was considered a slave’s death and allusions to Isaiah 53 abound.) Next, Oden appeals to Rom. 5:18, which he mistranslates, “So one man’s act of righteousness [sic, ‘one act of righteousness,’ references to ‘one man’ appearing in surrounding verses] leads to acquittal and life for all men,” and asks whether Jesus’ one act is “inclusive of both his life and his death,” and whether his death “could … be bifurcated from his life.” I answer no to the first question, yes to the second, and note that these merely rhetorical questions do not even begin to address the half-dozen exegetical reasons I listed for denying a Pauline reference to the totality of Jesus’ earthly life of obedience to God and the law. That one act of righteousness does not include Jesus’ previous life any more than Adam’s contrastive one transgression included a subsequent life of sinning. Contextually, Jesus’ one act of righteousness refers to his dying for the ungodly, dying for us while we were still sinners, shedding his blood for our justification, and reconciling us to God through his death—period. Nor does Paul say that God credits Jesus’ one act of righteousness to the account of believing sinners in place of their sins.

Therefore when Oden cites the crediting of Abraham’s faith as righteousness, he makes my point. It is our faith, not Christ’s righteousness, that is credited to us as righteousness. The problem is not that ” ‘Celebration’ is too dependent upon Pauline language of ‘accrediting,'” as Oden alleges I think, but that “Celebration” attaches Christ’s righteousness as a direct object of accrediting, as Paul never does. This unscriptural attachment falsifies Oden’s statement that “‘Celebration’ does not attempt to argue in detail a particular view of the language of the crediting of sin and righteousness.”

Proceeding to Rom. 5:19, Oden writes that “this text does not specify whether the obedience of this One [Jesus Christ] is through his life or death or both.” But the very preceding verse has specified “one act of righteousness” in contrast with “one transgression,” a contrast avoided by Oden. Then he opines that Paul’s Greek verb katastathesontai “can be argued exegetically” to imply the accrediting metaphor. No exegetical argument appears, though; and even if the verb be taken to entail a forensic declaration, as some commentators do take it, Paul does not say that believing sinners are declared righteous through having Christ’s obedience imputed to them. A forensic declaration does not equal or demand that kind of imputation. All that is needed to make forensic sense of Paul’s statement is for Christ’s obedient submission to death for our sins to result in God’s declaring righteous us whose sins have thus been imputed to Christ.

Oden describes as “selected” the New Testament passages using the metaphor of accounting and treated by me. Be it known, however, that I selected them be cause they are the only New Testament passages which use that metaphor, not because I found them easy pickings for my case and neglected harder passages. Then Oden distills the thought of Rom. 3:24-25; 4:6-8; 10:3-9; 2 Cor 5:21 into an “accounting … to the believer by God himself the perfect righteousness of God’s own representative and guarantee: God the Son, Jesus Christ,” so that “the [believing] sinner now possesses … God the Son’s own righteousness.” Unfortunately for this distillation, and as I pointed out in my critique, those Pauline passages mention God’s righteousness, not his Son’s.

I do not understand the relevance of Oden’s statement, “The idea that one’s sins are unconditionally covered by an other’s righteousness may, indeed, if misunderstood, tend toward license.” For I did not raise this concern. Nor do I understand the question, “Does ‘Celebration’ indeed say, as charged, that the perfect life of Christ is unilaterally imputed to the actual behavior of believers?” (italics added). Where did I make such a charge? Finally on this topic, it should be clear that I support the opposition to a Roman Catholic doctrine of in fused righteousness, but for the sake of fruitful dialogue it seems to me that Protestants should exhibit as much willingness to accept scriptural criticism as they expect Roman Catholics to exhibit.

The rest can be disposed of in short order. Contrary to Oden’s declaration, I have never suggested that “Celebration” is “soft or ambiguous in fostering a tendency toward ‘universal salvation’ … or edging toward universalism.” It clearly does not. I only noted that evangelicalism “has long included … even some who believe in universal salvation” and that at the present time evangelicals are migrating to or to ward universalism “occasionally.” Since I declared myself an exclusivist, how can Oden countenance the possibility that I disagree with the evangelical persuasion that “no one comes to the Father except through the Son”? I did express concern, however, over “the currently massive migration of evangelicals from exclusivism to inclusivism” and what I take to be some ambiguity in “Celebration” on this issue. Oden does not address it (unless he confuses inclusivism with universalism, as I presume he does not).

I am interested to learn that “annihilationism cannot by any means come under” the “definition” of “eternal retributive punishment” in “Celebration.” But it remains a question in my mind whether all the signatories understand annihilationism to be excluded.

Robert H. Gundry is scholar-in-residence at Westmont College. He is the author of many books in the field of New Testament studies, including commentaries on Matthew and Mark.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

For me, the main purpose of art is transportation. I’m not talking about murals on the sides of buses. I’m talking about the singular ability of art to pull us, Alice-like, through the Looking Glass and into other realms.

I have always maintained that the fictional depiction of such journeys—as when Aeneas descends into the Underworld, or when the Pevensie kids go through the wardrobe to Narnia—is really about what happens when a person encounters art. In fact, in the second Narnian story, the kids literally climb into a painting. But however it happens, Alice and Aeneas and everyone else go someplace otherwise inaccessible—to the other side of the rainbow, the horizon, the mirror—and then, even better than that, they return, still the same, but somehow ineffably changed. They come back from the dead, as it were, and tell us about it. And their journey is a picture of what it is to read a story, or view a painting or a film; you enter a realm beyond your own and then you return to your own realm, but you are not the same. To put it yet another way, you fall asleep and dream and wake up.

And nothing can take us elsewhere more quickly and powerfully than movies. There is something about the visual and aural power of film that is unparalleled. If the sound is good enough and the screen is large enough and the other people in the audience eat their popcorn quietly enough we can sometimes vault up into the darkness and over the bar at the edge of Reality and fall and fall like Alice into another world. This, generally, is why I go to movie theaters.

But most movies these days don’t aspire to pull their audiences into other worlds the way they used to, and that is why I often find myself hissing like a treed cat at the current state of cinema. I am especially bothered because never before in the history of film have special effects been so good. Digital technology can take us to Mars and make it convincing even to a jaded adult. So when movies don’t use this technology for real transportive purposes, I get upset. Let me give you an example.

Did you see Jurassic Park? I know it’s old news, but it serves my argument here and most people saw it. When it came out I thought, At last, something that will take me to the other side of the mirror! I couldn’t wait to see it. I knew that, given the advances in technology, I would, in fact, actually see a dinosaur. A real dinosaur! Now, technically I’d seen dinosaurs before—who hadn’t?—in cel animation, in stop-action claymation. I’d seen the guys in the rubber suits galumphing over crappy HO-scale models of pre-Nikkei Tokyo. I could see their unconvincing and ill-shaped plastic mouths, painted sloppily by some hungover intern on a deadline. The high-octane suspension of disbelief necessary for these sweaty pseudo-lizards was achievable only via fatigue and malt liquor, and keep it coming. Ah, but Spielberg’s dinosaurs would be different. The reviews told me so, and hallelujah, the reviews were right. Spielberg and his special effects geniuses delivered the goods, and I was in heaven. At least at the start of the movie. For a few moments it was unutterably glorious, and then—Ichabod!—the glory departed. But those few moments are worth recounting.

They were toward the beginning of the movie, when the three protagonists have arrived at the eponymous Jurassic Park, and are zipping along in a jeep, hoping to spot their anachronistic quarry. Then, behind them—or beyond them, so the viewer sees it but they cannot—rises up as out of some premythical depths the awesome spectacle of what we had only heard existed, of what we had only imagined existed, and now here it was, the very thing itself: a view-filling 80-ton brontosaurus so outrageous and so real that one was immediately in awe of it. We were suddenly and actually in the presence of a living monster, resurrected from the prehistoric mist. And a few seconds watching it showed that this beast was no phoney-baloney stop-action model; no, it was the true monster itself, the one all those ersatz reptilians meant to get at, of which Godzilla is a mere type and shadow. This is what it’s all about, I thought. This is worth 150 million dollars and two years of labor. And closer to home, this is even worth eight bucks for a box of Good’n’Plenty and a waxen cup of Dr. Pepper the size of a fat man’s fez.

And then it got even better: in a quintessenially Spielbergian cinematic fillip the massy monster shifted his awesome bulk and was suddenly and impossibly on two legs, the better to reach the more tender—one presumes—foliage at the whippy tippy-top of a verdant Jurassic tree. This primordial ballet was a kind of cinematic perfection, because the mundane physical act of a hungry vegetarian reptile reaching for food became holy and sublime. It was like watching an angel cough. For those few moments it was as though we, like fairy-tale Jack, had just poked our head through the hole in the top of the sky and were staring, agog, at a land of gold and giants. Lo! we had ascended into the heavens and were mingling and cavorting with gods and monsters.

Of course I had wanted to groove on this terrific otherness forever, to stay in this holy otherworld outside of time for as long as possible, at least until the credits rolled. But this, alas, was not to be. You see, Mr. Spielberg had a wide load of plot to extrude, and there was only 90 minutes left! The next thing I knew Jeff Goldblum was storking around with Laura Dern and people were getting munched by Happy Meal Raptors and the once billowy fantasy was shadoobily in tatters. The balloon had been pricked—bang!—and instead of staring dreamily at a golden age of gentle monsters I was suddenly zooming headlong toward the credits, propelled by the tackily-decaled dragster of Spielberg’s plot. Holy Crichton Page-turner, Batman! It was over before it began, as though Jack’s mother had peevishly chopped the beanstalk out from under him because dinner couldn’t wait. Well, you can’t have everything.

Still, it’s a pity. So few current movies seem to be able to take me to another realm that I often find myself renting old movies just for this purpose, just for a hit of pure unadulterated otherness. Usually the older the movie, the better. I am especially drawn toward silent films and some of the earliest talkies. The faces and make-up hearken back to nineteenth-century theater. The acting is stagey and stylized. The villains are Villains, with black capes and longish hair and high eyebrows. And everyone exists in a jerky grey-toned amber, in a sun-starved under water realm, staring at us from the depths of the past, from the other side of the mirror. There is often a creepiness to it. One knows that everyone in such films is long dead, and yet there they are, smiling and talking and weeping. They are alive and dead at the same time. They are ineluctably Other.

The death-in-life or life-in-death aspect is at the essence of all of this somehow. A corpse is horrifying because it is a semblance of life, a mockery of it. It is dead life. Merely inert matter is not frightening. It’s the unheimlich, the uncanny of Freud, that spooks, that awes. The thing/not thing. Following this thinking, one sees that the image of a waking dream is at the heart of this as well. We are sleeping and conscious at the same time. Subject and verb, Earth and Heaven, are impossibly and wonderfully conflated. This impossible conflation is the true and mystifying and secret magic of Art: an otherness that somehow points you to something even more Other beyond it, ultimately to that ultimate Other, God Himself.

But most contemporary movies would rather connect with focus groups than with the horizon or heaven. They seem to say: let’s all laugh at divorce and how our hips have gotten bigger and how our sophisticated children know all those words they shouldn’t. I never pay to see such movies, but they all seem to find me on domestic airplane flights. There is a terrible smallness and insideness and familiarity to the worlds they depict. They aspire toward sitcom-ness. Watching them is often like watching ourselves in our own living rooms. Or like watching videos of ourselves watching videos—of ourselves watching videos, an abyss of endless facing mirrors leading to the increasingly enclosed and lightless nothingness and meaninglessness of the Self’s Black Hole. Hell in a shrinking nutshell. Something is missing. And it ain’t us.

All of which is why I found Jurassic Park so especially disappointing. It promised just the opposite of that, and didn’t deliver. And it wasn’t just the nitro-burning plot, it was the contemporary references littered throughout the movie like so many ketchup-stained Big Mac wrappers. Even the casting contributes to the problem. Because we know the celebrity actors’ eating and mating habits and see them on Letterman and Leno, they have lost the air of mystery that once lent them that requisite aura of otherness we associated with oldtime movie stars. The current scandalsheet tide washes them up too close to our beach blankets and we can smell them and touch them and know they are not the fabulous sea-serpents and ethereal mermaids we thought them to be.

Which brings me, finally, to that infinitely unplotty classic of Soviet cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. I confess that I started this piece for this magazine two years ago as a review of that movie, which had just been screened at an L.A. film festival, but on the cheap flight back home they showed some awful Nora Ephron comedy (see?), and I’ve been cogitating on the painful dissonance between them all this time.

Andrei Rublev is three hours of unalleviated otherness. There are no celebrities and no contemporary references and snide inside jokes, and there are no obvious plot-devices. Because it was filmed in Soviet Russia in the 1960s, it is already in a world as foreign to ours as Andrei Rublev’s fifteenth century is to ours. The premodern mujiks and kulaks of Khruschev’s rural dystopia were very similar, at least I thought, to the ones of Rublev’s day. The landscape has a bleak otherness to it. The mud and cold, the chapped Slavic faces, the mattocks and wooden shoes and coarse clothing inhabit some kind of parallel universe—surely not the same one that we do.

These characters are like nothing we have seen before. It is as though they had just fallen out of a painting. The movie follows the wanderings of a painter of icons, the title character, a historical figure best known for his icon of the Holy Trinity. I can hardly tell you what the story was all about, probably because it was all about something besides story. But I can tell you that it was powerful and mesmerizing and glorious. It was a Siberian mammoth steak of otherness, and it didn’t come with a packet of ketchup. Two years later I am still digesting it.

Andrei Rublev’s wanderings end with a long, exquisitely memorable scene in which a number of peasants are making a gigantic bell in the old style, pouring hot metal—melted down in home-made furnaces—into a baked mud form. It is as awesome and impresive in its inert monstrosity as Spielberg’s initial animated megalizard. The bell is so utterly huge—so much larger than the people who made it—that it stops us as the grazing brontosaurus stopped us. Our mouths open and we stare and stare at its stupendous otherness. The potential of this pre-tolled giant is almost palpable. When this bell tolls it will wake people in other continents, in other centuries. It is a kind of Ur-bell, ready to sound the return of Father God Himself to his old, abandoned planet.

Well, what else is there to say? Hollywood directors and producers, now hear this: I want the bell or the dinosaur—just the bell or the lizard—get it? I don’t want to find out that Jim Carrey is trying to steal the bell, or that Robin Williams is trying to bring the lizard back to Ork. I don’t want to find out that Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler are trying to get the bell back from their ex-husbands, who have taken up with beautiful young lizards. I just want the Thing itself. Please, just give me the bell or the lizard, okay?

And while I’m at it I don’t want self-conscious camera angles, or cute cameos. I don’t want any scenes in a Pizzeria Uno. I don’t want product tie-ins or cute, smartass kids; and I don’t want Keanu Reaves or Sandra Bullock or Meg Ryan or Ben Affleck or Kevin Bacon or Whoopi Goldberg or Kevin Spacey or any other of the extremely usual suspects. I don’t want soaring Grammy-fodder from Sir Captain Fantastic.

I just want to stare at something amazing, something that pulls me beyond myself and into the other side of the world, behind the veil and through the liquid mirror. I want to swim there for a while, tread some water, splash around, and then I want to go home. Dig?

Oh, one more thing: don’t be surprised if sometime you see some crazy guy zipping through the crowds at Cannes or Sundance, or along the red carpet in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at Oscar time. He’ll be wearing a T-shirt that says: It’s the Otherness, Stupid. And, of course, dear friends, it is.

Eric Metaxas is a writer for Big Idea, creators of VeggieTales. He is the author of many books for children (www.ericmetaxas.com).

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.