Page 3748 – Christianity Today (2024)

At the beginning of Austin Flint’s play, The Flaming Spider: Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Edwards hallucinates in a cold sweat on his deathbed in Princeton, New Jersey. The third president of Princeton’s fledgling College of New Jersey, and soon to be the third in a row to die an untimely death, Edwards can’t help but rue what could have been but never came to pass. Far removed from the family and friends he had loved and served in Massachusetts, he shouts in an eerie apostrophe to Sarah, his wife of 30 years, who had not yet made the journey to Princeton but comforts her husband nonetheless. “I never built a New Jerusalem in Northampton,” he cries in despair, “never built the great city on a hill. But the building blocks were in place, Lord. It was within our grasp.” Edwards continues in reverie, as he muses over the fleeting joys of New England’s Great Awakening. “What a dream it was. What a blessed dream. What a special light hung, still hangs over that [Connecticut River] valley. Look closely. There! Can you see the glow? Can you see it now, Sarah? Northampton, our beloved hills, white steeple of the meeting house. Truly we are blessed by God.”1

The Flaming Spider exaggerates Edwards’ feelings of failure as a minister, and misrepresents him when it suggests that he tried to build the New Jerusalem. But it offers a vivid portrayal of Edwards’ spiritual restlessness and seemingly boundless aspirations-sustained in spite of intense frustration by an unparalleled and irrepressible theological idealism—and illuminates the irony of his phenomenal, though overwhelmingly posthumous, success. Indeed, on this tercentennial anniversary of Edwards’ birth in East Windsor, Connecticut (on October 5, 1703), thousands have gathered to remember one whom many would call an unlikely man—dismissed by his own parishioners from the First Church of Northampton, then opposed by family relations at the Stockbridge Indian mission, and finally succumbing in a bout with smallpox two months after moving to Princeton. Despite such bitter disappointments, millions around the world continue to celebrate Edwards’ life—compelled by his singular capacity to depict the glory of God. Some still struggle for control of his weighty mantle.

Though inhibited during his lifetime by many who sought to thwart his ministry, Edwards now enjoys an enormous international reputation. He died in 1758 with only a handful of disciples (and a larger number of admirers away from New England’s halls of power). But by the end of the 18th century, his followers had founded a spiritual movement, promoting Edwardsian doctrine and practice throughout the Anglo-American world. During the early 19th century, Edwardsians dominated New England and began to circle the globe with the growth of the modern missionary movement. Today, the name of Edwards is known on every major continent. And people have read his writings not only in English, Gaelic, and Welsh editions but also in German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Arabic, Choctaw, Chinese, and Korean. Edwards never would have guessed it. And he would surely not have been pleased with all of the purposes he has served. But the long-term investments he made as preacher, teacher, and theological writer continue to yield a plentiful harvest after three centuries.

In the United States alone, dozens of groups—made up of secular scholars and Christian patrons alike—have gathered to take advantage of Edwards’ tercentennial. In towns from Princeton to Pittsburgh, as well as from Wheaton to Washington—not to mention Edwards’ haunts in Northampton, Stockbridge, and Wethersfield—a wide assortment of people have met to come to terms with Edwards’ legacy. The most prestigious group of scholars met at the Library of Congress for a multidisciplinary colloquy, “Jonathan Edwards at 300.” But the largest group, and the one most committed to Edwards’ religious agenda, converged in droves on the Minneapolis Convention Center. Hosted by Desiring God Ministries and led by the Rev. John Piper, senior pastor of the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, their meeting was held, in the Edwardsian words of Piper’s conference website, “for all who desire to see and savor the glory of God.” It featured talks by Piper himself, J. I. Packer, and Iain Murray. And it sought to extend Edwards’ “passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.”2

Perhaps the most permanent monument to Edwards’ tercentennial year is the stack of publications—piled like bibliographical stones of remembrance—released in honor of the occasion. They are too many to note even in passing, roughly a dozen books and scores of essays in sundry periodicals. Scholarly quarterlies and more popular magazines have feted Edwards.3 Christian publishers like Baker and Presbyterian & Reformed have issued paperbacks for lay readers.4 And academic presses, as well, have published major scholarly tomes.5 Many thousands of pages on Edwards appeared in 2003 alone.

One book that stands out from the crowd is Jonathan Edwards and the Bible, Robert Brown’s study of Edwards’ engagement with biblical higher criticism. Ignored for decades by secular scholars, Edwards’ vast biblical writings are finally receiving due attention. And scholars like Brown (and Stephen J. Stein of Indiana University) are leading the way.

Brown’s book reveals that higher criticism emerged in North America long before the second half of the 19th century (where scholars usually place it). In fact, he contends that “the problem of the relationship of critical thought to the Bible is almost as old as the American experience itself.” Brown demonstrates that Edwards tackled this problem head-on. Indeed, Brown argues, “the problem of biblical criticism is a ubiquitous feature of Edwards’s work, an aspect absent of which the nature and genesis of his entire theological career cannot be adequately understood, or can hardly be made intelligible at all.” He uses Edwards to devalue misnomers like “pre-” and “post-critical” that have pervaded the modern study of the history of biblical scholarship. And he transcends the false dichotomy in stock questions about whether Edwards was a “medieval” or “modern” thinker.

In Brown’s account, Edwards was a “modestly critical” theological conservative whose thorough engagement with biblical criticism opened the door to more radical views. As an apologist for historic Protestant claims about the Bible, its formation and authority, Edwards answered more skeptical critics along evidentiary lines. He defended the historicity of biblical narratives, supported traditional views of the provenance of disputed biblical books and, according to Brown, responded diligently to the “infallibilist critique” (the argument that historical/traditionary forms of religious knowledge are incapable of yielding infallible certainty). Such argumentation involved him inevitably in a “program of modernization … that carried within it inherent tensions and a momentum toward increasingly naturalistic and untraditional interpretations of the sacred texts.” Despite his conservatism, then, Edwards’ work, according to Brown, “is the product of, and not an exception to, the forces producing the eclipse of biblical narrative in western culture.” Specialists will wrangle over the finer points of Brown’s interpretation. But most will agree that he has written a masterful treatment of his subject.

Avihu Zakai is a Jewish scholar who teaches history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. But in Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History, he provides a more thorough, even sympathetic, synthesis of his subject than any American—or Christian—ever has. Based on extensive research in Edwards’ manuscripts and treatises, and culminating in an assessment of Edwards’ best-selling sermon series, “A History of the Work of Redemption” (1739), Zakai elucidates the significance of what he terms Edwards’ “redemptive mode of historical thought.” His argument, in sum, is that

[i]t was Edwards’s reaction to the metaphysical and theological implications of Enlightenment historical narratives, which increasingly tended to set aside theistic considerations in the realms of morals and history, which led in part to the development of his redemptive mode of historical thought—the doctrine that the process of history depends entirely and exclusively on God’s redemptive activity as manifested in a series of revivals throughout time, and not on autonomous human power.

A lot was at stake, in other words, in Edwards’ defense of the Great Awakening (and its alleged enthusiasm) against its cool, cultured despisers, a lot that pertained to the doctrine of providence and a Christian view of history. Edwards “fully understood the serious challenges” of the Enlightenment. And “he was alarmed” by its increasingly naturalistic view of history. Indeed, “[w]ith great dismay he observed that Enlightenment historical narratives not only deprived the realm of history of teleological ends and theological purposes, but stipulated that history did not manifest the presence of God’s redemptive activity.” In response to what he saw, then, as “the de-Christianization of history and the de-divinization of the historical process,” Edwards sought “the reenthronement of God as the author and Lord of history,” as well as “the reenchantment of the historical world.” In the midst of his struggle, moreover, he constructed what would become a uniquely “evangelical historiography according to which revivals and awakenings constitute the heart” of history.

This is not an easy read for those who are new to Enlightenment history. But Zakai’s analysis of Edwards’ historiography is superb, as is his presentation of what was at stake in the transatlantic debates about the new science and its bearing on a Christian view of the world.

Amy Pauw’s book on Edwards’ trinitarian theology is—surprisingly enough—the first of its kind. Despite the thousands of books and articles devoted to Edwards since his death, no one has ever published a major work on his doctrine of the Trinity. Pauw is a theologian herself at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary who deals with Edwards as an important interlocutor. She confesses that Edwards was an occasional, not a systematic, thinker. Nonetheless, she uses him to mediate the current debate among (mainly) systematic theologians over the merits of the “social” and “psychological” views of the Trinity.6 According to Pauw, Edwards employed the language of both trinitarian models. He “alternated or modulated between them depending on the immediate theological and cultural context of his writing, but never repudiated either one.” Consequently, his writings are rich with raw materials useful to those who wish to bridge the gap between these models today.

Pauw has plenty of problems with Edwards. She disapproves of Edwards’ use of the Puritans’ “covenant of redemption” (for its anthropomorphic subordinationism and implicit support of patriarchy); of his (alleged) supralapsarianism (and its denigration of the creation); of his epistemological idealism (for its negative affect on his presentation of the integrity and value of the material world); of his (allegedly) crabbed exclusivism in the realms of soteriology and eucharistic doctrine; and of the severity of his notion of eternal divine punishment. She presents a constructive theologian’s view of Edwards, to be sure, a view that Edwards would likely have blasted as an omen of declension. But her work is a treasure trove—and not only for systematists. It contains the most detailed treatment of Edwards’ trinitarianism to date.

The crowning achievement of Edwards studies during this tercentennial year is George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Most of the leading Edwards biographies picture him as a tragic figure, a genius trapped in the cage of his Calvinistic worldview. But Marsden resists this common temptation, refusing to render Edwards’ life in terms of his failure to transcend his social and cultural location and anticipate the advances of more enlightened intellectuals. “In writing this life of Edwards,” he announces early on, “one of my goals has been to understand him as a real person in his own time.” The result is now the definitive life-and-times of Edwards himself, a nearly exhaustive work that will not soon be replaced.

Better than anyone else before, Marsden enters Edwards’ world—physically, mentally, and spiritually—and helps us understand his significance as an 18th-century leader. He covers all the usual ground but explores some new terrain as well, bringing to life a cast of characters usually slighted by other scholars. He makes good on a wealth of Edwards’ understudied manuscripts, working most closely with correspondence and filling out our understanding of Edwards’ everyday affairs. Especially impressive is Marsden’s handling of the military context of Edwards’ work in Northampton and Stockbridge, and of the history of Edwards’ work with Native Americans. He describes the billeting of soldiers in Edwards’ parsonage in Northampton, the outfitting of Edwards’ Stockbridge home as a British garrison, as well as Edwards’ understandable obsession with the significance (apocalyptic and otherwise) of British fighting against the Roman Catholic French. He thereby highlights Edwards’ remarkable composure as a scholar. And he stresses the worldly importance of Edwards’ work with the Indians.

“The first goal of a biographer,” Marsden writes in his introduction, “should be to tell a good story that illuminates not only the subject, but also the landscapes surrounding that person and the horizons of the readers.” Marsden tells a wonderful story, enriching his narrative with a wealth of little-known gems from Edwards’ world. He also succeeds in shedding new light on the varied landscapes of Edwards’ life, inviting his readers to enter this territory imaginatively.7

As Marsden acknowledges in his preface, his ability to do this has been facilitated by the Yale Edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, a publishing project nearing completion during this tercentennial year that has supported all of the books discussed above.8 For half a century, a team of scholars associated with “the

Edition” (as its supporters usually revere it) has been transcribing, annotating, and introducing Edwards’ writings, working in recent years primarily with unpublished manuscripts. Read in the past only by those who could decipher Edwards’ hand (an extremely difficult task that has left many in despair) and could afford an extended stay at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, these manuscripts—as presented in the Yale Edition—have begun to revolutionize the study of Edwards.

The most visible sign of this revolution, a sign apparent in virtually all of the tercentennial publications, is that we now know Edwards, in Marsden’s words, “as a person, a public figure, and a thinker in his own time and place.” For much of the 20th century Edwards was known as a contradiction, a medieval Calvinist on the outside and modern scientist on the inside, one whose most important thoughts transcended their time and were hidden from view. In the well-known words of Perry Miller (who founded The Works of Jonathan Edwards), “Edwards’ writing is an immense cryptogram … not to be read but to be seen through.” Moreover, his life was “an enigma,” for “he speaks from a primitive religious conception which often seems hopelessly out of touch with even his own day, yet at the same time he speaks from an insight into science and psychology so much ahead of his time that our own can hardly be said to have caught up with him.”9 Miller’s Edwards was an anachronism, an isolated intellectual thinking way ahead of his time but forced by circ*mstance to express himself in an outworn Christian idiom. His life had little to do with what Marsden calls “his own time and place.”

But the more that Miller’s Edition has filled out our picture of Edwards’ world, the more Edwards’ life appears coherent, his thought more timely, less enigmatic, shaped not by an urge to transcend his age but by an abiding passion to serve it—as a preacher, biblical scholar, and trinitarian theologian. Today’s Edwards is not an anachronism. He comes across, rather, as an engaged intellectual rooted in the Christian tradition, thinking along with the trends of his times and doing so mainly in the service of the souls of his parishioners. He was a genius, to be sure, but not a proto-naturalist chafing at his 18th-century context. Rather, his genius is best understood in relation to that very context.

Not all are pleased with the new Edwards. In the words of historian Bruce Kuklick, Edwards proved far more attractive and serviceable to secular intellectuals when portrayed by Perry Miller as “one of us—close to being an atheist for Niebuhr.” But now that Edwards has been unmasked as an evangelical supernaturalist and committed parish pastor (ironically—and regrettably, for Kuklick—by Miller’s Edition), his thought “is not likely to compel the attention of intellectuals ever again. Indeed,” argues Kuklick, “it is more likely to repel their attention.”10

To most disinterested observers Kuklick’s claim will appear hyperbolic. Nonetheless, it does represent a real problem. The Edwards of history appeals far more to evangelicals like Marsden than he does to atheists like Miller and Kuklick. But it took the likes of Miller to pull Edwards into the limelight and, more important, to provide concrete support for Edwards scholarship. Sadly, Edwards’ spiritual heirs have never worked hard at promoting painstaking and costly historical research. Consequently, Edwards’ fate within the academic world has always depended in the main on the interests and funding of those who prefer to muffle his evangelical passion.

If the new Edwards—the Edwards of history, the Calvinist pastor and theologian mainly concerned with the cure of souls—keeps scholars from studying Edwards’ significance for the lives of non-Christians, and if evangelicals do not increase their support for Edwards scholarship, we had all better beware. Our harvest will not prove nearly so plentiful at 400.

Douglas A. Sweeney is associate professor of church history and the history of Christian thought and director of the Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is the author of Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford Univ. Press).

1. Flint teaches creative writing, primarily playwriting, at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he runs the undergraduate major in Literature/Writing. Though The Flaming Spider remains unpublished, it has been performed in numerous places since its World Premiere at Yale in January of 1999. I have quoted from a videotape recording of the World Premiere performance.

2. Quotations taken from the conference website, www.desiringgod.org, on June 27, 2003.

3. Examples include the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of Presbyterian History, Christian History magazine and the Italian evangelical journal, Studi di Teologia (published by the Instituto di Formazione Evangelica e Documentazione).

4. See especially D. G. Hart, Sean Michael Lucas, and Stephen J. Nichols, eds., The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition (Baker, 2003); and Stephen J. Nichols, The Spirit of Truth: The Holy Spirit and the Apologetics of Jonathan Edwards (P & R, 2003).

5. For a broad sampling of the latest technical scholarship on Edwards, see especially David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds., Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons (University of South Carolina Press, 2003); and Paul Helm and Oliver D. Crisp, eds., Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian (Ashgate, 2003).

6. The “psychological” (or Augustinian) model, according to Pauw, compares the Trinity to “a human mind and its internal operations of knowledge and love.” It portrays “the Son and Spirit as the Wisdom and Love of the one God, thus emphasizing divine unity.” The “social” model, on the other hand (“initiated by Richard of St. Victor in the twelfth century”), emphasizes “relationality within God by depicting the Godhead as a society or family of persons” (pp. 11-15).

7. I have published more extensive and critical reviews of the books by Brown, Pauw and Marsden in this year’s volumes of Theology Today, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and the Evangelical Studies Bulletin (respectively).

8. At press time, 23 of the Yale Edition’s 27 letterpress volumes have been published. The remaining four volumes are slated for release in 2004.

9. Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards, The American Men of Letters Series (William Sloane, 1949), pp. xi, xiii, 51.

10. Bruce Kuklick, “Review Essay: An Edwards for the Millennium,” Religion and American Culture, Vol. 11 (2001), pp. 116-17.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In May 1988, while on holiday in Cornwall, I was deeply stirred by hearing a Methodist choir sing the conversion hymn of the Wesleys. The haunting 18th-century tune was one I had never heard before, and the powerful words conveyed a sense of the raw experience of men newly entering on a hitherto unimagined spiritual world. “Where,” asks Charles Wesley in the first line, “shall my wondering soul begin?” The freshly composed hymn was probably sung by his brother John on the day of his conversion, May 24, 1738. The choir was marking the 250th anniversary of that event, often taken to be the birth of Methodism. The decisive stage in the Christian pilgrimage of John Wesley was considered well worth celebrating.

Now, 15 years on, there is another reason to commemorate the great evangelist. The current year, 2003, is the tercentenary of Wesley’s birth. To mark the occasion, several biographical studies have appeared. None has been able to draw on the final volume of Wesley’s journal, issued earlier this year in the authoritative version edited by Reg Ward for The Works of John Wesley. Nor does any of them, including each of the titles reviewed here, supersede Henry Rack’s life of Wesley, Reasonable Enthusiast (Epworth Press, 1989), published just after the earlier commemoration. The two books by John Kent and John Munsey Turner considered here are reinterpretations of Wesley rather than detailed accounts of his life. Neither is chronologically arranged; both encompass the rise of Methodism as well as the founder himself. The similarities do not end there, for the authors are both retired English Methodist ministers who were trained as historians at the University of Cambridge.

Yet the perspectives are very different. Whereas Turner adopts a professedly Methodist standpoint, seeing Wesley as the creator of the tradition in which he stands, Kent takes a much more detached view, eyeing the evangelist more as a figure in the history of world religions. Both attack Wesleyan myths. Turner deplores the hagiography that has ignored, for instance, the relief of some of the elderly autocrat’s followers at his eventual death. Kent, however, takes the assault on received opinion much further. He denies the existence of a spiritual movement that had Wesley as one of its central figures. There was, he claims, “no large-scale eighteenth-century evangelical revival.” Along with much of the other religious baggage surrounding Wesley, in Kent’s view, the notion of a revival must be thrown overboard. What, more precisely, do these contrasting interpretations have to offer?

Turner, whose less revolutionary account may be taken first and more briefly, is critical of treatments of early Methodism as a “one person show.” He therefore puts Wesley in the context of the whole Evangelical Revival (he entertains no doubts of its existence), stressing the pragmatism that led the evangelist to create a system of itinerancy for spreading the gospel round the British Isles. Wesley was a man of the 18th century, with the foibles of the age, such as aversion to the rebellion of the Americans against George III. Wesley is depicted as a loyal Anglican, a folk theologian (here Turner follows Albert Outler), and the co-author, with his brother, of what the author justly calls “the greatest body of devotional verse in the English language.”

Turner is also eager to give an overview of the movement that Wesley founded, and so he discusses the socio-political impact of Methodism over subsequent centuries and the character of Primitive Methodism, a 19th-century breakaway from Wesleyanism. These topics, though of great importance, are perhaps rather too remote from Wesley himself to warrant inclusion in such a volume. There are also points where unexplained allusions—to George Bell (p. 38), to the Irish textile triangle (p. 43), even to Methodist societies (p. 46)—will not convey their meaning to a newcomer to the field. Nevertheless, this volume will achieve the aim of the author, to explain the significance of Wesley in the light of recent scholarship (Turner is notably up-to-date) to Methodists and non-Methodists alike.

Kent’s book also has great virtues. Its attitude to Wesley’s conversion rings truer than Turner’s. For Turner, the episode of 1738 was relatively unimportant, certainly in comparison with the event of 1725 when Wesley first took up the rigorous self-discipline of the High Church party. For Kent, the 1738 conversion was formative of the mature Wesley, for then he turned from his previous reliance on self-discipline to a personal faith that gave him greater resilience. The issue of whether Methodism saved England from revolution, the perennial Halévy thesis, is also treated more satisfactorily by Kent, who points out that the authorities were so firmly in control that there was no question of revolution in England in the first place. Furthermore, Kent’s book puts the revival phenomena—though they are not so labeled—of Wesley’s day center stage. Visions, dreams and special providences, the stuff of vibrant popular religion, are shown to be crucial to what occurred. There are welcome passages where contemporary documents, sometimes unpublished, are carefully dissected. The annotations of Archbishop Secker on manuscript correspondence written by John Berridge, an evangelical clergyman, are particularly revealing of the cleavage between the theological opinions of the religious authorities and those of contemporary evangelists. The analysis in Kent’s book is very broad, encompassing, for instance, the writings of Thomas Hobbes as well as the novelists of Wesley’s day. Above all, Wesley and the Wesleyans is fresh and suggestive, because it challenges all existing interpretations of the rise of Methodism.

The conceptualization of John Kent’s book is drawn from Religious Studies, the discipline that the author long taught at the University of Bristol. Certain assumptions, sometimes found in that field but rare elsewhere, are made without argument. In particular, the notion of the existence of such a thing as “primary religion” is asserted. It is very like the “primal religion” that commentators have often attributed to traditional African societies. For Kent it is the impulse, natural to humanity, to seek supernatural power to cope with the experiences of everyday life, whether deep-seated anxieties, particular problems or the need for self-approval. It was this force, expressing itself in perceptions of divine intervention, that, according to Kent, Wesley harnessed for his movement. Primary religion, on the author’s account, must be distinguished from “secondary religion,” the formulation of theologies and the consequent creation of denominations. The plastic energy of primary religion was molded into the substance of Methodism.

Although this framework is boldly outlined in the first chapter of Kent’s book, it is not carefully defended from potential critique. Yet it is remarkably open to dissent. The very distinction between primary and secondary religion is doubtful. Can a single impulse of human spirituality permeating the whole of history be isolated? Surely the quest for divine aid takes on many forms depending on local settings and specific faiths. It is doubtful whether religion could ever exist, even conceptually, except in the form of a particular religion. The primary and the secondary, in Kent’s terminology, are therefore inextricably mingled together.

This confusion is apparent when Kent comments on the testimonies of Wesleyan women. One of them, Mary Thomas, recalled that Charles Wesley had “asked me if I was justified and I said no. You told me I was in a state of damnation.” The concept of justification, according to Kent’s twofold classification, belongs, as a theological rationalization, in the category of secondary religion. The idea of damnation, however, falls within the area of primary religion, which Kent says includes the notion of a God “who might reject one altogether and punish indefinitely.” Yet on Mary Thomas’ lips the two are yoked together as alternative forms of the human condition. Any attempt to disentangle secondary from primary religion is doomed to failure. The fundamental postulate of Kent’s analysis is invalid.

Hence the reader needs to venture into the argument of the book with more than a little caution. Kent suggests that the Protestant recovery of which Wesley was a central figure was concerned with the interplay of these two aspects of religiosity. The disappearance since the Reformation from mainstream English Christianity of images of saints and their invocation left a gap in the area of primary religion, a vacuum where people wanted to call on supernatural aid. The official Church of England, preoccupied with providing theological sanctions for the socio-political order, did not cater for the need. Hence there was an opening for a movement offering access to heavenly power. Wesley saw the hole in contemporary religious provision and filled it. In its first phase, roughly from 1740 to 1770, Wesleyanism contained a protean dynamic of spontaneous spirituality, with cries and moans, anguish and despair, release and rejoicing. Only gradually, with the disciplining of Methodism into regular channels, did secondary accretions, theological formulae and denominational structures, take over. By 1800 the process was virtually complete, though traces of primary religious energy could still be found among rural Primitive Methodists as late as the 1880s.

There is much here that carries conviction. There is a great deal of evidence that the Methodist movement did undergo over time a slow stiffening, a sort of corporate routinization of charisma. Nevertheless there seems to have been much more expectation of supernatural intervention in post-Reformation England than this account would allow. Contemporary miracles were denied by official Protestantism, but divine interventions, as the work of Alexandra Walsham has shown in Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), were standardly looked for both in the churches and beyond their bounds. The supernatural in the form of prophecies and prodigies was firmly entrenched in popular culture. So there was a deep seam of intense religiosity for Wesley to mine. Signs and wonders were not a new form of marketing ploy so much as common ground between Methodism and much of its host society.

The analysis of the Wesleyan phenomenon in Kent’s book has many other dimensions. The Protestant recovery, on his account, was not only a religious process but also political. Kent points to the resurgence, against the forces of the Counter-Reformation, of Protestant Britain, usually in cooperation with Protestant Prussia. He also devotes whole chapters to the place of women in the movement and the attitude of the Anglican authorities to its development. His argument in these sections is that Wesleyanism became more patriarchal as the 18th century advanced and that the Anglican response to Methodism was fair and adequate. He seizes every opportunity to take issue with other historians, sometimes explicitly (as when he disagrees with Reg Ward’s contention that early Methodism was a lay movement), sometimes tacitly (as when he objects to the idea that the Reformation meant a “stripping of the altars,” an allusion to the work of Eamon Duffy). The result is a lively polemical work, sometimes demanding to follow but always vibrantly opinionated.

Two subjects may be singled out for special comment, the first being the theme of holiness. Kent gives considerable attention to the topic, for he recognizes that it was Wesley’s central preoccupation. Methodism, in Wesley’s view, was raised up to spread scriptural holiness across the land. He warmly encouraged his followers to seek the experience that he preferred to call “perfect love,” a condition where deliberate sin was known no more. Wesleyan holiness, according to Kent, meant “altered states of consciousness, brief in themselves, and with no lasting effect on the will or the personality”; and he holds that those who claimed the experience “invariably lost it.”

Neither evaluation does justice to the available evidence. Many Methodists believed that perfect love, once given, never left them; and many non-Methodists noticed a quality of saintliness about the manner and behavior of some (by no means all) of these exceptional Wesleyans. It is mistaken, furthermore, to suppose, as Kent does, that by the end of the 18th century, Methodism “gave up the attempt to sustain a holiness movement at its heart,” leaving the task to American revivalists. There was, on the contrary, a powerful indigenous strain of holiness teaching that put down deep roots in many parts of England, a tradition discussed by Turner. Holiness was an enduring force in 19th-century English Methodism.

The other issue that calls for special comment is the relationship of Wesley to the Enlightenment. Kent is keen to deny that the evangelist was influenced by the age of reason, pointing out his habitual style of argument from authority and his disregard for historical criticism of the Bible. He was “detached from the intellectual preoccupations of his age.”

This claim misrepresents its subject. It is true that Wesley did appeal to authorities, ancient as well as modern, for his opinions: so did most philosophes. It is also true that he did not adopt the canons of biblical criticism that were being pioneered by some German contemporaries; but neither, for example, did the Moderate leaders of the Church of Scotland, who were renowned for their alignment with the Enlightenment. In Wesley’s early years as a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, his reading was vast, rigorous and often contemporary. He never lost his intellectual curiosity, treating the experience of his converts as an object of investigation. By the standards of his day he was a natural philosopher, a practicing scientist. He disliked metaphysics, he allowed pragmatism to triumph over church order, and he embraced the central progressive values of the age. Above all, Wesley believed in the supremacy of reason. The faith he favored was “a religion founded on reason, and every way agreeable thereto.”1 Wesley was a man of the Enlightenment.

The different pictures of John Wesley in these two volumes do not exhaust the possibilities for understanding the man. It may be suggested that it would be closer to reality to see him as a remarkable intellectual, surrendering an exclusive concern with the life of the mind because he was rationally persuaded that there were more urgent responsibilities. He believed from the 1720s that the quest for holiness was the logical path for a sinner who acknowledged his Creator. Holiness, he discovered during the 1730s, was unattainable without conversion to Christ. He therefore embraced the gospel out of conviction in 1738, an event that the Cornish choir did well to celebrate two and a half centuries later. Once that transaction had taken place, the overriding priority was to convey the message of salvation and holiness to the mass of the people. That was how Wesley spent his life, applying his powerful intellect to the theological and practical problems that arose in the spirit of enquiry that he had absorbed from his cultural milieu. He was therefore, as Turner acknowledges, at the heart of the rise of evangelicalism. If the process of Protestant recovery was a not a recrudescence of something that can be called primary religion, it can safely be called a revival. Kent’s analysis is unlikely to persuade historians to discard the Evangelical Revival from their accounts of the 18th century.

David Bebbington is Professor of History at the University of Stirling, Scotland. He is spending the fall 2003 semester as Visiting Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. His Didsbury Lectures were published as Holiness in 19th Century England (Paternoster).

1. G. R. Cragg, ed., Works of John Wesley, Vol. 11 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 55.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The recently completed seven-volume critical edition of John Wesley’s Journal and Diaries is a significant landmark in the publication of the Bicentennial Edition of Wesley’s works and a fitting commemoration of Wesley’s 300th birthday (June 17, 1703). Because of the care with which the edition has been prepared, and especially because of the brilliance of its notes, this set offers a great deal more than much- appreciated insight into the convictions, actions, frustrations, and aspirations of one of the key figures in the modern history of Christianity. So delightfully instructive is the reading found at the top on the page (what Wesley himself published) and at the bottom (what the editor supplies) that, before saying anything else, it is appropriate simply to dive in.

The wisdom, erudition, and bracing good humor with which all seven volumes are filled can be illustrated by the record of Wesley’s doings in February and March, 1789—as, at age 85, he continued the incredibly energetic level of activity he had sustained for 60 years. So, we learn from Wesley that on Friday, February 6, he urged 20 or 30 of his local preachers in London to go on preaching “the doctrine of Christian Perfection which God has peculiarly entrusted to the Methodists.” Over the next several weeks, he was out and about: preaching, writing, reading, encouraging local Methodist societies, and preaching some more. Then on Tuesday the 24th, before preaching in the evening on Ephesians 3, he enjoyed “an agreeable and useful conversation” with William Wilberforce. To Wesley, it was especially welcome that Britain’s prime minister, William Pitt, was being so ably assisted by “such a friend as this.” The next day, which Wesley had instructed his societies to spend in solemn prayer for King George III, was transformed into a day of rejoicing when word was received concerning “the recovery of His Majesty’s health.” And so at 5:00 and 9:00 in the morning, as well as at 1:00 in the afternoon and also in the evening, Wesley led prayers of gratitude for the King’s recuperation.

On Sunday, March 1, Wesley recorded that someone had prophesied his death in the month to come, to which he replied, characteristically, with a scriptural phrase: whether he lived or not, it would be quickly seen if the prophecy was correct, and “one way or the other, it is my care to ‘be always ready’ [1 Peter 3:15].” Then came more preaching, more visiting of Methodist classes, and more conferences with old friends, including this one on Friday, March 13: “I spent some time with poor Richard Henderson, deeply affected with the loss of his only son, who, with as great talents as most men in England, had lived two and thirty years and done—just nothing.”

Wesley’s delight in Wilberforce, his concern for the health of the monarch, and his unvarnished opinion of the younger Henderson all cry out for elucidation. In the annotations we find that elucidation, and more. Concerning Wilberforce and Pitt, a note provides the information that Wesley’s earlier opposition to the American Revolution was now flowing into ardent support for Pitt as the new prime minister went about setting things right after the American debacle; we learn that “of course JW and Wilberforce were and had long been one in a detestation of the slave trade”; and we find out that Wilberforce wrote up a memorandum from this meeting about which he said, “I called on John Wesley, a fine old fellow.” The notes on the king’s health and on the deceased young man are such gems, and they are so representative of the treasures spread thickly in all seven volumes, that they must be quoted in full:

George III had suffered repeated ill-health during 1788: first bilious attacks, then irritation, sleeplessness, and garrulity. Never one to desert his post, he held a levee on October 24 in order, he said, “to stop further lies and any fall of the stocks”; J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, 1969), p. 644. When, however, “while driving in Windsor Park, [he] alighted and shook hands with a branch of an oak tree, asserting it to be the King of Prussia,” it was clear that his sanity had given way (J. Holland Rose, William Pitt and National Revival [London, 1911], p. 407, n. 2). At the end of November, his physicians moved him by deception to Kew, advising the Privy Council that his disease was not incurable but that it was impossible to forecast how long it would last. The immediate political consequence of the collapse (which was what alarmed JW) was that if the Prince of Wales succeeded to the Regency by unfettered right, he would certainly turn out Pitt’s government and bring in Fox. The battle between Pitt and Fox over this issue need not be related here, but Pitt’s delaying tactics were supported by the knowledge that the King was now in the charge of Dr. Francis Willis, the most distinguished practitioner of the century in the field of mental illness, who declared an early recovery certain. JW’s prayers were planned too late; the chancellor announced the King convalescent on February 19, and he resumed his authority on March 10.

John Henderson (1757-88) had been born in Ireland when his father was an itinerant preacher there, and was educated at Kingswood [school, founded by Wesley]. “At eight years he understood Latin so well as to be able to teach it at the school. At twelve he taught the Greek language in the school of Trevecca,” leaving that establishment at the same time as John Fletcher. At the age of 24, he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he acquired a reputation as a polymath, in languages, philosophy, law, and medicine, which attracted the attention of the literary world of that day; and his philanthropy matched his learning. The Wesleyan world attributed his downfall to the study of Boehme’s “wild philosophical divinity, and …. the profound nonsense that abounds in the dark regions of mysticism,” of Lavater, and of magic and astrology. More immediately, he became addicted to smoking, drinking, and experiments on himself with opium and quicksilver. He had become completely introverted for some time before his death on Nov. 2. He was buried in Kingswood, but “his father, Mr. Richard Henderson, was so strongly affected by the loss of his affectionate and only child, that he caused the corpse to be taken up again, some days after the internment, to be satisfied whether he was really dead”; Arminian Magazine 16 (1793): 140-44. See also Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-64), 4:151, n. 2; 286, n. 3; 289-99.

Along with thousands of other annotations of similarly revealing precision, such exquisite mini-essays open up theological and personal meanings of Wesley’s important labors in a most revealing way. They are the work of W. Reginald Ward, professor emeritus at Durham University in England and, taken in the round, the greatest living historian of religion and society for Europe’s long eighteenth century.1 In addition to the annotations, Ward also supplied the first volume of the series with a breath-taking introduction to Wesley’s journals in the context of 18th-century autobiography.

Work on the journals’ texts, which Wesley had published and re-published in short “Extracts” from the early 1740s, as well as on the daily diaries that Wesley used as a memory prompt for preparing the published journals, is also of exceedingly high quality. The reconstruction of those diaries, which involved cracking a shorthand code that had long baffled scholars, is the work of Richard Heitzenrater, professor of Wesley studies at Duke Divinity School, who is also the general editor of the Bicentennial Edition and author of his own helpful books like Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Abingdon, 1995).

While the level of textual and critical work on this edition has been extraordinarily high, it has not been rushed to completion. Discussion for the project began in 1960, spurred by the late Albert C. Outler (1908-89) of Southern Methodist University, who campaigned throughout his life for the recognition of Wesley as a first-order theologian. The leading Wesley historian of mid-century, Frank Baker (1910-99), served as the first editor-in-chief. His responsibilities also included securing a reliable text for the works to be included in the critical edition—no small challenge in itself, since Wesley prepared for the press more than 450 separate works (each reprinted, often with fresh editing, on average four to five times).

The first volume of the Bicentennial Series, an edition of Wesley’s Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion, appeared nearly 30 years ago in 1975. In 1983, when the project’s first publisher, the Oxford University Press in England, was forced to give up the venture for financial reasons, it was taken up by Abingdon Press in Nashville. At that time it was also renamed the Bicentennial Edition in honor of the 200th anniversary of the founding of American Methodism in 1784 and, in general, to memorialize Wesley’s lifework. In 1986, Heitzenrater took over for Baker as the general editor. Of the 30-plus volumes planned, 16 have now been published (including four of sermons, two of letters, one each of doctrinal works and tracts on the Methodist societies, and a splendid edition of the 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of The People Called Methodists representing the writing of Charles Wesley as well as the editing of John). Lest the pace of publication seem slow, it is useful to compare the modern critical edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, which began publishing as long ago as 1957 with Paul Ramsey’s edition of Edwards’ Freedom of the Will, and then crept along at a glacial pace until new leadership and fresh funding quickened the pace in the early 1990s.

Volume 7 of the Wesley Journals and Diaries is especially welcome not only because it brings Wesley’s singular account of his own life to a close but also because it includes a thorough index for all seven volumes. The journal must, of course, be used with caution, for by the nature of the case it is partial to Wesley’s own viewpoint. For balanced treatment of any theme or event in his momentous career, it must also be read alongside Wesley’s many other writings and the writings of his contemporaries. Yet with a full index for a superbly annotated journal, it is now much easier to chart the ebb and flow of Wesley’s opinion on all sorts of important subjects.

In his tussle with evangelical Calvinists of his era, for instance, it is important to grasp why Wesley could write to John Newton in 1765 that, “I think on justification just as I have done any time these seven and twenty years, and just as Mr. Calvin does. In this respect I do not differ from him an hair’s breadth” (21:509). Likewise, it is instructive to learn why Wesley could conclude in 1755 that “the hand of the Lord (who does nothing without a cause) is almost entirely stayed in Scotland and in great measure in New England” because many of their leaders “were bigots, immoderately attached either to their own opinions or mode of worship…. . Mr. [Jonathan] Edwards himself was not clear of this” (21:19). It is similarly revealing to see Wesley report enthusiastically in 1753 after reading a pamphlet on the electrical experiments of Benjamin Franklin—”What an amazing scene is here opened for after ages to improve upon!” (20:447). There are also many reminders of how closely Wesley’s work was interwoven with that of his brother, Charles, among which one of the most poignant took place two weeks after Charles’ death in April 1788. As described in the notes, when Wesley tried to line out his brother’s hymn, “Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown,” and came to the lines, “My company before is gone / And I am left alone with Thee,” he broke down in a flood of tears (24:76-77n50).

In sum, because of the extraordinary diligence that went in to the preparation of these seven volumes, readers are in a much better position to measure the insights as well as the mistakes of a truly remarkable Christian, to understand his life and thought against the background of 18th-century history, and to peer more deeply into the inner workings of this initial period of evangelical history. That the 3,845 pages making up these books are also an awful lot of fun to read does not in the least detract from their historical and theological value.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford Univ. Press).

1. As examples, see Christianity under the Ancien RÉgime, 1648-1789 (1999); The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (1992); Religion and Society in England, 1790-1850 (1972); and The English Land Tax in the Eighteenth Century (1953).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Marva Dawn’s writing about worship displays an interesting trajectory. The prolific Regent College teaching fellow has thought deeply and written widely on a number of important topics, and her books have received well-deserved acceptance and acclaim. But the seeker-sensitive baby-boomers who run the show in so many North American churches have remained resistant to her provocative word about worship’s glorious worthlessness. So she keeps trying. In each published iteration—culminating in her most recent effort—her message stays essentially the same, but it becomes somewhat better enculturated: a bit more inductively argued, a bit more fairly illustrated, a bit easier to understand. She’s reaching out, while trying not to dumb Dawn.

Her first book on worship, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down (Eerdmans, 1995), argued that many churches have confused worship with evangelism, to the detriment of both. But the book was widely understood—or misunderstood—as a defense of classically based music and traditional forms of worship. Her sharp criticisms of certain worship styles and patterns were perceived as polemical and élitist. (The charge of élitism could hardly be avoided, given the book’s title.) She sought to correct these misunderstandings in her second book on worship, A Royal Waste of Time (Eerdmans, 1999). Slightly more accessible, this volume included study questions and a handful of topical sermons. In it, the argument from her first book—worship is not a utilitarian means to an evangelistic end—was expanded: worship is not rightly perceived as useful for any other end. The worship of God has its own inherent telos.

Dawn’s most recent offering, How Shall We Worship?, shows her desire to go even further to connect with a wide spectrum of worshipers and worship leaders, and assist them in thinking more deeply about worship. The promotional copy on the back of the book promises that “within an evening’s read, you’ll be able to navigate through the worship debates.” Indeed, at 180-odd postcard-size pages, How Shall We Worship? isn’t nearly as demanding as the two previous books. That’s partly because she’s adjusted her prose style, which in this book is less scholarly (fewer footnotes and more exclamation points), though still rigorous. But it’s also because this book self-consciously employs a helpful pedagogic strategy for provoking deep thought: asking good questions.

In fact, the book is part of a new series from Tyndale entitled Vital Questions. As Dawn herself notes:

Many of the manuals for how to do worship in the present age are dangerous, for they frequently prescribe ‘successful’ strategies that do not consider the local situation in which worship is conducted. … No liturgical scholar, theologian, or sociologist can designate how worship should be conducted in a particular place. Rather, each congregation must ask better questions, so that in every place our worship is faithful to the kind of God we have and the biblical guidance He has condescended to give us.

With each chapter, Dawn observes God’s character and, with the help of Psalm 96, explores a particular question or series of questions about worship. The scriptural imperative to “Sing a new song unto the Lord” (Ps. 96:1) prompts a discussion about “What kinds of music should we use?” (A.: All Kinds.) “The gods of the peoples are idols” (Ps. 96:4) leads into a solid, prophetic riff on “What idols tempt us away from worshipping the only true God?” (A.: mammon, technology, power, prestige, and more.) Sometimes she works much harder to connect her Psalmic spine to the particular questions she wants to ask. For example, from verse 8 (“Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name”), through what seems a labored connection, emerges an important turn on the classic shape of the Church’s liturgy.

How Shall We Worship? contains no extended argument; rather, it ranges far and wide, inquiring helpfully about how worship shapes us, about finding our place in creation’s praise to God, about navigating dialectic poles (e.g., head/heart, order/freedom, joy/lament). And even though the main text

is often in the interrogative mood, an appendix offers additional questions for discussion (though sometimes these questions are less the “how might this work in your church?” sort than the “did you catch the important point I made on page 79?” variety).

Of course, you’d expect someone with 15 books under her belt to have a few answers in addition to questions. And Dawn doesn’t disappoint. She offers scriptural and cultural insight in plentiful measure, and she’s especially good when covering familiar territory, such as the relationship of worship to evangelism.

At the same time, this familiar territory brings with it some not unfamiliar problems. Hints of the élitism and favoritism that marred her previous work appear here, too. While she tries to be even-handed in her critique (“the traditionalists blundered … ,” “the contemporaryists misjudged …”), her much sharper criticism is reserved for those whose first impulse is to baptize new cultural expressions and put them to work in worship. She does not seem to have an ear for the arguments that have been leveled against status-quo preservers. In a key passage on how worship shapes our character, she writes: “worship dare not be glib or superficial, ought not to dispense false assurances or manipulate emotions.” Right on the money, as far as it goes. But to be fair, she would need to include a parallel sentence acknowledging the other side: worship dare not be timid or perfunctory, ought not dispense disconnected truths or conform to tradition for its own sake.

Moreover, her prophetic calls are sometimes muffled by the distance between her and some in her audience. Nowhere in the book do we find an appreciative anecdote about being led in prayer or praise through a guitar-driven popular worship song. But such would go a long way toward earning her credibility among the crowd at whom her critique is most appropriately aimed.

Finally, Dawn is temperamentally given to a touch of Hauerwasian harshness. So, when confronted with the common complaint, “I didn’t get much out of that worship service” (maybe the complaint that got her started writing about worship in the first place), Dawn suggests the proper response is this: “So what? It wasn’t you we were worshipping, was it?” Not exactly calculated to inspire a sympathetic hearing or further constructive conversation.

Inquiry-based learning is difficult to pull off in writing, and it’s fair to wonder whether the inductive mode is too much of a stretch for Dawn. But she more often than not asks good questions—both pointed and pastoral. And when she’s genuinely asking them, How Shall We Worship? is at its best.

Ron Rienstra is associate for Student Worship at Calvin College, where he directs the loft, a weekly worship service planned and led by students. He is the author of Ten Service Plans for Contemporary Worship (Faith Alive Resources).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I can’t be the only Christian reading Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels’ celebration of Gnostic theology and texts, and thinking, “What’s so heretical about this?” This best-selling book, and its accompanying train of reviews and author profiles, presents a familiar cast of characters. The Gnostics, developers of a variety of Christ-flavored spiritualities in the earliest centuries of the Christian era, are enthroned as noble seekers of enlightenment. The early Church, which rejected these theologies, is assigned its usual role of oppressor, afflicting believers with rigid Creeds. It’s the old story of oppressive bad guys and rebellious good guys, and Americans never tire of it.

But a look at the supposedly scandalous material comes up short. The most-cited Gnostic text, the Gospel of Thomas, mixes familiar sayings of Jesus with others of more mystical bent. These are sometimes cryptic but hardly outrageous. They’re not far different from Christian poetry and mysticism through the ages. Where’s the problem?

Well, not here. Early Christians rejected Gnosticism, all right. But what Pagels presents is not the part they rejected. What they rejected, Pagels does not present.

Let’s look at the first part of that statement. Pagels in fact does Christianity a service by calling us afresh to the truth that God is within and permeates all creation. Every person can awaken to this and experience God directly.

This truth gets emphasized or neglected according to the pressures of the surrounding culture. For a long time, Christianity had to cope with Enlightenment rationalism, which held suspect all things supernatural. Followers of many religious traditions have benefited from recent years’ new openness. But even in hostile environments, direct encounter with the divine can’t be fully suppressed, because it is true. It keeps bursting out, in the form of Christian mysticism or as charismatic and evangelical movements. When a preacher says you can have a “personal relationship with Jesus” or have “Jesus in your heart,” that’s what he’s talking about. It’s a direct, personal, and probably electrifying encounter with the interior presence of God.

You don’t have to be a full-time contemplative to experience this; lightning can strike anywhere, any time. When it first hit me, I was a non-Christian tourist strolling around an Irish church. Teens praying after a Christian rock concert, a Hispanic Catholic woman on silent retreat, a Greek Orthodox man with an icon by his computer—anyone can experience this dynamic presence of God, because God is within everything he creates. There’s no way to force this experience, but it never hurts to be open, to ask. So “The Kingdom of God is within you” is hardly a heretical statement. Today’s Neo-Gnostics would find a crowd around them, from 17th-century Spanish nuns to 21st-century American Pentecostals, saying, “That sounds like what I’m talking about.”

Now let’s take a look at the second half of the previous statement. “That sounds like what I’m talking about” is a qualified endorsem*nt—a gesture of openness till we hear more. There is such a thing as self-deception, and confusion can bloom in unfamiliar spiritual realms. Though such experiences are indisputably beyond words, after we have them we try to talk about them. We want to share them with others, and we want to check whether we simply flipped out. Say that it’s like going to Paris. Everyone takes a photo of the Eiffel Tower. When we get home, we compare them; some snapshots are fuzzy and some from funny angles, but we can recognize them as depicting the same thing. The snaps don’t capture the reality; nothing can; but they’re ok as records.

The Creeds are photos everyone agreed on. They are minimal and crisply focused, not fancied-up. They are not a substitute for personal experience, but a useful guide for comparison, for discernment. If someone’s snap shows King Kong climbing up the Tower, we can say, “Hey, you’re off base there. Something’s messing with your head.” If Kong is wearing a lei and a paper party hat we might say, “Aw, now you’re just making stuff up.”

That’s what early Christians said to the Gnostics. The problem wasn’t the insistence that we can directly experience God. It was that the Gnostics’ schemes of how to do this were so wacky. Preposterous stories about creation, angels, demons, and spiritual hierarchies multiplied like mushrooms. (Even some Christians, like Origen and Clement of Alexandria, dabbled in these fields.) The version attributed to Valentinus, the best-known Gnostic, is typical. Valentinus supposedly taught a hierarchy of spiritual beings called “aeons.” One of the lowest aeons, Sophia, fell and gave birth to the Demiurge, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. This evil Demiurge created the visible world, which was a bad thing, because now we pure spirits are all tangled up in fleshy bodies. Christ was an aeon who took possession of the body of the human Jesus, and came to free us from the prison of materiality.

“Us,” by the way, didn’t mean everybody. Not all people have a divine spark within, just intellectuals; “gnosis,” by definition, concerns what you know. Some few who are able to grasp these insights could be initiated into deeper mysteries. Ordinary Christians, who lacked sufficient brainpower, could only attain the Demiurge’s middle realm. Everyone else was doomed. Under Gnosticism, there was no hope of salvation for most of the human race.

Now you can begin to see what the early Christians found heretical. Gnosticism rejected the body and saw it as a prison for the soul; Christianity insisted that God infuses all creation and that even the human body can be a vessel of holiness, a “temple of the Holy Spirit.” Gnosticism rejected the Hebrew Scriptures and portrayed the God of the Jews as an evil spirit; Christianity looked on Judaism as a mother. Gnosticism was élitist; Christianity was egalitarian, preferring “neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.” Finally, Gnosticism was just too complicated. Christianity maintained the simple invitation of the One who said, “Let the little children come unto me.” Full-blown science-fiction Gnosticism died under its own weight.

Pagels does not endorse this aspect of Gnosticism. But the Gnostics would not endorse her version either. They did not think of these elaborate schemes as mythopoeic (which is how Neo-Gnostics describe them), but as factual. Your salvation depended on getting it right, and Gnostics argued with each other much as theologians do today. Some claimed that the body was so evil you had to give up sex; others said the body was so illusory that it didn’t matter what you did with it. A well-meaning postmodernist who murmured “You’re both right” would be reviled for not grasping what’s at stake.

Neo-Gnostics share our culture’s penchant for pick-and-choose religion, and in this case that’s better than inhaling the original whole. But every pick-and-choose religion has this limitation: the follower can never grow any larger than his own preconceptions. He has established himself a priori as the ultimate authority, and his thoughts will never be larger than his hat size. Two heads, or a billion, are better than one. This is the reason for community. We might think there are two ways of determining truth, either top-down authority, or every-man-for-himself. But there is an alternative: consensus. We see it from the start of Christian History, in the discussions of Acts 15; we see it in St. Vincent of Lerins’ handy rule that we trust “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” A modest core of creeds and Scriptures tells us all we require, while a generous circle of liturgies, devotional writings, and commentaries casts additional light.

“Light” is the key word for the Neo-Gnostics. As an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I feel strong empathy with their yearning for this encounter. But I’m puzzled that they still seem to be expecting that this experience will be mainly intellectual. “Light” for them means insight. Christians would say to them, as we did to the original Gnostics, that there is something better. It will permeate your whole self, not just your mind; it embraces all of creation, celebrates good food and marital communion, and cares enough about this material world to build hospitals and work to free slaves. The thing you are seeking is not an idea but a Person, a Person who is mysteriously your Creator, and thus already present, waiting, at your deepest levels.

The Neo-Gnostic writings seem to me evocative but theoretical, a little distant, like they don’t quite know yet what they are looking for. I will be glad to see how these light-seekers evolve. Where there is an open heart there is always good hope, because as Jesus promised, “He who seeks, finds.”

Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author most recently of The Open Door: Entering the Sanctuary of Icons and Prayer (Paraclete). She is a columnist for Christian Reader and reviews movies regularly for Our Sunday Visitor. This article first appeared on beliefnet.com. Used with permission.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Occasionally, when taking a train to or from Chicago, I’ll notice through the buzz of commuters a recorded message. Among other things, the disembodied voice instructs me that “emergency exits are to be used in case of power loss.” I have heard this message dozens of times, and yet every time—every time—the voice penetrates my consciousness, I somehow hear, “emergency exits are to be used in case of Hauerwas.” And I twitch for a moment before realizing what the voice really said.

This quirk of mine suggests that I’ve got some faulty wiring—and, yes, I’ve spent too much of my life in academic precincts—but it also tells a story about the workings of reputation. For Stanley Hauerwas is known, especially to people who haven’t read a word he’s written, as a provocateur, a prankster with a penchant for the outrageous—the sort of person who might well send the weak of heart and delicate of sensibility scrambling for an emergency exit. Has Hauerwas done anything to earn such a reputation? Certainly. (“Justice is a bad idea for Christians,” he says in one essay; Bill Clinton “is incapable of lying,” he declares in another. This list could be extended, and colorful supplementary anecdotes provided.) Is the reputation fair to Hauerwas? No. But it is the fate of a paradoxical theologian to be misunderstood.

Hauerwas’ reliance on paradox has attracted much attention—it had a lot to do with Time magazine calling him “America’s best theologian”—but it has also led some to question his intellectual seriousness. Such skepticism is simply mistaken, as it was when it was directed, decades ago, at G. K. Chesterton. Yes, “paradox,” like “mystery,” is a term too easily invoked, often used to cover a reluctance to think hard thoughts; but true paradox is a powerful mode of thinking, a way of calling attention to the inadequacies of our conventional categories and suggesting alternatives to them. (See Hugh Kenner’s Paradox in Chesterton—now, alas, long out of print—for a compelling survey of this territory.)

Still, however wrong-headed such accusations of frivolity may be, it’s hard to imagine that Hauerwas hasn’t noticed them. And in his account of natural theology, With the Grain of the Universe, he seems to abandon his habitual rhetorical mode. The book is far more expository than we are accustomed to seeing from him, and more heavily documented; the argument is even a bit dry at times, something I never thought I’d say about anything by Hauerwas. Yet these appearances are at least somewhat deceptive. In the preface, Hauerwas warns his readers not to expect this to be “the ‘big book’ that many of my friends and critics have suggested I should write,” and adds: “I do not think theologians, particularly in our day, can or should write ‘big books’ that ‘pull it all together.’ “

So if With the Grain of the Universe is not that kind of book, and not a typical Hauerwas performance either, what is it? I suggest that it is a disassembled paradox; the magic box of Hauerwasian style is here broken open, its parts laid out before us as in an exploded diagram. The effect is simultaneously impressive—one sees more clearly than ever how much learning is needed to produce Hauerwas’ insights—and a bit disenchanting: I’m not sure I want to know how the magician does it. But no one reading this book can say that Hauerwas hasn’t done his homework.

There is, very clearly, a paradox at the heart of this book, and it is the claim that Karl Barth is the greatest modern exponent of natural theology. This is an evidently strange claim, because if there’s anything that people know (or think they know) about Barth it is that he repudiated natural theology—that is, the project of articulating and defending at least some Christian beliefs on the basis of what can be known from “nature,” or general revelation. (Arguments for intelligent design, for example, are a form of natural theology.) The tradition originates, for Christians, in St. Paul’s claim that some of the “invisible attributes” of God can be discerned in the things he has made (Rom. 1:20); but theologians have never agreed on just how much of what Christians believe can be inferred from an investigation of the Creation itself without the aid of Scripture. Karl Brunner, in his 1934 book Nature and Grace, argued that, because humans are made in the image of God, there is a substantial “point of contact” between the human and divine that can be readily understood and developed. The blunt force of Barth’s rejoinder to Brunner is captured in its title: Nein! Little could anger Barth more than a claim that we humans can in any way move towards God (either morally or epistemologically) by our own power. How could such a thinker be an ideal representative of natural theology?

There’s something else curious about this claim: Hauerwas makes it in the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland (of which this book constitutes the final version)—and, as he notes, Lord Adam Gifford established his lectures, more than a century ago, with the goal of “Promoting, Advancing, Teaching, and Diffusing the Study of Natural Theology.” But Hauerwas is well aware of the problem of “keeping faith with Adam Gifford,” and one could do worse than describe the book as an attempt to ask just what such faith-keeping would have to be. Hauerwas discusses four previous Gifford lecturers at some length in this book: one (William James) who was thoroughly at ease with the Giffordian understanding of natural theology; a second (Reinhold Niebuhr) who might seem to be more narrowly Christian but, argues Hauerwas, is scarcely less comfortable than James; and two others (Alasdair MacIntyre and Barth himself—whose idea was it to invite him?) who have serious, though quite different, reservations about the whole idea. MacIntyre’s doubts became the very subject of his talks, later published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, and Hauerwas is following MacIntyre in making his book self-reflexive: Gifford Lectures about the Gifford Lectures.

Hauerwas’ conclusion is that there’s nothing wrong with natural theology, as long we define it in a Barthian way rather than in Lord Gifford’s or William James’ way—and as long as we don’t try to dress up a highly generalized theism in Christian clothing, as Hauerwas believes Niebuhr did. “Do we have anything more in Niebuhr than a complex humanism disguised in the language of the Christian faith?” he asks, and his answer is, “Probably not.” The warning signs come early, Hauerwas believes: “The first hint in Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures that his theology is in fact anthropology is that he does not begin The Nature and Destiny of Man with an account of our sinfulness but with the generalized anthropological observation that ‘man has always been his own most vexing problem.’ ” And later he quotes approvingly Robert Song’s claim that, while Niebuhr uses trinitarian language, the God he describes is functionally unitarian—a rather vague deity, not truly and intrinsically Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I am a bit confused by Hauerwas’ argument here. The existentialist language of “anxiety” was cutting-edge at the time that Niebuhr gave his lectures (1939), and indeed the great popularity of the book was largely a function of Niebuhr’s ability to present the Christian faith as a set of answers to the most pressing questions of the day. Was it really impermissible, from a seriously Christian point of view, for him to start with those questions? Or could that strategy have been justified if Niebuhr had pushed through his existentialist lingo to a fully orthodox theological anthropology and doctrine of God? In any case, if Hauerwas is right to argue that Niebuhr never truly went beyond a kind of disguised humanism (and I think he is), then a major problem with natural theology is illuminated: one can begin with what unbelievers already know, already believe, but how does one get from that realm to the realm of revealed biblical truth?

Ultimately, I believe, Hauerwas is saying that that danger is too great, and that therefore natural theology should never be first theology. Barth discovered early in his career that the great error of 19th-century Protestant theology was its decision to think that human “religious experience” was an appropriate first principle of Christian theology. Indeed, some of the strongest opponents of Christianity—notably Feuerbach and Nietzsche—realized that a theologian who began with “religious experience” had already given up the game; Barth learned from them not to make that mistake, and to insist instead on the priority of God’s revelation, no matter how dissonantly it might ring in the secular ear. Hauerwas the provocateur recognizes a kindred spirit: “one almost begins to think that the more absurd the doctrine from the perspective of modernity, the more Barth enjoyed showing why and how it must stand at the beginning of theology.”

But in that case what becomes of natural theology? Hauerwas contends that in the latter part of his career Barth came to recognize that his Nein to Brunner had been, if not wrong, at least inadequate; he further contends that Barth learned this from studying Thomas Aquinas, whose commitment to the role of analogy in theology—to the recognition that what we say about God bears an analogical relationship to what we say about human beings—Barth came, at least in part, to share. For Aquinas the analogical principle does much to make natural theology possible—but it is a principle grounded in the nature of God as revealed in Scripture, and this is what makes Aquinas’ view acceptable to Barth. In the end, we are called upon to be the witnesses of Jesus Christ to the world, and however we choose to bear that witness, we must remember this (Hauerwas is summarizing Barth but it is his view too):

The Christian … cannot address the non-Christian on the basis of a general or human responsibility interpreted as the responsibility to conscience or to supposed or real orders and forces of the cosmos. Rather, every person is to be addressed as one who exists and stands in the light of Jesus Christ.

A last word about this powerful and important book: it is telling that Hauerwas chose to have it published, not by a university press or a trade house (as have been the choices of most Gifford lecturers of the past), but by a Christian publishing company, Brazos Press. It matters that this most “academic” of Hauerwas’ books comes to us with the imprint of a company dedicated—like Stanley Hauerwas’ career—to the life and health of Christ’s Church.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Westview).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As his authorship drew to its close, shortly before his sanity gave out, Nietzsche concluded that Christianity was “the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity,” and “the one immortal blemish of mankind.” Because these sentiments were not untypical of him; because they were couched in literature of such distinctive quality; because his ideas have had such an enormous impact; because one can report them to people in any sphere of life who have neither read nor even heard of Nietzsche and find them instantly recognized as a summary of attitudes they encounter, embrace, or fear, their author has been widely regarded as the foremost anti-Christian writer Europe has produced. In the early days of a new millennium, we may recall that, with a joyful sobriety too disciplined to cross the border into sheer abandoned intoxication, this self-styled antichrist wrote in his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, of the bliss of pressing one’s hand “upon millennia as upon wax” and writing “upon the will of millennia as upon metal.”

What if we need to correct our account of Nietzsche? What if the literature has avoided or missed important and positive things he has to say about religion, even about Christianity? What if Nietzsche found a friend in Jesus? Alistair Kee, of the University of Edinburgh, strikes out in the direction of answering these questions in his provocative book, Nietzsche Against the Crucified.

Seven chapters conduct us quickly through some of the major Nietzschean themes. God is dead and, with God, Truth. Morality is gone and aesthetics is applied physiology. Christianity offers the ultimate in decadent resistance to a proper will-to-power. Then comes a hinge chapter, dealing with Nietzsche’s thought on eternal recurrence. Here, Kee’s thesis that Nietzsche is a fundamentally religious thinker, comes into its own, as he interprets this notoriously controverted teaching as a sign that the numinous mantle of mystical religious experience had settled on his subject.

The way is opened for some reassessments. Nietzsche was a man of faith, a philosophical faith akin to religious faith. He even passes the christological test. For Nietzsche not only called Jesus the noblest human being—he meant it. He not only said that, from the earliest times, Jesus’ followers had corrupted his message—he meant that, too, but, more significant still, he thought it important actually to say it. Why bother to do so unless you want to make a point of rehabilitating Jesus?

Nor does Nietzsche embrace a free and independent human Jesus in the context of sheer godlessness. There is a concept of deity worth entertaining, the holy storm-God Jehovah, wreathed not in the holiness of moral goodness or of aesthetic beauty, but in a dreadful uncanniness. Believe in him or not, at least he would be a worthwhile character, president of an order that is neither benign nor moral, an order adequately represented in religion only by the God beyond good and evil that Nietzsche discerns in parts of the Old Testament. Cut it as you will, you will therefore find a religious thinker, if you take Nietzsche at his word. Indeed, Nietzsche is re-opening the question of religion for us—and on terms that are counter to the postmodernism foisted on him by familiar contemporary description. The bottom line is that Nietzsche experienced some kind of revelation that led him to perceive the natural order as religiously colored at its very roots. His is a knowing form of natural, pagan religion.

My account is cryptic, but it just summarizes where the author more or less leaves his readers, with swirling waters surrounding Nietzsche’s own position. Kee bequeaths to us the task of ordering our religious life and constructing our religious thought with the aid of Nietzsche’s insights. This book is an example of those projects that seek both to separate the inspiration of Jesus from what later Christianity has made of him and to requisition the thoughts of a putative opponent of religious faith for the service of religion.

We can see the point of trying to do this with Nietzsche. Surely few honest Christians can read the psychological observations of Nietzsche, to give one example, without acknowledging that he penetrates rather deep into human realities, including religious ones. When, in his earlier years, he adhered to Schopenhauer and to Wagner in a campaign to vitalize German culture, there is plenty there to stir the conscientious Christian to some enthusiasm. When, in his later years, he undertook the demolition of Christian morality, there is plenty there to cause the conscientious, by now uneasy, Christian observer to suspect that there is something we need to learn. If there are unexpected and unexplored religious possibilities here, we should be glad to hear of them.

But has Alistair Kee persuaded us? The book is well-written, a pleasure to read, more interested in getting to the inside of his subject’s thought than parading learning. There are other works around which emphasize Nietzsche as a religious thinker, but usually written for fellow-members of the guild of Nietzsche scholars. This one certainly contains resources to make us think again, particularly by returning to the work of Karl Jaspers, whose interpretation of Nietzsche has so influenced the author. Nevertheless, the argument does not persuade.

The more thorough scholars will complain that you need to tackle the work of Michael Allen Gillespie if you want to be persuasive on nihilism in connection with the noble deity; that you need to know the Greeks as well as did Nietzsche and those like Patrick Moroney who have produced monographs delving into the classical sources, before taking Nietzsche at his word on the originality of his doctrine of eternal recurrence. They might worry that Kee implicitly dates the waning of Schopenhauer’s influence too early, and explicitly dates the break with Wagner too late. However, as one who does not belong to their number, I pass over such things.

Not that we can rise above the former years and ignore the scholarly habits of two millennia. For less thorough scholars, there is yet plenty to make them worry about careless treatment of Nietzsche’s texts. 1886 is given as the publication date of Human, All Too Human, but what happened in that year was that Nietzsche turned it into the first of a two-volume work and wrote a new preface. Kee tells us that Nietzsche asked in his earliest book the question: “What kind of figure does ethics cut once we decide to view it in biological perspective?” Not so: this was a question added to a new preface to the book, 14 years later. Check the first essay in The Genealogy of Morals, where we are told that we shall find the saying that “the true Redeemer will come,” and you do not find it; actually, the saying comes at the end of the second essay in that work. Nietzsche supposedly styles himself as this “defiant prodigal,” the phrase cited as found in Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s translation of The Will to Power. But what Nietzsche actually says here is that there is an “imperiled kind of man” who is “stronger, more evil, covetous, defiant, prodigal.” Kee has excised a comma and converted an adjective into a noun in his zeal to convert a prodigal Nietzsche into a son who, however conventionally irreligious, still really cares about religion.

We draw attention to these things not in the cause of merry pedantry, but because the author uses the texts to make a case. And its main substance is seriously affected by careless handling. But we can formulate the main point of our present difficulty thus: Kee does not attend to Dostoevsky. And this makes a lot of difference.

Standard accounts of Nietzsche’s descent into insanity record his collapse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Turin, sobbing as he embraced a poor working horse being flogged. Kee reminds us of a scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment which features the public beating of a horse by a drunken man, followed by a little boy going in anguish to embrace and then kiss the blood-stained head of the horse. He then notes that Dostoevsky’s works greatly impressed Nietzsche. But nowhere do we need to bear this in mind more than in the area of Nietzsche’s christology. In The Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche refers to Dostoevsky as “the only psychologist … from whom I had anything to learn,” a “profound human being, who was ten times justified in despising the superficial Germans.” The context is a discussion of the criminal, and Nietzsche indeed has Crime and Punishment in mind here.

The Twilight of the Idols was produced in the last year of its author’s sane life, 1888, quickly followed by The Antichrist, which latter work is understandably Kee’s special quarry for finding out Nietzsche’s thoughts on Jesus. This is where things begin to go wrong with his case that Nietzsche admired Jesus.

In The Antichrist, Dostoevsky comes up again, this time specifically in the discussion of Jesus. Nietzsche is investigating what he describes as “the psychological type of the redeemer” and lambasts the Frenchman, Ernst Renan, for a contribution to the discussion of the historical Jesus that depicts his subject as genius and as hero. This, Nietzsche fulminates, is as wide of the mark as can be. Renan is a failure as a psychologist, and one wishes that a Dostoevsky had been on hand to offer psychological observations on Jesus.

Now Dostoevsky furnishes Nietzsche with a categorical alternative to the genius and the hero in order to understand Jesus. The relevant category is that of “the idiot.” This is a word that may come as a shock to some of us, but both Dostoevsky in his novel of that title, and Nietzsche, ascribe a different content to it from the one that immediately springs to the mind of most English readers. At one stage, it was dangerous to assume that Nietzsche took his actual conception from Dostoevsky, and we must still be careful in describing what use he may have made of him. But the extent of Nietzsche’s reading of Dostoevsky has become clearer over the years, and we can now proceed with a little more confidence.1

To characterize things in an inexcusably bald and flat-footed way, it is surely Dostoevsky’s great achievement in this novel to portray with such remarkable coherence the figure of the idiot, Prince Myshkin, who is transparently as he appears, self-consistent, morally flawless on one plausible reckoning of character. The idiot has no pride of the common kind, no guile of any familiar kind, no desire to hurt. With unpretentious, even undeclared, passion, he apparently wishes to see and to bring out the best in people, and if any should harbor a contrary ambition, it can only bring him pain and a measure of bewilderment. If the reader feels contempt for the idiot—and only an idiot or a saint will be free of an occasional impulse towards an exasperation which borders on contempt—the question of why that is so is uncomfortably searching. It is not obvious how idiocy is linked with intelligence; any connection or lack thereof is probably for the reader to ponder, if so desired. The Prince has a kind of purity, a kind of innocence of character. The Welsh word gwirion usually means “foolish” but can also mean “innocent.” Keeping those two meanings in mind helps in the reading of Dostoevsky’s novel.

What about the idiocy of Nietzsche’s Jesus? The initial cluster of ideas offered as Nietzsche explores this theme include “a condition of morbid susceptibility of the sense of touch which makes it shrink back in horror from every contact, every grasping of a firm object”; “instinctive hatred of reality: consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and irritation which no longer wants to be ‘touched’ at all because it feels every contact too deeply. Instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all enmity, all feeling for limitation and distancing.” Nietzsche adds that “the fear of pain, even of the infinitely small in pain—cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love.” Jesus “demonstrated how one ought to live” in his behavior “before the judges, before the guards, before the accusers and every kind of calumny and mockery. … He does not resist, he does not defend his rights. … He entreats, he suffers, he loves with those, in those who are doing evil to him.”

One has to be very careful with Nietzsche here. Strictly, perhaps, we should say that he bids us approach the world in which Jesus lived and the question of the psychology of the redeemer by reference to the concept of the idiot; it is safer to put it like this than to say that there is a straightforward identification of the characteristics of Jesus and idiot. But Nietzsche’s description of Jesus’ pacific, nonresisting, and suffering conduct needs to be linked very closely to Dostoevsky’s idea of the idiot in any attempt to understand Nietzsche on Jesus. Although one might not be able to get Dostoevsky’s idiot and Nietzsche’s Jesus to fit each other precisely, and the differences may be significant, the reader of The Idiot will recognize some striking kinship with the portrayal of Jesus in Nietzsche’s Antichrist.

Kee leaves all this out. Practically the only remark he makes about Jesus as “idiot” is to say that Nietzsche is probably guided by etymology in this designation: “In classical Greek idios meant ‘private’ as opposed to ‘public.’ Jesus would therefore appeal to him as a man who goes his own way, by his actions and demeanour exposing and thereby judging unworthy judges.” Kee attains this conclusion by inadmissible selection of data. Comments on Jesus from Human, All Too Human to The Gay Science are ignored. So is a crucial comment made in Beyond Good and Evil about Jesus’ knowledge of love.2

It would doubtless be wise to eschew a dogmatic interpretation of Nietzsche’s thinking about Jesus; to this extent, a criticism of Kee must be guarded. But the persistent endeavor to couch Nietzsche’s relation to Jesus in terms of maximal affinity ignores a crucial strand in the literature. For Nietzsche, there is pathos in Jesus, whatever else is there too. Any attempt at a positive reclamation from his authorship of some of the things of God falters if we don’t get that.

Indeed, let him who gets all Nietzsche and all the Nietzschean nuances right cast the first review. And certainly we must beware of injustice toward the author of this study, as though he were aiming to write something more comprehensive than he is. It must be acknowledged that certain aspects of the whole business are deucedly difficult to be sure about anyway, among them the cardinal question of Nietzsche and the numinous, the whole matter of his religious experience. Whether or not it matters whether or not we call Nietzsche a religious thinker, I am not sure. But, in any case, what are we homines religiosi to make of him?

In his remarkable will and testament, Ecce hom*o, Nietzsche talked of himself in what turned out to be his last sane days as “uninterruptedly creating nothing but things of the first rank which no man will be able to do again or has done before, bearing a responsibility for all the coming millennia.” He who unmasks Christian morality, which is what Nietzsche is finally up to, “breaks the history of mankind into two parts.” And so, he says:

I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful—of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man; I am dynamite.

We can make one of two mistakes with this kind of talk. We can get intensely excited, and reckon, indeed, that Nietzsche is a world-historical phenomenon of practically unbounded significance. Or we can dismiss it all as arrant tripe, the extreme case of what eventually befalls an egomaniacal victim of tertiary syphilis. On the first reaction: it will ever be the tendency of intellectuals to overestimate the import of one of their own. On the second: the sober student of current days and of Nietzsche will scarcely fail to identify his influence as something of great importance.

There may be consolations for religion in Nietzsche’s works, and Kee is right to keep the relevant discussions going. Perhaps the best effect of Nietzsche’s authorship is to shake and to challenge us into resolution. The resolution must be to give an account of the hope that is in us in the light of his writings. We know that the man on the cross did not write, but that he did act, his unphilosophical solitude placed in the service of scum in order to transfuse us with the blood of kings. He will reign when Nietzsche’s words have perished. But Nietzsche’s words have not perished yet, and while it is a case of word against word, we obey the word of Jesus aright when we attend aright to the words of others like Nietzsche, who are human, all too human.

Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of Revelation and Reconciliation: A Window on Modernity (Cambridge Univ. Press).

1. A useful study has recently been published by P.Travis Kroeker and Bruce K.Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (Westview Press, 2001). While I beg to differ a little from these authors on relevant points of emphasis, see the remarks on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in the concluding chapter on “Christ in the ‘Grand Inquisitor.’ “

2. “It is possible that within the holy disguise and fable of Jesus’ life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love.” (“What Is Noble?”, section 269).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

While writing this review, I am proctoring the final exam for my course on the history of science and religion. And as I look out over my students, their brows furrowed in thought, the value of Species of Origins by Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa becomes apparent.

I teach at the University of Georgia, the flagship school in the state’s higher-education system. My class is mostly composed of honors students reared in the American South. Many of them are deeply religious—about half claim to attend Protestant church or fellowship meetings regularly. I can count on a few of these to jump to the defense of Genesis during class discussion. The University of Georgia is a state school, however, and many of my students are nonreligious or even anti-religious. Some of them roll their eyes in response to the biblical apologetics of their evangelical Protestant classmates.

In short, my class reflects the mix of beliefs that characterize the New South, which remains the most religious region of the country but is no longer monolithically so. All manner of belief and disbelief cohabits here. After all, my students say, this is Georgia, not Alabama! Little do they know that Alabama students would say something similar, perhaps about Arkansas. Species of Origins speaks to such an audience, whether at a state university in the Deep South or an evangelical Protestant college in the Northeast (where the authors teach).

In recommending this book for my students, I do not recommend it for everyone. Indeed, the authors had a particular audience in mind when they wrote this book: their own students. They kept their eyes fixed on this audience throughout, and succeeded in authoring a serviceable introductory text on a profoundly complex subject. People of various ages and backgrounds could benefit from being their students. This book serves as the next best thing for those of us not enrolled in their courses.

It is Giberson and Yerxa’s thesis that multiple theories of origins compete for the American mind at the dawn of the new millennium. Some of us believe in young-earth creationism; others in some sort of theistic evolution or progressive creationism (slippery terms with different meanings to different people); and still others in naturalistic evolutionism.

Leading a discussion-based course in science and religion has taught me at least one lesson. Regardless of their stance on the issue, Americans (including honors students at a leading Southern state university) typically possess little detailed knowledge about their own conception of origins—and know virtually nothing (except perhaps murky negative stereotypes) about any competing theories. In the words of Sam Cooke’s song from the Sixties, they “don’t know much about history; don’t know much biology; don’t know much about a science book.” This goes for self-professed Darwinists as well as creationists. Most could not pass a snap quiz on the fundamentals of their science. (Theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists probably would do the worst.) With this book, the authors seek to redress this situation without proselytizing for any particular viewpoint (though their inclinations are clear).

Giberson and Yerxa open with the creation story of modern science. In the beginning the Big Bang spawned wholly naturalistic processes that ultimately

generated humans, and Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson said it was good—or something along those lines. “Most of the story is quite well understood and is supported by a wealth of scientific data. Even the more speculative parts are not without empirical support,” they stress. “And yet, when pollsters ask Americans if they believe the scientific creation story, they answer, in overwhelming numbers, with a resounding ‘NO!’ How can this be?”

Although they betray their skepticism about the sufficiency of naturalistic processes to account fully for organic development, Giberson and Yerxa clearly favor the scientific story’s basic chronology. They emphasize that virtually all scientists in every discipline agree on about ten billion years for the universe (some would extend that span by several billion years), five billion for the earth, a half billion for multi-celled organisms, and about one hundred million years for hom*o sapiens. Against this timetable, they pit the tenets of Henry M. Morris and the scientific creationists associated with his Institute for Creation Research.

For simplicity, Giberson and Yerxa focus on Morris as the author of the modern fundamentalist creation story, though Morris would surely defer to Moses in that respect. In a series of three hardhitting chapters, the authors establish Morris’ religious commitment to a literal six-day creation within a strict biblical time frame; lay out the scientific dimensions of Morris’ creationism as largely a sustained critique of evolutionary naturalism; and detail the narrow, conspiracy-theory mentality that underlies Morris’ vilification of evolutionism as the diabolical source of virtually all social ills.

It’s not a pretty picture. But Giberson and Yerxa are just as hard on the alternative offered by such naturalistic scientists as Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking. Returning to the creation story of modern science, Giberson and Yerxa now call its proponents the “Council of Despair” for their starkly reductionist picture of life. “We are but selfish genes in a purposeless world, matter become conscious, fighting a powerful delusion that we are here for a purpose,” the authors state in summary of this view. No wonder Americans reject it. “Is there a middle ground?” the authors ask.

In the final third of the book, Giberson and Yerxa turn to the so-called “muddle in the middle,” leading into a detailed examination of the intelligent-design paradigm. Gaps in the biblical narrative, age-long days of divine creation, and various divinely guided forms of evolution compete for attention here. After offering quick glimpses of these various middle-ground concepts, the authors focus on the modern intelligent design movement, which they trace back to the mid-1980s and present as blossoming in the 1990s with the work of Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski.

Giberson and Yerxa see the intelligent design movement as having “attracted so much attention that it has succeeded in dominating the origins debate” since the early 1990s; indeed, they suggest, it is “setting the agenda for much of the debate.” This may be true at Christian colleges, but not in general. Certainly Giberson and Yerxa can cite sympathetic articles about intelligent design in The Wall Street Journal, First Things, Christianity Today, and the like, but such publications are among the movement’s natural allies.

After seeming to fall under the influence of Johnson’s prose, Giberson and Yerxa revert to their customary critical mode. They note that intelligent design has made virtually no inroads into secular science. Although “there is a growing body of serious literature assessing intelligent design,” they conclude, “most of this literature is quite critical, and the rest is produced by identifiable design theorists.” And if they looked at America’s conservative Protestant subculture, they would see that while Johnson’s attacks on evolutionary naturalism are welcome as far as they go, Ken Hamm’s Morris-inspired Answers in Genesis (“a ministry begun in 1994 to proclaim the authority of the Bible from the very first verse,” via books, cassette tapes, radio broadcasts, and other media) continues to gain more adherents at the grass roots.

Species of Origins provides Christian students with a portal into the origins debate that swirls about them in college and (perhaps) church discussion groups. Issues are presented from a perspective that evangelical Protestants can appreciate. By not taking a stand in the end, the book leaves students free to adopt their own reconciliation of science with religion in the light of greater understanding of the alternatives. As I grade their exams, I see that most of my students have done just that. Giberson and Yerxa would surely see that as their goal as teachers.

Edward J. Larson is Russell Professor of History and Talmadge Professor of Law at the University of Georgia. He is the author most recently of Evolution’s Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands (Basic Books).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I was giving a talk at a Catholic church just outside Chicago when one member of the audience stood up, apologizing because she had to leave. She explained that she was part of the “Quad Squad,” a team assigned to help with round-the-clock care for quadruplets born a few weeks earlier to a couple who were members of the church community. Such voluntary caregiving—disproportionately provided by women—is invaluable, yet it commands little respect, argues Emily Abel in Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940. Indeed, Abel writes, in this culture at this time we routinely “disparage the people who sustain life and nurture the weak.” We prefer to maintain our illusion of independence in all things. No one wants to be dependent. In fact, it has even become the name of a syndrome—codependence—and is to be avoided at all costs. How strange that a state we all share—that of dependence on others—becomes a condition we first deny exists and then re-cast as pathological.

But the reality won’t go away. Whether the focus is on preschool-age children or aging parents, practical questions of caregiving are central to many American households. And increasingly, scholars in many fields—moral theory, psychology, political philosophy, and more—are turning to the subject of care.

This current attention to care has many sources, but the most significant of these is feminist thought, in particular the evolving feminist debate over motherhood as the archetype of caregiving. Motherhood took a beating in 1970s feminist political tracts and treatises, which tended to see caregiving as a kind of servitude imposed on women by a patriarchal society. But the visceral antipathy toward mothering expressed by radical feminists helped to spur a reaction in the 1980s, when a few brave souls opined that perhaps the family was not the source of all political evil. Today exploration of mothering is widespread among feminist writers and scholars who are rethinking the world of women’s work, seeing in the historic connection of women to caregiving a source of strength, a form of knowledge, and a claim to authority.

The anti-maternal camp didn’t give up without a fight. Some spoke darkly of creeping “pro-natalism” in the women’s movement. But the debate had shifted in ways both salutary and problematic. A problematic feature was an unfortunate tendency to counterpose “justice” (as an abstract “male” concept with pretensions to universality and even-handedness) to “care” (associated with keen attunement to the particular case and, of course, with women’s work). Why it seemed a good idea to pit justice against care remains a mystery to me. Surely an interesting struggle from the beginning of Western philosophy to the present moment has been to bring justice and care, the many and the one, into a single frame. Surely egalitarianism need not mean hom*ogenization and justice isn’t reducible to a “male model” of reason, even-handedness, and impartiality. (Why is that a male model anyway?)

Responsible critics, by contrast to those who claimed that some weird “identification with patriarchy” explained the reevaluation of women’s work, argued that proponents of a care ethic romanticized female feeling above ostensibly male abstract thought, reproducing the hoary dichotomies that feminism was supposed to be deconstructing in the first place. Care theorists replied by insisting that women’s concentration on relationships and particular cases, on the attentive work of love, was a psychological achievement and an epistemological stance, not something hard-wired into nature. Men could get in on the act, too. If they did they became “mothers” as well. “Fathers” were still left out on the doorstep cooling their heels in many of these discussions, and attempts to bracket sticky questions of what male and female embodiment might have to do with psychologies and epistemologies couldn’t be held at bay indefinitely. Still, it was a relief not to have mothers treated as a bereft, ground-down “sex-class” doomed to reproduce the system that had victimized them.

Important political questions about care began to be asked. For example, in Joan Tronto’s 1993 book, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, care as a political concept was defined as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.” Antecedents to a perspective that had become a female preserve in current debates could be found, so she argued, in male Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who emphasized sentiment and saw the household as an antidote to the corruption and vanity of the public world. Many concepts of justice have been infused with imperatives associated with a care perspective and, for that reason, look very little like the “abstract” vision of justice feminist care ethics descried.

No one wants to be dependent. In fact, it has even become the name of a syndrome—codependence—and is to be avoided at all costs.

Thinking about care politically, rather than as a primarily psychological dynamic, meant you had to consider the nature of social responsibility. Who was responsible to whom and for what? What role should the government play in “nurturance”? Is government responsible for day-care in the same way that it is responsible for safety in the streets? Too frequently the slogan, now grown stale through excess of repetition, that “it takes a village to raise a child,” seemed to mean that it took the vast panoply of various social service agencies and government bureaucracies to raise a child. In the name of care, it seemed, caregiving could became remote and formulaic. Moreover, “caretaking” could surely be as paternalistic (or maternalistic) as systems of “male dominance” feminists aimed to replace.

The theoretical debate stalled out at this point even as the solid work of social history has gone on. Rather than arguing the question of whether there is or is not a distinctive model of female moral reasoning linked historically to the task of care, social historians display concrete and various worlds of caregiving previously lost to historic awareness. Emily Abel’s contribution occupies the middle ground between a straight empirical account and a philosophical argument. A professor of Health Services and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Abel brings to the project her experience as a receiver of care (in her fight against cancer) as well as a giver of care who, together with her siblings, tended to her mother until she died.

Abel poses and reposes a caveat that runs as a leitmotif throughout her book. It goes like this: Care can “reignite family conflicts, impose financial stress, and encroach on both work and leisure.” But … caregiving can also be a “transformative experience, introducing us to new forms of human connectedness.” The awkward “connectedness” is Abel’s way of talking about situations in which human beings are compelled to recognize the essential sociality of the self and the intricacy of the webs that connect us one to another.

When you are young and healthy and an American, breathing the bracing air of individualistic freedom and being all that you can be, it isn’t so easy to recognize that you owe your identity to others who have cared for you, educated you, and sent you on your way. Abel understands that Americans need reminding that illness and disability are constant features of human life, although the “dominant culture extols the virtues of independence, seeks distance from such basic life experiences as birth, illness, and death, and trivializes most unpaid work done by women in the home.” It was the trivialization of that work that animated several generations of 19th- and early-20th-century feminists, not in order to phase out motherhood but rather to lift up the work of mothers in families and communities by recognizing and honoring this work as the civically vital contribution it was. Although the conditions caregivers deal with—birth, pain, infirmity, disability, and death—are constant, the context and meaning of care shift historically. New technologies profoundly alter care, for example.

Abel’s book covers the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, a period that saw the bolstering of physicians’ claims to authority over those of female caregivers. Powerful new medical technologies and the enhanced professionalization of medical training increasingly held sway. The broad contours of Abel’s book feature themes and claims that highlight the interplay of traditional female modes of knowledge and the newly authoritative mode of “scientific” medicine that gained ascendance. The latter triumphed at the expense of the “emotional and spiritual aspects of caregiving” that had lent prestige to the “private world of caring,” a world of “empathic knowledge” Abel distinguishes from “scientific rationality.” More and more caregivers—the professional physicians—were distanced from the recipients of care—the patients. The upshot was a diminution of the emphasis female caregivers had placed on helping a person to prepare for death, an imperative tied to religious belief.

The “scientific rationality” mode has a hard time with death, preferring to fight it off as long as possible or to ignore it altogether. By contrast, empathic knowledge helped families and the dying person to take leave of one another in ways that permitted the normal grieving process to go forward: this, at least, is the broad contour of Abel’s more theoretical formulations.

We meet some extraordinary women in Abel’s pages. She devotes a chapter to one Martha Shaw Farnsworth, a “white woman from Kansas between 1890 and 1924,” who cared for two husbands, an infant daughter, and a niece. (Abel’s repetitious identification of caregivers by race is tedious when, given the context, it is quite obvious whether the women she is discussing are white or black.) Something like an apprentice system functioned as mothers transmitted their medical skills to daughters. Women routinely attended one another in childbirth and at the sickbed. Birth and death were communal events.

The singularity of devotion caregiving often required “exacted a terrible toll and conferred significant benefits,” Abel insists. Diseases that felled individuals and entire families in the period she covers included pneumonia, typhus, typhoid fever, diptheria, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, dysentery, tuberculosis. During an epidemic, “women moved continually from house to house in the community, exposing themselves and their own families to disease.” The overall picture that comes through is one of competence and determination. Caregiving, especially in time of epidemic, disrupted women’s lives, breaking the rhythm of household and farming chores, including harvest and “putting up” fruits and vegetables. But it also offered women a broad sphere within which to display their special knowledge and to gain recognition as healers. In their journals, women note the pleasure they derived at supplying the needs of their loved ones.

With the goal of professionalization before them, physicians criticized the influence of untrained caregivers and even nurses, especially during childbirth. Still, the realm of practical experience represented by women caregivers retained a great deal of respect among ordinary people throughout the 19th century. In the 20th century, that respect drained away as practical reason gave way to new techniques.

Abel traces this history of change and loss in the journal of Martha Shaw Farnsworth, which came to more than 4,000 pages. Farnsworth’s story is one of “suffering, perserverance,” of “nursing sick and often dying babies,” of responding to new techniques and the social mobility that broke up the old world of caregiving by weakening the “bonds of interpendence among many women.”

At one point, Abel makes a move that problematically overstates her case. She claims that the “virtues of rationality, objectivity, neuturality, and universality” spelled doom for women caregivers. This is unfortunate. “Scientific rationality” of a cramped sort, unattuned to varieties of ways of knowing, need not be equated with the undeniable virtues of rationality, objectivity, and universality per se. These latter virtues, in turn, do not rule out particular needs, claims, and commitments tout court. Here Abel veers dangerously close to the “male rational/female feeling” dichotomy critics of the care perspective rightly decry.

It is scientism, not “Enlightenment values” as such, as Abel suggests, that privileges one way of knowing above all others, downgrading women’s traditional approaches to medical care in the process. As intergenerationally transmitted healing practices were disparaged, a reductionistic form of biologically based scientism triumphed. Overstating, no doubt, but pointing to a real tendency, Abel claims that this triumph “rendered irrelevant the patient’s emotional and moral state, interaction with providers, and physical surroundings”—all of which were central, indeed the heart of the matter, for women caregivers.

The federal government got into the act, too, setting up a Children’s Bureau headed by former Hull-House resident Julia Lathrop. Hard-won maternal practices were demoted in favor of “scientific motherhood.” A pre-Spock book, The Dangers of Too Much Mother Love, sold like hotcakes in the 1920s and 1930s. Mothers and grandmothers were chided for being “doting,” “over-solicitous,” and “blindly fond.” Even rocking, cuddling, playing with, and singing to infants fell under a pall of suspicion. In 1923, a president of the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote that infants and young children “suffer from the attention showered on them by the parents, numerous friends and relatives.”

Pressing a thesis argued eloquently by the late Christopher Lasch (though he is nowhere credited in these pages), Abel discerns growing doubts among women about the value of generations of practical wisdom as they, too, fell under the spell of the expert culture. The costs to women themselves were high, for their authoritative claims to healing and caregiving could not, and did not, survive. With an official governmental imprimatur, manuals on child-rearing “undermined women’s faith in their own judgment” and, by urging mothers to shun the advice of relatives, neighbors, and friends, “experts may have increased women’s sense of isolation.”

Abel references the thousands of frightened, desperate, curious women who wrote the Children’s Bureau, the volume of missives reaching 125,000 a year. These letters reveal women turning themselves into nervous wrecks over such matters as the possible lasting consequences of a child’s refusing to drink milk from a cup or stubbornly clinging to either the breast or the bottle. Inevitably, the new science of child-rearing oversold itself, so much so that many women believed they had been promised perfect children if they followed expert advice and grew angry when doctors told them there was no way to remove birthmarks or freckles.

There are also desperately sad tales of families resisting institutionalization of their children, the treatment mandated for a variety of conditions and ailments, including tuberculosis. One Italian family whose saga Abel details couldn’t bear to part with their little girl, so they took her to live with a relative in New Jersey in order to get the mandated exercise and fresh air. This prompted the New York Charity Organization Society to “report the case to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, requesting it to find a way to take Maria ‘by force’ to the hospital.” The spcc said it had no jurisdiction in New Jersey. There matters remained until the family made the mistake of bringing Maria home to New York for a visit, where the authorities’ jurisdiction pertained. The unhappy child was forced into a hospital where, pining for her family, she died.

Many parents in this era found themselves under attack for excessive “emotionalism” if they refused to institutionalize their children. The director of social service work at Youngstown Hospital in Ohio described parents as “prejudiced by their love for their child,” conceding that “although it may be more of an animal love than human it must be recognized.”

For charity workers as state paid caregivers, tubercular people were “menaces who should be segregated from their families and the rest of society.” As well, according to Abel, “charity workers assumed that poor women were too emotional, ignorant, and fatalistic to deliver good care.” Caregivers sometimes fought back, pointing out that children often grew sicker in the hospital. Abel breaks the reader’s heart with stories of parents trying desperately to retrieve homesick children or to prevent the institutionalization of a child, stipulated routinely for children with disabilities. (Of course, some parents rushed to send their disabled children off to an institution.)

Under the sway of Social Darwinism, the last decades of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries also witnessed alterations in the rhetoric deployed to refer to children with epilepsy and “feeble-mindedness.” Once called “afflictions,” various maladies and conditions now labeled a child a “defective.” An affliction had been taken as a sign from God; each child had value. But a defective child is, as Abel writes, a “lemon, like a bad car.” Indeed, the 1892 annual report of the Board of Directors of the Illinois State Institution for the Feeble-minded referred to the inmates as the “waste products of humanity” and a “menace” to society. The grief attendant upon separation of families from the “waste product” they had given birth to was laid at the doorstep of “maternal overemotionalism.” Official institutional caregiving reinforced a burden of shame carried by families with a “defective,” associated in the public mind with “vice, immorality, failure, bad blood, and stupidity.”

The knowledge mothers evoked where their disabled children were concerned was haughtily dismissed. One mother insisted there were capabilities her son possessed that didn’t show up on iq tests, ending her plea with: “My boy is very dear to my heart.” But it was easier by far to acquiesce in the culturally reinforced view of a child as a waste product, fit only to live out a life in an institution, than to recognize that this was a human being wounded in many ways but capable of tears, laughter, love, of responding to sights, sounds, textures. The goal was “hand them over and forget about them.” Still, desperate mothers queried: could not something be done for a “Mongolian type child”? And the doctor writes back, no, there isn’t, and that is why he must be institutionalized.

When parents complained of abuse in the institutions to which their children had been sent, as they noticed scrapes, bruises, soiled clothing, lice in hair, and even broken bones, these were dismissed or explained away. Most appeals for better treatment or release were fruitless. Abel accepts the grief-stricken assessment of parents that their child died from a broken heart; that a child’s condition deteriorated the moment he or she was institutionalized.

Much has changed in our attitude toward persons with disabilities, and for the better. There are all sorts of folks experimenting with all sorts of approaches to medicine, too. But the world of caregiving shows remarkable continuity from 1840 to the present. Caregiving takes time. It is now a lonelier endeavor than it was in the 19th century, when giving care was a communal activity. The upshot is that Grandma is sometimes dropped off at the er for the weekend with a “breathing problem” or some such because exhausted families need a bit of time off. Surprisingly, Abel doesn’t mention the networks of sustaining and supporting care available through churches. Nearly all churches of a reasonable size feature support for caregivers as a social ministry, of which the “Quad Squad” I mentioned at the outset is a representative example.

As she concludes, Abel fumbles the ball a time or two. Hoping she won’t be set upon by the voluptuaries of progress, she goes through the by-now ritualistic caveat: I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the nostalgia-for-a-mythical-past party. She repeats yet again the basic yes and no: caregiving is often depleting and exhausting but it provides important gratifications. She references feminist texts that portray women caregivers negatively, as slavishly tending to others because they are forced to by “oppressive ideological and material forces,” even though the weight of her own book undermines such simplistically freighted formulations.

Almost as an afterthought, Abel strings together a garland of hoped-for broad reforms that come out of nowhere and are never argued for, simply listed as so many desiderata. Much of this tends toward the formulaic—”eradicating the gender division of domestic labor,” for instance. Who can possibly be opposed to nostrums like spreading the work of care more equitably, or adopting policies that address the needs of caregivers? Telling us we ought to embrace diverse family and community arrangements adds nothing to the discussion because this isn’t an issue she addresses in any detail or offers compelling arguments for or against. Her book would have been better off without such bumper-sticker afterthoughts, for the strength of Hearts of Wisdom at its best is the concreteness of Abel’s case studies and her archival evidence. A grocery list of vague nostrums only detracts.

Jean Bethke Elshtain’s most recent book, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, was published by Basic Books in April. An earlier work, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (Basic Books, 2003), bears directly on the themes taken up in this review essay.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In Navel-Gazing, her cheekily titled memoir of pregnancy, Jennifer Matesa recounts a conversation with her midwife, Nancy. “Birth will change you,” Nancy assures her. “You’re not going to be the same after giving birth. This is a big deal.”

Having babies has always been a big deal, but medical technology and a culture of choice afford many women the luxury of making a big deal of it. One reason pregnancy assumes such proportions is that Americans expect it to be a planned event. Though worries about biological clocks are still heard often enough, the traditional notion of a “childbearing age” is nearly obsolete, perhaps replaced by the metaphor of motherhood as maternity leave. That is, having babies does not occupy decades of female maturity, but is a project for a discrete slice of time taken off from other (often professional) pursuits. It is “intentional,” in the idiom of the day.

A handful of recent books colorfully display these trends in childbearing. Written by professional women—academics, journalists, writers—they are noteworthy for their focus on “becoming” a mother—that is, on pregnancy. All reckon in some way with tensions between feminism and motherhood, simultaneously praising pregnancy and resisting the “essentialist” view of women as biologically determined baby-makers. Bookshelves already groan with works on pregnancy, dispensing advice on adding fiber to the diet, sterilizing formula bottles, and teaching baby to sleep the night. But as these writers justly lament, there is more to say about having a child, and it may be that the only way to get at this is to tell your own story.

Jennifer Matesa worked with a photographer colleague to produce Navel-Gazing. It is a diary with illustrations, mostly of the mother and her belly: pregnancy as a work of art. While the subject of her book began as an “accident,” like the babies in several of these books, the notion that pregnancy is a choice so predominates that Matesa holds in reserve the possibility of a first-trimester abortion: “The idea keeps cropping up in the back of my mind that I could have an abortion. It’s a relief to know that, if it gets too crazy and I discover that I’m just not cut out to do this, there are ways I could get out of it.”

She doesn’t abort but instead embarks on an adventure recognizable to many American women. The milestones and minor irritations of pregnancy, like food cravings, clumsiness, prenatal weigh-ins, ultrasounds, and epidurals are familiar enough in popular culture to win laughs in TV sitcoms. Last year, Friends relied on Rachel’s (Jennifer Aniston) pregnancy to provide humor and move the story line along, ending the season with a special tear-jerking episode on the birth. The hospital setting of that episode reminds us that birth is usually a medical event in the United States. Academic treatments of American childbirth often excoriate this fact. The standard critique goes something like this: doctors treat the body as a machine, the female body as a defective or pathological one; hospital personnel force needless procedures in labor to keep deliveries efficient, appear indispensable, and generate profits.

Women unhappy with obstetric care can seek out a midwife instead, as Matesa and two of the other writers considered here opted to do. A leading association of midwives, the Midwives’ Alliance of North America, describes childbirth as a healthy part of a woman’s lifecycle and eschews unnecessary interventions in delivery. As health-care costs escalate, midwifery is gaining support in many quarters as a safe, humane way to handle low-risk pregnancies. Even some obstetricians now share their practices with nurse-midwives. (Births by midwife still make up only a small percentage of the nearly 4 million annual deliveries in the United States, but have risen from a negligible few in the 1980s to about 10 percent by 1998.)

Midwives do not promise an easier labor, since avoiding drugs is part of their model of care, but the treatment they offer seems gentler and more personal. What is so appealing to many women is midwives’ respect for natural processes and traditional birthways—which patients can enjoy while knowing that the full arsenal of medical technology awaits in case of emergency. Two market-savvy birth centers in my area north of Boston capitalize on this conflicted longing: one advertises “Bed, Breakfast, & Baby,” bringing to mind a kind of English manor for cozy deliveries, and another, a “Birth Cottage,” boasts “blending modern day birth with old world charms.” Of course, this romanticized image of birth is only attractive when stripped of the olde-worlde danger of death in childbed.

Interest in natural birth sometimes is coupled with desire for spiritual nurture in birth. Indeed, it’s striking how readily several of these writers turn to spirituality, even in books not explicitly religious. Matesa doesn’t have much use for “all the Catholic indoctrination” she grew up with, but muses over Kathleen Norris’ meditations, attends Quaker meetings, and buys her baby a Navajo dream-catcher.

Early modern folk suspected midwives of supernatural powers, even witchcraft; we assume they are at least spiritually sensitive. The classic work of modern American midwifery is Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery, and the appearance of a fourth edition reflects growing interest in this approach to birth.

Gaskin’s story is a chapter out of the folklore of American counterculture. In 1970, her husband Stephen led a convoy of more than 200 people on a journey across the country. Their caravan of re-purposed schoolbuses traveled from San Francisco to Tennessee, with a few stops along the way to birth babies in parking lots and Dakota blizzards. Settled in their Tennessee commune, The Farm, Ina May taught herself midwifery and started a birthing center. Since then, The Farm has maintained an impressive record for safe deliveries, presiding over 2,028 births by 2000, with a cesarean section rate of only 1.8 percent in contrast to national averages of approximately 23 percent. Ina May, named “the most important midwife in the world” by a scholar of the subject, still “catches” babies and trains others in spiritual midwifery.

But what spirit is this? In places the operation has a Christian flavor. Ina May explains that the commune was founded on the model of Acts 2:44-45, a “church” with husband Stephen “functioning as pastor.” Birth is “Holy,” she affirms, and women were “designed by God to be self-regulating.” But Spiritual Midwifery is a grab-bag of other spirits, too. Gaskin and her husband pay tribute to a Zen master in San Francisco for their enlightenment, Ina May also crediting her awakening to a Capuchin monkey. To her husband she owes “a respect for life force and holiness, [and] how to manage spiritual energy.” The book is a period piece of hippie life, with earthy, beaming men and women describing their “telepathic” and “psychedelic” moments in birth. Stephen Gaskin explains that breastfed babies are nourished with “vibrations,” that is, “Those sexual love vibrations are a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.” Ina May instructs spiritual-midwives-in-training that “each and every birth is the birth of the Christ child,” and calls them to take a vow like a yogi, monk, or nun.

Not all midwives understand their art this way, but caregivers with names like MoonDragon, Motherwood, and Mother Earth Birth, with treatments like hypnobirthing and Raindrop therapy, do represent a significant strain of midwifery. Debra Rienstra’s Great With Child offers an altogether different way of spiritualizing pregnancy. It is an exceptional book, capturing wonder and joy without being maudlin, theologically grounded without being preachy.

Rienstra, an English professor at Calvin College, opens the book hoping for a third child but a miscarriage comes before the full-term pregnancy of her son Philip. Her experience carrying Philip resembles that of the other writers, but her perspective is different. Pregnancy is not about choice but assent to mystery: a “reckless yes,” Rienstra calls it. She stays with obstetricians rather than choosing midwives and finds support for her pregnancy in community and literature. Family, friends, and church members offer help, cook meals, and adjust schedules, thereby paying respect in practical ways to the coming of new life, and showing that “work is love made visible,” as a cross-stitch over the author’s kitchen sink reminds. Rienstra observes that the changes wrought in the body during pregnancy are preparatory for the love-labors of motherhood. She shows how Christianity illuminates the creaturely experience of having children, calling her work a study in “embodied feminine spirituality.”

Scripture, hymns, and medieval mysticism nourish these reflections. Significantly, literature also helps her think through pregnancy. Contemporary women poets appear here, but Rienstra draws heavily from the Great Books: selections from Homer, Augustine, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and others connect the particulars of pregnancy with broadly human predicaments. Rather than a concern for women alone, childbearing amplifies themes integral to human life and central to classic literature.

While Great With Child is a book on pregnancy by an academic woman, Cristina Mazzoni’s Maternal Impressions is an academic book about pregnancy, replete with authorities, endnotes, and specialized vocabulary. Though distinct in tone from the other books considered here, it resonates roundly with the group.

Mazzoni focuses on four questions: how we influence our children; how we know them and ourselves in relationship to them; how mothering changes women as subjects; and how we can speak about motherhood. Her title comes from the traditional belief that pregnant women “impress” marks on a child, so that a baby’s birthmarks allude to the mother’s craving, maybe in the shape of a strawberry or the color of coffee. Mazzoni offers intriguing treatment of popular texts like the fairy tale Rapunzel or Luke’s account of the Visitation, but her discussions of French and Italian feminist writings are so thick with theory that, for instance, a fascinating analysis of the epistemology of “quickening” (the old term for feeling fetal movement) winds up with Luce Irigaray’s conclusion that women’s defining characteristic is mucous.

Mazzoni’s confession that she was surprised by the “upheaval” of new motherhood would find hearty agreement from the other writers. New motherhood may be hard by definition, but this kind of surprise and isolation are the aggravating circ*mstances of our time and place. Just home from the hospital, moms may have visits from helpful others, but the bulk of the care for this new human being often falls to the mother alone. One’s previous occupation, perhaps challenging and rewarding in its own right, does little to prepare one for the sheer work required.

British novelist Rachel Cusk outdoes the rest of the group in dramatizing how “unrelievedly shocking” motherhood is. The title of her memoir—A Life’s Work—is not lightly chosen. Everything is hard for her, from newborn crying jags and endless feeding to infant playgroups. Though her descriptions are colorful and frequently funny, the metaphors offered for babies—a large rucksack, an alarm, a bomb (actually several kinds of bombs)—evidence not a little dismay at being stuck with a child. Her little Albertine appears in these pages largely as a source of crisis and trouble rather than as a person.

Readers may empathize with Cusk and the other writers, but a weakness besetting the maternity-diary books is the abundance of intimate detail. Large doses of personal narrative and photos of an author’s gravid belly, even if lovely, open these books up to stereotyping as the self-absorbed musings of women overimpressed at having a baby. But to see these books as simply page-turners for the parents-magazine set is to miss the point. Cusk concedes that books like hers are “of no real interest to anyone except other mothers. … [T]he experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in translation to the outside world.” Perhaps that’s true about delivery-room horror stories and breastfeeding mishaps, but the concession is too broad.

Books like these speak into the space between the ubiquitous manual What to Expect When You’re Expecting and the famous Lennart Nilsson photos of fetuses floating in utero, where we look in amazement at the baby whose image (and existence?) is brought to us by sophisticated medicine and technology. Critics complain that those images present a baby suspended in space, as though the mother did not exist; we’re more impressed at the technology that gets her out of the way so we can see the baby. Those fetal images are breathtaking, but one cannot fully grasp the baby’s becoming without seeing how the mother supports it. Paying attention to the astounding work-in-progress of pregnancy is one way to nurture a culture of life.

Agnes Howard teaches at Gordon College.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.