Page 3391 – Christianity Today (2024)

It was July 1706. The people of Tranquebar, a small Danish trading station on the Coromandel Coast in southeastern India (modern-day Tamil Nadu), rejoiced to see the Danish ship Sophia anchoring in the deep waters. Tamil boatmen rushed to offload the cargo. The captain who oversaw the transfer of goods became impatient and mercilessly whipped the boatmen. But one of the passengers on the ship, a 23-year-old German missionary, objected, “Do not whip! They are people.” To this the captain replied, “No, they are Malabarians [i.e., ‘beasts’].”

In contrast to the callous attitudes of merchants who exploited lowly workers without concern for their well being, the missionary, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1683-1719), had come to India for the express purpose of letting all people, high or low, know their privileges, rights, and responsibilities before God. Ziegenbalg’s deep respect for the Tamil people, their culture, and their traditions left an enduring impact upon south India and had far-reaching influence. By the time William Carey, the celebrated English Baptist missionary often called the “father of the modern missionary movement,” arrived in Calcutta in 1793, evangelical Christianity in India was nearly a century old. Almost every missionary method that he later developed had already been tried—by a Pietist Lutheran in Tranquebar.

Pietist pioneers

Early Lutheran Reformers had associated “mission” with preaching the Word of God and administering the sacrament, leaving little place for cross-cultural missionary work. But German Pietism (sometime called “The Second Reformation”) opened the door to a more holistic understanding of Christian outreach. Halle Pietist leader August Hermann Francke believed that evangelism and education went hand in hand and that every person on earth should be able to read the Bible in his or her own language and to learn some useful skill—a revolutionary vision for world mission.

A Pietist court preacher in Copenhagen persuaded King Friedrich IV to start an overseas mission in 1705. He also managed to bring two young German Pietists, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau, to Copenhagen and strove to have them ordained as missionaries. The king took it for granted that the Danish Lutheran Church and the Danish East India Company (DEIC) would support his decision. This did not happen. In fact, the directors of the DEIC dispatched a secret order to the governor of Tranquebar directing him to hinder the missionaries—an order that unfortunately reached the governor before the missionaries arrived. He left them stranded on the shore.

A converted missionary

By 1706, Tranquebar (Tamil: Tarangambadi, literally “village of dancing waves”) was already a flourishing trading settlement of about 30,000 people, including 20 Danes, 500 Roman Catholics (mostly of Indo-Portuguese descent) and 2,000 Muslims. About 90 caste groups worshipped in 51 major temples and spoke 18 different languages (predominantly Portuguese and Tamil).

Soon after his arrival, Ziegenbalg ventured to bridge the gap between the Europeans and the Indians, who looked on Christianity as something foreign. He learned to speak Tamil, read Tamil literature, and carefully studied the ideas and practices of the people. In 1708 he confessed that his knowledge of the local culture had “converted” him, and he no longer viewed the Tamil people as “the uncivilized heathens,” like other Europeans did. His experience enabled him to treat the Tamils as equal partners and friends and to earn their trust in return. In fact, his commitment to justice and the welfare of the common people collided with the interests of the DEIC, which did not hesitate to imprison him for four months.

Ziegenbalg was committed to helping the Tamil Christian converts practice their faith within their own cultural setting. Once a Tamil medical doctor asked him, “Should converted Christians give up their culture and social status?” Ziegenbalg replied, “No, converted Tamils should not become Europeans! Conversion does not mean a change of outward appearance; rather it requires a change of mind and results in a transformed life.” He believed that conversion to Christian faith should re-orient the entire life of the converts, including their cultural and religious heritage, towards Jesus Christ.

Ziegenbalg’s Tamil sermons, hymns, ethical writings, and German translations of Tamil literature demonstrate his deep cultural and religious sensitivity. Moreover, his work in Tranquebar epitomized Francke’s vision of Bible translation and universal literacy. He was the first to translate the New Testament into Tamil (printed in 1715) and began translating the Old Testament as well—a project completed by his successors B. Schultze and J. P. Fabricius. Aided by Tamil partners, he built a church and founded schools where children studied the Bible along with Tamil ethics, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and world geography. In the course of time, these children became the bearers of Tamil Christianity.

Tranquebar and beyond

Ziegenbalg’s colleagues tried to follow his example by continuing his translation and literary endeavors. Their many accomplishments include a treatise on Tamil medicine (1713) and the first English-Tamil Dictionary (1779). C. T. Walther, one of Ziegenbalg’s most gifted successors, observed that Tamil culture was in many ways similar to ancient Hebrew culture and sent his observations back to Germany, hoping that his insights would clarify the meaning of certain biblical customs and idioms that Europeans could not easily understand.

Walther, who believed that European missionaries were merely temporary guests and catalysts among the Tamil people, was also a strong advocate for indigenous leadership. In 1727 he encouraged Rajanayakkan, a convert from Roman Catholicism, to establish a congregation in Thanjavur—a task no European would dare to attempt since Thanjavur was an ancient citadel of Tamil power and pride. Rajanayakkan, a soldier in the army of the King of Thanjavur, also acquired a grant from the Maharajah for a model modern school. In 1733, Walther persuaded the mission authorities in Europe and the Christians in Tranquebar to ordain Aaron as the first Tamil Lutheran pastor in Thanjavur.

The Tranquebar Mission bore fruits beyond its own small region. Ziegenbalg’s colleague B. Schultze established a Lutheran mission in Madras (then the major center of the English East India Company) and became the first missionary supported by the London Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge—a remarkable example of early ecumenical cooperation linking India, Germany, Denmark, and Britain. Moreover, the Halle Reports, the first mission periodical newsletter or magazine (published since 1708), popularized the Tranquebar Mission not only in Western Europe but also in Russia and North America and led to the emergence of voluntary missionary societies. Ziegenbalg’s pioneering endeavors thus not only laid the foundation for tremendous growth of the church in South India in the coming century, but it also set the pattern for future missionary work all over the world.

Daniel Jeyaraj is associate professor of World Christianity at Andover-Newton Theological School.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

The story of conversions in India is an excellent example of the indigenous discovery of Christianity (rather than a Western Christian discovery of indigenous societies). No culture is sacred but every culture has the potential to become so. Throughout history, Christian faith has transcended ethnic, national, and cultural barriers, reshaping and redeeming the cultures it has entered. But Christian faith has also taken the shape of those “host cultures” as people in each culture recognize resonant themes in the faith.

Missionaries from abroad bring an initial stimulus, with new technologies for transmitting both Scripture and science. Those technologies serve, together with local agents, to “translate the message” into idioms that are locally acceptable and attractive. After an incubation period—during which early converts absorb, thoroughly internalize, and adapt the gospel to their own culture—explosions of spiritual energy turn whole communities to the new faith. Nowhere can this pattern be more clearly seen than in the process that culminated in Tirunelveli (then spelled Tinnevelly). From 1799 onwards, whole villages forsook old ways and turned temples into chapel-schools. Christians doubled or tripled their numbers in every decade thereafter.

Strategies: literacy and learning

This story starts in eastern Germany—in Halle and Herrnhut, the wellsprings of Pietism. Evangelicalism and Enlightenment were twin engines in A. H. Francke’s vision of bringing universal literacy and numeracy to every person on earth—man, woman, and child—so that each might gain access to God’s Word in his or her mother tongue.

Ziegenbalg came to Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India in 1706. He built the first modern Tamil schools, printed schoolbooks, scriptures, and scientific studies. As small congregations and trained Tamil pastors and teachers proliferated, the Halle vision spread to more and more villages in the Tamil countryside. By the 1730s, Tamil evangelical leaders such as Aaron and Rajanayakkan had gained royal patronage and were building the first model school in Thanjavur. Forty years later, disciples whom C. F. Schwartz (one of Ziegenbalg’s successors) had trained at higher-level schools in Thanjavur were fanning out, two by two, across the peninsula, until their chapel-schools reached Palaiyankottai in Tirunelveli Country.

Schwartz, perhaps the most remarkable of all Halle missionaries in India, was adept in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit, Portuguese, and other European languages, both modern and classical. A skilled preacher, teacher, schoolmaster, diplomat, and statesman, he ended his 50-year career as Raja-Guru, Protector-Regent, and “Father” to Serfoji, Maharaja of Thanjavur.

By then, gifted disciples he called “Helpers” had gone far and wide—from Tranquebar to Tiruchirapalli, to Tirunelveli, and even as far as Travancore (almost 300 miles away). This outreach occurred during times of ceaseless war, famine, and suffering. It took place in the face of implacable opposition to Christian missions from the English East India Company, whose forces were then extending their rule over much of the subcontinent.

Gifted disciples

Missionaries from abroad deserve only limited credit for the efforts that turned Tamil communities toward Christian faith. Time and again, adventurous and gifted converts brought the gospel to their home villages in their own tongue.

Schwartz’s disciples illustrate this. As early as 1769 a Vellalar (from a high caste that had created a proud classical Tamil civilization) Christian soldier stationed with the East India Company’s garrison at Palaiyankottai wrote Schwartz about his small congregation, begging for a pastor. In 1778, Schwartz himself came to Palaiyankottai. While there, he baptized an affluent Brahman widow whom he already knew. Christening her “Clarinda,” he gave her a place of leadership within the small congregation. Clarinda, with help from a Vellalar catechist-disciple named Rayappan, ran the local school and endowed the building of a proper (pukka) “prayer/school” hall. She was not satisfied until her small congregation had its own full-fledged and properly trained pastor-teacher.

The person sent to tend the congregations was Satyanathan Pillai. Satyanathan came from a highborn Vellalar family in Thanjavur. A veteran Schwartz disciple, he had served as pastor-teacher of the suburban village “prayer hall” as well as the city congregation of Thanjavur. When Satyanathan first came to Tirunelveli in 1783, Schwartz also recruited a brilliant youth named Vedanayakam Pillai and took him back to Thanjavur where, in due course, he became the most renowned Tamil scholar-writer of the age. The Maharajah later recognized Vedanayakam’s achievements and bestowed on him the title of Sastri (Master of Learning). Meanwhile, from 1790 onward, after he was ordained as the very first Tamil evangelical missionary, Satyanathan began to lead what was to become India’s first extraordinary and rapid Christian conversion movement.

Back from the dead

This process accelerated in 1797. A young Shanar (low-caste) convert, Sundaranandam David, returned from Thanjavur and launched a radical bhakti (or “spiritual or devotional”) movement among his own people. Schwartz, aged and failing, had trained and sent him to help Satyanathan. The movement began when Sundaranandam’s relatives, blinking their eyes at his sudden appearance as if from the dead, heard the wonders of his conversion. Soon after they themselves had embraced the gospel, four families at Vijayaramapuram, not far away, asked for instruction.

Then Shanars at Shanmugapuram and surrounding villages also joined him. Satyanathan and Sundaranandam found themselves talking and talking with people who allowed them “not even a quarter of an hour’s leisure.” For 16 days, they worked night and day. Shanars, treated with respect for the first time in their lives, responded in droves. One relative explained, “I am glad to see that you behave so kindly towards us and make no distinction of caste.” Whole villages began to turn Christian. Soon, thousands of Shanars (who now began to call themselves “Nadars,” or “Lords”) flocked to embrace the new faith.

This, in turn, aroused the wrath of landlords. Fearing loss of the free labor landlords believed was due them, they called for the warlords. Toughs and “club-men” from Ramnad descended upon the new communities and “plundered, confined, and tortured” them, pulling down their mud-thatch huts and prayer-schools, burning their books, and exposing them to insults, intimidation, and violence. This persecution coincided with wars then tearing apart much of south India. Beyond fortified towns and villages, devastation, famine, and pestilence stalked the land. Thousands of Christians lost everything and saw lives destroyed, prayer-schools and dwellings pulled down, property taken, and families beaten, stripped, and sent into the jungle to die.

Sundaranandam, charismatic and fiery, led the movement after Satyanathan’s health began to fail and he retired to Thanjavur. Thereafter, constant persecution and martyrdom set a pattern that would be replicated in other movements of mass conversion. During the century that followed, whenever whole villages turned Christian en masse, persecution would follow.

Villages of refuge

Desperation inspired creativity. The first “Village of Refuge,” modeled on biblical lines, was called “Mudalur” or “First Village.” It was so successful that other settlements soon followed (i.e. Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Samaria, Galilee, Megnanapuram, Sawyerpuram, Anandapuram, Dohnavur, and many more). Voluntary “self-help” societies were formed within each village to care for the needy, those fleeing their homes, the sick, poor, widows, and orphans.

As numbers of Christians doubled, missionaries began to arrive. They helped to build institutional infrastructures. Eventually, schools, printing presses, colleges and seminaries for training leaders, and hospitals followed. Pietistic communities of Tirunelveli Country became so numerous, prosperous, and strong that in the long run they helped, in some measure, to transform local Hindu culture and society.

In 1816, James Hough, a military chaplain and disciple of Cambridge pastor Charles Simeon, arrived. He had forsaken a Church of England “living” to serve God in India. He found 53 thriving congregations meeting in thatch-roofed prayer-houses, where children recited Scripture and copied verses onto palm leaf (cajan) books, and where worshippers tarried to sing hymns “to a late hour.” They gave him a joyful welcome. Hough opened schools, using his own funds to erect small buildings, hire schoolmasters from Thanjavur, and buy books from Tranquebar. By 1819, with help from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.) and the Church Mission Society (C.M.S.), 15 Tamil schools were serving 551 students and two English schools were teaching 59 students. Two more “villages of refuge” were also founded, Pohlayarpuram and Houghayarpuram.

The arrival of Karl Rhenius in 1820 radically transformed prospects for Tirunelveli’s evangelical Christians. An ex-soldier from Berlin, with Moravian leanings, he had come to India under the fledgling C.M.S. at a time when the English were hard to enlist. He was later described as “one of the ablest, most clear-sighted and practical, and most zealous missionaries that India has ever seen” and as the “Apostle to Tirunelveli.” A charismatic and fiery individual with a superb command of Tamil, he had a vision for social revolution.

“Pilgrims,” again trained and sent out two by two across the countryside, quickly brought fresh outbreaks of mass conversion. Shanar (a.k.a. Nadar) villages were the most responsive, but converts also came from other communities, including some landholding Vellalars. Again, whole villages turned Christian. Sometimes converts threw images of village deities into wells and transformed local temples into prayer-school halls. Again, when persecution broke out, new villages of refuge sprang up. Dohnavur, for example, was endowed by a Swedish-Prussian Count to whom Rhenius had written. It was here that Amy Carmichael would later establish her well-known ministry to girls fleeing temple prostitution.

On June 2, 1830, an assembly of Tirunelveli congregations founded their own Philanthropic Society (Dharma Sangam). During severe persecution, with landed gentry throwing up resistance, this society showed how converts could help one another and strengthen themselves by setting up a permanent endowment for purchasing new villages of refuge where new Christians might live in peace. One such endowment, made by David Pillai Asirvatham, a prominent Vellalar Christian, was celebrated in a special kal-natu (“founding” ceremony) on December 15, 1836, and christened Suvisesha-puram (“Gospel-village”). By that time, members of congregations numbered 11,186. Two decades later, this number had grown to 46,047. (Catholic Tamil Christians in Tirunelveli villages numbered roughly the same.)

One strength of this movement lay in its inner support structures. Tirunelveli congregations themselves, among their hundreds of schools, systematically promoted female education and fostered voluntary societies for charitable purposes. In every Christian village, congregations assembled each morning and evening at the ringing of a bell for united prayer. Each congregation was governed by its own panchayat or “council of five,” the pastor and schoolmaster sitting with headman and elders, so that conflicts could be resolved and standards of behavior maintained. Following the Halle pattern, within a system of universal education, each person was continuously drilled in truths of the faith. All, old and young alike, were expected to memorize and recite Scriptures, doctrines, and duties. Small groups examined each other in basics. Baptism and communion could be delayed, sometimes years, until rigorous tests were passed.

By 1831, overarching structures had begun to knit congregations together. Coffers of the Dharma Sangam remained full, reaching 13,320 rupees in 1858 (a rupee, then worth half a dollar, could feed a family well for a fortnight). The Bible and Tract Society (and Press), founded in 1822, printed 45,000 tracts and boasted a 1,237-rupee surplus. The Shanti Sangam (Peace Society), Suvisesha-fanam (“Gospel-penny” or Poor Fund), Widow’s Fund, and Missionary Society that sent its members (known as Desanthari or “Pilgrims”) to every village where no conversions had yet occurred, along with several hundred schools and two colleges for training leaders (some teachers being non-Christian Vellalars), were all locally supported.

These voluntary associations gave Tirunelveli congregations a sturdy sense of self-reliance and independence. During these years, there was little dependence upon colonial (European or Western) resources, motifs, or styles. Most importantly, these Christians remained culturally Tamil—in art, architecture, poetry, and music. Works by Vedanayakam Sastri, and later H. A. Krishna Pillai’s epic Rakshany Yatrikam, an adaptation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 4000 verses within the idiom of classical poetry, brought Tamil evangelical culture to its zenith. The cultural contributions of Tamil Christians serve to silence those who charge that Christianity in India was never more than an “alien” imposition of “cultural imperialism.”

Repeated story

The story of Tirunelveli evangelical Christianity provides a template that can be applied to the story of every other major conversion movement in India over the past two centuries. The same pattern of Christian expansion was replicated among Pulaiyars in Travancore (now Kerala), among Malas and Madigas in Andhra, as well as among all the aboriginal peoples, such as the Khonds, Mundas, Santals, Garos, Mizos and Nagas, dwelling along the forested escarpments of India’s internal and external frontiers and maritime shorelines. Hundreds of such stories, each reflecting unique peculiarities of its own processes of inception, incubation, and expansion under indigenous impetus, can be told.

In virtually every instance, a local culture was Christianized within a community that was either excluded from the great traditions of Sanskritic civilization or had not yet been significantly touched by that civilization. Nor had any such culture yet felt the full impact or attraction of Islamic civilization. This meant that, when touched by the gospel, as conveyed by the combined forces of Pietistic Evangelicalism and Pietistic Enlightenment coming out of Germany, together with modern sciences, printing presses, medical facilities, and technologies, such cultures were open to radical transformation.

Robert Eric Frykenberg is professor emeritus of history and South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Trapped within Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, struggling to free itself from Slezkine’s ideological thesis, is a poignant history of Russia’s Jews. It is a history of desire—of 19th-century Jews seeking to free themselves of the Jewishness of the Pale of Settlement by exulting in the Russia of Tolstoy and Chekov; of zealous Jewish commitment to and success within the early Soviet Revolution; of the shock of betrayal under Stalin, as Jews were persecuted for their ethnic Jewishness; and finally, of Soviet Jews’ spasmodic, discomfiting, but at times passionate rediscovery of their Jewish identity. The emblazoning image Slezkine leaves us with is of thousands of Russian Jews, most of whom “had probably never been to a synagogue before,” coming to meet Golda Meir in 1948 on Yom Kippur at the Moscow synagogue, chanting in the streets, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Unfortunately, Slezkine surrounds and ultimately overwhelms the promise of this narrative with a thick and loathsome typological shell. Instead of dealing fully with actual Jews, Slezkine mythologizes all Jews as the descendents of Mercury (Hermes), “the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the sword.” As Mercurians, Jews work with their minds and by their wit. They value language, they value ideas, they value talent and merit. Even when they dwell in a land for centuries, they are essentially nomads, eschewing any permanent connection to place and nation: “A Jewish house in the Ukraine did not resemble the peasant hut next door, not because it was Jewish in architecture (there was no such thing) but because it was never painted, mended or decorated. It did not belong to the landscape; it was a dry husk that contained the real treasure—the children of Israel and their memory.” Sure of their divine exceptionalism, Jews think their neighbors dim-witted: “Their world is larger and more varied” than those of the poor or the princely, both of whom lack a Mercurian intellect. These non-Jews, in Slezkine’s typology, are Apollonians, committed to arcane structures of nobility and caste that run according to values such as manliness and honor, but not merit and ingenuity. Jews think they are better than the Apollonians, lord and plebe, because Jews think better than both: “[Jews] would all take a justifiably dim view of Ivan,” for “[i]f one values mobility, mental agility, negotiation, wealth, curiosity, one has little reason to respect either prince or peasant.”

Slezkine’s grand and, one can only say, facile thesis consists of the great modern victory of the Mercurians over the Apollonians. It is an account breathtaking in its reductionism: “[F]or much of human history, it seemed quite obvious who had the upper hand. … Then things began to change: Zeus was beheaded, repeatedly, or made a fool of; Apollo lost his cool; and Hermes bluffed his way to the top.” Modernity emerges on the heels of the Jewish Mercury: “Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds.” In a nifty syllogism, to become modern is to become Mercurian, which is to say, to become Jewish: “only the Jews—the scriptural Mercurians of Europe—came to represent Mercurianism and modernity everywhere.” Indeed, it appears that Slezkine is either being modest or inexact in referring only to the 20th century as “the Jewish century.”

Ultimately, the real value in The Jewish Century is that it reminds us of precisely what is so objectionable about typological thinking. There is, of course, the obvious: Slezkine’s valorization of Jews relies on the very terms used by any and every anti-Semitic tract: for Slezkine and, say, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Jews are effeminate, cosmopolitan, cunning thinkers whose odd insular languages and blood ties separate them decisively from their neighbors—whom, for good measure, they see as inferior. At the very least, any scholar taking up this tired dichotomy must address how he expects his use of these terms not to validate the racism of which they are a part. Slezkine not only confirms that Jews historically have been seen as “devious, acquisitive, greedy, crafty, pushy and crude,” but he, shockingly, affirms this view of Jews as rational: “This, too, is a statement of fact, in the sense that, for peasants, pastoralists, princes and priests, any trader or moneylender, or artisan is in perpetual and deliberate violation of most norms of decency and decorum.” One would think that at this point doing history requires more than affirming society’s most reflexive and stereotypical beliefs, even if the values they traditionally reinforce are inverted in the process.

Yet, where The Jewish Century is most instructive of the failure of typological thinking is in the way its emphasis on epic battles and the myth of historical tectonic shifts overwhelms and buries the empirical details of human life that make history a joyfully unpredictable and rich affair. Typological histories are committed to imposing unchanging value-structures on human events, and in this they become anything but historical. Typologies become systems unto themselves. Instead of analyzing history, Slezkine preoccupies the reader with typological brain teasers such as: “Modernity meant universal Mercurianism under the nationalist banner of a return to local Apollonianism.” The more time spent translating abstractions such as this, the more distant become the actual circumstances of people’s lives. Consider how just now wading through the abstractions of Mercury and Apollo has made remote and hazy the compelling historical narrative of Russia’s Jews that I outlined at the outset. This is precisely how it feels to read this book.

Ultimately, when resisted even slightly, typological histories can be shown to be absurdly and comically inaccurate. In claiming that “good citizenship (including patriotism) is a version of the ever vigilant Jewish endeavor to preserve personal and collective identity in an unclean world,” Slezkine writes as if the history of political theory does not exist; after all, Aristotle and Augustine, non-Jews both, have contributed a thing or two on citizenship. Indeed, Slezkine’s own account tumbles inward. At one point he insists that “Jews epitomize Western civilization—as its original creators, best practitioners, and rightful beneficiaries.” In almost the same breath—literally eight pages later—he admits that “Jews did not launch the Modern age. They jointed it late, had little to do with some of its most important episodes (such as the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions), and labored arduously to adjust to its many demands.” On the text’s first page, he claims that nationalism is modernity’s “principal religion,” which is to say that modernity is “about every nation becoming Jewish.” Elsewhere he claims that “nationalism … [was] fundamentally Apollonian,” which by his calculus means that nationalism is fundamentally un-Jewish. What needs to be said here is screamingly obvious: No single people epitomizes Western civilization or nationalism. People, civilizations, and political phenomena are best thought of as full of knots; responsible scholarship gives an account of their tangles.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about The Jewish Century is that it so often—even centrally—betrays its own typological thesis. Slezkine claims that of the three loci of Jewish life in modernity—the Soviet Union, Israel, and the United States—only the United States was Mercurian. Marxism, in its anti-nationalist universalism, and Zionism, in its remaking of Jews as self-sufficient farmers and manly warriors, embodied Apollo. Given that of the three, only the United States did not have Jews central to its theoretical beginnings, we might reasonably wonder how it can be that, as Slezkine says, becoming modern is about becoming Jewish. That is, if we are to take Slezkine’s terms seriously for the moment, what he presents is a story of the way in which the majority of 20th-century Jews were only too ready to remake themselves as Apollonians. Typologically, the Jews, in fact, missed out on their own century.

Of course, in light of the destruction of European Judaism, the 20th century was anything but the Jews’ (or anyone else’s, for that matter). If the absurdity of Slezkine’s typological argument is not amply revealed by the fact that the terms by which he mythologizes Jews—Jews are cunning, clannish, lacking “in dignified maleness,” good with money, disproportionately represented in business and print—are the very terms by which Nazism justified the Jewish genocide, then consider this: “One reason the twentieth century became the Jewish Century is that Hitler’s attempt to put his vision into practice led to the canonization of the Nazis as absolute evil and the reemergence of the Jews as universal victims.” Slezkine’s calculus becomes obscene when being the victim of genocide is made to affirm “Jewish values.” There is no meaning to being slaughtered; it is simply to die a horrible death.

In the end, if we strip away all the typology, the motivating question of this book very well may be, how is it that Jews have been able to achieve a real measure of material and intellectual success as decided minorities? To that end, Slezkine presents innumerable lists of high Jewish demographics, from banking in Minsk to university faculties in Moscow. This is a legitimate question; there is nothing inherently wrong about trying to account for Jewish achievement. But if we are looking for generalizations, what more can be said beyond this: that under the pressure of historical circumstance, some Jews exhibit certain habits, practices, and values that make for certain types of social prominence? Further than this, what’s required is to spend time in specific historic contexts, gathering and analyzing evidence of what worked and what didn’t. Slezkine does not do this hard and necessary work. He gives us myth instead. And he leaves us to wonder what became of those Moscow Jews promising to return to Jerusalem.

Jonathon Kahn has a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1998 Ross Gregory Douthat enrolled in Harvard University. The it school, known to Ross Douthat and countless other hopefuls as the H-Bomb. Twenty thousand students. Twenty-two-billion-dollar endowment. More than one million dollars per student. Begun in 1636, the school denies entry to 91 percent of applicants while admitting the best and brightest. Harvard is Harvard.

That same year, I, Nathaniel Jon Daniel Taylor, began my studies at Bethel University. The it school for Baptist General Conference diehards and their ilk. Three thousand students. Fifteen-million-dollar endowment. Five thousand dollars per student, 220 times less than Harvard. Bethel wants to be a good school that educates and trains students in a Christian context. And Bethel is Midwestern to a T: only 27 percent of the students are from out of state. The student body is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and, of course, Christian.

I majored in English Literature and graduated in glorious sun in May of 2002.

Ross Douthat majored in History and Literature and graduated in a downpour a week later.

Three years after our entrance into the “real world,” I’m working at Starbucks and leading high school orchestras on tours of Europe. Ross Douthat works at The Atlantic Monthly and now has written the story of a young man’s four years at the richest, best, most desirable school in the world. Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class is a commentary on the culture of Harvard and the privileged of America. For Douthat, Harvard was not the “refuge of genius and a sanctuary of intellect” he had expected to find; rather, he soon discovered that “the real business of Harvard … was the pursuit of success.” Harvard is the “best known ticket” to entrance into “a privileged class of talented students [that] sits atop the world … secure in the knowledge that they rule because they deserve to rule, because they are the best.” Harvard is the place where the ruling class is educated and maintained.

Both Harvard and Bethel are sold as known quantities—brands that parents can trust. Parents understand that Harvard means success. Bethel promises a solid education in an evangelical setting. At Bethel parents know their children will be kept safe from godless professors, a sexualized culture, and binge drinking—and may even find a good Christian spouse. Their children will enter as Christian teenagers and leave as Christian adults. And at the end, after the entire bill is paid, both sets of parents will be happy.

Harvard is fully entrenched in the world of the American Dream, the world of liberal piety, capitalist joy, status, and money. To a degree Bethel is caught in this same world. Bethel wants to be high on the US News and World Report college rankings, proudly informing donors and prospective students that it is the eighth-ranked university in such-and-such region. It wants recognition for its success as a school educating doctors, professors, pastors, professionals, teachers, and nurses. It wants its students to go out and claim great fame and success. It wants all this, yet Bethel is an avowedly Christian school that is “committed to a distinctly evangelical Christian philosophy of education.” Bethel’s definition of success is constrained by the calling of God to live in the Kingdom of Heaven. In God’s kingdom success is not measured by the percentage of alumni that give money or which former students walk the halls of power or the latest academic research. In God’s Kingdom success is loving God and loving your neighbor and giving hope to the hopeless and blessing your enemies. Unfortunately for Bethel, these are difficult things to measure and even harder to execute. How do you help students see the Kingdom of God? Where is the course that trains Samaritans to be good?

Bethel’s particularistic commitments are sharply at odds with Harvard’s fervent pluralism. In step with the wider culture, Harvard is dedicated to Tolerance. As long as the students are happy with their moral position, then so is Harvard. Harvard is Las Vegas to Bethel’s Vatican City. Where Harvard turns a blind eye to rampant pornography, Bethel combats it.

It’s true that, in this admirable desire to mold Christian character, Bethel is too often simplistic in its answers. Like many other Christian schools, Bethel has a lifestyle statement that focuses on prohibiting drinking, premarital sex, and other vices. Students are exhorted through Bible studies, chapel, church posters in the hall. This unceasing barrage, this chorus of affirmation and certainty, however well intentioned, leaves many students frustrated and cynical about Christianity, especially in its evangelical permutations. In our moments of doubt, fellow students may urge us to “just pray about it and believe.” It seems that questions are wrong and doubting is faithless. Like many a good parent, Bethel has a hard time letting students find their own way in becoming adults.

But then comes a moment when we notice that Bethel hasn’t simply replaced our parents in telling us what to do. To our surprise, relief from cynicism is found in the classroom, where professors honestly and humbly engage difficult issues of literature, history, physics, philosophy, and a life well lived. This is Bethel’s secret: it is a school blessed with a group of wise and wonderful professors who ask hard questions and seek honest answers. From my freshman discussion of the nature of faith in Shusaku Endo’s Silence to my senior Literary Theory course where voices quivered in defense of feminism, I found professors who didn’t allow unexamined convictions to pass unchallenged.

The faculty at Bethel engage in students’ experiences and provide a framework for students to understand their changing lives. Professors show by their example what it means to be a Christian living an intellectually full and honest life. This direct interaction with strongly committed teachers is what makes Bethel work as a school.

For all the glories of its faculty, Harvard does not offer this intensive interaction. By Douthat’s account, Harvard “rarely rewards devotion to undergrad education.” Its professors are off doing research, maintaining tenure and status, and traveling far and wide, leaving the dirty work of teaching undergrads to graduate student assistants. The demands of faculty to produce and to be a success are too high to bother with teaching.

Outside the classroom, Bethel’s audacious mission to encourage Christian discipleship provides abundant opportunities for service: mission trips to Mexico, tutoring in Minneapolis, volunteering as tax preparers for the poor, and countless others, large and small. Harvard, of course, offers similar opportunities, and I’m sure that many students there (Christian and otherwise) give their time and energy to service (just as there are many at Bethel who can’t be bothered). But the ethos of Harvard, as Douthat describes it, is fundamentally about success. Harvard will prepare the way for you.

This has certainly been true for Douthat himself. At Harvard he wrote for the Crimson. He interned at National Review and went skinny-dipping with William F. Buckley, Jr. From Harvard and National Review and the drive to succeed he landed at The Atlantic Monthly, where he wrote Privilege. He’s been interviewed by NPR and skewered by Slate. His book has been widely and (mostly) favorably reviewed. At the age of 25 he is wildly successful, and he clearly deserves it. He is a very capable and insightful writer who will go on to do great and good things. But his success is due in part to Harvard—the institution, the education, and the culture.

Success, in an odd way, found me too. From Bethel I got work on an Indian reservation and rode horses with Lonnie Little Bird and saw a world outside my own. From Bethel I struggled to teach math to a kid who can’t get 2 + 9 and learned to love a neighbor. From Bethel and tutoring I landed at St. George’s in London, a window on the wider world.

Bethel was good to me and Bethel was hard for me. It was a strange place, mixing stereotypical puritanical living with the boundless love of God—signing covenant statements about community while finding community in the inner city of Minneapolis. At the beginning Bethel, for me, was not a place of hopes and dreams; rather it was a place of societal duty. I needed a degree, and Bethel would provide one. But by the end of my four years, I was surprised by what I had learned and how I had changed. At Bethel I began to understand how to live a good life, a kind of success even Harvard might envy.

Nathaniel Taylor is a dutiful Starbucks employee and sometime tour guide residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The top-selling golf books on Amazon.com aim to help you play the game better, from The Plane Truth for Golfers (about the plane of the golf swing) to Tiger Woods’ How I Play Golf. The only non-instructional book in the top ten features Phil Mickelson’s ruminations on who and what helped him win the 2004 Masters. Keep scrolling down and you’ll find the occasional biography or history among the 6,700 books listed, but you’ll be overwhelmed with instructional books.

It isn’t until you get to 107th place that you run into Deepak Chopra’s Golf for Enlightenment, a book that aims to teach seven lessons of “the game of life.” And then come thousands more books about shaving strokes from your score.

It appears that golfers don’t give a rip whether golf can teach them something about life. They just want to consistently drive the middle of the fairway, hit the green in regulation, get out of sand traps in decent shape, and sink those birdie putts. And they’re willing to spend money on books that help them do that.

Christian publishers publish books to help people think about all of life from a godly perspective. Since golf is considered at best a mere diversion, and at worst a game that tempts one to use the Lord’s name vainly, Christian publishers usually don’t show much interest in golf.

Unless the book can help readers think better or live better for God—thus three of the books reviewed here. The Chopra book does the same thing, but from a pop-Eastern religion-cum-Western-psychology perspective. The target audience for such books, presumably, is golfers who want to be better people.

But as I noted, golfers don’t want to be better people. They want to be better golfers. As the Amazon rankings suggest, these books are destined to collect dust on the shelves of golfers who have received them as Father’s Day or birthday gifts.

Moral golf

Don’t get me wrong. These books have virtuous things to say. For example, each of the nine chapters in Roger and Becky Tirabassi’s Transform Your Game begins with a lesson about golf, which is then applied to life. It nearly goes without saying that I would be a better golfer and person were I to “Practice like the Pros,” “Play by the Rules,” and “Overcome the Hazards.”

Another example: In The Heart of a Golfer, Wally Armstrong devotes a chapter to “Trust Your Swing.” After three pages of golf anecdotes and advice, he concludes by reminding readers that we can “trust Christ with our future.” I’m unconvinced by the analogy, but there’s no doubt that both bits of advice are salutary.

Finally, in Life Lessons from the Game of Golf, Steve Riach profiles professional golfers and their character traits. So Payne Stewart’s chapter focuses on “faith” and “influence,” and Jack Nicklaus’ chapter is about “sacrifice” (though it is mostly about his wife’s sacrifice in letting Jack practice and trot around the world while she raised the family; stretching illustrations to the breaking point is a common occurrence in such books).

Deepak Chopra’s lessons are more mystical—”Find the Now and You’ll Find the Shot,” “Play from Your Heart to the Hold,” “Let the Game Play You,” and so forth—but the result is the same: tidbits of advice for better living, from “Be willing to redefine yourself everyday” to “Don’t act when you’re in doubt.”

Of course, some of Chopra’s advice runs directly counter to Christian sensibilities. “We are here to nourish the self,” he explains early on. “The self is the source of your personal identity.” Still, he connects to his subject by explaining that golfers must first examine themselves and their attitudes before they can improve—a truism on which we can all agree.

Well and good. I am not about to argue against such virtues as they relate to golf or life. Self-control is an absolute necessity in both, as are perseverance and patience, and a host of other virtues.

Books in this genre, of course, are implicitly trying to get at a deep truth—that in golf, as in every sphere of life, there is spiritual truth to be mined. One’s instinct in this sport, as in all sports, is to assume that the spiritual fruit lies in the area of morality—that golf will make you a better person. A study of golfers on the course would suggest just the opposite, which is perhaps all the more reason these authors felt compelled to write these books.

But such books merely scratch the surface of “golf spirituality.” Indeed, golf is a sport rich in Judeo-Christian meaning, but books that express that meaning most simply and artfully are being written in the thousands already.

The Theology of Golf

By rich in Judeo-Christian meaning, I don’t necessarily mean rich in theological allusions—although golf has plenty of that. For example, it seems patently clear that golf is a living apologetic for hard-core Calvinism.

You hit a near-perfect iron to the green, so accurate it strikes the flag stick—and then ricochets off and ends up in a sand trap. So much for your perfect iron. On the next hole, you wickedly slice a drive into a thick cluster of trees, hear a frightening thud—and see your ball magically bounce out into the middle of the fairway. This sort of thing happens in every round. There is no sense shaking one’s fist heavenward or cursing the ways of this inscrutable god. If one wants to get on in the life of golf, the best posture is to humbly accept this god’s complete sovereignty and prepare for the next shot.

In this regard, golf is Protestantism on steroids. It is a purely individual sport. In team sports, the weight of salvation is shifted constantly, from pitcher to shortstop to batter, or from quarterback to lineman to linebacker. No one player has the burden for more than part of the game, and every teammate is there to bring encouragement one to another. In golf, the burden rests squarely on the shoulders of the golfer for every shot, from start to finish.

Since after every shot, golfers have between three and four minutes to reflect on that shot, we tend to become as introspective as the most anxious Puritan. And what we’re introspective about is our sinfulness—that is, how we’ve missed the mark once again—and what we can do to correct our wayward swing. The system of scoring in golf reinforces all this. It is the only system in which there is a direct correlation between the player’s sinfulness and his score: the less one misses the mark, the lower one’s score.

Golf can also be mined for how it plays into Christian mythology. It is the only major sport played in a garden—though many golfers spend more time in the wilderness. Even at average courses one is often impressed with the splendid aesthetic balance of grass, trees, flowers, and sand, and the way the eye is drawn down the green, curving fairway. If Wrigley Field is beautiful in its own way, for its pleasing symmetry, Pebble Beach is positively Edenic in its splendor.

In addition, the structure of the game harkens more to salvation history than do other sports. Baseball in this respect is more like a Greek tragedy. You play an inning, run around the bases, and the next inning you find yourself back at home plate, where you start all over again—that’s history as a circle. In golf, you begin with a goal on the horizon, toward which you travel. And then when that trek ends, with the ball resting safely in the hole, you walks to the next tee to commence another journey. This is history with a telos, an eschatological goal.

Still, as intellectually entertaining as such theological ruminations are, they fail to get at the heart of what makes golf a deeply spiritual activity. To do that, we need to talk about the nature of play.

Play Is the Thing

In his classic Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Catholic scholar Johan Huizinga explains that play is “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the play intensely and utterly. … It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.”1

As such, play is “the first act of freedom,” says Michael Novak in The Joy of Sports. “The first free act of the human is to assign limits within which freedom can be at play. Play is not tied to necessity, except to the necessity of the human spirit to exercise its freedom, to enjoy something that is not practical, or productive, or required for gaining food or shelter.”2

Play is what it is precisely because it aborbs us “intensely and utterly” but for no apparent good reason. Play is play when it is engaged passionately and pointlessly, when it doesn’t do any good by our usual calculus. If we play primarily to stay in shape or to build character or to make a lot of money, the activity is better called exercise or catechism or work.

Play is play, then, when it mirrors the Sabbath—a day in which nothing useful (by human reckoning) gets done. Though we usually speak of the Sabbath as rest from labor to get ready for another exhausting week of work, this is not its theological origin. God did not create and participate in the Sabbath because he was worn out after fashioning the universe. Instead, the Sabbath is the seventh and final act of his creation, and as such is the culmination of Creation—the point of it all.

The Latin Vulgate translation of Proverbs 8:30-31 runs like this: “I [Wisdom, i.e., Christ] was at his [God’s] side putting together everything, my delight increasing each day, playing before him all the while, playing in this world made of dust, and my delight was to be with the sons of men.” Or, as Thomas Aquinas saw it, in Luiz Jean Lauand’s summary: “God plays. God creates playing. And man should play if he is to live as humanly as possible and to know reality, since it is created by God’s playfulness.”3

Modern scholars recognize that the original Hebrew moves in a slightly different direction. Still, Aquinas’ insight accords with the sweep of salvation history, which begins with the creation of the Sabbath and culminates with the Eternal Sabbath—characterized by freedom and joy in the presence of God. Remembering the Sabbath is crucial not simply because we need a break but because it manifests our origin and our destiny—the full sweep of God’s salvation history. When Peter Berger, in his Rumor of Angels, says that play (freedom and joy!) is a “signal of transcendence,” he’s getting at that connection between play and Sabbath.

That golf teaches virtues is all well and good. That it is a quirky metaphor for many theological themes, fine. But its real glory is to be found not in what it can teach us but in what it is: a game to be played.

Ironically, the eastern mystic Deepak Chopra comes close to grasping this theological take on golf. His chapters each begin with a fictional story involving Adam Seaver and Leela. Leela, he lets us know in a prologue, represents the way “ancient sages” define life—as a “game.”

“The divine game isn’t a competition but play for the sheer joy of it. It has the total innocence that comes naturally to young children. … We have to accept the divine gift that makes heaven out of life on earth.” A few paragraphs later, he quotes “one spiritual leader” (Chopra is vague at attribution) as saying, “When you look around, there is eternity in every direction.”

Then he applies all this to golf: “If you approach golf the wrong way, trying to manage its mechanics from the level of ego, these limitations are reinforced. If you approach golf the right way, letting your spirit be free to enjoy the leela, these limitations disappear.”

Chopra is fundamentally right about the nature of golf. Like all sports, it is all about leela, a Sabbath, from beginning to end. It’s all about play.

And Chopra is almost right about the nature of life. It is all about the Sabbath, from beginning to end, and therefore fundamentally about play—freedom and joy in God. As such, it has many moments when eternity is manifested within it—if only we have eyes to see.

Ah, yes, but Chopra, as usual, soon veers off into silliness. Sorry, Deepak, but a heck of a lot of golf is about mastering the mechanics of the swing, and there is only one entity that can practice those mechanics: the self. And the self, no matter how much he or she enjoys leela, will always and everywhere face limitations. It’s called finitude.

Chopra’s pseudo-mysticism soon leads him to say things that suggest he really doesn’t understand “play” after all. The hint comes when he says that play has a “total innocence that comes naturally to young children.” He apparently has not watched young children play. Lots of competition there, and some of it pretty intense. This discomfort with play as something that engages us “intensely and utterly” comes out later, when Leela tells Steve to simply stop keeping score and to “forget where the ball goes.” Chopra imagines that golf can be enjoyed by just swinging away at the ball with no goal, no telos.

Catholic theologian (also, as I recall, an NFL coach) Vince Lombardi put it most Christianly: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” This does not mean that anything goes, for as Huizinga notes play “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.” But it is not play unless it is engaged “intensely and utterly.” I’m not sure how golf can be played if you don’t keep score, and you don’t strive to keep that score low. It is these limitations and passions that are golf’s genius, at the very core of its freedom and joy. Chopra, in trying to transcend these limitations, ends up subverting the play element.

The Most Christian Golf Book in Recent History

Lest the Christian reader (and golfer) despair, there is hope, and hope aplenty. There are all sorts of books at Amazon.com that seek to help readers experience the theological essence of golf.

As a beginning, I recommend the most theologically informed and eschatologically hopeful golf book written in the last twenty years: Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. There are two reasons it remains very near the top of the list of bestselling golf books. First, it seeks to answers the golfer’s ongoing existential question: “How do you build a swing that you can depend on to repeat in all kinds of wind and weather, under all kinds of presses and pressure?”

Second, it proclaims a gospel—some splendid good news (caps are in the original): “THE AVERAGE GOLFER IS ENTIRELY CAPABLE OF BUILDING A REPEATING SWING AND BREAKING 80.” It is the kingdom of golf heaven drawn near.

Golf most reflects things divine when it is played as if it were nothing but human—proceeding “within its own proper boundaries of time and space.” It is an expression of human freedom most when it is played by “fixed rules and in an orderly manner” and “intensely and utterly.”

Golf books that teach you how to play the game better and better are really the most theological of golf books, because they take the game of golf most seriously, as if it were play. And though the Christian golfer should surely try to be virtuous while on the golf course, he is most Christian, and most virtuous, when he’s simply trying to lower his score.

Mark Galli is managing editor of Christianity Today magazine. He writes an occasional column for Christianity Today Online about theology and sports called “Play Ball.”

1. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Reprint: Beacon Press, 1971).

2. Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports: Endzones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit (Madison Books, rev. ed., 1993).

3. Luiz Jean Lauand, “Ludus in the Fundamentals of Aquinas’s World-View,” International Studies on Law and Education, Vol. 2 www.hottopos.com/harvard2/ludus.htm

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

By the standards that please accountants, administrators, and the people who do the numbers, times have never been better for Christian higher education, or so it seems. After all, over the last ten years, total enrollment at Christian colleges has increased by more than 45 percent, nearly three times the rate of growth at the 1,600 private colleges and universities in the United States, and ten times the growth of enrollments in state schools. Total undergraduate enrollment at member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities now stands at over 135,000, with probably another 40,000 enrolled in ancillary and graduate programs. Endowments of Christian colleges have begun to creep up into the fabled top 500 of college and university endowments. Wheaton, the richest of all the Christian colleges, ranked 145th in the nation in terms of endowment in 1993, and ran a budget of $45.3 million; in 2002, its budget was $63 million, and its endowment stood at $159 million. The same good things were happening in other places, too. Messiah College, for instance, was sitting on an endowment of over $65 million in 1994 (ranking it 202nd in the nation) and $94 million in 2002; Gordon College saw its budget soar from $29 million in 1998 to $39 million in 2001.1

The high times even trickled down to the faculty. A full professor at Eastern College took home $44,000 in 1994; at Messiah, $48,000; and at Westmont, $48,900. In 2003, the full professor at Westmont was earning $68,700; at Messiah, $65,100; and at Eastern, $68,500.

Nor does any of this seem to be a fluke. “Christian elementary and secondary schools, home schooling, and youth ministries are all thriving,” reported The Chronicle of Higher Education in a feature story in 1999, and they have provided a potent market for Christian higher education recruiting. Christian higher education has also developed more sophisticated marketing tools, and it has benefited from the increasing perception that secular and state schools offer little more than non-stop parties and binge drinking. And probably most surprising, Christian higher education has rocketed upwards in terms of academic and intellectual respectability. “Of all America’s religious traditions, evangelical Protestantism … ranks dead last in intellectual stature,” wrote Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe in 2000. But when Wolfe visited Wheaton College, he discovered that the students “are as outstanding as any in America,” while its faculty “are writing the books, publishing the journals, teaching the students, and sustaining the networks necessary to establish a presence in American academic life.” No longer, warned Wolfe, can Americans “write off conservative Christians as hopelessly out of touch with modern American values.”2

If news like this made for happiness, then we should be happy indeed. The problem is that it lacks context. The enrollment surge represents a great accomplishment, but its greatness is somewhat diminished by the fact that the total undergraduate enrollment of Christian colleges still amounts to only 1 percent of the 15 million or so students enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States. Institutional membership in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities stands at an all-time high of 130, but that amounts to less than 4 percent of the 3,600 colleges and universities in the United States—and at a time when self-identified evangelical Protestants number over 20 million Americans and comprise 7 percent of the population.3 In other words, only one in seven evangelical Christians is likely to attend a Christian college, although these institutions could—and statistically should—correspondingly carry three times as many as they do. Places like Indiana Wesleyan report enrollments of over 10,000 students; but 70 percent of Indiana Wesleyan’s students are part of its off-campus College of Adult and Professional Studies. Fully a quarter of the CCCU colleges and universities enroll fewer than a thousand students; fully a third enroll less than a thousand full-time undergraduates.

It’s not merely that the pool of students is disappointingly small. Christian higher education also has to compete with secular campuses where various Christian ministries have carved out “safe” spaces for Christian students. The success of Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and church-related college-age organizations around the country on secular campuses has undermined a major rationale for attending a Christian college or university. So long as Harvard, Dartmouth, or Penn State could be portrayed as quicksands of secularism, Christian colleges had an important trade-off to offer student recruits: the Ivies may offer a more prestigious education, but they’ll smother your spiritual life, and what will it profit a bright kid if he gains a Harvard MBA but loses his soul? Yet today at Harvard, “there are probably more evangelicals than at any time since the 17th century,” says Peter J. Gomes, the minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, and certainly no part of an evangelical himself. As Harvard expanded enrollments in the 1970s and 1980s, that “meant that a lot of Midwestern white-bread Protestant Christian evangelicals at whom Harvard would never have looked in the past, and who would have never looked at Harvard, suddenly became members of the university.” Evangelical students venturing into deepest, darkest Cambridge will still find more than enough hostility to Christianity to challenge their faith; but they’ll also find the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, the Asian-American Christian Fellowship, RealLife Boston, or Park Street Church’s Friday evening prayer fellowship in Emerson Hall. Campus Crusade alone has 27,000 staffers on 1,000 American college and university campuses. And as they grow, such ministries reduce the sense of threat and exposure evangelical students have to feel on secular campuses—and reduce, also, one of the major incentives for coming instead to a Christian college.4

Size, of course, is not a moral quality, so maybe I’m putting our attention on the wrong category. But acceptance rates may be moral qualities, since acceptance rates are generally understood as a good measure of how picky a college can afford to be, which in turn is supposed to indicate how stable (and tuition-proof) its financial position is. By that standard, not many of the Christian colleges enjoy much fiscal stability. For instance: according to the 2002 Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities, Huntington College accepted 650 new students in 2001—but this was almost 95 percent of those who applied, and only a third of the 219 who actually enrolled had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class. This suggests that Christian colleges are enormously eager to take whatever students sign up—which suggests, in turn, that they do so because, like the airlines, they cannot afford too many empty seats: Christian higher education is so dangerously tuition-dependent that it can’t be too picky about the caliber of student it enrolls. We apologize for this by reasoning that our educational philosophy is one of ministry, and ministry doesn’t turn people away. On the other hand, that type of student tends to be much more expensive to educate (for reasons I’ll come to in a minute); so even when increases in enrollment improve revenues, they also increase costs. As Melissa Morris-Olson wrote in 1997, “increased enrollments in colleges and universities have not necessarily resulted in improved financial conditions.”5 And the reason is that we are filling those seats with high-maintenance students.

Sadly, it is precisely Christian colleges and universities which are in the weakest financial position for dealing with such students. Whatever the high-number financials are for a Wheaton or a Messiah, the truth is that they are depressingly lower for most of the rest of Christian higher education. In 2002, while little-known Carnegie “Master’s Colleges and Universities” like Rider University enjoyed revenues of $111 million (or Suffolk University, which had $127 million, or my old neighbor, Villanova University, which had $285 million), Christian colleges in the same Carnegie category went a-begging. Eastern had revenues of $47 million, Geneva had $33 million, Malone had $32 million, and enrollment powerhouse Indiana Wesleyan reported only $55 million. That pales beside the revenues enjoyed by the top-flight Carnegie ‘Baccalaureate’ colleges that places like Gordon, Wheaton, and Eastern think of as their real counterparts. The wish, in that case, is only father to the thought, since none of the CCCU schools—not even Wheaton—could match the $110 million in annual revenues enjoyed by Amherst (or Amherst’s $877 million endowment), the $128 million reported by Grinnell (or Grinnell’s $1.111 billion endowment), or the $129 million enjoyed by Oberlin (with its comparatively modest portfolio of $537 million).

The wild ’90s were good for nearly every college or university endowment, and almost all Christian colleges experienced endowment growth. But compared broadly, that growth was amazingly meager. Wheaton’s place in the endowment ranking actually slipped to 159th in 2002, and 166th in 2003; Messiah fell 100 places to 302nd by 2002, and skidded to 320th in 2003, losing 6.4 percent of its endowment value in the bust year of 2002. Seattle Pacific, which was lodged at 398th in 1994, was mired at 575th in 2003.6 Over the same decade that Harvard and Princeton tripled their endowments, the rate of endowment growth at Wheaton was a third less, while Messiah’s grew by only 60 percent. Either because development officers at Christian colleges are unusually modest in what they ask for, or (what is more likely) donors are concluding that their dollars buy them more prestige at Harvard than Messiah, the financial base of Christian higher education seems actually to be shrinking, rather than growing. And the closure of William Tyndale College, despite a takeover by Regent University and a influx of $1 million in cash, may well be only an indication of what the lengthening financial shadows of Christian higher education are pointing toward.

As the costs of private higher education across the board soar ever upwards, and as the purposes of college education turn ever more vocational, only the most élite of private liberal arts colleges are likely to survive in their current configurations. And especially for Christian liberal-arts colleges, which are disproportionately grouped in the upper Midwest, the question will eventually be asked: Why do we need 13 Christian colleges in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois? Why, for that matter, do we need three in Pennsylvania? Even the schools which do not finally succumb to the pressures of finance and under-enrollment will still be asked whether merger and consolidation offer a better deployment of resources that are clearly strained to the limit. Inevitably, we will have to wonder whether we are better served by 130 financially edgy colleges, or fifteen combined and (hopefully) stable ones. And inevitably, too, there will be an unholy amount of jockeying among certain Christian colleges whose idea of consolidation will amount to little more than a Darwinian absorption of their lesser-endowed fellows.

What grinds this comparison in deeper is that places like Amherst, Grinnell, and Oberlin were all themselves once Christian colleges—all of them, in fact, founded in the 19th century by righteous Congregationalists who were convinced that Harvard, Yale, and the other old foundations of American higher education had gone rubbery. They are, in effect, enjoying the fat incomes that were originally designed for Christian tables.

Or perhaps (and this is more unsettling) their trajectory reveals the direction Christian higher education in America eventually goes when even modest success comes knocking at the door. I suspect that many of Christian higher education’s schools suffer most, not from lack of money or lack of management, but from a dismaying level of confusion over their exact purpose, a confusion which often begins in the sorry tale of finance that I have just recited, and ends in the loss or crippling of Christian mission. James T. Burtchaell’s sobering 1998 study, The Dying of the Light, chronicles with relentless dismay how the press of finance led to the crumbling of mission in precisely the places Oberlin, Grinnell, and Amherst once were. Until the Civil War, higher education in America was almost entirely private and Christian—not Christian in the sense of an explicit commitment to faith-learning integration, mandatory chapel and Bible courses, or any of the attributes CCCU schools today use to identify themselves as self-consciously Christian, but Christian in the sense that they had been founded by churches, were staffed by clergy and overseen by boards of clergy, and assumed that their students already possessed a Christian identity from their churches which required only a moralized liberal arts curriculum to polish up. Of the 109 undergraduate colleges in the United States in 1848, not more than ten could be classified as secular. But during the Civil War, in an effort to promote “scientific” modes of agriculture, the federal government undertook a massive legislative intervention in the form of the Land Grant College Act to finance (from the sale of federal lands) the establishment of state-owned vocational schools. In time, these vocational colleges expanded their focus to include teacher-training, engineering, and a number of other “mechanical arts.” Between 1862 and 1910, state-financed higher education posed a serious challenge to the reign of the private, church-related colleges, and the colleges responded in three ways:

(a) they turned to new sources of financial support, such as trustees, alumni, foundations, and industry, many of which required a toning-down of particular religious viewpoints if the colleges were to appeal successfully for the donations of wealthy individuals not of their particular persuasion (a Baptist college, for instance, was not likely to get much money from a Presbyterian financier if it unwisely flaunted its Baptist distinctives);

(b) they turned to new forms of governance, recruiting academics-cum-administrators rather than clergymen as presidents, and deep-pocket philanthropists as their trustees; and

(c) they turned to new forms of professionalism, as they looked to recruit ever-more prestigious faculty—faculty, unhappily, whose first allegiance was to their professional guilds or disciplines, rather than to the church that stood behind the college.7

And so, by a long process (sometimes very long: Princeton still maintained mandatory chapel for undergraduates as late as the mid-1960s), the Christian identity of places like Grinnell, Oberlin, and Amherst was steadily effaced, to the point where one can hardly recollect that they ever had any religious connections at all.

I am not sure that the same developments promise to be any less lethal to Christian higher education today. Lacking endowments sufficient to ensure fiscal stability, and finding the tuition revenue generated by increased enrollments mysteriously proving inadequate to their expenses, Christian colleges turn first to their boards of trustees or directors. Since more than three-quarters of the CCCU schools were organized under the umbrella of evangelical denominations, their boards were originally expected to contain a substantial representation of their sponsoring denominations (in at least two cases I have had direct contact with, even faculty and administration were expected to be members of that denomination). But these were exactly the trustees who were least likely to prove equal to the task of supplying budget shortfalls, and that has meant that the boards of evangelical colleges have recruited some unlikely converts to their governing agencies—individuals who are either well-endowed themselves but of meager religious profile, or else religiously sympathetic but not so well-schooled in evangelical theology as to know what part of the foot goes into the shoe first. This, then, casts board members into roles in the life of Christian colleges for which they may not be well-prepared. And that only speaks to the well-intentioned. In too many instances, board candidates are recruited without any explanation of what a board is supposed to do, recruited sometimes for the prestige they get from being a trustee, or recruited without commitment to putting time or effort into dealing with “problems.”

Boards, in order to stay on top of this managerial explosion (and also because this is the only way their business-world backgrounds have conditioned them to see matters), have increasingly turned to non-academics as their presidents—people, in other words, who have either never lived inside academe, or who have ever only held administrative or development posts in higher education, and who tend to see a college’s imperatives in business-driven, rather than mission-driven, terms. As late as the 1980s, the majority of presidents of Christian colleges were academics with terminal doctorates in some recognized discipline, while the presidents of Bible colleges were usually holders of undergraduate theology degrees and graduate education degrees. By the end of the 1990s, however, barely more than half of the Christian college presidents had a Ph.D. Only 8 percent of those were in the humanities and only 11 percent in theology or biblical studies; more than half had been career administrators. These are not prophets or the sons of prophets; they are managers.8

The same imperative that pushes Christian colleges in pursuit of managerial leadership also pushes them in pursuit of prestige faculty, who, presumably, can act as enrollment magnets (and, incidentally, as hiring trophies for administrators). We want, naturally, the best faculty talent we can get, and we want to get it from the best schools. But the “best” schools frequently turn out to be also the most secularized ones, which means that we are likely to find ourselves recruiting people who are already deeply enculturated in the value systems of élite universities, and who cannot be easily persuaded to abandon them for the missions of Christian colleges. Or else, we recruit faculty whose professional expectations have been shaped by the research university, and who experience disgruntlement and communicate disaffection when they discover the teaching loads and salaries on offer in the cash-strapped Christian colleges.

Even when we are able to recruit new Ph.D.s who can pass doctrinal muster, the passing grade is often not a high one. Lacking much theological training beyond Sunday school, faculty are often unwilling or unable to fully embrace and explain the mission of a particular Christian college. Pascal once remarked that “pious scholars” were rare, and this would not be a bad thing for search committees to commit to memory. In some cases, I have seen Christian college faculty positively pride themselves on being only “amateur” or “lay” theologians, on the grounds that they are much too committed to their disciplines or their students to acquire deep theological learning. (I have found this to be especially true in those evangelical traditions, like the Anabaptists, which have long histories of anti-intellectualism.) Unhappily, theological amateurism often becomes a vacuum into which secularism fears not to tread. In 1996, a Bethel College student, Andrea Sisam, went to the extraordinary length of suing Bethel for forcing her to view in class selections from the film The Tin Drum, which included scenes of simulated oral sex; and I remember being recruited for a senior administrative post at another Christian college, and being asked how I would respond to parents who were upset when a faculty member in the arts assigned Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs to his students.9 All of this is certainly first-rate academics; whether it is still Christian is a good question, and one which I expect was once asked at Oberlin, Grinnell, and Amherst, too, before the tide washed the questioners away.

Can Christian institutions choke on their own success? Quite possibly, and especially on the success we have most prided ourselves upon, which is student enrollments. We concentrate on the increased enrollments without also asking what it is we are increasing our enrollments of. And that may be a much more troublesome proposition than the numbers themselves. As Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton noted in 1998, “students are coming to college overwhelmed and more damaged than in the past.” More than half of the campuses Levine and Cureton surveyed reported difficulties with student eating disorders; 44 percent reported campus disruptions, 42 percent drug abuse, 35 percent alcohol abuse, 25 percent gambling, and 23 percent suicide attempts. Nearly one-third of all freshmen grew up in single-parent households; and they are driven to college, not by a passion for learning, much less truth, but by terror that without a college degree they have nothing to look forward to but lives on minimum wage. There have always been problem students; but the numbers who bring problems with them to college have grown, as have the intractability of the problems (histories of sexual abuse as children, single-parent and dysfunctional homes, chronic psychological traumas and illnesses). The less selective a college can afford to be, the more likely it will see mounting numbers of the damaged among its student population.10

On the other hand, those students who come mercifully free of such problems pose problems of their own. Today’s college student arrives on campus with expectations very different than those of a generation ago, largely because advances in information-related technology have raised those expectations to the level of “normal.” Computer systems and internet access are no longer luxuries, both for on-campus communications networks and for personal convenience; but they still cost as though they were. Ubiquitous as the internet seems to be, it is also very much an infant technological tool; connections, systems, and usage can be surprisingly fragile—and maintenance, highly expensive. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently installed software for intercepting viruses that carried a $400,000 price-tag. Just as with administrative costs, the greater the drive to enroll more students, the more expectations are laid on technology, and servicing those expectations may turn out to cost more than the gains made by enhanced enrollments.11

But more than mere problems among students, there is the cultural dilemma of what Peter Sacks savagely lampooned as The Attitude, a postmodern sensibility of “utter disengagement” which expects entertainment, is puzzled by demands for work, and which regards the reading of books or the application of reason as being nearly as foreign as the other side of the moon. Postmodernism has given us a generation steeped in “consumerism, entertainment, and entitlement,” complained Sacks, and in an institutional environment governed by managerial administration and cost-focused boards, woe to the faculty who sit lightly by these demands.12

Surely, you argue, Christian institutions should simply rebuff these ungodly attitudes as firmly as they rebuffed the ungodlinesses of earlier decades. Except that my own experience of Christian education is that rebuffs are expensive, and culture is powerful. I have seen played out before my own eyes the tendency of evangelical Christians to deplore certain behaviors, find that the deploring has only gotten them strange looks and marginalization by the dominant culture, and then discover ways of rationalizing those behaviors. A female faculty member at a Christian college in California confessed her horror to me, more than a decade ago, at how easily abortions could be procured there—and how readily parents, who liked to talk pro-life politics in public, paid for their daughters’ abortions in private. Litigation-shy administrators have turned to an evangelical version of don’t-ask-don’t-tell to deal with gay and lesbian faculty. Binge drinking is ignored by residence life directors and student-life vice-presidents who know that trustees and parents will vent their wrath on them, not the drinkers.

Even when trustees finally do attempt to intervene in a principled fashion, they are not likely to be thanked for it. When Huntington College dismissed “open theism” advocate John Sanders last fall for theological cause, the college president criticized the decision” because it “could be a blow to academic freedom.” I suppose it could. But why, in a Christian college, do we now declare that secular academic virtues are more important than questions of Christian doctrine?

“Christian colleges … profess Christian doctrine and practice as our defining feature and our primary driving force,” laments Eric Miller of Geneva College, “but a stroll through the campus bookstore, or a visit by an accrediting agency …. remind me of the extent to which we at Christian colleges, despite our clear differences of belief and behavior with our secular equivalents, swim in the same polluted waters.”13 After so much effort at creating and supporting Christian higher education, it is almost the worst judgment we could hear, and yet it springs at once to mind: why bother?

It’s the unaffected willingness of evangelicals to accommodate themselves to the spirit of the age that so deeply troubles me. I do not say this merely because I am besotted with the old wineskins. I have spent a quarter-century in Christian higher education, and with only a few sunspots of grief. It is the city of my first love, and God forbid that anyone should hear this as anything but the faithful wounds of a friend. I also am describing systemic, not personal, dilemmas, and those dilemmas are actually not all that far removed from the pressures secular liberal-arts colleges experience. But for Christian colleges, the dilemmas are complicated by the issue of faithfulness, which we gloss over to our peril, but which also has no easy solution once we trade in conviction for professionalism. At the end of the day, I would prefer conviction, even if the conviction is a little oddball, to professionalism which dies the death of a hundred moral updates.

It would be horrific to think that evangelicalism cannot keep its colleges, that what happened to Grinnell or Amherst or Oberlin—or Yale or Harvard or Dartmouth—is indicative of a deep-seated weakness in the evangelical mind that insists on playing itself out in an endless spool of accommodation and conformity. We hear the call of our Savior to be in the world, but not of it; we hear the demand of the prophets to serve God and not Baal; but we also hear the call of our cultural Sirens, and we discover that we do not believe what we hoped and thought we believed. What we believe in is management, financial survival, increased enrollments, and growing endowments, all the while crying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord is here. My friend Mark Noll made quite a sensation in 1994 when he published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a jeremiad against evangelical anti-intellectualism; and right as he was in what he said, he may not have been right enough. What we may suffer from even more seriously, more than just a scandal of the evangelical mind, is a scandal of the evangelical heart—or, as Ron Sider has it, a scandal of the evangelical conscience, a shrinking back from the costs and penalties which a testimony against the culture of American higher education will require, a leaving of our first love. Today, our calling as evangelical Christians in higher education may be, as T.S. Eliot said, to “make perfect our wills.” Doing so may be the only hope we have of saving our minds.

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. His book Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster) was cowinner of the Lincoln Prize, the second time he has won this annual award for the most outstanding work of scholarship on Lincoln.

1. The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s annual surveys of pay and benefits of leaders at private and public colleges and universities also include data on expenditures and revenues. See the surveys for May 5, 1993 (pp. A17-A24) and October 23, 1998 (pp. A-39-A58) for the data referred to here. This data, and the data on endowments which I have drawn from The Chronicle’s annual endowment rankings, can also be accessed through The Chronicle‘s website at www.che.edu.

2. CCCU Directory and Resource Guide for Christian Higher Education (CCCU, 2000), pp. 13-14; Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities (Thomson/Peterson’s, 2002), p. 1; Leo Reisberg, “Enrollments Surge at Christian Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5, 1999, pp. A42-A44; Alan Wolfe, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” The Atlantic Monthly (October 2000), pp. 56, 58.

3. D.G. Hart, That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (Ivan R. Dee, 2002), pp. 4-5. There are many ways to count “evangelicals,” and other sources arrive at much higher figures.

4. Neil Swidey, “God on the Quad,” Boston Globe, November 30, 2003.

5. See the statistics on these institutions in the CCCU Directory and Resource Guide for Christian Higher Education and Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities (2002); Melissa Morriss-Olson, Survival Strategies for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU, 1997), p. 4.

6. Justin Ball, Justin Bell et al. “The Highest-Paid Leaders and Employees at Private Institutions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2003, pp. S14-S35; “College and University Endowments,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2004, pp. A30-32.

7. James Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches (Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 819-851.

8. James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, “The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money,” Harvard Magazine (October 1998), p. 6; John G. Plotts et al., “Career Paths of Presidents of Institutions Belonging to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities,” Research on Christian Higher Education, Vol. 6 (1999), pp. 137-146; Martin Finkelstein, “The Morphing of the American Academic Profession,” Liberal Education, Vol. 89 (Fall 2003), pp. 1-11.

9. Charlotte Allen, “Is Deconstruction the Last Best Hope of Evangelical Christians?”, Lingua Franca (December/January 2000), pp. 47-59.

10. Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton, “Collegiate Life: An Obituary,” Change (May/June 1998), pp. 14-17; Levine, “How the Academic Profession is Changing,” Daedalus, Vol. 126 (Fall 1997), pp. 6-10.

11. As it is, colleges and universities actually find it easier to raise money to construct new buildings than for the maintenance of them, and since it’s easier to defer maintenance on a dormitory than on a computer network, we are witnessing the rise of an attitude which proposes to dismiss building maintenance altogether. Build it, patch it, tear it down and replace it with another building, because it will, in the long run, be cheaper to replace it than maintain it. The cost to the quality of institutional life, however, is the creation of an atmosphere of impermanence and improvisation on a campus. “Financial Pressures Squeeze Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 19, 2003, pp. A8-13.

12. Peter Sacks, Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America (Open Court, 1995), pp. 9, 121.

13. Eric Miller, “Alone in the Academy,” First Things (February 2004), pp. 30-34.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Science proceeds by articles; theology proceeds by books. Einstein’s entire output in the celebrated annus mirabilis of 1905 was five articles that total seventy-five pages in length, while Louis de Broglie provided one of the foundational insights of quantum mechanics in a four-page paper in 1923. The defining works of theology, on the other hand, are more easily measured in pounds than pages—Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, Calvin’s Institutes, Barth’s Church Dogmatics.

Notwithstanding this difference—and it is just the first of many ways in which the two fields tend to attract and shape persons of rather different temperaments—science and theology both require years of training and immersion in their respective, highly specialized languages. Physics may only require a few pages to lay out a fundamental theory, while theology requires a few volumes, but mastering either one requires a decade or more of study.

Yet the questions that science and theology ask are of interest to far more individuals than can expect to grasp the answers in their full technical glory. Fortunately, between the forbidding technicality of Einstein’s papers and the off-putting heft of the average work of systematic theology, there is a kind of sweet spot: the invited lecture series. Such lectures constitute a genre all their own, defined by their unwritten but universal 60-minute time limit, the boundless curiosity and limited specialization of a general university audience, and—at least if the lecturer is John Polkinghorne—the capacity of an elder statesman to sort out with uncommon clarity the core issues of his field. And the result of these lectures—again, at least if the scholar in question is Polkinghorne—is a book that scientists, theologians, and lay people in every sense of the word can engage and enjoy.

Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality expands on the scientist-theologian’s 2003 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. The title and subtitle convey the distinctives of Polkinghorne’s approach. On the one hand, as the title suggests, this is not really a treatise on “science and religion,” with religion left so ill-defined that the book will frustrate practitioners of any actual faith. Polkinghorne is convinced that Trinitarian theology, anchored in “the scandalous particularity of the incarnation,” is a better vantage point for engaging science than religion in the abstract. On the other hand, as the subtitle suggests, twenty years of work as a theoretical physicist have led Polkinghorne to the conviction that science delivers truth about reality, and he is determined not to evade the implications that reality may have for the theory and practice of Christian faith. His account of science and Christian theology succeeds unusually well in doing justice to both sides of the conversation.

Indeed, one of Polkinghorne’s themes in Science and the Trinity is that science and theology have more in common than is often supposed. Philosophers of science have demonstrated the fundamental circularity of the scientific process: observations do not make sense without a theory, yet theories can only be constructed based on observations. The astonishing success of the scientific enterprise—the simple fact that mathematics, physics, and engineering form a continuum rather than being, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Jay Gould, non-overlapping magisteria—suggests that there is nothing inherently vicious about hermeneutical circles. Christian theology, no less than physics or chemistry, can be read as an attempt to make sense of real-world data—albeit a different sort of data—in a circular process of experience, theorizing, and “inference to the best explanation.” So theology can be subjected to many of the same tests of plausibility as those which give science its force.

The hermeneutical character of science—its dependence upon theory to make sense of empirical observation—is much clearer to us in 2005 than it was in 1905. Fundamental scientific theories have proven to be anything but the simple deliverances of experience that Enlightenment empiricists expected. No one expects general relativity to be obvious to an undergraduate physics major, no matter how compelling its elegance and simplicity may be to those who understand it. Rather, scientists have come to expect fundamental theories to be, in Polkinghorne’s apt phrase, “tough, surprising, and exciting.”

By the same token, Polkinghorne argues, we cannot dismiss Trinitarian theology on the grounds that it is not obvious, or even because it is never explicitly outlined in the founding texts of the Christian tradition. To the contrary, the claim that God is best understood as Father, Son, and Spirit represents generations’ worth of careful reflection on the data that confronted the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth and was preserved in the canon. “Of course this way of thinking is counterintuitive, just as so much of quantum theory is counterintuitive, but, just as in the case of quantum mechanics, that novel pattern of thought is forced upon us by the reality encountered and it does not arise from fanciful or unconstrained speculation.”

Yet as with any good scientific theory, the Trinitarian account of creation, redemption, and ongoing divine sustaining has explanatory power that goes far beyond the initial data. “A deeply intellectually satisfying candidate for the title of a true ‘Theory of Everything’ is in fact provided by Trinitarian theology,” Polkinghorne writes:

Our scientific ability to explore the rational beauty of the universe is seen to be part of the Father’s gift of the imago Dei to humankind, and the beautiful rational order of the universe is the imprint of the divine Logos. … [Scientists’] repeated experiences of wonder at the disclosed order of the universe are, in fact, tacit acts of worship of its Creator.

Trinitarian thought, too, makes deeply intelligible the extraordinary fruitfulness of the universe, its information-generating character, and the relational underpinnings that quantum mechanics suggests lie underneath our experience of individuality. All these features of our universe, for which science per se can offer no explanation, are deeply consonant with the Trinitarian “theory.” Tough, surprising, and exciting indeed.

So why do many scientists regard theology as the very antithesis of science? More than once in Catherine’s professional career she has heard fellow scientists dismissively say, “That’s religion, not science,” not meaning that the idea being dismissed is concerned with the nature of God and God’s relationship to the created universe, but rather meaning that it is fundamentally untestable. One reason for this ongoing misperception is that natural science is largely concerned with the reproducible behavior of the physical universe, whereas Christian theology is grounded in historical and particular events that are not subject to repetition and verification. This is a genuine and salient difference, even though scientists often forget that some of their own disciplines—such as astronomy and cosmology—rely extensively on historical data.

Yet Christians themselves have also contributed to this misunderstanding. Not long ago we were deep in conversation with friends (another physicist–writer married couple, as it happens) who asked Catherine with genuine curiosity how she reconciled being a Christian with being a scientist. When Catherine mentioned that she found the “theory” of the resurrection of Jesus to be by far the best explanation of the available historical evidence, one of them exclaimed, “I’ve never heard anyone talk about religious belief as based on evidence!” If many scientists have rarely encountered people of faith who expect their beliefs to be anchored in observable reality, that is not necessarily the scientists’ fault.

With his vigorous advocacy for the rational character of Christian claims ranging from the Resurrection to the Trinity, Polkinghorne does much to reclaim ground that has been needlessly ceded in the science–religion dialogue even by thinkers who identify with the Christian tradition, from Ian Barbour to Arthur Peacocke, let alone claimed by secular scientists like Carl Sagan and Steven Weinberg, who relegate religion to the realm of the subjective and irrational. Reading Polkinghorne, one begins to hope that the 20th century’s positivistic conceptions of “war” between science and theology may soon be a distant memory, and that even the patronizing rhetoric of “non-overlapping magisteria” may give way to a more mutually humble encounter between disciplines that recognize one another as both being enterprises fundamentally concerned with arriving at truthful accounts of reality.

The humility required does, however, go both ways. The implications of Polkinghorne’s subtitle—his insistence that science delivers an increasingly accurate and fruitful account of reality—brings at least as much of a challenge to certain Christian assumptions as Catherine’s explanation of the resurrection did to our friends’ assumptions about the basis for religious belief.

For science seems to Polkinghorne to demonstrate resoundingly that the universe is “evolutionary” in character. This observation is by no means limited to biology: from the unimaginable early seconds after the Big Bang, to the structure of quantum effects with their built-in uncertainty and probabilistic nature, observable reality in both its history and its present form is not static, but dynamic.

To be sure, Polkinghorne, along with many others, is quick to point out the extraordinary fruitfulness of the universe’s processes, to concur with Freeman Dyson that “the universe in some sense must have known we were coming,” and to argue persuasively that once again Trinitarian belief makes such fruitfulness intelligible. But Polkinghorne takes very seriously modern physics’ claim that the world is intrinsically indeterminate:

The God of love has not brought into being a world that is simply a divine puppet theatre, but rather the Creator has given creatures some due degree of creaturely independence. Trinitarian theology does not need to see the history of the world as the performance of a fixed score, written by God from all eternity, but may properly understand it as the unfolding of a grand improvisation in which the Creator and creatures both participate.

What does this imply about the classical theological—though not strictly biblical—language about God’s omniscience and omnipotence? God is not the biblical God if he does not know everything there is to be known. But to go the further step of insisting that the future is already there to be known in the same way as the present or the past is to make a claim not about God, but about time.

In a Newtonian universe of law-governed billiard balls, of course, the entire history and future of the universe is implicit in any given moment, since the initial conditions and the laws of nature determine all future outcomes. In such a universe, God would indeed “know everything” in something like the classical sense of omniscience. However, such a universe also precludes freedom, and any divine intervention would require the kind of arbitrary rearranging of billiard balls that will get you into trouble at the Humean pool hall.

But whatever its merits or limits, physics has known for nearly one hundred years that this simply is not our universe. Our world is shaped by probabilistic events that, most physicists believe, are not knowable before they occur. And while it is beyond the scope of physics to pronounce definitively on this, the quantum mechanical universe makes space for the possibility that the universal human intuition that we are genuinely free (within evident limits) is true. Likewise, the biblical claim that God is genuinely present and active in the world no longer requires us to describe that active presence in terms that defy physical law.

Polkinghorne’s approach to the broader question of divine omnipotence with respect to creaturely freedom is ingeniously faithful to the twin witnesses of Christian orthodoxy and contemporary science: Whatever limitations of either knowledge or power God has in relation to the created world are God’s own doing. The Creator is omnipotent—there are no limitations on the kind of universe he could have created, a point strikingly reinforced by the many features of our universe that could just as well have been otherwise. But the world that the Creator has in fact created is a world with space for freedom—indeed, a world that seems astonishingly carefully prepared for the natural development of creatures that can exercise their freedom. In this world, God’s knowledge and power are limited, but not because God is inherently limited. Rather, God has chosen to limit himself.

As Polkinghorne and a number of other theologians observed in the 2001 volume The Work of Love, this is a familiar idea with respect to the Incarnation—which for Christians refutes once and for all the Gnostic belief that God will have nothing to do with bodies. The Incarnation represented divine self-limitation and accommodation to an embodied creation, not a necessary limitation on God himself—kenosis, to echo the Greek word that Paul used in Philippians 2. Could it not also be, Polkinghorne and his colleagues have asked, that Creation involves kenosis? If so, we may need to abandon the Greek belief that God will have nothing to do with time.

It is worth noting how Polkinghorne’s approach diverges both from thoroughgoing naturalism and from the intelligent design (ID) movement. On the one hand, Polkinghorne appreciates the extraordinary “anthropic” fruitfulness of not just Earth but the entire universe, something to which hard-core naturalists can seem almost willfully blind. Yet he is not inclined to dispute the overwhelming

consensus of biologists that life has arisen through an interplay between “chance and necessity” generally termed “evolution” (though Polkinghorne insists that chance is not as “blind” as the biochemist Jacques Monod claimed).

For Polkinghorne, the developmental nature of both life and the cosmos are simply a natural consequence of the Creator’s gracious gift of freedom to the created order. Howard van Till, another physicist-turned-theologian, describes the universe as displaying “robust functional economy,” meaning that the universe was created containing the fertile complexity needed to develop the astonishing array of life we observe, without requiring further supernatural input.

None of this necessarily rules out the fundamental contention of intelligent design—that certain aspects of life are too complex to have arisen without the guidance of a designer. Yet it does reveal how limited id’s scope really is. On the one hand, ID attracts hostility from the scientific establishment because it seems to undercut science’s hopes of understanding the workings of chance and necessity in the world. On the other hand, the only Designer of which ID can speak is little more than a shadowy cosmic Engineer, ready to intervene with clever solutions to problems, but whose ultimate intentions are unknown and, within the scope of ID theory at least, unknowable. Polkinghorne’s Trinitarian account of a freely developing universe, on the other hand, can fully accept science’s understanding of reality while also making much more specific claims about the nature of the world’s Creator. That Creator turns out to be a loving Economist, a kind of endlessly resourceful Alan Greenspan, who creates and sustains an wondrously fruitful, free world.

Creates, sustains, and redeems—for perhaps the most notable and moving aspect of Polkinghorne’s recent work is his attention to the stringent implications of current cosmology. Our universe, no less than our own bodies, is truly “in bondage to decay,” inexorably descending into cold and lifeless disorder, albeit on a timescale of billions of years. Its ultimate futility poses a radical challenge not just to secular optimism but to any theology, such as process theology and its close relatives like panentheism, that has no place for the Creator’s transcendence of creation. If “the world is God’s body,” in the phrase that is popular among certain ecologically concerned theologians, God is terminally ill.

It is here that resurrection becomes such a vital theological category. “The antidote to apocalyptic pessimism,” Polkinghorne writes, “is the fundamental Christian picture of death and resurrection; a real death followed by real and unending new life, in which what had died is restored and transformed in order that it may finally enter into its ‘true glory’.” Not only bodies and souls but the cosmos itself will be rescued from bondage.

This hope depends upon a God who transcends the world yet has made himself known within it, just as orthodox Trinitarianism has always claimed. But here too Polkinghorne has something fresh to offer. The fatal defect in panentheism, he suggests, lies not so much in the idea that a time-bound, dynamic world could share in the life of a timeless God, but rather in an overrealized eschatology which assigns that participation to the “old creation” rather than to the “new creation” disclosed in the resurrected Son. “The new creation will be a world wholly suffused with the divine presence. … I do not accept panentheism as a present theological reality, but I do affirm the eschatological hope of a sacramental panentheism as the character of the new creation.”

Could it be that both time and bodies are part of God’s good creation and will ultimately share in God’s own life? If so, perhaps there will be time in the new creation to plumb the depths not only of theology’s massive books but science’s compact equations, making scientist-theologians—or even economists—of us all.

Catherine Crouch teaches physics at Swarthmore College.Andy Crouch is a writer and editorial director of the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Michelangelo’s early works, like those of most artists of his time, went unsigned. No one installed little plaques by the niches they occupied in churches or palaces to identify the sculptor, though people who knew art knew his. It wasn’t until he heard someone attribute the Roman Pietà to a rival that he entered St. Peter’s in the dead of night and chiseled his name on the stone at the Virgin’s feet to claim the credit due.

Intellectual property law has come a long way since then, and we threaten students with explusion and worse for failure to attribute authorship properly. Every year major research universities spend a portion of their budgets settling disputes about stolen credit for ideas, inventions, or discoveries to which a price tag has been attached. Now and then the Arts and Leisure section of a major newspaper reveals another artistic “hoax” or a case of misattributed authorship. The race to identify the structure of DNA and the much bitterer race to claim credit for discovery of the AIDS virus are now famous in the besmirched annals of scientific history.

But the most prolific presence in the history of human endeavor, the one who still gets the prize for the most varied and surprising range of creativity, is old “Anonymous.” “Anon,” we call him or her affectionately in bibliographies. Anon has produced some of the loveliest moments in the history of the arts: sonnets and statues, illuminated parchments and luminous chants. One of Giotto’s nameless apprentices painted a little fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua that exudes a sweetness and truth equal to any of the grander pieces surrounding it: a figure of charity, one hand extended upward, and other downward, where her gaze falls kindly on a kneeling supplicant at her feet. She gave what she received, and was able to do the one because she could do the other. In St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, an almost comic Virgin Mary, carved by some artisan who went home to several children and a potato dinner at night, gathers a crowd of assorted folk under her cape, looking benevolent but a tad bewildered at the bumptious lot she’s undertaken to embrace. I want to meet the stonemason who made her at some heavenly festival of the arts; he’ll still be chuckling.

In her autobiography Annie Dillard writes about a curious childhood habit of hiding pennies where strangers would find them and returning to the hiding places hours or days later to see if someone had been along to receive the surprise. Oddly, she did not wait and watch to catch the look of surprise and gratification on the face of the unknown beneficiary of her anonymous magnanimity. Imagining it seems to have been enough. It was enough to be a dispenser of grace—to commit, as we put it now, “random acts of kindness” and never be known for them.

By great good fortune I happened to be among the folks who contributed to the little volume called Random Acts of Kindness published by Conari Press in 1993. The writing of that volume came about in a highly unusual and creative way. The editors gathered a large group of friends and acquaintances at the publishing house, provided food, drink, computer terminals, tape recorders, pens, paper, and listeners, and a general atmosphere of celebration, and asked us to tell stories of random acts of kindness to them or to each other, or to write them down. When have people who had no reason to single you out and no expectation of reward been kind to you? When have you done that for someone else? The stories they gathered that night are simple, surprising, unsentimental testimonies to the forces of grace and generosity, still undefeated by capitalism, competition, and “enlightened self-interest.” The acts described were more often than not anonymous. “I never got her name.” “I never saw him again,” people recalled with a certain touched amazement, as though finally it was the indifference to recognition or reward that made the act of kindness something not simply humane, but sacred. Anonymous gifts leave no doubt about the motive. They reaffirm the criteria Paul offered as tests of real love: that it “vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, … seeketh not her own.”

It’s hard to square selflessness and anonymity with an economy that depends so entirely on the idea of credit. We “give credit where it’s due” because such credit establishes for us a place in the order of things; it confers power and authority on those who have earned them and, we assume, makes us all more secure knowing whom to trust. Banks assign credit levels depending on how thoroughly they know you as a consumer and can predict your getting and spending behavior. Students want credit for their work, and routinely quibble over the point that made a difference between a B+ and an A- because they’re headed for med school or law school where credit matters. They need what they have done to be reckoned to them fully. Eventually that reckoning translates into billable hours. All accomplishments must be duly recorded on a transcript or a résumé or a transaction log. Otherwise how would we know where to direct our respect, whom to rely upon, whom to hire, whose company to seek?

And what if we didn’t? What if we didn’t know exactly who was responsible for the donation, or the damage? What happens when we don’t know whom to thank or blame? What happens is a curious confusion that cuts both ways. When we don’t know whom to blame, we tend to do two things: we scapegoat, fixing the blame on the most convenient suspect, usually on someone we might for other reasons have wanted an excuse to blame anyway, and at the same time we generalize the blame, enlarging it to include whole classes of people or corporate forces whose vilification serves our purposes. Criminal acts and vandalism are generally anonymous (though even there the occasional “signature clue” testifies to the longing for credit), and their anonymity forces the community to reckon with something in which they themselves may be involved: neglect of youth, conditions that drive the poor to extreme measures to survive, abandonment of each other to domestic violence and “lives of quiet desperation.” An anonymous act always invokes community: we look around at one another wondering who it may be among us who has done this thing, find ourselves reassessing our relationships.

The anonymous act of generosity is perhaps the only thing that can offset the anonymity of crime. Consider what might be the opposite of the scapegoating, which cultural historian René Girard maintains is the oldest and deepest basis of human community. What if, instead of looking around to find whom to blame, we find ourselves looking around to figure out whom to thank? Who might have planted the flowers along the public path or left out cookies for the work crew or cleared the trash from the vacant lot? Suspecting one another of kindness, we might find ourselves looking with more benevolence upon each other, even, as theologian Jonathan Edwards put it, “toward being in general.” The anonymous kind act is a reminder that some spirit of goodness and grace does move among us, “blowing where it listeth,” and the unpredictability of its movements is part of the grace.

The discipline of anonymity is as difficult and as freeing as any authentic virtue: it upsets the order of things. It screws up the scorekeeping that keeps the game going and forces us to look beyond the game. It threatens a fairly reliable system of rewards and dares poverty. It is the kind of lofty, laughing freedom from goals and greed that Wendell Berry’s “Mad Farmer” challenges us to in his “Manifesto”: “So, friends, every day do something / that won’t compute. Love the Lord. / Love the world. Work for nothing. / Take all that you have and be poor.” In his admonitions the Mad Farmer simply underscores the examples of the greatest among us: real spiritual leaders arise among us from the anonymous ranks of the lowly and come as strangers “whose own receive them not.” We are taught to consider when we may be entertaining “angels unaware,” to give to “the least of these” and to care for those who are not our own—because in fact they may be. Anonymity makes a claim on us all. Those who belong to no one belong to everyone.

And those who remain anonymous voluntarily reap rewards unavailable to the rest of us. Knowing where they left the pennies for the rest of us to find is very likely a pleasure worth every sequestered penny and more. They give and go their way, free even of the burden of gratitude which, when it can’t be directed to them, disseminates around the gift like a fragrance that sweetens the polluted air we breathe.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre is professor of English at Westmont College.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Where once evangelicals had been united in a consistent critique of Roman Catholicism, today evangelical attitudes have become diverse in the extreme. These attitudes range from unilateral rejection through intense theological criticism to varieties of cautious acceptance and partnership. Some evangelicals have even responded to the contemporary Roman Catholic Church by converting. These positions—as antagonists, critics, partners, and converts—define a broad spectrum, yet each one also reveals something significant about strengths and weaknesses within evangelicalism itself.

Antagonists

Evangelicals who continue to reject Catholicism in toto feel that they have history on their side. They may not be fully informed about the details, but they are troubled about Catholic domination over civil affairs (as claimed, for example, in Unam Sanctam [1302], when Pope Boniface VIII asserted ultimate papal authority over both spiritual and temporal realms). They often know about the anathemas of the Council of Trent (1545—63), when Rome directly attacked key Reformation doctrines such as justification by faith alone through grace alone.1 They invariably know about the Catholic claim of papal infallibility from 1870, though they may not understand how that declaration was qualified.

In addition, all-out antagonists enjoy an immense reservoir of voices from the history of Protestantism on which they can draw for warnings about the dangers of Catholicism. The twenty-fifth chapter of the 1647 edition of the Westminster Confession, for example, describes the Roman pontiff as “that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition.”2 A. J. Gordon (1836—95), a devout Baptist who founded institutions that became Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, declared, “It is Satan who is the real Pope and his subordinate demons who are the real cardinals.”3 Though sometimes less vitriolic, evangelicals who espoused J. N. Darby’s premillennial dispensationalism regularly saw the Roman Catholic Church as the ten-horned beast of Revelation 17. Harry Ironside, who became pastor of Chicago’s Moody Church in 1930, assured his audience that the papacy would be revived and would once again clothe itself with royal purple and ecclesiastical scarlet, “riding the Beast.”4 Bible teacher Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895—1960), in his commentary on Revelation (first published serially 1934—42), wrote that “in the seventeenth chapter of Revelation God speaks of religious Babylon and identifies it with the Roman ecclesiastical system.”5 A few decades later, evangelicals registered their concern at the prospect of electing Catholics to American national office. Thus, evangelicals today who reject the Roman Catholic Church without qualification as a minion of Satan carry on a long tradition.

In the world of ordinary, nonlearned evangelicals, atavistic anti-Catholicism remains as colorful and unmistakable as ever. A representative is Jack Chick, a mysterious writer or team of writers responsible for some 400 million copies of cartoon booklets (Chicklets) in 70 languages.6 Typical is “Last Rites,” where John, a hapless Catholic, is hit by a car, receives last rites, and dies. After several attempts to bargain his way into heaven, he asks of Jesus, “Don’t you love the Roman Catholic Church?” A faceless Jesus replies, “How could I, John. Her false teachings are why you are going to the lake of fire.”7 In the tract “Are Roman Catholics Christians?” Chick traces the life story of Helen, a devout Catholic. After her first Communion, Chick asks, “What does Jesus think of the Roman Catholic Institution?” Answer: “He calls her the great whore.” Chick speaks of the Catholic mass as making Jesus a liar8 and the Communion wafer as the “death cookie.”9 It would be easy to dismiss Chicklets as an aberration except for the reception of these booklets. Catholic scholar Mark S. Massa notes that one Chick comic touches more people than most theologians and preachers hope to reach in a lifetime.10

But rejecting Catholicism is not limited to evangelicals who are paranoid or ignorant. In the heat of the debate after twenty evangelicals signed the first Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) document, R. C. Sproul, then a professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Florida, declared, “I am convinced as were the Reformers, that justification by faith alone is essential to the gospel and that Rome clearly rejects it.”11 A few years earlier, John Green, a Catholic and an undergraduate at evangelical Wheaton College, had to wonder why his world religion professor lumped Buddhism, Islam, and Catholicism together as non-Christian faiths. (Green graduated with two degrees from Wheaton and remained a Catholic.)12 A Wheaton faculty member who had signed ECT 1 received a letter from a high school friend, with quotations attached from the Council of Trent and the judgment that Catholicism “is a false gospel—a terrible gospel, a gospel if believed and followed will damn a person to hell.”13

Mission fields remain sites where mutual rejection between Catholics and evangelicals is strongest. When in the wake of ECT 1, articles in Christianity Today reviewed recent changes among Catholics, one letter writer complained, “Why did neither Colson nor McGrath urge us to consider Catholics as an evangelistic field desperately in need of the gospel?”14 The region that bears special witness to this kind of mutual rejection is Latin America, although some parts of southern Europe also continue to witness harsh evangelical-Catholic antagonism. The extent to which firsthand experiences of hegemonic, mechanical Catholicism can overpower recent openings to dialogue was indicated dramatically by events at the Seventh Assembly of the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) at Heddson, England, in March 1980. When the general secretary of the fellowship invited two Roman Catholics (one a well-known charismatic) to the gathering as observers, consternation resulted among the Southern European representatives to the WEF. The Italian Evangelical Alliance withdrew, and the Spanish Alliance suspended its participation.15 Meanwhile, in Latin America, despite the mutual respect initiated by Catholic and Pentecostal ecumenical dialogues, evangelical entry into Catholic territory still can lead to church-sanctioned violence. In sum, rejection of the Catholic faith as a less than Christian religion comes in many forms from many kinds of evangelicals for a variety of reasons.

Critics

However many evangelicals of however many stripes continue to regard the Catholic Church as a dangerous enemy of the gospel, many other evangelicals are now on record with a variety of more moderate criticisms. That variety can be summarized in the following categories.

First are those evangelicals who have taken careful note of recent Catholic professions about justification by faith but who just cannot believe they could be genuine. Such voices sometimes argue that so long as Trent remains a part of respected Catholic tradition, it is impossible to take seriously Catholics who profess to accept salvation by grace alone.16 Others are not satisfied unless and until Catholics affirm the exact shape of Martin Luther’s or John Calvin’s definition of objective justification before God.17 Still others say that if the Catholic Church maintains its traditional practices and teaching concerning Mary, it cannot truly affirm justification by faith.18 Yet others worry that the recent declarations on justification represent the victory of a will to unity over a reliance on truth.

Justification by faith remains at the center of evangelical concern. While ecumenical dialogues, especially between Lutherans and Catholics, have made enormous progress on this doctrine, many evangelicals remain less than satisfied. When the first ECT document appeared in May 1994, much of the criticism from evangelicals focused on perceived fudging about this doctrine. As a partial response, an Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals published “The Cambridge Declaration” on April 20, 1996. This document, signed by roughly one hundred evangelical leaders, including several college presidents, emphasized the five soli of the Reformation: sola scriptura, solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, and soli deo gloria. Each paragraph of the statement concludes with “We reaffirm … We deny … ” In these statements, the central matter of evangelical interest is obvious. For example: “We deny that justification rests on any merit to be found in us, or upon the grounds of an infusion of Christ’s righteousness in us, or that an institution claiming to be a church that denies or condemns sola fide can be recognized as a legitimate church.” Yet the Cambridge Declaration was considerably more than merely an anti-Catholic document. It also contained strong medicine for evangelicals, including warnings against marketing the gospel in terms of health and wealth, worship as entertainment for the self-centered, and church growth defined by sociological standards instead of the biblical gospel.19

Another flurry of reactions came in December 1997 after the publication of ECT 2 (“The Gift of Salvation”). Although this document emphasized that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone (yet with its terminology nuanced to fit both Catholic and evangelical understandings of these terms), certain evangelical leaders felt that, to preserve evangelical unity, a separate counterstatement was required. The result was “The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration” framed by a fifteen-member drafting committee, published in March 1999, and signed by 114 notable evangelicals.20 Yet this document, which criticized the ECT process, was not without its own critics. On one side, members of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals refused to sign it because to do so “may be interpreted as a tacit endorsement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”21 On the other side, Roger E. Olson of Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University criticized the document for making a forensic view of salvation essential to the gospel itself, therefore pushing Anabaptists (not to mention Catholics) beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy.22 The evangelical Congregationalist Gabriel Fackre cautioned that “accent on the penal and personal so dominates the text that other classical Christian teachings are muted or missing.”23 Similar criticism appeared in letters to the editor of Christianity Today, including one signed jointly by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., John G. Stackhouse, Jr., and Nicholas Wolterstorff, who objected that this new evangelical statement “focuses so much on justification and so little on sanctification.” These scholars also expressed surprise at “the affirmation that ‘saving faith includes mental assent to the content of the gospel.’ We wonder how God saves infants and mentally retarded people.”24 Such controversy might sound like inconsequential infighting within the evangelical debating club, but it was important as indicating the altered theological situation brought about by the engagement of evangelicals with the Catholic Church.

Some evangelical criticism stimulated by these discussions was not gentle. R. C. Sproul, for example, dealt more harshly with his evangelical colleagues who had joined Catholics in ways he considered inappropriate than with the Catholic Church itself. Beginning with the premise that the historic evangelical and official Catholic doctrines of justification were fundamentally irreconcilable, he assumed that “no matter what the authors’ intentions ECT involves a tacit betrayal of the gospel.”25 He concluded that “the light of the Reformation is waning,” and the “evangelical house totters on the brink of collapse.”26 Sproul implied that evangelicals who supported Catholic-evangelical initiatives such as ECT might fall under Paul’s censure of the false teachers who were troubling the Galatian church and perverting the gospel.27 Likewise, John MacArthur, Jr. cautioned fellow evangelicals that the moral solidarity pursued by ECT 1, though legitimate and in some ways salutary, could easily undermine essential Christian teaching.28

In the colorful controversy among evangelicals following the publication of ECT 1, letters to Christianity Today reflected considerable theological wariness, often directed toward the evangelical signers. For example, “Social activism … is not worth putting aside … the gospel of Jesus Christ, which includes salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, as revealed through Scriptures alone by the Holy Spirit. My hat is off to Mr. Colson for his zeal for unity, social activism, and spreading the gospel. However, to minimize the fact that evangelicals and official Rome preach two different gospels, which are mutually exclusive, is to deny reality.”29 Or, again, “I was appalled at Packer’s condescending attitude toward those who don’t buy his Catholic love affair. … He puts aside Scripture in favor of his agenda.”30

In response, J. I. Packer outlined the six major criticisms that he perceived among evangelicals worried about evangelical-Catholic rapprochement: (1) Catholic brotherhood with evangelicals is a mirage, (2) Catholics think that the Holy Spirit interprets Scripture through decisions of the church, (3) Catholics do not believe in salvation by faith alone, (4) Catholics see conversion as both initial turning and also a lifelong process, (5) many individual Catholic churches lack adequate biblical teaching to guide spiritual maturity, and (6) signers of ECT are illegitimately seeking organic unity with the church of Rome.31 Packer felt that these fears could be allayed. Yet his list nonetheless summarized points of major theological concern among evangelicals who remained skeptical about engagement with Catholics.

Nevertheless, as recently underscored by Gerald Bray, the Anglican professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, even evangelicals who remain firm critics of the Catholic system of belief and the Catholic Church are certain that individual Catholics may be saved “in spite of the system.” In Bray’s words, “They look at Catholics (as at everyone else) as individuals, and make up their minds accordingly. Of course, they will usually try to persuade converted Catholics to leave the Catholic Church and join an Evangelical congregation somewhere, but this is so that they can be properly fed spiritually, and not (usually) because they are just bigoted Protestants. They would say exactly the same thing to a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Baptist who was attending the wrong church.”32

Partners

Many evangelicals, though aware of continuing theological differences, are ready, as a response to Christ’s prayer for unity among his people, to partner with Catholics on many fronts. These fronts include social-political cobelligerency, the affirmation of “mere Christianity,” a common enjoyment of historic roots, the sharing of mission and ministry, and agreement on spiritual formation.

Cobelligerency

ECT 1 rested substantially on a desire for social-political cobelligerency. About half of the 8,000-word document was a general call to unity among those who bear the name of Christ. Of the remainder, gospel witness received 1,300 words (and most of the subsequent criticism). Civic participation got nearly 2,400 words.33 This emphasis was not surprising since ECT initiators Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus remain well known for their leadership in America’s culture wars. Cobelligerency is a term popularized among evangelicals by Francis Schaeffer and frequently used by J. I. Packer to speak of Christians linked with one another against forces of evil in contemporary society.34 In a similar view, Timothy George, Southern Baptist theologian at Beeson Divinity School, has spoken of an “ecumenism of the trenches.”35 Even Carl F. H. Henry, who would not sign ECT 1 because of doctrinal reservations, nonetheless supported the effort by evangelicals and Catholics to combat moral problems together.36

Advocacy for pro-life causes is probably the theme that most unites evangelicals and Catholics. David Neff, editor of Christianity Today, has written, “Today, classic theological liberalism is no longer the church’s main threat. As we enter a post-Christian world, one driven by consumer culture and the entertainment industry, we face more basic challenges, such as the radical devaluation of human life. In this context, we find ourselves standing with Catholic and Orthodox believers on key social issues.”37 While pro-life is often shorthand for a stand against abortion, thoughtful pro-life Christians (both evangelical and Catholic) also advocate care for the aging, medical care for the poor, adequate housing for all, and compassionate standards for immigration. Sometimes pro-life is extended to advocacy for peace, although Catholic ecumenical scholar Jeffrey Gros has noted that evangelicals tend to be less enthusiastic than Catholics about these broader expressions of pro-life.38 Keith A. Fournier, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice (affiliated with Pat Robertson), has argued that “Protestants and Catholics [need] to cooperate in their fight against the culture of death. … We Christians, regardless of our different confessions and traditions, desperately need to become allies to push back the darkness with the light of the Evangel and the empowerment of His Spirit.”39 Pat Robertson has made a similar point: “I know that people of faith were under attack as never before by common enemies so virulent that it was essential that we lay aside certain concerns over legitimate theological differences to join together and support things upon which we all agree, such as the sanctity of human life.”40 Of these evangelical affirmations of social-cultural cobelligerency, Catholic Jeffrey Gros asks provocatively, “Should it not be Jesus Christ that draws his disciples together, and not just a common enemy?”41

Mere Christianity

In defending participation in ECT 1, J. I. Packer enumerated his substantial disagreements with Catholic theology but then outlined a basic Christian faith that evangelicals and Catholics can hold in common—but which various liberal theologies reject:

The drafters of ect declare that they accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, affirm the Apostles’ Creed, “are justified by grace through faith because of Christ,” understand the Christian life from first to last as personal conversion to Jesus Christ and communion with him, know that they must “teach and live in obedience to the divinely inspired Scriptures, which are the infallible Word of God,” and on this basis are “brothers and sisters in Christ.” … Do we recognize that good evangelical Protestants and good Roman Catholics—good, I mean, in terms of their own church’s stated ideal of spiritual life—are Christians together? We ought to recognize this, for it is true.42

Packer’s sense that many evangelicals and Catholics share what C. S. Lewis famously called “mere Christianity” has become much more common over the last forty years. San Diego Christian Forum, based in Mount Soledad Presbyterian Church, provides one example of such an evangelical-Catholic affirmation. This church offers conferences on subjects vital to Christian thinkers that feature both evangelical and Catholic speakers. The vision statement of this church-sponsored forum reads in part, “While the form of the message of the conferences is irenic and inclusive, the content is Orthodox Christianity—what C. S. Lewis termed ‘Mere Christianity.’ “43

“Mere Christianity” becomes personal when an evangelical and a Catholic join in marriage. For Elizabeth and Karl Wirth, this kind of marriage represented a positive ecumenical statement but also brought a number of problems. Accepting each others’ “mere Christianity” did not diminish the salience of unresolved questions:

Is the Protestant formula of sola scriptura a proper guide to church doctrine? Has God consistently led the Catholic Church through his Holy Spirit, or are the Magisterium and papal infallibility serious heresies? How is a person saved? Are we saved in the present tense at all? Is the order of Christian worship fixed—centered on a feast on the real body and blood of Christ, or centered on the proclamation of the Word? … Can a group of friends just start a church, or is the church only to be led by those ordained by bishops in communion with the pope?44

Answers to such questions remained elusive for this couple, but the experience of a Catholic-evangelical marriage did highlight the need each tradition has for the other: “Not much in the Catholic culture helps a believer to progress beyond an eighth-grade understanding of the faith. … For their part, Protestants need Catholics to help them avoid becoming shallow and rootless. The Catholic Church brings two thousand years of theological reflection on every aspect of faith and culture.” Despite such breakthroughs in understanding, the Wirths still grieve that when their son gets older they will need to explain “why Mommy goes to Communion and Daddy doesn’t.”45

Shared Historic Roots

“Why should Christians today care about what the church fathers … had to say?” asked Christian History magazine of evangelical theologian Christopher Hall. His reply: ” ‘The Holy Spirit has a history.’ The church does not thrive in the first century, fail in the second, then revive in the sixteenth. The Spirit never deserts the church.”46 This sense of continuity in the church and of the work of God across the centuries has encouraged many evangelicals to seek out the historic roots of Christian faith.

For many, that search leads to the Catholic Church or at least to the Catholic Church before the Reformation. It can even encourage gratitude to the Protestant Reformers for leading the way. David Steinmetz of Duke Divinity School elaborates: “The Reformation is [in part] about the early fathers, whom the Protestants wanted to claim.”47 In his 1536 preface to the Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin tried to demonstrate to the Catholic king of France that his teachings were in complete harmony with the fathers. Steinmetz continues, “Calvin and [Philip] Melanchthon both believed it was a strong argument against a given theological position if you couldn’t find authorization for it in the Fathers. All the Reformers loved Augustine (Luther, remember, was an Augustinian friar).”48

As Steinmetz and other scholars of early Protestantism have explained, Reformers such as Calvin used early church fathers such as John Chrysostom because they appreciated these early figures as models and because they wanted to be connected to their spiritual ancestors. Since the Reformers too regarded innovation as heresy, in Steinmetz’s phrase, “The Reformation was not an argument about everything, but about just some things. It was not, for example about the Trinity or the two natures of Christ. … If we ask where these accepted doctrines came from—they came from the Fathers’ reflections on the Bible.”49

Some evangelicals with a theological bent imitate their Reformation forebears by tracing theological precepts through a thousand years of medieval monasticism, back through 500 years of the patristic period, eventually finding solid foundation in the New Testament, and then even deeper roots in ancient Judaism (as portrayed in Rom. 9—11). Protestant, Catholic, Jew: Christians enjoy a shared history with intertwining roots.

Richard Foster, a Quaker who attends an Evangelical Presbyterian Church, has been an important promoter of these deep, pre-Reformation Christian roots. His books Devotional Classics50 and Spiritual Classics51 provide readings drawn from the entire range of Christian history and from a variety of Christian faith traditions. Nearly half of the readings in each volume come from Catholic writers, with about half of these Catholic writings prior to the Reformation. The accompanying Scripture readings, prayers, and suggestions for practice offer spiritual nurture to evangelicals and Catholics alike.

InterVarsity Press’s Ancient Christian Commentary series is another evangelically sponsored venture that both feeds and develops evangelical interest in historic roots.52 This series presents what seventy Christian teachers of the first 600 years had to say about each text of the Bible. The resulting commentaries allow today’s readers to see Scripture through the various lenses of early (all pre-Protestant) teachers who studied these texts.

Another example of appreciation for pre-Protestant grounding is evangelical attachment to The Imitation of Christ, which was written a century before the start of the Reformation. Thomas à Kempis, a devout monk in the Brotherhood of Common Life situated in what is now the Netherlands, may have been the book’s copyist, its compiler, its editor, or (most likely) its author. Almost from the beginning of the Reformation, this guide to Christlike living has crossed the boundaries between Protestant and Catholic. It is available today in more than one hundred languages and has been read by more than one billion people. It has been called “the second-best selling religious book of all time”—second only to the Bible.53 Despite the obvious monastic setting of the book, evangelicals freely bring its spiritual challenges into their own time and space. That phenomenon, when joined to a growing interest in other pre-Protestant Christian literature, only strengthens the sense of a shared spiritual heritage.

Ministry and Mission

Local ministries that bring Catholics and evangelicals together now dot the globe and illustrate the potential of evangelical-Catholic partnership. A small sample illustrates these possibilities. John Armstrong, a Baptist from Carol Stream, Illinois, heads up Reformation and Revival Ministries. This organization sponsors conferences and publishes a periodical, Reformation and Revival Journal. Its speakers and writers come from both sides of the Reformation divide.54 Nearby in Chicago, John Green, a Catholic, works as founder and executive director of Emmaus Ministries, which cares for sexually exploited men. Emmaus Ministries is supported by foundations, churches, and individuals representing a broad spectrum of both evangelicals and Catholics.55 Logos Ministry in Southern California and Arizona reaches six thousand people each week in intensive two-hour sessions of Bible study. Catholic Bill Creasy, who teaches the Bible as literature at UCLA, heads up this ministry, but he attributes the work’s vision to evangelical Bible teacher J. Vernon McGee. A spinoff of Logos Ministry is Life Teen, founded by Monsignor Dale Fushek. This evangelism program has gone nationwide in eight hundred Catholic parishes throughout the United States, Canada, and eleven other countries. In Phoenix, Life Teen’s success among Catholic youth has drawn evangelical churches into the mix. Evangelicals there created their own systems of youth ministry based on the Catholic Life Teen model.56

Older evangelical ministries have also caught a similar vision for sharing their efforts with Catholics. Campus Crusade for Christ’s cooperation with the Light and Life Movement in Poland offers one exemplary instance. In Florence, Italy, another Campus Crusade team was asked by a priest to assist parish staff in guiding a system of women’s and youth Bible studies, which eventually touched hundreds of families in that city. Another Italian Catholic ministry, Alpha-Omega, borrowed concepts from Campus Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws” and created a similar document to use for Catholic evangelization.57 Youth with a Mission (YWAM) has created shared ministry with Catholic-evangelical staff in Malta, Ghana, Uganda, Austria, the Philippines, and elsewhere.58

Similarly, Young Life, an evangelical youth ministry headquartered in Colorado Springs, has been working on partnered relationships with Catholic youth ministries for some time. In 1991, Dan Ponsetto, a Catholic campus minister from Boston College, created a manual for Young Life workers aimed at helping them guide Catholic teens in their Young Life groups. It stressed particularly the different concepts of conversion at work and instructed Young Life workers in recognizing that Catholics view conversion as a lifelong process: “It is confusing or even insulting to talk to a young Catholic about becoming a Christian when he or she has been involved in years of weekly worship, religious education, retreats, and has made a conscious decision to receive the sacrament of confirmation.”59 Not all Young Life groups function in this way, but in some areas Catholics and Young Life staff partner well in bringing the gospel of Jesus to teens.

The large evangelical relief agency World Vision once had a rocky relationship with the Catholic Church, marked by charges of proselytizing and countercharges of libel. In the early 1990s, World Vision began to change direction by looking for ways to work with local Catholic churches in needy areas. World Vision’s work in the Philippines, for example, is guided by the World Vision Development Foundation, whose vice president in the year 2000 was Deogracias Iniguez, the Catholic bishop of Iba (Zambeles).60

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical campus ministry, co-sponsors an annual conference on theology. In 2002, that conference, held at Wheaton College, paired evangelical and Catholic scholars addressing related subjects. Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, was among the speakers. Even though sponsors and hosts were solidly evangelical, Catholic Thomas Rausch could write, “Most impressive was the good will of all those present: speakers, participants and hosts. … At the end of the conference, the participants gathered for a ‘Closing Worship.’ They joined in prayer and response without any awkwardness or hesitation in a service that from a Catholic perspective seemed a combination of elements from the Liturgy of Hours and the Mass’s Liturgy of the Word. It was good to pray together. We should do it more often.”61

When mission and ministry unite, it is not always with evangelical predominance. David E. Bjork, an evangelical missionary to France, writes of such an experience. He and his family arrived in Normandy in 1979 with the challenge to plant an evangelical church that could become self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. Bjork began in typical evangelical fashion by inviting new acquaintances to study the Bible with him—which Marc and Henri did. Then his new Bible students invited him to visit their church. Bjork was startled to find more than 600 Catholics worshiping “in the presence of God’s Spirit.” Puzzled, he agreed to meet with the local priest. Over a period of more than three years, he came to recognize “Father Norbert as my brother in Christ.” The next question became obvious: “Is it really necessary for me to establish a ‘new church’ in France?” David Bjork then made the difficult decision to merge his ministry into the local Catholic church.62

Bjork’s example, an evangelical finding a cooperative ministry with Roman Catholics, is still not the norm. But it has become so common in so many places as to demand deliberation, not on whether it should take place but on the protocols to govern such activity as it occurs.

Spiritual Formation

Some evangelicals who read Catholic writers discover spiritual disciplines unfamiliar to their own evangelical heritage, including the disciplines of silence, contemplation, and deep devotion to Christ. For many in the fast-paced world of evangelicalism, these spiritual disciplines have offered a welcome respite. Evangelical groups now practice ancient lectio divina, a meditative prayerful way of reading Scripture and listening for God’s revelation through it.63 Evangelical retreat speaker Jan Johnson is among those who have created a Protestantized version of this Catholic tradition.64 Christopher Hall invites evangelicals to practice Praying with the Church Fathers, even if they must use the ancient sources with a measure of selectivity.65 Other evangelicals avail themselves of the opportunities presented by softening relationships between evangelicals and Catholics to take retreats in monasteries for spiritual direction and refreshment. The growing prominence of evangelical spiritual directors also fosters closer connections with Catholics, since many of these directors receive their training from Catholics who draw on centuries of experience in these disciplines.66

Converts

Some evangelicals make the next big step. They They go “home to Rome.” Then, as so often with converts, some become zealous advocates of the church they once opposed.

Thomas Howard was born into an evangelical family filled with pastors and missionaries, including his sister, the noted author Elizabeth Elliot. Howard was a professor of English at Gordon College when he converted to Catholicism on Holy Saturday in 1985; two days later he resigned his faculty position. It had been a twenty-year journey, begun during undergraduate days at Wheaton College, where he grew to love liturgical worship. Interviewed by Christianity Today shortly after converting to Catholicism, Howard said that for him the key was “the question of unity between Christ and his church.” This concern led him to a revised picture of authority, which he saw as residing within the Catholic Church, a position that grew from his study of ancient Christianity. In his words, “It’s clear historically why and how and when the doctrine of the papacy developed early on.”67

Howard was convinced that becoming a Catholic did not make him less an evangelical. Indeed, he has called himself an evangelical Catholic. But he did sense personal gains and losses resulting from his conversion. On the positive side, he gained a sense of the mystery of the church, he was able to dip into deeper reaches of Christian spirituality, and he was able to reclaim the Eucharist for what he saw as its real worth. Yet even as Howard expressed relief at finally being rid of what he called “the desperate, barren, parched nature of evangelical worship,” he also admitted, with some longing, that he missed the companionship of a “biblically literate laity.”68

Dennis Martin, associate professor of historical theology at Loyola University in Chicago, began as a Mennonite with a historical conscience. During high school, he was stirred by Frederick W. Faber’s hymn “Faith of Our Fathers.” Even then, “I was looking for recognizable and tangible historical ancestors in the faith with whom I could identify.”69 Only later did he discover that the lyrics “Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword” did not refer to Reformation-era Anabaptists persecuted for their beliefs on baptism, or Protestants persecuted by Catholics. The key was discovering a verse of the hymn consistently omitted by Protestants: “Faith of our fathers, Mary’s prayers / Shall win our country back to thee; / And through the truth that comes from God, / England shall then indeed be free.” When Martin realized that Frederick Faber was a nineteenth-century Catholic who wrote the hymn to memorialize Catholics persecuted by Protestants, it was a portent of things to come.

Martin’s studies of church history led him to medieval monasticism and the history of liturgy, which both strengthened and challenged him: “I simply could not see my way clear to massage the patristic and medieval evidence into a Free Church Model.” Meanwhile, he began to experience frustration with Mennonite church government by consensus. He had to ask if this democratic form of church polity led to truth or merely to popularity. He also began to question how far beyond the Mennonite borders the “True Church” extended. And so to Rome.

Nine years into his life as a Catholic, Martin could write with a sense of certainty, “Catholicism … [possesses] codified liturgy, sacraments, priesthood, doctrine and law, permitting adult converts faithfully adhering to these structures to know that they belong.” He appreciates “sacramental confession” as “a very effective path to spiritual growth, a truly fruitful way to confront one’s sins and overcome them.” And he values his part in the Catholic Church with “its stubborn insistence on an identifiable True Church.” Yet Martin also is aware of losses, as he says wistfully, “I miss the four-part a cappella congregational singing immensely, but one may doubt how well that will be preserved in coming generations.”

Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, began his spiritual sojourn as a Dutch Reformed Calvinist. After graduating from a Christian Reformed high school and from Calvin College, Kreeft became a Roman Catholic while a graduate student at Yale. It was primarily “history” that drew Kreeft to Rome: “I developed a strong intellectual and aesthetic love for things medieval: Gregorian chant, Gothic architecture, Thomistic philosophy, illuminated manuscripts.”70 But this love was not merely a matter of taste: “I discovered in the early Church such Catholic elements as the centrality of the Eucharist, the Real Presence, prayers to saints, devotion to Mary, an insistence on visible unity, and apostolic succession. Furthermore, the Church Fathers just ‘smelled’ more Catholic than Protestant.” Kreeft’s study of history led him to a revised view of how Scripture and church relate to each other: “I was impressed by the argument that ‘the Church wrote the Bible’: Christianity was preached by the Church before the New Testament was written—that is simply a historical fact. It is also a fact that the apostles wrote the New Testament and the Church canonized it, decided which books were divinely inspired.” With church and history combined, Kreeft came to the conclusion that “Christ founded the Catholic Church; that there is historical continuity.” About the point of decision he writes, “I seemed to sense my heroes Augustine and Aquinas and thousands of other saints and sages calling out to me from the great ark, ‘Come aboard! We are really here. We still live. Join us. Here is the Body of Christ.’ ”

What does Kreeft feel he lost and gained? He gained an appreciation for the richness of God’s mystery. Having come to think of Protestant theology as overly infected with Descartes’ scientific view of reason, Kreeft learned to appreciate “wisdom rather than mere logical consistency, insight rather than mere calculation.” He also learned to worship God through all of his senses, not merely the mouth and ears of Protestantism. Perhaps most important, he found himself swimming within the two-thousand-year stream of historical Christianity. But Kreeft also speaks of losses. He inherited from his evangelical roots a serious concern for truth that he finds sadly missing among many Catholics. For example, although he finds Catholic theology quite clear on the subject of justification by grace through faith, “well over 90 percent of the students I have polled … expect to go to Heaven because they tried, or did their best, or had compassionate feelings to everyone, or were sincere. They hardly ever mention Jesus.” And he misses music. He remembers evangelical worship with “beautiful hymns, for which I would gladly exchange the new, flat, unmusical, wimpy ‘liturgical responses’ no one sings in our masses.” Kreeft envisions a time when all of these losses will be redeemed. “I think in Heaven, Protestants will teach Catholics to sing and Catholics will teach Protestants to dance and sculpt.”

Scott and Kimberly Hahn moved along slightly different paths. Scott, assistant professor of theology and Scripture at Franciscan University of Steubenville, is also founder and director of the Institute of Applied Biblical Studies and editor of the Bulletin of Applied Biblical Studies. In the past twenty years, he has given more than 600 talks, many of them available through a widely used system of tape distribution. Meanwhile, Kimberly, who holds a master’s degree in theology from Gordon-Conwell, cares for their six children—and also fills frequent speaking engagements. They tell their tandem stories in an autobiographical book titled Rome Sweet Home.71

Scott began his life in a nominal Presbyterian home, was steered away from delinquency by a Young Life worker, and then was deeply and thoroughly converted to Jesus Christ. After graduating from Grove City College, Scott, now married to Kimberly, attended Gordon-Conwell Seminary, from which he graduated in 1982.72 He then began his career as pastor of a Presbyterian church, taught at a local Presbyterian seminary, and kept up a voracious reading program. Hahn maintains that it was Scripture itself, particularly as it speaks of God’s covenant, that led him to the Catholic Church: “I wanted to see people fired up about the Old Testament and its relationship to the New—the Old flowing into the New. … As I dug deeper in my study, a disturbing pattern began to emerge: the novel ideas I thought I had discovered had actually been anticipated by the early Church Fathers.” Hahn’s intense study of Scripture also led him to think about Scripture itself: “I began to see how important liturgy was for the covenant, especially in Hebrews.” On Scripture and authority: “I kept pushing [on sola scriptura]. ‘Isn’t this ironic? We insist that Christians can believe only what the Bible teaches. But the Bible doesn’t teach that it is our only authority.’ ” Then he was led to other doctrines such as the Eucharist: “Why would it have offended the Jews so much if Jesus was only talking about faith and a symbolic sacrifice of his flesh and blood?” To the pain of his parents, his professors, his former church, and his wife, Scott Hahn converted to Catholicism at the Easter Vigil of 1986.

Kimberly Hahn’s journey began earlier and progressed longer but ended the same way. She was raised in a sturdy evangelical family, early on made a personal decision for Christ, worked with Scott at Grove City in his Young Life ministry, and married him shortly after graduation. At Gordon-Conwell, she supported pro-life causes while studying theology. This combination of interests led her to wonder if abortion and contraception were in some way connected. In typical evangelical fashion, she headed to Scripture to find out. Her conclusion: “Fertility, in Scripture, was presented as something to be prized and celebrated rather than as a disease to be avoided at all costs.” Later she would conclude that in this small but important area of her life she was already becoming Catholic. Sacraments provided another tug. Much later, as she reluctantly stood by as their daughter Hannah was baptized into the Catholic Church, Kimberly said, “I was not prepared for the beauty of the baptismal liturgy. It was everything I would have prayed for my daughter.” At Easter of 1990, Kimberly also entered the Catholic Church.

What do the Hahns feel they gained and lost? Scott is convinced that Scripture teaches the essentials of Catholic theology and that the early Christian fathers rightly created the foundation of true Christian faith. Kimberly has come to value Mary. She accepts the Catholic belief that when Jesus gave his mother to John, the act prefigured his giving of her to each beloved disciple: “Instead of seeing Mary as a tremendous obstacle to me, I was beginning to see her as a precious gift from the Lord—one who loved me, cared for me and prayed for me with a mother’s heart.”

But like most who cross the chasm of the Reformation, the Hahns experience loss as well as gain. Kimberly misses the sense of community in evangelical churches: “When we would go to Mass, people would come in and leave their coats on, looking like they were ready to bolt as soon as they received the Host. (I would never go to dinner at someone’s house and leave my coat on!) For an evangelical Protestant used to fellowship and friendly conversation after the service, it was a shock to discover that most people did not intend to stay and greet one another.” Similarly, Scott writes:

When evangelical Protestants convert to the Catholic Church, they often enter into a kind of “ecclesiastical culture shock.” They leave robust congregational singing, practical biblical preaching, a conservative pro-family political voice in the pulpit and a vital sense of community, with various prayer meetings, fellowships, and Bible studies to choose from each week. In contrast, the average Catholic parish usually finds itself lacking in these areas. While these converts typically feel that they have “come home” by becoming Catholics, they do not always feel “at home” in their new parish families.

Much of Scott Hahn’s ministry now works to encourage Catholics to experience a spiritual discipleship of the sort he experienced as a young evangelical. At other times he is wooing evangelicals to join him in coming to Rome.

Not all evangelicals who convert to Rome do so after intensive study. The conversion of popular singer John Michael Talbot came after disillusioning experiences with both rock ‘n’ roll music and Protestant fundamentalist religion. In the midst of crises, Talbot was greatly assisted by Father Martin of Alverna, a Franciscan retreat center. Under Father Martin’s tutelage, Talbot became a Roman Catholic and then went on to perform music that appeals to great numbers of modern American Christians of all sorts. Talbot’s appeal has been neatly captured by Scot McKnight, an evangelical theologian who published an important article on evangelicals who became Catholics73:

I once attended one of his concerts, at a small monastery in Wisconsin. John Michael walked in with a background vocalist, took a seat on a stool, tuned his guitar quickly, closed his eyes, sang his songs for 1 hour and 45 minutes, stood up and said, “May the peace of the Lord be with you!” The more liturgically trained, and we were not among them, knew what to say next. He then exited the front. I have never been in a more worshipful setting.

McKnight interviewed thirty evangelicals who became Roman Catholic and then analyzed reasons for their conversions. Four principle causes emerged—certainty, history, unity, and authority—all of which have been intimated in the personal accounts already examined. McKnight’s description of reasons for converting to Catholicism is important in itself, but it also offers to contemporary evangelicals a clearer picture of their own strengths and weaknesses.

Among McKnight’s subjects, an unmet desire for certainty was an important spur to conversion. Kristine Franklin, an evangelical missionary to illiterate people, mused, “I had to be absolutely sure, before God, that what I was telling them was, in fact, the Christian Faith, free from error. It had to be one hundred percent Truth. The problem was, using my ‘Bible alone’ principle, I had no way to be absolutely sure.” Another evangelical, Bob Sungenis, fretted, “We were in and out of five different Presbyterian churches within the next five years, each move being due to disagreements on the pastor’s interpretation of the Bible.” For evangelicals operating under such pressures, certitude from a higher source offers welcome relief.

Considerations of history have also drawn many evangelicals toward Rome. Neophyte evangelical students of church history are almost always startled to find that Christians of the early centuries were Catholic. As they study, they create spiritual friendships with Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Augustine, and wonder what and who else they have missed. Catholic convert Marcus Grodi commented, “The more I read church history and Scripture the less I could comfortably remain Protestant.” If these students also sampled liturgical worship with its ancient hymns and creeds, they sensed a long-missed rootedness with early believers who sang and said the same words. In McKnight’s phrase, “It is no trivial matter that evangelicals have quartered Church history and excluded the first three-quarters.” To these evangelicals, the antidote to historical shortsightedness is the Catholic Church.

The ideal of unity is also a force drawing evangelicals to Rome, especially since it exploits favored evangelical images for the church: communion of saints, body of Christ, community of believers. Evangelicals can wince at Peter Cram’s description of Protestantism as “one long, continuous line of protesters protesting against their fellow protesters, generating thousands of denominations, para-churches, and ‘free churches,’ which are simply one-church denominations.”74 Longing for an end to these endless divisions, disillusioned evangelicals such as Cram seek out the Catholic Church, where they can enter the mass in Hong Kong or Nairobi, São Paulo or Vancouver, and find roughly the same liturgy, the same Scripture passages, the same sacraments, and the same beliefs.

A principle of authority can also create restful security for evangelicals weary of constantly reinventing the theological wheel. Even though evangelicals enjoy many strong traditions for interpreting Scripture, the responsibility for interpreting and responding remains individual. As McKnight states the problem, “This democratization of Scriptural interpretation, leading inevitably to the authority of the individual conscience, is intolerable for some evangelicals, because everyone gets to believe what he or she wants.” Catholic convert David Lowry expressed the relief many converts feel. “Why this greater joy? Because I do not have to be the judge in judgment of the Catholic Church, of the Scriptures, or even of myself. It’s not my job.”75

Most other evangelicals who also long with similar intensity for certainty, history, unity, and authority do not become Catholics. For them, the objections to Rome remain weightier than what Catholicism offers. Yet to observe why some evangelicals become Roman Catholics is certainly to gain a better sense of contemporary Catholic-evangelical terrain and of weaknesses in evangelicalism that require attention.

Taking Stock

Evangelicals respond to Catholics in many ways ranging from outright rejection to conversion. Most evangelicals who enter into greater contact with Catholics, however, practice various forms of partnership pointing toward mutual acceptance. The dramatic religious and cultural shifts of the past forty years have increased the sense of a shared Christian faith—shared but not identical. Differences remain and deserve to be faced. But where those differences do not preclude joined efforts, more and more evangelicals and Catholics are joining to serve God together with as much creativity as God-given skills and divinely appointed limitations allow. The needy of the world care little whether the Christian before them is evangelical or Catholic but much whether they might encounter the love of Christ and the truth of the gospel that can redeem the soul.

Meanwhile, evangelicals who remain highly critical of Catholic theology and practice have much to teach members of both traditions. Their persistence in criticism points to genuine weaknesses within Catholicism as well as to outdated prejudices. Both bodies can also become self-corrective as they listen to firsthand accounts of conversion. To tell the full story, it would be important to hear from the many who convert from Catholicism to various branches of Protestantism. Heeding the reasons why people find Christ or see Christ more clearly in one tradition instead of the other involves questions of great importance. But this shared love of Christ also prepares for eternity, where, at least in the hopes expressed by Peter Kreeft, evangelicals will teach Catholics to sing and Catholics will teach evangelicals to sculpt and to dance—all in praise of God.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. Carolyn Nystrom is a writer in Wheaton, Illinois. This essay is excerpted from their book Is the Reformation Over?, just published by Baker. Copyright 2005 by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom. Used by permission of Baker Books.

1. For example, “The Decree Concerning Justification” from the sixth session of the Council of Trent (1547). This decree is reprinted in many places, including Mark A. Noll, ed., Confessions and Catechisms of the Reformation (Baker, 1991), pp. 173-88.

2. Quoted in Donald W. Sweeting, “From Conflict to Cooperation? Changing American Evangelical Attitudes towards Roman Catholics: 1960-1998” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1998), p. 7. Sweeting’s dissertation is an excellent source of information on its subject. Also helpful are Jennifer V. Suvada, “A Study of the Evangelical Protestant Reception of the Document, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, from Its Release in March 1994 through December 1996, Including a Case Study of the Southern Baptist Convention” (M.A. thesis, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1997); and Nathan Andrew Baxter, “Toward a Decorous Rhetoric of Public Theology: Evangelicals and Catholics Together—Betrayal, Alliance, or Good Beginning” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1999).

3. A. J. Gordon, “Modern Delusions,” a speech given at the International Prophetic Conference, Chicago, November 1886, in Prophetic Studies of the International Prophetic Conference (Revell, 1886), p. 67.

4. Harry Ironside, Looking Backward over a Third of a Century of Prophetic Fulfillment (Loizeaux Brothers, 1931), quoted in Sweeting, “From Conflict to Cooperation?” pp. 65-66.

5. Donald Grey Barnhouse, Revelation (Zondervan, 1971), p. 335.

6. Mark S. Massa, S.J., Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Crossroad, 2003), p. 100.

7. “Last Rites,” www.chick.com/titlesavailable (1994).

8. “Are Roman Catholics Christians?” www.chick.com/titlesavailable (1985).

9. Massa, Anti-Catholicism in America, p. 106.

10. Ibid., p. 109.

11. R. C. Sproul, Faith Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification (Baker, 1995), p. 39.

12. Jeremy Webber, “Catholicism and Wheaton: A Mixed Experience,” Wheaton College Record, December 12, 2003, p. 9.

13. Private letter to Mark Noll, June 20, 2001.

14. Thomas F. Neagle, “Letters to the Editor,” Christianity Today, February 6, 1995, p. 6.

15. A Contemporary Evangelical Perspective on Roman Catholicism (World Evangelical Fellowship, 1986), p. 7.

16. For example, Sproul, Faith Alone.

17. For example, Michael Horton, “What’s All the Fuss About? The State of the Justification Debate,” Modern Reformation, March/April 2002, pp. 17-21.

18. For example, S. Lewis Johnson Jr., “Mary, the Saints, and Sacredotalism,” in Roman Catholicism: Evangelical Protestants Analyze What Divides and Unites Us, ed. John Armstrong, pp. 119-40 (Moody, 1994).

19. This document is available at a number of websites, including www.reformed .org/documents/cambridge.html.

20. Available in Pro Ecclesia, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2000), pp. 133-44.

21. “News,” Moody, September/October 1999, p. 37.

22. Roger E. Olson, “Evangelical Essentials? Reservations and Reminders,” The Christian Century, August 24-September 1, 1999, p. 817.

23. Gabriel Fackre, “Ecumenical Admonitions,” The Christian Century, August 24-September 1, 1999, p. 818.

24. Letters to the Editor, “An Evangelical Consensus?” Christianity Today, October 4, 1999, p. 15.

25. Sproul, Faith Alone, p. 44.

26. Ibid., pp. 48, 183.

27. Ibid., pp. 187-88.

28. John MacArthur Jr., “A Personal Word,” in Protestants and Catholics: Do They Now Agree?, ed. John Ankerberg and John Weldon (Harvest House, 1995), p. 11.

29. “Letters to the Editor,” Christianity Today, January 9, 1995, p. 6.

30. “Letters to the Editor,” Christianity Today, February 6, 1995, p. 6.

31. J. I. Packer, “Crosscurrents among Evangelicals,” in Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission, ed. Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus (Word, 1995), pp. 154-56.

32. Gerald Bray, “Evangelicals, Salvation, and Church History,” in Catholics and Evangelicals: Do They Share a Common Future?, ed. Thomas P. Rausch (InterVarsity, 2000), pp. 92-93.

33. Baxter, “Toward a Decorous Rhetoric of Public Theology,” p. 32.

34. Brother Jeffrey Gros, fsc, review of Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences, by Norman Geisler and Ralph MacKenzie, One in Christ, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1996), pp. 90-93.

35. Timothy George, “Toward an Evangelical Ecclesiology,” in Catholics and Evangelicals, p. 142.

36. Carl F. H. Henry, “The Vagrancy of the American Spirit,” Faculty Dialogue: Journal of the Institute for Christian Leadership, Vol. 22 (Fall 1994), pp. 7-8.

37. David Neff, “A Call to Evangelical Unity,” Christianity Today, June 14, 1999, p. 49.

38. Gros, review of Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, p. 92. For an evangelical response to Catholics’ larger view of social concerns, see Kenneth S. Kantzer, “Pastoral Letters and the Realities of Life,” Christianity Today, March 1, 1985, pp. 12-13. Kantzer respected and supported the Catholic bishops’ “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and Economy,” November 1984. He agreed with Catholic desires to combat poverty, arms buildup, and materialism. He did, however, point to original sin as the root cause of these evils and suggested that government intervention may not be the way to solve them.

39. Keith A. Fournier with William D. Watkins, A House United? Evangelicals and Catholics Together (NavPress, 1994), p. 14.

40. Ibid., p. 7.

41. Jeffrey Gros, F.S.C., “Evangelical Relations: A Differentiated Catholic Perspective,” Ecumenical Trends (January 2000), p. 2, referring to the quotation from Pat Robertson in Fournier, House United?, p. 7.

42. J. I. Packer, “Why I Signed It,” Christianity Today, December 12, 1994, 35.

43. Ralph E. MacKenzie, “Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Evangelizing the Culture” (paper presented at Theology Conference, Wheaton College, April 2002), p. 15.

44. Elizabeth and Karl Wirth, “Two Churches, One Family,” Re:Generation Quarterly, August 1, 2002, p. 9.

45. Ibid., p. 11.

46. “The Habits of Highly Effective Bible Readers: A Conversation with Christopher A. Hall,” Christian History, No. 80 (2003), p. 9.

47. David Steinmetz, “Why the Reformers Read the Fathers,” Christian History, No. 80 (2003), p. 10.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Richard J. Foster and James Bryan Smith, eds., Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups (HarperCollins, 1990).

51. Richard J. Foster and Emilie Griffin, eds., Spiritual Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups on the Twelve Spiritual Disciplines (HarperCollins, 2000).

52. Thomas Oden and Christopher A. Hall, eds., Ancient Christian Commentary series (InterVarsity, 1998- ).

53. Carolyn Nystrom, Thomas à Kempis: Imitating Jesus (InterVarsity, 2002), p. 12.

54. MacKenzie, “Roman Catholics and Evangelicals,” pp. 10-11.

55. Ibid., p. 10.

56. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

57. Thomas P. Rausch, “Catholic-Evangelical Relations: Signs of Progress,” in Catholics and Evangelicals, p. 42, referring to Kalevi Lethinen, “Evidences of New Life in Europe: Problems Associated with European Missions” (unpublished Campus Crusade staff report).

58. Rausch, “Catholic-Evangelical Relations,” p. 43.

59. Ibid., p. 44.

60. Ibid., pp. 45-47.

61. Thomas P. Rausch, “Another Step Forward,” America, July 15-22, 2002, p. 9.

62. David E. Bjork, “When Obedience Leads Us into the Unknown,” in Catholics and Evangelicals, pp. 149-70.

63. Lectio divina began with early monasticism prior to the sixth century. It became part of the Rule of St. Benedict, a guidebook for Benedictine monks, an order founded by Benedict of Nursia (480-547).

64. Jan Johnson, Listening to God: Using Scripture as a Path to God’s Presence (NavPress, 1998).

65. David Neff, “Don’t Read the Bible ‘Alone,’ ” interview with Christopher Hall, Christianity Today, November 2003, p. 58.

66. For a new periodical organized mostly by Protestants that features insight into the spiritual disciplines, see Conversations: A Forum for Authentic Transformation, published biannually by Life Springs Resources in Atlanta.

67. John D. Woodbridge, “Why Did Thomas Howard Become a Roman Catholic?” Christianity Today, May 17, 1985, pp. 48, 58.

68. Ibid., p. 50.

69. Dennis Martin, “Retrospect and Apologia,” Mennonite Quarterly Review, Vol. 78 (April 2003). goshen.edu/mqr/pastissues/apr03martin.html.

70. Peter Kreeft, “Hauled Aboard the Ark,” www.peterkreeft.com/topics/hauled-aboard.htm (accessed February 27, 2004).

71. Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism (Ignatius Press, 1993).

72. Hahn later earned a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Marquette University.

73. Scot McKnight, “From Wheaton to Rome: Why Evangelicals Become Roman Catholic,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Vol. 45 (September 2002), pp. 451-472.

74. Ibid., p. 466-68.

74. Ibid., pp. 469.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

How do you understand the first two chapters of Genesis? As the story of the creation of the world? Maybe as key texts in a pitched battle over intelligent design. Maybe the Creation story was the first story you learned in Sunday School, and maybe it was the first Bible story you taught your kids.

In Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, the first instalment of a projected five-volume spiritual theology, Eugene Peterson tells us that he once read Genesis 1-2 as merely the story of the beginning of all things. He was “distracted” from the “personal immediacy” of those chapters for many years—years spent wrangling about evolution, years spent contrasting them to Babylonian and Sumerian cosmology. “Then I became a pastor, and gradually realized what powerful texts Genesis 1 and 2 are for dealing with life just as it comes to us each day.” In the pastor’s study, he learned to “pray and teach and preach these Holy Scriptures into” the ordinary lives of ordinary people, to help them raise their children and tend their fields and go to their offices and knit socks and bake bread and pay their taxes inside Genesis 1-2. He began to see that the beginning of Genesis was not simply an “account of the beginning of all things,” but also a beginning of how “to live right now.”

This description of learning to inhabit Scripture is not just a handy hermeneutic for Genesis 1-2. It is also an apt summary of Peterson’s oeuvre; he could not have written his particular books had he not spent so many years in the pastorate. Even though he subsequently took an academic post, and even though he is now “retired,” his writing comes from the parish, from the pulpit, from the pastor’s study.

This is what he learned, in the parish: that we are living in conditions very similar to the Hebrew exile; that we are uprooted and lost and not grounded and that we do not have a center. “I felt that I and my congregation were starting over every week,” writes Peterson. “There was no moral consensus, no common memory, all of us far removed from where we had grown up. The lives of my parishioners seemed jerky and spasmodic, anxious and hurried.” And so he began preaching the prophets of Israel, Isaiah among them. And he noticed that one of Isaiah’s favorite themes is creation. And he noticed, further, that in Scripture, only God creates. This is, in essence, what separates men and women from God: God creates; we can’t. God is the Creator, we are creatures. “When the conditions in which we live seem totally alien to life and salvation, we are reduced to waiting for God to do what only God can do, create.” And in that key, Peterson found himself returning to Genesis 1–2, asking not what the texts had to tell him about Darwin but rather “How can I obey this? How can I get in on this?”

What he has given us in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (the somewhat awkward title comes from a Hopkins poem) is an investigation of, and an invitation to, “the Christian life as lived.” Peterson opens with some housecleaning: there is some vocabulary we have to get clear on, some words that, like false cognates, mean one thing in contemporary American, and another thing in classical Christian. Spirituality, for example, and Jesus, soul, and fear-of-the-Lord. With this basic vocabulary in place, Peterson spends the bulk of the book exploring three stages on which Christ plays: creation, history, and community.

The first section moves through a reading of the Gospel of John to a reflection on the importance of Sabbath. The second section, “Christ Plays in History,” confronts sin. Human history exposes the Whiggish lie that humanity is on an upward, forward march, getting better and better and nearer the realization of Heaven on Earth in each succeeding generation. The event that defines Christians’ entry into human history, says Peterson, is the Cross. Here, our central texts are Exodus and the Gospel of Mark, and Peterson leads us from an account of the Crucifixion into the practices of Eucharist and hospitality.

But we come to the table not to stay at the table. We come to the table so that we might leave, equipped to work and love and live in the world. Ergo, the final section of the book, “Christ Plays in Community,” counters today’s regnant individualism. Peterson is clear: “there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no holiness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community.”

Community is popular in certain, Wendell Berry-reading Christian circles these days. (I include myself in those circles. Peterson, too, reads Berry, and he quotes him, and, indeed, Berry’s shadow lies over this whole book.) Peterson’s musings on Berry are rooted and built up in biblical witness. This is, in some ways, a more energizing and useful vision than Berry himself provides, because it allows for translation into our daily lives where Berry leaves us guessing. We can’t move to Berry’s Port Williams, but we can count on the church and the Holy Spirit being nearby.

Peterson grounds his discussion of community in Deuteronomy—which teaches, he says, how to be formed into the People of God—and in Luke-Acts, culminating in a meditation on the love command. Attempts to isolate just what is original and distinctive about Peterson’s take on community will fail, because to think there is something unique about his communal ethos is to fall back into the habit of which Peterson is calling us to repent. He is simply telling us to love our neighbor; not to do any thing fantastic or extraordinary, but simply to love.

There are, says Peterson, two basics to the Christian life that we North Americans find difficult. First, the Christian life is about God, not about us. This cuts to the heart of much of the vaunted spirituality of contemporary America. Why do we leave one church for another? Why do we dabble in spiritual practice, creating a bricolage of these prayers and those disciplines? Because it suits us. The bricolaging suits us. The church with the vital youth group suits us better than the church near our house. We like old hymns better than praise choruses. We like liturgy better than Quiet Time, or vice versa.

But, Peterson reminds us, this show in which Christ plays is not about us. It is not done for our entertainment. It is played at the pleasure of God. Here he is simply reiterating an old Christian theme. As St. Ignatius of Loyola put it, the end of man is “to praise, reverence, and serve the Lord.” Or, the Shorter Catechism: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” (Note that the glorifying precedes the enjoying.) Booklist, in a favorable review of Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, describes Peterson as “No dogmatic catechist”—presumably, in the eyes of the Booklist reviewer, high praise. And indeed Peterson is “no dogmatic catechist” if a dogmatic catechist is one who is rigid, and mean. But he is a catechist indeed if we understand catechesis to be the process of forming Christians so that they might better be able to inhabit and proclaim the Gospel.

Peterson’s second axiom dovetails with the first: “we cannot participate in God’s work but then insist on doing it our own way. … We can’t live a life more like Jesus by embracing a way of life less like Jesus.” In that pithy phrase, many of the stereotypes about evangelicals (i.e., those who’ve reduced the entire Gospel to being buddies with Jesus) versus mainliners (those who’ve reduced the Gospel to mere social justice) seem to fall apart: life as one of Jesus’ followers, it turns out, requires “the lifelong practice of attending to the details of congruence—congruence between ends and means, congruence between what we do and the way we do it.”

Peterson himself is a great exemplar of such congruence. And this book will doubtless inspire many people to reflect anew on the Christian story, on Christian living, and ask how can I, too, get in on this?

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God (Algonquin/Random House) and, most recently, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity (Brazos).

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