Page 4575 – Christianity Today (2024)

There are people who think God doesn’t like country music, but I tend to think he does.

–Country singer Mark Collie

It was Reinhold Niebuhr who suggested that American history is best interpreted through the category of irony. His argument was so suggestive that it was adopted and exploited by a parade of leading historians–from Perry Miller to C. Vann Woodward to Henry May, right on down to Martin Marty in our own day. And if this shotgun matrimony of incongruities, the passionate love-hate affairs of American virtues cohabitating with the vices they deplore most, captures something fundamentally true about the (formerly slave-holding) Land of the Free, then nowhere is it easier to be found than in the quintessentially American art form of country music.

Designating country music an art form straight-away lands us, like Dorothy deposited in Oz by a tornadic dream, deep in the territory of irony. Three-chord song structures, keening steel guitars, rednecks singing out their noses–you dare to call this art?

Even Nashville, as synonymous with country music as any place on earth, has doubted that it might be so. Blessed with several strong universities (preeminently Vanderbilt and Fisk), Nashville has long styled itself “the Athens of the South.” In 1943 the governor of Tennessee denounced Roy Acuff and his Grand Ole Opry for making the state the hillbilly capital of the United States. Little matter: Acuff was then so astronomically popular and so prototypically American that the Japanese, in their banzai charge on Okinawa, cried out, “To hell with Roosevelt; to hell with Babe Ruth; to hell with Roy Acuff!” The fiddler impresario responded to the governor’s anathema by himself running, twice, for the office.

There is much to be said about the aesthetic status of country music, but mainly I want to concentrate on ironies inherent within the art itself. It is, in fact, no small part of the art of country music that it teems with ironies both delicious and vexing. The three books here under review especially equip us to appreciate ironies pervading two key themes that run, root to stem, through country music: race and religion.

On the matter of race, Mississippi-born pastoral theologian Tex Sample provides us with a blunt but inarguable summary: “Without black music, country music would simply not be country.” Sample cites a scholar who says country’s “sound, structure and text: are all indebted to African Americans and their gifts. Country’s harmonic origins lie in the blues. Its dramatic employment of stringed instruments (flatpicking and sharp, fluid fingerpicking) traces back to black musical culture.”

In fact, black mentors stand behind nearly all the truly great country artists. Jimmie Rodgers, long hailed as the Father of Country Music, in his earliest years listened to black railroad crews who worked in unison by chanting under the lead of a caller setting the cadences. (Nicholas Dawidoff reports a former worker who remembers “sexy calls” were most effective: “Some callers would talk about the lingerie that a woman wore. Now that caused the crew to really shift that track.”) As a young adult, Rodgers spent many of his recreational hours in black neighborhoods, frequenting billiard halls and blues-playing juke joints. In his heyday, Rodgers’s music was so transparently African American that some worried about him as “a white man gone black.” At least in terms of his repertoire, there is no evidence Rodgers ever tried to disguise the connection. He is most famous for a series of 12 “blue yodels,” and his “Blue Yodel No. 9,” recorded in 1930, features no less than Louis Armstrong on trumpet.

Contemporaneous with Rodgers, and equally important to the history of country music, was the Carter Family. The “family” consisted of an eccentric, preoccupied Virginian named A. P. Carter, his wife Sara, and their guitarist-niece Maybelle. The Carters recorded dozens of timeless songs (“Keep on the Sunny Side” would be among the most familiar, but my own favorite is the haunting “Hello Stranger”). Most of these were gathered by A. P., who often disappeared on monthlong song-hunting forages throughout the Appalachians. As Dawidoff notes, “A. P. had an excellent ear for affecting music, but a poor memory for melody.” To compensate, he took to traveling with black blues singer Lesley Riddle. Riddle not only helped Carter take down songs: he taught A. P. many of his own and coached Maybelle in the strikingly plaintive guitar style that subsequently molded generations of pickers.

Such recounting could go on at length. Hank Williams learned guitar from a black man. Bob Wills’s Western Swing–a wondrously odd music that initially struck my pretentiously hip teenaged ears as ridiculous but eventually won me over with its sheer, infectious fun–melded fiddle music and Dixieland jazz, as well as Wills’s deep love of the blues of Bessie Smith. (One of our very finest living musician-songwriters, Merle Haggard, was mentored by Wills and prefers to call his own work “country jazz.”) Bill Monroe pioneered bluegrass out of an amalgam of fiddle shuffles, gospel hymns, and jazz (whence bluegrass’s yen for improvisation), and perfected his mandolin technique with the tutelage of an African American guitarist whose syncopated licks, Dawidoff says, helped “make old-time string-band music into something livelier and more complex, shaping his notes into sophisticated rhythm structures that experts will be hashing over for generations.” Young Johnny Cash, bored with a job selling appliances door-to-door in black Memphis, met a retired street sweeper and banjo picker named Gus Cannon. Most days, rather than hawking vacuum cleaners, Cash brought along his guitar and jammed on Cannon’s porch.

But–and here is the irony–despite this monumental legacy, African Americans and African American concerns are glaringly scarce in country music. Tex Sample cites one careful study confirming that “Of the thousands of songs on the country music hit charts since World War II, probably no more than twenty mention race in any connection.” Only two black artists have achieved visibility. Deford Bailey performed on the Grand Ole Opry during the twenties. Decades later, Charley Pride recorded a string of hits. Yet his first three singles were released without any accompanying publicity photos, and when Pride walked on a Detroit stage for his first concert he was greeted by stunned silence that was broken only after he joked about his “natural tan.”

The racism marring country’s ethos–and racism, I am afraid, is what it must be called–can be explicit. Charlie Louvin, one-half of the brotherly duet whose vocal harmonies are spine-chillingly beautiful, can still offhandedly refer to scrub pine trees as “nigg*r pines.” Charlie’s late brother Ira alienated Elvis Presley, with whom the Louvins were touring in 1955, by screaming at him that he was a “f—in’ white nigg*r.” Mostly, though, country music’s racism is a racism of forgetfulness and neglect. It reflects, I suppose, the wider racism of the white, working-class, southern culture from which it sprung, tortured and almost hopelessly complicated by the familiarity and proximity of a people and a culture to which it owes so much but, in its own economic and psychological insecurity, also fears and feels it must denigrate.

This is, of course, finally no excuse. Reinhold Niebuhr seized on irony to interpret American history exactly because it preserves an important capacity for self-criticism. So those of us who love to promote the art need to forcefully remind ourselves that behind the lily-white face of country music courses black blood and pulses glorious black soul.

Most country singers learn how to sing in church. George Jones picked up his first guitar chords in a Pentecostal Sunday school and for a while traveled with an evangelist as a child singer. Young Emmylou Harris sang duets with her father in church. Of the present-day stars in Lesley Sussman’s Yes, Lord, I’m Comin’ Home!, 14 had strong Baptist upbringings, four Pentecostal, and four Methodist or Nazarene.

Yet, as they mature and decide to pursue careers in music, country artists’ venues inevitably and, at best, ironically include not just sanctuaries but honky-tonks. Sussman says, “playing gigs in South Oklahoma beer joints” made Toby Keith “feel as if he was betraying [the] spiritual values” of his Christian raising. Mark Collie tells Sussman, “You’re faced with all your church learning and then you’re going out and making a living playing in roadhouses and bars. It’s very strange. I would be singing in the roadhouses on Saturday night and then playing the revivals on Sunday afternoon. Many a Sunday I felt like the preacher was speaking directly at me.”

So country artists ricochet between the carnal passions of Saturday night and the spiritual ecstasy of Sunday morning. A few notables have tamed this charged dialectic and managed stable personal lives: Dawidoff remarks that Kitty Wells, the first successful female solo performer in country music, “was a devoted wife and mother who didn’t drink or smoke, took a Bible with her on the road, and carried herself, the popular Tennessee governor Frank Clement observed, in ‘the finest tradition of Southern womanhood.’ ” Wells and her (only) husband have been married six decades. But many other artists have struggled, on sometimes nearly mythical scales of self-destruction, to balance the Bible in one hand and the bottle in the other.

Hank Williams wrote classics like “I Saw the Light” that still ring out at southern gospel sings, but perished from hard living and heartbreak at age 29. Carter Stanley (of the Stanley Brothers) made gospel songs the keystone of his career but drank himself to death by age 41. George Jones amazes his friends and fans, who have literally given him up for dead more than once, that he is still alive in his sixties.

Yet the uneclipsed standard-bearer in this grim litany of tortured souls is perhaps Alabaman Ira Louvin, who finally, and one can’t help but think mercifully, died in a car wreck in 1965. Raised with brother Charlie in Pentecostal fervor, Ira was to his last years telling a local preacher he would perform one more concert, then take to the road as an evangelist. He penned exceedingly preachy songs like “Broadminded,” which inveighed against social dancing and drinking: “That word broadminded is spelled s-i-n / I read in my Bible, ‘They shall not enter in.’ ” Trussed on a rack with the church stretching from one end and the honky-tonk from the other, Ira would perform in a bar, revile himself for it, then drink himself into a stupor. In unremitting turmoil, he was given to violence and repeatedly stomped mandolins to pieces. He attempted to strangle his third wife with a telephone cord. She got loose and emptied a .22 pistol into Ira. He survived, and a newspaper quoted her afterward as saying, “If the son of a bitch don’t die, I’ll shoot him again.”

Ira had a high forehead with a widow’s peak, an aquiline nose, crazed eyes, and a maniacal open-mouth smile. The cover of the Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real album features the siblings in a mock hell, with flaming rocks and a cardboard Satan looming behind them. Baby-faced Charlie has his arms extended with palms open, gesturing from the right side across the scene as if to say, “Ain’t this a silly picture.” Ira, though, appears positively possessed and faces the camera with arms out and fingers curled, beckoning the viewer into the torment. He is scarier, by far, than anything else in the picture.

True, all kinds of great music marinated in misery. The travails of classical composers such as Mozart and Beethoven are well known. Many jazz geniuses have passed short, stormy lives, such as Bix Beiderbecke, who died at 28, and Charlie Parker, who never made his thirty-fifth birthday. But perhaps no music so consistently and starkly juxtaposes the sacred and the profane as country.

The progressive country songwriter Butch Hanco*ck wryly provides Dawidoff some clue to this irony: “In Lubbock [Texas] we grew up with two main things. God loves you and he’s gonna send you to hell, and that sex is bad and dirty and nasty and awful and you should save it for the one you love. You wonder why we’re all crazy.”

More seriously, Tex Sample challenges the church to put aside its tendencies to sanitize life and mount superficial moralistic facades that obscure unpleasant realities from view. Indeed, it disappoints to hear many of Sussman’s subjects insist that they became truly Christian only after they stopped singing about suffering. Susie Luchsinger (Reba McEntire’s sister) says, “I’d never been really happy singing country music. So much of it was about turmoil and fear.” The talented songwriter Paul Overstreet, according to Sussman, now “leaves it to others to write lyrics about cheating hearts, Sunday morning hangovers, and breaking up.” Red Steagall unwittingly reveals how far such attitudes are from genuine Christianity, remarking, “I just wish that everybody could have a positive attitude whether they believe in God or not.”

A good deal of excellent country music need not offend even the most avid reader of Norman Vincent Peale or the most naive champion of family values. Country songs are forever remembering Mama and harking back to home and the old ways. At their best, these songs reinforce foundational virtues and poignantly invoke healing tears.

But not all country music is informed by the power of positive thinking. I wonder if Sussman’s subjects, God bless them, have stopped reading the Psalms or Jeremiah or the Passion accounts in their Bibles. If the Christian tradition is any guide, it is not always wrong or “unhealthy” to grieve or cry out in anger or admit one’s sinfulness. I would like to think that, before they grew up and began dragging their guitars and broken hearts into barrooms, country singers gleaned something of these verities in their little rural churches. Isn’t it possible, even likely, that George Jones–who Frank Sinatra once called “the second best male singer in America”–first learned something about the artful acknowledgment of suffering at the foot of the cross?

In any event, he learned it somewhere. Dawidoff is at his considerable best in describing Jones’s visceral vocal prowess on his performance of “A Good Year for the Roses.” The song is the lament of the survivor of a shattered marriage morosely surveying his home for signs of his departed wife. As Dawidoff writes, “The vocal effect is like a human bagpipe–the slow release of a deep, mournful sound. He gives you the picture of a man who senses he is about to be unhappier than he has ever been, and will be for a long time. Someone who understood no English could hear Jones sing this song and would know instantly what it is about.”

And if that isn’t art, art doesn’t matter.

Rodney Clapp’s latest book is A Peculiar People: The Church As Culture in a Post-Christian Society (InterVarsity Press). He dedicates this essay to his late father-in-law, Jess Baldwin, and his dance band, the Sundowners.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 8

7B5lm7B50087826

Juzo Itami is perhaps the best-known contemporary Japanese director on this side of the pond. His bawdy “Japanese Noodle Western,” Tampopo (1986), a commercial and critical hit, was immediately followed by A Taxing Woman (l987) and A Taxing Woman’s Return (l988), both of which dealt with a polite, endearing, and maddeningly persistent tax investigator who roots out corruption and mob collusion in high places. Like these earlier works, Itami’s latest offering, Supermarket Woman, is a high-octane, speedball comedy brimming with social satire. And its feet are firmly planted on the ground of everyday Japanese life.

Hanako is a recently widowed homemaker who loves a well-run supermarket. She delights in a crisply displayed array of produce, a neatly packaged cut of meat, a glistening exhibition of freshly caught fish. When the glitzy Bargains Galore superstore opens, she joyfully runs down to check out the deals. There she meets Goro, of the moribund Honest Goro’s supermarket, a down-at-the-heels establishment poised on the brink of ruin. Having sneaked over to check out the competition, Goro is stunned into defeatist despair. But Hanako points out some shady practices–meat doctoring, bait-and-switch scams, and unbelievable bargains for “the first thousand customers” that run out minutes after the initial half-dozen shoppers storm the aisles. “You can beat them,” she exhorts Goro, “by providing great products at good prices. Supermarket success is not about gimmicks and glamour, but good old-fashioned bargains.” Goro rallies, and the pair set off to make Honest Goro’s the best supermarket in all Japan.

What follows is a hilariously entertaining comedy. Nobuko Myamoto, who gained fame as the Taxing Woman of Itami’s earlier films, is a screen tsunami as the shopping expert, Hanako. At the Seattle International Film Festival, where Supermarket Woman had its North American premiere, the audiences were howling with glee at her antics. Only a Japanese woman could be so exquisitely polite, so patiently deferential, even as she cuts through all obstacles, a juggernaut of pure, moral energy. She is right and she knows it. By the end of the film, so will everyone else. Or else.

Hired on as a combination cheerleader, quality consultant, and motivational executive, Hanako proceeds to rally support for a new and improved Honest Goro’s. If the store fails, it will be bought out by the shady Yakuza types who run Bargains Galore. With the competition vanquished, they will be free to charge larcenous prices for wilted vegetables and soggy meat. But to accomplish her counterattack, Hanako must wade through the cronyism of Honest Goro’s department heads, each of whom commands loyalty from his underlings in a semiautonomous fiefdom. She must also root out petty corruption, spying, and betrayal.

The genius of Supermarket Woman is that, while on one level it’s simply a madcap comedy about a food store, on a deeper level it’s a razor-sharp satire about Japanese society. The boom of the last three decades has stabilized. Japanese banks, once seemingly unstoppable, are now overextended with bad real-estate loans. The ruling political party has suffered a string of humiliating scandals, and the other Tigers of Asia are biting off chunks of Japan’s market share in the industries that fueled its postwar economic miracle. China’s economy will soon dwarf Japan’s. A disquieting ennui has settled on Japan, and many Japanese are asking tough questions.

Supermarket Woman readily crosses cultural boundaries, but viewers will require a few cultural cues if they want to crack the deeper satirical levels. To get something of the bang that a Japanese audience gets you have to know a few essentials about Japanese life.

Freshness is an obsession to the Japanese, especially in seafood. The final plot twist turns on this and could be easily underappreciated. New Year’s Day is one of the biggest holidays in Japan. Extended families get together for a feast of sushi, sashimi, and other delicacies–all of which must be as fresh as is humanly possible. The supermarket trade is dependent on its ability to provide the freshest seafood and produce right up to the big day.

Consensus is essential to Japanese deal making. While North Americans like to hammer out a deal in undisguised combat, the Japanese prefer to reach a consensus where everyone saves face. Deal making is just as ruthless as it is here, however; it’s conducted in a passive-aggressive style that stymies many Western businessmen and diplomats. Witness American attempts to negotiate the opening of Japanese markets. Nuance is everything.

Efficiency is not always what it seems. The Japanese are in many areas–notably assembly-line work–the most efficient people in the world. But there are some arenas in which tradition and aesthetics reign supreme. Food preparation is one of these areas. Who else would build restaurants dedicated to blowfish sashimi, a fantastically expensive delicacy, arrayed on the plate in exquisitely cut patterns–when a slight mistake in removing the entrails will poison and kill the hapless gourmet? This happens many times a year. Japanese moms expend enormous amounts of time creating perfect school lunches, replete with little Jell-O animals and gaily patterned rice balls. For years rice was coated with talcum powder to give it an attractive sheen in the market, until the talc was finally linked to a high incidence of stomach cancer. In Tampopo, eating a simple bowl of udon noodles becomes an ecstatic, multisensory experience. Since seeing that film, I have never approached udon without a sense of awe.

While Japan is rightfully lauded for its low rate of personal crimes–like burglary, assault, and murder–it is, like many Asian nations, steeped in a tradition of bribery, petty corruption, and cronyism that is difficult to root out. In the U.S. Navy, the term comshaw is a bastardization of a word that essentially means to take military equipment and trade it for favors. Sailors don’t “steal” flight jackets, tools, or food–they comshaw them. There is a lot of comshaw going down in Honest Goro’s.

In a recent interview, Itami–whose face was slashed by Japanese mobsters shortly after the release of his 1992 film Minbo–Or, The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion–spoke provocatively about this pervasive corruption: “Japanese people lack principles. Western society is based on the Christian identity. There is a set of rules to protect. But in Japan, everything is based on relationships, and relationships change.”1 At a time when many Americans are inclined to give up an ethics based on “rules” for an ethics based on “relationships,” Itami’s comments are not without interest.

For a Christian audience, Supermarket Woman raises some interesting ethical questions. What would a Christian supermarket look like, and how would it be different from any other? Certainly the meat would not be repackaged, redated, and sold as fresh. The employees would not be comshawing meat and fish to pad their paychecks; that’s obvious. But what about the hyperbolic ads and other practices taken for granted in the world of American business? And, more difficult still, what about the system in which the supermarket industry is embedded? To what extent, for instance, would the workers at a Christian market be involved in the decision-making processes that shape their lives?

Supermarket Woman explores these issues from a Japanese perspective, offering an accessible glimpse into an ancient society facing the latest in a long series of painful adjustments to the realities of a changing world. “East is East,” Kipling pontificated, “and West is West, and ne’er the twain shall meet.” Juzo Itami, for those who care to take note, proves him wrong.

1. Michael A. Lev, “In a Culture That Values Conformity, Two Japanese Social Critics Speak Up,” Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1997.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 10

7B5lm7B50107826

The exchange that takes place in this book–a frank but friendly exploration of the differences between Mormons and evangelicals by two people who have carefully studied each other’s thought–is long overdue. Actually, I have been waiting for it since a Sunday night in the 1950s when I sat as a teenager in a fundamentalist church in northern New Jersey. Walter Martin, the well-known evangelical “cult expert,” was doing a series of weekly talks in that church, and on this particular evening his subject was Mormonism. The session had been widely advertised, and the small church was packed. A dozen or so Mormons were in attendance, seated as a group near the front of the auditorium. We had seen them walking in, carrying their copies of the Book of Mormon. Martin was well known to both Mormons and evangelicals. His book The Maze of Mormonism had been around for a few years, and he had recently renewed his published attacks with a larger book, The Kingdom of the Cults.

Martin was an effective rhetorician, and I was captivated by the way he made his case against non-Christian groups. He had a fine one-liner, for example, about Christian Science: just as Grape Nuts are neither grapes nor nuts, Mary Baker Eddy’s system of thought is neither Christian nor science. On this particular evening it was clear that the Mormons had come armed for debate, and Martin was eager to mix it up with them. During the discussion period, one young man was quite articulate as he argued that Martin misunderstood the Mormon teachings regarding atonement and salvation. Martin was not willing to yield an inch, and what began as a reasoned exchange ended in a shouting match. The young Mormon finally blurted out with deep emotion: “You can come up with all of the clever arguments you want, Dr. Martin. But I know in the depths of my heart that Jesus is my Savior, and it is only through his blood that I can go to heaven!” Martin dismissed him with a knowing smile as he turned to his evangelical audience: “See how they love to distort the meanings of words?”

I am paraphrasing the preceding from a memory reaching back over about four decades, but I can still hear in my mind what the Mormon said next, with an anguished tone: “You are not even trying to understand!”

I came away from that encounter strongly convinced that Martin’s theological critique of Mormonism was correct on the basic points at issue. But I also left the church that night with a nagging sense that there was more to be said, and that the way to let it be said was captured in the young Mormon’s complaint: both sides had to try to understand each other. Craig Blomberg and Stephen Robinson’s How Wide the Divide? proves that it can be done.

When InterVarsity Press sent me the manuscript version of this book with a request that I provide a jacket blurb, I read it eagerly and sent back my words of praise. When I received my copy of the book, I immediately read the published endorsem*nts. Most of the other evangelicals hedged their bets in offering positive comments, explicitly signaling their sense that this kind of dialogue is a risky venture: the book “will undoubtedly draw fire from every side [and] I may reserve some fire of my own”; “it is sure to spark controversy on both sides of the divide”; “readers from either side may differ at points with their representative writer and wish some other crucial issues could have been featured.”

It is understandable that evangelicals would approach this project gingerly. Relationships between Mormons and evangelical Protestants have always been stormy. In his narrative describing his “First Vision,” Joseph Smith made much of his own youthful worries about a religious atmosphere characterized by a “war of words, and tumult of opinions.” But his own new “revelations” did nothing to quiet the tumult. The resultant charges and countercharges between his followers and their evangelical neighbors only served to increase the level of hostility in American religious life.

It is time for some folks on both sides to lower the rhetorical level, even if doing so entails risk. This book makes a strong move in that direction. It is coauthored by the right kind of people, two scholars who should have considerable credibility in their own communities. The Latter-day Saints leadership has been greatly agitated in recent years by some of the writings produced by LDS intellectuals. The independent Mormon journals Dialogue and Sunstone regularly feature attempts to synthesize Mormonism with Jungian, feminist, and neo-pagan, even Roman Catholic, motifs. But Stephen Robinson, who teaches Ancient Scripture studies at Brigham Young University, demonstrates no interest in those innovations. He develops his case exclusively with reference to “acceptable” Mormon texts, deviating from this pattern only to show his familiarity with mainline and evangelical Protestant scholarship. Similarly, Craig Blomberg, a New Testament professor at Denver Seminary, employs standard evangelical formulations regarding inerrancy and premillennialism in making his case. Thus the argument is joined by two scholars who–unless the fact of their partnership is itself made to count as evidence to the contrary–represent the basic orthodoxies of their respective traditions.

This also means, of course, that some important topics are left untouched. The intellectual renaissance experienced in both the evangelical and Mormon communities in recent decades has in each case been led by specialists in American religious history. The result has been an impressive output of highly insightful historical investigations by scholars who have a loving but critical posture toward their own traditions. There is much in this literature for the two communities to discuss together. This book, however, is for all practical purposes ahistorical, focusing almost exclusively on questions of systematic theology.

But that does seem to be an appropriate place to start. While it will be necessary eventually to look together at the historical contexts in which the theological agenda of each group was shaped, there can be no way around a frank discussion of what both groups believe here and now about the basic elements in the drama of creation, sin, and redemption.

The title of this book poses the right question: how wide is the divide between Mormons and evangelicals? That there is a divide is beyond challenge. The dialogue here demonstrates, however, that it is not quite as wide as many evangelicals think. Robinson’s call for a more charitable evangelical reading of Mormon doctrine emphasizes at least three kinds of concern.

First, he wants us to distinguish carefully between official Mormon teachings and various speculations on specific subjects, such as the Adam-God theory, offered by Mormon leaders and sometimes endorsed in popular Mormonism.

Second, Robinson asks us not to decide too quickly that we understand what Mormons are really meaning to say about doctrinal matters. For example, Robinson admits that in talking about the relationship of faith and works, “LDS terminology often seems naive, imprecise and even sometimes sloppy by Evangelical standards, but Evangelicals have had centuries in which to polish and refine their terminology,” and besides, “we have no professional clergy to keep our theological language finely tuned.”

Third, even in assessing official teachings, he asks that we evangelicals look carefully at what things are actually emphasized in the life of the Mormon community. While doctrines like “God’s corporeality and God’s nature as an exalted man” may indeed be “linchpins in LDS theology,” they are not, he insists, regularly featured: “more important, more in evidence, more often preached, more often studied, explained and pondered by the Latter-day Saints are the more central doctrines of the gospel of Christ.”

These points are well taken, and Craig Blomberg responds in a way that models evangelical civility. While some of us might nuance the evangelical case differently at a few points, I for one never worried that he was misrepresenting us, or conceding too much to his dialogue partner. Nor does he seem to be motivated by any deep desire to vindicate every charge evangelicals have ever made against Mormon belief and practice. To commend this spirit is not to espouse timidity in opposing false teachings.

Where the Latter-day Saints are wrong, and especially where their teachings are dangerous to human souls, we need to expose their errors. Walter Martin was fond of quoting Galatians 1:8 in his critiques of the writings that were allegedly delivered to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!” This warning must not be ignored–always remembering, of course, that the same apostle asks us to avoid “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions [and] envy” (Gal. 5:19-21).

But again, how wide is the divide? As Robinson would have it, Mormons certainly do believe more than the New Testament’s presentation of the gospel, but they do not believe less. The core of what they commonly confess with evangelicals, he insists, should be sufficient for evangelicals to be “willing to admit the truth: that Mormons accept the New Testament and worship the Christ who is described there”–a compliment, incidentally, that he seems quite willing to return.

I need more convincing. Stephen Robinson says that we are sinners who are desperately in need of divine mercy, and that “God through grace has provided the gift of his perfect Son. If humans accept this gift and enter the gospel covenant by making Christ their Lord, they are justified of their sins, not by their own works and merits, but by the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ accepted in their behalf.” Should I be pleased to see Robinson making that confession? Perhaps. I can honestly say that I would like to be pleased. I certainly find nothing wrong with the way he says it here; if someone whom I was evangelizing said those same words with obvious sincerity, I would be hopeful that I had witnessed a genuine conversion. Why, then, am I reluctant to rejoice when a Mormon says them? Because I still worry about the larger set of beliefs and practices in which this confession is nested.

Blomberg and Robinson report that their disagreements run deepest on questions about the nature of God and human “deification.” Differences on such matters are not easy to downplay. As John Calvin put it in the opening pages of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the knowledge of God and knowledge of self are so intimately intertwined that “which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern.” Confusion about who God is and who we are before the face of that God is a very serious business. For the Christian tradition, clarity about these very fundamental matters has always required a recognition that God is the sovereign Maker of all things, separated by an infinite ontological gap between his own transcendent being and the creaturely realm. We believe that the acknowledgment of this gulf between Creator and creation is fundamental to biblical faith. To confuse the two is to commit idolatry.

Mormons do not acknowledge this gap. That, for many of us, is bound to produce a very distorted understanding of our human condition and of the Source of the grace that alone can save us.

Robinson has a ready reply to this line of argument. The point I have just made about a gap between the being of God and creaturely reality is, as he sees it, an example of the way we traditional Christians have imposed Greek philosophical categories on the message of the Bible. This anti-Greek theme is a constant refrain in his discussion. Mormons “reject the interpretive straitjacket imposed on the Bible by the Hellenized church”; “disagreeing with the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon is not the same as disagreeing with the New Testament”; Mormon teaching “does contradict Plato” but that doesn’t make it unbiblical.

Anyone who is tempted by this “de-Hellenizing” rhetoric–and it is not uncommon in Christian circles these days–should read John Courtney Murray’s The Problem of God (Yale University Press, 1964). There the great Jesuit thinker convincingly demonstrates that the classical creedal formulations about “being” and “substance” were not impositions of alien philosophical categories but the result of a necessary search for words that would capture the sense of Scripture to guard against dangerous misreadings of the biblical texts. Murray’s insistence that such formulations are not only good but also inevitable is confirmed in Protestant history as well. Even the strictest “no creed but Christ” churches introduce, in some form or another, extrabiblical formulations that rule out eccentric interpretations of biblical teachings.

The choice between Mormon and Christian teaching is not one between an uncluttered reading of biblical texts versus an interpretive system laden with philosophical categories. The Mormon sociologist O. Kendall White argued in his Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy: A Crisis Theology (Signature Books, 1987) that for all of its uniqueness, Joseph Smith’s theology had some striking affinities with the emerging Protestant liberalism of the nineteenth century. Both perspectives featured a finite God, a perfectible humanity, and an emphasis on works righteousness.

This is an important suggestion to pursue, since it points to some key philosophical assumptions that Mormons bring to theological discussion. Many Protestant liberals have admitted that their very similar assumptions do not easily comport with the full range of biblical teaching. If LDS thinkers want to claim biblical fidelity, they must argue, not that they alone come to the Bible unencumbered by philosophical commitments, but rather that their peculiar metaphysical constructs are more adequate explications of the biblical message than those of historic Christianity.

It is important for Mormons and traditional Christians to talk about these things. But for starters we should be encouraged to speak to each other in very personal terms about how we came to sense the need for a Savior, and how we have responded to the healing that he brings in his wings. The conversation must also move to larger issues about what it means to proclaim and teach the gospel in its power and purity. We would also do well to reflect together about the history of our relationships with each other; here evangelicals may have to admit that Mormonism has sometimes flourished, whatever its confusions, because we have not always been very faithful in our own teaching and practice.

Perhaps–perhaps–these conversations will even convince us that we have more to learn together about the gospel itself. At the very least, our discussions can help us to avoid bearing false witness against our neighbors. This book should be carefully studied by anyone who is convinced that such a dialogue is a good and important thing to pursue.

Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is on the editorial board of Books & Culture.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 11

7B5lm7B50117826

Born in Lithuania in 1911, the descendant of a Polish-speaking family that had been in that region for generations, Czeslaw Milosz first came to prominence as a poet in Poland in the early 1930s. In the war years, during the Nazi occupation, Milosz was in Warsaw, where he wrote and edited material for the resistance. In 1946, he entered the diplomatic service of the newly founded People’s Republic of Poland. From 1946 to 1950, he was stationed in Washington, D.C. The following year, after returning to Poland, he defected to the West.

Milosz lived in France from 1951 to 1960; it was there that he wrote The Captive Mind, a study of intellectual accommodation to Stalinism. In 1960 he came to the United States to teach at the University of California at Berkeley, where he soon became a tenured professor. He has lived in Berkeley ever since, becoming an American citizen in 1970.

In 1980, Milosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Widely regarded as one of the greatest living writers, he has been a significant influence on contemporary American poetry. Though fluent in English, he continues to write almost exclusively in Polish–his native language and its literature, he has said, make up his “estate.” In the 1970s he began to translate the Bible into modern Polish, and he has thus far completed a number of books, including Job, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, the Gospel of Mark, and Revelation.

Having recently celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday, Milosz shows few signs of slowing down. He has recently published a personal anthology of world poetry, with commentary, A Book of Luminous Things (Harcourt Brace); and with Leonard Nathan, he has translated the poems collected in Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon), by the Polish poet Anna Swir. In addition, his correspondence with Thomas Merton has been published in Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar Straus Giroux). Earlier this year, Robert fa*ggen visited Milosz at his home in Berkeley.

How did you first conceive of your new anthology, A Book of Luminous Things?

I conceived it originally as an anthology in Polish, and it has appeared in Poland, though under a different title. In Polish, the title is something like “The Book of Useful Things” or “Excerpts from Useful Books.” But the idea was identical. It is something conceived in a struggle against certain tendencies present in modern thought and poetry.

As I tried to explain in my introduction, I wanted to restore equilibrium between the subject and the object. Modern poetry, like modern art in general, has become more and more subjective, increasingly concentrated upon our perceptions at the expense of the world that is before us. I even draw on some Eastern traditions, because I see that a great deal of Chinese poetry, for instance, may be under the influence of Taoist and Buddhist thought in which there is a kind of a cohabitation of the subject and the object. This may seem surprising; we typically associate the East with an emphasis upon what is internal and, therefore, subjective. But in fact, in ancient Chinese poetry the subject–instead of trying to dominate nature and things, as in the Western tradition–somehow identifies with the object of perception. And in that way, the poetry achieves a certain equilibrium.

As the title suggests, this is a book about things seen by various poets, and seen with a certain detachment, in a state of contemplation. In my introduction I invoke Schopenhauer, for whom Dutch still lifes are the ideal in painting. So let us say that the whole book is considered with a great respect for the Dutch still lifes and their luminous grasp of things.

What you say brings to mind another language of vision, quite different from that of the Eastern traditions. I’m thinking, for example, of Paul’s words in Romans: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”

There was, of course, a great argument in the first centuries of Christianity that the created world is sufficient to prove the existence of God. Perhaps in the idea of an anthology largely descriptive of simple visible things, there is sort of a gratitude to God for creation, an approval of being, against nothingness.

I also have the sense, though, reading your commentary in the second section of the anthology under the heading “Nature,” that the visible world, the world of creation, is something that troubles you, and that there is a tension there.

Of course, the world troubles me very much, to say the least. In that regard, I guess, the Book of Job remains the last word. When we ask why there is evil in the world, we haven’t gotten any further than Job. Of course, the conclusion of Job is very weird. God seems to say, “Why do you judge me by your standards? I do what I want, that’s not your business.” The Book of Job ends by berating man about the incomprehensibility of what is done by God.

I have always wondered too about Job’s “comforters,” who tried to convince him that if he suffers, obviously he is guilty. They seem to be very reasonable men. Why does Job constantly scream that he is innocent? Who is innocent? Who among humans can say that he is completely innocent?

You have described yourself, and others have described you, as a very “instrumental” poet: you allow other voices to speak, to use you as their vehicle. This whole anthology seems to me to be like another poem, in that you have allowed all of these voices to speak through you. It seems a continuation of your poetic tapestries of the late 1970s, The Separate Notebooks and From the Rising of the Sun, and, later, Unattainable Earth.

Yes, I am very glad that you mention this; what you say is precisely what I had in mind. It may be that this quality–the touch of my own presence–is more marked in the Polish edition because I translated most of the poems, whereas, in the English edition, I use already extant translations.

One of the most striking sections in A Book of Luminous Things is the section titled “Woman’s Skin.” Though the other sections, such as “Travel,” “The Secret of a Thing,” and “Nature” suggest your enduring preoccupations as well as understandably general concerns, “Woman’s Skin” seems somewhat more personal.

Well, I confess here that I’m in love with a woman who lived sometime around the year 1200, a Chinese poet named Chu Shu Chen. Perhaps I should read the poem of hers that I included, entitled “Morning”:

I get up, I am sick of

Rouging my cheeks. My face in

The mirror disgusts me. My

Thin shoulders are bowed with

Hopelessness. Tears of loneliness

Well up in my eyes. Wearily

I open my toilet table.

I arch and paint my eyebrows

And steam my heavy braids.

My maid is so stupid that she

Offers me plum blossoms for my hair.

I suppose our intimate connection is largely due to the fact that she lived eight hundred years ago. That’s long enough to establish a love relationship, yes? I also included a poem written by a Chinese emperor who opens one eye in the morning and looks at a woman, a concubine or a wife, who gets up and, in the mirror, paints her face. He wonders why, for whom? The desire is to eliminate the masquerade.

Following the section called “Non-Attachment,” made up of poems suggesting a way of finding peace in a world of infernal passions, you include an “anti-chapter” and you come back to “History,” the concluding section of the anthology. Are history and history’s tragedies something that we always have to come back to?

It seems to me you bring up one of the most difficult issues. We cannot turn our back on history, however we may try. But there are many ways of establishing our relationship to history. As you know, in Warsaw during the war, I wrote the most serene poems in my career. They were connected with history, but connected in a negative way. They restored normalcy to a world that was completely disturbed–that was their unmentioned context. So in the midst of massacres a poet can write poems, peaceful poems, as many old Chinese poets did, but a relationship between the poem and its circ*mstances exists somewhere deep.

In the same way, I think, the poems of Anna Swir, whom I have translated, are intimately related to her war experiences even when she writes about love. Her erotic poetry probably would have been different without those experiences. Some people say that her love poems are very cruel, because she objectivizes her subject. We have a man and woman, the intimate relationship of male and female, and yet the voice of the poet is very impersonal. There is something almost calligraphic about her poems.

In one poem, “A Plate of Suffering,” Swir writes, “This morning / a vast new world / is created for me, / especially for me, what a luxury! / The world of suffering.” This appears to be a strange mix of sensuous joy and spiritual despair.

Yes, and that represents a link, I should say, between her love poems, very blatant erotic poems, and her poems about hospitals, for instance–about old women in hospitals. She is writing out of compassion, compassion for the situation of women, but not in any typically fashionable form of anger or pity.

In a poem you wrote about translating Anna Swir while you were on an island in the Caribbean, you include what could be a definition of poetry: “Whatever we do, desiring, loving, possessing, suffering is always only meanwhile. For there must be something else true and stable.” That echoes a definition of the poet from a poem in Provinces: “The poet, someone who always thinks of something else.” And, earlier, you drew on your cousin Oskar Milosz’s definition of poetry as “the passionate pursuit of the Real.”

By “the Real,” he meant God. Poetry, like every human action, is only meanwhile. And awareness of that postulates that something unchangeable and stable may be good. I must add that I have received a copy of a huge book on my poetry written by a Polish priest and entitled Poetry and Theology. He proves that I am all right from the point of view of Catholic orthodoxy.

Is he right?

The situation in theology is very peculiar. Over a period of centuries, theology developed a special language, and today this language somehow doesn’t penetrate minds outside the theological guild. This is precisely the argument of that priest: that poetry should be for a theologian a source of inspiration and new language.

So he finds in your work something that is much closer to what theology should be drawing on. Why do you think theology has gotten into this predicament?

For many reasons which I cannot trace here, because a full answer would have to take account of the transformation of Western civilization since the Middle Ages. Certainly the rise of science and technology has played a part in theology’s troubles.

In The Land of Ulro, you address the impact of science on the religious imagination. Do you see Christianity and science at odds, or does Christianity in some respects lead to science in emphasizing Incarnation, God’s creation, and the drive toward the new?

Nineteenth-century science was unremittingly hostile to any notion of religion. And we are, to a large extent, children of the nineteenth century. We use scientific images taken from the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century science has penetrated our consciousness only very slowly. Einstein’s theory of relativity, the theory of quanta and so on: despite whole libaries of competent popularization, these developments are far more difficult to imagine than the concepts of nineteenth-century science.

But they do have their effect–and, of course, the most important discovery of modern science that can be translated into the imagination is the Big Bang. In the writings of my cousin Oskar Milosz, which predate that theory of cosmic origins, there are passages that–read today–clearly seem to be speaking of the Big Bang, the beginning of space and time. He invokes theologians of the Middle Ages, who had a theory of the creation of the world through the transmutation of nonphysical light into physical light, and hence the beginning of time and space. This is important, because it upsets Newtonian notions of eternal categories of space and time. In the Newtonian imagination, time and space were like enormous containers in which things were happening independently of those containers. But if we take Einstein and the Big Bang seriously, space and time are no longer these terrible containers separated from God and man. Oskar Milosz thus re-imagined a world in which it is possible for humans to feel human.

It seems that poetry today, if it is serious, is a kind of exploration of our place in the universe, and precisely not putting in practice any system–even theological systems or scientific systems–but just groping. That’s why poetry and the imagination can be important. I believe that in my anthology there are many poems that redefine our place in the universe. If you take the work of Wislawa Szymborska, who recently won the Nobel Prize, I especially selected those poems in which she deals with a contrast between us as human beings and nature.

As in her poem “In Praise of Self-Deprecation.”

Yes, yes, because there she implies that barracuda with moral problems cannot be imagined. “The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with. / Scruples are alien to the black panther. / Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions. / The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.” This is in contrast to our constant torment, doubts, insecurity, and so on.

This reminds me of one aspect of Genesis, or of the Garden of Eden: We are related to other creatures, we are from dust, yet we are also supposed to have dominion over other creatures.

The dominion of man over all creation was very important for civilization. But, at a given moment, that dominion breaks down. For Descartes, for example, animals were living machines, but with the progress of biological science especially, the borderline between human beings and animals now is very blurred. The question is difficult; our position of dominion is not clear. And yet, at the same time, as “In Praise of Self-Deprecation” shows, there is an enormous distance between us and animals.

Robinson Jeffers, with whose work you have had a long dialogue, tended to grant moral superiority to nonhuman creatures.

Yes, but that was part of his perverse philosophy, which resulted from crossing Friedrich Nietzsche with biological science. He called the result “Inhumanism.” I am very ambivalent about what Jeffers had to teach, but I appreciate his daring. He was a poet in revolt against modernism. He rebelled against pure form and condensation. He said, reportedly, “I want to speak my mind, my philosophy.” It’s too constricting to be caught in the necessity of constant experimentation, speaking through objective correlatives and creating metaphors. In that way, he was very bold. But the weak points of his thinking are also obvious. It is perverse to say that “distraction which brings an eagle from the sky is better than pity.” That’s perverse! That is not true! There is a certain scale of human decency that speaks against that sort of thing.

Jeffers’s sense of inhuman nature as an absolute good that will survive the destruction of humanity can be related to apocalyptic thought in American culture. You have translated the Book of Revelation; how do you take its message?

The Book of Revelation is a very curious book. The Beast of which John writes is Rome, primarily. So his vision was taken from history, but at the same time, it was moved into another dimension; it became generalized, applicable to other historical situations. That is meta-history in a way. Thus the Apocalypse can still be read today.

I have lived in apocalyptic times, in an apocalyptic century. To live through the Nazi and Communist regimes in Poland was quite a task. And, indeed, there is a whole literature of the twentieth century that is deeply apocalyptic. My work to a large extent belongs to that stream of catastrophist literature that attempts to overcome despair, often through the use of rather ironic procedures. As you know, during the German occupation of Warsaw, I wrote a poem called “A Song for the End of the World.” The essence of the poem is that the end of the world is going on constantly, and we have a man binding tomato plants who says, “there will be no other end of the world.” In a way, he is the savior of the world; whatever is going on, there will always be a man binding tomatoes. But I have always tried to liberate myself from complete despair by postulating a world that will exist after we are no more.

In addition to Revelation, you have translated many other books of the Bible. Which have been the most challenging?

No matter what book of the Bible you choose to translate, you are confronted with the problem of finding the right level of language: neither archaic nor journalistic, but somewhere between those two poles. Most modern translations of the Bible into English fall into journalism, excessive colloquialism.

My problem in translating the Bible into modern Polish was to maintain a high style without archaism. So, for example, when I translated the Psalms, I took as my ideal some fifteenth-century Polish translations. I had to cope with the perennial problem of readers of the Psalms–namely, that the author asks constantly for favors for himself. It’s a childish sort of address to the Father to grant him riches and prosperity and to save him from danger and so on. This demands a considerable dose of humility on the part of the translator and the reader.

In your letters to Thomas Merton, you discuss some of the aspects of life in the United States that troubled you, particularly racial tension and television. How did you find America in the late 1950s?

You see, I came to America in a very privileged position because I came here to teach and I didn’t go through many of the experiences that are shared by ordinary Americans or immigrants. But I was sensitive to the toughness of American life, the sheer difficulty of surviving in this environment. Political terror confronted every person in Poland under the communist system. But when I came to America, I saw that the same amount of fear can be inflicted by the economy–not by the secret police, but by the economy. So I have experienced in my life two types of society: one in which fear is political, and another in which fear is economic.

In the letters, you tell Merton that you have always been crypto-religious. It seems that your sense of being Christian or Catholic was in very grave doubt. Has this changed for you? Or what kinds of crisis were you experiencing at the time in relation to the Catholic church?

I would say that I have been in a crisis all my life, and I am not an exception in this century.

When you met Merton, how did you find him?

I found him a very lovable man, heavyset, with a pleasant face. Absolutely the contrary of how we imagine a monk. A man liking humor, jokes, drinks.

Well, he seemed to be himself very much troubled by the Catholic church, particularly on the question of pacifism, and you objected to his staunch pacifism.

Yes. And I quarreled with him over the American idealism about nature. Nature is not really very good. On the other hand, I do not accuse nature of cruelty, because nature is innocent. I have dealt with this problem more recently in a poem “To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat’s Honor and Not Only.”

One lyric of yours, “To Raja Rao,” contrasts the comforts of Eastern philosophy with your own predicament as a Christian. At the end of the poem, you say that your lot is “reading Pascal.” Why?

Pascal lived at the time when so-called libertinism and agnosticism were already widespread. And he was writing against the wolf of skepticism, Montaigne. Pascal personifies a man in crisis. So for a man in crisis as I am, Pascal is a spiritual brother in a way. Pascal said that “to believe and to doubt, and to gain this belief is for man what running is for a horse.” Every hour, I believe this one hundred times. And in this way, belief can be nimble.

How would you react to a critic who called you a Christian poet?

Well, I feel that he pulls the blanket to his side a little. But it would be pleasant for me.

Do you find that in America there’s some embarrassment about being involved in poetry and being a Christian? Have you found that something you have been uncomfortable with in public, that somehow American culture is not receptive to that?

No, I do not take this too much into account. My position is determined by my situation in Poland, not in America. In Poland they grasp rather well my position, which is not that of an official Catholic and not connected with those who invoke Catholicism for political purposes. I do not try to call myself Catholic, because it is a dangerous label. It leads logically to the Christian Democratic Party.

One of the sections of A Book of Luminous Things is called “Travel,” and you allude there to a theme that has been a preoccupation your entire life, the desire for “somewhere else,” movement to a better world. To what extent does this movement represent both a gain and a loss?

When I was in America for the first time, after the war, I was very restless. I didn’t like communism, and I didn’t like capitalism. For a while, I thought of going to Primavera. Primavera was a commune founded by the Hutterites in the forests of Paraguay. They wanted to practice a kind of basic Christianity, with a life of hard work and simplicity. I used to meet the delegates from that sect in Washington. Fortunately, my wife, who was more sober than I, was opposed to that idea. Later on I heard from a Swiss friend who, before the war, spent time in such a commune in Germany. There was a shortage of women, and the women who were there were very unhappy. So life “somewhere else” is not necessarily better. But there was something very attractive about the idea of Primavera.

In Scripture, labor and individual responsibility are part of the movement toward freedom. In Romans 8, Paul writes that “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”

Yes, for me this is a crucial passage from the New Testament. It is very mysterious. In the Roman Catholic catechism, we read that nature was created by God as immortal and was ruled by different laws than are in effect today. Original sin changed nature into the nature of today. And, at the end of time, the fulfillment of redemption means a world without death and decay. In that way, man’s redemption by Christ brings redemption to nature, saves it from mortality. This stresses the central role of man in the universe. It is, I should say, a most anthropocentric vision, both mysterious and profound.

Robert fa*ggen is associate professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College and adjunct associate professor at Claremont Graduate School. He is the author of Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, just published by the University of Michigan Press, and the editor of Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 14

7B5lm7B50147826

Alot has changed since the days when American religious history was written mostly by and about men. Over the past 15 years, an abundance of new literature has brought to light the central role of women in every kind of religious endeavor: in lay and ordained leadership, in missions, religious education, social reform, music and hymnody, revivals, and, of course, innovative and vigorous fundraising. Add to this the fact of women’s numerical superiority in nearly every religious setting, and it really begins to seem true that, to quote the title of Ann Braude’s recent essay, “Women’s History Is American Religious History.”1

Central to this provocative essay is Braude’s assertion that the overwhelming “presence of women” in churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques demands new interpretive narratives of religious history. Her implication is that we have paid too much attention to singular women, those who were first to be ordained or to sit in a theological seminary classroom.2 Obviously, this “top-down” history is important, but it has tended to slight other–admittedly more ambiguous–dimensions of “women’s presence,” especially their roles in sustaining popular religion.

This can be difficult material for historians to get at, and not only because the vast majority of women didn’t leave written records. As many emerging studies have already shown, women’s spiritual “ways of knowing” sometimes coexist uneasily in a late-twentieth-century world that prides itself on being skeptical, unsentimental, and “street-smart.” One obvious way to get at women’s inner religious experience is through diaries, biographies, and (for women in the present) ethnography. From these works we get fresh perspectives on familiar subjects; the landscape is permanently altered.

On the face of it, Writing Out My Heart, a recent volume of selections from the journals of Frances E. Willard, would hardly strike most readers as a “good read,” nor would one suspect that such a preeminently public person as Willard, renowned president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union during its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s, would have had much opportunity to record a rich inner life. Furthermore, a collection of journal excerpts is by definition missing any obvious plot line; Willard’s autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years (1889), is a better bet if we are looking for a text with a plan. Finally, the bulk of the journal was written in the years when Willard was a sheltered young woman without much experience of the wider world beyond Evanston, Illinois, and a farm in Wisconsin. Yet Writing Out My Heart makes Frances Willard approachable, human, and very interesting.

Carolyn DeSwarte Gifford spent years transcribing Willard’s journals (which had been assumed to be lost or destroyed until they showed up in 1982) and then selecting from the 49 volumes. The text here represents about a tenth of the total. Through her choices of what to include, Gifford has managed to give shape if not exactly a plot to Willard’s journals. In effect, the journal entries tell the story of a young woman (and then, to a lesser extent, an older one) struggling to get her spiritual, theological, and moral bearings, even though it seems as if her heart keeps going out on its own.

A shy, retiring, at times lonely young woman, Willard conceives what sounds like a schoolgirl crush on a young woman named Mary Bannister. This seems harmless enough–it was a very common phenomenon at the time; a hundred years ago young women routinely shared intimacies that might raise eyebrows today–until Mary falls in love with Willard’s brother and Willard finds that she, unlike Mary, cannot move on to marriage. Instead she is desperately jealous of Mary’s growing attachment to her brother. To make matters worse, she becomes engaged to a suitable, charming young ministerial student whom her family likes, only to break the engagement when she finally realizes she cannot love him. All this raises hard questions for her about her identity and her relationship to God: does he frown on her single condition in life and on her “unnatural” affections for women?

And then there are the predictable losses to death: her sister and father early on, and finally her mother, who dies full of years. Her mother’s passing is hardest of all, and Willard never finishes grieving for her–nor does she ever quite settle her doubts about whether she and her mother will be reunited in the world to come.

Most of this is new material that Willard barely touches on in her more “public” autobiography, and it is fascinating. Gifford’s highlighting of Willard’s moral and religious inner life is also a departure from the usual picture created by Willard’s biographers–that of a canny politician and organizer, women’s suffrage leader, and social reformer par excellence. She was all these things, but her public roles are more understandable when we begin to comprehend her religious commitments and dilemmas.

Aimee Semple McPherson’s colorful career as a Pentecostal evangelist, healer, and Hollywood-style celebrity is the subject of a richly contextualized biography by Edith Blumhofer. Much of McPherson’s legend persists in theories about her notorious disappearance in 1926, an apparent attempt at a lovers’ tryst staged as an abduction by mysterious kidnappers. But Blumhofer, while not downplaying the scandal, refuses to trivialize McPherson, pointing instead to her legacy as an innovative revivalist, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and compelling spiritual figure for millions of devoted followers.

Though undeniably one of the best-known and most significant women in twentieth-century American religious history, McPherson consistently eludes whatever pious constructions present-day observers may attempt to impose on her. Unlike Willard, she left no diaries to record her inner life, and, as Blumhofer points out, she continually rewrote her own autobiography. Moreover, McPherson clearly reveled in the theatricality of popular revivalism, and in its secular analogue, Hollywood culture of the 1920s.

Further, we may wonder exactly what difference McPherson’s physical charisma played in the creation of her sometimes ambiguous religious persona. Though the whiff of sexuality in her platform demeanor offended some religionists, it attracted far more. And although McPherson’s sexuality raised doubts for others about her sincerity, she was undeniably successful in combining her allure with genuine evangelical warmth–a success that points toward a growing convergence between popular religion and the secular, media-driven culture of middle America.

Biography is one way of getting at women’s religiosity; group biographies, cast as congregational studies, shed a slightly different light. Jody Davie’s Women in the Presence, for example, takes a folklorist’s approach to her study of a suburban Presbyterian women’s Bible-study group. Another good example of this genre is Joanna Bowen Gillespie’s Women Speak: Of God, Congregations, and Change, an in-depth view of women’s work in four geographically representative Episcopal congregations.

Although Gillespie’s book is not framed historically, it is still a helpful reference point for thinking about change. The book presents an unhurried, affectionate look at women’s sense of their own place in congregational life, and Gillespie’s subjects emerge as articulate and thoughtful people. But they also speak a particular language, depending upon the generation they hail from, about faith, commitment, and service that transcends theological boundaries. It is deeply personal and, Gillespie argues, deeply feminine.

This will endear her subjects to some, and frustrate others. Gillespie, in fact, quotes a response from a seminary professor who had read an early version of the manuscript: “It is as though these women have been unaffected by the evangelical, the Anglo-Catholic, the liberal, the Social Gospel, the existential, and the Jungian movements.” Certainly this gap between the language of religious professionals and that of laypeople is not unique to Episcopalians, nor does it necessarily reflect on women more than men; but Gillespie’s interviews do witness to a long-standing suspicion among many leading Protestant churchwomen, voiced even more strongly by Frances Willard a hundred years ago, that excessive concern for theology is the antithesis of true religion.

The difficulty of unearthing a feminine voice in modern religion will become only more acute as we confront the devotional literature that women of all traditions have turned out with such quiet regularity–everything from the spiritual musings of Marjorie Holmes to the pious romances of Grace Livingston Hill. Such sources probably reflect an authentic feminine voice in American Protestantism, although it may be difficult to take seriously the books our mothers left lying around for less-than-subtle, edifying purposes.

Difficulties multiply when we turn to women and Catholic devotional culture. Unless one knew Robert Orsi’s earlier book, Madonna of 115th Street, one would suppose he had taken on an impossible task in making readers care about the hundreds of thousands of devotees of the Catholic Saint Jude, the “Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes and Things Despaired Of.”

Read in one way–a reading Orsi himself does not rule out–Thank You, St. Jude is unlikely material to win our sympathy. Though the vast majority of devotees are women, male priests run the national shrine in South Chicago and control the considerable sums of money raised by it. Moreover, when women appeal to the male saint for help in matters of love and health, they seem to undercut a sense of their own agency. Occasionally they forgo sound medical advice in favor of the ministrations of the saint. They purchase and cherish “holy junk”: small statues of the saint, prayer cards, medals, greeting cards, and the like. Yet Orsi succeeds in making us care about these women.

The cult of Saint Jude (cult here is a specifically Catholic term, without the usual negative connotations) was begun in Chicago in 1929. In 1935 the publication Voice of St. Jude was started; in it are found the thousands of narratives in which women petition Jude for help and then thank him for having answered their prayers. Orsi draws on these narratives as well as interviews with current long-term devotees of Jude.

Orsi has located himself in relation to the devotees with a great deal of wisdom. He says up front that he is not a believer in Saint Jude, but he grants the women he studies their full measure of faith in him. At other times he seems almost to adopt the women’s voices as his own. Sometimes he is gently humorous, as when he describes the devouts’ insistence that statues or pictures of Jude ought to “look like” his cousin Jesus.

Orsi argues that women’s relationship to Jude clearly improved their lives. In place of hopelessness they gained hope. If they lost agency in some ways they gained it in others, especially in their determination to imagine Jude in their own way–sometimes in contradiction to the choices of the officials of the shrine. When their letters to Jude were published, they gained a public voice and permission to say things about their lives (their alcoholic husbands, their rebellious kids, their interfering in-laws) that normally they couldn’t. In helping and being helped by other devout, they enjoyed “reciprocity,” the networks of caring women.

More than any other book we’ve read (except perhaps Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity), Thank You, St. Jude suggests a model for talking about women’s experiences when those experiences could be described as unglamorous at best, exploitations of the credulity of women at worst. It is possible that Orsi is able to write so well and so sympathetically about these women because devotions like those of Saint Jude seem part of a dying world; they are the stuff of nostalgia. Currently thriving aspects of women’s popular religious culture may be harder for scholars to tangle with–for all sorts of political and personal reasons. Nevertheless, future scholars of women’s devotional lives will most certainly turn to Orsi’s approach for clues on how to proceed.

These four books, as well as many others we could name, more than justify Ann Braude’s claim that women’s experience should be central to our understanding of American religion, and not simply because women are the majority of religious believers. To what we already know of famous ministers, theological controversies, and the growth of denominations, women’s stories bring new complexities and richer textures. They should certainly arouse new curiosity about American popular religion, in all of its wonderful array, as an important arena of expression and creativity for countless, and often anonymous, churchwomen from all traditions. The emerging new literature on women’s lives is at once fascinating, theologically ambiguous, intellectually frustrating, and personally compelling. And, to make a fairly safe prediction, it will never be dull.

Margaret Lamberts Bendroth is the author of Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (Yale University Press). Virginia Lieson Brereton is the author of From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Indiana University Press). They are the codirectors of the Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism project at Andover Newton Theological School.

1. In Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas A. Tweed (University of California Press, 1997), pp. 87-107.

2. In this respect, however, see sociologist Mark Chaves’s innovative and important study of women’s ordination (forthcoming from Harvard University Press).

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 20

7B5lm7B50207826

After 15 years as an Episcopalian priest, Gary Mathewes-Green could no longer tolerate being under the authority of apostate bishops. He and his wife, Frederica, both adult converts to Christianity who had attended seminary together, began looking for a denomination that still honored the traditional creeds and moral principles. The dissident Anglican branches wouldn’t do, because Gary “felt he couldn’t climb further out from the branch to a twig; if anything, he had to return to the trunk.” The couple briefly considered the Roman Catholic Church, which allows married priests in Gary’s situation, but they were repelled by some of the theology, by the authoritarianism, and by the prospect of working under the supervision of people whose thinking resembled that of the Episcopal bishops whom they were fleeing.

Gary eventually came to the Orthodox evangelist Fr. Peter Gillquist, who answered his theological questions, convincing him that Orthodoxy taught salvation by grace, not works. Frederica remained reluctant for a while to desert the sinking ship of liberalized Anglicanism, reasoning that there was a special need for chaplains on the deck of the Titanic. She also says that it is typical among couples converting to Orthodoxy for the husband to be gung-ho from the start, and for the wife to take more time getting used to the idea. True to form, Frederica now can’t imagine ever not being Orthodox, writing that she “tasted and saw, and nothing can compare.”

Facing East gives readers a chance to taste Frederica’s experience and to compare it with their own. It is the story of a year in the life of Father Gary’s young missionary congregation (Antiochean Orthodox) in the Baltimore area, a family diary of a liturgical year. I found it sufficiently charming to read aloud to my wife over several weeks in our after-dinner routine. We are Presbyterians who are just as satisfied with our local church (but not our denomination!) as Frederica is with her Orthodox community. Although our ship isn’t sinking, we still found much in her account to admire.

For one thing, Orthodoxy provides a magnificent aesthetic experience. Worshipers absorb the faith not by hearing about it but by reliving the gospel and the Passion in the liturgy. This gives them a sense of contact with the historic Christian tradition that is often missing in services that are centered on the sermon and more closely tied to contemporary culture.

Second, Orthodoxy is demanding. Participating in the fasts and in the long services (often standing) discourages the attitude, so prevalent among Protestants, that going to church should be something like watching television.

Finally, the Mathewes-Green parents seem to have persuaded their daughter and two sons to share a good deal of their enthusiasm. I need to hear of no further wonders. Those children are potentially more impressive answers to prayer than a thousand miraculously renewed icons.

Did I say that Orthodoxy as practiced by the Mathewes-Green family is demanding? Not if you compare it with the disciplined life of Seraphim Rose, a character straight out of the days of the Desert Fathers.

Born Eugene Rose in San Diego in 1934, he came to San Francisco in the 1950s to seek wisdom of the gnostic kind, studying Oriental lore under Alan Watts. Eugene had the makings of a superior academic mind, including an amazing gift for learning languages. He also had a devotion to seek Truth rather than fashionable knowledge, and to live for God rather than for a career. This inherent sanctity made him unsuitable for a life in the mind games of academia. In fact, it made him unsuitable for a career even in the Orthodox Church, where he was constantly in conflict with manipulative bishops.

Eugene had virtually stumbled into Orthodoxy, falling under the influence of a saintly prelate called “Archbishop John.” Able to see straight through his church’s flawed exterior into the patristic understanding of Christianity at its heart, he never looked back. With his friend Gleb (later Abbot Herman), he founded a monastery in the Northern California mountains west of Redding, living there an arduous life of monastic asceticism and scholarship. As Father Seraphim, he died of an intestinal infection in 1982, at the age of 48, leaving volumes of inspired but loosely organized writings, mostly in the form of lecture notes or articles published in the journal Orthodox World.

I cannot even begin to evaluate his achievement in this brief essay, except to say that I have rarely encountered so penetrating an intellect combined with so generous a spirit. His biography by a brother monk may seem overlong for some readers, but it is packed with fascinating details I wouldn’t have wanted to miss.

One common criticism of Orthodoxy is that it reflects a “Dark Ages” mentality. Father Seraphim would have been proud to admit that he was trying to recapture the mindset of the early Christian centuries. I was taught to see pre-Reformation church history as the story of the Church of Rome, with Augustine and Aquinas leading to Luther and Calvin. From the Orthodox viewpoint, the main story is not Rome, but a turbulent, glorious millennium of church councils and inspired patristic scholars, followed by a tragic second millennium of schisms and decline. Frederica summarizes it eloquently:

For the first thousand years, the thread of Christian unity was preserved worldwide through battering waves of heresies. The method was collegial, not authoritarian; disputes were settled in church councils, whose decisions were not valid unless “received” by the whole community. The Faith was indeed common: what was believed by all people, in all times, in all places. The degree of unity won this way was amazing. Though there was some local liturgical variation, the Church was strikingly uniform in faith and practice across vast distances, and at a time when communication was far from easy. This unity was so consistent that I could attribute it to nothing but the Holy Spirit.

When the unity of Christendom was broken, and papal autocracy substituted for collegial deliberation, the Western Church was free to develop in a direction that led to such disasters as the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the sale of indulgences. The Protestant Reformers meant to return to the roots of Christian belief, but their formula of sola Scriptura failed to prevent waves of further schisms.

Whatever Protestants may think of specific Orthodox doctrines and practices, we should respect the motives that brought people like the Mathewes-Greens and Seraphim Rose to Orthodoxy. At bottom, they are the same motives that launched the Reformation. There is a passion to dig beneath centuries of accumulated accommodation to the spirit of this world, to rediscover the treasure of authentic gospel truth that was proclaimed and defined at the beginning. Whether Orthodoxy has all the right answers or not, it is profoundly attractive to people who are asking the right questions, and who want to find the trunk of the tree rather than to crawl further out on a branch.

One thing we can learn from Orthodoxy is to take the long view of Christian history, seeing the Reformation as one episode in a much bigger story. Throughout the twentieth century, Christianity seemed doomed to wither away under the devastating critique of scientific investigation and the vast social changes that rendered faith (so the experts explained) simply irrelevant. In the end, it is materialism that has withered.

What name shall we give the third millennium? I like to think that we are coming to an Age of Reconstitution. Christianity is not dead or dying, but poised for a new beginning in a world that needs the Good News more than ever. We need to stop multiplying schisms, to set aside the tools of worldly power, and to give the Holy Spirit a chance to help us rediscover the truth that once united us. Those of us who are not inclined to join the converts to Orthodoxy can nonetheless rejoice to have them as worthy partners in that great work of healing.

Phillip Johnson is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Defeating Darwinism (InterVarsity).

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 22

7B5lm7B50227826

Resurrection is harder to imagine than death. Newspapers don’t devote a page a day to resurrections, and the archetypal Resurrection draws more deniers than believers. Death, on the other hand, is the single greatest preoccupation of literature and the prime prompter of the human drama. David Remnick won a Pulitzer Prize when the motif was death, in Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. The key question about its sequel is whether, for a book subtitled “The Struggle for a New Russia,” the right title is Resurrection.

Early reviewers say no. They praise the reporting of the former Washington Post Moscow correspondent and current New Yorker staffer, but they observe the inconvenient fact that most of the news he brings is negative: The standard of living has plummeted. Crime has soared. Corruption disfigures politics. Pollution fouls the rivers, the skies, the land. Life-expectancy rates are stunningly low–59 years for males–and the birthrate is the third lowest in the world. The forecast: demographic disaster.

Remnick’s instincts are surer than his critics’. This best Western reporter on improbable Russia moves beyond the predictable analytical categories of politics and economics to consider culture as well, and in the process, he espies “a recovery from postimperial funk.” A non-Christian, he nevertheless recognizes how important the faith of this long-Christian nation was to its enduring the 74-year Soviet parenthesis. In sum, he transcends the common failing of measuring Russia by a Western yardstick, and more than the mere sentiment of a Russophile gives him grounds for his hopeful title.

True, the open-endedness of this book’s story makes for a narrative less tidy than that of Lenin’s Tomb. True, also, if a new birth is in process, it is being handled by some pretty messy and very bloodstained midwives. Remnick’s main theme, “the struggle for a definition of the new Russian state,” is captured neatly by the microcosmic story of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior–“magical realism, Russian style.”

Stalin destroyed this cathedral, which could accommodate 15,000 worshipers, as he did 95 percent of the churches in the capital of atheism. In its place was to rise the Palace of Soviets, taller than the Empire State Building and implementing “a design that can only be described as a Tower of Babel with Lenin on top.” The plan “to erase the old gods of man and establish bolshevism as the reigning faith . . . came to the most pathetic and banal of ends.” Natural springs defeated the plan, until, years later, the stagnant water was converted to the world’s biggest swimming pool.

Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, the Richard Daley of Moscow, now oversees the rebuilding of the cathedral. It is a symbol of Russia’s rebirth, he explains: “We are recovering the memory of our ancestors.” A popular television host, who finds it “disgusting to watch former members of the Central Committee act pious and more religious than the patriarch himself,” concedes that “there is vitality, real life, in all this. This is an aesthetic built on illegal money and faux Orthodoxy and tawdriness. But what else is there? This is our life as it is!”

The Soviet Union died on Christmas Day 1991, and that date demarcates Remnick’s two books. (It seems that Someone outdid the mayor at the symbolism game.) To carry the story from 1991 to 1996, reporter Remnick relies heavily on his well-honed skill at conducting interviews, and he offers ample–sometimes more than ample–selections from them. He gets in to see the high and mighty, some of them known in the West and some of them not, and he seeks out ordinary people as well. Certain interviewees have lost considerable relevance, Mikhail Gorbachev especially, Vladimir Zhirinovsky somewhat less so. Remnick has not yet gotten to certain dramatis personae, most notably general-turned-politician Aleksandr Lebed. President Boris Yeltsin is, fittingly, at the center of the cast. The book intertwines two main plot lines, Yeltsin’s and his country’s.

Remnick’s judgments about character seem generally sound, even authoritative, but not always. He retains the soft spot for Gorbachev symptomatic of Western liberals–this, despite averring that whatever the egomaniacal “retired czar” of Bolshevism achieved was at odds with what he intended. (Gorbachev’s first words on hearing that the Soviet Union was dissolved: “What happens to me?”) Nor does Remnick depart from the eastern seaboard consensus on Lebed. The general is honest, yes, but he is also “stupid,” the flaw of flaws to sophisticates.

Remnick does seem to have his finger on Yeltsin’s pulse, such as it is these days. The figure of courage atop a tank in 1991 is now a bumbling shadow of his old self. Hemmed in by shockingly misbehaving parliamentarians and obtuse advisers, his reactions are as erratic as his electrocardiogram. Remnick’s strong narratives of the 1993 firestorm at the Russian White House and the 1995 electoral campaign show how close to the abyss Russia was. The war in Chechnya is an ineradicable blot on Yeltsin’s memory. Without discrediting his historic achievements in moving Russia out from under the totalitarian thumb, Remnick persuasively demonstrates how overmatched this erstwhile Communist apparatchik is by the task of creating a civil state amid the anarchic rubble of the collapsed great experiment.

Some people we don’t know may be more important than some we do. Remnick got an interview with Vladimir Gusinsky, “the most powerful and mysterious member of the new Moscow elite,” a 41-year-old capitalist who employs 12,000 in his conglomerate, of whom 1,000 are his personal security force. In putting this swimmer among Mafia sharks on display, Remnick sets up this contrast: Moscow intellectuals “now see only disaster and oligarchy,” but “the new wave of Russian entrepreneurs craves a legal order.” Here is another contrast to ponder: American interest in Russia has waned at the very moment when “there is no place on earth more future-oriented, more interesting, than Russia.” (See, for example, the roiling, neon-lit phantasmagoria of “Moscow This Minute” in the June 1, 1997, issue of the New York Times Magazine.)

No Russian receives more space in Remnick’s account than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One can read whole books on the collapse of the Soviet empire that mention Solzhenitsyn not a single time. The Western consensus may be that he is an irrelevant icon; but Remnick, while not uncritical, takes him very seriously, indeed, not only as the literary figure with the greatest historical impact on our century but also as a source of wise counsel for rebuilding Russia. One who has repeatedly been prescient before may prove prescient again, despite being a spectacular public-relations failure. Remnick gives Solzhenitsyn his due as few do.

Remnick also observes, as astonishingly few Western commentators do, the calamitous effect of three generations’ worth of systematic liquidation of Russia’s most spiritually sound and intellectually independent citizens. Solzhenitsyn is only one among many who mourn this loss. Fellow camp survivor Lev Razgon tallies the millions and concludes that “the capacity to create a democratic critical mass was diminished genetically by the communist regime’s policy of forced exile, imprisonment, and execution.” Many of those who remain suffer from residual communism-in-the-soul, and they are fertile soil for the National Bolshevism of the Red-Brown alliance of convenience, which is the greatest threat to a gradual democratic flowering. Yet, relentlessly, a generation not suckled on the old fears and prejudices now moves into adulthood.

As we watch the Russia-watchers, we can put it down as a rule that the more optimistic they were that the Soviet worm would someday metamorphose into a normal-society butterfly, the more pessimistic they are today. The less they blamed the ideology for the horrors, the less they cheer its passing. But those who got it wrong once are more than likely to get it wrong again. Conversely, those who saw the Soviet story as a tragedy can now imagine a happy ending. After the euphoria of 1991 has come a protracted period of “anti-euphoria” about Russia’s prospects. Remnick’s book shows why, in dense detail. Yet he remains hopeful–not naively; rather, grimly–but hopeful nonetheless.

A newspaper story tells of the tolling of the church bells this past Easter, from 300 churches in Moscow and countless others across Russia, spreading anew the “sounds of heaven” above the citizens. “Victory,” cries a priest, “a miracle,” a vindication. Remnick could have used that story.

Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (Regnery).

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 23

7B5lm7B50237826

A reader with a very strong postmodernist bent might read Keith B. Richburg’s Out of America as a perverse attempt at a film noir script. In film noir, the protagonist is beset by various legitimate and illegitimate group and institutional interests, almost always in a case of mistaken identity. The protagonist is thought to be someone he isn’t. Here, in this book, our protagonist (the hero, for conservative whites and blacks, or anti-hero, for Afrocentrists, black nationalists, and white liberals) just happens to be Richburg himself, an enterprising, truth-seeking, if somewhat harried, black American journalist, who spends the length of this work running from the mistaken identity of blackness. He does not, in the end, wish to be mistaken for underachieving American blacks who want government handouts, the type who burned down their Detroit neighborhood in 1968, as Richburg’s father showed him from their front door, or those nasty, savage black Africans who threaten to stain their entire continent with murderous political chaos and diseased blood. It is his literal fear in the book that he will be mistaken for a Hutu, a Somali, a Tutsi, a black South African, or, when he is shopping or banking in America, an outlaw black. It comes as his great relief that he is none of these, even if it is sometimes difficult for him to convince the world of that fact.

If Richburg had been a more imaginative writer, there would have been something here for an exceptional, or at least unusual, book about identity as a form of power and as an expression of fate, as the psychology of group disharmony. The problem with this book lies not in the fact that the real subject here is Richburg himself and not Africa. We might lament the fact that the author seems not to recognize that Africa is indeed the greater subject and the more laden with possibilities, but nonetheless Richburg himself as subject would have been sufficient if he had taken a more detached view of himself or had taken himself as outsider in Africa a great deal less seriously, or less histrionically, than he does. (There are, for instance, all those moments when Richburg describes himself as wishing to punch his fist through a wall in frustration at African corruption, or ready to weep at African tragedy, or numbed by a persistent African brutality, or banging his fist on the desk of some petty African bureaucrat who cannot understand what Richburg seems to see so clearly, so that the entire book can be reduced to one rhetorical device–the exclamation point–and one emotional pitch–moral outrage–while the author seems to be “mugging for the camera,” so to speak.) The secret in writing a book about yourself is knowing the limitations of your subject. This, Richburg apparently did not know.

The subtitle, “A Black Man Confronts Africa,” expresses clearly enough why this book really falls down. First, there is nothing new in black American authors writing books about going to Africa, expecting to find “the Great Me” or something like that, only to come away cursing and screaming about Africa as “the Absolute Not Me” or bemused by an Africa that is “the Great Disorder.” The stranger-in-a-strange-land theme seems fairly exhausted soil for a book about Africa these days. Richard Wright did this theme in his 1954 book about Ghana, Black Power. Eddy Harris did this in his more recent survey of the entire continent, Native Stranger. Both are better-written books than Out of America. Marita Golden’s Migrations of the Heart is another such book. George Schuyler’s Slaves Today, a 1931 novelization of his impressions of Liberia, is as scathing about African life as anything written.

Martin R. Delany was one of the black Americans to write about traveling in Africa. In his 1861 Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, he saw, to use Ras’s phrase from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, more “black possibilities” in Africa as a place where black Americans could emigrate than many twentieth-century black writers have tended to see. The great nineteenth-century American black nationalist Alexander Crummell, who lived in Africa for many years, wrote extensively about his time there and the people. Langston Hughes wrote about traveling in Africa in both volumes of his autobiography. The transplanted Jamaican novelist and poet Claude McKay wrote about traveling in Africa in his autobiography. In France in the late 1950s, Presence Africain published a volume called Africa Seen by American Negroes, not a travel volume exclusively but nonetheless valuable and instructive, with such first-rate black thinkers as William Leo Hansberry, Martin Kilson, St. Clair Drake, and Rayford Logan, several of whom spent considerable time in Africa. And there is black journalist Louis Lomax’s 1960 journalistic survey of the continent, The Reluctant African.

Richburg refers to none of this rich, varied, and extensive material. He seems to think that he is unique in making the claim that he can talk about Africa because “I’ve been there.” Many have been there and written about it, often despairingly. Few black Americans, whether in the nineteenth century, when many thought of Africans as backward and heathen, or the twentieth, when many thought of Africans as backward and colonized, have seen Africans as equal to themselves or sub-Saharan Africa as anything other than the harsh physical geography that it is. Even Marcus Garvey thought African culture inferior. It was only with the rise of both African independence and the civil-rights movement that Africans began to take on in the black American imagination some type of cultural and political authentication, at least, and even this has been–with the advent in recent years of an implausible Afrocentrism–desperately tied to North Africa in a nonsensical worship of ancient Egypt because it has monuments and symbols that Europeans and white Americans respect.

In the nineteenth century, many black Americans saw themselves as redeemed by America only inasmuch as they could redeem a “fallen” Africa through the idea of America. Today, many black Americans see themselves as “fallen” people, destroyed by America and the white West, who can only redeem themselves through the idea of Africa. Richburg’s book would have been enriched immeasurably, both intellectually and artistically, had he not only indicated to his reader that he was familiar with this body of writing but actually discussed his views in light of some of these earlier ones. He owed this to his readers as an informant and to himself as a writer. His book would then have had a context, a sense of tradition, and a great deal of the false theatrics about “alienation” from the race could have been profitably eliminated. The result would have been a much more grown-up book than the one we have.

Second, regarding the subtitle, is the only thing to recommend this “Africa-as-the-great-horror” book the fact that a black American wrote it? As Richburg’s response to Africa seems indistinguishable from what he describes as his white colleagues’ response, why should his race fundamentally matter? All that seems to matter, according to Richburg himself, by book’s end, is that he is an American, not a black American, and certainly not an African American. His is an American, a Western, response. Indeed, the upshot of the book is precisely this: there is no reason to think that by virtue of the fact that he is a black person he has any special knowledge of, interest in, or connection with Africa.

Why couldn’t Richburg go to Africa and report his findings in a book without his race or his ancestry ever becoming an issue? Is that impossible? I assume not, since Richburg wrote a number of stories about Rwanda and Somalia for the Washington Post where his race was never mentioned. So, why choose to write a book about the problems of Africa in this way? Doesn’t a consideration of his alienated ancestry simply get in the way of a straightforward look at the problems of Africa? Whether he likes Africa or Africans has nothing to do with what Africa is. The book never really answers these questions, and thus it never justifies what it defines as its “occasion.” It simply assumes that its occasion is self-evident. This may say a great deal about race in the United States, but nothing at all useful about Africa.

Oddly, this book also advances a Pan-Africanism that appears to contradict other strands of Richburg’s argument. This is evident when, for instance, Richburg draws parallels between black Americans and Africans, initiated by a conversation with his father about enterprising Asians who have opened businesses in the black community of Detroit:

Most Africans were born in independent black countries, but their leaders still harp about colonialism the way black America’s self-described “leaders” like to talk about slavery and Jim Crow. There’s another similarity, too: Black African leaders talk about foreign aid as if they’re entitled to it–it’s something that is due to Africa, with no strings attached–the same way many American blacks see government assistance programs as a kind of entitlement of birth.

Later, Richburg describes the expectation of many Africans that the United States should come and straighten out their internal problems. It would seem that Richburg is arguing–the merits of the argument being another matter–that the flaws of black people worldwide are the same and emanate from the same cause: lack of discipline. This explanation is as unconvincing as saying that all of Africa’s problems can be attributed to racism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. In either case, the person who holds the opinion wants to legitimate his or her values, not objectively understand Africa. What is interesting is the author’s persistence, for reasons unclear to this reader, in linking Africans and black Americans in ways that seem strained and even racist. So earlier generations of British and American white philanthropists thought the problem of African education and adjustment to colonialism could be solved with the Booker T. Washington/ Tuskegee model because, in essence, there was no difference between Africans and black Americans.

Perhaps the greatest puzzle in Out of America is why Richburg went to Africa in the first place. He writes at one point that “I really did come here with an open mind, wanting to love the place, love the people.” On the other hand, he talks about his “initial misgivings about venturing into the land of my ancestors” when he was first offered the position of the Washington Post’s African bureau chief. By his own account, he did not seem to enjoy the African Studies course he took as an undergraduate at Michigan, where he always came late with a blonde girl who was a fellow student. What he describes indicates defiance of a particular ethos rather than interest in exploring or adopting it.

I can appreciate Richburg’s impatience with many white liberals and white academics who tend to romanticize, overlook, or explain away real problems in black life wherever they are found. Such apologists wish to credit a black victimhood and “resistance” at the expense of a black set of responsibilities; by doing so, they actually reduce the scope of black humanity. I also found Richburg’s chapter on black American leaders in Africa very compelling. Most black Americans today don’t think straight about Africa, and their leaders and intellectuals have been of little help to them in this regard.

Yet Richburg’s blanket disdain for Africanists and scholars is odd. First, he never presents what they say about Africa, except to say that they dislike the word tribe, so his disdain is never explained. Given his subject, a chapter on the African Studies Association and the state of African Studies seems mandatory to me. It is irresponsible to indict the failure of scholars and Africanists unless you are willing to engage them. Second, most of Richburg’s own solutions for Africa differ little from those of many prominent Africanists, such as George N. B. Ayittey. I suspect that Richburg dismisses scholars and Africanists to give his book a marketable anti-intellectual veneer: here’s a writer, we’re to understand, who is dealing with hard-hitting, plainspoken truths and not overly subtle rationalizations. This cheap-shot strategy wins a certain set of readers even if it does nothing to improve the substance of a book’s argument.

Finally, if this book was meant to expose Americans to the terrible problems of Africa, particularly in places like Somalia and Rwanda, with which Richburg has the greatest familiarity, it does not do so as well as it could because it seems so superficial, as if the author never engaged the place, never tried to dig down to its heart or its soul. He seems to marvel simply at the theater of his own disgust and revulsion. Africa is never truly a place for Richburg but only a kind of elaborate psycho-mirror. This explains the book’s very truncated, surface view of African history and the hubris of the writer to think he can explain a continent as huge and diverse as Africa in the way that he does. If he really wanted to prove his arguments he would have taken on a book like Pierre Pradervand’s Listening to Africa: Developing Africa from the Grassroots, published in 1989, which paints a very different and much more hopeful Africa than Out of America does.

If the book is meant to make a case for the degrees of separation between Africans and black Americans, one is better off reading James Baldwin’s famous late-1950s essay, “Princes and Powers,” on the same subject. It is more elegantly and incisively argued, more passionate and moving, and much shorter than Richburg’s book. The power of Baldwin’s essay is that he discerns this difference with such deftness and insight when meeting the African in Europe under the most humane and civilized circ*mstances. The Africans’ difference does not hinge on their chaos, their inhumanity, their brutality, their cruelty–in effect, as Richburg argues, on their being uncivilized, on how obviously they are different from you and me–but rather in the fact that they see the world differently. Our own humanity hinges on the recognition that we cannot define their humanity simply as the sum total of their pathologies and inadequacies. Every people on the face of the earth deserves better reporting than that.

We do not get from Out of America any sense of how Africans see themselves and the world. Richburg never gets inside their culture to tell us. Africans are, for him, simply a shameful enigma. His book ultimately is not about how Africans are different from black Americans but how he as a black American can demonstrate his redemption by showing how Africans are different from, and lesser than, everyone else in the world.

Gerald Early is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and director of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 24

7B5lm7B50247826

The cover illustration showed a mousetrap stuffed with dollar bills under the headline “Taking the Bait?” The cover copy continued with another question in smaller print: “As Christian publishing turns into big business, is theological integrity giving way to marketing considerations and a watered-down, pop Christianity?” Inside the July 12-19 issue of World magazine, the answer to both questions was a resounding yes. Gene Edward Veith’s article, “What Ever Happened to Christian Publishing?,” timed to hit the street just before the Christian Booksellers Association convention in Atlanta, presented a blistering indictment, concluding with a call for the “spiritual revival” of Christian publishing, “for which Christians should be praying.”

To the extent that the charges in Veith’s article are true, they should be a cause for deep concern among all of us who are involved in some way with Christian publishing (which, in Veith’s terms, means evangelical publishing: he ignores Catholic, Orthodox, and nonevangelical Protestant publishers). If, on the other hand, there are distortions in his account, it is important to address them as well. For both of those reasons, Veith’s article should receive a careful reading.

But there is another reason to focus attention on this article, which is representative of what World variously likes to call “biblical journalism” or “biblical objectivity” or “biblically directed reporting.” (For the latest in a long series of editorial explanations of World’s approach, see Marvin Olasky’s column, “Philosophical Doubleheader,” in the July 26/August 2 issue.)

Under the direction of Joel Belz (publisher) and Marvin Olasky (editor), World has made a significant contribution to Christian journalism over the last several years. Their robust engagement with critical issues, driven by a strong commitment to Christian principles and seasoned with humor and more than a dash of sarcasm, has lifted their magazine into the “must-read” category. But along with those virtues, World has its share of flaws, most notably an end-justifies-the-means philosophy that encourages writers to ignore evidence that contradicts the party line and to ratchet up most every controversy to the level of heresy or unfaithfulness to God. Both the virtues and the flaws–especially the latter–are on display in Veith’s report on the state of Christian publishing.

At the heart of Veith’s critique there is one simple but important truth: too many Christian books are superficial– “spiritual junk food,” as Veith puts it. As an editor who receives review copies of dozens of Christian books every week, I can only say, alas, amen. Veith is absolutely right, and if World had built a story on that theme, just when the Christian publishing industry was expecting some cheerleading, I would have applauded. But that wouldn’t have made for a very dramatic story; it is not exactly news. And so instead, Veith has constructed a tale of venality and theological spinelessness on a grand scale. In Veith’s telling, virtually the entire Christian publishing industry has been corrupted by the intrusion of “big business” and a foolish desire to ape secular trends.

While not alleging a conspiracy in the strict sense, Veith constructs his argument with all the standard devices of the conspiracy theorist, in the grand tradition of the paranoid style in American evangelicalism. His article is a hodgepodge of disconnected observations and facts ripped out of context. He reports the 1992 buyout of Word by Thomas Nelson and the failed attempt, that same year, by a group of Zondervan employees to buy back the company from HarperCollins, the publishing giant owned by the Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, raising concerns about the conflict between corporate imperatives and Christian ministry.

Veith’s main example of the baneful pressure on Zondervan from its secular master is its decision to scrap a line of academic books that had not enjoyed profitable sales. Much as I love academic books (the good ones, anyway), I fail to see how this decision suggests that Zondervan has capitulated to Mammon. How, in fact, does it differ from World’s decision not to run 5,000-word reviews of university press books? Zondervan publishes books like Alister McGrath’s Studies in Doctrine (with a foreword by J. I. Packer), Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and the outstanding NIV Application Commentary series. They also publish books that are superficial Christian versions of secular counterparts, and books that are bad in other quite distinct ways. The good ones should be celebrated, the bad ones not. But the reality simply doesn’t fit Veith’s conspiratorial narrative.

Perhaps the most egregious distortions in Veith’s article, however, occur in his attack on InterVarsity Press and Eerdmans. If you are familiar with these publishers, you may wonder what on earth they are doing in this article. Obviously you haven’t read widely enough in the vast and fantastic literature of paranoia. Here is how Veith segues to the assault:

Some smaller publishers resist the pressures of commercialism and continue to publish serious theological books–but some of them nevertheless have drifted from biblical orthodoxy.

And then, as cases in point, Veith proceeds to cite IVP and Eerdmans.

So the connection is this: The whole article is a story about how Christian publishing has forsaken Truth and is in need of revival. Many publishers have been seduced by avaricious dreams of crossing over to the “coveted secular market,” but others, such as IVP and Eerdmans, lusting for respectability on the world’s terms, are instead whoring after the strange gods of atheistic intellectuals, heretics, Catholics, and Jews.

It has always been a matter of some amazement to me that many of those who proclaim most loudly their attachment to Truth are so ready to ignore or suppress inconvenient truths. It is, of course, possible to deceive others (and even oneself) while telling part of the truth and leaving out the bigger picture in which that truth has meaning. So, for example, Veith does not mention that next year IVP will publish the first volumes in its most ambitious project ever: the 27-volume Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. It is the goal of this project to reaffirm “the classic Christian exegesis” of the early church. This enterprise provides a magnificent contrast to the trends Veith rightly deplores, but he says nothing about it. It would complicate the picture a bit, wouldn’t it?

Veith’s account of Eerdmans is similarly distorted. While he allows, with condescension, that “Eerdmans still publishes on occasion important evangelical books such as David Wells’ No Place for Truth,” his overall verdict comes down on a publisher that has “drifted away from biblical orthodoxy.” Still publishes important evangelical books “on occasion”? Well, there was that book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll. And Neal Plantinga’s Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be (honored as Book of the Year by Christianity Today magazine, as Noll’s book was the year before). And Gordon Fee’s magisterial commentary on Philippians. And then there was David Jeffrey’s People of the Book, which was unanimously chosen for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 1996 Book Award for scholarship. Gene Edward Veith was one of the three members of the CCL Book Award Committee.

Veith concludes with an admonitory story. “What has gone wrong in the Christian publishing industry,” he writes, “can perhaps best be illustrated in the career moves of Mr. [Frank] Peretti, the million-seller author.” Peretti, you see, was “lured” from Crossway to Word “for a reported $4 million and a plan to turn Mr. Peretti into a crossover hit.” Now the conspiratorial touch:

According to a veteran publishing insider who spoke on condition of anonymity, Word took the first manuscript Mr. Peretti delivered, The Oath, and hired a secular editor from the New York publishing establishment to make it more acceptable for the tastes of the non-Christian market. As might have been predicted, The Oath has failed to win the big sales of Mr. Peretti’s first novels.

In short, early Peretti, the very model of the “in-your-face” Christian writer (before Word got to him with their filthy lucre and their “New York publishing establishment” editor), equals Christian publishing Before the Fall. Others may see this morality play differently, feeling that if This Present Darkness represents our high point, we didn’t have far to drop. For them, the chief lesson to be drawn from Peretti’s spectacular success is that evangelicals are capable of producing their very own trashy bestsellers. (By the way, according to Publishers Weekly of July 14, 1997, The Oath has sold more than 500,000 copies.)

World is right to insist that as Christian journalists we are committed to certain fundamental propositions about the nature of reality. Everything is not up for argument or negotiation. But the world our God has created is a strange and intricate and complex place, and our writing should reflect its nature. When we do violence to that reality, distorting it to fit this or that thesis, we betray our calling.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 26

7B5lm7B50267826

It is 5:30 a.m. I am struggling to make it to the airport for a 7:00 a.m. flight to London. The first news program of the day accompanies my last-minute preparations. There is a special feature on a new plague that is threatening much of the fabric of Western life. It’s not a medical problem, however; it’s a computer menace: the Millennium Bug. Many of the computers on which our banking, insurance, health, and other vital institutions depend are not prepared to cope with New Year’s Day 2000. They don’t know how to shift the date beyond 1999; they were not programmed to deal with all those zeros, and if they can’t, system failure of massive proportions will ensue. The hunt for a solution is on, and time is running out.

This bit of apocalyptic whimsy reminds me how pervasive is technology’s presence in our world and–more to the point–that the particular bits of machinery that should soon keep me several miles aloft are not fail-safe. It reminds me too of colleagues who lost their lives on January 8, 1989, returning from the same conference I had attended when a British Midland jet came down near Kegworth on a flight from Heathrow to Belfast. The interface between people and machines, between the mortal and the mechanical, can be fun and frivolity; it can also be lethal and lamentable.

The essays that Donald MacKenzie has drawn together in his most recent book, Knowing Machines, are animated by a concern to take stock of the diverse ways in which human beings and machines interact with one another. These essays continue the project on the social construction of scientific knowledge with which MacKenzie has been engaged for some two decades. (His earlier work includes an influential sociological reading of British statistics, connecting its modern history with eugenics, and a study of accuracy in the nuclear-missile industry.) He has drawn inspiration from those like Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Harry Collins, Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin, and Steve Woolgar, who have pressed sociological analysis into the very cognitive content of scientific claims. Mapping the putative boundary line between science and ideology is thus a cartographic venture on which MacKenzie remains unwilling to embark.

Given that MacKenzie is a sociologist at the Science Studies Unit of the University of Edinburgh, it is perhaps understandable that his inaugural cut at the problem of technology is via a re-examination of Karl Marx’s take on the subject. Despite the collapse of nearly all the state regimes of Marxist inspiration, MacKenzie maintains that Marx’s credo that “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” still has much to commend it. His account of “Marx and the Machine” predictably contains a certain amount of ritual intramural jousting with other commentators on whether Marx was a technological determinist, on social organization as the engine power of technical change, and on class conflict within capitalism as fundamentally a struggle between worker and machine. Whatever sense of irresolution may linger on these issues, however, he remains sure that Marx’s insistence on the essentially political nature of technological history is a suspicion worthy of retrieval.

In a second preliminary essay before the case studies that make up the bulk of the book, MacKenzie reflects on the tensions between economic and sociological accounts of technological change. Explanations relying on neoclassical economics he finds unpersuasive since the profit-maximization thesis presumed to propel production technology is empirically faulty. Interpretations assuming a natural trajectory in technological history–frequently drawing conceptual sustenance from biological analogies–are no more convincing. A more reliable guide to making sense of the persistent patterns of technical change, and one that has the added attraction of mediating between the economic and the sociological, is what MacKenzie calls “ethnoaccountacy.”

Ethnoaccountacy is a concept analogous to ethnomusicology or ethnobotany. These refer to the actual ways in which societies produce music or classify plants. By analogy, ethnoaccountacy would attend to how accounting really gets done, not on how it should be practiced or on what its theoretical principles lay down. MacKenzie mobilizes this idea to good effect in its application to technological decision-making; financial assessments of new technology turn out to be different in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan for the simple reason that what passes as “profit” is geographically variant. And profit is different because differing accounting practices are operative.

There is, I think, something altogether right-headed about this move; and surely there are implications of wider dimensions. Maybe our seminaries should devote a little more time to the study of ethnoecclesiology, ethnoethics, and ethnotheology. It’s fine to elaborate ideal structures, moral principles, and conceptual frameworks. But there could be some advantage in taking a good hard look at, for example, how middle-class churches really resolve conflicts, or how tough moral choices are made in hospital wards, or the way theologies actually get made in sectarian societies. In my view, the “ethno” turn has much to commend it.

The chapters that follow illustrate something of the lineaments of such an expansive program. Not that we find here any simple coherence, sure-shot historical method, or universal model. To the contrary, the argument is elaborated on a case-by-case basis–messy, to be sure, but cumulatively impressive for that very reason. For after all, MacKenzie is convinced of the fundamentally contingent nature of technological change, and its history is therefore bound to subvert neat, unilinear schematizations. Besides this, to a lay reader like myself, the chapters look technically impressive, showing an intimate grasp of key mathematical concepts, engineering practices, computerspeak, and the ins and outs of laboratory arenas.

MacKenzie’s scrutiny of the adoption of the laser gyroscope in aircraft navigation, for example, reveals that its establishment as the dominant technology in the industry was in large measure the outcome of a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than any intrinsic superiority over competing systems. With impressive technical detail and conceptual mastery, MacKenzie rehearses the history of the laser gyroscope’s evolution, from nineteenth-century experiments to establish the existence of ether to its incorporation in the Boeing 757, but such matters are not presented in isolation from market forces, the personal prejudices of corporation vice presidents, and PR strategies. Indeed, Boeing’s key role in the laser-gyro revolution, according to MacKenzie, had as much to do with the image of high-tech glamor it wanted to project and the vicissitudes of the civilian and military aviation markets as with technical matters of high accuracy or reliability. Technological revolutions are never simply about technological superiority. In sum, the story exemplifies what Bruno Latour dubs “technoscience”: a networked amalgam of science, technology, social process, and social interest.

The same is true of the evolution of supercomputing, which had its origins in the imperatives of World War II and came to maturity during the Cold War. The narrative that MacKenzie weaves here takes him to the nuclear-weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore and is intended to show how “powerful organizations have shaped the technology of supercomputing as well as being its primary market.” The reciprocal connections between the technological and the social are thereby again laid bare.

The “social shaping of technology” is revealed from yet another angle in the case of “The Charismatic Engineer,” Seymour Cray, whose career MacKenzie (along with Boelie Elzen) considers in a separate chapter. As depicted in a 1990 Business Week cover story titled simply “The Genius,” Cray, whose name became synonymous with “supercomputer,” would seem to be the quintessential “rugged American individualist.” In their account of his career, MacKenzie and Elzen pay full tribute to Cray’s charisma. They note how his secrecy (“his very occasional ‘public’ appearances” were restricted “to carefully selected audiences, usually made up largely of technical specialists from current or potential customers”) has fostered a mystique:

Around the privacy, anecdotes proliferate. Cray has become a legend, a myth, a symbol. Tales (many no doubt apocryphal) of his doings and sayings are told and retold. Display boards of these sayings accompany the exhibition devoted to Cray at Boston’s Computer Museum. Rigorously rationed as they are, Cray’s pronouncements take on an exceptional significance.

As MacKenzie and Elzen show, the image of the rugged individualist is finally misleading, for the “charisma of Cray was the product of a network of relationships that stretched far beyond the man and his brain.” Indeed, the story of Cray, who repeatedly cut loose from the successful organizations he created in order to begin afresh, perfectly exemplifies what MacKenzie and Elzen call “the dialectic of charisma”:

If a network is to grow and survive (more machines, more sales, a growing firm; an empire; a church), its links must multiply, expand, and solidify. Not only are more actors involved, but also many more specialist functions, often far removed from the skills of the leader. However entrenched the image of the charismatic leader’s authorship of everything, strains in the opposite direction develop.

Even the seemingly abstract and disengaged world of mathematical proof, according to MacKenzie, is not insulated from social forces. When, with catastrophic results, computer systems fail, for example, questions about design accuracy suddenly come to the fore. Given the litigious environment of modern society, computer scientists increasingly need to come to terms with what passes as providing a formal proof that a system is correct. One such case was the microprocessor called VIPER (verifiable integrated processor for enhanced reliability) developed by the U.K. Ministry of Defence. Its design was marketed as enjoying the status of mathematical proof. The declaration ended up heading for the High Court with the Ministry of Defence contesting the challenge that its claim to mathematical proof was a misrepresentation. The case never got to court for one reason or another, but MacKenzie reflects on just what would happen if lawyers and judges were asked to rule on what constitutes a mathematical proof, for it is clear that different sides in the dispute operated with quite different expectations of what a proof amounted to. MacKenzie thus probes and problematizes the seeming innocence of mathematical proof and displays the negotiated character of what passes for it. He draws the inevitable conclusion: we need a far better understanding of “the sociology of proof.”

In the relationship between humans and machines, the litigational is one thing, the lethal quite another. Consider in this connection MacKenzie’s account of computer-related accidental death. In an altogether fascinating exploration, he reviews–insofar as methodological quandary and data availability allow–the issue of fatal accidents involving computer systems, and provides an unparalleled inventory of some 1,100 cases. These arise from a variety of causes–software error, design failure, and operator misjudgment–and range from medical accidents and military incidents to air disasters and deaths from automated industrial equipment. All these press him to the conclusion that, in efforts to address matters of safety, it is necessary to move beyond issues of technical accuracy to the organizational aspects of real-world operation. In the middle of this investigation, moreover, he makes the provocative observation–merely as an aside–that compared with such professions as medicine and law, the computer world has been far more diligent in self-monitoring and publicizing the failures of its own profession. That comment hints at something profound in the moral economy of the professions.

The nuclear industry is MacKenzie’s final port of call in this sustained sociological interrogation of modern technology. In a chapter coauthored with Graham Spinardi and enticingly entitled “Tacit Knowledge and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” the tensions between the explicit and the tacit are exploited to the full. The whole argument is premised on the conviction that, unlike explicit knowledge, which is recorded in a form that can readily be retrieved, tacit knowledge can be lost.

It’s a bit like thatching, I guess: the craft almost died out some years ago because there were virtually no master thatchers left to pass on the art to succeeding generations. Now, according to our authors, the same sort of thing just could happen to the nuclear-weapons industry–which, it turns out, is far more dependent on tacit knowledge than we might imagine.

If specific, local knowledge was indeed crucial to the design and production of nuclear weapons, then their “uninvention”–by accident or design–would be at least a theoretical possibility. MacKenzie and Spinardi pursue this line of investigation with much vigor, reviewing the history of the industry, interviewing key players in the drama, and surveying the difficulties that various states experienced in their attempt to go nuclear. In the latter case, the authors reckon, explicit descriptions of the construction of earlier atomic bombs were never enough to guarantee success, and so the attainment of atomic competency would be better described as independent re-invention rather than mere reproduction. Copy-catting, it is clear, was never the simple task it seemed. In every case, such tacit factors as expert judgment, lengthy apprenticeship, pragmatic inventiveness, hands-on experience, and a feel for the job were decisive. As one official put it, having “a cookbook design doesn’t mean you can make a cake on the first try.”

Whether or not MacKenzie and Spinardi’s account–not to mention their utopian hope–is persuasive, there are important implications to be drawn from the general tenor of their analysis. If how-to books don’t really do the job in the high-tech world of the nuclear-weapons industry, where the meticulous following of regulations is supposed to produce the goods, then we can hardly expect objectivist do-it-yourself routes to the contemplative life, quick-fix guides to psychotherapy, and five-point plans to spirituality to be very effective. Ironically, if MacKenzie is to be believed, it is in the realm of technology that there is a growing realization of the central pedagogic significance of an old craft–apprenticeship. Here, working with a master, as Leonardo da Vinci himself recalled, one learns far more than ever the teacher knows he or she is conveying. Elsewhere it is called discipleship. Maybe that’s why Jesus left no guidebook or systematic theology; instead, he apprenticed followers.

It is doubtless often true that mechanization is intended to reduce labor time and thereby increase capitalist accumulation. No doubt it is also true that “from the viewpoint of the worker, the machine is thus a direct threat” since it is “capital’s material mode of existence.” And it can further be conceded that a machine culture imposes new disciplinary regimes on the labor force that can be manipulative, managerial, and–indeed–mechanistic. Such may well be the case. But this can hardly be the whole story. For one thing, the absence of latter-day Luddites is surely noteworthy. Perhaps the sheer entertainment value of the ever-smaller screen has bred a society of technophiles that–even if careless of contemporary philosophy–instantiates Richard Rorty’s postmodern vision of playfulness as the highest value. For another, economically reductionist accounts of technology tout court are bound to founder on the rock of hard particularity–such as the forgotten fact that the washing machine, as a labor-saving device, was invented by the Shakers to leave more time for prayer!

David N. Livingstone is professor of geography at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is the author of several books, including Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, and The Geographical Tradition.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 27

7B5lm7B50277826