Page 4021 – Christianity Today (2024)

By John Wilson

Rediscovering spiritual reality.

Books & CultureMarch 4, 2002

My “Stranger in a Strange Land” column in the latest issue of Books & Culture is about the Eucharist—how it has been marginalized in our worship, and how I have seen a hunger for it among many young people. That is part of a larger story in evangelicalism.

In the Baptist churches I was raised in, most people still went to church on Sunday night. Often that was a time when visiting missionaries came to raise support. They dressed like the people they were serving, and they displayed various artifacts brought back from the mission field. Occasionally, though not often, they showed slides or a film.

On one of those relatively rare occasions, when a film from Africa was shown, the missionaries spoke particularly forcefully about the false beliefs of the African people to whom they were bringing the gospel. Above all they spoke of the crippling superstition of the Africans, their belief in a world of spirits.

I had heard and read such things many times before. My grandmother, who helped to raise my brother and me, had been a missionary to China. I grew up knowing missionaries, and I read countless missionary biographies and autobiographies. But on that Sunday night, I saw something I had never seen before. I saw that the world of the Africans, as the missionaries described it, was in many ways close to the world of the Bible: a world where much could turn on the interpretation of dreams, a world where unseen powers and principalities battled.

Without in the least intending to, the missionaries were giving the impression that the very notion of believing in spirits—and all that implied—was a sign of superstition, to be cleared away. Mumbo-jumbo. And for the first time I had a troubling thought that was to recur often over the years: What did the people all around me in church really believe? Did they really see the world as it is seen in the Bible? Did I?

In those same Baptist churches, we celebrated the Lord’s Supper with soda crackers and grape juice—once a month, usually.

The first thing I learned about the Lord’s Supper was this: “It’s just a symbol.” Such was the horror of “popish superstition,” almost 500 years after the Reformation. That lesson, repeated over and over, was odd, because somehow it didn’t fit with Jesus’ own words, which the pastor always spoke.

In 1654, the Anglican divine, Jeremy Taylor, wrote that

after the minister of the holy mysteries hath rightly prayed, and blessed or consecrated the bread and the wine, the symbols become changed into the body and blood of Christ, after a sacramental, that is, in a spiritual, real manner; so that all that worthily communicate do by faith receive Christ really, effectually, to all the purposes of His passion.

What did Taylor mean by those resonant words, “that is, in a spiritual, real manner”? Some kind of hocus pocus?

hocus pocus n. 1. Nonsense words or phrases used as a formula by conjurers. 2. A trick performed by a magician or juggler; sleight of hand. 3. The skill or power of a magician. 4. Any deception or chicanery.

The source of the expression “hocus pocus” is uncertain, but many scholars believe it originated in a medieval parody of the Latin Mass (hoc est corpus meum; “this is my body”).

A visitor, I attended Mass at a church in Washington in a neighborhood of immigrants from Central America. Most of the worshipers were women. They received communion eagerly, hungrily.

Administration of Communion to the Sick, Bilingual Edition

Jesus dice,

“Yo soy el pan vivo bajado del cielo, el que coma de este pan vivira para siempre. El pan que yo dare es mi carne, y la dare para la vida del mundo.”

Esta es palabra de Dios.

Jesus says,

“I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”

This is the Gospel of the Lord.

Is the Eucharist hocus pocus, a perverse con game in which Christians deceive themselves? Is it “just a symbol”?

No. I have eaten that living bread. And you?

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

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Reflection

What area of my life or ministry do need to be more strategic about?

Prayer

Lord, help me not only to know what I’m to do, but give me the energy and will to do it strategically, faithfully, and persistently.

“Four steps to achievement: Plan purposefully, prepare prayerfully, proceed positively, pursue persistently.’

—William Arthur Ward, inspirational writer

Leadership DevotionsCopyright Tyndale House Publishers.Used by permission.

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Mark A. Noll

The coming of global Christianity.

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Historians of the recent past quite naturally feature the European War of 1914 to 1918 as the first defining event of the twentieth century. It precipitated a series of interconnected and immeasurably destructive European conflicts stretching from Belgium in 1914 to Kosovo in 1998. It drew many non-European nations closer to the West, triggered a profound spiritual crisis in Europe, and began a process that moved the United States into global preeminence.

Yet decisive as World War I certainly was, it is possible to imagine that historians of Christianity may one day consider the years surrounding 1915 as supremely significant for strikingly different reasons. This alternative perspective on the past opens up from the angle of contemporary world Christianity. Violence still looms large—but not the warfare of northwestern Europe. Rather, the events of greatest significance are the genocide committed against Christian Armenians by Turkish Muslims, culminating in 1915, and the nearly simultaneous Islamic attacks throughout the Middle East on other groups of Greek, Maronite, Jacobite, Nestorian, and Chaldaean Christians. The emergence of larger-than-life historical actors is still important—but not political leaders like Woodrow Wilson or Adolf Hitler. Rather, the key personalities are prophets like William WadÉ Harris, who in 1910 was visited by the angel Gabriel in a Liberian prison cell and then went forth to evangelize with astonishing effect throughout West Africa, or Simon Kimbangu, who underwent similar experiences with similar results only a few years later in the Belgian Congo. Again, in this alternative Christian History, the speeding up of global interchange is still critical, as also the role of the United States—but not for relationships in the West. Rather, the key exchanges come from the labors of Pentecostal missionaries, who in the early years of the century carried the message of baptism in the Holy Spirit from Azusa Street in Los Angeles to Brazil, Chile, Central America, Nigeria, the southern cone of Africa, the Philippines, and India.

Such an alternative world history will strike many readers as perverse. Yet those who give Philip Jenkins half a chance with the arguments presented in The Next Christendom may not be so sure. With this book, Jenkins, who teaches in the history and religion departments at Penn State, adds to his growing list of provocative titles that ask readers to rethink what they thought they knew for sure.1

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The great merit of Jenkins’s short study is to synthesize the burgeoning literature on non-Western Christianity and to make bold projections for the twenty-first century. His burden is to ask how the future must be regarded if contemporary realities like the following are kept firmly in view:

In 1999, there were 18 million Roman Catholic baptisms—of those, 8 million took place in Central and South America, 3 million in Africa (and 37% of the African baptisms were of adults).
As of the same year, the largest chapter of the Jesuits was in India, and not in the United States as had been the case for many decades before.
Today there are more Roman Catholics in the Philippines than in any single country of Europe, including Italy, Spain, or Poland.
For most major Protestant traditions, the largest individual denominations today are located outside of the United States or Europe—for example, many more Presbyterians in South Korea than in either Scotland or the United States; many more Assemblies of God in Brazil than in the United States.
Today there are at least 1,500 Christian foreign missionaries (mostly from Africa and Asia) at work in Great Britain.
For more than 50 years, the most rapid expansion of Christianity and Islam has been taking place in Southern nations with the highest general growth of population found anywhere on earth.

By highlighting such indisputable evidence, Jenkins underscores what missiologists have been saying for some time.2 The center of gravity in world Christianity has moved South. The “average” Christian in the world today is not a well-dressed Caucasian suburban male but a poor, brown-skinned woman living in a Third World megacity. While European Christianity has become archaeology and North American Christianity hangs on as sociology, Christianity in ever-expanding sections of Africa, Latin America, and Asia is dynamic, life-transforming, and revolutionary—if often also wild, ill-informed, and undisciplined. Muslim-Christian conflicts will almost certainly grow in quantity and intensity throughout the twenty-first century as centers of rapid Christian and Muslim expansion encroach upon each other in many parts of the Two-Thirds World.

What Jenkins makes of the new world Christian reality is not what all observers will see. China, for example, does not play a large part in this book, and his treatment of India is restricted to Hindu-Christian conflict and the role of Dalit (“untouchable”) conversions in fueling that conflict. Yet it may very well be that world Christian leadership for the twenty-first century might come from India (where there exists an 1,800-year history of up-close negotiation with other world religions) or from China (where incredible Christian breakthroughs are occurring among both highly educated intellectual Élites and practitioners of traditional religion among the rural poor). Still, Jenkins’s own conclusions from his evidence offer more than enough for serious thought.

He is especially provocative when he insists that Christian expansion deserves to be treated substantially as the new Christians describe it. Yes, of course, the need for social cohesion among displaced peoples can explain the attraction of Christian community, massive relocation to cities can explain the attraction of inner self-discipline provided by Pentecostal experience, and the promise of divine healing can explain the appeal of Christianity where there is no modern medicine. Jenkins, however, tries very hard to break through the Western insouciance that presumes to tell non-Westerners what they are really up to. Whatever political, social, or cultural factors may be appropriate for explaining Christian expansion in the Two-Thirds World, Jenkins holds that amid the great diversity of Christian churches in the Southern world, a common feature is “the critical idea that God intervenes directly in everyday life.”

Jenkins also offers convincing reasons for depicting the religious future of the planet as a series of Main Events featuring Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and Muslims, surrounded by sideshows of only marginal significance from Buddhists, Hindus, evangelical Protestants, and the Eastern Orthodox. As for modernist elements of Western Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, Jenkins obviously feels that they are drifting rapidly to the simply irrelevant.

In his description of likely future conflict, Jenkins carefully catalogues the many different possibilities for systemic violence between Muslims and Christians. These include situations where Muslims are a massive majority and construct hegemonic societies (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia); situations where large Muslim majorities must still confront smaller but long-standing Christian minorities (Indonesia, Egypt, Sudan); situations where Muslims and Christians are equally balanced and equally aggressive (Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia); situations where large Christian majorities face rising Muslim minorities (the Philippines, Uganda, Germany, France, Britain); situations where dominant Christian or secular majorities are interlaced with small but sometimes prosperous Muslim communities (the United States, Brazil, Mexico); and the situation of the former Soviet Union, where Christian minorities in the Muslim republics of south-central Asia may call upon Russia, with a slowly recovering Eastern Orthodox consciousness, to act on their behalf.

And there are many other thought-provoking opinions. Jenkins wonders, for example, if American standards of religious freedom and American separation of church and state may not be historical anomalies in the face of weightier traditions in the Southern hemisphere among both Muslims and Christians—traditions that treat society as an integrated whole requiring a high degree of religious uniformity. He explores provocatively the relative influence of Catholic-based liberation theology and Pentecostal-inspired evangelism in Latin America, and then suggests that Andrew Chesnut might have got it right: “the Catholic Church has chosen the poor, but the poor chose the Pentecostals.” Finally, Jenkins pounds another nail into the coffin labeled “Christianity Defined as Western European Religion.” However empirically absurd it has become, much received academic opinion still insists on ascribing Christian growth in the Two-Thirds World to the agency of American television evangelists, a manipulating Vatican, the cia, the U.S. military-industrial complex, Coca-Cola, or NestlÉ. While Western elements do take their place in the story Jenkins tells, he is entirely persuasive in arguing that non-Western Christianity must be defined first in non-Western terms.

In sum, if the times demand nothing less than a major rethinking of contemporary global history from a Christian perspective, Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom will be one of the significant landmarks pointing the way.

1. As examples of a prodigious recent output, see Jenkins’s Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001); and Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (Yale Univ. Press, 1998).

2. For example, Dana Robert, “Shifting Southward: Global Christianity Since 1945,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, April 2000, pp. 50-58.

Mark A. Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the editor of God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790-1860 (Oxford Univ. Press) and the author of The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Eerdmans).

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Philip Jenkins

The fastest-growing religious group?

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In their hasty efforts to explain Islam to the American public, media commentators have offered some dubious statistics that, if true, would have striking consequences for the picture of religion worldwide. How many times of late have you heard that Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion, that Islam will be the world’s largest religion within a few decades? The figures are spurious, since Christians will far outnumber Muslims at least through the coming century. That North Americans so readily accept such predictions testifies to our continuing ignorance of the flourishing state of Christianity in the global South, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Despite all the superb scholarship on “Southern” Christianity over the last 20 years, many North Americans are oblivious to the booming numbers of Christians worldwide. For our secular Élites, at least, there are ideological reasons to ignore this Christian explosion—to hope, perhaps, that if they ignore it, it will go away. Across the global South, the churches that are enjoying the richest harvests are quite alarming even from the viewpoint of mainline liberals, let alone hardcore secularists. These newer churches preach deep personal faith and communal orthodoxy, mysticism and puritanism, all founded on clear scriptural authority. Whether such congregations describe themselves as Pentecostal, independent, or even Catholic, they preach messages that, to many a Westerner, appear simplistically charismatic, visionary, and apocalyptic. In this thought-world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith healing, exorcism, and dream-visions are all fundamental parts of religious sensibility. For an American liberal, this emerging Christianity is about as alien as Islam, and perhaps just as frightening.

Published in 1990, David Martin’s Tongues of Fire became one of the most influential sociological attempts to analyze the Pentecostal movement, as it exists in its Latin American heartlands. Working from a British perspective, Martin drew parallels between today’s growing Pentecostal/Protestant movements and the historic experience of Dissenting and Methodist churches in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (Ultimately, as Martin has argued in these pages, Pentecostalism grows out of Methodism, by way of the Holiness tradition). In Latin America today, as in the industrializing England of 200 years ago, enthusiastic new churches emerge to fill needs left untouched by the traditional society. These needs might be economic, since the new churches offer mutual aid and support, but at least as important is the sense of community that the congregations offer in the wastelands of urban society. The new churches offer transformations that are both personal and cultural. Converts feel free to speak and think for themselves in a way that was not possible when they were required to show deference to the old hierarchies of church and state. In more senses than one, “tongues of fire” are lapping across modern Latin America.

With its sympathetic approach, Martin’s book did much to lay to rest the then-popular myth that Latin Pentecostalism was little more than an arm of U.S. cultural imperialism, a cia-sponsored counter to Catholic liberation theology. Indeed, Martin’s writings over the years have not only helped to explain the social appeal of modern Pentecostalism but also, perhaps, indicated its patterns of future growth. Though a modern Latino Pentecostal might be unimaginably poor by Western standards, the thrift, sobriety, and self-confidence acquired in his or her congregation promises to lift that family into the ranks of respectability and, within a generation or so, into full middle-class status. Inevitably, the Pentecostal and evangÉlico churches will gain wealth, power, and social influence within their respective countries. Pentecostalism must therefore be seen as a crucial aspect of modernization and social development: so much for the familiar Western dismissal of “fundamentalism” as a panicked rejection of modernity and globalization!

Martin’s new book expands his focus to the global phenomenon of “Pentecostalism, and its vast charismatic penumbra.” Throughout, his approach is judicious, balanced, and respectful. His range of cultural and historical reference is also impressively broad. Beginning with Pentecostal roots in the “pullulating matrix of American experimental religion,” he traces “how the religion of poor whites fused with the religion of poor blacks to create a potent amalgam capable of crossing the cultural species barrier and taking off on a global scale.” After revisiting his familiar ground of Latin America, he describes Pentecostal successes across Africa, where the new churches have far outpaced the so-called “African independent” congregations that attracted so much attention a few years ago. His account of Asia is especially significant since Pentecostalism is at the cutting edge of Christian growth in China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and all around what we conventionally call the Pacific Rim—but should increasingly be termed the “Christian Arc.” An important chapter discusses the Pentecostal presence among indigenous peoples in Central America and elsewhere, peoples for whom the churches serve as an essential bridge to what would otherwise be a deeply intimidating modern civilization.

As will be obvious from this very diverse listing of regions and societies, Pentecostalism emerges as anything but a homogeneous whole. It appeals to “the respectable poor seeking to enter the modern world” in Latin America; to “the new middle classes of West Africa and South-East Asia”; as well as to minority groupings for whom such familiar class terminology is quite inappropriate. But however its exact appeal varies from place to place, the Pentecostal movement is succeeding dramatically. A global total of 250 million Pentecostals today—and that is a conservative estimate—could rise to a billion by 2040 or so. If that projection is correct, there will then be almost as many Pentecostals as Hindus worldwide, and they will far exceed the number of Buddhists. (But just try going to your local superstore and looking for materials on Pentecostal Christianity, as opposed to those Asian faiths.)

Martin is particularly good at addressing issues that earlier scholars have neglected. It is not too difficult to study regions of runaway Pentecostal success like Korea or Brazil and to suggest why the movement should have burned there like fire in the thatch; but why have other societies proved so resistant? If Latin America has welcomed the new faith, why is Latin Europe (largely) so cool? Martin’s explanation stresses the enormous economic gulf that separates the two areas, as we contrast the relative prosperity of even the poorest corners of Europe with the extreme immiseration of urban Brazil or Chile. He may well be right, but the contrast suggests the limitations of his British- and European-oriented perspective. Though analogies can be suggestive, the differences between global South and North might just be too enormous to allow any worthwhile extrapolation. In this context, I note the lovely epigraph that Martin has taken from John Updike: “I don’t think God plays well in Sweden … God sticks pretty close to the Equator.”

Among the book’s many virtues is the perceptive comparison between Pentecostal and Catholic currents in the global South. Too often, researchers implicitly accept the dichotomy offered by the new churches themselves between the spiritual flames of reformation and the lifeless mass of the old churches, especially when (as in Latin America) these older churches are intimately tied to the state and the elite social order. Martin fully recognizes the rhetorical nature of such claims—revolutionaries always need to portray the old order in the grimmest possible terms—and he knows that Southern Catholic congregations share many of the vibrant features that characterize their Pentecostal neighbors. Since Catholic churches are flourishing in the global South, winning millions of converts in Africa and Asia, they must be offering at least some of the same attractions as the Pentecostals. Sometimes, Roman Catholics borrow explicitly from charismatic models. The very successful El Shaddai lay movement, founded in the Philippines, now operates on a near-global scale. Likewise, in Latin America “The most successful response to the Pentecostal challenge is clearly charismatic Catholicism.” As Martin writes, “both Catholicism and Pentecostalism are global options, offering the two most vital versions of Christianity in the contemporary world.” Worldwide, Catholicism is “the main Christian rival.”

My one criticism of his sympathetic interfaith approach is that he does not carry it far enough. He scarcely acknowledges how well some of the other “mission churches” are doing, especially the large Anglican Communion, which in much of Africa has a distinctly Pentecostal tone. Across much of the global South, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists have all experienced some degree of what Martin terms “Pentecostalization,” a process that owes much to a close and literal reading of the New Testament, free of the lenses supplied by the Western experience of rationalism and secularization.

David Martin’s Pentecostalism is an invaluable survey of what is clearly one of the most important worldwide social movements of the last half-century. One must be struck by the enormous gulf that exists between the events that he describes and the standard media and scholarly accounts of trends in the Two-Thirds World. Depending on one’s point of view, such blindness to a spiritual explosion of this magnitude is either hilarious or deeply alarming.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of many books, including The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford Univ. Press), reviewed in this issue, and Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (also from Oxford).

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Stephen N. Williams

The global ministry of John Stott

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Well, a remarkable man and a remarkable ministry. In 1999, Bishop Timothy Dudley-Smith published the first volume of a biography of John Stott.1 The sequel takes us to the edge of the subject’s eightieth birthday, which he celebrated in April 2001. In this second volume—its chronological outline is modified by the need to follow certain broad trajectories in describing the ministry—the biographer picks up the story in the early Sixties, with Stott established as the Rector of All Souls’ Church in London.

Under his leadership and expanding staff, the congregation of All Souls’ increased in numbers and strength, creative initiatives, and cultural diversity. Those who have mainly encountered Stott outside the United Kingdom will not always appreciate how his international leadership developed out of dedicated, unremitting labor and commitment to the congregation in his care. That leadership itself emerged as he became widely known both through independent travel and through association with Billy Graham in the decade of the World Congress on Evangelism at Berlin (1966). Even those rooted in the United Kingdom may be surprised to learn just how much Stott participated in official and unofficial discussions on various questions that exercised the Anglican Communion. But was his an “Anglican identity,” as many supposed during this decisive period in British evangelicalism? Two events highlight this question.

The first is the well-known public disagreement with Martyn Lloyd-Jones at the Second National Assembly of Evangelicals in October 1966, on the question of the nature of evangelical unity. Any summary description of what the disagreement was about risks being an interpretation, for, as the biographer makes clear, the background and the story of the disagreement are themselves matters of disagreement.2 Timothy Dudley-Smith disclaims the interpretation that Lloyd-Jones explicitly appealed to evangelicals to leave the major denominations and form a united church.3 But he finds the nature of Lloyd-Jones’s appeal unclear and implies, without saying so, that Stott understood the logic, force, or effect of what was said to constitute an encouragement to separation from “mixed” denominations; hence his response from the chair. Although we know where the biographer’s ecclesiological sympathies lie, and although he could hardly have described matters in a way that some will not criticize, Dudley-Smith does what he can to avoid stirring the pot once again and keeps his account to the minimum possible in this kind of biography. Much more could have been said just in the way of report, let alone of interpretation, but one senses his anxiety not to reopen wounds that should have healed a long time ago.4

The second event is the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress, held at Keele in 1967. This marked the public emergence of Anglican evangelicalism as a significant force in church and society. Behind it lay and within it bubbled the energies of John Stott, along with those of collaborators like Sir Norman Anderson. Yet, I believe that nothing should deflect us from the conviction that Stott’s Anglicanism is less significant than his evangelicalism, something that appears crystal clear to many Third World leaders (and not just because they might be unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the English scene). His was and is an Anglican churchmanship, but not an Anglican identity. Although Dudley-Smith does not put it like that and might question the felicity of the formulation, it seems to me to be the upshot of his account and one clearly warranted by the evidence.

The most conspicuous public trend in Stott’s ministry overall has probably been his increasing concern for and involvement with the Third World. In moving from the Sixties to the Seventies, his biographer documents the changing contours of the ministry, as the university missioner mutated into the global traveler from “Australia to the Arctic.” Such a ministry could only develop if things changed at All Souls’, and this happened when Michael Baughen was installed as vicar there, just before Christmas in 1970. It signaled the birth of a new era, but not of a new man, save in the sense of one daily renewed. For we are still with the Stott of youth, who gave himself completely to Christ, the Stott of Cambridge days, whose self-discipline was legendary, the Stott of the Sixties, evangelist, pastor and teacher, his parish now increasing and self decreasing in the service of his Lord.

The middle years of life have been called “the exhausted years,” at least for that defiantly unstottonian breed which has lapsed into marriage and the family business.5 Readers who accompany him on his travels at this time of life will wonder why they were not such years for John Stott too; they will find it exhausting to keep up with him, while the man himself goes on relentlessly. (The pace does not slacken very much even when variously plumed and speckled birds fly in and out of these pages duly noted, photographed, and reported in writing by their pursuer.)

The best-known fruit of this period is the work with the Lausanne Congress and movement, a time and a context which saw Stott’s leadership in international evangelicalism evidently consolidated.6 Behind the hopeful scenes there could be painful differences, not just on theological questions about the relation between evangelism and social action, but also on questions of leadership and strategy, involving a degree of tension with Billy Graham at one stage. However, any awkwardness seems to have been short-lived and quickly dealt with, leaving the relationship between the two men warm and strong as ever.

Theological differences arising between Stott and some other evangelicals over “Lausanne” issues were in time compounded by the suspicion, even the charge, that he had broken with authentic evangelicalism in questioning the belief that hell consists in unending penal torment for the wicked.7 Indeed, this controversy belongs to the late Eighties and Nineties, and not to the Seventies. But even if we do not collapse into a single constituency all evangelicals who have theologically disagreed with Stott, the profile of Stott as an “erstwhile evangelical” was taking some sort of shape in the Lausanne years of his establishment as an international leader.

In relation to the question of hell, a particularly sad tale unfolds, more painful for his subject than his biographer tells. Theological disagreements are there to be overcome, if we can manage it, but the church can grow through them where there is mutual respect, acceptance, love, and appropriate trust. Growth is stymied and fellowship marred when people conscientiously committed to Scripture and completely surrendered to Christ as Lord are regarded as bordering on the traitorous when they break rank (or threaten to) on the duration of future punishment. But I must underline that it is only a proportion of those who have dissented from Stott on this question that has consigned him to the ranks of the unfaithful.

During the decade when this began to brew, the decade of the Eighties, as the unstinting traveling continued, the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity was launched under John Stott’s directorship. Alongside concern for Christian leadership in the Third World and for the poor, his conviction had grown that we must “penetrate culture for Christ,” and the establishment of the institute was designed to enable folk to think Christianly about all the business and all the spheres of life.

Although emphases have sometimes changed over the course of Stott’s ministry, the continuities are well indicated in both biographical volumes; there is more unfolding than reversal. What broke surface as fresh emphases over the years appeared one way or another early in that ministry, though there were new configurations. If you have the abilities and the calling, and are rooted and grounded in Christ, then evangelism, pastoral care, biblical teaching, theological thinking, compassion for the poor, and concern for work and marketplace really form one seamless whole. This is something deeply impressed on the reader of both volumes of this biography.

As he used those abilities and interpreted that calling in the last decade of the second millennium (roughly coinciding with his seventies) Stott focused increasingly on the Third World by developing initiatives established under the auspices of the Langham Trust and Evangelical Literature Trust in the United Kingdom, and John Stott Ministries in the United States, now part of the Langham Partnership. Scholarships in the West are offered to Third World Christians to help them gain doctorates in biblical and theological subjects and return to their homelands to train others in biblical understanding and to promote expository preaching. To the same end, books are carefully selected for pastors and grants made to Third World seminary libraries. During this decade, Bishop Dudley-Smith himself produced a “comprehensive bibliography” of John Stott’s own writings and a selection from them.8 Naturally, the narrative account in this volume is laced with descriptions of these, from the earlier studies of The Baptism and Fullness of the Spirit or Men Made New to the later Evangelical Truth and including well-known volumes like I Believe in Preaching, The Cross of Christ, and Issues Facing Christians Today as well as contributions to the Bible Speaks Today series.

Time fails us to tell of everything in this biography: this review touches on approximately 1 percent of what is going on in it and the biographer himself touches on rather less of what has gone on in his subject’s life. The final chapter draws conclusions about the man and the ministry. It is particularly welcome because in the flurry of activity which is recounted, it is occasionally hard to keep fully in mind the man himself in the midst of that ministry. In pausing to consider Stott’s character and qualities, Dudley-Smith reminds us of what lies at the heart of that ministry, namely, the heart of the man, and finely draws together the ways in which Stott has exemplified the “obedience of faith” with a simple and uncomplicated dedication of his life to Jesus as Lord.

What shall we say to all this? First, a word of gratitude to the biographer. Biography can take more than one form, including the general form of chronicle. This genre is faithfully exemplified here and we are much indebted to Timothy Dudley-Smith for researching the data and presenting the findings. Selection must have been difficult and no two people would have done it in the same way. Many verbal impressions are recorded of an incident or meeting that featured Stott. It was right that they should be, and the author is to be admired for his skill in their judicious deployment and painting a compelling portrait of his subject through them. Still, judgments they are, of course, and their separation from the account of “fact” is practically impossible for any biographer.

It is possible that, just as we might sometimes border on losing the man in the midst of his activities, so, very occasionally, those activities threaten to be “flattened out” by the need to move on and report on the next matter. For example, we go swiftly from the account of controversy over Essentials and the question of hell to Snow Buntings and American Goldfinches. I hope that I am allowing fully here for the keenness of Stott’s ornithological interest. Yet perhaps I am unfair and merely exhibiting the unwisdom of doing what I did, i.e., reading the book in two or three great chunks. In any case, how else could the tale have been crafted?

One thing is clear: this is not a volume about chocolates or speed limits. After reading it, I am not sure whether I need one or two hands on which to count the number of times John Stott has had an “off” day or spoken a significantly misplaced word. In terms of persistent weaknesses, there are two main candidates: the temptation to take one chocolate too many during the season of the blue moon and the occasional calculated imprecision in interpreting the reading on the speedometer. And a measured scrutiny of these two candidates suggests that, even here, the case against Stott might not indubitably stick.

So what do we have in this biography? Hagiography? Actually, nothing of the sort. But a sketch of somebody singular, yes. Tom Cooper “tells how his year as study assistant has replaced ‘the “super-star image” we have of such men’ with that of a ‘mere mortal’ who has ‘consecrated his life to Christ and whom God has elected to use.’ ” Idolization of leaders is just that, and it applies to Stott as much as to anyone. He has discouraged it more than anyone. Nevertheless, it remains that, as far as we can judge, this has been a life of singular victory through singular submission, the faults being more evident to God than to others. Some unknown and uncounted men and women have doubtless borne like fruit, but not many prominent leaders have done so.

Indeed, if a reviewer be permitted the dubious privilege of perversity, I think that the biographer could have gone further in drawing out his subject’s qualities by correcting one misleading impression, revising one questionable judgment and adding one neglected emphasis. My motive in suggesting this is not to glorify John Stott. It is to secure as accurate an impression as possible for those who will be acquainted with him in future only through his writings or through others.9

The corrigible impression concerns the possibility of Stott’s becoming a bishop. Terry Lovell reported a conversation with Stott on this matter: “He would, he admits, in many ways rather like to have been a bishop. Not for the self-gratifying quest for privilege, or the gas-and-gaiters comfort of high office. Rather, for the sheer, naked power.” The quotation from Stott that follows these words should of itself have led Lovell to change his sentence about power. As it stands, it is totally misleading to the point of being plain false.10 Here the biographer, who tries to make fair assessments throughout the book, might have interpolated a demurral, for his own account has done everything possible to distance the reader from such an appraisal.

The questionable judgment concerns Stott’s demanding global ministry in the late Eighties, when he was drawing toward his seventieth birthday. The “deeper reasons” for undertaking this are (rightly) said to be a burden for the Third World and its leaders in particular, a commitment to preaching and experience of the benefits of international consultations. Yet: “No doubt in some way, as perhaps most work of this kind does, it ministered to his own needs, conscious or unconscious. After so many years his own identity was bound up in it, and reaffirmed visit by visit.” In a case like this, one can hardly be definitive on questions of identity and unconscious needs. But I venture to disagree firmly with this judgment. Rare though this might be for someone in his position, it seems to me that Stott’s identity has been formed remarkably free of the characteristic constraints in question. We are more safely guided into his psychology when we dwell on the reason for his initial refusal to return to speak at Urbana back in 1967. According to John Alexander, Stott “felt bringing the Bible expositions at Urbana Conventions was such a rare privilege that nobody should enjoy it more than once.”

The neglected emphasis concerns the personal cost of Stott’s ministry, a cost that he believes is just intrinsic to discipleship. He has somewhere stated his belief that books on evangelism tend to give insufficient weight to the place of personal suffering in evangelism. The basis of this belief is his reading of the Bible. But beneath the remark there also surely lies personal experience not to be paraded before the public eye. The biography makes one or two explicit allusions to what it constantly implies, namely, the centrality of personal prayer in John Stott’s life. We see only the outward effects of his experiences of God, but those who pray as God would have them pray are bound to suffer as Scripture warns that they will suffer.

Timothy Dudley-Smith presents us with a person of unusual all-round abilities, character and discipline. What are we to emulate? Abilities obviously differ in their distribution and indicate the diversity of God’s people. Qualities of character, on the other hand, are meant to express the unity of that people. Holiness and love form the root, but the root can be planted properly only in the soil of humility. Nothing is more striking about John Stott than that humility, as his biography reveals. Its foundational Christ-centeredness has at least one unexpected, but entirely natural, effect. It is this: many influential leaders consciously or unconsciously make those exposed to them wish that they too could become such figures so that admiration becomes spiced with a little envy. Doubtless people have felt this with Stott, but not on account of any spirit that he exudes. If I may speak personally, I should say that time spent listening to or talking with John Stott over the years has always left me wanting simply to discover what my particular tasks are in life and fulfill them obediently, without aspiring to do anything or to be anyone else. It is profoundly liberating.

In his last chapter, Dudley-Smith makes much of the comparison between Stott and Charles Simeon, a welcome comparison which, one hopes, will stimulate increased interest in Simeon amongst non-Anglican (and, for that matter, Anglican) evangelicals. It is worth adding that Simeon learned from one John Thornton “the three lessons which a minister has to learn: 1. Humility.—2. Humility. —3. Humility.”11 They are, of course, lessons we all equally need to learn.12

Abilities are one thing, character another—but should John Stott be emulated in respect of discipline? Among the sections in the biography that are both most illuminating and most amusing are those that record the experience of his study assistants over the years. They asked themselves whether he was to be emulated in respect of his discipline and cognate meticulousness. The concept of “discipline” and the elements ingredient in it have to be analyzed carefully, of course. But whatever temperamental factors or physical capacities enter into such things, the root of John Stott’s conviction about the importance of discipline is the biblical exhortation to redeem the time.13 Without loading upon ourselves unrealistic expectations or unwarranted guilt, we must surely acknowledge the importance of his example in this area too.14

Unrelenting discipline is part of a wider picture of unrelenting thoroughness in Stott’s general approach to life. But this is embedded in a spontaneous love of and interest in all things, nature and people. His ornithological interest is well-known, but note the strong general statement:

Scripture bids us go beyond birds and include in our interest everything God has made: “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them” (Psalm 111.2, NRSV). Since “the works of the Lord” refer to his works of both creation and redemption, it seems to me that nature study and Bible study should go together … We ought to pursue at least one aspect of natural history.15

Less well-known, but almost as conspicuous, is his interest in all things human. He would surely own Terence’s famous dictum: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto (I consider nothing human alien to me).16 Ultimately, I think, this intense interest has biblical roots not distant from those that underlie Abraham Kuyper’s classic lectures on Calvinism.17

But the biography summons us to think beyond John Stott, so let us switch focus in conclusion. It has long been noted, and often lamented, that while the majority of the world’s population of Christians lives outside the West, Western voices have a disproportionately large say in the public formation of evangelical theology on the international scene, and Western leaders are frequently slow to learn from others and share with them the tasks of leadership. This is not the place for a treatise on the matter, for which the reviewer is unqualified anyway. The last thing we need is to foster a competitive spirit in these matters. But while this biography should lead us, first, to rededicate ourselves personally to Christ and to the privileges of our particular responsibilities, it is to be hoped that it will generally and widely make us think the harder about life and leadership in the Third World. We should miss the point of John Stott’s life and labors if these occupied us more than the mission of Jesus Christ in his world.18

1. See Bruce Hindmarsh, “Basic Christianity—with an Oxbridge Accent.” Books & Culture, September/October 2000, p. 6.

2. See the correspondence featuring Hywel Jones and Hindmarsh in Books & Culture, January/February 2001.

3. He regards Iain Murray’s account as “admirably objective” (p. 464, n. 73).

4. I know that some will find this way of putting it frustrating and objectionable.

5. Not, it should be said, that John Stott regards singleness as anything other than a special calling given only to some, probably only a few.

6. Perhaps it will be asked whether “international evangelicalism” is a coherent notion, but I put it thus for convenience.

7. His position, much misunderstood, is that hell is both actual and final, but annihilation, rather than perpetual consciousness, may be the ultimate end of those condemned.

8. See John Stott: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Leicester: IVP, 1995); and Timothy Dudley-Smith, ed., Authentic Christianity: From the Writings of John Stott (Leicester: IVP, 1995).

9. I have myself been privileged to know John Stott for over 30 years, but I know him no better than do thousands of others and less well than many of those.

10. Stott’s sentiments should be read in the light of 1 Timothy 3:1.

11. Handley Moule, Charles Simeon: Biography of a Sane Saint (London: IVF, 1965), p. 65. Timothy Dudley-Smith wrote the foreword to this edition. In this biography of Stott, Dudley-Smith quotes Sir Marcus Loane’s characterization of the parallels between Stott and Simeon, including the remark that they are not comparable in personality (p. 429). Perhaps not, but temperamentally both fought the fight against impatience. Possibly Dudley-Smith plays this down. But it is hard to say. While Stott is extraordinarily gentle with the faults of others, he seems unsparing in his attitude to his own. He has written of having made rather a mess of his life before he came to Christ, but the first volume of the biography shows little evidence of this. That is not because anything is concealed; it is because of Stott’s high standards. So where many of us deem our impatience to be a trivial fault, Stott takes it far more seriously in himself. In light of Scripture, his is the right perspective.

12. Reflection on John Stott forces us to pose the question whether it is possible to be humble to a fault. (The answer is: “Not really”!) See Stott’s responses to Moltmann (p. 205) and to David Edwards in David L. Edwards and John Stott, Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), p.33.

13. Though this is not Stott’s preferred rendering of Ephesians 5.16; see God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians (InterVarsity Press, 1979), ad loc.

14. To the question of whether anything in this account amounts to a depiction of eccentricity, I am tempted to say that John Stott is eccentric in the way Geoffrey Nuttall described Richard Baxter, whose “position, in fact, was so central as to be eccentric.” G. Nuttall, The Puritan Spirit (London: Epworth, 1967), p. 116. I am indulgently expanding the scope of Nuttall’s comment to apply it, mutatis mutandis, to Stott’s Bible- and Christ-centered life. Incidentally, it is interesting to see Baxter mentioned at one point in the biography alongside Cranmer, Hooker, and Simeon (p. 87). Stott has the highest regard for Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor.

15. John Stott, The Birds our Teachers: Biblical Lessons from a Lifelong Bird-Watcher (United Kingdom: Candle Publishers, 1999), p. 9f. Is that a realistic application for all of us?

16. This was described by John Ferguson as “the greatest sentence to emerge from the Hellenistic age.” Quoted by Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (Yale Univ. Press, 1993), p. 11.

17. Calvinism (Eerdmans, 1943). Kuyper quotes this saying on p. 30.

18. I am grateful to David Johnston for his comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

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Telford Work

The fan club strikes back

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One by one, the students around me open up about an adolescent trauma they have in common. One is telling me about her first steps out of the closet.

“There was no way this thing could have lived up to our expectations. After the first time, I even lied to cover up my disappointment. I told my friends, ‘It was great.’ Everyone else was saying the same thing. But I was asking myself, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ Finally we started asking each other, ‘Were you let down too?’ And it turned out that everyone felt the same way.”

These undergraduates are remembering their first experience of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Some had camped out for days beforehand. All had left the theater with the uneasy feeling that something had gone horribly wrong. Instead of being initiated into the mystical power of the Force, they had endured demythologizing lectures on “Midichlorians” (a kind of spiritual mitochondria). Instead of a fumbling but earnest Luke Skywalker, they had met an irritatingly childish Anakin Skywalker. Instead of the comic relief of Han Solo and Chewbacca, they had met the dreadful wackiness of an amphibious donkey named Jar Jar Binks. Instead of being swept away to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, they felt like they had just been taken in a minivan to a children’s pizza joint.

Cut to Santa Clarita, California, where a Blockbuster customer, watching Episode I at home, had a thought worthy of Stanley Fish: Is there a film in this film? He pulled out his PowerMac, started up Final Cut Pro, loaded in the video, and got to work. When he finished, the film (retitled Star Wars Episode I.I: The Phantom Edit) was 20 minutes shorter and ten years more mature. Jar Jar’s follies were cut ruthlessly. Anakin’s outbursts were trimmed, making him a quieter, more thoughtful youngster. Midichlorians were marginal. There was less patronizing and confusing talk about trade federations and senatorial politics. Scenes were tighter. The distracting Jules Verne-like undersea travel sequence was gone. And the film was much better.

New opening text, receding into infinity as before, tells the story:

Anticipating the arrival of the newest Star Wars film, some fans, like myself, were extremely disappointed with the final product.
Being someone of the “George Lucas Generation,” I have re-edited a standard VHS version of “The Phantom Menace” into what I believe is a much stronger film by relieving the viewer of as much story redundancy, pointless Anakin actions and dialog, and Jar Jar Binks as possible.
I created this version to bring new hope to a large group of Star Wars fans that felt unsatisfied by the seemingly misguided theatrical release of “The Phantom Menace.”
To Mr. Lucas and those that I may offend with this re-edit, I am sorry 🙁
—THE PHANTOM EDITOR
thephantomedit@hotmail.com

Soon rumors were circulating through Star Wars circles of an underground “corrector’s edition” that was truer to the Star Wars tradition than the commercial version.

Movies have long been cropped for video and edited for television. Ted Turner gained infamy in the Eighties for colorizing mgm classics. Even “fan edits” are nothing new. People have been excerpting films since the sixteen-millimeter era. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is available in color, with a rock-opera soundtrack. But The Phantom Edit is more than just a fan edit. On behalf of the “George Lucas Generation,” the Phantom Editor is asserting the community’s authority over its own canon. He is claiming that he is better than George Lucas at telling the story.

A long time ago in a country far, far away, similar currents surged through another turbulent young community. There another anonymous disciple appropriated the work of others on behalf of needy readers, fueling a critical fire that rages today more than ever. Visualize the opening words of Luke scrolling into a starry sky:

Anticipating the arrival of a narrative of the events fulfilled among us, some disciples, like myself, were extremely disappointed with the final product.
Being a member of the “apostolic generation,” I have re-edited a standard scroll into what I believe is a much stronger Gospel by relieving the reader of as much needlessly complicated staging, awkward Greek, and disconcerting claims about Jesus as possible.
Having followed these things closely for some time, I created this version to bring new hope to people like you, Theophilus, who felt unsatisfied by the seemingly misguided distribution of “The Gospel of Jesus Christ.” To Mark and those I may offend with this re-edit, you had it coming. 😉

Like modern biblical scholars, Star Wars interpreters tend to cluster into several camps over Star Wars’ synoptic problem. One camp vests authority in the author, George Lucas. It affirms the copyright laws that protect intellectual property. It worries that fan edits are altering details that may be significant for episodes 2 and 3. In an article on TheForce.Net, Chris Knight demands that if editors “start tinkering with Anakin’s life journey then I seriously gotta question whether these guys understand Star Wars at all.” Elsewhere Knight defends Anakin’s virginal conception and the pseudoscience of Midichlorians, and even makes a plausible argument for the infuriating Jar Jar.

Purists like Knight would find allies among the biblical critics who have rediscovered the literary genius of Mark, fueling its remarkable comeback after centuries in Matthew’s shadow. When one sees how Matthew and Luke have softened Mark’s hard edges and obscured many of its most compelling features, one can sympathize with George Lucas. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46) instead of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Mark 15:34)? Maybe Lucas knows what he’s doing after all.

Another camp vests authority in the community of serious fans. It thinks that offensive material in The Phantom Menace doesn’t fit the authentic Star Wars vision (which it sees embodied in the original episodes IV-VI). It has become cynical about a series that has drifted into kiddie marketing and lost its focus. So it considers the Magisterium morally right to exercise eminent domain, and vindicated when an anonymous vigilante produces an edition at home that fans themselves find superior. As one of my undergraduate viewers puts it, “If Lucas can’t do it, let someone do it who does know Star Wars.”

These radicals are the Star Wars tradition’s true conservatives. The Phantom Editor would find allies among the centuries of faithful readers who preferred Matthew to Mark in its homilies, Luke to Mark in its church year, and the Longer Ending to Mark’s abrupt original. A Jesus who can do very few miracles in his own country (Mark 6:5)? That doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know (Matt. 13:58).

A third, anarchist camp refuses to vest authority anywhere. It blames Lucas for using his exclusive ownership of the story to destabilize rather than protect his own texts. Several years ago Lucas issued new editions of episodes IV-VI. These were cluttered with digitally introduced creatures, bigger explosions, and new scenes. As fans watched helplessly, he effectively colorized his own films. If Lucas had improved them in the process, his community might be more forgiving. But the gimmicks crowded out the original charm. Jar Jar, clown-diving down the slippery slope, added insult to injury. And Lucas has promised to add more scenes into episodes IV-VI that tie them more firmly into I-III. Someday the usc film school may have to offer courses in source, form, redaction, and text criticism.

But he who lives by the splice will die by the splice. Star Wars fans speak of “canonical” texts, but Lucas’s “original autographs” have not yet been written. No one, not even Lucas, knows the canon’s eschatological boundaries. In response, fan editors mine the existing texts to construct new ones. Suddenly The Phantom Menace looks more like a draft of Mark than a first edition, and The Phantom Edit looks more like the Jesus Seminar than Luke. Both groups of editors fabricate for faithfulness and succeed only when they persuade. The deconstructionist camp would find an ally in the student who told me, “It’s just a movie.” Shall we color that soliloquy red, pink, gray, or black?

When I ask my students whether the fluidity of these authorized and unauthorized editions is confusing them about where the real Star Wars story lies, one shrugs off my concern: “Look at all the editions of the Bible!” The belly laughs all around speak volumes. These postmodern evangelicals are sailing through a sea of biblical fan edits without sinking into anarchism. They understand the mixed motives behind the translations, critical editions, and niche-marketed Bibles that all claim to tell the church’s sacred story. Knowing that Gospel writers modified Mark doesn’t send them on frantic quests for the historicist Jesus. They are neither anchored by original autographs nor drowning in chaotic texts. Yet to them Jesus is not “just a movie.” Biblical pluriformity has not weakened their appreciation of the story’s ultimate integrity. In fact, it may have strengthened it. Only an eternal story could shine so brightly through so many centuries of spin.

What happens now? Cut back to last summer, as new edits continued to appear: An “Episode I.II” that digitally garbles Jar Jar’s lines and subtitles them with pithy words of wisdom. A Spanish-language version that rearranges the chronology of battle scenes and changes dialogue. The cat is out of the bag. Next stop, the Gospel of Thomas.

As things got out of hand, the formerly tolerant LucasFilm sent out the word that it would prosecute copyright offenders. This drove the edits off eBay and back underground, and won a published apology from the Phantom Editor himself. (He turns out to be Mike Nichols, director of Wit and other big-budget pictures.) But it did not win over all the fans.

Some have argued that Lucas should buy The Phantom Edit and canonize it. My undergraduates favor that approach. They respect the authority of both Lucas and the community he made. In The Phantom Edit they see a film that reflects Lucas’s own tradition at its best.

The apostolic churches of the Roman Empire, unencumbered by modern copyright laws and notions of intellectual property, followed that logic when, from among the many authorized and unauthorized fan edits of Jesus’ biography, they authorized a set of four reliable Gospels. We can thank Mark for writing a Gospel so compelling and irritating that it provoked at least two equally canonical responses (three if you also read John as an answer to Mark). We can thank his appropriators for rising to the challenge. We can thank the church that honored Jesus’ memory by refusing to make us choose between them. And we can thank the Spirit who guided them all.

Telford Work is assistant professor of religious studies at Westmont College. He is the author of Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (Eerdmans).

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Gabriel Said Reynolds

Sayings and stories

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In the crash course in Islam offered by the media over the last six months, many Christians will have heard it said that Muslims regard Jesus as a great prophet—not divine, and superseded by Muhammad, but nonetheless a figure of respect. For the reader who wants to go beyond such bland generalities, there is a surprisingly large literature on Jesus in Islam, including a number of well-written, informative works on many aspects of the topic.1

Tarif Khalidi’s The Muslim Jesus is the latest addition to this genre. Khalidi, a Lebanese Sunni Muslim professor at Cambridge University, has a limited agenda in this work, one which his predecessors did not take on: to introduce the non-Qur’anic Jesus, the one who appears in later Muslim piety. Unlike the more general books, The Muslim Jesus—although its title seems to indicate more—is basically a collection of, and commentary on, the sayings and stories about Jesus in medieval Islamic works in Arabic.

As such, the book might appear as a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, Khalidi neglects other Islamic languages (most importantly Persian). Moreover, he never brings up the big questions that are essential for the Christian reader, i.e., the origins of and reasons behind the Islamic rejection of Jesus as crucified, savior, and divine. The author’s assimilation of this fascinating material does not go too much beyond appealing yet meatless statements such as “it is salutary to remind ourselves of an age and a tradition when Christianity and Islam were more open to each other” or that here we have “a unique record of how one world religion chose to adopt the central figure of another.”

Despite this, The Muslim Jesus is a very good book. Khalidi writes in eloquent yet never pompous English (which he modestly attributes to his son’s help with the translation), always striving to be comprehensible to the nonspecialist. Moreover, he has done valuable work simply in collecting, annotating, and translating this material. Thereafter, he lets the material about Jesus speak for itself, in order (I think) to make an important point: that the Jesus of Islam is a creation of Islam. In Khalidi’s words, the Muslim Jesus is “a compound image,” a figure “resurrected in an environment where he becomes a Muslim prophet.” Thus, Khalidi explains, a wide range of Muslim authors used the figure of Jesus as a spokesman for their cause, be it asceticism, quietism, Shi’ism, or anti-Christian polemic. This point, too, is a critical one, and a welcome counterbalance to those polemical Muslim writers who insist, in the face of 150 years of scholarly research to the contrary, that all Islamic dogma was revealed in the lifetime of Muhammad. Refreshingly, Khalidi firmly rejects the idea that “Islam [sprung] fully developed from the womb of history.”

The Muslim Jesus, which is never dogmatic in tone, begins with a basic 45-page introduction and continues with a presentation of 303 sayings attributed to Jesus or stories about him. Khalidi refers to this material as “the Muslim gospel.” The phrase is a curious one, seeing that the Qur’an itself frequently speaks about the “gospel” as God’s revelation to Jesus (as the Torah to Moses and the Qur’an to Muhammad). What Khalidi refers to as “gospel,” however, is a collection of traditional sayings and stories that he has gathered from Muslim authors who wrote between the eighth century (the second Islamic century) and the eighteenth century (overlapping the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the Islamic reckoning).

This material then, cannot be regarded as authentic to Jesus in any historical-critical sense, and Khalidi is more than willing to accept as much. He even goes so far as to suggest that the “Islamic Jesus of the Muslim gospel may be a fabrication.” Yet the material will prove fascinating to the Christian reader for a couple of reasons: it provokes one to question how this material entered into the Islamic tradition, and it undermines the simplistic Muslim understanding of Jesus as a prophet like any other.

Khalidi presents the traditions chronologically, that is, beginning from those that first appear in Islamic works. He follows up each tradition with precise references to its Arabic source (or its appearance in Western translations) and then provides a short discussion of its importance and possible origin. He could have chosen to divide the material topically, which likely would have been more convenient for the nonspecialist. A topical organization would also highlight some important trends: most notably, that a large number of the traditions are clearly parallel to biblical passages. Thus an Islamic tradition reports Jesus saying “Place your treasures in heaven, for the heart of man is where his treasure is.” Elsewhere a ninth-century Muslim tells the story that the disciples found Jesus “walking upon water. One of them said to him, ‘Prophet of God, shall we walk toward you?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. As the disciple put one foot forward and then the next, he sank.” In another place, a thirteenth-century Sufi writes that Jesus said, “he who has not been born twice shall not enter the Kingdom of heaven.”

Also prominent among the traditions in The Muslim Jesus are those which depict Jesus as an ascetic, encouraging self-deprivation: “Jesus used to say, ‘Truly I say to you, to eat wheat bread, to drink pure water, and to sleep upon dunghills with the dogs more than suffices him who wishes to inherit paradise.'” Elsewhere, “Jesus would say to the world, ‘Away from me, you pig!,'” and “Jesus used to eat the leaves of the trees, dress in hair shirts, and sleep wherever night found him. He had no child who might die, no house which might fall into ruin.” This is the Jesus of whom Muslim mystics and ascetics were especially fond. They used these traditions to justify their lifestyle (and criticize that of others). At times, this pious Jesus seems even to call into question the legalism of orthodox Islam: “A pig passed by Jesus. Jesus said, ‘Pass in peace.’ He was asked, ‘Spirit of God, how can you say this to a pig [an unclean animal]?’ Jesus replied, ‘I hate to accustom my tongue to evil.'”

Yet elsewhere, Jesus appears as the epitome of Islamic orthodoxy, as when he is pleased with the man who has been off on religious warfare, or when we see him performing the Islamic prayers, or when he gives a description of the Qur’anic paradise complete with rivers of “milk, water, and honey. Its inhabitants are comely maidens, alike in age, chaste, and living in pavilions.” And if, as we’ve seen, some of the traditions in The Muslim Jesus mirror biblical passages, others contain a very unbiblical Jesus. Thus a tradition reports that Jesus referred to food saying, “nothing that is born into this world is ever without pollution.” Elsewhere an eleventh-century Sufi reports that Jesus said, “He who fears [God] does not laugh.”

Finally, certain traditions seem to have the distinct purpose of arguing against Christian doctrine regarding Jesus (who better to do the job?). This comes through in the tradition that “whenever the Hour [i.e., the Final Hour] was mentioned, Jesus used to cry out in anguish like a woman.” In another story, intended to emphasize that he was not divine, Jesus is confused by someone who did not respond to his words. God tells him, “How can [that man,] whose heart has half an atom’s weight of love for me, hear the words of human beings?”

In short, the Jesus of the “Muslim gospel” takes on a number of different identities, some of them sharply contradictory. This is (in my opinion) a product of the Christian roots from which Islam sprung and its subsequent efforts to separate itself from those roots.

Whatever the case may be, Khalidi is to be congratulated for collecting this material and presenting it in a clear and accessible manner. He has also included a complete bibliography of Arabic sources for the specialist and detailed endnotes with the most important secondary literature for the specialist and nonspecialist alike. Khalidi might also be thanked for writing a book remarkably free of the arrogant tone and the gratuitous attacks on earlier scholars that seem to plague the field of Islamic studies. On the contrary, The Muslim Jesus reflects the humility and sincerity of its author.

—This article concludes a two-part series. The first part considered “Muhammad Through Christian Eyes.”

1. Among these, I would draw attention to Michel Hayek’s Christ de l’Islam (1959), Geoffery Parrinder’s Jesus in the Qur’an (1965), Olaf Schumman’s Der Christus der Muslime (1988), and Neal Robinson’s Christ in Islam and Christianity (1991), which carefully details the most important Islamic writings on Christ from the Qur’an to the modern era.

Gabriel Said Reynolds is a doctoral candidate in Islamic studies at Yale University.

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Julia Vitullo-Martin

Questions for postmodern Christians

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Last year a friend invited me to lunch at the Harvard Club in midtown New York. He showed up dressed law-firm business style and cast a cold eye over my outfit—black shirt, long black skirt to meet the Harvard dress code, black boots, and Navajo jewelry. “Oh,” he said. “I see you’re still working downtown.” His sense of downtown as hip and slightly insolent is entirely missing from Robert Fogelson’s new book, Downtown, which ends in 1950. (Well might you ask, however, whether anything was hip in the United States in 1950.)

Fogelson has set himself the task of writing “the first history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city.” He believes he has traced a retreat from downtown as the premier business district, to downtown as the central business district, and finally downtown as just another business district. But the history of the American downtown is still being written, and it resists being plotted simply as a story of decline.

Downtown equals hip in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and many other cities in part because artists, actors, and musicians often move into the weakest spots in an urban economy—the only areas they can afford—and then reinvigorate them into a whole new life. With its highly segregated business day—an attribute Fogelson regards as essential to downtown—a financial district becomes perfect for those who are willing to live in odd spaces, eat in cheap restaurants, and come out to socialize at night when the brokers have gone home.

When terrorists flew two jets into downtown New York’s World Trade Center, they were attacking a symbol of financial power. What they were attacking, in fact, was Fogelson’s downtown of decades past, for downtown New York long ago yielded its financial dominance to midtown and to decentralized financial markets around the nation and the world.

Wall Street, a mere 1.6 kilometers long, still ends at Trinity Church, as it has since 1698, and the great financial names still shine on embossed brass plaques on important buildings. Wall Street is still the synonym in common parlance for financial power—the symbol that attracted previous generations of terrorists, such as the anarchists who, on September 16, 1920, exploded a bomb outside J. P. Morgan and Co. at 23 Wall Street, killing 33 people and injuring more than 400. (The scars from that explosion still mar the stone at Morgan Guaranty, the successor firm.) But Wall Street is no longer the Wall Street whose name was given to the precipitating event of the Great Depression—the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Names change, and so do neighborhoods. But while downtown New York retains its symbolic place as the center of the globalized economy, it has in fact become something else—a charming, funky mixed neighborhood of great financial houses living side-by-side with tiny businesses, shops, galleries, restaurants, residences, and government offices. It holds some of the best restaurants in the city—some upscale and others astonishingly cheap—and has become a magnet for uptown New Yorkers. True, this is a far cry from the obsessively corporate, concentrated model presented by Fogelson. Which is fine—simply another stage in a neighborhood’s life—but Fogelson seems to think it’s sad and perhaps even fatal.

His first description of downtown in the nineteenth century offers a quotation from A. G. Gardiner, an English journalist, who made his initial trip to the United States in 1919. As his ship sailed into New York harbor, Gardiner wrote, the city resembled the “serrated mass of a distant range of mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with a precision that suggests the work of man rather than the careless architecture of nature.” There in front of him were the tallest buildings he had ever seen. This was “down town,” crowned by the 53-story Woolworth Building. To Gardiner it looked like “a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skyward by some violent geological fault,” a vertical “street,” the Englishman added, inhabited by people carrying out “all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon.”

I once worked in the Woolworth Building, which is indeed magnificent. My fellow tenants were mainly architects, consultants, lawyers, writers, and accountants; most of us would have appreciated a few more rewards from the kingdom of Mammon. Woolworth the building is a Gothic spectacle, black and gold, with extraordinary gargoyles on which Woolworth the man had the faces of his enemies—mainly prominent financiers— carved for posterity. As you hit the elevator button you can look up at what appears to be John D. Rockefeller as a grimacing gold monster. Woolworth already understood the importance of symbolism to downtown.

The evolution of downtown, Fogelson rightly observes, made plain the destructiveness of the American determination to keep business and residential districts strictly separated. In contrast, European cities tended to spread businesses and residences over pretty much the same territory, with the notable exception of London’s financial district, which shut down at night much as Wall Street did a century ago. When businesses and residences are side by side, streets stay lively around the clock. When they are separate, one is deserted when the other is busy.

Fogelson quotes Frederick Law Olmsted, the foremost American landscape architect and the creator of Central Park, as tracing the separation of businesses and residences to the “law of progress” and to a “fixed tendency among civilized men” to enhance the “cleanliness and purity” of domestic life, which could not be sustained alongside factories. The nineteenth century was, of course, a time of brutal industrialization and brutal pollution. Separation of industry and residences seemed to make sense, particularly for those who could afford to move away from work. Upper- and middle-class Americans fled to the suburbs and shut the gates to business behind them.

This separation was then institutionalized in zoning codes, beginning with New York’s master code in 1916. From the 1920s forward few Americans seriously questioned the wisdom of keeping businesses, including retail, out of good residential neighborhoods, or keeping residences out of business neighborhoods. The unanticipated effect was sterility (Olmsted’s “cleanliness and purity”) in many American communities.

Fortunately for urban downtowns, aggressive and often rather impoverished youngsters in the 1960s and 1970s decided they wanted to live in precisely the neighborhoods their parents had rejected. They defied zoning codes to do so, moving into industrial buildings in downtown New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities across the country. They converted loft buildings to residential use, opened coffee shops and cheap restaurants, used public transportation, and lobbied government officials for better public services. They did for cities what Homesteaders had done for the American West a century before. Every city that is economically strong today had young pioneers breaking down zoning barriers 30 years ago.

Still, for every American city that has a revitalized downtown, there are five with dead downtowns. And even the vibrant downtowns suffered immense loss and waste. New York’s Woolworth Building, for example, which today commands astronomical rents, stood nearly empty during the 1970s—a ruined beauty without friends.

Americans preferred suburbs. They agreed with Olmsted that the suburb was “the most attractive, the most refined, the most soundly wholesome” form of domestic life. And they abandoned their cities to sit, in Olmsted’s words, under “their own semi-rustic ‘vine and fig-tree.'” Americans wanted to own their own homes sited in their own landscaped plots, however small. But every civilization has required population density to support the arts, theater, music, dance. Without urban density—and the noise and dirt and aggression that come with it, as well as the wealth it generates—a society is unlikely to move forward culturally.

So where are we now? A good 50 years after Fogelson’s well-told story ends, the nation’s most important downtown has been devastated by terrorism. Many workers who are free to abandon urban offices are doing so. There’s some ghastly irony here. Fogelson called his book Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. Had he written a book ending in the year 2000, he surely would have added something like “and rise again.” What is downtown’s future after September 11? The early signs are that New Yorkers, and Americans generally, are not ready to write its epitaph.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a New York-based writer, is at work on a book about the American criminal jury.

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Chandra S. Mallampalli

What the history of high politics doesn’t tell about the creation of Pakistan.

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Historians who write about horrific events such as ethnic cleansing or civil war must often sift facts from a muddle of emotion, prejudice, and faint recollection. And yet this very pursuit of an antiseptic or impartial truth threatens to strip history of vital aspects of human experience. To what extent might so-called facts of recorded history actually serve to conceal or silence voices of those who have endured catastrophe? Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence attempts to recover the “underside” of the Partition of India—stories of women, children, and outcasts that have been buried beneath priorities of more conventional approaches to history writing. At the same time, Butalia’s narratives shed light upon the role of religion in shaping identities of families and communities. With tensions between India and Pakistan threatening to boil over into war, this revisionist history is all too timely.

On June 3, 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, an event that resulted in the largest single planned migration in world history. Roughly 12 million people were compelled to leave their homes and resettle in another territory, designated primarily for persons who shared their religion. In the process, hundreds of thousands died, as communities were convulsed by an orgy of communal violence and anarchy. More than 75,000 women were abducted or raped; but their stories have found no prominent place in history. Historians have preferred instead to focus on the “high politics” of the Partition: state-level negotiations, conflict between political parties, and, of course, the “surgical” boundary line that divided two nations, drawn by the infamous colonial Boundary Commissioner, Cyril Radcliff. This conventional “gaze on the past,” says Butalia, has tended to pass over “feelings, emotions, [and other] indefinable things that make up the sense of an event.” Moreover, the preoccupation with high politics has marginalized the voices of ordinary people—those who suffered most from the events in question.

In order to retrieve the voices of the marginalized, Butalia turns not to official reports kept securely in the National Archives of India or the British Library but to the “alternative archive” of human memory. Without memory, there can be no individual or group identity. But how exactly should memories of the living shape our understandings of the past? Memory, after all, may act as a reservoir of prejudice and hatred, yet the articulation of memory may also help heal wounds of the past. Butalia treats her interviewees as eyewitnesses to a colossal human tragedy. Though she does little to “cross-examine” them, she places them in context. Her historicizing of the narratives adds to their coherence and brings a visceral dimension to events that might otherwise be viewed from a cold distance.

Above all, Butalia gives voice to the thousands of women who were raped or abducted while crossing the India-Pakistan border. At the time, reports of missing women had become so frequent as to prompt both governments to embark on a Central Recovery Operation, intended to locate women who had been abducted by members of the “other religion” and return them to their families. But the effort was riddled with difficulties. Could women trust agents of the state any more than they could trust their abductors? In some instances, Butalia shows, police and other officials were complicit in the crime of treating women as commodities, to be bought or sold for one purpose or another. Some women never found their way back to their original families. As victims of rape or abduction, they lived out their lives in a constant state of exile and silence.

Identifying victims of abduction posed yet another difficulty for the Recovery Operation. Within a climate defined by Hindu-Muslim hostility, the very fact of a mixed marriage aroused suspicions of abduction and the absence of choice. But what were officials to do if they found women who wanted to remain with their “abductors”? Here, Butalia’s feminist convictions become most pronounced. “For the majority of Indian women,” she writes, “marriage is like an abduction anyway, a violation, an assault, usually by an unknown man. Why then should this assault be any different? Simply because the man belonged to a different religion?” While levying a critique against the practice of arranged marriage, such words also challenge the primacy of religion in defining a woman’s identity.

Indeed, Butalia portrays religious identities as sites for patriarchal control and suppression of the female voice. Amid the turmoil of Partition, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh men protected their honor by maintaining possession and control over their women. Butalia’s interviews turn up ghastly accounts of fathers killing or “martyring” their wives and daughters in order to facilitate their own migration and “protect” their women from possible abduction, rape, or forced conversion to another religion. The same “religious” sensibilities, however, made it uncertain whether a woman would be welcomed back into her original family after having been raped by a member of another religion.

In particular, Butalia argues, notions of purity and pollution, derived from religious tradition, shaped familial sensibilities. Because of their relatively greater preoccupation with notions of purity, Hindu and Sikh families, she observes, were more reluctant than Muslim ones to readmit women. Thus, while graphically depicting trials of women of the Partition, such accounts also point to the significant role played by rival religious traditions in shaping consciousness among ordinary Indians—a hotly contested topic.

Indeed, scholars of South Asia frequently betray anxiety over how to represent the place of religion within Indian society. If popular accounts leave the impression of immemorial antagonisms (just as the recent conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo were widely said to be the result of ancestral hatreds), those who write from the political Left tend to place the origins of India’s religious divisions no farther back than the colonial period. Had it not been for the British, who classified Indians according to religion, Hindu and Muslim identities—so the story goes—would have been far more overlapping, breathable, and syncretistic. Religious disputes over territory would have been less pronounced, and the Partition might never have happened.

The academic assault on primordialism of any kind—of religion, race, or ethnicity—assumes that difference itself is the cause of conflict. We are encouraged to view religious differences as false products of “colonial modernity.” The real or authentic “sacred East,” by contrast, is marked by syncretism, tolerance, and nonviolence. Such values are epitomized in the outlook of Gandhi and fleshed out in the lives of village peasants. But this romanticized view is anchored more in the preconceptions of nineteenth-century European scholarship than it is in Indian realities. It downplays the role played by Indians themselves in constructing their religious boundaries, through revival, reform, and reinterpretation of their traditions.

A middle path—between exploding identities in the name of tolerance and viewing them as fixed, timeless essences—is the order of the day. “We must develop a notion and a practice of identity,” Miroslav Volf writes, “which is situated somewhere between a formless hybridity and a rigid purity—a notion and a practice both strong enough not to be dissolved and porous and complex enough to be hospitable to ‘impurities’ and ‘differences.’ “1 Now more than ever, the need for such balance is urgent.

Chandra S. Mallampalli is assistant professor of history at Westmont College.

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Alan Jacobs

In the wake of September 11, everyone was quoting W.H Auden’s September 1, 1939. But Auden himself repudiated the poem’s most famous lines.

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In Shakespeare’s first Henry IV play, one of the rebels against the king, a Welshman named Owen Glendower, lays claim to marvelous magical powers and supernatural gifts. His powers have been testified to from his conception; he is both a prophet and the object of prophecy. He begins by telling an assemblage of rebel leaders of the dramatic signs in the heavens that heralded his nativity:

… at my birth
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.
These signs have mark’d me extraordinary;
And all the courses of my life do show
I am not in the roll of common men.
Where is he living, clipp’d in with the sea
That chides the banks of England, Scotland, Wales,
Which calls me pupil, or hath read to me?
And bring him out that is but woman’s son
Can trace me in the tedious ways of art
And hold me pace in deep experiments.

With these boasts young Harry Percy—Hotspur—has no patience. When Glendower resonantly proclaims, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” Hotspur replies, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?” When Glendower in turn replies, “Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command the devil,” Hotspur’s final answer is decisive:

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I’ll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!

Hotspur’s counsel to Glendower is my counsel to all of us. Let it be my text and my meditation.

1

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a particular poem came again and again to the public’s attention—a poem by W. H. Auden called “September 1, 1939.” On the Saturday after the attacks, Scott Simon read the poem aloud on National Public Radio; a friend of mine who teaches at the University of Virginia heard it declaimed at an interfaith prayer meeting; on October 11, the one-month anniversary of the attacks, The New Yorker magazine sponsored, program at New York’s Town Hall called “Beyond Words” during which many writers read the work of others on relevant themes, and there the Irish poet Paul Muldoon read “September 1, 1939.” (I find it ironic that a program entitled “Beyond Words” would be composed of nothing but words; surely during the course of the evening someone called attention to that irony, but the words kept coming all the same. For The New Yorker, nothing is ever truly beyond words.) There was even an article about the phenomenon, by Eric McHenry, posted on the online magazine Slate, but we’ll get back to that later.

Such use of this particular poem was almost inevitable, given the presence of the month of September in the title, the poem’s concern with a just-arrived world crisis, its association with New York City, and the popularity, among literarily educated Americans, of at least some of the sentiments the poem expresses. The first day of September in 1939 was of course the day on which Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and therefore—thanks to a mutual defense treaty Britain and France had signed with Poland—the beginning of the long-dreaded European war. In January of that year, Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood had come to America for an indefinite stay. (Both, as it turned out, would become American citizens and would live in this country for at least part of the year for the rest of their lives.) The two friends landed in New York, but Isherwood soon decamped for sunnier California; Auden, though, stayed, and soon found a house in Brooklyn where he lived with one of the most extraordinary assemblages of characters one could imagine: the great English composer Benjamin Britten, his lover the tenor Peter Pears, Thomas Mann’s son Golo, the writers Paul and Jane Bowles, the young Southern novelist Carson McCullers, and, for a brief time anyway, the most famous of them all, the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. But Manhattan, then as now, was where most of the action was, and Auden spent a lot of time there; so his poem about the moment at which the European world collapsed begins with these words:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street.

Though the events which trouble Auden’s spirit occurred across the Atlantic, he receives the news in New York; a certain geographical—and perhaps more than geographical—disconnection from the tragic events is essential to the poem’s meditative structure. And, really, this is not wholly different from the situation of those gathered in New York’s Town Hall a month ago, brooding on the events that had occurred at the southern tip of Manhattan Island a month before.

Casting his mind across the ocean, then, to the continent he had recently abandoned—largely because of the relentless pressures and expectations it held for him—Auden was moved to consider the question that one always considers in such situations: why did this horrible event happen? And his answer would become one of the two most famous moments in this very famous poem:

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

This is basically the argument of John Maynard Keynes’s book of 1919, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, only in simplified and moralized form: the countries that had placed such an enormous financial and moral burden on Germany with the Treaty of Versailles were responsible for the events of September 1, and only pedantry or manipulative political rhetoric could mask that responsibility. And Auden emphasizes that he speaks not for himself only: anticipating those pedants and politicians, he masses the wisdom of “the public” and “schoolchildren.” The appeal is palpably democratic, but the tone hieratic; the prophetic here wells up from below, rather than descending from on high.

One can easily trace the links between this poem and the events of September 11 of this year, events which have caused so many to ask, “What have we done to these people to make them so angry at us?” As I listened over the Internet to Paul Muldoon reading the poem and noticed the forceful sonorousness—the slight but audible increase in emphasis—with which he uttered the words “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return,” I could hear in his voice the confidence of one who knows that the syllables he speaks carry prophetic force; and I could see in my mind’s eye row after row of heads in a half-darkened hall nodding in sobered affirmation.

I said that this stanza constitutes one of the two most famous moments in the poem; the other comes in the penultimate stanza:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Once again, I recall Paul Muldoon’s voice assuming a certain weight and substance as this stanza came to its resonant close—the weight and substance appropriate to the prophetic utterance. And I imagine those many attentive heads nodding again, or perhaps bowing slightly, burdened by the difficult truth of Auden’s charitable imperative.

But it is not clear—and was not at even at the time clear to Auden—what power commands and undergirds such charity. A few months earlier Auden had written another famous poem, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” which had its own memorable conclusion:

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

But praise what? And why? Similarly, “September 1, 1939” ends with a plea, almost a prayer:

May I, composed like them,
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Here Muldoon, in his reading, became especially emphatic. But what should this flame affirm? In both poems the tone, the language itself, are hieratic and prophetic. But there seems to be no content to the message—the tone itself soothes or exhorts or encourages or strengthens, but only so long as we politely refrain from wondering why the verb “praise” has no object, and the “affirming flame” nothing in particular to affirm. On close inspection there is a certain vacuousness to such phrases, as though this brilliant poet were paying something less than full attention to the task before him.

As I noted earlier, “September 1, 1939” has been often read, or at least quoted, in the months since September 11, and frequently commented on; but only Eric McHenry, in the piece in Slate that I referred to earlier—its title, by the way, is “Auden on Bin Laden”—only Eric McHenry, to my knowledge, has noted one of the most interesting and significant facts about the poem: that within five years of writing it Auden had completely repudiated it, and eventually excluded it from all collections of his poems over which he had control. Why and how did this happen?

Alas, the story is too long to tell in full here. Suffice it to say that throughout the year 1940, as the war grew in intensity, as news of its cruelties became more detailed, as the character of the Nazi regime became more unavoidably clear—and, moreover, as his own personal life became richer and, then, more complex—Auden had cause to reconsider his thinking on many subjects, perhaps chief among them what Saint Paul named “the mystery of iniquity.” The more deeply Auden contemplated the human capacity for evil, the more frivolous his explanation of Nazi aggression seemed—not because it is untrue that “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return,” but because that is a small portion of the truth masquerading as the whole. The lines are resonant—they sound prophetic—because they are simple, but they are simple because they ignore so much of the truth. The prophetic tone, Auden came to believe, masked an evasion—as, he also came to believe, it so often does. In these years of self-examination, in the great turbulent anonymity of New York City, Auden came to recognize his own evasions and to repent of them. He eventually returned, with gratitude and relief, to the Christian faith of his childhood.

As for the other famous line, “We must love one another or die,” Auden came to despise it. When compiling the first edition of his Collected Poems in 1945—and, incidentally, it should tell you something about Auden’s achievement and his stature as a poet that his publishers asked him to collect his verse when he was still in his mid-thirties—Auden left “September 1, 1939” out of the collection, deeming it a poem not worthy of preservation. When his publishers cried that he couldn’t possibly omit his best-known poem, Auden held firm for a while, but ultimately gave in—with the provision, though, that “We must love one another or die” be amended to “We must love one another and die.” But, as he perfectly well knew, this renders the line meaningless, or at best ineffectual, without any remnant of the prophetic force which he had called forth when he wrote it; and in later editions of his poetry he was adamant about excluding the poem altogether. Once, later in the 1940s, Auden picked up a copy of a book containing “September 1, 1939” in the home of a friend, and wrote in the margin next to the famous line, “This is a lie.” A lie because, again, it evades—evades our mortality, evades a recognition that mortality is the wage we have earned with our sin. “We must love one another or die” holds out the implicit promise that if we love one another we will not die. Here, death, as it does so often, gets in the way of a beautiful sentiment—the kind of sentiment we all relish, offering as it does a potential rescue from the most implacable of our enemies: the grave.

Many years later, Auden would write a wise and beautiful poem called “Ode to Terminus”—Terminus, the Latin god of boundaries, of limits, or, as Auden puts it, “of walls, doors, and reticence.” Terminus, Auden says, alone can teach us that invaluable lesson: what we can’t do, what is beyond our reach. The poem concludes with a sly look back at his earlier self, the young and brilliant poet who told us that we must love one another or die:

In this world our colossal immodesty
has plundered and poisoned, it is possible
You still might save us, who by now have
learned this:
… that abhorred in the Heav’ns are all
self-proclaimed poets who, to wow an
audience, utter some resonant lie.

One could say that, in this poem, Auden is reminding himself of Hotspur’s lesson to Glendower: the real task of the poet is not to cultivate the prophetic tone, the oracular utterance, but simply to tell the truth, and thereby shame the devil.

2

In the spring of 1936, another English writer—one who also paid attention to the events that led to what we now call World War II—was making the first of a series of trips to the Balkans. The British Council had invited Rebecca West to lecture in Yugoslavia, where signs of the rise of the Nazis and the ongoing depredations of Stalinism were already evident. West wrote to an official of the Council that the country would inevitably be “overrun either by Germany or, under Russian direction, by communism; which would destroy its character, blot out its inheritance from Byzantium.” Soon she would realize, if she did not already, that Yugoslavia’s “inheritance from Byzantium” was also a tense and complex thing, since the Byzantium of Christian Orthodoxy was also the Istanbul of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Here was a land whose past, present, and future placed it always at the intersection of immensely powerful states, empires, faiths: at this strange place in Southeastern Europe, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam collide. It was a place, West soon learned, of endlessly fascinating complication, and a place utterly endangered.

In the following years she would make two more trips to Yugoslavia, covering every province of the country from Croatia and Dalmatia through Bosnia and Serbia and on to Montenegro. And all the time she was writing an account of what she saw, an account that began as an imagined “short book” but gradually transformed itself into one of the largest, most ambitious, and greatest books of the twentieth century. In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, West would combine her three journeys into one, changing names, linking events, amplifying characters—but also spinning marvelous historical cadenzas: no one has written more compellingly than West about the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand which sparked what then was called the Great War, or about the tragic failure of the Emperor Stephen Dushan, or about the key moment in Serbian history, the crushing defeat of the Serbian people by the Ottoman Turks on the plain of Kossovo in 1389. (In the Vrdnik monastery in the Frushka Gora of Serbia, West saw, still lying in state, the headless body of Prince Lazar, who led the Serbs in that debacle. She touched his blackened and dessicated hand.)

West’s story is in at least one respect a classic tale of the modern world: the encounter of the liberal mind with something much older than itself, something alien to it—something fully historical. She begins her narrative with frequent expressions of her disdain for the Croats, whom she believes sold their precious birthright for the cold pottage of the money and power offered them by the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Croats she meets are proud of their links with the West—links which, in West’s mind (especially with German expansionism having come back to terrible life), should be their greatest shame. Her love is reserved for the Serbs, who remain faithful to their Eastern and Orthodox and Slavic roots; she has a kind of Rousseauian passion for their “primitive” attachment to their own history.

But as she goes deeper into Serbia, she sees more and more clearly a side of this attachment dark and inexplicable to her. She thinks of a place called the Sheep’s Field in Macedonia, where these people whose “preference for the agreeable over the disagreeable” she has loved meet at an ancient stone to sacrifice animals, in hopes of making women fertile. (“But what they were doing at the rock was abominable.”) She thinks above all of the strange fact that Prince Lazar is the greatest hero in Serbian history, not in spite of but because he lost the battle. The prophet Elijah in the form of a grey falcon, so the story goes, demanded that the prince choose between an earthly and a heavenly kingdom. The prince chose the latter. To the Serbs this is an act of great courage and piety, since the blood of so many of Lazar’s people will therefore be on his hands; to West, it is an abysmal revelation:

“If this be so,” I said to myself, “if it be a law that those who are born into the world with a preference for the agreeable over the disagreeable are born also with an impulse towards defeat, then the whole world is a vast Kossovo, an abominable blood-logged plain, where people who love go out to fight people who hate, and betray their cause to their enemies, so that loving is persecuted for immense tracts of history, far longer than its little periods of victory.” I began to weep, for the left-wing people among whom I had lived all my life had in their attitude to foreign politics achieved such a betrayal. They were always right, they never imposed their rightness. “If this disposition to be at once Christ and Judas is inborn,” I thought, “we might as well die, and the sooner the better, for the defeat is painful after the lovely promise.”

A few years earlier, West had written an angry and sometimes scornful biography of Saint Augustine; but here, she comes very close to an Augustinian view of the human order. She does not, I believe, understand all that she sees; but she sees with a clarity almost unparalleled in her century.

And such seeing requires an almost astonishing courage, because again and again West must admit the inadequacy of the convictions that led her to Yugoslavia in the first place. She did not find what she was looking for—the “authentic” culture which had preserved its beautiful ancient ways. Nor did she find its opposite, the Conradian heart of darkness, something almost equally easy to discover. Rather she found a mixed thing, beauty and horror constantly side by side. It is true that near the end of the book it is the horror that seems to dominate, but that is a function of the crushing of her high hopes, and the onrushing tide of world war. What truly dominates is an overwhelming sense of the complexity of our social and moral worlds, of the extraordinary entanglements that make us who we are. West learns that telling the truth about this world is an overwhelmingly difficult thing to do, but she has the courage and resourcefulness to continue to try, as best she can, to leave nothing out that would make the story neater, more aesthetically pleasing, simpler and therefore more encouraging—and all this though she loves and craves artistic form above all things:

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book. We can all of us judge the truth of this, for hardly any of us manage to avoid some periods when the main theme of our lives is obscured by details.

But despite this passion for the cup which can contain and shape our lives, she won’t impose form, she won’t deface the truth with false clarification. In her time (as in ours), that is too dangerous. A powerful image of the temptation to impose form and meaning comes late in the book, as West and her companions are driving through Macedonia, and West suddenly calls out to the driver to stop the car:

I had reason; for on the balcony stood a man dressed in shining grey garments who was announcing his intention to address the plains by a gesture of supreme authority. The proud stance of his body showed that he had dug the truth out of the earth where it lay under the roots of the rock. The force of his right arm showed that he had drawn fire from heaven, so that he might weld this truth into our life, which thus shall not perish with our bodies. The long shadows lay bound to the plains, the mountains’ bleakness was explored by the harsh horizontal beams of the falling sun; they, and the men and beasts who labored on them to no clear purpose, would know their deliverance so soon as they had heard him. Nearby there squatted on the grass beside the roadside two wretched veiled women, faceless bundles of dust-colored rags, probably Muslim divorced wives of the sort, more pitiable than the beggars of the towns, who hang about the fields and stretch out their hands to the peasants. It seemed as if they must spring up and throw aside their veils, never to beg again, as soon as he had spoken.

But he would never speak. He was a scarecrow dressed in rags which had been plastered in mud to give them solidity against the winter, and he had been stored on the balcony till it was time to put him out among the fruiting vines. His authority was an exhalation from a bundle of straw. … The soul can be uplifted, it can be seduced into seeing an end to its misery and believing that all has been planned for its good from the beginning, by a chance concatenation of matter that in fact means nothing and explains nothing, that is simply itself. So potent was the argument of the scarecrow to the eye that it made for incredulity regarding all other exaltations.

This episode occurs 775 pages into Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. The interpretive confidence with which West began her journey has long since given way to confusion and indecision; but so desperately does she want to hear the definitive prophetic word that she is ready at a moment’s notice to give herself over to this Führer of the Macedonian fields—were he but to speak. But he does not speak; and her seemingly pointless quest must continue without benefit of the preternatural authority the hieratic figure had seemed, for that one moment, to embody. The prophet capable of resolving the manifold ambiguities of Yugoslavia had not, she discovered, been commissioned by any deity.

So she trudges on, like Dante in the depths of an ever-ramifying Hell, and at one point, very late in the book, she laments the situation in which she finds herself. She must explain, as part of her historical narration, something that happened on the battlefield of Kaimakshalan, but before proceeding, she pauses:

Of this battlefield, indeed, we need never think, for it is so far away. What is Kaimakshalan? A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty? This part of it is called South Serbia. And where is that, in Czechoslovakia, or in Bulgaria? And what has happened there? The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length. Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know.

That places so far away that they could not possibly be relevant to our lives nevertheless are, somehow, intensely relevant—that is an experience with which we are increasingly familiar, are we not? And Rebecca West is the great writer of this predicament. She knew, as the book expanded wildly before her eyes, that she was doing something inexplicable to others, yet absolutely necessary. In letters written while Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was in progress, she referred to it as a “wretched, complicated book that won’t interest anybody.” Later she wrote of it as a “complete explanation of the course of history, but that of course will prevent anyone from having time to read it.” Reading proofs (when the book had grown from an essay to its final half-a-million words) she saw what she had done as an “inventory of a country down to its last vest-button, in a form insane from any ordinary artistic or commercial point of view.”

When she finished her manuscript in early 1941, its length posed a singular problem, because in the midst of the war paper was being strictly rationed. But West’s publishers, Macmillan of London, seem not to have hesitated: they found her narrative utterly absorbing. As her editor wrote, “Who would not be [compelled] by a book which demonstrated by its argument that the East End of London would not be lying in ruins if the Balkan Christian powers had not been defeated by the Turks in 1389?”

Rebecca West is a great writer, and her book a great book, because she told the whole of the truth that she could see—she told the hard truths, and the long truths. To be sure, she shaped her narrative artfully—she saw no need to observe the truth-telling canons of journalism. For instance, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon describes a single journey, though “in fact” West made three trips to Yugoslavia, no one of which exactly corresponds to the book’s narrative structure. But in the strict sense she invents nothing.

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That last sentence echoes one of the great poems of our time. It’s called “Lying,” and it’s by Richard Wilbur:

In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter.

At the end of this poem Wilbur invokes that faculty of elaboration and connection that, whatever we choose to call it, makes art. “Odd that a thing is most itself when likened,” he writes, and to “liken” is to pretend that one thing is another. This pretense leads to what Wilbur calls “the great lies told with the eyes half-shut / That have the truth in view.” Those who tell such lies discern in ordinary events the lineaments of the extraordinary; for instance (and here Wilbur concludes),

That matter of a baggage-train surprised
By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees
Which, having worked three centuries and more
In the dark caves of France, poured out at last
The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king
And to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world
Was faithful unto death, and shamed the devil.

By being faithful unto death, and telling the truth as best we can discern it—even, or perhaps especially, by telling great lies that have the truth in view—artists fulfill their role and function in society, and honor their God-given vocation. If God wishes to grant their words a prophetic power (as he most assuredly did with Rebecca West, though she did not believe in him), that’s his business. The business of the artist is to be attentive—or, as Flannery O’Connor put it in one of her essays, to be stupid. The stupid artist is one too focused on “the turbine-vent which natural law / Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,” or on a mud-plastered scarecrow on a hilltop in Macedonia, even to ask whether her vision is a prophetic one, whether her tale will provoke. May every artist, by God’s grace, be stupid enough to tell the truth and shame the devil.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. His book, A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age (Brazos Press), was published last fall; A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love is just out from Westview Press.

- More fromAlan Jacobs

Page 4021 – Christianity Today (2024)

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