Page 4038 – Christianity Today (2024)

If you’ve been to a conference on the state of the church in the last five years, chances are you’ve heard it said that while we live in a postmodern world, the church is still largely stuck with assumptions and practices shaped by modernity. That’s the thesis of A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass), by Brian McLaren, the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Washington- Baltimore area. What follows here is the first in a series of three responses to McLaren’s book, after which McLaren himself will respond. Next issue: Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

There is something quintessentially American—not to mention modern—about the title of Brian McLaren’s book. St. Luke famously described the citizens of Athens as “spending their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.” Imagine what he would have said about the denizens of advanced consumer capitalism, for whom the pursuit of novelty has become a veritable patriotic obligation. We spend our time not so much telling or hearing, as buying and selling, a new kind of everything under the sun.

The first chapters of A New Kind of Christian don’t entirely ward off such skepticism. Neo, the book’s Caribbean American postmodern muse, leads off with a series of admitted “gross oversimplification[s]” that recite the now-familiar case for postmodernity. (Neo, by the way, joins a host of spirit guides of African descent in recent popular culture, from Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance to Whoopie Goldberg and Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix. The significance of these enigmatic characters, almost always helping a white Everyman come to terms with his past and his destiny, is worth pondering.) According to Neo, the modern era was characterized by, among other distinctives, conquest and control, secular science, objectivity, the monolithic organization and nation-state, individualism, and consumerism. (No real exploration here of how individualism and monolithic organizations managed to flourish side by side.) Postmodernity, then, will be “postconquest, postmechanistic, postanalytical, postsecular, postobjective, postcritical, postorganizational, postindividualistic, post-Protestant, and postconsumerist.”

Well, it all depends on what you mean by post. In his less careful moments, Neo seems to take post to mean non or anti, and that is certainly too simple. As I write, a massive military force is converging on Central Asia to achieve conquest and control on the behalf of a secular, consumer-oriented nation-state, buttressed by a flood of public and private analysis and critical thought—and even if ultimate conquest and control may be elusive, that will make us no less modern than Europe in the unstable years between the World Wars.

It would not have been unusual, before September 11, to hear postmodernistas explaining that patriotism and civic duty were decaying features of the “modern” era, soon to be eclipsed on the one hand by Pico Iyer’s “global souls” and by their anarchic wto-bashing opponents on the other. But anyone who sold short the shares of flag-makers has been sorely disappointed. Postmodernism, as Neo defines it, bears more than a passing resemblance to nineteenth-century Romanticism, and there’s ample recent evidence that a modernist is a Romantic who’s just been mugged by history.

Still, there are many reasons to agree that conquest, mechanism, analysis, secularity, and the rest have lost some of their totemic power, even if the average cubicle-dweller remains firmly in their grip. Witness the unintentional hilarity of 1950s-era instructional science films, with their stentorian narrators and godlike scientists in white coats. Westerners may be more dependent than ever upon the apparatus of modernity, but they are less happy about it. But even if conquest, analysis, and monolithic organizations have lost their compelling power, that by no means spells the end of consumerism. The consumer, after all, is constantly encouraged to be postanalytical and postcritical (“Just Do It,” commands Nike), postobjective (“Make Your Own Road,” urges one purveyor of mountain bikes), and even, through the device of brand identity, simultaneously postorganizational and postindividualistic—a member of a postmodern tribe who leverages the prosperity of modernity to join a few kindred souls on an island of commodified culture. The acid of consumerism, dissolving the few bonds that constrained choices in the modern era, produces a fluid environment in which brands achieve world-orienting status almost by default. Postmodernity is ultra-, not post-, consumeristic.

Given the limitations of the term, then, the good news is that neither Neo nor his friend Dan is “a postmodern kind of Christian.” A postmodern kind of Christian would be cast adrift in an irrational, subjective, and profoundly consumeristic world where personal choice is paramount and personal fulfillment is the only game left in town. Far from it. McLaren has Neo and Dan engage in carefully crafted conversations that, while not philosophically rigorous in the strict sense, are anything but subjective feeling-sharing. (Indeed, one of the failings of A New Kind of Christian as literature is that it is hard to imagine two adults having such intelligent and honest conversations these days.) They may be “postorganizational,” but they are profoundly responsible—which is to say, committed and sometimes frustrated—actors within human communities like school, family, and church. They are undoubtedly consumers—more than one brand name, from Dan’s Honda Accord to Neo’s beer of choice, Pete’s Wicked Ale, gives McLaren a nifty way to sketch his characters—but they are defined by a deeper story that anchors their friendship in something beyond affinity. Except for a certain restlessness, these characters have little in common with the human tumbleweed that populate the works of writers like Douglas Coupland.

Something deeper and more durable than postmodernity is being explored in A New Kind of Christian. It is significant that McLaren has chosen to make his case in the form of narrative and dialogue—a kind of dialogue that is much closer to the Symposium than to Euthyphro. This is not a Socratic deconstruction of a novice’s philosophical intuitions. It is a conversation between friends which, like the Symposium, takes place in the midst of human loves and longings. If Dan undergoes a kind of enlightenment under the tutelage of the more learned Neo, Neo also experiences his own transformation in relationship with Dan. McLaren’s “two friends on a spiritual journey” are much more than talking heads. They are persons, enmeshed in particular histories, who are seeking truth in relation to one another.

Perhaps more than anything else, then, McLaren is reacting against a Christianity—or a kind of Christian—which feared and evaded this turn to the personal. Modernity, from the factory floor to the sociologist’s data model, has little room for particular persons with their infinitely complex stories of disappointment and hope, love and loss, faith and doubt, even as it revels in the ability to exercise control on a massive scale by abstracting away from personal history. Twentieth-century evangelicalism was hardly immune from fascination with the possibilities of technique, from fill-in-the-blank teaching devices like Evangelism Explosion to the “transferable concepts” of Bill Bright to the “observation, interpretation, application” method of Bible study I was taught as a student in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Armed with techniques and methods, whether rationalistic apologetic arguments or emotivistic mass crusades, evangelicals were sent forth to make converts. A disproportionate number of evangelicals have always been engineers and technologists. And yet when one actually talks to the beneficiaries of evangelicalism, the stories they tell rarely involve techniques and almost always involve personal relationship. The great irony of evangelicalism is the way it has persisted in consecrating a succession of techniques, even though there is ample evidence that apart from a profound engagement with human persons, those techniques have always proved barren.

Dan, the burned-out pastor, is a prisoner of technique. His formulas are failing him and, he suspects, his congregation. His formation in the ways of evangelicalism has left him dependent on a tired set of certainties. Neo, on the other hand, as Dan says at the end of the book, is “a hard character to explain, impossible to forget, and defiant of nearly all categories.” He even, in a bit of narrative invention that shouldn’t be overlooked, leaves town just when his friendship with Dan is getting good. He is, in short, not a machine. He is a person.

Hard to explain, impossible to forget, and defiant of nearly all categories—this is a perfect description of Jesus of Nazareth. Why has Christianity, particularly its evangelical forms, tried so hard to sand off the hard, impossible, category-defying edges of its incomparably personal Messiah? Why do our literature, conferences, and media so much more readily celebrate scale and uniformity than they do persons, those fearsome God-bearers who upset our expectations, frustrate our desires for domination, and don’t stay where we put them?

To ask these questions is to answer them. The “personal Savior” of evangelical piety is in fact an awesome and untamed incursion of the real into our abstracted, flattened cosmos—so threatening to the machinery of Jerusalem and Rome that he invited, and still invites, crucifixion. It is no wonder that we find knowing him, following him, and becoming like him less appealing than learning a new technique. After a century of depersonalized modernity inside and outside the church, Brian McLaren can plausibly propose “a new kind of Christian.” But his two protagonists, Dan and Neo, so much like Cleopas and his companion engaging in an animated and perplexing conversation on the road to Emmaus, are in fact the oldest kind of Christian.

—Andy Crouch is editor-in-chief of re:generation quarterly.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The first biographies of Golden Age theater composers tended to be American Masters-style valentines written by members of the family’s outer circle. The results were pleasant but left much to be desired as serious engagements with their subjects. Meryle Secrest’s life of Richard Rodgers, Somewhere for Me, represents the second generation of musical theater biographies. Now that the main players and their comrades are mostly deceased, these bios offer—albeit respectfully—the warts-and-all readers expect; they are charier of legends passed along the grapevine while still falling well short of real substance.

Rodgers was something of a late bloomer. He teamed up with lyricist Lorenz Hart in 1919, and the two banged around penning forgettable college productions for six years before finally making a hit with a smart benefit revue, The Garrick Gaieties of 1925. Rodgers had been on the verge of taking a job selling underwear, but after the success of this little show he and Hart never looked back. Through the late twenties they blessed Broadway with a succession of bonbons, hanging fine little songs on airy plots. After an uneven stint in Hollywood when work on Broadway dried up during the depths of the Depression, they entered into a halcyon period, producing scores bursting at the seams with some of the choicest songs Broadway had ever heard.

But as the years passed, Hart, a serious alcoholic, grew increasingly unreliable. Rodgers often had to trawl New York’s bars in search of his gifted collaborator, sometimes resorting to writing lyrics himself. Finally, in the early forties, Rodgers was forced to jump ship to the seasoned and steady Oscar Hammerstein, and the result was a series of musicals tying song to story in a fashion only fitfully achieved on Broadway before. For we twenty-first-century sophisticates, Oklahoma! is that corny wheezer we have endured politely in high school auditoriums. We can’t readily imagine the impact that it had on audiences at the time, so elated after “People Will Say We’re in Love” that Joan Roberts had to come back onstage to take an extra bow.

For the next two decades, Rodgers and Hammerstein reigned as the deans of the Broadway musical. Today it is quaint to read conductor Lehmann Engel’s The American Musical Theater of 1967, laying down the law that there would be far fewer unsuccessful musicals if writers simply adhered to various tenets derivable from the classic ones. Implicitly Engel treats Rodgers and Hammerstein’s template as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk model, impressive in its own way as the Wagnerian synthesis of drama, music, and dance in a grand spectacle. For us, Pacific Overtures and Urinetown blow Engel’s cozy assumptions sky-high, but how was he to know? In his era, Oklahoma! had been followed by its siblings Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I, all of which had long runs and tours, endless revivals, and were made into big fat movies, their songs becoming virtual folk music for a postwar America.

Secrest tells this story skillfully, yet she has only a yeoman’s familiarity with Rodgers’s music beyond the grand old standards familiar to most people of her generation. Whole musicals go by in a few sentences, with a handful of cast members and a couple of songs mentioned by name. An especial problem is the earlier shows that Rodgers wrote with Hart: just what was a musical like Heads Up! or America’s Sweetheart like? Bringing these alive to the reader requires listening to old dance band medleys of songs from obscure scores, and poring over playbills, scripts, stills, and sheet music in libraries and archives.

But Secrest does not go to this kind of trouble, and the problem continues after the Hart era. With the success of Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein were predictably commissioned to write the score for a top-class musical film. The reader might want to know just how Rodgers and Hammerstein fit into the creation of the hit State Fair and what the score was like, but Secrest addresses the movie and its 1962 remake virtually parenthetically. After Hammerstein’s death, Rodgers wrote lyrics to his own melodies for No Strings. Obviously one would like to know how Rodgers fared as a lyricist: Secrest is silent on the point. In the late sixties Rodgers wrote the songs for a television production of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, starring NoËl Coward! Few readers will have had the opportunity to see this special or hear the music, and we might naturally look to the biographer to provide enlightenment, but amid some passing notes on how the production went, Secrest says not a thing about Rodgers’s contribution to it.

What really interests Secrest is Rodgers the man. We learn that he was an emotionally unavailable philanderer and a hypochondriac with a drinking problem. His wife, Dorothy, picture-perfect on the surface, was in private a chilly control freak addicted to Demerol. Their marriage was one part propriety and one part dependence, leavened by flashes of love. But ultimately this is just John Cheever territory; by now people like this are clichÉs both in fiction and biography.

Yes, Secrest is best known as a psychobiographer. But what would we think of the biographer of a novelist who had not read all of her subject’s books—or the biographer of Chopin who had only sampled a few each of the nocturnes, waltzes, and impromptus? As Secrest repeatedly leans on the aperÇus on Rodgers’s music in Alec Wilder’s classic American Popular Song rather than presenting her own verdicts, one begins to wonder whether, in the end, Secrest values Rodgers’s output in any serious way.

But satisfying as it might be to dismiss Secrest as yet another philistine, unworthy of her subject, the charge isn’t entirely justified. To be sure, Rodgers richly deserves his place as one of the masters of Golden Age musical theater, possessing as he did an uncanny gift for producing bewitchingly infectious melody. He leaves behind a lovely chocolate box of a legacy. The question remains whether there was much more to him and his work than this.

Nothing that Rodgers said in interviews suggests so. When anyone tried to bring him out on his technique, he tended to be a bit dismissive. Really, he just cranked it out. Hammerstein spent weeks tweaking the lyric to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'”; Rodgers came up with the melody in fifteen minutes, and the whole score in a week or two. Nor is there any particular individual personality to be distinguished in his music. It is often said that Rodgers’s music tempered Hart’s acerbity with sweetness—but we would say the same thing if Hart had written with George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, or any number of others. Rodgers’s melodies with Hammerstein are often called “warm,” but then this had been a central quality of Hammerstein’s lyrics and scripts for decades; Rodgers keyed his style to one that already existed. Like Berlin, Rodgers was more craftsman than artist.

Of course, to require of great art that it issue from the creator with effort and follow from identifiable aspects of his personality would demote Mozart or, more pertinently, Gershwin, in real life a rather callow caddish sort who gave rather dopey interviews but somehow came up with deathless works like Porgy and Bess. Still, it is hard to say that Rodgers’s work ever surpassed the level of bracing deftness.

Rodgers’s scores are always essentially processions of solid melodies, some of them repeated here and there. Where he tries for pastiche (the “nightclub” numbers in Pal Joey, the German folk evocations in The Sound of Music), he always sounds ultimately much more like himself than the object of the mimcry. Any co*cktail pianist is familiar with the fact that talking while playing the piano is oddly difficult, and finds it useful to have under his fingers a few songs he can play practically asleep, to resort to when someone innocently walks over to chat while he is playing. I was a sometime co*cktail pianist a while ago, and my “reserve” tunes were all by Rodgers except for Gershwin’s “Oh, Lady Be Good.” Rodgers’ songs are often just plain easy.

Nevertheless, often in the coming year—Rodgers’s centennial—talking heads will sound a familiar refrain: “They don’t write them like that anymore.” On the contrary! In all of his meat-and-potatoes dependability, Rodgers has a true heir today in none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber. Secrest dutifully extols Rodgers’s melodies as “timeless,” but this judgment would have been more persuasive in 1963 than it is today. Rock, rhythm and blues, and rap are now the daily soundtrack for most Americans under 60. Lloyd Webber couches his work in the rock tradition, and thus among those who still cherish theater music, it is his work that is as esteemed and anxiously awaited as Rodgers’s music was back in the Eisenhower era.

Interestingly, the same pundits who get misty at the mention of Rodgers’s name commonly dismiss Lloyd Webber as an undertalented scourge. And it is true that Lloyd Webber’s success is partly a matter of luck and momentum: I have known any number of music teachers and barroom pianists who could produce melodies just as pat and catchy. Lloyd Webber has benefitted from the patronage of slick producer Cameron Macintosh. Yet luck plays a part in most careers, and meanwhile the very traits that critics pillory Lloyd Webber for are the same ones that they treat as unexceptionable when chronicling musicals of the past.

Critics often complain that Lloyd Webber scores repeat one song too often in an attempt to imprint it upon the public—”Memory” in Cats, for example. But the audience for The Student Prince in 1924 was served up with an almost numbing number of repetitions of “Golden Days” and “Deep in My Heart.” Rodgers was no stranger to this practice, nor did audiences feel cheated by it. During their collaboration on Do I Hear a Waltz?, Stephen Sondheim was frustrated by Rodgers’s casual assumption that such repetitions made for good musical theater even when not strictly motivated by the narrative. Limitations of space on pre-cd recordings required substantial abridgments; obviously reprises were the first things cut. This obscures for modern critics how much repetition there was in many vintage scores as performed.

Lloyd Webber has also been excoriated for his dependence on high-tech gimmickry in his shows, and one does often leave his shows humming the sets rather than the music. But again, the inherent evanescence of theater productions distorts evaluation here. The Ziegfeld Follies hit Broadway year after year with gargantuan sets, massive choruses weighted down with garish costumes, and number after number designed to show all of this off. Today all we have is tinny 78s and quaint black-and-white photos, but in the qualitative sense, little distinguished what theatergoers experienced chez Ziegfeld from Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express (skaters dressed as trains amid moving set pieces and smoke effects) or The Phantom of the Opera (famous for its falling chandelier). If Ziegfeld was a “master showman” and Irving Berlin’s writing for him a mark of prestige, then why is Cameron Macintosh a huckster and Lloyd Webber a hack?

And Ziegfeld was merely continuing a tradition. The American musical traces to The Black Crook of 1866, whose producers tossed together a stranded ballet company with a creaky melodrama and bedecked the combination with gaudy spectacle. After this behemoth, tricked-up “extravaganzas,” as they were then termed, were a cherished genre that nurtured many careers. Musical theater histories take a teleological perspective, seeking the line leading to the musically sophisticated and narratively cerebral musicals of Sondheim. This tends to celebrate the tony book musicals in favor of the blowsy hodgepodges playing at the same time, as readily attended by most theatergoers as the more ambitious ones, and often warmly received by the critics.

Rodgers himself was no more opposed to pageantry than Lloyd Webber has been. Jumbo (1935) was performed in a huge tent and depicted a circus, complete with real elephants, trapeze artists, etc., all of this rather dwarfing songs like “My Romance” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” which are all that come down to us from it today. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s flub Me and Juliet (1953) today lives as a brief, quiet cast recording, which gives no indication that massive sets and attendant special effects were the raison d’Être of the show itself.

Yet there remains for many a sense that Lloyd Webber is somehow lesser than Rodgers. Is there anything to this, beyond nostagia? Yes and no. Lloyd Webber’s scores do represent a qualitative decline even from Rodgers’s standard in terms of compositional quality. But this is the fault more of transformations in middlebrow musical taste than of Lloyd Webber.

By the time he hit the scene in the 1970s, the rock revolution was well underway. Rock music, child of the blues, country, and folk music, is driven largely by rhythm and vocal charisma. These factors have more immediate impact than melody and harmony, whose appreciation are more dependent on tutelage or a chance “ear.” There have always been rock musicians who tried to push the envelope, but overall, the music is less artistically substantial than the idiom that the old standards were written in, requiring less effort on the part of both author and listener. The pop music of Rodgers’s day was about long, crafted lines cast in precise language, to be performed with a certain poise. Rock is brief hooks cast in pungent but loosely structured language, to be performed with elemental vigor.

Today, people roughly 45 and younger have grown up in an America where this is the default idiom. It can be argued that rock’s lyrics are often more honest and probing than anything a Lorenz Hart or Oscar Hammerstein wrote. But these men’s lyrics required much more craft in the composition than Alanis Morrissette’s, and the fact remains that, overall, rock has dumbed down mainstream musical taste in America.

Like Rodgers, Lloyd Webber writes for the market. He is not writing for scholars and artistes; he wants his work to be heard and to make him a good living. Lloyd Webber is actually the equal of Rodgers in coming up with lovely melodies. But in line with the lowered expectations of modern listeners, his tendency is to cast whole songs out of what Rodgers would have regarded as a mere beginning. “Unexpected Song” from Song and Dance is typical. We begin with an achingly beautiful 16 bars. Rodgers would have segued into a nimble bridge, repeated the first statement, and then gone out on a dandy coda. Lloyd Webber simply repeats those 16 bars over and over again, deriving drama from the cheap trick of changing the key with each repetition. Only a corpse would not respond to this to some extent—but then we all like hot dogs, too.

None of this, of course, means anything to most listeners. Young musical theater fans cherish double-cd recordings of Lloyd Webber’s music the way people of another generation loved their Rodgers and Hammerstein lps. Books have been written gushing over Lloyd Webber’s career as if he were the equal of Verdi. Lloyd Webber’s American heir, Frank Wildhorn, has written musicals in a similar vein that are equally cherished even by musically sensitive people. The cast recording of his Jekyll and Hyde, released years before the show actually hit New York, was an instant hit among musicals fans.

The people for whom these scores are so precious never knew an America where “She likes music” was immediately assumed to mean classical music, and where Rodgers’s songs like “Where or When” were considered common coin, rather than caviar for the smart set or retro camp. They grew up with Bob Dylan, Metallica, and Kurt Cobain, and thus the last thing they are listening for is melody and harmony. They seek lyrics written in broad, iconic strokes and the theatrical power of big sound and driving rhythms. They are also cued significantly to individual performance, again trained by rock, which emphasizes performer charisma over musical content. John Raitt’s performance was not the main reason one bought the Carousel cast album in 1945, but fans of Lloyd Webber’s shows and their ilk are close watchers of Colm Wilkinson, Linda Eder, Douglas Sills, and other specialists in the genre.

And what this means is that if Lloyd Webber did write more substantial music, most of his listeners would not follow him. Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard lean closer to the Rodgers level of craft and restraint than his other scores, and it is no accident that neither has had the endless runs that Cats and Phantom have enjoyed. Meanwhile, Sondheim’s more complex music often requires several listenings to fully grasp. While the recordings have conditioned a growing Sondheim cult, complete with a journal and websites, the shows tend to have short runs.

Of course, Sondheim is an extreme. But today even well-crafted middlebrow musicals devoid of rock inflection only run with a gimmick: City of Angels with its film-noir effects and jazz feel, Ragtime with the appeal of the music referred to by the title and its race angle, and so on. Otherwise, such shows do not become must-have recordings, a fate that has eluded, for example, the rapturous Nine, based on Fellini’s film 81/2, beloved by a coterie but unknown to most of the people seeking standby tickets for Miss Saigon.

Certainly there were plenty of shows before the rock era whose scores were slapdash, functional affairs. But crucially, only hard-core buffs have heard of most of them today. If they by chance had long runs, they were unlikely to be revived and even less likely to be recorded (who can name a song from Hellzapoppin’?). Only in the 1970s did scores like this begin to take their place in ordinary fans’ pantheons, the fans in question often perplexed to find that the occasional Brahmin sniffs at the artistic worth of scores they esteem the way an earlier generation did Kiss Me Kate.

To be as gushingly embraced by the American public as Rodgers was in his heyday required that his music not surpass the level of solid craft. If they had lived into the 1950s, Gershwin and Kern would not have attained such a hold on the public with the likes of their nervy Let ‘Em Eat Cake and Music in the Air. Lloyd Webber similarly must write for the modern ear desensitized by rock. In this light, Secrest’s biography of Rodgers can be seen as a demonstration of plus Ça change: viewed up close, one finds that the giant of musical theater composition is actually something of an emperor with no clothes.

—John H. McWhorter is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, has just been published by Times Books.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“On seeing Giorgione’s style,” wrote Giorgio Vasari, “Titian abandoned that of Bellini, although he had long practiced it, and imitated Giorgione so well that in a short time his works were taken for Giorgione’s.” So Vasari, the sixteenth-century Italian artist, historian, and critic, chronicled the aesthetic formation of that period’s great colorist, the Venetian painter Titian. Titian, who trained under both Bellini and Giorgione, learned their styles well enough to seamlessly complete paintings begun by both artists. Then he went on to forge his own acclaimed style in which drawing was absorbed into color. Working thus from his teachers toward his own sensibility, Titian seems to have derived a new art from old.

“Encounters: New Art from Old” was the theme of a striking exhibition at Great Britain’s National Gallery in the summer and early fall of 2000. The exhibition catalogue offers the reader 24 beautifully illustrated essays, each focusing on a prominent contemporary artist who has created a new work of art based upon a chosen work from the National Gallery’s collection. All 24 artists, whether sculptors, painters, or even video artists, have elected to base their work on the most traditional form of traditional art: easel paintings.

Clearly the exhibition and the catalogue alike were calculated to provoke, to challenge received opinion. Haven’t we been told that contemporary art is by definition contemptuous of tradition? And isn’t the greatness of an artist measured by the extent to which he asserts his originality, breaking with the past? On these and other matters, including the relationship between art and technology, Encounters has much to teach us. As Thomas A . Clark is quoted in one of the essays, “Innovation is startling and beautiful not because it gives rise to a new poetry, which would be incomprehensible, but when it is an old poetry made new.” Yet for the most part these artists do not themselves work in the tradition with which they have chosen to dialogue. What then constitutes tradition, and how can these artists be situated in it?

Video artist Bill Viola chose a painting by Hieronymus Bosch (1474-1516) as inspiration for his new work. Viola, a creator of large video installations where moving screens as well as images, and intense sound as well as sight, forcefully engage the viewer, has been looking carefully at paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Viola believes the transformation of art that took place during that period, driven by the techniques of Renaissance perspective and printing, anticipated the equally transforming technological developments in the arts today. Further, he draws a connection between the social, religious, and political upheavals of that time and our own. Thus he treats the painting by Bosch as a “visual template” from which he constructs his own moving pictures. Viola employed the same strategy in his 1995 work, The Greeting, which was closely based on Jacopo da Pontormo’s sixteenth-century painting, The Visitation. Viola’s electronic medium, and our experience of it, is vastly different from Pontormo’s technique of painting, but even so an uncanny similarity between the images remains. “I don’t believe in originality in art,” says Viola. “I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We’re always borrowing.”

Viola’s intention to make something new through borrowing from the old is laden with concern for the essence of creative ingenuity and has little to do with sentimental longing for the past. Viola uses the template of the past, not to resuscitate it, but as a springboard for innovation.

From Viola we may gain insight into a regular pattern in artistic innovation based on past models. Was this pattern, for example, alive in early Christian borrowing from traditional Roman architectural models? Imperial basilicas and the atriums of Roman domestic houses were architectural templates for the emerging church in the fourth century. A fourth-century church, with its atrium and long-columned nave, is an appropriation of the domus and basilica traditions, but it is also something that they are not. It is an entirely new form of building serving a new religious need. Which counted for more in the minds of fourth-century Christians—the ingenious and palpable difference in its new church plan, or the building’s heritage in the Roman tradition?

Traditions are not easily dismissed, for they are more than idea and appearance, they are systems that work. Tradition is a means through which certain kinds of things can happen. Tradition, in both a broad and narrow sense, is very much about how you get certain things done. Thus, to accept or reject a tradition is to accept or reject a tradition’s techniques. Annie Dillard tells a story of how in working-class France, when an apprentice might get hurt or tired, those with experience in the trade would say, “It is the trade entering his body.” Similarly, intimacy with tradition is a matter of bringing tradition into one’s bones; it requires of us a kind of embodiment if we are to make anything out of it.

It is one thing to admire the past, but it is more difficult to embody the methods and techniques of the past. This may be because technological advance—indicated by the claim of a general distinction such as “toolmaker,” or identification with any one of a series of titles leading from “stone” to “bronze” to “iron” to the “industrial” and beyond to the “information age”—has been taken, in Westernized cultures, as the symbol of self-defining achievement. Much of each generation’s self-esteem is tied to just how it gets certain things done; for many, the techniques of the present define not only the moment itself but the person as well.

Encounters is full of examples of artists who seek to use tradition while avoiding the retardaire stigma of past artistic technology. Writing about the British painter Patrick Caulfield and his artistic response to a seventeenth-century painting by Francisco de Zurbaran, Richard Morphet admits that Zurbaran no doubt would find Caulfield’s blunt and simplified quotation of his work offensive. Caulfield’s approach is to transpose Zurbaran’s naturalistic painting of a cup of water on a silver plate into Caulfield’s own painting, Hemingway never ate here. Caulfield’s painting is highly schematic; through color-charged planes it suggests an interior space, perhaps a tapas bar, with a small table on which floats Zurbaran’s cup and saucer. Morphet wonders if this transposition of Zurbaran’s naturalism into Caulfield’s abstraction, which has a tongue-in-cheek feel, could be read simultaneously as admiration and as irony.

Another artist, Richard Hamilton, offers a computer-generated response to the seventeenth-century Dutch painter of church interiors, Peter Saenredam. Hamilton, like Caulfield, avoids the physical mechanics of past art technique and focuses instead on process as a conceptual problem. “Hamilton wished, in emulating Saenredam,” writes Morphet,

to follow so far as possible the same sequence of procedure preparatory to painting. These were to measure the building; to make perspective drawings from the elevations; to make studies on paper, observing colour and texture and recording information on lighting; and finally to paint the picture using the data thus accumulated. He also wished to follow Saenredam in using the most advanced technical assistance available at the time; in his case this was computer technology.

So, Hamilton worked with a photograph of an interior scene at the National Gallery that he scanned, and then used his computer to distort, until it reflected the ethos of Saenredam’s The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem.

Technology apparently is the means by which Hamilton defines his world and sets himself apart from Saenredam, but it is also the means through which he intends, conceptually, to join Saenredam in dialogue. “The idea that you’re competing with Oldenburg or Warhol. … these judgments are quite absurd. You are really competing with Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Poussin. … That’s the kind of time span that art is all about,” Hamilton says.

Like Hamilton, the majority of artists featured in Encounters take a conceptual approach to the artists and tradition they choose. Ian Finlay responds to Claude Lorrain, not with paint or even visual imagery per se, but with 12 simple words etched on a piece of glass. Anselm Kiefer responds to Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way with his own Light Trap, a large painting that, as reproduced in Encounters, looks something like a constellation map. “Kiefer has never been interested in the emotionalism of spontaneous gesture and exaggerated colour. … his work is actually closer in its aims and strategies to conceptual art,” essayist Keith Hartley says. “What attracted Kiefer to [Tintoretto’s] painting was the linking of the creation of stars, of our universe, with human procreation, the mirroring of the macrocosm in the microcosm.” To such ideas Anselm Kiefer can relate, though the material appearance of Tintoretto’s artistry does not particularly elicit a response in kind from him.

Every artist in Encounters is aware of the range of intellectual issues represented by the technological distance between the past and the present, but not every artist takes this awareness as an inducement to join a merely conceptual artistic conversation. Some artists seem to care as much for the body as the mind, and so emphasize the body’s role in engaging the art of the past.

Leon Kossoff is one of several artists of this sort. He made prints and drawings after three paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, The Brazen Serpent, Judgment of Paris, and Minerva Protects Pax from Mars. Kossoff’s strategy, bringing mind and body together, develops as he stands before a work of art and draws it: “From the earliest days when I scribbled from the Rembrandts in the Mond Room,” Kossoff says, “my attitude to these works has always been to teach myself to draw from them, and, by repeated visits, to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind.” Kossoff’s work admits an overriding visual orientation to the art he draws from, and essayist Morphet picks up on this: “Through the concentration of a process of mark-making that depends on the complex of shapes he is looking at. … Kossoff seeks to see the original painting from inside and to be able thus to find a structure that is both true to his experience of it and has the quality of being something seen as if for the first time.”

In this visual and physical orientation to the art of the past, Kossoff is joined by other painters represented in Encounters, including Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Paula Rego, Antoni Tapies, Cy Twombly, and sculptor Anthony Caro. In the works of each of these artists we sense that the connection between the genius of the past and present resides in the senses and emanates from them to emerge in the mind as idea or concept. Lucian Freud, who painted two pictures, each called After Chardin, has long been a student of paintings in the National Gallery. Working at night, before Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress in the gallery itself, Freud seems to be engaged in weaving his own hand into Chardin’s. Looking at either of the After Chardin paintings, we can imagine Freud physically following the patterns of Chardin’s painterly brushstrokes, but the result is clearly a Freud. He expressed his attitude about this kind of work in relation to Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), a picture he painted in 1983. “I intended first to make a copy of it,” he said. “Then I thought, why don’t I do one of my own?”

One may thus be tempted to separate the artists presented in Encounters into two groups, the conceptualists and the sensualists, one group engaging the past through the mind, the other through the body. But this oversimplifies the processes of each group and fails to account for some artists in Encounters who clearly tread both paths.

David Hockney, who responded to Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ portrait, Jacques Marquet, baron de Montbreton de Norvins, is a case in point. Hockney is unique in this group of artists in that his work has been inspired by research into and recovery of the actual technique of his chosen artist.

Hockney’s theory about Ingres’ working method (expounded at length in his recently published book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters) is controversial. He claims Ingres achieved his deadeye precision of line through the use of a camera lucida, an optical device that projected the image of Ingres’ sitter onto his drawing page. Ingres’ drawing sheets show no signs of erasure, no questioning of judgment, no fault in the coordination of hand to eye. How else, asks Hockney, without the aid of an optical device, could Ingres ever have been absolutely right about every line he drew?

Ingres experts tend to look askance at Hockney’s assertions, but everyone is impressed with the practical intelligence Hockney has brought to understanding Ingres. What’s more, Hockney’s research has driven him into a whirlwind of artistic exploration, now with his own camera lucida. For the “Encounters” show, Hockney used this device to produce Twelve Portraits after Ingres in a Uniform Style. Each is a portrait of a uniformed security guard at the National Gallery. Hockney’s drawings, like Ingres’s, are hardly photographic, and like Patrick Caulfield, Hockney juxtaposes, with some irony, naturalistic drawing with more abstract distortion, but one gets the feeling that Hockney is not tongue-in-cheek here. He seems to have discovered and integrated into his working method something from the past that makes sense in the present. In this way Hockney seems, of all the artists presented in Encounters, to have accomplished the feat of producing a body of work based on the past that is genuine to his own artistic sensibilities, without guile.

With the introduction of the word “guile” we must consider one last artist from this collection, whose work has always seemed to contain a cunning duplicity. The American painter Jasper Johns, whose Catenary (Manet-Degas) takes as its point of departure Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, gives us a response to the art of the past which is stunning in both its conceptual and physical strength and presence. Manet’s Execution now exists in fragmented form. It is composed of four separate pieces of the original work that came into the hands of the artist Degas, who glued them into a larger blank rectangle in the respective places they must have occupied in Manet’s original composition. (We know what the original looked like through drawings and a print that Manet also produced of the same subject.) As it stands, fragmented and partially lost, Manet’s Execution represents a compelling metaphor for the entire project of an encounter with the art of the past. Enter Jasper Johns, who—as essayist Marco Livingstone suggests—creates “less a transcription of the Manet than a reformulation of it in his own language.”

It is the thoroughness and consistency with which Johns’s language engulfs the Manet that impresses me. Johns has long been concerned in his work with perceptual enigmas and the relationship of the literal to the figurative. His longtime fascination with the relationship of artistic mark-making to the tools and methods by which artists make these marks has led to the literal inclusion in his works of a whole series of likely and unlikely devices upon which artistic works may depend. These have included measuring devices, sweeping brooms, painting stretchers glued face inward to his canvases, maps, stenciled numerals and letters, coffee cups, silverware, towels, three-dimensional casts of human body fragments, and quotations of other art works, to name only a few.

In the Manet, Johns has found opportunity for something of a mini-summa of his entire outlook. Johns deals with the conserved pieces and the lost segments of Manet’s Execution as if they constituted a map showing both charted and uncharted areas. He transposes the shapes of the pieces onto his own rectangle in outline and then proceeds to add layer upon layer of luxuriously worked paint over them until, in the uniformity of an overall gray color, the outlines are only vaguely discernible. The subject of execution, and the lostness of the whole painting, have a poignancy that takes in all our negotiations with the art of the past. Such encounters always compel us to acknowledge that some things have simply been lost, while others that are found still remain aloof, as if in a fog.

Just off the surface of the painting, hanging from the upper right corner and draped across to the lower left corner, Johns has suspended a string. The arc of this string is called a “catenary,” the natural curve of a uniform line suspended between two points. On one hand, this catenary imitates a gentle curve in Manet’s composition leading diagonally down from the point of a gun in the upper right corner and through the tips of swords hanging on the executioners’ belts. In this way it commemorates an abstract piece of poetry, an inadvertent and elegant surprise that emerges even while an execution is taking place. On the other hand, insofar as the string is “real” and the painting an “illusion,” the string, which takes its shape due to the force of gravity, represents the order of nature into which human agency seeks both through executions and art works to intrude. Stenciled in outline along the bottom edge of the painting are the words, “CATENARYMANETDEGASJJOHNS1999.” This suggests that the artists themselves may be the catenary, the line that sweeps before the executions and all the other subjects that fill the paintings that become the history of art.

Johns, as did Bill Viola, uses the art of the past as a “visual template” through which to make something new. “One can’t just make something new because one wants to,” Johns says. We sense here a humble dependency that was so absent in the rhetoric of high modernism. Some readers will notice the lack of reference to the Transcendent in the essays contained in Encounters. Indeed there is little, if any, discussion of the role of muses, gods, or God in this book. Rather the artists and essayists analyze their circ*mstances empirically and, in the presence of so much art, conclude that art itself has been their major inspiration.

This could be interpreted as a rejection of the Transcendent, but it could also be seen as a kind of modesty. For some artists, an identification with the art of the past will always be a form of aggrandizement and a matching of titanic originary forces against the world. But Encounters presents enough artists working innovatively, while borrowing from tradition, to suggest that the overreaching assertions of originality that marked some exponents of modernism have faded away. As Bill Viola put it, “We are always borrowing. I think it’s a beautiful, wonderful thing.”

Joel Sheesley is a painter and professor of art at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

During 1906 and 1907, the headlines that lured American readers to pore over newspapers while sipping their morning coffee occasionally described startling local religious excitements. In April 1906 the Los Angeles Times alerted its readers to “howling, shrieking, and weird phenomena” at a downtown mission on Azusa Street. The Des Moines Capitol reported in July 1907 that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of the wife of the popular Republican Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court. The charge? Disturbing the peace of a residential community. The socially prominent Emma Cromer Ladd was found presiding serenely over raucous religious services in which the devout lay strewn about the floor, apparently unconscious, or shouted in tongues while twitched by contortions. And the front page of a Salem, Oregon, paper followed the case of the frustrated wife of a colorful local preacher named M.L. Ryan. She sued for divorce with the wry observation that the gift of tongues did not mix with family life.

Reporters of such stories seldom masked their own skepticism. For the most part they described an unprepossessing constituency—humble folk in modest surroundings professing the firm belief that among and within them God was doing an extraordinary thing. These people audaciously claimed to be both signs and agents of the end-times. They adeptly reinterpreted secular rejection as divine approval. Bemoaning the “carnality” of congregations that objected to their enthusiasm, they created alternative religious affiliations. For some this meant taking a second or third step away from the forms of church life most Protestants experienced. Resisting “dead denominational churches,” they opted for the freer environments of storefronts, tents, and camp meetings. Taken together they constituted an emerging, loosely interrelated network that had at its core the unshakable conviction that the New Testament “apostolic faith”—with accompanying signs and wonders—was being restored in twentieth-century America, where it heralded the imminent end of time.

If the secular press was skeptical, the religious press—when it deigned to remark at all on this radical movement on the edge of respectability—proved equally hard to convince that anything worth serious notice was underway. To be sure, a handful of religious periodicals with modest national circulation (like The Way of Faith) advertised the new religious enthusiasm; others (like the Massachusetts-based Word and Work) embraced the purported “restoration of the apostolic faith.” But respected standard Protestant publications largely ignored this latest popular religious excitement. Sooner or later, such enthusiasms wore out or turned ridiculous, as the case of the self-proclaimed apostle of healing, John Alexander Dowie, had amply confirmed. Pressing concerns like the new theology, immigration, the Social Gospel, and a disastrous economic downturn appeared to offer Protestant pundits more compelling subject matter.

If the mainstream mass media provided little clarity about the apostolic faith movement, that movement’s participants compensated with a strong sense of identity and purpose. And they articulated this in an alternative mass media that, together with the rapidly expanding integrated national railroad system, contributed to their astonishing growth. A generation later, when the larger culture next bothered to notice, they had circled the globe and were busy carving out an enduring place on the religious map. In 1957, a cover story in Life magazine, citing the enormous growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America, posed the question, “Is there a third force in Christendom?” The secular and religious press took yet another look, and what they found gradually and profoundly changed the way scholars view modern Christianity.

To understand early Pentecostalism, one must engage this alternative mass media—no easy pros-pect. Early Pentecostals deemed getting out their message far more important than preserving copies of their products. After all, they expected an imminent end, not a legacy to future generations. Meager finances and radical faith meant they acted “as the Lord provided means.” In practice that often meant missed or combined issues of monthly publications. Publications came and went with bewildering rapidity. Most bore biblical titles, many of which manifested Pentecostals’ all-consuming sense of the times. At least five Apostolic Faith magazines served an overlapping readership. The Bridegroom’s Messenger, The Bridal Call, and The Midnight Cry reminded readers that the “marriage of the lamb” loomed on the immediate horizon. The Upper Room recalled the faithful to the hallowed Pentecost event that they professed to see repeated in their midst. The Whole Truth kept in mind the “full” gospel they believed was uniquely theirs.

In addition to monthlies, there were countless tracts. A staple of evangelical outreach, tracts became for Pentecostals inexpensive announcements of the availability of miracles, spiritual gifts, divine guidance, and prophecies, as well as venues for personal testimony. Whereas periodicals tended to be ventures undertaken by leaders—pastors, evangelists, congregations, and, later, denominations—tracts gave voice to thousands of anonymous or virtually unknown devotees.

The first Pentecostals also created and marketed their own music. Since they sang with enthusiasm if not always with musical training, their hymnody offers revealing commentary on the early movement’s texture. New songs seemed at first as likely to come by exercising the spiritual gifts of tongues and interpretation as by more traditional means, but within a few years, the movement boasted a cadre of musicians who gave expression to Pentecostalism’s particular emphases on the Holy Spirit and the end-times. Often produced on the cheapest stock available, early Pentecostal music remains an essential if fragile and neglected source. In the movement’s first heyday, few could have imagined just how profoundly Pentecostals would influence the musical tastes of vast numbers of Christians.

Inexpensive books of testimony and admonition offer yet another glimpse into the early Pentecostal ethos. They present filtered (and sometimes conflicting) memories, invaluable to the historian, but requiring careful use. The wide range, fragmentary nature, and uneven quality of the sources for the study of early Pentecostalism mean that thorough and comparative familiarity with the literature is essential to responsible study.

More than anyone else to date, Grant Wacker has accomplished this feat. His new book, Heaven Below, invites the reader into the world of early Pentecostalism. Wacker’s title was a common Pentecostal descriptor for the glory Pentecostals said they felt. It is found as well in the words of an old Pentecostal favorite: “‘Tis heaven below my Redeemer to know / For He is so precious to me.” The song came from the pen of Methodist Charles Gabriel, but Pentecostals resonated with its intimate description of the inner life. And, Wacker observes, the way they appropriated typified the tenacity and creativity that made them prosper against the odds. For the faithful, Pentecostal experience—a “know-so” salvation and spiritually empowering baptism with the Holy Spirit—brought heaven into their souls and transformed their humdrum lives from the inside out. It made divine power part of every day for those who believed the Holy Spirit literally indwelled, guided and empowered them in tangible ways.

But the word “below” was important, too. This “heaven” was not just a foretaste of eternity, an ecstasy of soul: it was also a relentless incentive and compelling mandate to transform the here-and-now into a place in which God’s work could proceed unimpeded. And so, despite the otherworldliness exuded by early Pentecostal publications, a close reading suggests that these were fiercely practical men and women, ready to seize on modern technology while cherishing an antimodern rhetoric. This tension, Wacker argues, defined first-generation Pentecostals. His book invites readers to eavesdrop at the kitchen tables of Pentecostalism’s earliest devotees, to listen at their prayers, and to discover what they thought they were about.

Both Wacker’s approach and his thesis break new ground. The approach values the ordinary as much as the privileged, and the thesis explains how people sustained by otherworldly immediacy succeeded so remarkably in the here-and-now.

First, the approach. The strength of Wacker’s book is its firm footing in the primary sources. Even a peripheral glance at the endnotes reveals the astonishing array of rare materials he consulted. Indeed, only the handful of scholars who have devoted themselves to the vast Pentecostal sources that are the stuff of such research can fully grasp the daunting task Wacker undertook or the magnitude of his accomplishment.

Wacker made a conscious choice not to write a narrative history. That has been done several times from different perspectives, establishing basic agreement on the personalities, places, and dates that must be part of a responsible retelling. Rather, he examines the essence of early Pentecostalism itself, that practical outworking of experience and conviction that gave the movement its genius. He consulted primary sources from smaller and from more regional Pentecostal groups as well as from the large African American constituencies and from better-known groups like the Assemblies of God. He read individual testimonies, prophecies, letters, diaries, tracts, poems, and songs, as well as sermons and official statements. What emerges is a composite picture of a movement that, despite its impressive diversity, can effectively be organized around certain themes.

Here Wacker ventures into fiercely contested terrain. Indeed, few religious historiographies are as politicized today as is the historiography of Pentecostalism. Vested interests, political choices, and power struggles fuel bitter debates about the movement’s early essence. Not surprisingly, matters of race, class, and gender are often at issue. Is Pentecostalism best understood as African American religion? Was it, as some insist, once a racially inclusive movement quickly subverted by privileged whites? Is it rooted in evangelicalism, or does it represent a new stream with “its own cisterns,” as some contemporary Pentecostal scholars insist? Did it, as some argue, radically affirm public roles for women? Is it best explained as a movement of the socially dispossessed?

Such questions are highly charged, and history can be mined to fuel contemporary Pentecostal politics. Until recently Pentecostal history attracted only a handful of scholars, and these (coming from various disciplines) have been deeply divided about the movement’s origins and character. They often address one another instead of the academy. In the past decade, new trends in scholarship as well as the proliferation of Pentecostal-like forms of Christianity have expanded curiosity. But careful assessment has not always followed superficial interest, and scholarship that is insufficiently grounded may perpetuate the myths rather than probe the realities.

This is why Wacker’s careful work in primary sources is both welcome and needed. His extensive documentation is not just the mark of a competent historian: it is also the power of his book. In the sources Wacker overhears many “yes. … buts,” and he keeps listening when other scholars have tended to stop. Sometimes he finds speakers manifesting endearing traits; sometimes he is repulsed. His sympathy—or at least his ability to empa-thize—is apparent, but so is his careful sensitivity to the nuancing that keeps sympathy from dulling critical scholarship. What emerges is a portrait of people who, in many ways, resembled their contemporaries of similar class and region. Heavenly longings kept “getting mixed up” in the messiness of day-to-day existence, Wacker reminds us. His portrait may be more tempered than some, but it is compelling precisely because his subjects remain at once heaven-directed and earthbound.

And that leads to the thesis. Wacker roots his work in his observation that Pentecostals were driven by both primitivism and pragmatism. That is, they yearned fervently to erase history—to “leap the intervening years” and reappropriate the fullest meaning of the Pentecost event recorded in Acts 2. At the same time, however, they saw no contradiction in doing what was necessary to accomplish their goals. They frankly employed modern means to reach premodern ends. The resulting tension fueled the growth and wealth of a movement that professed to want nothing but Jesus.

Of course, neither primitivism nor pragmatism—nor a mix of the two—was unique to Pentecostals. But Wacker’s reading of the sources suggests to him that their absolute conviction of an intimate “moment-by-moment” relationship with Christ through the Holy Spirit was unusually intense. Relying on spiritual gifts like wisdom, prophecy, words of knowledge, tongues and interpretation of tongues, impressions, “leadings,” and other forms of immediate divine guidance, early Pentecostals believed the Holy Spirit infused all of life in practical, tangible ways. Unsalaried preachers and evangelists prayed for all temporal needs; the sick shunned physicians and medicines and prayed for healing; the jobless prayed for work and expected to be led to the right place at the right time; housewives beseeched guidance in every conceivable small instance of life. The rhetoric of utter reliance on God reinforced participants’ heavenly citizenship and obscured the canny common sense that planted an enduring radical evangelical movement.

Some will notice that Wacker does not address the story of global Pentecostalism. He makes no claims about the applicability of his generalizations to Pentecostalism in other cultures. Still, a responsible account of the history of global Pentecostalism must be rooted in an accurate assessment of its emergence and development in particular places—and, one might argue, especially of its North Atlantic history. In this Wacker excels. He does what he sets out to do. For him Pentecostalism clearly belongs to the broadly evangelical part of American Protestantism. It is not its own thing. Wacker offers a close look at the bitter internecine struggles through which Pentecostals disentangled themselves from their evangelical cohorts. But by every conventional measure their spiritual quests began—and ended—in the broad arena of evangelicalism, and he assesses them in that context.

Those with vested interests in the rendering of the early Pentecostal story will give Wacker mixed reviews because his “yes. … but” approach yields an account that challenges cherished myths. With few exceptions American Pentecostal history has been written by people who are not historians of American religion. If Pentecostals telling their own story have tended to produce unashamedly providential narratives (especially in the early years of the movement), many outsiders have interpreted the story through highly politicized lenses of their own. If one combs the sources for specific evidence, one is likely to find it. One scholar celebrates Pentecostalism’s openness to women’s public voices, while another challenges its record on women in leadership. Both can cite supporting evidence; both are failing to do justice to the complex realities of history.

Unlike the hagiographers of Pentecostalism, Wacker refuses to avert his eyes from the all too human dimension of the movement. But neither will his account satisfy the reductionist ambitions of some of his fellow historians. He doesn’t explain away the fervent faith of his subjects as hypocrisy or self-delusion. Rather, he reveals the world of early Pentecostalism from within, in all its aspects, and allows readers to draw their own conclusions. One can’t ask anything more of a historian.

Indeed, if the future historiography of Pentecostalism looks promising—and it surely does—that is in no small part thanks to Grant Wacker and his talented students past and present in the history of American religion at Duke Divinity School. They are producing carefully nuanced accounts based firmly in a wide array of primary sources and sustained by larger historical questions. Interest groups will undoubtedly continue to find what they want to find when they look at the Pentecostal past. But allowing the primary sources to speak on their own terms requires the dogged persistence of scholars immersed in the idiom and practice of a particular time and people and at home in the larger historical context. May their tribe increase.

Edith Blumhofer is director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and professor of history at Wheaton College. She is the author and editor of many books, including Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (Eerdmans), and she is currently at work on a biography of hymn writer Fanny Crosby.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It was the spring of the year and of my first pregnancy. My silhouette was just beginning to round out to the point where planting was awkward but not unmanageable. I settled my knees into the soil and sowed a patch of violas. As I buried the seeds in the ground and patted the dirt over their hiding spots, I thought of my own Seedling, nestled within me for his nine-month germination. I pondered the thread of continuity running through creation: new life begins in darkness, enveloped by mystery.

For King David, the depths of the womb were known only to God:

My frame was not hidden from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth.
—Psalm 139:15

In our day, however, human reproduction no longer seems so mysterious. Science has revealed exactly what goes on inside the womb, from the meeting of sperm and egg onward. Two new books from Harvard University Press shine an academic light into the secret depths of creation.

On Fertile Ground: A Natural History of Human Reproduction is the work of Harvard anthropologist Peter Ellison. In clean, elegant prose, Ellison has crafted a synthesis of current knowledge in a range of disciplines. As a reader with little background in science beyond high school biology, I found it tough going at times, but those with previous knowledge of anatomy and reproductive physiology will have less difficulty understanding Ellison’s terminology, and his exposition offers a superb overview.

A book more likely to end up in a “Reproductive Biology for English Majors” class is Making Babies: The Science of Pregnancy, by David Bainbridge. The playful title suggests the book’s flavor. Bainbridge, a professor at London’s Royal Veterinary College, covers his subject like an academic reporting for the National Enquirer. His eye for the sensational and amusing aspects of pregnancy, combined with his understated sense of humor, results in a more digestible—but still solidly scientific—read.

The books complement each other well. On Fertile Ground covers the whole range of human reproduction, from conception to menopause; Making Babies focuses specifically on pregnancy, telling the story of a single baby (and his mother) from conception through breastfeeding. As a nonscientist, I am not qualified to judge much of what Ellison and Bainbridge have to say. But both authors aim to reach a wide audience beyond their specialized fields, and I’m grateful for their efforts to draw the rest of us into the conversation. Science isn’t done in a vacuum—it has a great effect on our lives, on our families and communities. For me as a wife and mother, the science of reproduction is not an object of abstract curiosity but rather the stuff of my daily life. I read both books with my newborn son Gideon in my arms. It was especially fascinating to learn the details of the journey we had just come through together. But I was also prompted to wonder if this knowledge will increase our awe and respect for human life.

Had he studied the human reproductive system, I believe King David would have found many wonders to sing about. I was enthralled by Bainbridge’s account of conception in Making Babies, which provided me with an interesting “fact for the day” to share with my family: how a female egg is protected from penetration by multiple sperm (“polyspermy”), a threat to new life at its earliest stage. The moment a sperm enters an egg, an electrical current spreads from the sperm’s entry point across the egg’s surface, creating a force field against further sperm. In case that’s not enough, there’s also a backup system: the voltage change from the initial protection measure causes calcium atoms to leak into the egg, triggering the release of hundreds of little chemical packets. These packets fill the space between the egg and its protective shell, the zona pellucida—wonderfully described by Bainbridge as “a clear glassy sphere with a structure rather like a crystal, and clearly unlike anything else in the human body.” The zona’s very molecular structure is altered by the chemicals, rendering it impenetrable to sperm.

All this I excitedly recounted to my mother, my 14-year-old brother, and my 16-year-old sister one morning at the local coffee shop. My siblings were not impressed. When we got back to the car, they chastised me for “shouting” the words sperm and egg in a public place.

I’m not the only one who takes obvious delight in the miraculous workings of sperm and eggs. “Each of us is a little miracle,” Bainbridge proclaims, “the product of a million-to-one coincidental meeting of one sperm and one egg that burgeons into a living, breathing person. Although everyday life may make us forget it, this chance encounter is at the root of each one of us.”

There is a never-ending stream of things to wonder at in the making of a human life. “As soon as its maternal and paternal chromosomes are joined,” Ellison writes, “the new organism is genetically distinct from its mother and vulnerable to attack by her immune system.” An intricate dance between mother and child begins, as the newly fertilized egg gives off chemical signals letting its mother’s body that she is pregnant. Does our knowledge of these marvelous processes really prove, as Bainbridge believes, that we are the products of chance encounters? Or does it confirm King David’s words that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”?

These would seem to be theological questions, which the scientific evidence alone can’t answer. During the recent pbs series Evolution, it was argued that evolutionary science is compatible with religion because evolution answers the “hows” of life while religion addresses the “whys.” Perhaps many scientists see their roles as limited to exploring the “hows,” but Ellison and Bainbridge would certainly object. They believe that science has answered (or eventually will answer) all the “whys” of human reproduction.

As Bainbridge asserts, “Until the twentieth century … we often [made] sex, fertility, male and female into primal forces in our myths of how the universe conducts its affairs. In the last century, however, science has told us the answers to all these questions. We now know the reasons why there are men and women, why they have to unite to make a baby, which parent contributes more to the baby, and why it is women who get pregnant.”

“Over the centuries,” he continues, “it has gradually become clear how, within the first seven hectic weeks of pregnancy, the embryo changes from a single cell into a recognizable baby with eyes, ears, fingers and toes. During this scientific quest we have found out not only how we are made, but also why we are made this way.”

Why do we have sex? The “main reason,” Bainbridge replies, is that sex “stirs the genetic pot and constantly mixes human genes into new combinations that make new people.” Christian revelation would respond in a completely different manner. In his incomprehensible love, God chose to create the world, and he created man in his own image. Sex allows wives and husbands to share God’s love by becoming “one flesh”—and even to create new life that bears God’s image, as well as our own distinct genetic characteristics. Yes, sex enhances the gene pool, but this is only an observation—not an explanation. If you think science has solved the mystery of sex, imagine whispering in your spouse’s ear, “Honey, let’s mix some genes.”

Ellison, too, details specific evolutionary theories that answer the “whys” of our bodies’ reproductive design. Like King David, Ellison believes that our bodies are magnificently designed; or at least appear to be. Here are some examples of Ellison’s statements on design (with emphasis added):

Human reproductive physiology appears designed to run the narrow course between competing risks.

Our locomotory apparatus from the pelvis down shows considerable evidence of efficient design for bipedal locomotion.

But even with this elegantly engineered architecture, maintaining an adequate circulatory flow is a difficult feat.

Designing female reproductive physiology to be sensitive to the relative metabolic load of lactation results in an elegant balance among these three.

In each of these examples, the “designer” turns out to be natural selection, not God. Whenever Ellison invokes natural selection, it takes on the attributes of God directing creation. For example, “Natural selection has adapted placental morphology to provide for an enhanced rate of nutrient transfer.” And, “It should come as no surprise, then, that natural selection has provided physiological mechanisms to reduce the likelihood of overlapping gestation and lactation.”

I found that in all of Ellison’s sentences attributing our design to natural selection, when the term was replaced with “God” his logic was made complete. He looks at the painting and seems to credit the paintbrush for the magnificence of the work. This is not to imply that natural selection is incompatible with God—but often in these books, natural selection itself becomes a deity.

While I’m fascinated by the scientific discoveries about reproduction detailed in these books, I am also wary of how that knowledge was acquired and how it will be used. Bainbridge offers this nonchalant account of his work in a research group: “I was trying to develop methods of in vitro fertilisation (ivf) for deer … The sperm and eggs were … mixed in a plastic dish and I usually had a few seconds to watch them before returning them to their warm incubator … I watched the sperm swarm into view and crowd towards the waiting eggs.”

Of course, scientists do the same with human eggs and sperm. They attempt to peer into the darkness, to see the hands of God at work. Not seeing God’s hands, but only sperm and eggs colliding, they fancy it all chance. Scientists routinely “create” and destroy embryos, and much of what we know about human reproduction was probably discovered in these experiments. Yes, it’s interesting to know how a fertilized egg protects itself against polyspermy, or exactly how a tiny embryo develops. But at what cost?

While both authors use terms like “miracle” and “design” to describe life, neither believes that life is miraculous or designed in the commonly understood sense of those words. If the world is the product of natural selection and chance, there is no room for interaction with the supernatural. Bainbridge makes this clear in his chapter on why we have sex: “When the early Christians wished to infuse Jesus’ otherwise mundane earthly life with a hint of divinity,” he writes, “they claimed that he was produced by virgin birth. Virgin birth was so obviously impossible in the normal course of events that this plot device was enough to set the Messiah apart from all those run-of-the-mill prophets.”

If there is no God, there can be no man created in his image. And so another unsettling aspect of these books, which both Ellison and Bainbridge take for granted, is the treatment of man as just another animal. “How did an animal something like a chimpanzee give rise to a creature so smart and talented that it often has trouble thinking of itself as an animal at all?” Ellison asks. When chimpanzees write books, maybe we’ll find out.

I find greater wisdom in the words of my friend Edona, a seven-year-old refugee from Kosovo. When she visited my parents’ house, Edona declared that she loved their dog “more than anything!” I reminded her that earlier in the day she had said the same thing about my baby. She retracted her statement and put Gideon back in his rightful place. I asked why she liked Gideon more. “The puppy is good,” she answered, “but the baby is real.”

Though it seems a strange way to put it, we are more “real” than other animals. To say so is not to devalue the other creatures with whom we share the Earth. They too are given life by God. But only human beings are made in the image of God and will live eternally. You don’t have to be a Christian to sense our infinite value. Very few people act like we are mere animals, no more special than any other species. If they did, September 11 would stand for nothing more than the loss of a few thousand chimpanzee-like animals. A cruel and deplorable waste of life, yes, a blow to the gene pool, maybe—but hey, it happens all the time.

In the very last sentence of his acknowledgments in On Fertile Ground, in a note to his family, Ellison seems to agree that life is far more mysterious than his attempts to explain it suggest: “If all the work represented here were swept away I would still know, because of [my wife and sons], that love and family are what it’s all about.” A nice sentiment, but in light of the rest of the book, what is love? A product of natural selection, designed to aid in the survival of the race? For a more satisfactory answer, we must turn to King David, who not only marveled at the design of his body but also sang praises to the Designer.

—Bethany Torode makes her home in rural Wisconsin with her editor and superb critic, Sam, and their boss, Gideon. The Torodes have written a book titled Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception, due this spring from Eerdmans. Their website is www.torodedesign.com.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Growing up in the Middle-earth of American evangelicalism, I received the full Tolkien treatment. My parents read The Hobbit to me before bedtime, and I read it again many times on my own. I ventured through The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a teenager, studied it in college, and read it again as an adult. I made a handful of abortive efforts to read the saga’s dense prequel, The Silmarillion. A similar tale is told by multitudes of American Christians who grew up in the seventies and eighties, as it is by millions of British readers who are as hooked on Tolkien as they are on The Archers. But Tolkienism cuts an even wider swath. The trilogy has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, putting it well beyond the designation “cult classic,” and the first installment of the movie version is introducing Middle-earth to an even wider circle.

Until recently it hadn’t dawned on me that Tolkien’s books are not considered literature in the academic sense. I shouldn’t have been surprised, not only because they’re “fantasy” and suspiciously popular fantasy at that, but because none of the Inkling authors are much studied academically. Although they are cornerstones of my personal canon, they merit all of a single mention in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (on page 77, in connection with Dante). A Google web search for “20th Century British Novel,” the generic and historical classification in which we’d have to put Tolkien, yields college syllabi full of familiar names: Forster, Joyce, Beckett, Orwell, Woolf, Huxley. Recent additions include Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day) and the newly Nobel-christened V.S. Naipaul. Tolkien is never listed.

In J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Saint Louis University professor Tom Shippey aims to change that, and he is well qualified to try. His credits include among other things an excellent work of Tolkien criticism, The Road to Middle-Earth (1983), and editorship of The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (1994) and Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1996). More important, perhaps, his professional trajectory has closely followed Tolkien’s: “I attended the same school as Tolkien, King Edward’s, Birmingham, and followed something like the same curriculum. In 1979 I succeeded to the Chair of English Language and Medieval Literature at Leeds which Tolkien had vacated in 1925.” Shippey was also a fellow at Oxford from 1972 to 1979, where Tolkien had taught until his retirement in 1959; the two were acquainted from 1970 until Tolkien’s death three years later. In short, Shippey knows Tolkien’s world firsthand as few critics can.

Above all, Shippey shares with his subject a deep, abiding passion for philology: “the study of historical forms of a language or languages … [and] the texts in which these old forms of the language survive.” In his own writing Tolkien declared the importance of a “growing neighborliness of linguistic and literary studies” and designed his curriculum at Oxford to reflect that belief. He taught such texts as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which Shippey also teaches) with a strong emphasis on the dynamic growth of the English language from its Anglo-Saxon roots.

It’s a commonplace that Tolkien’s philological expertise informed his creation of Middle-earth, but Shippey goes further, suggesting that in no small part it was this knowledge that made Tolkien’s imaginative creations not merely believable but eerily resonant with the modern imagination. There is evidence for this, for example, in an appendix entry at the end of The Lord of the Rings in which Tolkien parses “hobbit” as hol (“hole”) plus the Old English bytlian, which means “to dwell,” arriving at the invented word holbytla or “hole-dweller.” In the same vein Shippey convincingly parses names such as Frodo, Ringwraith, Saruman, Bree, and Withywindle, revealing their implications for the overall design of Tolkien’s work. Whether or not Tolkien had all of these etymologies consciously in mind as he wrote (and it’s clear that in many cases he did), he was so familiar with the ancestral tongues that he couldn’t help but make Middle-earth a place of names and languages that really existed, or might have, in an unrecorded past. And all this works its magic on readers who have never conjugated an Anglo-Saxon verb. They feel in their bones the authenticity and coherence of Tolkien’s language.

But philological analysis does not dominate this study (as it did Road to Middle Earth). If The Lord of the Rings and its satellites are rooted in antiquity, they also are grounded in the modern world. Indeed, Shippey begins his book with the provocative assertion that “the dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic.” He cites as examples, in addition to Tolkien, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, among others. Like Tolkien, Shippey observes, all of these writers “are combat veterans present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatic events of the century.” And far from turning to fantasy as an escape from reality, they found in this literary mode a means of communicating what they had experienced, for which the tools of “realism” proved inadequate.

Tolkien’s works reflect the distinctive character of his time in other ways as well. When Shippey reveals Bilbo Baggins as a reluctant and desperately bourgeois adventurer, embodying Britain’s postwar malaise, most readers will wonder how they could have failed to see that all along. Precisely because he is quintessentially modern, Bilbo enables contemporary readers to connect with a legendary past: he is their stand-in, anti-heroic, bemused by the vast forces unleashed in the quest for the Ring.

Indeed, Shippey notes, anachronism, or “a superficial clash of styles,” is a primary tactic in The Hobbit: battle scenes transposed from World War I, dwarves spouting business jargon, and a dragon who can be sarcastic and colloquial one moment, archaically fierce the next. Tolkien’s intent, argues Shippey, is not only to bring a fantastic world within reach but also to show a fundamental unity between the present civilization and its heroic ancestry.

Tolkien was also modern in his portrayal of evil. Obvious representations of external evil forces—Sauron, the Ringwraiths, and the Orcs, for example—have led some critics to dismiss Tolkien’s moral universe as simplistic. Well, Tolkien did believe in good and evil, the one sharply distinguished from the other, but his depiction of moral conflict is inescapably modern. Many of the characters in Tolkien’s works are “eaten up inside”; the work of destroying the Ring nearly undoes Frodo, the ostensible hero. He is not a pure victor, then, but a kinsman of Charlie Marlow (Heart of Darkness), coming to grips not only with a foreign horror but with the evil in himself. As the trilogy’s unforgettable image of addictive evil, the Ring is “part psychic amplifier, part malign power.”

To acknowledge Tolkien’s overlooked “modernity,” Shippey insists, is not to deny that in other respects he was resolutely anti-modern. Tolkien was steeped in the English tradition to a degree almost unrecoverable today; he felt a special affinity with the Pearl-poet (whose poems he famously translated) and the Beowulf-poet. The Pearl-poet’s extensive descriptions of humans laboring in an enchanted natural landscape suggested a setting for modern inner turmoil: “Tolkien’s myth of stars and trees presents life as a confusion in which we all too easily lose our bearings and forget that there is a world outside our immediate surroundings.”

Like the Beowulf-poet (and like the novelist John Gardner, another student and translator of Anglo-Saxon poetry), Tolkien excels in the technique of “narrative interlace,” a technique in which “adventures are never told for long in strict chronological order, and continually ‘leapfrog’ each other.” Interlace creates a “strong sense of reality, of that being the way things are.” And when it serves the author’s purposes to do so, this technique also reinforces a sense of confusion, befuddlement; as Gandalf says, “Even the very wise cannot see all ends.” This notion is captured in a quotation from Fellowship of the Ring, currently a favorite bumper-sticker on college campuses: “Not all who wander are lost.” It was Tolkien’s purpose to show characters who don’t know where they are going, but who from an omniscient perspective are part of a grand narrative.

Much more is contained in the pages of Tom Shippey’s book, which is a thorough and highly readable study of an author whose powers clearly have been underestimated. Consider Tolkien explained and promoted. But does Shippey achieve the goal stated at the outset, to insert Tolkien into the canon as “the author of the century”? Perhaps not. The claim implied in the subtitle and expounded in the introduction rests on three factors: Tolkien’s immense popularity, his status as the inventor of an entire genre, and the literary value of his work. Shippey makes a case for the third of these, as well he must since it is the most contested. Still, in the end it is not clear that popularity and generic considerations push Tolkien to the top of the century’s impressive roll.

Never mind. Isn’t it time for another reading of The Hobbit?

Aaron Belz is a doctoral student in literature at Saint Louis University.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“Picture a square bed sheet,” my informant instructed. “The four corners are the four cardinal points. Now picture four heavenly creatures holding each of the corners: The creature on the northern corner is white; the one on the east is red; the one on the south is yellow; the one holding the western corner is black.

“Now picture not one, but 13 sheets, one on top of the other, rising upward. These are the 13 layers of the Maya Upperworld. The sky-bearers, bacabs, are holding the corners of the 13 levels.

“The book of the Apocalypse in the Bible talks about four horsem*n in heaven. Their horses are white, red, black, and yellow, like the bacabs. It talks about four angels holding the four corners of the earth. Isn’t that interesting?”

How would the ancient Maya come up with that, never having read the Bible? My interest began with an assignment to write a news report for Time magazine on an archaeological dig of Maya ruins and blossomed into a much more ambitious project: a novel set amid those ruins. I was to discover in my research for the book that there were many similarities between Maya and Christian cosmology.

The ancient Maya flourished as a civilization from a.d. 250 to 900 (though, as a people, they survived and number in the millions today). When the Spanish conquistadors appeared in the sixteenth century, with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, the Maya were already intimately familiar with many of the religious concepts the Spanish thought they were introducing to this “primitive” people: the religious use of the idea that seeds must fall into the ground to die in order to bring forth life; the need for blood to be spilt in order for there to be a relationship with the gods; and the concept of a sacrifice that does not end in death.

In my novel, a shadowy late-night visitor guides the protagonist through these mysteries. I turned instead to the counsel of William L. Fash, Harvard’s Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology, and chair of Harvard’s anthropology department at the Peabody Museum. I met him nine years ago in Copán, where he, along with his wife, Barbara, and a gifted group of archaeologists, scholars, epigraphers, and artists, was digging up vessel offerings, hidden temples, and the bones of lost kings—like miracle workers raising the dead. Since 1978, Bill Fash has championed multidisciplinary research projects there, all lucidly explained and updated, even for the (resolute) lay reader, in his recently revised book Scribes, Warriors and Kings (Thames & Hudson, 2001).

Fash visited CopÁn the first time at the age of 16 and was “flabbergasted by the richness of the archaeological remains and the beauty of the natural environment.” I know what he means. When you step onto the grounds the first time, you feel like you’re entering a fantasy world carved out of green volcanic tuff. The three-dimensional upright carvings (called stelae), the altars, the ballcourt, the Hieroglyphic Stairway, and the complex of temple pyramids known as the Acropolis all arise like ghosts out of the verdant jungle. In the words of the nineteenth-century explorer John Lloyd Stephens, who rediscovered the Copán ruins in 1839: “All was mystery, dark, impenetrable mystery.”

Fash and his team have come a long way in penetrating those mysteries, though he’d tell you they’ve barely scratched the surface. Nine years ago he said, “We could work with two hundred workers for the next hundred years and never solve all the mysteries of the Maya.”

This much they now know: “The Maya have come to be recognized as the most literate of all the pre-Colum-bian civilizations of the New World. They developed a complete writing system that enabled them to express any thought in the Mayan language. We have more Mayan inscriptions and texts than we do for any other civilization, and they tend to be more expressive of larger religious and historical concepts.”

When these lost cities throughout southern Mexico and portions of Central America were rediscovered in the nineteenth century, “no one knew what to make of this distinguished civilization that had been engulfed by the jungle,” says Fash. “This was a great mystery, and nothing excites the human imagination like a mystery.”

Any number of wild speculations arose about the origins of the Maya. The most helpful account came in the form of a book published by a priest (later a bishop) of YucatÁn, Fray Diego de Landa. “He was sitting in jail waiting to meet the Inquisition, and prepared this very long treatise on Maya culture as a means of trying to defend his occasionally overzealous attempts at conversion,” says Fash. “Ironically, the Inquisition is the reason we have Landa’s fabulous text about Maya civilization.”

Landa had a Maya scribe write down the names of the numbers, days, and months of the Maya calendar, which, Fash says, became “a great primer for Maya scholars who wanted to decipher the stone inscriptions.” Landa also had the scribe write down phonetic signs for Spanish sounds using Maya symbols. “No one could make heads or tails of that,” says Fash, “but what everyone could agree on was how the calendar worked.

“A number of sophisticated mathematicians and engineers applied what Landa had recorded to the surviving books and stone monuments. This cracked the codes of the dates on the Maya monuments, the lunar reckonings, and the Venus tables, and recognized other time counts related to astronomy.”

The focus on time and the movement of the stars and planets sent scholarship spiraling off in the wrong direction for about 50 years, he says. “Since that was what we could decipher, everyone obsessed on the Maya’s understanding of the cycles of time, their fascination with the movement of the heavenly bodies, and the obsession to record this in vivid detail in their books and inscriptions. Taken to a logical extreme, people concluded that the Maya must have been a theocracy governed by astronomer priests whose only concern was the passage of the heavenly bodies through the heavens.”

Many years later, scholars disproved this fantasy by means of basic archaeology and deciphering the hieroglyphs. “The archaeologists found defensive ditches dug around cities and other evidence for invasions of cities, and abundant evidence for the mass production of projectile points and other weaponry,” he says. “Most stunningly, in 1949 they discovered the ruins of Bonampak, Mexico, where the murals portrayed a pitched battle between two Maya kingdoms.” Implements of war and murals with images of human sacrifice contradicted the notion that this was a band of peaceful astronomer priests.

Fash highlights the “brilliant work of deduction” of architect, artist, and epigrapher Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Decades ago she concluded that the repeated dates at the Maya city of Piedras Negras were tied to history more than to astronomy. “The dates recorded events in the life spans of named individuals, and the monuments existed to pay homage to these rulers and important events of their lifetimes,” Fash explains. In other words, record-keeping related to the heavenly bodies was background information for historical events, perhaps to explain why a date was chosen for the accession of a ruler or for a particular war against a neighboring kingdom. “The monuments were erected by the Maya not to record the move- ment of heavenly bodies, but to record Maya history,” he says.

Fash focused his research on the Acropolis, the “sacred mountain”—one of several commanding monuments people see when they visit “the CopÁn ruins.” For the Maya, the landscape and everything in it, animate or inanimate, was alive with sacred power. The buildings, then, were earthly pictures of the cosmic world. The temples of Acropolis, built sequentially by Copán’s 16 kings, often one structure on top of another, were more than seats of government. They were the portals to the Upperworld and the Underworld where the gods and ancestors dwelt.

The Acropolis stands at the heart of Copán’s sacred geography. This is why Bill Fash established the Copán Acropolis Archaeological Project (caap) in 1988 to excavate and consolidate deteriorating structures of the Acropolis and to reconstruct “form, decoration, and stratigraphic associations” of the architecture. He told me, “The Maya speak to us through their buildings, and every building has a different message. Our task as archaeologists is to discover what a building means. What is their message?”

In 1993 they found out. As a project of caap and under the direction of Robert Sharer (University of Pennsylvania), archaeologists discovered a tomb inside Temple 16, at the heart of the Acropolis, that some were calling the most incredible find of their careers. They believed they had discovered the human remains of Copán’s founding king, K’inich Yax Ku’k Mo’ (pronounced kee-nish yash kook moh).

Bill Fash no longer lives in Honduras, but he returns every summer with students for onsite fieldwork. I reconnected with him there this past summer. Standing in front of Temple 16, he ex-plained how they finally confirmed that the person buried in the Hunal tomb, as it is called, was indeed the founding king. Immediately before us was Altar Q, the monument that had offered the most tantalizing clues. A square carving about the size of the bed of a 4 by 4 pickup, Altar Q was commissioned by Copán’s sixteenth—and last—king, Yax Pasah, and features carved images of CopÁn’s 16 kings, four on each side in the four cardinal directions. The altar is set upon four squat stone pillars, like a funeral bier. On the west face, or the front, K’inich Yax Ku’k Mo’, whose reign began in a.d. 426, is handing the kingly scepter to Yax Pasah, the last king, who died in 820. It is a symbolic gesture, intended to legitimize the reign of the commissioning king (and all kings in between) by linking him to the founder.

According to the inscriptions on Altar Q, Yax Ku’k Mo’ received the insignia of office from somewhere in “the west,” traveled for 153 days, then “rested his legs” in Copán. At the time, Copán was growing and prosperous, strategically located by the CopÁn river, which made it a major player on the trade routes. The arch-aeologists speculate that around a.d. 400, feuding warlords dominated Copán. There is evidence of a ruler before Yax Ku’k Mo’, but evidently he didn’t amount to much and left no inscriptions.

Yax Ku’k Mo’ arrived with the emblems of office after a sacred pilgrimage in 426, though, according to Fash, he had been “kicking around” for at least ten years prior to that. Archaeologists and epigraphers have deduced he had been commissioned in TeotihuacÁn, Mexico, then the most powerful city in Mesoamerica, “with its tentacles everywhere,” says Fash. The iconography of later rulers depicts Yax Ku’k Mo’ wearing goggles, which is a clue to his origins. Goggled eyes are Tlaloc imagery from TeotihuacÁn adopted by the Maya. The archaeologists also found pots in the tomb that clearly came from TeotihuacÁn. “But, then again,” says Fash, “you can’t go by the pots. There are pots from almost all of Mesoamerica in the tomb.”

The founding king created a regal ritual center, erecting a complex of buildings that included a new Acropolis and the city’s first ballcourt. He was also the first ruler to record inscriptions in stone. “The cosmological imagery he had carved on the ballcourt,” Fash says, “the recording of inscriptions, the stucco decoration, and the architecture styles all demonstrate that he intended to take CopÁn from a rural, backwater kind of place to a larger cosmopolitan center. It was his way of signaling that CopÁn was now going to be one of the great kingdoms of the Maya world.”

CopÁn did not become one of the larger city-states. At its peak in the eighth century the population hovered around 20,000 to 25,000. But “it was a gateway city on the edge of the classic Maya realm,” says Fash, and as such became the channel through which neighboring non-Maya peoples funneled their goods, their art, and their ideas into the Maya lowlands. “Conversely, these non-Maya groups could partake of the tremendous achievements and artistic prowess of Maya civilization through this window of opportunity in CopÁn. CopÁn played an important role in integrating the Maya realm with its non-Maya neighbors to the east and south,” he says.

He quotes his colleague, the late Linda Schele, who used to say that CopÁn (and other borderland cities) compensated for being on the edges by becoming “Super Maya.” Rather than asserting their prowess through political muscle and geographic expansion, the Maya at CopÁn became masters of artistic and literary expression, “creating more abundant and stunning works of art than anything that one could find elsewhere in the Maya world. The quality of the pictorial sculpture of the stelae, their portraits of rulers, the maize gods, birds, and other creatures adorning the late-classic buildings is vastly superior to that of any other Maya city.”

We are circling Altar Q. “The hieroglyphic inscription on the top says that this is the stone of K’inich Yax Ku’k Mo’. Those four stones underneath”—Fash points them out to me—”mean it is imitating the burial place of the person buried in the Acropolis. The burial slab in the tomb has four cylinders supporting it the same way.” Since Altar Q is placed directly in front of Temple 16, since it mimics a burial slab, and since it indicates it is the stone of Yax Ku’k Mo’, there was good reason for Fash and his colleagues to suppose that Temple 16 was the funerary temple of the founder.

“We tunneled into the Acropolis with the hope of uncovering these early remains. Lo and behold, we found a number of inscriptions and many different buildings in stratified sequences with associated dates going back to the time of the founding of the dynasty.”

Altar Q offered other clues. Yax Ku’k Mo’s image on the west face shows him wearing a single jade bar across his chest, called a pectoral. It also shows him holding a shield with his right arm, suggesting he was a left-handed warrior, drawing his weapon with his left hand and warding off blows with the shield held in his right arm. When the researchers examined the remains in the tomb, they noticed a series of combat-style fractures; most notably, the bone of the right forearm had suffered a serious break that hadn’t healed properly. A fractured right forearm is consistent with a parrying injury of a left-handed warrior. They also found in the remains a single jade bar like the one Yax Ku’k Mo’ is shown wearing on Altar Q.

Establishing the historicity of the founding king was a pivotal finding. First, says Fash, “it corroborated every later record we could find in early classic texts. It shows that there is a historical basis to the claims made by later kings about the life and times of their founding ancestor. To demonstrate that there is archaeological evidence to support the existence of this man and the claims made by later rulers of his role in setting up this distinguished Maya kingdom is terribly important, not just for the study of Copán and Honduran history but for the larger discipline of anthropology in the New World.”

But second, finding the bones of Yax Ku’k Mo’ put many other pieces of the puzzle in place, clarifying the purpose and function of subsequent temples, built on that spot, which, in turn, pointed to Maya cosmology. Fash writes in his book, “Structure 16 and all its predecessors were sequent versions of the funerary temple—or sacred mountain, in the Maya view—of K’inich Yax Ku’k Mo’.” Implements of ritual worship were found buried inside these later temples and deified images of the founding king adorn their facades. Yax Ku’k Mo’ was the historical fulcrum of CopÁn and more—the conduit to the Upperworld and the focal point of Maya worship, as the subsequent temples built there attest. In other words, history and cosmology at Copán intersect in the tomb of Yax Ku’k Mo’.

Inscriptions ceased in 822, two years after the death of the sixteenth king. As a political and religious cohesive entity, the Copán followed the pattern of the other Maya city-states in the region at the time and, more or less abruptly, collapsed.

Finding the tomb of the founder and understanding the religious function of subsequent temples built over his tomb brought to light much about Maya cosmology. “Yax Ku’ Mo’ had a clear vision for the supernatural divine role of the king,” says Fash. For the Maya, the king was the sacred conduit of supernatural power. He accessed this power through blood rituals, of which there were two principal forms: auto-sacrifice and ritual human sacrifice, usually (though not exclusively) practiced in the context of warfare.

To invoke the power of the gods and communicate with the ancestors, including Yax Ku’k Mo’ (who had become a god), the Maya kings entered their sacred temples and underwent a flesh-piercing ritual called “letting blood.” After days of fasting and spiritual preparation, the king pierced his genitalia and let the blood drip onto bark paper, which would be burned in an incense burner. The ancestors, as gods, appeared in a vision in the smoke. Through blood-letting, the king touched and embodied the power of the gods and transmitted its benefits to his mortal constituents—which, it’s worth noting, didn’t hurt his staying power.

Yax Ku’k Mo’ was a warrior king. Warrior kings indeed fought for geographic expansion. But like everything else in the Maya cosmos, warfare carried metaphysical significance and was also viewed as a ritual. “The Maya, like other peoples around the world,” Fash says, “occasionally performed rituals that involved the use of human blood. In many cases, they performed the auto-sacrificial flesh-piercing ritual. But in other cases it was quite clear that the captives taken in battle were soon to be dispatched for sacrifice.”

The model of warrior kingship was upheld by his successors and showcased in the great Hieroglyphic Stairway, a historical text of stone inscriptions built (albeit shabbily), by Ruler 15 as an “ode to the CopÁn dynasty and the great acts of the early kings.” As Fash writes in his book, “The portraits of the rulers [on the Stairway] serve to identify the distinguished sovereigns whose accomplishments are heralded in the lengthy inscription. The portraits. … stress the roles of the royal ancestors as great warriors, for virtually all of them bear shields.”

The blood proffered by the warrior kings was “the most sacred of sacrifices,” says Fash. Its internal logic was strikingly similar to Jesus’ words: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). “Quite simply,” says Fash, “they recognized that for there to be new life on earth there must first be death. Their metaphor for this was the maize plant. For there to be maize, an ear of corn must be plucked and the kernels of corn buried in the ground. From this would sprout new life and the whole cycle would renew again. All of the cultures of Mesoamerica believed their creator fashioned humankind from maize dough. Ritual sacrifice was viewed the same way. The bones were buried and from them would come new life. For there to be life, there had to be death. It was deemed necessary for the continual cycling of the world.”

The king, as conduit to the Upperworld and possessing divine attributes himself, saw it as his duty, through ritual sacrifice, to repay the gods for the blood debt incurred at creation and to keep the rhythms of life in motion—the rising and setting of the sun, the movement of the planets, the seasons. “The ancient Mesoamerican believed that the gods sacrificed themselves and were burned to ashes so there could be a sun, so the sun could move across the sky, so there could be humankind, and so humankind could have maize to eat. The sacred context in which these things took place recognized that the most precious thing that they knew, their own blood, needed to be given to repay the blood debt they owed the gods and to contribute to the renewal of the world,” says Fash. “That’s not to say you don’t lament the loss of life. But it does inform how one understands why they considered this to be a vital part of life on planet earth.”

Understanding the religious motivations behind rituals of human sacrifice gives us a window into how the Maya understood their world. But having a religious motivation certainly does not justify evil acts. If it did, what would that suggest about the World Trade Center attack? Fash says that the Maya understood the world in dualistic terms. “From the point of view of Mesoamerican civilizations, there will always be the light and the dark, hot and cold, night and day. Duality was the way the world was, and there was no disputing or changing that. From their point of view, these opposing forces had to exist for there to have been a world. The constant conflict and interplay of good and evil, light and dark, night and day, was a given and not something to try to resist. It was the nature of the universe.”

In my research I have found one exception to this. It is the Maya myth of the Hero Twins, recorded in a sixteenth-century sacred book of the Quiché Maya called the Popol Vuh. In the myth, the Hero Twins descend to the Underworld, a wet, smelly place filled with disease and decay from which few had hope of escape. There they engage in an epic battle against the lords of the Underworld in the form of a game on the ballcourt. The lords quickly trick the twins, throw them into an oven where they are consumed, grind their bones, and toss the remains into the river of hell. But the twins, being clever, had anticipated the trick and concocted a means of escape. They emerge from the river five days later, their visage changed, as the sacrifice that did not end in death. They then wander the Underworld, performing other sacrifices that did not end in death, like setting houses on fire that would not be consumed and sacrificing people who did not die.

The lords of the Underworld have never seen such miracles. Not to be outdone, they challenge the miracle workers (who they’ve failed to recognize in their new guise) to another ball game. The twins, through a series of miracles too convoluted to delineate, defeat them. Victorious in the arena of testing, the twins rise to the Upperworld reborn as heavenly creatures: the sun and the evening star, Venus. In his book, Fash describes this conclusion as a “a staggering defeat over the masters of hell.”

The myth holds out hope for the Maya that humans from the Middleworld could enter the arena of confrontation, the Underworld, pass the test, and be reborn as new creatures, like the Hero Twins, reaching one of the 13 levels of the Upperworld. That is why ballcourts were so important to the ancient Maya and why every regal ritual center had one (sometimes more than one). Fash writes, “It is believed that on important ceremonial occasions, Maya rulers took on the role of the Hero Twins, and their opponents took on the role of the Lords of the Underworld. If the ruler won the game, he symbolically defeated the forces of death, darkness, disease, and famine, giving his people cause to rejoice.”

The blood that must be shed; “seeds” dying in the ground; the ballcourt rituals where good battles evil and wins; the promises of a sacrifice that does not end in death: where did the Maya come up with such notions? I don’t have a clue. Perhaps there is a hint from the writer of Ecclesiastes, who says that God has “planted eternity in the human heart” (3:11).

In a sermon, Fredrick Buechner recounts a conversation with a junior officer on the bridge of a British freighter in the middle of the Atlantic late one evening. The officer had been looking to see if he could spot the lights of other ships on the horizon. “The way to see lights on the horizon,” he told Buechner, “is not to look at the horizon but to look at the sky just above it.” Maybe in the world of Maya, it is better not to look straight at the practices and rituals—the blood, the bones—but up a little, beyond them, to see what they point to. Their cosmology is like a sketch, an outline, not the entire picture (inevitably, it got messy) but the edges. It reminds me in a way of Luther’s theology of the Cross. That event was brutal and bloody, too, and through it, he says, we see the “rearward parts of God”—posteriora Dei—as Moses did in Exodus 33:22-33: “As my glorious presence passes by, I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed. Then I will remove my hand and you will see me from behind. But my face will not be seen.”

Here is how I work it out in my novel: “The Maya understood the need for blood, especially the blood. They have shown us there isn’t enough human blood in all the world to satisfy the gods. They are telling us the power of the sacrifice cannot be found in the blood of humans sacrificed by human hands. When the warfare increased toward the end of the dynasty, and the Maya all over the lowlands fought their civil wars and took captives, did they send them to the fields to work? No. They cut off their heads and carried them on sticks. For what? What did all that blood avail the ancient Maya? The gods were not satisfied. Yax Pasah built Altar Q. The sixteen kings took their place. The first king handed the staff to the last. That was it. The conquistadors were not good Catholics, my friend. But that does not revoke the power of the blood of God spilled by God himself. It was the only sacrifice that did not end in death, like the legend of the Hero Twins.”

Wendy Murray Zoba is the author of Day of Reckoning: Columbine and the Search for America’s Soul (Brazos) and Sacred Journeys (available in May from Tyndale).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. —1Timothy6:10, NIV

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. —Adam Smith

I’m not in it for the money. —Commonly overheard saying in Silicon Valley

Last year in his Human Follies column for New York Press, Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger remarked on the tragic deaths of missionary Roni Bowers and her baby daughter Charity over the skies of Peru. With many others, Tiger raised the question of why the Peruvian drug interdiction plane felt it necessary to open fire on a planeload of teetotalers. Had he stopped there, the column would have been a well-crafted if readily forgettable effort. But after the pro forma lament of pointless death, Tiger segued into an anti-missionary polemic. He railed against the “extraordinary vanity and presumption. … of missionaries” who “disrupt the most fundamental ideals and values of the people on whom they inflict themselves.” These “frank imperialists,” he said, “enjoy a fuzzy kind of permission to conduct a kind of business that is largely impossible in other less ethereal spheres of life.”1

A torrent of outrage, from all around the world, rose in response. Linked to by hundreds of websites, including the vaunted Arts & Letters Daily, a column in a free Manhattan weekly that might have drawn a few angry letters instead drew buckets full. Some of the reported postmarks: Birmingham, AL, Fremont, CA, Edgewood, KY, Toronto, Johannesburg, and Papua New Guinea. Is this the sort of thing people have in mind when they talk about “globilization”?

Well, yes and no. In the prologue to Globalization and the Kingdom of God, Duke University’s James Skillen explains that globalization is “the growing interdependence of people throughout the world.” This interdependence, he suggests, is so loaded with importance that it may shift our very “perspective on the meaning of life”: what we are witnessing is nothing less than the creation of a “single global village.” Skillen summarizes Dutch professor Bob Goudzwaard’s delivery of the 1999 annual Abraham Kupyer lecture thus:

The burden of [Goudzwaard’s lecture] is to shed light on the religiously deep wellspring of contemporary economic globalization. … [H]e arrives at the deepest level, where he sees people—especially westerners—hypnotized by acquisitiveness and competition, fearful of falling behind or not getting ahead fast enough, acting like children who believe there is no other way to “make progress,” even though poverty and environmental degradation grow worse rather than better.

It is by now a strikingly familiar picture. It’s globalization in this sense that Seattle anarchists saw reflected in the Starbucks windows they smashed during the World Trade Organization riots in 2000. And it is a perspective on globalization also shared by many prominent Christians, including the pope. In 1999, John Paul II publicly wrung his hands over the way things are going:

If globalization is ruled merely by the laws of the market applied to suit the powerful, the consequences cannot but be negative. … More and more in many countries [and] in America a system known as neo-liberalism prevails; based on a purely economic concept of man, this system considers profit and the laws of the market as its only parameters, to the detriment of the dignity of and the respect due to individuals and people.

I speculate, but this may have been the notion in the back of theologian Massimo Salani’s mind when he complained in an article in the Italian magazine Avvenire that McDonald’s was a Protestant institution that is hostile to community bonds.

Statements like these infuriate John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, editors of London’s classical liberal weekly newsmagazine, The Economist. In A Future Perfect, they jointly find the pope’s remarks, if not hypocritical, then at least bizarre. Here, they write, we have “one of the men who has most turbocharged the pace of globalization” by helping to remove the “greatest barrier to the universal role of market capitalism,” and yet:

[A]s the 1990s wore on, the pope became increasingly uneasy about what he had wrought. As he contemplated the spread of sin, selfishness, and inequality, he worried that “unbridled capitalism” was little improvement on “savage Marxism.”. … Globalism began to assume the same role in his life that communism once had.

In response, the pontiff might cite Peter Jay’s The Wealth of Man, which—among other unsavory aspects of global capitalism—chronicles Russia’s disastrous transition from communism. Where the government would not allow enough latitude for regular markets to function, the black market and organized crime arose, inspiring lawlessness and murder. Vodka, which the communists had supplied in enough quantity to keep the population sedated, now became more affordable in greater quantity, and Russian men promptly began drinking themselves to death. Through rigged auctions, valuable state properties were sold for rubles on the dollar and then resold, the wealth being funneled into foreign bank accounts; they wisely didn’t trust their own crony-ridden financial institutions.

Most of the former Soviet Bloc nations haven’t fared much better. Micklethwait and Wooldridge tell of one former satellite dumping raw sewage into the river that it and a neighbor satellite jointly share in a tiff over non-payment for sanitary water. Africa continues to be a war- torn wreck. Asia, though it evidenced—and continues to show—real progress, nearly dragged the whole world into a financial pit in 1998 following the unexpected devaluation of Indonesia’s currency, the rupiah. And while vast wealth has accumulated in places such as America, the distribution of said wealth is seriously skewed. Maybe the Seattle rioters had a point. Maybe we should turn to a more heavy-handed but survivable governance and relegate globalization, with communism, to the dustheap of history.

Not so fast, say our classical liberals. The thesis of A Future Perfect is that globalization, on the whole, is tugging us in the right direction and hence needs to be “not only. … understood but. … defended stoutly.” With characteristically witty Oxbridge prose and a raft of subtitles, they set out to do just that: explain and defend globalization against its enemies and, more important, its erstwhile friends. Globalization, they argue, has been badly (and under-) sold by free-market types, American enthusiasts, and center-left politicians the world over. Nearly every camp has giddily embraced one or more of the refutable myths about what they call “a process rather than a fact.”

Micklethwait and Wooldridge attempt to hack through the hyperbole that surrounds the issue. Yes, they admit, globalization has been driven by “the gradual decision by politicians to step out of the way since the end of the Second World War,” but that hardly amounts to a laissez-faire regime: control could be, and historically has been, reinstated quickly. Contrary to the wishes of anarchists and utopian libertarians, the nation state is not about to wither away anytime soon. Yes, it does create losers, but if this sometimes “savage process” is allowed to run its course, the number of winners end up “far outnumber[ing]” those it shortchanges. Too often, globalization has been held accounatable for social ills that are in fact directly traceable to suffocatingly corrupt local governments, which often seek to deflect blame by foisting it off on a foreign force.

Clearly, Micklethwait and Wooldridge say, the critics of globalization have not done their homework. Consider cell phones. Before September 11 they were widely cited as symbolic of the excesses of globalization—”leashes” in Dilbert-speak, or another example of Much Too Much Information. A recent movement to ban them from being used by commuters saw some success in New York State. Similar regulations would have been adopted by other localities by now, were it not for the events of September 11, which so graphically demonstrated the benefits of this technology.

And where is the mobile-phone market growing most rapidly? In the developing world, in places like Afghanistan, where such technology has meant the difference between being connected to the world and being cut off. The authors note that the average wait for a fixed line in Russia is ten years. In only five months, Lucent was able, by installing several handfuls of base stations in the most remote regions of Argentina, to bring telephone service to half a million previously unserviced people. Bangladesh, whose person-to-phone ratio was 275-to-1, has had over 300 villages outfitted with phones. “For Bangladeshi farmers,” Micklethwait and Wooldridge write, “the phones provide liberation from middlemen. Rather than having to accept a broker’s price, Bangladeshi farmers. … find out the fair value of their rice and vegetables” and avoid getting gouged in the process. A Future Perfect is chock-a-block with examples like this one, graphically making the point that globalization is, at bottom, about giving people more options.

But both A Future Perfect and The Wealth of Man end on a somber note.

The Economist editors confess that “the devil has all the best tunes.” That is, the benefits of globalization are so spread out and the victims so concentrated, there’s a real and present danger that the Chicken Littles will drag the sky down on the rest of us. One would be tempted to dismiss such concerns, but it has happened before. The 1800s, seen by Micklethwait and Wooldridge as a wellspring of globalization, gave way to the intense nationalistic movements of the nineteenth century and the bloody twentieth. Success begot national pride and envy, which begot petty conflicts that snowballed. In a sense, then, globalization creates its own counterreaction. In the wake of the destruction of the Twin Towers, many speculated that that counterreaction was precisely what was occurring.

Taking the long view of economic history, Peter Jay pegs the current situation as step two of a waltz motif: economic success creates envy and draws predators. In the next step, either a compromise is reached whereby most of the wealthy party’s money is protected with enough going to the rest of society to smooth things over or the whole enterprise breaks down. He worries that in this new, well-connected world, “the South” —that is, the poor nations mostly of Africa, South America, parts of Asia and Eastern Europe—might follow the lead of the Seattle/Genoa anarchists and gang up on “the North”—the wealthy nations—cramming a version of global governance down the North’s throat that effectively shuts down a process that began with the industrial revolution: “a truly Malthusian denouement.” Lest we doubt that could happen, Jay reminds us that “even in the United States primitive superstitions and ethical blindness can afflict broad swaths of an immensely affluent and educated society, not least constraining the nation’s lawmakers to adopt barbaric postures.”

For all their skepticism, Christians have generally been more nuanced in their assessment of globalization and its prospects. Goudzwaard explicitly condemns the “many who condemn globalization as a demonic endeavor leading people to the abyss and thereby [finding] an alibi to excuse themselves from any responsibility.” He adds that “those who stand in Calvin’s line may not adopt this attitude” [italics added]. “Long before the present process of technological and economic globalization began, God’s message of global Good News went forth and began its work. The idea of globalization, therefore, is not foreign to the Bible.”

Indeed, it’s a bit of a puzzle for Jay, who takes a very secular, avowedly Darwinian approach to his discipline, to answer many of the whys and wherefores of economic history. Specifically, why did the (at least nominally) Christian West—whose economic thinking Jay surprisingly spurns in favor of Islam—accomplish the following: 1) discover the New World; 2) spark the industrial revolution; 3) become the chief (but far from only) beneficiary of globalization? China, Jay notes, was at one time far ahead of the West in many respects—including seafaring—but then retracted. Islamic science and intellectual culture generally, once superior to that of Europe, ran aground.

Was it just random chance that the West took the lead? Or is it possible that, however perverted it sometimes became, the missionary impulse—which Christians trace back to a commandment explicitly given by Jesus—played a part in this outcome? China, remember, faced no internal contradiction by contracting. The Chinese found much of the world backward and boring, and the emperor had no “great commission” to uphold. To this day, Christian missionaries continue to take the gospel to such “backward” people, often introducing technology and raising their standard of living in the process. As for Islam, missiologist Andrew Walls has shown how the “translatability” of the gospel and the “cross-cultural diffusion” of Christianity contrast with the dynamics of Islamic expansion.

Granted, it is important not to minimize the reality of greed as a motivating factor. But it is at least a plausible hypothesis that Christianity’s missionary instincts helped prepare the soil from whence globalization eventually sprang.

Shifting from the roots of globalization to the present realities, Anna Peterson, Manuel Vasquez, and Phillip Williams, the editors of Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas, look at how Protestants and Catholics in Central and South America navigate a world influenced by globalization. They find that, contrary to some people’s fears, globalization has not meant secularization: “religion is changing but not disappearing.” In fact, “if anything, religion has become more central to struggles around collective and individual identity and to the rearticulation of damaged civil societies.”

They find that Christians of all stripes from El Salvador to Peru have begun to concentrate less on the government’s ability to provide social justice and more on how individuals can help one another escape from poverty and vice and reach toward prosperity and salvation. The emergence of Protestantism as a competing option has led even progressive Catholics to “embrace pastoral approaches” that focus more on exhorting people to assume individual responsibility for their actions, not only for their own sake but for the common good. And “the increasing circulation of goods, capital, people, and ideas” has encouraged churches to become “critical resource centers” for both financial and spiritual assistance. Protestant and Catholic alike, churches have begun to learn from one another’s successes and failures—in everything from worship style to outreach. Again, I speculate, but it’s likely Micklethwait and Wooldridge would call that globalization in action.

1. Lionel Tiger, “Missionary Come Home.” New York Press, Volume 14, Issue 20 (2001). A response to Tiger by this author with respect to the question of pluralism can be found at www.spintechmag.com/2001/ jl080101.htm.

Jeremy Lott is senior editor of Spintech magazine and a student at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It has been remarked with wry hauteur that literary criticism is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. This conclusion was presumably the product of observing that for someone who is clever and has time on his or her hands, a piece of writing is fair game. So literary criticism is implicitly viewed as an enterprise both democratic and aristocratic: democratic because in fact the discipline does not make excessively serious demands; aristocratic because the guild of critics requires that others take its gnostic expertise excessively seriously. Such allegations may or may not be ill-deserved, but the fact that they ring a bell with those who know little enough about it— and who might not recognize good literary criticism if they saw it—at least tells us something about perceptions. You only have to be clever at talking to talk cleverly about literature.

Possibly this attitude extends to literary theory, regarded as something vaguely akin to literary criticism, their intellectual fates intertwined if not inseparable. If so, exemplifiers of the attitude might do well to peruse a substantial essay on “Christian Identity and Literary Culture,” namely David Jeffrey’s People of the Book, to the end that they might think again. The range of questions the author wants to pose and to address, as listed in the preface, signals clearly enough the nature of the chapters that follow, whose contents are diffuse. We have something of a tour of the land of Western literary culture through the ages; a tour that is not meant to take in everything, not even everything important; a tour whose guide is explicitly Christian with an explicitly Christian interest and agenda; a tour where the reader’s attention is designed to be arrested as much by the particulars of the sites visited as by the detailed plan of the journey. But of course there is a unifying theme and unifying threads. What are they?

“Logocentrism” is the idea under scrutiny. It is associated especially with Jacques Derrida. Jeffrey’s interest is not in particular themes such as the relation of speech to writing, but in the wider characterization of the Western literary tradition, largely inspired or influenced by Christianity, as “logocentric.” On this view of things, words embody truth and rationality, and truth and rationality are objective and normative. Derrida repudiates this philosophy.

Here we must stop for a moment to forestall a misunderstanding. When Jeffrey was writing People of the Book, “logocentrism” was a fashionable term to deploy in seminar rooms or literary journals. Today that’s not so much the case; newer fashions have replaced it, while Derrida himself, ever elusive, has simply left it behind. But if the term has lost some of its cachet, the underlying notion is if anything more fashionable than ever, turning up in many guises—as when the authors of a recent Native American theology propose to deconstruct the Euro-American understanding of “truth” via the Trickster figure that appears in many Native traditions.

Jeffrey’s mission in any case is not to rescue logocentricity; it is to rescue the tradition from the charge of logocentricity. The literary word has not functioned as Derrida and many others have assumed. This thesis is fleshed out in a number of investigations which take in Scripture, Augustine, medievals, Puritans, moderns, and other scenes and figures. It is defended by drawing attention principally to three things.

The first is the relation of words to extralinguistic realities as this is understood from the very beginnings of seminal Christian writing both in Scripture and Augustine. Minds are not to be stayed upon the words that convey truth. They are to be stayed on the truth conveyed. And it may be brokenly conveyed. Indeed, it is never adequately conveyed. For truth lies in the transcendent signified and it is incarnate, moreover, not first in words but in flesh.

The second is the ethical dimension in reading. Here, if anywhere, Jeffrey puts greatest emphasis although his theses are profoundly interrelated. The literary tradition which is inspired by the Book, the Bible, commits the serious reader to be serious ethically, for its spring is the ethical seriousness of the gospel. One is not meant to treat literature with formalistic dispassion; the attempt to support the objectivity of textual meaning by downgrading the role of the reader’s interest is misguided, even if the intention is to safeguard truth and rationality. For this is to abandon precisely the historical and theological roots of a literary tradition bent on engaging the reader.

The third is the locus of authority, which lies not in the text but that to which it witnesses. I mention this third and not second, though it naturally follows the first point, because its formulation is generally less prominent than the two others, its importance coming particularly (though not only) to light toward the end of the volume, in the discussion of the Puritans. On these characters, Jeffrey is none too keen; they foreshorten their sights to concentrate on text at the expense of the world disclosed by it.

Under these headings a great amount of expository argument takes place. The announcement of the logocentric issue in chapter 1 is succeeded by an account of “Scripture upon Scripture” that leads to a statement of Jesus’ typological reading. Jerome, along with Augustine, is then called in to witness to the ethics of reading before a chapter on “Evangelization and Literacy” tells stories from Anglo-Saxon England. This is powerful material and leaves us with a sober impression of barbarian cruelty against which the humane beauty of the Christian gospel stands out in sharp relief. Chaucer and Wycliffe occupy the next space as they press home their understanding of committed reading and then the world of symbolism is opened out to us, both in its medieval integrative force, bringing reader and world together through the evangel, and in its haunting crisis as represented by Goethe. (A number of illustrations enrich the written account.) From the Puritans to Matthew Arnold, this world is then lost either by contracting one’s preoccupations or by sloughing off the serious challenge offered to the reader by the contents of the Bible in the atmosphere of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism.

The scene finally shifts across the pond for the tale of “the Bible and the American Myth,” a tale of how the Book had force, no doubt about it, and was anything but frozen text, but unfortunately was too often read and vigorously deployed against its grain in the service of the New World. Jeffrey’s concluding appeal is different from those of many an American evangelist and politician, but no less passionate: come repentantly to read repentantly and there will be deep rest for our souls. Derrida and his kin should think about that, not about logocentrism.

What an account of Jeffrey’s work cannot easily do is to convey the author’s extremely wide range of reading in investigating the nooks and crannies as well as the broad pastures of history. It is a very interesting, as well as broadly spanned, volume. Further, there is a sense of urgency allied to the intellectual cause: it is edifying scholarship. The documentation of the tradition’s grave summons to serious ethical reading and engagement is helpful and important. Augustine gives us a strong launch. Kierkegaard inimitably reminds us of what is at stake, but he is just the incisive representative of centuries of conviction on the matter. Jeffrey has told us what a Christian literary culture has looked and should look alike.

Suppose the central proposition in the volume be reduced to the stark claim that Christian literary theory is theologically bound to think of the text as mediator between reader and res, crafted to promote their union, and that it has historically exemplified this. Then the contention is right, and importantly so. But more is contended than just this. And here, assessment finds us on what is in some respects difficult terrain. Those expert in this or that particular area will undoubtedly disagree with this or that interpretation offered by the author. It could hardly be otherwise in a book of such ambition. One is duty bound also to apostrophize: a number of errors occur in the text, involving, for example, the spelling of non-English words (including biblical languages, transliterated and untransliterated) and factually wrong statements (Charles Simeon of Cambridge is granted a Professorship of Chemistry … or was there more than one noteworthy Simeon in that day?).

Still, this is obviously not what makes our terrain difficult nor is it just the sheer variety of particular historical judgments that are made. What is problematic is the way Jeffrey makes connections in the argument. Sometimes they are on the surface. Sometimes they are below it. Sometimes they are explicit. Sometimes they are implicit. Sometimes the large steps are taken with the apparent and perhaps unimpeachable intention that the reader should take the smaller ones that hook up arguments. Sometimes the large steps are taken so as to put the reader at a disadvantage, not knowing whether a particular construction is one’s own or the author’s. It would be unfair not to allow for authors’ divergent ways of presenting a case and to that extent there must surely be a latitude of judgment on cogency. So the above description is not meant to be uniformly evaluative. But if we take segments from the pivotal treatment of medieval reading, the problem can be fairly laid bare.

In two important chapters (5 and 6) Jeffrey asks, first: “How does authority lead the intelligence?” and then “How does the reader resist (or not) the authority of the text?” In order, he says “to pursue these questions in their medieval context, we need to regard each as a question with distinct ethical overtones.” So in the first of the two chapters he wants “to suggest that the question about authority is answered less by proposition than by analogy or trope,” while in the second he wants to consider “the much more slippery question of the resistant reader.”

But one needs to adduce far more evidence than Jeffrey does in the first of those chapters in order to establish his conclusion. At most, what is demonstrated is that “analogy or trope” could be used in lieu of what we familiarly think of as the “proposition,” but generalization to the medieval period is impossible on the evidence supplied. One really needs evidence from Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, for example, to establish this conclusion. On the other hand, if we put a lot of weight on Jeffrey’s description of what he is doing as a “suggestion,” our expectations must accordingly be modified.

The discussion of Wycliffe in the next chapter introduces another type of difficulty. Its place in the overall argument of the book is important. Driven by an “obtrusively ethical approach to questions of meaning in biblical narrative,” Wycliffe concludes that the very grammar and logic of Scripture must be understood out of canons intrinsic to itself, not extrinsic (e.g., Aristotelian) ones. This leads to creative syntactical and grammatical interpretation theologically directed by a belief in Christ, the divine Logos, as the content of Scripture. The religious facts of creation and incarnation generate a hermeneutic whereby the meaning of a text does not lie in just what the text temporally, in its own time, says. The temporal is by grace the place of divine power and incarnate presence, and the very meaning of a text ultimately authored by God is therefore not susceptible of a purely grammatical analysis derived from syntactical rules in general hermeneutics, but is intelligible only in terms of the peculiar reality and truth divinity wants to convey. This summary does less than justice to the nuance and detail of Jeffrey’s statement of the point, but is adequate for present purposes. We may enumerate just three difficulties here.

As part of the case against calling the Christian literary tradition “logocentric,” a contrast has been drawn earlier in the book between a “formalistic” and “ethical” reading of texts. The point is, broadly, well made. But confusion threatens when Wycliffe’s substitution of “a logic and theory of exegesis intrinsic to the foundational text of Scripture” for Aristotelian canons is described as “ethical”. The “ethics” involved on this particular score is not identical with the ethics involved in a reader attending to the message of Holy Writ. Wycliffe’s move can be fully supported by those who regard it as, quite generally, a principle of hermeneutics that you must attend to the peculiar grammar and logic of a text. In other words, there is a distinction between “ethical reading” in the sense that (a) one ought to read in accordance with the avowed logical and grammatical principles of a given text and (b) one ought to read with a will to hear and obey its religious meaning. Of course, the senses are deeply compatible, but they are not identical.

Jeffrey takes the Latin tempus as equivalent to the Greek kronos (sic: it should be chronos) and duratio as kairos. But what does he mean by the latter equivalence? Is, for example, duratio Vulgate for kairos and, if so, how felicitous is that rendering? Or are they judged broadly semantic equivalents? But, if so, on what grounds and in what contexts? And how is it concluded that kairos means “God’s time, in which all being is eternally present”? Further, in the only sentence quoted from Wycliffe, we read of the “aeternitas” of God. How is this related to duratio or to kairos?

“As [Wycliffe’s] work stands, his ‘doctrine of possibilities’ is richly suggestive of the direction of his mature thinking.” The doctrine is explained: “By the ‘doctrine of possibilities,’ for something to be possible it simply must once have existed, must now exist, or else it must be going to exist at some time in the future, in its own time.” That is, a possibility is an imagined form of an actuality, past, present, or future; the possibilities are not, for example, counterfactual conditionals or logical possibilities. Yet we are told a few sentences later that “intelligibility is synonymous with possibility. In other words, the principles of being and intellection are identical.” If so, it seems as though intelligibles do not include counterfactual conditionals or logically possibles per se and that the principles of intellection extend no further than the principles of being and so also fail to include those. Is this what Wycliffe really held? And if so, does it not more hinder than advance his insights?

The context of the discussion in the book should show that all this provides a significant and not a relatively trivial example of what can go on. It instantiates why, quite in general, more conceptual work needs to be done on the relation of word to Word to deliver Jeffrey’s thesis. In the important chapter on “The Symbolism of the Reader” the author speaks of faithful reading as “an incarnational activity and part of an incarnational process,” but if one were to put all this in the context of Christian dogmatics through the ages, one would see why some are disposed to dispute the historical and theological propriety of using “incarnational” as a qualifying adjective in his way. Here what is needed is a discussion of the relative meanings of “indwelling,” “ingestion,” and “incarnation.” In sum, then: Jeffrey successfully impresses on us the nature of the Western Christian tradition of reading, key features of the literary culture it creates and sustains, the ethical constraints on readership, and the shape that a debate on logocentrism would do well to take. However, more narrowly theological or doctrinal questions pertaining to the nature and hermeneutics of the biblical word and the nature and scope of incarnation remain to be sorted out.

There is a characteristically delightful sequence in Jerome K. Jerome’s book, Three Men in a Boat, where the author describes the start of a dogfight between assorted representatives of the canine species in the lobby of a building. The big dogs engage in the serious stuff while the little ones fight among themselves and fill up their spare time by biting the legs of the bigger ones. A theologian like the reviewer who knows so much less about literature than does David Jeffrey fears the application. Actually, I am entering a plea for cooperation. Unlike the bellicose canine fraternity in Jerome’s amusing account, let the collegial Christian one be marked by the intellectual cooperation of students of literature, theology, philosophy, and any other fields pertinent ad hoc so that together we may press for those values, in all their beauty, truth, and goodness, that Jeffrey has discovered in “the people of the book.” The Book, books, and the values thereof are, after all, under serious threat. Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of Revelation and Reconciliation: A Window on Modernity (Cambridge Univ. Press).

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

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Books have biographies. Like people, books have lives that can be told and stories that can be recounted. James Secord’s Victorian Sensation is an extraordinary example of a new genre of scholarship that might appropriately be dubbed the biblio-biography. It is the story of the writing, publishing, circulating, and reading of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, first published anonymously in 1844 but later revealed as the child of the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers. An imposing cosmological epic conceived on a grand scale, the book created a sensation at the time.

Embraced by some, vilified by others, it at once bemused, infuriated, consoled, and revolted readers in its bold portrayal of the drama of evolution and its popular synthesis of everything from astronomy to zoology. One thought it a “priceless treasure,” another dismissed it as materialist “pigology.” Some found it manly; others were sure they could detect a womanly hand behind its anonymity. Some thought it daring; still others found it melancholic. And while the young Thomas Archer Hirst—who would later become a prominent mathematician—found it laid out in a “masterly” fashion, Thomas Henry Huxley abominated it and characteristically sniped that it was nothing but a “weed,” a “lumber-room of second-hand scientific furniture,” and “a broth of a book.” Indeed, writers outdid one another in the metaphors they exploited to stage-manage the text for readers. The book’s striking red binding prompted one to “attribute to it all the graces of an accomplished harlot.” Its continuing anonymity drew from another the exclamation: “Unhappy foundling! Tied to every man’s knocker, and taken in by nobody; thou shouldst go to Ireland!” To yet another the book was an illicit marriage between gross credulity and rank infidelity.

But all this is to anticipate. Before readers can react to a book, they have to get it into their hands. Writers, publishers, printers, binders, shippers, sellers, and readers are netted together in a complex web of interchange, a tangled nexus that lies hidden behind the book that every reviewer—including this one—sits down to read. As Secord observes, “the most abstract ideas about nature should be approached first and foremost as material objects of commerce and situated in specific settings for reading.” Accordingly, the story of Vestiges is placed firmly in the context of the history of the book as a commodity that is constructed, advertised, circulated, and paraded in a variety of ways. The “great sensation” that it caused was crucially dependent on developments in print technology, systems of mass distribution, and other innovations in a rapidly industrializing Victorian Britain.

Production then, is Secord’s point of departure. And here we are treated to an exquisite elucidation of the revolution in the publishing industry at a time when steam presses, railway bookstalls, and telegraph wires all burst on the scene. These, and a dozen other technological breakthroughs like them, created the very possibility of a book becoming a sensation precisely because they created the possibility of a reading public. Books, magazines, tracts, pamphlets, and papers of all shapes and sizes tumbled from the presses. New editions could quickly be printed. And the culture of reviewing was established. In these circ*mstances the market for knowledge rapidly expanded. Print and progress reinforced one another. And all the more so as ever cheaper editions were made available. With such a system in place, the conditions were right for the mushrooming of works surveying the state of natural knowledge, and for publishers like W. & R. Chambers in Edinburgh to meet the hunger by printing schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other improving texts.

This was the environment into which the anonymous Vestiges was launched—a book about cosmic progress for a progressive age. The author in fact was the Robert Chambers of the publishing firm just mentioned, but he took strenuous steps to ensure his anonymity by always corresponding with his own publisher, Churchill, through a third party with whom he developed a scheme of code names lest correspondence should fall into the wrong hands. And so his book was sent out into the world nameless.

Why? Because it was a touchy subject. This circ*mstance affords Secord the opportunity to reflect on the connections between writers and readers. As he reminds us, the astonishingly different ways in which Mary Barton (1848) was read when the public realized that the author was Elizabeth Gaskell, the wife of a Unitarian minister, and not some handloom weaver, bears witness to the invisible cords netting writer and reader together in the making of meaning. As readers wrestled over how to identify an ethereal author, it mattered whether the writer was from the gentry or the working class, was a believer or an infidel, a gentleman or a cad: “What if the anonymous author was not to be found in London’s fashionable Pall Mall, but a few blocks away in the squalid dens of Holywell Street, notorious for atheism and p*rnography?” Because urban terrain and moral territory belonged together, speculation was rife. And Secord notes that there were distinct spaces of surmise: names that circulated in Edinburgh barely surfaced in Oxford, while “those that were common in London’s fashionable West End were barely known in the Saint Giles rookeries only a few blocks away.” Anonymous works were troublesome, then, for they dislodged comfortable assumptions about the connections between readers and authors. Not least, readers and reviewers found it difficult to warrant the expertise of an unknown penman; without an author, authority was hard to stabilize. Moreover, anonymity allowed a writer to reshape his or her own identity without the anchor of named identification. It enabled Chambers to shift his ground when he saw that scientific readers, such as those at the British Association, queried his technical competencies. The gentlemen of science too often pointed to errors, blunders, inaccuracies, and, in some cases, just plain rubbish. Chambers, irked, shifted strategy and aimed for a different audience. As succeeding editions of the book adapted themselves—Lamarckian-like—to the prevailing circ*mstances, the anonymous Chambers underwent an evolutionary transformation. As Secord engagingly expresses it, the secret author became, over succeeding printings, “a voice with a history.”

In detailing the circ*mstances of Chambers’s life, his authorial strategy and narrative voice, his religious and political outlook, his family affairs and social networks, Secord treats us to thick description of the highest order. The inhabitants of 1 Douane Terrace, Edinburgh, are brought to life in the most vivid detail. The tactics adopted in Vestiges to secure the confidence of readers, to mobilize authority, and to manage the most tricky subjects, like sex and transmutation, are reviewed with penetrating insight.

Secord’s treatment, then, opens up the production side of the publishing industry to telling scrutiny. The consequences are far-reaching. No longer can intellectual history be conducted in isolation from the materiality of the books and bodies in which ideas are incarnated. All of this is an impressive achievement. And yet, if anything, Secord’s revelations on the consumption side of the scientific circuit are yet more remarkable. For books are read differently in different places, in different ways, by different people. As Secord charts in filigree detail the way Vestiges was received in a multitude of social and physical spaces, the very idea of “the reader” is profoundly disrupted and exposed for what it is—an imagined singularity.

Here again, the delight is in the detail. On ways of reading, we learn much. Take Charles Darwin. A book-abuser. A page-ripper. A marginal graffiti artist. Darwin’s library was not a space of ostentatious display; it was a workshop in which books were the tools of the trade. Or take the anxiety that evangelicals had that books should be read the right way. “How shall you begin to read a book?” asked the Religious Tract Society. “Always look into your dish and taste it, before you begin to eat. As you sit down, examine the title-page; see who wrote the book; where he lives; do you know anything of the author?” Readers read in different ways. And they read differently depending on what they have already read. No books are encountered “cold.” Rather, they mingle and intertwine in the minds of readers to produce new and unexpected alliances. As Gillian Beer once put it, there is a remarkable miscegenation among texts.

For all that, distinct groups of people tend to read books in similar ways. The emergence of periodicals serving niche markets helped create literary tribes who reacted in distinct ways to new offerings. Here Secord treats his readers to an extraordinary survey of how Chambers’s volume was received in a range of weekly and monthly magazines. In different social and physical spaces, to put it another way, Vestiges was treated differently. We discern here, as Secord puts it, distinctive “geographies of reading.” In circulating libraries, gentlemen’s clubs, drawing rooms, social circles, and public houses Vestiges was read and talked about in different ways. Evangelical reviewers read it one way; progressive gentlewomen another; radical reformers yet another. In every case, meaning was manufactured in the spaces of textual encounter.

In different London salons the book entered fashionable conversation in different ways and found itself very differently treated. Among aristocratic readers, such as in the home of Lord Francis Egerton—a leading Tory—it was regarded as poisonous, and the refutations streaming from the pens of scientific critics were warmly embraced. To the progressive Whigs who gathered in the drawing room of Sir John Hobhouse, it was boldly visionary and gloriously free of bigotry or prejudice. In Unitarian conversation, like that in the townhouse of Lord and Lady Lovelace on Saint James’ Square, the book’s emphasis on change from below was seen as a telling blow against a smug ecclesiastical establishment.

In different British cities, too, the book fared differently. Elucidating the fine-grained geography of London’s, Liverpool’s, and Edinburgh’s moral topographies, Secord again and again uncovers how differently situated readers read Vestiges in different ways. In Cambridge it was vilified by writers like the clergyman-geologist Adam Sedgwick, who thought it an example of the most degrading species of materialism. (Sedgwick’s views, incidentally, did not go down anything like as well in Edinburgh.) By contrast, in Oxford, where science was less important in the culture of the university, the prevalence of liberal theology and tendencies toward unbelief meant that Vestiges received a warmer welcome there. Here, the naturalistic cosmology that the book promulgated deeply affected readers like the poet Arthur Clough and J. A. Froude, British historian and man of letters.

In every city there were spaces of appreciation and spaces of aggression, spaces of suspicion and spaces of bewilderment. Social class, local politics, religious creed, and professional interests all had a bearing on patterns of reception. While Edinburgh evangelicals like Hugh Miller regarded Vestiges as “one of the most insidious pieces of practical atheism,” phrenologists like George Combe enthused about “the great scientific learning” it displayed. Differences such as these were not simply the expression of radically different religious sentiments; they were as much to do with local urban politics and the control of municipal Edinburgh’s administrative structures as dogma and doctrine. The act of reading, it is clear, is a cultural performance. But it is also an individual practice. And Secord devotes the last third of his book to the place of reading in the making and remaking of personal identity. His strategy here is to fasten on a sequence of single readers—some better known than others—in order to unpack something of the existential experience of reading. As for Vestiges itself, Secord’s stories of individual responses display readers engaged in struggles of epic proportions, perhaps even “a choice between salvation and damnation.” In an era of working-class defection from institutional religion, a series of blasphemy trials, and the spawning of a spate of city missions, Vestiges was nothing less than a sign of the last days. Pursuing stories like these in painstaking detail, and focusing most especially on the case of Thomas Archer Hirst, Secord uncovers the ways in which that Victorian sensation shaped self-understanding and personal identity through new ways of understanding nature.

Finally, Secord calls our attention to how Vestiges was read by the new generation of evolutionists such as Huxley and Darwin. Huxley, as we have seen, lambasted it. To him it was a work in which a “spurious, glib eloquence” had entirely triumphed over real science. It confused wishful thinking with hard evidence. It mistook opinion for fact. It was, he bitingly quipped, a form “of fetish worship, where reverence is proportionate to the bigness of the idol.” All in all, Huxley thought Vestiges did nothing but stand in the way of the march of science toward professionalism. If science were to progress, such amateurism had to be left behind.

Seen in this light, the feuds that the book fired were part of a wider struggle about the kind of activity that “real science” was supposed to be. Darwin, by contrast, read the book differently. To him it was not so much a cosmological romance conducting readers from one end of time to the other; instead he saw in it a screwed-up version of his own theory. Here was an author who had recklessly paraded before the public a naturalistic theory of evolutionary change and—even worse—had not hesitated to spell out its moral ramifications. Perhaps it was because he was anxious about how the public would react to his own theory that Darwin was inclined to think that Huxley had been “rather hard on the poor author.” But he certainly had to distance himself from Vestiges, if only to make it clear that his own project was a different species of thing altogether.

Such, in all too brief compass, is the story that Secord sets before us. On page after page we find illuminating detail, telling observation, penetrating analysis, and quotable quote upon quotable quote. Secord himself considers his work “an experiment in a different kind of history.” That is too modest. It is a powerful accomplishment that will set new and exacting standards on how histories of scientific culture will be written in the future. No student of science, religion, and society can afford to pursue her inquiries without taking with the greatest seriousness Victorian Sensation. In compiling this review, I have forgotten more than I have remembered from this remarkable volume; but that only goes to confirm Secord’s own observation that those “books that allow us to forget the most are accorded the authority of the classic.”

Finishing Victorian Sensation, however, is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning. Reviewing a book which is itself about the reception of a book is an odd experience. At every point the reviewer finds himself implicated in the very plots that Secord spins. Every reader of Victorian Sensation will find herself, if Secord’s insights are assimilated, embroiled in the drama at every twist and turn. Readers of Vestiges were situated—socially, politically, religiously; so are we. As readers made and remade the meaning of Vestiges, so too do we make and remake the meaning of every text we read.

Indeed the entire enterprise of Books & Culture is open to the very analyses which Secord spells out in such rich detail. Books & Culture has its own format, typeface, and advertising strategies; its own social circuitry and readerly spaces; its own theological geography and cultural ecology; its own means of authorizing its authors. And the same is true of other books too—not least printings of the Bible. As Paul C. Gutjahr has recently put it,

Even if not constrained by doctrine and clergy, Scripture is constrained by its own materiality: how it is set in type, formatted, commented upon in marginalia, illustrated, bound, and distributed. If the story of nineteenth-century publishing teaches us anything, it is that bible packaging, content, and distribution all inseparably work together to give the Book meaning. A book is judged by its cover, as well as by all aspects of its contents and method of conveyance—a precious lesson worth remembering in any attempt to interpret the meaning and influence of the Word once it becomes words.1

All of which is just a way of saying that the implications of Secord’s marvelous achievement spiral way beyond the subtitle of this book—”the Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” It is nothing less than a reworking of our understanding of the culture of the book—and for that very reason, of Books & Culture itself.

David N. Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is the author of several books, including Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, The Geographical Tradition, and (with R.A. Wells) Ulster-American Religion. With Mark Noll he edited Evolution, Science, and Scripture: Selected Writings, by B.B. Warfield.

1. Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 (Stanford Univ. Press, 1990) p.178.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.