Page 3790 – Christianity Today (2024)

Michael S. Horton

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Third in a series sponsored by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, this volume (the fruit of an international conference) draws together an impressive roster of liturgical scholars in order to understand both the origins and future of Reformed/Presbyterian worship. Rare among edited collections, this volume reads smoothly as a unified book. Editor Lukas Vischer, long recognized as a senior scholar on ecumenism and worship (he was director of the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission), and series editor John D. Witvliet must be congratulated for having organized and supervised the transitions between such a varied team of specialists. This work is distinguished also in that it brings together the past (“Reformed”) and present (“always reforming”) impulses inherent in the tradition without privileging one over the other. In this way, it provides a model for transcending polarizing tendencies that often generate more heat than light.

Leading off the historical survey, distinguished Calvin scholar Elsie Anne McKee rises to the daunting challenge of providing a summary that includes the background and development of a general Reformed consensus, turning to more specific traditions (Zwinglian and Calvinist) and exploring their commonalities as well as, in some cases, rather remarkable contrasts. While the Calvinist expression finally came to dominate the confessional and liturgical forms, Zwinglian elements have never been wholly absent as a more radical critique of medieval worship. Professor McKee notes, for example, Calvin’s greater appreciation for the sacraments alongside the preached Word, and therefore the frequent (weekly, in Calvin’s best-case scenario) celebration of the Supper.

Swiss pastor and liturgical scholar Bruno Bürki takes the survey into the 17th century, concentrating on developments on the European continent. Especially useful in providing a brief account of crucial trends, individuals, and texts that are largely unavailable in English, this chapter spans the period of orthodoxy, pietism and the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the liturgical movement, Barth, and post-World War II liturgical efforts. Included are numerous references to specific worship books that have emerged within various European Reformed churches. Like many of the contributors, Bürki assesses the current state of Reformed practice as one of considerable confusion and advocates a recovery of Calvin’s liturgical impulses.

Those unfamiliar with Yale liturgical scholar Bryan Spinks’ remarkable contributions to this field have a treat in store for them. Spinks’ chapter on the particular circumstances coloring Puritan-Presbyterian (and Congregationalist) suspicions of established liturgical forms is an admirable summary. He rightly notes the political context in which conformist Puritans increasingly gave way to nonconformity (both in England and Scotland, especially after the Restoration) in refusing episcopacy and the Prayer Book by government fiat. Yet this antipathy fueled suspicions even of Knox’s Book of Common Order and the even less formal Westminster Directory. Spinks also notes the mid-19th century’s retrieval of liturgical forms in the Church of Scotland “that drew on the classical and Reformed traditions of worship.”

British Congregationalist Alan P. F. Sell provides a useful background summary of Congregationalism in Britain and the United States, noting its more radical understanding of the priesthood of all believers and a 19th-century ambivalence about the nature and significance of the sacraments. This eventually gave way to the “Genevan party,” which introduced Continental liturgical reforms and with them a heightened appreciation for the sacraments.

The balance of this survey section takes up the development of Reformed worship practices in global perspective. Especially impressive is the recurring theme of unity amid diversity, characteristic of the Reformed tradition from the very beginning but all the more pertinent now that non-Western churches represent new centers of the Christian and Reformed faith and ministry. Marsha M. Wilfong summarizes the Reformed/Presbyterian tradition in the United States; Coenraad Burger, South Africa; Ester Pudjo Widiasih, Indonesia; Seong-Won Park, Korea; Issaiah Wahome Muita, East Africa; Livingstone Buama, Ghana/West Africa; Kasonga wa Kasonga, Congo; Gerson Correia de Lacerda, Brazil (my favorite chapter in the book); Baranite T. Kirata, the Pacific Islands, and Geraldine Wheeler, Australia.

Whatever the future shape of Reformed worship, it will emerge in greater conversation with our wider community around the world. We are reminded by the voices in this volume that the legacy of colonialism in its missionary forms has decisively shaped indigenous worship and has served to justify to many at least the re-evaluation (even rejection) of the Western liturgical heritage of the Reformed tradition in favor of renewed expressions of native culture.

Why is it, though, that the liturgies brought by the first missionaries are identified with colonial imperialism, while the influences of European and American pietism, revivalism, the charismatic movement, and televangelism are somehow identified more with indigenous spirituality? After all, I often hear the same criticisms of historic forms of worship from evangelicals in the United States today: they are too Western—indeed, Northern European (despite the fact that, for example, Calvin’s attempt was to recover the practice of the ancient church, which was hardly Northern European). But the “indigenous” worship many of these brothers and sisters have in mind seems less indebted to any particular folk culture than to a generic popular culture that now seems, through the global impact of American entertainment, to have captured the masses around the world. How “indigenous” is that?

Can we conceive of a way in which, whether in North America or South Korea, traditional Reformed liturgical principles can be re-invoked while at the same time appreciating diverse expressions that are genuinely local and not simply an unreflective adoption of non-Reformed practices? The contributors render invaluable service in helping us think these questions through in our own North American situation.

Part 2, consisting of a single, wide-ranging essay by the editor of the volume, asks “What is it that makes Reformed worship Reformed?” The essence of Reformed worship, Vischer suggests, is a movement in which God condescends to meet us where we are, communicating his forgiveness and grace to us in Christ through word and sacrament, issuing in our grateful responses, intercessions, gifts, and witness on behalf of the world. Vischer highlights the social and political dimensions of such worship and cautions against developing our liturgical convictions merely in antithesis to other traditions.

Part 3 returns to contributions by authors on specific Reformed emphases: a richly suggestive chapter by Joseph D. Small (“A Church of the Word and Sacrament”), a typically well-informed discussion of music in the world-wide Reformed/Presbyterian communions by Emily R. Brink and John D. Witvliet; a controversial yet thoughtful re-thinking of the role of visual arts by Geraldine Wheeler; and a still more controversial and, in this reviewer’s opinion, less compelling re-evaluation of traditional doctrinal and liturgical expressions in the light of feminist theology by Leonora Tubbs Tisdale. A chapter by Horace T. Allen, Jr. on “Calendar and Lectionary in Reformed Perspective and History” provides one of the most useful brief discussions of the history and theological-exegetical support for the church year and lectio continua-selecta balance that I have encountered. Vischer closes the volume with his reiteration of the theme of “Worship as Christian Witness to Society.”

Most of the heavy lifting in this field has been done within mainline denominations, while many of us who belong to more conservative Reformed/Presbyterian denominations find ourselves increasingly trapped between unreflective traditionalism or an equally unreflective adoption of trends associated with broader evangelicalism. We need the sort of careful labor that this volume represents.

Weaknesses in this collection are few, but a recurring one is worth mentioning. It is clear that this is a conversation among mainline churches, with barely even passing reference to Presbyterian/Reformed churches that are not aligned with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. In fact, although membership in some of these denominations numbers in the hundreds of thousands in the United States and, in other parts of the world (Nigeria and South Korea, for example), in the millions, more space is given to revivalism, the rise of the Social Gospel, Pentecostalism, Vatican II, and evangelical parachurch organizations. Perhaps this is in part explicable in terms of the weight of influence stemming from non-Reformed communities, but it is a continuing weakness that mainline and more conservative/confessional wings of the Reformed tradition seem more willing to engage in conversation with their own non-Reformed counterparts than with each other. Obviously, it is a weakness on both sides.

It will also come as no surprise that when the social-political dimensions of worship are enumerated in this volume, as they frequently are, there is a consistent ideological bias. All too often, alas, “prophetic” means not necessarily opposing “the powers and principalities” that obstruct the kingdom’s advance as much as opposing one secular captivity with another. While the authors wisely remind us of the Reformed insistence on all of life belonging to God and therefore warn against quietism, they might have also reminded us of the Reformed suspicion of all human attempts to identify God’s kingdom with the kingdoms of this world, whether forged by the Left or the Right.

But this criticism does not reflect the burden of this book, and if those of us engaged in ecumenical conversations both at home and abroad from less “mainline” churches wish to be wiser in our own theological and practical reflection, this volume is a terrific place to start. In addition to being challenged, we will find that many of our own questions, observations, and intuitions are reflected in these pages.

For example, an encouraging consensus appears in the renewed appreciation of the older Reformed resources, especially in their concern for a word and sacrament ministry, at a time when the principal choice many of our churches today seem to face is between didactic verbosity and a liturgical free-for-all (either low church/pop-culture or high church/high culture varieties). This collection reflects a commitment to the struggle to define the practice of Christ’s church according to his word as that is refracted through the lens of Reformed principles—and to do so, in the words of Brink and Witvliet, in a way that leads us to receive and respond to God’s grace “‘in, but not of’ the culture of the people.” Even those from non-Reformed traditions will find this an encouraging example of wise reflection on faithfulness both to the message and the mission of Christ’s church in our time.

Michael S. Horton is associate professor of theology at Westminster Seminary in California and author of A Better Way: Recovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship (Baker).

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

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William Westfall

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My first encounter with evangelical worship took place in the First Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had just passed through Sunday school and was now permitted to worship with the adults at the real religious service. The congregation (well over 500 people on a good Sunday) was seated in curved pews that looked down upon a platform set against the east wall of the sanctuary; it was furnished with a lectern and pulpit, a remembrance table, an American flag, fresh-cut flowers (given in memory), and two high-backed chairs reserved for the ministers in their black Geneva gowns. Behind the platform, the white-robed choir was arrayed in ascending rows, having advanced to this place while singing the processional hymn. A splash of polished organ pipes further enhanced this impressive backdrop. Above the pulpit there was a plain white cross.

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My older brother and I were placed between my two grandmothers, who sang with great courage, dueling joyfully at the upper limits of the human voice. My father, who had led us manfully to our places, always managed to escape just before the sermon on the pretext of helping his friends prepare the coffee and biscuits. They talked golf in the church basement, blissfully unaware that their presence in the kitchen was contesting the gendered divisions of church work. My mother had died when I was a baby, but it was she who had introduced the family to this congregation.

Of the sermons I remember almost nothing, although for years I assumed Zion was a town in Scotland. During the service my mind was often drawn to the stained glass window that filled the entire south wall of the sanctuary. Known simply as the Harrison window, it offered a romantic interlude during moments of tedium, and I have often wondered if it was Tiffany’s radiant image of the angel of the Resurrection that had drawn me to the study of religion and culture, albeit in a foreign land.

What I was witnessing almost 50 years ago, Jeanne Halgren Kilde explains, was the culmination of a process of architectural change that had begun well before the Civil War. Her rich and fascinating study traces the transformation of evangelical worship in America from the neoclassical New England meetinghouses that still ordered Protestant worship in the early 19th century to the massive neomedieval structures that had become the predominant church form throughout America a hundred years later. In clear and accessible prose she details not only the changes that took place to the interior and exterior composition of the church but also the articulation of auxiliary institutional spaces, such as Sunday schools, church parlors, meeting rooms, and kitchens.

But the book is far more than an account of an important series of ecclesiological developments, valuable as that may be. Drawing unobtrusively upon the insights of postmodern analysis, Kilde carefully deconstructs the transformation from neoclassical to medieval in relation to a number of social and cultural questions. How, for example, did the shift from box pews to amphitheatrical seating mark a change in the relationship between the minister and the congregation; how did the advent of the Gothic style signify a new response to the changing political climate of antebellum America; how did church decoration and the rise of professional choirs relate to the increasingly middle-class composition of suburban congregations?

Once one starts down such an interesting analytical path it is hard to know where to stop. I wondered, for example, about trying to deconstruct the representations of the sacred within this new religious space. In all cultures, representations of the sacred acquire special attributes. Whatever secular forces may have shaped this new space, the fact that it was associated with the worship of God gave it an authority that set it apart from other architectural spaces. Even a ten-year-old knew one had to behave in a certain way inside a church; the sanctuary of that old church seemed timeless and unchanging. How did this work—how did this space become sacred?

Embedded in the narrative is another, perhaps more controversial theme. Kilde is intrigued by the relationship between religion and popular culture, and in the chapter from which the title of the book is taken—”Church Becomes Theatre”—she links the transformation of evangelical worship to the changes that were taking place in opera houses and other large theatrical venues. For professional architects, churches and theaters presented similar spatial problems, and they responded to them in the same way. In terms of seating, lighting, and staging, church and theater led parallel lives; indeed they seemed to feed off one another. Here the practical, utilitarian character of American evangelicalism enjoyed free rein: the fact that theatrical techniques could be used to present religion more effectively fully justified their widespread adaptation to religious purposes.

Visually this relationship is beyond question—in the late 19th century theaters and churches looked much the same. But I wonder whether this did not trouble those evangelicals who were determined to protect the purity of their religion from the intrusion of modern and secular notions, who may have bristled at the notion of the church becoming a theater or worship becoming performance. Did the sacred qualities of the church in some way protect it from this equation? But then there are two meanings in the title of this book, and if the first may go too far, the second is spot on. Even if the church did not become a theater, all these theatrical techniques were nonetheless very becoming: they suited the needs of evangelical worship very well.

Reading architectural space is a highly rewarding enterprise, and one stands in awe of the author’s ability to explore nonwritten texts so creatively. By skillfully chronicling the movement from one church type to another and linking this transformation to the social and cultural concerns of American evangelicalism, this book not only enriches our understanding of American religious history but also brings what was peripheral to center stage, illuminating old questions and opening up new ones.

And yet the very strength of the story raises some important questions about the narrative Kilde so carefully constructs. Her study focuses upon the development of the amphitheatrical arrangement within a neomedieval structure; but is the dominance she claims for this new setting of worship limited by considerations of geography and class? All the new medieval churches the author selects are suburban and self-consciously middle-class; but what of the churches in smaller cities and towns where a single congregation had to encompass different classes and competing traditions of worship? Did they follow the same architectural course; did these evangelicals worship God in the same way? In my own field of study—Protestant Ontario—the neomedieval form was used by all denominations for all their churches throughout the Victorian period. From north of the border, American religious architecture appears incredibly eclectic. Is the story this book tells the only story, or just one important (perhaps even dominant) story among many?

The way Kilde handles the Gothic revival also suggests a few problems. In her account of the period leading up to the Civil War, she treats the building of fashionable Gothic churches as something of an unfortunate architectural interlude because it drew evangelical congregations away from experimenting with new forms of worship; Gothic then returns at the end of the story as an alternative to the amphitheatrical arrangement, one which would become the preferred architectural idiom for many liberal congregations in the early 20th century. The Gothic revival was of course championed by high church Anglicans, and their preoccupation with the restoration of pre-Reformation liturgies clearly set them at odds with the basic traditions of evangelical worship. But Augustus Welby Pugin’s famous mantra of the Gothic revival—in it “we find the faith of Christianity embodied and its practices illustrated”—was not only a call for the reproduction of medieval churches but also a statement of the utilitarian character of Gothic design. Its principles, the Ecclesiologist explained, were based on “the strictest utility”; long before the Bauhaus, Gothic theory tied form to function. High Victorian architects in Ontario and elsewhere followed this dictum to their advantage, effortlessly adapting the medieval form to the needs of hundreds of Protestant congregations.

The association of Gothic, utility, and moral purpose also ran through the work of John Ruskin, perhaps the most influential architectural critic in the English-speaking world. Through his extensive writings Ruskin transformed the way Protestants saw their churches, and developed (albeit from a different perspective) themes that are central to this study—the social and religious meaning of architectural change and the link between worship space and popular culture. In sum, the Gothic may well have been more central to the core narrative of the text. Regrettably, Ruskin’s name does not appear in this study.

I also wondered about nation and empire. American historians of religion have written at great length about the close relationship between American evangelicalism and the national destiny of the United States. While this study suggests a link between new seating arrangements and democratic ideals, I kept hoping the story would push this further by considering the association between the new church form and the iconography of American nationalism. In Canada the link between architecture and nation was clear from the start. The Gothic parliament buildings in Ottawa placed the new Canadian nation firmly within a British imperial narrative, and every Protestant church in every village and town in Ontario praised Queen, God, and country. How did this relationship develop in the United States?

The narrative suggests a disjunction between church and nation, for in rejecting the neoclassical church form, were not the Protestant churches also distancing themselves from the neoclassical images of the American nation state that were so firmly embedded in the national capitol and being reproduced in public buildings throughout the country? Did the separation of church and state in some way temper the relationship between the forms of evangelical worship and the representations of American national identity? Perhaps evangelical religion was able to shape American culture precisely because it was not linked directly to the nation state.

William Westfall teaches history and humanities at York University in Toronto. He has written extensively on religion and architecture in Canada and is the author of Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario, and The Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College.

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

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Douglas A. Sweeney

The precarious life and hard times of religion in the university

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Religion does not do well in the hands of academics, whether they are sympathetic to it or not.” So argues Darryl Hart of Westminster Theological Seminary in his provocative book on religious studies in the university. As a matter of fact, he claims, the field has “failed to produce first-rate scholarship.” It has “limped along behind other academic disciplines.”

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The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education

Prof D. G. G. Hart (Author)

Johns Hopkins University Press

336 pages

$31.00

More important, according to Hart, it has been conflicted from the start. Its practitioners have pursued the study of supernaturalist faith communities in a largely secular, indeed naturalistic, way. And they have labored in the service of both the academy and the churches, creating confusion in the general public regarding the nature of their craft, and schizophrenia among one another in the guild.

In The University Gets Religion, Hart jumps right into the recent fray over the secularization of the academy, paying special attention to developments in religious studies.1 His focus is on the arguments used to justify this discipline, its scholarly methods, and its place in the modern American university. Ignoring the intellectual giants whose work gave rise to the secular study of religion (e.g., Hume, Durkheim, Freud, and Weber, Europeans all), Hart suggests that a host of home-grown, largely forgotten, liberal churchmen proved most important in building up the American profession of religious studies, and in defending its legitimacy as a university discipline.

Hart traces the history of this defense through three major phases. In phase one (c. 1870-1925), he avers, leading white Protestant churchmen responded to the rise of new American universities by baptizing their scholarly methods and moral values. They accommodated older orthodoxies to recent scientific findings, and promoted university-based religious scholarship under the aegis of mainline Protestant campus ministries.

In phase two (c. 1925-1965), modernist Protestants emerged victorious from their row with fundamentalists, their leadership in the field now uncontested. But chastened by world war and its technological devastation, they proved more pessimistic about the promises of science. They began in earnest to found departments of religious studies in universities. But they often did so in an effort to shore up the nobler traditions of Western civilization, promoting a “neo-orthodox” theological resistance to historical presentism and cultural arrogance.

In phase three (c. 1964 to the present), religion departments sustained the social upheavals of the 1960s, a decade when earlier Protestant rationales for religious studies began to implode. Consequently, the discipline “reinvented itself as an academic field of critical inquiry,” symbolizing this transition with the founding of the American Academy of Religion (AAR, formerly the National Association of Biblical Instructors). This “new academic appearance,” however, “never hid completely the older ministerial one.” And, more than ever, scholars of religion “suffered from the strain of being pulled in two directions simultaneously, one churchly, the other academic.”2

We are left today, according to Hart, with an academic discipline still in search of a solid identity. Having been “stripped of the pious and social grounds for studying religion,” recent scholars have failed to “produce a set of compelling intellectual reasons for its place in the university.” Further, Hart contends that this failure is endemic to the very enterprise of establishing the discipline on a completely secular/scientific footing. “As much as religious studies strives to sever ties to communities of faith,” he writes, “it cannot do so without self-immolation. The academic study of religion has not only been dependent historically upon churches, synagogues, and mosques, but it has no object of inquiry without particular religious traditions. As such, religious studies needs communities of faith, and such dependence will always be out of place in the modern university.”

The good news, he concludes, is that the removal of religion from the university would prove a blessing to all concerned. It would enhance academic freedom within the halls of academe, allowing scholarship to proceed more freely there along purely secular lines. (Hart believes that the concept of academic freedom was designed “to protect the university from external restraints” such as those of politics and religion, enabling the establishment of “its own professional standards.”) And it would enhance both the study and the practice of religion, freeing them from the shackles of modern naturalism. “Because the university is incapable of evaluating dogmatic claims and supernaturally inspired texts,” he explains, “the religion it tolerates tends to be … thin …. To exclude those religions that assert their own exclusive claims to truth, then, is to do them a favor. Academic inquiry, if the history of religious studies is any indication, waters religion down to the point where faith makes no actual difference.”

In The Sacred & the Secular University, Jon H. Roberts and James Turner offer little in the way of a normative response to secularization—certainly nothing as drastic as Hart’s call for a divorce between religious studies and modern science. Its much more modest, 100-page body began life as a presentation at a conference on higher education held at Princeton University’s 250th anniversary celebration (in March of 1996). But, as befits their more breezy survey of academic secularization in general, Roberts and Turner offer a breadth of perspective that helps to contextualize Hart’s study, and to moderate his arguments as well.

Whereas Hart has imbued his narrative with irony and tinged it with hints of conspiracy, suggesting that the usually liberal Protestant captains of modern religious studies have nearly sunk their own ship by overloading it with foreign cargo, Roberts and Turner attribute secularization within the modern American university, not to any one class of people, but to subtle and systemic scholarly forces. Indeed, as Princeton’s John F. Wilson summarizes their interpretation in his introduction to the volume, “these developments certainly took place without the benefit of any overall design or prescription of a system. Changes that summed to an emerging new era in American higher education occurred without clear central direction.”

Put all too briefly, the argument of Roberts and Turner is that academic specialization in the emergent American universities yielded methodological naturalism, which in turn helped to produce a kind of secularization. Before the late 19th century, American college professors did not offer specialized courses, and students did not declare academic majors. All pursued the study of a general liberal arts curriculum. They did so doxologically, and in preparation for public service. Their study was capped accordingly with a course on (mainly Christian) moral philosophy taught by none other than the college presidents. And most scholars approached their studies with religious direction and moral purpose, preparing for work that would promote the glory of God.

But with the rise of research universities human knowledge became fragmented, as scholar-teachers began to study and teach less broadly and much more deeply. Not many of these new specialists ever intended to undermine belief in God. “In fact, modern academic specialization in the United States initially developed mostly within explicitly Christian institutions.” As a matter of course, though, religion became compartmentalized like every other form of knowledge, and no longer played a central role in integrating the curriculum.

Once this happened, explain Roberts and Turner, it was only natural that the disciplines would develop their own methodological canons, their own epistemological criteria, without much recourse to religion. And in an era whose intellectual culture was dominated by Darwinian theory and biblical criticism (trends that often seemed to justify this restructuring of higher education), the consequences of this marginalization of religious discourse would be profound. “Religious concerns became essentially extrinsic to the culture of science. Nonbelief (though not unbelief) became science’s reigning methodological principle.”

In the humanities, a concern remained to promote moral and spiritual ideals, and these ideals continued to cast a secular kind of coherence on the curriculum. But grounded as they usually were in philological historicism, the humanities could not fill the place of moral philosophy and religion. More often than not, they only eased people’s concerns about specialization. “They certainly did not save the unity of knowledge when moral philosophy decayed but, by disguising the collapse, only made it easier to accept.”

Ultimately, write Roberts and Turner,

As higher education increasingly became identified with expanding the boundaries of verifiable knowledge, such knowledge became valorized in classrooms, seminar rooms, laboratories, and academic discourse. Truth claims based on alternative epistemologies—tradition, divine inspiration, and subjective forms of religious experience—increasingly lost credibility within the academy. … During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colleges and universities became identified as institutions imbued with the faith that the only knowledge really worth having is obtainable through rational, ‘scientific’ inquiry. If this now seems obvious to us, it is a measure of how completely higher education and the culture to which it has ministered have been captivated by that faith.

The story told by Roberts and Turner does contain a certain measure of irony. For in their view (as in the view of Hart), antebellum moral philosophers themselves helped to set this train of events in motion. By devoting the bulk of their instruction to divinely ordained “laws” of human nature and society, laws that could be studied “scientifically,” independent of revelation—most famously, by promoting Scottish Common Sense Realism—they unwittingly invited a trojan horse into American college classrooms that would later undermine the religious purposes of their work.

While all three historians under review exaggerate the extent to which such Christian humanism self-destructed, Roberts and Turner are not out to blame Christian scholars themselves for secularization. Rather, if their analysis provides Christians with any practical lessons for intellectual life, it suggests that the secularization of the academy, even the secularization of religious studies, has involved a far more complicated and elusive kind of historical evolution (pardon the pun) than most intellectuals have usually recognized.

Indeed, how easy it has been for well-intentioned Christian scholars—and not just liberal ones—to accommodate to imperceptibly harmful and misleading forms of naturalism. Such accommodation is often viewed as a fact of life in the modern university, as a requisite way of doing business within our disciplines. We can make it without denying our belief in God and divine providence, getting along well with non-Christians from whom our faith would serve to divide us. But at what price? And toward what end? As Hart suggests, these are questions that could haunt us for a very long time.

Let’s face it: Christians, at least traditional ones, have always been supernaturalists. Though full of ignorance and sin, our perceptions and interpretations are shaped profoundly by supernatural revelation, supernatural grace, not to mention the work of the Holy Spirit within our souls.

We have good reasons to get along with those who don’t share our religious beliefs—indeed, reasons beyond those of Christian witness and apologetics. Further, these beliefs do not always impinge very directly upon our work. We frequently see eye-to-eye on mundane matters with non-Christians, with whom partnership for secular purposes often proves mutually beneficial.

But we also have good reasons to call things completely as we see them, to speak theologically about the significance of our work—not holding back as compartmentalized Christians afraid of the scandal of the cross (or worse, afraid of transgressing sacred disciplinary boundaries), but reaching out in the bright hope of promoting divine justice, righteousness, and peace. Intellectual honesty and integrity demand no less.

If we are to do so, however, we must resist the temptation to take our faith and go home, letting the modern university go to hell, as it were. And here is where I must disagree with my friend Darryl Hart. To risk a cliché, our God is the Lord of both creation and redemption. And he has called most Christians to incarnate his love and grace primarily in the secular city. To be sure, we are called to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”

(2 Cor. 10:5), opposing ideas and intellectual trends that are inimical to Christian faith. But we can and ought to do so, even in the field of religious studies, without succumbing to sectarianism and expending all our energies on behalf of our own communities.

Besides, as these two books make clear, the canons of the modern university have always been more fluid than they have seemed. The rules of the academic game are under continual negotiation. Christians, like everyone else, have a right to take part in these discussions. And we should do so, not to secure a place of honor in the university, but to minister to the intellectual needs of those around us.

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

1. Among the many other recent books that discuss the secularization of the modern university, those best-known to professional historians include George M. Marsden and B. J. Longfield, eds., The Secularization of the Academy (Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), and George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishments to Established Non-belief (Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), two books whose production Hart assisted as Marsen’s postdoctoral research fellow at Duke University in 1988-89. Among recent works on the history of the study of religion in the university, Conrad Cherry’s Hurrying Toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Indiana Univ. Press, 1995) is perhaps best-known.

2. For a much stronger argument regarding the failure of the aar (and related institutions) to secure a sufficiently scientific approach to religious studies in North America, see the recent collection of essays by Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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

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Andrew P. Morriss

Ecomonics and the secular faith in progress

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In the sequel to his acclaimed 1991 book Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics, University of Maryland School of Public Affairs Professor Robert Nelson has written what may be the most important recent book on the future of the economics profession. Mixing intellectual history, theology, and a sophisticated yet readable account of the primary doctrines of 20th-century economics, Nelson’s book both illuminates economics’ immediate past and draws attention to the problems of its future.

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Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond

Robert H. Nelson (Author)

408 pages

$41.02

Economics as Religion takes on two tasks. First, Nelson recasts the intellectual history of 20th-century economics in theological terms. Economists, he suggests, constitute nothing less than “the priesthood of a modern secular religion of economic progress that serves many of the same functions in contemporary society as earlier Christian and other religions did in their time.” This priesthood offers, in Nelson’s account, “another grand prophecy in the biblical tradition. The Jewish and Christian bibles foretell one outcome of history. If economics foresees another, it is in effect offering a competing religious vision. The prophecies of economics would then be a substitute for the traditional messages of the Bible.” Second, Nelson uses his master-metaphor to pinpoint the challenges facing economics as a discipline, and economists as individuals, in the 21st century.

Thinking about economics (or other social sciences, political movements, and the like) as a religion can be helpful even where the analogy is only an approximate fit, but Nelson makes a persuasive case that the analogy is a good one. It can also be quite a bit of fun—Nelson’s playful aside comparing the technical language and mathematics of current mainstream economic writing to medieval church Latin is both entertaining and enlightening, and there are quite a few more like it sprinkled throughout the book.

To make his case, Nelson relies heavily on two extended analyses of particular sets of economic works. In the first part of the book, he undertakes to decipher the religious subtext of Paul Samuelson’s textbook, Economics. More than merely a text for undergraduates, Nelson argues, Samuelson’s Economics was designed “to provide an inspirational vision of human progress guided by science in order to motivate Americans and other people to the necessary religious dedication to the cause of progress.” This secular gospel glorified efficiency as the ultimate value, not to allow increased consumption but because efficiency offers “the best measure of the rate of movement along the path of economic progress.”

Nelson carefully documents how Samuelson glossed over complications and problems with his grand narrative, relegating some to appendices and leaving others out entirely. Samuelson told and retold an economic story that, although presented as scientific fact modeled on physics, was in fact driven almost entirely by quasi-religious assumptions. (Indeed, one of my few criticisms of Nelson is that he does not devote nearly enough space to describing Samuelson’s repeated failures to get critical facts right—for example, in continuing to report Soviet economic “success” as superior to free markets long after serious questions were being raised about Soviet economic statistics. Having been taught Econ 101 with Samuelson’s book, I must admit I have a longstanding grudge against it.)

Despite the flaws of Samuelson’s text, Nelson concludes, Economics was a “major artistic and inspirational success.” His point is that the book merits attention as a work which—for better or worse—had a powerful effect. That it did so depended, of course, on the fact that it was an assigned text for millions of readers, not that it was freely chosen reading matter.

Playing Martin Luther and his fellow Reformers to the “Catholicism” of Samuelson and the neoclassical economists are the leading lights of the Chicago School: Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and George Stigler. These economists, Friedman and Stigler in particular, rejected not so much the idea of secular salvation offered by efficiency and progress but rather the orthodox ideas about how it was to come about. In place of Samuelson’s story of “a powerful federal government [that] is fully capable of doing many wonderful things for the American people, not only eliminating unemployment but also bringing about many other great benefits,” the Chicago “Protestants” offered a vision of flawed humanity whose fallen nature required institutions like markets and property rights to protect individuals from one another as they pursue their self-interest. (Knight is a more complex figure in this tradition, and space precludes a full account of Nelson’s treatment of his writings.) The third generation of Chicago economists, typified by Gary Becker and Richard Posner, extended the principles developed by the first two generations to new areas (families, crime, law), making the conflict with Samuelson’s orthodoxy more pronounced.

Turning to work by Ronald Coase, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Oliver Williamson, Douglas North, and others—the “new institutional economics”—and surveying their contributions, Nelson concludes that they succeed at “showing in both theoretical and empirical terms that norms of honesty, a sense of community, respect for rules, and other elements of culture can have a major impact on economic growth and development.” So impressive are their results, he observes, that historical analyses may be more effective than “the quantitative and other formal analytical methods commonly employed by economists for the last half century.”

Nelson’s survey of 20th-century economic thought is thorough and surprisingly readable; he has always been a good writer, and he has outdone himself here. Anyone interested in economics but not inclined to wade through the jargon and mathematical formulas of the original articles and books can get a sense of the basic insights and failings of the literature by reading the first 260 pages of this book.

But perhaps the book’s most important contribution lies in the final part, in which Nelson examines the larger role of “economics as a religion” in Western society. Two points are critical to the argument. First, what has given economics the “power to move the world” is its vital role “as part of a secular religion of progress of American civil society, helping to provide a normative basis for the necessary implicit contracts of a modern economy.” Indeed, economics can be seen as a religion peculiarly suited to liberal democratic capitalist societies—a religion that has “the particular characteristic that it advances the pursuit of self-interest in appropriate domains but tightly restrains it in others.”

The economic religion of progress is now under attack, and Nelson concludes the book by considering the challenges facing it. One of the most important comes from the environmental movement, large portions of which reject the faith in efficiency and progress that drove Samuelson’s influential text. This skepticism is not limited to the most extreme “deep ecology” advocates, who find humans a “cancer” on the planet. Even more moderate environmentalists reject the economic vision of a heaven on earth built from material progress.

Consider, for example, the Endangered Species Act (ESA). An economic analysis of this legislation would focus on the incentive effects of the law and the irrationally large differences in expenditures on different species. The general consensus of economic research is that the esa harms endangered species by making their presence costly to landowners and that spending on species preservation is driven more by the “cuteness” of the endangered species in question than by its ecological value. Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, not a moderate on the environment but no deep ecologist either, rejected such analysis, terming the esa a modern Noah’s Ark which Congress had commanded be filled with all species regardless of cost. Clearly this is a direct challenge to the gospel of efficiency. (The other key challenge comes from libertarian thought—and I won’t describe Nelson’s discussion of it to motivate this journal’s readers to seek out the book for themselves.)

Economics as Religion is a major work—one that everyone concerned with economics (and everyone ought to be concerned with economics, in my opinion) should read. It prompts the reader to reconsider the intellectual legacy of the discipline, to rethink the role of economists in public debate, and to ponder the rising challenges to the religion of progress. If Nelson is right, our choice of civic religion today will have a major impact in shaping the society we will leave for our children. The old order is crumbling; what will replace it remains an open question.

Andrew P. Morriss is Galen J. Roush Professor of Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and Senior Associate, PERC—The Center for Free Market Environmentalism.

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

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Philip Jenkins

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No, not that crisis, the crisis. The horrors of the past two years are symptomatic of much deeper conflicts and discontents, which largely have their roots in the 1960s. In A People Adrift, Peter Steinfels, a loyal Catholic and a highly perceptive observer of the contemporary church, analyzes these long-term trends in a way that is obligatory reading for anyone concerned with the future not just of Catholicism, but of Christianity in the United States. His predictions for change may or may not prove accurate, the directions he wants those changes to take may be controversial, but the book is the best guide currently available to how this situation came to pass.

Steinfels begins with the observation that “Today the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is on the verge of either an irreversible decline or a thoroughgoing transformation.” As he notes, a comment of this sort sounds like journalistic hyperbole, but in 2003, it seems quite justifiable. After the recent abuse scandals, the prestige of the Catholic clergy is at an all-time low. More important, perhaps, is the real resentment that many priests have expressed towards their episcopal superiors. According to critics, the bishops pursued irresponsible policies that allowed clerical molesters to pursue their careers; yet when public pressure became too great, the same bishops adopted stringent new policies that seemed to throw accused priests to the wolves.

Meanwhile, many ordinary Catholics used the perception of deep crisis to advocate their particular causes, which would (they believe) have averted the disaster. Liberals had their particular remedies—if only priests were allowed to marry, or women could have been ordained. Conservatives, too, felt they knew what had gone wrong: the crisis would not have occurred if homosexual clergy had not been tolerated, or if the seminaries had enforced both sexual and theological orthodoxy. What Steinfels terms simply “The Scandal” became a symbolic stage on which different factions could enact their particular scripts. It was depressing to see how predictably each side reprised its familiar role. As Steinfels comments about an earlier conflict, it confirmed a picture of “a church in which, at the leadership level, if not in the pews, everyone was operating on hair trigger, mental muscles tensed to think the worst, ready to perceive a doctrinally cautious appeal for dialogue as a subversive act.”

The evidence that the American Church is in serious trouble is not in doubt, though the causes are debatable. Most serious, given the role of the clergy in this tradition, is the shortage of priests. The ranks of priests have thinned since the high-water mark of clerical prestige in the mid-1960s, while overall Catholic numbers have swelled. Today, the ratio of non-retired priests to Catholics is less than half what it was in 1965, and the corps of priests is aging. In 1965, the average age of diocesan priests in diocesan ministry was 45, whereas today it is 60. Many of these older priests may be superb pastors, but inevitably, they will be less in touch with the needs of rapidly changing congregations, especially so given the revolutionary ethnic changes now under way in American Catholicism. Reciting a series of similarly disheartening statistics, Steinfels concludes: “To ignore these indicators would be folly.”

What does a clerically centered church do when it runs short of clergy? Does it seek new sources of personnel—most obviously, among women and married men—or does it shift its orientation to increase lay involvement? Or—the present situation—does it do nothing systematic, beyond waiting and hoping that things may change somewhere down the road? Steinfels generally favors the liberal approach to these issues, seeing the ordination of women as inevitable in the long run, and he may be correct. At least for the foreseeable future, though, American Catholics face a massive dilemma that results from the juxtaposition of those two potent words, American and Catholic.

As Americans, they face the pressures toward diversity, tolerance, and sexual liberalism that are so pervasive in contemporary culture, not to mention the deep distrust of traditional authority and hierarchy. Looking at the internal dynamics of the Church, we can reasonably suggest that if we were dealing with an autonomous American denomination, we would have seen married priests by 1970 and women priests by about 1980. But of course the American church is part of a global Catholic whole, and its policies are determined beyond American shores. American Catholics still find it hard to credit that they constitute only six percent of the world’s Catholic population, however significant this minority may be in terms of wealth and influence. Ultimately, the decision about (for instance) whether women might be ordained will be determined by global factors, and not by the internal debates of American clergy and laity.

What we have here looks like a collision between an irresistible force and an immovable object, and as long as that nightmare endures, American Catholics will face the tension resulting from demands that cannot be satisfied. To say this is not to predict inevitable disaster, to expect “irreversible decline.” Things can change, whether on the side of the irresistible or the immovable. In theory, American Catholics might become more conservative theologically, perhaps as a result of ethnic changes. One of the less noticed elements of The Scandal and the ensuing controversies was the relatively tiny part played by Latinos and Asians, who constitute the fastest growing sections of the American church. Vocations might revive.

Alternatively, the Vatican might, under a new papacy, become much more sympathetic to reform. Even a future pope elected by a conservative phalanx of cardinals might, in office, become a radical reformer. Recall that the epoch-making Pope John XXIII was originally chosen as a harmless papa di passagio, a transitional pope, someone who would occupy the throne quietly for a few years while Church factions prepared for the critical next election. Obviously, it appeared, John was too old and unambitious to make any real changes while in office. Might such a stunning reversal of expectation occur again? In such a scenario, the next pope—perhaps a Latin American or African?—might approve or even initiate many of the reforms now favored by North Americans, and we would enter a dramatic period of transformation.

And then, finally, we have the scenario in which the next pope would be as conservative as John Paul II, or even more so—and yes, that could happen. American Catholics would find themselves ever more out of sympathy with official Church policies, and the Church would face internecine conflicts, accelerating an almost certain decline. But once again, everything depends on a factor that is at present completely unknowable, namely the social and theological outlook of John Paul’s successor. Whatever the outcome, the next papal election should be a critical turning point in modern Catholic history.

Though he appreciates the wider picture, Steinfels is restrained about making grand prophecies. He is at his best, perhaps, in tracing the changes of recent decades as they have affected ordinary Catholics in the pews. It is sobering to think that of all the social transformations that Americans have experienced since the Eisenhower years, the radical changes in Catholic liturgical and religious life may have been among the most influential and far-reaching, at least in their impact on a very large section of the population.

In the 1960s, a quarter of the population believed that they could on any Sunday literally and entirely partake of the body and blood of Christ, the Son of God. Many still have absolute faith in that doctrine, but millions more who describe themselves confidently as Catholics see the Eucharist in terms that are largely or purely symbolic. Equally dramatic has been the shift in beliefs about Hell and damnation, a tectonic change that Steinfels intriguingly associates with the 1968 debates over the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Within a few decades, tens of millions of people ceased to believe in the physical presence of Christ in the Mass, no longer accepted a worldview founded on the existence of heaven and hell, and most gave up the ancient practice of Confession—could there be a more sweeping social and intellectual revolution? And how much further could these changes go in coming years?

Steinfels knows better than to try and predict the future in too much detail. He is also wise enough not to let his political and theological preferences lead him into producing a partisan tract. Instead, he closes with a meditation on the Virgin Mary and the Annunciation, and the theme of submission to God’s will. Where the Church will really go in the next decade or two, only God knows. Steinfels, like other Christians, knows that this phrase is an expression of confidence, rather than despair.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author most recently of The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford Univ. Press).

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

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Douglas Jones

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God can be so cruel in his mockery of us. Who would have thought that divine laughter could sound like fungal growth? Or that a history of elms could reveal God’s disdain? Yet that appears to be one reading of the history of the American elm that Thomas Campanella traces in his Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm. Campanella himself, of course, is not at all concerned with this sort of theological question, offering an engaging but tame chronicle of the elm. But the more pressing issue is, why have several centuries of Christian reflection barred these sorts of exegesis-of-nature questions from discussion?

Page 3790 – Christianity Today (10)

Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm

Thomas J. Campanella (Author)

240 pages

$20.00

Imagine a medieval Christian mind taking in a book like Republic of Shade. That mind would already carry a wide and serious commitment to the Psalmist’s declaration, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard” (Ps. 19:1-3). We tend to read this as encouraging a vague, greeting-card appreciation of nature, but the medieval imagination was more risky and specific. Mountains speak. Water sings. Trees talk, and they won’t shut up. Medievals weren’t frozen by fear of Enlightenment snickering or duped into mathematizing creation. All of creation was a poem.

Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and Henri du Lubac’s series on medieval exegesis go a long way toward showing how the church’s embrace of Enlightenment hostility to imagination undermined the more playful medieval tradition. But it really takes something like James Jordan’s underground theological classic Through New Eyes to appreciate how a mind steeped in biblical typology might begin reading trees. In typological terms, trees in Scripture act like giant words, expressing not only the general glory of God but also more specific themes. Both trees and saints come out of the ground. Both grow on riverbanks (Ps. 1) and bring food and medicine to the world; “their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing” (Ez. 47:12; cf. Rev. 22:2). Jotham preached “the trees once went forth to anoint a king over them,” and the blind man healed began to see men as trees walking. Trees are images of humans, and they reflect our own fruitfulness, hubris, and decay.

And God manifests himself at trees—”arboreal theophanies,” Jordan says—like those in Eden and in front of Moses but also in the careful wood of the Tabernacle and Temple, which create grand images of God’s people gathered around him. The entire Davidic line is pictured as a tree, a root, a stump, a branch (Is. 42; 6:13; 11:10) that ultimately develops into Christ, the vine, the tree of life, executed on a tree, having threatened fire to “every tree which does not bear good fruit” (Mt. 3:10). Christ Himself doesn’t hesitate to urge us to read trees wisely: “Now learn this parable from the fig tree” (Mt. 24:32).

Learn from the tree? Why does that directive not show up regularly in seminary hermeneutics courses? We go to great pains to teach seminary students about exegeting Scripture and secret Foucauldian power structures, but we leave them largely clueless about exegeting nature.

Campanella himself does a wonderful job pinpointing many of the meanings early America found in the elm. Thoreau, Trollope, Dickens, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Wharton, and O’Neill all paid special attention to the American elm, Ulmus americana. Henry Ward Beecher gushed that the elms of New England “are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture” and that no other tree “unites, in the same degree, majesty and beauty, grace and grandeur, as the American elm.”

Colonial homesteaders dragged elms in from swamps and used them symbolically as “bridal trees,” and Native Americans offered elms as trees of friendship. The elm took on its grandest symbolism when it became the image of colonial political resistance, a harness in Boston for hanging British tax officers in effigy: the Liberty Tree. Each of the 13 original colonies also went on to designate elms or artificial equivalents as Liberty Trees, a symbol that was even transplanted to France via Tom Paine for Jacobin use.

Whether in the Puritan, colonial, or Romantic periods, the elm played a special role in differentiating the United States from Europe. Oliver Wendell Holmes ridiculed the foreign Lombard trees near his boyhood home because they suggested “vague hints of dead Pharaohs.” Andrew Downing, a key figure in the spreading elm devotion, asked “what should we think of Italians, if they should foreswear their own orange trees and figs, pomegranates and citrons, and plant their streets and gardens with the poison sumac of our swamps?” Why, then, should we “fill our lawns and avenues with the cast off nuisances of the gardens of Asia and Europe?”

In part, this differentiation from the Old World came as a reaction against the city, long considered morally deficient. Cities were associated with European tyranny and mob rule, and rapid urban expansion in the United States during the mid-19th century only exacerbated antiurban concerns. Campanella cites the Boston clergyman Nehemiah Adams, writing in 1838, as reflective of the time:

Let us forsake, a while, the noisy streets, and the ceaseless hurry of business, for a more quiet sphere of thought… . [A] treeless city is too much like a desert. We feel oppressed, by the monotonous dominion of brick and mortar… . Men cannot bear to be always shut up from the inspiration of God’s works. He must gaze on the trees … or his spirit will faint within him.

Yet while using elms to distance themselves from Europe, earlier Americans had always been conscious of being the babies on the block. We needed some history in order to have moral credibility. Garden-cities helped overcome that dilemma as well. Trees could give the appearance of age without having earned it. In fact, the elm was the fastest growing native tree. Andrew Downing, again, explained that “if we have neither old castles nor old associations, we have at least old trees that can teach us the lessons of antiquity, not less instructive and poetical than the ruins of a past age.” Through elms, the hope was that a town might actually “instill in the youth that love of beauty and morality which would enable him to withstand the attraction of urban wealth and vice.” No wonder Old Testament groves had to be torn down.

This yearning for early respectability took on an even more comical drive when observers realized that parallel columns of tall, arching elms could create the semblance of a Gothic cathedral—or, as Longfellow noted, under the “arches of the elms, … the trees themselves more than ever become like columns and ribbed ceilings of churches.” Moreover, with characteristic American hubris, Montgomery Meig declaimed that a “noble sylvan temple could be constructed in less time than the great cathedrals of Europe,” and “in a few years, a temple of unequaled gothic tracery would rise into the air like Solomon’s, without sound of hammer or tool of iron.”

Such impatient sentimentalism couldn’t last. The rise of civil romanticism and the lust for the new independence would fail. Dutch elm disease first reared its head in the forests of Europe ravaged by World War I, then advanced across the Atlantic to attack the American elm population. As public works projects popped onto the scene in a Rooseveltian wave, the cry to save the elms appealed to the can-do fervor of the era.

Yet within a generation, 200 years of elms had disappeared from the American scene, millions upon millions of trees. Once considered a “trash tree,” the most useless piece of vegetation in the forest, then the icon of everything America wanted—freedom, independence, patriotism, pastoralism, sublimity, and speed—the elm was reduced to nothing but a stump, an icon of mockery. As Campanella observes in passing, “smaller plants may feed and sustain us, but in trees we see ourselves.” Learn this parable from the elm tree.

Douglas Jones is a senior fellow of philosophy at New St. Andrews College, Moscow, Idaho, and senior editor of Credenda/Agenda magazine.

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

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Catherine H. Crouch

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A persistent cultural stereotype of scientists is that we are out to dominate and exploit the natural world that we study. In Life on a Young Planet, distinguished paleontologist Andrew Knoll wants to turn this stereotype on its head, replacing scientist-as-conquistador with scientist-as-steward. In the opening pages, he writes, “by coming to grips with life’s long evolutionary history, we begin to understand something of our own place in the world, including our responsibility as planetary stewards.” Knoll has set out to write nothing less than a narrative history of how life arose on Earth—”science’s creation story,” he calls it—assuming, or at least hoping, that if we know the story, we will see that it is humanity’s job to preserve the rich diversity of life on Earth which is presently our inheritance.

Page 3790 – Christianity Today (12)

Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth

Andrew H. Knoll (Author)

Princeton University Press

288 pages

$44.60

Knoll begins his book by challenging another cultural stereotype: the pedantic scientist who reduces marvelous phenomena to sterile terms. To Knoll, the findings of his field are exciting and wonderful, and he hopes to share that wonder with his readers. Of course, this is to exchange one stereotype for another—the scientist as Impresario of Wonder—but Knoll’s writing is eloquent and engaging, and the story is a fascinating one. How did the Earth’s atmosphere go from being rich in sulfur to being rich in oxygen, without which life as we know it today could not survive? How did life arise from nonliving chemicals? What was the nature of those first life forms? How did those first life forms develop into the amazing variety of complex creatures we see today that inhabit nearly every imaginable niche of our planet—even hot springs and chasms deep in the sea floor? While much remains to be understood about each of these questions, what is known is amazing.

The ingenuity of paleontologists is also impressive. Knoll describes the methods as well as the findings of his field, showing us how he and his colleagues deduce the story from the many kinds of records that early life has left us, from fossils to the DNA of today’s creatures. The story of the rise of early life is interspersed with descriptions of the research process that both illustrate the vast range of methods employed and lend a human concreteness to the discoveries. For example, Chapter 6 opens with an anecdote from Knoll’s graduate studies with groundbreaking paleontologist Elso Barghoorn:

“Take a good chunk. You never know when you’ll be back.” With that admonition, Elso Barghoorn heaved a fifty-pound block of chert into our aluminum dinghy, beached on a rocky promontory along the north shore of Lake Superior.

Seeking to pump up “human interest,” many books for the non-expert reveal and at times exaggerate the competition and egotism that are unfortunately far too common in science. Life on a Young Planet is refreshingly, even remarkably, free of any sense of jostling for position. Knoll describes his own contributions with humility, praises the insightfulness and hard work of his mentors and colleagues, and portrays the community of paleontologists in warm and affectionate terms. (As a scientist myself, though in a very different field, I find myself wondering if it can really be as good as Knoll makes it sound!)

Life on a Young Planet is not entirely successful as a primer in paleontology for the average reader. To trace the development of life on Earth, Knoll must cover an enormous range of scientific terrain, including the geology, atmospheric chemistry, and oceanography of the early Earth as well as the biology of the organisms that inhabited it. Before the story can really take off, a great deal of background must be established. Consequently, the early chapters are dense and lack a clear narrative shape. Each chapter begins with a paragraph-long summary; I often found I needed to return to the summary a few times in the course of reading the chapter to understand where the chapter was going. Vocabulary is also a problem. This history of early life overflows with creatures, phenomena, and ideas, and Knoll assumes a familiarity with both concepts and vocabulary that I doubt most readers have, using technical terms interchangeably with more common synonyms without making the correspondence clear.

At about chapter 8, however, “The Origins of Eucaryotic Cells,” the book finds its narrative stride, and from there on, the story line is clearer and more compelling. Chapter 8 itself is particularly strong. It begins with the story of the discovery of how eucaryotic cells (cells with nuclei) came to have metabolic organelles inside them. (In plant cells, the conversion of sunlight and carbon dioxide to oxygen and sugars, photosynthesis, takes place in chloroplasts; in animal cells, the conversion of oxygen and sugars to carbon dioxide and energy-storing molecules, respiration, takes place in mitochondria.) It is now accepted that the organelles were originally independent bacteria, engulfed by another cell. But Knoll does more than just give this explanation; he tells us how this idea was first proposed by Konstantin Merezhkovsky in 1905, but dismissed because the experimental evidence did not seem consistent. More than 60 years later, Lynn Margulis proposed the same idea independently for a different type of cells, and the new techniques of molecular biology were able to verify it. This chapter is filled with the excitement of a revolutionary change in thinking.

The bulk of Knoll’s narrative ends with describing the conditions that gave rise to the sudden rapid development of many types of multicellular animals. Chapter 12, “Dynamic Earth, Permissive Ecology,” lays out the thesis that this remarkable diversification—known to geologists as the Cambrian Explosion because of the dramatic increase in the number of observed fossil species in the Cambrian period—took place when the ecology of the Earth was undergoing equally dramatic changes: “extreme environmental stress can induce mutations that fuel biological innovation.” Changes in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and oceans may have been particularly crucial in allowing larger, more differentiated animals to arise. At the same time, the presence of animals had a reciprocal impact on the surrounding environment. “Life and environment evolved together,” Knoll concludes, “each influencing the other in building the biosphere we inhabit today.”

Throughout Life on a Young Planet, Knoll connects his writing repeatedly to creation stories, using biblically allusive language, but he generally avoids giving metaphysical interpretations of the scientific findings he describes. Not until the epilogue does he directly tackle the relationship between science and religion. Here, Knoll takes a generally friendly stance toward religion; while he strongly rejects a literal reading of Genesis on the grounds that it is contradicted not only by his own field but also by central findings of astronomy, physics, and geology, he advocates a complementary approach to religious and scientific understanding of the universe, with science revealing what took place and religion why it took place:

The great creation stories of the Bible, or the Upanishads, or the Aboriginal Dreamtime, provided ways of comprehending the universe thousands of years before Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein provided new explanatory language. As eloquent guides to a moral universe, they continue to speak across the generations.

“Science’s creation story,” he adds, “accounts for process and history, not intent,” and he rightly points out that while science places some limits on what religious accounts can be believed, the daily tragedies of human existence issue far greater challenges to our understanding of how a loving God can be sovereign over our planet.

But in declaring that questions of morality and purpose are the terrain of religion rather than science, Knoll exposes, perhaps unwittingly, why this book does not achieve its first stated goal: to persuade the reader that it is our job as humans to steward the earth. Earlier in the epilogue, he argues that human beings occupy a unique position in life’s history, not because humanity is in some way the culmination of evolution, but rather because we possess the power, through technology, to profoundly shape the future of life on our planet in a way no other species can.

At this point, Knoll needs to show us that the history of life itself persuades us to use our formidable power in a particular way—to preserve the diversity that presently exists. But such persuasion is notably absent. The most he can say is, “I don’t know whether God decreed the passenger pigeon, but if he did, it was not for us to exterminate.” I agree with Knoll that science’s story on its own is devoid of intent. Consequently, contrary to what Knoll seems to think, it offers no moral guidance. Science’s story, however awe-inspiring, does not point to any particular way—much less the best way—to use our power.

In Knoll’s picture, we have complete responsibility for the future of the planet. This inspires the final plea that closes the book:

On this planet, at this moment in time, human beings reign. Regardless of who or what penned earlier chapters in the history of life, we will write the next one. Through our actions or inaction, we decide the world that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will know. Let us have the grace and humility to choose well.

Fortunately, the biblical narrative tells us that we do not have to make our choices alone. If human beings really did write the next chapter of our planet’s history unaided, it would be bleak indeed. But if the universe is actually sustained and directed by its Creator, there is reason to believe our planet can recover from some of our mistakes. And worship of that Creator, not just wonder at the creation, can generate the grace and humility that Knoll invokes. There is still hope that we will not completely remake our planet in our own image, with the lifelessness that would surely come if the last word were ours.

Catherine H. Crouch is an assistant professor of physics at Swarthmore College.

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

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Culture

Review

Russ Breimeier

Christianity TodaySeptember 1, 2003

Sounds like … similar to previous entries in the acclaimed series-worshipful acoustic pop with alternative touches, featuring Jars of Clay, Sixpence None the Richer, Bebo Norman, and several others

Page 3790 – Christianity Today (13)

City On A Hill: The Gathering

Various

September 23, 2003

At a glance … though weaker in many ways than the previous efforts, The Gathering still stands as an outstanding album that offers thought-provoking worship and sophisticated acoustic pop sounds

With three albums in as many years, the highly acclaimed and undeniably popular City on a Hill series has left a lasting mark on Christian music, generating one of the most enduring modern worship songs (“God of Wonders”) and selling a combined total of more than 700,000 units. With the fourth and final edition, City on a Hill: The Gathering, producer Steve Hindalong has drawn things to a close.

The City on a Hill series is unique in its community-inspired collaborations of worship between prominent Christian musicians. With the exception of Third Day, the long-time participants are back for round four: Jars of Clay, Caedmon’s Call, FFH, Sixpence None the Richer, The Choir’s Derri Daugherty, and Glassbyrd (which was involved behind the scenes the whole time). The Gathering also features returnees Sara Groves, Bebo Norman, and Paul Colman Trio, plus City on a Hill newcomers Andrew Peterson, Ginny Owens, and acoustic-pop band Silers Bald. Hindalong is again joined by fellow producers Daugherty and Marc Byrd of Glassbyrd.

With all the returning creative forces, The Gathering retains many of the characteristics that made previous efforts so endearing: impressive duets, sophisticated acoustic-pop arrangements, and a reverence for ancient church tradition blended with modern worship. I’ve always loved how one album seems to inspire the next. Ignoring the slight detour of 2002’s Christmas album, The Gathering picks up where Sing Alleluia left off—with the sound of birds and bells, juxtaposed over a running stream.

Unfortunately, there are indications that the series has run out of ideas. Like the previous albums (except the Christmas one), “Marvelous Light” is featured on The Gathering; it might be viewed as a recurring theme, but it lacks punch this time. There’s also the decision by Hindalong and Daugherty to once again resurrect “Beautiful Scandalous Night” for the second or third time in their career—though not on previous City on a Hill projects. Although it’s sung beautifully by Leigh Nash (Sixpence) and Bebo Norman, it feels like the song’s been done too often, as if it were an admission that the producers can offer no better. Then there’s the multi-artist title track and first single, sort of a Christian folk/pop “We Are the World” that almost sounds too forced: “Sisters, brothers/We’ve got to learn to love each other/Our Father in Heaven has called us to be instruments of peace.”

But there are far better collaborations on the album. Offering tremendous ambience and a toy box of percussion instruments, “Jesus Went to the Garden” features powerful vocal performances that jell together rather than merely singing verses in turn. The same is true of the excellent and energetic musical prayer “Instrument of Peace,” which teams the Paul Colman Trio with members of Glassbyrd, The Choir, and Jars of Clay. The acoustic rocker “Table of the Lord” benefits from a simple, memorable melody, as well as strong orchestration underlying FFH with Paul Colman.

While the series has yet to produce another worship song as good as “God of Wonders,” some of these come close. Jars of Clay offers a brief-yet-effective performance of “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” which leads into a pretty invocation by Sara Groves, “Come Be Who You Are.” Christine Glass (Glassbyrd) gives a breathy duet with Ginny Owens in a simple worship song, “We Will Trust You,” and Owens is featured again in the gently prayerful “Open Our Eyes Dear Savior.”

There’s no shortage of talent or quality performances, so it’s hard to dislike much about The Gathering. While there’s nothing wrong with the songs themselves, the album isn’t imaginative or cohesive. The title track states the intended theme of loving others as God has loved us. From there it goes into the crucifixion of “Beautiful Scandalous Night,” then “Jesus Went to the Garden” (covering Gethsemane through the Resurrection), followed by the communion anthem “Table of the Lord.” Then comes Andrew Peterson’s “Holy Is the Lord”—a fabulous song about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, but it feels somewhat out of place here.

The album may lack thematic vision and originality, but like a good sequel, The Gathering leaves true creativity to its predecessors and generally gives listeners what they want. It closes quietly with the sound of running water and a distant thunderstorm, signaling the last you’ll hear from this terrific series (that is, until the inevitable four-disc boxed set). My hope is that The Gathering, along with the other albums in the pioneering series, will inspire other Christian artists to be just as creative and collaborative in art and worship.

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Culture

Review

Chris Armstrong

A high-caliber film shows how messy it was when Luther helped change the course of history

Christianity TodaySeptember 1, 2003

Before the Reformation, the meaning of life came highly structured from the hierarchy of the Church. One didn’t ask questions. One didn’t need to.

Many believers, perhaps most, experienced Truth through relics, images, and rituals—not as oppression but as comfort. To be sure, one did not meet God face to face. But one did not want to! For the late-medieval rank and file, assurance of salvation came not from bold access to the throne of God, but from the myriad mediating practices of penance and devotion.

In Luther, one scene in particular brings home this historical reality. Glowing with joy, a young mother who has purchased an indulgence (a remission of temporal punishment) for her crippled daughter holds it out to a gaunt Martin Luther: “Look what I bought for Greta!” She has been gulled by the rhetoric of the charlatan indulgence-seller, Johann Tetzel (Alfred Molina).

Luther (Joseph Fiennes) takes the paper and reads it. His anger at the corrupt establishment rises and boils over. He forgets the gentleness he has displayed toward her. “This is worthless,” he says, crumpling it in his fist. “You must rely on God’s love.” Crestfallen, she turns and walks disconsolately away.

At several key moments in the movie, Luther faces the charge that he is tearing apart the church. He grapples repeatedly with the possibility that he is destroying, rather than building, God’s kingdom. To their credit, though, the filmmakers resist the temptation of portraying a Lone Ranger Reformer against a thoroughly evil Church. There are enough sympathetic figures in the Catholic establishment (Matthieu Carriere’s Cardinal Cajetan chief among them) to create some sense of historical nuance.

Moreover, we get to see some warts of the Reformation. Andreas Karlstadt (Jochen Horst) takes Luther’s teachings to their extreme, announcing that the day of the great leveling has arrived. Soon we see townspeople dragging the monks who have cared for them out of their church and pummeling them. Rocks crash through stained-glass windows. A crucifix is knocked to the floor. (The scene involves a bit of historical sleight-of-hand: the real Karlstadt, advocating nonviolence, had refused to join the militant radical reformer Thomas Müntzer.)

Luther is still a medieval man; this anarchic attack on authority is too much for him. He appeals to the princes, demanding the peasant revolt be put down. Soon the blood of the peasants runs on the floor of the ruined church.

Surveying the carnage, Luther agonizes: “I have torn the world apart.” He begins to slide into depression. He must force himself out of bed each morning. Until, that is—in a moment befitting Hollywood—he meets the escaped nun Katerina (Claire Cox). Sunny but steel-willed, Katerina leads Luther from the dark tunnel and into the summer of the loving marriage he has long denied himself.

Of course, this is a Lutheran movie, not a Catholic one—it is backed by Thrivent, the major Lutheran financial services organization. The answer to the question of whether Luther is destroying the church he loves or bringing it back to its most basic sources of authority is clear. The abuses flowing from the “sewer” of Rome are portrayed starkly enough.

But writer Camille Thomasson and director Eric Till have done well to show something of the anguish and desolation that comes with the uprooting of old meanings and the conflicted (and always incomplete) process toward the new. Even if we are convinced, with Luther, that the new meanings are really the oldest ones of all—fidelity to Scripture, salvation by grace alone, the surpassing love of the Father—we can sympathize with the human toll of what our age has fashionably called a “paradigm shift.”

If there is any misstep in the film, it is the relentless niceness of its Reformer. Throughout we see Luther filling the void left by the old, corrupted symbols of late medieval Catholicism with the simple “Jesus loves me” theology of a mainstream Sunday school class.

The filmmakers have hardly gotten young Martin out of his early years as a psychologically tortured monk, convinced God is out to get him, when they remake him as a mild ’90s Luther. His confessor Staupitz (Bruno Ganz) is reduced to blustering: “In all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never once confessed anything even remotely interesting!”

As a student at Wittenberg, Luther insists on giving a teen suicide a Christian burial—theological niceties be damned. Interpreting the story of the Prodigal Son to children in the woods, he stresses the father’s surpassing love. In the tower at Wartburg, he interprets a Greek term as expressing that same love.

All of this is fair enough, though the theme does become wearing. In one impassioned sermon, Luther takes aim at the villain Tetzel, who emotionally blackmails his audiences by unfurling crude paintings of hell and then offering to help them buy their relatives’ way out of eternal agony. Tetzel’s problem, Luther insists, is that his God is too mean.

“I, too, saw God as sentencing sinners to death in hell,” Luther preaches. “But I was wrong.”

Oops. In a major film for a diverse viewing public that sees nothing but an oppressive, hypocritical church, this ’90s approach may indeed serve the producers’ religious motives. But God’s sovereignty seems to have receded a little too much here. And one wonders, if this was really all the Reformation was about, why would anyone have objected? Why didn’t all the Catholics just get on board, singing Kumbaya?

Finally, though, the film does tell us as much as it probably can: the Church had been corrupted in many ways. It had strayed from the Bible—its best and truest authority. And the road back was a rough one.

What it loses in theological subtlety it gains back in artistry. This is a dramatically gripping and visually stunning movie. More, it is warmly personal: Sir Peter Ustinov comes near to stealing the show as Luther’s wise, wry prince-protector, Frederick; Staupitz is another Catholic “good guy” whose concern for his spiritual son lights up the screen. The film is—as much as can be expected—historically even-handed.

Luther matches grandeur of vision to excellence of execution. The resulting drama packs spiritual as well as entertainment power: it charged the atmosphere even of the small screening room where I first saw the film. I will be seeing it again.

Chris Armstrong is managing editor of Christian History magazine.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere

More information about the film, including its trailer, is available at its official web site.

Lutheran theologian and journalist Uwe Siemon-Netto has reviewed the film for The Lutheran Witness and for UPI.

Concordia Publishing House has a tie-in book.

Review roundups of Luther are available at Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Christianity Today‘s weekly Film Forum feature will summarize reviews from the religious press and mainstream critics next Thursday.

Christian Reader, a Christianity Today sister publication, earlier offered a quick summary of Luther’s defining moment. Christianity Today‘s Christian History Corner asked if the reformer really ever said, “Here I stand.”

Christian History magazine devoted two issues to Martin Luther, one on his early years (including his posting of the 95 Theses) and another on his later years (including his marriage and writing “A Mighty Fortress.”) Sadly, neither issue is available online, and the latter is out of print.

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Culture

Review

Dr. Ben Witherington III

Christianity TodaySeptember 1, 2003

On the face of things, The Gospel of John seemed like it would be a difficult narrative to convincingly bring to life on the silver screen. For starters, how would they get an audience to sit still for the all-talk-and-no-action Farewell Discourses in John 14-17, not to mention other long discourses in John's gospel?

Then there is the difficulty of the Johannine Jesus, whom Bible scholar Ernst Kasemann once said "bestrides the stage of this Gospel like a colossus, as a deity." How do you convincingly portray Jesus saying things like "before Abraham was, I am" and make it believable in an early Jewish setting—coming from a truly human being? How do you convince the audience that this is the same Jesus of the other Gospels, when John's gospel has no exorcisms, few if any parables, no Sermon on the Mount, no birth narratives, and Jesus spends more time in Judea than in Galilee?

How do you pull this off when the screenplay is a verbatim transcript of the Good News translation of this Gospel—with no words added or subtracted? How do you successfully weave together the voice of the narrator and the dialogue of the characters in the drama?

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Despite these and other daunting challenges, this first ever full-length film on the Gospel of John is a convincing and powerful portrayal of the Johannine Jesus. It's not the first film in the Visual Bible series (Matthew and Acts are among the others), but it is decidedly the first that involves world-class actors (culled from the Royal Shakespeare company and elsewhere), a world-class actor turned narrator (Christopher Plummer), and world-class producers and cinematographers. The film's beautiful soundtrack to the movie is of equally high quality, and involves replicas of musical instruments used in Jesus' day.

It all adds up to what I think is the best portrayal of Jesus ever offered in a feature length film.

Interestingly, this beautifully shot film (mostly filmed in Spain with the Temple scenes filmed in a studio in England) was financed by a wealthy Jewish Canadian. Various biblical scholars—led by Dr. Peter Richardson of Toronto—were on the committee to assure its authenticity.

The film runs some three hours, and the DVD package comes with two discs of the film, and a third disc of background information, interviews with the principles and some wonderful extras like maps and much more.

And though the film is a stunning success, that's not to say it is without its weaknesses. If you were to compare the Passion narrative as portrayed in this film to Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 portrayal in Jesus of Nazareth, I think you would come away finding the Zeffirelli version more compelling and having more pathos. It is a fair comparison since Zeffirelli largely follows John's gospel in his portrayal of Jesus before Pilate and Jesus on the cross.

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The crucifixion scene is relatively bloodless in The Gospel of John (a deficiency Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ makes up for in spades). Furthermore, the portrayal of Lazarus' resurrection is more telling and more dramatically rendered in Zeffirelli's film than in this one.

But these are niggling complaints. On the whole, the portrayal is telling and sometimes compelling—thanks especially to the fine acting by Henry Ian Cusick, who plays Jesus. With a beguiling simple grace and style, Cusick convincingly presents us with a Jesus who is both human, and so very clearly more than human—no small task. There is a warmth and passion to Cusick's winsome portrayal. He tells his first followers "Come and see," and even as a viewer, you want to do so.

While it is doubtless true that Mel Gibson's film has received far more press, it is hard to believe it could be more impressive than this film. The Gospel of John film has the advantage of telling the entire story, not just focusing on its violent conclusion.

Thanks to The Gospel of John, the "Word made flesh" has now become the Word made visible. In an age of visuals, it might just attract many who would never take the time to read John's gospel.

Dr. Ben Witherington, III, is Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary.

What Other Critics Are Saying

compiled by Jeffrey Overstreet from Film Forum, 09/18/03

Chattaway goes on to mention another Jesus movie showing at film festivals: The Gospel of John, the latest installment in the series called The Visual Bible.

In Phillip Saville's adaptation of John's gospel, Henry Ian Cusick plays Jesus. The film is scheduled for limited release on September 26. It will spread to other cities throughout the autumn. You can listen to an interview with producer Garth Drabinsky at this link.

A few religious press critics have already seen it. Holly McClure (Crosswalk) says, "The story is so compelling and entertaining that it doesn't feel like a long movie. And when it was over, I wanted more. Watching this movie gave me a renewed appreciation for Jesus and the struggles he went through to bring God's message to the world."

Movieguide's critic says, "There are other Jesus movies in preparation, but [this film] is the one that most Christians have been waiting for. It is inspired truth, a biblical sermon. Christians need to go into all the world to bring their friends to watch the Good News of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, in The Gospel of John."

Mainstream critics caught the film at the Toronto Film Festival on "the symbolically chosen September 11." Richard Ostling (Associated Press) notes that the movie "consists entirely of John's Gospel, word for word. But that verbal straitjacket doesn't sap the drama and sometimes enhances it, creating thought-provoking entertainment."

Ron Csillag (Seattle Times) calls it "a sprawling, visually stunning work … [its authenticity] reinforced by a haunting musical score created with instruments from Jesus' time, and with hundreds of meticulously researched period costumes, using only fabrics from the era. The movie, like the book, is poetic, restless—almost otherworldly."

James Adams (The Globe and Mail) says, "Saville has done an admirable job … pulling together a handsome, polished production. Gospel's greatest overarching characteristic, besides textual integrity, is sincerity, evinced in both Christopher Plummer's measured, almost sotto voce narration and British actor Henry Ian Cusick's assured, robust portrayal of Jesus." (Commentary from religion columnist Michael Valpy is also online.)

Taking a different view, Martin Knelman (Toronto Star) calls it "relentlessly high-minded, making one yearn for the trashy sacrilege of a Hollywood biblical potboiler."

from Film Forum, 10/02/03

The Gospel of John , a film that follows John's Scriptural account word by word, is gaining more praise from Christian critics. David DiCerto (CNS) applauds the efforts of director Phillip Saville (Metroland): "Beautifully shot on a modest budget and with a running time of three hours, the film … eschews biblical pageantry in order to paint an intimate portrait of Christ true to its source material. The film's tasteful handling of Jesus' death achieves equilibrium between the salvific suffering and the redemptive triumph of the cross, without fixating on its more grisly aspects."

Similarly pleased, Michael Medved (Crosswalk) writes, "The Gospel of John represents such an honorable, even heroic effort that it seems almost unfair to focus on its cinematic shortcomings … but the carefully crafted images never take on a life of their own beside the solemnly recited Biblical narrative and dialogue. [It] inevitably feels like a very high class Sunday school film strip rather than an emotionally satisfying cinematic experience."

Then Medved asks a troubling question: "Why has this New Testament story failed to produce the hysterical denunciations that have already greeted Mel Gibson's upcoming (and superb) crucifixion epic, The Passion? Having seen both films, I can report that neither project deserves condemnation for anti-Semitic messages, though Jewish audiences should feel far more concerned about The Gospel of John."

from Film Forum, 10/23/03

Patricia Paddey (Faith Today) investigates how the movie manifesting The Gospel of John came into being.

from Film Forum, 10/30/03

Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) says, "The Gospel of John is exactly what its title suggests: a word for word rendition of the book of John using The Good News Bible as its sole textual source. The result is a faithful, reverential version of what remains to this day to be the greatest story ever told."

from Film Forum, 01/02/04

Hal Conklin (Cinema in Focus) nominates The Gospel of John. "In all of the hype about the release of The Passion of the Christ, this film is remarkably honest and convincing, and has made no waves at all." This film is now available on DVD. Mixed responses from mainstream critics are posted here.

from Film Forum, 04/22/04

In the midst of Passion mania, Christian moviegoers should not miss the opportunity to see the other major film about Jesus recently released. Phillip Saville's The Gospel of John presents the whole story of Christ as it is narrated in one book of the Bible. The actors provide the dialogue, while the narration is read by Christopher Plummer. This three-hour production may not have the big budget or the notoriety of Mel Gibson's film, but it deserves attention and will reward viewers with its careful dramatization of Scriptural events. Henry Ian Cusick is a passionate, human, persuasive Christ, and he makes the dialogue work even though he has to say, "I tell you the truth … " dozens of times.

Peter T. Chattaway (Canadian Christianity) writes, "The film suffers a bit from a common tendency in this genre to make nearly everyone sound like a well-educated Briton (though the traitor Judas is played by a Canadian). But Henry Ian Cusick delivers one of the more charismatic, confrontational and compassionate interpretations of Christ around; and Christopher Plummer's subtle, supple narration is a treat for the ears."

Christianity Today Movies reviewed the film in March.

REVIEW

The Gospel, Literally

A Break-through film makes the Word visible.reviewed by Ben Witherington IIIChristianity Today, May 10, 2004

Related Elsewhere:

A ready-to-download Movie Discussion Guide related to this movie is available at ChristianityTodayMoviesStore.com. Use this guide after the movie to help you and your small group better connect your faith to pop culture.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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