Page 2251 – Christianity Today (2024)

I‘m a philosopher. This means I get paid to think about the “problem of evil.” I’m also a Christian. This means I take the Bible seriously. Finally, I’m getting older. This means I observe grief at firsthand more frequently than before. In a pastoral setting I’ve always said, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed by the name of the Lord.” But can’t we say more in a philosophical setting? Must we end with God’s rhetorical response to Job? Shouldn’t we seek a theodicy “justifying the ways of God to man”? Perhaps the book of Job should have the first word, but must it have the last word?

I used to give the last word to the “Free Will Defense.” A universe with genuinely free people capable of both good and evil is better, I argued, than a universe populated with mere puppets incapable of freely responding to God’s love. But doubts began to arise. If an unrigged coin is flipped, then it is “free” to land either heads or tails. And if it is “free” to land heads once, then it is “free” to land heads two times or two thousand times. Of course, the probabilities against the latter are astronomical. Yet the Creator of astronomy isn’t going to stumble at the merely improbable. So why not create people who freely do good in all circ*mstances?

Besides, the human autonomy assumed by the free will defense was hard to reconcile with God’s omnipotence. How could a mere creature act independently of the Creator? Finally, if evolution is true (as I believe), then there was a lot of pain in the animal world prior to Adam’s sin and here the free will defense is as silent as Job.

Nonetheless, my search for a theodicy continued. A “soul-making” theodicy seemed untouched by such problems. Forget the libertarian freedom assumed in the free will defense; think only in terms of virtues and vices. Courage is of great value. But courage without real pain would be impossible—so also faith and hope. And if God created this world as a hedonistic paradise, then the virtues—both pagan and Christian—would be impossible. How can we hope for what already exists and how can we believe what we already see?

But once again problems arose. While pain sometimes produces virtue, other times it produces only despair. Beside, where’s the morality in God deliberately creating a universe where one man is born blind so that other people can see his glory? Again, we are reduced to the silence of Job.

Brian Davies and David Burrell are both first-class philosophers. Both are working in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas and both have recently argued that the philosophical critics of Job’s silence fail to take the doctrine of creation with sufficient seriousness. Burrell’s book, Deconstructing Theodicy: Why Job Has Nothing to Say to the Puzzle of Suffering, is as short as the title is provocative. We’ll begin with it.

Designers and craftsman make things; only God creates. This distinction, Burrell argues, ought to cause philosophers to think twice before “justifying the ways of God to man.” All theodicies mistakenly assume that the creator and the creature inhabit the same space and time. Was Shakespeare born before or after Hamlet? The play’s setting long predates Shakespeare’s time. But knowing this doesn’t answer our nonsense question. Shakespeare’s “creation” of Hamlet is not a case of backwards causation, since Shakespeare and Hamlet don’t share a common universe. Hamlet kills Polonius with a dagger; but Shakespeare doesn’t (and couldn’t!) kill Hamlet with Laertes’ sword, though we must not push the analogy too far. Authors and their characters don’t inhabit the same temporal realm; but they both experience events temporally. Yet even this is untrue of the Creator and his creatures.

Frequently, God’s “timelessness” is the first step in a “free will” theodicy. And just as frequently, those defending a “soul-making” theodicy will object that a timeless God is aloof, remote, the very antithesis of the biblical God. However, Burrell is making neither of these points. Rather, he says we all “stand in need of metaphysical reflection to help invert our normal expectations attending a relationship with God [emphasis added].” The cure for metaphysical blindness begins with Job. There we learn to speak to God while avoiding Job’s friends’ damnable presumption of speaking about God. Paradoxically, our metaphysical puzzles dissolve when we take Job’s practical approach to God instead of his friends’ speculative approach. The Book of Job is “an adroit deconstruction of the very enterprise of theodicy,” says Burrell, because it operates “in a performative rather than a propositional key.”

Central to Burrell’s argument is “speech act theory,” as it is pretentiously termed. When a preacher stands before a man and a woman and says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” or a woman breaks a bottle of champagne across boat’s bow and says, “I christen thee ‘Mary Lou,'” neither the preacher nor the woman is “operating in the propositional key.” Rather, their words are essentially actions (performatives) which make the couple husband and wife or name the boat Mary Lou. When Job arraigns God and calls him to court (13:18); when he swears an oath before God proclaiming his innocence (31:7-12); or when he challenges God to make known the sins for which he is being punished—Job is not hoping to learn about God, but wanting (demanding!) to hear from God. Burrell endorses Wittgenstein’s aphorism: “You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed.” (Or, for those preferring songs to oracles: ” ‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear”).

Much to his friend’s consternation, God responds to Job’s demands. But how, philosophers will demand, is this possible? If God is metaphysically transcendent, how can he speak to Job? Once again, Burrell insists that the question is nonsense. Remember, taking creation seriously inverts our normal assumptions. We must not picture God as a Super-Being, unique because he is the most powerful, knowing, and loving being in the universe. No, the author of a play is not one of its participants. Neither do the Creator and the creature share something called “being,” much less a being in the universe.

Augustine’s life was transformed when he realized that all things have “the same message to tell, if only we can hear it, and their message is this: We did not make ourselves, but [the One] who abides forever made us.” No matter how far we run; no matter how much we disclaim, nothing we do can stop us from being our father’s son or daughter. So too, nothing can sever our (metaphysical) relation to God. As Aquinas says, our “very existence is an existence-to-the-creator.” Being forever present to Job as his creator, God speaks. But what Job hears is not answers and explanations for his problems—what he hears is that God is his creator. “Whatever understanding may be forthcoming,” Burrell insists, “is thoroughly operative, as in Wittgenstein’s ‘knowing how to go on,’ a quality of understanding that one might relate retrospectively to oneself, without ever proposing that it could assist another prospectively.”

Though a person in the grip of grief wants nothing more than “knowing how to go on,” philosophers who are not grieving want answers. How, they query, can it be true that (1) an all-powerful and good God exists and (2) evil exists? Isn’t it obvious that one negates the other? Well, not really. X always negates not-X. But we cannot know that X negates Y unless we know what X and Y are. “Heavy” and “light” cannot coexist; “heavy” and “blue” can. The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil fully exploits this simple truth of logic: until we know what God is, what goodness is and what evil is, nothing significant can be said about “the problem of evil.” Like Burrell, Davies explicitly rejects all attempts to “justify the ways of God to man.” But he also explicitly rejects claims that evil makes God either impossible or improbable.

Put bluntly, Davies’ response to God’s critics goes like this: Fred says, “The dry ice was so cold that it burned like fire.” Sally replies, “That’s impossible—fire and ice cannot coexist, so it is impossible for anything cold and to burn like fire.” Fred shrugs his shoulders and says, “There must be something wrong with your logic because the ice really did burn like fire.” Likewise, Davies argues that a universe without God is like a story without a storyteller—if there is a story, there must be a teller; if there is a universe, there must be a God. So there must be something wrong with a logic proclaiming that evil negates God.

No thing simply “poofs” into existence. We have no clue as to the cause of many cancers, yet we have no doubt that there is such a cause. On the other hand, there is no cause of 7 being the next prime number after 5 since this is part of 7’s essence. What 7 is and its being the next prime number after 5 are one and the same.

The universe, however, is not like the number 7. There is nothing about the universe or its parts where we can say that knowing what it is and knowing that it is are one and the same. For example, we know a good deal about the essence of dinosaurs, but such knowledge tells us nothing about their current existence. We also know that unicorns are one-horned, horse-like animals, and chiliagons are thousand-sided regular polygons. But that doesn’t mean they exist. And it is not only Thomistic philosophers who distinguish between a thing’s existence and its essence. Black holes are collapsed stars whose gravitational fields are so strong that even light cannot escape; that’s their essence. And this is something scientists knew before discovering evidence for their actual existence.

Since nothing about the universe even suggests that its existence and essence are one and the same, it is irrational to suppose that it simply “poofed” into existence. The only alternative to its “poofing” into existence is that it has a Creator whose existence and essence can be distinguished, but never separated. (This is Aquinas’ notion of “divine simplicity.) While Davies rather quickly considers all the standard objections to this old argument—from Hume’s claim that things might “poof” into existence to Kant’s objection that existence is not a predicate—his greatest concern is not with the argument’s foes[1] but with its friends. While this argument demonstrates that there is a Creator, too often its defenders assume that it also tells us what or who the Creator is. The problem goes back to Descartes.

The essence of humans, Descartes argues, is our immaterial mind. Our bodies are mere tools we use the way a violinist uses a violin. Violinists exist apart from their instruments, and people exist, according to Descartes, even when they have no bodies. From here it is easy to conclude that God and people are really quite similar. Both are essentially spirits; both have knowledge; and both are able to “make a difference” in the physical realm. Philosophers who take this position, like Richard Swinburne, have no particular difficulty imagining what God is like.

Davies, on the other hand, argues that “the oddness of God” is impossible to exaggerate. Any attempt to image what God is (as opposed to that he is) reduces the Creator to another part of the universe, even if God is the biggest, strongest and smartest part of the universe. (Remember Job: God is not like the Leviathan; God is the creator of the Leviathan.) Philosophy can only tell us what the Creator is not, but this is no small matter since it keeps us from making serious mistakes about God and evil.

One serious mistake is to look for evidence of God’s action in the world. If we are commanded to pray, then mustn’t our prayers “make a difference”? If we believe that God made everything, then shouldn’t there be evidence of his craftsmanship in the things that he has made? Like Burrell, Davies argues that we must invert our metaphysical assumptions. It is not the intricacies in a book’s plot that point to an author; it is the book itself. The notion of a book without an author (even a simplistic and poorly written book) is incoherent. So too, it is not God’s interventions (“answering prayer” or “guiding evolution”) that point to God. “Something can only intervene by entering into a situation from which it is first of all absent, while God,” Davies argues, “cannot be thought to be absent from anything he creates.” It is not God’s aloof transcendence that renders “intervention” metaphysically puzzling; rather, it is his immediate presence to everything that makes talk of intervention conceptually incoherent. I can intervene in your actions; I can’t intervene in my own actions.

Another serious mistake concerns God’s goodness. “Aslan is good, but he is not safe” says C. S. Lewis. So too, Davies says that God is good, but he is not morally well behaved. Not, of course, because God is morally ill behaved, but for the same reasons that God is not a good bicycle rider. Only people can be morally good or bad. And while God is personal (since he knows and wills), he is not a person; he is the Creator of people.

Davies urges us to forget the word “moral” in connection with the Creator and simply think about goodness. Many philosophers argue that this a fool’s errand, since “goodness” refers to so many different things. As Davies sarcastically notes, “Good knives are things that can cut bread into slices while good motorcars are hard to get into the kitchen. Good motorcars help us to travel long distances while good knives would make for an uncomfortable ride.” But this hardly means that “goodness” resides only exists in the eye of the beholder.

“Goodness” is no more subjective than “knife” and “motorcar.” While goodness in a knife and goodness in a motorcar do not name the same property, they both point to what knives and motorcars are (respectively) meant to be. A knife is good when it does what knives are meant to do; a motorcar is good when it does what motorcars are meant to do. This means that “there is a serious connection between goodness and being.”

A knife which lacks a sharp edge or a car which lacks a motor are both bad, while ones which have sharp edges and motors are good, at least in one respect. A perfect knife or car is one which has everything it is supposed to have. In this world, it is undoubtedly true that such perfection doesn’t exist; we can always think of ways that knives or cars can be improved. But try to think of ways in which the Creator of all that exists can be improved.

What about the world God created? There is another sense of perfect, according to which a thing is perfect if it is complete; that is, if it has everything that it is supposed to have; no more and no less. A perfect “middle C” on a piano is neither the note with the highest pitch nor the lowest pitch; a perfect pentagon is a figure which has five equal sides, not four equal sides nor six equal sides. So in what sense is the world God created complete (or not)? To answer that question, we would need to know the Creator’s intentions. But if God is as odd as Davies says he is, that’s not a question we can ask of God. Or, better, it’s a question we frequently ask of God, but the answer is not one we can understand. It’s beginning to seem like all philosophical roads lead to Job!

There is one more point to pursue—what’s evil? It is clearly incoherent to suppose that God might have created a world with the greatest possible goodness. (Is the goodness of a perfect middle C greater than the goodness of a perfect pentagon?) But couldn’t he at least have created a universe with no evil? It depends on what evil is.

Everyone (except Descartes) agrees that God can’t make logically contradictory “things” like a square circle, although it is better to say that there is no such thing as a square circle, either real or imaginary. Nor can God commit suicide or created a second being whose existence and essence are one in the same. Since God and God alone is perfectly complete and lacking in nothing, it follows that anything God chooses to create will necessarily be less than perfect, i.e., there will be “things” that it lacks, “metaphysical holes” so to speak.

Now, in one sense, a “hole” is literally nothing. The hole in a donut is not composed of some super-fine donut dough; it’s “composed” of nothing. But in another sense, some holes are absolutely real and mean the difference between life and death, like a two-inch hole in my chest.

Given these philosophically profound platitudes, we can now define two radically distinct understandings of “evil.” The first defines “evil” as the opposite of good. Evil is to good as black paint is to white paint. On this theory, good and evil are both substances, but they have opposite attributes. The second definition of evil goes back to Augustine and Aquinas. It’s the one Davies defends. On this theory, good and evil are not two substances with opposite properties. Rather, they are related like light and dark. Light exists; “darkness,” while real, does not exist. It is only the absence of light. Humans can make a flashlight; not even God can make a flashdark. So too, according to Augustine, Aquinas, and Davies, evil is a privation. Its existence is wholly parasitic on the good.

On the dual substance understanding of evil, it makes perfect sense to ask: Why did God create a universe with so much evil? But try asking this question on the other theory: Why didn’t God create a universe where everything lacked nothing? First, a universe which lacks literal nothing would be absolutely complete, but then, the universe would be God. The notion of “two absolutely complete beings” is as incoherent as the notion of “two greatest presidents of the United States.”

Second, multiplicity of things is itself good. While each day of creation was pronounced “good,” the whole of creation was “very good.” Likewise it is good that arteries should be soft and rocks should be hard. Good arteries (the kind that keep people alive) have “softness”; good rocks (the kind that make dams sturdy) have “hardness.” So it makes no sense to ask for a universe of diverse things, none of which lacks anything.

When my grieving friend cries to God for answers, I have no answers. I only cry with him. And neither do I have answers when a philosopher worries (or argues) that evil negates God. But I do have a question: “Exactly what kind of God is it that you think might not, or cannot, exist?”

Ric Machuga, author of In Defense of the Soul: What It Means to Be Human (Brazos Press), teaches philosophy at Butte College. He is completing work on “Big Questions: A Robust Philosophy for a Scientific Age.”

1. For an excellent and more historically oriented consideration of the argument’s foes, see Ralph McInerny’s Gifford Lectures, Characters in Search of Their Author (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2001).

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It is still infernally difficult to get beyond the bombastic self-reporting that came out of the 1960s. Although recent scholarship suggests that their parents might have been kissing but not telling, it is routine even now to hear po-faced pronouncements that the Sixties generation invented sex. Likewise, it is hard to think about religion in that decade without being jostled and crowded by the self-aggrandizing claim that God died on their watch—on January 4, 1965 to be precise, if an influential book of the period is to be believed.

Nevertheless, something significant did change for the Western churches during that decade. This story is thick with multiple causation, countervailing trends, and conflicting interpretations, and it would be hard to find someone who could tell it in a more careful and responsible way than Hugh McLeod has done in The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. McLeod sees common trends across Britain, the United States, and France, as well as the other countries that he occasionally features from Western Europe (notably the Netherlands) and the English-speaking world (especially Australia and New Zealand). As to chronology, McLeod ruminates dryly: “When did ‘The 1960s’ begin? You can make out a reasonable case for saying ‘1960’, but many other dates have been suggested.” He discerns the span between 1958 and 1974 as the primary period of change, with 1967 as the climactic year.

McLeod’s conceptual framework is the decline of Christendom.[1] He helpfully describes Christendom as “a society where there are close ties between leaders of the church and secular elites; where the laws purport to be based on Christian principles; where, apart from certain clearly defined outsider communities, everyone is assumed to be Christian; and where Christianity provides a common language, shared alike by the devout and by the religiously lukewarm.” Christendom had been eroding for more than two centuries, but in the 1960s it crumbled.

To come at it by way of contrast, the religious crisis of the 1960s is not about an intellectual defeat for Christianity. Coercion stopped being used to further the cause of Christ—that is the salient change. Henceforth, people must freely choose to live God’s way rather than being forced to by the government. And the legal changes came apace. Canada’s Pierre Trudeau removed restrictions on divorce, hom*osexuality, abortion, contraception, and lotteries—all in one bill. The decline of Christendom meant that a lot of people who used to be nominal Christians through legal or social pressures broke away from the church and its teachings.

There were, of course, unseemly, shouting-in-the-street disputes among different stripes of Christians, and pungent attacks on the churches from without. The longest quotation in The Religious Crisis of the 1960s is reverently allotted to the incoherent oracle of the Beat culture, Allen Ginsberg. The poet’s program for social reform is far more lucidly summarized by McLeod himself: “He was particularly hopeful about the beneficial effect that LSD could have on members of the government.” Desegregation, women’s liberation, free love, anti-colonial revolutions … the social and political issues descended upon the churches like the plagues of Egypt. A priest in Cleveland observed that the members of his congregation were so opposed to the clergy offering support to the Civil Rights movement that they would react with hostility to a sermon on loving your neighbor!

The most concrete result of the religious crisis of the 1960s was that “large numbers of people lost the habit of regular church-going.” Despite the impression given by the flamboyant confrontations that make up the era’s tribute edition, this was not so much a matter of people rejecting the church as them neglecting it. McLeod brilliantly argues that affluence was a major prompt for the decline of Christendom. Prosperity and full employment freed people from the need to do and say the right thing in the eyes of others. The good opinion of neighbors and extended family members became an insurance policy that people were increasingly willing to let lapse. Religious activities were no longer pursued just because they were a traditional social expectation.

Affluence also meant that free-time options became much more diverse and diverting. Church attendance gradually lost out to more entertaining pursuits. A related factor was the new orthodoxy of permissive parenting. German radicals apparently seriously believed that the cruelty of the guards in Nazi concentration camps stemmed from how they had been potty-trained. Generations of parents had insisted that their children were going to Sunday school whether they wanted to or not, but the 1960s broke that cycle. Once again, by and large, these youths did not stop going because they had formulated new views on the question of God: they simply wanted to stay out late on Saturday night and then sleep in.

One line of speculation avers that the dropping of the catechetical baton was compounded by the mass entry of women into the workforce. For over a century men had been saddling their wives with the full responsibility for the spiritual formation of their children. With women now holding jobs outside the home and husbands not jumping in to help with the housework, something had to give, and it was often teaching the little ones how to pray. Christendom declined because the young were no longer being socialized into Christianity. This was not a process of examining and rejecting the claims of Christianity: a significant percentage of people went awol when it came to religious education and then, once adults, they in turn had nothing to pass on to their own children. When a journalist asked the English footballer David Beckham if he was planning to have his son christened, he replied that he liked the idea, “but I don’t know into what religion.”

The Religious Crisis of the 1960s provides a compelling and persuasive account of the complex changes it addresses. Nevertheless, I part ways with McLeod on two points. One is regarding our personal perspectives on the church controversies of that era. McLeod acknowledges that his sympathies are with “the theological modernizers.” At times, this stance affects what he does and does not see. On a trivial level, he can report that the official slogan of the assembly of the World Council of Churches at Uppsala in 1968 was “The World Sets the Agenda” without noticing that this is so risible as to be parody-proof. More substantially, McLeod claims unconvincingly that although all the churches that continued to grow happened to be theologically conservative, this is not the relevant factor. (Indeed it is—it might even have had something to do with them not letting the world set their agenda.)

Even this critique should not be pushed too far, however, as McLeod baldly reveals that the evangelical movement was the big religious winner of the 1960s, especially in its Spirit-filled, chorus-singing manifestations. The amplified self-importance of the Woodstock scene has reverberated so much that it is stunning to read a clear-eyed, historical assessment such as this: “In the longer run the worldwide impact of the Charismatic Movement has been far greater than that of the counter-culture.”

The other main theologically conservative option, the Roman Catholic Church, took on some prize fights in the 1960s and hemorrhaged active members. A lot of the Catholic progressives seemed to want to be Protestants. Many of their proposed reforms read like a championing of the priesthood of all believers. And what could be more Lutheran than the recurring stunt of a priest marrying a former nun?

The Catholic Church’s ban on the use of birth control products was formally under review for several years. Many lay people assumed that this world lead to its being overturned and started to live in the good of the coming kingdom. When the pope surprisingly reaffirmed the ban in 1968, many Catholics became estranged from the Church. Likewise, young liberal or mainline Protestants tended to identify so strongly with the heady social and political movements of the period that the latter eventually became their surrogate church. In contrast to these two groups, “Conservative branches of Protestantism weathered the storm more effectively.”

Second, McLeod unduly minimizes the difference between Europe and the United States. It is common to observe that America has not followed other Western nations on the path of secularization. McLeod objects: “These contrasts are exaggerated … the points in common are more important than the points of difference.” He acknowledges the anomaly that religion plays a large, overt role in American politics. That aside, McLeod observes that the main divergence is merely that Christianity in America is still strong in “popular culture.” Hmm. But besides that one thing …

Hugh McLeod rightly reminds us to keep control groups in view lest we wrongly infer from declining church attendance an informed critique of religion. Marxist and socialist organizations lost a greater percentage of their members than the churches did, despite Marxism being intellectually fashionable in both the universities and the liberation movements energizing young people. That is to say, what has actually been in decline is organizational commitments generally. Even in Britain, the Christian Union is still often the largest student-run organization at universities.

Therefore, McLeod ultimately sees the modern churches as having faced some heavy sociological forces reasonably well: “Yet, in the pluralist and relatively secular societies of the later twentieth century, the Christian churches continued to have an important role. At a time when many other voluntary organizations had also suffered serious decline, they remained the largest in numbers of active members, and the widest-ranging in social influence.” Irreligious Sixties radicals did not imagine that.

1. This is a view that I hold myself. See Timothy Larsen, “Dechristendomization as an Alternative to Secularization: Theology, History, and Sociology in Conversation,” Pro Ecclesia, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer 2006), pp. 320-37.

Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, is the author of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford Univ. Press). His new book, about the Bible in the 19th century, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A number of contemporary writers on “global Christianity” think that it is important for Westerners to learn from the forms of Christianity practised in the “Global South,” particularly Africa. Foremost among them is Philip Jenkins, whose 2006 book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, reviewed in Books & Culture, concludes with an exhortation for Western Christians to try “reading from the South.” This imaginative practice “can help free biblical passages and even whole genres from the associations they have acquired from our own historical inheritance.” Jenkins says little about how one could learn this way of reading and thinking, though I am sure that going to live in a Christian community in the Global South would be the ideal. However, a more modest step that any Westerner can take is to make a point of reading books written by Asian, African, and Latin American Christians—such as Karen King-Aribisala.

King-Aribisala is an English professor in sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous city, Lagos, Nigeria. Her 1989 collection Our Wife and Other Stories and her two novels, Kicking Tongues (1998) and The Hangman’s Game (2007), are all available in North America and are all well suited for undergraduate literature classes. The Hangman’s Game was awarded the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the “Best Book” from the African Commonwealth countries.

The Hangman’s Game weaves together two stories that are separated by nearly two centuries and by the Atlantic Ocean. The first is narrated by a comically neurotic Nigerian woman, originally from Guyana, determined to write her novel in spite of her precarious pregnancy and her country’s tyrannical government. Nigeria’s president—obviously modeled after Sani Abacha, who ruthlessly ruled and pillaged Nigeria in the 1990s—is systematically executing his opponents. The two lead males, the novelist’s husband and her gardener, are involved in overlapping schemes to save the country from oppression: the husband plans a spiritual coup through a massive Christian outreach, and the gardener plans an armed coup that will use the outreach as a cover. The way King-Aribisala schematizes these two available responses to political desperation has the effect of schematizing modern Nigeria’s history, which is packed with armed coups and spiritual revivals. But neither of these big nationalist schemes comprehends a woman who has her hands full with a baby about to be born and a novel about to be written.

The second story is itself that novel-in-progress, Three Blind Mice, which keeps interrupting the first story. It is about the failed 1823 slave revolt in Demerara, a British colony now part of the South American country Guyana. Taken right from the history books are the main events: the Demerara revolt, though suppressed speedily and violently, involved many thousand slaves, and was the first major slave revolt in the Caribbean where Christianized slaves played a prominent role. A zealous young London Missionary Society missionary (his actual name was John Smith) was subsequently condemned to death as a conspirator, for since his arrival he had incited the antagonism of the plantation owners by teaching slaves to read and telling them that Christianity calls all men equal. Demerara’s governor makes an accurate prediction: “Teach the slaves to read, teach them from parts of the Bible which let them feel all men are equal in the sight of God … and you teach them revolt.” (King-Aribisala gives many such examples of the consequential and socially engaged biblical hermeneutics that Jenkins wants Western Christians to learn from.)

What makes the novel funny as well as insightful is the way that the two stories refuse to stay apart. Each story overflows into the other, and as a result the reader stays alert, listening in one story for echoes of what he has heard in the other. The boundaries are blurred between the oppression of black slaves in the British Empire and the oppression of black citizens in the independent but corrupt country of Nigeria. But The Hangman’s Game has more to say about writing than about politics. Though it depicts domineering rulers who deny the truth that their authority is always subordinate to God’s, its central conflict is the struggle of the domineering writer to relinquish control over both the real and the fictional people in her life. When she starts writing, she resolves, “As God is my witness, I was going to be in control whether they liked it or not—or kill them off.” But in dealing with her novel’s fictional people she gradually realizes that the right way to deal with real people is not to stay in perfect control by treating them as stock characters who can fulfill a function in a predetermined plot. She learns, rather, to practice love by acknowledging the uniqueness and having compassion toward the flaws of each person. And, repudiating the commonplace that in the world of the text the writer is God, she learns that God, not she, is in control.

King-Aribisala’s earlier novel, Kicking Tongues, charts a similar journey. The ambitious protagonist, during the course of narrating the story, realizes that her noble social and political goals can only be achieved once she acknowledges her own and her nation’s need for God. In the loose poem that serves as epilogue, she prays for the Lord to deliver Nigeria from “blood-guiltiness” and “perversities,” and thanks him for having taught her and her fellow pilgrims “How / To set this love / In order.” Indeed the book can be read as a pilgrimage towards a realignment of that which an African Christian writer two millennia before King-Aribisala, St. Augustine, called ordo amoris. For in the world as seen through King-Aribisala’s fiction, you can never solve horizontal, human-to-human problems unless you solve the vertical problem—and I think this is a major reason why her work has received little scholarly attention. Her vision matches what Jenkins says about African Christianity in at least one sense: it is thoroughly un-secular.

If implicitly this is a novel about a woman’s and a nation’s pilgrimage towards repentance and reconciliation with God, explicitly it is about forty individuals’ pilgrimage from the Eko Holiday Inn in Lagos, the old Nigerian capital, to the new capital, Abuja. Into the soil of late 20th-century Nigeria, King-Aribisala transplants Chaucer’s pilgrimage from the Tabard Inn in Southwark towards Canterbury. (Some might consider a strategy like this, adopted by an African writer, as a kind of subservience to the Western canon or as a lack of cultural authenticity. Actually, the net effect of this transplanting is robust confidence rather than subservience, because King-Aribisala retells The Canterbury Tales with aplomb, and grounds it squarely in the Nigerian cultural and political context.)

Since she invites comparison, I should mention that in terms of both psychological perceptivity and verbal artistry King-Aribisala is no match for Chaucer. Her characters are often schematic, and never as hilariously hypocritical as Chaucer’s; her long passages of free-verse poetry often seem to be poorly edited padding. But like Chaucer she succeeds, by the very heterogeneity of her narrative structure and by the disharmony of the voices contained in it, in pointing to the futility of human effort and the need for grace. The Abuja-bound bus—its passengers include a milkmaid, a deaconness, a police superintendent, an English graduate student, a traditional Yoruba Chief, and an air-hostess—becomes a microcosm of Nigerian society, full of engaging ethnographic details. Each passenger has a tale to tell: the woman in purdah tells of how she saved her husband from his debtors by dressing him up as a veiled woman; the British umbrella salesman tells of how his encounter with Nigeria made him confront within himself a subtle tendency toward violence and misogyny. Though the strong-willed narrator attempts to monopolize all their voices, she does not succeed, and by the end of the journey resolves (much like the narrator in Hangman’s Game) to grant others the freedom to deviate from the plot she had in mind for them.

Many observers, myself included, are convinced that Christianity’s center of gravity is shifting southward, away from the North Atlantic countries and toward their former colonies, and are further persuaded that this shift will bring blessings both to the church and to the world. In the January/February issue of Books & Culture, Andy Crouch raised doubts about the “slippery metaphor” of this shifting center, and about whether the North Atlantic countries have really lost their status as the site of the most influential forms of Christianity. His caution is justified, and the speed of the shift should not be exaggerated. However, current trends in the global church suggest to me that a city such as Lagos, far outside the borders of Western Christendom, is set to play a role in the first half of this millennium as important as was London’s in the second half of the last millennium. If I am right, then Chaucer and King-Aribisala, though separated by many centuries, have more in common than the plot structure of their literary works. Both are lovingly critiquing a society where Christianity is predominant and yet shallow, where widespread piety often fails to produce personal integrity and public justice. Imagine if the critique were effective! Imagine if the Christianity King-Aribisala depicts were one day to have global influence as great as the Christianity Chaucer depicted!

These scenarios are fun to contemplate while reading The Hangman’s Game and Kicking Tongues. But a warning should be added to Jenkins’ exhortation to read from the South: this is not a trick for making belief easy, for regaining some lost simplicity. The sense I get in reading King-Aribisala is that I am looking into a world where belief is not easy but it is right, and though it can be painful it is good for the world. Her enjoyable writing makes a consistently strong point that putting God first and learning to make room for diverse voices are vital, even in a country as rife with religious and ethnic tension as Nigeria.

Stephen Ney is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of British Columbia.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

There are those, writes Charles Fountain, “who see baseball as succor to the soul, a spirit that binds eras and generations.” To say the least.

In early 20th-century Puerto Rico, “baseball was what fisherman thought about when they cast their lines and farmers when they harvested sugar cane,” writes Larry Tye in his biography of Satchel Paige. Richard Peterson remembers true love in rough and dirty midcentury Pittsburgh:

My buddies and I played baseball every day, beginning in the cold, soggy spring, through the dog days of summer, until the chilly fall rains turned our fields of dreams into mud. With neighborhood rivalries and individual pride at stake, we played a punishing, reckless brand of baseball that often went beyond a love of the game itself …. I lived for those games and couldn’t imagine what I would do with my life if I didn’t play some day for the Pirates.

Peterson was in college and on his way to becoming an English professor by the time his Pirates defied history, logic, and bookies everywhere by defeating the Yankees in the 1960 World Series. As the season came to a close, the city erupted into fiesta and melted into love, more than 100,000—a sixth of its population—showing up at midnight to welcome the team back after it seized the National League pennant. “Ever see anything like this?” a New York writer asked the Pirates’ Clem Labine, who had played on the Dodgers’ championship team five years before. “Not like this, dad. Even Brooklyn was never like this.”

Even Brooklyn. The words still sing and sting, a half-century later. New York had been to baseball what New Orleans was to jazz, the epicenter of a great national passion. In his 1994 documentary Baseball, Ken Burns, himself Brooklyn-born, beautifully captured the earthy intricacies of this allegiance, recording for posterity the language, syntax, and inflections of a trio of winsome and articulate New Yorkers—Stephen Jay Gould, Billy Crystal, and Doris Kearns Goodwin—recalling the baseball of their childhoods. Their testimonials warmly reinforce Robert E. Murphy’s contention that New York was then “so dense with baseball fans that it took three teams to represent it, each of them deeply rooted and closely identified with the place in which it played.” Succor to the soul indeed.

But even among its New York rivals, Brooklyn’s attachment to its team stood out. Through most of the 19th century, Brooklyn, incorporated as a separate city, had cultivated a careful distance from Manhattan. Against the countervailing wisdom of the age, many wished it to stay that way. “One grew tall and became the center of most American things,” writes Murphy in After Many a Summer: The Passing of the Giants and Dodgers and a Golden Age in New York Baseball. “The other grew wide and became the center of little except its own way of life and, for a while, even more than its mighty neighbor, of baseball.” By the 1950s, “all the country knew that Brooklyn was the Dodgers and the Dodgers were Brooklyn,” Ebbets Field the blessed site of holy union. After decades of sometimes bathetic failure, the team became a force following World War II, winning the 1955 World Series and numerous pennants. “Never had Brooklyn, intimate with baseball for more than 100 years, held a team so close to its heart,” Murphy, himself a small child in the 1950s, remarks.

But Murphy’s book is decidedly not memoir. It is history, and history at its best: impelled by a love that sharpens intelligence and deepens vision. His book, in fact, is hardly about the game of baseball at all—it’s rather about the Dodgers and Giants, New York City, and the (losing) battle to keep them together. With piercing judgment and tart irony he renders the injustice, injury, and pain the loss of these teams inflicted not only on New York but on the nation itself.

Murphy’s committed style may draw arguments, but his efforts to be scrupulously fair cannot be denied. His ample knowledge of the evidence and the historiography helps him present a richly complex story, with no simple, single villainous presence. Horace Stoneham and Walter O’ Malley, owners of the Giants and Dodgers respectively, were facing considerable economic, social, and civic pressures that left them uncertain of their abilities to keep the teams financially sound. Local identities were rapidly thinning, stretched by new forms of locomotion and weakened by dreams that promised truer identities elsewhere. Baseball, “inner-city-based, incompatible with the automobile, was looking old,” Murphy notes, with all major league teams struggling at the gate as the decade, year by year, revealed its goods—among them commercial jet service from the East Coast to the West, just beginning in 1958 (the year, not coincidentally, the Dodgers and Giants left town). There was certainly wonder in that. America was not just “moving again.” It was moving in all kinds of ways it had never moved before. Would it take baseball with it? The answer didn’t seem at all certain.

Along with granting a widespread perplexity, Murphy even finds evidence of good faith on the part of both the teams’ owners and the city officials who fought to keep them in New York. What he doesn’t find is enough good faith, at least not enough to justify the decisions of the owners to take the teams and run. Both teams were making money, the Dodgers loads of it—a model franchise, it seemed, the envy of the league. New York’s civic leaders scrambled, often dysfunctionally, to find ways to meet O’Malley’s insistent demands for a new stadium, one that could lure people beyond the borough back into town. It was not enough.

For his part, O’Malley, who had gained control of the Dodgers by 1950, claimed a profound commitment to Brooklyn. Others aren’t so sure, Murphy among them. “Whether or not he actually loved Brooklyn,” Murphy concludes, “he didn’t care as much about improving the borough as he did about having his own ballpark, built and located to his own specifications.” O’Malley’s new stadium in Los Angeles would be his lasting treasure. All the treasure left in Brooklyn was memory. In his famous “obituary” of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Dick Young of the New York Daily News pronounced judgment with mordant disdain: “The cause of death was acute greed, followed by severe political complications.” The Dodgers had died “the healthiest corpse in sports history.”

But in those bewildering cold war days, with the nation poised, as Robert Wuthnow has put it, between promise and peril, did all of this contention about baseball, all of this upset, truly matter? It wasn’t just the ordinary fans who felt deeply that it did. Perhaps the single most illuminating facet of Murphy’s book is his recapturing of the language and arguments New York’s leaders used as they faced what was, to them, a truly momentous situation, charged with civic import. Brooklyn congressman Emmanuel Celler forcefully contended that team owners should not see themselves as businessmen but rather as “sportsmen who were satisfied just to make a living while serving the interests of their fans.” New York City Council President (and Brooklynite) Abe Stark, in a statement before the Congress, stated his view just as sharply. “It is my belief,” he declared, “that a baseball franchise morally belongs to the people of a community. It is not the personal property of any individual, to be removed at the slightest whim.” George V. McLaughlin—onetime New York City police commissioner, part-owner of the Dodgers, president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, and friend of O’Malley—spoke in the same way as he led a last-ditch effort to purchase the Giants from Stoneham. His not-for-profit group, he explained in a letter to Stoneham, was comprised of “public-spirited citizens.”

If neither education nor government nor church nor the family nor health nor the sky nor even finance itself is safe in the market’s hands, why should we give baseball over to it?

Read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and you’ll find this very phrase, and phrases like it, used repeatedly. It’s the old republican tongue, insisting with a conviction born of bitter experience that purely private interests were finally corrupting of the ends that humans might—must—achieve, including, above all, a significant sense of solidarity and commonwealth, a prosperity born of mutuality. Citizen Franklin started a fire company, published a newspaper, and launched a debating club. Among McLaughlin’s concerns was baseball. Both men knew that such distinct yet interconnected activity was wonderfully and mysteriously necessary for the prospering of the whole. More ominously, they sensed that if these institutions, and a hundred like them, were absent, a dark expansive vacuum would emerge, to be inevitably filled by forces boasting an authority born of might, that could only degrade a citizenry into a warping dependency.

“Why was not one owner willing to stand up and say ‘no’ to the abandonment of New York fans?” wonders Murphy, wandering around in that void decades later. Why indeed? “It was now clear where baseball owners stood: for themselves and economic opportunity, rather than for devoted fans and a game’s traditions.”

This was the disturbing reality the departure of the Dodgers and Giants made clear. In its aftermath, some began to fight, in the words of Senator Estes Kefauver—another concerned citizen—to “return baseball to the American people.” None fought harder than Branch Rickey; probably none cared more. Rickey, the most historically significant baseball man of the century, was the executive with the brightest mind and sharpest vision for all facets of the game, including its social context. Born in 1881, Rickey had been part-owner of the Dodgers in the 1940s while also directing its day-to-day operations (including the operation to integrate black players into the majors)—until O’Malley, who detested him, forced him out. In an appearance before Congress in the spring of 1960, Rickey starkly opined that “the major league owners need to be saved from themselves.” He himself was in the midst of just such a salvation effort, the attempt to launch a new major league, the “Continental League,” which would, among other things, feature the kind of revenue-sharing among its eight teams that would later make the National Football League not only rich but also admirably competitive, keeping even small-market franchises in the game. Baseball owners resoundingly resisted (and still do).

In his sprightly history of this effort, Michael Shapiro notes that Rickey “threw himself into the job with the energy of a young man who saw a higher purpose in his work.” Baseball, Rickey believed, was, simply, good for the nation. Beyond that it was simply good, and should thus be preserved. But he also knew that such preservation was necessarily a civic act—hence his willingness to battle the owners in the U.S. Congress for the possibility of restoring and renewing the game. As Shapiro puts it, for Rickey “the game was a noble enterprise that the Senate was in a position to deliver to an eager nation.”

The Continental League failed, never playing a game. The owners cagily co-opted Rickey’s plan, deciding to permit franchise expansion for the first time in fifty-some years rather than grant the new league equal status. By this time, professional baseball was under threat for the first time from another sport, the far more disciplined, hierarchical, and entertainment-savvy NFL. Many predicted Major League Baseball’s demise. But eventually it found ways to latch on to the postwar economic juggernaut and ride into the expansive consumerist future, regaining some of its popularity in the 1970s by belatedly embracing free agency, and drifting along with the neo-traditionalist turn the nation took through the ’80s and ’90s, in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam.

It’s a story in many ways of ascent—costly ascent, as Charles Fountain’s Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training makes clear. In probing the underlying workings of the political economy that sustains the major leagues, he provides striking evidence of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter was getting at when at mid-century he described capitalism as a system propelled by “creative destruction.” The alliance of private capital, civic energy, and middle class affluence has certainly been creative: spring training has gone from a spare, money-losing necessity to a revenue-raising, profile-enhancing piece of promotion for town and team alike. Cities and counties throughout Florida and Arizona now vie for teams like drones in quest of the queen bee, and the golden honey of capital has flowed.

Fountain’s account of the wooing of the Astros for a new spring training site in Osceola County, Florida, in the mid-1980s, at the moment the competition for mlb attention was being jacked up to a new level, is nicely illustrative. “So what do you want? asked the county. The Astros began tentatively, afraid of asking for too much. Well, how about four practice fields, they said. Done, said the county. What else?” By winter of 1985 Astros general manager Al Rosen was one satisfied man. “I don’t think there is another spring training facility comparable to ours,” he announced.

That judgment didn’t hold up for even a decade; the facility, Fountain writes, became “quickly obsolete.” Other teams and towns had seized on Osceola’s example and pushed for more plush, sophisticated accommodations. Some efforts, like the misguided development of “Baseball City” in Polk County, Florida to which the Kansas City Royals had committed, flopped, and for good reason. “Had Baseball City been real,” judges Fountain, “had it been supported by a local population and a local government and a business community, spring training and the Royals might have had a chance.” But this “city” was, in the end, merely a brand, as vacuous as the names that now bedeck our stadiums. “Calling it ‘Baseball City’ … couldn’t make it a community,” Fountain concludes, suggesting that in this high-stakes game success requires “a high degree of coordination and cooperation among the state, the host cities, and the various civic groups”—not just “civic involvement” but “citizen involvement.”

One can almost see Franklin, and a little while later, Alexis de Tocqueville, smiling. Almost. It would be comforting to imagine that even capital, in the end, must submit to what Fountain calls the “real,” this solidity born of human devotion, affection, and persisting ties. But that’s not quite the way it works. Just ask Brooklyn.

Yet our abiding, sentimental faith that market-driven enterprise can safeguard and nurture our most necessary ideals, practices, and institutions persists. Haven’t we endured enough history by now to know better? If neither education nor government nor church nor the family nor health nor the sky nor even finance itself is safe in the market’s hands—despite the vigilance of good men and women striving to make the system work for us, not merely for itself—why should we give baseball over to it?

All fans know that three words, whether spoken by villains or saints, kill the spirit of whatever sport of which they’re said: It’s a business. Baseball is not a business, any more than is marriage, or teaching first grade, or playing four-square. If we want to raise boys and girls who will come, like the aging Satchel Paige, to preach “the sanctity of the double steal and the blessedness of the bunt,” we will find ways to preserve and protect this treasure. And chances are, if our children learn to feel the sanctity of the double steal, they’ll come to know other realms of sanctity, too—and perhaps gain the courage to construct ways of guarding them.

Eric Miller is associate professor of history at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. His book Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch will be published by Eerdmans this spring.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

At a conference luncheon some years ago, I sat next to Sally Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor’s longtime friend and the editor of her collected works. O’Connor aficionados had been breathlessly awaiting the biography that Fitzgerald was purportedly writing, and so that day at the table we were eager for whatever revelations Fitzgerald was willing to divulge. There were none (it turns out there was probably also no biography, as we would discover later), but Fitzgerald was ready with hints for all of us. After a scathing review of various O’Connor critics, she turned to a well-known author sitting at the table and said, “I have your book with all of the corrections written in. If you’d like me to send it to you in exchange for a new copy, I would be happy to do so.” I imagine the author never got around to arranging this exchange.

It is not too hard to conclude what Fitzgerald would have thought of Brad Gooch’s new biography of O’Connor. Gooch indicates that in 1980, Fitzgerald discouraged him from even considering beginning such a project since she claimed it would be so similar to her own. She impertinently offered to hire him as an assistant should that need ever arise, however. And it would be safe to say that during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, without her imprimatur no biography of O’Connor would ever have been authorized. The family and Fitzgerald jealously guarded letters and other primary sources, and Fitzgerald wanted to be sure that any picture that would emerge in any biography would be one thoroughly vetted by herself. She wanted absolute control.

Years passed, and it became clear that—despite her repeated claims to the contrary—no biography would emerge from Fitzgerald’s mounds of research. In 2000, she died without finishing her project. In 2003, Jean W. Cash published Flannery O’Connor: A Life, the first biography of the author. Reviewers were generally disappointed in the work, calling it an overwhelming collection of facts that did not create a picture of a full human being. Cash made no attempt to connect the life with the work, and while she presented the events of O’Connor’s life, she was unable to portray the truth of that life as if it made any difference to the work. Actually, up to now, the most effective story of O’Connor’s life has been the one she herself tells in The Habit of Being, the collection of O’Connor’s letters edited by Fitzgerald. In these letters one sees the full person, her musings on her work, her scathing sense of humor, her theological reflections and her clear identity as a Roman Catholic, her struggles with debilitating illness, and the rush to a premature end as the letters abruptly stop on July 28, 1964, several days before her death from lupus at age thirty-nine. In fact, many of the events described by Gooch can be found in this collection of letters, but Gooch, unlike Cash, attempts to connect at least some of the dots and ultimately to connect many of the facts of O’Connor’s life with her writing.

Gooch interviewed hundreds of O’Connor’s friends, family, and acquaintances, and delved into unpublished letters he discovered in libraries and private collections across the country. In addition, he had access to the recently unsealed letters of “A,” who corresponded with O’Connor for several years and remained anonymous until her suicide, at which time her identity as Betty Hester was revealed. As a result of this painstaking research, Gooch is able to present quite a bit of new information about the various phases of O’Connor’s short life. Some of the most fascinating tidbits come from roommates and friends during her years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; her time at Yaddo, the artists’ center in Saratoga Springs, New York; and her residence in New York and in Connecticut with the Fitzgeralds. Of particular interest is the fact that her own mother would not tell O’Connor about the diagnosis of her illness; instead, Fitzgerald told her during one of O’Connor’s trips north.

This is not a literary biography in the full sense. Gooch does not delve deeply into the stories. But he is interested in finding echoes in the stories of events in O’Connor’s life. For example, Gooch identifies what he considers the real-life prototype for the Bible salesman Manley Pointer from “Good Country People.” O’Connor got to know Erik Langkjaer, a textbook salesman, in the early 1950s. Regina, O’Connor’s mother, reported at one point that he was O’Connor’s “boyfriend,” and that she was heartbroken when he married someone else. In the story, Hulga-Joy, an atheistic 33-year-old PhD with a wooden leg, almost allows herself to be seduced by the young Bible salesman before he steals her wooden leg and runs away. Before he does that, he kisses her, and O’Connor writes, “The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain.” Years later, Erik Langkjaer recalled what it was like to kiss O’Connor: “As our lips touched I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no real muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori, and so the kissing stopped …. I had kissed other girls, and there had been this firm response, which was totally lacking in Flannery. So I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton, and in that sense it was a shocking experience.” Whether this was a more or less accurate recollection of Langkjaer’s perception at the time goes unexplored, but it is clear that Gooch feels he has made a significant connection between the life and the work. It is a questionable connection, interesting from a certain angle if it is true, but is it particularly significant?

A biographer must make constant judgments about inclusion and exclusion of the details of a person’s life. In spite of its many good qualities, this book has one glaring flaw, which will keep it from being the definitive O’Connor biography we have been waiting for, and it has to do with what Gooch omits in his quest for connections. O’Connor’s work is at its core profoundly theological because the author, a pre-Vatican II Catholic, was an ardent believer. In story after story and in all of her letters and essays, O’Connor’s foremost concern is communicating the truth of the gospel through remarkable works of the imagination. Setting out to write for a blind and deaf generation, she realized that in order to get their attention, she would have to “shout … and draw large and startling pictures,” and in the process she created a strikingly original body of work undergirded by a profoundly Christian aesthetic. Her knowledge of Scripture was extensive, and her surviving library, filled with her own marginalia, reveals an active and lively theological mind. But this unmistakable reality—that O’Connor’s faith was at the very core of her being—does not drive Gooch’s reading of her life. One can only conclude that such an orientation is as alien to him as it has been to critics over the years who have omitted any consideration of that which was most important to her and, in fact, was her entire reason for writing. In her essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” O’Connor writes, “The meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and … what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don’t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction.” Of course some of these critics, invoking the intentional fallacy, contend that O’Connor’s own pronouncements about her work are misleading and should be ignored or at the very least treated with hermeneutical suspicion. This might be a viable position if her own statements did not line up so exactly with the direction of her fiction.

Gooch does not completely ignore O’Connor’s faith; he downplays it, and it becomes in his picture of O’Connor no more than an idiosyncrasy of an especially odd person—just what you would expect, in other words, from a woman of O’Connor’s peculiar tastes, and, therefore, a part of her life to be pushed conveniently to the periphery in her biography. This is clearly not an accurate assessment, and it is reason enough to question Gooch’s overall judgment. We look forward to the biography that O’Connor’s friend William Sessions is now writing, and trust that the third attempt to capture her life will contain the whole person.

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner is professor of English and Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Poet Mary Karr came to national attention with her bestselling 1995 memoir The Liars’ Club and its sequel, Cherry, five years later. Jon M. Sweeney talked with her about her new memoir, Lit, shortly before its publication last November.

There seem to be two distinct aspects of your writing, and they may not really be connected. You write bestselling memoirs and award-winning poetry. Do you find it tough to do both sorts of work at the same time?

I don’t do both at the same time. The memoir writing is a very punishing kind of work. Prose favors information, and it is more baroque and bulky, though some prose is easier than memoir. I can always write a piece of journalism in a pinch, or read and critique a dissertation, but poetry doesn’t work that way. Poetry is different for me—much harder aesthetically speaking. The page you start with is extremely blank.

Also in contrast to memoir, poetry has this great virtue of economy. Plus, I just love it.

So how did the new memoir come to be?

To be honest, I turned down a large advance for Lit, and I did it from prayer. The offer came when Cherry was on the bestsellers lists, and people in publishing started offering me money. But I wrote a book of poetry instead. Then within two weeks of when I started working on Lit, I was in London at a party where I hardly knew anybody, and I sort of bumbled into both my agent and the woman who ended up acquiring it. I’d been in Prague and had slopped down about fifty pages (eventually deleted), and I was in London for a day. That’s been my experience in terms of prayer: I had literally just started putting words to this thing, and this editor I’d worked with before announced she was leaving the UK for Harper Collins US, and she was eager to get a proposal. That’s how I often feel guided. There’s this profound ease. It’s not that there are not struggles and hardships, but I have a sense that I’ve been guided, steered. This also happened when I was facing an NYU tuition bill that exceeds most annual salaries in academia.

People often say it was so lucky I ran into them at just that minute. For me, it’s evidence of God.

One of my favorite parts of the early going in Lit is the story of how you taught poetry to a group of functional but retarded women at a home in Minneapolis. Their ability to spot a good poem from a lousy one seemed dead-on. And you wrote: “To say the women changed my life may be a stretch, but only just …. Maybe the girls in my gym class had been right all along, and poetry was a trick on smart people—a bunch of hooey, fawned over by whining fops of the most stick-up-the-ass variety. The way an uncertain believer might stumble onto proof of God, the women at the group home fully converted me to the Church of Poetry.” So here’s my question: Is there a similarity between bad poetry and bad religion?

Yes, absolutely. You can smell it. Both have that sense of fakery. People who have grown up in more traditional Christian upbringings often have to wrestle themselves free of dogma that was punishing to them. There’s something false about bad poetry, something inaccurate or unreal about both bad religion and bad poetry. Donald Justice once distinguished between being emotional and being sentimental. To be emotional, you have evidence, but not with sentiment—the author somehow instructs you to feel sad or cranky or whatever without fully letting you know why.

I remember once going to a revival meeting as a child in Texas and being very moved by the whole thing, and then hearing this woman standing near me say, “I prayed for her, and I know I’m keeping burning coals from falling on top of her head.” And I thought, Oh my, there’s something false about this church crap. People can tell when religion isn’t right.

I was fascinated throughout Lit with the ways that you talked about what Christians might call the work of the Holy Ghost. I don’t think you ever actually used those words, though, did you?

I threw out 500 pages of this book, and it was mostly stuff that sounded like I was proselytizing. That’s the last way I wanted to sound. I made a conscious decision to talk about religion in a way that I hoped a secular audience could hear. It wasn’t easy. Talking about religion to the non-practicing human is like doing card tricks on the radio, or watching p*rn to understand making love.

I originally had a lot of stuff in there about the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, for instance, but I took most of it out. My editor saved me. I’m a big fan of prayer partly because I believe in its power. The truth is: I took a lot of that stuff out of the book because it’s something I prayed about.

You tell the story of your marriage, its troubles, and its eventual end. At one point, you talk about admiring your husband’s “cool certainty” versus your own “ragtag intermittently drunken lurching around.” Which of those ways would you say you approach God these days?

I wouldn’t say my approach to God is at all intermittent. Probably my mass attendance isn’t where it should be. But other than that, I talk to God every day, throughout the day. I know that that sounds pious and crazy, but it’s true. I’ll sometimes walk down the street and pray for a face that walks by. “Lord bless her,” I’ll say to myself. That sort of thing. On those five blocks between my apartment and my gym, something magical kind of happens. People become very particular. I see their rage. Their desire. They look more real to me. Now is that contact with God? I think so.

Again I pray not from being particularly devoted or righteous, but because I’m particularly desperate. My mind isn’t always my friend. God corrects my thought, or spiritual seeking of any kind does—even counting my breaths one to ten in a sort of Zen practice can turn down the volume on my noggin. I also say the St. Francis prayer a lot. I have a lot of prayers. So, intermittent religious practice—no. But ragtag, certainly.

I remember saying to my spiritual director that as soon as I pray and give this to God it is going to be okay and I’m going to feel okay—and that makes me really mad! Why doesn’t he just nail me all to the cross and get it over with? Now I talk with God, to Jesus, that way. Really frankly.

When I first got sober, people used to say to me, Everything’s going to be all right. But one time a woman said back to me, Well, everything’s all right now. I was checking into a mental institution at the time, but she was right, and I heard it, too.

Good days, I have this sense of being who I’m supposed to be in the world. It gets very quiet in my head, and that’s the presence of God in my life, of Jesus my brother, and those things keep me coming back, like going to McDonald’s for fries. When I’m like that, everything just keeps working.

A Jesuit asked me, when I was getting sober, “What would you write if you weren’t afraid of anything?” The answer is, I have no idea. I still don’t have an idea. I’ve been afraid for so much of my life. And I don’t work on a long-term plan. I get very simple, parental messages—not lowered on a fishhook from a cloud—but a still voice tells me to take a nap or have a sandwich. Or it tells me that God’s greatest joy is when I’m fully alive and who I am—which is something I didn’t get as a kid. It is a great sweetness.

Of course, there are times when it’s very arid with God. On my bad days, I think of God like he’s a tree stump or a subtle bastard. I used to think of God as a more paternal figure. There’s a great prayer, Jesus, my lord and savior and my good brother, sprinkle me with the blood of the Lamb. I can sense Christ as my brother. But the past month, maybe, I sense all I don’t know and can never know as okay. On good days, I can ask myself in every situation: Where is God in this? Yes, sometimes he’s a subtle bastard. But most often, not. I haven’t had a drink for 20 years, and that’s grace. That’s God’s good grace.

Jon M. Sweeney’s most recent book is Cloister Talks (Brazos Press). He was received into the Roman Catholic Church on October 4, 2009.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The quest of the historical Jesus is turning out to be like my wife’s search for the perfect coffeemaker: unending. Albert Schweitzer traced the quest critically from the 18th century up to his own time (the early 20th century) and added an apocalyptic wrinkle to that quest, now called “the first quest.” Largely because the temporary ascendance of existential theology made historical concerns seem relatively unimportant (what counts is what impacts your existence here and now), questing for the historical Jesus lapsed into something of a coma till Ernst Käsemann revived it with an influential lecture in 1953. This second quest fizzled quickly, though. Its historiographical skepticism kept it from producing very much more than a question mark. In reaction, a cadre of scholars said we can do better by concentrating on the Jewishness of Jesus. For we now have an increased understanding of 1st-century Judaism, against which background we can evaluate the canonical evangelists’ portrayals of Jesus. Hence the so-called third quest.

Enter John P. Meier into the ranks of third-questers. Law and Love makes up volume 4 of his A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Meier intended to write only one volume, but two more volumes followed. He then determined to make volume 4 his last by taking up in it the enigmas of Jesus on the Mosaic law, Jesus’ parables, Jesus’ self-identifications, and the reason(s) for his crucifixion. (Apparently because it would entail the supernatural, a resurrection of Jesus, along with his miracles, lies outside the confines of enigmas open to historical research “using scientific tools,” in which case David Hume wins—historiographically speaking—before an examination of testimonial evidence even starts.) Alas, volume 4 manages to cover only the first enigma; and it is hard to imagine that Jesus’ parables, self-identifications, and crucifixion, about each of which others have written voluminously, can be covered in a single fifth volume by so learned and meticulous a scholar as Meier. The perfect coffeemaker is turning into an elusive pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

To his credit, Meier differentiates the historical Jesus, limited to what can be learned about him through accepted criteria of historical research, from the totality of Jesus’ words and deeds; and he disavows presenting his historical Jesus as “the new and improved version of Christian faith in Christ.” The supposedly accepted criteria of historical research used by Meier have recently suffered considerable qualification and criticism, however; and his use of those criteria shows some inconsistency. Take, for example, the criterion of dissimilarity, or discontinuity: what “cannot be derived either from the Judaism(s) of Jesus’ time or from the early church” is likely historical, because it’s unlikely to have been made up. Yet Meier hails as historical several of Jesus’ legal pronouncements not only because they differ from Judaism (and early Christianity) but also because Jesus’ very making of legal pronouncements characterizes Judaism: “First-century Palestinian Judaism being what it was, how could a religiously oriented Jew who tried to lead a religious movement … among his fellow Jews be anything else [than ‘the halakic Jesus,’ that is, a Jesus who made pronouncements concerning the Mosaic law]?” So it’s dissimilarity that supports historicity for Jesus’ halakic pronouncements, but it’s similarity that supports historicity for the halakic Jesus himself. Hmmm. Why couldn’t someone argue that Jesus’ Jewish followers falsely made him appear halakic so as to tone down his off-putting, unfulfilled apocalypticism and thus appeal to a wider audience for whom halakic teachers were acceptable?

Meier trumpets his own dissimilarity by averring that though he may not be right in his positions, “every other book or article on the historical Jesus and the Law has been to a great degree wrong.” Yet similarity to majority opinion among current scholars marks Meier when without argument he treats none of the canonical Gospels as written till 40-70 years after Jesus’ death and treats the traditions about Jesus as reworked many times prior to even our earliest records of those traditions in Mark and Q (a putative sayings-source reflected in Matthew and Luke). Never mind the arguments of some current scholars that the very early church father Papias’ description of Mark’s Gospel as enshrining Peter’s recollections favors a severe limitation of reworking, for example, and that favoring earlier dates of writing are the lack of any reference in the reports of Jesus’ Olivet Discourse to the burning of the Jews’ temple in ad 70 and Matthew’s repeated insertions of Sadducees into paralleled material though the Sadducees lost their importance (and most of them their very lives) in the destruction of Jerusalem at that time. The dating of our sources affects judgments about historicity, of course.

Let it be said, though, that Meier’s book contains a wealth of useful information, acute observations, and penetrating argument, much of which appears in lengthy footnotes. Consider the superb explanation of Old Testament purity laws, buttressed by 500 lines of bibliography in a single footnote of fine print. What appear to be digressions make sense as comparative backcloth for the purported legal pronouncements of Jesus. Regardless of disagreements, the breadth and depth of Meier’s scholarship call for high admiration.

As to the Mosaic law, Meier helpfully notes (1) variant readings in its texts; (2) the later addition of commands to the Law as though they originally appeared in it (take Jesus’ transforming Moses’ assumption of a divorce certificate [Deut. 24:1-4] into Moses’ commanding such a certificate to be written and given [Mark 10:2-5; Matt. 5:31]); and (3) diverse interpretations of the Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Old Testament apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, writings of the 1st-century Jewish philosopher Philo and the 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus, and rabbinical literature dating from considerably later—all these for comparison with Jesus’ legal pronouncements. As to primitive Christianity, Meier commendably denies that the apocryphal Gospels and the Nag Hammadi materials, including the Gospel of Thomas, provide independent historical sources concerning Jesus, rejects the Jesus Seminar’s portrayal of Jesus as “a wandering Cynic philosopher in the Greco-Roman mold,” and speaks of “mainstream Christianity” in the 1st century as opposed to the notion of a crazy quilt of disparate Jesus-sects.

After discussing the question, What is the Law? Meier takes up the pronouncements of Jesus on divorce, notes that Jesus’ making adultery a consequence of divorce presumes remarriage, and judges that the historical Jesus forbade such divorce totally. Supporting this judgment are (1) the multiple attestation of these pronouncements in various kinds of literature (Gospels, a sayings-source [Q], and a Pauline epistle); (2) the pronouncements’ dissimilarity to what is said about divorce in all relevant background literature (so that it’s unlikely Jesus’ pronouncements were read onto his lips from elsewhere); (3) the coherence of such radical pronouncements with the radicality of Jesus’ other pronouncements and celibacy; and (4) the embarrassment caused Christians by the stringency of Jesus’ pronouncements on divorce, an embarrassment evident in Matthew’s redactional addition of “except for immorality” (even if this exception were to apply only to remarriage-less divorce [Matt. 5:32; 19:9]) and in Paul’s acquiescence to the divorce of a Christian by his or her non-Christian spouse (its remaining unclear whether Paul allows the Christian to remarry [1 Cor. 7:15]). I would quibble with Meier over his treating as unhistorical the narrative surrounding Jesus’ pronouncements in Mark 10:2-12 and Matthew 19:3-12, and over Meier’s brushing aside the Mishnaic evidence of a 1st-century debate between Hillelites and Shammaites over sufficient grounds for divorce (there being astounding correspondences between the Mishnaic rules for judging cases of capital blasphemy and Mark’s account of Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin, to take a parallel case). Nevertheless, Meier is justified in his scoring of those who allow their pastorally lenient concerns to lower the bar set by the historical Jesus on the topic of divorce.

Next comes Jesus’ absolute prohibition of oaths. Meier traces this prohibition back to the historical Jesus on the ground of its attestation in both a Gospel (Matthew 5:34-37) and an epistle (James 5:12); on the additional ground of the prohibition’s dissimilarity, particularly in its absoluteness, to all relevant background literature (the Law allowing and sometimes commanding oaths); and finally on the ground that throughout the church’s history most Christians have loosened the prohibition out of embarrassment over its stringency, so that early Christian invention seems unlikely.

If then the absolute prohibitions of divorce and oaths derive from the historical Jesus, he dared to prohibit what the Law allowed and commanded even though (it goes almost without saying) he affirmed the Law as a whole. How does Meier handle this inconcinnity? A full answer awaits his discussion of Jesus’ self-identifications. Already, though, Meier portrays him as a self-consciously eschatological prophet. But would such a prophet have arrogated to himself the authority to abrogate certain elements of God’s law given through Moses? Wouldn’t an even more exalted self-image have been required?

Yet precisely because Mark 2:28 plays “the Christological trump card” in favor of Jesus’ letting his disciples violate the Sabbath (“And so the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath”), Meier judges the saying inauthentic. But if the historical Jesus attacked, subverted, or annulled the laws regarding divorce and oaths, as Meier affirms he did, why should Meier judge it “too ludicrous” to think Jesus did the same in regard to Sabbath law? Furthermore, all supposed violations of the Sabbath by Jesus himself take place in stories of miraculous healings. Since miracle-stories are ipso facto historically suspect, those violations are likewise suspect. But Meier judges it historically true that Jesus and his followers thought he performed miracles whether or not he actually did. So what is to prevent our judging those stories to be dealing with the historical Jesus? Might the failure of all relevant background literature written prior to AD 70—might its failure to prohibit healing on the Sabbath prevent our judging those stories historically authentic? Meier thinks so. To the contrary, we might ask why first-generation Christians would have invented stories that made recognizable nonsense as regards contemporary understandings of Sabbath law. And why don’t the New Testament stories count as evidence that Jesus’ opponents regarded healing on the Sabbath as a violation thereof? It seems as though Meier would regard similar stories about others as such evidence if those stories appeared outside the Gospels.

Because of well-known differences between Jesus’ appeal to David’s action at the house of God (Mark 2:25-26) and the story as it appears in 1 Samuel 21:2-10, Meier thinks it impossible that Jesus, halakic as Meier portrays him to have been, would have “proceed[ed] in the presence of those scriptural experts [the Pharisees] to mangle and distort the text of the story” and make “embarrassing mistakes.” To take but two of many possible examples, however, since Matthew, no slouch when it came to mining the Old Testament, freely used Hosea 11:1‘s reference to Israel’s exodus from Egypt in the distant past as a messianic prediction (Matthew 2:15) and since Paul, an ex-Pharisee and scriptural expert, freely applied the rejection and restoration of Israel as God’s people according to Hosea 2:23; 1:10 to believing Gentiles, who had never been God’s people, then the historical Jesus could have used Scripture with similar freedom. Meier’s argument rests faultily on a modern canon of interpretation.

Mainly because it expresses “creation theology within the context of the end time,” as does one of Jesus’ authentic pronouncements on divorce, Meier does give the saying that “the Sabbath came into being because of humanity, and not humanity because of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27) “a good chance of coming from the historical Jesus.” Mark 2:27 doesn’t negate Sabbath law, however. Nor does Jesus’ asking what man wouldn’t pull his son, ox, or sheep out of a well or pit on the Sabbath (Matt. 12:11; Luke 14:5; see also Luke 13:15). Rather, these sayings give expression to the historical Jesus’ “commonsense approach to Sabbath observance” so as “to shield ordinary pious Jews [‘who could hardly afford to stand by when they were in danger of losing one of their livestock, to say nothing of their children’] from the attraction of sectarian rigorism” as taught and practiced by “the Essenes or other sectarians.” Oops. I thought radical rigorism is supposed to characterize sayings attributable to the historical Jesus, as in his absolute prohibitions of divorce and oaths. Now relaxed common sense does the trick. Oh the vagaries of the quest!

The topic of Jesus and Jewish laws of purity comes up next, with a focus on Mark 7:1-23, the whole of which Meier considers inauthentic with the possible exception of verses 10-12 concerning the vow of Corban (the dedication of a gift to God). As to this exception, Meier says “the conflict [between the dedication to God and the command to honor your needy parents by letting them use the gift] does not seem to annul the very practice of making a vow.” But if the historical Jesus forbade all vows, he had no need to say that honoring your parents overrides the vow of Corban. The vow shouldn’t have been made in the first place. So either Meier should consider these verses inauthentic along with the rest; or we should regard these verses as simply an exposé of the Pharisees’ hypocrisy, in which case historicity not only for verses 10-12 but also for their narrative framework, where the Pharisees figure, becomes a viable possibility.

A battery of objections dog that possibility, though: (1) Extra-biblical literature doesn’t support that all Jews rinsed their hands before eating. Yet examples of hyperbole occur in Mark 1:5, 33, 39; 6:33 (compare John 12:19). Why not in Mark 7:3, too, especially since, despite a similar lack of literary support, the immersions that Mark also mentions in 7:4 are supported by archaeological evidence? If 7:3-4 occurred in pre-70 Jewish literature outside the New Testament, would Meier count the passage as valid evidence? Why would Mark or some Christian before him engage in the hyperbole that all Jews rinsed their hands before eating if not enough of them did so to justify the hyperbole? Surely it would be generally known that they didn’t. And the mysterious phrase, “with a fist,” speaks against unhistorical invention. For wouldn’t a fabricator of the story make it culturally understandable? (2) In verses 6-7, Mark writes for the most part the Greek text of Isaiah 29:13, which excoriates the teaching of merely human commandments, whereas Jesus would have used the Hebrew text, which excoriates the merely mechanical practice of commandments. But it’s the practice of human commandments according to the Hebrew, so that the shift from practice to teaching simply sharpens the point of the commandments’ human origin; and the evangelists often redacted an authentic quotation to suit their own emphases. (3) The shift from hand-rinsing to food laws is unnatural. Not at all! Shifting from how to eat to what to eat makes for a natural progression. (4) Though an abrogation of kosher laws satisfies the criteria of “both discontinuity from the Judaism of Jesus’ day … and a style coherent with those sayings of Jesus that are generally considered authentic,” “it hardly seems credible that the popular Palestinian Jewish teacher named Jesus should have rejected or annulled in a single logion [the saying in v. 15 that nothing going into the body can defile a person] all the laws on prohibited foods enshrined in Leviticus and Deuteronomy …. If Jesus did actually annul the food laws, how did he remain so popular and influential among the common people …?” Well, it seems credible to Meier that Jesus prohibited divorce and oaths absolutely yet remained popular (despite the frequency of divorce and oaths, one might add). (5) Early Jewish Christians kept kosher, so that Jesus mustn’t have abrogated that feature of the Law. But why did the table fellowship of Peter, Barnabas, and other Jewish Christians with Gentile Christians come under criticism from Judaizers if it wasn’t for the eating of non-kosher food (Galatians 2:11-13)?

So much for Jesus and the Law. Now for Jesus and love. There is much to laud in Meier’s discussion of this topic. He argues that the historical Jesus reaffirmed the Old Testament commands to love God and your neighbor. Dissimilarity favors historicity in that neither any Jewish writing prior to Jesus or soon after him nor any New Testament book outside the Synoptics quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18b word-for-word and back-to-back, ranks them in order of importance, and rates the two of them superior to all other commands, as Jesus does. A kind of multiple attestation likewise favors historicity in that the double love-command in the earliest Gospel (Mark 12:29-31) is joined by the command in a sayings-source (Q as reflected in Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) to love your enemies. Jesus’ welding together widely separated love-commands, ranking them in relation to each other, and rating them superior to all other commands show that he reflected on the totality of the Law, possessed halakic competence, and probably knew how to read. But given Matthew’s redaction in 22:40 (“On these two commands hang the whole Law and the Prophets”), Meier observes that the conjoined love-commands do not provide the historical Jesus’ key to interpreting the whole Law. Nor does “your neighbor” mean anyone near you. For the immediate context in Leviticus distinguishes aliens from neighbors and thereby limits “your neighbor” to a fellow Israelite, and Jesus does not expand this meaning. (The parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:29-37 refuses to define “my neighbor” and challenges me to be a neighbor.) In addition, John 13:34 commands only the loving of one another in the Christian community; and 1 John 2:15 prohibits loving the world, that is, the world of unsaved human beings, whom only God (and not even Jesus) is said to have loved (John 3:16). The command to love your enemies has in its favor dissimilarity: it doesn’t occur in the Old Testament; and though parallels are found in other early literature, Jesus’ command, like many of his commands, is distinctively laconic whereas the parallels add elements of self-benefit and divine vengeance.

Talking about love, I remember that my beloved teacher Marchant King once said, somewhat dismissively of the quest, that all we have is the biblical Jesus. Naturally, Christians want as much correspondence as possible between the various biblical portraits of Jesus, which we still have in our hands, and the historical Jesus, whom we no longer have in person. Theologically, nonetheless, more stress should fall on the biblical Jesus than on the historical Jesus, so that believing scholars might well beware lest a zeal to establish the historicity of every jot and tittle in the Gospels lead them to harmonize the texts unnaturally and thereby miss the rich variegation of God’s love in Christ. And since, grammatically speaking, the quest of the historical Jesus can mean a quest by Jesus as well as a quest for him, the evangelist in me wants to say that as a shepherd, the biblical-historical Jesus is lovingly searching for us, lost sheep that we sinners are.

Robert H. Gundry is scholar-in-residence and professor emeritus at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He is the author of Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross, published by Eerdmans in 1993; a forthcoming paperback reprint by Wipf and Stock of The Old is Better: New Testament Essays in Support of Traditional Interpretations, first published in 2005; and Commentary on the New Testament: Verse-by-Verse Explanations with a Literal Translation, forthcoming from Hendrickson.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Perhaps only Tom Wright could author a book about Scripture’s authority that would garner back-cover endorsem*nts from Brian McLaren, J. I. Packer, Ben Witherington, John Franke, and Timothy George. For these figures often disagree about the theological direction in which our ever-complicated evangelical churches ought to head. Wright himself does not really offer the last word, except insofar as the title (a bit of cheeky double entendre, chosen by the publisher rather than by the author himself) suggests a way of relating biblical authority to our current place in the drama of redemption.

How does one summarize a summary by a masterful communicator? Such is the dilemma of this review. The Bishop of Durham packs concise history, clear thinking, clever images, and contemporary churchmanship into “a tract for the times,” as Wright describes the book in his preface to the American edition: “I trust that those who have grumbled at the length of some of my other books will not now grumble at all the things I have left unsaid in what is necessarily a very compressed, at times almost telegraphic, treatment.” Such a treatment attempts to outflank contemporary battles in which the Bible is “generally treated the way professional tennis players treat the ball. The more you want to win a point, the harder you hit the poor thing.”

After an extended prologue, chapter one develops the concept of biblical “authority” at some length. Wright’s “central claim” is that “the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ can make Christian sense only if it is a shorthand for ‘the authority of the triune God, exercised somehow through scripture.’ ” The Bible consistently associates authority personally with the God decisively revealed in Jesus Christ. Accordingly, the Bible’s authority comes in story form. Moreover, biblical authority must be strongly associated with the concept of God’s kingdom. Building on Telford Work’s recent Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation, Wright finds it “enormously important that we see the role of scripture not simply as being to provide true information about, or even an accurate running commentary upon, the work of God in salvation and new creation, but as taking an active part within that ongoing purpose.”

Chapter 2 hints briefly at a biblical theology of God’s “word” that is consistent with such a concept of “authority.” The Word of God in the Old Testament does not function straightforwardly “as a synonym for the written scriptures, but as a strange personal presence, creating, judging, healing, recreating.” In that light we can make more sense of “Scripture and Jesus” (the topic of the even briefer chapter 3), since as the ultimate Word of God (e.g., John 1; Hebrews 1) Christ accomplishes that to which Scripture pointed. Chapter 4 then examines diversity within the New Testament, and discontinuity as well as continuity between the two testaments of Christian Scripture.

Cultures of biblical interpretation dominate the second half of the book, beginning in chapter 5 with “The First Sixteen Centuries.” Wright affirms early Christian approaches to the unity of the Bible over against countervailing forms of “Gnosticism,” with critical comments about its contemporary revivals. He also appreciates the medieval fourfold sense of Scripture in some ways, but criticizes allegorization for giving inadequate attention to the Old Testament and hence to Jesus’ Jewishness. In this context Wright also reflects upon the relation between Scripture and tradition: the standard terms of discussion, regarding whether or how both might be sources of authority, results in category confusion. Likewise, in later Protestant contexts, the developing treatment of reason rationalistically, “as an entirely separate source of information, which could then be played off against scripture and/or tradition,” goes against the classical ideas that Richard Hooker and others advocated.

Yet such has been “The Challenge of the Enlightenment” (chapter 6), with its rival religious priority upon individual human experience and its anti-Christian eschatology. Simply reacting against scholarship is naïve; everyone already depends upon scholars for their translations, lexicons, and so forth. Wright is unsympathetic to radical postmodern ideologies that dismiss the possibility of true knowledge by interpreting everything (except themselves) in ideological terms.

Hence he criticizes the recent tendency to add “experience” to the traditional three-legged Anglican stool of Scripture, tradition, and reason. This so-called Wesleyan quadrilateral is not true to John Wesley himself, especially since it often ends up taking the form “Scripture says … tradition says … reason says … but experience says … and so that’s what we go with”: “Adding a fourth leg to a three-legged stool often makes it unstable.” Moreover, the original image easily misleads, since Scripture, tradition, and reason “are not so much like apples, pears and oranges as like apples, elephants and screwdrivers.” In a better image, then, “Scripture is the bookshelf; tradition is the memory of what people in the house have read and understood (or perhaps misunderstood) from that shelf; and reason is the set of spectacles that people wear in order to make sense of what they read,” while experience deals with the effects on people of what they read. Experience cannot function as an authority unless the concept of authority has become meaningless (and Wright is not afraid to point out the irony that postmodern revivals of Gnosticism assume concepts of self-identity they have elsewhere deconstructed).

Chapter 7, “Misreadings of Scripture,” catalogues twelve ways conservative Christianity characteristically misreads the Bible, then enumerates twelve from the liberals. Against both, Wright appeals to the need for “critical realism.” Chapter 8, “How to Get Back on Track,” gathers together some recommendations. Wright’s ultimate model concerns relating Scripture to the drama of redemption, along the lines of a five-act play—creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the church:

Those who live in this fifth act have an ambiguous relationship with the four previous acts, not because they are being disloyal to them but precisely because they are being loyal to them as part of the story. If someone in the fifth act of All’s Well That Ends Well were to start repeating speeches from earlier acts, instead of those which belonged to the fifth act itself, the whole play would begin to unravel. We must act in the appropriate manner for this moment in the story; this will be in direct continuity with the previous acts (we are not free to jump suddenly to another narrative, a different play altogether), but such continuity also implies discontinuity, a moment where genuinely new things can and do happen. We must be ferociously loyal to what has gone before and cheerfully open about what must come next.

Of course, since the decisive act has occurred in Jesus Christ, we do not have the same relationship to the New Testament that the early Christians had to the Old. Readings of Scripture must be totally contextual (historically and canonically), liturgically grounded, privately studied, refreshed by appropriate scholarship, and taught by the church’s accredited leaders. Here Wright pulls no punches: he is concerned about the real danger “that church leaders forget what ‘the authority of scripture’ actually means in practice” in favor of running programs. Indeed, “most churches, even those with well-developed educational programs, have a long way to go in their teaching of scripture.” An appendix of “Recent Resources on Scripture” can help willing readers to begin reversing that problem.

Overall we may hope that this book will be a tremendous blessing to Western Christians, not only in presenting many traditional affirmations winsomely but also in clarifying muddled and difficult concepts. Wright’s assessments of, and analogies for, relating tradition, reason, and experience to Scripture are perhaps worth the price of the book by themselves. Despite slippage on a few details, The Last Word is a wonderful resource for scholars, clergy, and lay people.

On a couple of points, however, we must demur or at least seek more nuance. First, Wright occasionally manifests a biblical scholar’s dismissive tendencies regarding systematic theology. A characteristic example would be his criticism of John Webster’s Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. While appreciative, Wright suggests that “one would never have known, from reading this book, anything at all about what the Bible contains …. [S]ince [Webster’s] thesis is that scripture is the central source for all Christian thinking, it might have been appropriate (and not beyond the wit of such a fine scholar) to base this contention, too, on scripture itself.” This criticism, immediately preceding a strongly dismissive comment regarding Karl Barth’s theological exegesis, is well-taken but ultimately too strong. Webster’s controlling motif of sanctification indirectly applies biblical themes to complex issues, with all the abstraction necessary to high-level theological discourse. Yes, direct biblical citation is absent where it would be preferable or even necessary for Webster’s sketch to convince us fully. But not all biblical interpretation can fit the same genre.

Second, Wright practices apparently scrupulous equivalence between liberal and conservative Christians when criticizing (un)biblical misinterpretation. This is undoubtedly due to the bishop’s current context: the debates within Anglicanism over sexual ethics that are reflected in the book’s dedication and in a number of comments throughout. Wright views fundamentalism as a form of modern or anti-postmodern questing after certainty—which is true enough, depending on what counts as “fundamentalism.” Furthermore, conservative biblical interpretation needs critique—perhaps even sustained criticism. Meanwhile, Wright denies that to criticize polarizations means that he is “indifferent to the question of whether the events written about in the gospels actually took place.”

Aside from the rhetorical situation among Anglicans, however, it is not clear that conservative Christianity should be tacitly lumped with fundamentalism, or that “liberal” misreading needs to be treated on quite the same terms. Wright’s very realized eschatology regarding the church—leaving the ultimate eschaton outside his five-act model, speaking of working “to implement the resurrection of Jesus” on p. 115, and so forth—may or may not lie behind his ecclesiastical assessments at this point. In any case, many readers may reject the book’s rhetorical equivalence between “conservative” and “liberal,” despite the effects of the post-Enlightenment era upon both—if indeed only one side thinks the decisive acts in the drama actually happened.

Those complaints notwithstanding, The Last Word is a fabulous book. With characteristic verve and occasionally pungent grace, Wright rightly locates the doctrine of Scripture within the dramatic authority of the Triune God, whose last word is spoken in Jesus Christ but must continually be heard in and by the church, for a needy world. The Last Word could be the beginning of more faithful listening, as well as sustaining more fruitful conversation about the nature of biblical interpretation.

Daniel J. Treier is associate professor of theology at Wheaton College. Currently completing a volume on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Brazos Theological Commentary, he is most recently the author of Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Baker Academic).

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The Ends of Life is one of the most enjoyable, provocative, and instructive works of historical scholarship I have ever read. It is a work I will return to again and again, and I doubt that I will ever exhaust its riches—even though its historical narrative occupies fewer than three hundred pages (followed by a hundred and fifty pages of notes). Keith Thomas has provided as rich and compelling a picture of what early modern people lived for—what they believed gave meaning to their existence—as we could ever hope to have. And few if any historical subjects could be more worthy of our attention.

Sir Keith Thomas is widely regarded as one of the greatest living historians, and yet his reputation has been built almost wholly on just two books: Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (1983). Aside from the occasional article or pamphlet, Thomas produced little in the quarter-century following the publication of Man and the Natural World. One might think of him as the Marilynne Robinson of historians, given that almost the same number of years separated Robinson’s extraordinary novel Housekeeping from her even more extraordinary Gilead.

Thomas taught at Oxford for over thirty years. (The novelist and biographer D. J. Taylor studied under Thomas when at Oxford, and has written that “He was a brilliant and merciless expositor, quite the cleverest man I met at Oxford or anywhere else—so brilliant and merciless that he should never have been let anywhere near nervous undergraduates.”) Then, in 1986, he was named President of Corpus Christi College and held that post until his retirement in 2000. This administrative service is usually cited to explain the long scholarly silence, but the fact of the matter is that Thomas’ historical method simply requires extended periods of research and gestation. It’s worth noting that his academic career began in 1955: none of his books was produced in less than a decade. We probably wouldn’t have gotten The Ends of Life all that much earlier even if Thomas had never been an administrator.

Near the beginning of The Ends of Life Thomas briefly describes his method and identifies his goal as a historian: to produce “a retrospective ethnography of early modern England, approaching the past in the way an anthropologist might approach some exotic society.” For Thomas, the ethnographic approach requires him to allow his subjects, whenever possible, to speak for themselves; this in turn requires the historian to know what they say; and this requires countless hours spent sorting through obscure archives and perusing dusty and long-forgotten chronicles (in Latin as often as English). Thomas knows what the great and near-great think—Samuel Pepys, Thomas Hobbes, and the noble Puritan divine Richard Baxter make frequent appearances here—but he also has an unerring sense for the telling anecdote from an obscure source. For instance, he explains that the records of the city of Lichfield note an interesting expense: when Queen Elizabeth I made a progress there in 1575, the city paid one William Hillcroft five shillings “for keeping Mad Richard” out of the royal presence.

Why does he relate this story? Because it indicates the concern of the fathers of Lichfield for the “honour” of the city, and the achievement and preservation of a certain dignity is one of the “ends of life”—one of the things that people in the early modern period thought made life worth living. Thomas identifies six general sources of potential or actual fulfillment for English men and women in the years (roughly) from 1500 to 1800. First he explores “military prowess”—the first of the “ends of life” to wane in importance, thanks to the rise of a professional soldiery—then “work and vocation,” “wealth and possessions,” “honour and reputation,” “friendship and sociability” (including marriage), and, finally, “fame and the afterlife.” He makes the curious statement in his preface that he chose to “omit any sustained discussion of religion” because it is “too large a subject to be adequately treated here”—curious, because the book is full of distinctively Christian reflections on all the topics mentioned. There were a good many Christians in England in the period that Thomas studies, and it turns out that they have very many interesting things to say about wealth and honor and friendship and all the rest; and they do not always agree with one another.

On the motivating powers of the fear of hell: “When James Boswell visited the great jurist Lord Kames in 1782, he remarked that the doctrine of the eternity of hell’s torments did harm. ‘No,’ said Kames, ‘nobody believes it.'”

In concluding his narrative, Thomas—making one of the few claims in the book I disagree with—says that the “traditional message” of Christianity is that “it was to the next world, not this one, that human beings should look for their fulfillment.” But his own narrative suggests something very different, namely an energetic engagement with this world, in which work and vocation, friendship and sociability, and all the rest are not simply dismissed but are considered sub specie aeternitatis. For some Christians the “particular friend” (the especially close friend, the “second self”) is incompatible with the commandment that we should love our neighbors as ourselves; but the biblical pairing of David and Jonathan is cited often as a model of Christian friendship—one 17th-century minister even thought of his beloved sister as “our beloved Jonathan”—and, as Thomas explains, “in 1778 the Quaker lady Mrs Knowles famously defeated Samuel Johnson” in an argument on this point by pointing to the distinctive affection that Jesus bore for John, the “beloved disciple.” Indeed, close friendships were often understood as foretastes of heaven—the Earl of Clarendon thought that friendship was “much more a sacrament than marriage is”—and it was not uncommon in the early modern period for close friends to be buried together.

In the same chapter Thomas elegantly demonstrates the long and slow process by which such openly intimate friendships came to be seen in hom*osexual terms. Before the 18th century there are few such suspicions, and it was only slowly that male friends abandoned the practice of embracing and kissing to demonstrate their affection, contenting themselves with handshakes. In 1630, John Winthrop, leader of the Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay, wrote to his friend Sir William Spring and pleaded for a letter in return: “Let us hear that sweet voice of thine, my love, my dove.” Immediately after quoting this, Thomas points out that “as governor of Massachusetts, Winthrop oversaw the execution in 1646 of a sodomite, whom he denounced as ‘a monster in human shape.’ ” Even as we have begun to interpret these figures from the past as though they were just like us, Thomas introduces an anecdote that reveals how thoroughly alien their thinking could be; but he is equally likely to tell a story that suddenly closes the gap of time. It is impossible not to feel a sharp pang of sympathy for John Chesman, a chandler and barber who died in 1508, and left to his fiancée, Agnes—”my wife should have been [if] God had willed”—”a gown cloth that should have been my wedding gown.”

Again and again in The Ends of Life, these people from the distant past stand forth to us with a quick vividness, and then yield the stage to others. On social mobility: “At Oxford the phenomenally industrious Dr Prideaux, Rector of Exeter College between 1612 and 1642, kept the old leather breeches he had worn as a young man in order to show his pupils the social depths from which his diligence had raised him. It was said that three men in his college lost their lives in vain attempts to emulate his industry.”

On the motivating powers of the fear of hell: “When James Boswell visited the great jurist Lord Kames in 1782, he remarked that the doctrine of the eternity of hell’s torments did harm. ‘No,’ said Kames, ‘nobody believes it.'”

On honor and precedence: “In 1625 Roger Williams of Brecon assaulted John Games, declaring that, since he was the fourth son of Sir David Williams, Games ought to have offered to go out of the room before him. Games retorted that he was the second son of Sir John Games and appealed to the Earl Marshal. In 1673 Lord Cholmondeley killed a carter for his ‘insolence’ in not allowing his coach precedence on the highway.”

On the promises of heavenly bliss: “An Elizabethan preacher promised the inhabitants of Wilton, near Salisbury, that ‘to live in heaven together is better than to live in Wilton together.’ But an old lady on her sickbed, near Lewes, Sussex, was not so sure: when a well-intentioned neighbour informed her that she would shortly go to heaven and be with God, Jesus Christ, angels, and saints, she answered that ‘she had no acquaintance there, she knew nobody there, and therefore she had rather live with her and her other neighbours here than to go thither to live amongst strangers.'”

These quotations could continue for some time: there is something equally funny or poignant or surprising on almost every page. This “retrospective ethnography” is a great feast indeed. Reading The Ends of Life, I find myself recalling John Dryden’s words about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “‘Tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty. We have our fore-fathers and great-grandames all before us, as they were in Chaucer’s days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, tho’ they are call’d by other names than those of Monks and Friars, and Canons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns: for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, tho’ everything is alter’d.”

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Original Sin: A Cultural History (HarperOne) and Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Not often do sports movies go beyond themselves. The competitor wins, the team triumphs, sometimes camaraderie also happens, and well, that's all rousing, and we're happy for it, and that's that, somehow at once both bracing and soppy. We leave with an admiration for pluck or just plain old luck, whether it be for Rocky, Rudy, Hoosiers, or The Rookie. Every once in a while, an exception does come along: Eight Men Out (1988), John Sayles' meditation on the ill-famed Chicago Black Sox; The Natural (1984), a mythopoetic tale of baseball magic; Field of Dreams (1989), full of father longing and Shoeless Joe; and last, Chariots of Fire (1981), a British film that perhaps comes closest to penetrating the varied allure of performance.

And now there is Invictus, Clint Eastwood's film of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, in which an inspired South Africa scrapped its way to the finals to beat a far more powerful New Zealand team. Remarkable is perhaps the best word for it. Part of that comes from Eastwood's refusal to cheese up the telling—no gymnastic camera, no glitzy lighting, no breakneck cutting, no string anthems, and, above all, no trumped up melodrama. Instead, he tells his real-life tale in flat-out deadpan fashion. It helps enormously that this is one story that does not in the least need any amping up. And the truth is that Eastwood might have done more dramatic pumping than he does, given the much fuller and quite wondrous story told in the source account, journalist John Carlin's closely documented Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation (2008). The events of the film begin two-thirds of the way through Carlin's book.

In short, for all of the inherent wow factor of the story itself, a "fairy-tale," as one South African player put it, Invictus is a rather quiet account, as befits the manner of its central character, the great African leader Nelson Mandela, played with respectful grace by Morgan Freeman. It's been easy enough over the years for Freeman simply to play Freeman, a blues-loving son of the Mississippi Delta, especially when in cahoots with Eastwood, who invariably casts him in amply comfortable roles (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby). Here, though, Freeman stretches, and the performance seems pitch perfect. That is no easy task. The actual Nelson Mandela, for all of his legendary stature, is self-contained and mild-mannered, and on the public-speaker charisma index, decidedly bland. But Freeman manages to convey the appeal of Mandela the statesman: unswerving determination complemented by personal charm, a dose of courtliness, and insistent kindness to everyone, especially to his enemies.

The film pays what heed it can to Mandela's (and South Africa's) long and complicated backstory. A lawyer and a prominent political activist, he was in 1964 (at age 46) sentenced to life in prison by the apartheid South African government for political agitation in resistance to mounting racial oppression. Mandela spent the next eighteen years at hard labor on the notorious Robben Island, a South African Alcatraz, located just off the coast of Cape Town. By the mid-1980s, acknowledging drastic change as inexorable, P. W. Botha's white-supremacist government saw in Mandela, by now an international cause clbre, a reasonable negotiating partner. In 1988, for the convenience of the government—and a bit of pr for a nation that had become an international pariah—Mandela was moved to the relative luxury of a warden's cottage at a prison near Johannesburg. There he stayed until early in 1990, when at last he was released at the age of 71, an event the film hastily covers. Four years later, with a new constitution and South Africa's first democratic elections, Mandela became its first black prime minister.

The winner inherited a bitterly divided country, white Africans deeply frightened and many black Africans eager for swift retribution. The question was not only whether the political insurgents could actually run a modern techno-state but whether the two races could somehow conjoin for mutual well-being. So dire was the antagonism that the country narrowly averted a coup and civil war, thanks, apparently, to Mandela's secret talks with the far right-wing Afrikaner leadership. What is remarkable is that time and time again, the path Mandela takes confounds both sides. On his first walk into the president's office, he finds white staff cleaning out their desks, upon which he calls a meeting to invite all to stay in their jobs so long as they will commit to the new government (Carlin's book indicates that they all do). And when Mandela's black security chief gets more staff, he protests that Mandela has sent him white men from the old government's infamously brutal security service. Here and throughout, the word in Mandela's mouth and his deeds is reconciliation. Indeed, Mandela's great accomplishment in his prison days and afterward was his immense dedication (and skill) in winning respect and trust from even the most extreme opponents, whether they be guards or prime ministers. Mandela's posture throughout all the troubled years of South Africa, including his own long imprisonment, recalls old Lear's radical humility, speaking to the true-hearted daughter he has deeply wronged: "When thou dost ask me blessing I'll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness; so we'll live." One means to effecting healing of that sort is the focus of Invictus.

Still, whatever his personal magnetism, Mandela cannot meet individually with the whole of a divided South Africa. With that recognition comes the potential of sport in general and rugby in particular. Mandela gets it in his head that one way of uniting the country would be to find something that all South Africans could cheer. Hence, South Africa's national rugby team should win the World Cup. The problem with that scheme is that, one, the national team is a very clear underdog (the film overplays this), especially against a massive and potent New Zealand team; two, rugby is really a white person's sport, particularly beloved by ardent supporters of apartheid, a condition aggravated by a long apartheid-induced international ban on South Africa, whereas black South Africans vastly prefer soccer, scorning rugby as an emblem of white control; and three, the Springboks, the national team, has only one black player and also proudly wears colors associated with white domination. How Mandela, and finally the team itself, manage to overcome these assorted obstacles makes the substance of the tale.

And rousing it is, though it would no doubt seem corny and preposterous if it were not all true. The film version chiefly emphasizes Mandela's role in these events as opposed to the team's efforts, though those are very much inspired by Mandela's personal care for a team largely consisting of non-political brawler types. Mandela befriends the team captain, Francois Pienaar (quietly played by Matt Damon), and he makes efforts to know the team and to introduce rugby and the team to black South Africans. Moreover, Mandela confronts the deep-down hostility of black South Africans for his support of the Springboks, which he shows by arguing that the team should keep both its name and its green-and-gold jerseys.

Lo, it does work, Eastwood providing, perhaps a bit too often, obvious instances of black and white coming round to rally enthusiasm for the Springboks. But that was apparently just the way it happened. In all of this, viewers witness Mandela's elegant combination of guile, hope, and care working its wondrous way. Of course, the team's own prodigious efforts have a lot to do with that unimaginable display of support; this is, after all, their return to international competition after the long ban for apartheid. Most of all, though, we witness the mysterious, deeply healing power of sport, even with so brutal a sport as rugby—football without the pads, played skin to skin, shoulder to sweaty buttock.

All of that is very strange, and—despite a flood of monographs, dissertations, and scholarly articles—we haven't gotten very far in understanding why and how for player and fan alike sport does what it does. Striving for a kind of "thick description" of how cultures function and persist, anthropologist Clifford Geertz construed notions of "deep play," games and rituals wherein people "tell themselves about themselves," and much of what Geertz argues about cohesion explains a good deal about Mandela's gamble on rugby in South Africa. Still, imponderables remain: from whence does this bent come, and what story does sport at its deepest tell? For fans, as in Invictus, sport unites stalwart adversaries, Afrikaner and African, in support of some transcendent something beyond themselves. Frankly, that this should happen does not make much sense, but happen it does.

From another angle, though, sport seems at its purest to summon from some well within the appetite for "playing together" or with another, which is ultimately an elaborate form of celebrating at least the prospect of mutuality, if not the thing itself. In competition, two "adversaries" meet together to vie for something or other within a set of agreed upon rules, and that is play. That this should happen at all and that so many take remarkable pleasure in it makes even less sense.

A Christian anthropology might link all of this to humankind's profound thirst for the original harmony—a condition of profound trust and gladness wherein the lamb and the lion frisk, no creature preys upon another, Adam and Eve walk with God at the time of the evening breeze—all an exultant expression of the goodness of physicality and pure, full delight in being alive. In the delight and beauty of bodies and souls in contest with themselves or others—whether in hitting a curveball, completing a golf swing, or pounding each other raw—we glimpse the dream of wholeness and reconciliation. In play, then, lies a kind of "fun" that partakes of the plenitude of delight and intimacy intended for the whole creation. When that happens, sport becomes dance and even, perhaps, still another form of mating.

And so sport goes its way, these days especially broken and mangled, but still one of the deeper puzzles in human behavior. Sometimes, rarely, for reasons beyond knowing, sport does what it was meant to do. For a brief time in South Africa, sport did its thing, yielding reconciliation and unity, at least for a brief while, in a grievously wounded land. Eastwood's Invictus catches that story, and the story of Nelson Mandela's profoundly Christian vision of what love in the world should mean.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. This review is dedicated to Russ DeVette (1923-2009), for over two decades as head basketball coach at Hope College the embodiment of sport as caritas.

Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.