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To some, early church debates about Christ read like a computer programming language: impossible to decode. To others, the early church theology seems as relevant as the dress codes of a Carthusian monastery.

To help us understand what the early church was driving at in the millions of theological words it produced, Christian History talked with Thomas Oden, who teaches theology at Drew University. He is author of the three-volume systematic theology: The Living God, The Word of Life, and Life in the Spirit (Harper San Francisco, 1992).

Christian History: Why did the early church spend so much energy trying to understand precisely how Jesus was human and divine, especially since ultimately it’s a mystery how he is both?

Thomas Oden: All ancient Christian writers and councils knew that it’s impossible to fathom fully the Incarnation. Attempts to articulate this mystery always fall short of absolute precision. On the other hand, they discovered that you can talk about the Incarnation in ways that fail to do justice to what we do know.

The early church had to deal with the apostolic testimony of the New Testament, and the New Testament clearly portrays Jesus as the Savior, as Mediator between God’s holiness and human sin. It portrays him as truly God and truly human. Any teaching that failed to do justice to the full witness of the Scriptures had to be challenged.

For example, Arianism failed to understand that in Jesus we meet the Uncreated One. Arius thought Jesus was a creature. That runs counter to the apostolic testimony, particularly in John’s and Paul’s writings. Theological definitions are precise because they look for language that rules out heretical interpretations—interpretations that fall short of the wholeness of biblical faith.

If these ecumenical councils hadn’t done the hard labor of working out the precise language, we would have had, not less, but more trouble understanding Jesus Christ.

Why did many early church fathers, like Athanasius, argue for orthodoxy in ways that seem harsh, even nasty?

I don’t think Athanasius’s responses, to take that example, were simply pugnacious. He knew that more than theological opinions were at stake—nothing less than the integrity of the New Testament, the apostolic testimony to Christ. In the case of Arianism, if the church taught that Christ was somehow less than God incarnate, then it would have given the whole game away. You cannot speak about reconciliation the way the New Testament does—a reconciliation of a holy God and sinful humanity—without a full incarnation. For Athanasius, the issues were too important to discuss calmly.

Some in the early church who were branded as heretics—like the Monophysites—are today reconciling with the Orthodox Church. Are Monophysites heretics or not?

Clearly some of the more radical Monophysites were, but in some cases, the two parties agreed on fundamentals.

The Monophysites, in trying to protect the deity of Christ, asserted that Christ had one nature (monophysis) rather than two. But the word physis, or “nature,” was used differently by Monophysites and the Orthodox; in many cases, they were not disagreeing as much as talking past one another. In the last two years, the Coptic, Syrian, and other Monophysite churches have moved significantly towards reconciliation with Eastern Orthodoxy, though some serious differences still remain.

Many Protestants balk at the phrase, “Mary, the Mother of God.” Yet the early church was in near unanimous agreement on this term.

Though many Protestants have problems with the term, it seems to be a concept we all accept. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, and the major Protestant teachers don’t reject the formula of the Council of Ephesus. They don’t think of Mary as merely the Christ-bearer, only a specially annointed man, but the actual bearer of God in the flesh.

Again, it’s a matter of faithfulness to the apostolic witness. Jesus is the pre-existent Logos, who, John’s Gospel says, is with God from the beginning. If this same One is born in the flesh, it is not someone less than God who is born—and Mary is the mother. So the term may trouble some Christians, but I don’t think the theology does. In this, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox agree.

The early theological formulations have been under steady attack for some time. How do you respond, for example, to those who say the early church’s conclusions about the Trinity reflect, not timeless truth, but only a Greek intellectual world view?

The thinking about the Trinity did not begin with philosophy but with the apostolic text, the Scriptures. Paul gives this benediction in 2 Corinthians 13:13: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” Embedded in this statement (written in the early 50s) is a very early oral tradition that understands God in a tri-fold way. Take another example: In Jesus’ baptism, the Father descends to bless the Son by the power of the Spirit. Trinitarian prototypes such as these do not come out of Greek philosophy.

Are you saying there is no cultural influence?

Not at all. When the apostolic teaching moved into Greek culture, it used language and symbols appropriate to that culture. But the fundamental notion of the Trinity came before the church ever discussed it in philosophical terms.

Furthermore, even when we do notice the influence of Greek culture in the development of doctrine, we have to recognize the role of the Holy Spirit. From the beginning, the Spirit has been at work to guide the church into all truth, as Jesus promised. So it’s not accidental that the Spirit has guided the church to formulate a clearer teaching about God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That doesn’t mean we have to accept everything the early church adapted from Greek culture. The church in India, for example—which arose in the early centuries and held to the basic theology formulated in Greek culture—had to proclaim the faith in something other than Greek categories!

Some moderns believe that early church doctrine is hopelessly male-centered, with talk of a Father-God bringing forth a Son. What is your view?

Actually, the early church teachers thought just the opposite. Augustine taught that God’s saving action in his Son Jesus Christ actually honors both male and female. Naturally, an incarnate savior must be born of a woman, for men cannot give birth. If he had become female, however, he would have given a double honor to the female sex—a female bringing forth a female savior. Instead, God becomes male by being born of a female, and so he honors both sexes in the Incarnation.

Others feel ancient orthodoxy is rigid. Were early creeds theological straitjackets?

Actually, a great achievement of the early orthodox consensus is its flexibility! Within this orthodoxy, there is enormous cultural flexibility. That’s why you find the Nicene Creed, for example, expressed in every language on earth, and in a variety of Christian communions. Southern Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Chinese house-church believers, Mexican Pentecostals, and Rumanian Orthodox all share the same basic Christological and Trinitarian definitions.

Has studying this abstract doctrine helped you in your own faith?

My faith has not been helped by abstract doctrine. But it has been helped by the church’s hymnody, its liturgy, its pastoral care. Above all, I’ve been helped by its exegesis, its constant wrestling with Scripture, especially with the New Testament Jesus. The ecumenical community in the first five centuries was constantly making decisions in reference to specific texts of Scripture. It always stood under the authority of Scripture.

So these theological documents, creeds, and treatises are to me lively, relational, and meaningful documents because they wrestle with Scripture and, therefore, with issues we wrestle with today.

Copyright © 1996 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Valentinus (2nd century A.D.)From papal candidate to leading Gnostic

A brilliant theologian who taught in Alexandria, Egypt (the Oxford of his day), Valentinus moved to Rome in about A.D. 136 and quickly became a candidate for pope, then known as bishop of Rome. Not only was he not elected, he was excommunicated when he later emerged as leader of a heresy known as Gnosticism, which taught that only a select few receive gnosis (“knowledge” in Greek) from God about how to find salvation.

With this conviction, Valentinus proceeded to reinterpret the Bible—misinterpret, charged critics such as Irenaeus and Tertullian. For Valentinus, the most important lessons of Scripture came not from the obvious meaning but from the symbolism beneath the words. This method of biblical interpretation, called allegory, allowed Valentinus to create elaborate stories and teachings that blurred the lines between Christianity, mysticism, philosophy, and Judaism.

To the Genesis sketch of Creation, for example, Valentinus added a number of details. Throughout the ages, according to Valentinus, God produced 15 spiritual couples who personified divine characteristics such as goodness and truth. One being, Sophia (Greek for “wisdom”), rejected her partner because her only passion was to know everything about God. By herself she conceived and gave birth to a deformed child, whom she named Ialdabaoth (probably meaning “Child of Chaos”). Out of the elements of creation, her son (the diety portrayed in the Old Testament) produced the dark world of humanity and infused it with numbness toward God. Jesus, God’s great revelator, came to awaken people to the “deep things of God.”

For Valentinus and other Gnostics, there was no mixing of the spiritual world with the physical. Thus they rejected the incarnation, crucifixion, and bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Valentinianism endured merciless polemics by the church fathers for the first few centuries A.D. then faded into oblivion—until 1945.

Until then, all we knew of Valentinus came from his critics. But among the 52 documents recovered from the ruins of what was perhaps a Gnostic monastery near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, is a book written by Valentinus or his followers. Called The Gospel of Truth, it reads like a sermon and draws on the Gospels and the writings of Paul.

Novatian (c. 200–258)Fought for a pure church a little too hard

It was the spring of 251, and the Roman bishop was dead—martyred by Romans in a new wave of persecution. But raiders from the north were temporarily diverting the empire’s attention, so Christians were breathing a sigh of relief. Two issues immediately confronted church leaders: (1) Who should they elect as the new bishop of Rome? (2) What should they do about “lapsed Christians,” those who renounced their faith during persecution?

Novatian was the leading churchman in Rome, a brilliant theologian, and the obvious choice for pope. But he wasn’t elected, perhaps because of his unpopular, hard-line position about the lapsed. He said they could never be readmitted to the church, and he invoked the words of Jesus: “Whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.”

Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, a major North African city, did not agree. He called Novatian “a foe to mercy, a destroyer of repentance.” The influential African bishop supported Cornelius, who was elected pope. Cornelius believed that the lapsed could be reinstated to the church by repenting and doing penance based on the seriousness of the offense. Christians who had offered sacrifices on Roman altars drew the stiffest penance.

Local supporters of Novatian rallied around their man and elected him pope. Cornelius promptly excommunicated him. Both men courted recognition of church leaders abroad. In the process, Novatian’s followers evolved into a separate church, with bishops and congregations throughout the empire.

Novatian fled Rome during renewed persecution that began in late 251. Remaining true to his beliefs, he died a martyr during yet another round of persecutions some seven years later. Novatian’s church endured for about four centuries, until Muslim invaders swept westward and slaughtered those who refused to convert to Islam.

Paul of Samosata (Bishop of Antioch, c. 260–268)Luxury-loving bishop

From his humble beginnings in the village of Samosata, in what is now southern Turkey, Paul developed into a church leader who moonlighted for mammon. When he was elected bishop of Antioch (in modern Syria), he was the chief financial officer for Queen Zenobia of Palmyra.

Somehow he amassed a fortune. His critics said it was through accepting bribes. Whatever the source of the money, he quickly earned a reputation as the luxury-loving bishop—at least according to early church critics, who were known to exaggerate the immorality of heretics.

But it wasn’t only this behavior, condemned as unbecoming of a bishop, that generated three church conferences in five years but his theology. Paul apparently believed that Jesus was no more God than were the prophets, and for this reason he forbade the singing of hymns to Jesus. Jesus, the bishop preached, was “an ordinary man” on whom “the Word came and dwelt,” not one worthy of worship.

Paul’s critics said the bishop understood the Trinity as a union of the Father, Wisdom (Spirit), and the Word (Logos). Wisdom and the Word reside within the Father, Paul said, as reason resides within humanity. Wisdom and the Word are not separate persons, he explained; they subsist within the Father. Paul said it was God’s gift of the Word that uniquely inspired and empowered Jesus.

The bishop evaded the questions the first two councils asked him, but members of a council in 268 managed to wrangle enough answers out of him to convince the majority that he was, in fact, a heretic. They deposed him and elected a new bishop.

The queen, however, had other plans. A staunch ally of Paul, she retained him as bishop. Four years later, when Rome defeated the queen, the Roman commander forced Paul to resign and banished him from the city. Disciples of Paul, called Paulianists and Samosatines, worshiped as a sect until most joined the theologically kindred Arians in the following century.

Pelagius (c. 354-after 418)He battled lax morals with bad theology

When the British monk Pelagius moved to Rome in about 380, he didn’t like what he saw. Professing Christians, consumed by their desire for luxury and wealth, felt no shame in offering and accepting bribes. Their passion for materialism was matched by their apathy toward spiritual matters, such as godly living.

Brilliant and strong-minded Pelagius thought these warped ethics grew naturally out of the prevailing theology, which emphasized God’s grace and asserted that human beings are incapable of holy living. Pelagius and his followers argued otherwise.

Emphasizing the free will that God gave humanity, Pelagians rejected predestination as well as original sin, the belief that the sin of Adam and Eve spiritually contaminated the human race. They taught that the sin of Adam and Eve affected only them, and that human beings are born without sin and with the freedom to choose their own path in life.

Many theologians, like Jerome and Augustine, respected Pelaguis’s life and intent. Pelagius, himself a devout monk, convinced many wealthy Romans to do as he had done and forsake their possessions.

But as Pelagianism spread, it became an increasing problem for the church, and the aging Augustine worked fervently to stop it. At risk, believed Augustine, was the doctrine of grace. If humans are born without sin, what is the need for God’s grace? And why not let humanity save itself by exercising free will and choosing to live the holy life? The biblical scholar Jerome joined Augustine in condemning Pelagius, calling him a “corpulent dog … weighed down with … porridge.”

Pope Innocent I excommunicated Pelagius in 417. Though the monk was briefly restored by the new pope, Zosimus, in 418, Zosimus encountered such a storm from African bishops, where Augustine lived, that he changed his mind and wrote a letter condeming the Briton.

Pelagius disappeared from history, though his teachings endured for another century. The issues raised by Pelagianism reappeared many times in the Middle Ages and broke out afresh during the Reformation.

Stephen Miller is a free-lance writer and former editor of Illustrated Bible Life. He is a member of CHRISTIAN HISTORY’s editorial advisory board.

Copyright © 1996 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Shortly after the turn of the second century, Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, consulted Emperor Trajan about the rapidly spreading Christian “superstition” in his district, asking him what he should do about it. By interrogating a few people, Pliny learned that “on an appointed day,” Christians habitually met before daybreak and recited “a hymn to Christ, as to a god.”

These hymns, which go back to the earliest days of Christianity, sharply contradict the popular notion that the doctrine of the Incarnation is only a brainchild of fourth-century theologians playing irrelevant word-games. Long before Christian emperors convened their solemn assemblies, thousands of Christian worship services sang the praises of the Holy Child of Bethlehem.

This is one reason the orthodox party eventually triumphed in the Arian controversy: Athanasius simply argued theologically what the church had been singing for two centuries. But if the Arian controversy settled the issue of Christ’s full divinity and humanity, it did not settle the issue of exactly how the divine Christ became human. That concern was left to later theologians.

Christ without a Human Soul

With the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity (A.D. 312), the church marked a new phase in its triumphant expansion. Almost overnight it became fashionable to believe. As a result, churches were crowded, as professor Alan Richardson said, “with the half-converted, the socially ambitious, and the ill-instructed.” The Greek idea of God as utterly transcendent reappeared with new vigor among professing Christians—with mixed results.

During the fourth century, two schools of theology offered contrasting interpretations of biblical passages speaking of the Incarnation. One of these was at Alexandria, the other at Antioch. The Alexandrians emphasized strongly the divine nature; the Antiochenes, the human. One began in heaven and moved to earth; the other commenced on earth and looked to heaven.

The first sophisticated explanation of the Incarnation came from the Alexandrian side of the debate, from one Apollinarius (c.310-c.392), an elderly pastor of Laodicea who greatly admired Athanasius, leader of the Alexandrian school. We may be inclined to think of all heretics as dark, sinister figures bent on the overthrow of Christian truth, but Apollinarius’s lapse into heresy didn’t happen until he was over 60. Till then he enjoyed a reputation as a pillar of orthodoxy. Churches throughout the empire experienced only shock when they first heard that the venerable bishop had fallen into error.

Echoing Athanasius, Apollinarius began his case for the Incarnation with the full deity of Christ: only God could save the world, and, if Christ is Savior, he must be divine. But the question is, how?

The old scholar struck upon the idea of approaching the question from a psychological view. He felt that human nature embraced the body and the soul. But at the Incarnation, the divine Word displaced the animating and rational soul in a human body, creating a “unity of nature” between the Word and his body. Humanity, he felt, was the sphere, not the instrument of salvation—merely the place where salvation occurred, not a means of salvation. Christ, therefore, had only one nature: Apollinarius spoke of “one enfleshed nature of the divine Word.” The Alexandrian stress on Christ’s deity remains, but the only thing human about Christ was his physical body.

Apollinarius, definite as his heresy was, deserves our praise for a pioneering effort that forced the church to think more deeply about Christ. His fault lies in his inability to push any further into the heart of truth. The widespread respect that Apollinarius had gained over the years explains why he was never exiled—though, as a heretic, he was forbidden to worship in the Catholic church. He died in his eighties, remaining a scholar and writer to the end.

Objections to Apollinarianism arose quickly. Does the Gospels’ picture of Jesus not depict a normal human psychology, showing Christ with a human mind and human emotions? And if the Word displaced the rational human soul, with its powers of choice and sin, how could Christ be fully human, and therefore, how could human beings be fully redeemed? If the Word did not unite full humanity with himself, then how can we hope to be saved?

In this atmosphere, the Council of Constantinople (381) effectively silenced the Apollinarian teaching. It simply was not an adequate description of the Incarnation.

Mother of God?

The second “heresy” was associated with the name Nestorius, a famous preacher at Antioch, who in 428 was appointed archbishop of Constantinople. In the shadow of the imperial palace, Nestorius proved to be a devout, well-meaning monk but a strident, tactless preacher. On the streets, his persecuting temper earned him a nickname, “Firebrand.” Shortly after assuming his duties in the capital, he launched a sermonic attack against the popular term Theotokos, or “God-bearer,” as a title for the Virgin Mary. Ordinary church folk assumed that their new preacher regarded the Savior as an inspired man, nothing more.

In point of fact, Nestorius meant nothing of the sort. He thought the term might suggest that the babe born of Mary was not human but God only, which he felt was another form of the Apollinarian heresy. He suggested as an alternative the title Christotokos, “Mother of Christ.” But his unguarded rhetoric made some think he believed Christ not only had two natures but also two wills, that there were two Christs so to speak, one divine, one human, existing in the one body. Since this appeared to deny the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus as an integrated individual, controversy filled the air; charges sounded from pulpits. Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria, called on Nestorius to recant.

To settle the uproar, the emperor adopted the time-honored policy of summoning a general council. It met at Ephesus in the summer of 431. Nestorius refused to attend, but the emperor, who had once supported Nestorius, acceded to Cyril’s demands and deposed the firebrand. Repudiated, Nestorius found himself exiled to his former monastery at Antioch even as a new bishop assumed his pulpit in Constantinople. Nestorius’s followers were also expelled from the church and soon established the Nestorian Syrian churches of the Middle and Far East, some of which survive to this day.

Nestorius lived until late in 451, long enough to welcome Pope Leo’s doctrinal epistle (or “Tome”) and the “definition” of orthodoxy announced at the Council of Chalcedon. He received the council’s conclusions as his own. “I have endured the torment of my life,” he said just before dying on the borders of the empire. “Every day I beseech God to accomplish my dissolution, whose eyes have seen the salvation of God.”

Fine words from a maligned man. But the Nestorian controversy did serve one lofty purpose. The more extreme members of the Antioch school made clear the need to talk about Christ’s deity and humanity in convincing terms, especially terms describing the union of both in a single person.

“Robber Council”

Soon after the Council of Ephesus, a third disgraceful affair called Eutychianism spread controversy throughout the East. From a monastery near Constantinople, an elderly but unlearned monk named Eutyches (c.378–454) began to defend Christ’s deity, a teaching sometimes called monophysitism (from the Greek, meaning “one nature”). He taught that Christ’s humanity was swallowed up in his deity, just “as a drop of honey that falls into the sea dissolves in it.” It was virtually a rerun of Apollinarianism, and before that, docetism (the teaching that Christ only seemed to be a man).

Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople pronounced the monk a heretic. In Alexandria, however, Dioscorus, the city’s patriarch, was eager to assert his power in Constantinople. At his request, the emperor once again summoned an “imperial council.” This one at Ephesus (449) allowed Dioscorus to rehabilitate Eutyches, but the rest of the church saw through the politics. Pope Leo dismissed it as a “robber council” and joined Emperor Flavian in asking the emperor for a new council. Such was the shady background of the historic Council of Chalcedon, a town not far from Constantinople.

In 451 nearly 400 bishops quickly indicted Dioscorus for his actions at the “robber council” and then set forth the definition that has become classical orthodoxy. Chalcedon admirably states what Christ is not.

Against the earlier heretic Arius, the assembly affirmed that Jesus was truly God, and against Apollinarius that he was truly man. Against Eutyches it confessed that Jesus’ deity and humanity were not changed into something else, and against the Nestorians that Jesus was not divided but was one person.

In order to deny the Greek conception of God as remote and uninterested, but at the same time to be loyal to Scripture, Chalcedon offers no “explanation” of Jesus’ mystery. The council fathers knew that Jesus fits no class. He is absolutely unique. Chalcedon left the mystery intact; the church remained a worshiping community.

But the affirmation also made it possible to tell the story of Jesus as good news. Since Jesus was a normal human being, he could fulfill every demand of God’s righteous law, and he could suffer and die a real death. Since he was truly God, his death was capable of satisfying divine justice. God himself had, by his grace, provided the sacrifice.

Bruce L. Shelley is senior professor of church history at Denver Seminary and author of Church History in Plain Language (Word).

Copyright © 1996 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Bruce Barron is the author of “Politics for the People,” a guide to politics for the average reader, and a staff member of the Pennsylvania Family Institute.

Daniel H. Bays, professor of history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, researches modern Chinese Christianity. He has edited “Christianity in China: The Eighteenth Century to the Present” (forthcoming from Stanford University Press).

J. Bottum is associate editor of “First Things.” His essays and reviews appear regularly in the “Weekly Standard” and other publications.

Edward E. Ericson, Jr., professor of English at Calvin College, is the author of two books on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most recent of which is “Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World.”

Eugene D. Genovese is the author of many books, including most recently “The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War” and “The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism.”

Christopher A. Hall teaches biblical and theological studies at Eastern College.

Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College.

Robert Kachur teaches British literature and composition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is working on a book investigating how Christina Rossetti and other Victorian women writers used the Book of Revelation in attempts to create an authoritative female Christian voice.

Lyman A. Kellstedt is professor of political science at Wheaton College.

Roger Lundin, professor of English at Wheaton College, is the author of “The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World.” His biography of Emily Dickinson is forthcoming from Eerdmans.

Eric Metaxas, whose humor writing has appeared in the “Atlantic” and the “New York Times Magazine,” has written many children’s stories for Rabbit Ears Radio. His most recent books are “The Birthday ABC,” a children’s book; and “Don’t You Believe It!,” a parody.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.

Virginia Stem Owens is director of the Milton Center at Kansas Newman College. Her book “Assault on Eden: A Memoir of Communal Life in the Early 70’s,” first published in 1977, has been reissued with a new preface.

John Powell is assistant professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University, Erie. His most recent publications include a special edition of Nineteenth-Century Prose on “Victorian Biography” (1995), and “Art, Truth and High Politics: A Bibliographic Study of the Official Lives of Queen Victoria’s Ministers in Cabinet, 1843-1969.”

Joy Sawyer is a therapist in private practice in Denver, Colorado. Her poems have appeared in Inklings, “New York Quarterly,” “Theology Today,” and other publications

Corwin E. Smidt is professor of political science at Calvin College.

Tim Stafford, senior writer for “Christianity Today,” is the author of many books, including most recently “Knowing the Face of God.”

Harry S. Stout is Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity at Yale University and general editor of “The Works of Jonathan Edwards.” He is the author of “Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism.”

Larry Woiwode received the Award of Merit for the Short Story from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995. His most recent books are “Silent Passengers,” a collection of stories, and “Acts.”

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 2

bcjul96mrj6B40026618

“Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy”

By James Fallows

Pantheon Books

296 pp.; $23

“Telling the Truth: How to Revitalize Christian Journalism”

By Marvin Olasky

Crossway

303 pp.; $20, paper

I heard James Fallows talk on National Public Radio, describing the event that put him over the edge. Watching one of the Washington news talk shows, Fallows heard a panel of journalists pronouncing authoritatively and articulately on what President Clinton should do in Bosnia. The trouble was, Fallows knew each of these journalists, and he knew for a fact that none of them had been to Bosnia or covered the story firsthand. They didn’t know what they were talking about. He felt embarrassed, Fallows said, to be part of a profession with such low standards. He decided then and there to write about what has gone wrong with American journalism.

James Fallows ranks among the finest journalists of our time. His specialty has been in-depth illumination of complicated subjects. Seeking to understand the Asian challenge, for example, he was not content to do some interviews and make a three-week Asian trip. He took his family to live in Japan and several other East Asian countries. He has brought a similar care to subjects as arcane as Pentagon weapons procurement. He cannot be dismissed as a ritual complainer. (Complaining about the news seems to be the equivalent of reviling camp food when you are in junior high.)

Not content to describe trends, Fallows names names and cites examples, such as Mike Wallace parachuting in for an instant interview with a subject he does not have the time to understand, or co*kie Roberts refusing to respond to any press inquiries about the amounts she is paid for speaking to special-interest groups. Fallows says that American journalism has gone wrong, so wrong that it undermines our democracy.

He is not charging media bias (he is not denying it, either) but something far deeper. Fallows says journalism has developed habits that undermine its very purpose, which is to equip citizens with the information they need to participate in democracy. Journalists are destroying the house they live in.

Why are voters both passive and angry? Why do they despise politicians and the media? Why do fewer people read the newspaper? Why do so many consider voting a waste of time? Fallows suggests that journalists should read what they write and watch what they produce, and they may begin to understand.

Because of the way journalists report, Fallows says, Americans increasingly perceive political issues as nothing more than arbitrary stances taken by politicians to manipulate voters or special interests (“Clinton Modifies Health Plan to Appease Seniors”). Likewise, people see political campaigns as mere horseraces to handicap (“Fogal Predicts Race Will Narrow”) with nothing at stake except a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” for particular self-serving politicians and their “handlers.” The public believes that politicians care only about their re-election. Why? Largely because that is the only motive ever attributed to them by journalists. Fallows decries “a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems.”

Problems as they appear in the news are rarely solvable; they appear impossibly complex and tragic. News headlines are dominated by scandals and disasters, punctuated by ironic or cynical commentary. The best-known, best-paid journalists are most often seen shouting rudely at each other on talk shows or at the President as he boards a plane. This is what ordinary people learn of political life from the news. Why should they care about it?

Reporters who make it on national TV are the big stars of journalism, Fallows says, and would-be stars emulate them just as they once emulated Woodward and Bernstein. What they emulate is axiomatically bad journalism.

Journalists make it onto TV via the news talk shows, which require that they speak (or more likely, shout) in one-liners about subjects they know little about. Since few have really studied, say, the difficult subject of Medicare reform, they cannot discuss Medicare but only whether Newt Gingrich can convince the public to swallow his Medicare medicine. What does the audience learn from this? Very little about Medicare. They learn that cynical politicians are trying to get advantage over each other by “selling” various approaches to a government program that many elderly people depend on to pay their medical bills. They get insider talk about the tactics being used to push or oppose one approach or another. The audience may or may not turn off the news talk show. (That depends on how entertaining the show is.) They will turn off any hope of understanding what is at stake in Medicare, or finding a politician who truly cares. News talk shows contribute “to a mood of fatalistic disengagement.”

Washington journalists want very badly to get on these talk shows, Fallows claims, partly because of the ego inflation that comes with such exposure, and partly because exposure means name recognition that can be turned into cash on the lecture circuit. Some journalists are selling their souls, he suggests. Many of the rest would like to.

The other way onto national TV is by becoming a star for a network. Stars make even larger amounts of money, but not for good reporting. It isn’t profitable for a network to let, say, Judy Woodruff take a month to research a story. Other lower-ranking staff members do the legwork. Woodruff gets flown in for the interview. Since she doesn’t have any in-depth understanding of the story, she can’t add any news value. She can only add the clever, ironic, poised comment–perhaps one that suggests how terribly complex the issue is, or that the politicians have messed up again.

Network TV journalism may seem light years away from the local newspaper, but Fallows thinks that elite national journalists set the trends for everybody else. Fallows favors an alternative approach, developed by the experiment loosely known as “public journalism,” whereby news organizations try to foster understanding and dialogue in their communities. For example, some newspapers have tried to find out what issues their readers consider paramount, and then they cover politicians’ response to these rather than the ersatz controversies (mudslinging, mostly) that are invented by campaign headquarters. Journalism should discard its false pose of objectivity, Fallows says, which translates roughly to “we don’t care.” Rather, journalists should be purposeful in supporting democracy and take care that their work fosters the understanding and civility that democracy requires. “Without purposefulness,” he quotes Buzz Merritt, “toughness is mere self-indulgence.”

If Fallows decries modern journalism as cynical and sensational, Marvin Olasky scorns Christian journalism that is tepid, lukewarm, and “dithering.” For Fallows, journalism is a tool of democracy. Olasky understands it as a weapon of holy war. Although Olasky teaches journalism at a government school, the University of Texas, his interest lies in journalism that instructs in Christian truth–the sort he pursues as the editor of “World,” a Christian newsmagazine. “A solidly Christian news publication should not be balanced,” he writes. Rather, it should “fight a limited war against secular, liberal culture.” Olasky employs such military imagery freely in “Telling the Truth,” a distinctive blend of textbook and manifesto.

Like Fallows, Olasky believes that journalism should be purposeful, not objective in the sense of never taking sides. He wants activist journalists, who write their stories to illustrate truths they are deeply convinced of. Olasky proposes the standard of “biblical objectivity,” which teaches God’s truth by “presentation of the God’s-eye view.” “Biblical objectivity means showing the evil of hom*osexuality,” he writes; “balancing such stories by giving equal time to gay activists is ungodly journalism.”

The problem with such Old Testament journalism is getting the God’s-eye view right. Olasky seems to suffer no lack of self-confidence on this point. He concedes that nafta was the kind of story for which no biblical understanding is obvious. A journalist must balance views and perspectives (dither?) on some such issues. There do not appear to be many such issues, however. “Biblical objectivity,” he writes in one example, “means supporting the establishment and improvement of Bible-based education, and criticizing government schools.” Really? The Bible tells us to criticize government schools?

A more pernicious problem is that a commitment to teach can be at odds with good reporting. An old, wry line catches this: “I already have the story; I just need some quotes.” Most often when people complain to me about mistreatment by a reporter, they describe someone who did not really listen because he had already made up his mind (though he never said so). This is irritating to the subject, but even more corrosive to the story. If you already know what you will write before you begin, you are not really reporting. You are just ornamenting your view with quotation.

Olasky seems mainly oblivious to this problem, even though he has critiqued it when the reporters’ commitment is pro-abortion. In “The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988,” in a chapter entitled “Ideology Versus Investigation,” he calls most newspapers “pro-abortion lap dogs” and says they avoided “hard investigative digging on abortion.” Olasky quotes from “USA Today” reporter Marlene Perrin, who was set up by Planned Parenthood to do a negative story on pro-life pregnancy counseling centers and admitted she “couldn’t get to the fake clinics, but I talked to clients who had been there. . . . The Planned Parenthood people were very helpful in providing them for me.” That is bad reporting by anyone’s accounting, but precisely such softness has led to modern journalists’ insistence on toughness and objectivity. Good reporting does not require that you give both sides equal credence, but it does require that you get both sides of the story.

In another example, Olasky tells of the “Baltimore Sun’s” story on the anti-abortion film “The Silent Scream,” which quoted filmmaker Bernard Nathanson and then followed his five paragraphs with 32 paragraphs of sharp attack. Would that have been, in Olasky’s mind, fair reporting if the reporter’s sympathies had been anti-abortion? Is bias all right if it is our bias? I know many Christians who resent the anti-Christian bias of the secular press, but what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The issue, I think, is not that the reporter has a point of view. It is that a point of view can steer you toward caricature if you are not careful. The adjectival phrase “tough, but fair” should apply to Christian journalism.

Olasky is right to criticize the “on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand” style of reporting. If a journalist has no point of view (or thinks he has none, or pretends to have none), then what he produces becomes either false or inhuman. Even reporting a traffic accident requires an implied commitment to the value of human life and property. Many stories would be more interesting and of greater value if the reporter made clear why they matter, and even demonstrated what position is right and what wrong. Olasky hails journalism in earlier American centuries, when newspapers could (and sometimes did) see the news through a strong biblical lens. Many also saw the news through a strong Democratic lens, or a Federalist lens. A city like New York had dozens of newspapers, all vociferously competing to put their spin on the news. (Fairly often they falsified their reports, too.) Newspapers were far from objective then, but no one complained that Americans were disengaged from politics.

Today one newspaper reads like any other. They are (I believe) more factually accurate than in the nineteenth century, yet almost passionless. Television news is similarly monochromatic, its variations lying only in graphics, set, and stars. This does not make for a robust exchange of ideas. (More vivid points of view have become the property of weekly magazines like the “National Review” and “The New Republic,” and of talk radio, which can profitably appeal to small segments of the market.)

Olasky is right, then, that Christians in journalism should vigorously speak the truth that they know. I think he would do well, however, to hear what Fallows says about how journalism can undermine democracy, and consider that a Christian lives in two kingdoms. Journalists are certainly to advance God’s kingdom by proclaiming God’s truth. We are also to treat our neighbors the way we would like to be treated, and to seek the welfare of the city where we live. Having felt the sting of being disinherited by journalists, having witnessed firsthand the blindness of people with such confidence in their position they cannot see another point of view, evangelical Christians of all people ought to eschew arrogance. Arrogance does not produce good journalism, though it may cheer on our own camp.

“People will pay attention to journalism only if they think it tells them something they must know,” Fallows writes, and “Journalism exists to answer questions like, ‘What is really going on?’ and ‘Why is this happening?’ ” Good journalism, therefore, ultimately requires a vigorous Christian point of view, which alone truly identifies what people must know and explains what is really going on.

I can’t agree with Olasky, however, that the problem with Christian journalism is that it is lukewarm. I find the problem to be that Christian journalism (what little exists) is not very insightful. We rarely do the hard work–investigation and thinking–that enables us to advance the reader’s understanding and knowledge. I worry that in his emphasis on vigor and conviction, Olasky barely acknowledges the importance of listening, probing, and sifting through vast areas of uncertainty and ignorance. Granted, it is hard for a crusading journalist to find the patience and care required. But good journalists do.

DIRECTED VERSUS DITHERING

Directed reporting–the combination of a biblical world-view and precise, tough-minded reporting–is atypical within Christian journalism for two reasons. First, it is time-intensive: It is much easier to pontificate about the decline of the Cuban economy than to go to Cuba, interview people there about tight rationing, and report that:

to get even those limited rations, Cubans stand interminably in line. “For four hours I waited for this!” one grandmother fumed to us as she stalked into her home late one afternoon. She raised a small plastic bag which held two tiny rolls and three small bars of soap.

Second, among those able and willing to do a good job from the field, there is sometimes a reluctance to merge opinion and reporting, even though the opinion in directed reporting comes through the selection of specific detail, and it has long been recognized that all reporters inevitably select. Biblical objectivity, however, does not emphasize personal opinion: The goal is perspective that is grounded in a biblical world-view. If there is insufficient biblical rationale for a story theme, out it should go.

A Christian publication, in short, should teach, but it should teach effectively by showing rather than telling. Directed reporting is designed to show readers the salient facts in a Bible-based contextualization, and allow them to agree or disagree with the conclusions reached. It differs from reporting that picks up here a fact, there a fact, because it is directed within a biblical framework; it does not dither. It also differs from theoretical writing that does not have a base in pavement-pounding reporting.

–By Marvin Olasky, from “Telling the Truth”

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 3

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Indeed, I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to ‘live o’er each scene’ with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life. Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved. As it is, I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived.

–James Boswell, “The Life of Samuel Johnson”

“The Life of Samuel Johnson,” the great prototype of modern biography, was published on May 16, 1791, the anniversary of the day in 1763 on which James Boswell first met Doctor Johnson in the parlor of Thomas Davies, an actor who kept a bookshop in Covent Garden.

Apart from his irrepressible boastfulness–in this case, not unjustified–Boswell’s remarks about his life of Johnson reveal a naIvete characteristic of the Enlightenment. “Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was,” Boswell says of Johnson, “he might have been almost entirely preserved”–a strange turn of phrase, the strangeness of which Boswell doesn’t perceive. So we are to imagine a relay-team of biographers attending the great man from birth, recording not only what he did–“all the most important events . . . in their order”–but also “interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought.” And there you have it: a virtual Doctor Johnson.

In “Whose Emily Dickinson?” (in this issue), Roger Lundin tells how he began work on a biography of Dickinson with a comparably naive notion of what it would entail, and how in the course of that project he gained a new sense of the irreducible mystery at the heart of every human life. (Along the way, he also became much more charitable in his judgments of fellow biographers.)

If excessive confidence in the power of biography to fix and “preserve” its subject is one pitfall biographers must avoid, another is the pressure to distort the life according to the dictates of this or that overarching agenda. Biography, as Harry Stout remarks (in this issue), is “the most contested form of history-writing.” Famous lives become advertisem*nts for a political philosophy, a religious faith, a sexual identity (thus we are confronted with Dickinson as lesbian poet, Schubert as gay composer). Evidence that does not fit the agenda is twisted or ignored.

Stout makes an interesting observation: that Christian historians of this generation have tended to avoid biography. His own experience as a biographer sheds light on this seeming anomaly. Stout’s life of George Whitefield, the eighteenth-century revivalist, provoked bitter criticism and controversy. He had sought to present a balanced view of Whitefield, as “simultaneously saint and sinner.” In some quarters, that smacked of impiety: “I learned that Protestants and Roman Catholics are not so far apart in the matter of saints as their theologies proclaim.”

In a letter written earlier this year, Randall Balmer came at the same problem from a different angle, and with a focus specifically on the evangelical community:

We’re beginning, I think, to see some attempts at evangelical biography and autobiography–Daniel Barth Peters, a missionary kid and a graduate student at Claremont, is coming out with “Through Isaac’s Eyes” (Zondervan), which I’ve read in manuscript–but it’s difficult and painful. Difficult because evangelical kids grow up with an authorized narrative about their lives. It’s triumphalist in nature, and it’s drummed into them over and over through sermons, testimonies, and the like. So evangelical biography and autobiography still have a long way to go, and we have precious few examples to guide us.

A look at the current crop of Christian books confirms Balmer’s assessment. Still, there are many encouraging signs. Susan Bergman’s memoir “Anonymity” (1994), for example, is an outstanding evangelical autobiography that breaks free of the prefabricated language and sentiment typical of the genre. The Eerdmans series, the “Library of Religious Biography,” which includes Stout’s “Whitefield,” Edith Blumhofer’s “Aimee Semple McPherson,” and (forthcoming) Lundin’s “Dickinson,” among others, offers strong models for the biographer. Also noteworthy is “Growing Up Fundamentalist: Journeys in Legalism and Grace” (1995), a collection of interviews by Stefan Ulstein.

Richard Holmes has described biography as “the most lovable of modern English literary forms,” adding that, “If I had to define biography in a single phrase, I would call it an art of human understanding, and a celebration of human nature.” That is very well said. I think of the splendid obituary for F. F. Bruce, by W. Ward Gasque and Laurel Gasque, which appeared in the “Reformed Journal” (October 1990). There I learned that

One key to [Bruce’s] productivity was his formidable filing system. His wife Betty said he never threw a piece of paper away; it might have a useful note written on it. . . . His system was simple. During the war he began to use discarded cereal boxes to store his notes, arranged according to the order of the Bible, from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21.

That does not add to our understanding of Paul and his circle, or make the hard sayings of Jesus any easier. But it’s one detail from a portrait that, in the span of not quite three pages, gives an impression of F. F. Bruce you are not likely to forget. It gives delight.

I’ve often been haunted by the vision of the Last Judgment in Revelation. It’s very biographical: “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the books” (Rev. 20:12). A record more complete, even, than anything dreamt of by Boswell: a biography to end all biographies.

Even when one remembers God’s mercy, that vision has considerable power to disturb. Still, if we delight in the eccentricities of Johnson and Dickinson and Bruce, in the qualities that make each daughter and son one of a kind, each friend unique, how much more will the Creator relish that biographical feast!

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 4

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“Read no history,” Benjamin Disraeli advised: “nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” Let theory stand for the grand systems in the light of which mere human beings are at best a nuisance. Then biography, in contrast, is the realm of stubborn particulars: messy, contingent, resisting abstraction. Theory is the Great Society; biography is the Robert Taylor Homes. Theory is French; biography is English. (Thus it makes perfect sense when the literary theorist Terry Eagleton contemptuously observes that “there would seem to be no end to the peculiar English mania for the Individual Life.”)

Fittingly, this special section on biography begins with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who defied the mad, murderous attempt to make reality conform to the theories of Marx and Lenin. In his book “Invisible Allies,” Solzhenitsyn sketches the improbable lives of some of the individuals who helped to topple the edifice of Soviet power.

Theory bears strange fruit. We’ve all seen the poster art of Socialist Realism: a brawny, purposeful tractor-driver, say, ushering in the bright dawn of the proletariat. The American cousins of those Soviet painters are churning out Christian biographies. See Harry Stout’s “Biography as Battleground” for a report from the front.

Other essays consider the statesman William Gladstone, the poets Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, and the novelist Robertson Davies: an odd bunch. What they have in common, Roger Lundin reminds us, is “the contrapuntal complexity of a human life.” And therein lies the endless fascination of biography.

–JW

What Solzhenitsyn Has Done for Us Lately

By Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

” ‘The Russian Question’ at the End of the Twentieth Century”

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Translated by Yermolai Solzhenitsyn

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

135 pp.; $15

“Invisible Allies”

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Translated by Alexis Klimoff

and Michael Nicholson

Counterpoint

344 pp.; $29.50

“The Solzhenitsyn Files: Secret Soviet Documents Reveal One Man’s Fight Against the Monolith”

Edited by Michael Scammel

Translated under the supervision of Catherine A. Fitzpatrick Edition Q

472 pp.; $29.95

When the Soviet Union died in 1991, no one had a better right than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to say, “I told you so.” Beyond displaying astonishing predictive powers, Solzhenitsyn also contributed mightily through his writings to the delegitimizing of the Soviet regime. Although he shook the Kremlin’s foundations and shocked the world, the ensuing applause has long since faded away. The cult of novelty, about which also he has written, asks, “What have you done for us today?” Prophets are not always honored in their own lifetime.

A blip of regard for Solzhenitsyn did surface fleetingly when he returned to Russia in 1994, as he had said all along, against all evidence, he would do. However, the apparent intractability of post-Soviet reality–yes, he anticipated this, as well–has created an environment inhospitable to a public recognition of Solzhenitsyn’s world-historical achievement. Western Sovietologists, once blindsided by events, now hint at a hankering for a renewed Soviet Union. (Without its Sovietism, of course!) In Russia, the young respect his heroism but pay him little heed, and pensioners vote to bring back the Communists. That Solzhenitsyn seems to such groups to belong to the past they take as an indictment of him, not of themselves.

Now, however, is exactly the right moment to reconsider Solzhenitsyn. For, in a serendipity of timing, three new volumes by or about him have appeared. ” ‘The Russian Question’ at the End of the Twentieth Century” contains both the title essay and his “Address to the International Academy of Philosophy” in Liechtenstein. These pieces display the current state of his thinking. By contrast, the other two books focus on the most intense and harrowing period of his sensationally dramatic life, the years leading up to his 1974 expulsion from his homeland. “Invisible Allies” tells the stories of brave persons who helped him fight the Great Dragon even while he was inside its belly. The Solzhenitsyn Files reprints hitherto-secret documents charting the Soviet government’s efforts against him. Combined, they provide an unexpected but satisfying symmetry.

When one reads the contemporary essays against the background of that earlier struggle, the strongest impression is of the consistency of Solzhenitsyn’s vision throughout the years. Now, as before, he listens only to the sad music of Russia and sings only of it. His 5,000-page magnum opus, the series of novels called “The Red Wheel,” focuses on the years 1914-17, rendered in minute detail. By contrast, “The Russian Question” allots only 100-plus pages to 400 years of Russian history. Since it assumes a familiarity with that record beyond the reach of almost all Westerners, it is not the place to start reading Solzhenitsyn.

The thesis of Solzhenitsyn’s polemic is that Russia needs to attend to its internal development. This process will require prolonged, undistracted calm, a condition that Russia has never enjoyed. Again and again its leaders have embroiled the nation in foreign adventures, unfailingly to Russia’s disadvantage. This record explains why Russia could not withstand the Bolshevik coup d’etat. Its disastrous consequences we know in large part through Solzhenitsyn’s valiant labor. The most melancholy of these consequences has been the systematic liquidation over three generations of the best of Russia’s human capital–“counterselection,” he calls it.

With its resources depleted, and without the required calm for internal development, Russia has come out from under the rubble of collapsing communism, Solzhenitsyn has said, in the worst possible way. And so we have “the Great Russian Catastrophe of the 1990s.” With the schools in disarray, with government officials ineffectual at best and openly criminal at worst, with life-expectancy and birth rates having plummeted, the demoralization of the citizenry is so profound that The Question now is, “Shall our people be or not be?”

Before heading home, Solzhenitsyn said his farewells to the West, in Europe. His 1993 Liechtenstein address strikes many of the same themes delivered at Harvard’s 1978 commencement ceremony, but–because the times have changed–he omits the specific criticisms of Western weakness that so distracted commentators from his main message. Therefore, this may be the best piece to give to any of our thoughtful young who wish to know what Solzhenitsyn has to say to the West.

Among the familiar themes, Solzhenitsyn continues to indict the Enlightenment while nonetheless cherishing such values of the West as “its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law–a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen.”

On the whole, however, the balance in this address shifts away from the political and toward the personal. The concomitant mellowing of tone befits the occasion, as one Christian (Orthodox) speaks to others (Roman Catholic). In our lives of affluence and bustle, “We have ceased to see the purpose.” The best evidence of our confusion about life’s why question is that we lack “a clear and calm attitude toward death.” As our Enlightenment inheritance cuts us off from any consciousness of living under God’s heaven, “the thought of death becomes unbearable: it is the extinction of the entire universe at a stroke.”

In his own old age, Solzhenitsyn can prepare for death serene in the confidence that he found his raison d’etre and was faithful to it unto the end. His suffering gave him his mission in life, and it gave us the word gulag, to stand alongside Holocaust as a shorthand term for modern man’s inhumanity to man. Some of his literary characters speak for him when they thank God for prison. What things he learned in those camps. He had to tell the world. Then the world would change. He did. And it did. No writer, in the words of the New Yorker’s David Remnick, “has had a greater effect on the course of modern history.” Nor has any writer had a greater sense of integrity, of coherence, of seamlessness about his life.

“Invisible Allies” and “The Solzhenitsyn Files” refresh our memory of Solzhenitsyn’s singlemindedness. Until now, the best source for the story recounted in these books was “The Oak and the Calf,” memoir-like sketches by Solzhenitsyn, most of which he wrote in 1974 while residing in Zurich and while the memories were fresh. As unequal as would seem a confrontation between a butting calf and an apparently immovable oak, one wag, when the book appeared in English in 1980, said that the battle between the Soviet authorities and Solzhenitsyn was altogether unfair: the Soviets never had a chance. Yesterday’s outlandish witticism has become today’s historical fact.

Such was the drama of this struggle that some reviewers considered “The Oak and the Calf” Solzhenitsyn’s most compelling book. This, despite his repeated announcements that some of the best parts had to be kept quiet, but with repeated promises that someday they, too, would come out. Those missing parts constitute “Invisible Allies.” Only with the Soviet Union dead could these chapters be published. And only now do we learn how many of the chief dramatis personae he had to keep from us. Anyone who liked “The Oak and the Calf” will love “Invisible Allies.” With the covering of tracks no longer necessary, Solzhenitsyn here writes with such energetic abandon that the reader races along, sometimes scarcely able to keep up with all the tumble of events.

The pleasure of reading this book is immeasurably enhanced by contextualizing it with “The Solzhenitsyn Files.” True, the execrable bureaucratese makes freshman compositions look good by comparison. But one reads these documents for the refracted light they cast on Solzhenitsyn and his co-conspirators. Well, not much on the coconspirators. For, notwithstanding intensive and systematic surveillance efforts by the Committee for State Security (KGB), it is astounding how few of his allies the authorities ever ferreted out, a handful in a hundred. This ignorance is particularly remarkable because Solzhenitsyn’s estranged first wife became complicit with the KGB, and thus her minders had access to inside information. Yet, on the very eve of Solzhenitsyn’s deportation, KGB head Yuri Andropov is still wondering aloud if “we have a hostile underground and the KGB has overlooked it.” So the calf was foxy, too.

It is important to specify what we have and do not have in this volume. We have 157 documents concerning Solzhenitsyn–the survivors from the 177 first published in Russian–drawn from the secret, often top-secret, files of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USSR. President Boris Yeltsin declassified them. The dates range from 1963 to 1980. (So the authorities kept tabs on the exile and kept trying to damage his reputation in the West!) Nor is the Russian compilation of 177 entries an exhaustive set of the Central Committee’s files on Solzhenitsyn. About the omissions in the original version, the book’s introduction is inexplicably silent. Of files in other government agencies, crucially including the KGB, this book contains none. Stories circulate that the KGB has destroyed many, maybe more than a hundred, of its files on Solzhenitsyn; since destroying files is out of character for Soviet bureaucrats, someday we may have these, too.

The introduction to this volume is written by Michael Scammell, author of a mammoth but deeply flawed biography of Solzhenitsyn. And, true to form, Scammell concludes his comments with a little gratuitous blackening of Solzhenitsyn’s character. Nevertheless, this introduction is, in the main, quite appreciative. Scammell concurs that “Solzhenitsyn is shown to be completely correct in his contempt for the government’s abilities,” and he is particularly taken by some of Solzhenitsyn’s “breathtakingly prophetic political remarks” caught by the KGB’s bugging devices. As early as 1965, for example, Solzhenitsyn observed, “This is a government without prospects,” adding that “it’s not working.” Not only did he expect the whole structure of Soviet Communism to collapse, but he predicted that the various republics would then go their separate ways. By 1969 Solzhenitsyn was suggesting that the very materials composing this book would someday, to the authorities’ chagrin, become public.

The documents are clustered chronologically into five sections: “Early Struggle” (1963-69), “Nobel Prize” (1970-71), “Approaching Crisis” (1972-73), “Expulsion” (1974), “Exile” (1975-80). One wishes for the files of 1961-62 about Nikita Khrushchev’s authorization of the publishing of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” since that decision gave Solzhenitsyn his standing to wage the struggle herein charted and is now clearly understood to be the first sledgehammer blow weakening the Kremlin’s foundations.

The chief event in the first section was the KGB’s 1965 raid of the apartment of Veniamin Teush. Looking for something else, they happened upon manuscripts by Solzhenitsyn deposited there for safekeeping. Also as early as 1965, via their bugs, the KGB knew that Solzhenitsyn was working on “The Gulag Archipelago” (and that he considered the revered Lenin “nothing but a serpent”). So already the terms were set for the mortal combat that ensued. In “Invisible Allies,” Solzhenitsyn calls this confiscation of 1965 “the most painful blow I suffered in what is now a quarter century of literary conspiracy.” With all the materials for “Gulag” now in hand, he feared that it might never come out. Good-hearted but careless in handling secrets, Teush “had broken the thread that I had patiently been spinning out of the darkness of prison cells.” And Solzhenitsyn now began burning some papers hidden elsewhere.

Amid the multiplicity and density of a decade’s-worth of events, the minutes of Politburo (and other) meetings about the Solzhenitsyn case show the top leaders to be bumbling and dithering. The best index of their befuddled obtuseness is the language of their discourse. 1967: “It is the duty of every Soviet writer to march in the ranks of his people as they engage in a collective effort to build communism.” 1970: “The Soviet Writers’ Union is not only an association of writers, but also a union of persons who hold the same viewpoints.” 1974: “An important goal of the anticommunist campaign initiated in connection with Solzhenitsyn is to camouflage the monstrous oppression of the workers and peoples by reactionary forces occurring daily in the capitalist world.” Frankly, these brief quotations do injustice to the discourse of the Soviet leaders, for its distinguishing feature is mealy-mouthed sprawl.

When the powerful use the language of propaganda not on the masses but on one another, can they really expect their peers to think them sincere? But in a hothouse existence so removed from reality as to imagine that there are only two kinds of Western newspapers, communist and bourgeois, and to assume that Solzhenitsyn, a provincial of peasant stock, must be descended from rich landowners, ideology can turn minds to mush. Besides, until a final decision is reached, better to keep one’s head down and play the familiar linguistic game. Afterwards, one can call Solzhenitsyn “a stinking dog that is ready to destroy everything and everybody to save his scabby skin.” Ah, now there is language that one can believe in–and a true index of the coarseness of the mind behind the words.

After years of dawdling, the mighty rulers finally brought the Solzhenitsyn matter to a head in early 1974. Astoundingly, even at this late date, they did not comprehend his motives, whether rooted in conviction (“traitor”) or in money (“paid lackey”). Over the years, they had had many options to consider. The silliest was to “smother” him with “embraces,” in hopes that he would then gratefully toe the party line. Another was to take away his membership in the writers’ union; done, but deemed insufficient. Or they could always imprison him again. (But would he then be a martyr to future generations?) Or they could simply kill him. (This was once in fact tried, in 1971, by poking him with a poison-tipped implement, and it laid him up for two months.) Or they could deport him.

This last option had long been recommended by KGB man Andropov, who later was the sponsor of Mikhail Gorbachev. It was the shrewdest move available. Let the prickly fellow be a burr under the saddle of the West for a while. Although Solzhenitsyn considered exile for a Russian writer worse than death, Andropov had learned from journalists that the West would consider any other move worse.

When, as at this climactic moment, we hear the voice of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, he comes off as the dimmest of all bulbs. In its gray banality, his speech is clotted with such fillers as “if I may call them that” and “if I may say so.” (Which, of course, you can, for who will say you nay?) In early 1972 he had declared a report by Comrade Andropov “in all respects useful and correct.” Now, two years later, he opens a crucial meeting about Solzhenitsyn by asking, “What shall we do with him?” After further dimwittedness, Brezhnev closes the meeting by charging Andropov and another comrade to “draft the whole procedure,” meanwhile, for his own part, sighing, “The issue of Solzhenitsyn is certainly not an easy one, it’s very complicated.”

Solzhenitsyn was expelled to the West on February 14, 1974. The most fascinating aspect of this book’s final section is Andropov’s exulting over the KGB’s propaganda successes in influencing Western opinion. He is thrilled by accounts of Solzhenitsyn as “a new millionaire,” and he chortles, “The attitude toward Solzhenitsyn is changing also among the so-called ‘liberal’ intelligentsia that showed such interest in him.” All this–and no harm to detente. Yes, the West gave Andropov ample reason to feel confirmed in his own wisdom. And Brezhnev in his.

To move from “The Solzhenitsyn Files” to “Invisible Allies” is to leave the fetid air of a sewer for Alpine freshness. Here is a world inhabited by gloriously fearless men and women. Especially women. (The reader can be forgiven for wondering how many of them loved Solzhenitsyn, for in some way they all did.) And especially persons educated in the sciences–for under the Soviets the humanities were ideologized in a way that we are coming to know for ourselves. As the sparkling prose hurtles us down the story line, we are caught up in that epic suspense in which we know the end of Solzhenitsyn’s story but not the steps along the way. For characters new to us, we experience that normal dramatic suspense of not knowing how their stories will work out.

Reading this book clarifies why Solzhenitsyn did not want his biography written during his lifetime. Much vital information had to be kept secret. When the definitive biography does get written, it will draw heavily upon “Invisible Allies.” Among the correctives, we must abandon the widespread notion that Solzhenitsyn was a lone wolf. He moved among people who would lay down their lives for their friend. To them, too, we can apply Samuel Johnson’s dictum that “there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.” They, like Solzhenitsyn himself, were ordinary people. It is just that these ordinary people did extraordinary things. Yes, on occasion, some of them disappointed Solzhenitsyn. One must remember how much he was asking of them. The striking thing is how many were faithful to him, at great risk to themselves.

“Invisible Allies” explicates a curious passage in “The Gulag Archipelago”–curious even to its author–in which he describes “a spiritual relay, a sensor relay,” which governed all his personal contacts in prison, in exile, in underground operations: “During all those seventeen years I recklessly revealed myself to dozens of people–and didn’t make a misstep even once. . . . (It seems to me that such spiritual sensors exist in many of us, but because we live in too technological and rational an age, we neglect this miracle and don’t allow it to develop.)” More than 100 such confidants find their way into these pages, 40 of them crammed together into one chapter (the second echelon of helpers), others receiving full-chapter treatment. As a novelist, Solzhenitsyn has always been stronger at creating characters than at developing plots, and here his strength is on full display. He sketches a life in quick, assured strokes, leaving out all inessentials, yet with a keen eye for those telling idiosyncrasies that bring a person to life on the page.

Beyond its obvious danger, the work of these allies was both exhausting and exacting. Long manuscripts had to be typed out, with as many carbon copies as the typewriter could handle, then typed again, to generate enough copies to hide away in various spots. Then came the transporting, the hiding, the keeping track of them. And every step must be out of view of the Unsleeping Eye. Then there were the emendations and additions. And more typing. What now is done with a keystroke on a computer took months. Meanwhile, the author kept turning out yet more.

In addition to the making there was sometimes the unmaking. If copies became obsolete or a potential leak was feared, a given cache would have to be destroyed. Once a conduit opened to the West, more destruction would follow. The light of fires runs like a leitmotif through this book, as manuscripts were burned. Yet the whole of Solzhenitsyn’s large corpus survives. And we remember the most famous line of Mikhail Bulgakov’s great novel “The Master and Margarita”: “Manuscripts don’t burn.”

Amid the onerous labors there was also much fun. The boyish side of Solzhenitsyn comes through repeatedly. Though forced into an underground life, he nonetheless relished the conspiratorial game played for the highest stakes. The exhilaration of outwitting their menacing foes created an uncommon camaraderie even beyond that seen among friends in “The First Circle,” and they delighted in giving one another playful nicknames.

One joy of reading “Invisible Allies” is meeting real-life models of characters in Solzhenitsyn’s fiction. The first chapter gives us the prototypes for Potapov (“The First Circle”) and the Kadmins and their intelligent dogs (“Cancer Ward”). Nikolai Zubov, alias Kadmin, was a gynecologist and an ex-zek who was remanded to the same locale for internal exile that Solzhenitsyn was. A handy man, Zubov developed methods for secreting messages. One method was to undo the binding of a book, then redo it with thin sheets glued together, sufficient to contain a whole manuscript under the cover. Thus did Solzhenitsyn take his first step in literary conspiracy–using a book of plays by George Bernard Shaw!

The chapter on “The Estonians” is an exceptionally moving one. Here we meet again two brave men from “Gulag,” Arnold Susi and Georg Tenno. Having once caused the soft spot for Estonians in Solzhenitsyn’s heart, now they justified it by providing him a Hiding Place. Here, we now learn, is where, during two winters, Solzhenitsyn did his main writing of “Gulag.” Of one highly productive 146-day stretch (it is characteristic of Solzhenitsyn that he knows to the day just how long this period lasted), he says, “It even seemed as if it was no longer I who was writing; rather, I was swept along, my hand was being moved by an outside force.” The KGB never tracked him down there: “the state security boys do not deserve high marks.”

After “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, Solzhenitsyn received many fan letters. This was how he met several of his future invisible allies. One such was Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, a sardonic, impulsive Leningrader–“Queen Elizabeth,” or “Q” for short. As we already knew, she once disobeyed an order from Solzhenitsyn to destroy an intermediate copy of “Gulag.” It was this copy that the KGB finally found in late 1973, after five days and nights of interrogating her. Whether she then hanged herself or was murdered by the KGB, the historical irony is that, by seizing this copy and thus having it available for mischievous misuse, the KGB hastened the publication of this book, which had already, unbeknownst to them, reached the West.

For several years Solzhenitsyn’s closest coconspirator was Elena Chukovskaya, granddaughter of Kornei Chukovsky, a grand old man of letters beloved as a children’s writer. The longest chapter is devoted to her story. Starting as early as 1965, this incredibly disciplined and effective worker served virtually as his chief of staff, so that when Solzhenitsyn said “we,” he meant Lyusha and him; and she was “in on the secret of Gulag from the first.” Only after some time did it dawn on Solzhenitsyn that, as part of the liberal Establishment in which she was reared, she did not altogether share his outlook. It was he, more than his cause, that she cared for, and Solzhenitsyn is quite candid about their complicated relationship. Lyusha was one ally the KGB did know about, and apparently they tried to assassinate her, in a staged traffic accident. After Gorbachev came to power, Lyusha led the way in urging that Solzhenitsyn be allowed to return home.

Reading these and many other stories of selfless courage, one wonders if the West could produce a group of people with equivalent dedication. Theirs are the luminous personalities Solzhenitsyn had in mind when he confounded his Harvard audience by saying there were persons of such spiritual intensity in the Soviet Union that he could not recommend the West as a spiritual model. But, in fact, some individual Westerners did become invisible allies. Grateful tribute to them, including some whose identities Solzhenitsyn never learned, takes up a full chapter. There was a key contact in the French embassy in Moscow who transmitted manuscripts. When Solzhenitsyn met this person in Paris in 1975, he discovered that a male pseudonym was cover for a Catholic nun, Russian by birth. A scholarly American army officer, William Odom, now well-known, transported archives in the diplomatic pouch. Some journalists helped, too–Swedish, Norwegian, American, British, Italian. Solzhenitsyn calls them heroes–“and remember, they were from the West, inexperienced in our ways, and were professional sensation-seekers to boot–not one of them ever breathed a word.”

Toward the end of “The Russian Question,” Solzhenitsyn emphasizes what an important role “human will plays,” more than materialistic theories comprehend. He calls this “a Christian view.” Then, concluding as always on the note of hope, he posits that there remains in his beloved country, now as before, a nucleus of spiritually healthy people. It is to them that he addresses his concluding exhortation: “We must build a moral Russia, or none at all–it would not then matter anyhow.” Michael Novak’s independent words, in his 1994 Templeton Address, are eerily resonant: “The free society is moral, or not at all.” What is true for Russians is true for us all.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 6

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If we look at Scripture we can see virtually every type of history-writing. There is political and military history, the history of religions, and social history. As well there is the history of populations and migration. Legal and economic history abounds. But most of all, there is biography. At its most basic, Scripture is a massive stringing together of the lives of faithful (and faithless) human beings from Adam and Eve through Jesus Christ, Judas Iscariot, and the founding generation of the Christian church.

This biographical focus is not surprising. While it is true that history is about great impersonal forces and movements, institutions and events, short-term “triggers” and long-term evolutions, it is first and foremost about human beings responding to the world they inherit in irreducibly personal and idiosyncratic ways. History is most authentic and personal at the individual level. What better way for Scripture to communicate the personal dimensions of saving faith than through biography? And what better way for subsequent generations of Christian historians communicating the progress of faith over time to serve their readers than through biography?

Yet precisely because religious biography is so personal it is also the most contested form of history-writing. Biographers claim their subjects as their own–and so do readers. When different groups with different agendas claim the same subject–as has happened, for example, with a number of recent books and films about Malcolm X–there is inevitably a contest to control memories in ways that reinforce one constituency or another.

Such tensions can also reside within the soul of the individual historian. It is, I think, one of the more striking facts about Christians writing history that until this generation the vast majority of Christian historians wrote biographies of the faithful. But this generation of professional Christian historians has not been drawn to biography. I’m not sure of all the reasons for this, but one possibility is that biography, far more than other forms of history, raises the issue of contested legacies, or better, competing loyalties. Is it possible that, for the same reason that Christian historians entered history instead of theology or biblical criticism, where tensions between the academy and church run strongest, they also avoid biography, where tensions between providential and temporal history are especially keen?

I did not fully realize the personal and contested nature of religious biography until I wrote one myself on the celebrated eighteenth-century revivalist George Whitefield (“The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism,” Eerdmans, 1991). Before writing that biography I managed to exist fairly comfortably in two worlds. I was both a “professional” historian and a “Christian” historian. My territory was the Puritans, a time-honored subject in the profession and in the church. And my methodology was chiefly that of intellectual history, largely divorced from personal lives and psychosocial experience. The first book I wrote, “The New England Soul,” dealt largely with the “meaning of America” as it came to be defined by the Puritans and retained in the secularized form of an “American civil religion” for generations thereafter. I could describe Puritan theology and doctrine empathetically, which all historians have to do, and feel good about it. In disinterested terms, I described Puritan belief, leaving it up to the reader whether he wanted to share these beliefs or simply study them in order to understand America a little better. Reformed Christian readers praised the book because it described ideas they held dear without any personal consideration of the men who espoused them. The book did not dwell on any single individual for more than a couple of pages. Puritan giants such as John Cotton, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards were noted for their ideas, not their personalities. There was never a need to go into any biographical detail beyond the beliefs that collectively constituted “the New England soul.”

As a scholar writing intellectual history, my vantage point was that of “objectivity,” subject to the canons of “scientific evidence” shared by most professional historians. Observing the rules of objectivity does not imply that historians have no faith, nor does it imply neutrality to all subjects. It refers rather to a methodology and a tone. The methodology stresses rigorous recovery of all relevant facts, no matter where they lead. “Truth,” in proximate terms, is the goal of most professional historians. Such truth makes no claims to complete objectivity or divine inspiration. It rests on the level of secondary causes that all reasonable scholars would see and understand. Of course, there would be differences among historians, but differing opinions would always be rooted in “facts” that described the past “as it really happened.” In his classic presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1950, Samuel Eliot Morison expressed the ideal in the following way:

Truth about the past is the essence of history and historical biography, the thing that distinguishes them from every other branch of literature. . . . In other words, the historian must be intellectually honest. Sublimating his own views of what ought to have been or should be, he must apply himself to ascertaining what really happened. Of course his own sense of values will enter into his selection and arrangement of facts. It goes without saying that complete, “scientific” objectivity is unattainable by the historian. His “choice of facts to be recorded, his distribution of emphasis among them, his sense of their significance and relative proportion, must be governed by his philosophy of life.” Certain mid-nineteenth century historians fancied that they could be as objectively scientific about the multitudinous, unrefractory materials of human history as a physiologist should be (but seldom is) in describing muscular reactions. But none of these, from Ranke down, if pressed, would have denied that their philosophy of life influenced if it did not dictate, their selection, emphasis, and arrangement.

Notice in Morison’s description of the historian’s task the absence of any reference to God or providence. Morison, like most other professional historians, is restricting his professional search for truth less to the sublime and eternal than to the proximate and probable. He is concerned with secondary causes and the pursuit of those causes in every direction, regardless of what it does to the image or reputation of his sources. That was the model I had in mind with “The New England Soul,” and it worked to fairly good effect. In fact, I made no personal claims of faith in “The New England Soul.” I simply told the story of Puritan preaching as it fit the facts, in a tone indistinguishable from that of confessed atheist historians like Perry Miller or Edmund Morgan. But because my subject matter was intellectual history–ideas, values, faith, and doctrine–the book could stand up both to the professional community of scholars demanding objectivity and to the Christian community, particularly the Calvinist Christian community.

My biography of George Whitefield embodied the same objective perspective as “The New England Soul,” but it aroused a quite different and far more hostile response on the part of many Christian readers and reviewers. How did this happen?

Recognizing that no biography is ever “definitive,” I set out to fill the gaps in earlier Whitefield biographies in ways that would locate Whitefield in his age. I wanted him to be a respectable–and respected–part of the academy’s legacy as well as the church’s. Virtually all earlier biographies of Whitefield tilted toward intellectual and providential history. They summarized and endorsed Whitefield’s Calvinist beliefs, attributing his success to providence and uncritically adopting Whitefield’s perspective on himself (often stated in Pauline terminology) as their own. In this perspective, Whitefield’s friends were God’s friends, and Whitefield’s enemies were God’s enemies. There was a certain finality to these hagiographies reminiscent of biblical history. Such works pleased the (Calvinistic) faithful, especially the Calvinistic faithful untrained in history, but failed to appeal to professional historians, who knew that as an intellectual, Whitefield was no great shakes. He disliked books, and he disliked systematic thought and scholarly disputation. He left little of interest for the intellectual historian. When faced with filiopietistic biographies, the scholarly community simply dismissed Whitefield as a second-rate intellect at best, a charlatan at worst.

As a professional biographer, I sought to bridge the gap between the Whitefield that the Christian faithful saw and the Whitefield the profession saw. I wanted, in other words, to expand Whitefield’s legacy to two constituencies who had quite different–and competing–loyalties. Recognizing that Whitefield’s historical significance was not in intellectual or theological history, I couched the biography in social and cultural history.

I was quite clear in my introduction to note that Whitefield’s social history, that is, the social history of his age, was not of paramount interest to him (and his followers). And it was not of paramount interest to me as a Christian. But it was an untold story. And so, without claiming definitive status or rejecting the Calvinist theologian emphasized in other biographies, I told the story of Whitefield and his times as a social history.

This time I would not emerge unscathed. It is one thing to talk in disinterested terms about the clash of ideas, and quite another to use the tool of cultural biography and talk about personalities in ways that are not always salutary, though–to the best of one’s knowledge–honest to the facts. Whitefield was a great man of faith, but he was no timeless saint, always abused and never illegitimately offensive. Like all Christians, he had full measures of the saint and the sinner vying for control of his soul. And this balanced Whitefield, simultaneously saint and sinner, was the man I sought to portray in my biography. Apparently I broke some cardinal rules in writing religious history that had to do with not demeaning (i.e., humanizing) Christian mythic figures. I learned that Protestants and Roman Catholics are not so far apart in the matter of saints as their theologies proclaim. Protestants want their saints as badly as Catholics and bridle against efforts that present them as human beings, albeit Christians.

In reflecting later on the different readings my books elicited, I can understand why some Christian readers had such negative responses to the Whitefield biography. They did not understand the different levels of history-writing the Christian scholar is free to pursue. Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear in my own mind then. So, for the record, let me be more precise. When I as a Christian historian write social history and cultural biography, I have to keep in mind at least three different levels of analysis, which I would label temporal or mundane, providential, and divine or inspired. Each of these levels of analysis, I would argue, is proper in its own sphere, but wrong when applied outside that sphere.

Let me say just a bit about these three levels. By temporal or mundane history I mean the history of natural or secondary causes; the social, political, economic, and intellectual history that all historians, whatever their personal beliefs, practice by observing the rules of evidence and adhering to a common pursuit of truth that all can agree upon.

By the providential level I mean the level of history seen through the lens of supernatural faith. This level separates Christian from non-Christian historian and asserts that the ultimate force in history, lying behind and above all secondary causes, is the God of Scripture. Unlike non-Christian historians, who might ascribe finality to this mundane force or that, Christian historians discern the sovereign hand of providence in Scripture and in the subsequent history of the church. They cannot write history only on the mundane level, as if it were determinative and sovereign. But even as Christian historians confess the underlying level of providential history they should also confess that they are fallible human beings whose perception and understanding of that grand providential design allows them to affirm its reality, not to interpret it with definitive finality.

In fact, there is only One who can discern the finger of God with finality, and that is God. This is the third level of interpretation, which I label divine or inspired. It is small company indeed, limited to God and to those ancient biblical chroniclers who wrote through direct, divine inspiration. This divine level of history has only one text, Scripture, and it must be read and received as sui generis. If a mere Christian historian were to declare with finality based on his or her professional opinion that David was indeed a man after God’s own heart, I would quibble. Mary, yes; Samuel, yes; Joseph, yes. But not David. He had far too much blood on his hands for such a lofty designation. Yet because God tells me in Scripture that David is such a person, I confess that, however mysterious, it must be true. I have to believe it because this is not only sacred history; it is divine history. As a Protestant, I cannot say that about any other text.

Protestant Christians do not always make the necessary distinctions between providential history and divine history, and that is what gets them in trouble. Some approach their subjects not only with a deep faith but with a conviction bordering on biblical certainty. They will affirm the uniqueness of Scripture and be the first to proclaim themselves “biblical Christians,” but their writing reads like another chapter added onto the Scriptures.

The Puritans did this. Through tools like typology, they believed they could know with biblical certainty the meaning of events swirling around them. They knew with finality who were God’s friends and who were God’s enemies. Most important, they knew that they were the “New Israel” entrusted with a messianic national destiny. Other, more recent Christians evidence a similar certainty about America that manifests itself in two contrary directions. Some are as certain as the Puritans that America is God’s chosen nation, while others are equally certain that America is not God’s chosen nation. Both err by taking on a pretentious air of divinity and inspiration that is properly limited to God and to the Scriptures. They confuse the second and third levels of interpretation as inappropriately as non-Christian historians confuse the first and second levels of interpretation.

So, too, with Whitefield. In my biography, some wanted me to see Whitefield’s friends as unambiguously good and his enemies as unambiguously bad. In his early career, Whitefield did not hesitate to pronounce “Arminians” (by which he meant everything from Free Will Methodists to deists) outside the fold or, at best, roadblocks to the faith.

I could not share this judgment. While I personally espouse a Reformed, Calvinistic perspective on Christian faith, I claim no exclusive truth for that if it means denigrating or, worse, warring with Christians of other theological persuasions. In the case of Whitefield, the greatest irony is that, in America anyway, his “Old Light” critics were even more Old World Calvinistic than he was.

The recognition of multiple levels of interpretation is necessary if Christian historians are to be a voice in the secular academy and in the mundane world. But these interpretive layers can also constitute a problem of massive proportions–of horribly distorted legacies–if they are not kept within their proper spheres. If I were to introduce class, culture, gender, or childhood experience as the sole determinant of Whitefield’s ministry, if I were to reduce Whitefield’s activities to psychological needs, I would have crossed a line the Christian cannot cross–the line of misplaced providence. I would be attributing sovereignty to class or psychology or gender when, in fact, there is only one sovereign determiner of people and events. By the same token, were I to proclaim with finality that Whitefield’s Calvinistic friends were God’s friends, and that his more Arminian antagonists were enemies to the gospel, there, too, I would be guilty of assuming a divine vantage point on the past. Christ has risen to glory, and the apostles have long since died. There is no other inspired history anytime, anywhere. So, following Paul’s maxim to be all things to all people, I am both a professional historian and a Christian historian, a dual practitioner sometimes emphasizing one or the other without ever wholly neglecting either.

If these levels of interpretation have any legitimacy, they should give us comfort as Christian historians. They give us a path to participate in the common learning of the academy in ways that, I hope, will make our world a better place (and history without hope is simply nihilism). And they give us a way to assert our faith free of the crushing burden of pretensions to divine certainty. Competing legacies, in other words, can coexist–at least in the life of the church–and, when properly situated, can be a light of insight both to the church and the world.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 9

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When I was young, and my father got the blues, he would often try to buck himself up by telling me what a good president he would have been. To this bricklayer who was the son of Swedish immigrants, the job of leading the Free World looked like a snap when compared to battling the caprices of nature or contending with the vagaries of the human heart. Whenever a cold wave had driven my father and his crew off the job for a week, or Lefty, his lead bricklayer, had gone on one of his periodic drinking binges, I could expect to hear, “I’d do a better job than that rich guy Kennedy. He doesn’t know what pressure is,” or “What does Johnson know about life? A man with common sense needs to be president.” Having assured himself that only a poor career choice had kept him, and all of America, from fulfillment, my father was then free to resume his labors with good cheer.

In choosing teaching over bricklaying, I left my father’s trade behind but carried his trait with me. As my father did, so do I occasionally try to shake myself out of discouragement by imagining what I might have done.

To be sure, in true academic fashion, I have changed the range of reference for my comparisons. Rather than declaring what a great president I could have been, I make myself proud by thinking that I would have done a better job of writing a particular book or dispatching a complex subject in a 20-page essay.

This temptation–a fantasy of sorts–has been especially strong for me in the case of biographies. Throughout my adult life, I have read for pleasure the lives of noted authors and public figures. And, admittedly, I have come away from more than one biography convinced that its subject would have fared better in my hands. “Had I told the story of Robert Lowell’s life, I would have traced more clearly the pattern beneath the cruel behavior,” I’ve told myself, or, “Walter Jackson Bate is a great writer, but if I had done Samuel Johnson’s life, I would have gotten it right about his Christian faith.” Buoyed by such assurances, I have invariably gone back refreshed to teaching American literature and writing about literary theory.

Then, several years ago, when I agreed to write a biography of Emily Dickinson, everything changed. Convinced that it was a relatively straightforward job, I anticipated finishing the work in a year or two and moving on to other things. But now, four years later, what at first looked like a simple task has turned out to be the most exacting assignment I have ever undertaken. When I finish my revisions of the biography in the next several months, I will return to my other labors having been duly chastened by the experience. My appreciation for biographers will have been deepened and my fantasies forever dispelled.

The 250 or so pages of the Dickinson biography–which will appear in the Eerdmans series, The Library of Religious Biography–will represent close to two years of actual work on the subject. Over the past several years, I have read several hundred books and articles about Emily Dickinson, made four trips to New England for research in libraries with Dickinson manuscripts, and written, discarded, and rewritten close to 200,000 words on the great enigmatic poet from Amherst, Massachusetts.

Yet it is not the volume of work that has made this assignment so challenging. Because of her mystifying brilliance, Emily Dickinson is one of the most intriguing intellectual companions imaginable. She never makes for dull company. Even now, as I comb over poems and letters that I have read countless times in recent years, I find myself stumbling upon a fresh insight or a brilliant gem of wit that I have never seen before. Dickinson once wrote of heaven that “it beckons, and it baffles.” The same is true of her life and poetry. They compel our interest and frustrate many of our efforts to understand them. But they never bore us.

Instead of attributing the rigors of writing this biography to the distinctive difficulties of Dickinson’s work, I have come to believe that they are intrinsic to the art of biography itself. “Biographical prose, which reflects historical truth about persons, is the hardest kind of prose to write,” claims Park Honan, who is, not surprisingly, himself a biographer. It is one thing, for instance, to attempt to analyze Emily Dickinson’s beliefs or poetry; it is another matter to try to “reflect the historical truth about her person.” It is one thing to try to take the measure of an idea or deed and make judgments about it; it is something else entirely to try to follow the flow of a thought or action back to its tributary sources in the murky waters of motives, fears, hopes, and obsessions.

As I have tried in recent months to articulate the challenges of biographical writing, I have been helped in the process by questions that friends have asked me about my work along the way. Each was a simple question. Yet by compelling me to explain my goals and analyze my methods, the questions from my friends have brought Dickinson’s life and my own writing into sharper focus.

So,” asked a colleague over coffee the morning after I had gotten news of the fellowship that was to initiate my work on the Dickinson biography, “are you going to discover that Emily Dickinson really did have a secret lover?” My friend asked this question in jest, but in doing so he made a serious point about our urge to find a single, sensational explanation for a complex, mystifying life. He had no special interest in Dickinson, but his curiosity about her had been piqued over the years by the myths and legends that–like so many fun-house mirrors–have twisted almost beyond recognition the picture of Dickinson that has come down from the past.

The myths had already begun to develop during Dickinson’s own lifetime. In 1881, Mabel Loomis Todd, who would eventually become the first editor of Dickinson’s poetry, arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts. After having surveyed the town’s social scene for several weeks, Todd wrote to her parents in Washington, D.C., to tell them “about the character of Amherst. It is a lady whom the people call the Myth. She is a sister of Mr. Dickinson, & seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years. . . . She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful. She writes finely, but no one ever sees her.” Such behavior demanded an explanation, Mabel Loomis Todd concluded, and during Emily’s own lifetime, a number of people had already labored to provide one. “No one knows the cause of her isolation, but of course there are dozens of reasons assigned,” Todd informed her parents.

Some biographers have fared little better than Dickinson’s neighbors in trying to divine the “cause of her isolation.” Here was a vibrant, attractive, and brilliant woman who grew into adulthood in a New England village a decade before the Civil War. Why did she renounce marriage, vocation, and membership in the church and retreat by the age of 30 to the seclusion of her parents’ home? Why did she write close to 1,800 poems over 30 years and yet never seek to have them published? Did Emily Dickinson have any idea that the body of work she left behind would establish her as one of the great lyric poets of the English language?

In the decades after Dickinson’s death, a failure at love was offered as the standard answer to such questions. Accounts of the poet’s life claimed that her seclusion had been prompted by a lover’s rejection or by her own rejection of offers of love. The search for a secret lover became a quest for the hermeneutical key to unlock the mysteries of her life and art. One early account, written by Dickinson’s own niece, had Emily heroically resisting the advances of a married man, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. “Fated” to love Wadsworth, Emily nonetheless rebuffed him and thus averted “the inevitable destruction of another woman’s life.” In rejecting Wadsworth, Dickinson chose the high and holy calling of a cloistered life: “Without stopping to look back, she fled to her own home for refuge–as a wild thing running from whatever it may be that pursues.” Another version, offered in a competing biography, claims that Emily rejected the proposal of an Amherst College graduate. When George Gould begged her to marry him, this account has it, she refused and “told him she would dress in white, fall, winter, spring, and summer, and never again would go outside the gate, but live the life of a recluse–for his sake.”

In academic circles over the past few decades, notions of romantic heterosexual love have fallen into disfavor, only to be replaced by an intense interest in hom*osexual experience. In Dickinson studies, this has meant that, as an explanatory key, unrequited love has been exchanged for unremitting lust. Over the past 20 years or so, a number of critical and biographical studies of Dickinson have claimed to have divined the mysteries of her lesbian libido. Here, we are told, in the covert reaches of Dickinson’s hom*osexual passion, lies the secret to her beckoning life and her baffling art.

In the end, however, hom*osexual desire is no more satisfactory than heterosexual ardor as a master key to unlock the meaning of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and life. To be certain, Dickinson’s complex relationships with women and men provide vital clues to the mysteries of her life. They are simply clues, however, to part of her experience and not keys to the whole of her life. As created by God and the agency of human freedom, the story of any individual life is far more complex than the tales of unrequited love or insatiable lust would lead us to believe.

One of the most challenging tasks the biographer faces, then, is that of responding with nimble wisdom to the contrapuntal complexity of human life. To understand any story, whether it is lived or imagined, an interpreter must consider the full array of forces and intentions that have gone into its making. For biography, this means that in addition to taking the measure of the sexual, psychological, and economic forces that come into play in a person’s life, the biographer must also attempt a nuanced interpretation of the ethical ideals that inspired that person’s actions and the sacred dimension that impinged upon the subject’s life. In tracing the outline of an individual life, then, the biographer must abandon the search for a single thread and seek instead to unravel a tangled skein of motives and goals.

When I told another friend I was about to tackle a biography of Dickinson, he looked at me unenvyingly and said, “Hasn’t she already been picked over enough? Is there anything new to say?” This question resembled the one about the “secret lover” in its assumption that something like a single meaning might exist for Dickinson’s life and poetry. In this case, however, the questioner was not interested in the search for that meaning, because he assumed it had already been completed. What he wondered was why anyone would linger over a life that had been exhaustively described and dissected.

This friend’s question became especially interesting to me as I began to see its relationship to widely shared evangelical beliefs about hermeneutics in general and biblical interpretation in particular. The writing of this biography, I realized, had brought me into the heart of current struggles over questions of truth, intention, and authority in interpretation.

My friend’s question–“Is there anything left to say?”–betrayed its origins in widely held evangelical beliefs about intention and meaning. Lacking a robust doctrine of the church and a clear understanding of the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in history and tradition, modern evangelicals have been prone to view meaning as a fixed entity that can be traced to a specific source. In the main, evangelicals have argued that every text has a univocal, or single, meaning. That meaning is determined by the intention of the author behind the text. We read to discover what that intention is, and when we have uncovered that intention, the work of interpretation is over. All that remains to be done is to apply the changeless meaning we have found to our ever-changing lives.

When looked at this way, interpretation becomes the art of offering definitive accounts, and a model of this kind indeed held sway over the theory of interpretation earlier in this century. Only decades ago, it was common for authors, reviewers, or publishers to claim that a particular work had said the final word about its subject. Such overweening confidence was bound to provoke sharp reactions–exemplified by Roland Barthes’s notorious celebration of textual interpretation as a kind of free play “unimpoverished by any constraint.”

In Dickinson studies, interpretive freedom of this type has produced some provocative and insightful readings, but it has also led to a number of far-fetched interpretations in which the critic’s preoccupations are projected anachronistically onto the poet and her life. Thus in one version Dickinson becomes a proto-radical whose “comic vision destabilizes, subverts, and reimagines cultural situations.” According to another reading, Dickinson was a thoroughgoing feminist decades before her time; she knew that “we [women] have to create ourselves, because, as we know, the patriarchy is only too willing to do it for us, as it always has, to our disadvantage at the very least, or suppression and oppression at the most.” Or Emily surfaces as the lesbian who offers in her poetry “a submerged identification between the blunt rounded shape of the western Massachusetts mountains and a woman’s breasts, [and] presents nature, embodied in these mountains, as the ‘strong Madonna,’ from whom she sucks support.”

So, for better or worse, one can hardly say that Emily Dickinson’s life has been picked over to such an extent that there is nothing new to say about it. Indeed, the history of biographical interpretations of Dickinson would seem to confirm that what Joel Weinsheimer (“Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory,” 1991) says about interpretation in general is true of the writing of biography in particular: “An interpretation as such is different from and yet also the same as what it interprets. Unless it is both, it is not an interpretation.” If an interpretation is not in some sense the same as what it interprets, then it is not an interpretation but an entirely new text; and some biographical treatments of Dickinson do appear to be creative texts that bear little relationship to the poet’s actual life. Yet, at the same time, if an interpretation is not in some sense different from its object, then it “is not an interpretation of the text but a copy of it.” And to be sure, some biographical accounts of Dickinson are so dully unimaginative that they add nothing to our understanding of her life or art.

Weinsheimer argues that there is in interpretation “a pole of correctness,” which affirms that truthful interpretations “are necessarily of the text” and life; at the same time, there is a “pole of creativity,” which confirms that a text or a life “can sustain interpretations that are not just duplicates of it but genuinely other.” What makes the interpretation of any text a bracing and rewarding enterprise is the fact that “both poles are definitive of interpretation. If the text had but one right interpretation and many wrong ones, or many right interpretations and no wrong one, there would not be a problem.” It requires wisdom to “understand how there can be but one text and yet . . . many right interpretations.” Weinsheimer’s claim is as true of the interpretation of lives as it is of texts.

There is no danger, then, that we will ever exhaust the store of significant things that might be said about the life of Emily Dickinson, any more than we could utter the final word as to the meaning of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” or Saint Paul’s “Letter to the Romans.” In interpreting a text or telling the life of another person, one strives to honor the object of one’s study through a devoted attention to its character and a creative understanding of its present importance. Attention without creative understanding makes for a lifeless recitation of facts; creative understanding without attention to facts produces mere fantasy.

Dickinson herself captured something of the paradoxical nature of biography in a poem about the lives of poets and the “afterlife” of their poetry:

The Poets light but Lamps–

Themselves–go out–

The Wicks they stimulate–

If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns–

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference–[#883]

“The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement,” Leon Edel, the distinguished biographer of Henry James, once observed. “A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.” In “The Poets light but Lamps–” Dickinson notes this vital link in her depiction of the poet as one whose experience “stimulates” the wick that continues to burn long after the poet’s life, like a match, has “gone out.” If inspired, the poem becomes a “vital Light” with the power of a Sun. And “Each Age [is] a Lens” that refracts and disperses the light from the poet’s lamp.

The longer I have thought about the productive difficulties of writing a biography, the more I have appreciated what the task has in common with all our efforts “to hand on what we in turn have received,” as the apostle Paul puts it. This common bond was made especially clear to me when yet another friend asked the simplest question possible about my work. All he said was, “How has writing a biography been hard?” This friend is a distinguished New Testament scholar, and I answered him by referring to his own work. The challenges I have faced, I told him, are inherent in any effort to write creatively and fairly about events of importance in the past for which there are scanty records and about which there is a history of disputed interpretation.

That is not to confuse the life of Emily Dickinson with the Gospel of Matthew. But as I spoke with my friend, I realized how obstacles very much like those facing a biographer loom before anyone who strives to tell the truth about the past. There is so little to go on, but so much to be said. “It’s just incredible. It just does not explain,” argues Quentin Compson’s father in William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” as he tries to piece together events from only decades before. “We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature. . . . They are there, yet something is missing.”

That something missing, as Quentin’s father comes to understand, is a sympathetic openness to the full range of human motivation. Although he is an inveterate cynic, Mr. Compson admits that he must expand his own range of reference before he can understand the life of another: “Have you noticed,” he asks his son at one point in the novel, “when we try to reconstruct the causes which lead up to the actions of men and women, how with a sort of astonishment we find ourselves now and then reduced to the belief, the only possible belief, that they stemmed from some of the old virtues? the thief who steals not for greed but for love, the murderer who kills not out of lust but pity?”

I come to the end of my work on Dickinson, then, having been chastened by the challenges of the task. I have learned almost as much from the difficulties of writing about Dickinson as I have from the extraordinary body of poetry and letters that she left behind. In attempting to account for the mystery of her life, I have come up against the perpetual temptation to dispense with nuance or conflict in favor of sensational explanation. At the same time, as I have selected works and incidents representative of the whole of Dickinson’s life, I have had to consider the tension between the pole of correctness and the pole of creativity.

While evangelical hermeneutics has tethered meaning to the pole of correctness, some postmodern theories have tied it to the pole of creativity alone. As I have worked with the rich materials and pondered the eerie silences that Emily Dickinson left behind at death, my respect has been deepened for all interpreters who have sought to negotiate the narrow straits between absolute certainty and interpretive license. Whether they have written biographies, histories, commentaries, or the like, the ones who have charted those waters continue to assist us in our difficult passage to the truth.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 11

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“Robertson Davies: Man of Myth”

By Judith Skelton Grant

Viking

787 pp.; $35

When a man has character, the hardest temptation to resist is the temptation to become a character, and the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies was never a man to resist the temptation very strenuously. Indeed, Judith Skelton Grant’s biography makes clear that Davies set out early in life to become a character and to fashion himself into a type of the Edwardian eccentric–complete with broad-brimmed hat, monocle, and walking stick. “Unless someone pretty desperate comes along,” declared a 1937 Oxford student magazine about his time at university in England, “Robertson Davies looks like being the last of the real undergraduate ‘figures.’ ” Davies’s death (on Dec. 2, 1995, at age 82) makes only harder the task of distinguishing the man from his persona–and in some sense, one doesn’t want it done. What his many admirers want to remember just now is the outrageous anecdotes and theatrical poses that made his life as fascinating as his fiction.

Judith Grant, one of Davies’s most devoted admirers and the editor of two collections of his newspaper work, is happy to oblige. Her biography contains little critical analysis of Davies’s fiction. Indeed, the kind of strong mixture of literary criticism with biographical fact that we expect from definitive biographies of writers is missing from Grant’s account, with the odd result that his novels come to seem like things that happen to Davies rather than things that both derive from and explain his life. What Grant has included in her biography, however, is an abundance of good stories from Davies’s many careers: as the last of the Oxford aesthetes, as a stage manager at London’s Old Vic theater, as the newspaper columnist who created and popularized the curmudgeonly Canadian commentator “Samuel Marchbanks,” as a hopeful young playwright, as a disappointed middle-aged playwright turning to novel-writing, as a relentless practical joker, and, finally, as the colorful Master of Massey College, brightest ornament of the University of Toronto and Canadian letters.

And yet, it is of course on his novels that Davies’s reputation must ultimately rest. He was a world-class comic writer, and after his 1951 “Tempest-Tost,” a hilarious but somewhat plotless first novel about an amateur production of Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” he created a classic. “Leaven of Malice” (1954), the second book in the Salterton Trilogy, recounts the events that follow when a false notice announcing the wedding between two children of professors from the local university is maliciously placed in the newspaper of a small Canadian city. Wise and witty, it is simultaneously Davies’s funniest novel and his kindest–a nearly Dickensian work that exposes the foibles of its characters but refuses to leave them shamed beyond redemption.

After “A Mixture of Frailties,” a transitional novel and the last to be set in Salterton, Davies produced what seemed at the time (the end of the sixties) a major advance in his writing: “Fifth Business.” The story of the endless consequences that unfold from a single snowball thrown by a schoolboy in a small village before World War I, the novel follows through life a pair of boys as they advance in the Canadian social world. With “Fifth Business”–and “The Manticore” and “World of Wonders,” the books that completed the Deptford Trilogy–Davies found a way to incorporate into the novel both his lifetime reading in the mythological researches of Carl Jung and whatever happened to interest him at the moment of writing.

In the seven novels that followed “Fifth Business,” he managed to convert into Jungian archetypes a seemingly endless number of topics: hagiography, prestidigitation, psychoanalysis, gypsies, violin repair, Rabelaisian sexuality, academic rivalry, art forgery, genealogy, Wesleyan preaching, cinematography, homeopathic medicine, and much more besides. One constant in Davies’s fiction is the intrigues in the closes of Episcopalian cathedrals, and a fascination with high Anglicanism appears in all his novels.

Raised as a Presbyterian, Davies was received into the Church of England while an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1930s. In later years, he distanced himself from Christian belief, striking a Shavian attitude. As he told an interviewer for the “Paris Review” (Spring 1989), Christianity was not sufficiently discriminating:

Salvation is free for everyone. The greatest idiot and yahoo can be saved, the doctrine goes, because Christ loves him as much as he loves Albert Einstein. I don’t think that is true. I think that civilization–life–has a different place for the intelligent people who try to pull us a little further out of the primal ooze than it has for the boobs who just trot along behind, dragging on the wheels. This sort of opinion has won me the reputation of being an elitist. Behold an elitist.

In 1981 Davies published “The Rebel Angels,” the first in the Cornish Trilogy that would come to include “What’s Bred in the Bone” (1985) and “The Lyre of Orpheus” (1989). Telling the story of a rich young man’s courtship of a graduate student from a gypsy family, “The Rebel Angels” is regarded by many of Davies’s admirers as his finest novel–as indeed it almost certainly is, with its blending of two distinct narrative voices, its clever portrayal of the many levels of Canadian society, and its surprising (and scatological) ending. And yet, fine as it is, “The Rebel Angels” may at last come to be seen as the novel with which it became clear that Davies’s turn down the lane of Carl Jung was ultimately a wrong turn (whatever the immediate improvement it brought to his fiction), the novel with which it became clear that Davies would never fulfill the Dickensian promise of “Leaven of Malice.”

The distance necessary for making such judgments, however, is not yet at hand. Judith Grant’s research was completed not only before Davies’s death but even before the publication of his last novel, “The Cunning Man,” in 1994. Still, what she has given us is considerable: the most substantial account we have of the artfully contrived character who was Robertson Davies.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 13

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