Page 4038 – Christianity Today (2024)

Those who have discovered C.S. Lewis’s enchanted universe of Narnia might recollect its terrible Empire of the South: Calormen. There, beyond the Great Desert, dwell a “wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel” people, who pray to Tash, a bloodthirsty god. Tash, “the inexorable, the irresistible,” is represented on Earth by the cruel Calormene ruler, the Tisroc, who once ordered the death of a cook for his indigestion. While not deified, the Tisroc is so revered by the Calormenes that a mention of his name is never heard without the added: “May he live forever.”

Like so many Narnian figures, the Tisroc is not Lewis’s invention but a parody. For the Tisroc is part Ottoman sultan and part Muhammad, “blessings and peace be upon him,” the prophet of Allah, “the Merciful, the Benevolent.” He is but one representation in the colorful corpus of Christian writings on Muhammad, the prophet who has intrigued and terrified the West since the rise of Islam in the seventh century. Western Christian writers have repeatedly redrawn his figure, now as a demoniac, then as a bloodthirsty, sex-crazed barbarian or as a noble rationalist.

Indeed, Muhammad is one of those figures whose legend has grown so greatly that his historical person seems entirely overshadowed. Partly as a consequence of this, Christian scholars today seem utterly at odds with one another over who this man was and how we should regard him, while the vast majority of Christians are almost entirely ignorant about Muhammad, his life and teachings. At a time when a deeper understanding of the world’s one billion Muslims has taken on a new urgency, it is no sensationalism, I believe, to maintain that it behooves every Christian today to encounter for himself the man regarded by Muslims as the final prophet of God, Chief of the Messengers.

Medieval Depictions:”This Machomet, this cursidfals man … “

Muhammad first appears in the Western canon from the pen of an intriguing ninth-century activist, Eulogius of Cordova. Eulogius lived under Islamic rule in Spain, where he took a leading role in inflaming Christian insurrection. This was done, remarkably, not by taking up arms but rather through a movement of voluntary martyrdom. One of the ways to carry out such a plan was to openly insult Muhammad, a crime invariably punishable by death. For this reason Eulogius’s Liber Apologeticus Martyrum includes polemic against the Muslim prophet.

Much of the literature of the next several centuries, through the Crusading period, is likewise polemical. Characteristic of this period is the letter from Peter the Venerable (of Cluny) to Bernard of Clairvaux “on the false prophet Muhammad.” Elsewhere in his writings, Peter addresses Muhammad in the first person: “Shall I believe that you were a true prophet of God? Truly I would be more foolish than an ass.”1

A similar hostility is seen under a much different guise in a curious lyrical novel written by Alexandre du Pont in 1258, The Romance of Muhammad.2 Du Pont composed his work in Old French and not in Latin, thus clearly intending it for popular consumption. At the time of his writing, news had recently arrived of Louis IX’s disastrous crusade to Egypt, and the Franciscans and Dominicans were opening missions in Islamic lands. In the Romance, du Pont seeks to secure his Christian readers in their faith, despite their military losses to Islam and the tales of its opulence that the Crusaders brought back with them. This he does by showing Muhammad to be nothing but a Christian heretic who, with diabolical aid and ceaseless treachery, planted his perverted faith among the barbaric Arabs. In du Pont’s account, Muhammad is also aided by a renegade Christian hermit, who helps convince Muhammad’s wife, Khadija, that her husband’s epileptic seizures are in fact a sign of divine visitations. Du Pont’s Muhammad is brutal as well, ordering his followers to convert all people to Islam through warfare, and to “hand over straightway to be tortured; Those who are unwilling, in spite of force; Or other means, to adhere to it.”

But another remarkable work in Old French, almost contemporary to du Pont’s Romance, offers a sharp contrast to this critical portrait of Muhammad. In fact the Book of Muhammad’s Ladder (also extant in a Latin version, which appeared anonymously in 1264) is derived from Islamic accounts and told from a Muslim point of view.3

Muhammad’s Ladder tells the story of the Prophet’s night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and thence his ascent to God’s throne. Here Muhammad speaks in the first person of his journey on the fabulous mount al-BurÂq and his face-to-face encounter with God. Upon reaching the highest heaven, having passed the prophet Jesus in the first heaven, Muhammad relates:

When I, Muhammad, saw that I was alone, since Gabriel had left me, I took strength and courage in love of God. … When I came near [the Throne], I heard a voice say to me: “Approach me, my friend Muhammad. … Know, Muhammad, that I consider you the most honored of all the messengers and the highest of all the creatures and angels and men and demons which I made.”

It should be noted, however, the translator of the Book of Muhammad’s Ladder justifies his presentation of Islamic material by noting that readers will recognize Muhammad as a fraud when they “become acquainted with the errors and unbelievable things that he recounts in this book.”

Scholars such as Miguel Asin Palacios and Maria Rosa Menocal have maintained that Dante Alighieri composed his Divine Comedy as a Christian imitation of and response to this very work. Muhammad, of course, finds an unhappy place in the first part of Dante’s brilliant poem. In the bowels of hell Muhammad suffers with his cousin and son-in-law Ali, both “cleft in the face from chin to forelock,” a fitting punishment, in Dante’s view, for those who cleft Holy Mother Church with their heretical teachings.

Muhammad’s earliest appearance in English literature is hardly more elevated. In his historical poem, Fall of Princes (1438), John Lydgate includes a chapter “Off Machomet the fals prophete.” In Lydgate’s account “this Machomet, this cursid fals man,” was neither prophet nor monotheist, but “he koude riht weel flatre and lie” (he could flatter and lie well). Lydgate repeats many of the same accusations that appear in earlier polemics; again Muhammad is an epileptic who beguiled his followers with chicanery while privately engaging in debauchery. This was his ultimate doom, for he “Lik a glotoun deied in dronkenesse … Fill [fell] in a podel, deuoured among swyn [swine].”

Yet even as Lydgate retailed such crude stuff, Christians were beginning to study Islam firsthand. The impetus came with the rise of the Franciscan and Dominican missions to the Islamic world. St. Francis Assisi visited the court of the Egyptian Sultan; Raymond Lull was martyred in North Africa. The effect of this new movement is evident in the Summa Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas, who was in contact with Dominican missionaries in Syria, but its fruition would not be seen until the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment Depictions: “The creedof Mahomet is free from suspicion orambiguity … “

In Enlightenment writings, Muhammad is depicted not only with reasonable accuracy but also with surprising favor—in part because many leading Enlightenment figures sought alternatives to orthodox Christianity. At the outset of the eighteenth century, Leibniz, in his Theodizee (1710), praised Muhammad for preaching a “natural” religion. In 1756, Voltaire published his massive Essai sur les moeurs, which includes a chapter “de l’Arabie et de Mahomet.”

Muhammad, according to Voltaire, possessed a “lively and strong intellect … [and] a penetrating and authoritative demeanor.” Having seen the ignorance of the Arabs, he determined to set himself up as a prophet and do away with the paganism, Judaism, and aberrant Christian sects that flourished in Arabia. Like all enthusiasts, Muhammad was so taken by his ideas, which he took up in good faith, that he deceived himself as he deceived those around him. Yet, having risen to power through his sagacity and military prowess, he died a noble death. In fact, Voltaire directly confronts the polemic of his predecessors: his Muhammad is a wise man, an accomplished poet, a brilliant general, and a remarkable visionary.

The historian Edward Gibbon followed Voltaire’s lead in biographical writing on Muhammad. Gibbon speaks at length of the “genius of the Arabian prophet” in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-87). He is glowing in his praise for Muhammad’s “commanding presence, his majestic aspect, his piercing eye, his gracious smile, his flowing beard.” Gibbon, in his comely English, describes Muhammad’s just character and brilliant charisma: “His memory was capacious and retentive, his wit easy and social, his imagination sublime, his judgment clear, rapid, and decisive.” Gibbon’s Muhammad is not a prophet but rather a rationalist (like Gibbon himself!) who “beholds, with pity and indignation, the degeneracy of the times; and resolves to unite, under one God and one king, the invincible spirit and primitive virtues of the Arabs.” In fact, Gibbon contends, Muhammad’s rationalism permeates Islamic doctrine and scripture, in favorable contrast to Christianity: “The creed of Mahomet is free from suspicion or ambiguity; and the Koran is a glorious testimony to the unity of God.”

The Muhammad of Modern History: “That is not the work of a traitor or a lecher … “

By the end of the nineteenth century, German authors such as Gustav Weil and Julius Wellhausen had begun a systematic investigation of Islamic historical writing on Muhammad. The quest for the historical Muhammad was on—an endeavor that was colored by the religious biases of the scholars, despite their pretensions of impartiality. Foremost among them was a Belgian Jesuit, Henri Lammens, whose writings on the personal life of Muhammad still enrage many Muslims. Lammens, an indefatigable researcher and elegant writer (who quotes from classical Arabic poets and Victor Hugo alike), describes Islam’s “lascivious” prophet as few since have dared to do. In his FÂtima et les filles de Mahomet (1912), Lammens describes Muhammad the “Prophet-King” and his rapacious appetite for meat, perfumes, and girls. While he does not hesitate to shed a kind light on Muhammad’s familial life (such as his love for his daughters and grandchildren), Lammens also shows an unflinching willingness to bring to light controversial material. Unlike many others, Lammens does not pass over the less flattering sayings attributed to Muhammad, such as “Woman is a calamity,” or “Beware of women, for Hell is filled with them!”

The Christian reader will get a much different perspective from Lammens’s contemporary, the Swedish bishop Tor Andrae. In his Muhammad: Man and His Faith (1930), Andrae seeks to locate the genesis of Muhammad’s religious ideas in the Eastern Christianity that surrounded the Arabian peninsula. He goes so far as to posit a hypothetical encounter that Muhammad might have had with a traveling Nestorian preacher. This encounter, Andrae suggests, led Muhammad to imitate monks, as seen in his practice of taking a month each year to conduct a retreat in the mountains outside Mecca. Andrae combines a great familiarity with the Syriac church and an interest in the psychology of religion to paint a unique portrait of Muhammad, a man with “deep earnestness, the keen expectation of future life [and] contrition and trembling before the Day of Judgment.” Like Lammens, Andrae does not refrain from pointing out what he sees as the moral failures of Muhammad, but he does so with the aim of understanding. What is more, Andrae involves his own faith in his judgment: “But if we would be fair to him we must not forget that, consciously or unconsciously, we Christians are inclined to compare Muhammad with the unsurpassed and exalted figure whom we meet in the Gospels. … And when it is measured by such a standard, what personality is not found wanting?”

More recent historical scholarship, even by clergymen, is largely void of such confessional commentary, in part out of concern for Muslim sensibilities. Such is the case with W. Montgomery Watt, an Anglican priest, whose Muhammad at Mecca (1953) and Muhammad at Medina (1956) together make up the most comprehensive modern biography. Rather than seeking Jewish and Christian influences on the prophet, Watt focuses his attention on the social milieu of seventh-century Arabia. His Muhammad is a social and political reformer deeply moved by the economic crises of his day, which led to the neglect of the poor and the oppression of weaker tribes. Following the Islamic sources at each step, Watt traces the entangled tribal relationships of Mecca and Medina to show the brilliance of Muhammad’s statesmanship. Moreover, Watt vigorously defends the moral character of the Prophet against the traditional charges of insincerity, treachery, and sensuality: “[He] established a religious and social framework for the life of a sixth of the human race today. That is not the work of a traitor or a lecher.”

Watt’s irenic approach and his trust in the Islamic historical sources has by and large set the standard for more recent historical biographies of Muhammad. Ironically, while many scholars have treated the gospel narratives with great skepticism in their furious search for the historical Jesus, their counterparts have become increasingly respectful of the Islamic canon and its portrayal of the Prophet. Frank Peters, a former Jesuit and professor emeritus at New York University, has made this irony quite clear in his essay, “The Quest for the Historical Muhammad.”4 Peters laments that, while scholarship on Jesus has constantly broadened its perspectives, scholars in Islamic studies are still “riveted on Muhammad and what is imagined to have been his own immediate milieu.” In his own biography of the Prophet, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (1994), Peters seeks to dispel both traditional Islamic and modern scholarly myths about Muhammad. Thus he denies the Islamic and scholarly presumption that the Prophet’s Mecca was an important trading center and suggests that Muhammad borrowed religious notions from the Jews of Medina, after all.

The Muhammad of Faith: ” I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known … “

The rancorous debate on the Muhammad of history continues to rage. Meanwhile, a separate tradition of Christian scholarship has long sought the Muhammad of faith. In 1853, when Sir Richard Burton secretly performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, incognito as a Persian nobleman, he was impressed by the Muslims’ reverence for Muhammad. They approached the Prophet’s tomb, Burton wrote, “with awe, and fear, and love.”5 Later Christians have likewise sought to capture the Muhammad of piety, including the aforementioned Tor Andrae in his remarkable Die Person Muhammeds in Lehre und Glauben seiner Gemeinde (1917).

Here, Andrae describes the immense adoration that surrounds Muhammad, who in the Qur’an appears only as an imperfect servant of a perfect master. It was through the Islamic community’s devotion, as another scholar has commented, that Muhammad “went on to become the Holy Prophet whose intercession had sovereign authority before God, ‘the best of creatures,’ endowed with charisma [and] supernatural powers.”6 Andrae’s work examines the legends of Muhammad’s miracles, the doctrine of his sinlessness, and the cult that surrounds him. For Andrae, the veneration of Muhammad as an intercessor has had a transforming effect on the legalistic core of Islam; the prophet is supremely an agent of divine mercy: “Above all, at that terrible moment when men are gathered for judgment, the prophet is the only one who will dare to step before Him.” Andrae astutely observes that it is here, in the religious experiences and emotions of believers, that real dialogue can take place between Christians and Muslims.

More than six decades later, Andrae’s approach was explicitly taken up by a German Catholic, Annemarie Schimmel, in her Und Muhammad ist sein Prophet (1981; translated as And Muhammad Is His Messenger, 1985). Schimmel is at her best when depicting the Muhammad of Islamic mysticism and mystical poetry. She colorfully relates the many virtues and charisms attributed by Muslims to the Prophet, who did not cast a shadow and whose drops of sweat bloomed into roses. Elsewhere she relates Muhammad’s status as “Chief of the Messengers,” the one who combines the love of Jesus with the justice of Moses; the one who spoke directly to God on the heavenly throne, while Moses fainted at the Burning Bush. Schimmel is especially interested in the Sufi doctrine of the light of Muhammad, the pre-existing principle through which the world was created. Sufis, she notes, often attribute to the prophet a saying elsewhere considered as God’s: “I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known; therefore I created the world.”

Schimmel’s scholarship has undoubtedly helped Christians better understand the immense emotions of the devout Muslim’s relationship to Muhammad. As another scholar pointed out, “Muslims will allow attacks on Allah; there are atheists and atheistic publications, and rationalistic societies; but to disparage Muhammad will provoke from even the most ‘liberal’ sections of the community a fanaticism of blazing vehemence.”7

Meanwhile, other Christian scholars have considered the question of the Christian’s relationship to Muhammad. Among evangelical scholars, this has been the source of no small controversy. At one extreme, Anis Shorrosh, in his Islam Revealed (1988), depicts Muhammad as a violent and selfish powermonger whom Christians should openly disdain. At the other extreme, Robert Owen (in an unpublished paper presented at a 1987 international missions conference) has suggested that Muhammad should be recognized as a messenger of God.

Somewhere between these extremes (and much more persuasive) is Phil Parshall, who in The Cross and the Crescent (1989) and Inside the Community: Understanding Muslims Through Their Traditions (1994) pays particular attention to the cultural context of Muhammad. Still more eloquent is Kenneth Cragg, an Anglican priest and scholar of Islam, who in his Muhammad and the Christian (1984) addresses the difficult issues that have led to so much polemicizing. While irenic in his approach, Cragg does not shy away from honest answers, maintaining that “an Islam that has no mind to privatize its relevance has no warrant to immunize its claims.”

Most admirably, Cragg speaks candidly and even imploringly to the reader, for he has clearly put his heart and soul (and life’s work) into this project. Ultimately Cragg teaches us that, while Christians may not completely reconcile themselves with the figure of Muhammad, they will be moved by this encounter to reexamine their own relationship with the God who moved Muhammad so powerfully. Certainly I, as a student of Islam, have fallen more deeply in love with the Lord whose most powerful expression was clothed in weakness.

—This is the first article in a two-part series. Next issue: The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature.

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

Petrus Venerabilis, Schriftum zum Islam, edited by R. Glei, 1985.

Li romans de Mahon, edited and translated by Reginald Hyatte, 1997.

Le livre de l’eschiele Mahomet, edited and translated by Reginald Hyatte, 1997.

International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 23 (1991), pp. 291-313.

Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, 1893.

M. Rodinson, “A Critical Survey of Modern Studies on Muhammad,” Studies on Islam 1981, pp. 23-85.

W.C. Smith, Modern Islam in India, 1946.

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

There haven’t been all that many films about Afghanistan. In the waning days of the Reagan era, when the mountains and deserts of that country proved as difficult for the Soviets as the jungles of Vietnam had been for the Americans, the land of the mujahideen was seen as a sort of mythic battlefield where Western agents like Rambo and James Bond could flex their heroic muscles in the name of freedom. A 1988 release, The Beast, showed Russian soldiers doubting the purpose of the brutal campaign. But for the most part, the image-makers of the West simply haven’t been interested.

When Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf set out to make a film about the plight of Afghanistan under the Taliban, he could hardly have foreseen the circ*mstances under which it would be seen. Kandahar, which won the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival, is an eye-opening look at the stifling conditions under which most Afghans have lived in recent years, and it provides an essential bit of background to the conflict that now rages there. Believing the title was too obscure to lure English-speaking audiences, the film’s distributors initially planned to call it The Sun Behind the Moon for its release in the West, reflecting the fact that one of its central metaphors is a solar eclipse: the film begins by juxtaposing this image with that of a woman’s face obscured under the shadow of her burqa. But the city after which the film is named is no longer unfamiliar to Western audiences.

Kandahar follows Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), an Afghan refugee turned Canadian journalist and political activist, as she sneaks back into the country of her birth in an attempt to prevent the suicide of her little sister, who has written that she intends to kill herself on the day of the impending eclipse. When the film begins, the eclipse is just three days away, and Nafas, who begins her journey in Iran, spends much of the film pleading with local Afghans to guide her to Kandahar, where her sister lives. Along the way, Nafas records her thoughts onto a tape for her sister and peers at the barren scenery from behind the embroidered veil of her burqa. She enters the country disguised as one of an old man’s four wives, and at one point, he complains that she dishonors him by lifting her veil too often. When the man and his family are robbed and turn back, Nafas hires a boy named Khak (Sadou Teymouri) to take her closer to her sister’s home.

Makhmalbaf uses this journey to explore the oppressive social realities that faced both women and men in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The wives of Nafas’s first guide share makeup and jewelry, but even among themselves, each woman applies her cosmetics in secret, under the head-to-toe covering of her burqa. Women who need medical attention are examined through a curtain with a tiny hole that is barely big enough for the physician to shine a light in the woman’s eye or place a depressor on her tongue—and when the doctor tells his patient to say “ah,” he does not speak to her directly, but gives the message to her child, who sits at the edge of the curtain and repeats everything that both sides say. When Nafas herself becomes ill, she finds to her surprise that the nearest village doctor, Tabib Sahib (Hassan Tantai), is an African American who initially came to Afghanistan to join the fight against the Russians. He, too, must wear a disguise; although he cannot grow a beard, the law says he must have one, so he glues an artificial set of whiskers to his chin.

Everywhere Nafas goes, she is surrounded by reminders of the violence that has plagued her native land. A girl reminds her not to pick up any dolls that she finds on the ground, because they might be rigged to explode. Boys in school learn to describe the destructive power of sabres and Kalashnikovs as though they were reciting passages from the Qur’an. And of course, there are the many amputees who have been wounded by the land mines left over from the wars in Afghanistan. Nafas’s last guide is a man who lost his forearm; when the Red Cross workers tell him they don’t have any prosthetic hands, he hectors them into giving him a pair of legs instead. The film’s most distinctive image may be the sight of one-legged men hopping on crutches across a lunar landscape to retrieve the prosthetic limbs dropped by parachute.

Makhmalbaf’s films have often been a mix of fiction and documentary. Salaam Cinema (1995) is essentially one long screen test, in which a stream of would-be actors respond to Makhmalbaf’s casting call and he prods them into various forms of action, goading them in a manner that at times seems cruel. Around that time, a retired police officer asked Makhmalbaf if he could act in the director’s next project—and Makhmalbaf recognized the would-be actor as one of the men who had arrested him for taking part in a demonstration against the Shah some 20 years earlier, when Makhmalbaf was a teen. The result of this coincidental meeting was A Moment of Innocence (1996), in which Makhmalbaf both re-creates the moment of his arrest and depicts his attempts to make a film about it, with the officer’s help.

Kandahar, too, is rooted in real life. Like the character she plays, Pazira was born in Afghanistan and is now a graduate student in journalism in Canada; the story was inspired by a letter she received from a childhood friend who said life under the Taliban was no longer worth living. Similarly, Tantai is an American convert to Islam who fought the Russians in Afghanistan; in an interview with Iranian critic Jahanbakhsh Nouraei in Film International Quarterly, he said he became a Muslim because Islam’s teachings on fighting back made more sense to him than Christianity’s emphasis on turning the other cheek. Makhmalbaf scouted the country in secret before writing the script, and he allowed his cast of nonactors, some of whom were themselves refugees from Afghanistan, to improvise. This technique can work to the film’s detriment, as the dialogue sometimes seem a little stiff or redundant, but it does give the film an authenticity that would be lacking in most Western productions.

The film’s treatment of religion is somewhat complicated, as one might expect from a director who has made his own journey from militancy. Makhmalbaf was once so opposed to movies that he stopped talking to his mother because she went to them. He began his career making Muslim propaganda films such as Fleeing from Evil to God (1984), and his early features, which expressed his concern for the oppressed, disturbed Western audiences otherwise sympathetic to his message because his social critiques were rooted in a fundamentalist worldview. However, as he matured as an artist, his films became more nuanced; at least two were banned by the Iranian government. Nor have the authorities in Iran appreciated his ongoing attention to the fate of Afghan refugees there, the subject of his 1987 film, The Cyclist.

In Kandahar he exposes the dark side of faith, which some people use to justify their hatred and violence, but he also suggests the more positive role faith can play. Tabib Sahib admits that, although the civil wars in Afghanistan have disillusioned him, he is still searching for God, and he does this now not by killing his enemies but by helping others through their misery. Somewhere between these clear alternatives is the more troubling image of Nafas’s first guide, who stands off to the side and chants praises to God while bandits rifle through his family’s belongings.

It is possible to see the old man’s praise as an ineffectual habit or a pitifully impotent defense against the shock of violation. Seen thus, piety amounts to nothing more than weakness and self-delusion. But the old man’s prayer may also be taken as a genuine cry of gratitude even in the midst of suffering, expressing thankfulness that he and his family are still alive and confidence in God’s ultimate justice.

What’s not in doubt is Makhmalbaf’s anger and despair at the suffering and the bleak absurdity everywhere in view in Afghanistan, a misery that cries out for relief.

Peter T. Chattaway lives in Canada and writes about movies.

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

In theory, Islam is a religion without a clergy. On the ground, things look different. Before Patrick Gaffney decided to pay attention to Islamic sermons in the late 1970s, no comprehensive study of contemporary Islamic preachers existed. He spent hundreds of hours in mosques in Egypt, recording and analyzing what he heard. His curiosity was ahead of the curve. A couple of years into his study, Islamic preachers ceased to be viewed as irrelevant. Today, Gaffney is your man if you want to make sense of what’s being said at mosques worldwide.

A polyglot, Catholic priest, and chair of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, Gaffney found that modern Islamic preaching represents variations on three ideal types, based on the kind of knowledge from which the preacher derives his authority—hence preacher as saint, preacher as scholar, and preacher as warrior. This typology structures Gaffney’s book, The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Univ. of California Press, 1994), which includes a sample sermon of each type. He is also coauthor of Breaking Cycles of Violence: Conflict Prevention in Interstate Crises (Kumarian, 1999).

In November, the animated and witty redhead described to Agnieszka Tennant—with abundant hand gestures and with words—the power that resides in the Islamic preacher’s pulpit.

What sparked your interest in Islamic preachers?

The center of my interest was authority. I wanted to study why some religious traditions and social institutions carry weight and some don’t. With the help of a professor at the University of Chicago who had studied Arab politics in Jordan, I came to realize that authority in the Islamic world was a topic virtually invisible in the literature. Before I went to Egypt to study it, I read virtually everything I could find, and it was much easier to find information about preaching in the twelfth century than preaching in the twentieth century. I thought, What’s going on here? Preaching is being heard in mosques all over the Middle East, and I’m trying to find out about it by reading what scholars and reporters have written, and there’s virtually nothing there.

If you talk with Muslims, they’ll tell you that Islam rejects the whole notion of clergy. Their self-understanding doesn’t allow them to think that way. But institutionally they give people titles and cell phones, and those people function like clergy. To some extent we have this in the Christian tradition, too. Many Christian groups are very suspicious of clerical authority. The Presbyterians rejected bishops and so on. Yet to an outsider, it might appear that the groups which have rejected clerical authority have simply reinvented it in other forms. Obviously the analogy is not perfect, but it may help to understand how Muslims can claim that they have no clergy.

What kind of authority do Islamic preachers hold?

To some degree that depends on the source of their authority. Is it spiritual power, wonder-working power of the kind associated with saints? Is it ethical teaching based on a mastery of the texts of Islamic tradition? Or is it the calling of a holy warrior? These are ideal types, and they may overlap. And all of them trace their authority to the time of the Prophet and his immediate successors. Muhammad was the civil leader, the political leader, and of course the one who spoke for God. So in the Islamic world, political and religious authority are ideally embodied in the same person.

Over the centuries, as the Islamic imperium began to fragment, political and religious authority were frequently divided. Religious authority was assumed by the community of preacher-scholars. They established networks to train their own people. Mosque universities arose to prepare religious scholars, who became officials in a widespread quasi-bureaucracy where their common training in Islamic law enabled them to speak for the tradition.

Classic Islamic law is highly idealized, unlike American and European law, which is very practical. Certainly these Islamic scholars were capable of being very practical in issues of contracts and marriage, for example, but their orientation toward public order was somewhat removed from the messy exigencies of politics. Nevertheless, while there was a gap between religious authority and political authority, the ideal of their inseparability was maintained, because that’s the way it was in the early formative period of Islam. And it’s this ideal that the Islamist movement has sought to restore to reality.

I should add that Islamic preaching has a linguistic code. In traditional understanding, the clerics are supposed to preach in formal Arabic. The difference between written Arabic and spoken Arabic is much greater than the difference between written English and spoken English, for example. Common people in the Arabic world don’t speak the written language; they speak one of the many dialects. Preachers have customarily employed high, formal Arabic, even though the uneducated people don’t understand such language very well. This kind of preaching, which is still common among the scholars, derives authority from the tradition.

In the last 30 years, however, the Islamist movement and its mujahid preachers (the warrior type) have introduced the language of the street into preaching. This informal language, which used to be taboo, evokes a more immediate response from ordinary people. It rings in the ear. Because of its capacity to arouse emotion, it would compare to formal Arabic as heavy metal compares to classical music.

There’s art to both kinds of preaching. When you preach in dialect, you’re sacrificing your association with tradition. You might lose some prestige, so you have to do it very well. Still, one result of this move toward preaching in common language is that individuals who had never thought of preaching as an option can take the pulpit and preach.

So there are competing sources or forms of authority for Islamic preaching?

Yes, very much so. If you ask Muslims what gives this preacher more authority than that one, the stock answer is, We obey the preacher who knows more. But how do you determine who knows more? What are the relevant credentials, and who gives them? In the Islamic world, all of these questions are being asked when it comes to preaching. Perhaps most fundamentally, Muslims are asking what kind of knowledge makes you a better leader and therefore a more credible preacher.

Is there a consensus?

No. This is one of the deep tensions within the Islamic world. Pious Muslims in Egypt or Palestine or the United States hear one preacher saying one thing and another preacher saying another. Take, for instance, Osama bin Laden. What is the source of his authority? He gives his little sermons that are broadcast on al-Jazeera, and various people listen and obey. Then you have another preacher, say the Grand Mufti of Egypt, who is a state-appointed sheik. He says, Osama bin Laden doesn’t speak for Islam, and violence is not the way to respond to injustice.

These alternatives represent different kinds of knowledge. The Mufti has studied the Islamic tradition for decades; he’s a great scholar of the classical legal texts. Osama bin Laden does not have a classical Islamic education. He studied engineering, became a businessman, and decided to support the mujahideen.

There’s this great divorce between ways of knowing. One group says that those who study the texts, who can recite the Qur’an letter-perfect, are the ones who speak with the authority of the tradition and thus are the leaders whom good Muslims should obey. Another group says, Those guys are stuck in medieval mode; they study ancient texts that describe a world which no longer exists. Knowledge proves itself in action. Those who can accomplish their goals obviously possess knowledge; their success certifies them. So there are leaders, like Osama, whose claim to authority rests on their mastery of the practical tools of political power.

What makes Osama special is not the way he thinks. He’s the head of an organization that is like an international corporation or an international mafia. Because he has so much money and has the, you might say, bureaucratic competence to create an output from his motive, he becomes capable of implementing an agenda which is murderous and suicidal.

In your book you mention a third category of knowledge.

Yes. A Sufi priest would claim to have knowledge that cannot be questioned by human inquiry—esoteric knowledge.

Would this knowledge correspond with the word of wisdom or the leading of the Holy Spirit in the Christian tradition?

That’s not a bad comparison. Sufis, who tend to be less visible in the pulpit, are not accessible to interrogation. They don’t sit there and argue with you. They speak an oracle, and “those who know” are thankful that they’ve heard the voice and behave accordingly. Those who question such revelations—well, they simply aren’t part of God’s plan. Still, Sufis, too, ultimately have to prove their credibility. One of the Sufi gifts is to see the inner self. So a Sufi confirms his claim to authority by knowing your inner secrets.

An anthropologist who wrote a study of Lebanese religious specialists in the 1970s and ’80s describes a Sufi sheik who came to a village and was trying to win disciples. Some of the people in the village were suspicious. They arranged a test: a man who was really a thief and liar pretended to become a disciple of the visitor. The Sufi sheik took him on. The skeptics in the village concluded that the sheik was obviously a phony; otherwise he would have seen through the deception. Real Sufi sheiks are supposed to know the difference between liars and genuine followers.

Of the three categories of preachers you describe—the saints, the scholars, and the warriors—which one holds the most sway in Islamic society?

The scholars by far are the grand tradition. They’re the main current of Islamic preaching. They have their own story and they have a left and right wing. These scholar-preachers tend to be seen as apolitical. Or if they are seen as political, they’re seen as supporting the establishment. And it’s specifically against the scholar preacher that the preacher as warrior speaks in the polemic within Islam.

In 1977, when you went to Egypt, specialists in Middle East Studies generally saw your interest in local Islamic preachers as eccentric. Only two years later, everybody was fascinated with Islamic clerics. What changed?

Most American and European Islamic specialists had a view—some still have a view—of Islamic civilization as having enjoyed a golden age, having prospered and produced great works of theology and literature in the medieval period, and then having declined. With the rise of the Ottoman empire, the great Islamic language became Turkish—not Persian and Arabic.

Before I went to the field I was reading all these books on Middle Eastern anthropology, history, and politics. At that time, most specialists in the field regarded preaching as formalistic, shallow, irrelevant behavior that happens in mosques—and of course, serious, politically strong people only go to mosques when they have to. People with political power instrumentalize religion; they use religious people to support their policies, or they suppress them when they don’t support their policies. From this scholarly perspective, religious people were not seen as actors in political terms. Preaching didn’t have to do with real life or real political interests or real social values.

So scholars who wanted to know what Islam is like, who wanted to understand what’s going on in the Islamic world, didn’t go to mosques. Preachers, in their mind, were just babbling things that the government told them to say or reciting old formulas—called sermons—based on medieval books. In short, the prevailing opinion was that preaching wasn’t really worth studying.

Well, when I got back to Egypt in 1979, the big thing that had changed people’s minds was the Islamic revolution in Iran—the overthrowing in December of 1978 of Mohammad Shah Pahlavi, whom the United States brought into power in 1952, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran (he’d been in France) in February of 1979. This stunned the American public, especially the defense establishment, because the United States had enormous investments, both political and military, in Iran. There had been tens of thousands of American personnel, many of them military, in Iran, which was the most important American ally in the Islamic world. And to have the Shah overthrown, overnight, was very shocking.

And the revolution in Iran demonstrated the power of preaching?

Yes, very much so. Khomeini had brought his ideological cause to the populace largely through preaching. While he was in exile, first in Iraq and then later in France, his recorded messages had been brought back to Iran. Through his tape-recorded sermons he had created a groundswell of ideological excitement that contributed to people’s willingness to face conflict, to march in the streets when they were being challenged by soldiers. A new enthusiasm that became intensely political had its origins in preaching. Khomeini had been in exile for years before the revolution happened; he wasn’t present as a leader, but his words were in the air.

So part of the influence of Islamic sermons lies in their function as propaganda?

That’s right. Before the revolution in Iran, most Middle East specialists had ignored popular movements and focused their attention on state-centered factors, on armies and poitical leaders. When someone asked in 1975, What’s going on in __? (fill in the blank with a Middle Eastern country), the answer, typically, from an American observer would be about the government. What’s going on in Egypt? Well, Sadat said this. A lot of other things going on in these countries were invisible to international observers, who were focusing almost exclusively on the state and politics narrowly construed. The revolution in Iran, and then the assassination of Sadat in October of 1981, upset those assumptions.

Suddenly it became very clear that there was a widespread dissatisfaction throughout the Islamic world with conventional, state-sponsored solutions. For a long time people had been asking, “How can we develop our country better?” or “How can we get rid of corruption?” or “How can we have more opportunity for our children to have better jobs?” And the conventional answers were, well, you need socialism or better education or heavy industry. With the failure of these solutions, a movement grew up arguing that religion offered the answers to chronic economic and political and social problems. By the mid-1970s this movement had begun to enter the political forum in the Middle Eastern countries. And many leaders of these countries began to respond to it. One response was to try to manipulate it.

This was done in Egypt, where Sadat attempted to encourage these Islamic movements because he saw them as countering socialist or communist movements. He began to give the Islamists the right to march in public, the right to publish books; he began to coordinate political activity with their leaders. But the movement got out of hand. And when Sadat tried to suppress it, others said, Well, you can’t tell them to shut up, they speak for Islam. Ultimately this led to his assassination in 1981. A similar thing happened in Syria and other places, notably Algeria. The Islamic revival became a political movement and started threatening the security of those states. And of course, the United States began to worry, too, because U.S. policy centers on relations with state actors that are American allies, like Iran before the revolution.

That’s why many of the post-September 11 reflections are really quite old now for those who have been following developments in the Middle East and elsewhere. I was shocked but not surprised by what happened. I didn’t expect it; I don’t want to imagine such things can ever happen. But they’ve happened in many other places, including Israel, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. And so that they happened in America, too, is shocking but not at all out of character with what’s been going on for many years now in many parts of the world.

How do Islamic preachers compare to Christian preachers in America?

Islamic preaching in its historical evolution is different from Christian preaching in one major aspect. Islamic preaching was defined classically as being the voice not only of the prophet but of the legitimate political establishment. So an Islamic preacher, in the classic sense, is really preaching in the name of the government as well as in the name of God, because God and the government in Islamic political theory have the same source.

In modern times the establishment of a secular nation state created a dilemma. If a leader of a state is not recognized as legitimate in religious terms, then the preacher has to ask himself, Am I preaching in the name of the state and of God as understood in Islamic terms? Or am I preaching only on behalf of God or the state? That becomes a problem.

In the Islamic world, some mosques are, in fact, state institutions: They’re funded by the state; the mosque preacher is appointed and salaried by the state. Other mosque preachers refuse to accept government instruction. They preach in mosques that are independent of the government, where they see themselves as preaching in the name of the tradition, in the name of Islam, and therefore they may or may not approve of what the government says, depending on Islamic teaching.

Are there also differences related to job description?

In the Christian tradition, the preacher is not only the one who proclaims the Word but also the one responsible for the care of souls. Pastoral care and preaching are closely integrated, and the sermon is a vehicle for both of these. Christian congregations, for the most part, are self-selecting, volunteeristic communities.

In the Islamic world it works differently. Mosques don’t normally have congregations of the sort that represents a fixed community. Muslims will tell you that the obligation to attend the Friday ritual prayer is the occasion for hearing a sermon. They’ll tell you, I have to go to pray in a mosque, but it doesn’t matter which one I go to. And it doesn’t really matter who is preaching; any preacher fulfills my obligation.

There are many reasons for this. In the cities, any sense of a close connection between a preacher and his congregation is often undermined by the bureaucratic reality that preachers are assigned to mosques by the government. In the village mosques, which the government largely ignores, they are likely to have a local man who is poorly trained, whose full-time job is something else altogether. His preaching may consist of nothing more than a recitation of certain pious poetry. And he may in effect say a version of the same thing every Friday. But here again there is little to encourage a strong sense of personal connection between preacher and congregation.

Having said that, however, it’s important to add that in the last 20 years of Islamic revival, preachers have emerged who have a strong appeal to local congregations. These preachers have become the magnets around whom communities of committed believers gather.

Is this new dynamic introducing an element of pastoral care in the relationship between the congregants and the preachers?

I still wouldn’t call it pastoral care in the Christian sense because that implies spiritual direction. The Islamist movement has more to do with political and social indoctrination than spiritual training. You would find spiritual training most present in the Sufi tradition, in which the preacher functions as a saint or a holy man. But the Sufis are much less political, and the Islamic revival we’ve been describing is very hostile to the Sufi tradition.

And again, the worshipping community is defined differently in Islam. For instance, you’d never find lists of members in mosques as you do routinely for Christian churches. The size of a congregation depends on how many people come to pray. The individual Muslim’s sense of affiliation with a specific congregation is very informal.

In a village or a neighborhood, people tend to pray together, and they feel a responsibility to one another as neighbors, as members of the community. So an informal sense of belonging emerges—especially in a village, where people not only go to the same mosque but also go to the same market and to each other’s weddings. But that’s not really a mosque congregation, that’s a social community of which the mosque is simply one part.

Let’s talk about the Islamic sermon. What is its function and what values does it promote?

The classic sermon is fairly short, probably eight to ten minutes, and it’s highly formulaic. It starts with an introduction, which is really a sort of prayer. The sermon proper is based on a theme that is introduced with a reference to a Qur’anic text, after which the preacher proceeds to interpret that text, in language that is quite abstract and moralistic. Typically the sermon also includes references both to other Qur’anic texts that shed light on the central text and to sayings not found in the Qur’an but traditionally attributed to the Prophet, called hadith. The preacher will often refer to events in Islamic history, and he may work in anecdotes of Islamic sages as well.

The second part of the sermon is much shorter and traditionally more practical. In Christian terms it has some of the functions of the announcements that the pastor gives each Sunday sometime before the sermon. One of the features of that second part of the sermon, classically, was that the preacher was to cite, by name, the legitimate ruler under whose authority he preaches. Thus, in the Islamic tradition, that second part of the sermon turned out to be very important, because the preacher was really authenticating or authorizing the leader. If the preacher wanted to condemn the leader, or offer a milder correction, he had a perfect venue for doing so—but his criticism would be expressed indirectly, by allusion and implication.

The very end of the sermon is a kind of litany in which the preacher calls on God for forgiveness and the congregation joins in response. The call to prayer immediately follows the end of the sermon.

Is it fair to say that the sermon is primarily exegesis, with little application?

Well, the application is by allegory. To the educated listener, the application will often be clear from the theme selected and the way the examples from the tradition are chosen and explained. For the most part, Islamic sermons avoid what Christians would see as direct application. In that sense they leave more to be understood.

What are some of the blind spots in our conventional understanding of Islam?

I don’t think it’s widely understood that Muslims worship the same God that Christians and Jews worship. Allah in the Islamic tradition is the same spiritual being as Yahweh, the Lord. Muslims worship the God of Abraham. And Muhammad understood his calling as a prophet to be in full continuity with the God of Abraham.

Now of course Muhammad claimed to be directly inspired by God. In fact, Muslims claim—and this is an important doctrinal point for them—that Muhammad was illiterate, so that even if by some historical accident the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament had fallen into his hands, he couldn’t have read them. A number of scholars suggest that there is a lot of evidence in the Qur’an that Muhammad knew these texts. Muslims strongly reject this view and insist that the Qur’an is the inspired word of God.

In any case, for Christians and Jews the encounter with Islam is an encounter with a sibling. And while the history of that encounter has often been marked by bitter hostility, there have also been places and times where Christians, Muslims, and Jews worked together in relative harmony. Islamic Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw all kinds of interesting thinkers engaged in the great medieval intellectual synthesis. And there are a few other examples—twelfth-century Baghdad, for instance. Now there are lots of jagged edges to these stories, but we haven’t given them sufficient attention. We tend to focus on confrontation rather than cooperation.

What would you say to Christians for whom Jesus himself will be the great stumbling block to embracing Muslims as siblings?

Great question. I was giving you the public relations answer. Jesus is a stumbling block, and genuine Muslim-Christian dialogue is difficult. Jesus is central for us as Christians in a way that Muslims simply cannot accept. They have their own Jesus, but it’s a Jesus we hardly recognize.

You may know the work of the late Kenneth Cragg, the longtime Anglican bishop in Cairo, who wrote a good deal along these lines. Others like him include the great French scholar Louis Massignon and the late George Anawati, a Dominican priest who devoted his life to Islamic thought. What they propose is a platform of co-operation that will require deep thoughfulness on the part of both Christians and Muslims—and not papering over, you might say, the roots of our specific traditions.

Agnieszka Tennant is an associate editor of Christianity Today magazine.

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

“Most Americans of middle age or older,” Jean Bethke Elshtain observes, “have heard of Jane Addams. Didn’t she have something to do with immigrants and social work?” Founder of Hull-House, the pioneering Chicago settlement house inspired by a Christian impulse to “share the lives of the poor,” extraordinarily influential among young women as a model of what women could accomplish, defender of the immigrant and advocate for children, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize, Jane Addams has largely slipped from public consciousness since her death in 1935. In a new book, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life, Elshtain brings Addams vividly into focus and shows why her life and work are profoundly relevant to the challenges Americans face at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Herewith an excerpt.

In 1915, Otis Tufton Mason, then curator of the Department of Ethnology in the United States National Museum, published Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture. This text provided scholarly confirmation of views that Jane Addams already held about the centrality of women’s role in the creation and maintenance of culture. Mason’s book appeared in 1915; although Addams had been expounding views consistent with Mason’s well before that date, his book bolstered her convictions.

The overriding theme limned by Mason is that women did not languish in the backwater as men charged forth to create culture and make history; rather, if one looks at the world of primitive culture (by which he means cultures prior to written languages and with a tribal structure of one sort or another), one finds women food bringers, weavers, skin dressers, potters, beasts of burden, jacks-of-all-trades, artists, linguists, founders of society, and patrons of religion. The “founders of society” category is especially important in light of the fact that the dominant Western political tradition features only male founders of polities. Mason, however, gestures toward female foundings. He believes there is substantial anthropological and paleontological evidence that women were the creators of settled social life. This thesis belied then-ascendant Social Darwinism, with its accounts of societal origins in a brutal survival of the fittest.

By contrast, and in light of his evidence, when Mason sees women pass before him, he sees not “an abject creature. … the brutalized slave of man,” but a creature whose ability to do almost everything helped to create a “higher law of culture. … the law of co-ordination and co-operation.” Women were inventors. Women domesticated animals. Women were the cultural carriers of weaving and of textiles in general—and this is a vital dimension of civilization. Women harvested what nature offered and invented orderly cultivation. They were the “first ceramic artisans and developed all the techniques, the forms, and the uses of pottery.” Women were the first to “conceive the idea of shelter for herself and her helpless infant.” Women invented dyes and the arts of decoration; women linked necessity—protecting the body—to beauty. Lastly, the mother-child pair was the first linguistic unity.

Because motherhood requires stability, women were the primary agents of stable matrimony—an enormous advance for civilization and for women themselves. Women were prophetesses and mourners. They helped create religion. Women were teachers and friends. They had “their share in determining the relation of geography to history, in the conquest of the three kingdoms of Nature, in the substitution of other forces to do the work of human muscles, in the elaboration of industrial aesthetic arts, in the creation of social order, in the production of language, in the development of religions.” Surely, Mason argues, the progress of civilization and of “intellectuality” should not be “opposed to childbearing.” Indeed, if such a sentiment becomes prevalent, a society is doomed. For both pedagogy and the body politic had their origins in female-generated activity.

This is a sharp alternative to accounts of human origins that stress the hunt, including, as I have already noted, the heady cruelties of Social Darwinism with its mapping of “nature red in tooth and claw” onto human social life.1 Although Addams was an evolutionist and familiar with Darwin’s account of competition within and between species, she drew her conclusions instead from sources that, like Mason’s book, advocated the view that the primordial tasks of women were essential creations of culture. Not only was she an opponent of Social Darwinism in her own day; her views also place her in a tradition of thought that fell into disrepute with the demise of the social feminism she advocated and the triumph of an individualist version of feminism in the past quarter century.

What Addams seems to have glimpsed is a form of power that doesn’t have as its means violence and doesn’t have as its end total control and command. She had long been searching for that ever-elusive female authority, the right and the power not only to speak but also to act. She confronted a conundrum: that women have been both powerful and powerless. But it seemed that—at least, for much of history—the forms of power that women wielded and the areas of human life in which they had their say did not grant women the right to speak afforded to men, which flowed to men by virtue of the form of power they exercised and the arenas over which they had effective control. Certainly women have not been uniformly and universally downtrodden, demeaned, infantilized, and coerced. Women have not, however, been afforded the authority of men. The new woman of Addams’s age was well advised to seek the source of authority in new versions of women’s historic strengths. For, just as Addams had recognized that “there is power in men,” so power is to be found in women’s history.

Every culture holds an image of a body politic. What Addams insists upon is that the female body—most importantly, the maternal female body—is the central image of social generativity and fecundity. Clearly, one need not be a mother in the biological sense—although she found this the most vital of all human activities—in order to locate oneself within this image. This body politic is not the classical notion of a kingdom or king’s domain. It is, instead, a vision that locates “familied contexts” and “communities of everyday belief and action that regenerate political education without subordinating people.” Could Chicago be that sort of body politic, with its stockyards, sweatshops, and tenements? There was a fighting chance, if woman-power and authority as a civic ideal available to all came to prevail.

Municipal Housekeeping, Whose Time Has Come

In 1903, a bill was introduced in the Michigan legislature that provided for the electrocution of infants with mental infirmities—no doubt inspired by the eugenics craze that was then sweeping the United States. Electrocution was quick and didn’t involve suffering, or such was the claim. By extension, what better way to rid society of “imbeciles” than to do it quickly and tidily at birth?2 For reaction to this proposed piece of legislation, prominent persons were polled, Jane Addams among them. She is quoted as saying: “The suggestion is horrible. It is not in line with the march of civilization nor with the principles of humanity. The Spartans destroyed children physically infirm. Are we to go back to the days of Sparta? Feeble-minded children are one of the cares of a community. It is our duty to care for them. Such a bill surely cannot be passed in this country of enlightenment.”3

Addams surely believed that women would be less likely to promote such a policy than men. Why? Were women morally superior? No, not that, but women, with their hands-on primary responsibilities for children, before and after birth, could not treat “imbeciles” as a generic category the world is best rid of: or so Addams devoutly believed. Addams tells story after story of mothers devoted to their “feeble-minded” offspring. It is clear, at times, that she has some reservations about the toll this takes on the poor women and their families. But the answer is not to destroy those with special needs, it is for the community to pitch in to help. Given her commitment to make the world less violent and cruel, the “feeble-minded” and “mentally deficient” (these words were standard usage in her day, and by no means considered epithets) must come under a capacious civic and ethical umbrella. That is part of municipal housekeeping.

In a commentary on “The Home and the Special Child,”4 Addams indicates her support for, but caution about, experts making judgments about the needs of “special children”—a point that had been argued by the previous speaker on a panel on which she sat. Addams asserts: “It is difficult for a parent to make a clear judgment in regard to his own child, especially in respect to the child’s mental or moral capacities. But, if parental affection clouds the power of diagnosis, at the same time, after the diagnosis has been made by the trained mind, parental affection enormously increases the power of devotion which is necessary to carry out the regimen which the trained mind has laid down.” Bowing toward the trained expert without stripping parents (and the mother is central here) of their authority in relation to their child, Addams notes that in going through a socially sanctioned process of child-study and diagnosis, the parent realizes the child is “not an exception” and loses “his peculiar sensitiveness in regard to his child. The reaction of this change of attitude upon the entire family is something astounding.” She then links this process to one of her standard briefs against self-pity, the notion that one is “so isolated,” that one (or one’s child) is “an exception.” Parents thus convinced go through a process like this:

You think you have a child unlike other children; you are anxious that your neighbor shall not find it out; it places you and the normal children in the family in a curious relation to the rest of the community; but if you find out that there are many other such children in your city and in other cities thruout the United States, and that a whole concourse of people are studying to help these children, considering them not at all queer and outrageous, but simply a type of child which occurs from time to time and which can be enormously helped, you come out of that peculiarity sensitive attitude and the whole family is lifted with you into a surprising degree of hopefulness and normality.

She proceeds with a number of anecdotal tales from her own experience that illustrate the extraordinary difference it makes when having a “special child” becomes ordinary, “simply a type of child which occurs from time to time.” Only when mothers are freed from a “sense of isolation,” when they discover that “there were many other people who had children of that sort who were not thereby disgraced,” when “the community recognized such children and provided for them,” and needed the mother’s cooperation in this—then and only then can that which is broken be somewhat repaired. Jane Addams didn’t win this battle; the era of massive institutionalization was upon the country. But she helped create what might be called a countertradition, another way of doing and thinking, which one day bore fruit. In lecture after lecture, newspaper article after newspaper article, interview after interview, she stressed the theme of municipal housekeeping as a type of applied morals (her characterization) and as a mode of analysis.

The phrase municipal (or civic) housekeeping is easily misunderstood and dismissed: it seems to imply that politics can be replaced by housekeeping on a grand scale. No doubt some social reformers had precisely that in mind, but Addams was not so naÏve. Indeed, she taxed the doctrinaire socialists of her day for the ideological naÏvetÉ they exhibited concerning the anticipated glories of the socialist future. She recalled how one ardent socialist during the course of the weekly Hull-House drawing-room discussions held under the auspices of “The Working People’s Social Science Club” had declared that “socialism will cure the toothache.” A second interlocutor, not to be outdone, upped the ante, insisting “that when every child’s teeth were systematically cared for from the beginning, toothache would disappear from the face of the earth.”

Even as she deplored fanaticism and the notion that nothing is more important than the right theory, she opposed politics as violence and resolutely refused to glamorize social unrest. Episodes like citywide strikes may be exciting to some, but they turn a town into “two cheering sides” as if one were a spectator at a sporting event. Fair-mindedness goes down the drain. Her quest for balance, and for a politics that best fits the quotidian norm a social democracy should embody, takes expression frequently as a determination to mitigate. She and Hull-House and similar settlements would mitigate a situation. We rarely use the term nowadays in this way, but she has in mind to make milder and more gentle; to render anger and hatred less fierce and violent; to relax the violence of one’s action; to alleviate physical or mental pain; to lighten the burden of an evil of any kind; to reduce severity; to moderate to a bearable degree.

The politics of a socialized democracy was concerned with precisely this kind of mitigation. Addams understood the importance of politics; hence the key role she played in seconding the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as the candidate of the Progressive Party for president in 1912. She made hundreds of speeches in behalf of her candidate, stumping to the point of physical breakdown. She appreciated that electoral politics was a central feature of American life. But why should something as basic to the well-being of a city as garbage collection be a matter of political influence, deal-making, and contestation?

City Housekeeping As Experimentation

Why not be experimental, for what is a settlement if not “an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city,” she had written in Twenty Years at Hull-House. Municipal housekeeping was an experiment. Look at the situation closely. Study it. What do you see? You cannot help but observe that most of the departments in a modern city “can be traced to woman’s traditional activity.” Two points must be made. The first is that it makes no sense to disallow women to vote on matters that so directly concern them. The second is that in light of their traditional activities, women possess the insights and expert (if informal) knowledge needed by cities in order to deal with the manifold problems that have emerged in the overcrowded immigrant city: insanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality at alarming rates, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution, and drunkenness. In times long past, when the city was a citadel, it may have made sense that “those who bore arms” were the only group “fully enfranchised.” Addams writes: “There was a certain logic in giving the franchise only to grown men when the existence and stability of the city depended upon their defense, and when the ultimate value of the elector could be reduced to his ability to perform military duty.”

But cities no longer settle their claims by force of arms. Instead, the city depends upon “enlarged housekeeping.” No “predatory instinct” serves us here, nor does “brute strength”—not when one is dealing with “delicate matters of human growth and welfare.” Is it not possible that the city has failed to keep house properly “partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities”? Addams stresses that “ability to carry arms has nothing to do with the health department maintained by the city which provides that children are vaccinated, that contagious diseases are isolated and placarded, that the spread of tuberculosis is curbed, that the water is free from typhoid infection.” Addams argues for a new civic humanitarianism in which women not only can but must participate:

Because all these things have traditionally been in the hands of women, if they take no part in it now they are not only missing the education which the natural participation in civic life would bring to them, but they are losing what they have always had. From the beginning of tribal life they have been held responsible for the health of the community, a function which is now represented by the health department; from the days of the cave dwellers so far as the home was clean and wholesome it was due to their efforts, which are now represented by the bureau of tenement house inspection; from the period of the primitive village the only public sweeping which was performed was what they undertook in their divers dooryards, that which is now represented by the bureau of street cleaning.

Simple logic and the aspiration to political education all combine to urge upon women and all others municipal housekeeping. Addams speculates on two possible effects, if women get the municipal ballot. The first is an “opportunity to fulfill their old duties and obligations with the safeguard and the consideration which the ballot alone can secure for them under the changed conditions and, secondly, the education which participation in actual affairs always brings. As we believe that woman has no right to allow the things to drop away from her that really belong to her, so we contend that ability to perform an obligation comes very largely in proportion as that obligation is conscientiously assumed.”

Jane Addams’s argument, straightforward in its assessment of the problems and a way to meet them head on, is also subtle in its recognition that much of woman’s political innocence, which appears as moral goodness, derives from the fact that women haven’t had the opportunity or the power to do many of the things—including the horrible and dubious things—that men, who have had both power and opportunity, have done. So if one could “forecast the career of woman, the citizen,” it is that she, too, must “bear her share of civic responsibility not because she clamors for her rights, but because she is essential to the normal development of the city of the future.”

To an extraordinary degree, Chicago’s women had already rolled up their sleeves and tackled the host of problems Jane Addams enumerates. She was intertwined from the beginning of Hull-House—indeed, even before its beginning—with networks of powerful, influential, and civically engaged women. They provided financial backing. They lobbied powerful men—in many cases, their own husbands. They went public with their concerns. They worked indefatigably. This was volunteer activity, not only because many of the women were well-to-do but because they were responding to a deeply ingrained call to service. But they were frustrated by the limits they encountered repeatedly, and were no doubt pained as well as chagrined by the fact that they were not allowed to vote even in municipal elections. Typically, Addams ties the municipal ballot for women to a very practical set of concerns. But she goes on to link women suffrage as a general proposition to the insistence that women must discharge their civic duty, which they cannot do while separated from the ballot.

In a pamphlet entitled “Why Women Should Vote,” penned in 1915, Addams charges contemporary women with failing to “discharge their duties to their households properly simply because they do not perceive that as society grows more complicated it is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her own home if she would continue to preserve the home in its entirety.” Life in a crowded city quarter affords the meticulous housekeeper no sanctum sanctorum. She may scrub day and night; dust around the clock; close the blinds and shutters (assuming she has windows and can occasionally see sunlight); but the meat she puts on the table may nonetheless be tainted, the drinking water surging with bacteria, and the winter overcoats and cloaks bearing contagions from the sweatshops. Addams educates women who represent many languages and traditions but who share a common concern for the well-being of their children, to understand in what that well-being now consists:

In a crowded city quarter. … if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities—no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a tenement house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone is powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. She cannot even secure untainted meat for her household, she cannot provide fresh fruit, unless meat has been inspected by city officials, and the decayed fruit, which is so often placed upon sale in the tenement districts, has been destroyed in the interests of public health. In short, if woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying quite outside of their immediate household. The individual conscience and devotion are no longer effective.

Addams illustrates this point with a parable from chapter 13 of Twenty Years at Hull-House: “The Story of the Self-Sacrificing Mother’s Spotless House, All in Vain.” Addams begins by recalling the typhoid fever epidemic of 1902, in which the 19th Ward, “although containing but one thirty-sixth of the population of the city, registered one sixth of the total number of deaths.” Hull-House residents had “made an investigation of the methods of plumbing in the houses adjacent to conspicuous groups of fever cases.” She continues:

They discovered among the people who had been exposed to the infection, a widow who had lived in the ward for a number of years, in a comfortable little house of her own. Although the Italian immigrants were closing in all around her, she was not willing to sell her property and to move away until she had finished the education of her children. In the meantime she held herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors and could never be drawn into any of the public efforts to secure a better code of tenement-house sanitation. Her two daughters were sent to an eastern college. One June when one of them had graduated and the other still had two years before she took her degree, they came to the spotless little house and to their self-sacrificing mother for the summer holiday. They both fell ill with typhoid fever and one daughter died because the mother’s utmost efforts could not keep the infection out of her own house. The entire disaster affords, perhaps, a fair illustration of the futility of the individual conscience which would isolate a family from the rest of the community and its interests.

Addams may be a bit rough on the self-sacrificing mother here, but she has a point to make, so she permits herself some heavy-handedness. Participation in municipal housekeeping aimed at helping to keep everyone’s children safe is the best shot at protecting your own children. You can bar the door, but germs do not knock before they enter. Don’t turn your back on housewifely duties, Addams argues, but extend their purview. You are in part responsible for the condition of the streets, the food, the drinking water, even the schools. You can lobby for playgrounds or watch kids harm themselves or even run afoul of the law through playing in busy city streets or train yards.

Jane Addams knew that much of the work of culture lay in the creation of the boundaries that make free activities possible. But when those boundaries constrict and strangle, when they fairly asphyxiate the patient, it is time to take decisive action. Much of the activity of Hull-House over the years involved pushing boundaries to include people who had been excluded, as well as extending boundaries that were too restrictive in other ways. “Home extension,” some have called it. Optimistically, Addams believed that both the family claim and the social claim would be ennobled in this dynamic process; that neither need lose. As she notes in the biography of her friend, Hull-House resident Julia Lathrop (a distinguished figure in her own right):

Even in the very first years of Hull-House we began to discover that our activities were gradually extending from the settlement to a participation in city and national undertakings. We found that our neighborhood playground, the very first in Chicago, was not secure until it became part of a system covering the whole city; better housing was dependent upon a good tenement house code for which we had worked against many obstacles through the City Homes Association.

The Garbage Wars

The problem of garbage was typical of the many problems in the 19th Ward caused by the lack of political responsiveness to serious public issues. In many cases the lack of responsiveness was due to extensive corruption, or “boodling,” as it was called, which lined the pockets of a few but did not clean the streets for the many. One of the more remarkable early Hull-House stories is that of how Miss Jane Addams, in 1894, became the first woman appointed sanitation inspector of the 19th Ward. The problem of garbage was severe. Sidewalks, where they existed, were buried under many feet of compacted refuse. Immigrants reared their families in its stench, with vermin as their ever-present companions. Activities in the immigrants’ world were severely circ*mscribed according to gender. There were male- and female-defined activities and spheres of movement, with the woman’s being inside the home (despite the number of young girls, unmarried women, widows, and deserted, divorced, and single mothers who were compelled to work outside the home) and the man’s outside the home. Garbage was far too low a thing for men to tend to routinely—it seemed an extension of the household—but no single household could possibly deal with mountains of it. So it was a municipal task. But the city wasn’t doing its job, because of sloppiness and political corruption.

Those who insisted that garbage was each family’s own business assumed that so long as you sweep out or dispose of your own, you’ve fulfilled the applicable ethical code, that of the household. But this represents a disaster for the whole. A civic ethic must be brought to bear. That is why corrupt city housekeeping is such a problem. To correct the problem, it isn’t so much a matter of salting the entire city apparatus with squeaky-clean social reformers as, instead, working as hard as one can to ensure that those who take on civic tasks—even chores as humble yet necessary as garbage collection—realize their importance to the whole and see that their efforts are a vital part of the wider challenge to make the city more livable and more beautiful.

Addams’s appointment as sanitation inspector came only after a protracted battle between Hull-House and Alderman Johnny Powers, a popular “boodler” who delivered turkeys at Thanksgiving but who was indifferent to the garbage problem despite the mounting evidence of disease and the much higher than average death rates, including infant mortality, in the 19th Ward. Hull-House launched a campaign to unseat Powers and to bring in a reform candidate (who presumably would not reward a Powers loyalist with the garbage inspector appointment). Hull-House received some backing for this effort from prominent businessmen, and it submitted a bid to the city council in the hope of being awarded the garbage-collection contract. In the first round, Hull-House’s bid was thrown out. But the effort generated a flurry of citywide publicity: the Hull-House ladies versus the flashy, smooth, and popular Mr. Powers. The upshot was that “Major George Swift, a reform-minded Republican,” decided to “appoint her [Addams] garbage inspector for the 19th Ward—the first woman to hold the $1,000 a year job.”

So Addams and another Hull-House resident began the odorous if not onerous task of traipsing along after garbage collection teams to make certain that the task was completed to their satisfaction. The Chicago newspapers made much of this, but Addams’s own telling of the tale in Twenty Years at Hull-House is circ*mspect (if reminiscent of Charles Dickens in its detail). One sees the “huge wooden garbage boxes” that little children played on and in, the “decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by Italian and Greek fruit peddlers,” the “residuum left over from the piles of filthy rags which were fished out of the city dumps and brought to the homes of the rag pickers for further sorting and washing.” Many living in the neighborhood got used to the foul smells, and those living farther away were unaware of the increasingly dangerous situation. For more than three years prior to Addams’s appointment, the Hull-House residents had complained of these conditions. They had encouraged their neighbors to join them in the effort to obtain redress. But only slight modifications had occurred, and the conditions “remained intolerable.”

Addams tells us that by her fourth summer at Hull-House she was “absolutely desperate” because her “delicate little nephew, for whom I was a guardian, could not be with me at Hull-House at all unless the sickening odors were reduced. I may well be ashamed that other delicate children who were torn from their families, not into boarding school but into eternity, had not long before driven me into effective action. Under the direction of the first man who came as a resident to Hull-House we began a systematic investigation of the city system of garbage collection.” The Hull-House Women’s Club was drummed into service, with 12 Irish American clubwomen working to investigate conditions in the alleys. At the end of their investigation, the women reported to the health department all of the violations they had observed and recorded: a total of 1,037. One can well imagine the effect this veritable mountain of disastrous information had on the health department chief, accompanied as it was by accusations of city inaction in the face of mounting death rates, especially among children, in the 19th Ward.

Addams praises the clubwomen who “had finished a long day’s work of washing or ironing followed by the cooking of a hot supper” and for whom “it would have been much easier to sit on her doorstep during a summer evening than to go up and down ill-kept alleys and get into trouble with her neighbors over the condition of the garbage boxes. It required both civic enterprise and moral conviction to be willing to do this three evenings a week during the hottest and most uncomfortable months of the year.” But they persisted.

A settlement is always led, Addams insisted, from the concrete to the more abstract. You must try to see the relation of the small thing to the whole. She illustrates this point with a story about the tailors’ union that met at Hull-House, which once sought the help of the residents there in “tagging the various parts of a man’s coat in such wise as to show the money paid to the people who had made it.” By the time one added the costs of “salesmen, commercial travelers, rent and management” to those of cutting, buttonholing, finishing, and other aspects of the job, the poor “tagged coat was finally left hanging limply in a closet as if discouraged by the attempt.” But this desire to “know the relation” of one’s “own labor to the whole is not only legitimate but must form the basis of any intellect action” for improvement. You must start with the particular, even though you can’t end there.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. This article is excerpted from her newly published book, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy. Copyright 2001 by Jean Bethke Elshtain. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved.

1. Interestingly, Darwin, unlike many Social Darwinists, does not draw from his account of origins the conclusion that there should be rank inequalities, racial divides, and all the rest. We are, he insists, “one species, so there is absolutely no reason why the world’s population cannot operate in sympathy and harmony.” The Origins of the Species (Modern Library, 1990), p. 244.

2. It is difficult to imagine what the legislators who proposed this measure could have been thinking. A mini-electric bed on which to place and to execute defective newborns in every delivery room? The image is so grotesque as to be stomach-churning. Thomas Edison himself had demonstrated the glories of electrocution by electrocuting an elephant. A grainy old film exists showing the great elephant being led to a special stand. The elephant is wired up. A switch is pulled. The great creature totters, smoke curls up, its knees buckle, it is felled.

3. In this “country of enlightenment,” of course, persons with mental retardation or mental illness or even epilepsy, on the basis of sloppy diagnoses (or no diagnosis at all, in many cases), were shunned and institutionalized. The United States Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell sanctioned the practice of involuntary sterilization of “imbeciles.” Nowadays, diagnostic procedures are deployed prior to birth in order to promote the abortion of “defective” fetuses. The entire medical profession is geared in this direction; although the language of choice is, of course, “choice,” women who have gone through the experience report having felt the pressure to abort.

4. National Education Association Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (1908), pp. 1127-1131.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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