The City: Winter 2009

THE CITY Playground or Battleground, as printed in Alliance Weekly, authored by A.W. Tozer, Chicago, Illinois, 1952.

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n the early days, when Christianity excercised a dominant influence over American thinking, we conceived the world to be a battleground. Our fathers believed in sin and the devil and hell as constituting one force; and they believed in God and righteousness and heaven as the other. Man, so our fathers held, had to choose sides; he could not be neutral.

For him it must be life or death, heaven or hell, and if he chose to come out on God's side he could expect open war with God's enemies. The fight would be real and deadly and would last as long as life continued here.

Men looked forward to heaven as they would to returning home from the wars, laying down of the sword to enjoy in peace the home prepared for them. How different today. The fact remains the same, but the interpretation has changed completely. Men think of the world not as a battleground but as a playground. We are not here to fight, we are here to frolic. We are not in a foreign land, we are at home. We are not getting ready to live, we are already living, and the best we can do is to rid ourselves of our inhibitions and our frustrations and live this life to the full. This changed attitude toward the world has had and is having its effect upon Christians, even gospel Christians who profess the faith of the Bible...They might hedge around the question if they were asked to declare their position, but their conduct gives them away. They are facing both ways, enjoying Christ and the world too, and gleefully telling everyone that accepting Jesus does not require them to give up their fun...their worship a sort of sanctified late night clubbing without the champagne and the dressed up drunks. Sides do not enter into it.

A publication of Houston Baptist University

WINTER 2009

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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Franc is J. Beckw ith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Hugh Hew itt Ramesh Ponnuru Editor in Chief Benjam in Domenech Reviews Editor Micah Mattix Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Hunter Baker Matthew Bo ylesto n David Capes Joe P. Carter Victoria C. Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Wilfred Mc Clay Dan McLaughl in Russell Moore Robert Stac ey Joshua Trevino Pejman Yous efzadeh

THE C ITY Volume II, Issue 3 Copyright 2009 Houston Baptist University.

All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by Ree Drummond.

Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org.

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in this issue

FAITH & THE CITY Jay W. Richards on Christianity & Capitalism Paul Bonicelli on Man, The State & Your Neighbor Eric O. Jacobsen on Redeeming the Commons

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ETHICS & SOCIETY Matthew Lee Anderson on Jon & Kate plus Marriage Joseph M. Knippenberg on Socrates & Health Care Anthony Joseph on America’s Abortions Owen Strachan on Manliness Louis Markos on Biblical Translation

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BOOKS & CULTURE Harold K. Bush on Mark Twain David Mahan on Demanding Poetry Mark Coppenger on Knowing Christ Christopher Benson on Atheism With Two Poems by Bill Coyle And The Word by Saint Ambrose

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The God of This World To His Prophet Bill Coyle Go to the prosperous city, for I have taken pity on its inhabitants, who drink and feast and dance all night in lighted halls yet know their bacchanals lead nowhere in the end.

Go to them, now, commend, to those with ears to hear, a lifestyle more austere.

Tell all my children tired of happiness desired and never had, that there is solace in despair.

Say there is consolation in ruins and ruination beneath a harvest moon that is itself a ruin, comfort, however cold, in grievances recalled beside a fire dying from lack of love and trying.

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CHRISTIANITY & C A P I TA L I S M 4MYTH)AND)TRUTH$

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Jay W. Richards

am originally from Amarillo, Texas—a medium sized city up on the panhandle—and attended a mainline Presbyterian church growing up. I thought of myself as a Christian. When it came time for college, I went off to a small formerly Christian liberal arts school—I say formerly Christian because while there was a chapel on the campus, you wouldn't notice it if you were walking around.

In my first semester, I found myself in a political science course reading the Communist Manifesto and another book called Democracy for the Few by an American socialist named Michael Parenti. The professor said, “There is an easy way to get an A in this class. If you read the text book five times, I'll give you an A.” Now it turns out that he didn't quite say that, but that's what I heard him say. What he actually said is “if you read it five times, you are bound to get an A.” Something like that. But I just thought, “Well, this is easy—I’ll just read this book five times.” And so I did and I still have the copy of the book. Almost every line is highlighted in this book. It's full of statistics about a small percentage of the American population which owns most of the real estate, most of the capital, leaving presumably the majority of the American public with little prosperity or wealth.

As a Christian, though not a critically thinking one, I immediately fell for what I thought were quite compelling arguments. For several years, I was essentially a Christian socialist. I wasn’t a Marxist—I didn't believe in violent revolution—but I thought something vaguely like this: Christians ought to be concerned about the poor and poverty. Socialists talk about doing something about the poor and poverty. Therefore, Christians ought to be socialists.

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By the time I was a senior, I had actually taken a few economics courses and read some books by Thomas Sowell, and I became more or less convinced intellectually that free market capitalism was a much more efficient economic system, in terms of distributing goods and services, than any form of command economy. I had a course my senior year, in 1988, on Eastern European politics and economics, the conclusion of which was that Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had more or less met the economic strength of the West.

Talk about a useless course come 1990. Yet even after I graduated from college and went to theological seminary, I still thought that while you might be able to make an economic case for capitalism, you couldn't make a moral case. There was just something morally unsavory about it all.

In a course on social ethics in theological seminary, I read a book called Theology of Liberation by a Latin American theologian named Gustavo Gutierrez. Liberation Theology, at least as Gutierrez presented it, was a form of Marxist social analysis of Christian theology.

I thought to myself, you know, I've never actually read a critique of this, so I went to the library and found a little book, a collection of essays called Will it Liberate by Michael Novak. I read it, and then I read his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and another book by George Gilder called Wealth and Poverty. And as I read these books, I suddenly realized that you can make a case for capitalism not only on economic grounds, but on moral grounds. The arguments were there all along.

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o and behold, now twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think we're still facing the same arguments. There are people who are now voting in the US who do not remember the Soviet Union or the lessons of the Cold War. I’m now convinced that these arguments actually have to made be made anew in every generation, at least once. Capitalists tend not to frame their arguments for capitalism in compelling moral terms, and Socialism has a kind of morally intuitive plausibility, appealing to our concern about the poor.

As columnist Bret Stephens wrote recently: “Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence.�

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That’s one of the reasons I wrote my book, called Money, Greed and God, as a response to more recent books like God’s Politics by Jim Wallace of Sojourners, or older books such as Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider.

The argument I make is that as long as you define capitalism correctly, and you avoid a certain number of basic intellectual mistakes that cause our moral intuitions to misfire, you can be a serious Christian and an advocate for capitalism. Most of the misconceptions about capitalism fall into one of eight myths, and most troubles for Christians arise from making one of these intellectual mistakes.

I do not argue for capitalism as the biblical or the Christian economic system—it’s nowhere near that simple. I think you can be a good Christian and be a socialist. I think you can be a good socialist—you can be some kind of socialist, at least—and go to heaven.

You might just end up in a bad economic section of heaven.

The Judeo-Christian tradition contributed to the rise of capitalism and economic freedom in the west. And I believe, when you get past the myths, the basic Christian worldview lends itself to capitalism.

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4THE)PIETY)MYTH$

he piety myth arises from the mistake of forgetting the law of unintended consequences, or rather ignoring unintended consequences and trade-offs, and putting most of the moral weight on our intentions, our motivations for a policy, rather than its unintended outcomes.

An economic journalist named Henry Hazlitt wrote a book in the 1950s called Economics in One Lesson. He actually defines what he calls “the art of economics” this way:

“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate, but at the longer effects of any act or policy. It consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group, but for all groups.”

Hazlitt’s talking about the art of economics as a craft. It’s something that you learn, that you get embedded in your intuitions. He’s not talking about the science of economics. Of course there are aspects of economics that are predictive, that are properly described as a social science—but the problem isn't that we're not smart enough to get 7

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these things. It's just that we tend not to do this. We tend to go straight from our moral intuitions into some particular policy without refracting those intuitions through this kind of consideration.

I call this the piety myth after a quote by a 20th century French philosopher by the name of Etienne Gilson who famously said that “piety is no substitute for technique.” Gilson’s point was that piety is the state of our hearts. It's the state of our motives and our orientation toward God. In terms of your state before God, your intentions are relevant— both what we do and why we do it. But why we do something is not really important when it comes to economics—only what we do is important. If we actually want to help people and if we have to choose, wouldn't we rather have people that who implement good or helpful policy for bad reasons than people who implement bad policy for good reasons? We might be concerned about the legislators' souls who do that, but we ought to focus our attention and our moral reasoning on the consequence of policy and not on the intentions of those who advocate that policy. “Piety is no substitute for technique.”

About six years ago, I had a detached retina. I happened to be in Texas at the time and thought it was the heat, 113 degrees and all, but after the third day, I went to the doctor. I had to get on a plane, emergency surgery in Seattle, ended up getting the guy who is considered the best physician for this in the Pacific Northwest.

The night before the surgery my wife said, “You know, do you know if he's a Christian?” And I thought, you know, I don't know. It hasn't come up. I guess I'd like it if he were a Christian, but if I had to choose, I would rather if he would be really good at retinal surgery and a pagan than the other way around. I asked him how he did his job, and he said, well you know, reattaching a retina is like reattaching wet toilet paper that's floating in warm Jell-O without being able to touch it.

Today, I can see in my left eye. “Piety is no substitute for technique.” When you get on a plane, you don't care so much about the faith of the Boeing engineer as his knowledge of aerodynamics because we know that there are basic realities of physics and aerodynamics and medical technology.

We often forget that when it comes to economics, but there are basic realities, objective realities that aren't dependent upon our prefe8

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rences in the economic realm, too. That's precisely why we can't substitute our piety for economic technique.

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spoke at Houston Baptist University earlier this year, and actually spent the entire lecture doing nothing but talking about policies that were inspired for good reasons, but led to very bad consequences. Let me just give you a couple of examples.

Consider child labor law for a moment. Very few people would argue against it. If you follow child labor law in the West in the United States, for instance, it turns out that the law more or less tracked with the economic prosperity of our country and with cultural expectations. But there was a time in the early American colonies in which most children worked, most children didn't go to high school and college. The general expectation was that the children living on farms, for instance, spent most of their days working on the farms.

They didn't do this because their parents didn't care about their education. They did it out of necessity. The family simply needed their children to work. My grandfather didn't finish the sixth grade because he needed to work on a cotton farm, but as our country became more and more affluent and the middle class became more and more affluent, there came to be a set of expectations, reasonable expectations that most children, at least not during the summer, ought to spend their time in schools. Child labor law more or less tracked with those cultural expectations, which had themselves followed on from economic prosperity.

What happens, though if, we try to impose American style child labor laws on countries that aren't yet at our economic stage? Well, this actually happened in 1992. A federal policy was passed by Congress called the Child Labor Deterrence Act, the purpose of which was to prevent products that Americans consumed from being produced by child labor in Third World countries, in particular, in Asia.

We saw pictures of children in what we would consider sweat shops, and Americans were indignant at this. They didn't want to buy tshirts or shoes that had been made by children, so we passed this law restricting the types of things that we would buy in trade.

It actually worked, insofar as it reduced child labor in garment factories in Asia. Now, you might already be thinking, what’s the problem? Well, most of the children that you think are in Third World countries working in garment factories, do you think they're just there because they wanted to upgrade their iPod or something? Why 9

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were they there? Most of them were there for economic necessity.

They were working in what we would consider unsafe conditions, but they didn't really have a choice. It was either that or starving to death.

They knew that; their parents knew that. So, given that, what do you think happened when they suddenly couldn't have a legal job in a garment factory? UNICEF did a study of this actually, and it looks like about 35,000 of these child labor jobs disappeared in the garment industry, so they disappeared from where the cameras were.

Unfortunately, it moved into things like rock digging and very unsafe work and, in particular, child prostitution. So, they didn't suddenly get to school, get to the nearby private school, they just moved from the legal economy to the illegal economy and clearly moved to less desirable jobs.

That is, to me, one of the most dramatic illustrations of believing the piety myth. No one advocating the Child Labor Deterrence Act had anything but the best intentions. There's no doubt about that, but that had absolutely no effect on the actual consequences of the policy, and it's because I seriously doubt that any of the legislators thought very long about it. They didn't ask that question: what's going to happen next if we do this?

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he second example would be our current financial crisis. Now, I sort of tread on this lightly because, obviously, it is a very complicated issue. There are lots of factors that went into causing it. This will be debated for years, but most people if you just sort of do a random Google search on cause of the financial crisis, you know what the cause is, at least, given by the media. It's unfettered capitalism, or Wall Street greed, something like that. (Whenever I hear about Wall Street greed, I always want to say, did the people on Wall Street get greedier than they were ten years ago?) In any case, it’s usually blamed on the free market, on capitalism run amok or something like that.

The problem is that many of the things that went into causing the crisis were not the sorts of things that would exist if the market were actually free. For instance, there are these so called governmentsponsored enterprises, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, quasipublic quasi-private banks with the implicit guarantee that they’ll be backed up if they make bad decisions, an implicit guarantee that it 10

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turns out is justified. Add to that a series of policies over a period of decades by the Congress and the U.S. government all intended to encourage affordable housing for lower income Americans, the effect of which was to degrade eligibility standards on loans for houses on mortgages so that more and more people with less and less money could buy more and more expensive houses with less and less of a down payment, less and less skin in the game—thus inevitably increasing the likelihood of default.

Over time, this combination was a formula for disaster. This was a result of activities of extreme risk, choices that were made on the part of millions of individuals that would have been much less likely without the government policies. So here we’ve got another example of the piety myth: What’s the intention? Increase affordable housing for lower income Americans. What’s the consequence? At least in part, it’s the financial crisis.

It’s so easy for us to attach our moral intuitions directly to what we need to do instead of taking the second question, of asking about unintended consequences. Let’s control the price of medical care.

And then what would happen? Let’s control the price of rent in your cities. And then what would happen? Let’s control the price of wages at a federal level. And then what would happen? It’s not hard stuff is it? But you have to take time to ask the question and to avoid the impulse to only determine the level of piety.

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4THE)GREED)MYTH$

he greed myth is widely believed and propagated not only by critics of capitalism but especially by champions of capitalism—which is one reason it’s so difficult to uproot. Think of it as the Gordon Gekko myth. The iconic character from Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street, as played by Michael Douglas, is still very relevant today—Stone, as it happens, is working on a sequel thanks to the current financial crisis—and the scene everyone remembers from that film is this amazing speech Gekko gives, dubbed the “Greed Is Good” speech. He stands up in his immaculate suit, symbol of Wall Street capitalism, and says:

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Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all its forms has marked the upward surge of mankind.

And you might say, “Yeah, okay, but that’s Oliver Stone’s take on it.

This is a caricature. No one would actually make that argument, right?” Of course, many people have. Free market advocates have.

Certainly Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Virtue of Selfishness—and, as it happens, a hard-core atheist—made a point of contrasting Christian altruism on the one hand with capitalism on the other. She claimed that socialism was based on Christian altruism, so that capitalism as she said and altruism are incompatible.

They’re philosophical opposites that cannot co-exist in the same man or society.

I’d be willing to agree with her if her definitions were correct: If Rand is right, then Christians cannot possibly be capitalists. Greed has always, in the Christian tradition, been considered a vice or a sin. It’s one of the seven deadly sins. No matter how many seminary degrees you have, this is hard to get around—greed is just a vice, and if capitalism is based on it, we’ve got a serious problem.

The question is, was Rand right? Despite the popularity of her argument—both with people who support Rand’s views, and with people like Michael Moore—I think she made a serious mistake. The problem is that most people believe Rand just made explicit an argument that had been part of modern capitalism from the very beginning. The question I get most often is: didn't Adam Smith make more or less the same argument in The Wealth of Nations?

The answer may be that many more people quote Adam Smith and think they know what he says than have actually sat down and read The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. Here's one of the quotes we've all heard: “It's not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest,” not from their altruism but from their self-interest.

In another famous quote, Smith says, “In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity business people are led by an invisible hand, and thus without intending it, without knowing it advanced the interest of the society.” Now, superficially that might look like Smith is making more or less the same argument that Rand is, but if you read 12

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The Wealth of Nations, you can't get through the book and still think that Smith was actually making Ayn Rand's point.

Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher, a traditionalist, not at all the kind of fellow to endorse vice. In fact, responding to a Dutchman named Bernard Mandeville, who had earlier advocated vice and greed as the basis of the free society, Smith called Mandeville's system wholly pernicious.

Mandeville was the author of The Fable of the Bees, an 18th century description of a beehive where the residents pursue their self-interest and selfishness and vice within a quite orderly beehive. The bees complain about the immorality of the system, and they complain so much that Jove finally decides to give them want they want. So he makes them all virtuous, and the beehive completely falls apart.

Mandeville’s point was that freedom and prosperity were based on vice and not virtue. But Smith disagreed in significant ways—he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments to talk about the development of man’s natural sympathies. He wasn’t a radical individualist like Rand. He very much believed that human beings have natural rights, but we’re intrinsically social creatures. He believed in the invisible hand of the market, but the invisible hand of the market only worked for social benefit when the visible hand of cultural institutions and the rule of law were oriented so that people were incentivized correctly.

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elf-interest is not the same as selfishness. Every time you take a breath, eat a meal, take your vitamins, go to sleep on time, obey your parents, you act in your self interest. When you get to work on time, you act in your interest and the interest perhaps of your children. Those are self-interested acts. They are not immoral acts. In fact, they’re praiseworthy.

Remember the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Self-love, rightly oriented, is actually a basis for altruism toward others. So self-interest and acting in our self-interest is not, by definition, immoral. And I think that much of what Smith is arguing is that point, that the butcher, the brewer, the baker can pursue his narrow interests, his goals—making some money, paying his rent, feeding his children—and he doesn't have to think about the good of others. He simply has to be pursuing his narrow goals, but in a market, in a free market system, to pursue those he has to have 13

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another abiding consideration. He has to think: it is morally wrong to steal from my neighbor, so what could I provide for him that he would freely buy? Can I do it at a price that will be cheaper than my competitors but will allow me to make a profit?

Even if the individual in the marketplace is narrowly concerned, he nevertheless has to think about the good of others in order to succeed so that his private self-interest can channel itself into a socially beneficial outcome. Self-interest broadly construed is not about greed.

Many people make this mistake—they just conflate self-interest and selfishness—but self interest covers all the things we are naturally concerned about.

Selfishness is self-interest disordered. Notice what Smith says in that previous quote. He says: “in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity.” He doesn't say the butcher, the brewer, the baker ought to be greedy or selfish. He says, “in spite of their selfishness and rapacity.” There's what he calls a natural system of justice, a natural system of liberty. When you have that, when you have the rule of law, so people can't kill each other, they can't steal from each other, they have to abide by contracts and so forth. Then, even if they are selfish to get ahead they have to think of the needs of others, at least, insofar as the exchange is concerned. That's his point.

It's not that capitalism is based on greed. It’s that capitalism—the market economy—channels not only our hard work and our creativity and our enterprise, but also our vices; things like selfishness and self-centeredness.

That’s an entirely different point from saying that capitalism is based on greed or saying that greed is good. And surely that’s what we want in economics, right? We don’t want an economic system that requires utopia, requires us all to be angelic beings—the human race is fallen, and our economic system should correspond to that reality.

We aren’t always wholly selfish, but we are often selfish, and we do things for various immoral reasons. Yet a good economic system can make it possible to channel even our immoral behavior into socially beneficial outcomes. That’s Smith’s point. Whether he’s right or wrong, that’s another argument, but it’s a sign Rand’s argument actually misses something unique and interesting about the free market economy.

Some of you might be concerned about some of the Biblical warnings about wealth. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says “do not store 14

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up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal...” What kind of person does Jesus have in mind here? What is a person who “stores up his wealth,” who hoards his gold in his bedroom, hides it his mattress; what do we call that person? We rarely meet people like this today— in the Middle Ages they were called misers, and perhaps today Ebenezer Scrooge is the literary stereotype. Capitalism does not encourage miserliness—in fact over time, it ends up being irrational—but its opposite, enterprise.

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he activities of the entrepreneur in almost every relevant way are different from the miser because the entrepreneur is not a hoarder of wealth. Here's how George Gilder puts it in his book, Wealth and Poverty. He says “the grasping or hoarding rich man is the antithesis of capitalism not its epitome, more a futile figure than a bourgeois one.”

There's a fundamental difference between miserliness, between hoarding our wealth and the activities of the entrepreneur. Just think about some of the contrasts: Security versus risk: The miser likes the security of his wealth. He knows how much he has. He doesn't put it at risk. If he manages to bury it in the right place, he's still going to have it. The entrepreneur, by definition, risks his wealth and often the wealth of his friends in pursuit of some vision. He puts it at risk rather than hoarding it. Certainty versus uncertainty: There's a certainty in hoarding your wealth, hiding it away. The entrepreneur always acts in the arena of some degree of uncertainty. Instant versus delayed gratification: Consumption or hoarding has a certain instant gratification. We have our money. The second we want something, we can buy it. Delayed gratification, you end up tying up your assets somewhere, and you have to delay the gratification that you hope might come somewhere in the future, but you don't even know if it's going to. Cynicism versus faith: Entrepreneurship, by definition, is an act of faith in the future, what George Gilder calls “faith in the compensatory logic of the cosmos”—that if you cast your bread on the waters, at least in certain circumstances, it will come back to you, perhaps several-fold.

Of course entrepreneurs are not motivated for purely altruistic or selfless reasons. That's not my point here. My point is that the successful entrepreneur is not focusing on money as the ultimate end, but using it as a tool. Profit in the future might be one of those ends, 15

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but the entrepreneur uses money like the lawyer uses argument or a document, or a surgeon uses a scalpel, or a carpenter uses a hammer.

That's the role of money with the entrepreneur, and it's almost in every relevant way different from the activities of the miser.

George Gilder did say in his book that the entrepreneur acts for altruistic reasons, and he got in a lot of trouble for that. Let’s think about his meaning, however. “Altruistic” is based on the Latin word, alter, which means other. His point is that the entrepreneur has to be other regarding, not in the sense that he's necessarily concerned about the wellbeing of others, but the good entrepreneur has to ask, what service, what software program, what delivery service can I provide for others, and if I did it, they would freely buy?

By definition, a successful entrepreneur has to think about what others want and what they need. It's very easy to forget this, and to forget that many of the Biblical injunctions had to do with hoarding rather than enterprise.

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4THE)ZERO)SUM)MYTH$

et’s consider one final myth, which I identify as the zero sum myth. Zero sum game comes from game theory, and you all can imagine there are three kinds of games. A zero sum game is a win/lose game. It's one plus minus zero equals zero. So, they sum to zero: checkers, chess, basketball, football, games like that are zero sum games. That means if somebody wins, somebody else has to lose. It's just the nature of the game.

There are few real-world examples—beyond, perhaps, nuclear war—of a lose-lose game. Yet there are win-win games, also called positive-sum games. This game doesn't necessarily end with everyone playing it equally well off, but it means that the players end up better off than they would have if they had not played the game.

The question we must answer is whether capitalism over the long run, over the long run, is a zero-sum game or a positive-sum game.

Most folks and a lot of folks that are critics of capitalism actually assume, whether they realize it or not, that it's a zero-sum game: if I get rich, won't someone else become poor? Another example is the assumption that if the gap between the rich and poor is growing, it's 16

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the rich getting richer that's causing the poor to get poorer—a logical fallacy pre-supposing the zero-sum game.

Is it possible to get rich without causing someone else to become poor? I think there are two basic responses to this.

The logic of free exchange or free trade is, by definition, win-win.

Let me give you a simple example. I pay my barber $15 to cut my hair, alright? What kind of exchange is that? Well, I give her $15 freely and she takes it freely and she cuts my hair freely. That means that I value her cutting my hair more than I value the $15, and she values the time it took her to cut my hair. Sure, she values the money more than the time it took her to cut my hair. What that means is as a result of the exchange, even though nothing new has been added to the system, it's a win-win game and the win-win goes up the more player or participants there are in the game. That's just the logic of free exchange.

The other response is this: you often find when people thinking are in zero sum game terms, they're thinking of the total amount of wealth as a fixed sum. Sort of like a cherry pie. You've got a cherry pie. It's sitting there on the shelf getting cold. It's a fixed size, so the best you can do if you've got guests and you want everybody to have an equal slice is to cut the slices equally. If you give somebody too large of a slice that means somebody else will get a smaller slice, right? So it's a zero-sum.

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he truth is that the economy is not like that. But a lot of people have thought more or less in those terms. Karl Marx, although he sometimes seemed to realize this was not true, had a more or less zero sum game view of the economy. In his Communist Manifesto, he predicted that capitalism sowed the seeds of its own destruction. He argued that over time, capitalists who owned the means of production would employ workers, pay them wages, build the factory for making shirts or something like that. Take the shirts and try to sell them for more than he had paid for them. Take the so called surplus value ... and what did capitalists do? Marx didn't say they went out and wasted it. They didn't squander it. Rather that they reinvested in greater equipment so that the workers were more productive. Because they were more productive, you would not have to pay them as much or for as many hours. Marx thought that capitalists over time, would get wealthier and wealthier and the large group of the proletariat, the working class, would get larger and 17

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larger and poorer and poorer. As a result of this process, over time, reach a breaking point in which a very small number of people had most of the wealth in the economy, leaving large numbers of people without it. There would be a socialist revolution and then public ownership of public means of production.

Think for a moment of the pie as the total amount of wealth in the economy in Marx’s analysis. Marx’s prediction was that over time the largest portion of wealth would be in hands of the few, leaving the large majority of the population with less of the wealth. Now given the benefits of historical knowledge, this view may seem ridiculously mistaken—but there was a time when half the human race languished under a theory that made this presupposition.

When Marx was writing his Communist Manifesto in 1848, the wages of the laborers in industrial Britain were going up not down.

This is at a time when we would have considered the situation of laborers quite dire indeed. But still, his argument didn’t represent reality.

Now what did reality do? Well of course, a market economy, as we all know, grows over time. Sometimes it contracts—but over time the total amount of wealth grows, it goes up. That means that an economy operating under certain conditions can actually increase in size— the total amount of wealth can go up. That means that somebody can get a big slice of the pie. They didn't necessarily take it from someone else. Someone else might end up with a very large slice of the pie, but the pie itself is larger, so even those with a smaller percentage end up with a bigger piece than they had before.

That's still a win-win situation, and I think that is the sort of arrangement we should want, not just as capitalists but as Christians.

The economist can't necessarily account for this, but the JudeoChristian tradition actually anticipates it, if you presuppose the Judeo-Christian view of the human person.

Consider: we are created in God's image, the only creatures who were created in the image of the Creator God. In the Bible, God calls the universe into existence out of nothing. We're not creators like that, with a capital “C.” Nevertheless, we are image bearers of that same God. What that means in part is that we are motivated, as images, to take the material universe God has given us and transform it into things that weren't there before. We take from the field and make bread. We 18

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take from the vine and make wine. We take sand and turn it into computer chips and fiber optic cables. We take the material substrate, and we create wealth, and in high-tech global economies the mind part of the wealth comes to predominate over the matter part of the wealth. We create wealth that wasn't there before. We create new ways to harvest resources, and ways to create new resources.

In doing all these things, we are not in conflict with God’s will for humanity—quite the opposite. From the carpenter of ancient Judea to today, our impulses toward creation, toward providing for ourselves and for others, need not be driven not by amoral vice, but can be supported by moral virtue.

Jay Richards is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem (2009). This article is adapted from remarks delivered as part of the American Enterprise Institute's Project on Values and Capitalism.

19

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M Y N EIGHBOR ’ S K EEPER ]church0and0state}

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Paul Bonicelli

et me state right off the bat that I am not a businessman, nor am I a business professor, so that kind or experience is not what I bring to the table. And I didn’t learn much good about business from my family. My dad was indeed a businessman; he owned a moving company. He did reasonably well, but didn’t see much value in paying taxes. As far as other entrepreneurs in the family, my grandmother and her brothers engaged in the production, sale and distribution of adult beverages in the Mississippi Delta—that is, they were bootleggers.

Needless to say, I don’t really have any valuable moral or practical lessons from my family to pass along to you. But what I do know, and have experienced, is from my academic studies and my practical work as a development official for the U.S. government. I have seen first hand that what I’ve studied and taught and written about is indeed true. That is, I know that local business enterprises, agents of commerce, are not only valuable, they are the only agents that can actually provide the welfare of the city even as other spheres like the family, the church and the state can provide for the welfare of the city.

This preposition for provides for a most important distinction: the one actually provides it; the others make it possible.

It is my goal here to make a few comments about the all-important role of business, and to do so from the vantage point of theory and then to note the practical working out of the theory.

The question put to me is: What can local business do in the effort to promote the welfare of the city? Which I understand to mean, mainly: what can local business do for the poor, those who are not yet enjoying the benefits of the richest and freest society on earth?

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Business cannot do everything, but business is able to do what only business can do, and that is provide a way for human beings to be fully human, to be co-creators with God, imitating him as we are made in his image to do just that. Business is the sine qua non when it comes to the welfare of the city. And if you don’t mind, I will favor the term “enterprise,” not only because I think it is more descriptive, but also because it lets me draw on the work of Saint Thomas and the best modern expression of his ideas that speak to social and economic issues: Michael Novak. Those of you who have read both of these thinkers will not be reading much new from me but it is important I think to always revisit first principles.

If the family and the church’s role is to provide moral instruction to guide our hearts and minds; and if the state’s role is to provide a framework of law and order and security of property and contracts where our material as well as our spiritual lives can be lived out to their fullest; then the role of commercial enterprise is to provide the laboratory where the virtues we have learned from our faith and our families can be acted upon and lived out. Enterprise is also where our God-given gifts and talents can be employed and exercised so that our co-creations, our produce, our evidence of progress can be enjoyed, reinvested and used to bless ourselves and others.

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make two crucial assumptions. The first is that each of us is created by God to glorify him. But how do we do that? We worship, we serve, we love, we bless, and we honor. But how do we do those things practically, specifically, how do we serve and love and honor and bless others? By joining with God to be co-creators, taking what he has given us and using those things to make life better for ourselves and our fellows, we glorify him.

The second assumption is that each of us is called to virtue. In our devotion to God, we should practice many virtues, such as charity and love and honesty. But there are other virtues that are required for us to be a material blessing to others so that the love and the charity and the honor have real meaning; I refer to virtues such as hard work, ingenuity, creativity, service, prudence, husbandry, etc.

The family can teach and model some of these virtues and can even act as a microcosm of the world in terms of material production; the church can teach and model some of these virtues and under monastic orders, proto-capitalism was birthed over 1000 years before Max 21

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Weber identified it as a Protestant phenomenon; and the state can teach, through law, and model some of these virtues even though it produces nothing materially.

Yet neither the family nor the church nor the state can truly teach us and show us and—very importantly—produce in us the habits of virtue necessary for our lives to be an actual and practical blessing to others on a significant scale. Their focus is either constrained by an affinity for those closest to us, as in the case of the family; or constrained by a proper and greater focus on the aspect of worship and spiritual things, as in the case of the church; or constrained by the simple fact that the state truly cannot and does not love or care for anyone—a scary thing indeed if the state claims to love us.

The church is unable to model and inculcate a habit in us of virtuous thrift and a work ethic and creativity and prudence and ingenuity and husbandry. Surely it interprets for us the scriptural injunctions to live virtuously along these lines; it does teach these and surely we can practice them to some degree in the context of service as a member of a congregation or the church writ large. But, to repeat, such goals are limited. That is not the church’s role or main business. It doesn’t produce material blessing, just as the family produces very little alone.

The state is also unable to model and inculcate these habits in us and it certainly doesn’t produce any goods—it merely redistributes them and often foolishly or corruptly. In fact, Anglo-American political thought has long worried about the idea of the state being a parent-teacher. We admire the ancient Greek and Roman social and political systems for many reasons, but we are rightly wary of the ancients’ veneration of the state and its too great an emphasis on the role of the state in our lives. Plato’s Republic is not an attractive model for Christians, though we learn much from studying it. We are glad the Founding Fathers knew the ancients, but most glad that they adapted ancient wisdom by correcting it and completing it with biblical ideas.

So what sphere is able to teach and model, and most importantly, inculcate in us the habits of virtue so necessary if we are to truly honor and serve God and others by being co-creators and practice a strong work ethic, prudence, thrift, reinvestment, creativity and ingenuity? Only free enterprise can do that. Only those men and women who start and operate enterprises that employ people to use their 22

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talents, gifts and labor to produce goods and services can do that.

The more local, the better, for the simple reason that consistent productivity relies on accountability and accountability relies on close relationships among human beings living out their lives in harmony and agreement on the permanent things.

I am no enemy of the multinational corporation, and I don’t think that small business is immune from corruption and sloth, but I do think it is easier to invite cheating and sloth when too many involved in the enterprise are able to operate anonymously and autonomously from others.

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nterprise is a schoolhouse and a laboratory for the inculcation and working out of virtue. What virtue? What I’ve noted: creativity, ingenuity, thrift, prudence, service and hard work. Enterprise is the venue where these must be put to use if the enterprise is to survive. It is the venue where many talents and gifts are put to use because they must be put to use if enterprise is to mean anything.

But enterprise is not only a positive good; it is the antidote for problems that the family and the church and the state can cause.

What do I mean by problems that the family and the church and the state can cause? Well, the family and the church and the state are inadequate to do much more than teach us virtues or to provide a space to allow us be co-creators with God to his glory. For all their indispensable value, they are simply unable to provide us the laboratory or to let us have a chance to do the fieldwork that allows us to make the virtues our own, as habits, and thus bring on the material blessings we need as humans. But worse, much worse in my view, they can actually harm us in these areas.

The family, when it is understood to be the only realm where one should learn and exercise gifts and talents and live out virtue, to live as fully human, is too limiting. All those gifts and talents and knowledge that God has given to others that can bless us are kept away from us, or rather we are kept away from them, if the family is all we know. A remarkable family indeed, and quite large, that contains within itself all the virtue and talent needed to be the productive and creative human beings we can be.

I have seen this problem all over the world: Africa, Latin America, Asia. For whatever romantic notions some want to embrace about tribalism, it is simply a detriment to human flourishing; tribalism is a 23

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major cause of poverty and backwardness. There is no scriptural injunction to segment ourselves away from others simply because they are not called by our surname.

I realize, along with Francis Fukuyama and Lawrence Harrison and the culture theorists, that in some low-trust societies, tribalism is often necessary to be able to engage in enterprise with any success, but I have found that the root cause is very often a choice people make because of misplaced loyalty bordering on xenophobia and racism.

The family is valuable and necessary for so many things, but it cannot and does not allow us to flourish as co-creators with God and we should not be timid about recognizing that.

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he church, for all its importance and value—most importantly because it brings knowledge of God and the life in Christ—can overstep its limits. Some of its teachers, both Protestant and Catholic, have a checkered history of acting on the fear that people will be too creative, too ingenious, too productive. Surely, materialism is a sin and causes great harm, but its opposite, asceticism, is also a sin and causes great harm when it becomes idolatrous. As an aside, I am thankful for scholars, teachers and ministers who work very hard to counter teachings that would thwart the co-creativity of the faithful, and I certainly have nothing kind to say about the Prosperity Gospel peddlers.

The state, for its part, cannot teach us very well and has a very limited role in inculcating virtue by service in it and for it. I cherish constitutional republican democracy (in that order), but Winston Churchill was right: It is the least bad form of government compared to all the rest, and I would add, because it, like all other systems, is operated by men and not angels; men who seek their own selfinterest by means of the ballot box—I mean the elected officials as well as the labor boss or the corporate boss who would get the government to give them an advantage at the expense of others.

If you don’t know the concept of corporatism, I encourage you to learn about it. It might be in your future. It is a system that combines the idealists in government and society with the naïve in the religious and business and labor community who believe that somehow the state can guide the plans of the creative and hard working people among us for everyone’s benefit. It encourages the state and the church to coopt the role of enterprise as though they know what they 24

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are doing and are capable. It can be as harsh as Peron’s Argentina or as incompetent as Mussolini’s Italy or as mild as democratic Sweden, but it doesn’t work well precisely because it thwarts the ability of humans to flourish to the fullest extent by their God-given talents will let them. And it can never work in a huge and diverse and rich country like the United States.

The best we can say, along with Tocqueville, is that a constitutional republican democratic state has the best chance of correcting its errors compared to other states. But it can’t cease making those errors, one of the most egregious being its never ceasing desire to try to control us down to the number of breaths we are allowed to take—no breaths for the almost-born infant or a limit of breaths for the person judged too old and ill to have a proper quality of life.

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nterprise is not only the schoolmaster and laboratory to teach us and inculcate in us important habits of virtue, it is the antidote when the family and the church and the state are allowed to overreach and step out of their sphere. So once again, we find that human freedom must be respected, not simply as a matter of philosophy and God-given right, but as a practical matter: without freedom, the good things we need and want are denied us. Ask someone who used to live under socialism, or who now lives in Massachusetts.

So, who is blessed and how are they blessed by enterprise when enterprise is allowed to do what only it can do?

First, the individual is blessed by enterprise. And we must not take our attention off this most important of subjects: the individual. God made each of us, individually, to glorify him by means of the gifts he has given us. Co-creativity is first and foremost an activity that takes place in the one-on-one relationship between God and man. God does not co-create with ethnicities or tribes or families or churches or states. He co-creates with his precious individual human creatures because he made each one for a purpose. By doing our part as individuals, however, we make larger collectives more blessed and more of a blessing.

The individual who starts a business with his talent, hard work, ideas and the capital he has earned or for which he has been found worthy to borrow, is blessed. The employees he hires, whether just one or 10 or 1000 are blessed by being able to sell their labor and use their own talents and gifts. Both gain not only materially, but they 25

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also develop and deepen character. Both are fulfilling their selfinterest properly understood: another reference to Aquinas and Tocqueville. All these individuals are serving others by serving themselves. The family, too, is blessed whenever its individual members are blessed—unless of course it is a dysfunctional family, but that is another matter.

Second, the community in which the enterprise is started is blessed: more wealth and resources are generated by the employment and the provision of goods and services—literally everything and everyone gains something, no matter that the gain is uneven. The pie grows, that is the only possible good outcome and it is the right one, because the share of the pie is determined by how much virtue is learned and employed. The best news is that all have a chance to grow their share if freedom is respected.

Third, the church is blessed by enterprise because the faithful can not only support the work of the church, obviously, but they can live out teachings that the church gave them but couldn’t provide a laboratory and fieldwork for the living out of them.

The state is blessed because its work is fulfilled: it has provided the sanctity of contracts and the rule of law, a framework and a political space for the flourishing of human beings. It is relieved of many presumed burdens when more and more citizens are free to take care of themselves and their families rather than rely upon the state to coerce their upkeep from a dwindling group of producers.

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et me conclude with this: so far in this catalog of blessings, I’ve been describing a developed nation-state, one that operates according to the principles of society and government that rely on the flourishing of human beings according to virtue. It all depends on each element playing its role, not overreaching or intruding into another sphere, but rather respecting other spheres. Not pretending it can do what can be accomplished only in another sphere. And so we can see that once an individual is poised to be blessed and to bless, he is a catalyst for blessing the entire world, if, of course, you understand the dynamism of capitalism.

I referred to my work in development earlier: I have seen development taking place in poor countries, despite tremendous odds: obstacles such as an overweening state, unhelpful religious leaders and plain old human nature problems. But where I’ve seen development, 26

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I’ve seen individual human beings flourish in enterprise according to virtue that they are living out, even if they couldn’t write an essay on it to save their lives. And when I’ve seen these people, whether in the United States—Houston included—or over many years of traveling the world and providing funding for the private sector to teach and encourage the willing who want to practice democratic government and free market capitalism, I’ve more often than not seen Christians at work.

Do you have to be a Christian to learn and practice all these things and reap the rewards? No, but it sure helps. Gosh, I wonder why that is?

Paul Bonicelli is Provost of Houston Baptist University and a former Assistant Administrator of USAID. 27

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REDEEMING CIVIC LIFE IN THE COMMONS [our0public0square{

D

Eric O. Jacobsen

riving from Seattle to Steven’s Pass along Highway 2, takes you right through a small city called Monroe.

Nestled near the base of the Cascade Mountains and skirting the meandering path of the Skykomish River, this town of 16,000 could very well be a compact oasis of civilization to rival anything one would find in Switzerland or in the Lake District of England. But Monroe is nothing of the sort. It is an ugly collection of strip malls, oversized signs, and utility wires. In short, it is pretty much indistinguishable from most places you are likely to see when driving from one destination to another in this country.

We’ve come to expect this kind of baseline ugliness in our small towns and even in many of our major cities as well. But why should the public realm in one of the richest and most advanced civilizations in the world look this way? Isn’t the public square where we are supposed to show the world and ourselves what we are capable of when we work together? What do such low expectations about the visual culture of our public realm tell us about ourselves and about our values? I think that this regrettable condition may very well be connected to two valuable words that have virtually dropped out of our national lexicon in the past few generations.

The words civic and commons represent important aspects of our shared life that have been badly obscured, undergoing subtle transformations from being concrete notions to abstractions. This fact is 28

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especially concerning because there seems to be so little awareness of how these important words atrophied in the recent past, and because in understanding the special case the commons, we can achieve in part a redemption of our civic life.

I’ll begin with the concept of civic, which is connected to the word city. The word city continues to be used as much today as it ever was, but what we call cities today represents a significant deviation from the way cities have been understood throughout much of history.

This change can be best understood by seeing the city in relation to the neighborhood.

The architect Leon Krier uses the analogy of a pizza to demonstrate the difference between the traditional and contemporary way of understanding this relationship in his book, Architecture: Choice or Fate.

A traditional city, according to Krier, is like a pizza. There are lots of different sizes and types of pizza and they are generally well regarded. One feature of a pizza is that one slice of pizza is representative of the whole. That is to say, whatever kind of pizza you have, each slice will contain most of the ingredients that make it an enjoyable culinary experience. For example, if you have a Hawaiian pizza and receive a slice that doesn’t have any Canadian Bacon, you are justified in feeling cheated.

Krier claims that cities are like pizzas and slices of pizza are like neighborhoods. That is to say every neighborhood should contain most of what you love about the particular city which contains the neighborhood. You should be able to experience and enjoy the city at the level of your neighborhood.

Yet in the aftermath of World War II, planners decided that there was a more rational way to think about the city. Through a policy tool known as functional zoning, they began to separate the functions of the city into different geographical zones. Hence the emergence of a residential zone for houses, a retail zone for shopping, a commercial zone for working, and a recreational zone for playing.

This idea may have had some merit, but Krier is not alone in remaining unconvinced of its wisdom. In his mind, dividing up the city in this way makes about as much sense as dividing up the ingredients of a pizza and serving them separately. It may have the same nutritional value, but almost all of the enjoyment of the pizza gets lost in the translation. In the same way, our cities today have many of the same components of traditional cities, but because everything is 29

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separated by function, cities today are much less interesting and enjoyable than they were before. What we have now is a rationalized grouping of the functions of the city without a city in and of itself.

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he second word I want to highlight is the word commons, which typically refers to “a piece of open land for public use.”

Although “the commons” was a central aspect of community life in the first American towns, the idea embodied in this word has almost disappeared from our imagination as a result of our changing conception of the functions that buildings and other structures play in the town fabric. According to Daniel Solomon in his book Global City Blues, town fabric has traditionally served three functions: 1. It houses people and provides places for work and their private needs.

2. It creates settings for monuments.

3. It shapes and defines the outdoor public spaces of a town.

Solomon holds that contemporary building practices have reduced the functions of buildings to just the first of these purposes. Most buildings today exist to enclose space for certain activities. Buildings are valued chiefly from an interior perspective for the amount of square footage that they enclose. The outside of a building is only considered insofar as it can facilitate bringing people into the building. That is to say, the outside space is used for parking and signage.

In some cases, contemporary buildings are built for monumental purposes, but what is forgotten is that the monuments depend on the fabric of buildings that allow them to stand out in the cityscape.

What is almost completely off the radar is the notion that buildings shape the public realm. The architect Colin Rowe in his book Collage City helped to bring this to light—he used ground figure renderings to draw our attention not to the shapes of the buildings themselves, but to the shapes created by the space between the buildings.

Traditionally, good urbanism sought to make the public realm a pleasant place to enjoy and to interact with ones fellow neighbors. A well conceived outdoor space creates a kind of hallway along which it is pleasant to walk and rooms that invite people to stop and relax.

Contemporary cities, by way of contrast, tend to have amorphous spaces that are not good for much except for parking. If we compare the way buildings are sited in the context of pre and post-war neigh30

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borhoods we see this difference dramatically. It should come as no surprise then that the commons, understood as a piece of open land for public use, has almost disappeared from our contemporary lexicon. However, when people encounter a space functioning as a commons, they tend to respond positively to it and gather there.

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highlight these two areas so that we can begin to focus our attention as Christians on the redemption of civic life. The classic text to begin thinking about our relationship with our geographic setting is Jeremiah 29:7. “Seek the welfare of the city into which you have been called, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” The context here is the Jewish exiles from Jerusalem who are living in Babylon.

They’ve just been told that they will have to remain in exile for another 70 years and the verse we read is Jeremiah’s advice for coping with living in a foreign country. He tells them to seek the welfare—or shalom—of the city.

Shalom can be translated as peace, but it is a form of the word meaning more than just absence of conflict. Peace here means wholeness and justice—a community that is thriving. So shalom describes God’s expectation for the cities in which we find ourselves. It is a word of specific content.

The other aspect of shalom that I want to point out is its locus. Jeremiah first tells them to get married, have kids, plant gardens. We can picture him directing his comments to individual households at that point. And then he turns his attention outward—outside of the walls of their individual houses and comments on what the city should be like. The locus for Jeremiah’s specific command to shalom is not the individual household, but the commons and other more public places in between the houses. Whatever shalom means by way of specific characteristics, we must first acknowledge that it is a public or shared vision for life together.

This is important for us to consider given the consequences of fifty years of functional zoning, which have been twofold with regards to this passage. On the one hand our cities have become less shalomlike. And on the other hand, while geographic separation of activities according to function may or may not be a good idea for the purpose of those specific activities, it certainly has a detrimental effect on the space between: the public square.

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In order to find a way forward towards a redeemed vision of shared life of shalom in the city, we are going to need to go back a bit into the origins of functional zoning in order to get a glimpse of the values embedded in this planning practice.

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oning in this country technically began in New York City in 1916, but by the end of World War II it had become the dominant mode of land use regulation in just about every city in the United States. A watershed event for functional zoning was a Supreme Court case argued in 1926 that decided cities did have rights to restrict land uses according to functional zones.

Prior to this decision, land use was regulated by municipalities, but it was done primarily through nuisance laws. If someone was planning to build something next door to your house that would have been dangerous, noisy, or smelly for your family; the city could have deemed that project incompatible with residential character of neighborhood and prohibited it.

The case that we will be examining came about when the town of Euclid (which is a suburb of Cleveland) passed a zoning law prohibiting commercial buildings and apartment buildings in a particular residential zone of the town. A local real estate company who owned land in the newly designated residential section had planned to develop that land for commercial purposes, and felt that the creation of a residential zone made their land less valuable and therefore constituted an unfair intrusion on their land rights.

The case of Euclid vs. Ambler Realty then became a watershed case in land use law and we will be using it to provide some insights into the values embedded in contemporary zoning . I am not a legal scholar and I am not trying to argue that the Supreme Court got it wrong.

One could disagree with the premise of functional zoning, but still believe that it is not a constitutional issue and that the federal government has no business getting involved in this discussion. My point in looking at this case, is simply to get a glimpse into the values that shaped the direction that land use patterns took in the post-war years. We will use these implicit values as a jumping off point for evaluating how shalom-like our contemporary neighborhoods actually are.

The first thing that we will observe is the assumptions about children and families embedded into functional zoning. The well-being of 32

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children is used as a justification for the need for functional zoning.

This particular passage is one of many references to children: Some of the grounds for this conclusion are promotion of the health and security from injury of children and others by separating dwelling houses from territory devoted to trade and industry.

Now what we picture when we read this is the notion of protecting children from the dangers of a particular kind of trade and industry.

One could think of a slaughterhouse or a smelter. But I want you to think more broadly about trade and industry—what about a coffee shop or a corner grocery, or a barbershop? Do children need protection from these kinds of places?

If we think about the broad scope of zoning regulation, we realize that what is intended here is to protect children not from butchers knives and burning sulfur, but rather the intent is to protect children from society at large. This law when implemented would protect a ten-year old boy from walking to a corner store to buy orange juice for his family or to the barbershop to deliver a message to his dad.

The implicit value expressed in this legislation with regard to children is what Delores Hayden refers to as the “home as refuge” model.

The home is a place where children are protected from the larger society. Children are kept in the home safe from society until they are old enough to form their own families. At that time they will protect their families from public life.

This ideal, interestingly enough, is a holdover from the Victorian era and can be linked to Christian (specifically Evangelical) thinking.

The home within that community was considered to be a spiritually nurturing place, while society was understood as mostly evil. Christian men steel themselves each day to go out and do battle in the public realm, but come home each night to a haven of spirituality. A major figure that actually helped to perpetuate this ideal for evangelicals was William Wilberforce. Robert Fishman documents his influence in Bourgeoisie Utopias: This contradiction between the city and the Evangelical ideal of the family provided the final impetus for the unprecedented separation of the citizen’s home from the city that is the essence of the suburban idea. The city was not just crowded, dirty, and unhealthy; it was immoral. Salvation itself depended on separating the women’s sacred world of family and children from the profane metropolis. Yet this separation could not jeopardize a man’s 33

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constant attendance at his business—for hard work and success were also Evangelical virtues—and business life required rapid personal access to that great beehive of information which was London. This was the problem, and suburbia was to be the ultimate solution.

This ideal, which became prevalent among Americans in general and Evangelicals in particular, is quite a bit different from at least one image of shalom in the Scriptures: Thus says the LORD of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. (Zech. 8:4—5) Here we have both young and old interacting, not in private households, but in the streets or the common spaces of the city.

I’m not opposed to the “home as refuge” notion as one aspect of domestic life. We all need a safe place to share intimacy and to be able to relax. What I am suggesting is that if we take Jeremiah’s mandate seriously, we may also want to see home as a place from which children can begin to practice participation in public life and a place where children are trained in public involvement.

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second justification for separating different kinds of land uses into different geographical zones had to do with a general understanding about what the rich and poor deserve. In explaining why it is acceptable to prohibit apartment buildings from existing on the same block as detached single-family homes, Justice Southerland provides the following rationale: … very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.

Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes.

Given all of the other language about protecting children, one commentator quipped: “does Justice Southerland realize that children live in apartment buildings as well?” Frankly, I’m not sure whether he did realize this fact—yet the point of this justification comes across loud and clear. Zoning, from its inception, can be seen as a tool for 34

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protecting the home as a setting for private consumption for middle and upper income members of the community.

Now as Christians, this issue should at least get our attention given all that the Bible says about our obligation to not neglect the poor: They who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way; father and son go in to the same girl, so that my holy name is profaned (Amos 2:7) The question can be articulated in this way, is the idea of incomeexclusive neighborhoods consistent with the Biblical notion of shalom? While we have stricken down most political mechanisms by which neighborhoods can be racially exclusive, during the era of zoning economic mechanisms have caused neighborhoods to become increasingly income exclusive.

This is an issue that can easily divide the Christian community into those who feel that income inequality is justified and those who feel it is not. Without tackling that controversy head on, I wonder if our particular topic can allow us to articulate a slightly more nuanced answer. We can begin with one representative passage concerning our obligation to the poor: You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 19:10) The owner of the vineyard is not being instructed to sell his property and distribute it to the poor, but rather he is told leave the boundaries and liminal spaces of his vineyard alone so that the poor can derive some spillover benefit from his wealth.

What I am suggesting here is that if we accept some degree of diversity with regards to different people’s private domicile, we might at the same time think of the neighborhood or the spaces in between the houses as the gleanings from which those with less personal resources could benefit. The question of justice for the poor with regards to land use is so often expressed simply as a demand for more affordable housing. What I am suggesting is that we widen our scope just a bit and think about access to a good neighborhood for everyone as a requirement of justice.

So if I had to stick my neck out and try to derive a justice imperative with regards to neighborhoods, what I might suggest is an end to housing type exclusive zones where we have one zone for big 35

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houses and another zone for condos and apartments, but rather mix them all on the same block. I would also question the justice of gated neighborhoods as well as homes on 5-acre lots (unless people are growing crops on them) because they fail to leave any kind of common space for those who can’t afford to live on a large house.

Another value embedded into functional zoning has to do with the place of strangers in society. We have already suggested why a slaughterhouse or a foundry might not be a good fit in a mostly residential neighborhood, but the zoning code of the town of Euclid excluded all commercial activity—including the coffee shop and corner grocery. The rationale for this kind of a move was the following: A place of business in a residence neighborhood furnishes an excuse for any criminal to go into the neighborhood, where, otherwise, a stranger would be under the ban of suspicion.

The logic here is that a coffee shop is a dangerous place in your neighborhood because it provides a safe place for a stranger to hang out when strangers ought to feel ostracized. Note also how the language implies that a stranger is likely to also be a criminal.

There are a couple of issues here that need to be highlighted. The first is that as Christians we should be a bit concerned about legislation that is targeted against people for being strangers. Treating strangers at least with respect is a mainstay of Biblical justice: You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Duet. 10:19) Not only does this command require us to treat strangers well it is a reminder of how we all benefit when strangers are treated well.

When we speak about strangers we forget that it is a geographically fluid term.

We are all strangers somewhere. One of unsettling characteristics of post war subdivisions is how easy it is to get lost in them if you don’t happen to live there. All of the houses are oriented to the back yard, so you don’t usually see a lot of life in the front. And there are no commercial establishments so you can’t ask anyone for directions.

The other issue that is of concern with this justification is that it assumes a certain relational rigidity in the categories. There are two kinds of people, it seems to imply: strangers and friends. Those who are friends have always been and will always be friends, and those who are strangers have always been and will always be strangers. It 36

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doesn’t allow for the fact that most people we encounter begin as strangers to us and then can move along a continuum of acquaintance, friend, soul mate, and even family.

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y setting up neighborhoods that shun strangers, we have created a residential setting that actually accentuates the problems associated with strangers. Because there are no good public spaces, we rarely get a chance to get to know those who are strangers to us, and people who live next door to each other may remain strangers because they have no good place in which to interact.

Now again, we have to be nuanced as to how we might apply this notion of welcoming strangers in a contemporary setting. Our communities have become socially fragmented, which leaves everyone more vulnerable to the dangers associated with strangers. And over the past few decades it seems that a growing number of individuals have become significantly estranged from mainstream society and may have a much harder time making a positive contribution to the social capital of a particular neighborhood even in the best of circumstances.

Within the Bible, there was an expectation among God’s people that strangers would be welcomed into our homes. But this was in a context of a tighter knit community with a tradition of elders at the gate.

Elders at the gate would be the first to meet a stranger and would act as a kind of screening mechanism against danger and potential threats to the community. Now if after that screen someone in the community decided to take a stranger into their home, their neighbors would be aware of this arrangement and would look out for the safety of the one who took the stranger in.

Since we don’t have tight knit communities, nor do we have elders at the gate, we need to find liminal places where we can get to know strangers in a more secure environment. I’ll make two suggestions in this regard: third places and defensible space. Third place is a term coined by Ray Oldenburg in a book entitled The Great Good Place.

Oldenburg’s thesis is that everyone needs a third place that is not home and is not work where they can drop by and stay as long as they want.

Third places are important for socialization and as a nonthreatening place to meet people. Oldenburg claims that inviting a 37

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person into one’s home represents a significant risk for both the host and the guest. Because it is a risk, we tend to want to screen people before we extend or accept an invitation into a home. And because even for people we know, a home visit requires a lot of coordination of schedules and cleanup—inviting our friends to our homes can be a rare occurrence.

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hird places are important in helping us get to know people that we may not yet feel comfortable inviting into our homes.

And third places can help increase the frequency with which we interact with those we do know. If estrangement and familiarity are seen not as fixed categories, but in continuum, we can come to think of third places as catalysts of familiarity. One problem with functional zoning is that it often eliminates the legality of third places.

Another related concept is defensibility. This is a concept that I learned from James Rojas, who conducted an interesting study of socialization patterns in East L.A. Rojas points out that the typical middle class American front yard exists to send a message of respectability to the neighbors and is not a social space. In order to interact with the homeowner in such settings, one would have to cross this dead space of front yard and then approach the main threshold of the house at the front door. When the door is opened, it will quickly be determined whether you know the homeowner and will be invited in or whether you are a stranger and will be kept out. If you are deemed a stranger, the conversation at the door will be strained and brief. It is not a setting in which people will tend to move towards a stronger relationship.

In East L.A., Rojas observes that there is a tendency to put a low fence around the front yard (chain link or wrought iron) with a gate in the middle. Now normally we think of a fence as pushing people away. But what Rojas helps us to see is that in this context, the fence is actually creating a more social space by pushing the threshold out towards the sidewalk. The homeowner in this context has a defensible space where they can stand and interact with people on the sidewalk. They can actually position themselves in their front yard in such a way as to indicate what kind of interaction they are open to.

They can orient themselves towards the sides of their fence for more familiar conversation with a neighbor, or they can rest their arms on the gate to chat with people as they pass by. Rojas points out that this 38

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can be such a comfortable setting that it can sustain a long pause in the conversation without anyone feeling uncomfortable.

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et me qualify everything else that I will say about the church in the neighborhood by first saying that the church’s primary role is the proclamation of the Gospel for the salvation of humankind. Yet we should acknowledge that the church can play multiple other roles, and some of those secondary roles can have a positive impact on the neighborhood.

I think that one of the most important secondary roles that the church plays in the neighborhood is to help redeem the notion of community. Whatever else I’ve already said about the specific attributes of shalom, underlying all of them is an implicit commitment to some aspect of a common life that is lived out in the common spaces of the community. It is getting increasingly difficult for members of society to articulate on what basis this common life exists.

Individualism a longstanding feature of American life, but in the past few decades it has taken a more radical turn. Now it seems that for a lot of people, the individual is the basic and even exclusive unit of society. People express a longing for community and even join communities, but those communities always remain extra-curricular.

When I join a community, I don’t allow that community to become part of who I am. I remain an individual who has voluntarily associated himself with a particular community because it can give me something that I think I need. When I feel as if that community no longer can give me what I need, I see no particular problem with leaving that community.

So what we call community is often just a coalition of individuals who obtain some temporal advantage in meeting together. We see this radical individualism wreaking havoc on marriages and families.

People often get married as individuals and remain individuals in their marriage. When the marriage is no longer “fulfilling,” they see no issue with getting out.

Roberto Goizueta notes this difference between his Mexican American community and what he sees among middle class Americans: When two U.S. Hispanics meet each other, the initial discussion after the introductions will likely involve family and relationships: who are your parents? What town is your family from? I knew your mother’s second cousin twice removed! I had a friend who must 39

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have known your sister. It is thus quite disconcerting for Hispanics to meet an Anglo whose initial discussion will, instead likely involve career and work: what do you do for a living? Oh, that must be very interesting work! Where did you do your training? These later questions, reflecting an emphasis on individual “achieved” and chosen identity over organic, received identity, are often perceived

by U.S. Hispanics as insultingly dismissive of these relationships.

The church—especially those with a vigorous covenant theology— can be a place to witness to a recovered notion of community. The image of the church as the body of Christ with a strong sense of interdependence can be a powerful witness in the neighborhood. For this reason I think that it is important for the church to be as demographically mixed as it can be. I know that the racial mixing has been difficult for the church, but with regard to this issue, I am equally if not more concerned with churches that seem to be intentionally targeting a certain age.

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second way that a church might directly impact a neighborhood has to do with the redemption of space. Wendell Berry develops this wonderful notion of local culture through observing an old rusted out bucket nailed to a tree. This bucket collects leaves and what not over the years and then over time the fibers break down and these things, in the bucket turn into soil that can return to the earth and allow things to grow. Berry sees in this bucket an analogy for how human community is supposed to develop: A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself— in lore and story and song—that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.

Berry claims that in order to do this kind of work, a community must exert a kind of centripetal force on its residents. It must draw residents toward the center of community life, and it must encourage the next generation to return and make their contribution to the local culture.

The schools have failed, according to Berry, to inculcate love for and knowledge of the local culture and instead are focusing training children toward the future—toward the development of a career.

This oversight is not only (literally) unsettling for our children; it is also a kind of irresponsible stewardship of the local environment.

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I think that the church in the neighborhood could exert this kind of centripetal force on a neighborhood if it was cognizant of the value of this role. In order to do this, a church would have to have a pretty strong sense of its physical connection to its neighborhood. This perspective would have been taken for granted when there was a stronger sense of church parish in the community.

Unfortunately, many churches have completely lost any sense for how to do this. Many churches have adopted the suburban campus model that places its buildings in the middle of a large parking lot and is completely cut off from the fabric of the neighborhood. Or older churches that are more embedded in a neighborhood often develop a kind of fortress mentality toward the neighborhood in which they are located.

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astly, at risk of coming off as a bit too ethereal. I want to think about ways that the church can redeem time for a neighborhood. Colin Gunton in The One the Three and the Many has made the insightful observation that in the West, despite all of our labor saving technologies, we seem more pressed for time than other more simple cultures. Gunton sees as part of the problem our attempts to seize time and commodify it. With our technological innovations and our scheduling tricks we think that we can save time and then later spend it again. But as Gunton observes, the core of the problem is that we have forgotten how to live graciously in time and to receive it as a gift.

The Biblical doctrine of creation provides a kind of cadence of daily life and the rhythm of the week that is instructional for human living.

The church is one of the primary means by which these rhythms are counted out and help to shape the community. The rhythm of weekly worship provides a kind of foundation for common life. This can also be true of the yearly rhythms of advent to Christmas and lent to Easter followed by a stretch of ordinary time. And even life rhythms can be marked and noted by the church as babies get baptized, people get married, and people die.

Our society must begin its recovery of civic common life in the city by thinking about the form of the spaces that we share together. I believe that Christians in their various roles within local communities can model as well as advocate this type of thinking. And Christians can enrich the conversation about our shared life by bringing a coherent vision of shalom as a coherent image of the good life. Institu41

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tional churches are not the only place from which Christians can advocate for these things, but churches can play a unique role in the redemption of common life if they are willing to play this role.

Churches specifically can bear witness to the reality of community life and play a role in the redemption of both space and of time.

This is important work because our civic health depends on it. Civic health is essential for us to fully become the image-bearing creatures that God created us to be. And civic health is what towns like Monroe need to be the healthful and redemptive places that God desires us to inhabit.

Eric O. Jacobsen is the author of Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (2003) and has a doctorate from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the Senior Pastor of the First Presbyerian Church in Tacoma, Washington, where he lives with his wife and four children.

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Anno Domini Bill Coyle Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn…

So Jesus, far away and long ago, instructed his friends in holy unconcern.

They mustn’t have had squirrels in Palestine (note to self: look this up). In any case, he omitted them—their clutching sense of mine, mine being obviously out of place.

I like to sit here watching the local squirrels, The way they gather nuts, bury them, hide The spot with dirt and twigs, the way their quarrels chase them around and up a maple’s side, The way that they come closer when I call, And even when I don’t—the way they stand begging—year round but more so in the fall— prepared to take the food right from my hand.

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One will eat each nut as it’s doled out; another will eat one and bury two; another takes a nibble of each nut, pauses and considers what to do.

Consider the squirrels of the park, they gather their nuts and steal their neighbor’s when they can.

Their plumpness presages the colder weather.

What careful, small, grey creatures. How like man.

When common sense requires that we fill our stores against the time of scarcity, how can He tell us in good conscience, Fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee?

Treasure in heaven? Closer at hand, the ravens stalk glassy eyed through leaves of fallen gold, and homeless men lie sprawled out under heaven’s immense capacity for rain and cold.

Bill Coyle is an award-winning poet and translator whose work has been published in the Hudson Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic, and Poetry, among other places. He teaches in the English Department at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts.

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M ARRIAGE IN S OCIETY

,the0generation0clash.<

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Matthew Lee Anderson

his summer, Jon and Kate announced that they were getting a divorce. What would have otherwise been minor news turned into a national spectacle: The Gosselins, the parents of eight children including a set of sextuplets, had leveraged their fame into a â&#x20AC;&#x153;realityâ&#x20AC;? TV show on TLC. The story would quickly be superseded by the odd behavior of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whose infidelity and pathetically self-indulgent confession made him the laughing-stock of our endlessly titillated national media. But that too eventually passed, and by the time you read this, the attention of the national media will doubtless be focused on yet another scandal of marital failure.

High profile scandals such as these and the ongoing controversy over gay marriage have kept marriage at the forefront of the ongoing conversation about the shape and future of American society. But it is not merely our social institutions that are in question. As advocates for traditional marriage recognize, at the core of the matter are two fundamentally irreconcilable anthropologies. At stake is nothing less than our self-understanding and our derived notions of what makes individuals flourish and how we understand the common good.

Despite the gravity of this debate, I fear traditional marriage advocates have failed to educate younger generations about the proper role of marriage. I take as one representative demographic younger evangelicals, the majority of whom support civil unions and a quarter of whom support full recognition for same sex marriageâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a number that some evidence suggests is on the rise. On this point, younger evangelicals are no different from their secular peers.

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In their attempts at arresting social decline, conservatives have been forced to articulate the distinct advantages of marriage. This case has largely proceeded along two lines. The philosophers, on the one hand, have argued that the procreative element of marriage is intrinsic to the institution. The sociologists and historians, on the other, have pointed out that marriage is no longer an institution, but rather exists solely by the individual commitment of the people marrying, and then have proceeded to point to the economic, social, and psychological benefits that the best research links to marriage.

It is common, however, to diminish the affective component of marriage in an attempt to replace it as the foundation for the union, which is reasonable enough. Clearly the emotional highs that come from â&#x20AC;&#x153;being in loveâ&#x20AC;? wane over time, and successful marriages require more substantive ties. However, it is my worry that in doing so, traditional marriage advocates are cutting themselves off from a potential stronghold and enormously effective line of criticism, one that adopts the language and presuppositions of those for whom marriage no longer matters and subverts them from within.

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oung people marry late. In the 1970, men married at an average age of 23. Now, we wait on average until 28. These facts are interesting enough, but their significance is harder to determine. Ben Domenech, the editor of this journal, recently wrote in an essay at The New Ledger: Within the current generation, the value assigned to marriage and family have decreased dramatically, resulting in a delay in the median age of marriage, a marked decline in reproduction rates, and an associated loss of some of the admirable qualities that enabled Americans to contend with the great trials and challenges of the 20th Century.

Domenech identifies marriage with the formation of the sort of virtues that led to victory in the Second World War. For Domenech, the delay in marriage and childbirth indicates the loss of an American social and cultural ideal, and our declining ability to preserve her.

What Domenech does not say, however, is that many of the virtues that undergird the capitalism that has made America great are now working to subvert traditional notions of marriage. The twin features of American individualism and the pursuit of happiness, both of which have been immeasurably valuable in the economic and political spheres, have been dislocated from the communal and social ties 46

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that had previously kept them within appropriate boundaries. It is common enough to blame atomistic understandings of the individual (derived from Locke) as undergirding our current approach to marriage. And while true enough, the corrosive effects of that particular notion of the individual were mitigated by the quite real and noncontractual relational ties that shaped human life. When technological advances allowed us to separate sex from its fruit and provided us increased mobility, those social ties began to weaken, leaving the individual unrestrained in pursuit of his (individual) happiness.

American individualism, for so long a friend of the markets and economy, became a foe to the traditional family.

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his dislocation has transformed our understanding and our practice of marriage. While our language has remained largely the same, we enter a different union than our grandparents did. It is impossible to understand the rising marital age without understanding this transformation in our understanding of marriage and how it is constituted.

Paradoxically, young people report that marriage is important to their happiness and highly desirable. Cohabitation, which the best sociological evidence indicates reduces marital happiness, is often justified on the ostensibly pro-marriage grounds that extensive knowledge of our “partner” is crucial for a healthy marriage. In more conservative circles where such behavior is still greeted with suspicion, this argument is baptized and cohabitation is transformed into lengthy dating relationships that frequently function as pseudomarriages.

Yet while young people continue to marry, the meaning of their unions must be created ex nihilo, as there is no “institution” for them to enter. The explosion of the wedding industry highlights this paradox perfectly, as our decayed understanding of the meaning of marriage has placed an enormous amount of weight on the external symbols of the union. As they no longer have any socially defined meanings, such symbols have become only outlets of individual creativity and expression—perhaps nowhere more evident than in the amusing and mildly distressing trend of marriage parties dancing down the aisle.

For their support and strengthening, such marriages are appeal to pseudo-psychological notions of “personality types” and “the right 47

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fit.” There is, it seems, a lurking suspicion that even as the makers of our marriages, we will not be strong enough to sustain them—a suspicion confirmed not by our observation of our parents’ marriages, many of which (especially among evangelicals) have survived, but by our consumption of countless hours of media that has normalized divorce and infidelity. Deprived of tradition and social structures that might support marriages, we turn to the same resources as our peers—self-help books and Oprah.

This realignment of our understanding of marriage is driven in large part by the separation of marriage and children, a separation that stems from and reinforces our pervasive Gnosticism. This sort of underlying philosophy was clear in Caitlan Flanagan’s recent halfhearted endorsement of traditional marriage in Time: The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it—given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized— simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it? If so, we might as well hold the wake now: there probably aren't many people whose idea of 24-hour-aday good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness.

Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function—to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation's own safe passage into adulthood? Think of it this way: the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives—that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old.

Flanagan’s essay typifies the sort of bifurcation that people approach the question of marriage with. Either marriage is intended to “increase the pleasure of the adults who enter it” or it is for the rearing and nurture of children, which the bifurcation inherently suggests is at odds with the pursuit of individual pleasure. The notion of happiness at stake here is a decidedly thin one. The good life has been stripped of its association with virtue and self-sacrifice and aligned 48

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with a more therapeutic notion of satisfaction. On this account, we stay together for the children, but not for our own happiness.

This is, to be fair, a reasonable position and one that is rightly interested in the well-being of children and cognizant of the sacrifices that it takes. But in accepting the bifurcation between pleasure and children, Flanagan accepts the prevailing notion that pleasure is to be understood as short-term gratification, rather than the pursuit of a good over a long period of time. This position rests upon an incipient gnosticism that understands the fruit of our physical union not as an intrinsic good that contributes to and culminates in our own individual flourishing, but rather as a duty to be assumed.

In other words, in Flanagan’s presentation, the raising and nurturing of children are not intrinsically connected to the well-being and flourishing of their adult parents, but rather can only be justified on grounds that are external to their union. In not encouraging parents to find their own happiness—perhaps in some more robust sense, but also in an affective sense—in the flourishing of their children, we reinforce problematic conceptions of both happiness and marriage.

Staying together for the children is both good and pleasurable for both the children and the parents.

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he inevitable result of this position is that the meaning of marriage is distorted by over-inflating the role of children—a temptation to which even defenders of traditional marriage occasionally fall prey. By locating the meaning of marriage in children, we disestablish the body and its offspring from its appropriate context by infusing them with meaning that they are not capable of bearing on their own. Ultimately, children grow up and form new marital relationships and have their own children, leaving their parents behind. If the institution of marriage is grounded in children, then this process would inevitably lead to the ending of the marital unions once the children have grown—as we have, in fact, started to see among baby boomers whose children are now adults.

The bifurcation between children and the flourishing of parents is a denial of the transcendent basis of the institution of marriage that is grounded, ultimately, in the notion of the image of God. And it is a subordination of children to our “life plans.” Through the use of birth control, we wait until the perfect moment to have children. It is

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the technological subordination of the physical creation, and it is at odds with the meaning of marriage.

In defending the place of children in American marriages, then, marriage advocates need to be careful to do so in the proper way. We trade vice for vice if we simply assert that people should stay together for the sake of the children, without articulating a broader vision for the context in which those children will be raised. The meaning of marriage is bigger than even the children that it produces, and it ought shape and guide the raising of those children, and so be an enduring and stable institution.

Yet this is to advocate not simply for a different formulation of marriage, but a different understanding of the individual who enters marriage. On this account, the good of the individual is inextricable from the good of the community that he enters into because the individual’s own existence is a social one. And the ties that bind that community together do not remain external to that individual’s identity—and hence remain severable without repercussion—but rather affect and potentially constitute the personal identity of the person engaging in marriage. We remain married for ourselves because the severing of the marriage bond would create a radical rupture in our self-understanding.

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his broader metaphysic offers deeper resources for more imaginatively oriented defenses of traditional marriage, one that can fit within the language of individual happiness and pleasure while subverting it. People marry for the simple reason that they think the last five years together will—somehow—be better than the first. That is, they marry because they think that marriage will make them happy. This language, while fraught with perils and loaded with problematic assumptions, ought be the language of marriage advocates, for in non-trivial ways, it is language that is true.

It is a self-evident proposition in our culture that marriage is difficult. And the entire conversation about the decline and future of marriage in America often serves to reinforce this notion. We are frequently reminded by defenders of traditional marriage of rising divorce rates, delayed marriages, cohabitation, the troubles of courtship, etc., and rightly so. The descriptive case must be made if we are to understand how we might strengthen marriages.

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However, over the last few years, the public conversation about marriage has largely been dictated by efforts to preserve traditional marriage through legislation and the courts and by attempts to defray the negative effects of high profile scandals. Those seeking to arrest social decay are always at risk of being framed strictly in the negative, which is largely what has happened with traditional marriage advocates. But the combined effects of this strategy and the normalization of divorce through the mass media have obscured the positive case for marriage. Most young people are not able to articulate why, if at all, they should choose marriage over any of the alternatives.

Consider, for instance, the excellent defense of marrying young by Mark Regnerus in the pages of Christianity Today. Writes Regnerus: So enough of the honeymoon banter: insiders know that a good marriage is hard work, and that its challenges often begin immediately. The abstinence industry perpetuates a blissful myth; too much is made of the explosively rewarding marital sex life awaiting abstainers. The fact is that God makes no promises of great sex to those who wait. Some experience difficult marriages.

Spouses wander. Others cannot conceive children…

In sum, Christians need to get real about marriage: it's a covenant helpmate thing that suffers from too much idealism and too little realism. Weddings may be beautiful, but marriages become beautiful. Personal storytelling and testimonies can work wonders here, since so much about life is learned behavior. Young adults want to know that it's possible for two fellow believers to stay happy together for a lifetime, and they need to hear how the generations preceding them did it.

It is hard to disagree with such prudent counsel, especially when I am in substantial agreement with him. Yet strategically speaking, Regnerus’ call to “get real about marriage” and his framing of it as a “covenant helpmate thing” is ultimately unsatisfying. Young people are often painfully conscious of the difficulties of marriage, even if they remain blissfully naïve about the resources required for overcoming them. And I suspect this fact is no different from previous generations: marriage will always appear to be at a disadvantage to the alternatives. The point of the institutions surrounding courting were to guide unreflective people into marriage, as they probably wouldn’t choose it otherwise—as we have seen—despite the fact that it is in their best interest.

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Regnerus’ conclusion that the institution of marriage no longer exists prompts him to turn to the only place left to ground marriage: the individuals entering it. He closes his piece this way: “If a young couple displays maturity, faith, fidelity, a commitment to understanding marriage as a covenant, and a sense of realism about marriage, then it's our duty—indeed, our pleasure—to help them expedite the part of marriage that involves public recognition and celebration of what God is already knitting together.”

Regnerus has no words of advice for how we should interact with those who lack the requisite virtues he lists, so we are left to assume that they would in fact be better off not marrying. And perhaps this is right. But, as a defender of the position Regnerus is advocating, I know firsthand how difficult it is to answer the practical questions about marriage—how mature, how faithful, how deep an understanding of marriage need one have in order to justify getting married? The criteria are not very clear.

In fact, Regnerus’ position is not so far off from Flanagan’s. In both cases, the good of marriage is extrinsic to the union. For Regnerus, only when young people exemplify particular virtues ought we counsel them to marry. This minimizes the goods that are intrinsic to marriage that come about despite the virtues—or lack thereof—of the people marrying. By limiting marriage’s scope to those who exemplify a particular set of virtues, Regnerus adopts a position on marriage that reinforces its de-institutionalization: what makes marriage go is what we bring into it, rather than what we get out of it.

Regnerus’ claim that we should be more realistic about marriage is, in one sense, right. But being more real ought to mean rejoicing in the difficulties and struggles that marriage brings, and rejoicing in the opportunities they present to grow in sanctification and virtue. Our understanding of the goods of marriage needs to be reframed so that we locate them within the context of marriage and within the challenges that inevitably accompany it. It is not that we are too idealistic about marriage, but that we are not idealistic enough. Our ideals are too small and weak—and when threatened by the reality of pain and suffering, it is our ideals that retreat.

It is imperative for those who want to persuade young people to marry, and to marry well, to reclaim the language of romance and to locate it strictly within the context of marriage, a strategy that depends upon understanding that goods of marriage exist within the 52

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context of the relationship, rather than depending upon the virtues of the individuals entering it or the goods it brings about. Again, Regnerus: Much about evangelical marital ethics is at bottom therapeutic: since we are pro-family, we are sure that a happy marriage is a central source of human contentment, and that romantic love is the key gauge of its health. While our marriage covenants are strengthened by romance, the latter has no particular loyalty to the former.

Romantic attachments are indeed fickle, but they can also be cultivated. And advocates of traditional marriage must recognize that we are making our case to people whose hearts and minds have been shaped more by Hollywood than Holy Scripture. In this context, even the conceptual separation of the emotional aspects of romance from the covenantal aspects is to relinquish culture ground that should be ours. Marriage is the only proper context for any romantic attachments to maintain their vibrancy, and experiencing and overcoming challenges are necessary for these emotional attachments to continue. The language of covenant is the language of loveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it is precisely because we love our spouses deeply and vibrantly that we cultivate fidelity. To grant that romance can exist outside of marriage (or the road to marriage) is to grant too much.

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his is, of course, the case that G.K. Chesterton made nearly a hundred years ago as he attempted to use the language of romance against those advocating for the redefinition of marriage. Excuse the length of the quotation, but as anyone whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s read Chesterton extensively knows, his thoughts tend to run together at epic length: But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events. They are dull because they are 53

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omnipotent. They fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures. The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of those great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect. It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance. Of all these great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important. Hence it is misunderstood by the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty. They think that if a man makes a gesture it would be a startling and romantic matter that the sun should fall from the sky. But the startling and romantic thing about the sun is that it does not fall from the sky. They are seeking under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations—that is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there are no shapes. There is nothing baser than that infinity. They say they wish to be as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe to be as weak as themselves.

Chesterton understood that the case for marriage must be presented as the only romantic option, as the culmination of the very values that opponents were using to undermine it. The challenges that have nothing to do with our decisions or our wills form the substance of both pain and drama in marriage—especially when we recognize that our spouses’ and children’s wills are not as malleable as we might initially presume.

This heightened sense of romance fits within the language of the culture more easily while subverting its presuppositions in that it ties marriage to the happiness of the individuals entering it, makes the good of marriage intrinsic to its structure, and locates children in their proper context—as the natural fruit of marriage and as depending upon the prior romance of the parents for their health and wellbeing. And it is a deeply idealistic vision of marriage. As Chesterton says elsewhere, “It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.” When the infatuated young man tells his lady that he wishes to never leave her, he is simply expressing the intuitive notion that marriage is the natural end for our romantic inclinations—inclinations that ‘idealistic’ portrayals of marriage inspire, cultivate, and ultimately redirect.

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This is why Mark Sanford and the Gosselins matter. As Caitlin Flanagan points out, they reinforce our common cynical disposition toward marriage. But in doing so, they also reinforce that marriage still matters. This is the territory of subversive truth: it is precisely the threat of infidelity and betrayal that provides so much drama in modern marriage. The covenant could really be broken, a man’s word could come to nothing. And when it does among our society’s most visible members, we collectively identify with their moral weaknesses and justify our own failures and shortcomings. But only within a world steeped in marriage is that sort of cynicism possible—a world that doesn’t care would have ignored Jon and Kate altogether.

Matthew Lee Anderson is a writer, public speaker, educator and editor. A graduate of the Torrey Honors Institute and Biola University, you can read more of his writing at his blog, MereOrthodoxy.com.

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S OCRATES & H EALTH C ARE ]0beings0and0citizens0}

I

Joseph M. Knippenberg

make my living—meager though it may be—teaching “Great Books” at a liberal arts college. Reporters rarely call me to ask me what I think, or what Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, or Kant would have to say, about the pressing questions of the day. Truth be told, they never call me to ask about that, though they have occasionally availed themselves of my supposed expertise on other matters.

Nonetheless, I am convinced that the great thinkers who wrote those great books have a lot to teach us, not only about the perennial questions of justice, truth, and beauty, but also about how to think about the pressing questions of the day. This is no accident. Whether we realize it or not, our pressing questions point back to those perennial questions. As the writer of Ecclesiastes insists: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

So when I have a captive audience of students (future reporters, perhaps?), I try to demonstrate this by showing how my favorite old books shed light on the issues about which our current talking heads generate so much heat. A few weeks ago, I seized a golden opportunity, in a discussion to Plato’s Republic, to talk about our great national debate about health care.

In that dialogue, Socrates and his interlocutors approach the problem of justice by creating, in speech, the best city. Since for the classical thinkers, statecraft is, as George F. Will once put it, soulcraft, Socrates focuses on education, on the formation of the souls or characters of the citizens. He notes that when the education fails (as it inevitably will), the resulting “licentiousness and illness” will produce a need for many doctors and lawyers.

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Socrates then proceeds to criticize people who spend so much time and effort attending to their health that they can no longer contribute in any meaningful way to the city. Rather than do their jobs—say, as warriors or potters—they devote themselves entirely to keeping themselves alive. Abandoning the public functions that give their lives meaning, they live for the sake of living, which is to say, meaninglessly.

As an alternative, Socrates proposes a “statesmanlike” medicine, whose aim is simply to restore to health those who can, once healthy, contribute to the common good, but not merely to keep alive those who can no longer serve any public purpose. When the highest political considerations govern medicine, in other words, what will matter most of all is the good of the city rather than the health of life of any individual.

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hen I was in graduate school, I had a flamboyantly unhealthy professor who used this passage as a springboard for questioning our national obsession with healthy living (or rather with health), as if staying alive were itself sufficient to give meaning to life. To the degree that we’re not merely animals, he argued, we shouldn’t act as if we were.

I agreed with him then, and I think I still do. If our national spending is any indication of our priorities, we are surely as a people more devoted to the health of our bodies than to, say, the salvation of our souls. If that’s so, I’m not convinced that that’s, er, healthy.

But there’s another dimension to the discussion in the Republic that’s particularly apposite to our current political debate. While he later in the dialogue blows a big hole in this line of argument, for his current purposes Socrates speaks as if a human being can be wholly and solely identified with his “public” role. Each human being is, above all else, a citizen, serving a particular purpose in the larger community and political economy. That’s what justice as devotion to the common good seems to demand. If I’m a professor and I can no longer profess, I’m essentially worthless and no longer have any reason to live. (For all I know, some of my students may already secretly harbor this opinion.)

Stated another way, if our lives derive their meaning from the way in which they fit into a larger whole, and if that whole is defined by or identified with the political community, then if and when we can 57

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no longer be productive citizens, our lives are meaningless. If we hold this view, it’s not altogether clear why we should want to live under these circumstances and perhaps altogether too clear why no government or public authority would wish to support or encourage such an unproductive and meaningless life.

Now, I doubt that our political approach to healthcare will ever be couched in terms quite that stark, but I can imagine a—so to speak— kinder, gentler version of it. Do we want, for example, to “invest” in medical care for the young (who have their whole lives in front of them) or to “spend” our scarce resources on the old (who have their best days behind them)?

Of course, we can respond that all lives are infinitely precious in God’s eyes, but this isn’t really a political argument. Leaving aside for the moment all talk about the so-called “wall of separation,” there is still this: we may well be infinitely precious, but we don’t have infinite resources to expend (our current illusions about government spending to the contrary notwithstanding). Were we to have a thoroughly public healthcare system, we would be compelled to make choices. And I’m very worried about the principles that would inform those choices.

O

ne important way of avoiding this chilling prospect is to turn from a focus on the nuts and bolts of healthcare policy to a larger “cultural” argument. As Socrates ultimately acknowledges in the Republic, and as every Christian believes, we most emphatically do not derive our significance from our membership in a merely political community. Stated in a secular way, we are human beings as well as citizens. We Christians can add under our breath that we are human beings—created in God’s image—as well as citizens. There is a higher law than political necessity or democratic legitimacy, a law that limits the pretensions of any political order. While this higher law can be stated in religious terms, it (as C.S. Lewis argued in The Abolition of Man) need not be. Regardless of what actually happens in the healthcare debate, we need to make sure that our decision-makers are properly modest and humble, that they “know their place.”

I am not altogether averse to expressing this position in terms of a right to life, but I prefer language that counterposes one community to another. Consider, for example, St. Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the city of man. We are, Augustine says, pilgrims 58

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or sojourners in this world, but we travel as households, not as individuals. His locutions acknowledge our relatedness to one another, and our responsibilities to and for one another.

This communitarian language offers certain advantages in talking about healthcare. While the language of rights runs the risk of emphasizing mere life and making individual self-preservation the beall and end-all of everyone’s striving—as if our object were merely to stay alive and not to live well—the language of responsibility points to what our lives are for. And in the first place we are for one another, not as citizens, but as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, and wives. Of course, if we’re for one another in this way, the people who should be making decisions about care are precisely those fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, and wives.

In the end, I’m less interested in who wins or loses the immediate debate over healthcare than in limiting the pretensions of the political community and of those who govern it. Don’t get me wrong: I care about the nuts and bolts of healthcare. But I care even more about encouraging a proper consideration and appreciation of the limits of politics. It’s a concern shared by the tradition of Christian political thought, by classical liberals like John Locke and Immanuel Kant, and, yes, even by Socrates and Plato, who harbored no illusions about the likelihood of any ruler actually being a philosopher-king.

I wish I were as confident that those who now hold the reins of power in Washington, D.C. shared that concern.

Joseph M. Knippenberg is a professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University, and an adjunct fellow at the Ashbrook Center.

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A B ORTION & A MERICA’ S PAST ]0a0nation0wounded0}

P

Anthony M. Joseph

ro-life Americans tend to see abortion so much as an evil of our own time that the pre-Roe v. Wade American past seems a golden age by comparison. This perception contains a good deal of truth, but it must be qualified, and crucially. By 1973, when the Supreme Court in Roe v.

Wade declared abortion a constitutional right, America had already been morally “wounded” in its capacity to defend and support the unborn child. A large part of this wounding occurred in the nineteenth century, long before feminism, the sexual revolution, and the constitutional right to privacy gave abortion moral and legal plausibility. And we have never fully recovered from the injury.

To be sure, nineteenth-century America was favorable to unborn life in several important respects. First, abortion was much less common then than it is today. By the mid-1800s, it is true, many American physicians began reporting an alarming increase in the number of abortions, and some of them estimated an abortion rate as high as ours is today. Such testimony, however, was and remains anecdotal, and we will probably never be able to calculate an abortion rate for the nineteenth century that can make any claim of being scientific.

We do know that for most of the period no method of abortion existed that was at once safe to the mother and deadly to the fetus.

Herbal treatments of various sorts were reputed to be abortifacients, but the high dosages at which they could effect abortion were also harmful or even deadly to the mother. Low dosages that were safe to the mother, on the other hand, were ineffective in expelling the fetus.

Surgical abortions, a relatively new technique in the period, were extremely perilous ventures and could not have been frequently per60

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formed without leaving a long, sad and public trail of female corpses.

Thankfully, the historical record reveals no such trail. In short, abortion in the nineteenth century was too dangerous or too ineffective to have been as commonly resorted to as it is today.

The nineteenth century was also the age of the anti-abortion statute. Every American state except one (Kentucky) enacted an antiabortion statute by 1900. These laws received little opposition, as there was no discernible “pro-choice” movement. Early on, some of these laws prohibited abortion only after quickening—that is, the point in pregnancy when a woman first felt the fetus move, usually at about four months’ gestation. But as the century wore on the laws increasingly punished abortion performed at any stage of pregnancy, first with lesser punishments for prequickening abortions but then with equal punishments for abortions at any gestational stage. Typically, the abortionist was punished, not the woman, who was regarded as a victim of the crime rather than one of its perpetrators.

The anti-abortion laws received the support of American physicians, who were motivated by a growing appreciation of the humanness of unborn life from conception onward. For in their time the science of human embryology made stunning advances. Since the seventeenth century, medical science had begun to overturn ancient and medieval paradigms of human reproduction, and the nineteenth century was the heyday of this revolution. Sperm had been discovered in the late 1600s, but the mammalian egg was definitively identified in 1827. The uniting of sperm and egg was first observed in 1875.

Around the same time, research into unborn life after conception culminated in the brilliant work of the German Wilhelm His, who obtained miscarried embryos, some of them just a few weeks old and only a few millimeters in length, and by careful examination created a credible sequence for embryonic development. All of these developments persuaded physicians that there was no stage in human gestation that marked a transition from a non-human or less-thanfully human life to a human one. Rather, the unborn were human from conception onward. Today the friends of legal abortion revolt against this humanizing of unborn life. Their quarrel arises first with the advances of the nineteenth century.

But for all this—the low abortion rate, legal protection of the unborn, and the new embryology—two features of the nineteenth61

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century anti-abortion consensus ultimately proved unfavorable to the unborn in the twentieth.

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irst, American physicians, even those strongly opposed to abortion, typically valued the life of the mother more highly than the life of the fetus, and in a crisis delivery their first priority was to preserve the life of the mother. Toward that end, physicians sometimes induced labor before fetal viability or, more gruesomely, performed the procedure known as “craniotomy,” in which the head of the fetus was perforated with scissors, the skull destroyed, the body dismembered and the pieces removed. On this matter an unhappy division arose in Christian medical ethics. The Catholic Church insisted that mother and fetus were completely equal in respect to the right to life. In 1884, accordingly, the Holy See prohibited the teaching of craniotomy in Catholic medical schools and promoted the cesarean section instead, on the ground that it gave mother and child the best combined chance of survival. But cesarean sections were dangerous procedures in the nineteenth century—unconscionably so to most non-Catholic American physicians—and had little attraction in a country which remained largely Protestant. Thus the preference for the life of the mother, sometimes expressed through the killing of the fetus, became engrained in American medical ethics and practice. After 1900, the preference would become a wedge with which to justify abortion in a much greater range of circumstances.

The second damaging feature of the nineteenth-century consensus is connected to the first. The life-of-the-mother preference was developed and affirmed in an American intellectual environment that lacked a fully articulated theological tradition on the nature of unborn life and the morality of abortion.

On this score one must be careful not to be misunderstood. There can be no doubt that, over the expanse of two millennia, the Christian tradition—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant alike—has viewed abortion as a serious sin. The Scriptural condemnation of pharmakeia (Gal. 5:20), a term for occult medicine, may well have included abortifacient drugs. Certainly the extrabiblical writings of the Early Church are uniform in their opposition to abortion. The Didache (c.

100 A.D.) explicitly condemns abortion (phthora) as well as pharmakeia. Clement of Alexandria condemned those who destroyed by means of abortifacient drugs what the providence of God had created. Ter62

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tullian, assuming as did many ancients that the material substance of the embryo was drawn exclusively from the woman’s blood, said it was “not lawful to destroy what is conceived in the womb while the blood is still being formed into a man.” Augustine and Jerome agreed that the precise point at which the human soul was infused into the body was not known, but Jerome called abortion “parricide” (the killing of a near relative) and Augustine termed abortion before ensoulment a form of fornication or adultery. St. Basil, the great theologian of the Eastern Church, declined to distinguish among stages of pregnancy and regarded all abortion as homicide, setting Eastern Orthodoxy on a path from which it never wavered. The Early Church saw human gestation as the work of a God intimately involved in the creation of each human being. The embryo was no less the work of God at earlier stages of development than later ones. Abortion was a failure to show due reverence for God’s work and a serious moral wrong.

The Early Church’s condemnation of abortion was successfully transmitted to the medieval Church, whose liturgical celebrations added to the high value the Early Church had placed on all unborn human life. December 25, which had been established as the feast of the Nativity of the Lord by the late fourth century, was complemented in the Eastern Church by a feast of the Annunciation on March 25, marking the conception of Christ nine months prior. A similar pairing occurred for the Virgin Mary, her conception being celebrated on December 8 and her birth on September 8. In theology, Maximus the Confessor, the great seventh-century theologian of the Eastern Church, advocated the theory of immediate ensoulment that these celebrations implied. In the West, theologians such as Thomas Aquinas embraced versions of Aristotle’s theory of delayed ensoulment—that the soul entered the embryo at 40 days for males and 90 days for females—but did not for that reason depart from the doctrine that abortion was sinful at every gestational stage.

After the Middle Ages, the Christian tradition persisted. The Protestant Reformers fell within range of the existing opinions regarding ensoulment and did not alter the Church’s moral tradition on abortion. Luther took the view that the human soul was derived from the seed of one’s father, as the body was. This theory of “traducianism” was meant primarily to explain the transmission of original sin, but it also placed Lutheran thought in the line of the theory of immediate 63

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ensoulment. Melanchthon, for his part, accepted the theory of delayed ensoulment that predominated among Catholics. Calvin did nothing to dilute the moral tradition in calling abortion “unnatural” and “abominable.” In the seventeenth century, Catholic thought began to seriously consider immediate ensoulment, shaking loose its attachment to Aristotle; at the same time, the “new embryology” began to supply empirical reasons in support of that change. If anything, this development strengthened the Christian moral prohibition of abortion, though the doctrine actually stood in little need of strengthening.

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hus the Christian tradition uniformly condemned abortion despite changing ideas of the nature of unborn life at different stages of gestation. And in the nineteenth century, the earlier Catholic articulations of this tradition remained vivid doctrinal markers in Catholic thought. Francis Patrick Kenrick, a midnineteenth century Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia and author of a widely used seminary text on Catholic moral theology, referenced the tradition in discussing abortion at length in his treatment of the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”

But for reasons that are not entirely clear, nineteenth-century Protestant thought, at least in America, appears to have been relatively reticent on abortion. This was crucial for a country that remained overwhelmingly Protestant. Protestant theology as it bore on unborn life focused on the origin of the soul (whether the soul came, as in Luther, from a human parent or from a direct creative act of God) and the transmission of original sin. The timing of ensoulment and the morality of abortion, by contrast, were less frequently discussed.

The work of the eminent Calvinist Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge reflects both these emphases and these lacunae. In response to an inquiry in 1839 from his brother, Hugh Lenox Hodge, a physician and early opponent of abortion, Charles offered some reasons for believing that human life began at conception but frankly admitted, “I do not know of any speculation on the subject. I suspect we all know just nothing.”

In his classic three-volume work Systematic Theology (1871-1873), Hodge discussed theories of the origin of the soul but not the timing of ensoulment. Hodge was equally silent on the morality of abortion.

In his treatment of the Sixth Commandment, “Do not kill,” Hodge 64

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addressed homicide, suicide, dueling, war, killing in self defense, and capital punishment—but not abortion.

In the late nineteenth century, both physicians’ concerns and the new embryology began to shape a Protestant response. The Protestant Episcopal Church in 1877 implored clergy to “be ready at all proper times” to demonstrate that abortion was a violation of the Sixth Commandment. William G. T. Shedd, a Calvinist Presbyterian, discussed the origin of the soul in his Dogmatic Theology (3 volumes, 1888-1894). Unlike Hodge, however, Shedd explicitly affirmed immediate ensoulment and cited the sinful nature of abortion— ”foeticide is murder in the eyes of God, and of a pure human conscience”—as evidence of this fact. Even so, one gets the sense that Protestants of the late nineteenth-century were just beginning to articulate a neglected tradition on abortion. Concerned Protestants lamented the practice of abortion among their own and the relative silence of their churches in comparison to the Catholics.

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o long as American culture was, broadly speaking, favorable to unborn life and hostile to abortion, the two features of the nineteenth century here discussed—the precedence given to the life of the mother and the lack of theological reflection on abortion—did not greatly impact the practice and law of abortion. A crisis delivery might sometimes lead to an abortion to save the mother, but that could be considered a rare “hard case” to be rendered still rarer by progress in obstetrics. Similarly, the lack of theological reflection on abortion and the unborn seemed to reflect the priorities of Protestant theologians rather than any conscious challenge to the Christian tradition. With law and medicine so overwhelmingly opposed to abortion, these two shortcomings of the nineteenth-century consensus on abortion might have seemed only marginally harmful.

But by the dawn of the twentieth century, one of the key secular changes in the history of abortion was underway. Medical discussion of abortion increasingly shifted from the crisis delivery to the crisis pregnancy. The threat to the life of the mother began to be envisioned as arising months before delivery, during the pregnancy itself. This shift was primarily the result of increased attention to the medical impact of pregnancy on the mother, and in that respect it was to be welcomed. But the shift amplified the nineteenth-century preference for the life of the mother over the life of the fetus and gave that preference greater practical impact. In the new crucible of the crisis preg65

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nancy, the “indications” for abortion—that is, the conditions that would warrant the performance of an abortion—were extended beyond the “life” of the mother to include her “health,” both physical and mental, and, under the stresses of the First World War and the Great Depression, her economic and social well-being as well. Such extensions were reflected in Frederick J. Taussig’s work Abortion, Spontaneous and Induced: Medical and Social Aspects (1936). Taussig, an advocate of liberalizing the nation’s abortion laws, listed numerous possible medical indications for “therapeutic” abortion, including tuberculosis, heart disease, leukemia, syphilis, and psychosis. Taussig went further to admit the indication of rape and the “eugenic” indication of a transmissible disease in the mother. Finally, Taussig professed support for “social-economic” indications as well, especially if they aggravated medical ones, as in the case of a sick mother with “heavy household duties” and a lack of resources to care for the children she already had. None of these extrapolations were foreseen

by American physicians of the nineteenth century, but by the midtwentieth century they had became sufficiently plausible to attract a large sector of medical opinion and educated opinion generally. The proponents of liberalized abortion had exposed and exploited a hitherto hidden elasticity in the life-of-the-mother preference.

“Indications theory” penetrated Christian reflection. To be sure, it made little headway among many Christian thinkers. Catholic theologians continued in their familiar line. If abortion was not permissible to save the life of the mother, it certainly would not be permissible for the purpose of securing her health or socio-economic wellbeing. In his encyclical Casti Connubii (1930), Pope Pius IX affirmed that the lives of mother and child were “equally sacred.” Some Protestant theologians, too, articulated more fully the nineteenth-century consensus, employing the new embryology as Shedd had and giving the consensus new theological heft. In his Ethics of Sex (1963) the Lutheran Helmut Thielicke dismissed Catholic theories of ensoulment as needless metaphysical speculation; the “plain biological facts” were sufficient to establish the fetus as a human being. Thielicke saw the preservation of the life of the mother as the only possible justification for abortion; he decisively rejected social indications.

Elsewhere, however, the indications revolution left its mark. Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, first published in English in 1961, repeatedly asserted the Christian moral prohibition on abortion—a great di66

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vine “No,” as he termed it—but ultimately introduced exceptions that came close to swallowing the rule. For Barth, a doctor was not necessarily guilty of a wrong if he counseled abortion on account of a “threat presented to the physical or mental life of the mother, or of economic or environmental conditions.” Indeed, Barth relied on the physician rather than on any general code of Christian ethics to determine the best course to take in each particular case. Such reasoning easily shaped the abortion debate in America.

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merica in its pre-Roe past was substantially more supportive of unborn life than it has been post-Roe. But the anti-abortion consensus forged in the nineteenth century contained two elements that ultimately became preconditions for widespread acceptance of abortion by the time of Roe v. Wade. First, the explicit preference given the life of the mother over the life of the fetus established the rhetorical ground for the indications revolution of the twentieth century. Indeed, for decades the abortion debate has often been cast as a contest pitting the “life” of the mother against the “life” of the child, when the medical and social circumstances of modern pregnancies have only rarely justified that description. Only the nineteenth-century preference for the mother in a crisis delivery can explain the persistence and potency of this rhetorical archaism. Second, the nineteenth-century theological reticence regarding unborn life and abortion created soft intellectual material that the advocates of liberalized abortion all too often reshaped with indications theory.

Long after the origins and even the terminology of that theory have been forgotten, it remains the driving historical force behind the prochoice movement, which seeks above all to shift the locus of abortion debate from the ontological status of the unborn to the lifecircumstances of the mother.

These then, are our nineteenth-century wounds. They made Americans in the era of Roe less able to defend the unborn child than America’s history would have otherwise suggested. This should not surprise us, of course. In ways hidden and unforeseen the past often leaves us morally weakened to face the challenges of the present.

Christians can appeal to God’s mercy for the purification of our thoughts and hearts, for release from the imperfections that have been bequeathed to us. Indeed, with such a prayer before the throne of God, it will only be a matter of time before the Christian tradition on unborn life vivifies all the Christian congregations—Protestant, 67

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Catholic, and Orthodoxâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that can make any credible claim of being part of the Church Christ founded. And from such centers of recovery a fuller healing of America can proceed.

Anthony M. Joseph is Associate Professor of History at Houston Baptist University. He is currently editing the legal papers of James Iredell, one of the first justices of the United States Supreme Court.

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THE TROUBLE WITH MEN \trials0of0fatherhood| Owen Strachan “The problem of manliness is not that it does not exist. It does exist, but it is unemployed.”

I

Harvey Mansfield

do not know if you have noticed, but men are in trouble. At least, that’s what the books say. There are scads of them, exposing the perils of modern men from every conceivable angle. Not that you can find said books in any one section of your standard big-box bookstore. I recently trooped over to my local Barnes & Noble and browsed the shelves, looking for the manhood section. After fifteen minutes or so, a bit puzzled by the lack of a definable section on a topic that fells many millions of trees each year, I appealed to the woman at the help desk. She chuckled and then informed me that “There is no section on manhood.” That clarified the situation, and I thought about a follow-up question: why not?, a rejoinder fraught with the peril of gender-related awkwardness. She followed up on her own: “You might look at the military history collection. Sometimes the books on men get tucked in there.”

If one could somehow collate the material on men and boys and display it in a bookshop (a daunting prospect, I know), one would find that, among other pastimes, men are declining (The Decline of Men), hiding (Where Men Hide), not reading (Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys), being warred against (The War Against Boys), no longer being nice (No More Mr. Nice Guy), no longer being nice as a Christian (No More Mr. Christian Nice Guy), hating church (Why Men Hate Church), puzzling over their identity, (What Is a Man?), and puzzling over the very concept (Manhood for Amateurs). Mansfield is right—manhood, and the men who embody it, exist. It has not gone away. But the art of manhood, the employment of masculine thinking and acting pro69

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ceeding out of reflection driven chiefly by divine guidance, has fewer practitioners than in seasons past.

What accounts for this sorry situation? To briefly cite a few major reasons for the recent decline of manhood, one would need to look into the ways in World War II altered the traditional home; the effects of first, second and third-wave ideological feminism on Western society (including churches); the cultural revolution of the 1960s and how it influenced men (especially in urban areas); the long-term intellectual currents that have created what many call philosophical postmodernism and its attendant impact on traditional notions of truth, morality, and gender; and the explosion of the Western markets and other economic factors that have created a host of bewildering conditions for modern people.

For our purposes, we look not at these causes, but at a particular aspect of manhood that they have influenced: fatherhood. In an age of widely acknowledged trouble for traditional manhood, what, we ask briefly, does fatherhood look like today? Secondly, how can we respond to the challenges and opportunities before modern men and fathers?

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peaking as a young man, fatherhood in our age is a complex matter. Fatherhood historically has involved authority and responsibility, traits young men were trained from birth to embody. At the apex of this code of conduct was marriage, which in ordinary circumstances involved fatherhood. “It is more than a command,” Martin Luther once said of procreation, and is in fact a “divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.”

Marriage and fatherhood loomed large before boys, challenging them, beckoning them, urging them to shoulder its burdens and experience its hard-won pleasures. This consensus, with obvious cultural variations, held for centuries.

Not so today. The New York Times recently reported that “About 18 percent of men ages 40 to 44 with less than four years of college have never married, according to census estimates. That is up from about 6 percent a quarter-century ago. Among similar men ages 35 to 39, the portion jumped to 22 percent from 8 percent in that time.” These are breathtaking figures that show how fast men have moved away from marriage and, accordingly, fatherhood.

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A second trend contributes to this sorry cultural state. Today, many men who do marry are backing away from children. The “deliberate childlessness” epidemic of recent years has taken hold in the minds of many couples. Theologian Al Mohler has commented on one Atlanta couple who have adopted this most modern of mindsets: The Schums just don't want kids to get in the way of their lifestyle.

They enjoy cruising to the Georgia mountains on their matching Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They love their gourmet kitchen, outfitted with the very latest stainless steel appliances and trendy countertops. Deb Schum explains, “if we had kids, we would need a table where the kids could do homework.” Clearly, children aren't a part of their interior design plan.

Mohler echoes this anecdote with statistics: “The paper also pointed to the fact the nation's birthrate fell last year to an historic low of 66.9 births per 1,000 women age 15-44. That represents a decline of 43% since just 1960.”

It is this phenomenon, one we cannot ignore, that we focus on for the duration of the piece. One could point out that marriage must be the first commitment of the man, indeed the young man. This point is true, and worthy of much reflection. My aim, however, is not at this fundamental responsibility, but at the corresponding responsibility, the ideal terminus of the marital relationship. Fatherhood requires men to not only care for a woman, but to commit themselves to the long, hard and greatly rewarding work of leaving a physical heritage, a corporeal legacy.

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he traditional father has not died out as a species. We are around. In my tradition, the neo-confessional Christian crowd, we young fathers look awfully, well, young. My wife and I are regularly noticed by people in our little town on Chicago’s North Shore as we stroll around with our little girl. This is primarily because there are very few couples our age that are 1) married and 2) have children.

When my wife and I do meet young couples with children in our community, we’re often stunned by the age disparity between us. I recall one afternoon after church when I took my wife out to eat, and my daughter and I stepped outside for some fresh air. We were soon joined by another man with a restless baby. We exchanged glances.

“They’re tough at this age, aren’t they?,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “they certainly need fresh air.” As we parted company, I could not 71

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help but notice to myself that he had likely been at least 15 years older than me. And yet here we were, each with a tiny baby, facing the first challenges of paternity together. That moment would be worthless anecdotally if it had not reoccurred numerous times in recent memory.

The absence of fathers—and children—in popular culture is striking. Many of us younger types have cottoned in recent years to NBC’s The Office, a show noteworthy not only for its humor, but for its lack of children—and, not coincidentally, its deficient men. Of the six most prominent male characters, only one has a child. All are deficient men, leaving vital aspects of their manhood unemployed. They work, but in other areas related to traditional masculinity, they falter.

Men in this kind of position, whether young or old, hew a difficult and uncertain path. Disconnected from a greater purpose, they take unserious things very seriously, while leaving serious things to other folks. They care very deeply about football, extreme hiking, online war games, their pets, or the cultivation of their “man-cave.” To speak plainly, they find life hard and have difficulty fitting in with any one group. Garrison Keillor captures this widespread anomie when he suggests that Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, and now it is a problem to be overcome. Plato, St. Francis, Michelangelo, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Vince Lombardi, Van Gogh—you don’t find guys of the caliber today, and if there are any, they are not painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or composing Don Giovanni. They are trying to be Mr. O.K. All-Rite, the man who can bake a cherry pie, go play basketball, come home, make melon balls and whip up a great soufflé, converse easily about intimate matters, participate in recreational weeping, laugh, hug, be vulnerable, be passionate in a skillful way, and the next day go off and lift them bales in that barge and tote it.

In the face of feminism (or post-feminism), older and younger men today are wilting, and embracing attitudes and traits historically common to women.

Still other men react differently to the postmodern gender code. For some young men (and, as the lives of the rich and famous reveal, some older men), who have not yet bottled their testosterone and stowed it away, life comes as a series of pursuits, a game in which one gratifies natural desires for as long as possible. Life is about short-term gains: hot sex, large muscles, low commitment, maximum 72

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gratification. Tom Wolfe looked into masculine body culture in I Am Charlotte Simmons and found an exaggerated manhood: The muscular students here at Farquhar were merely subscribing to the new male body fashion—the jacked, ripped, buff look. They were all over the place here on the weight-lifting floor! Ordinary guys with such big arms, big shoulders, big necks, big chests, they could wear sleeveless shirts and strap-style I’m-Buff shirts to show off in! What were they going to do with all these amazing muscles? ... Nothing, that’s what… It was a fashion, these muscles, just like anything else you put on your body.

The characters that practice this brand of outsize masculinity in Wolfe’s book not only obsess over the body, but ignore the mind.

Though they attend Dupont University, a fictional school modeled after brainy Duke University, they play endless rounds of video games, lose themselves in epic athletic feats performed by other men, and watch mindless raunch-culture films featuring boy-men like Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, and Will Ferrell.

They are the size of men, and they have the physical traits of men, but they inhabit very little of true manhood.

By now, this much, is clear: the books do not lie. Modern men need help. They need direction. So what is the cure?

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ne major answer that suggests itself is deceptively simple, and will surprise no one who has followed the trail of thought in this article. Primarily, men must give themselves wholly to a woman, preferably at a young age, in order that they might honor the call of Genesis 2:24 and experience all the blessings it brings. As they commit their lives to a woman, they should then pursue fatherhood. If the Lord gives them children, whether naturally or through adoption, they should focus all of their energies on leading, providing for, and protecting their family, to the glory of God.

It may seem counterintuitive to propose that men take on more responsibility at a time when they are showing such pronounced affinity for none. But if this kind of life is assumed with sound guidance from the man’s family, church, and mentors, it will usher men into robust manhood as nothing else will. Men, as the muchdiscussed John Eldredge has rightly pointed out, need a challenge to thrive. Leon Podles has noted on this point that “Men will do anything, will come as close to death as possible, will even die because of 73

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their sport, if only they can have the possibility of tasting this transcendence through athletic mysticism.”

This is quite right. Though they may genuinely be passive, weak, indifferent, rebellious, or any other number of sins, men respond to the prospect of transcendence. Is this not what the football fields filled with young blockers and quarterbacks teach us? Have we not all seen young men come alive in a field where they are pushed and mentored, whether the mechanic shop, the class on philosophy, the missions trip to a far-away locale? In these situations, boys think they are gaining experience, trying new things, learning a certain set of skills. They are only partially correct. When guided well, what they are actually doing is becoming men.

How does this relate to fatherhood? Well, as any young father’s bleary eyes tell us, fatherhood is a total mind, soul and body pursuit.

Now, the young father not only has a wife dependent on him for leadership and support, but a child who cannot even lift her arms to shield herself. From this point forward, the young man must take special care to plan well, lead spiritually, work tirelessly, and put every member of his family before himself.

These are overwhelming realities. I recall how the recent birth of my own daughter overwhelmed and challenged me. This is no merely modern experience, of course; young fathers have boggled at the duties of marriage and fatherhood for millennia. But, unlike other eras, our age trains men at every step to think of themselves as stupid, incapable, and hapless, mere manservants in the presence of hyper-capable women (as women today often are). I realized early on that I instinctively thought in these categories, and that I was going to have to self-consciously raise my own awareness of the needs of my family. Practically, and with a considerable measure of what one could call “growth opportunities” along the way, this has meant less basketball, more budgeting, initiating regular conversation with my wife about the state of our marriage, and lots of time spent walking or playing on the floor with my daughter.

My time with Ella has occasionally felt extravagant, and selfishness tugs at us all, but I take confidence in knowing that in the grace of God, those moments yield not only a transformation of my heart, but the gradual shaping of a precious little girl who asks for so little and yet gives so much.

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atherhood, we must remind ourselves, is not a failsafe. As we see in the inner-city, ravaged by fatherlessness, and also the suburbs, rife with divorce, simply having children in no way guarantees that families will stay together, children will thrive, and society will benefit. In order for fatherhood to claim a man, a culture that celebrates and requires responsible manhood must exist. This can only come from strong homes, churches, and other organizations that together promote a challenging and exhilarating vision of manhood.

There is no better source for this vision than Holy Scripture, which has much to say about fatherhood in particular and godly maturity in general. To look at a very small scattering of passages, Genesis 2:24 shows us the basic plan for men: to marry and procreate. Deuteronomy 6 suggests that fatherly (and parental) instruction must come at all times, “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” More than almost any other text, Psalm 127 raises a “full quiver” of children to a nearly exalted level. Proverbs is little more than a father training his son to live a godly life. In Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3, the Apostle Paul reminds fathers that they are spiritual heads of their homes and images of divine authority in the family. He goes on in 1 Timothy to suggest that the most mature members of the church community be exemplary fathers who fully provide for and spiritually nurture their families.

Looming above the entire biblical corpus is the Father, the divine fulfillment of which all are earthly patriarchs are but a passing shadow. To speak with necessary broadness, the Bible shows that the Father loves His children, provides generously and faithfully for them, instructs and nurtures them, protects them from all comers, leads them through a ruined world, and ultimately, saves them from their personal sin through the substitutionary death of His own Son. We earthly fathers do not take on all of these roles, and thankfully so, but we certainly can learn a great deal by taking some time to study the fatherhood of God in texts like Ezekiel 16, Galatians 4, and 1 John 3. In the Great Commission of Matthew 28:16-20, this gracious God gives all men, indeed all Christians, the great privilege of making spiritual children in the faith, enhancing the call to take physical dominion by a spiritual call.

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Just as we need to celebrate the responsibility and significance of manhood, revealing its nobility and necessity, so we need to offer men and boys a majestic vision of God. The small, domesticated God common in certain theological circles is a huge contributor to the listless existence of many men. Refuting common-sense pragmatics, cultural commentators like Collin Hansen have showed that many in the rising generation are not turned off by a “big view” of God but are enchanted by it. What we might call “small God theology” is out; “large God theology” is in. Amidst a world of no-fault divorce, political scandal, and self-esteem dreams, many today—including men— hunger and thirst for a fresh vision of a holy God, a transcendent Lord who calls for selfless abandonment to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Manhood exists. It has survived feminism and post-feminism, though one could not necessarily say that it is currently thriving.

Whether in a bookstore or the broader culture, it struggles to find a home. What is needed in our day is a fresh vision of the manly life.

Though we have no failsafe for the problems before us, we have hope. As we seek to employ our manhood in a confused age, we hold out responsibility as fulfillment and a great God as the Father we attempt, however imperfectly, to emulate.

Owen Strachan is a doctoral student in Historical Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he is the Managing Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding. You can read more of his work at his website, OwenStrachan.com.

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T RANSLATION AND T HE W ORD [the0feminist0bible{

A

Louis Markos

decade has gone by since the news leaked out that the foremost Evangelical translation of the Bible (the New International Version) was planning an updated, American version that would conform itself to the “rules” of gender-neutral language. The resulting grass-roots resistance movement thankfully (if temporarily) nipped that project in the bud, but it has proven powerless to stop the slow but persistent encroachment of the gender-neutral agenda. Most of the Bible translations that have been released over the last 15 years (from the New Revised Standard Version to the Contemporary English Version to the New Living Translation) have carefully and systematically eliminated “sexist” language from the pages of God’s Word. Simultaneous with this revamping of the Holy Scriptures, the mainline Protestant denominations have so retranslated and/or reworked their hymnals, prayer books, and creeds as to remove every trace of “gender-specific” language from the Sunday service. And they have been quite thorough in their gender-neutral overhaul.

Where once the believer boldly proclaimed his belief that Jesus Christ “. . . for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man,” he now is expected (well, forced) to proclaim that “for us and for our salvation . . . [Christ] . . . became human.”

With astonishing speed and success, most liberal mainline denominations have constructed for their parishioners (whether they wanted it or not) a space that, if not particularly sacred, is at least blissfully free from all that “sexist” and “insensitive” language of the past: by 77

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which is meant the language of Homer, Plato, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible.

Meanwhile, in schools, colleges, and, yes, churches all over the country, students and parishioners have been indoctrinated into using gender-neutral language by professors, school teachers, pastors, and administrators alike. Often the “rules” are not formally taught; they are just taken for granted. Just as the basic tenets of Freudianism have been absorbed by millions of people who have never read Freud—and may in fact be strongly opposed to his teachings and his worldview—so the “rules” of gender-neutral language have so assimilated their way into society as to be almost invisible. The champions of gender-neutral language have been remarkably successful at disseminating their agenda throughout almost every strata of society.

Scan through almost any academic journal (including faith-based ones) and you will find nary a word or phrase that deviates from “non-sexist” language usage. More disturbing, flip through almost any textbook (K-12) used in the public school system, and you will find exactly the same total surrender to an agenda that was initiated by the radical feminists but which found its way (as same-sex marriage is slowly doing) into the mainstream.

Worse yet, over the last five years, the almost total capitulation to gender-neutral language on the part of liberal mainline pastors and theologians has spread into the evangelical world. Thus, while many of our finest evangelical writers bend, and at times distort, their prose to accommodate gender-neutral usage, a number of our best evangelical magazines move closer, with each issue, toward the total elimination of gender-specific language. Of course, not all segments of society have so capitulated. The great American heartland (including many who sit in mainline pews) has not fully embraced it; neither has most of the media (including and especially Hollywood) nor most of those great writers (like Thomas Cahill) and periodicals (like Touchstone and The New York Review of Books) that truly care about style. Still, the gender-neutral agenda has been quite pervasive in its penetration.

It should be clear by now that I find this trend not only alarming but insidious. Indeed, what renders it most alarming and most insidious is that its use is advocated by people who otherwise would distance themselves from any kind of feminist agenda. I do not “accuse” all those who use gender-neutral language of being feminists in 78

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disguise—far from it. My point is that many who follow the “rules” are unwittingly furthering an agenda they do not endorse. Not all who use gender-neutral language do so out of intimidation; there are many out there (particularly those with ties to academia) who believe sincerely (or at least have convinced themselves to believe sincerely) in gender-neutral usage. The problem is that many of these “converts,” though they still form a minority, are quite willing to go along with imposing their new-found “faith” in gender-neutral language on the majority.

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he purpose of this essay is not to accuse the translators of the CEV (or, for that matter, the writers of modern textbooks) of consciously and conspiratorially pressing some hidden feminist agenda. Rather, I hope to challenge those people who have accepted gender-neutral language without really thinking through its assumptions or its ramifications, who have simply thrown up their hands and said, “Oh well, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” I write, that is, for those people in the pews and the classrooms and the offices that use gender-neutral language not out of strong conviction, but because they are intimidated, indifferent, or uninformed about the goals and premises that underlie “non-sexist” language usage. And I write especially (though not exclusively) for Christians who have felt pressured to use gender-neutral language because it is the “Christian” thing to do.

When the leaders of the mainline denominations decided, early in the 20th century, that they would become more relevant and exert more societal influence if they liberalized their doctrinal beliefs and practices, they really believed that the “people” were hungry for such liberalization and would accept it as more “natural” than the teachings of traditional orthodoxy. They proved, of course, to be dead wrong in their predictions of what the people really yearned for and of what they considered “natural” and “proper.” In seeking to be relevant, they became profoundly irrelevant; in seeking to accommodate the gospel to the culture, they lost the gospel without winning the culture.

It is my contention—both as a Christian of evangelical convictions and as an English Professor—that the widespread use of genderneutral language in the church represents another form of accommodationism that is detrimental not only to the church, but to our schools, our universities, and our society as a whole. It will be the 79

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burden of this essay to defend this admittedly strong statement. Before doing do, however, it would perhaps be best to pause and consider what exactly the “rules” of gender-neutral language are. They are fairly simple and few in number: 1. Never use “he” as the gender inclusive pronoun. Although “he” has been so used for thousands of years and in the great majority of languages (many of which are even more gender based than English), the “rules” of gender-neutral language say this is no longer acceptable. We must not make general statements like “Everyone returned to his home” or “A good doctor cares about his patients” or “The poet chooses his words carefully.” In such instances, we must replace “he” with “he or she” or “he/she,” or, better yet, just make the whole sentence plural, so that “he” can be replaced by the safely genderless “they.” Or we can play with people’s minds (as many modern textbooks do), and switch back and forth between using first “he” and then “she” as the inclusive pronoun.

2. Replace “sexist” words like fireman, policeman, chairman, and layman with gender neutral ones like firefighter, police officer, chair, and layperson. Use brothers and sisters rather than brothers or brethren, and men and women rather than men. Don’t use words (actor/actress, waiter/waitress) that distinguish between the sexes; either use the traditionally male word (actor) to encompass both sexes or, better yet, invent a new word (like server) that can be used in a unisex fashion. Strike altogether from your vocabulary phrases like “man-made” or “man-hours.” (When my third-grade daughter was assigned a paper in which she had to discuss the natural and human structures of a major American city, it took my wife and me a full thirty minutes to figure out that by “human structures” the teacher meant “man-made structures.”)

3. Never use the word “man” or “mankind” to signify the human race. Use instead words like human, person, humanity, or humankind. This even goes for Jesus; our Lord is no longer to be described as fully God and fully Man, but as fully divine and fully human.

(There are even a small number of Christian writers who so contort their syntax as to never use the pronoun “he” in reference to God. Rather than write, “God cares about his people,” they write, “God cares about God’s people.”)

Taken together, these mandates have helped increase the growing awkwardness, vagueness, and downright ugliness of most academic 80

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and corporate writing, while championing a particularly petty form of egalitarianism, on par with envious siblings who each insist on getting exactly the same size piece of pie.

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et me slow down and discuss, first, why I oppose genderneutral translations of the Bible and other church documents, and, second, why I also oppose the tacit enforcement of gender-neutral language in our schools and churches and refuse to subscribe to it in my own teaching, speaking, and writing.

Those who insist on stretching their translations of the Bible on the syntactical rack of gender-neutral language are fond of equating the phrases “gender-neutral” and “gender-accurate.” These phrases are most certainly not synonymous. To use “he/she” rather than “he” is to be more politically (not grammatically) correct; the issue has nothing whatsoever to do with clarity of meaning or grammatical accuracy. When Paul says, “if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation,” everyone (and I mean everyone) knows that the “he” does not refer to men only but to all humanity (men and women). Now, in our postfeminist society, there are many who will feign ignorance as to what the “he” refers to and will make long, impassioned speeches about how they really don't know what the author meant when he used “he,” but these people are being intellectually dishonest. They know full well what the “he” means. I did my graduate work (1986-91) at the very politically correct University of Michigan and was shocked by the large number of Professors and especially graduate Teaching Assistants who made it their goal (if not their mission) to change the speech patterns of their students to comply with their gender-neutral agenda. It was their hope that, over time, people's writing (and thinking patterns) would so radically shift that they would truly be confused as to whether the inclusive “he” in an “archaic” essay referred to males only or to all human beings.

Today, essentially all the grammars and textbooks written for Freshmen Composition classes are insistently and flagrantly politicized in the area of gender-neutral language. Most universities and seminaries drill into the heads of their students that they must avoid “sexist” language at all costs, in both their speaking and writing.

Even businesses have jumped on the bandwagon. This genderneutral blitzkrieg has been quite successful, not because of any inherent “strength” or “justice” in its position, but because it has marshaled to its cause three of the strongest forces in Western (especially 81

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American) society: guilt, intimidation, and the desire to “fit in.”

Massive societal peer pressure has been exerted on students, parishioners, and employees alike to “get with the program.” If they do not—if they persist in speaking the language used by all men in nearly all languages since the beginning of civilization rather than the newfangled, politically-correct terminology of yesterday—they must be ready to face scorn, embarrassment, and the cold shoulder.

A close parallel to this is the strong expectation now placed on people to use the phrases “African American” and “Native American” rather than Black or Indian. Most people now use these new coined phrases in polite company, not because they think it inherently right to do so, but because they fear being accused (falsely and groundlessly, of course) of being a racist. Just so, the fear of being labeled a sexist if one speaks in the language used by nearly every American before 1980 is usually enough to enforce conformity. In the late 80’s, when the gender-neutral agenda began to be pursued in earnest by its proponents, many of the more liberal, secular universities paralleled this agenda by erecting and enforcing their own speech codes that forbade the use of any language on campus that might be construed as racist or sexist.

I am afraid that there is really only one word that can adequately describe this state of affairs. That word is censorship.

In the Preface to the Contemporary English Version, the editors (in an attempt to justify their censoring of all “sexist” language from their translation) make the following claim: In everyday speech, “gender generic” or “inclusive” language is used, because it sounds most natural to people today. This means that where the biblical languages require [an important concession that!] masculine nouns or pronouns when both men and women are intended, this intention must be reflected in translation, though the English form may be very different from that of the original. The Greek text of “Matthew 16:24 is literally, “If anyone wants to follow me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” The Contemporary English Version shifts to a form which is still accurate and at the same time more effective in English: “If any of you want to be my followers, you must forget about yourself. You must take up your cross and follow me.”

The assumption that underlies this paragraph is not only radically untrue; it is insincere, manipulative, and patronizing. The literal translation of Matthew 16:24 quoted above is neither unnatural nor 82

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ineffective. Even after two decades of gender-neutral brainwashing in our schools and universities, any teen (or even child) would recognize immediately the naturalness of the original verse and would understand that its invitation is made to all people, not just males.

The editors of the CEV would have us believe that their genderneutral translation of the verse is more natural and effective and that it more truly reflects the way “real people” speak. But they are putting the cart before the horse. The true goal of the gender-neutral agenda is not to reflect existing patterns of speech, writing, and thought, but to so radically alter those patterns that people will, in time, really come to think of the literal translation as unnatural.

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he Bible is the most widely read and influential book of all time. Along with the creeds, hymns, and prayers recited weekly in liturgical services, the Bible is responsible for defining the rhetorical and syntactical patterns along which run our hopes, our values, and our dreams. Those wishing to normalize gender-neutral language have no better tool than the Bible to accomplish their goal.

Just as those in the media industry who advocate the normalizing of the homosexual lifestyle have realized that the best way to do so is to get people accustomed to seeing same-sex couples both on film and in TV sitcoms, so those who advocate “non-sexist” language realize the best way to spread their agenda is total immersion. Once the schools, workplaces, and churches conform their various textbooks to the rules, the average American will find it nearly impossible to free his mind from a constant flow of gender-neutral language.

It is, I think, quite significant that the translators of the CEV do not “fix up” the “sexist” language of Matthew 16:24 by replacing the “he,” “himself,” and “his” of the original verse with “he/she,” “himself/herself,” and “his/her.” They resort instead to recasting the whole verse into second person. Many of the other gender inclusive Bible translations prefer instead to recast such “sexist” verses into the plural (“All those who would be my followers must forget about themselves . . .”), but none, at least to my knowledge, have chosen to insert a he/she into the original text. Why, you might ask, do they prefer to use second person or plural (the CEV, in fact, uses both) rather than substitute in he/she? Merely to answer that the he/she construction is awkward and a bit ungainly will not do, since students and academicians across the country are trained to use such constructions and to accept them as “natural.” No, the reason lies 83

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elsewhere. To have used he/she would have immediately clued the reader in to the fact that the translators are playing fast and loose with the text, that they are inserting into the original alien phraseology. By using second person/plural instead, the translators are enabled to preserve the illusion that this is what the Bible really sounds like: that it in fact “endorses” the gender-neutral agenda.

Translations like the CEV and TNIV have eliminated every single use of the inclusive he or of man/mankind in the Bible—even when they have to perform syntactical contortions to do so! Despite what they say in their prefaces, “naturalness,” “effectiveness,” and “accuracy” are not the foremost goals in the minds of such translators. If I have to wonder constantly whether it is the Bible writers or the translators who are using second person/plural, then I can’t fully “trust” my Bible. Would anyone in academia dare to “translate” the poetry of Shakespeare or Milton in such a way as to eliminate all uses of the word man/mankind? Yet that is exactly what has been done to the poetic verses of David’s Psalms and Wesley’s hymns.

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hough a few scattered people in the past have toyed with an alternative to the inclusive “he” (see Chapter 14 of The GenderNeutral Bible Controversy), gender-neutral language represents something unprecedented in the history of language. Like same-sex marriage, it is a wholly new thing, an idea that would have seemed ludicrous (if not unthinkable) to anyone before, say, 1970. And yet, despite this fact, its very vocal proponents act as if it were the most obvious and natural thing in the world: the necessary endpoint of thousands of years of linguistic evolution. Buoyed up on a wave of what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” they feel no shame in blithely sweeping away three millennia of traditional syntactical structures that are shared alike by Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, and the majority of other world languages. You see, although many reasons have been put forward over the last 15 years to justify genderneutral translations of the Bible, there are really only two reasons that hold any weight. The first, discussed above, is the argument that the English language has so changed as to render traditional “sexist” language both unnatural and ineffective. The second is the (generally unspoken and often unconscious) claim that had the writers of the Bible lived today, they would have used gender-neutral language.

Many of those who translate the Bible in accordance with the “rules” of gender-neutral language believe deep down that they are 84

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doing what Paul or Jesus would have done were they alive today.

Such a claim is as nonsensical as it is offensive, a supreme example of our modern cultural arrogance, of that progressivist elitism that says we are right and all the ages before us wrong. Although it is undeniable that we are all influenced by our historical moment and the values and mores of our culture, we today seem to think that we sit in a privileged position from which we can judge objectively all the ages and people that came before us. We really think that if Paul had lived today and had attended one of our “enlightened” universities or seminaries that he would have come around to our position sooner or later. Quite to the contrary, we know Paul spoke out against the entrenched idols of his day, injecting a breath of fresh air into the selfsatisfied stuffiness of the day. It is almost impossible to imagine Paul pussyfooting around his pronouns and making sure always to say humans instead of men and humankind instead of mankind.

Does that mean that Paul would have been “culturally insensitive” or blissfully unconcerned with the plight of women? Certainly not!

He would surely (like Jesus before him) have striven to treat women with respect and equal dignity. Indeed, inasmuch as the advocates of gender-neutral language call for better treatment of women, I applaud them. Many have their hearts, I believe, in the right place. But the elimination of male pronouns or the use of euphemisms like “humankind” are not changes that will inspire people (whether male or female) to honor women or to give them the respect that is due them. Can we not follow in the footsteps of Paul by finding ways to change the hearts of fallen men and women without accommodating the idols of modern society? Can we not affirm the God-given gift of femininity without jumping (wittingly or no) on the feminist bandwagon. Indeed, I would argue that, far from enhancing the dignity and uniqueness of women, gender-neutral language often ends up effacing femininity. It is, on the whole, a good thing that modern women have been given the opportunity to work in traditionally male professions, but too often that opportunity has come with a price: the expectation that professional women will act and think and behave like men. Too often, gender-neutral means anti-feminine (not to be confused with anti-feminist!). Gender-neutral language has been one of many forces behind a growing breakdown of the essential differences between masculinity and femininity. If such forces ever win out, a time may come when we will no longer respect wom85

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en as women or encourage them to use their gifts to serve the church and society in a way that affirms (rather than acts in spite of) their God-given femininity.

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ut there is another reason to take pause before we convince ourselves that a modern-day Paul would have cheered the CEV or the NRSV or the new and emasculated hymnal. To make such a claim is not only to impose our own very contemporary values on Paul; it is to set a dangerous if not lethal precedent. It is to suggest that the language and culture of the Biblical writers are not a sufficient vessel for carrying the Word of God. If we accept the reasoning that says a modern Paul would have used gender-neutral language, it will not be long before we assert (as many already have) that if Jesus could have been transported to the 21st century and met a loving homosexual couple face-to-face, he would have given his blessing to their “marriage.”

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson took his copy of the New Testament and crossed out all those passages that involved the miraculous (including the Resurrection account). He did so because he was quite fully convinced that his “enlightened” world had disproven the existence and even possibility of miracles, and because he was also quite sure that had Jesus and the writers of the New Testament lived in his age, they would have seconded his wise editing out (or, better, censoring) of stories that (to the modern man) would appear so patently unnatural and ineffective. Jefferson felt confident in his ability to dictate to Jesus the proper way to behave in the modern world; our new slate of gender-neutral translators feel equally confident in their ability to dictate how he should speak.

I have said that there are only two legitimate reasons for condoning gender-neutral translations of the Bible, but there is, of course, a third. Many who advocate gender-neutral translations of the Bible (and of the hymns, creeds, and prayer books) do so, so they claim, to avoid offending the more “sensitive” people in the pews.

I can’t say I’ve met any of these hypothetical sensitive people, but, if they do exist, they are certainly vastly outnumbered by the people who are genuinely (if silently) disturbed by the co-opting of their scriptures and traditions. (Indeed, I would argue that the majority of those “sensitive” people are precisely the ones who are engaged in neutering the Bible and the prayer books!) And besides, even if there 86

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are a significant number of such “sensitive” people, how far are we to go in accommodating their sensitivity? Shall we cease to speak about sin and the need for confession? Such talk certainly offends more people than the types of pronouns used in the service. And how far, one may legitimately ask, is the revamping of traditional language to go? What is next? Gender-neutral translations of Augustine’s Confessions, the Imitation of Christ, and the Summa Theologica? Shall we build for these “sensitive” people a nice little insulated world safe from all male pronouns? Or, better yet, and much more in keeping with the politically correct, multicultural, postmodern agenda of the public schools, shall we just keep them from reading anything that was written before the advent of gender-neutral language?

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s an English Professor, I find most people (young and old alike) have little confidence in their writing abilities or their control of grammar and syntax. Such doubts and fears leave them particularly vulnerable to being beaten into submission by teachers who present gender-neutral language as if it were a fait accompli, a thing proven and incontrovertible, when it is neither.

If I may don, for a moment, my professorial robes, I hereby grant all those who read this essay the permission not to use genderneutral language. I grant them as well the right to refuse to purchase, read, or acknowledge as authoritative the CEV, the NRSV, the NLT, and the revised hymnal and Book of Common Prayer. I grant them further the courage to speak up in their congregations and schools and universities and question those in authority as to whether they should themselves be embracing and propagating the gender-neutral agenda. I do not grant these things out of some puffed up sense of pride or self-importance, but because the granting has to start somewhere, and it might as well start with an English Professor.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of George Orwell’s 1984 is the way Orwell’s totalitarian rulers have succeeded in controlling not only the bodies but the minds of their citizen drones. Be ye not deceived: to control someone’s language is, in the end, to control his thinking. For Winston Smith, Orwell’s defeated hero, the totalitarian ethos and practice of his society had spread too far to be stopped. For us, however, there is still time. Just say no!

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s there anything really wrong with gender-neutral language, as such, you may ask? Granted, imposing our own politically correct preferences upon the writers of the past is unfair at best and unethical at worst. But what about using gender-neutral language in works written today? There are still, after all, many Christian writers who, though they themselves write and speak in “non-sexist” language, are still fair-minded enough to use a traditional (non genderneutral) translation of the Bible when quoting verses from the scriptures. What could be wrong with using language that purports to be fair to, and inclusive of, women? Isn’t America all about equality?

Well, yes and no. If you mean by equality the equal dignity and inherent worth of every human being; if you mean the freedom from oppression and the liberty to worship as you please; if you mean, further, equal pay for equal work and equal educational and employment options without regard to race, creed, or gender: then, yes, America is all about equality. Indeed, it must be admitted, some of the early crusading feminists helped bring about much-needed reforms that extended the blessings of equality to countless women.

Unfortunately, when the proponents of gender-neutral language (and their multiculturalist allies in the public schools) talk about equality, they mean not equal dignity or pay or opportunity, but egalitarianism: the belief that everyone is the same and should be treated the same. The tenets of egalitarianism hold that the differences we see between the sexes and between people in general are not innate, essential, or God-given, but social constructs. The goal of egalitarianism is not unity in diversity or the celebration of inherent worth but a bland, universal sameness: the creation of a lowest-commondenominator world devoid of all difference and uniqueness.

It was this desire, this yearning to build an egalitarian state that led directly to the atrocities committed during the political and cultural Revolutions that tore apart France, Russia, China, and Cambodia.

And when I say led directly, I mean precisely that. When these four would-be utopias began to kill all those who were too far “corrupted” to be assimilated and sent the rest to be retrained in brutal labor camps, they were not betraying their principles (as do Christians who shoot and kill abortion doctors), but enacting them. The one thing the egalitarian idol will not (and cannot) allow is deviation from the norm. If you would like a true word image of the logical and necessary outcome of egalitarianism, then picture in your mind a 88

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great artist or writer shoveling mud while publicly denouncing his own God-given gifts.

Being forced to use “he/she” rather than “he” or “person” rather than “man” may seem worlds away from the Gulag Archipelago, but I would argue that the same foundational ethos underlies both. In both cases, a form of censorship is imposed that is meant to restrict and retrain the mind: to narrow the “free exercise” of thought; to reduce it to a certain groove; to render it incapable of thinking outside the publicly mandated egalitarian box. Of course, we are nowhere near this Orwellian nightmare, at least not yet. But the warning signs are there.

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hile doing my graduate work at the University of Michigan, I was forced to deal, not only with gender-neutral language per se, but with another offshoot of the feminist linguistic agenda. Although women frequently refer to themselves as “girls,” and although most consider it a compliment when they are referred to as a “lad y,” the egalitarian protocol on campus mandated that these words be stricken from our vocabulary. After all, they reasoned, we do not call grown-up males “boys”; why then should we call grown-up females “girls”? And as for “lad y,” far from a compliment, such words are oppressive, patriarchal tools meant to instill submission in women. As you can imagine, those of us who did not want to run afoul of the politically correct were forced to monitor our words, second guessing ourselves at every turn. I do no exaggerate when I say that when I graduated and moved to Texas to teach at Houston Baptist University that I was able to reclaim a considerable portion of my mental and emotional energy. When the human mind is put in a situation where it must continually twist, bend, and contort itself to conform to an unnatural pattern imposed on it from above, it gets tired, frustrated, and (as my fellow Texans might say) just plain worn out.

This is precisely the effect that gender-neutral language has on those who feel compelled to use it. The constant, nagging worry that one might slip up and say “he” or “mankind” or “man-made” causes the mind to get both exhausted and muddled. Now, the feminists could, I suppose, counter my argument by claiming that, in time, “non-sexist” language will become so common that it will seem natural to those who use it. But that is the problem: gender-neutral language does not represent a natural evolution in linguistic patterns 89

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and usage; it is an agenda imposed from above. As such, it will, I contend, always seem unnatural and forced and will continue to muddle the minds of those who use it. Why is this “muddling” a problem? Because, over time, such behavior instills in its user a loss of initiative and nerve. In educators, administrators, and ministers, in particular, it helps foster a type of fastidiousness and over-precision that most of us (I include myself in the group) are already prone to developing.

Early in the 20th century, T. S. Eliot wrote a brilliant character study of a certain type of modern homo urbanus (“city man”) who is prevented from breaking out of the meaningless tedium of his life by just such a fastidiousness and lack of nerve. His name is J. Alfred Prufrock, and, despite the fact that he is capable of great imaginative thought, he is stifled by a host of petty (but nonetheless real) fears that prevent him from asserting himself in any way. He does not speak forth the prophetic words he feels burning inside him for the same reason a modern academic will not dare speak the word “mankind” in a meeting of his colleagues: he fears he will be punished (not with imprisonment or exile but dismissive scorn), vivisected (not with a knife but a withering glance), and decapitated (not by Madame le Guillotine but by a cutting remark from a fashionable lady).

The censorious imposition of gender-neutral language is, I believe, one of several factors that is helping to produce a generation of American males who are as timid, ineffective, and emasculated as J. Alfred Prufrock. And that is not only a tragic thing for the men of America; it is even more tragic for the women. Despite all the best efforts of the feminists and their allies, I suspect the vast majority of girls and women are still looking and hoping to marry a man with a backbone: a man who is unafraid to assert himself, to be a leader, to make decisions. Most wives want a husband they can respect enough to trust, follow, and rely on. The sad fact of the matter is that the feminists who have pushed gender-neutral language into the mainstream (though not necessarily their unwitting allies) don’t really care about the desires of women.

Though I celebrate the contributions of professional women, our nation (and churches, and families) are desperately in need of men who are willing to assert themselves and to take leadership roles, but how can they be expected to do so when everything (including language) encourages them not to. Of all the gender-neutral “rules,” 90

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perhaps the most damaging is the one that insists on replacing man/mankind with human/humankind. Aside from the downright ugliness of this practice, the refusal to use man/mankind has had the subtle effect of not only neutering but dehumanizing language.

When most readers read the word man or mankind, an image of a real, concrete man pops into their head. When they read human or person, something far more abstract is conjured instead, something that more closely parallels the impersonal, amorphous god of pantheism than the personal, incarnate God of the Bible (in whose image we were made). Now, of course, this is the very reason feminists want us to use the word person rather than man. They reject any and all notions of male headship, including the Pauline practice of imaging and summing up (fallen) humanity in the person of Adam. They would far prefer for us to image in our minds a neutered, faceless, androgynous thing than have our thoughts directed to the image of a male. Likewise, they would prefer us to use “it” rather than “she” when referring to objects toward which we feel love and affection: ships, countries, churches, etc. (Holy Mother Church is no more acceptable than Father God).

I said above that most American women want husbands who will lead—which means, in part, men secure enough in their masculinity not to be threatened by strong, gifted wives. They also want something else: a man with enough gumption to act as the ambassador between his family and the world. All languages have their own equivalent of the word mankind, because in all cultures (even those “matriarchal” utopias that postmoderns dream about), the male has been considered the representative human being. Feminists absolutely hate the idea, and yet that is precisely what the vast majority of wives want their husbands to be. When men lose their place, their identity, and their integrity, it is women, in the end, who suffer the most. But then that is a casualty the feminist movement is more than willing to accept. You’ve come a long way baby!

Louis Markos, (www.Loumarkos.com) Professor in English at Houston Baptist University and Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities/Scholar in Residence, is the author of From Achilles to Christ, Lewis Agonistes, and Pressing Forward: Tennyson and the Victorian Age. 91

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T WAIN FOR THE A C OLYTES ]the0american0scribe} Harold K. Bush Who Is Mark Twain? Edited by Robert Hirst. Harper Studio, 2009.

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s reported by Robert Hirst, the editor of this new volume of previously unpublished writings, Mark Twain left behind when he died a veritable mountain of personal papers, somewhere in the vicinity of over half a million pages worth: letters, sketches, halfwritten tales and stories, unidentified manuscripts, speeches, and autobiographical dictations, as well as photos, bills, receipts, postcards, and contracts. Indeed, some scholars have claimed that Mark Twain saved more of his unpublished writings than any other American authorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;most of them now safe and sound among the vast archive in the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. Twain was certainly aware of the fact, as the most famous American both at home and around the world, that the prodigious interest in all things Twain would not only endure, but would surely grow, even long after his death. An incurable capitalist and speculator, he also probably considered their rising financial values as well.

About that monetary value, he was quite right. About his conjecture regarding the growth industry of all things Twain, he was also surely correct. Even now, almost exactly a century after his death in April 1910, anything newly presented to an eager reading public that was written by the legendary Missourian becomes a cause for some great cultural palm-sweating. The latest release, entitled Who Is Mark Twain?, is a fine, readable collection of writings by Twain that have up till now remained unpublished (mostly, that is; a few of these pieces have in fact been previously released in customized, rare edi93

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tions). This material is “fine,” that is, if you are already yourself a bit of a Twain acolyte, like me. It’s sort of like a new set of unreleased recordings by the Beatles, or a new basement tape bootleg by Bob Dylan—it helps tremendously if you are already a fully convinced if not dogmatic and excessive fan. And if you count yourself a completely obsessed devotee and/or wack job (of which there are quite a few for all of the above), well then, all the better. As such, I would steer new readers to some of Twain’s masterpieces. Don’t start here, I would urge, if all you’ve ever read are the standards from high school English class (you know, the ones I need not name). Instead of this book, try Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, Puddn’head Wilson, or Connecticut Yankee, if you haven’t read them closely and lovingly, or a collection of the much overlooked shorter pieces, such as Tom Quirk’s excellent Penguin edition of Tales, Speeches, Essays & Sketches.

That said, if you have read most of Twain’s established mastertexts, of which there are roughly a dozen, give or take an oddity such as No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (that late, greatly bowdlerized fantasy that defies description) or The Prince and the Pauper (the one, by the way, that his own children loved the most), and if you are willing to wade even more deeply into the strange and yet highly entertaining mind of this great writer, then this volume provides some tantalizing new selections. None of them measure up to the very best of the Twain canon, but many of them are provocative, revealing various bits and pieces about how the great author thought, and even about his writing process. The book is handsome, well-produced, and it does contain more than a couple of decent pieces. Many of the selections, such as “The Undertaker’s Tale” (featuring the melodramatic Cadaver family),”The Music Box” (about an expensive purchase shipped back from a European trip, reminding us of the author’s wealth and cultural pretensions), “The Missionary in WorldPolitics” (a late-in-life rant against America’s growing imperialism that sounds eerily familiar to common screeds delivered without a smile in today’s political climate), “Happy Memories of the Dentist’s Chair” ( a funny old-school sketch of the type for which he is justly famous and beloved) and others, are easily consumed, providing both humor and insight in ways not unlike his greatest works (though none, again, can be considered among those great works).

One should note, however, that some of the pieces contain rather famous remarks by the author, or otherwise brilliant moments of 94

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humor and clarity. In the second piece, “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture,” Twain credits his famous quote about lightning and the lightning-bug to Josh Billings—except that in the earliest case, the difference is between “vivacity and wit” instead of the “almost-right word & the right word.” The essay “On Postage Rates on Authors' Manuscripts” begins with Twain's famous, cheeky quip, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself” (recent confusions regarding, say, health care reform or the stimulus package confirm this suspicion, for me at least). In “A Group of Servants,” Twain describes the challenge of spelling the names of his Hungarian and Polish servants, surnames that act like “the alphabet out on a drunk.” Here’s how he describes the dentist in “Happy Memories of the Dental Chair”: “he had the calm, possessed, surgical look of a man who could endure pain in another person.” Twain displays an edgy impatience when he digs at missionaries in “The Missionary in World-Politics”: “I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children's faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods.” As usual, Twain is fiercely opposed to oppression and arrogance of any sort, whether they come from mission boards, congressmen, grammarians—or even nameless dentists.

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erhaps most haunting is “The Privilege of the Grave,” which serves as a kind of motto for the volume. Only once deceased, says Twain, can we speak with openness and frank honesty: “There is free speech there, and no harm for the family.” He speaks with what I would like to call a confident and haunting wisdom on these lofty topics: “Murder is forbidden both in form and in fact; free speech is granted in form but forbidden in fact.” Always the detective’s eye for even the slightest hint of hypocrisy, he reminds us that while alive, we must always guard our words and thoughts. The privilege of the deceased is that they can speak openly and honestly— and not long after those words were penned, Twain’s claim was confirmed, as it still is being confirmed a century later.

Another privilege, one might add, is that world-class authors can have published even the leftovers, remnants, and half-starts that populate their literary estates, and even to wide cultural attention and mild acclaim. This collection rings true; it sounds like its fascinating author, more or less. Glimmers of hope and pleasingly powerful sen95

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tences frequently surface within each piece, like carp in the pond of a Japanese garden, seeking visitors. His optimism, art, and/or flat-out fun often are only to be balanced later on (if not immediately) by less carefully constructed statements, however.

As he sailed into the choppy waters of his later life, this unevenness of style and content became even more the case; but throughout his career, Mark Twain wrote almost non-stop, with breathless joy, blinding pain, and unparalleled endurance. His correspondence is staggering; his dictated autobiography, much of which has never been issued in book form, is well over half a million words as well. It’s no surprise, then, to discover some unevenness in his many hundreds of thousands of unpublished words.

Although it does not include very much scholarly apparatus (no index and little historical support for unknown names, places, events, and so on), the volume includes a smart and informative introduction by Hirst, the General Editor of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the author and his life and work. Overall, Who Is Mark Twain? is a nice addition to the Mark Twain bookshelf, and perfect for reading in an easy chair, with its roomy pages and comfortable font and style. Its greatest appeal, and surest audience, will be Twain aficionados wishing to add it to their already burgeoning collections. And yet that’s okay by me: I do believe that more of Mark Twain and his quirky sensibilities is always better for America—especially in these harried times in American history, when Twain’s voice can often seem surprisingly germane and culturally savvy, even after a century—and this volume contributes to keeping this prophetic and preposterous spirit alive in our time.

Harold K. Bush is Professor of English at St. Louis University and the author of Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (2007) and American Declarations: Rebellion and Repentance in American Cultural History (1999).

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D EMANDING P OETRY ]a0noble0vernacular} David C. Mahan Selected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill. Yale University Press, 2009.

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hen I am asked what Geoffrey Hill’s poetry is like—often by people who have not read a great deal of poetry—I almost always answer, “It’s pretty difficult; dense and challenging to understand.” I also usually add, “But he is one of the most important, most worthwhile and rewarding poets you can read, if you are willing to invest the time and energy.” Upon re-reading the poems in the new Yale edition of Hill’s selected verse I felt that way myself.

True to the claim advertised on the jacket of Selected Poems, this collection provides an excellent survey of Hill’s verse by which “readers can observe in one volume how Hill’s style took shape over time,” and it does include “some of the poet’s strongest, most sensitive, and most brilliant pieces.” From such notable and provocative poems as “Genesis”—”By blood we live, the hot, the cold,/To ravage and redeem the world:/ there is no bloodless myth will hold”—and the disturbing sonnets of lament “Two Formal Elegies (to the Jews in Europe)” to excerpts from all of the long poems (Mercian Hymns in full) and his recent Without Title, this edition offers the most comprehensive sampling of Hill’s corpus currently available.

There are, of course, gaps that readers of Hill would have wanted to see filled (for myself, the “Lachrimae” sequence in toto and more sections from The Triumph of Love). One also wonders whether readers can make much sense of the whole from portions of long sequences whose meaning and measure consists of their unified 97

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achievement (a difficulty that could have been ameliorated by even a limited introduction, which Selected Poems curiously lacks). But such, by definition, are the constraints of selections of this kind. Despite such limitations, the range and depth of Hill’s subjects and concerns, as well as his remarkable skill as a craftsman, emerge with as much force as the fierceness of his countenance on the book’s cover. To read Geoffrey Hill’s poetry is to experience a confrontation with ‘passionate intelligence’, and with the work of an acute conscience engaged in “The struggle/ for a noble vernacular” (from The Triumph of Love, section LXX, regrettably omitted from this selection).

It should be added that, though we most commonly associate Geoffrey Hill with ‘serious poetry’, his seriousness does not lack wit and humor, nor irony and ambiguity, of such sophistication that close attention to his work leaves one breathless to keep up. His puns, word gags and clipped one-liners—”heroic/ verse a non-starter, says PEOPLE;” “It now seems probable that I have had/ a vision or seizure—some stroke of luck”—appear throughout, adding lightened texture to his otherwise pointed commentary. His often selfdeprecating gags disabuse readers of the idea that he takes himself more seriously than the subjects which concern him.

I am not one who subscribes to the view that poetry’s first purpose is pleasure, at least not the kind of pleasures that we derive from mere entertainment. Indeed, poetry of the kind Hill produces is often un-pleasant, as well as disturbing, often disorienting, and always demanding. I would say, rather, that poetry’s purpose is to satisfy, which it does—when it succeeds—by challenging, provoking, inspiring, and yes, at times, entertaining us. In Hill‘s hands, it is also, as his poet-persona avers at the end of The Triumph of Love, “a sad and angry consolation.” Geoffrey Hill’s poetry offers all of these gifts, and it is a credit to the publishers at Yale University Press to make work of such quality more available to an American audience in this new representative selection.

No generalities do justice to the breadth of Hill’s poetry, though some general observations do help to orient especially new readers.

First, although Geoffrey Hill is a poet with his ears sharply tuned to the present, he is more prominently a poet of the past—not as a sentimentalist but as an excavator and memorialist. His endeavor to recover, to remember, to honor and, frequently, to chastise has occupied his poetic attention throughout his career. How we remember, 98

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or fail to remember, designates the ethical as well as the emotional fields of most of his work. For Hill the poem is a moral site, or “moral landscape,” and his treatment of history bears that stamp. So he writes in “Tristia: 1891–1938: A Valediction to Osip Mandelstam”: Images rear from desolation Like ruins upon a plain.

Tragedy has all under regard.

It will not touch us but it is there — Flawless, insatiate — Or his tribute to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “‘Christmas Trees’,” who appears “in his skylit cell/ [. . .] pacing out his own citadel”, in which the poet cautions:

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Against wild reasons of the state his words are quiet but not too quiet.

We hear too late or not too late.

istory is habitation in Hill’s verse, the presence of the past in the present made available in images and voices dense with pathos. In his haunting suite of sonnets “Funeral Music” from King Log, for example, Hill scrutinizes the fate of 15th century Catholic martyrs who “meditate/ a rueful mystery; . . . Dying/ To satisfy fat Caritas.” These are “Contractual ghosts of pity” who speak from beyond the grave: “so we bear witness/ Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us.”

The poet’s ‘pitch of attention’ in these verses (a quality he adopts from and admires in John Crowe Ransom, among others) derives from more than the personalities or ‘spirits’ of remembered ones, however. For Hill their memory, and so their instruction to us, consists of the concrete reality of their existence, as ones who dwelt within “the brute mass and detail of the world.” In his treatment of these Catholic martyrs we hear the brutality of their execution: Crash. The head Struck down into a meaty conduit of blood.

So these dispose themselves to receive each Pentecostal blow from axe or seraph, Spattering block-straw with mortal residue.

The more recent (for many of us, perhaps the more relevant) atrocities of the Holocaust summon similar concentration on the corporeal as appeal to remembrance. “Undesirable you may have been, un99

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touchable/ you were not,” the poem “September Song” insists. Section XIII of The Triumph of Love gives fierce pitch to the fate of these ‘undesirables’, and with a similar theological irony as we find in “Funeral Music”: Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?

Who can now tell what was taken, or where, or how, or whether it was received: how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, overlaid, raked over, grassed over, spread around, rotted down with leaf mould accepted as civic concrete, reinforceable base cinderblocks: tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up with the Baltic and Pontic sludge.

The densely packed series of hard consonant words resists the very thing that the poem admits as a central problem of anamnesis: how can these be remembered, given that their memory was so systematically erased, their bodies treated like so much bureaucratic waste?

“Each sensate corpse in its fatal/ mass solitariness [. . .] This, and this,/ the unique face, indistinguishable, this, these,/ choked in a cesspit of leaking Sheol,” Section XCVII remonstrates.

On behalf of their memory, and ours, it is the poetry that resists their erasure, that pushes back to recover what has been pushed aside.

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here Hill turns his attention to matters of religious faith, and to Christian faith in particular, his excavation project takes a theological as well as historical cast. Hill is a Christian, and his poetry and critical work are imbued with that outlook.

“Hill’s work can as little be separated from his religious nature as wetness could from water,” writes David E. Pritchard in his review of Selected Poems. Still, the poet in the poetry, through multiple personae and assumed voices, manifests a troubled relationship to that faith.

“God/ Is distant, difficult,” the persona of “Ovid in the Third Reich” confesses, and Hill’s protracted treatment of the faith, in regard to its chequered history as well as its tenets, bears out this tension.

In the sequence of sonnets “Lachrimae” Hill contemplates the nature of the spiritual life and the difficulty of contact with the divine.

The central image is the crucifixion: 100

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Crucified Lord, so naked to the world, you live unseen within that nakedness, consigned by proxy to the judas-kiss of our devotion, bowed beneath the gold, with re-enactments, penances foretold: scentings of love across a wilderness of of retrospection, wild and objectless longings incarnate in the carnal child.

At issue for faith is both the reality of the experience craved and the means of representing faith’s objects, which would make such experience available. “I founder in desire for things unfound./ I stay amid the things that will not stay” the speaker and “self-seeking hunter of forms” in “Pavana Dolorosa” laments. Christ is both icon and incarnate one, present but obscured, seen but “unseen within that nakedness.” Our response to him, these sonnets argue (whether of dedication or dismay), faces similar ambiguity within that necessity of his mediated presence, “consigned by proxy to the judas-kiss/ of our devotion.”

The mood of these poems here and elsewhere in Hill, however deeply invested in historical reflection and sensibility, displays a peculiarly modern temperament. The question that looms over Hill’s protracted interest in matters of faith involves the present viability of that vision “in a world come of age,” to borrow Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s apt phrase. “These are harsh times/ with hag Faith going the rounds,” the poet-persona of The Triumph of Love laments (LXXXVI), and in such times new languages are needed. And in his verse Geoffrey Hill assumes the posture of ones who seek through sympathetic skepticism, manifesting not the doubt of those who say, “It is not true,” but “Oh, that it were true, that we could know it as true”--not of disbelief but of distressed believing.

For the poet this dilemma of the intellect and the will is a poetic problem, and more broadly, a problem of speech and speaking, by which we shape our quests as well as articulate the questions and answers we put forth along the way. So Hill’s persona in the first section of The Orchards of Syon declares: I shall promote our going and coming, as shadows, in expressive light; take my belief, if only through a process taxing salvation —; 101

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then pleas, “may I proceed? —/ not merely to divert with faith and fiction,/ to ease peregrination [. . .].”

‘Not merely to divert’, in the face of profuse distractions and what Hill has called “the acoustical din that surrounds us,” could stand as one signature statement over Geoffrey Hill’s entire artistic career. Yes, his poetry is demanding, even daunting, but that is the quality of poetry we require for these demanding times. When asked in one interview why he wrote such difficult poetry, Hill’s response also answers the question of why we should read him: because “[w]e are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other.” Selected Poems provides fresh occasion for scrutiny of this kind, which Geoffrey Hill uniquely and passionately delivers.

David C. Mahan (Ph.D., Cambridge) is the Director of the Rivendell Institute at Yale University and the author of An Unexpected Light: Theology and Witness in the Poetry and Thought of Charles Williams, Micheal O'Siadhail, and Geoffrey Hill.

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K NOWING C HRIST T ODAY ,the0shrinking0god.< Mark T. Coppenger Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, by Dallas Willard. HarperOne, 2009.

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allas Willard has “had it up to here”—with those who characterize and marginalize Christianity as a belief system lacking true knowledge; with the elevation of “feelings, traditions, force, ‘willpower,’ and blind commitment” over rationality; with those who equate knowledge claims with intolerance; with the media who portray faith as “believing what you know is not so;” with the evaporation of moral knowledge in society; with the secular university’s absurd claim to be rational; with the insular, sub-Christian behavior of the typical church and denomination; and with those who fail to be “open and gracious” toward people with differing perspectives.

So what’s not to like in Willard’s new book, Knowing Christ Today?

More than you might think.

There’s no denying the charms of the book. First, Willard quite rightly demonstrates that the theism “story” is reasonable and can stand toe to toe with the “nirvana” and “naturalist” stories. He holds strong on miracles and the Resurrection. Second, he skewers people who need it badly (when he hears Harvard’s Steven Pinker claim that “universities are about reason, pure and simple,” he asks, rhetorically, “Has he escaped committee duty?”). And third, his claims can be fresh, pointed, and plausible. Noting that “specialization” and “professionalization” have taken over the universities, he observes that there is no “‘department’ of reality, or of the good life, or of the good 103

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person and how to become one.” He further notes that science “cannot provide scientific knowledge of science.”

He certainly has a way with metaphor and analogy. For example, he compares moral knowledge with the knowledge of electricity—if society loses either, chaos is the consequence. “If the entire universe could originate from nothing,” Willard writes “then surely a cup of tea could originate from nothing.” Or when he criticizes the Christian scholar’s tendency to distinguish religious belief from academic learning, he suggests that “asking about the integration of faith and knowledge under current assumptions is a bit like asking whether more people live in the city or in the winter.”

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ut along the way, Willard makes some odd if not unfortunate moves. He overstates the persuasive power of theistic proofs: After presenting a version of the kalam/cosmological argument, he says that it “shows conclusively that there is something more than the physical or ‘natural’ universe.” Most philosophers of religion, including evangelicals, are disinclined to say that their work shows anything “conclusively.” For instance, in the introduction to “Two Dozen (Or So) Theistic Arguments ,” Alvin Plantinga says, “These arguments are not coercive in the sense that every person is obliged to accept their premises on pain of irrationality.” Rather, theists are more inclined to speak of establishing “plausibility” and “reasonableness” than of slam-dunk proof. They work more to counter assaults on the faith through “defeater defeaters” than to fashion escape-proof demonstrations. Of course, Willard is free to challenge this more modest approach, but he needs to give more cautious souls their due. As it stands, his claim comes off as wishful thinking, or as a sign that he’s underestimated the cognitive effects of the Fall.

He also repeatedly leaves Biblicists scratching their heads. Whether saying that “[a]ll human beings are equally loved by God,” that Jesus could just as well have been a woman, except for “some localized circumstances,” that in “the view of Jesus and the New Testament [. . .] love is everything,” that pastors “can lay down the burden of getting people to do things,” including the “enforcement” of “exclusiveness,” that God’s ways will result in “the ultimate satisfaction of everyone,” or that evolution is actually evidence for God’s existence, Willard prompts puzzlement if not rebuke. Is he saying God loved Esau as much as Jacob? That “Our Mother who art in heaven” would have worked well had it not been for ancient patriarchy? And 104

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what exactly did the cross propitiate? Is he saying Paul was out of line in pressing the Corinthian church to expel the fellow having an affair with a relative? Will the damned really be satisfied when all is said and done? And where are the verses that even hint at the splendor of theistic evolution?

Also, Willard’s zeal to teach that Christianity is more than mere belief (and to distance himself from philosophers who define knowledge as “justified true belief”), he leaves one wondering how the New Testament could give the term ‘believe’ such a prominent role.

Magnifying the passages where Paul talks of knowing (by acquaintance) Christ and God, he gives short shrift to the many verses resting heavily on belief. It’s as though he wishes Paul had stepped up to write, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’, and know in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (with apologies to Romans 10:9).

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illard channels Karl Rahner, though without naming him.

Keen on providing generous space for the “anonymous Christian,” he embraces a “Christian pluralism,” which holds “that people of ‘other’ religions or no religion at all may be ‘right with God’.” In this vein, he faults those whose Jesus is not “big enough”—the ones who read too narrowly John 14:6 (“No one comes to the Father except through me”) and Acts 4:12 (“There is no other name under heaven [. . .] by which we must be saved”). They’ve missed, respectively, the work of the “cosmic Christ” and the situational reference to Peter and John’s healing ministry at the Temple. Or so he argues.

He is also unreasonably hard on the local church and denominations. He repeatedly casts “organized religion” in an unfavorable light, making generous use of scare quotes to speak condescendingly of “Christians by socially recognized standards.” He observes, “Jesus [. . .] did not send his people out to make Christians or to start churches as we understand them today.” Really? Doesn’t church planting fit the Great Commission and the apostolic age wonderfully, as with the missionary-sending congregation in Antioch, with Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders, and with John’s record of letters to the seven churches of Revelation?

If, indeed, the churches we have today are marginal, where is the serious spiritual work being done? According to Willard, the real pastors are “spokespeople for Christ” spreading knowledge out in 105

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the world. “Their task is not to get people to believe things, to share ‘Christian’ feelings or rituals, to join Christian groups, or to be faithful to familiar Christian traditions –though all of these may have some place.” Well, at least, getting people to believe things and inviting them to church has some place in the Kingdom. Still, if Willard is right, Jesus is better served by “free range” pastors—supposedly like Willard himself.

The book aches for more examples. Who exactly are the ecclesiastical bad guys? Does he mean all of us who cherish our denominations, while cooperating with other Christians on a variety of matters? And what counts as a regrettable “peculiarity,” pointlessly dividing Christian groups today? Infant baptism? Gay ordination?

The Immaculate Conception? Ministerial vestments? Congregational polity? Covered-dish dinners? Are they all equally trivial?

Speaking of a want of examples, one would have hoped for more evangelical heroes, both in this book and in Willard’s earlier book, The Spirit of the Disciplines. I think he could use a bit more of John Bunyan, John Owen, David Brainerd, Lottie Moon, and J. C. Ryle to complement his Simone Weil, Karl Barth, Teresa of Avila, Dorothy Day, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (In his book, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, my Southern Seminary colleague Don Whitney addressed this sort of deficit.)

One gets the sense that Willard is proposing a sort of epistemologically muscular Christianity, scornfully impatient with the church’s intellectual asthmatics, relational myopics, and cultural arthritics. I just wish he would have been more patient with those of us who love the local congregation, our warts and all. Who take delight in the way that churches can cooperate in fielding thousands of evangelistic missionaries around the world. Who think that some denominations have gotten it doctrinally wrong in a big way and that others have gotten it doctrinally right in a big way—and that it makes good sense to join churches of “like faith and order.” I hope he’ll bear with believers like us.

Mark T. Coppenger is Professor of Christian Apologetics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including Touchstone, The American Spectator, USA Today and The Christian Scholar’s Review.

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T HE C HRISTIAN R EVOLUTION ,fashionable0enemies< Christopher Benson Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, by David Bentley Hart. Yale University Press, 2009.

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hen Friedrich Nietzsche authored his second Untimely Meditation, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), there was a hypertrophied sense of history among his German contemporaries. He urged his reader to hate any study of history that offers “instruction without invigoration” and “knowledge not attended by action.” Under the Hegelian philosophy of history, for example, Christianity was treated as an idea rather than a way of life, “denaturized” through abstraction and dissection, unrecognizable to an “impartial auditor.” Humanity needs, Nietzsche insisted, a history “for the sake of life and action, let alone for the purpose of extenuating the self-seeking life and the base and cowardly action. We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life.”

If the malady of Nietzsche’s day was an excess of history, ours is a deficiency of history, nowhere more conspicuous than in the oblivious writings of the so-called “New Atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, all dwarfs in the shadows of giants like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In their clumsy hands, Christianity is always treated as a poison rather than an elixir, a weapon rather than an olive branch, denaturized through pride and prejudice, unrecognizable to scholars and adherents of the religion. While the malady has changed, the prescription has not.

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Atheist Delusions is a history that serves life by restoring and revivifying the memories lost when the church and its “fashionable enemies” drank from Lethe. Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart argues for a brave thesis that will stiffen the backbone of Christians who suffer from sloth—the signature sin of postmodernity— and will spank the posterior of their enemies who suffer from pride—the signature sin of modernity: Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilization, whether convulsive or gradual, political or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity—that can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution”: a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.

Here is a genuine historian who possesses, in the words of Nietzsche, “the power to remint the universally known into something never heard of before, and to express the universal so simply and profoundly that the simplicity is lost in the profundity and the profundity in the simplicity.” Atheist Delusions is a rarity, on the order of the Black Prince’s Ruby, because its author is not a historian by training but by “great artistic facility, creative vision, [and] loving absorption in the empirical data.”

Do not expect Hart to indulge the temper tantrums of the New Atheists, except for when he occasionally cuts with the polemical edge of Tertullian, such as: There are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism.

The main purpose of the book is to transport the reader—who is separated by historical forgetfulness, cultural alienation, and banal familiarity with the present—to the early centuries of the Christian era, so he can become sensible again to “the novelty and uncanniness of the gospel as it was first proclaimed.” With astonishing success, Hart achieves his objective of showing

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how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues.

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ransportation to this revolutionary past, however, is not possible without first unveiling the ideology of “the modern,” which hides as imperceptibly in our Zeitgeist as a mimic octopus blends into the colors and textures of the sea floor. What is the ideology of the modern? According to Hart, it is the “story of the triumph of critical reason over ‘irrational’ faith, of the progress of social morality toward greater justice and freedom, of the ‘tolerance’ of the secular state, and of the unquestioned ethical primacy of either individualism or collectivism.” Again, with astonishing success, Hart achieves his objective of showing that what many of us are still in the habit of calling the “Age of Reason” was in many significant ways the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value; that the modern age is notable in large measure for the triumph of inflexible and unthinking dogmatism in every sphere of human endeavor (including the sciences) and for a flight from rationality to any number of soothing fundamentalisms, religious and secular; that the Enlightenment ideology of the modern as such does not even deserve any particular credit for the advance of modern science; that the modern secular state’s capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted, not solely by virtue of the superior technology at its disposal, but by its very nature; that among the chief accomplishments of modern culture have been a massive retreat to superstition and the gestation of especially pitiless form of nihilism.

Space does not permit me to survey the evidence that Hart marshals for his objectives. Let me hazard a prediction: Christians and heathens will undergo a paradigm shift when they realize, based on the substantive evidence and perspicacious analysis, that they have been enchanted by a tale—like “Little Red Riding Hood”—that is “false in every identifiable detail,” a tale memorably rehearsed by Hart:

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Once upon a time, it went, Western humanity was the cosseted and incurious ward of Mother Church; during this, the age of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity labored in brutish subjugation to dogma, superstition, and the unholy alliance of church and state. Withering blasts of fanaticism and fideism had long since scorched away the last remnants of classical learning; inquiry was stifled; the literary remains of classical antiquity had long ago been consigned to the fires of faith, and even the great achievements of “Greek science” were forgotten till Islamic civilization restored them to the West. All was darkness. Then, in the wake of the “wars of religion” that had torn Christendom apart, came the full flowering of the Enlightenment and with it the reign of reason and progress, the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new and revolutionary sense of human dignity. The secular nation-state arose, reduced religion to an establishment of the state or, in the course of time, to something altogether separate from the state, and thereby rescued Western humanity from the blood-steeped intolerance of religion. Now, at last, Western humanity has left its nonage and attained to its majority in science, politics, and ethics.

It is not my usual habit to quote at length, but Hart’s sentences are worth hearing because they are chords that defy imitation, truths that vibrate on the ear long after they are sounded.

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should mention three concerns. My first concern is that Hart’s exclusive commitment to Christus Victor, a motif of atonement that prevailed among the early church fathers, only partially explains why the gospel spread in late antiquity. Christus Victor holds that Christ, as a second Adam, saves us by defeating the powers of evil. I would argue, like Martin Luther, that a biblically comprehensive account of the atonement incorporates Christus Victor and penal substitution (Col. 2:13-15). The latter motif holds that Christ, as a sacrifice, saves guilty and condemned sinners by taking our sins on himself. The gospel transformed “the moral and spiritual consciousness of Western humanity” not just through the cosmic emphasis of Christus Victor, lest we reduce the gospel to social justice, as Hart sometimes does, but also through the personal emphasis of penal substitution. In short, the baptized Roman was not only freed from “the schemes of the devil,” “the rulers,” “the cosmic powers over this present darkness,” and “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”—Amen!—but also from “the wrath of God,” the judgment of the law, and the “wages of sin.”

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My second concern is that Hart’s contrast between the modern concept of freedom and the Christian concept is not sharp enough. In his brilliant chapter, “The Age of Freedom,” Hart claims that moderns departed from an antique understanding of freedom by maintaining that “there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom.” Hart rightly describes this “primal ideology” as nihilism. Libertarian freedom— conceived as pure spontaneity of the will—is a patent illusion, and should be seen as “a kind of slavery: to untutored principles, to empty caprice, to triviality, to dehumanizing values.” Nevertheless, the autonomous will has become the reigning god of our age, fed by “heroic and insatiable consumers.”

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o far, so good. My concern arises when Hart endorses what he calls a “classical understanding” of freedom, whether pagan or Christian, as “emancipation from whatever constrains us from living the life of rational virtue, or from experiencing the full fruition of our nature.” While he recognizes that those constraints include “our untutored passions, our willful surrender to momentary impulses, our own foolish or wicked choices,” he seems to express a semi-Pelagian confidence in the fallen will, cooperating with divine grace, to “achieve that end toward which our inmost nature is oriented from the first moment of existence.” In my view, the Reformed accent on total depravity corrects this error of synergism, as theologian Michael Horton writes: We do not deny that we cooperate with God’s grace and, by receiving the means of grace (Word and sacrament), grow into maturity in Christ, but we do deny that we can cooperate in our own regeneration (i.e., acceptance by God), our will being enslaved to sin until God graciously frees it to embrace Christ and all his benefits.

We are not declared righteous because we have cooperated with God’s grace; we are justified “freely by his grace” (Rom. 3:24) so that we can.

The free will teaching of the Greek fathers, which Hart adopts, does not adequately reckon with how sin deprives humans of soundness of will. Church historian Charles Partee succinctly articulates the Reformed view on freedom: “Two perils must be avoided. If divine sovereignty is overemphasized, the result is complete resignation. If 111

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human freedom is overemphasized, the result is brazen confidence or abject fear. Calvin’s astounding conclusion is that we should accept our freedom but not boast of it.”The only “live option,” to use William James’ terminology, is between libertarian freedom and Christian freedom that dares not speak its name; in the end, this is a “dead option” because the former is an illusion despites its appeal to our consumerist sensibilities.

My third and final concern is that Hart’s treatment of the Christian revolution is limited to the first four or five centuries of the early church, as if to suggest that the subsequent centuries of medieval Christendom and its Protestant challenge lost the revolutionary fever.

A schismatic whiff can be detected in this contestable assertion: The church—the only universally recognized transnational authority that could possibly rival or even overrule the power of the monarch—had to be reduced to a national establishment, an office of the state, or a mere social institution. This was the principal reason, after all, for the success of the Reformation, which flourished only where it served the interests of the secular state in its rebellion against the customs and laws of Christendom, and in its campaign against the autonomy of the church within its territories.

By overplaying the political aspect, Hart rules out the possibility that the Reformation succeeded because the radical message of the gospel was renewed. Presumably, Hart shares the idée fixe that “Orthodoxy has no stake in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation polemics.”

Horton’s reply to this dismissive attitude is worth repeating: Orthodoxy may not have a stake in the Reformation/CounterReformation polemics per se, but it must have a stake in the exegetical questions and answers raised by that momentous debate. If Orthodoxy has no stake in interpreting such scriptural themes as union with Christ, justification, sanctification, and related aspects of Christian teaching, then it is hardly Christian.

The Protestant revolution, much like the Patristic revolution, was “nothing less than—to use the words of Nietzsche—a ‘transvaluation of all values,’ a complete revision of the moral and conceptual categories by which human beings were to understand themselves and one another and their places within the world.”

Privileging the era of the early church above any other era risks chronological snobbery and ecclesial triumphalism. Using an Elvis 112

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Presley intonation, Rodney Clapp, editorial director of Brazos Press, writes: Classical Christian spirituality… is best respected and lived when it is not treated as an untouchable, frozen, and unchangeable deposit.

It is better inhabited from the inside out, constantly pushed and probed, presented with unprecedented questions and objections and sometimes daringly taken in a direction not previously considered. We live by faithful improvisation. Only then will the Spirit “mooo-ve” us from the past, into the future.

Faithful improvisation is the key to a revolutionary future, just as it was to a revolutionary past. Faithfulness without improvisation veers toward dogmatism; improvisation without faithfulness veers toward heresy. Let there be no doubt: the Christian revolution was not hatched in the basement of political dissidents but in the empyrean heaven, where Jesus Christ executes the primal act of the revolution—to keep the “form of God” (faithfulness) while taking the “form of a slave” (improvisation). The Incarnation is the revolution—so we are charged to perpetuate this slave revolt, being the noble face of Christ to the powerful and powerless.

Christopher Benson is a teacher and book reviewer in Denver, Colorado. His writing has appeared in The Weekly Standard, Christian Scholar’s Review, Books & Culture, Image, Modern Reformation, and The Christian Century.

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The Wise Men G.K. Chesterton Step softly, under snow or rain, To find the place where men can pray; The way is all so very plain That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore On tortured puzzles from our youth, We know all the labyrinthine lore, We are the three wise men of yore, And we know all things but truth.

We have gone round and round the hill And lost the wood among the trees, And learnt long names for every ill, And serve the made gods, naming still The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil Of vision and philosophy, The Serpent that brought all men bale, He bites his own accursed tail, And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed...

With voices low and lanterns lit; So very simple is the road, That we may stray from it.

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The world grows terrible and white, And blinding white the breaking day; We walk bewildered in the light, For something is too large for sight, And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun (... We need but walk a little way, We need but see a latch undone...)

The Child that played with moon and sun Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed, The old strange house that is our own, Where trick of words are never said, And Mercy is as plain as bread, And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies, And low and large and fierce the Star; So very near the Manger lies That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes To roar to the resounding plain.

And the whole heaven shouts and shakes, For God Himself is born again, And we are little children walking Through the snow and rain.

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4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ Saint Ambrose In each volume of T H E C I TY , we reprint writing or remarks from great thinkers of the faith. Here is an excerpt of a letter from Saint Ambrose, (c. 337-397) the Bishop of Milan and one of the original four doctors of the church, on Christ, courage and the cross, as translated by Philip Schaff in 1887.

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ereby we are brought to understand that the prophecy of the Incarnation, “The Lord created me the beginning of His ways for His works,” means that the Lord Jesus was created of the Virgin for the redeeming of the Father’s works. Truly, we cannot doubt that this is spoken of the mystery of the Incarnation, forasmuch as the Lord took upon Him our flesh, in order to save the works of His hands from the slavery of corruption, so that He might, by the sufferings of His own body, overthrow him who had the power of death. For Christ’s flesh is for the sake of things created, but His Godhead existed before them, seeing that He is before all things, whilst all things exist together in Him. His Godhead, then, is not by reason of creation, but creation exists because of the Godhead; even as the Apostle showed, saying that all things exist because of the Son of God, for we read as follows: “But it was fitting that He, through Whom and because of Whom are all things, after bringing many sons to glory, should, as Captain of their salvation, be made perfect through suffering.” Has he not plainly declared that the Son of God, Who, by reason of His Godhead, was the Creator of all, did in after time, for the salvation of His people, submit to the taking on of the flesh and the suffering of death?

Now for the sake of what works the Lord was “created” of a virgin, He Himself, whilst healing the blind man, has shown, saying: “In Him must I work the works of Him that sent Me.” Furthermore He said in the same Scripture, that we might believe Him to speak of the Incarnation: “As long as I am in this world, I am the Light of this world,” for, so far as He is man, He is in this world for a season, but as God He exists at all times. In another place, too, He says: “Lo, I am with you even unto the end of the world.”

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Nor is there any room for questioning with respect to “the beginning,” seeing that when, during His earthly life, He was asked, “Who art Thou?” He answered: “The beginning, even as I tell you” (Principium quod et loquor vobis). This refers not only to the essential nature of the eternal Godhead, but also to the visible proofs of virtues, for hereby hath He proved Himself the eternal God, in that He is the beginning of all things, and the Author of each several virtue, in that He is the Head of the Church, as it is written: “Because He is the Head of the Body, of the Church; Who is the beginning, first-begotten from the dead.”

It is clear, then, that the words “beginning of His ways,” which, as it seems, we must refer to the mystery of the putting on of His body, are a prophecy of the Incarnation. For Christ’s purpose in the Incarnation was to pave for us the road to heaven. Mark how He says: “I go up to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God.” Then, to give you to know that the Almighty Father appointed His ways to the Son, after the Incarnation (secundum incarnationem), you have in Zechariah the words of the angel speaking to Joshua clothed in filthy garments: “Thus saith the Lord Almighty: If thou wilt walk in My ways and observe My precepts.” What is the meaning of that filthy garb save the putting on of the flesh?

Now the ways of the Lord are, we may say, certain courses taken in a good life, guided by Christ, Who says, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.” The way, then, is the surpassing power of God, for Christ, is our way, and a good way, too, is He, a way which hath opened the kingdom of heaven to believers. Moreover, the ways of the Lord are straight, as it is written: “Make Thy ways known unto me, O Lord.” Chastity is a way, faith is a way, abstinence is a way.

There is, indeed, a way of virtue, and there is a way of wickedness; for it is written: “And see if there be any way of wickedness in me.”

Christ, then, is the beginning of our virtue. He is the beginning of purity, Who taught maidens not to look for the embraces of men, but to yield the purity of their bodies and minds to the service of the Holy Spirit rather than to a husband. Christ is the beginning of frugality, for He became poor, though He was rich. Christ is the beginning of patience, for when He was reviled, He reviled not again, when He was struck, He did not strike back. Christ is the beginning of humility, for He took the form of a servant, though in the majesty of His 118

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power He was equal with God the Father. From Him each several virtue has taken its origin.

For this cause, then, that we might learn these divers virtues, “a Son was given us, Whose beginning was upon His shoulder” (Filius datus est nobis, cujus principium super humeros ejus). That “beginning” is the Lord’s Cross—the beginning of strong courage, wherewith a way has been opened for the holy martyrs to enter the sufferings of the Holy War.

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his beginning did Isaiah see, and therefore he says: “A Child is born, a Son is given to us,” as also did the Magi, and therefore worshipped they, when they saw the little One in the stable, and said: “A Child is born,” and, when they saw the star, declared, “A Son is given to us.” On the one hand, a gift from earth—on the other, a gift from heaven—and both are One Person, perfect in respect of each, without any changeableness in the Godhead, as without any taking away from the fulness of the Manhood. One Person did the Magi adore, to one and the same they offered their gifts, to show that He Who was seen in the stall was the very Lord of heaven.

Mark how the two verbs differ in their import: “A Child is born, a Son is given.” Though born of the Father, yet is He not born, but given to us, forasmuch as the Son is not for our sakes, but we for the Son’s. For indeed He was not born to us, being born before us, and the maker of all things created: nor is He now brought to life for the first time, Who was always, and was in the beginning; on the other hand, that which before-time was not is born to us. Again we find it thus recorded, how that the angel, when he spoke to the shepherds, said that He had been born: “Who is this day born to us a Saviour, Who is Christ the Lord, in the city of David.” To us, then, was born that which was not before—that is, a child of the Virgin, a body from Mary—for this was made after man had been created, whereas the Godhead was before us.

Some manuscripts read as follows: “A Child is born to us a Son is given to us;” that is to say, He, Who is Son of God, is born as Mary’s child for us, and given to us. As for the fact that He is “given,” listen to the prophet’s words: “And grant us Thy salvation.” But that which is above us is given: what is from heaven is given: even as indeed we read concerning the Spirit, that “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, Who is given unto us.”

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But note how this passage is as water upon fire to a crowd of heresies. “A Child is born to us,” not to the Jews; “to us,” not to the Manichæans; “to us,” not to the Marcionites. The prophet says “to us,” that is, to those who believe, not to unbelievers. And He indeed, in His pitifulness, was born for all, but it is the disloyalty of heretics that hath brought it to pass that the birth of Him Who was born for all should not profit all. For the sun is bidden to rise upon the good and the bad, but to them that see not there is no appearance of sunrise.

Even as the Child, then, is born not unto all, but unto the faithful: so the Son is given to the faithful and not to the unbelieving. He is given to us, not to the Photinians; for they affirm that the Son of God was not given unto us, but was born and first began to exist amongst us. To us is He given, not to the Sabellians, who will not hear of a Son being given, maintaining that Father and Son are one and the same.

Unto us is He given, not unto the Arians, in whose judgment the Son was not given for salvation, but sent over subject and inferior, to whom, moreover, He is no “Counsellor,” inasmuch as they hold that He knows nought of the future, no Son, since they believe not in His eternity, though of the Word of God it is written: “That which was in the beginning;” and again: “In the beginning was the Word.”To return to the passage we set before us to discuss. “In the beginning,” saith the Scripture, “before He made the earth, before He made the deeps, before He brought forth the springs of water, before all the hills, He begat Me.”

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