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Critics of Biblical Studies often charge that the discipline attends only to the minuscule, the pedantic, the trendy, the inane, thereby sucking the life out of the faith of wandering souls who dare enter its ranks. Commentaries, with their discussions of questions that never arrive at any definitive answers, and dissertations, with subject matter so narrow that only their authors will ever care to read them, stand as chief examples of these failings. But books such as D. Stephen Long’s Hebrews (a volume in WJK’s Belief series) and David M. Moffitt’s Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews (a “lightly revised” version of his 2010 Duke dissertation) refute such sweeping judgments. In my opinion, both exhibit an ancient and recently revived commitment to studying the Bible not simply for the intellectual curiosity of academia but ultimately for the life of the church.

In Atonement and the Logic of the Resurrection, Moffitt’s ecclesial commitment only explicitly surfaces in his acknowledgements (“it is my sincere hope that [this work] will be of benefit to both the church and the academy”), but implicitly it courses throughout the book; his argument makes a real difference for the interpretation of Scripture and therefore matters for the church. This claim is no small one, as he seeks to provide “a substantive re-reading” of the letter that acknowledges the presence and the necessity of Jesus’ resurrection. Readers who haven’t pored over Hebrews lately, much less interacted with recent waves of biblical scholarship concerning this epistle, might question the boldness of Moffitt’s claim. After all, why would anyone need to argue for the centrality of the resurrection for any book of the New Testament? Doesn’t each one affirm Jesus’ resurrection? Actually, the Epistle to the Hebrews explicitly mentions Jesus’ resurrection only once (13:20: “The God of peace, who led up the great shepherd of the sheep from the dead by the blood of the eternal covenant, our Lord Jesus Christ”), which leads the majority of interpreters, clearly catalogued by Moffitt in his opening chapter, to claim that “the category of Jesus’ heavenly exaltation leads the author of Hebrews to downplay that of Jesus’ resurrection.”

Moffitt employs a three-pronged argument to defeat this assumption. First, he collects examples from various forms of Second Temple literature and traditions which exhibit an eschatological hope that humanity will one day inhabit a place of glory above the angels when they take possession of the renewed creation. Hebrews’ resonance with many of the themes of this literature leads Moffitt to claim, “When God crowned [Jesus] with glory and honor, he became the first human being to retain all the glory that Adam lost.”

With this argument, Moffitt provides an enlightening answer to the oft-posed query of why the author of Hebrews begins by comparing Jesus to the angels. His answer? Jesus is human, while the angels are spirits. Therefore, based on the promises to Adam and Abraham and the hope for the fulfillment of those promises, Hebrews conceives of Jesus as the first human to be afforded a place of honor over the fiery angelic spirits. If Jesus is the inaugurator of this hope, he had to have a human body to be distinguished above the angels. Thus the hints toward a bodily resurrection begin.

Next, Moffitt needs to show how his argument for the importance of the resurrection in Hebrews accords with the signature emphasis distinguishing the author of this letter: a high priestly Christology. Moffitt suggests that Jesus was fit to become a high priest in the enigmatic order of Melchizedek because he possesses enduring life. Again, the reader might wonder how this claim could be controversial. At issue is the meaning of perfection in Hebrews as a qualification for Jesus’ priestly ministry. Moffitt observes a sequence from suffering unto perfection unto priesthood and thereby clarifies and interprets correctly, in my opinion, the narrative of the author. Jesus’ perfection means that he, unlike other high priests, will never again succumb to death. Hence, the moment when this reality unfolds is the moment of Christ’s resurrection. In essence, “His resurrection from the dead enables him to be a high priest.”

Finally, any claim for the necessity of the resurrection for the logic of Hebrews must also address the metaphor of atonement undergirding much of the letter. The author of Hebrews understands Jesus’ death through the lens of the Yom Kippur ritual where the high priest would atone for the sins and impurities of the people of Israel. Like the high priest, Jesus enters into the holy place with blood to atone for sin. Most commentators link this atonement with Jesus’ death on the cross, but Moffitt argues, drawing from conversations in ritual and sacrificial studies, that the guild has gotten the logic precisely backward. Jesus’ blood in Hebrews is not a reference to his death but (in the vein of Lev. 17:11) a reference to his life. His death is not the moment of atonement, but only the inauguration or the “front end of a process that culminates in the atoning moment.” That atoning moment occurs when Jesus offers his living self, body, and blood before God’s throne after the resurrection.

For the author of Hebrews, Moffitt claims, Jesus’ resurrection matters. He had to have a human body to be elevated above the angels. He had to possess enduring life to become high priest in the order of Melchizedek. He had to appear before God with a blood sacrifice to atone for sin, and he did so after he ascended to heaven with his resurrected body. Hence, Moffitt may not convince individuals repelled by Hebrews’ references to bloody rituals and thoroughgoing reliance on the stories and cult of the Old Testament to bring this letter to the center of the canon, but he has demonstrated, and convincingly so in my opinion, that this letter stands squarely in the vibrant stream of the confessions of the early church. In his words:

[F]or the author of this homily, the heavenly Son came into the world, suffered and died, rose again, ascended into heaven, made his offering for eternal atonement, and sat down at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there, the author avers, he will come to judge the living and the dead. This is the outline of the author’s Christology and the context in which he works out his understanding of how Jesus effected atonement.

If Hebrews becomes one more voice from our heritage that boldly proclaims its belief that “on the third day he ascended from the dead,” members of Christ’s body who question the resurrection now have less reason to do so. The life of the church depends completely upon the resurrected life of its Lord, and Moffitt has tuned our ears to hear another voice in the canon of voices who say so.

Long’s Hebrews commentary is a fitting dialogue partner with Moffitt’s work not only because he draws from it, and proclaims its positive contribution, but also because he has a robust view of the resurrection as well, arguing that such a claim is “decisive for Hebrews’ argument.” This attention to resurrection is only one of many “creedal” features of his commentary.

Long is not a biblical scholar but a systematic theologian, but works like his own show how to bridge the Gablerian divide. Approaching his commentary reminds one of Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Both aim to be more than “the first step toward a commentary,”[1] offering instead “a reconsideration of what is set out in the epistle, until the actual meaning of it is disclosed.”[2] Or, as the series editors, Amy Plantinga Pauw and the late William C. Placher, put it: “the series’ authors will seek to explain the theological importance of the texts for the church today, using biblical scholarship as needed for such explication.” Consequently, Long approaches the text with the fresh eyes of an outsider. For example, he introduces his readers to the theological value the early Church Fathers attributed to Hebrews’ statement that Jesus is both the radiance of God’s glory and the imprint of his being (Heb. 1:3). For them, the radiance “expresses the coeternity whereas the ‘exact imprint’ of his substance reflects the distinct agency of his person.”

Long then acknowledges that the author of Hebrews did not intend such a differentiation, but used the two metaphors to reinforce one another. The art of his reading of this epistle is that he not only affirms this historical critical claim but also shows that the Church Fathers would do the same. They saw the terms duplicating one another, but went a step further to ask why the author chose to include the duplication. Long’s appeal to the Church Fathers teaches us to read this weighty phrase in a deeper way:

The duplication suggests the Son shares the essence of God, but does so in a unique way. He is the “repetition” of God through a distinct agency. To express this requires language that expresses both sameness of essence (radiance) and distinction of person (exact imprint), without the latter opposing the former.

At the same time, Long avoids the stereotype of an interdisciplinarian who provides only surface—or, even worse, incorrect—interpretations of a discipline foreign to his own. Long reads Scripture in its original language quite well. He attends carefully to both the content and the form of the letter. He navigates the rough places in the terrain of Hebrews scholarship with solid knowledge of the debates, and he offers plausible and insightful readings of the text, as any good commentator should do. For example, his commentary includes one of the clearest interpretations I’ve seen of perfection in the epistle. His excellent discussion concludes, “[Jesus’] obedience, learned through suffering, makes him perfect. In other words, he brings his perfection as the ‘exact imprint’ of God into creation, into its space and time, and achieves it there. He becomes what he is.”

What distinguishes Long’s commentary, and all other volumes in the Belief series, are the “further reflections” scattered throughout the text. In each of these venues, a theme from Hebrews provides an entrée into a theological discussion with voices from the past and present, the near and far, the academic and the popular. Ernst Käsemann’s gnostic interpretation of Hebrews, now largely dismissed, provides an opportunity to contextualize the propensity for gnosticism in the church. Hebrews’ interest in the Jewish cult demands discussion of traditional atonement theories and their contemporary challengers. The requirements of faith before God (Heb. 11:6) spill into an analysis of Catholic and Protestant epistemology. At times, these discussions just whet my appetite, and I wish he had gone into even more depth. But in providing the references and in introducing the topics, he equips the interested reader with sources for delving further into the topics.

Long argues that we should read Hebrews for three reasons. First, the author’s artful reading of Israel’s scriptures in light of Christ’s triumph teaches us how to read Scripture. Second, it jolts us out of flat modern metaphysics and opens our eyes to the richness and mystery of the real world. Finally, it “integrates doctrine, ethics, and politics, helping the faithful negotiate troubled times.” On this last point, Long’s own work follows the model of the perpetually anonymous auctor. Like a Socratic gadfly, he asks how exactly readers can hear the message of this letter. In other words, with Barth, he affirms that historical criticism is insufficient; one must think theologically about the text with the aid of the universal (in time and space) church.

Even the addition of theological discussions to word and history studies, however, falls short of the grace offered in this letter. Long wonders provocatively, “Can Hebrews be heard only by those who have been divested of some property (10:34), pursue peace with everyone (12:14), show hospitality to strangers (13:2), attend to prisoners (13:3), or honor marriage (13:4)?” If we do not show hospitality (as Long himself had opportunity to do for a young Guatemalan migrant worker) can we really hear the word? Can we really hear Hebrews when mutual love remains elusive between denominations? His questions remind us that doctrine should shape our character, but that the opposite is also true. Our lived character prepares us to grasp the doctrine.

In some ways, Moffitt’s and Long’s books are quite different. The former is a published dissertation intended for a highly specified audience (consider all the German, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek a chance to boost your language skills!), while the latter is an interdisciplinary commentary written for biblical scholars, theologians, clergy, and lay people alike. These efforts are united, however, in more than just subject matter. Far from being dead tomes of the ivory tower, they exemplify a vibrant study of the Bible that offers new life to the church because practitioners like these perform their work in the service of a risen and living Savior.

Amy L. B. Peeler joined the faculty of Wheaton College in the fall of 2012 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University.

1. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, preface to the 2nd edition, trans. from the 6th ed. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford Univ. Press, 1933), p. 6.

2. Ibid., p. 7.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It is February of 1969 and a new television series is beginning on BBC2. The first images—they are in color, which is noteworthy—are of Michaelangelo’s David, Botticelli’s Primavera (in closeup), a series of beautiful buildings both ancient and modern. A noble and passionate organ piece by Bach plays. Finally one word appears on the screen: “CIVILISATION”—followed soon by this: “A Personal View by Kenneth Clark.” In weekly episodes that last into May, the learned and patrician Clark, one of the great art historians of his age, guides his viewers through the history of European art from the fall of Rome to the rise of modernist architecture in the New World. In the first sentence he speaks, Clark quotes John Ruskin’s view that it is through the history of art that we can best understand a given civilization’s core commitments and true achievements; for the following 13 hours he makes his viewers believe that Ruskin was right.

The series was extraordinarily successful, and the primary lesson that producers at the BBC learned from it was that the “personal view” was key: the series worked not because it provided many beautiful images from the history of Western art—though it did that, and filmed on 35mm stock as well, which is why modern DVDs of the show look so good—but because viewers loved being guided by Clark. His distinctive sensibilities, his willingness to pronounce his own judgments and to own them as just that, personal, captured viewers’ imagination.

So the BBC decided to do it again—but on a larger scale. If the history of Western art made a good story, why shouldn’t the whole history of humanity make a better one—if you could find the right teller? And thus was born, in 1973, The Ascent of Man, a primer on “cultural evolution” hosted by the mathematician, historian of science, and polymath Jacob Bronowski. This series opens not with Bach but with Bronowski’s own reedy voice—”Man is a singular creature”—but when the title sequence arrives, it announces its debt to Civilisation: “THE ASCENT OF MAN,” the first screen reads, followed by “A Personal View by J. Bronowski.”

The Ascent of Man was produced by Adrian Malone, and one of its directors was David Kennard. A few years later they moved to the United States, where they decided that they would look for a subject even larger than the long history of human evolution: Why not the story of the universe itself? And so in 1981 their new PBS series was launched, once more in the 13 parts that Clark had apparently made canonical. It begins with what appears to be the camera moving through a field of stars—a technique pioneered by Douglas Trumbull in the later, phantasmagorical scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—as ethereal music by Vangelis plays. Then the title: “COSMOS.” Then: “By Carl Sagan.” And on a third screen: “A Personal Voyage.”

We see huge ocean waves breaking, and then a man standing on a grassy cliffed coast with a heavy sea off to the right. (Perhaps in Newfoundland?) He begins to speak, not in the polished Oxbridge tones of Clark and Bronowski but in an oddly modulated voice hinting at Sagan’s native Brooklyn: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if from a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”

Everything here—the music, the images, the quietly impassioned tones of Sagan—reinforce this core idea: “We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Throughout the series Sagan repeats two key messages. The first is that science is our only true guide to the mysteries we approach:

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, an entirely human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

The second message emerges from the Cold War politics of the time: instead of approaching the Cosmos with reverence, “we are directed far more toward war.” We endanger ourselves and our planet because we fail to realize that “present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking around for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths.” We must unlearn that arrogance; we must cultivate awe in the face of the immensity of the Cosmos. This is our only hope.

Millions of people watched Cosmos—indeed, until Ken Burns’ Civil War series appeared a decade later it was the most-viewed show in PBS history, and if you count worldwide viewers it may still be the most-viewed of all. Among the viewers was a man in Covington, Louisiana who almost certainly watched it with a glass of bourbon in his hand. This man, whose name was Walker Percy, was a doctor of medicine but instead of practicing that art had become a writer. He was deeply interested in the manifold varieties of human oddity, preferring perhaps the farcical to the tragic—or at any rate he was inclined to see the farcical within the tragic. For this reason, and because as a writer he kept irregular hours, he also liked to watch the Phil Donahue Show, the first of the tabloid talk shows that later became ubiquitous on American daytime TV. It occurred to Walker Percy that a strange, twisted thread linked Carl Sagan’s “personal voyage” through the Cosmos and the bizarre array of bruised and weird people who showed up so regularly on Donahue’s set. Thirty years ago he published the book in which he traced that thread. It is called Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self-Help Book, and it may as well have been written yesterday.

2.In the second chapter of the Philosophical Fragments (1844), Søren Kierkegaard introduces a key idea in this way: “Suppose there was a king who loved a maiden of lowly station in life …”—after which follows something considerably longer than an example or even an anecdote, but not quite a short story. It’s a kind of brief parabolic tale, a little fable. Similarly, in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard approaches the terrible story of the binding of Isaac by retelling it over and over again, beginning invariably with “It was early in the morning” and ramifying from there into different branches, different ways of trying to make sense of what Abraham did. (“No one is so great as Abraham! Who is capable of understanding him?”)

It is a curious and affecting way of pursuing philosophical and theological questions: to burst into story, as characters in Broadway musicals burst into song. Percy is one of the few who have taken Kierkegaard as a model in this respect. Lost in the Cosmos is stuffed with mini-stories, cast in the form of “thought experiments” which conclude with questions for the reader. There is the soldier of the future who may or may not be able to see the Parthenon; the “ex-suicide” who goes to work because he doesn’t have to; the several observers of a corn dance at a Taos Indian pueblo; the physicist (“You write about the Cosmos”) whose friend and neighbor is also a popularizing scientist—but a more successful one.

These stories culminate in questions because Lost in the Cosmos is (so its subtitle informs us) “The Last Self-Help Book,” and takes the form of a “Twenty-Question Multiple-Choice Self-Help Quiz to test your knowledge of the peculiar status of the self, your self and other selves, in the Cosmos, and your knowledge of what to do with your self in these, the last years of the twentieth century”—the sort of quiz you might take while thumbing through an issue of Reader’s Digest or Ladies’ Home Journal or Psychology Today, but afflicted with a comic gigantism, inflated wildly and parodically to 250 pages. Question 20 (“The Self Marooned in the Cosmos”)—which, in the spirit of the thing, naturally becomes three questions—is embedded in 40 pages of narrative about a handful of survivors on a blasted post-nuclear-holocaust Earth.

Among the other narratives, one of the longest and most provocative is part of Question 8 (“The Promiscuous Self”) and is called “The Last Donahue Show.” It is the last Donahue show because Phil’s conversation with and about a pregnant 14-year-old named Penny—”I want to have my baby. I think babies are neat”—is interrupted by the sudden arrival on the set of three uninvited strangers, two of whom have inexplicably traveled through time while the third has (rather more explicably) traveled from distant space. One visitor is a Confederate colonel named John Pelham. The second is John Calvin—yes, that John Calvin. And the third is an unnamed representative of an advanced alien civilization who has come to announce the imminent nuclear destruction of all, or almost all, life on Earth.

So what in the world is going on here? We might begin to grasp the point by noting that at the end of the last episode of Cosmos, Carl Sagan solemnly intones,

The human species is now undertaking a great venture that if successful will be as important as the colonization of the land or the descent from the trees. We are haltingly, tentatively breaking the shackles of Earth—metaphorically, in confronting and taming the admonitions of those more primitive brains within us; physically, in voyaging to the planets and listening for the messages from the stars. These two enterprises are linked indissolubly.

To this image of a voyaging, questing, shackle-breaking humanity moving forth boldly into the Cosmos, Percy’s fable implicitly responds with a question: What if the Cosmos were to come to us? And were to come in the form of a highly advanced race that has concluded that we suffer from a not-fully-understood “disorder” that makes us “a potential threat to all civilizations in the G2V region of the galaxy”? Among all the species in the G2V region, the Cosmic Stranger says, we are “the only one which is by nature sentimental, murderous, self-hating, and self-destructive.” We have to be destroyed before we communicate our disorder to other worlds.

As Phil Donahue says in response to this news, “Heavy!”

3.Stuck right into the middle of Lost in the Cosmos is a 40-page “intermezzo” that Percy calls “A Semiotic Primer of the Self.” It’s prefaced by a kind of apology in which Percy predicts that many readers will not be satisfied with it and, anyway, it “can be skipped without fatal consequences.” But Percy certainly thought it the most important part of his book. In fact, it sums up and often repeats things he had been writing for the previous 30 years, ever since, early in the 1950s, he had started reading some then-recent work on symbolic thought—especially Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key—which in turn led him back to the philosophy of language and communication developed in the late 19th century by Charles Sanders Peirce. Most of Percy’s publications in the decade before his first novel, The Moviegoer, appeared in 1961 were essays on semiotics, that is, the study of signification.

When Percy collected those essays in 1975, in a book called The Message in the Bottle, he wrote a prefatory essay that covers much of the same ground that he would later cover in his “Semiotic Primer of the Self.” In that essay, “The Delta Factor,” he describes the collection as “the meager fruit of twenty years’ off-and-on thinking about the subject, of coming at it from one direction, followed by failure and depression and giving up, followed by making up novels to raise my spirits.” This is not the only place where he suggests that his inquiries into semiotics were the primary focus of his intellectual life, to which his fiction was secondary.

He returned to these same themes over and over because he thought them absolutely essential to the formation of an adequate “theory of man”—but, as he sometimes ruefully commented, “people are not interested.” That’s from a self-interview he wrote in 1977, in which he went on to claim that as bad as the 20th century had been, things “have to get even worse before people realize that they don’t have the faintest idea what sort of creature man is. Then they might want to know. Until then, one is wasting one’s time. I’m not interested in butting my head against a stone wall.” And yet five years after writing these words he was butting his head against that same stone wall one more time—though perhaps from a slightly different angle. The chief difference between Lost in the Cosmos and his earlier semiotic inquiries is that he had come to realize the fundamental role that television played in the semiotic formation of the American self.

All signification involves mediation: any sign mediates in multiple ways, between a person’s mind and a concept, or a thing, or another person’s mind. Media are systems of signification; and the people who populate media signify and thus mediate. Did Kenneth Clark get chosen by the BBC to host Civilisation because he was an authority on its core subjects? No doubt; but more to the point, Clark was recognized by a large audience as an authority on its subjects because he was chosen by the BBC. He mediates culture to his audience—just as Carl Sagan, in precisely the same way, mediates science, and Phil Donahue mediates a very different subset of culture than does Clark. Each of these figures offers “a personal view” of an issue or “a personal voyage” into a subject and in so doing makes the abstract and the difficult (or in Donahue’s case the just plain weird) seem accessible, recognizably human. Television provides for us a series of authoritative mediators of images, who are themselves, though we are not encouraged to think about this, also images.

We are not encouraged to think about how the structures of mediation work because that would cause us to question them and our relation to them. That is, we might start reflecting on the semiotic construction of the self, and begin to see the formation of our selves as problematic, none of which is good for business. American media culture, Percy believed, involves a lunatic oscillation between absolute indulgence of the self (Donahue) and absolute evasion of it (Sagan). Looked at in one way—in any number of ways—Phil Donahue and Carl Sagan have very little in common; looked at in Percy’s way, they serve an almost identical function as guides who gently distract us from attention to how we’re being formed and how we might be formed differently. Percy’s task, therefore, is to bring the self with all its contradictions into proper focus, to subject it to the harsh light of truth.

But he knows that we do not wish to experience this, so he follows Kierkegaard’s model of ironic and comical “indirect communication.” Percy is to us what Virgil was to Dante, but cannot fulfill that role straightforwardly because of our hostility to anyone who claims moral authority. But maybe a sardonic, foul-mouthed, bourbon-drinking Catholic Virgil is the one we both need and deserve.

4.Carl Sagan first became known to the general public as an authority on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and when Percy makes Sagan the central character of Lost in the Cosmos he clearly has this point in mind. (I should pause here to acknowledge that I owe Carl Sagan a great debt: when I was fifteen I discovered at my local public library a copy of Intelligent Life in the Universe, a book Sagan co-wrote with the Soviet physicist I. S. Shklovsky on a subject with which I was fascinated at the time. Several chapters of the book feature quotations from a book by Loren Eiseley called The Immense Journey: these quotations intrigued me enough to send me on a search for Eiseley’s book, which I came to adore. Eiseley was for a number of years my favorite writer, and I still hold him in great esteem.)

Yes, I seriously mean to claim that the central character in Lost in the Cosmos is Carl Sagan, even though he is not mentioned directly until quite late in the book. If we understand Sagan’s prominence in American middlebrow culture in the early 1980s we will see Percy’s book’s title as a pointed reference to the PBS series; and then relatively early in the book, to reinforce that point, we meet the fictional scientist who “writes about the Cosmos” and gets invited to talk shows. Question 17 of the Lost in the Cosmos self-help quiz is titled, “The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is So Anxious to Establish Communication with an ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence).” And the question itself is: “Why is Carl Sagan so lonely?” It seems to Percy that one important prompt of any deep desire for contact with extraterrestrial intelligence is a sense of absence or deficiency—deficiency in one’s own self, in others’ selves, in the world. But what, Percy wonders, what precisely is this absence? What is it that makes us look out into the Cosmos with such longing?

At around the same time that he was working on Cosmos, Sagan was writing a screenplay about the first human encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. It is difficult to overstate how important this subject was to American popular culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind—featuring as a significant character a French scientist, played by the great director François Truffaut, whose desire to meet intelligent aliens is highly reminiscent of Sagan’s own enthusiasm for ETI—had appeared in 1977. Five years later, Spielberg would direct the even more popular E.T. Sagan, writing in the midst of this craze that he had done a good deal to fan into flame, couldn’t get the screenplay developed, so he turned it into a novel, Contact (1985); only in 1997, the year after Sagan’s premature death, did a film version appear.

The protagonist of Contact is a scientist named Ellie Arroway (played in the film by Jodie Foster), who admits that she does not, cannot, believe in God because there is no evidence, no “data,” supporting his existence. But, in a twist rather more ironic than one might have expected from Sagan, when Dr. Arroway meets intelligent aliens, all evidence of that meeting is destroyed, and she has to face pervasive and scornful disbelief of her story. In the movie’s most famous speech, Arroway explains why she does not, given this utter absence of evidence, admit that she never met aliens:

Because I can’t. I … had an experience … I can’t prove it, I can’t even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever … A vision … of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how … rare, and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish … I … could share that … I wish, that everyone, if only for one … moment, could feel … that awe, and humility, and hope. But … That continues to be my wish.

And one more layer of irony: many times over the years I have seen this speech claimed by Christians as expressing their own commitment to belief in the face of skepticism and scorn.

In Contact, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens we meet are perhaps more technologically developed than we are but they clearly feel a kinship with us that they wish to deepen. This vision offers a radical alternative to the previously dominant idea that such aliens would want to destroy us out of sheer but inexplicable malice. But the possibility that an extraterrestrial intelligence might look upon us with moral disgust and even horror never crosses the popular mind. Percy sees this as a lamentable failure of imagination.

5.I noted earlier that the last and longest narrative set-piece in Lost in the Cosmos relates the experiences of a tiny handful of humans who have survived the nuclear attack on Earth by an alien race that has deemed us too murderous to be allowed to infect the rest of the Cosmos. Percy prefaces this narrative with a note in which he credits Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos, and its accompanying book, with inspiring his extended science-fictional riff. “Sagan’s book gave me much pleasure,” Percy writes,

a pleasure which was not diminished (perhaps it was increased) by Sagan’s unmalicious, even innocent, scientism, the likes of which I have not encountered since the standard bull sessions in high school and college—up to but not past the sophom*ore year …. For me it was more diverting than otherwise to see someone sketch the history of Western scientific thought and leave out Judaism and Christianity.

Percy briefly suggests some elements of a truer history before insisting once more (perhaps disingenuously) that he bears no hostility towards Sagan, whose “sophom*oric scientism” is not “deplorable”:

—no, what is deplorable is that these serious issues involving God and the nature of man should be co-opted by the present disputants, a popularizer like Sagan and fundamentalists who believe God created the world six thousand years ago. It’s enough to give both science and Christianity a bad name.

Percy’s critique here is more subtle than it might at first appear. Science is not the problem; even a “sophom*oric scientism” is not the problem. The problem is science and scientism and religion alike being filtered through the semiotics of the “personal view” and the “personal voyage”: it is the television-based cult of personality that’s mind-numbing and soul-killing, whether the personality so celebrated is that of Carl Sagan, Phil Donahue, or Percy’s fellow Louisianan Jimmy Swaggart, whose evangelistic program was in 1983 carried by more than 250 stations around the country.

People—people in their role as viewers—are receptive to cults of personality because such cults distract us from the dislocations of our very selves, and from the suffering those dislocations cause. The kind of literate, educated person who might pick up a book by Walker Percy can see how that works in the case of the Phil Donahue Show, which is why “The Last Donahue Show” comes fairly early in Lost in the Cosmos. It’s a savagely funny parody, but it also flatters our sensibilities. That Carl Sagan’s cosmic meditations, shown in primetime and on PBS, might work on its viewers in the same way is not so easy to see, and not so comforting to realize; but it’s true. Cosmos was not about science, but about allowing us to observe a scientist with an attractive personality as a substitute for thinking scientifically.

Those in the audience for Phil Donahue’s final show are distracted from themselves by watching Penny, the pregnant 14-year-old who thinks “babies are neat”; those who watch Cosmos are distracted from themselves by thinking about “our place in the Cosmos,” that is, by reverting to abstract categories that evacuate personhood from human beings and fail to imagine contact with extraterrestrial intelligences in terms other than those of an utterly decontextualized “wonder.” Donahue, Sagan—not really a dime’s worth of difference between them.

When the 16th-century Frenchman Michel de Montaigne produced his extended exercise in self-investigation called the Essays, he knew his project was open to criticism. “If the world complains that I speak too much of myself,” he wrote, “I reply that it does not even think of itself.” Lost in the Cosmos is Percy’s attempt to make the world think of itself, or rather to prod and provoke each of his readers to ask the uncomfortable questions that our preferred entertainment media help us avoid.

Though it might be better to say “our preferred uses of entertainment media”: the problem is not television per se but how we habitually use it. Consider once more Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: it is “a personal view,” and Clark is a winsome guide, but he wears his authority lightly, and—this is far more important—the camera is rarely on him, preferring to offer long lingering shots of the great works of art he describes. Whatever Clark might say about it, Charlemagne’s Palatine Chapel speaks eloquently for itself, because it is a product of the human mind and employs a visual language we are eager to read. The Crab Nebula remains comparatively inscrutable. This helps to explain why Clark as a guide promises less but delivers more than Sagan, who by denying that the “heavens declare the glory of God”—remember, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be”—seeks to deprive the Crab Nebula of what may well be its native tongue. Civilisation is proof that television can be used in a way that prompts responses from viewers, that stimulates thought rather than merely transmitting a putatively authoritative account of what is and what was and what remains yet to come.

People can read novels in the same existentially evasive way and for the same self-forgetful purposes that drive them to watch most of what they see on television. (Today they can, and do, use the internet for similar purposes.) This may account for Percy’s abandonment of his usual genres of fiction and essay in favor of this mongrelized form, with its ludicrously inflated question-and-answer format, its interpolated stories, its sensitivity to the most recent pop-cultural trends, even its overt and arcane scholarship. Percy is striving to break our usual readerly habits, to prevent us from being simply entertained, to make us oscillate among laughter and puzzlement and offense and excitement.

Lost in the Cosmos is the most peculiar book of Percy’s career, and in my judgment his finest achievement. I read it when it first appeared, and if you had asked me at the time whether I expected the book to be relevant in 30 years, I probably would have said no. It seemed so topical, so of its moment; and how long could that moment last? But re-reading it in preparation for this essay I saw how little it matters that many people today will know nothing or nearly nothing about Phil Donahue or Carl Sagan. Their immediate heirs are with us every day when we turn on the TV. And Walker Percy’s social vision remains as acute and discomfiting today as it was in 1983. That says a great deal for him as a writer and cultural critic; but it also, I believe, teaches us that our culture is, in its bones, changing less quickly than we have accustomed ourselves to believe. It’s the same old Cosmos, declaring the same old Glory, and we’re just as prone to getting lost in it as we ever were.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. His edition of Auden’s For the Time Being is due in May from Princeton University Press. He is the author most recently of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford Univ. Press) and a brief sequel to that book, published as a Kindle Single: Reverting to Type: A Reader’s Story.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Not long ago, I moved with my family to Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world where, every day, everyone eats a doughy cornmeal paste, nsima. They’ll dip it in simple vegetable sauces for ordinary times and eat it with meat stews for special occasions, but whatever is or is not served alongside, nsima itself is the staff of life. “If you don’t have nsima,” a subsistence farmer told me, “you don’t have life.” Indeed, when the corn crop fails, as it occasionally does, hunger is severe and widespread.

It wasn’t until he said this that I realized how little meaning Jesus’ words “I am the bread of life” had for me—and probably for most of us in the West, where a lack of bread does not immediately portend imminent death. For 1st-century Middle Easterners—and, interpreting “bread” loosely, for many people in the world today—death is exactly what a lack of the starchy staple means. Conversely, abundant bread (enough to feed five thousand?) and storehouses full of grain mean life, and life to the fullest.

In The Food and Feasts of Jesus, Douglas E. Neel and Joel A. Pugh endeavor to introduce the contemporary reader to the food culture of the 1st century: a near-impossible task if one expects meticulous re-creations of recipes or menus. Foods change drastically over the course of mere decades, let alone millennia. Rice and tomatoes, for example, which we now regard as essential to Middle Eastern cuisine, were unknown in that region in the 1st century, coming, as they eventually did, from farther East and from the Americas, respectively; they do not appear in these recipes. But perhaps because they acknowledge the impossibility of perfectly achieving their aim, Neel and Pugh’s project succeeds. It’s possible to grasp the outlines of the food culture taken for granted by Jesus and his contemporaries; by preparing some meals in that style, we can get at least a taste of what food meant in that time and place.

And a richer understanding of food in the ancient Middle East can help us understand the Scriptures better; for example, the Gospels, especially Luke, are full of meals redolent with symbolic importance. To understand even a bit more about the food culture in which Jesus broke bread is to understand Jesus himself just a bit more, beginning with that strange claim we Christians remember each time we celebrate the Eucharist: I am the bread of life. When these words conjure a white Wonder-branded loaf or a crisp Parisian baguette or the thought of too many carbohydrates, we misunderstand: “For rich and poor alike, bread was the heart of the first-century Mediterranean diet. It was made every day. It was eaten at every meal …. Bread was what people ate to live …. When the bread was gone, everything was gone.”

Bread was more than just what people ate; it defined their way of life, from the yearly sowing and harvesting to the occasional milling and trading and the daily mixing and baking. By introducing readers to the significance of bread in the 1st century, the authors give us the background to be able to understand the significance of bread as a symbol in the Old Testament as well as the New, and they do even more—they teach us to disrupt our culture’s habits of eating prepared foods quickly and alone, to slow down and ponder our food and what food meant (and means) for people living in an agricultural society, and to make bread and eat it as Jesus and his friends would have, with our hands and as a utensil to scoop up whatever sauces are being served alongside, much as my Malawian friends eat their starchy staple, nsima.

A major strength of the book is that the authors have, in their study of biblical foods and feasts, retained a strong sense of what those foods and feasts are about. Yes, like the authors of other books on “what Jesus ate,” Neel and Pugh tout the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, but unlike many of their counterparts, they grasp that the relative healthfulness of one foodstuff or the other is rarely in view in ancient writings. Instead, food is symbolic of God’s grace, provision, and love; feasts, of God’s generous welcome to all sorts of people. And for God’s people in an agricultural society, responsibility and care for those less fortunate took the form of visibly, tangibly sharing the food that was the result of whole seasons of work.

Most of the recipes in this book are simple enough for the home cook, and are likely to appeal even to eaters who are only slightly adventurous. Of course, most of the meals re-created here are probably more like meals enjoyed by the wealthy on a good day than what sufficed for ordinary folks on ordinary days. Still, the authors’ invitation to “join the feast” is a nuanced and thoughtful one, aimed at separating the reader from “our fast-food culture” and rediscovering the pleasure of creating entire delicious meals from scratch, inviting others to share, remembering those who do not have enough, and, in every bite, relishing the goodness and generosity of God, without whose sustaining hand there is no bread, no nsima, no life.

Rachel Marie Stone is the author of Eat with Joy: Redeeming God’s Gift of Food, just published by InterVarsity Press.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Christian Wiman’s new memoir begins and ends with the same four-line stanza from one of his uncompleted poems:

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this

The two versions of the stanza, whose paradoxes (God as an abyss, believing nothing yet something) set the tone of the book’s reflections, differ in only one respect. The first ends with a colon, the second with a period. The shift is subtle but momentous. It suggests that the unfinished poem has now been completed, but in a very unusual way: not with additional stanzas or the reciting of a traditional creed, but with every word in this dazzling book.

Wiman’s story is well known in the poetry world. After growing up on the barren plains of West Texas, he set out to become a poet during his college years. “When I read Samuel Johnson’s comment that any young man could compensate for his poor education by reading five hours a day for five years,” Wiman wrote later, “that’s exactly what I tried to do, practically setting a timer every afternoon to let me know when the little egg of my brain was boiled.” This apprenticeship included four years bouncing around Europe, followed by a variety of teaching positions and two well-received books of poetry.

Then things took a radically different turn. Poetry, America’s most prestigious poetry magazine, was suddenly flooded with money in 2002, thanks to a $200 million bequest from Ruth Lilly. After an intensive search for a new editor, the magazine’s foundation chose Wiman. In this role he would instantly become one of the leading voices in American poetry. But winning a lottery is never an unmixed blessing. His days would be filled with the business side of poetry, and poets would constantly cozy up to him, hoping to win his favor, neither of which seemed to bode well for his own writing.

In 2005, Wiman learned that he has a mysterious, incurable cancer of the blood, which has meant frequent hospitalizations and a bone marrow transplant. (The cancer, Wiman says, “is as rare as it is unpredictable, ‘smoldering’ in some people for decades, turning others to quick tinder.”) During this period, he has somehow managed to publish a collection of essays, highly original translations of selected poems by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and a stunning third book of poems, all while continuing to edit Poetry.

He also has discovered, or rediscovered, his Christian faith.

My Bright Abyss is divided into eleven chapters with titles like “O Thou Mastering Light,” “Dear Oblivion,” and “Mortify Our Wolves”—most of which are references to poems or other writings that figure somewhere in the chapter. Although Wiman recounts a spectacular religious experience he had when he was twelve, his drifting away from faith later and how, almost despite themselves, he and his wife began praying over meals in the months after his cancer diagnosis, My Bright Abyss is no traditional spiritual autobiography. It is a series of often brilliant meditations (the subtitle says “meditation,” but the musings, which Wiman calls “fragments,” seem too diverse to be contained by the singular) in language that is at times as lovely and intricate as Wiman’s highly charged poems:

I grew up in a flat little sandblasted town in West Texas:
pump-jacks and pickup trucks, cotton like grounded
clouds, a dying strip, a lively dump, and above it all a
huge blue and boundless void I never really noticed until
I left, when it began to expand alarmingly inside of me.

With its assonance (“flat,” “sandblasted”), alliteration, rhymes, and lovely lyric shift from the sky to a sense of internal emptiness, this sentence, like many others, blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose. If the 19th-century English poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins were transported to early 21st-century America, this is the kind of memoir he might have written.

Wiman is inclined toward mysticism—toward direct communion with God—and its characteristic paradoxes, such as “unmeaning” as a source of meaning. Yet he repeatedly insists that our experience of God must not take us away from the world. Praying must always be linked to doing, and meditation to communication. “I felt almost as if God had been telling me,” he writes at the end of a short chapter centered on the French mystic Simone Weil, to get out and “do something.”

His poetic assessments make the same point in reverse, advocating verse that is visionary as well as grounded in relationship and the details of ordinary life. He praises A. R. Ammons, for instance, “who had no religious faith at all but whose work has some sort of undeniable lyric transcendence,” while confessing a lack of enthusiasm for William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop. Wiman’s claim that both Williams and Bishop, brilliant as they were, lack a religious imagination, strikes me as both right and—since few poets have been as universally praised as Bishop in recent decades—refreshingly unconventional. Poets who earn an effusive endorsem*nt include Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and the 17th century-English poet George Herbert (“read him!”).

Wiman’s own vision of God and the universe is characterized by contingency and interconnectedness. “God is given over to matter,” he writes, “the ultimate Uncertainty Principle. There’s no release from reality, no ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ from which some transforming touch might come.” This suggests that “faith is folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product.” Here and elsewhere, Wiman is feeling his way toward a theory of God’s presence that chimes with the findings of contemporary physics.

In one of the book’s most moving meditations, Wiman suggests that the interconnectedness of matter extends not just to this life but also to the next. Musing (in an essay about the deaths of his grandmother and Aunt Sissy) about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ last words—”I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life”—Wiman asks himself how Hopkins could be so happy to leave a life he loved. Perhaps, Wiman concludes, “there is some way of dying into life rather than simply away from it, some form of survival that love makes possible.”

There are so many lovely passages and fine insights in My Bright Abyss that it seems almost criminal to leave most of them unmentioned here. Wiman includes a handful of his own poems, and offers fascinating insights into several. After seeing the works of Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh frequently in these pages, readers may find themselves looking for more, as I did.

One curious omission from My Bright Abyss is the language of the Bible itself. Other than Christ’s dying words—”My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me,” which appear in a multitude of the meditations—most of the book is devoid of direct reference to biblical language. The absence is puzzling, standing in vivid contrast with St. Augustine’s Confessions, a key inspiration in other respects.

At only one point in My Bright Abyss did I find myself saying, “No, No, No!” Late in the book, Wiman says, “I’m a Christian not because of the resurrection (I wrestle with this) ….” Even here, Wiman does go on to describe, in beautiful and powerful terms, how Christ’s suffering “shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering” and “makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible.”

But Christianity without the resurrection isn’t Christianity. Whatever the flaws of the early 20th-century fundamentalists in their battles with theological modernists, surely they were right to insist that a literal resurrection lies at the very heart of Christianity, and that Christianity with no resurrection is another religion altogether. “[I]f Christ has not been raised,” as the Apostle Paul puts it, “then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

What a relief, then, a chapter later, to come upon the assertion that “to be a Christian has to mean believing in the resurrected Christ,” despite Wiman’s qualification that “I grow less and less interested in the historical argument around this.” Yes, I said to myself, I can wholeheartedly commend My Bright Abyss not just to secular friends and to a certain strand of Barthians, but to my fellow evangelicals—perhaps especially to fellow evangelicals.

Those who write about an illness that may lead to their death often worry that pity will prevent readers from engaging with the ideas they are conveying. My Bright Abyss deftly subverts this temptation. There are moments, of course, where the cancer stares us straight in the face, as when Wiman compares the agonizing pain of his bone marrow transplant to being “skinned … on the inside,” or when he considers what it would be like if his two young daughters were to lose their father. But the prospect of dying is so fully integrated into living in My Bright Abyss that both are fully before us.

In the chapter that reflects at greatest length on his cancer, Wiman describes how he and his wife both “began spontaneously crying” in the last room of a retrospective exhibition of Lee Bontecou, an American artist whose sculptures make use of materials as diverse as metal and mail bags. “[W]hat is so moving about her work,” Wiman writes, “is the sense of enclosed and solitary suffering that is slowly transfigured through the decades …. [D]eath and life are so woven together that they are completely indistinguishable: you cannot see one without the other.”

This marvelous book, with its mastery and insight, its comfort and challenge, may well become part of our literary-theological canon. It may also be a hint of things to come: shortly before My Bright Abyss was released, Wiman announced that he will be stepping down from Poetry this summer and taking up residence on the faculty of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

David Skeel is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author most recently of The New Financial Deal: Understanding the Dodd-Frank Act and Its (Unintended) Consequences (Wiley, 2011).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Alister McGrath’s C. S. Lewis: A Life is the first important biography of Lewis since A. N. Wilson’s C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1990). Not that there haven’t been other biographies. George Sayer revised and enlarged his 1988 biography Jack: C. S. and His Times in 1994, and Alan Jacobs published The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis in 2005. However, Sayer’s revision brought little new to light and Jacobs’ biography—while wonderfully written and immensely instructive—is primarily a biography of Lewis’ imaginative life rather than a detailed exploration of his lived experience. Wilson’s Freudian reading of Lewis’ life will always be suspect to many readers and scholars—although in fairness, Wilson’s discussions of some of Lewis’ books, notably The Discarded Image, are often perceptive and penetrating. Enter McGrath’s biography, the first fresh reading of Lewis’ life in a generation. McGrath, a prolific writer in theology and apologetics with a thorough grounding in literature and history as well, brings to the task a broadly informed understanding of Lewis and 21st-century Western culture; both perspectives serve him well as he discusses Lewis’ life and work through the lens of their potential to engage contemporary issues, especially postmodernity.

Knowledgeable readers of Lewis will find much that is familiar, yet they will be fascinated by at least four “new readings” of Lewis advanced by McGrath. By far the most interesting and thoroughly documented is McGrath’s suggestion that the heretofore agreed upon date of Lewis’ conversion to Christianity, September 28, 1931—during a trip to Whipsnade Zoo—is off by as much as nine months; instead, McGrath believes the conversion may be plausibly dated June 1932. The cause of this discrepancy? Lewis’ poor memory for dates. After carefully examining Lewis’ correspondence with Arthur Greeves during this period—especially Lewis’ recounting of an important conversation with J. R. R. Tolkien—McGrath contends that Lewis may have confused two separate trips he took to Whipsnade Zoo: one with his brother, Warren, on the September date and another with Edward Foord-Kelcey in early June 1932.

McGrath suggests that Lewis may have mistakenly fused the two separate trips into one, an argument made all the more feasible when Lewis writes about his conversion in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: “I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.” That is, the “when” of Lewis’ conversion memory is linked to a trip to the zoo, not to a particular date. However, McGrath does not lean too heavily on this point, judiciously remarking:

Yet whenever Lewis’s insight is to be dated, it is to be seen as bringing to a conclusion an extended process of reflection and commitment, which proceeded in a series of stages. We cannot seize on a single moment … as defining or dating Lewis’s “conversion” to Christianity; instead, we can trace an ascending arc of reflection, of which the conversation with Tolkien represents a critical imaginative transition, and the trip to Whipsnade Zoo its logical outworking.

The second “new reading” advanced here is McGrath’s argument that Lewis and Mrs. Janie Moore—the mother of his friend, Paddy, who was killed in the trenches in France in World War I—were almost undoubtedly lovers. While other biographers have discussed this possibility—most notably Sayers and Wilson (who claims: “While nothing will ever be proved on either side, the burden of proof is on those who believe that Lewis and Mrs. Moore were not lovers”)—McGrath is the first to offer more than supposition, marshaling both circ*mstantial evidence and reasonable inferences in support of his contention. For instance, McGrath cites studies of the impact of World War I on British social and moral conventions: “Young men about to go to the Front were the object of sympathy for women, old and young, which often led to passionate—yet generally ephemeral—affairs.” Since we know Lewis wrote about Mrs. Moore being in his rooms at University College in 1917, McGrath says “we are perfectly entitled to wonder what [she] was doing” there. He also links Lewis’ early feelings for Mrs. Moore to his study of courtly love and his sonnet “Reason.”

The third “new reading” concerns the nature of Lewis’ academic career in Oxford from his initial appointment in 1925 as a tutor at Magdalen College until his move to Cambridge in 1955 as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature. Earlier biographies generally consider these years in light of Lewis’ academic achievements and popular publications, especially his books such as the Ransom Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Great Divorce (1945), Mere Christianity (1952), and the Chronicles of Narnia. McGrath also discusses these works—at times almost turning his book into a critical biography—but he also explores in some detail the discouragement Lewis experienced as an “outsider” among his Oxford colleagues. Because his popular publications made him something of a “superstar,” McGrath says Lewis was dogged by “persistent institutional hostility and rejection.” Many of Lewis’ peers faulted him for “his seeming disregard for the norms of traditional academic scholarship … [and saw this work as] placing him on the margins of academic culture, rather than at its centre.” Even after he completed his magisterial 700-page English Literature in the Sixteen Century, Excluding Drama (1954), the third volume in the Oxford History of English Language, “Lewis was seen as a spent force by many in the late 1940s and early 1950s.” In addition to his being marginalized professionally, McGrath says that the growing difficulties of living with Mrs. Moore, Warren’s alcoholism, and the gradual erosion of the meetings of the Inklings—the legendary group of writers including Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams—contributed to Lewis’ growing unhappiness and sense of displacement in Oxford.

The final “new reading” McGrath provides concerns the nature of Joy Davidman’s relationship with Lewis; in short, McGrath explores the view first publicly promoted over ten years ago by Douglas Gresham that his mother went to England in 1952 with “one specific intention: ‘to seduce C. S. Lewis.’ ” McGrath notes that newly discovered Davidman papers—including a sequence of 45 love sonnets written by her to Lewis—suggest she decided to return

to England after her initial meeting with Lewis and [to forge] a closer relationship with him. Twenty-eight of these sonnets set out in great detail how Davidman attempted to forge that relationship. Lewis is represented as a glacial figure, an iceberg that Davidman intends to melt through a heady mixture of intellectual sophistication and physical allure.

Because these new papers were only becoming available as McGrath’s biography was being completed, additional biographical and scholarly work will harvest more fascinating material on this matter.[1]

As good as McGrath’s biography is, it is not—as its publisher claims—the “definitive” Lewis biography. Indeed, for someone as complex, prolific, and controversial as Lewis, only a future, multivolume biography will approach being definitive. A case in point is Lewis’ huge correspondence, in the range of ten to fourteen thousand letters. Whoever writes Lewis’ “definitive” biography must integrate this correspondence into the story of his life. And while McGrath makes liberal use of this correspondence—now available thanks to the monumental efforts of Walter Hooper—it remains for someone else to mine the depths of Lewis’ letters and to show how they evidence the varying aspects of his lived experience. For instance, each of the issues raised in the previous paragraphs needs to be explored in much greater detail—something only possible in a multivolume biography.

C. S. Lewis: A Life is eminently readable, in part because of its easily accessible prose and McGrath’s stylistic decision to employ the use of questions as a heuristic. Two examples must suffice. Early in the biography, regarding Lewis’ search for joy, McGrath writes: “What does Lewis mean by Sehnsucht? … Lewis was probing and questioning the limits of his world. What lay beyond its horizons? Yet Lewis could not answer the questions that these longings so provocatively raised in his youthful mind. To what did they point? Was there a doorway? And if so, where was it to be found? And what did it lead to?” Later when he writes about Narnia, McGrath asks: “So how did Lewis invent this imaginative world? And why? Was it a retreat into the security of his childhood at a time of personal and professional stress? Was Lewis like Peter Pan, an emotionally retarded boy who never really grew up, and Narnia his version of ‘Never Never Land’? ” Sometimes McGrath goes on to posit possible answers, while other times he does not. This is an effective rhetorical strategy; the questions engage the reader’s mind and keep him or her anticipating the next page in the story that McGrath is telling.

McGrath’s biography of the most important Christian author of the 20th century is certainly worthy of its subject. Readers will find much to admire in the book, and its publication fifty years after Lewis’ death gives witness to his enduring legacy, one that C. S. Lewis: A Life will help to sustain.

Don W. King, professor of English at Montreat College, is the editor of Christian Scholar’s Review. He edited the collection of Joy Davidman’s letters, Out of My Bone, published by Eerdmans in 2009.

1. For instance, see my essay “A Naked Tree: The Love Sonnets of Joy Davidman to C. S. Lewis,” SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review, Vol. 29 (2012).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Some time ago we would have called this book a literary history. Samuel Otter positions Philadelphia, along with Boston and New York, as a capital for writers and artists in the 19th century. He argues that in the city we can see the development of the authentic American voice. It pronounces on the uncertain and always hesitant growth of human freedom that will get one prominent expression in the Civil War. The book takes us from the 1790s to the 1850s.

But Philadelphia Stories is literary history on steroids. Otter expands dramatically the scope of “the literary.” This enlargement now figures in a pretty standard way in university departments of English but has noteworthy features nonetheless. In the old days we would have begun with America’s first novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote a novel of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Arthur Merwyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799, 1800). Now Otter looks at memoirs, news reports, and medical documentation, scrutinizing them with the same care he later gives to Arthur Merwyn. As his monograph moves into the 19th century, the author carries on with the examination of the novel as a genre but also considers diaries, advertisem*nts, political pamphlets, scientific reports, and accounts of public meetings. He joins observations about these written works to analyses of other expressive productions such as museum exhibits, cartoons, and pictures to enrich our understanding of the city’s writerly culture. And finally Otter has read extendedly in historical works about Philadelphia.

In part, Otter is interrogating texts in terms of context; he grasps the literature as it arises from the political and economic history of the city. Otter has connections to the American Studies movement, which traditionally combined history and literature. So he explores the junction between facts and symbols, the intersection between 19th-century Philadelphia and 19th-century depictions of it. In the end we get Otter’s appraisal of the artsy visions of Philadelphia—of how novelists and others described issues of public and private lives that were embedded in a particular urban area. But this puts matters in an old-fashioned way that does not get at the sophistication of Otter’s perspective.

Repeated complementary sketches, sometimes cannibalizing one another, and often exhibiting similar structures in the portrayals of Philadelphia, generate a complex signifier. English-department types call the set of shared categories, civic commitments, and collective musings a discursive formation, which Otter names, sensibly enough, “Philadelphia.” “Philadelphia” generalizes from 19th-century writings but also emanates from a social reality, and Otter’s scrutiny of “Philadelphia” tries to uncover this reality in Philadelphia. That is, he wants to tell us, via “Philadelphia,” the principal truths about the city in the period before the Civil War. In unpacking the code at work, the scholar gets at the core but tormented values that shaped Philadelphia.

We have a set of impressions that reflect both the mental world of the authors and the connection of this mental world to the material substrate of the city. But we cannot so easily separate “Philadelphia” from Philadelphia. The collaborative views of the 19th-century authors form an integral part of Philadelphia. “Philadelphia” has a dubious and ambiguous ontological status. The real city manufactures belief about it but blends into it the imaginings of novelists and writers.

We can get a handle on these notions only with difficulty. Otter’s prose style makes me believe he has committed himself to them. His array of usages, not exactly a style, mixes words and things, as I will not so happily put it. For lack of a better terminology, I call it his analogical method, which I can best clarify through examples. So, for Otter, publishers “disseminate the textual city,” and people “encounter networks of imperatives” when they move through the “spaces” of the city. Writers “inhabit the city’s problems” and “articulate a historical surface”; the literature simultaneously insists on geographical “circulation” and rhetorical “implication,” and transforms the city’s grid of streets into a “surface of vulnerability.” The authors whom Otter treats “narrated Philadelphia as an event,” or “fictionally realize/d/” the city. Protagonists in novels moved over “the shared, unstable ground of assumptions.” Otter himself wants to manage “the spatial dilemmas of literary criticism” while pointing to “the dialectic between place and concept.”

So what was essential to Philadelphia, or “Philadelphia”? Otter locates the central theme in the literature, written by both blacks and whites, as an uneasy “regressive advance” in race relations. Although Americans aim at a public order that a conception of white over black does not determine, violence and loathing always accompany our progress, if indeed we have progress. That is, Philadelphia Stories focuses on the major thread of the country’s history in the first part of the 19th century. Because we find the city at the heart of a narrative of freedom-in-the-making that has a culmination from 1862-1865, Philadelphia’s literature has a national scope. The color line makes a romance Philadelphian. And because stories of freedom-in-the-making carry on to the present as a fundamental element in our nation’s literature, we would expect to find similar themes in contemporary literature.

Thus, the penultimate end of Otter’s book gives a reading of Melville’s “Benito Cereno” of 1856, the novella about a Spanish ship overtaken by its slaves. Since the basic Philadelphia story holds a dialogue about race and freedom, Melville counts as “a kind of” Philadelphia writer for Otter. Because “Philadelphia” means the contested nature of race, all stories with a peculiar racial twist are “a kind of” Philadelphia story. Otter welcomes “Benito Cereno” as a tale of the city. Strictly speaking, we have in this line of interpretation the fallacy of affirming the consequent. If Philadelphia stories are racial, we cannot infer that racial stories are Philadelphia stories. But this holds Otter to a standard of linear thinking irrelevant to his book. Even so, if we accept the reasoning, we must also concur that, in a sense, we have Philadelphia stories in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Gettysburg Address. The metaphorical embrace of “Philadelphia” reaches out to many narratives.

John Edgar Wideman, the acclaimed African American novelist of the late 20th and early 21st century, for some time resided in Philadelphia. In ending his volume, Otter leaps to the present: Wideman’s novels hearken back to the Philadelphia fiction from the period from 1790 to 1850. Like authors two hundred years ago in the city, Wideman worries over the dilemmas of race, and over America’s inability to cash out its ideals. For Otter, “a kind of” Philadelphia story designates a narrative of a racial cast, and we can see impressive continuities from the 18th to the 21st century. Philadelphia Stories aspires to teach us about all of American literature.

What should we do with university departments of English? We surely can’t assign them their old job of teaching writing to undergraduates.

I think Otter overplays the dominance of race in the literature of the city. This imbalance mainly comes about because of the attention he pays to black writers. They form a tiny minority of the city’s writers but loom large in Philadelphia Stories. Otter then reinforces the exaggeration by the selection of a racial story of Melville’s to illustrate the genuine dominion of Philadelphia. Finally he selects a contemporary African American author, Wideman, to exemplify the literature of Philadelphia in the present. I find these complaints about the effort, however, minor. Readers will have different judgments about what forms the core of Philadelphia’s writerly history, as they will have different opinions about the analogical method, which structures the thinking in this scholarly study. Students with greater wisdom may find my grumbles unjustified.

I do have a larger grumble. The book is unreadable. I mustered only six to twelve pages a sitting, and at the end of my seventeen-day stint, my wife asked me why I faced my bedtime reading with such a grim face.

Let me explain. The analogical method fails. Otter strives for the arresting phrase, and wants to us to think about the fiction in a certain way. But he left me scratching my head. The same goes for his “a kind of” judgments, which have their outstanding use when he makes Melville “a kind of” Philadelphian. Otter intends to have us reflect on race but instead left me puzzling over the argument. The analogical method and the “kind of” logic obscure his meaning. The man does not have the ability with English to make his enterprise succeed. Indeed, the two devices are components of an overall strategy that results in a systemically gummed-up essay.

Toward the end of the book Otter examines an 1842 lithograph, “A View of the City of Brotherly Love,” that pictures a nightmarish metropolis. Otter says that in one place “an upper-class man and woman enact a crime of passion.” I go for my trusty magnifying class, and see a man shooting a woman. Nothing indicates upper-class status, or a crime of passion. And I have no idea what the ugly verb “enact” conveys—at least the fifth time Otter has used it. For English professors, “enact” connotes something having to do with performance, but how can a victim of a shooting be somehow performing? A vignette that calls for short empirical remarks has been translated into something only problematically intelligible.

In writing this review, I gave some thought to literary history that I have profited from: Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture (1940); George Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens (1946); R. W. B. Lewis’ American Adam (1955); Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957); Nina Baym’s Women’s Fiction (1978); and Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983). These books show their age, and they don’t make for easy reading. But swollen and impenetrable prose rarely defines them.

What should we do with university departments of English? We surely can’t assign them their old job of teaching writing to undergraduates. Their scholarship consists of the higher nonsense. I think we should just stay away from it. Maybe some of this stuff will die off if our attention does not feed it.

Bruce Kuklick, professor emeritus of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, has written two books that deal with race and Philadelphia, To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia (Princeton Univ. Press) and Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontain (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press). With Emmanuel Gerard, he is now working on an international history of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Imagine (as if we have to) a cantankerous public debate between a Christian and one of the new atheists. After the predictable sparring over whether or not God exists, the dispute takes its historical turn. The atheist recites the great litany of ecclesial sins—ways that the church has elicited or even sponsored violence. The Christian then comes to faith’s defense, relaying as much of William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence as a pithy sound bite allows. But what if, rather than defending the church, the Christian goes off script, replying instead with a range of accusations against Christians that surpass what the atheist has offered, thereby transforming the debate into an act of public penance? Gone is the fear that Christianity might not be true (one that gives rise to so much nervously animated apologetics). Replacing it is a different fear—and a profound sense of disorientation. Such might be the performance of Ephraim Radner, professor of historical theology at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, were he to pinch-hit for the latest defender of the faith. Or so we can gather from his latest publication, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church.

Penitential scenarios like this have been conjured before—in Donald Miller’s bestselling Blue Like Jazz, for instance, in which Christian undergraduates construct a reverse confessional booth where they apologize for the church’s failings (“You know, the Crusades and all that stuff”) to revelers at Reed College; or in the general inclination of any number of enterprising evangelicals to distance themselves from the church’s disappointing historical “baggage.” But Radner’s approach differs from such accounts as a gritty, high-stakes playoff game in the NFL differs from a pick-up game of Ultimate Frisbee. Indeed, A Brutal Unity rivals Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation in its scope and complexity, and might even be considered an attempt to retell just those stories. Radner, a Protestant, agrees with his Catholic interlocutors that something in our modern world has gone wrong. However, he places the blame for this less on an elusive pattern of secularization (Taylor) or on Protestant fragmentation (Gregory) than on the much wider phenomenon of Christian disunity itself, for which there is ample blame to go around. Indeed for Radner, Christian disunity is what gave birth to—or rather, miscarried—the liberal democratic state.

These are massive claims, and Radner marshals the erudition to uphold them, or at least to make an impressive attempt. His work builds upon his earlier publications, such as Spirit and Nature: The Saint-Médard Miracles in 18th-Century Jansenism, on a group of reform-minded Catholics who (unlike their Protestant counterparts) did not press their agenda to the point of breaking communion. Radner’s 1998 book The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West argued that the Holy Spirit has abandoned the church. Based on a figurative reading of the Old Testament, Radner suggests that fleeing to another communion (a Protestant becoming Catholic, for example) would be like an Israelite, after the sack of Samaria by the Assyrians, fleeing to the “safety” of Judah, which would eventually be sacked by the Babylonians. One might suggest that his figural reading was so effective that Radner’s argument has been about as popular in our day as Jeremiah’s was in his. That said, Radner has practiced what he preaches, plunging himself into scandalous situations of Christian complicity in his mission work in Burundi, and more recently as an ordained Episcopal priest who, though being of a more traditional persuasion in the matters of the hour, insists on staying put.

A Brutal Unity is Lenten reading. Radner is immensely learned, and his prose does not go down easy. His book seems triggered with some kind of advanced security device that prohibits casual readers from coming away with a quick summation. The only way through this trail of tears is to walk it slowly, page by painful page. A Brutal Unity is less an ecclesiology than an “eristology,” which Radner defines as “the study of hostility in its disordering forms and forces.” Christian ecclesiologies, he charges, have not taken division seriously enough; in fact, Protestant and Catholic thinkers have expressly denied that disunity is fundamentally real. To disabuse us of this evasion, which he terms “schismatological idealism,” Radner works his way through past church divisions and their debilitating present effects. Aware of the depressing impact of his rhetoric, Radner ends each harrowing chapter with a sermonic refrain, though offering little comfort: He riffs on Peter’s tears, abandoned Jerusalem, or the apostolicity of Judas, in which we mysteriously participate. Because they offer the opposite of feel-good American evangelicalism, these sermonettes might be packaged separately and marketed under the title, “Your Worst Life Now.”

Radner’s opening argument involves an extended polemic against William Cavanaugh’s aforementioned The Myth of Religious Violence, a book that—in Radner’s view—unjustifiably absolves Christians from their share in the violence of the liberal state. On the contrary, the church needs the liberal state as much as the liberal state needs the church, because the nations as we know them arose from the inability of Christians to refrain from mutual murder. One thinks of the Muslim who holds the key to Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, because Christian factions so frequently erupt into fistfights at ground zero of their resurrected life.

Radner marches his readers deep into the killing fields of Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust, and returns to these two catastrophes throughout the book, as if tightening a cilice. By documenting how Christians were unable to prevent them, Radner is not suggesting that religious division causes violence as much as that it coheres with it, which is to say, Christian division is not the exclusive inflamer of violence, but it is a central one. In the case of Rwanda, Radner painstakingly catalogues how embedded Christian divisions caused a “moral paralysis” and “handicap[ped] the gospel’s power to model a Christian community with any effective integrity.” Radner’s sources on the Holocaust are even more thorough. He unearths a horrible instance of ecumenical cooperation: Among the members of death squads, “most were in fact at least nominal Christians, who had been formed in some fashion by their churches …. They were Protestants and Catholics both.”

If this sounds familiar, it is because many opponents of religion have marshaled such statistics to vilify Christianity. Radner is well aware of such accounts, their exaggerations and unwarranted conclusions. But this does not deter him:

[T]he historical evidence does show that Christian division, especially in the case of the Holocaust, did indeed occupy a facilitating role and was at least informed by prior relationships of antipathy that were never overcome in the face of evil—we can and must say this at least, and accept its challenge to our ecclesial self-understanding.

To suggest otherwise, Radner says—whether to exonerate Pope Pius XII or to overemphasize the role of Bonhoeffer (who had to leave the wider church behind)—is to succumb to what he terms “hallucinogenic fantasy.” Figural readings of the Bible are often dismissed as fanciful, but Radner’s figuralism has teeth, and his reading of the Church “as herself Jew” does much to properly acknowledge the extent of Christian complicity in the Shoah. “The failure and often outright refusal to treat the Church and Israel as joined has proven disastrous both to the Jewish Israel’s existence and to the Christian Church’s integrity.” And here is a sentence to provoke heart-warming discussion at the next neighborhood Bible study: “The dead bodies, as it were, are already gathered by the time churches admit to complicity in their murder.”

Radner explores Catholic and Protestant (and, to a lesser extent, Orthodox) attempts to deny the reality of Christian disunity by carving out an inviolable space of “the Church as such” in contrast to its earthy, sinful reality. But, for Radner, ” ‘the church as such’ can never be reduced to the claims of exhaustive Catholic specificity or eschatological Protestant spiritual aggregationalism.” Catholic ecclesiology, “complete in itself, admitting of neither diminution nor increase,” and a Protestant vision of the church which is “circ*mstantial and contingent … occasional and disclosive” are equally inadequate. The saving of the church from her own sins by concocting an invisible or elusive sanctity is, admittedly, a traditional theological move, but it has been a disastrous one. Were this approach employed Christologically, it would be plainly Gnostic. What then makes it permissible in a theology of the church?

Beginning with the Bible’s Jerusalem Council, A Brutal Unity offers a small church history in and of itself, moving through Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule, the Conciliar Movement, and into early modernism. Radner finds a workable model of church unity only in the pre-Nicene era, making the villain of his story Ephiphanius of Salamis (d. 403), who listed heresies and distanced the church from her enemies, especially the Jews. This, according to Radner, inaugurated the “Epiphanian paradigm” and its program of exclusionary violence. What follows from this, if I am reading Radner correctly, is the church’s “brutal unity.” Providentialism and proceduralism are the blinders that prevent the church from realizing its unholy predicament. The former is the notion that God was somehow at work in church councils despite the messiness of the process, however violent; the latter is the idea that somehow bureaucratic decisions and parliamentary process betray the hand of God. We should, Radner believes, trust neither.

It is not (so far as I can tell) that Radner disagrees with, for example, the Council of Chalcedon. Rather, he begrudges any appeal to providence that would gloss the savagery surrounding such councils. This leads to one of the book’s most fruitful insights, as Radner takes on John Henry Newman’s conclusion that the Miaphysites—by demurring from Chalcedon—were on the wrong side of history. Indeed, Newman’s 1845 conversion to Catholicism was clinched with the realization that he, as an Anglican, was in the place of the Miaphysites, that is to say, a branch cut off from the church’s main trunk. But Radner shows how Newman’s view of Christian disunity cannot take account of the astonishing progress that has been made in recent reconciliation of the Non-Chalcedonian communities, where both parties cautiously admit there to have been misunderstanding. This does indeed, it seems to me, erode a facile appeal to providence (while not, we can hope, ruling out providence itself). It is, furthermore, an argument to which we should be especially sensitive considering the current plight of Miaphysite Christians in Egypt. I might add here that Newman’s epithet for Geneva (i.e., Reformed Christianity) as having “ended in skepticism” can make little sense of the orthodox resurgence of Reformed thinkers like Karl Barth.

Having blocked off self-serving appeals to providence—even going so far (too far, I think) as to compare them to ethnic cleansing—Radner takes aim at his next target: The notion that due procedure is a harbinger of true unity. In discussing the variegated history of Conciliarism, he discerns a “proceduralist turn,” or “the reduction of truth to procedural agreement.” Radner traces the source of our naïve faith in the ballot box with lengthy and fascinating reassessments of Nicholas of Cusa, Henry of Navarre, and Thomas Hobbes, concluding that Conciliarism’s pneumatic hope defaulted to process, and that the process failed. From the ashes of this defeat (to summarize a vast argument), the phoenix of liberalism emerges, with neologisms like “conscience” and “solidarity” in its wings: “The liberal state is not the antithesis of the Christian Church, but it nonetheless was partially driven, in its evolution, by the Church’s failures of integrity …. [T]he Church’s failures stand as a mirror image of the state’s incapacities.”

Following this geneology of liberalism, the book is then infused with bibliographic steroids. In addition to historical theology, Radner draws upon sources as varied as game theory, linguistics, neuro-science, and the literature of conflict resolution. But this is not mere strutting, for his purpose is clear: “Schism, heresy, discipline, fracture, discord negotiation, consensus, decision making, and reconciliation as practical forms of life bound up with diverse meanings and social constraints—all these have been studied with far greater care by sociologists than by the Church’s theologians.” Can we not see, argues Radner, that divisions have rendered Christian churches useless in evaluating human interaction? And this is why the world’s effort at conflict resolution judges the church:

[T]o engage such study as a Christian demands new humility that is not easily assumed, for it would expose the actual human dynamics that order ecclesial relations as frequently primary, and only masquerading as divine imperatives, gussied up by appeals to the Spirit and slothful and self-serving prophecies of pneumatic providence.

One thinks here of the summer assemblies—familiar to so many Mainline Protestants—that assume the winds of the Spirit can be harnessed with a majority vote.

Having dismissed a sweep of Christian history, one expects from Radner some kind of way forward, a revamping of what consensus-seeking might look like—something that can avoid the “procedural providentialism” that has been so unsuccessful. What he actually offers, however, is frustratingly elusive, however pious: Christian self-giving, “kenotic pragmatism,” or simply the Beatitudes. “One would pray for the multiplication of pastors of unity such as this, and for their overwhelming of the structural political order that is its inadequate although inescapable shadow.”

Medieval mysticism is replete with saints meditating upon, even entering, the wounds of the body of Christ. Having worked through the entirety of this book, I can now relate. For indeed, the wounding of Christ’s body is the figurative truth that seems to unify Radner’s alarming rhetoric. “Division is bound to the Lord of life himself …. What is unity? It is not something that can cleanse itself of division, since if it is a unity of love, it is born of division and bound to division.” Division, furthermore, “is the central part of the history of the Church as a whole and in its parts.” Though he does not put it quite this way, Radner’s “robust ‘somatic’ ecclesiology” includes the wounds. Somehow this scrambles our traditional theological categories:

In this life that is God’s, any Anglican—or Roman Catholic or Methodist or Lutheran—can be Pentecostal; any Catholic Protestant can be an evangelical Protestant; any member of one church can be a member of another church that has separated from the first; any Roman Catholic can be a Protestant. Any Christian can do this, not because standards of truth have been cast away, but because the standards can be suffered, in their very contradiction by the place where he or she will go with Jesus.

As this suggests, Radner is after some kind of sacrificial knowing, and his postliberal formation at Yale under George Lindbeck here certainly shows. Could we call this a saving compromise? Radner (unsatisfyingly) answers this question with more questions: “But compromise with what? With truth? With unity itself? No: the compromise was long effected by the Church and churches through their catastrophic indolence.” Nor is this an attempt to evade institutional necessity: “There are no anti-institutional ‘strategies’ for the Church. For bodies cannot take as their presupposition that they have no form.” We are bound to those forms—Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox—and to the forms of the democracies most of us inhabit as well. We can escape from none of them, neither from our ecclesial divisions to safer communions, nor from our national situations to purer places.

Radner has done his best to seal off all the exits and force us to come to terms with his unpleasant thesis. Surely more objections could easily arise (from Cavanaugh especially), and one can imagine Protestant and Catholic responses that defend the church’s traditional ecclesiologies, all less cruciform than Radner’s. Radner may be right to distance himself from the traditional use of Mary as a figure for the church which, because of the doctrine of her sinless conception, has justified Catholicism’s presumably immaculate “Church as such.” But there are other ways of thinking of Mary’s figural relation to the church that are left unexplored. And where is the theme—so prominent in church history, including Calvin—of the church as mother? I imagine Radner’s answer here would be that our mother is a whor*.

An Anglican critic might impolitely suggest that Radner’s determination to stay Episcopalian has affected him to the point that he has inadvertently written the ultimate Episcopalian theology: inclusion at any cost. If unity “lunges in an almost annihilating direction with respect to diversity,” should orthodox Christians cease saying the Nicene Creed in solidarity with the Arians they once rejected? Hopefully this is not the “sacrifice of conscience” for which Radner repeatedly calls. I wonder if there is enough traction left in Radner’s truth claims to let him name supercessionism the heresy that it may be. Is “Epiphanian” exclusion, furthermore, not already present in the New Testament itself (2 Tim. 4:3-4; I Cor. 5:2; Matt. 18:15-17; 1 John 4:1-6)? And yet, of all the things one can say about this book, to say it is unscriptural is not one of them. A Brutal Unity is biblically saturated in its substance, scope, and penitential shape. Having eaten Radner’s book, my stomach is bitter—but the Old Testament has never been more alive. And one verse from the New—interpreted figurally—seems to summarize Radner’s thrust, whether applied to our own fractured churches (of whatever communion) or to the liberal state itself: “Paul said to the centurion and the soldiers, ‘Unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved'” (Acts 27:31).

Let the figural interpretation continue: When David was insulted and pelted by Shimei of the house of Saul, David’s companions rallied to his defense, threatening to decapitate his adversary. David’s response surprised them. Permit Shimei’s harangue, he told them, for “If he is cursing because the Lord said to him, ‘Curse David,’ who then shall say, ‘Why have you done so?'” (2 Sam. 16:10). In the same way, as much as Radner frustrates and unnerves me, I hesitate to defend ecclesiology as I know it from his reproof, lest his message also be God’s. That said, most of us will prefer the lying prophets of feel-good ecumenism (1 Kings 22:22) to this Micaiah. They tell us our divisions are good; “everybody gets a prize, for each church carries a special ‘charism.'” But Radner refuses to stir up another tonic to settle our stomachs. Instead, he swallows the gall of ecclesial realism to the dregs: “It is not only the case that the Church is fallible, but that the Church is actually deformable, pervertible, turning into the contradiction of her own claims.” On that note, can somebody please pour me a drink?

Matthew Milliner is assistant professor of art history at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When someone mentions “the Sixties,” the first thing that leaps to mind is probably not priests and monks gathered for theological discussion. But from the long purview of history, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) easily ranks among the most significant events of that turbulent decade. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Council, and debate over its meaning shows scant signs of slackening.

Arguments over Vatican II, in fact, frequently find themselves pulled into the “culture wars” and political alignments of Western democracies. For liberal Catholics, the Council often signifies a salutary rupture in the history of the Church, an about-face from the reactionary legacy of the First Vatican Council (1869-70), enforced by a train of intransigent popes until the miracle of John XXIII, who shocked the world by calling for a new council in 1959. By contrast, conservative Catholics tend to interpret Vatican II as continuous with the past, even if accommodating new developments, and they champion the efforts of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to reign in liberal excesses.

One of the many virtues of Massimo fa*ggioli’s engaging book is demonstrating the limits of viewing the Council strictly through a political prism. A professor of the history of modern Christianity at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and formerly a fellow at the prestigious John XXIII Foundation of Religious Studies in Bologna, fa*ggioli knows his stuff. While he focuses primarily on the postconciliar reception of the Council and its contested interpretations, he is keen to situate the Council itself in the broader history of Catholicism. From the perspective of the Catholic Church, he reminds readers, Vatican II is still a “very young” council. Likening it in importance to the Council of Trent (1543-1562), the fountainhead of what historians once called the “Counter-Reformation,” the full implications of what transpired between 1962 and 1965 might not be plumbed for centuries.

This is true for Vatican II, fa*ggioli believes, even though this Council, unlike past ones, was largely “pastoral,” not “dogmatic.” That is, bishops met in Rome not to define church teachings or refute errors, as had been the case with practically all past councils (the Catholic Church recognizes 21 ecumenical councils in all, of which Vatican II is the most recent). Rather, drawing from Scripture and church traditions, churchmen gathered to offer “updated” guidelines for how the Church should engage the modern world. The French word ressourcement (loosely: drawing from the past) and the Italian aggiornamento (loosely: bringing up to date) have in fact become the standard watchwords to sum up Vatican II. Put as a question, the Council asked: How can the Church, while faithful to its own traditions, learn to speak in a new idiom, to engage “modernity” in its messy, multifaceted manifestations?

In contrast to past councils, all European or Mediterranean affairs, Vatican II was global in scope, drawing church leaders from around the world and making room for non-Catholic observers. Coinciding with the promise and uncertainty of postcolonial geopolitics, the Council’s various decrees awakened a heady response from Christians in the Global South. fa*ggioli nicely sums up the liturgical changes in Africa, for instance, by quoting one priest: “The pre-Conciliar African Church set its heart on the possession of [Western] harmonium. The Post-Conciliar African Church glories in its use of drums.”

Vatican II whisked the Catholic Church into new theological territory on many issues: religious liberty, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue, to name a few. As such, it has often proven divisive. Interpreting these divisions strictly with a political vocabulary, again, makes little sense in fa*ggioli’s analysis.

Instead, he identifies two main “schools” of interpretation of the Council in reference to two of the Church’s most hallowed theologians. The more optimistic “Thomists,” named for the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, tend to see Vatican II’s updated teachings as compatible with various modern ideals and aspirations, and many regard the “spirit” of the Council as a down payment for more progressive changes in the future. This school found its center of gravity in the journal Concilium (founded in 1965) and included among its ranks theological luminaries such as Yves Congar, Marie-Dominque Chenu, and Edward Schillebeeckx.

By contrast, the more pessimistic “Augustinians,” named for the erstwhile Bishop of Hippo, tend to see the Church as an island of grace in a sea of sin and disorder, and are given to interpreting the Council in more restrictive terms. These voices first gathered around the journal Communio (founded in 1972) and include figures such as Henri du Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the current pope, Josef Ratzinger, who served as a theological advisor at the Council as a younger man. Interestingly, Ratzinger actually played a role in launching both journals, and evinces in fa*ggioli’s analysis both Thomistic and Augustinian proclivities, even if most Vatican watchers today identify his papacy more with the Augustinian side.

Beyond the Thomists and the Augustinians are those we might label the hyper-progressives and the hyper-traditionalists. The former would include figures such as Hans Küng, who received international recognition when he was banned from teaching theology in the 1970s because of his dissent from Rome, and Karl Rahner, a Jesuit theologian ever popular in Catholic universities, who regarded Vatican II as only “the beginning of a beginning.” By contrast, the hyper-traditionalists would include the so-called “sedavacantists” (who claim the Holy See has not had a legitimate Pope since Pius XII) and the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and members of the secretive Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), who interpret Vatican II as vitiating many of the Church’s past teachings. This reactionary side of Catholicism received international attention shortly after Ratzinger took office, when, after he lifted the excommunication of four bishops whom Lefebvre had consecrated, one bishop was discovered to have denied the Holocaust.

John Paul II figures in the book, but less than one might have expected. fa*ggioli makes much of the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops—a gathering in Rome, called for by the Pope, that sought to achieve coherence in the reception of Vatican II by setting limits on overly permissive interpretations. This meeting received a powerful assist from The Ratzinger Report, an interview published in 1985 with the current pope, then Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith. In it, Ratzinger rebuked those who saw the Council as a “rupture” and/or sought to pit the (radical) “spirit” of the Council against its (more traditional) “letter.” Curiously, fa*ggioli hardly mentions the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), one of the signal accomplishments of John Paul II’s papacy.

If fa*ggioli’s work has a shortcoming, it is his decision to focus largely on internecine conflicts about the Council from within the Catholic Church. In one section he profiles reactions from Protestant and Orthodox observers, but this material is covered all too briefly. Other voices are not heard. Discussing, for example, how the Jewish community, evangelical Christians, or newspapers of record (in various countries) received and interpreted the Council might have added rich, if complicating, layers to an already impressive work.

But for anyone in search of a “guide for the perplexed,” to get up to speed on the reception and the continuing legacy of Vatican II between now and 2015, fa*ggioli’s book is as good a place as any to begin.

The Council of Trent shaped Catholicism for some four centuries and counting; the Council of Nicaea has been steadfastly at work since the time of Constantine. Who says Vatican II cannot do the same? “The past,” William Faulkner famously wrote, “is not dead; it’s not even past.” And Vatican II is still a very young council.

Thomas Albert Howard holds the Stephen Philips chair in History and directs the Center for Faith and Inquiry at Gordon College. His book God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford Univ. Press), won the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award for History/Biography.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Richard Mouw, soon to retire as president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is familiar to many readers of these pages. But, for those who might not know him, Mouw has had a successful career in writing books that—while aware of first-order scholarship—are accessible to what Mary Tyler Moore once called “ordinary people.” In this lovely book of 136 pages, Mouw has done it again.

His subject is Abraham Kuyper, a person known to some in the Presbyterian and Reformed community, but perhaps not so much elsewhere. In brief, Kuyper had several careers in an action-packed life (1837-1920): pastor, journalist, author, and politician (in the last he was prime minister of the Netherlands for a while).[1] While Mouw draws on Kuyper’s various writings, the one work that makes Kuyper so compelling is Lectures on Calvinism (hereinafter Lectures), which he gave as the Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1898. The main subject of Lectures can be called Kuyper’s theology of culture. As Mouw charmingly says, “this was the Kuyper who lured me in.” What Mouw discovered in that classic work “was a vision of active involvement in public life that would allow me to steer my way between a privatized evangelicalism on the one hand and the liberal Protestant or Catholic approaches to public discipleship on the other hand.”

Since Rich Mouw calls his approach “a personal introduction,” I will get personal for a few lines as well. I first read Lectures early in the 1960s as an undergraduate student in a reading group at the Park Street Church on the Boston Common. The then-minister to students, Harold O. J. Brown, later to have a distinguished career at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, gave me the book and guided my thinking. I was excited by the book for the same reasons as Rich, and at about the same time. When I joined the Calvin faculty in 1969 as an avowed Kuyperian (though, importantly at that time, not a Dooyeweerdian), I was greeted as a comrade by Rich Mouw and George Marsden, who had been there for a couple of years. Even though they were only a few years older than me, George and Rich acted like the senior colleagues I needed. They helped guide me to a writing career beyond only teaching that I never imagined I’d have; like writing History Through the Eyes of Faith, and being an editor of Fides et Historia and the Reformed Journal. If I have done any good, Rich and George—under the shadow of Kuyper—deserve thanks.

The genius of Mouw’s take on Kuyper is the way he also “lures in” a Christian reader to a vision so compelling that, once a person sees it, she can’t un-see it, and life changes. Kuyper’s vision presents a robust proclamation of the lordship of Christ in all areas of life. This is summed up in a much-quoted sentence from Kuyper: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign of all, does not cry ‘Mine.’ ” This is what Mouw means by a theology of culture, comprehending all the things that humans do and make. Those things are meant, in the intentions of God’s creation, to be related to each other in a coherent pattern that reveals the glory of God.

Of course, Kuyper and Mouw are aware that sin comes into the world and that Jesus has to come to redeem everything, but that’s the point; he came not just to save souls (although that) but to redeem the whole cosmos in all its differentiated complexity of ideas and institutions. Christ restores the created kingdom, allowing the full human flourishing that God meant from the beginning.

The idea of “sphere sovereignty” in Kuyper has caused some people to stumble, but Mouw does a fine job of easing the perhaps reluctant reader into it. Kuyper insists that each of the various patterns of culture—family, business, education, art, church, state—is meant to be sovereign within its own sphere because each is to do what none other does. This is an essential point for Kuyper and for Mouw, who quotes a recent scholar: “Each sphere has its own identity, its unique task, and its God-given prerogative.” But they are all meant to be coherently advancing God’s purposes in their own ways: for example, science is meant to advance knowledge; economic activity to advance stewardship; political activity to advance justice.

With government being only one sphere among many, we can see why Kuyper appeals to some modern-day conservatives who want to limit the role of government. Mouw seems to find in Kuyper more of a role for government than for the institutions in other spheres. First, government is called on to intercede when the activities of one sphere intrude unduly on those of another, what Mouw calls “patrolling the boundaries” between the spheres. Second, government must also act to protect the weak and the vulnerable against the powerful in any sphere of activity, most notably in the workplace. Third, there is a special role for government in matters that transcend the vocations of the various spheres, like the keeping up of roads and bridges that both business people and church people use. So while government is just one sphere, it seems almost to be a super-sphere, because it can and must do what other spheres cannot and must not do. While Kuyper is hard to classify in the left-versus-right politics of our time, he does not give much comfort to those who want to “get government out of the way.” Rather, he seems to see a rather active role for government in trying to make the creation norms work in the coherent way God intended them.

If sphere sovereignty is one Kuyperian principle that has given some non-Reformed readers problems, then “the antithesis” is another, though some evangelicals may know about it via Francis Schaeffer, who borrowed it from Kuyper and popularized it. Kuyper often said, and his zealous followers still quote this line: “the fact that there are two kinds of people [redeemed and unredeemed] occasions of necessity the fact of two kinds of human life and consciousness of life and two kinds of science [knowing].” One faction of those who follow Kuyper style themselves the “Reformational” party, and they take the notion of the antithesis to its logical conclusion, that is, that non-Christians are not able to know much of anything important. God is the author of truth; if people do not know God, they cannot know (what Francis Schaeffer used to call) true Truth. In fact, I once heard a “Reformational” lecturer remark that, while unbelievers could know their phone number and how to get home, they couldn’t know much of any importance beyond that.

Mouw helps us here in recalling that there is another side of Kuyper, one that valued “common grace,” which he held in paradoxical relation to “the antithesis.” He kept the two in creative tension by placing them in a larger theological context. Mouw again helps us with an accessible way to understand this: “When an obviously wicked person does some unexpectedly good thing, we Kuyperians can say ‘that’s common grace at work.’ When a sinner acts according to the total depravity script, or when we feel the continuing pull of sin in our own lives, we can take this as confirmation that the antithesis is real.”

The author does many other things in this splendid book, such as thinking through a Kuyperian lens about: enhancing the church’s role when institutions in other spheres aren’t working well; developing patience to wait on God’s time in the public world, when kingdom solutions aren’t so apparent; helping sometimes too-confident evangelicals to learn from the humble discipleship of the Anabaptists, especially the Mennonites; and learning to dialogue with Islam.

But Mouw’s last chapter, to use the cliché, is by itself worth the price of the book. The author is at both his Reformed and evangelical best in “A Kuyperianism under the Cross.” He follows the eminent historian Mark Noll, who published a lecture I was privileged to hear at Calvin some 16 years ago, “Adding Cross to Crown.” Noll was fully supportive of the whole Kuyperian vision of asserting Christ’s lordship in all areas of life. But sometimes that led to a triumphalism that did not reflect well on the Christ of the Cross. The Jesus who points us to all that territory to be claimed for him is a Savior whose “footprints are spattered blood, and the hand that points is marked with a wound.” To follow this Jesus, says Noll, is to remember “the road to Calvary that the Lord Jesus took to win his place of command.” Mouw then disarms us all by asking that the confident Kuyper [this is mine, says Jesus] meet the humble and self-effacing Mother Teresa, whose loving care for dying lepers in the streets of Calcutta gives a necessary corrective to the triumphalist, sometimes almost arrogant, spirit of the Reformed. Of course, Jesus will one day say “mine” to all creation, and a joyful day that will indeed be; but until then we are called to go out, as Mouw writes, to “those broken regions of creation where the homeless set up their crude sleeping shelters, where people grieve, and where the abused and abandoned cry out in despair. Jesus calls us to join him there, for those square inches—and those who inhabit them—belong to him too.”

If readers are not deeply moved by Mouw’s conclusion, I declare them here and now to be hard-hearted people! Kuyper rightly teaches us to develop a theology of culture. But, until the day the trumpet blows, that cultural awareness needs to be formed in the shadow of the Cross. We are much in Rich Mouw’s debt, again.

Ronald A. Wells is professor of history, emeritus, at Calvin College. He is now mostly retired in Tennessee, where he directs the Symposium on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College. His most recent book is an anthology, The Best of the “Reformed Journal,” co-edited with James Bratt (Eerdmans).

1. For another recent look at Kuyper in Books & Culture, see Makoto Fujimura, “Breathing Eden’s Air,” July/August 2012.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Just as Wheaton College was celebrating its sesquicentennial in 2010, it also found itself naming a new president. Duane Litfin had announced his retirement plans a couple of years earlier, and the community turned to an alumnus and son of a celebrated faculty member to wear the mantle of leadership. While the decision to leave the pulpit of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church was not an easy one, in many ways the journey back to Wheaton proved to Philip Ryken that one can truly go home again. Shortly after he had completed his first year in office, Todd Ream sat down with President Ryken in historic Blanchard Hall on the Wheaton College campus.

You grew up on campus, and your father has been a professor of English here for more than 40 years. You were a member of the class of 1988, and you have been a member of the board of trustees, so in many ways serving as the president is like coming home.

I’ve actually been surprised at how familiar the campus context feels to me. They say you can’t go home again, but I feel in so many ways I really have come home. The vibrancy of the student community, the ongoing life of teachers and scholars who are engaged as faculty members on a liberal arts campus like this, the physical space in which we do our academic work—all of these things were part of my childhood. Whenever I came back for a visit, during our many years away, I had a sense of being in my natural habitat. This may be the only place in the world I can go where people still call me Philip—there are faculty members here who remember me from when I was a boy.

What in particular propelled you to accept the presidency?

The short answer is it became really clear that God was calling us to do this. My wife and I had for some period of time been open to the possibility of coming to Wheaton. From the very day I started Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, I approached that as potentially a life-long calling. We were very happy there, those were our close relationships and all the things about leaving were negative, not positive. We loved living in the city, loved the people I was working with on staff at the church. But we were open to the possibility of coming to Wheaton partly because as the college developed its profile, it seemed to us just as a matter of sober judgment that it might be something that I would have the gifts to do. It was a process of the door always just being a little bit more open and a little bit more open and a little more open, rather than closing at one of any number of places where it could have closed. So I view it as both an inward calling and an outward calling that’s a matter of obedience to the Holy Spirit.

What do you see as the most important dimension of your role as president? Your predecessor, Duane Litfin, said it was encouraging or cultivating an environment for the integration of faith and learning. You may have a different answer.

My answer would be very similar to that. The way I usually say it is that my primary responsibility is to do what a president can do to cultivate, maintain, encourage, and promote into a new generation the theological orthodoxy, spiritual vitality, and intellectual rigor of Wheaton College as a Christ-centered liberal arts campus. There’s a theological dimension to that, and there’s also a spiritual dimension, which of course is closely tied to the theological but is a thing unto itself. We’re an academic institution, so there’s always a commitment to the life of the mind. And we do talk about integrating learning with faith or learning with faith and living. I prefer to talk about integrating learning with faith so that faith is clearly seen to be the fundamental thing—the reintegration of learning with faith, partly for historical reasons, because I think that’s something we’ve gotten away from in higher education in America, but also thinking in terms of the flow of redemptive history.The life of faith and the life of the mind were always intended to be together, and it’s only in the fallen world that they get separated and need to be brought together again.

Wheaton is an evangelical institution. In their recent book The Anointed, which takes a critical look at evangelical populism and anti-intellectualism, Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson observe that evangelicals “are arrayed along a broad spectrum of believers.” Some schools have a denominational connection, but Wheaton is rooted in the larger evangelical movement. In what ways does that “broad spectrum” influence the statement of faith, the educational purpose, and the lifestyle expectations of the school?

The definition of “evangelical” has been a contested issue for a long time, and that’s undergone a lot of sociological and historical scrutiny. At the end of all that, I’m not sure if we’re any clearer on what an evangelical is or isn’t. We certainly are very comfortable talking about Wheaton as an evangelical institution, but if you ask how we’re defined, it’s not so much by that label as it is by our mission statement and our statement of faith itself. Students and faculty and staff at Wheaton College come from many different denominations and backgrounds. I think that’s always been one of the great things about Wheaton. I have a lot of respect for many other Christian colleges and universities in the United States, many of which have vital denominational connections. At the same time, I think there is something healthy about us living in community with believers in Christ who do not have all of the same views that we have and do not have all of the same background and practices that we have. It’s similar to the kind of physical health that comes to a community when it’s not so hom*ogenous that it’s susceptible to certain kinds of viruses and diseases; there’s a spiritual health that comes through those communal relationships in the wider body of Christ. What unifies us fundamentally is our relationship to Christ and the work of his Spirit, but what enables us to live in community is also our statement of faith and our community covenant, and so if you want to know what the boundaries of our community are or what we mean by evangelical, it’s in large measure defined by our statement of faith and community covenant.

In that same book, Stephens and Giberson refer to Wheaton as the premier Christian college in America. What role or roles does or should Wheaton play among other Christian colleges and also within the larger evangelical community?

I am very careful about claiming any leadership role for Wheaton College, and I made that clear even in the presidential search process. In life in general, we shouldn’t be quick to claim for ourselves any kind of leadership position. We prove our leadership through our service—we see that lived out in the character of Christ. A great example for us is what the Apostle Paul says: insofar as I imitate Christ, imitate me. He’s recognizing that his leadership is not perfect, that the true leadership comes from Christ, but if there is anything that is Christ-like in that leadership then it should be followed and it’s healthy to embrace that role. I hear again and again from people in higher education, faculty members on other campuses, people in the community generally, who are looking to Wheaton College for leadership. So to the extent that people do that, then we want to provide a Christ-centered leadership that others can follow if they choose to follow it.

I like to remind us all here that there’s no campus in the world that needs the gospel more than Wheaton College does, and I want to encourage us to have a very healthy self-criticism that we are free to exercise because we know that we’re accepted in Christ. We don’t have to prove our worth in comparison to other institutions or try to justify who we are by our own works; we’ve received the grace that God has for us in Christ. We can then pursue excellence with everything we have, being honest about the areas where we fall short and seeking God’s help in those areas.

What are the qualities that define faculty members here?

The ideal Wheaton College faculty member is a teacher, a scholar, a mentor, and a servant. It’s a very demanding calling to pursue excellence in all four of those areas over a sustained period of time. But I see many, many faculty on our campus excelling in all of them. One of the things that thrills me as a college president is to talk to students and ask the question, “Tell me about your favorite course this semester,” and have them typically want to tell me about two or three or four courses and what they’re learning. When we are looking at awards of various kinds, we don’t get nominations for the same handful of faculty every year. We get a wide variety of nominations for a wide variety of faculty.

How does the out-of-class experience at Wheaton—residence life, student activities, leadership programs, intramural sports, and so on—relate to what happens in the class, and vice-versa?

If you were to talk to our trustees and to our student development leaders and to many at least of our faculty, there would be widespread recognition that the learning that takes place outside of the classroom is a huge part of spiritual formation and of what happens in college. That’s one of the reasons why residential college education has a unique place in discipleship and development. Whether you’re talking about what students are doing in music, or student organizations, or athletics, or ministry, it’s very important to have leadership that understands the centrally academic role of a Christian college and can support that mission while at the same time recognizing the spiritual development that takes place on the practice field, in the rehearsal hall, at camp, and in the city of Chicago, which is a kind of laboratory for us as well.

One thing we’ve gained over time at Wheaton is a deeper understanding that experiential learning is a particular type of learning that doesn’t just happen on its own but requires preparation, oversight, and reflection. It’s becoming increasingly recognized, for example, that simply sending students overseas doesn’t mean that they have a transformational experience or gain any cross-cultural competency. You have to have an educational program that is really designed to teach cross-cultural skills in order to achieve that goal. All those other things that go on beyond the classroom are complementary in developing a whole person in Christ. That wholeness implies not just intellectual training but also spiritual, physical, and emotional learning—the whole person is shaped through those beyond-the-classroom experiences.

Do you find that faculty understand that?

Faculty understand that to varying degrees. Some of our faculty are very involved in experiential learning at Honeyrock; we have faculty members who go up every year with small groups of six to eight students and traipse through the woods. We have faculty who make a connection with one or another sports team or are plugged in to other programs outside the classroom. As a president, I see how committed people in some of these other areas of campus life are to the academic enterprise. They aren’t, for example, providing leadership for Christian ministry through service by saying it’s “spiritual” and thus takes priority over academics. Quite to the contrary: they understand that Wheaton College is an academic institution. Our coaches are very strong on the academic mission of Wheaton College. Of course some students get so caught up in other activities that they give less attention to the life of the mind, and our faculty then are wanting to insist on academic learning as the center of gravity for us. I’m fully supportive of that and emphasize it in my own work at the college.

From your vantage, what role do the visual and performing arts play here at the college?

I see the visual and performing arts—and the arts in general—as the leading edge of culture. If you want to know where culture is heading, look at its leading artworks. They’re not just responding to and reflecting on what’s already there, they’re showing you what is to come. One of the reasons why the evangelical community perhaps has not had as much influence culturally as it might have had is that it has not been at the forefront of the arts. I am someone who appreciates the arts without being strongly gifted in the arts. One way, I think, that God prepared me well for my current role was the experience of serving a congregation in center-city Philadelphia that included many professionals in the arts, particularly in music but also in the visual arts. And being very close to a couple of leading art schools, and having students who were seeking discipleship from those schools as part of our congregational life. To say nothing of the home in which I was raised, which put a high value not just on literature but on the arts generally. And the very stimulating conversations around our family dinner table with visiting scholars who were interested in the arts. I am thrilled that we are seeing increasing numbers of majors in the visual arts at Wheaton College. I am thrilled by the work that’s being done at our conservatory of music. I think it’s healthy for the Christian community at large for Christians to be thriving in those areas—and certainly healthy for our campus.

What comes next in terms of a master plan for the school?

In a couple of weeks I’m going to be introducing to the campus what I’m calling the president’s green paper on the mission, context, and direction of Wheaton College. I’m calling it a green paper rather than a white paper because with a white paper, properly understood, you pretty much have your policy set in place and you’re announcing an agenda. A green paper is not quite as far along in the process; it’s a more collaborative document, and it says we are inviting discussion. It’s very welcome for you to say, “Wait a second, you’ve left out something very important,” or “I like this goal, but I’m not sure you’re framing it in the way that you should,” or “If you really want to achieve that goal you have to do something about this.” And we’ll have that kind of discussion with students, faculty, staff, and leadership groups of the college, including our alumni council.

There are a variety of issues to touch on here, but it’s widely recognized that we need to do better in making global connections to prepare students for global service. I believe we need to continue pressing forward with making Wheaton a more culturally, ethnically, and internationally diverse community. This was a huge area of growth under Dr. Litfin’s leadership: there are three times as many students of color on this campus now as there were when I was a student. Roughly a quarter of our incoming class will be either international students or ethnic minority students from the United States. Our on-campus makeup is looking more like the worldwide body of Christ. But having said that, we need to do much more. For example, we need a much stronger representation from the Latino community on Wheaton’s campus. I personally desire to see more ethnically international students. We’ve grown in that area, but we can’t just say we’re at the place where we would like to be.

I am excited about the possibility that our review of general education will refresh and renew our commitment to the liberal arts. I’m looking for a liberal arts curriculum with a simplicity and unity that will inspire our faculty and also help our students make sense of their college education. We’ve tinkered with our general education requirements over the years, and there’s been a little adjustment here and a little adjustment there, adding up to an unintended cumulative effect; I think we’re in danger of having something that’s less than the sum of its parts because of that. There are a number of areas where we’d like to grow our facilities, and I’ll be touching on that in the green paper as well, but for future fundraising for the college, a major priority is doing everything we can to keep what is a very costly kind of education to provide affordable for as broad a range of students as possible. Keeping Wheaton accessible to a broad range of students, having a need-blinded admission policy—so that this won’t become a school that you can attend only if you’re wealthy—requires effective development work. Any future fundraising we’ll be doing for the college will include a strong dose of student scholarship support.

Last question. One day when you announce your intentions to leave the presidency, what contributions do you hope will mark your legacy?

You gave me these questions in writing, and I have to say that when I came to that question I was a little teary, just at the thought of leaving a job I love as much as this job and a place I love as much as Wheaton College. Of course I am aware that a day will come when I need to leave, and I pray from time to time for my successor as I often did in pastoral ministry, pray for the person who will follow me. There’s a sense of being part of something that’s much bigger than you are, and I look with huge admiration at the men who have preceded me in this office with unique abilities, just the right person for the right era of Wheaton College.

“Legacy” is the kind of thing that you leave to others to assess. I want to be found faithful in what God has given me to do at Wheaton College, and as I consider what it means to be faithful, the model for me is Christ-like leadership, which I think of in terms of the three-fold office of Christ: his kingly ministry, his priestly ministry, his prophetic ministry. So there’s a kingly aspect of presidential leadership, that is to say there’s the proper exercise of authority, there is the way that you represent the institution in your own person, and that leadership should be clear, it should be decisive, it should be benevolent, and it should inspire the affection and loyalty of the people in that community. There’s a prophetic dimension of the presidential work, particularly in a Christian college campus, where you’re teaching and preaching regularly in chapel. I’m often running out the door with my Bible in hand to speak to this student group or that student group and bringing some part of divine revelation to bear on that. And it’s prophetic in another sense, in the biblical sense, not just of speaking God’s Word but also speaking God’s Word to your situation. What’s happening in your community and in the world at that moment and also how do you prepare for what’s coming, I mean that’s all part of prophetic ministry. So being faithful to teach and apply God’s Word to the needs of this generation. And then there’s a priestly dimension, which is partly a dimension of intercession and prayer, but it’s also living with and in the community. The Old Testament priests did not live in Jerusalem by and large; they lived scattered among the places where the people of God lived all over Israel, and they were there so that when they carried the burdens of God’s people into the holy place and offered prayer on God’s altar, they could really stand for those people they lived among. And so our desire—I use the plural because this comes out of our marriage partnership and our family life—is to live in this community, share our lives with this community. We live right next to campus, we have lots of people into our home; this is our community.

Todd C. Ream is the Senior Scholar for Faith and Scholarship and an associate professor of humanities in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University. His most recent book (with Timothy W. Herrmann and C. Skip Trudeau) is A Parent’s Guide to the Christian College: Supporting Your Child’s Mind and Soul During the College Years (Abilene Christian Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.